‘I’ve got the Fukushima Blues’, by Glenda Cimino

Even though it’s not in the news,
I’ve got the Fukushima Blues.

Strontium 90 on the grass,
Iodine 131, cesium, plutonium –
Cow’s milk is poisoned in your glass,
But don’t tell- there’d be pandemonium!

Three reactors in meltdown,
Tepco now confess
But where the radioactive water’s gone,
Is anybody’s guess.

Even though they say I have nothing to lose,
I’ve got the Fukushima Blues.

Radiation spikes sky high,
People told to stay indoors,
Animals abandoned to sicken and die,
Workers sleeping on radioactive floors.

Radiation in your taps should not alarm,
They lie; for radiation will accumulate
Over days and years; but this sure harm
They do not want you to contemplate.

Even though it is not in the news,
I’ve got the Fukushima Blues.

Have to evacuate another town
Radioactive dust on the school playground
Will people take this lying down?
Maybe the living were better off drowned.

The heat and power of the nuclear sun
Burning down through layers of our earth
Do they know what they have done?
Officials argue and resign, for what it’s worth

Even though they say I have nothing to lose,
I’ve got the Fukushima Blues.

Anonymous workers facing certain death
Trying so hard the leaks to stem
Tepco cannot pay for their last breath-
Nothing but crackers and rice for them.

‘We’re sorry’, they bow, ‘we made a mistake’
-Truth is, that Tepco was often warned-
But ‘who would expect a 9.0 earthquake?’
They took no action, the advice was scorned.

Even though it is not in the news,
I’ve got the Fukushima Blues.

Who needs to fear a terrorist
When respected companies act like this?
Covering it up and playing it down,
It isn’t their children on that playground.

There’s nothing to worry about,
Forget it, you haven’t a care-
Just don’t drink the water, eat the food,
Or breathe the air.

Even though they say I have nothing to lose,
I’ve got the Fukushima Blues.

Deadly radiation released into the Pacific
Poisoning the fish humanity will need
The amount? Can’t be specific-
Measure it in units of human greed.

Nuclear energy so safe, so cheap –
But what is the cost not in their calculations
As a poisoned world we all will reap,
With more cancer, leukemia and genetic mutation.

 Even though it is not in the news,
I’ve got the Fukushima Blues.

Empty towns with deadened lights -
No one could take the time to pack
No need now for energy on dark nights -
Get out while you can, and never look back.

O babes of Chernobyl- what have we done?
Generations damaged beyond repair.
Is this also the fate of the land of the rising sun?
O nuclear fools, learn how to see and care!

Even though they say I have nothing to lose,
I’ve got the Fukushima Blues.

Four hundred and forty nuclear plants
And some still want to build some more
I’ve been accused of anti-nuclear rants -
But is energy really worth dying for?

We all live on only one planet
Travelling around our sun -
We’d better learn to take good care of it;
Surely even nuclear execs can count to one.

They say all will be well in this nuclear hell,
and I’ve nothing to lose-but- I’m telling you-
they’re giving our world the Fukushima Blues.

© Glenda Cimino ,all rights reserved. First published in News Four.

I am adding here a link to Glenda Cimino’s Poem Mr. Sarasota, published  in A.B Edwards archives , with thanks to Glenda for the poems. You can read Glenda Cimino’s  ’Cicada’ poem here.

The diversity site, a PEN Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee project

The idea that advised this poetry blog was and is the dissemination of literature, specifically poetic literature, in non-traditional formats such as web-formatted publication.  The reader can find the kernel of this  idea discussed here.  There are links on the Poethead about page to the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights (Barcelona 1996) and to UBUWEB.  The above links comprise the foundation of the blog, and advise the main thrust of the blog’s themes: the importance of translation, and the sharing of ideas in poetry. Poetry is always going to lend itself to derivations including in translation,  film, musical, and theatrical adaptations , to name but a few.

In 2011, I wrote a piece about the wealth of work that is available online for the discerning reader of poetry and of literature. In my view literary writing is undergoing a vast renaissance which is a result of avant-garde web-usage.  This fact appears to annoy the more traditional purveyor of literature who is up against it because publishing houses, poetic-foundations , and avant-gardeists are very embracing of their new audiences, and they are putting time and money into developing tech to reach new readers.

PEN International operates through volunteerism and through committee, the Diversity blog is a project of the PEN International Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee.  The importance of translation in literature was set out again in 2011 in the form of the Girona Manifesto ,which I am linking here .

Genres in the new TLRC  Diversity blog include , Essays, Poetry and Fiction.  Translators and readers are invited to contact the Committee with questions and submissions. I am adding here the link to Women Writers, as it is a special area of concern for me.  It is good to see that the International PEN Women Writer’s Committee is very active in the design and editorship of the blog, Lucina Kathmann and Marija Simokovic were very involved in the creation and launch of the women’s pages. Thanks to both women for their work and for publishing Aluine’s Gardens on Diversity.

The Diversity site

‘Green Geese’, by Edith Sitwell

“The trees were hissing like green geese…
The words they tried to say were these:

‘When the great Queen Claude was dead
They buried her deep in the potting-shed’

The moon smelt sweet as nutmeg-root
On the ripe peach-trees’ leaves and fruit,

And her sandalwood body leans upright,
To the gardener’s fright, through the summer night.

-
The bee-wing’d warm afternoon light roves
Gilding her hair (wooden nutmegs and cloves),

And the gardener plants his seedsman’s samples
Where no wild unicorn herd tramples-

In clouds like potting-sheds he pots
The budding planets in leaves cools as grots,

For the great Queen Claude when the light’s gilded gaud
Sings Miserere, Gloria, Laud.

But when he passes the potting-shed,
Fawning upon him comes the dead -

Each cupboard’s wooden skeleton
Is a towel-horse when the clock strikes one,

And light is high – yet with ghosts it winces
All night ‘mid wrinkled tarnished quinces,

When the dark air seems soft down
Of the wandering owl brown.

They know the clock-faced sun and moon
Must wrinkle like the quinces soon

(That once in dark blue grass dew-dabbled
Lay) … those ghosts like turkeys gabbled

To the scullion baking the Castle bread -
‘The spirit, too, must be fed, be fed:

Without our flesh we cannot see -
Oh, give us back Stupidity!’…

But death had twisted their thin speech
It could not fit the mind’s small niche -

Upon the warm blue grass outside,
They realized that they had died.

Only the light from their wooden curls roves
Like the sweet smell of nutmeg and cloves

Buried deep in the potting-shed,
Sighed those green geese, ‘Now the Queen is dead’
-
‘ Green Geese’ ,by Edith Sitwell, was dedicated to Richard Jenning. This poem published in Poems New and Old, by Edith Sitwell 1940 , Faber and Faber.

"Quince", by russian artist Victor Teterin (1922-1991)

This poem is published in memory of Michael McMullin 1916-2012, who kept the book  for me to transcribe and read.

Posterity and all that.

Recently, I wrote a post about how government bodies tend to view poetry. Indeed, I would say that given funding cuts to poetry and writer’s societies on both sides of the English Channel that the view tends toward jaundiced misunderstanding  rather than outright aggression. The image embedded in the piece was that of a woman placing flowers  at Ted Hughes‘ memorial stone at Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Ted Hughes’ stone was placed in close proximity to T.S Eliot‘s in the Abbey .  Eliot, the banker, the poet, and the editor of Faber and Faber mentored and supported Hughes. Eliot’s writing was of the monumental type, and clearly directed to posterity. It lacked intimacy, but produced in his readers the most tremendous reactions. I will admit that my favourite Eliot is his play, Murder in the Cathedral. I have for years tangled with the voices of the women, the chorus. This then is poetic-posterity. These women of Canterbury are doom-sayers, they are from the Greek-chorus. They are both ignored and later chided for their melodramatic utterances.  They are however  heard and regarded by the martyr Thomas À Becket.  They are not in the play to provide a dramatis-personae or as part of a construction, they actually make the play. I decided that I would add a section of the recording here for those interested in how T.S Eliot used the women.

Aside from Eliot, I find it quite difficult to relate to women characters that are written by men, as there is an absence somewhere that I regard as experiential. I look for women-writers with whom I can resonate. I think maybe Anna Livia as written by Joyce has for me a similar resonance to the Canterbury women written by Eliot.

Posterity seems to have increasing importance to those writers who have criticised Carol Ann Duffy in recent weeks. It took 341 years for the English people to countenance a woman laureate and her laureateship is attacked by the guardians of dogma, who not once sought to define (say) Ted Hughes’ Laureateship,

“Conversely, Carol Ann Duffy’s work which speaks so clearly to many today may seem stale to posterity. I have no idea whether this would distress her.” (Allan Massie)

The idea of poetic-posterity being defined by intellect is almost risible. The life of a poem is defined by the resonance of the image (or images) that are captured within the form of the poem, it is not a question of the perceived intellect of the poet but how the poem illuminates the reader. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill‘s images are fine-hewn and unforgettable, as are Plath’s, as are the images created by Anna Akhmatova, by Margaret Fuller, by Stevie Smith, or by Ágnes Nemes Nagy. The fact that a certain coterie of critics are glued to the idea of posterity whilst mistranslating the idea of popularity (or populism) wholly misses the point of poetry. It is not about how wordy and intellectual the poet,  but how that image which they have fashioned can adapt, and move with the reader through their lifetime and be always different and always challenging. That government-appointed funders do not recognise the place of poetry in our societies  is worrying.

I am adding here two excerpts of poems/prose which I will properly attribute next week. I want the reader to investigate the images and form therein,  and then possibly wonder at how stupidly gendered and egotistical the intellectual poets’ profound disconnect with their reader actually is become.

Poetry and Poetic Prose, two excerpts.

Excerpt #1.

Trees

“Learn. The winter trees.
Hoarfrosted crown to root.
Immovable curtains.
-
And learn too of the zone
where a crystal steams
and trees merge into mists,
as the body in recollection of it.”

Excerpt #2

Travels

I.

 ’I came to a land where freedom had been realised or was at least believed to be very close to its full realisation. For the people here the word freedom  could consequently not be applicable to themselves but only to other peoples who had not yet discovered the happiness-making formula that means the realisation of freedom. In this land,therefore, the people talked much and with a strong sympathy for all the people beyond the frontiers of their own land who were not free. It was said that one ought to exert oneself to  the uttermost in order to liberate all the lands and peoples of the earth. On the other hand, it would hardly have been the right thing if it had occurred to some compatriot to longingly, invoke, for example, the concept of freedom in an internal context to himself or any of his fellow-countrymen. To be sure, it was not forbidden by law to use the word freedom in that last-mentioned way, but a universally sanctioned convention in reality liquidated the word from any contexts other (than) external ones.

Since everything in this land was so new, so thrillingly and inspiringly new,  I became like a child, reborn, receptive and avid for knowledge, and also became involved in teaching in a school. By day and by hour I received proof which confirmed that freedom really was being realised  in this land as in no other. On the way to work, in buses,  trams and underground trains the workers sat studying books which promised them the chance of experiencing freedom completely realised  in their own lifetimes; a mother married to a simple sailor told me with eyes moist from emotion that there was every reason to expect that her son would attain the rank of admiral one day, and everywhere  there was testimony to the fact  that here women were acknowledged as beings equal to men with all their human rights acknowledged; among other things the fact that within the military profession they possessed the rank of captain, major and even colonel.”

EDIT  18/02/2012:

Excerpt # 1 was Trees by Ágnes Nemes Nagy , from Between Dedalus Press (Dublin) and Corvina Press (Budapest) 1998. In translation by Hugh Maxton.

Excerpt # 2 is by Mirjam Tuominen , The short prose Travels , is from Theme with Variations, published in 1952.

Murder in the Cathedral , the women , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxA_3qyN1lk 

T.S Eliot and the death of poetry ,  http://poethead.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/t-s-eliot-and-the-death-of-poetry/

‘Posterity and all that‘ by C Murray/Poethead is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at poethead.wordpress.com.

Experimenting with new poetry on poethead

I  have decided to inaugurate a new poetry section on the blog, which will be happening on the first Saturday of every month in the saturday woman poet category of Poethead. The first poem, Nine, by Brittany Hill will be followed in March by another poet-blogger’s work. I hope to keep this up until summer , when I will revise and decide whether to continue the section. The rest of the month’s posts  will be  of the usual blogging and book-talk for those readers who are interested in poetry, and in reading the work and themes of women poets. Thanks to my brave volunteers who have offered their works for the New Poetry space. I may also publish some poetic prose or short pieces of prose, as I have some pieces that are currently homeless.

As I decided to start with poet-bloggers , I’d like to invite anyone who is interested in sharing blog-links or contributing a poem to just add their name in comments. My email contact is c(dot)elizabethmurray(at)gmail(dot)com. I am adding this post to google+ and Facebook. This is an experiment, and I hope to try it for a period of a few months before deciding to retain it wholly.

 February’s poet is Brittany Hill , Nine , by Brittany Hill