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Richard Taylor - New Zealand Poet and Chess Player

Richard

Richard Taylor


Last Updated: 12/5/2009

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Gender: Male
Status: Single
Age: 61
Sign: Aquarius

State: Auckland
Country: NZ
Signup Date: 3/19/2007

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Wednesday, February 06, 2008 

Category: Writing and Poetry

The Waste Land


April is the uncruellest month,

Breeding mixing stirring feeding

Lilacs land memory and desire

And roots are dull with springing rain.

We were caught in a coffee quandry,

Tranced into the Hoftgarten,

Where sunlight and sun surprised, smiled,

And let us chat in Russin unt Deutsch,

Unt coffee flowed into ourselves,

Warming firing, and we stopped,

When April, with flaming hair,

Broke out in joyous French. Fear

Caught me by my tickling scrotum.

He, she adjured me to calm

As we sped on the sled into the terrible dark -

High high in snow freedom.

Deep at night I invade my books

And Westward walk

In that awful other season. Some go North.


What clutches grows inverted trees

Wierdly from all this ashly crumblings?

You. Yes, you - to you I speak. You

Will never have the knowing. No, no,

Never shalt thou know: for in your gloomed

Skull a pantomime is played -

Outside where beats down heat

There is no watering place, no holing up -

No where can be found the leastest trickle

In the rocks of gods

In the garden of rocks

In the harsh unshadowed land

Where I have forgotten

How this strange conjunction

Of striding morning shadows,

Inverting rising in meeting,

Was revealed to me - in a handful of-

A man with a blazing brow

Showed me fear in transformal

Primal dust, until, after the rain of red rocks,

I writhed in Wagnerian,

That Hitler (and I) so loved. (But we both

loved/feared grails and waters.)

We reappeared at the ending time,

And all applauded -

The the dew sparkling hyacinths

Had you shine with smile,

And another god impelled this All-

And vast the silence, the heart:

The sacred sacred heart

- We were unsighted by this fire.

Vast sea, empty sea -

In your green visions we untounged

- Searched we our hearts,

Nothing knowing of the core, the centre,

The nexus of stasis,

The thunder of the drumming of unsound.

Das Meer is unt Leer,

Unt Lear was crazed with blinded knowing -

(This much we know, as we are darked.)


Madam Sosostris had the flu,

And coughed like a wicked witch.

She was a bitch and played her fateful cards.

All the ages, all meanings, took on new life,

Including Thunder, way over Dark Mountain,

And we crouched who fell

Back into our fervent religious shell.

(I Tiresias, drinker of waking blood,

Wither in all dimensions, being regenerative

Corpsed was Clov's word -)

Uga uga jug jug jug.

Life life life - sex is fill of complex -

Broken bottles and Cleopatric rats.

Fear The Dog, Watch It Phlebas. .

Da Dadhatta Dhayaardvam.

Raise to 3 powers Shantih.



by R. Taylor







Graeme Perrin
Graeme Perrin

 
A bloody fine romp through so many fields of your making. Language too you can twist and beat into fine new shapes. There is a sound to this as well and a deep fall into heart. Great to follow and give yourself up to. You got me good. G.
 
Posted by Graeme Perrin on Wednesday, February 06, 2008 - 10:48 PM
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Richard
Richard Taylor

 
Thanks Graeme. In 1993 I was in NY - Lower East side - and I read this at a small poetry club - someone said it was better than the original - so called - by Possum! - I actually wrote it as one of the exercises "set" (actually in a book I had at University) -or suggested by Bernadette Mayer. There is a long list of here exercises somewhere in one of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E journals that came out in the 70s to 80s - run by such as Ron Silliman, Lyn Heijinian, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein and others.

One was "Re-write someone difficult"

An example might be to re-write "Lear" an extreme one would be "Finnegans Wake" [lol !!] and so on..but there were other exercises...quite useful - amusing.

I must dig out the list - the ideas were good - I don't seem to have many original ideas... so it;s good to have a pattern to follow so to speak -or to steal ideas...etc
 
Posted by Richard on Thursday, February 07, 2008 - 6:56 AM
[Reply to this
Richard
Richard Taylor

 
"Clov" is from Beckett's play "Endgame" ... of course the German is deliberately mispelt for satiric effect.

But I have known Old Possum's poems since I was a teenager (about 1966 or so) - I knew the Waste Land by Heart so it was a good one to re-write - I called April the "uncruellest" as it is - in NZ - a cold month!
I also placed the gerunds in a line -as against the opriginal thus:

"Breeding mixing stirring feeding"

whereas the original is

"April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with Spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Stanbergersee
With a shower of rain..."

A great poem - obviously much more than mine.

I forgot "covering".

"Leer" is German for desolate or vast (referring to the sea) and is from Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" -
I have never listened to the opera right through - I find it rather tedious, and I have no interest in the Holy Grail whatsoever! - I do like parts of the Ring Cycle though.

I here satirise one of the greatest and most beautiful poems in the English language...
but in my satire or behind it there is homage to great writer - T S Eliot

And "waking blood " refers to the fact that in both Homer and I think "The Aeneid" (which I have never read right through!) when Odysseus visits the dead in Hades to get info - Tiresias etc all have to drink blood inorder to hear or communicate with the dead -the saddest thing is Odysseus's communication with his dead mother - that strikes me as highly tragic - but is glossed over by Homer, Odysseus (he seems pretty callous about it all) and everyone else.
 
Posted by Richard on Thursday, February 07, 2008 - 7:36 AM
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L-J Stockman

 
Hi Richard, just been by to read and re-read.... Fascinating, and enjoyable to read the thinking and doing behind the 'finished work'.... Believe it or not Wagner is my - (let me get this right) great-grandmother's uncle on my mothers side...finally a claim to fame...however I too find his operas a little boorish to listen to the whole thing (sorry Unc.) Hope that August finds you well. Regards, L-J :)
 
Posted by L-J Stockman on Monday, August 18, 2008 - 2:32 AM
[Reply to this
Richard
Richard Taylor

 
Re Wagner - I imagine you would have to see his Operas AND hear them (preferably at Bayreuth if you could get there and afford to pay for it all) - I like it when we first encounter Alberich the Dwarf and then you hear on of his Leitmotifs - the tinkling and tonkling of the hammer as the slaves make or forge the magic ring of gold - but so sit through all three works could be an ordeal (I had them from the Library once and the whole opera sequence (The Ring Cycle) was bit much -but it is meant to combine the visual, Wagner's own lyrics and drama and was in a revolutionary musical style that influenced such as Debussy, Schoenberg and others - in fact all modern music has distant or close derivations form Wagner's innovations -The Flying Dutchmen is a magnificent work BTW. Eliot, Joyce and others all were fascinated by the Grail legend via Tristan and Isolde but it doesn't interest me much... it seems rather trivial to me... I just like words and language!

Interesting that you are related to Wagner -his son or nepwhew was a Nazi -


"... after the rain of red rocks,

I writhed in Wagnerian,

That Hitler (and I) so loved. (But we both

loved/feared grails and waters.)

We reappeared at the ending time,

And all applauded - ..."


Wagner broke with Nietzsche as Nietzsche violently disapproved of Wagner's anti-Semitic diatribes.

I just love words and word combinations - word magic. Hence my "satire" of The Waste Land (I have known it by heart since I was about 18 in 1966 or so) is a kind of Homage (to Eliot) as well as originally actually being a practice exercise... It is also perhaps even "comic" - seen from certain angles.
 
Posted by Richard on Sunday, September 14, 2008 - 12:24 PM
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