By Lendal Bridge

Cherry

By Parson Thru

Sat, 09 Nov 2019
  • 2367 reads
11 comments
 

By Lendal Bridge

After William Carlos Williams - Rimbaud/Solzhenitsyn, perhaps

By Lendal Bridge, I take my brushes out and paint.

Light patterns spread across the swollen Ouse, complicating its otherwise simple progress through the curve, between the many faceted banks and walls, its rippling brightness teased from a wintering sky.

A coffee cup, late of breakfast, foregrounds the ochre-speckled towpath – damp from here till April – framed by skeletal arms of birch, sycamore, chestnut.

Oarsmen/women opposite ease their slender hulls into secret racks behind a modernist facade, as scattered flecks of foam – remnants of many an upstream drama – process innocently past.

As a child, I imagined Lendal’s iron span would fold and take us, Bristol omnibus and all, to meet our private drowning place. It seems a more prosaic closing scene awaits.

Certificate U
Poem
Parson Thruses Dairy
Travel

Comments

Submitted by Insertponceyfre... on

I love this (as well as being amused by the ever-widening scope of your distraction activities from your course reading - painting now eh!) Are you living right by the river then?

 

Submitted by Parson Thru on

Hi insert. Yes. On a park bench.

Busy Whatsapping with the group. I really ought to finish reading this week's book. Promised to take my mother for fish and chips!!

Thank you for the cherries!!! X

Parson Thru

Submitted by Philip Sidney on

Great word painting.

Submitted by Parson Thru on

Thank you Philip Sydney. I've never really taken to Carlos Williams, but thought his style might work for describing the scene. One of his styles, anyway. Kind of. He was quite prescriptive about content.

Parson Thru

Submitted by Di_Hard on

I love the canoe(?) as "finely balanced purchase"

and "rippling brightness" with very different way of seeing the river "scattered flecks of foam – remnants of many an upstream drama, unseen – process innocently past"

Are you studying? Is it opening new ways of seeing/writing for you?

 

Submitted by Parson Thru on

Hi Di. Thanks. Yes, I'm studying, but this is from existing reading that I've been revisiting. I haven't really put anything into my writing from the course yet. My heart and head are in French vers libre down along the Beat route. WCW sits in there somewhere at odds with Eliot and to a point with Pound. I'm not at all well read really, but I know WCW was keen on trying to draw what he saw in front of him. A mix of influences, really. And sighing with letters.

Parson Thru

Submitted by Di_Hard on

Oh that will be fun, trying to guess from reading your stuff from now on, though I am so narrowly read it is only a few books wide, so will not know what has inspired you. Hopefully not always looking out of the window instead of reading set books :0)The most creative doodles I have ever done were in the margins of Far from the Madding Crowd (got a D  for A level) It will be like pushing a rock uphill if the set texts are all ones you are not interested in though?

 

Submitted by Parson Thru on

It might well, Di. But it's about looking for the positives. It's got me reading things I would probably never have read and dug up some theory from the past. Everything is connected. I went to take my Literature O Level a week after the event. Oops!

Parson Thru

Submitted by drew_gummerson on

Yes, I like this a lot. But I don't know that the words 'grudgingly' and 'innocently' fit. Because then it's an opinion of what you see and not what you see. But that's just my opinion. WCW is an imagist? Right? 

 

Submitted by Parson Thru on

Hi Drew. Thanks. I'll have a look.

I think early in his career there was agreement between Pound and Carlos Williams, but they diverged as Pound and Eliot adopted a more European and learned approach. I'm not sure which side stayed closest to imagism. Carlos Williams' later work became quite verbose, not really in Pound's spirit of imagism. He certainly believed that the physical facts spoke for themselves. A kind of painting of scenes and people.

Parson Thru

Submitted by Parson Thru on

Hi Drew. I think you're right about the "grudgingly" - the adverb is at the wrong end of the transaction. I'm going to keep "innocently", as the flecks of foam seem innocent where they pass the viewing point, having been involved in wreaking havoc with floods upstream. I've removed "unseen" from that as it seems redundant on rereading. Thanks for your suggestions.

Parson Thru