The Divided Line: Jan 2012
BOOK REVIEWS
[#] Rhys Trimble, Mynydd (Hafan Books)
[#] Tom Jenks, * (If P Then Q)
[#] Better Than Language (Ganzfeld)
[#] Rupert Loydell/Robert Sheppard, Risk Assessment (Damaged Goods)
[#] Nat Raha's 'Octet' (Veer)
[#] Elisabeth Bletsoe, Landscape From A Dream (Shearsman)
[#] Lara Glenum, Hounds of No (Action Books)
[#] Tout cela est matématique: Ian Seed's Shifting Registers
[#] “The soup was hairier than usual” – a review of Gene Tanta’s 'Unusual Woods' (BlazeVOX)
[] Never to have compromised with transcendence: Tony Trehy’s 50 Heads (Apple Pie Editions)
[#] Robert Hampson's 'an explanation of colours' (Veer)
[#] Lissa Wolsak's 'Squeezed Light' (Station Hill)
[#] Jim Goar's 'Seoul Bus Poems' (Reality Street)
[#] Famous Plays of 1931 (Gollancz)
[#] David Wevill’s 'Departures: Selected Poems', Giles Goodland's 'What the Things Sang', Jeremy Reed's 'Bona Drag' and 'Bona Vada', Hanne Bramness' 'Salt on the Eye: Selected Poems', Lars Amund Vaage's 'Outside the Institution — Selected Poems', María Baranda's 'Ficticia', Carrie Etter’s 'Divining for Starters' (all Shearsman)
INTERVIEW
[#] "Nothing that's quite your own": Vanessa Place Interviewed
POETRY
[#] Sophie Seita - Little Trauma
[#] Amy De'Ath - Cuteness is a Landscape
[#] Tray Drumhann - 2 Poems
[#] Juha Virtanen - from Some of its Parts
[#] Alex Davies - Poems & a section from Jon Wild & The Devil Himself
[#] Abdulkarim Kasid - 2 Poems translated by the poet and Sara Halub, with David Kuhrt and John Welch
[#] Amy Cutler - Wild Pansy
[#] Dominic Fox - After Slumber xiii
[#] Samantha Walton - 3 Poems
[#] Luke McMullan - Poem
[#] Colleen Hind - DP Selection
[#] Sophie Seita - Fragonard
[#] Francesca Lisette - 3 Poems
[#] R T A Parker - 9 Sonnets
[#] Fabian Macpherson - 2 Poems
[#] Helen Slater - Easter Sunday 24 April 2011
[#] Tessa Whitehouse - Draft Folder Poems
[#] Ralph Hawkins - The pflight of a Poet (Four Chanson)
[#] Tom Lowenstein - The Apartments of the Great Khan
[#] Lisa Jeschke - Lines 1, 2, 3
[#] Sarah Kelly - 2 Poems
[#] Nat Raha - 3 Poems
[#] Joe Luna - Two Songs
[#] Alistair Noon - Three Poems from 'Some Questions on the Cultural Revolution'
ESSAYS
[#] Peter Larkin - John Milbank's 'Legend of Death: Two Poetic Sequences'
[#] Ralph Hawkins - Ted Berrigan. Plagiarism and / or the Found Poem. A Creative Writing Lesson.
[#] Joe Luna - Field Report, CRS vol. 5, 21.5.10
[#] Michael Peverett - Charlotte Smith's 'Flora'
[#] Felicity Roberts and Edmund Hardy - Interior Ears I
[#] Edmund Hardy - Craniotomy: Lyric Poetry
"I.S." NOTES & COMMENTARIES
[#] Michael Peverett - Domestic Bliss
[#] Two Tree Notes
[#] A note on the recent work of Francesca Lisette
[#] 3 Disney Songs Considered
[#] In the City
Cuteness Is A Landscape - A Poem By Amy De'Ath
Little Trauma - A Poem by Sophie Seita
Domestic Bliss
by Michael Peverett
This is a piece that is partly about the Swedish poets Harry Martinson and Karin Boye. It's also partly about Trientalis europaea. I suppose I ought to call it "On Chickweed Wintergreen", but, more pickiness, I don't like titles that begin with "On".
Robin Fulton's new translation of Martinson is called: Chickweed Wintergreen: Selected Poems. (It's a bit unfortunate that though this essay owes so much to Fulton's book I'm not really going to be writing about it or even quoting it, but it's a pretty absorbing book, that is, if you feel interested in Swedish working-class sailor-poets who write about nature and space travel. Let's hope that, with Tranströmer being awarded the Nobel Prize, Fulton is posting some healthy figures elsewhere.)
Chickweed Wintergreen is one of those translation-titles, like Scott Moncrieff's Remembrance of Things Past, that proclaims a certain robust independence from its source-text. Yes, there is a poem in the book that is titled "Chickweed Wintergreen", and yes, this is a translation of a poem by Martinson that is titled "Duvkullorna", which is one of the Swedish names for the species of plant (Trientalis europaea) that in English is named "Chickweed Wintergreen". But flower-names, espcially within poetry, are about a lot more than denoting a species. Rarely are they merely a word, such as "tulip". The metaphors within them, usually, are far from buried. Most names are, or seem to be, wholly or somewhat descriptive. "Chickweed Wintergreen" being a case in point: great name for a book: zany, fresh and popping with images.
But this is an effect that owes little to Harry Martinson. The title strikes the imaginative reader precisely because, in Britain, the plant is not very well-known. The sad truth is, Trientalis europaea has always been too scarce to make much impression on UK culture. Quite why that is, isn't altogether clear. There seems to be plenty of the kind of thing that it likes (moss, moor, open pinewoods), yet it's always rare in England (the north, E. Suffolk), and only locally common even in Scotland.
Which explains the background to the English name "Chickweed Wintergreen", not exactly an academic name but clearly a plant-hunter's name rather than a traditional folk name (the oldest OED reference is 1760).
Imagine the scene: intrepid botanist wandering through an ancient Scottish pinewood, around midsummer; a place distinguished by members of the wintergreen family (Pyrola, generally rather local in Britain); botanist suddenly notices some leaves that seem a bit similar (i.e. oval-ish) but, behold, there's a flower on top that looks totally unlike Pyrola, but does look a bit like a chickweed (Stellaria). That, or something like it, must be how the name arose. I mean, taking into consideration that not only is the plant unrelated to either chickweeds or wintergreens, but it isn't eaten by chickens and it isn't green in winter!
Well, this is Martinson's little poem, which was published in the collection Passad (Trade Wind) in 1945.
DUVKULLORNA
Skogsstjärnorna frodas aldrig.
De bara reder sig
med karg nätthet i mossan.
De är spensliga,
men veta ingenting om den söta vekhet
du vill tillskylla sommaren.
Det spensligas bestämdhet
är inte mindre än ekens.
THE DOVEFLOWERS
The Woodland Stars never luxuriate.
They just manage
with sparse elegance among the mosses.
They are slight,
but they know nothing about the tender softness
you associate with summer.
The determination of the slight
is not less than the oak's.
I am not one of those who believe that poems don't state things; I think it's more interesting to see poems as principally statements, though sometimes rather complicated ones. Accordingly, I'm going to begin with the plant. In Sweden, it's common everywhere except in the far south, though (as Martinson points out) not luxuriant. It's a matter of a single plant here and there, growing among other species on the forest floor. Here it is:
Photo copyright Kristian Svensson, but I don't know how to contact him for permission!
It's one of those plants that doesn't exactly shout to us (small white flowers usually don't), but once it's noticed it's quietly striking. Along with Twinflower (Linnaea borealis), it was a favourite of Linnaeus. In Flora Lapponica (1737) he wrote: "I don't know any other flower whose grace so fascinates the eye; the spectator becomes almost bewitched! Maybe this is due to symmetry, the mother of all beauty."
Maybe. There are certainly two features that attract attention: one is the curious whorl of differently-sized leaves: a sort of assymetric symmetry, I suppose. The other is the flower itself, partly because there's usually only one flower, and partly because although the number of petals varies the favoured number is seven, which is uncommon to say the least. (The Icelandic name Sjöstjarna and the Dutch name Zevenster both refer to this.)
Martinson doesn't say anything about these features: he relies on the reader to do most of the evoking. All he tells us by way of description is that the plant is "spenslig" (slight, or slender), and this stands in for all the rest. Of course there are a great many plants that could reasonably be called slight, at least in comparison to oak trees, but perhaps there is a particular appropriateness in applying it to this one, where it glances both at the parsimonious production of flowers and at the plant's tendency to appear as isolated individuals rather than profuse stands.
In fact, these plants are not really isolated individuals. They are connected, beneath the woodland surface, by long lateral growths that throw up superterranean extrusions at rather lengthy intervals. That is the main way that Trientalis europaea spreads (or should I specify, the DNA of T. europaea): it puts most of its energy into securing its presence in a good habitat, and not much of its energy into the chancy business of colonizing new sites; few flowers, and even fewer seeds. Hence it never turns up in new woodland, but is a reliable indicator of old woodland. "A good competitor, but a poor colonist," comments the BRC on-line atlas.
Martinson has the reputation of being a poet who grasped science, and I suppose this poem confirms that. When he says:
The determination of the slight / is not less than the oak's
he is not only right about the specific case of Trientalis europaea, though that's still worth emphasizing. Modest and isolated as the plant appears in a European context, it is certainly a successful species, with a circumpolar distribution through the boreal regions of the Old World, and also in Western North America (in the east, it is replaced by the related T. borealis). But the general case applies too. Perhaps he had heard of the Dane Wilhelm Johannsen's genotype-phenotype distinction (1911), which has proved such a fertile ground for later writers. Perhaps his conclusion also amounts to a recognition that determination is the preserve of the genotype, and the success of a genotype has nothing to do with whether its phenotype happens to be an impressively mighty oak or some unattended unicellular organism, a reflection that will be commonplace to readers of e.g. Richard Dawkins.
Nevertheless, the poem does not quite come to rest on this scientific meditation. After all, taken at that level of generality the human connotations of "spenslig" / "slight" lose their validity altogether. But the poem clings on to them: great determination there must be, but the slightness is not dispensed with. It becomes a defining quality of the particular determination with which the poem is concerned: it intends to praise slightness. It's time to think about the context of the poem.
Like many of Martinson's nature poems, it appears at first glance to contain no human context whatever: there are no figures in the landscape, it is alienated from human concerns. And that is intentionally a challenge; an assertion that nature cannot be known if framed or tamed by the quotidian and human. This is a game that Martinson played from the off. Coming to poetry after a youth on the oceans, he repeatedly brought his public up against the realization that he was no stay-at-home, that he had un-domestic experience that his readers didn't share with him: for example in the famous poem that begins "Have you seen a steam collier" (1929) - he means, after a storm at sea - and draws all its energy from the unmistakable implication: No you haven't, but you know that I have. "Home Village" (1931) had framed the "silent lie" of tranquil village life through the eyes of one returning from "the brothel alleys of Barcelona".
Yet a nature poem such as this one does, lightly, intrude an awareness of a domestic context. Though the plant in question is not exactly commonplace, we've seen that a tradition already existed, among reasonably sensitive observers, of appreciating its finer features ("I don't know any other flower whose grace so fascinates the eye..."). Domestic bliss, Swedish style, tends to involve not just the home but its extension into the trees and the borders of that everlasting wood, where one is always roaming about, if only to find a good spot to fling out the washing-up water.
There's a further clue to this context in the two Swedish names for Trientalis europaea that appear in the poem. I've translated them literally; unlike the English name "Chickweed Wintergreen", both were evidently folk-names rooted in long tradition. But the one that Martinson uses in the title (Duvkulla - "Doveflower") was evidently a local name; it is certainly not much used now, and the only Google reference that isn't talking about Martinson's poem comes from a 1923 article in the provincial newspaper Dalpilen. It was the other name (Skogsstjärna - "Woodland Star") that was, then and now, in general use; and doubtless it turns up in the poem's first line in order to ensure that the reader knows exactly what plant Martinson is talking about. The local name in the title amounts to a confession: it is the poet's own name for the plant because it's the name he grew up with, in a countrified provincial locality, long before he set off to sail the world.
The poem then, implies the limited rambles of a child close to home: domestic surroundings. The defiant praise of slightness, in this context, amounts to a sentimental, perhaps desperately sentimental, defence of the limited horizons and quotidian activity of an unassuming home. Martinson had no particular reason to be sentimental about his own childhood; at the same time he was a popular poet, both working with popular sentiment and inevitably yielding to it, at least in respect of its thought-forms.
*
Taking refuge in small things was a sentiment that lay deep in popular culture. I don't want to reduce Martinson's poem to its popular substratum, but at the same time it's important to understand the substratum.
I want to approach it by way of the hugely popular pan-Nordic standard "De nære ting" / "Små nära ting". The composers of the melody, Kurt Foss and Reidar Bøe, recorded the song in 1951, both in Norwegian (June) and Swedish (September).
There were numerous subsequent recordings and, as is the way with standards in Sweden, a host of drinking-song parodies. I'm taking most of my information from Enn Kokk's interesting blog.
The original Norwegian lyrics were composed by Arne Paasche Aasen (1901-1978), a strongly left-wing politician, activist, journalist and poet. As a populist poet his work graded into song lyrics: rousing labour movement songs such as "Vi bygger landet" (based on an earlier Russian anthem), but also sentimental songs like "De nære ting". Norwegian and Swedish are so closely related to each other that translating from one into the other is a doddle, and Ture Nerman's Swedish version is sometimes almost word for word. The main difference is the inclusion of the word "små" (small); the Swedish title means, literally, "small near things", but you can't put that into idiomatic English without becoming wordy: "the little things close by", or something of that sort.
D F#6
Din längtan flyr vilse
G
så vida omkring.
Em
Det är som du glömt
A4 A
alla nära ting.
D F#6
Det är som du aldrig
G B dim (or Gm)
fick lugn en minut
D E7
till någonting annat -
A7 D
du jämt vill ut.
Your yearning heart wanders
so far and so wide -
it seems you've forgotten
the things by your side.
It seems that you never
one moment sit down.
To some destination
you're always bound.
Du tycker din dag är
så fattig och grå.
Vad är det du söker?
Vad väntar du på?
När aldrig du unnar
dig rast eller ro,
kan ingenting växa
och intet gro.
You think that your days are
so empty and grey.
What is it you're seeking?
What do you await?
If you never have
any fun or repose,
then nothing develops,
and nothing grows.
Gå in i din kammare,
liten och trång -
den gömmer vad hjärtat
höll kärast en gång.
På ropet i skogen
får ingen ett svar.
Finn vägen tillbaka
till det du har.
Go into your parlour,
so little and close -
it hides what your heart
used to care about once.
The cry in the forest,
it gets no response.
So find your way homeward
to what is yours.
Den lyckan du söker
bak fjället i brand,
den har kanske alltid
du haft i din hand.
Du skall inte jaga
så rolöst omkring…
D E7
men lära dig älska
Gm A D
små nära ting!
The treasure you looked for
in far mountain lands,
perhaps it was always
right here in your hands.
You don't have to struggle
so hungry and high,
just value those little
things by your side!
Ture Nerman (1886-1969), like Arne Paasche Aasen, had begun as a communist and was later a social democrat. But the song-lyric is solidly conservative in intention, intrinsically dubious about ambition and idealism. It may not be relevant to point it out, but they were no longer young men.
"Små nära ting" is a classic consolation-lyric, like that other song from 1951 "Cold Cold Heart" (Hank Williams, Tony Bennett), and such countless predecessors as the Irish standard "I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen" (in fact composed by an American, Thomas Paine Westendorf, in 1876). "Små nära ting" is less obviously aligned to the heteronormal male subject / female object format than either of those songs; in fact the most-remembered recording is probably Monica Neilsen's, if it isn't Anna-Lena Löfgren's.
Nevertheless, it shares the in-built tensions of the consolation-lyric, e.g. that if the unconsolable could be consoled by whatever the consoler is saying, then s/he probably wouldn't need consoling in the first place. The consolation-lyric is both heroic and doomed: heroic because in performance the song boldly offers itself as the resolving turning-point in its own narrative; doomed because every time the song is re-performed it turns out that the consolation is still needed. The singer continues to brood "why can't I ease your troubled mind and melt your cold cold heart"; the singer reiterates the ever-unfulfilled promise "I'll take you to your home again"; and here, the singer urges, yet again, the sweet simple advice about the little things in life that the poor distracted "wandering wanderer" finds it impossible to be satisfied with. (The classic Misty in Roots take on the Prodigal Son is apposite, and so is this more recent lament:
You've wandered so far
from the person you are.
Let go, brother, let go.
- which gains an extra frisson from its singer being not the reproving composer but, as we suppose, the very wanderer that Tim Rice-Oxley addresses. Battle is pretty much a big village.)
*
When Martinson built his poem towards that assertion about "the determination of the slight" he was, I believe, recalling another short poem published ten years earlier, by Karin Boye. Recalling it unconsciously, perhaps: he does not use the same words, but the shape of the clinching line surely betrays a kinship.
EN STILLHET VIDGADES
En stillhet vidgades mjuk som soliga vinterskogar.
Hur blev min vilja viss och min väg mig underdånig?
Jag bar i min hand en etsad skål av klingande glas.
Då blev min fot så varsam och kommer inte att snava.
Då blev min hand så aktsam och komma inte att darra.
Då blev jag överflödad och buren av styrkan ur sköra ting.
A STILLNESS SPREAD
A stillness spread, gentle as the sun-filled winter woods.
How was it, my will grew certain and my path obedient to me?
I bore in my hand an etched bowl of ringing glass.
Then it was my steps became cautious and would not stumble.
Then it was my hand became careful and would not shake.
Then I was suffused and borne along by the strength of fragile things.
(From För trädets skull (For the Tree's Sake), 1935)
Elsewhere, Boye had reacted defiantly to the national vein of cosy, domestic quietism. Indeed her famous poem "I Rörelse" ("On the Move") is the classical rejoinder in Swedish:
Den mätta dagen, den är aldrig störst.
Den bästa dagen är en dag av törst.
The day of satisfaction is not best.
The better day, that is a day of thirst.
But (as is always the case) the defiance conceals an awareness of the contrary pull, i.e. towards domestic peace. What takes her by surprise in the poem about the glass bowl is, perhaps, exactly a feeling of momentarily being at peace with her surroundings. And, of course, they are domestic surroundings: passing between a main house and an outhouse, and taking care not to trip on the ubiquitous birch roots.
The observation, a brilliant one I think, is that the fragile object so long as it exists unbroken is indeed a show of strength; it takes all the object's strength not to fall apart. (No-one calls Boye a scientific poet, but she is just as scientific as Martinson, and her poem too deserves to be taken as seriously as a statement.)
And this strength is what is communicated to the carrier who doesn't drop the bowl; her own tensed poise, being patently required of her, is accordingly manifested, and it reveals her capability to herself; not only her capability either, but the deep peace of having a nurturing role, and fitting it; the nurturer is dependent on her charge. A deep peace, for as long as it lasts.
Because, for both poets these would-be idealistic poems constituted swimming against the tide. There is a cry of desperation in their restfulness; in both of them, though Martinson's buttoned-up prickliness is so different from Boye's vulnerable transparency. Both were wanderers who returned to the little things; Boye, to the fateful role of carer that is imagined as a fulfilling pattern in her poem. But their bliss was most tranquilly revealed in poems that ignored the complications of people. In winter 1941 Karin Boye, anguished by personal distresses as well as the war, took a walk into the snow from which she did not return. Harry Martinson, product of a broken working-class home, his health ruined at sea in his youth, allowed the bitter freshness of his early poems to ferment into settled gloom. The last straw, perhaps, was winning the Nobel Prize in 1974; or more particularly, the barrage of adverse comment that it induced (mainly within Sweden itself). The prize was shared with Eyvind Johnson, another working-class writer; both were now members of the Nobel committee, so the award was certainly a bit naïve. In 1978 Martinson attempted to commit ritual suicide by disembowelment (seppuku) with a pair of scissors. He was horribly injured and died a few days later.
[Information about Trientalis europaea from Den virtuella floran.]
This is a piece that is partly about the Swedish poets Harry Martinson and Karin Boye. It's also partly about Trientalis europaea. I suppose I ought to call it "On Chickweed Wintergreen", but, more pickiness, I don't like titles that begin with "On".
Robin Fulton's new translation of Martinson is called: Chickweed Wintergreen: Selected Poems. (It's a bit unfortunate that though this essay owes so much to Fulton's book I'm not really going to be writing about it or even quoting it, but it's a pretty absorbing book, that is, if you feel interested in Swedish working-class sailor-poets who write about nature and space travel. Let's hope that, with Tranströmer being awarded the Nobel Prize, Fulton is posting some healthy figures elsewhere.)
Chickweed Wintergreen is one of those translation-titles, like Scott Moncrieff's Remembrance of Things Past, that proclaims a certain robust independence from its source-text. Yes, there is a poem in the book that is titled "Chickweed Wintergreen", and yes, this is a translation of a poem by Martinson that is titled "Duvkullorna", which is one of the Swedish names for the species of plant (Trientalis europaea) that in English is named "Chickweed Wintergreen". But flower-names, espcially within poetry, are about a lot more than denoting a species. Rarely are they merely a word, such as "tulip". The metaphors within them, usually, are far from buried. Most names are, or seem to be, wholly or somewhat descriptive. "Chickweed Wintergreen" being a case in point: great name for a book: zany, fresh and popping with images.
But this is an effect that owes little to Harry Martinson. The title strikes the imaginative reader precisely because, in Britain, the plant is not very well-known. The sad truth is, Trientalis europaea has always been too scarce to make much impression on UK culture. Quite why that is, isn't altogether clear. There seems to be plenty of the kind of thing that it likes (moss, moor, open pinewoods), yet it's always rare in England (the north, E. Suffolk), and only locally common even in Scotland.
Which explains the background to the English name "Chickweed Wintergreen", not exactly an academic name but clearly a plant-hunter's name rather than a traditional folk name (the oldest OED reference is 1760).
Imagine the scene: intrepid botanist wandering through an ancient Scottish pinewood, around midsummer; a place distinguished by members of the wintergreen family (Pyrola, generally rather local in Britain); botanist suddenly notices some leaves that seem a bit similar (i.e. oval-ish) but, behold, there's a flower on top that looks totally unlike Pyrola, but does look a bit like a chickweed (Stellaria). That, or something like it, must be how the name arose. I mean, taking into consideration that not only is the plant unrelated to either chickweeds or wintergreens, but it isn't eaten by chickens and it isn't green in winter!
Well, this is Martinson's little poem, which was published in the collection Passad (Trade Wind) in 1945.
DUVKULLORNA
Skogsstjärnorna frodas aldrig.
De bara reder sig
med karg nätthet i mossan.
De är spensliga,
men veta ingenting om den söta vekhet
du vill tillskylla sommaren.
Det spensligas bestämdhet
är inte mindre än ekens.
THE DOVEFLOWERS
The Woodland Stars never luxuriate.
They just manage
with sparse elegance among the mosses.
They are slight,
but they know nothing about the tender softness
you associate with summer.
The determination of the slight
is not less than the oak's.
I am not one of those who believe that poems don't state things; I think it's more interesting to see poems as principally statements, though sometimes rather complicated ones. Accordingly, I'm going to begin with the plant. In Sweden, it's common everywhere except in the far south, though (as Martinson points out) not luxuriant. It's a matter of a single plant here and there, growing among other species on the forest floor. Here it is:
Photo copyright Kristian Svensson, but I don't know how to contact him for permission!
It's one of those plants that doesn't exactly shout to us (small white flowers usually don't), but once it's noticed it's quietly striking. Along with Twinflower (Linnaea borealis), it was a favourite of Linnaeus. In Flora Lapponica (1737) he wrote: "I don't know any other flower whose grace so fascinates the eye; the spectator becomes almost bewitched! Maybe this is due to symmetry, the mother of all beauty."
Maybe. There are certainly two features that attract attention: one is the curious whorl of differently-sized leaves: a sort of assymetric symmetry, I suppose. The other is the flower itself, partly because there's usually only one flower, and partly because although the number of petals varies the favoured number is seven, which is uncommon to say the least. (The Icelandic name Sjöstjarna and the Dutch name Zevenster both refer to this.)
Martinson doesn't say anything about these features: he relies on the reader to do most of the evoking. All he tells us by way of description is that the plant is "spenslig" (slight, or slender), and this stands in for all the rest. Of course there are a great many plants that could reasonably be called slight, at least in comparison to oak trees, but perhaps there is a particular appropriateness in applying it to this one, where it glances both at the parsimonious production of flowers and at the plant's tendency to appear as isolated individuals rather than profuse stands.
In fact, these plants are not really isolated individuals. They are connected, beneath the woodland surface, by long lateral growths that throw up superterranean extrusions at rather lengthy intervals. That is the main way that Trientalis europaea spreads (or should I specify, the DNA of T. europaea): it puts most of its energy into securing its presence in a good habitat, and not much of its energy into the chancy business of colonizing new sites; few flowers, and even fewer seeds. Hence it never turns up in new woodland, but is a reliable indicator of old woodland. "A good competitor, but a poor colonist," comments the BRC on-line atlas.
Martinson has the reputation of being a poet who grasped science, and I suppose this poem confirms that. When he says:
The determination of the slight / is not less than the oak's
he is not only right about the specific case of Trientalis europaea, though that's still worth emphasizing. Modest and isolated as the plant appears in a European context, it is certainly a successful species, with a circumpolar distribution through the boreal regions of the Old World, and also in Western North America (in the east, it is replaced by the related T. borealis). But the general case applies too. Perhaps he had heard of the Dane Wilhelm Johannsen's genotype-phenotype distinction (1911), which has proved such a fertile ground for later writers. Perhaps his conclusion also amounts to a recognition that determination is the preserve of the genotype, and the success of a genotype has nothing to do with whether its phenotype happens to be an impressively mighty oak or some unattended unicellular organism, a reflection that will be commonplace to readers of e.g. Richard Dawkins.
Nevertheless, the poem does not quite come to rest on this scientific meditation. After all, taken at that level of generality the human connotations of "spenslig" / "slight" lose their validity altogether. But the poem clings on to them: great determination there must be, but the slightness is not dispensed with. It becomes a defining quality of the particular determination with which the poem is concerned: it intends to praise slightness. It's time to think about the context of the poem.
Like many of Martinson's nature poems, it appears at first glance to contain no human context whatever: there are no figures in the landscape, it is alienated from human concerns. And that is intentionally a challenge; an assertion that nature cannot be known if framed or tamed by the quotidian and human. This is a game that Martinson played from the off. Coming to poetry after a youth on the oceans, he repeatedly brought his public up against the realization that he was no stay-at-home, that he had un-domestic experience that his readers didn't share with him: for example in the famous poem that begins "Have you seen a steam collier" (1929) - he means, after a storm at sea - and draws all its energy from the unmistakable implication: No you haven't, but you know that I have. "Home Village" (1931) had framed the "silent lie" of tranquil village life through the eyes of one returning from "the brothel alleys of Barcelona".
Yet a nature poem such as this one does, lightly, intrude an awareness of a domestic context. Though the plant in question is not exactly commonplace, we've seen that a tradition already existed, among reasonably sensitive observers, of appreciating its finer features ("I don't know any other flower whose grace so fascinates the eye..."). Domestic bliss, Swedish style, tends to involve not just the home but its extension into the trees and the borders of that everlasting wood, where one is always roaming about, if only to find a good spot to fling out the washing-up water.
There's a further clue to this context in the two Swedish names for Trientalis europaea that appear in the poem. I've translated them literally; unlike the English name "Chickweed Wintergreen", both were evidently folk-names rooted in long tradition. But the one that Martinson uses in the title (Duvkulla - "Doveflower") was evidently a local name; it is certainly not much used now, and the only Google reference that isn't talking about Martinson's poem comes from a 1923 article in the provincial newspaper Dalpilen. It was the other name (Skogsstjärna - "Woodland Star") that was, then and now, in general use; and doubtless it turns up in the poem's first line in order to ensure that the reader knows exactly what plant Martinson is talking about. The local name in the title amounts to a confession: it is the poet's own name for the plant because it's the name he grew up with, in a countrified provincial locality, long before he set off to sail the world.
The poem then, implies the limited rambles of a child close to home: domestic surroundings. The defiant praise of slightness, in this context, amounts to a sentimental, perhaps desperately sentimental, defence of the limited horizons and quotidian activity of an unassuming home. Martinson had no particular reason to be sentimental about his own childhood; at the same time he was a popular poet, both working with popular sentiment and inevitably yielding to it, at least in respect of its thought-forms.
*
Taking refuge in small things was a sentiment that lay deep in popular culture. I don't want to reduce Martinson's poem to its popular substratum, but at the same time it's important to understand the substratum.
I want to approach it by way of the hugely popular pan-Nordic standard "De nære ting" / "Små nära ting". The composers of the melody, Kurt Foss and Reidar Bøe, recorded the song in 1951, both in Norwegian (June) and Swedish (September).
There were numerous subsequent recordings and, as is the way with standards in Sweden, a host of drinking-song parodies. I'm taking most of my information from Enn Kokk's interesting blog.
The original Norwegian lyrics were composed by Arne Paasche Aasen (1901-1978), a strongly left-wing politician, activist, journalist and poet. As a populist poet his work graded into song lyrics: rousing labour movement songs such as "Vi bygger landet" (based on an earlier Russian anthem), but also sentimental songs like "De nære ting". Norwegian and Swedish are so closely related to each other that translating from one into the other is a doddle, and Ture Nerman's Swedish version is sometimes almost word for word. The main difference is the inclusion of the word "små" (small); the Swedish title means, literally, "small near things", but you can't put that into idiomatic English without becoming wordy: "the little things close by", or something of that sort.
D F#6
Din längtan flyr vilse
G
så vida omkring.
Em
Det är som du glömt
A4 A
alla nära ting.
D F#6
Det är som du aldrig
G B dim (or Gm)
fick lugn en minut
D E7
till någonting annat -
A7 D
du jämt vill ut.
Your yearning heart wanders
so far and so wide -
it seems you've forgotten
the things by your side.
It seems that you never
one moment sit down.
To some destination
you're always bound.
Du tycker din dag är
så fattig och grå.
Vad är det du söker?
Vad väntar du på?
När aldrig du unnar
dig rast eller ro,
kan ingenting växa
och intet gro.
You think that your days are
so empty and grey.
What is it you're seeking?
What do you await?
If you never have
any fun or repose,
then nothing develops,
and nothing grows.
Gå in i din kammare,
liten och trång -
den gömmer vad hjärtat
höll kärast en gång.
På ropet i skogen
får ingen ett svar.
Finn vägen tillbaka
till det du har.
Go into your parlour,
so little and close -
it hides what your heart
used to care about once.
The cry in the forest,
it gets no response.
So find your way homeward
to what is yours.
Den lyckan du söker
bak fjället i brand,
den har kanske alltid
du haft i din hand.
Du skall inte jaga
så rolöst omkring…
D E7
men lära dig älska
Gm A D
små nära ting!
The treasure you looked for
in far mountain lands,
perhaps it was always
right here in your hands.
You don't have to struggle
so hungry and high,
just value those little
things by your side!
Ture Nerman (1886-1969), like Arne Paasche Aasen, had begun as a communist and was later a social democrat. But the song-lyric is solidly conservative in intention, intrinsically dubious about ambition and idealism. It may not be relevant to point it out, but they were no longer young men.
"Små nära ting" is a classic consolation-lyric, like that other song from 1951 "Cold Cold Heart" (Hank Williams, Tony Bennett), and such countless predecessors as the Irish standard "I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen" (in fact composed by an American, Thomas Paine Westendorf, in 1876). "Små nära ting" is less obviously aligned to the heteronormal male subject / female object format than either of those songs; in fact the most-remembered recording is probably Monica Neilsen's, if it isn't Anna-Lena Löfgren's.
Nevertheless, it shares the in-built tensions of the consolation-lyric, e.g. that if the unconsolable could be consoled by whatever the consoler is saying, then s/he probably wouldn't need consoling in the first place. The consolation-lyric is both heroic and doomed: heroic because in performance the song boldly offers itself as the resolving turning-point in its own narrative; doomed because every time the song is re-performed it turns out that the consolation is still needed. The singer continues to brood "why can't I ease your troubled mind and melt your cold cold heart"; the singer reiterates the ever-unfulfilled promise "I'll take you to your home again"; and here, the singer urges, yet again, the sweet simple advice about the little things in life that the poor distracted "wandering wanderer" finds it impossible to be satisfied with. (The classic Misty in Roots take on the Prodigal Son is apposite, and so is this more recent lament:
You've wandered so far
from the person you are.
Let go, brother, let go.
- which gains an extra frisson from its singer being not the reproving composer but, as we suppose, the very wanderer that Tim Rice-Oxley addresses. Battle is pretty much a big village.)
*
When Martinson built his poem towards that assertion about "the determination of the slight" he was, I believe, recalling another short poem published ten years earlier, by Karin Boye. Recalling it unconsciously, perhaps: he does not use the same words, but the shape of the clinching line surely betrays a kinship.
EN STILLHET VIDGADES
En stillhet vidgades mjuk som soliga vinterskogar.
Hur blev min vilja viss och min väg mig underdånig?
Jag bar i min hand en etsad skål av klingande glas.
Då blev min fot så varsam och kommer inte att snava.
Då blev min hand så aktsam och komma inte att darra.
Då blev jag överflödad och buren av styrkan ur sköra ting.
A STILLNESS SPREAD
A stillness spread, gentle as the sun-filled winter woods.
How was it, my will grew certain and my path obedient to me?
I bore in my hand an etched bowl of ringing glass.
Then it was my steps became cautious and would not stumble.
Then it was my hand became careful and would not shake.
Then I was suffused and borne along by the strength of fragile things.
(From För trädets skull (For the Tree's Sake), 1935)
Elsewhere, Boye had reacted defiantly to the national vein of cosy, domestic quietism. Indeed her famous poem "I Rörelse" ("On the Move") is the classical rejoinder in Swedish:
Den mätta dagen, den är aldrig störst.
Den bästa dagen är en dag av törst.
The day of satisfaction is not best.
The better day, that is a day of thirst.
But (as is always the case) the defiance conceals an awareness of the contrary pull, i.e. towards domestic peace. What takes her by surprise in the poem about the glass bowl is, perhaps, exactly a feeling of momentarily being at peace with her surroundings. And, of course, they are domestic surroundings: passing between a main house and an outhouse, and taking care not to trip on the ubiquitous birch roots.
The observation, a brilliant one I think, is that the fragile object so long as it exists unbroken is indeed a show of strength; it takes all the object's strength not to fall apart. (No-one calls Boye a scientific poet, but she is just as scientific as Martinson, and her poem too deserves to be taken as seriously as a statement.)
And this strength is what is communicated to the carrier who doesn't drop the bowl; her own tensed poise, being patently required of her, is accordingly manifested, and it reveals her capability to herself; not only her capability either, but the deep peace of having a nurturing role, and fitting it; the nurturer is dependent on her charge. A deep peace, for as long as it lasts.
Because, for both poets these would-be idealistic poems constituted swimming against the tide. There is a cry of desperation in their restfulness; in both of them, though Martinson's buttoned-up prickliness is so different from Boye's vulnerable transparency. Both were wanderers who returned to the little things; Boye, to the fateful role of carer that is imagined as a fulfilling pattern in her poem. But their bliss was most tranquilly revealed in poems that ignored the complications of people. In winter 1941 Karin Boye, anguished by personal distresses as well as the war, took a walk into the snow from which she did not return. Harry Martinson, product of a broken working-class home, his health ruined at sea in his youth, allowed the bitter freshness of his early poems to ferment into settled gloom. The last straw, perhaps, was winning the Nobel Prize in 1974; or more particularly, the barrage of adverse comment that it induced (mainly within Sweden itself). The prize was shared with Eyvind Johnson, another working-class writer; both were now members of the Nobel committee, so the award was certainly a bit naïve. In 1978 Martinson attempted to commit ritual suicide by disembowelment (seppuku) with a pair of scissors. He was horribly injured and died a few days later.
[Information about Trientalis europaea from Den virtuella floran.]
Rhys Trimble's mynydd
This would make an opulent Xmas gift for a poetry-loving pal, only about 30 pages but in a large 21.6 × 27.9 format, so that looking at it is half-way between reading poetry and leafing through an artbook.
The poetry within is like this (though I frankly admit that I selected this particular passage because it was relatively easy to quote; most of the poetry roves widely over those big pages).
cake feeder-ulate
deleuze stickless o o
plasticbag marking: wings
Saxifraga stellaris
Starry Saxifrage anthers toothed in sometimes wet stony places flushes acid
Nevis (1347m) elsewhere Labrador ...
brunette completion of
disgust on weatherbeat/ OTR
face becomes dropshadow
that is expedience whence
my slowing of wings
effervescent in water
bits that drop from
waterfeeder mouth
cake & 84 years down
hill. hard, he says.
hard. (31)
Of course the recurrent, slightly skewed, botanical descriptions of Welsh alpines attracted my attention (mynydd = mountain). But these descriptions, and the Welsh language elements, are only two of the tubes of pigment that squirtingly compose this airy, rather joyous, funny and romantic and open-ended forcefield.
This is Boiled String Poetry Chapbook #3, which is part of the impressive range of Hafan Books, which in turn means that your purchase supports refugee charities, primarily Swansea Bay Asylum Seekers Support Group (www.swanseabassgroup.org).
MP
Craniotomy / Lyric Poetry
Edmund Hardy
1. Rose
We must go inside the skull,
2. Metal
A touch of the skin of consciousness in the poetry of Anna Mendelssohn (‘the second hurled whore’) involves a displacement of disquiet:
3. Fern
The language of enquiry, for Lyn Hejinian, can align with or lean against the senses in an empiricism which, Bacon style, seeks not knowledge of the world but just the world itself. Within this, the line investigates its own worm or word-cast (& what is a field of poets but a set of lines, endless worms heading towards the sun).
4. Bullion
"quartzite infinities / played out in empirical surf" (Carol Watts, ‘Wrack’) The sea is its own investigation into records of cargo and other wreckage; the result is not chance, Wrack insists, though this refusal is not a path towards a total system implied by fragments so much as a play of determinations received by freed substances which become originating in their relation to themselves. The ruins of a never-surfeiting sea conjure an aleatory Imperialism patterned outside of time; but the wrack on the shore happens upon itself as us, and as such is entrusted to its readers. The motif of etching-writing in/stroke/of the surf becomes part of a chain or splash of substitutions - from foam to trace, squall to full stop, starfish to hand. The splash of substitutions ends in coinage and commodity, the plurality of any limit:
5. Ellipsis
In the poetry published in union newspapers in the US in the 1930s, and collected by John Marsh in the anthology You Work Tomorrow, lyric enacts its own emptying out from two pressures: historical, revolutionary memory on the one hand, and workplace coercion on the other. Poll, the name of a contributor of poetry to the United Automobile Worker in 1939, finds their poems emptied out into pure interpellation:
6. Myth
“Pip-Pip-Pip” (John Gay)
In book II of 'Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London' (1716) there is a scene in which Doll, the apple seller, falls through the ice (“The cracking Crystal yields”) while also being decapitated by a life-time of labour – her neck snaps beneath “autumnal Loads”. And as the severed head of Orpheus, thrown into the River Hebrus by Maenads, still sang out “Eurydice”, so:
7. Cold World
In the darkness, we can at least see that we can see nothing.
-------------
This essay formed the first part of the Interior Ears hand out accompanying the event "Intercapillary Places" 2
1. Rose
We must go inside the skull,
Sudden a thought came like a full-blown roseIn this neural model, informed by William Bell’s lectures on the nerves, as Alan Richardson argues in his British Romanticism & the Science of the Mind, the face is not the index but in fact the foreword or abstract of the heart – the skin is the visceral organ of choice for Keats, flushing, panting, blushing, an intercapillary poetry in which the passions of the mind will show themselves, roseate, coloured like a chart. In fact, skin is the semi-transparent but entirely unspoken satin in these lines – feeling and thought are the same: the rose flashes past and recedes into blood where it becomes a flush, so that the skin cuts through at the end of the line, before, anatomizing, the next cut goes right inside the heart. This is poetry as investigation, into language and the body emblazoned, and the passions of both. I take this method to be emblematic of a number of more contemporary lyric investigations.
Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart
Made purple riot.
(Keats, The Eve of St Agnes)
2. Metal
A touch of the skin of consciousness in the poetry of Anna Mendelssohn (‘the second hurled whore’) involves a displacement of disquiet:
unforked from the fire,A smudgy clawing, denting, leaves a smelting – the fire and “roaring start” of suspicions – which shape a metal shroud, pawed by a paranoia and inflamed hatred, the body sealed as in a bashed at can, by and with a thought which oscillates between true (political consciousness, beset and pawed by ambition and justification) and false (the pawing is that of a wakefulness insistently jarring at the product of an ideological apparatus) – neither is aligned entirely with the idea, later in the poem, of really “being alive”, such that the brain here is neither blown-out nor full-blown, it appears as soft, marked, but ductile, able to shift shapes because layered – impure accumulations. A consciousness which can be pawed into presents a complex idea of dislocation structures within multiple ideologies or pressures. Pricked by claws, it flakes as sawdust.
the roaring start
a consciousness that is pawed into,
nudged by lions’ claws, sweaty sawdust
3. Fern
The language of enquiry, for Lyn Hejinian, can align with or lean against the senses in an empiricism which, Bacon style, seeks not knowledge of the world but just the world itself. Within this, the line investigates its own worm or word-cast (& what is a field of poets but a set of lines, endless worms heading towards the sun).
And queried in the green rays as I sate:‘Queried’ sets up a tiny two stress grid square (| |), from which the same rhythmic pattern repeated as ‘green rays’ can diagonal out – the same grid but different, ferns and queries in a space which is moving, recombining. Wet fern leaves in a rain storm are green fans or grills of beaded light; the green ray of thought’s horizon line is broken, fleshed into leaf: up close it’s an entanglement – to scratch, protect, immerse. The bare light of matter, as a primary quality of patterned form, is darkness visible, a green blaze. Among the forms, inquiry into the world moves out and up in a diagonal, grounded by its originating locus, this tension producing a fractal movement of thought, the recursive algorithm of a frond.
(Thomas Hardy, from ‘Childhood Among the Ferns’)
4. Bullion
"quartzite infinities / played out in empirical surf" (Carol Watts, ‘Wrack’) The sea is its own investigation into records of cargo and other wreckage; the result is not chance, Wrack insists, though this refusal is not a path towards a total system implied by fragments so much as a play of determinations received by freed substances which become originating in their relation to themselves. The ruins of a never-surfeiting sea conjure an aleatory Imperialism patterned outside of time; but the wrack on the shore happens upon itself as us, and as such is entrusted to its readers. The motif of etching-writing in/stroke/of the surf becomes part of a chain or splash of substitutions - from foam to trace, squall to full stop, starfish to hand. The splash of substitutions ends in coinage and commodity, the plurality of any limit:
and there in bullion morning you askFlotsam receiving determination, becoming cause and reaction, a passage to the bare bones which are identical to the means of knowing them.
will it come near raiding a league out
spanning a tongue's length a ship or
rock manoeuvring the tide rising small
insurgencies shift the grains the cries
inside the absences of air [. . . ]
5. Ellipsis
In the poetry published in union newspapers in the US in the 1930s, and collected by John Marsh in the anthology You Work Tomorrow, lyric enacts its own emptying out from two pressures: historical, revolutionary memory on the one hand, and workplace coercion on the other. Poll, the name of a contributor of poetry to the United Automobile Worker in 1939, finds their poems emptied out into pure interpellation:
mounting. . .The three points of punctuation condense and implode the mind and its perceptions, the mind which also carries on. Speech surrounds and picks away at the lyric’s brain, inserting only itself, without context – speech as a pickpocket roulette of empty chambers.
mounting. . .
mounting. . .
come on there cutter. . .
let the shavings fly. . .
cut the steel. . .
16th by 16th. . .
6. Myth
“Pip-Pip-Pip” (John Gay)
In book II of 'Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London' (1716) there is a scene in which Doll, the apple seller, falls through the ice (“The cracking Crystal yields”) while also being decapitated by a life-time of labour – her neck snaps beneath “autumnal Loads”. And as the severed head of Orpheus, thrown into the River Hebrus by Maenads, still sang out “Eurydice”, so:
Pippins she cry’d, but Death her Voice confounds,The voice skitters and bounces beyond death, but Doll does not cry out a last gasp of spirit, only a ghastly continuation of instrumentality; public song presents the contradictory unity of a market harmony. A parody of the unrestrained individuation which Adorno (‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’) diagnosed as lyric’s route towards voicing the hidden of ideology, Orpheus is held as a spectral inverse of society, as lyric’s capitulation and ironic capacity to still give voice beyond the world-song it is entangled within. Gay’s line bounces round to a different way of unmasking the universalising spirit: founded on a sale placard, thus irrecusably embedded in the “bustle” of mere existence, false or failing song can – by irony’s scrutiny – achieve the illumination of necessity without the language of solitude. Gay’s use of tragic love’s absolute last gasp also extends to the deathly shelling of goods to their seed, revealing there not the seeds of love but the possibility of a new orchard and new returns,“Pip-Pip-Pip”.
And Pip-Pip-Pip along the Ice resounds.
7. Cold World
In the darkness, we can at least see that we can see nothing.
the cold of that nightLabourers migrate – most of the speakers interviewed by Henry Mayhew for his study of London in 1850, from whom the text of Seeds’ Mayhew poems is taken, would have migrated into London from the countryside; where is it that the character of national and international labour markets will be imposed, where will their own continuities, imposed from within multitudes at different speeds, such that some people will die from want, find their brutal edge, as labour-power takes on the consistency of a commodity, as potential itself is bought and sold. Seed works within this recorded speech, which embodies class against class and not an abstracted economy, cutting, rearranging, archiving, investigating it through form. In this quote, which ends the project’s first volume, there is no full stop at the end, ‘I thought it never / would be over’ and it isn’t over, the forms found in the spoken text here are not interstitial or episodic, they roll on, this is multitudinous voicing as the architrave of the civic or of civil liberties, as the idea of multitude was for Spinoza. The line breaks here cause this fragment to turn on the word ‘still’, doubling the cold into two lines, ‘still’ the point of purchase – the centre of the speaking voice’s temporal rustle - which allows the thought to continue on, pushed onwards with a force which gives it not an echo but a grammatical search for the subject ‘multitude’- labour-power incarnates in poetry as pure possibility, inseparable from the body of the worker – cold, cold still – horrifically inseparable from its repository or substratum, which would be life itself. What is searched for is a grammar to articulate not one faculty but the entirety of human faculties inasmuch as they are involved in productive praxis. As such, the poetry investigates how labour-power can move from a proper noun to a common noun, and it isn’t over.
in my limbs still
I thought it never
would be over
(John Seed, Pictures from Mayhew, LVIII)
-------------
This essay formed the first part of the Interior Ears hand out accompanying the event "Intercapillary Places" 2
Poetry by Colleen Hind
"DP" Intercapillary Selection by Colleen Hind - download as a pdf (283 kb)
06 / 11 / 10
become lucid, become sick
your guy broke
& I am like ∙ the milk on the broom
cities cry and boots empty
I am
the fruit of that capacity.
just kid me, O ballot carapace,
or what could be our bombast,
they are not fit to ring it round :
these idols and kits
10 / 11 / 10
& like foetus kicks
what | could be more Tory
thn Cambridge electing its Lib Dem,
meanwhile ∙ yr town
turning on my heel ∙ & my
masterstroke makes
your bezoar miaow, reaps
He that bent
the bones around your cunt ∙ P.R.
will make it fair
14 / 11 / 10
lo, give us cliff faces
& stories w/ wing-hid backs &
strip
the stink from off our pussies
yay –
me-bait! | we ceded 000,000’s
of acres by treaty | in return for
blankets, meals & trinkets or
have totemic #clinaman mica flakes
softly abound in silk draw-string sacks | b/c ·
limited by storyteller stamina &
01 / 04 / 10
thickens aye boil |
radially the boris
found my causes |
staple their dropsy
grades in
cunnilinguses of
o po po · I
I’m shaved the better to
& slathered in a butter ·
contact my relata
26 / 03 / 10
a pic of a wind turbine
is to me a
furze / key issue, | so.
I want to awaken
as the isomorphic de’il inside it | so
abide a little, O temp,
I have something to
send by thee :
a little shaking red boy
taught metal tapers,
25 / 03 / 09
ik voor mij vind
met bird fancier’s lung
casuist’s fist
all causes
must pass through me first
for the po-po
the po-po who slew
IAN TOMLINSON one April was
shoved by, was shoved by
the po-po who shaved me ∙ &
30 / 04 / 10
evry bollard
defined as
“an interest” ·
in advance of
rat inspectors ·
the vomit-flecked bibs
fitted on the bollards
rolled up & called sporrans ·
ballrooms where you
rot · my untrue love
13 / 05 / 11
& let one jaws
of one worm
sur la cimetière
my jo or
allow one
single rat’s mouth
to twirl · thru what
lies there · shut & shall I fetch us
my plough-share
& shall I
13 / 05 / 12
gathering how hard
#thefingering
in the garden ∙ my
glowing alcohol
drink chewing
a night butterfly
or something
my thoughts swats
like shadows grow
from flowerpots ∙
14 / 05 / 11
(or you could sorrow over
the omens ∙ star-nosed moles
maay now open ∙ immured in maples ∙
I favour : stashed our moans
down our names / now c’mon
exi$t alles lionclaw’d pause inviolable -
else her veil
it always included an astrolabe
b.v. zonder boomen S!eeper Brownie
boven op komen ∙ activate her now) ∙ &
30 / 04 / 10
unlit orders,
turn the car & the key
starts,
okay all caps,
London’s to sack to
unsnarl our false all-fours,
ghost hounds
govern a crisp lay-by,
Samantha Cameron is pregnant,
pandemic or snog cones,
13 / 05 / 11
at my | heil heidegger, |
at catastrophe dismay
& devastation | say |
hurrah horizon’s
mascot is actually a mirror, |
ankle-length &
you will need inter · as one
left · your own self
& w/ only flowers · if
even one fouls the grass there
27 / 03 / 11
then a nervous OHM.
my all-fours are golden /
they’re framed / -threes actually
sacking my thrashing gardener
he only has his/Telemachus’s
spermatic cord as cover ·
covers pug violin channel instead
23/7 pug violin
spent out image’s shadow
look him in the head | yes | look –
23 / 10 / 10
locked in this
mad performed town centre
w/ a myxy boris ∙
what a plonker ∙
London’s where Londoners are sent to die
England screws platinum mayors off that
so you haven’t lived
no I was entranced
by my miaow flow echolocation /
mounted protestors / po-po on a lance &
29 / 04 / 11
as w/ panto horse guts
the worse our debt gets
the longer yr house gas is ∙ as
evry civil private unit knows
here’s photos of your family we can stand up in
so then consign kenya to the white again
what leavings | like uk, greece & italy
under negroes risen up place them
& let us at the taxes | the foes & suppers
learn how you really treat f*xes
25 / 03 / 11
opposed without economy
to validity · arrived by rope & / et
a plate of c*untercum
model’s own (?)
& our arms untangle
now ploughs
& drenched ladies
on their pricks alight, (foetus kick subtle
), also honey-roast wood-pigeon angle
at ugh #lacomrades’ throats
24 / 03 / 11
even a fucking atheist can’t deny
all free will is servitude’s weird veil, if
wanti wanti cyaan’ get it
& getti getti no want it
& I am poetry’s Karl Rove
my hex pax
but a permanent realignment in aesthetics
cat clot
time knows :
time longer dan rope | so.
22 / 03 / 11
if you look outside
the environment /
PR functions of UK plc
there is nothing,
quite “puck”,
a great againt,
a void & so shall my shins
ground to cones
fall in coins of grass ∙
Samantha Cameron is for me.
13 / 03 / 11
#shaking | & as covered q.v.
sappers develop
b.v. zonder boomen
my how
steel flaws
fish my face also
still
peter can move me to tears
prosper ∙ apparition in a moses basket
arrives at the vegetable world | yes
13 / 03 / 12
pale drapes fawn-colour your #prescription | pills
now not period-blood piebalds | / freckles, | yr cock
all is gone &
gone are our friends | you,
in the morning, delicately walk
down along the side of the bed
to dress yr speckled belly with
a slain trophy wife’s wraith
as chemise teddy,
yawning &
14 / 03 / 12
f*ck off c*nt lord
you were my loved
got to get from
out from
under you too on my
death bed it
do some thing worth
to while got about 5 min day
got 3 amazing
grown up kids
05 / 08 / 11
Home that fortress
that its foes repulses
w/ enclosing them
Trolley Bit, / Button
Lift Riding Crop?
my selves pan over to me
where I am pulling your
Samantha Cameron
over a little hill in it.
a little, “Roquefort?” | si
13 / 05 / 11
avec ta rattrap pedal
considerd as rosarian · sur la
cimetière · lips soft
w/ promise swiftly
purulate & let
one jaws of one grub · sanity,
predecessor · godcundliness
a la peristalsis de ta tiny faithless
ankles · albeit resectioned,
fused with milklike data,
30 / 05 / 08
all males shall be hanged
govern thy puking
some bribed sunbeams
bear us a comb
from David’s paws unsnarl his hands
all males shall be hanged
hark to the lute
making good kindling
sign for the glade hounds
govern thy puking
01 / 10 / 11
ah earlywood burl wasps seethe |
a Black Watch’s father our
bay wreaths counterfeits brows ·
who says he wishes
his death was in vain ·
& as emmer is to spelt
yr zephyr embalming
Cy Tolliver pistils it rouses is to
the olive waters misfit vista
whose fragrances it borrows
02 / 10 / 11
ah this innately
attention-grabbing anagnorisis
you Elysian atoll’s bonny lars’s
gobs swill! we have eaten
*ussies that are less
like *ussies than your kisses | lars
you are all him Cameron | are him &
as him, in your condemnation,
#sideme with
war rapes & war famine
28 / 03 / 10
I taught women to puke jaw-bones
yike
our prime minister,
shnipping @ ripe tapers
w/ little grape scissors,
isn’t like so bad :
raise yr
amaranth eyes, O temp,
to the citronella candle
-crowded heavens,
15 / 03 / 08
O temp
type for Jafar and Schmitt
be thyself the needful document ∙
till London’s tall lamps
and her plain trees
are felled with puke
inhale birds’ healing gas ∙
I’ve something to send by you
O temp, stay a little ∙
bollards come up cob
31 / 04 / 10
hello? like salad hovers
O our turbans
& our flat caps
the bang my heart,
than my c*ck has nicknames in paris
more strays stalk rightful
hare sex
we think we’re outside
do we shove the buzzer
do we just bang on
28 / 03 / 10
your
scout is
blacking out
as flower mask young tories near
ha ∙
yet even free men
could honour you ∙
so get asap enough tea-lights
raise yr
amaranth eyes O temp
10 / 09 / 08
the Bullingdon boys
have inherited some surveillance equipment,
let’s at last
black up a horse ∙
who never let us like shnip shining
taper-tips out as pearls or
“now let’s f*ck in a bath
filled w/ porters or” or
“no now let us make l*ve
under a beautiful waterfall of porters”
29 / 04 / 08
boven op komen,
my name is Fortuna Wrist
.blo.uk I -
my mysogny was generalised preparedness -
I hid long my blood in my blondes - S!eeper Brownie -
boven op komen,
b.v. zonder boomen,
the dead
put please on tip-toe
in poorhouses,
12 / 05 / 11
ay me | intolerant
my pussy & therefore ∙ my music
survives basically on blood
bent bead-by-bead out the skinned
knees of shepherdesses’s
infant predecessors ∙ yet what is
wrong with me?
I smoke cock but I pass pussywet
see cities’s apparitions
in levant & couchant surveillance mosaïques
29 / 02 / 11
I must vanish
to #themoon
all my wants
thereto combine
could man but
come back from his c*m
my norms would all
in one word sum :
on the first day of Ambridge
gripewater on brushfire strewn steams
15 / 03 / 11
O temp
type for Jafar and Schmitt
be thyself the needful document ∙
till London’s tall lamps
and her plain trees
are felled with puke
inhale birds’ healing gas ∙
I’ve something to send by you
O temp, stay a little ∙
bollards come up cob
09 / 10 / 11
& in certain futuristic towns
tories will be weighed not counted
shortly you loosen your reins
on #quitethe wrong horse
how fortunate it was
we never were charged
for the block of veins
I will box up my pretty dresses
tippex we shit side-saddle sam
prepares us to alight in c*m
03 / 10 / 11
+ angle, pied-beautiful, to be
sodomized, | milk-white
in shadows | ROF- |
bukake in cond*ms dandles
nor can dapplings
remain milk-white so,
but temples came together to
spitters, zaaiers, ploegers
fold this eggnog sick pure |
bukake, Laclau, #themoon,
28 / 11 / 10
imf · like an infant will take
in a curiously human gesture
a hem to her neck
like a lead · calculate
our debt
against our exports ·
face your false decision
static in pussies · like
spritzed blood · spurted burning
over jews in ecstasy &
29 / 09 / 11
privy to acatalectic · senior-
-level conversations wi yr
sore cloaca already & as
our performi · ah like
my | almond-coloured lar · him
with the whine spreads adulterous
sails from your perfuméd light
summer jacket, I · spread family men
jewish in barracks · pick at ni*****
13 / 05 / 11
& as the court hocks
on the jew it counts | George
Osborne | emoticon coalition |
soaks frail cloth
embroidered with gloaming fat for | or else
exfoliation horizon twinkles &
“condom” an Esperanto swearword, | childlike · as
in > that’s no condom, my cock but moults
& sentience for spam & tinnitus |
cry by us | for votes for tory mps
30 / 09 / 11
shld · thank him
he prefers to voyage
on my knapsack
& convalesce in his box
autonomous he flicks
evidential easterlies
jubbers
observe his beauty
on my palm his jaws
show like a pox
04 / 04 / 11
la hobyar habits elles á | body
double fragrances it borrow
in yr atria beat
a blond white milk dapple
bedebit my bed | o muse non
non | got off rapist you | triumvirate |
tides / blokes rspv &
I kept him company to his
bollard in the wilderness
& sing, interest | empty la
04 / 04 / 10
who could I be
calling at this hour? I fasten David
yr brow to my stern ·
make sail for
Tokyo
not part of China
but down that way
else let cherubs scatter
tillers like
sackful of scales
04 / 05 / 11
w/ yr flid
poking out yr aunt
the panto horses
in the panto horses’s panto
horse etc. w/ his · forked mouth
w/ a perfect spark hovered ·
nor yr gargoyle
for a tantrum of roses
lazed her gatling about
its patchwork flanks ·
can’t be arsed
04 / 05 / 10
& #unlikeLabour
& #bedswordfathers
Cameron’s someone
you can get in commodity form
/ or normal form ·
in chainmail
or in #specialcontextarmour ·
i.e. contrails of motion
lines in corn mirrored in
skies of tesselating coin,
01 / 05 / 11
an ankle, albeit intact ·
restless thou rove thru
#brushfire of rosebushes ·
check this out
love is not
to sing out, human.
leave that for lovers ·
love is to blow with whispers
amen-allocated #clinamen
in the pastoral transhuman
03 / 05 / 10
am I the only one who thinks
gdp official aid
chinese democracy
gender equality
pandemic solidarity
lyric poetry after shoreditch
climate chaos
this is just to say
I pissed in the cherries in the icebox
forgive me
05 / 09 / 11
affect, inclination & passion
predecessors all swaddled
into sweet triptych
poltergeists · grind gold
ou roasted pigeons
will fly to the ni*gers
lib dems & thieves ·
& on fingers carrying out chores
wind white flowers · or warm
itty zombies will coo you from kerchiefs
31 / 04 / 11
as like barbarians | a tantrum of roses / or
troy MP suffrage | est-que ek the only one who | /
lyric systemic | stipulative Epic |
posiTIvist dialectic | diaLECtic managEMEnt style
hardens evry hole
& evry cock in the barracks
& as if la bathos app”, | / liver stipple & dying friend
& as if cognitive biasES countervail,
hIstoric DaMage? ou is | no
macaronic code-switch coulD |
poxies, damask syntax, sisterhood
-------------------------------------------------------------
50 poems from “DP” by Colleen Hind. Some of these have appeared in The Cambridge Reading Series pamphlets, Scree, Openned TV, & Sad Press / Everyone’s Cup of Tea, & as a getaway magic carpet from Punch Press. Some are with JK or PR, and some are dedicated to PR, SW, BJ, SW, SB, PM, DC, GO, NC & VC.
06 / 11 / 10
become lucid, become sick
your guy broke
& I am like ∙ the milk on the broom
cities cry and boots empty
I am
the fruit of that capacity.
just kid me, O ballot carapace,
or what could be our bombast,
they are not fit to ring it round :
these idols and kits
10 / 11 / 10
& like foetus kicks
what | could be more Tory
thn Cambridge electing its Lib Dem,
meanwhile ∙ yr town
turning on my heel ∙ & my
masterstroke makes
your bezoar miaow, reaps
He that bent
the bones around your cunt ∙ P.R.
will make it fair
14 / 11 / 10
lo, give us cliff faces
& stories w/ wing-hid backs &
strip
the stink from off our pussies
yay –
me-bait! | we ceded 000,000’s
of acres by treaty | in return for
blankets, meals & trinkets or
have totemic #clinaman mica flakes
softly abound in silk draw-string sacks | b/c ·
limited by storyteller stamina &
01 / 04 / 10
thickens aye boil |
radially the boris
found my causes |
staple their dropsy
grades in
cunnilinguses of
o po po · I
I’m shaved the better to
& slathered in a butter ·
contact my relata
26 / 03 / 10
a pic of a wind turbine
is to me a
furze / key issue, | so.
I want to awaken
as the isomorphic de’il inside it | so
abide a little, O temp,
I have something to
send by thee :
a little shaking red boy
taught metal tapers,
25 / 03 / 09
ik voor mij vind
met bird fancier’s lung
casuist’s fist
all causes
must pass through me first
for the po-po
the po-po who slew
IAN TOMLINSON one April was
shoved by, was shoved by
the po-po who shaved me ∙ &
30 / 04 / 10
evry bollard
defined as
“an interest” ·
in advance of
rat inspectors ·
the vomit-flecked bibs
fitted on the bollards
rolled up & called sporrans ·
ballrooms where you
rot · my untrue love
13 / 05 / 11
& let one jaws
of one worm
sur la cimetière
my jo or
allow one
single rat’s mouth
to twirl · thru what
lies there · shut & shall I fetch us
my plough-share
& shall I
13 / 05 / 12
gathering how hard
#thefingering
in the garden ∙ my
glowing alcohol
drink chewing
a night butterfly
or something
my thoughts swats
like shadows grow
from flowerpots ∙
14 / 05 / 11
(or you could sorrow over
the omens ∙ star-nosed moles
maay now open ∙ immured in maples ∙
I favour : stashed our moans
down our names / now c’mon
exi$t alles lionclaw’d pause inviolable -
else her veil
it always included an astrolabe
b.v. zonder boomen S!eeper Brownie
boven op komen ∙ activate her now) ∙ &
30 / 04 / 10
unlit orders,
turn the car & the key
starts,
okay all caps,
London’s to sack to
unsnarl our false all-fours,
ghost hounds
govern a crisp lay-by,
Samantha Cameron is pregnant,
pandemic or snog cones,
13 / 05 / 11
at my | heil heidegger, |
at catastrophe dismay
& devastation | say |
hurrah horizon’s
mascot is actually a mirror, |
ankle-length &
you will need inter · as one
left · your own self
& w/ only flowers · if
even one fouls the grass there
27 / 03 / 11
then a nervous OHM.
my all-fours are golden /
they’re framed / -threes actually
sacking my thrashing gardener
he only has his/Telemachus’s
spermatic cord as cover ·
covers pug violin channel instead
23/7 pug violin
spent out image’s shadow
look him in the head | yes | look –
23 / 10 / 10
locked in this
mad performed town centre
w/ a myxy boris ∙
what a plonker ∙
London’s where Londoners are sent to die
England screws platinum mayors off that
so you haven’t lived
no I was entranced
by my miaow flow echolocation /
mounted protestors / po-po on a lance &
29 / 04 / 11
as w/ panto horse guts
the worse our debt gets
the longer yr house gas is ∙ as
evry civil private unit knows
here’s photos of your family we can stand up in
so then consign kenya to the white again
what leavings | like uk, greece & italy
under negroes risen up place them
& let us at the taxes | the foes & suppers
learn how you really treat f*xes
25 / 03 / 11
opposed without economy
to validity · arrived by rope & / et
a plate of c*untercum
model’s own (?)
& our arms untangle
now ploughs
& drenched ladies
on their pricks alight, (foetus kick subtle
), also honey-roast wood-pigeon angle
at ugh #lacomrades’ throats
24 / 03 / 11
even a fucking atheist can’t deny
all free will is servitude’s weird veil, if
wanti wanti cyaan’ get it
& getti getti no want it
& I am poetry’s Karl Rove
my hex pax
but a permanent realignment in aesthetics
cat clot
time knows :
time longer dan rope | so.
22 / 03 / 11
if you look outside
the environment /
PR functions of UK plc
there is nothing,
quite “puck”,
a great againt,
a void & so shall my shins
ground to cones
fall in coins of grass ∙
Samantha Cameron is for me.
13 / 03 / 11
#shaking | & as covered q.v.
sappers develop
b.v. zonder boomen
my how
steel flaws
fish my face also
still
peter can move me to tears
prosper ∙ apparition in a moses basket
arrives at the vegetable world | yes
13 / 03 / 12
pale drapes fawn-colour your #prescription | pills
now not period-blood piebalds | / freckles, | yr cock
all is gone &
gone are our friends | you,
in the morning, delicately walk
down along the side of the bed
to dress yr speckled belly with
a slain trophy wife’s wraith
as chemise teddy,
yawning &
14 / 03 / 12
f*ck off c*nt lord
you were my loved
got to get from
out from
under you too on my
death bed it
do some thing worth
to while got about 5 min day
got 3 amazing
grown up kids
05 / 08 / 11
Home that fortress
that its foes repulses
w/ enclosing them
Trolley Bit, / Button
Lift Riding Crop?
my selves pan over to me
where I am pulling your
Samantha Cameron
over a little hill in it.
a little, “Roquefort?” | si
13 / 05 / 11
avec ta rattrap pedal
considerd as rosarian · sur la
cimetière · lips soft
w/ promise swiftly
purulate & let
one jaws of one grub · sanity,
predecessor · godcundliness
a la peristalsis de ta tiny faithless
ankles · albeit resectioned,
fused with milklike data,
30 / 05 / 08
all males shall be hanged
govern thy puking
some bribed sunbeams
bear us a comb
from David’s paws unsnarl his hands
all males shall be hanged
hark to the lute
making good kindling
sign for the glade hounds
govern thy puking
01 / 10 / 11
ah earlywood burl wasps seethe |
a Black Watch’s father our
bay wreaths counterfeits brows ·
who says he wishes
his death was in vain ·
& as emmer is to spelt
yr zephyr embalming
Cy Tolliver pistils it rouses is to
the olive waters misfit vista
whose fragrances it borrows
02 / 10 / 11
ah this innately
attention-grabbing anagnorisis
you Elysian atoll’s bonny lars’s
gobs swill! we have eaten
*ussies that are less
like *ussies than your kisses | lars
you are all him Cameron | are him &
as him, in your condemnation,
#sideme with
war rapes & war famine
28 / 03 / 10
I taught women to puke jaw-bones
yike
our prime minister,
shnipping @ ripe tapers
w/ little grape scissors,
isn’t like so bad :
raise yr
amaranth eyes, O temp,
to the citronella candle
-crowded heavens,
15 / 03 / 08
O temp
type for Jafar and Schmitt
be thyself the needful document ∙
till London’s tall lamps
and her plain trees
are felled with puke
inhale birds’ healing gas ∙
I’ve something to send by you
O temp, stay a little ∙
bollards come up cob
31 / 04 / 10
hello? like salad hovers
O our turbans
& our flat caps
the bang my heart,
than my c*ck has nicknames in paris
more strays stalk rightful
hare sex
we think we’re outside
do we shove the buzzer
do we just bang on
28 / 03 / 10
your
scout is
blacking out
as flower mask young tories near
ha ∙
yet even free men
could honour you ∙
so get asap enough tea-lights
raise yr
amaranth eyes O temp
10 / 09 / 08
the Bullingdon boys
have inherited some surveillance equipment,
let’s at last
black up a horse ∙
who never let us like shnip shining
taper-tips out as pearls or
“now let’s f*ck in a bath
filled w/ porters or” or
“no now let us make l*ve
under a beautiful waterfall of porters”
29 / 04 / 08
boven op komen,
my name is Fortuna Wrist
.blo.uk I -
my mysogny was generalised preparedness -
I hid long my blood in my blondes - S!eeper Brownie -
boven op komen,
b.v. zonder boomen,
the dead
put please on tip-toe
in poorhouses,
12 / 05 / 11
ay me | intolerant
my pussy & therefore ∙ my music
survives basically on blood
bent bead-by-bead out the skinned
knees of shepherdesses’s
infant predecessors ∙ yet what is
wrong with me?
I smoke cock but I pass pussywet
see cities’s apparitions
in levant & couchant surveillance mosaïques
29 / 02 / 11
I must vanish
to #themoon
all my wants
thereto combine
could man but
come back from his c*m
my norms would all
in one word sum :
on the first day of Ambridge
gripewater on brushfire strewn steams
15 / 03 / 11
O temp
type for Jafar and Schmitt
be thyself the needful document ∙
till London’s tall lamps
and her plain trees
are felled with puke
inhale birds’ healing gas ∙
I’ve something to send by you
O temp, stay a little ∙
bollards come up cob
09 / 10 / 11
& in certain futuristic towns
tories will be weighed not counted
shortly you loosen your reins
on #quitethe wrong horse
how fortunate it was
we never were charged
for the block of veins
I will box up my pretty dresses
tippex we shit side-saddle sam
prepares us to alight in c*m
03 / 10 / 11
+ angle, pied-beautiful, to be
sodomized, | milk-white
in shadows | ROF- |
bukake in cond*ms dandles
nor can dapplings
remain milk-white so,
but temples came together to
spitters, zaaiers, ploegers
fold this eggnog sick pure |
bukake, Laclau, #themoon,
28 / 11 / 10
imf · like an infant will take
in a curiously human gesture
a hem to her neck
like a lead · calculate
our debt
against our exports ·
face your false decision
static in pussies · like
spritzed blood · spurted burning
over jews in ecstasy &
29 / 09 / 11
privy to acatalectic · senior-
-level conversations wi yr
sore cloaca already & as
our performi · ah like
my | almond-coloured lar · him
with the whine spreads adulterous
sails from your perfuméd light
summer jacket, I · spread family men
jewish in barracks · pick at ni*****
13 / 05 / 11
& as the court hocks
on the jew it counts | George
Osborne | emoticon coalition |
soaks frail cloth
embroidered with gloaming fat for | or else
exfoliation horizon twinkles &
“condom” an Esperanto swearword, | childlike · as
in > that’s no condom, my cock but moults
& sentience for spam & tinnitus |
cry by us | for votes for tory mps
30 / 09 / 11
shld · thank him
he prefers to voyage
on my knapsack
& convalesce in his box
autonomous he flicks
evidential easterlies
jubbers
observe his beauty
on my palm his jaws
show like a pox
04 / 04 / 11
la hobyar habits elles á | body
double fragrances it borrow
in yr atria beat
a blond white milk dapple
bedebit my bed | o muse non
non | got off rapist you | triumvirate |
tides / blokes rspv &
I kept him company to his
bollard in the wilderness
& sing, interest | empty la
04 / 04 / 10
who could I be
calling at this hour? I fasten David
yr brow to my stern ·
make sail for
Tokyo
not part of China
but down that way
else let cherubs scatter
tillers like
sackful of scales
04 / 05 / 11
w/ yr flid
poking out yr aunt
the panto horses
in the panto horses’s panto
horse etc. w/ his · forked mouth
w/ a perfect spark hovered ·
nor yr gargoyle
for a tantrum of roses
lazed her gatling about
its patchwork flanks ·
can’t be arsed
04 / 05 / 10
& #unlikeLabour
& #bedswordfathers
Cameron’s someone
you can get in commodity form
/ or normal form ·
in chainmail
or in #specialcontextarmour ·
i.e. contrails of motion
lines in corn mirrored in
skies of tesselating coin,
01 / 05 / 11
an ankle, albeit intact ·
restless thou rove thru
#brushfire of rosebushes ·
check this out
love is not
to sing out, human.
leave that for lovers ·
love is to blow with whispers
amen-allocated #clinamen
in the pastoral transhuman
03 / 05 / 10
am I the only one who thinks
gdp official aid
chinese democracy
gender equality
pandemic solidarity
lyric poetry after shoreditch
climate chaos
this is just to say
I pissed in the cherries in the icebox
forgive me
05 / 09 / 11
affect, inclination & passion
predecessors all swaddled
into sweet triptych
poltergeists · grind gold
ou roasted pigeons
will fly to the ni*gers
lib dems & thieves ·
& on fingers carrying out chores
wind white flowers · or warm
itty zombies will coo you from kerchiefs
31 / 04 / 11
as like barbarians | a tantrum of roses / or
troy MP suffrage | est-que ek the only one who | /
lyric systemic | stipulative Epic |
posiTIvist dialectic | diaLECtic managEMEnt style
hardens evry hole
& evry cock in the barracks
& as if la bathos app”, | / liver stipple & dying friend
& as if cognitive biasES countervail,
hIstoric DaMage? ou is | no
macaronic code-switch coulD |
poxies, damask syntax, sisterhood
-------------------------------------------------------------
50 poems from “DP” by Colleen Hind. Some of these have appeared in The Cambridge Reading Series pamphlets, Scree, Openned TV, & Sad Press / Everyone’s Cup of Tea, & as a getaway magic carpet from Punch Press. Some are with JK or PR, and some are dedicated to PR, SW, BJ, SW, SB, PM, DC, GO, NC & VC.