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The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of his Mother: Poems 1965 to 1968
Paperback in very good condition. Covers are marked and sunned, corners are bumped, and front cover is creased at the lower leading edge. Page block is blemished. Binding is sound and pages are clear. LW
- GenresPoetry
54 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1968
About the author
Barry MacSweeney
34 books2 followersFrom The Boy From The Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother:
‘Born in “The Village”, Benwell, Newcastle On Tyne, July 1948. Educated Rutherford Grammar School, best subjects art & english. About 1963 picked up in France a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and The Drunken Boat. Then Baudelaire, Laforgue. Wrote first poems at school. That was a cissy thing to do of course. Began job as reporter on local evening paper. Met Basil Bunting, poet. Met Tom Pickard and Jon Silkin. Showed Bunting Walk poem, it came back sliced down to about 4 lines and a note: Start again from there. My first real lesson. Reporting gave me a sense of what words could be: economy and just get down the needed things, with no frills. Open to the city and the country. You can walk out of Newcastle for half an hour and be in greenery. The city gave words a harshness, like the steel or coal. Then I wd flit off to little stone cottage on the fells and fish for trout, and pick mushrooms. & swim in the freshwater lakes. Began to translate Laforgue, Cros, Corbiere.
1966-67: newspaper packed me off to Harlow Technical College, Essex, on a full-time journalist diploma course. An opposite life altogether. Synthetic new town, a dormitory to London. Its population, commuters with a vengeance. And the land was flat, that was a shock. An utter antithesis to Newcastle. Everything was so clean and clear-cut, and the people, they didn't belong, and had no roots in the town. Oasis. It was impossible to get involved. My eye, my colour/sluice became arbitrary for the first time. It was merely a funnel, and events and actions got a natural response from me. In Newcastle I was always too involved, always leaving pieces of myself against the walls. I wrote The Boy From The Green Cabaret poems in Harlow, and some political things for the first time. It was here I really woke up. Poems were fast and often, but it was bitter and solitary too. Spent days looking for some natural spot in the whole synthesis: found it, a small duck pond with sluice and lily-pads and footbridge. Told later it was one of the town planner's landscaping tricks.
Left here July 1967, sans honneur, carrying a bad character report in my hand & some poems, returned home to get the sack. But they didn’t like the cut of my face either. Since then jobs as chief reporter in Cumberland, dole, reporter, social security, dole, gardener, dole. Now helps run Morden Tower poetry readings, and publishing posters and books. & of course writing poems. Wants to see poets get away from revisionism. Nobody returns in glory to Lucknow. and this is June, 1968, Newcastle.’
‘Born in “The Village”, Benwell, Newcastle On Tyne, July 1948. Educated Rutherford Grammar School, best subjects art & english. About 1963 picked up in France a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and The Drunken Boat. Then Baudelaire, Laforgue. Wrote first poems at school. That was a cissy thing to do of course. Began job as reporter on local evening paper. Met Basil Bunting, poet. Met Tom Pickard and Jon Silkin. Showed Bunting Walk poem, it came back sliced down to about 4 lines and a note: Start again from there. My first real lesson. Reporting gave me a sense of what words could be: economy and just get down the needed things, with no frills. Open to the city and the country. You can walk out of Newcastle for half an hour and be in greenery. The city gave words a harshness, like the steel or coal. Then I wd flit off to little stone cottage on the fells and fish for trout, and pick mushrooms. & swim in the freshwater lakes. Began to translate Laforgue, Cros, Corbiere.
1966-67: newspaper packed me off to Harlow Technical College, Essex, on a full-time journalist diploma course. An opposite life altogether. Synthetic new town, a dormitory to London. Its population, commuters with a vengeance. And the land was flat, that was a shock. An utter antithesis to Newcastle. Everything was so clean and clear-cut, and the people, they didn't belong, and had no roots in the town. Oasis. It was impossible to get involved. My eye, my colour/sluice became arbitrary for the first time. It was merely a funnel, and events and actions got a natural response from me. In Newcastle I was always too involved, always leaving pieces of myself against the walls. I wrote The Boy From The Green Cabaret poems in Harlow, and some political things for the first time. It was here I really woke up. Poems were fast and often, but it was bitter and solitary too. Spent days looking for some natural spot in the whole synthesis: found it, a small duck pond with sluice and lily-pads and footbridge. Told later it was one of the town planner's landscaping tricks.
Left here July 1967, sans honneur, carrying a bad character report in my hand & some poems, returned home to get the sack. But they didn’t like the cut of my face either. Since then jobs as chief reporter in Cumberland, dole, reporter, social security, dole, gardener, dole. Now helps run Morden Tower poetry readings, and publishing posters and books. & of course writing poems. Wants to see poets get away from revisionism. Nobody returns in glory to Lucknow. and this is June, 1968, Newcastle.’
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September 27, 2019
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Song
I make marigold chains for yr breasts,
sleep on pigskin,
thigh to thigh
our kids
are tall, silver haired
spear rabbit
with willow-
wand
Dr. Zhivago, Love Poem
I leapt out into the aisle
hand out
ready to wipe her tears before they fell
They arrested me for
tearing another
Cinemascope screen with intent
Pastoral
Soft, soft bark in water,
fresh as cress.
The blue cattle of your eyes
grazing on the green of mine.
[Is that clever/poetic?--R.]
Song [another one]
The visitor sat with me
Days and night--gold as a finch,
Black as a gun barrel, inquisitive
As a child.
After a fortnight of insomnia, it left the
Vermouth, the glasses, the
steam, and a grey longing.
Is this freedom?
This grey longing?
Sometimes, it returns, when it is
Raining, and there are lights in the street.
And in men.
And I ask it to believe me when I shout
That you are beautiful and that I
Worship you.
Don't like:
Song: Bronchitis (for Paul)
Without a word,
a single sound
my brother crawls from behind me,
onto my sheets,
over my legs,
spans me with his young body
slides through the wall next to
my head
and coughs duets with the man
next-door until the sun comes up
when they sling mucus balls
at sparrows and robins
When Van Gogh
When Van Gogh
the brilliant mad
painter tramped through Paris
(sunflowers, O sunflowers!)
after quarrelling with Gauguin,
and heard starlings
above Sacre Couer,
it went in one ear and
stayed there.
A Lovely Child
she spat through her teeth,
delicately, as the novel would
inevitably say
this one pulled up her
white
dress
peed against the sea wall
jaunted into the port
whistling a hymn
through her teeth
Song
I make marigold chains for yr breasts,
sleep on pigskin,
thigh to thigh
our kids
are tall, silver haired
spear rabbit
with willow-
wand
Dr. Zhivago, Love Poem
I leapt out into the aisle
hand out
ready to wipe her tears before they fell
They arrested me for
tearing another
Cinemascope screen with intent
Pastoral
Soft, soft bark in water,
fresh as cress.
The blue cattle of your eyes
grazing on the green of mine.
[Is that clever/poetic?--R.]
Song [another one]
The visitor sat with me
Days and night--gold as a finch,
Black as a gun barrel, inquisitive
As a child.
After a fortnight of insomnia, it left the
Vermouth, the glasses, the
steam, and a grey longing.
Is this freedom?
This grey longing?
Sometimes, it returns, when it is
Raining, and there are lights in the street.
And in men.
And I ask it to believe me when I shout
That you are beautiful and that I
Worship you.
Don't like:
Song: Bronchitis (for Paul)
Without a word,
a single sound
my brother crawls from behind me,
onto my sheets,
over my legs,
spans me with his young body
slides through the wall next to
my head
and coughs duets with the man
next-door until the sun comes up
when they sling mucus balls
at sparrows and robins
When Van Gogh
When Van Gogh
the brilliant mad
painter tramped through Paris
(sunflowers, O sunflowers!)
after quarrelling with Gauguin,
and heard starlings
above Sacre Couer,
it went in one ear and
stayed there.
A Lovely Child
she spat through her teeth,
delicately, as the novel would
inevitably say
this one pulled up her
white
dress
peed against the sea wall
jaunted into the port
whistling a hymn
through her teeth
Displaying 1 of 1 review