NEW POEM BY TODD SWIFT II

COMPOSED DURING A CHORAL RECITAL IN LONDON

I have gone further out of myself

Than music allows

Setting words to music

Is a barbarism

You do not plate gold

On gold

The sheen overdoes

Creation

This voice exceeds time

Which does end

Despite oceanic claims.

I am beyond myself

In brightness

Of suntime and daynight.

Overcrowd this lucid vault

For a choir is born

Without fault

For Christ to listen to

On his return.

Which cannot happen

While time loiters

In the antechambers

Of the moon. I am a style

Happening to you

Despite your refusals

As if a god took you for

His own enjoyments

In a feathering triggerpoint

Of lit rage. Stage set

We die of plague to rise

With buboes drained

Pretty as the babe

Who all ovations bow to

In choral nazarenes of flow.

I raise a vocal range

Mountainous as Mars

To say you need no addition

When a lyric full throat

Takes on the freight

Of stars and plains and seas.

There is no green greener than

The sung span of your own

Boygirl tongue of fiery peace.

March 2015, London

Todd Swift

Comments

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

IRISH POETIC GENIUS KEVIN HIGGINS HAS DIED

Terrible sad news - the major Irish satirical poet of his generation, and a poet of comedic genius, and powerful authentic resonance, Kevin Higgins, has died yesterday in Ireland. Higgins, the author of many poetry books, most published by Galway-based Irish press Salmon, was known and admired world-wide, but nonetheless deserved even more recognition from the established great and the good - i.e. the prizes, medals, crowns, gongs and other titles thrown at many many lesser lights - except, he was so brilliantly biting, critical, and scathing of all that he spied as dishonest, unfair or wretched. Sweet-natured and hilarious in person, on paper, he was terrifyingly sharp-witted, and sparing of no prisoners. In a just world, he would be seen as the greatest of recent Irish poets, and even so, is recognised in anthologies and critical studies everywhere as the most acute, savagely clever, and startling of Irish political poets. The measure of his unexpected reach - a 'Heineken poe

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