In truth, the blandness of my verse proves I can not sing, but the attempt from the basis of no poet’s deep knowledge, skill, or values is also a measure of totally unschooled love. However, I am going to give the book of Gillian Allnut’s poetry – so fine that poetry is – to make up for it.
I felt but could not sing.
Like birds who lose a wing
I knew that loss was great.
He sung in such a choir
And did, I know, aspire
To know the love that some
Angels give when bid to come
To us.
No fuss
They make, for his own sake
I feel my heart doth shake.
To Joanne, who told me this I think (or was it in a dream):
Heart is not art,
Art without heart,
Can never dart
Through space or start
To fill that heart
From which I part
When lost, apart
From all that art
Which knows no heart.
That was a better bit of verse in my dream. I bought for you a poet's words yesterday, Jo. Gillian Allnut's Wake.
In the volume of poems named Wake is a poem about what poetry is and how it comes to you, or does not, as you sit with 'a pencil on a piece of paper', the pencil yet unmoved to thought or feeling. The poet in tne the poem takes heart from the fact that Julian of Norwich, who thought herself a 'poor unlettered creature' could not yet, until the heart of love she invoked came to her, in Christ's form, quoting himself from the Gospel of John Chapter 3 verse 8:
The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.
Allnut sees all, as Julian does in a hazelnut. She knows there is not poetic art without music (some choir appealed to) but that art in the end too is just clever work in which some one sits with a pencil and paper or, in Julian’s case, a ‘quill, with ink of oak gall, with a measured quire’. Quire is a measure of paper but also a simple book and also by sound association or more the choir my father sung in. Intelligence – knowledge, skills and values in truth – meets us as a poem only when we feel it with something we call ‘heart’.
In her poem, “The word ‘quire’“ [text is photographed at the end], Gillian absorbs us in the history of a word. Here is the etymology Allnut invokes us to know before we feel it. But we would not seek to know it if we did not feel it first – the mystery of grace in religion, inspiration in art , or love.
quire (noun.1) : c. 1200, quaier, “a short book;” mid-15c., “a set of four folded pages for a book; pamphlet consisting of a single quire,” original senses now obsolete, from Anglo-French quier, Old French quaier, caier “sheet of paper folded in four” (Modern French cahier), from Medieval Latin quaternum, “set of four sheets of parchment or paper,” from Vulgar Latin *quaternus, from Latin quaterni “four each,” from quater “four times” (from PIE root *kwetwer- “four”).
Meaning “standard unit for selling paper” (lately typically 24 or 25 sheets, the twentieth part of a ream) is recorded from late 14c. In quires (mid-15c.) means “unbound.”
quire (noun.2): an early form and later variant spelling of choir (q.v.), Middle English, from Old French quer, queor, variants of cuer, and compare Medieval Latin quorus, variant of chorus.
c. 1300, queor “part of the church where the choir sings,” from Old French cuer, quer “(architectural) choir of a church; chorus of singers” (13c., Modern French choeur), from Latin chorus “choir” (see chorus).
The meaning “band of singers” in English is from c. 1400, quyre. It was re-spelled mid-17c. in an attempt to match classical forms, but the pronunciation has not changed.
But ‘quire’ is becoming obsolete now as the trends in its use from 1800 show (perhaps – it is an unreliable measure to use a n-gram to say this)
Trends of quire
adapted from books.google.com/ngrams/ with a 7-year moving average; ngrams are probably unreliable.
After all that, you need the poem itself. Here it is, because I may not see you for a time before I gift you the book (where you will love the poem ‘as it were hunger …’ too).
All my love
Steven xxxxxxxx
Steve_Bamlett_blog 