Welcome to Pinks, the new mid-week freesheet from Some Flowers Soon. I’m going to use these posts to share quick poetry readings, brief reviews, and other news. The Friday essays will continue, although from August these will be for paid subscribers only (pledge below to be one of those — or let me know if you can’t afford it).
The name might mean as many things as the dictionary says: n. “any plant of flower of the caryophyllaceous genus Dianthus, including carnation”; v. “to decorate by cutting small holes”; adj. (Shakesp) “small” — not to mention other associations: for example, the defunct Saturday evening Norwich football paper known as The Pink ‘Un. I was also thinking of Gertrude Stein’s less-well-known but equally perfect sentence about roses, which plays with all the meanings above, except possibly the local football one:*
RED ROSES.
A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot.
* That said, The Pink ‘Un first appeared in 1913, Tender Buttons in 1914.
The big UK poetry news today has been the unsealing of official correspondence in the National Archives about who to appoint as Poet Laureate in 1967. W.H. Auden was the bookies’ favourite, but was apparently blackballed because of his “Gobble Poem” — also known as “The Platonic Blow” — a dazzlingly explicit description of a casual sexual encounter with a well-hung mechanic called Bud (or, as the confidential memo has it, “30 verses of an utterly revolting character”).
Auden never published the piece, but it was pirated in 1965 by some younger poets in New York, where he had lived from the 1940s. I’ve never doubted it was by Auden, because it’s hard to think of any other poet at that time who could have performed such a virtuoso pastiche of high English poetic style on such an uncanonical subject:
We aligned mouths. We entwined. All act was clutch,
All fact contact, the attack and the interlock
Of tongues, the charms of arms. I shook at the touch
Of his fresh flesh, I rocked at the shock of his cock.
The exuberant internal rhymes and alliteration, springing along each line, makes me think that Auden specifically intended a homage to one of his early influences, Gerard Manley Hopkins — himself no stranger to erotic evocations of the male body (“Hard as hurdle arms, with a broth of goldish flue / Breathed round”, “Harry Ploughman”) or indeed to writing brilliant poetry that no-one would publish.
The particular Hopkins fragment that haunts the prosody of “The Platonic Blow” for me, though, describes quite a different experience of ecstasy: “Moonrise”. Get the tune of this in your head, and then dive in to Auden’s “a day for a lay”:
I awoke in the Midsummer not-to-call night, | in the white and the walk of the morning:
The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe | of a finger-nail held to the candle,
Or paring of paradisaïcal fruit, | lovely in waning but lustreless,
Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, | of dark Maenefa the mountain;
A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, | entangled him, not quit utterly.
This was the prized, the desirable sight, | unsought, presented so easily,
Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, | eyelid and eyelid of slumber.
NOTES
You can read the BBC News report on the National Archives story: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-66224984
And you can find “The Platonic Blow” in all its glory here: https://www.vulture.com/2008/03/how_dirty_is_that_auden_poem_t.html
My original post from June about moving to paid subscriptions (before I had thought of Pinks…):