Raynard Corri was the bastard offspring of Captain Africa (the lard mogul) and Tracy. The captain disappeared without Tracy, who perished alone , along with her diamond collection, the victim of a mau-mau hit squad. Leaving Raynard alone wi…th the one thing money can’t buy: poverty.
He was discovered at one year old by a wayward nun; he had been living in the dumb waiter of the zambezi juice bar. Sister James (for it was she) lost no time in mailing the child, by first-class parcel post, to a friend in Milan. Fortunately he was erroneously delivered to the Eros Luxury Club, a converted charabang in the bowels of Salfords cultural quarter.
The proprietor, a swarthy ill-mannered character of Armenian origin, received the package with a bestial grunt. Taking a curved knife from a canteen of curved knives, he slashed it open. Raynard gazed into the face of this his first stranger and what he saw was pure malevolence.
He ran down flattened streets patrolled by aimless amputees through a world of refugees, out of the cold war into the deep freeze, he ran out of money, he ran into trouble.
He was adopted by Sheba and Rex, a pair of alsatian dogs who regarded the boy with an uneasy ambivalence. They lived in an Art Deco cocktail cabinet by the bicycle sheds of Salford Metropolitan Police Compound. They were devout Catholics.
It was arranged for Raynard to attend the School of Our Lady of the Seven Robes of St. Joseph by the Garden of Sorrows in the Vale of Tears which was run with teutonic efficiency by the little daughters of the sick under the iron rule of Mother Hadcroft.
Mother Hadcroft was everything rancid to Raynard: her mouth a malignant slit in the murderous mask she called a face; her cheesy breath steaming up her spectacles; her eyes like mobile ball bearings – their colour left a mechanical taste in the mouth.
Daily religious instruction furnished his vacant mind with tales of treachery, morbid betrayals, oceans pink with the blood of multitudes, saints looking to the sky, their living bodies smashed by hammers before the alien idols of the heathen. Incense filled his nostrils with the fatal breath of ghosts. Hermaphrodite choirs droned in his ears.
Each student could elect to spend their free time in one of three ways: putting out the chairs for bingo, sticking the santas onto christmas crackers, or in the service of the Knights of the Spa Orchid. The latter seemed the least demanding, the most hygenic, and it also appealed to the lad’s naive sense of chivalry.
The Knights of the Spa Orchid held their daily routines in the spacious open-plan lounge of the sinister Billy Corky, who affected the manner of the proto-fascist with psychotic attention to detail. His navy blue hair sleeked with ancient grease, his meagre Don Amechie moustache waxed stiff like the legs of a dead fly. He went nowhere without the chums.
The chums were namely Vincent and Thomas, and the brothers Fleming, a titanic duet each in possession of a powder-blue safari suit and arms of anthropoidal length. Their physical immensity fully emphasized the stiff angular grace of the nifty Billy, who now led the way into the lounge.
The lounge was furnished by three rows of seven leatherette easy chairs faced by one formica table. The curtains were the colour of mustard embellished with the bleeding heart motif. The walls were hung with colourless daubs. The carpet was monotonous, its pattern gave the impression of small animal crapping at regular intervals. The whole scene was lit by a soundless colour TV and a row of six orange table lamps in which shifting globules of molten wax moved like specimens of rare snot.
Enter Mother Eileen, flanked by the chums and a hyper-reverent Billy who wore the look of a man obsessed. She stood on the table and began.
‘Even as I speak, a filthy tide of bolshevism issues from the dives of tin pan alley. In short, the world is a subterranean playground for lounge lizards from every sphere of idleness and crime who, their pockets a-jingle with Moscow money go unchecked about their evil business. Take china, cathedrals ransacked, churches turned into judo schools. I have seen the finest laundries in the world converted into bordellos for the gratification of the lumpenproletariat. What with the drink trade on its last legs, and the land running fallow for the want of artificial manures, I leave you with this thought…’
Mantovani strings cascaded from the Queen Anne Dinatron stereo system. Everyone crossed themselves and left. The chums in their lilac Isetta bubble cars headed for the golden finger bowl where they were employed as part-time knuckle merchants.
Upon his arrival at the compound, Raynard, to his horror, found the cocktail cabinet in flames and his devoted guardians, Sheba and Rex, their heads split by faceless vigilantes, slaughtered in the rabies scare of ’69. ‘Christ! Where do I live?’ thought Raynnard in genuine desperation. And the heavy traffic seemed to whisper ‘Little Hulton.’
So for two weeks Raynard resided in a broom cupboard which he shared with an upright vacuum cleaner and Louise, a little number redolent of the lazoon of Fireball XL5 fame.
Little Hulton imbued Raynard with the tactile beauty of the luger and the surly prose of Mickey Spillane. Finally, however, it was the prospect of nude fencing lessons that drove Raynard out. Leaving a bag of onions for Louise, he left silently via the laundry chute. That winter he got a job at Barmy Sid’s Elephants Graveyard of up-to-the-minute accoutrements, during which time he moved into the bathroom with an all-girl cycle gang. On the back of a Rizzla paper in lipstick, he wrote this his first poem
John Keats
English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London. The oldest of four children, he lost both his parents at a young age. His father, a livery-stable keeper, died when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis six years later. After his mother’s death, Keats’s maternal grandmother appointed two London merchants, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, as guardians. Abbey, a prosperous tea broker, assumed the bulk of this responsibility, while Sandell played only a minor role. When Keats was fifteen, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School, Enfield, to apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon and study medicine in a London hospital. In 1816 Keats became a licensed apothecary, but he never practiced his profession, deciding instead to write poetry.
John Keats in Bright Star:
“A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore…”
Around this time, Keats met Leigh Hunt, an influential editor of the Examiner, who published his sonnets “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and “O Solitude.” Hunt also introduced Keats to a circle of literary men, including the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth. The group’s influence enabled Keats to see his first volume, Poems by John Keats, published in 1817. Shelley, who was fond of Keats, had advised him to develop a more substantial body of work before publishing it. Keats, who was not as fond of Shelley, did not follow his advice. Endymion, a four-thousand-line erotic/allegorical romance based on the Greek myth of the same name, appeared the following year. Two of the most influential critical magazines of the time, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, attacked the collection. Calling the romantic verse of Hunt’s literary circle “the Cockney school of poetry,” Blackwood’s declared Endymion to be nonsense and recommended that Keats give up poetry. Shelley, who privately disliked Endymion but recognized Keats’s genius, wrote a more favorable review, but it was never published. Shelley also exaggerated the effect that the criticism had on Keats, attributing his declining health over the following years to a spirit broken by the negative reviews.
Ode To Autumn
1.
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
2.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
3.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
by T. S. Eliot
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
Cath Corri
Poems can have order, sanity
aesthetic distance from debris.
All I’ve learnt from pain
I always knew,
but could not do.
Cath Corri ”When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think, The “sublime” object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be.'”
— Julia Kristeva (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection)
The rival
I determined to find out whose it was –
The portrait he looked at so, and sighed;
Bitterly have I rued my meanness
And wept for it since he died!
I searched his desk when he was away,
And there was the likeness – yes, my own!
Taken when I was the season’s fairest,
And time-lines all unknown.
I smiled at my image, and put it back,
And he went on cherishing it, until
I was chafed that he loved not the me then living,
But the past woman still.
Well, such was my jealousy at las
I destroyed that face of former me ;
Could you ever have dreamed the heart of a woman
Would work so foolishly!
Thomas Hardy – Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses