First of all, apologies for the lack of posts lately. I have been
extremely busy with my other projects and have been neglecting poor old
poetry a bit! You can see what I've been up to at my main website
http://williamcookwriter.com.
I will be migrating this site to the main one above shortly but will
leave a forwarding address so to speak. I recently received the best
critique of my poetry that I have ever received. Please check it out
below and make sure to visit Anthony Servante's excellent
site about Literary Darkness - always something interesting and well-written to consider there. Enjoy!
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William Cook joins the Modernism School of Poetry. From Wiki: “For the
modernists, it was essential to move away from the merely personal
towards an intellectual statement that poetry could make about the
world.” Thus William combines a writing style of prose and poetry to
weave an intellectual tapestry, slipping his words in and out of
subjective and objective observations, pulling and pushing the reader to
envision the completed tapestry while savoring the in’s and out’s of
the words themselves, much as we watch a movie without thinking about
the camera work or actor interpretations of the screenplay. As Peter
Gabriel points out in The Cinema Show regarding the use of cosmetics:
“Concealing to reveal.”
Let’s consider the “The edge of the night” from MOMENT OF FREEDOM:
Selected Poetry. First off, two notes: the title Moment of Freedom is
ironic in that the title indirectly states, a lifetime of slavery to the
“moment of freedom”, much as the term “a cloudless clim” from Lord
Byron, must incorporate “cloud” to denote an empty sky: an image to
convey emptiness rather than simply using the unpoetic “empty” to state
such. Second, the poem’s title capitalizes the article but not the noun
or prepositional phrase, combining poetic license with standard
grammatical rule (namely “The”, the first word in the line, must be
capitalized). The intellectualizing has begun; William flaunts the
world’s rules by obeying them as he pleases, this, a moment of freedom.
To the work:
The edge of the night
I
A table spread in a tomb, dinner for the dead
the dead! Why did you pay a visit to my eyes last night?
Night is the time for angels of dreams
we who, each of us, will one day return
to our hungry mother the grave. The darkness comes
from knowing nothing is ours, except death
takes bites out of my heart. O Asclepius pupil
teacher Chiron, please bring medicine
to my dead love, and I forever understudy
will attempt some sort of attainment
to wake with a sore splitting back from the cold floor
in borrowed clothes and eyes, lent by a saint
giving at the same time an encompassing embrace
‘Friend,’ is all he said in tears, heart big enough to feed
this dead world. To wake up and see the sun
if not the glare from beyond, glittering
on broken glass, beside stretched roadside
where some had sprayed symbolic worlds and signs
scars full of flowers – to wake is to see
again this unusual world, whose secret cannot be known
until we enter the sky, or the earth
takes the edge off the night, the memory of your smile
II
Judging this town of sleep, I found it had already been judged
the Lord on his axe-cut cross of cypress
he is an incurable domestic bore
a family man, who never swore a word
an only child with a hollow mother
full with the carved cares of a household
wearing his poverty as a coat of arms
for eyes to look upon that beheld no bravura of vision.
The crisp grass rattles and shakes ripely, dryly
and all of this in fidelity to death
it was the same old same old, the hard husk of the ego
won’t ever resolve, yet grinds down hard internally
into the swirl, the wine bitter-soaked seed
labouring lie -- vice is kindled, burned in loins that melt
peculiar smiles alive, of all hope
has gone to explore the forlorn desert all alone
far away from the security of grim towns
where a girl is safe searching numbly in the comfort of fear.
You have gone or strayed away, never to be found
I sit and hear sour hiss of traffic calling
this burned and gutted ghost, vague semblance of time
on and off like one long sick light-switch
electric dream/confused state of everyone
greedy for dead love, drain her life, her soul
from every side for me. Greatest dribbling cannibal
tired Bolshie future, sleep . . . with disease.
III
Torn in two, I stand between, the idol and the grave
I do not know anything, I do not know. I do not
of this world, know anything – nor do I want to
but I have misled the past and will do so again
bring the teachers to the fore, let them stand
and be accounted as emperors of their own disease
and demise. As the sky claps the earth -- wrings blood
from all rocks and far away I fly, every day
from the storm in the brain. The science of the mind
corroded the body, blinded every mile I ever burnt
in this life and the next if there ever were such a thing.
To discuss William’s deliberate misuse of grammar would be folly as it
is part of the pursuit to reach the reader. Note also his use of
metaphor and litotes. To say simply: “a corpse” is not in his
vocabulary; he metaphorically says “dinner” and the diner, death (“the
dead!”). Knowledge is life, and life is accepting death: “The darkness
comes from knowing nothing is ours, except death….” The first slip into
litotes comes from a shift into prose from the metaphor: “…to wake with a
sore splitting back from the cold floor in borrowed clothes and eyes…”
and with the “borrowed…eyes” shifts back to poetry and metaphor. These
are very aesthetic acrobatics.
Furthermore, in the line “To wake up and see the sun if not the glare
from beyond” we see additional shifts with the sun at once literal and
figurative (as that solar body we find upon waking and as a metaphor for
the afterlife). William maintains the balance between shifts throughout
the work and ultimately “time” becomes a “cannibal” eating us as we
sleep and wake, with varying degrees of metaphoric intents. Thus, the
final line of Part II captures this fatality of cannibalism of the self
as William becomes the “I” of the poem and states the thesis with the
“if”, bringing together the personal and the intellectual in Part III:
“The science of the mind corroded the body, blinded every mile I ever
burnt in this life and the next if there ever were such a thing.”
A work in three parts, “The edge of the night” is representative of the
poetry throughout MOMENT OF FREEDOM. Think of the book as a complete
poem with each individual poem making up the whole. I do not recommend
jumping around reading individual works, but rather beginning to end, as
one would read James Joyce’s Ulysses or William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.
It is a work worthy to be mentioned with these modernist authors.
William Cook
William Cook is a writer of the macabre from New Zealand, a small
antipodean island group in the South Pacific. When not writing, he looks
after two small daughters and designs book covers that are designed to
scare the hell out of people.
He can be reached at:
