Mary Ursula Bethell and Campbell McGrath - Workshop 03/06/22
Hello, everyone.
Mary Ursula Bethell was born in Surrey, England. She died in 1945 in Christchurch, New Zealand, at the age of 70. As well as a poet, she was a social worker.
Campbell McGrath was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1962. He has also written and translated drama.
A theme that stands out from the first poetic text is hope. Dawn rises in the east at the end of a long night. Think about hope or images of hope in your writing today.
As well as mentioning the night, a theme from the second text is solitude. Write about being alone.
The structure of the first text is more old-fashioned, where the second text is broken into parts of different styles.
We could call the second text 'fragmentary', while the first is more 'unitary'.
Six words to attempt to incorporate into your writing from Bethell: keen, intellectual, senses, dreams, flame, east.
Six words from McGrath: day, soft, water, forget, lost, assemble.
If you have a copy of The Exercise Book (Manhire, Duncum, Price & Wilkins), turn to "#120: The Things They Carried - a character exercise" for an additional challenge.
That's all. I hope you are inspired to write today.
The Small Hours
by Ursula Mary Bethell
Dying, dying,
the small, keen, shrivelled moon high up there in the west;
long, level cloud-banks lying low over the mountains,
dark earth steeped deep in rest.
Dying, dying,
the world to my heart, my heart to the known world;
intellectual light belying the say of roving senses,
foreseeing their sails close-furled.
Old ardours decadent;
dreams flying ghostly to dim caves whence they came.
How congruous midnight silence with interior stillness
sustaining a slow-dying flame!
Dying, dying,
condemned to go down to the abyss with every beast,
darkness prevailing... nay! even now daunted, paling;
dawn, night-denying, hail to you, hail to you in the east!
Nights on Planet Earth
by Campbell McGrath
"Heaven was originally precisely that: the starry sky, dating back to the earliest Egyptian texts, which include magic spells that enable the soul to be sewn in the body of the great mother, Nut, literally "night," like the seed of a plant, which is also a jewel and a star. The Greek Elysian fields derive from the same celestial topography: the Egyptian "Field of Rushes," the eastern stars at dawn where the soul goes to be purified. That there is another, mirror world, a world of light, and that this world is simply the sky—and a step further, the breath of the sky, the weather, the very air—is a formative belief of great antiquity that has continued to the present day with the godhead becoming brightness itself: dios/theos (Greek); deus/divine/diana (Latin); devas (Sanskrit); daha (Arabic); day (English)."
—Susan Brind Morrow, Wolves and Honey
1
Gravel paths on hillsides amid moon-drawn vineyards,
click of pearls upon a polished nightstand
soft as rainwater, self-minded stars, oboe music
distant as the grinding of icebergs against the hull
of the self and the soul in the darkness
chanting to the ecstatic chance of existence.
Deep is the water and long is the moonlight
inscribing addresses in quicksilver ink,
building the staircase a lover forever pauses upon.
Deep is the darkness and long is the night,
solid the water and liquid the light. How strange
that they arrive at all, nights on planet earth.
2
Sometimes, not often but repeatedly, the past invades my dreams in the form of a familiar neighborhood I can no longer locate,
a warren of streets lined with dark cafés and unforgettable bars, a place where I can sing by heart every song on every jukebox,
a city that feels the way the skin of an octopus looks pulse-changing from color to color, laminar and fluid and electric,
a city of shadow-draped churches, of busses on dim avenues, or riverlights, or canyonlands, but always a city, and wonderful, and lost.
Sometimes it resembles Amsterdam, students from the ballet school like fanciful gazelles shooting pool in pink tights and soft, shapeless sweaters,
or Madrid at 4AM, arguing the 18th Brumaire with angry Marxists, or Manhattan when the snowfall crowns every trash-can king of its Bowery stoop,
or Chicago, or Dublin, or some ideal city of the imagination, as in a movie you can neither remember entirely nor completely forget,
barracuda-faced men drinking sake like yakuza in a Harukami novel, women sipping champagne or arrack, the rattle of beaded curtains in the back,
the necklaces of Christmas lights reflected in raindrops on windows, the taste of peanuts and their shells crushed to powder underfoot,
always real, always elusive, always a city, and wonderful, and lost. All night I wander alone, searching in vain for the irretrievable.
3
In the night I will drink from a cup of ashes and yellow paint.
In the night I will gossip with the clouds and grow strong.
In the night I will cross rooftops to watch the sea tremble in a dream.
In the night I will assemble my army of golden carpenter ants.
In the night I will walk the towpath among satellites and cosmic dust.
In the night I will cry to the roots of potted plants in empty offices.
In the night I will gather the feathers of pigeons in a honey jar.
In the night I will become an infant before your flag.