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I incude this entire article about Clive James because you may not be able to access it in The Guardian online:
Telegraph Culture Books Authors
Clive James’s true gift to us was his magnificent poetry
JAKE KERRIDGE
Follow 1 DECEMBER 2019 • 8:00AM
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The critic Clive James, who has died at the age of 80, pictured in 2011
The critic Clive James, who has died at the age of 80, pictured in 2011 CREDIT: ANDREW CROWLEY FOR DT ARTS
For most of his dazzling career, Clive James’s besotted audience thought of him as, in The New Yorker’s phrase, “a brilliant bunch of guys”: chat show host, documentary maker, television critic, literary essayist, novelist and author of hilarious, not entirely truthful volumes of autobiography. Only in his last decade (he died last Sunday having been diagnosed with leukaemia in 2010) could we come to focus on him in one role, the one that came to mean the most to him: poet.
In 2014 he wrote a poem, “Japanese Maple”, in which he vowed to live long enough to see the new maple tree in his garden “turn to flame” in the autumn. Happily, he defied his doctors’ prognosis for several years; so long, indeed, that to his embarrassment the tree predeceased him.
But “Japanese Maple” went viral, cementing his late reputation as a brilliant poet of mortality. Even those of us who loved him in his earlier incarnations could apply Shakespeare’s words to him: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”
My first encounter with James’s poetry was reading his collection Other Passports as a teenager: not the sort of poetry book that impresses girls, but I plucked it off the school library shelf because I thought he was brilliant on the telly and I needed a laugh. It has its serious moments but it mostly comprises parodies, squibs, lampoons and witty Auden-esque verse letters; most of the lines that have stayed with me are too rude to quote in a family newspaper. Back then, his most famous poem was that gleeful expression of writerly schadenfreude, The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered. (“His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one/ With Barbara Windsor’s Book of Boobs.”)
When he published his collected poems in 2003, the volume was entitled The Book of My Enemy: not just in reference to his biggest poetic hit, but also because, as he put it, “The urge to write in verse has always been my financial enemy, and I have always done my best to resist it… I had a family to feed, and prose paid.” But having made his pile and retired from television at the turn of the millennium, he started to spend more time on verse, and to go deeper.
Like his poetic masters Auden and Larkin, James’s favoured method was to deploy a vigorously demotic vocabulary in a strict, old-fashioned verse form. (You could say of him what he said of Larkin: that he had “a romantic sensibility classically disciplined”.) Although his poems were formally structured, his aim was to make them sound like somebody talking – like Clive James talking. He developed a distinctive, accessible voice, the verse equivalent of the robust no-nonsense Aussie voice of his journalism.
This was honed on blokeish poems such as “Bring Me the Sweat of Gabriela Sabatini”, but was flexible enough to work well when he began to embark on such pieces of poetic self-examination as “Son of a Soldier”, in which he wrote about the damaging effect of his father’s death when he was a child, lamenting: “First for the hurt I had done to those I loved,/ Then for myself, for what had been done to me/ In the beginning, to make my heart so cold.”
In his last illness-plagued decade he published a book-length poem called The River in the Sky, four new collections of poetry and a 500-page verse translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (as well as several non-poetic books). His earlier, pyrotechnic satires already need to be peppered with footnotes to explain the references, but a late poem like “Sentenced to Life”, in which he thinks about his native Australia and the fact he is too sick ever to return there (“The sky is overcast/ Here in the English autumn, but my mind/ Basks in the light I never left behind”) will chime with anybody too far from home.
The obituaries focused on his work in television and journalism, but that will fade from the collective memory. It is in these universal late poems that he will live on.
Japanese Maple
Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:
Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?
Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.
My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that.That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:
Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colors will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.
© Clive James, 2014
“ The poet is a lifer. Anyone who gets into the game will soon start wishing that there was a version of it with lower stakes, but there isn't. - Clive James ”
The current assignment
Who did it? Any difficulties, comments, etc.
Dru's poem:
| Wed, Dec 4, 9:43 PM (10 hours ago) | | |
to Lisa, MARLOU, Mary, Rich, Rochelle, Salmonier@aol.com, Trish, Barbara, me, Gerard 
|
| | | |
Hi all.
Hope everyone is doing well.
absence
i was there in the moment
so much i was lost
in the magnetic molton center
of the middle of the night
in the darkest of forests
with no moon but the path
was still traversable
by the faint wanderings
of the dead stars
millions of miles away
i was there when i needed to be
holding on to the tail
of the ether that once
told me it loved me
i was in the drivers seat
of the bus when all
the passengers would not be still
as we slid and danced
across the danger to
land in a pile of rock
so many of these moments
and i was there for them
so much so that everything else faded
and now
all these years on
that magnification somehow
feels like an absence
an absence of everything else outside that moment
just like the inverse flash on your eyes
when you quickly turn out the light
there for a branded moment
upon the eyes
but slowly fading
Hope you have a great meeting!
Dru
| | | |
to me, gcoulombe92, lhharris96, marlounewkirk, marymary3, andersonrich8, rwbernold, tg49at, drudmartin, faylene747
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| | | |
Got a contagious cold, so will have to miss. Here's what I'd written:
Remainders
I am refigured by the missing-
hard scarred by their death,
wounded by their departure,
blotched by my disregard.
Grafted relatives and friends,
often greatly loved,
grow over burns
visible through new skin.
My changing self-appearance
Comes with aging realization
That I too will be numbered
Among the missing.
From Gerard:
From my father’s mouth
A poem about what I missed out on when I was absent
I was nearly always absent when my father spoke
In mystical ways; he was an introvert who never
Spoke unless someone pressed his “belly-button.”
Father was the toy child one held on one’s knee,
The one played like a boy-doll whose belly button,
of a sudden, pressed, was heard the noise of a click.
And, out came the magical lilt of a remembrance.
But, all the while, from birth to death, my father
Worked second shift as a warp tier in a textile mill
For nearly all of his life, excepting all of the parts
He had had on City Hall’s Stage as a young man.
On those occasions, when in the unique company
Of his three living brothers, father entertained
The company with stories from his bygone days.
He gesticulated as an autocrat, and pronounced
Things both magical and heretical, as a prophet.
He spoke in elevated tones and with impressive
Elan, until, concluding, he tumbled into his chair,
Perhaps drunk with the memories he had imbibed,
Or, more likely, exhausted from his performance.
(C)Coulombe.11-22-19
What did others miss out on? Was it good or bad?
Had I missed out on something
That was neither good nor bad,
There had to have been a reason,
One that would make neither
Those who went or stayed away
Any happier or sadder, today.
I know, to my personal dismay,
I never had any thought to allay.
Over time there have been absences
That went unexplained or unexcused;
Much of the time, who gave a damn?
Others, no less, hadn’t given a care,
All the while, when I wasn’t there.
Well, maybe someone did miss me.
A woman I had met once over coffee.
She had invited me to a film soiree,
And I had said to her, “I will see.”
Once, I met a very pretty divorcee
Who invited me over for cake and tea .
The cake was chocolate, my favorite,
Unfortunately, I was the one to grab it.
And it flew up in the air, topsy-turvy.
As recompense for how she had tried
To get me to bed her, I stiffed my pride
Into her, and quickly found a lock box
On her crotch, messaged, “out-foxed.”
The next assignment
Write a poem about the sound of snow.
The next meeting
Will be on Thursday, December 19, 2019.
