Martin Earl

The Mulch Shoveler

Walter Earl, age 76, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, shoveling mulch.

This is supposed to be the post in which I sign off, pack up my bags and leave as gracefully as possible.

07.12.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (143)

Martin Earl

The Fish, II (following a recent post by Camille Dungy)

Gabriel Metsu – “Maid Broiling Fish”, mid 17th century, Flemish

Gary Winogrand, one of America’s greatest street photographers, working in the tradition (or rather reworking the tradition) of Henri Cartier-Bresson, said that he was not interested in reality, per se, but what it looked like in a photograph. Camille’s passionate reading of a Bishop poem recently allowed me to make a connection I would have otherwise never made. Or at least that is what I assume, or I probably would have already made it. But, it was Camille’s picture of the poem, her version, what she highlighted and chose to include in the frame, how Bishop’s poem looked in her post that put me in mind of Padre António Vieira.

06.30.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (122)

Martin Earl

Poets and Painters

Richard and Mafalda sitting beneath a Pontus Carle painting, Lisbon 2008
 

The image of Thomas Mann at his writing desk is, for me, emblematic. The writer at work. Five thirty am, the light of day nowhere apparent, two candles illuminating the mahogany surface of his desk, haloing pens, inkstand, blank pages. The order in his studio is impeccable; filled with antiquarian trinkets, a crisp bourgeois density pervades. His only music, the scratch of the nib as it begins to fill the empty pages.

06.17.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (136)

Martin Earl

The Fallacy of Rejecting Closure

Gary Hume, Dream, 1991 (From “Door” series)

1.

My first camera, which I was given at the age of twelve, was a Japanese made Petri, a simple rangefinder camera that my father had bought at the PX in Okinawa, where he was stationed for three years as an Air Force Lieutenant, from 1954 to 1957. The camera traveled back to the U.S. in the hold of a ship, just as the pre-me did, doubly held in my mother’s “hold”, which was, in turn, held, strapped into a top bunk, in the ship’s hold. All together, I am told, we rode out a typhoon.

06.02.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (113)

Martin Earl

A SHORT, HIGHLY PERSONAL OBSERVATION COMPLETELY LACKING IN EXAMPLES WHICH I COULD HAVE NEVER HAVE MADE THIRTY YEARS AGO WHEN I WAS A YOUNG POET STILL LIVING IN NEW YORK, BECAUSE I DIDN’T KNOW ENOUGH TO KNOW IT WAS TRUE. BUT I DO NOW.

Germaine Greer, 
Paula Rego, 1995. (Pastel on Paper laid on aluminum
 120 x 111 cm., National Portrait Gallery).

W.H. Auden once said that he always felt that he was the youngest person in the room, even at an older age, when this was certainly not the case. I’ve felt similarly while blogging, especially when being reprimanded by commentators half my age. This could have all sorts of explanations. But for the moment let’s file them under “Monkey Glands”, aka W.B. Yeats. Today, I have a more pressing issue at hand, a comment on the younger generations of scriveners; or to reverse Auden’s impression, all of those younger than myself and involved, in one way or another, in the palimpsestic quest of poetry. I mean poets in their twenties, thirties and forties – fifty being the cut-off date.

05.19.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (111)

Martin Earl

Writing on Stone

Looking east towards Alexanderplatz and its famous television tower, East Berlin City Center

We are rapidly approaching the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, the most emblematic event of the collapse of communism in Europe, and of its ensuing collapse in the Soviet Union itself.

05.05.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (25)

Martin Earl

Some Practical Advice for Young Poets Considering Exile: Part 2

The catalyst, the fuse, call it what you like, whatever it is that sets sweeping change into motion, often comes in the form of epiphany, the sudden realization that things are not what they had seemed to be a moment earlier.

04.21.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (56)

Martin Earl

Some Practical Advice for Young Poets Considering Exile: Part 1

Perfect Parallax Correction

In my case it took almost two years of leaving and then returning, and then leaving once again to reach the point at which I finally gained what I would call a legal footing in Europe. In the midst of these two years (1984 – 1986) I even spent a week in China – an alternative to the European project – having planned for a year. It was a tumultuous period. I was arrested once in Paris and locked up in a classic gaol, the Conciergerie prison on the Ile de la Cité (exactly where, one hundred and ninety-one years earlier, in 1793, Marie Antoinette had awaited execution); on another occasion I was pulled off a train on the Swiss-Italian border and detained for several hours (both times for having been found to be in possession of illegal class-b drugs – the first time they were hid in my pouch of tobacco, the second time in my left sock); besides these mishaps, I was constantly dodging the gendarme’s check points in the Paris metro, due to my chronically defunct tourist visa. Even recently, I was nearly arrested in Frankfurt at a mid-airport Reisekontrolle, which seemed to loom up out of nowhere, because my Portuguese residence card was five years out of date.

04.09.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8)

Martin Earl

Dear Harriet

I want to apologize for being out of touch lately. Blogs should press forward under even the worst of circumstances. But those of you who have been following my posts, all seven of them, have no doubt noticed that I’ve not yet learned how to compose a blog.

03.20.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (15)