The Bliss of Solitude: Anne Sexton & Lovesong: Mercy Street by Peter Gabriel

When I first heard the new Peter Gabriel album 'New Blood' I couldn't warm to it; it didn't seem to improve on the originals so why bother? 
I should have known better really; it's a grower, there's a newfound intensity that focusses Gabriel's... intensity; he takes himself seriously and I love that about him. I particularly like his new version of 'Mercy Street', a song that was inspired by poet Anne Sexton. 
Sexton was troubled, lost, crippled by depression and tried to recognise and shape her history using poetry as therapy. She wrote essentially for herself and found an empathetic audience only after her suicide. 
Her search for relief took her in search of the house where she once lived with her father as a child, 45 Mercy Street. 
She walked the streets but couldn't find the address. 
Her search for identity and 'home' are elements picked up by Gabriel in his beautiful song.
I'm sure that you are familiar with the version off 'So' so I've included the new take from 'New Blood' here: MERCY STREET
It's emotional presence may be better felt after reading Sexton's poem:

45 Mercy Street

In my dream, drilling into the marrow of my entire bone, my real dream, I'm walking up and down Beacon Hill searching for a street sign - namely MERCY STREET. Not there. I try the Back Bay. Not there. Not there. And yet I know the number. 45 Mercy Street. I know the stained-glass window of the foyer, the three flights of the house with its parquet floors. I know the furniture and mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, the servants. I know the cupboard of Spode the boat of ice, solid silver, where the butter sits in neat squares like strange giant's teeth on the big mahogany table. I know it well. Not there. Where did you go? 45 Mercy Street, with great-grandmother kneeling in her whale-bone corset and praying gently but fiercely to the wash basin, at five A.M. at noon dozing in her wiggy rocker, grandfather taking a nap in the pantry, grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid, and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower on her forehead to cover the curl of when she was good and when she was... And where she was begat and in a generation the third she will beget, me, with the stranger's seed blooming into the flower called Horrid. I walk in a yellow dress and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes, enough pills, my wallet, my keys, and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five? I walk. I walk. I hold matches at street signs for it is dark, as dark as the leathery dead and I have lost my green Ford, my house in the suburbs, two little kids sucked up like pollen by the bee in me and a husband who has wiped off his eyes in order not to see my inside out and I am walking and looking and this is no dream just my oily life where the people are alibis and the street is unfindable for an entire lifetime. Pull the shades down - I don't care! Bolt the door, mercy, erase the number, rip down the street sign, what can it matter, what can it matter to this cheapskate who wants to own the past that went out on a dead ship and left me only with paper? Not there. I open my pocketbook, as women do, and fish swim back and forth between the dollars and the lipstick. I pick them out, one by one and throw them at the street signs, and shoot my pocketbook into the Charles River. Next I pull the dream off and slam into the cement wall of the clumsy calendar I live in, my life, and its hauled up notebooks.

The Bliss of Solitude: Galway Kinnell

Galway Kinnell's early work was fierce, with a bitter beauty that reflected the early 60s when he was an antiwar activist poet and, before that, a field worker for the Congress of Racial Equality. Not only a humanist, his view of the natural world reminds me of Ted Hughes; he looks at nature to better reveal human nature, often revelling in the unpleasant details of this wildlife.
 "I've tried to carry my poetry as far as I could, to dwell on the ugly as fully, as far, and as long, as I could stomach it. Probably more than most poets I have included in my work the unpleasant because I think if you are ever going to find any kind of truth to poetry it has to be based on all of experience rather than on a narrow segment of cheerful events."
Here his young self reads 'The Bear'.
He does not consider himself a 'nature poet' though:
 "I don't recognize the distinction between nature poetry and, what would be the other thing? Human civilization poetry? We are creatures of the earth who build our elaborate cities and beavers are creatures of the earth who build their elaborate lodges and canal operations and dams, just as we do…Poems about other creatures may have political and social implications for us."

As he's aged his work has softened and re-focussed on homely things. Tenderness, beauty and a love of family seem to have rooted him; his writing is less angry, less expansive; more specific and home grown. His children appear in his recent collection from 2007 'Strong is Your Hold', including "Everyone Was in Love" (read here by the poet himself) which recalls the delight of seeing his kids Maud and Fergus transfixed by snakes; they seem as fearless and keen eyed as he once was.
The children intrude themselves into his most private moments: 'After Making Love, We Hear Footsteps'.
With this more meditative stance Kinnell remains ever compassionate and, like Keats long before him, focusses on the transience of things and how their passing impacts on his everyday existence. He recognises the importance of bearing witness and being seen to do so:
"It's the poet's job to figure out what's happening within oneself, to figure out the connection between the self and the world, and to get it down in words that have a certain shape, that have a chance of lasting." 

It's interesting how a writer's defining work is invariably that which is their most direct; often their least ambitious; possibly because All of Us respond to immutable truths; oftentimes all of the wise words have already been spoken and rest between the borders of the saccharine and the sonorous. Just listen to Louis Armstrong's 'Wonderful World' or Mancini's 'Moon River' to wonder at the power of the platitude; I love the inclusivity of "we're after the same rainbow's end, waiting 'round the bend, my huckleberry friend; Moon river and me." even though I don't quite get it (what is a 'huckleberry friend'?) 
The weight and wisdom of words well placed can make us feel connected to something within and beyond ourselves; to a greater society. Poetry's balm might even help us towards humility and understanding; our feelings and failings endorsed when the penny drop moments are articulated well for us; they connect us to the ground and to each other. Although more than ever it's a dog eat world I hope that we have moved beyond 'survival of the fittest'; it's not the strengths that bind us; it's the weaknesses; we recognise our vulnerabilities in others and love them for it. 
Mmm, I need to step down from the pulpit and get back on topic: words and music as epitaphs...
It wouldn't be hard to imagine 'Promissory Note' as the world's favourite eulogy. 
There is a heartbreaking urgency to these simple words, written for Galway Kinnell's wife Bobbie:

Promissory Note

If I die before you
which is all but certain
then in the moment
before you will see me
become someone dead
in a transformation
as quick as a shooting star’s
I will cross over into you
and ask you to carry
not only your own memories
but mine too until you
too lie down and erase us
both together into oblivion.

The Bliss of Solitude: Mohammad Ali

The shortest poem in the english language is attributed to the boxing legend Mohammad Ali. 
At the height of his career he gave a speech at Harvard and was asked to recite one of his now famous poems. 
No "float like butterfly/sting like a bee" was offered; what he came up with was to become the subject of much debate. 
Was it: "Me, we."?
If so it could be seen as a kind of 'I am You', 'All of Us' inclusive statement; a recognition that his own popularity crossed all cultural and religious barriers and connected people, enabling folk to discuss what was previously unspeakable.
If it was "Me? Oui!", then that is as succinct and articulate an endorsement of ego as you could get (and boy what an ego.) 
I was in awe of Ali as a kid; he brought beauty, grace and humour to a brutal sport. I had a book on sports photography and remember that the centre spread was a full scale shot of the man's right hand. I'd sit and stare at that huge mitt for hours, wondering what it would be like to be clouted by the mammoth fist.  As well as one of the boxing greats (if not 'The Greatest'), Ali was a cultural icon who challenged and changed many lazy and ingrained prejudices. His questioning of the American presence in Vietnam ("I ain't got no quarrel with the Vietcong. No Vietcong ever called me Nigger") and his conversion to Islam opened a dialogue on subjects that might have remained impenetrable or taboo.
There's been so much written and spoken about Ali, but I think that two of the finest recognitions of his presence and power are Norman Mailer's 'The Fight' and 'When We were Kings" a documentary, both are candid observations of the infamous 'Rumble in the Jungle' when, towards the end of a career in decline he fought and beat the strong favourite, George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. It's also got some great footage of musicians (James Brown and BB King in particular) who played a musical festival in support of the fight.  
Why not have a look at the man in action and decide for yourself.
What a man.
What a fighter.
The Greatest? 
For me, oui!

The Bliss of Solitude: Carol Ann Duffy

Words, Wide Night 

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.

Carol Anne Duffy is our poet laureate whose words are direct and easily read. She believes that poetry is a unique way of relating to the world and "the place in language where we are most human". 
For her the reader must invest as much in a poem as the writer and as such that poetry is akin to prayer. 
"I like to use simple words but in a complicated way" she says, and that she does:

Talent

This is the word tightrope. Now imagine
a man, inching across it in the space
between our thoughts. He holds our breath.

There is no word net.

You want him to fall, don't you?
I guessed as much; he teeters but succeeds.
The word applause is written all over him.

Drams


Barley, water, peat
weather, landscape, history
malted, swallowed neat.


I like that last one almost as much as I like whisky. 
It made me want to like her; that and the fact that this is one of favourite poems:


There was a young man from Australia
Who painted his arse like a dahlia
Tuppence a smell
Went down very well
But thruppence a lick was a failure

The Bliss of Solitude: 'The Horses' by Ted Hughes

At the risk of sounding highfalutin, I find that poetry lies latent within me and reveals itself when I least expect it, invariably when I need it the most. For me it's a balm and acts as a pressure valve; quite often as I sit on the M40 raising my middle digit to the inescapable boy racer, a little verse will pop into view and rescue me from the rage of the road. Of course you need to feed to regurgitate, so every morning, around breakfast time, I try and take in a new poem; either that or reacquaint myself with something already seen.
I'm going to share some old and new favourites here (I hope that you'll reciprocate), typing them out will be good for me, might encourage the words to root deep and on occasion "flash upon that inward eye/which is the bliss of solitude" as Wordsworth so memorably put it.
I remember studying this poem by Ted Hughes for 'A' level at school and it must have struck me hard because those years remain as fog. I love horses; my favourite animal (although I quite like elephants and giraffes too). We have a field full of them (horses) behind our cottage; when I watch them from my bedroom window I can feel the world slowing down. This poem always reminds me of two other moments of 'culture'. The first is a pivotal scene in a much underrated George Clooney film 'Michael Clayton', where a chance encounter with horses in a field saves George's life. The other is the spoken outro to this fine song 'Working Alone/A Blessing' by the all too neglected Jackie Leven. He's good he is...

The Horses 

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird -
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline - blackening dregs of the brightening grey -
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey - ten together -
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew's tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging -
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys in the red levelling rays -

In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

TED HUGHES (1930-1998)