from R M Rilke’s French poetry

Posted: October 30, 2026 in Chat
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This is an excerpt from the Verges/Orchards sequence of French poems, written in the last four to five years of his life.

from poem 42

Tonight there was something in the air

that makes us bow our heads;

we want to pray for prisoners

for whom life stops.

And we think of life stopped….

Of life no longer moving towards death

and of where the future’s absent;

where one must be uselessly strong

and sad, endlessly.

………………………………………………………………….

translated from the French, by A Poulin, JR

The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, published by Graywolf Press, 1979

5 Lines

Posted: October 25, 2026 in Chat
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Vasilissa lies to me about where she goes at night.
The two-legged hut in the woods; ok, I know,
but dare not enter. In daylight, gone like smoke,
and the hearth cold as though it never was.
And Vasilissa amiable, quiet

4 Lines

Posted: October 22, 2026 in Chat
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Sitting idly by as the street outside rages –
in a peopled world is what people do.
My body is an armchair growing comfy as it ages:
shut off, turn on – there’s room here for you, too

Big City Dilemma – Jeremy Reed and Itchy Ear

Posted: October 19, 2026 in Chat
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Big City Dilemma

BCDilemma

Big City Dilemma is a collaboration between poet Jeremy Reed and music auteur known ubiquitously as Itchy Ear. The collaboration is called The Ginger Light. It is a mix of visuals, sound and sonic qualities, of the visual and aural qualities of Jeremy Reed’s poetry.

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This is a cd of their very successful performances, sampling vox pops with studio sounds, reverb and performance-time readings, bringing in sung choral lines, stutter of electronics.

Performances incorporate visuals, lights, film clips to create an all-round sensual experience.

Jeremy Reed has a good voice for this; his preferred technique is intoning the poems, it is non-conversational, a-casual – but he can linger on words, savour the sounds of the language; he performs and you go with him.

Itchy Ear has a wonderful repertoire of sonic effects, a deep sense of rhythm and rightness. I have always been a sucker for electronic music and he saves the wasted years, referencing our ennui and the insistent beat behind our lives underneath it all.

Jeremy gives us ambi-sexual adventures and city encounters. It is London, it can only be London.  Hidden in the 16 tracks is the concept of the thief as sampler, the culture-exclusion of the outlaw, the liminal world of the hustler, flaneur, and city-survivor. But the thief is king, he is Jean Genet, and the chemical disorder in the nerves; he keeps you pushing on always one step ahead of the fall.

The thief takes – for the huge kick of transgression; but then he dumps his goods. Another thieves to assert his self, different, amongst the more ordinary ruck of us. Genet thieved also for these reasons. The thief is a bit Raffles-ian, boundary crosser, homeless-yet-at home everywhere. The thief questions where our boundaries and borders are: what is ours, can also be his; what is ours and treasured, can be his trash.

On the downside, anyone who has ever been robbed… is never safe again. The thief is a liar and cheat and dirt – that is, when he isn’t a metaphor.

There are poems referencing iconic figures like Rimbaud, Francis Bacon, Garbo, Thom Gunn, of modern peripherals like Peter Doherty.

The insistent electronic pulse pushes on like a compulsive disorder, lit with bell tones, piano timbres that halt – their sound scintillating in the ear, the mind – then back into the city vortex. He brings in brass on Multitrack, girl backing singers intermixed with the slice of a camera taking and re-taking the promised picture to set your name in lights. The voice promises you nothing  of that, but the city Survivor’s Kit. The low tone of the voice, and the held back but wide repertoire of the music set up a cadenced and satisfying experience.

The city is stratified, the layers once more economically sealed from each other – only the thief can move between and within the stifling piled up detention zones of the city. Be warned the city will give you nothing, but if you learn its tricks, its ways, the hidden intersections, you can be a survivor, fully qualified, badged and certified.

GingerL

Available from: Cherry Red Records -www.cherryred.co.uk/

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Poets have collaborated with musicians before – we have the pioneering jazz collaborations of Danish poet Inger Christensen. You could go back to Auden and Britten with Night Mail, to Edith Sitwell and Walton on Promenade.

You could even reference Roy Harper with Lifemask’s opening movement of ‘The Lord’s Prayer’. John Cooper Clark. Since we are way off track – how about Principal Edward’s Magic Theatre doing Shakespeare?

On track we have Idlewild working with Edwin Morgan, Sorley MacLean collaborating with music and digital media. Eddie Reader singing Burns.

So how about singer-songwriters – how about Leonard Cohen? Even there he had to tone down his language and imagery for the song.

Musicians setting poetry to music is another matter – as was commented at the Leeds Lieder Festival: such experiments hardly ever work: Britten and Owen’s War poems was cited as an example. Why? They are two complete mediums . And they each include their own rhythms and music, their own phrasings and structures. The language has to be read in a certain way to make it work. Music has to be phrased in certain ways to make it work. The two working together is rarely happy.

‘Come into the Garden Maud’ from Tennyson. Maybe it worked for the audiences; did it work for Tennyson?

Equanimity

Posted: October 13, 2026 in Chat
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from First Essay on Interest

Not usury, but interest. The cup slowed in mid-raise,
the short whistle, hum, the little forwards shift
mark out intake of that non-physical breath

which the lungs mimic sharply, to cancel the gap in pressure
left by our self vanishing into its own alert –
A blink returns us to self, that intimate demeanor

self-repairing as a bow-wave….

by Les Murray.

The poem is from his 1983 collection The People’s Otherworld.
This book contains a great many treasures, like Bent Water in the Tasmanian Highlands.

That opening volte-face on subject I find amusing and intriguing. This is especially relevant as a previous book was entitled Poems Against Economics.

Les Murray often confounds expectations in his writing.
The real heart of the book, though, must be Equanimity.

There is something about a writer’s early and later mid-period that is usually outstanding.
It is after the writer has set out their stall of themes, attitudes, self-worth, and before the refining, honing that cut out so much of the music around the bare centre of the piece.
So much is lost at that point: the greater music of the mind working widely, almost at full capacity. To hone down is to turn from concert to chamber music.

Some writers, summing their writing career in a their own selections for a Collected poems rigorously comb out what their later selves see as excess baggage. In effect rewrite earlier work to fit in with later values, evoke posterity.
It is as though they mis-represent their work by doing this. There is so much to hear in the fuller versions, so many side themes, the pleasure of detail, that fill out and make generous the work.

The poem Equanimity travels many roads, the by-ways and the side roads, without losing direction. We learn to read with this, see how a seeming thing can be an essential part of something bigger, a reflection of something else.. The poetry is in the vision that makes disparate experiences chime together, harmonise.

Equanimity opens with anything but that, but startling jaracarandas and their nests in the trees, and then there’s the hungry mountain birds moving in. On top of all this squabbling there is the ”profoundly unwished/ garble of a neighbour’s quarrel’.

‘There are no Arcadias…’ he wrote, but ‘human order has at heart

an equanimity. Quite different from inertia, it’s a place

where the churchman’s not defensive, the indignant aren’t on the qui vivre

the loser has lost interest, the accountant is truant to remorse,

where the farmer has done enough struggling to survive

for one day, and the artist rests from theory…’

The varied enumeration expresses rather than explains what is said. It sounds very much like something worth searching for.

So, is it a place where there is a sense of completion in the day’s tasks, no nagging at the back of the mind of the endless unfinishedness? A temporary truce?

Equanimity is a state of being, you could call it a place within oneself, from where you observe the usual squabble and clatter around you without getting drawn in. In religious terms ‘a state of grace’.

Here’s hoping we all find ours.

from the Russian

Posted: October 5, 2026 in Chat
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I was reading an interview with an elderly Russian woman. It must have been a month or so ago, so, quite recent (in Le Monde newspaper).

The interviewer kept in the background – not one of those who presume Russian people can speak openly anywhere at any time, to anyone – and let her speak.
Or edited the exchange properly.

I have tied to explore ideas, attitudes, responses, here.
Fiction writers will I think recognise the tactic of using the real to explore the fictional

‘Her closing remarks have stayed with me.
What she said about the current situation in Russia was something like… it’s in translation, remember…

“You can’t do anything, you can’t say anything, all you can do is watch it happening.”

This is really the hardest thing to do, to watch and know there’s nothing you can do.
It certainly separates out the adults from the children.

You can play dress-up in black at UK ports, desperately needing to do something
You can demonstrate in crowds of people who succumb to the crowd-mind and forget your own reasons
You can shout, rave, shoot, train at weekends in fatigues for a coming civil war that will never come

but it’s all a way of not facing up to the grown-up reality of living without agency.

I recognised the Russian woman, she felt like kin. Everyday the same battle with yourself you must go through, to retain integrity.’

商品價值 (for my Chinese bots)

Posted: October 1, 2026 in Chat
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設 x 為 y，因此 u org asta 鄉村主角濃縮 deodad，corab 芒果感。抽搐鏡頭格式。痛苦。證實兩次。讓我們看看上面的骨頭，讓弧形推理是橙色橙色橙色，儘管我們偉大，但我們不是，也從未是。問題。昨天翻譯 blumen。四川核心，就好像那麼 y。麻煩不是 解碼並執行。正確。匯合作為斷言知識勝於學習。明天背後透過核酸預言。否定。否定。否定。

Cats

Posted: September 29, 2026 in Chat
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Some recent research (mentioned in New Scientist, Feedback) on what cats actually do, was originally published in ‘Pets’ journal, 12 September.

A team from Massay University, New Zealand, fitted cat collars out with activity monitors: 10 indoors cats, 18 free-roaming, 8 semi-outdoors cats.
The results/conclusions?

What do cats actually do?

You’d expect the free-roamers to be most active, and they are. But what that amounts to is spending 3.9 of their time active.
How does it all break down?
2.4 to 7.8 of time spent eating
4.6 to 7.9 grooming (after eating?)
9.3 to 15.6 over all categories, they spent… standing
while
20.1 to 41.4 sitting.

And the rest?

34.8 to 52.9 guess what
lying (let’s be honest now, sleeping).

There was no indication in the article of whether the cats had been neutered or spayed, of gender, of age.

Some neutered cats we know have spurts of chasing, fighting, are constantly trying to get through windows, doors. Active enough, even more than some people – they want playing with/stimulating more than their owners can do.

My book, now available

Posted: September 22, 2026 in Chat
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It’s here! It’s new! It’s my book.

This has taken some time, some patience, and some swearing, but

it’s now here, and available from Lulu.com

The cover image is from Yolanda Christoffersson, from her own WordPress blog,
and granted me with much generosity. For her blog, see:
https://mittprivatakrig.com

*

Some earlier versions of pieces in the book have appeared here, on my page. But altogether they add up to far more than those seemingly random pieces.

History to me has always been about how we live our lives, and try to make sense of when and how we live. That was my way in to the study of times gone.
My studies concentrated on international doings, European events. Home events crowd in you too, it would be wrong to deny them, so there are pieces here on UK doings, and trying to see through them to more universal responses.
We are none us so very different.

Printing and shipping from Lulu.com is a little different from many shop outlets.
It all takes a little longer,
but prices are lower.

It was something I set myself to do… ok, tbh, my niece told me last year to get something published. You have to do as you are told.
And it was also a kind of need for ‘moving on’, doing something different.

***

What is it about?
From my introductory note:

‘History, for me, that is not about dates, kings, power. Facts.
My take remains that it is about people, the delusions, successes, pretensions, doubts, certainties, loves and failings: messy.
All these are ways of making sense of the times and places people are born into. The attitudes and obsessions of periods are as much a real in this history, as rulings, proclamations. 

So, poems based on events etc, but that filtered through human responses.
How did it all start, this, awakening to the living-business?

First Light 

On the first day it rained –
how can you do anything then? 
Rain is the leveller, mixing
sky and earth into mud element. 

And on the second day the same, 
listlessly the ripening thoughts spoiling, 
cold damp languor stealing-in 
like cloud in a clear sky. 

And on the third the same again. 
This must have been when was made 
the Northern Quarter: always waiting 
never to be called. 

Another three days of this,
helpless behind steamed windows, 

mind in stupor, body in torment; body 
in stupor, mind in torment – 
I walked out then, without a coat, and 
Can you still doubt me? called. 

Didn’t wait for a reply. 

*

For more, see my Author page on Lulu.com:

https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/wwwlulucomspotlightmichaelmurray/

Go, little book, an enjoy your life.

The Cup of Death

Posted: September 19, 2026 in Chat
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I have just found some old notes (inadequate at best) made years ago, on a very jolly topic.

The Cup of Death.

It’s from a publication ‘Germania: Comparative Studies in the Old Germanic Languages and Literature‘, edited by D G Calder, T Craig Christy et al, 1988
Chapter 12: The Drink of Death in Old English and Germanic Literature’, by G Russom

The writer cites Old English as well as Latin writing, that is Pre-Christian and Christian.
‘Maxims’ 1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxims_(Old_English_poems) gives us – I do not have the orthographic O/E keyboard keys, so bear with me –


Deop deada waeg

Deop gives the meaning of deep
Deada death
Waeg cup or drink

The deep, the dead wave(?), or the solemn way of the dead.
This points to the pre-christian context of undying glory, and preparation of the funeral pyre.
St Guthlac is a help here. He wrote of death as the ‘bitter drink’ served by Eve to Adam. He also used the meaning of deop as terrible, awful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guthlac_of_Crowland

So we have a drinking cup that is described as deep, in the sense of producing deep slumber. Deep slumber in Old English literature was a term for death.

In Latin the cup of death is poculum mortis. It is usually connected with original sin in a Latin hymn admired by Bede, where Peter and Paul overcame Satan by drinking from the cup of death.
“the drink of death” also occurs in the Middle English Lyrics ‘Man May Longe… ‘(https://www.luminarium.org/medlit/medlyric/manmai.php)

In Old English deada waeg can also mean the last drink taken, in Early Germanic society, by suicides, human sacrifices and those about to undergo capital punishment.
We see here connections between punishment and original sin.

This also brings us to the well known ‘Account of Rus‘ by medieval traveller Ahmed Ibn Fadlen.
He observed the customs of Germanic Rus tribes, especially the funeral of an important chieftain. This included the voluntary sacrifice of the chieftain’s servant (usually female).
Just before being sacrificed, she was supervised by an old woman taking on the role of ‘the angel of death’, who gave a cup of strong drink.

Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum also mentions a death cup in use, in the legend of Hadingus and Signe.
– This tale is a close parallel to the writings of St Guthlac –

and tells how in the last moments of the hero Hadingus, condemned to hang by the King, the king’s wife offered him his last drink as he proceeded to to his execution, exhorting him to act bravely.
His maid servant offered to accompany him.

This practice of the drink for the condemned man was also the London custom at The Crown Inn en route to the Tyburn gallows.

We see a change now:
we come across the term Baedwaeg. This has term has suggested related meanings that include ‘the cup that urges’ in the meaning of urging to act bravely.

The Cupbearer
We see here the related reference to an ale-goddess in Scandinavian Mythology, by E H Davidson..
In Beowulf, we witness the Danish queen Wealtheow’s ‘courtesy’ at the feast meeting of Beowulf, at Heorat. She offered Beowulf a cup to urge him to act bravely in dealing with Grendel.
She first offered the cup to King Hrothgar to urge him to be hospitable, then she circled the hall offering to the young retainers, before offering to Beowulf, to urge him to free them of their burden.
Beowulf’s acceptance therefore was a promise to fulfill the obligation.

“Each offer of drink… (is)… an exhortation to display for her approval such heroic virtues as bravery, generosity, and loyalty…’
There is mention again of Eve’s cup to Adam as an incitement to act boldly to gain glory.

The Cup of Heavenly Life
We come across this in Bede’s History of the English Church.
St Cuthbert and the priest Herbert were ‘long coupled in the bond of Spiritual friendship.’ The two ‘did inebriate each other with the cups of the life of heaven.’

It is noted here that Herbert was thus inspired to seek heaven by Cuthbert’s exhortations rather than by learning.
Bede wrote: caelestis vitae poculis
baesewag paes leofen lican lifes: the cup that urges one to the heavenly life.

‘Note, in particular, the similarity between Herbert’s situation and that of the bereaved heathen who died with a lord, lady, or other loved one to achieve reunion in the afterworld.’

Sacred – profane intoxication, this is paralleled in Bede.
Saxo Grammiticus who writing at behest of Absolon, archbishop of Lund, allowed the cup of drunkenness before death as an urging for contempt for death.

The cup-bearer was usually female, and it has been suggested that in Beowulf Queen Waeltheow was taking on the role of one of the Norn goddesses (like the three Greek fates. There is an idea that the Viking Aser gods came from Asia, which could possibly allow correspondences between Greek gods and some Scandnavian).

The cup of death.
This was before we had access to Plato and his Last Days of Socrates, the cup of hemlock.

And the cup of heavenly life.
Omar Khayaam may have something to say about that.

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