Visions of Kali and Other Poems

By Michael Antony

These poems are a return to a past century in their approach, in that they tell of love affairs, encounters, or personal crises in simple language rather than being cryptic crossword puzzles or displays of ingenious imagery. They are also a return to a more recent past in content, since many of them were written around 1980 after a seven-year period spent on the road. They describe impressions of exotic countries (both their poverty and their beauty), the adventures of a life of wandering and drug-induced indolence on paradisiac beaches, and the love affairs of an era when young men and women related to each other rather more freely than they do today. These poems were rejected by publishers at the time, when the hippie lifestyle was not thought to be of interest and poems were supposed to be academic wordgames, not neo-romantic expressions of personal experience. There are signs both attitudes are changing, as the baby-boomers enter a period of nostalgia for their youth (including the counter-culture that inspired its music) and we near the end of the long drawn-out death of Modernism, which reduced all art-forms to idiocy or sterility. The book ends with some more recent poems, which reflect on life, death, justice, faith, science, other lives, and other worlds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475994728

Michael Antony

Michael Antony has lived and travelled in many countries and now lives in Switzerland. He is the author of several works of fiction, nonfiction ("The Masculine Century"), and poetry ("Visions of Kali").

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Visions of Kali

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AND OTHER POEMS

Michael Antony

iUniverse LLC

Bloomington

Visions of Kali

Copyright © 2013 Michael Antony.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-9471-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-9472-8 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 6/27/2013

Table of Contents

Introduction

Kali - Shiva

In Palmy Lands

My Muse

Vision on a Delhi Street

Kathmandu

Pokara Valley, Nepal

On Leaving a Place in Nepal

Dhulikel, Nepal

Nepalese Stupa

The Madman

The Street of Cages

Indian Siesta

Cripples

On an Indian Beach

Dépaysement

Sight-seers

Tedium in Eden

Indian Crossroads

Epiphany at Chapora Beach

Pigs in Goa

Mad Madame Lucille

Daybreak on Anjuna Beach

Mermaids

Morning on Little Vagator

Visions of Kali

The Blind Man

Empty Sacks

Chantal

Sleeping Rough in Bombay

Guardian Angel

Hermit’s Cell, Rishikesh

The Passport

Brothers

Jesus Freaks

Stuck in Teheran

Aphrodite - Dionysus

Ithaca

Rocky Beach, Paleohora, Crete

To a Very Young Love in Crete

Two Moments

Mixed Salad: To K.

Love on the Wing

Fidelity

Samos

Places on the Road

Instant Recognition

Hospitality

The Survivor

Berlin Fugue

Gomera

The Awakening

Milky Way Inn

Pieces of a Trip

Wages

Les Gorges du Tarn

New Year’s Eve

Slavery

Room-mate

St James’s Park

Snow Princess

Hope

Summer Kitten (1977)

On Writing Erotic Poems while my Bed is Empty

Vagabond in the Park

Rotterdam Park

Rotterdam, Rotting ’77

Rotterdam Canals, Saturday Night

Rotterdam Canals: Dawn

The Way Others Live

Forced Departure

Spanish Night

The Dancer

Enlightenment

To a Blonde Phantom on a London Street

Guatemalan Sunset

Urchins

Puerto Stroessner

Belem

Tijuana, Rosarito Beach

Souvenir

The Witness

Love and fear

Strasbourg ’82

Daemon

One Friday

To a Stranger on the Street

The Writer of Tragedies

The Failed Writer

The Derelict Artist

Nocturne

Gloom in Sunlight

Autumn of the Missiles

Terrorist

The Rope

Georgia

The Yellow Tractor

The Crying Game

To Ana in San Gimignano

Prayer for my Mother

A Mother’s Death

To Any Little Girl

Divinations

Under a Full Moon at Rapallo

Meditation in Cinque Terre

Reflections on an April Evening in Italy

Thoughts at Midnight,

The Masculine Century

Folkestone Revisited after 30 Years:

The Fox

Cosmic Speculations

A Modern Reading of Religion

Why Darwin was Wrong

Budapest: The Honest Whore

Light in Darkness

Anti-Modernist Manifesto

Acceptance

Release

Also by Michael Antony

Non-Fiction

The Masculine Century (A Heretical History of Our Time)

Part One: Sex, Art and War in the Twentieth Century

The Masculine Century, Part Two: From Darwinism to Feminism:

The Rise of the Ideologies of Aggression

Fiction

The Apocalypse Syndrome

Midnight in Engelstan

(all published by iUniverse.)

Drama

The Overthrow of Salvador Allende

(see my website: www.michael-antony.com)

Introduction

Poetry is the most autobiographical of all literary forms—apart from autobiography itself. It is a record of moments in a life and it often reflects a particular period of the author’s life more closely than literary forms that draw more largely on the imagination. Most of these poems were written before or around 1980 when I had just finished a seven-year period of travel and drifting about the world. At the time this way of life was often referred to as being on the road. It was one of the currents of that nebulous, diffuse tide of social rebellion known as the counter-culture, and in contrast to the forced economic migration of a lot of young Europeans these days it was a choice. From today’s perspective the baby-boom generation can be seen as the first to take advantage of the early stages of globalization—when travel for pleasure suddenly became possible for people other than the very rich or a handful of adventurous intellectuals and artists like Huxley or Lawrence. But in the seventies, before low-cost airlines, travelling a long way and for a long time without much money still involved a certain amount of hardship, discomfort and precarious living. This made it attractive as an escape from the security and conventions of middle-class society. For those of us from pioneer countries it answered a need to relive the adventures and survival challenges of our pioneer ancestors in an age where life had grown too staid, comfortable and predictable. It was not so much danger we hankered after as a sense of freedom—and of life as a voyage into the unknown. Odd as it may seem to generations subject to more material anxieties, I remember feeling a vague dread of coming out of university into a stable, secure job, starting a family, and then waking up retired. This aversion to a programmed existence was intensified by the turmoil triggered by the anti-Vietnam War protests in America, which set off a worldwide youth revolt against a system of regimented work and forced consumption, and led to a quest for an alternative way of life. A number of philosophical currents played a part in it, from Eastern religions to a back to nature movement (one of many attempts to go back to the simple life, from Renaissance pastoralism to the romanticism of Rousseau or Thoreau.) There was also the nineteenth-century myth of Bohemia as a poor but carefree artist’s life, personified by Rimbaud and updated by the fifties’ Beat Generation, above all in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. This constellation of influences ruled my life for seven years, and I vaguely expected I would live like that forever. Then in 1980 I moved to Switzerland with my Swiss girlfriend, and I settled down to a far more sedentary life as a teacher. In this state of tranquillity I began to recollect (in Wordsworth’s phrase) the emotions of the previous years.

These poems were either found in notebooks that had survived the years of wandering or else they were written as I recalled various episodes of that life. I put them together into a collection which I called Places on the Road. I sent it to various poetry publishers in the UK in 1982, but it met with no interest. I tried to publish individual poems in magazines and newspapers, but none of them was accepted. Since the internet did not exist then there was not much else to be done. I put the manuscripts in a drawer where they remained until the miracle of cheap self-publishing of recent times led me to look at them again. I had been thinking about returning to poetry after abandoning it for years as a dead art-form—killed off by that total separation of narrow, elitist art from all popular forms which is the most destructive aspect of Modernism (music is the best example, with the hideous, inhuman noises of contemporary academic composers at one extreme and the charming but naive melodies of popular music at the other—while the greatest tradition of musical composition in history has disappeared into a black hole in between.) Reading one or two poets like Seamus Heaney made me think it might be possible to write poetry again in the old sense (that of Yeats and Dylan Thomas), easily accessible in meaning but also skilful in its rhythms. I thought these poems from an earlier period of my life fitted in with this ambition and I decided to put them out there, in the hope they might survive until the interminable Modernist dictatorship (the Maoist permanent revolution) is finally over.

I have revised very little in these poems because they seem to me now to have been written by someone else and to belong to another age. I have finished one or two that seemed unfinished and included others I have written since. But essentially they are the record of a time that is no longer the present, which is why I have added the dates to most of them (either the date of the incident that inspired them or of the first version, which was often given definitive form in 1980-81.) Many of them would sound odd if they were seen as poems written today—because of the peculiar atmosphere of the age and the subculture they came out of.

My hippie period was something that I drifted into after university in Canada, which had been a disappointing experience. I had left my native New Zealand at twenty-one on a Commonwealth Scholarship to McGill in Montreal and had not finished my doctorate when the four-year scholarship came to an end. After a long obstacle-race of compulsory courses that had just been imposed on Ph.D. students in English Lit, I had at last got onto the thesis only to be prevented from writing on the subject I wanted to: the fascist thinking of the Modernist poets, Yeats, Eliot, Pound and Lawrence. I was made to understand this was a taboo subject. No specialist in any of these poets would supervise a thesis associating his idol with unsavoury political views (even though the divide between the fascist first generation of Modernists and the communist second generation, Auden and co, was a fascinating theme to explore—as civilization fell apart, some poets wanted to restore an idealized old order and others to raze the whole thing and start again.) So I was forced to switch periods to the innocuous realm of the Elizabethan drama. I fixed on the theme of the rebel hero from Marlowe to Milton: tracing the rebel as hero through Faustus, Tamburlaine, Hamlet, Coriolanus, Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois and on to Milton’s Satan (the source of the later romantic hero.) This time I was told this was far too ambitious for a Ph.D. thesis and I was forced to narrow it all down to Chapman, the least read of the authors covered. Finally, I was somehow pressured into writing on the influence of Stoic philosophy on Chapman’s plays. This obscure topic did not grip my imagination, so once my scholarship was over and I had to choose between spending my savings finishing this nonsense and living a life of bumming around the world, I chose the latter.

My disillusionment with academia led me to concentrate on my own writing ambitions. However, perhaps as a consequence of too many years shut up in the Ivory Tower, these ambitions took the quixotic form of the old