New Poems Published in Shot Glass Journal

Cambridge, July 2015. Photo by Clarissa Aykroyd


I recently had a few new poems published in the short-form poetry journal Shot Glass Journal, and you can read them here: http://www.musepiepress.com/shotglass/issue18/clarissa_aykroyd1.html

'Fryderyk Chopin and the Meaning of Space' was inspired partly by a documentary, and partly by a commission. Some months ago I was in Canada and one night I watched a documentary about Chopin - my favourite composer - with my father. In the course of the documentary it was mentioned that Chopin alluded to the mathematician Urbain Le Verrier in one of his letters. It was 1846 and Le Verrier had predicted the discovery of Neptune. Around this time I also had to write a poem about 'space' - in any of its meanings - for an upcoming reading with The Quiet Compere. This poem was the end result.

'Cambridge' came out of my visit to the city in July - and a piano I stumbled across - and 'Mise en scene' arose from work around my garden residency last summer.

Chopin, Poetry and Anne Stevenson's 'Elegy'

Fryderyk Chopin - by Maria Wodzińska, 1835


Life seems to have been distracting and distracted of late, and I had to follow a thought down the rabbit hole to find something to write about tonight.

I played the piano pretty seriously for about ten years in my childhood and teens - starting with the spinet or harpsichord, because unusually, my parents had one at home. (It had been my grandfather's, and when my father's family lived in Calgary, the orchestra used to borrow it.) The harpsichord will limit you to Renaissance and Baroque music, as beautiful as it is, and eventually I moved on to the piano.

I was the piano student who had talent but would probably have done better had she practised more. I still did reasonably well, but I can't help wondering if my teacher slightly regretted introducing me to the great Polish composer Chopin in the last few years that I was actively playing. I already knew his music up to a point and was keen to trying playing it. As it turned out, I loved playing Chopin so much that I didn't really want to play anything else. (This wouldn't have been a problem but for the fact that I was practicing for exams where only playing Chopin wasn't an option.) The Nocturnes hit me particularly hard. Some of them were far too difficult for me, but I gave quite a few of them a go, and some with success - along with some Preludes and Etudes.

Fryderyk Chopin is the poet of the piano. It was his medium, like no one else's. There is an extreme purity of emotion in his music which often overwhelms me. It's the tightrope walk between beauty and despair, over the abyss.

My father and I were watching a Chopin documentary together when I was in Canada, and this led to me writing a poem which rather strangely was both about Chopin and about Urbain Le Verrier, the French mathematician who predicted the existence of Neptune. Chopin mentioned Le Verrier in one of his letters. I was already thinking of writing a poem on the subject of Space, which I had been requested to do for my reading with The Quiet Compere (which took place last week in Hackney). Chopin and Le Verrier proved to be the subject of my poem, in the end.

Tonight, I thought I would see if there is poetry about Chopin. There is, but perhaps not a great deal or not specifically about him. But then I found this very moving 'Elegy' by Anne Stevenson about her logical, rational father's passion for the piano. The tension - or the beauty of the balance - between logic and emotion is also something I have been thinking about lately.

In Memoriam: Poetry for Paul Celan and Keith Douglas

Photo of Paul Celan's grave by Martin Ottman. Used under Creative Commons license



I have friends who are very drawn to the ambiance of graveyards, but while I tend to find them interesting and moving, I don't feel the same pull. I probably never had quite the degree of morbidness (morbidity?) required. When I have visited graveyards, I have had experiences both intriguing and difficult, and so it's an area which I handle with some care.

Very rarely, I have felt drawn to visit a cemetery specifically to see the gravesite of a person who I admire and perhaps to leave some tribute there. I've only identified three people for certain (those who are not my own relatives, that is) for whom I have felt this was something I really wanted to do. The first was Fryderyk Chopin, the great Polish-French composer, and I did visit his grave a few years ago at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, and left flowers. I was one of many, of course; the grave hardly needed the white roses which I carefully placed to one side. By then it had been something in my mind to do for at least ten years, so I was glad that I was finally able to go. I think Chopin was very important for me in my teens - when I discovered him and found that I was able to play some of his music, especially the Nocturnes, I wanted to play little else, slightly to my teacher's frustration. It also had something to do with the fact that he died young.

More recently, I have thought that I would like to visit the graves of Paul Celan and Keith Douglas. Both are also buried in France: Paul Celan at Thiais, near Paris (pictured above), and Keith Douglas at the Tilly-sur-Seules war cemetery near Bayeux, close to where he died. Again, I can't quite explain it. Both died prematurely and both have meant a lot to me, that's all I can say for certain.

Poetry dedicated to other poets is a difficult area. I have made tiny attempts and have found so far that it is hard to write anything except pastiche. I suppose it is likely that there will be an element of tribute to the poet's style, but a direct emotional reaction is perhaps the best thing to strive for. A very few such poems have become famous in their own right. One is W H Auden's great poem 'In Memory of W B Yeats', which I would like to write about on its own one of these days. It might help me to get over some of my Auden issues (yes...I have Auden issues.) But I think that degree of achievement is rare.

I have found poems dedicated to both Paul Celan and Keith Douglas, and you can find them on the links below (although the Keith Douglas poem is, I think, only an excerpt from a longer work).


IN MEMORIAM PAUL CELAN (Edward Hirsch)


from AT KEITH DOUGLAS'S GRAVE (Tim Kendall)


'In Memoriam Paul Celan' is directly inspired by Celan's own 'In Memoriam Paul Eluard', written for the great French surrealist poet.


Lay those words into the dead man's grave
which he spoke in order to live.
Pillow his head amid them,
let him feel
the tongues of longing,
the tongs.

(from 'In Memoriam Paul Eluard', translated by Michael Hamburger)


Hirsch's poem also contains many references to Celan's works: "beheaded tulips" from 'Chanson of a Lady in the Shade', "clawed and handled" from the darkness of 'Tenebrae', and so forth. I like the poem; I feel that the images are beautifully woven together and it is moving, but at the same time it's perhaps a little close to pastiche for my taste.

In some respects I prefer Tim Kendall's 'At Keith Douglas's Grave', and I want to read the whole poem now. I relate very much to the feelings of inadequacy and sadness in the few lines that I have read: "I/bring nothing and my eyelids itch." There is a trueness to the feelings there and I would like to go and see if I feel something similar in the same place.