Joseph Macleod
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Joseph Todd Gordon Macleod (1903–1984) was a British poet, actor, playwright, theatre director, theatre historian and BBC newsreader. He also published poetry under the pseudonym Adam Drinan.
Biography
Macleod was the son of Scottish parents, and was educated at
From 1927, he was an actor and producer at the experimental
The Ecliptic, Macleod's first book of poetry – a complex book divided into the signs of the zodiac – was published in 1930. It was approved for publication by
In 1937 Macleod became secretary of Huntingdonshire Divisional Labour Party and stood as a parliamentary candidate, but failed to gain election.
In 1938, Macleod became an announcer and newsreader at the BBC, and he began to write and publish poetry under the pseudonym "Adam Drinan". These poems dealt with the
Macleod moved to Florence in 1955, where he lived until his death in 1984. His work was re-discovered in the late 1990s, and Cyclic Serial Zeniths from the Flux: Selected Poems of Joseph Macleod, edited and with an introduction by Andrew Duncan, was published by Waterloo Press in 2008.
Poems
From 'Cancer, or, The Crab', a section of The Ecliptic (London: Faber and Faber, 1930)
- Moonpoison, mullock of sacrifice,
- Suffuses the veins of the eyes
- Till the retina, mooncoloured,
- Sees the sideways motion of the cretin crab
- Hued thus like a tortoise askew in the glaucous moonscape
- A flat hot boulder it
- Lividly in the midst of the Doldrums
- Sidles
- The lunatic unable to bear the silent course of constellations
- Mad and stark naked
- Sidles
- The obol on an eyeball of a man dead from elephantiasis
- Sidles
- All three across heaven with a rocking motion.
- The Doldrums: ‘region of calms and light baffling winds
- near Equator.’
- But the calms are rare
- The winds baffling but not light
- And the drunken boats belonging to the Crab Club
- Rock hot and naked to the dunning of the moon
- All in the pallescent Saragosso weed
- And windbound, seeking distraction by the light of deliverance
- For
- What are we but the excrement of the non-existent noon?
- (Truth like starlight crookedly)
- What are we all but ‘burial grounds abhorred by the moon’?
- And did the Maoris die of measles? So do we.
- But there is no snow here, nor lilies.
- The night is glutinous
- In a broad hearth crisscross thorn clumps
- Smoulder: distant fireback of copse
- Throws back silence: glassen ashes gleam in pond
- The constellations which have stopped working (?)
- Shimmer. No dead leaf jumps.
- On edge of a glowworm
- Hangs out its state-recognized torchlamp
- Blocks of flowers gape dumb as windows with blinds drawn
- And in the centre the rugate trees
- Though seeming as if they go up in smoke
- Are held like cardboard where they are.
- Bluehot it is queer fuel to make the moon move.
- [...]
- We trap our goldfinch trapping our souls therewinged
- Sacrifice our mad gods to the madder gods:
- We hymn the two sons of Leda and Zeus Aegis-bearer
- We don’t. We drink and drivel. My
- poor Catullus, do stop being such a
- Fool. Admit that lost which as you watch is
- gone. O, once the days shone very bright for
- you, when where that girl you loved so (as no
- other will be) called, you came and came. And
- then there were odd things done and many
- which you wanted and she didn’t not want.
- Yes indeed the days shone very bright for
- you. But now she doesn’t want it.
- Don’t you either,
- booby. Don’t keep chasing her. Don’t live in
- misery, carry on, be firm, be hardened.
- Goodbye girl: Catullus is quite hardened,
- doesn’t want you, doesn’t ask, if you’re not
- keen – though sorry you’ll be to be not asked.
- Yes, poor sinner . . . what is left in life for
- you? Who’ll now go with you? Who’ll be attracted?
- Whom’ll you love now? Whom may you belong to?
- Whom’ll you now kiss? Whose lips’ll you nibble?
- - Now you, Catullus, you’ve decided to be hardened.
- How can I be hardened when the whole world is fluid?
- O Aphrodite Pandemos, your badgers rolling in the moonlit corn
- Corn blue-bloom-covered carpeting the wind
- Wind humming like distant rooks
- Distant rooks busy like factory whirring metal
- Whirring metallic starlings bizarre like cogwheels missing teeth
- These last grinning like the backs of old motor cars
- Old motor cars smelling of tragomaschality
- Tragomaschality denoting the triumph of self over civilisation
- Civilization being relative our to Greek
- Greek to Persian
- Persian to Chinese
- Chinese politely making borborygms to show satisfaction
- Satisfaction a matter of capacity
- Capacity not significance: otherwise with an epigram
- Epigrams – poems with a strabismus
- Strabismus being as common spiritually as optically the moon
- The moon tramping regular steps like a policeman past the
- houses of the Zodiac
- And the Zodiac itself, whirling and flaming sideways
- Circling from no point returning to no point
- Endlessly skidding as long as man skids, though never moving,
- Wavers, topples, dissolves like a sandcastle into acidity.
- Is there nothing more soluble, more gaseous, more imperceptible?
- Nothing.
- Riddle-me-ree from An Old Olive Tree (Edinburgh: M. MacDonald, 1971)
- I was afraid and they gave me guts.
- I was alone and they made me love.
- Round that wild heat they built a furnace
- and in the torment smelted me.
- Out of my fragments came design:
- I was assembled. I moved, I worked,
- I grew receptive. Thanks to them
- I have fashioned me.
- Who am I?
Bibliography
Poetry
- The Ecliptic (Faber and Faber, 1930)
- Foray of Centaurs (Sections published in This Quarter, Paris, 1931, The Criterion, 1931, and Poetry (Chicago), 1932)
- The Cove (French & Sons, 1940)
- The Men of the Rocks (Fortune Press, 1942)
- The Ghosts of the Strath (Fortune Press, 1943)
- Women of the Happy Island (MacLellan & Co., 1944)
- The Passage of the Torch: A Heroical-Historical Lay for the Fifth Centenary of the Founding of Glasgow University (Oliver and Boyd, 1951)
- Script From Norway (MacLellan & Co., 1953)
- An Old Olive Tree (M. Macdonald, 1971)
Literary Criticism
- Beauty and the Beast (Chatto and Windus, 1927; Viking Press (USA), 1928; Haskell House (USA), 1974)
Novel
- Overture to Cambridge (Allen & Unwin, 1936)
Prose
- People of Florence (Allen & Unwin, 1968)
Theatre History
- The New Soviet Theatre (Allen & Unwin, 1943)
- Actors Cross the Volga (Allen & Unwin, 1946)
- A Soviet Theatre Sketchbook (Allen & Unwin, 1951)
- Piccola Storia del Teatro Britannico (Sansoni (Florence), 1958. Reissued 1963)
- The Sisters d'Aranyi (Allen & Unwin, 1969)
- The Actor's Right to Act (Allen & Unwin, 1981)
Autobiography
- A Job at the BBC (MacLellan & Co., 1946)
References
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8101-1623-8
- ISBN 978-1-85754-378-0
External links
- Joseph Todd Gordon Macleod (2009). Cyclic serial zeniths from the flux: selected poems. Waterloo Press. ISBN 978-1-902731-34-6.
- Joseph Todd Gordon Macleod – with audio recordings
- Joseph Macleod Collection at the University of Stirling Archives