Tuesday Poem - Outdoor Pig-keeping, 1954 & My Other Books on Pigs by Ken Bolton

Outdoor Pig-keeping, 1954 & My Other Books on Pigs 

Pig Farming. Methods Of

was a book I wrote in 1945

tho what I knew then of

pig farming you may wonder.  It is

a human enough activity.

I mean ‘universal’—did they have

pigs on Easter Island, the New Guinea

highlands, did the Maori?  Virgil

knew about pigs, tho I associate him, more,

with bees, my Latin education centering

on a limited number of texts—

bits of Caesar’s Gallic Wars

or Punic Wars (“Carthage delenda est”?)—

& not much else.  Virgil.  Ideas of

pig farming might be innate. (?)

Where do correct ideas come from?

“The head, boss.”  Pigs pretty much

know what they want (isn’t that

often thought to be the problem,

the thing held against them?),

give it to them.  “Long pig” was somehow

special dark knowledge when I was

a schoolboy, I mean the term.

A human dish.  (No one else ate it,

except the odd lion or tiger—

as a one-off: humans also

protect their own—better probably not

to eat them too often.)  But, to return

to the term, “long pig” implies knowledge

of “pig plain” sure enough.  It seemed

insulting, to me, back then—to the idea

of the human & humanity & I didn’t like

to utter it.  I remember once

someone telling me of an abandoned

hippy farm where they’d been producing

heroin.  The pigs were fed

on scraps & excrement

& were squealing.  Addicted.

Apparently the noise was horrible.  I did,

at some time, sleep near where a pig

—or pigs—squealed all night. I can’t remember

now whether it was simply very affecting

or whether it was specifically because it sounded

human.  It was loud, incessant & frightened.

I can’t remember where or when.  An

abattoir.  In 1945

I had not read Virgil.  I do know that.

It seems we’ve passed this way before.  In

‘another life’ I may have been a pig farmer:

I see me, late at night at a plain kitchen table

writing Pig Farming, Methods Of.  It’s

electric light—tho it could do with a stronger

bulb.  I write it in a child’s school exercise book.

My only daughter has died?  It’s hers, hardly used,

& I turn it round & start at the back?—or maybe

continue right on from where she left off.

She had been studying & had written amo, amas,

amat etc.  The vocabulary list begins with

“agricola”—farmer.  As I see it the farmer

does not become especially sentimental about

the exercise book.  He may have done, must

have done, at some time since his daughter’s death,

but now he writes.  Perhaps he writes with

extra care because it is her book.  Perhaps he writes

because it is her book.  He has not written

anything else before.  He writes now

because she is gone.  She was the future

& he was content to work to see her through—

to her adult life.  But now she is gone

he must make something else.  He is a widower.

I was brought up by my own father,

alone, me & my sister.  We kept dogs & cats

& pigeons, a horse.  No pigs.  Anyway,

there it is, & it has my name on it, 1945—Pig Farming,

Methods Of.


And here is another poem from Ken's Selected Poems put out by Shearsman Books. 
Below the link to the press in case you wish to invest in a copy. There is much to amaze
in this handsome book.  

 

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2012/bolton.html