Google Maps let me take a peek at your delightful bungalow and filling the fountain – could that be you? Perhaps in America they’re not called bungalows a word we learned from our former Indian, Imperial subjects and at least use of the word had no cost attached to it… You Americans, former subjects too now stand over the world yourselves and know the pains and gains of rule though U.S. foreign policy seems a far cry from your peaceful lawn and so I picked this bucolic tile design, by an AI drawn and hope you enjoy it’s faerie frolic…
I have included the bizarre stamp celebrating Dungeons and Dragons in the image of the card I sent…
This last year, both I and many poets I know (in the Internet sense as opposed to the real world or the biblical), have started illustrating their work using AI images whose results are sometimes so stunning as to distract from the poems being illustrated. So are we shooting ourselves in the foot, gilding the lily…
The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. It is organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, which arranges the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my second year and I was on List 10. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your poetic missives – to date I have received 21 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent. Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
Exegesis – “critical explanation or interpretation of a text”
Usually, I review my A-Z Challenge at the end of the month as well as hopping on the Roadtrip to review some of the other blogs I have visited, but over the last week I have started to have a perspective on what I have learned on my journey through commodities. Since with the best will in the world, I could not find either a commodity or a poetry form beginning with “X” – I am going to allow myself time to draw some threads together before going on to “Y” and “Z” next week – oh, and to choose a poetry form that I did not write to already this month!
I thought there would be quirky facts about various substances, I thought that portraying stuff as Commodities might yield a different viewpoint, but I didn’t anticipate the Geopolitical tropes that would occur time and again or the Environmental recurring themes either. Of course, I have realised that that is partly because of me – who I am and what therefore stood out for me. For example, the imperial atrocities associated with the early extraction of Rubber, both in the Amazon and the Congo. The fact that atrocities are still being perpetrated against indigenous peoples in both those river basins not to mention virtual slave and child labour. How industries rose and fell like the Whale Oil industry between 1780-1860 and only the advent of Kerosene saved many more whales from extinction – and yet the age of oil exploitation threatens a wider extinction through global warming…
Time and again we have seen how commodities like Gold, Silver and Oil – “Black Gold” – have been the driver behind imperial conquest, how enmity between trading blocks has led to fluctuations in the market – Putin’s war on Ukraine has – through sanctions applied to Russia – affected grain prices, energy prices and even more exotic commodities like Palladium – and these are not just effects on the traders who gamble in commodity futures, but ordinary people who have experienced rampant inflation due to rocketing energy prices or in Africa – people who have suffered the euphamistic “Food Insecurity” due to the lack of Ukrainian grain as we saw in yesterday’s Wheat. It’s not just the politics and the lingering effects of Imperialism, but the environmental issues that have come to light – we first encountered this with Barley – a crop which likes cool conditions but without too much rain and as we have come to know in the last few years (Donald Trump arch-denier notwithstanding) global warming can mean too hot, too cold, too dry too wet – too variable – so sip your malt whisky while you may…
Today the news is headlined by student protests against the genocide in Gaza calling not only for a ceasefire, and the implementation of the two-state solution, but the divestment of investment by their universities, in any company involved in supporting Israel – such as arms manufacturers like Lockheed. In making these protests, the students are not only demonstrating the ongoing ability of youth to see through years of invested bullshit and like the tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes, see what is really going on and call it out, but they reveal that they understand that the way to tackle it is through economics – hitting companies and errant countries in the wallet – the issues are complex and the histories entwined but much comes down to money… The issues of the environmental, socio-political and geo-political that my skimming through tales of commodities have raised, are much the same – if we want a better, fairer , safer world then it is going to cost us – choices will have to be made, things taken seriously…
Ever since last year, when the poet Misky introduced me to Midjourney – still the best generative AI picture app, I have been using it to produce illustrations – including a number of posts here on the A-Z Challenge. I am a painter and photographer but I would not rate my Illustration skills and so I am delighted by the ability of Midjourney to parse the instructions I “prompt” it with and watching the images form before your eyes is – well magic! But it can take a few iterations to get the AI to give you what you want (and sometimes you have to give up…) so here are some of the “nearly rans” from the past month!
You may recognise the unfortunate Sue (bottom left) from the post on Lacquer. When you ask Midjourney to create an image, it offers you not one, but four images to choose from and you can if you wish, either enlarge one or more of them or ask for variations on it – in this case I was happy with the first iteration.
I wanted an illustration of the many products that can be made from soya beans and although Midjourney made a credible and appetising looking effort, it was not quite comprehensive enough and in the end, I didn’t use it.
These happy families are quaffing orange juice and this illustrates how you can ask Midjourney to work “in the style of” – in this case the style of a Ladybird book cover which produced just the kind of post-war fifties feel I wanted to convey… Again, I went with the bottom left image but asked for it to be redone in a wider aspect ratio.
The problem with AIs is that they don’t fully understand what is going on in the images they learn from and this is particularly the case when asked to come up with something in the style of an old master. Here is the exact prompt I used here “The Goddess Athena impaling Pallas who is distracted by Zeus watching in the background in the style of Michaelangelo –ar 4:3 –v 6.0“. There is confusion about which and who Pallas is and even gender and though some spears are in evidence, they are not always held by the right person, and as for Zeus… You may say that my prompt is insufficient and you may be right but I think dealing with an AI is like trying to talk to an alien! The image I actually used in Palladium, had the following prompt – “The Goddess Athena fighting with Pallas as Zeus watches in the background in the style of Titian –ar 4:3 –v 6.0“
Lastly a series of images seeking to convey the Goddess Freya aka Vanadís for the post on Vanadium. I asked Midjourney to depict Freya Norse Goddes of love, beauty, fertility, sex, war, gold and magic but Midjourney declined until I removed the word sex from the prompt – Midjourney is a very modest AI… After that Midjourney interpreted the prompt with extraordinary beauty and imagination – I would tell you which two artists (separately) the following images were in the style of but I can’t let you into all my secrets but by all means hazard a guess in the comments and I will confirm if you are right… You might want to look at the one I finally chose (none of these) here.
And so to today’s poem. I used several lists of poetry forms to choose and guide me as to the poems I wrote for the A-Z Challenge but principally Language is a Virus, and The Academy of American Poets – Glossary of Poetic Terms. Looking through to find a form I had not chosen previously, I came across the Contrapuntal poem which combines two poems that can be read three- ways – each separately or together, reading across the lines, to form a third poem.
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
Worldwide Trade in Rubber 2022 – $18.4B – 239th most traded product representing 0.078% of total world trade.
Gentle Reader – this post should probably carry a warning – for it contains true tales of Theft, Violence and Depravity on an Imperial scale – it will visit a city 900 miles up a river, surrounded by jungle that nevertheless afford to build an opera house with imported marble and talent, it will visit both the geographical and metaphorical setting of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and reflect, not for the first time in this A-Z Challenge, on the evils done in the name of Imperialism. You have been warned…
The story of rubber begins innocently enough with a ballgame – archaeological evidence shows that the Olmec people of Mesoamerica played a game with a rubber ball made from the sap of the Hevea tree which grew extensively in the Amazon rainforest and which could be tapped to allow its white sap to be collected – this is called latex rubber.
Vintage illustrated collectible tobacco card from the Products of the World series published in 1909 by John Player and Sons Cigarettes, depicting agricultural exports and natural resources of world cultures and countries, here with two Indian workers tapping sap from a rubber tree, the first step in the mass production of rubber (Photo by Nextrecord Archives/Getty Images).
The English polymath Joseph Priestly received a small sample of latex and noted that it was very good at rubbing out (erasing) pencil marks and thus coined the name “Rubber”. In the nineteenth century, the development of first the bicycle and later the motor car, created a demand for rubber that far outstripped the sources of natural rubber and drove the discovery of synthetic elastomers – the technical name for rubberlike substances. The initial problem with developing rubber as a commodity, was that the Brasilian rainforest was the only source of Pará rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) and Brasil had a stranglehold on the market and one thing that commodity markets don’t like is a monopoly. There was no specific law banning the export of rubber plants or seeds from Brasil but nevertheless it was a closely policed prohibition – and no wonder – the wealth generated by the monopoly of the supply of rubber paid for that lavishly marbled opera house in Manaus, far up the Amazon, and for a stream of European opera divas to grace its stage. It took until 1870 for the seeds to be smuggled out and the monopoly broken…
I well remember this story of derring-do smuggling from my geography class at school in the 1960’s but looking back, there was no hint of a question as to the ethics of this act of theft and the geopolitical shift that it meant for the British empire – it seemed that was just the way of things. An even more heinous crime was happening across the Atlantic in a similar river whose basin held a hard-to-penetrate tropical rainforest – the Congo. From 1885 to 1908, while the development of British rubber plantations in the Far-East were still being developed, the Belgian Congo, operated as a private estate – the Congo Free State (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo) under the absolute rule of King Leopold II of Belgium – was another source of latex rubber. Congo rubber comes from vines and the wives and children of a village were held hostage whilst their menfolk were sent off to fulfil their quota of vine rubber. The depravity did not end there, with a bureaucracy that would have been the envy of the Nazis, every bullet used by Belgian soldiers had to be accounted for and justified, so if soldiers went hunting for meat or even sport – they would go into a village and chop off as many hands as required to justify their bullet allocation – claiming a police action as justification. No wonder Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece “Heart of Darkness” is set far up the Congo River where a European trader has gone rogue… So many people died under these imperial rules that though the exact figures are indeterminable, estimates range from 1.5 million to 13 million and the story of this genocide can be read here.
This is not to say that there were not many deaths of native Amazonian Indians as a result of rubber tapping in the Amazon but they have been overshadowed by the obscenity of Leopold’s genocide. It may be considered a boon then, that the theft of rubber tree seeds from Brazil and the subsequent establishment of rubber plantations in the Far Eastern countries of the British Empire, brought to an end the depradations in Brazil and the Congo… However, life on the remote plantations of the Far-East was at the very least a lonely station for the young men and women of the “Empire on Which the Sun Never Sets” as the globe encircling British Empire was sometimes called. Somerset Maugham (whom my mother “specialled”, or nursed one-to-one as a young nurse and who she described as a bitter old man) chronicled life on the plantations which we later watched dramatised on TV and if I can distil a typical story of his into one sentence it would be “Young planter comes back to England to wed from amongst the surfeit of girls following the First World War and returns to Malaya with his bride who later discovers he has a second family living at the bottom of the garden with a native wife – bitterness ensues…”
Let us leave the sordid world of the early sourcing of rubber and move back to the uses of Rubber as a commodity. We have already seen one source of the name rubber, but another product that became synonymous was the “Rubber” or Rubber Johnny – prophylactic to who knows how many unborn babies… there are car tyres, cushioning and shock-absorbing devices, and still there are Rubber Balls and many more uses besides. Eventually, as demand for rubber exceeded production of natural rubber, Synthetic Rubber was invented and American dominance in the market was advanced by the Second World War, when the Allies, with their access to Far-Eastern natural rubber, stifled Axis efforts by bombing synthetic rubber factories in Germany, Italy and Poland.
Natural Rubber is still an important commodity despite synthetic products which have burgeoned over the years – styrene-butadiene rubbers , polyisoprene, neoprene, nitrile rubber and last but by no means least Silicone rubber. Even without being a chemist, that list may have conjured for you, wetsuits, surgical rubber gloves not to mention heatproof cookwear… More than 28 million tons of rubber were produced in 2017, of which approximately 47% was natural. Natural rubber still goes into tyres and to dothat, the process of Vulcanisation had to be invented – a method of hardening the Latex or “India Rubber” (yes – the “stolen” rubber plantations of India gave their name to the raw material too) and this was eventually perfected by Charles Goodyear as a process involving heat and the addition of Sulphur.
Many other plants other than the Hevea Tree produce latex but have never been successfully been exploited and the price of rubber is volatile – for example, during the Covid crisis, the price of rubber spiked because of the demand for rubber gloves yet many small family-run plantations had rubbed up their crop to grow more profitable lines at the time such as palm-oil. Now plant diseases (which especially affect monocultures) and climate change are threatening the supply of natural rubber further…
Before proceeding to my own poetic offering, I cannot leave rubber without referencing A.A. Milne’s wonderful poem “King John’s Christmas” which takes us back to the very first discovered use of rubber and if you were unlucky enough not to have been brought up with his poems or only know of Winneie the Pooh – let this extract introduce you to a Wold of joy…
King John was not a good man, He lived his live aloof; Alone he thought a message out While climbing up the roof. He wrote it down and propped it Against the chimney stack: “TO ALL AND SUNDRY – NEAR AND FAR – F. Christmas in particular.” And signed it not “Johannes R.” But very humbly, “Jack.” “I want some crackers, And I want some candy; I think a box of chocolates Would come in handy; I don’t mind oranges, I do like nuts! And I SHOULD like a pocket-knife That really cuts. And, oh! Father Christmas, if you love me at all, Bring me a big, red, india-rubber ball!”
Which brings us to today’s poem for which I have chosen the poetry form Rhyme Royal:
The rhyme royal stanza consists of seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-c. In practice, the stanza can be constructed either as a tercet and two couplets (a-b-a, b-b, c-c) or a quatrain and a tercet (a-b-a-b, b-c-c). This allows for a good deal of variety, especially when the form is used for longer narrative poems. (source Language is a Virus – Poetry Guide)
Rubber
Has ever extraction so cruel been visited on poor people our industrial needs to fuel our market trade coffers kept full wealth from the Third World, First World pulls stolen plants new plantations bring relief to tropical sons
The smooth ride of the motor car or even humble bicycle wrote a trail of blood from afar ignorance of the genocide no excuse for the denial when now we know how goods are wrought with blood, sweat and tears they’re still bought
Blood diamonds the savage crop from where bloodied rubber once grew blood from Congo’s gold and coltan drop tin and tungsten to name but a few not just the Congo to give it’s due children of seventy-eight lands make goods never mind adult hands…
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
Worldwide Trade in Gasoline 2022 $16.86 Billion Worldwide Trade in Gold 2022 $14.568 Trillion
When I first researched a list of “Commodities”, Gold and Gasoline were the only two which came up for “G” on the best list I could find, but what a pair! Gold has been sought for centuries – valued for its incorruptible nature though it has arguably been one of the greatest sources of corruption of the human heart. Similarly, crude oil – the source of Gasoline, has shaped the political map ever since its component “gifts” were discovered and exploited with disastrous consequences for many peoples and for the world and its environment as a whole. So I decided to deal with both these commodities together – one constant and immutable, the other volatile, expendable and dangerous…
Gasoline is used for transportation and energy production worldwide and is severely implicated in global warming as a result of CO² emissions. The spread of the motorcar through the 20th century reshaped our lives and living arrangements and wars have been fought to secure, steal or destroy other’s oil sources. Arguably. The US, as the largest consumer has fought an undeclared war against the Arab nations since the Second World War to assure the flow of oil although it began with an alliance with Saudi Arabia that promised guaranteed oil supplies in return for non-interference with the Wahabist-based sect of Islam which was espoused there. The consequences of that are another story, but Iraq and Libya (a country that shared its oil wealth amongst its people in an unprecedented way) are but some of the victims of US-led wars designed to keep the best oil flowing in the “right” direction. The oil lobby is the greatest source of “climate deniers” although the car lobby and many car drivers are equally denying that Climate Change is happening and man-made.
A salutary tale of the corruption that surrounds commodities such as oil (and gold), is the recent movie Killers of the Flower Moon, in which members of the Osage tribe of Native American Indians are at first surfeited in wealth (see above) derived from the rights to oil found on their land but how an unscrupulous local politician then seeks to murder them and acquire their lands into his family.
Gold has also been a source of conflict and a regulator of success in wars as this article outlines. Paper money used to be backed by reserves of the actual gold which it symbolised and this was known as the “Gold Standard” and although this system has been replaced everywhere by the Fiat system the prevalence of inflation as a result of the severing of the link, has risen worldwide. Having gold bullion reserves finances wars – for example, it is estimated that Californian gold was responsible for 10% of the cost of the American Civil War. The UK had access to gold produced by mines in its colonies such as South Africa which the mines were obliged to sell to the treasury whilst over the course of the two World wars, Germany had no such access and so the UK was able to pay for some of the food and armaments that came from the US (and borrowed the rest which it only paid off in 2006).
Gold Fields South Deep Mine The Twin Shaft Complex comprises a Main and Ventilation Shaft. The Main Shaft extends in a single drop to 2,998m below surface, while the ventilation shaft extends to a depth of 2,947m below the surface. That’s almost 3 kilometres…
Oil and thence Gasoline prices are also levers of power in war e.g. the embargo on Russian oil in response to the war in Ukraine although to pull those levers means adversely affecting the price of oil commodities and the US has to try to persuade its Arab producer allies to release more product to stabilise the market. The price of gold and oil or gasoline (their markets show some different behaviours) are some of the most important commodity trading standards in the market and the first thing that many in the know will look at each morning.
Of course, gold has decorative and cultural uses as well as bullion – jewellery, crowns, ceremonial cups and it is because it doesn’t tarnish or corrode that it has had this value since ancient times and so is one of the earliest commodities to be traded.
And so to the poem and having recently written a Ghazal, I decided to try a Glosa…
Glosa, or glose, is a form originally from Spain, featuring a quatrain epigraph, and four ten-line stanzas with the last line of each stanza being the corresponding line of the epigraph. The key to the form is that it incorporates the words of another. The glosser, or glosador, advertises a connection to a prior text.
Gold and Gasoline
Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold! Bright and yellow, hard and cold […] Hoarded, bartered, bought and sold, […] Price of many a crime untold …
Gold has commanded lust of kings and beggars both who wish for things or for gold’s sake alone a useless dragon’s hoard coins, bullion bars and rings miners gave their lives for it soldiers died protecting it across the globe merchants trade the metal that will never fade Price of many a crime untold …
Shallow mines are damp and cold deep in the Earth’s heat lies the gold where miners in the new South Africa still sweat to feed the dragon’s hoard a ring with which to have and hold a brooch to sparkle and attract the eye a sovereign, symbol of King and country pays for the soldiers’ dice with death to die or win and maybe loot a little wealth Price of many a crime untold …
And gasoline’s story is much the same black gold fought over in the Great Game of nations tampering with other nations to keep their cars moving, lights burning the destruction of Libya a tale of infamy the treasures of Iraq to the winds scattered because compared to oil, culture didn’t matter and wars are won and lost by oil’s logistics and the market’s fluctuating statistics Price of many a crime untold …
Whilst gold has spawned so many crimes it doesn’t threaten climate-changing times it will not end our human hubris and rarely even give us bliss as when we ring the wedding chimes both have brought us good and bad and if we perish, though very sad we only have ourselves to blame for seeking gold and gas – the same Price of many a crime untold …
