Would be rather nice Pete, it had a combination of humour, thoughtfulness and insight, good while it lasted. Glidd and I got into spiral of despair around post 204, someone got us started and it all came tumbling out! :kissingcat:
Where is @gliddofglood Funnily I have just connected with an old school friend and he is putting up a piece of poetry everyday I hated it at school because I didn't understand it but life experience has helped Thanks @Pete1950
He just finished writing a book. I guess Hollywood picked up the film rights and he is hard at work on 'gliddnovel ' part 2
I sympathise. The bit I hated was being expected to learn poems off by heart, which I was never any good at. I would always revise and re-write the text each time, instead of reciting - which did not go down too well.
Benjamin Zephaniah used to live locally to me for many years, but moved away. His severe dyslexia has not stopped him from publishing dozens of successful books, including poetry, novels, and drama - which I admire greatly.
I was taught virtually nothing about poetry or literature at school. I was lucky to grow up in a house full of books otherwise I'd never have got started. At home one day I found copies of One Thousand Famous Things and One Thousand Everlasting Things by Arther Mee which were my Dad's when he was a youngster. They're treasure troves of poetry, literature and art from around the world intended to inspire children. There's no analysis or boring school masterly stuff just the odd introductory sentence to set the scene then Mee leaves the works to speak for themselves and trust a child's imagination to do the rest. I discovered these books when I was a teenager and never looked back. I had no idea the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner or the essays of Emerson existed before and one poem that blew me away was Grey's Elegy. It still does. Today's children need an Arthur Mee. Also inspiring was listening to a complete and unabridged serialisation of Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders on Radio 4. I must have been about ten or twelve. Dad had bought a swanky Bang and Olefsson hi-fi system and we listened to every episode with the lights down and the volume up. A romantic tragedy isn't the obvious choice for introducing a small boy to classical literature but the heightening intrigue, the Gothic overtones and the dripping, rustling atmosphere of the woods which Hardy evokes so vividly I found absolutely spell-binding. I went on to read every one of Hardy's novels and he is still one of my favourite writers, though The Woodlanders hasn't turned out to be one of my favourite Hardy novels because so many of the characters are exasperating. Grace Melbury, the main female character makes you want to slap her, while her fussing, interfering Father and the far too saintly Giles Winterborne both need a good kick up the arse.
Windscale The toadstool towers infest the shore: Stink-horns that propagate and spore Wherever the wind blows. Scafell looks down from the bracken band And sees hell in a grain of sand, And feels the canker itch between his toes. This is a land where the dirt is clean And poison pasture, quick and green, And storm sky, bright and bare; Where sewers flow with milk, and meat is carved up for the fire to eat, And children suffocate in God's fresh air. This is today's poem I remember it from school
At school I liked Siegfried Sassoon's, "Counter Attack", but two poems that really spoke to me were Vernon Scannell's, "A Case of Murder", about a young boy's hatred of the family cat, and Michael Baldwin's, "Calmly De-gutting Pears", a dark social commentary. Poetry, it seems, had to be dark to leave its mark. I could never connect with the romantic poets like Wordsworth and his ,"I wandered lonely as a cloud", because it felt so far removed from my upbringing and personal experience of life. Maybe I could give him a second chance but I'm happy not to need to try. I don't seek out poetry but a friend sent me something by Wendy Cope that hit home. It's called, "The Orange". And I love this: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another's throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself.” ― Philip Larkin It's a mix of tongue in cheek and autobiographical but there's a global truth in it. You know, I think I should read more poetry.
Mary had a little lamb, her father shot it dead. Now it goes to school with her between to lump's of bread!
Nearly all Larkin's stuff is great. Not sure how tongue-in-cheek that one is: I think it pretty much summed up what he thought. You can do a lot worse but buy a collected Larkin. It's only a few quid from Amazon.
I think you're right, Glid, tongue in cheek doesn't really fit. For me there is a dry humour there, but maybe that humour is mine and not Larkin's.
I'll let you know if it does happen, but don't hold your breath! I submitted the thing to 6 agents. They all tell you they'll be back to you in between one month and 3 months - if they get back to you at all. Imagine my surprise when I got my first rejection only hours after submitting! Talk about speed!
OK, in the spirit of this thread, let's have the opening to TS Eliot's The Wasteland, which is one of my favourite poems. It's long and completely abstruse, but very cool. April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
The bit I hated was writing essays about them. Poetry has its own magic and rhythm. Writing about it seemed to destroy much of that for me.
Agree. Classroom over-analysis is a menace. Its the death of literature for so many children. I also avoid like the plague modern editions of classic works which have been swollen to double the size by an exhaustive introductory chapter and whose text has been disfigured by a blizzard of numbered annotations. If the author had felt his book needed an instruction manual he would have written one. Just read the thing.
Disagree. Delving into it, deconstructing it, trying to work out what the writer was driving at, what he was alluding to, analysing the content and synthesising it into a critique - that's is the interesting bit.
That reminds me: No sun- no moon! No morn- no noon! No dawn- no dusk- no proper time of day- No sky- no earthly view- No distance looking blue- No road- no street- no "t'other side this way"- No end to any Row- No indications where the Crescents go- No top to any steeple- No recognitions of familiar people- No courtesies for showing 'em- No knowing 'em! No travelling at all- no locomotion- No inkling of the way- no notion- "No go" by land or ocean- No mail- no post- No news from any foreign coast- No Park, no Ring, no afternoon gentility- No company- no nobility- No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member- No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds- November!
Agreed. What you get out of a piece of literature is unique to you and if the author needed it to be more concrete than that then he should have made it clearer. This would avoid all the classroom anxiety and late night TV pontification.
