Search results for "poetry "
Epiphany
Today is my father's birthday. He would have been 57. I miss, amongst a myriad other things, his way of pricking overblown seriousness with scurrilous absurdities. And buried in his poems I find this moment of pathos, which made me chuckle in light of my recent grappling with philosophical horse-bollocks:
I found out!
For one moment I knew.
Then it passed from me
In a drunken stupor
In the Market Place Gents
Andrew Herbert Flintham (1951 - 2001)
An American Neighbour
Saturday, 23 December, 2006 - 00:11
Windsor, 1999: an American neighbour was a lover for a while. She heard me through the walls, I bought her flowers because I scared her daughter by banging on the door, and she thought I was 'Etony' because I wore a waistcoat with my suit.
For some reason I forget, I told her I disliked Robert Burns. For christmas, she gave me a book, inscribed it beautfully; it was an Everyman, one of my favourite bindings; it was 'The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns'. Later, of course, we fell out permanently.
I don't even know whether she'd ever been to Scotland. I could have deceived myself and seen her earnest American evangelism as irony. Funny the things that you think of at christmas.
"Razorback space 2.0 appears to be dead"
Saturday, 25 February, 2006 - 14:10
Razorback 2
We'll really miss you
Now the Swiss do
Unspeakable things
To your memory rings.
Slyck
BBC
Poetry is justified
Thursday, 10 November, 2005 - 14:30
For Percy Bysshe Shelley poets were 'the unacknowledged legislators of the world'. Dylan Thomas said, as he sang, that -
'song
Is a burning and crested act,
The fire of birds in
The world's turning wood,
For my sawn, splay sound'.
Baudelaire claimed the poet's mother would cry to God, 'Why not have given me a brood of snakes rather than make me rear this laughing stock?' - but the poet's perfect diadem is 'made of nothing but pure light... of which our mortal eyes, for all their might, are only a mournful mirror, a darkened glass'.
I say this by way of justification - it seems necessary always to justify poetry. P.P. O'Shaughnessy wrote a poem called 'Justification':
In the face of suffering,
Poetry
Is silent,
Irrelevant,
Or lacking grace.
In the face of poetry,
Suffering
May sometimes
Take second place.
At the very least this modest appraisal tells us something about the complicated relationship we have with the expression of human thought in forms which forge from words aesthetic beauty and clarity, and which, from time to time, play their reader as the spirit of the world plays Coleridge's Aeolian Pipe.
This is not to mention the fact that poetry is certainly one of the oldest forms of artistic communication which humanity in its every generational incarnation turns to for comfort and for proclamation. Poetry requires us, whether we read it or write it, to become Protean, to swap our identities for those of others, and to reflect on the abyss which separates each individual from another. It requires us, in a way that the visual simply does not, to 'be someone else'.
It is therefore a good thing that children are encouraged to write poetry, and for that poetry to be published and shared and returned to other children. To allow the creative act to be practiced, rather than merely 'told'.
So when a 14-yr-old boy writes a poem which tries to assume the voice of Adolf Hitler and express that human's viewpoint and his attitude to the Jews, should we be appalled? The Liverpool Riverside MP, Louise Ellman clearly is, despite the fact that she clearly hadn't read the full poem before making her opinions known. Or like a number of bloggers (most of whom have obviously not read the full text either), including one who claimed that this is an example of the UK sinking into its own excrement. I wonder if the recent bill outlawing 'glorification of terror' is an example of that excrement? And perhaps we should also ban Paradise Lost on the grounds that the poet has clearly tried to empathise with Satan, and in doing so has glorified the ultimate act of terror by trying to overthrow God and His Kingdom of Heaven, and incited hatred against the entire human race?
I would argue that Gideon Taylor, the boy in question, has a better grasp of what a poem is than carpet-bagging MPs and the blogger clones endlessly repeating each other's entries.
And by the way, it the least relevant facet of this case that the boy's poetry was the kind of doggerel you expect to find in juvenilia.
I hope Baudelaire is correct that 'the oblivious Poet lifts his pious arms, and blinding flashes of his intellect keep him from noticing the angry mob'.
Free and not so free
Sunday, 09 October, 2005 - 14:32
This morning I was deeply excited by a couple of news items I read from Slashdot and Boing Boing, only to run into a mixed experience of glee and disappointment.
Slashdot reported that the British Library has made available one of Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks on their website, alongside 13 others works from Jane Austin, Lewis Carroll and the Lindisfarne Gospels. This is exactly what libraries should be doing with the Internet...
However, when Boing Boing reported that some of Dylan Thomas's poetry was avilable online, namely a reading of "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" and the entire collection of the Caedmon recordings as free mp3 downloads, I ran into huge disappointment.
The first link is a page which, to be fair, does allow you hear Thomas reading his most famous poem, though only in a swf file which you therefore can't download and listen to on whatever music player you choose, and therefore it's only available for as long as poets.org choose to maintain the page.
The second link to the Caedmon collection is at salon.com, which means that the mp3 downloads are free only insomuch as you're prepared to be a premium subscriber to Salon. This twists the definition of free to a new level.
Thomas died in 1953, so while all of his texts are therefore out of copyright, other media forms such as recordings can still be controlled by copyright owners. Thomas' reading of his own poetry is one of the greatest experiences lovers of poetry and language can enjoy. So the $6 it costs to join salon for a month is almost certainly worth paying for the collection, if not for salon's other content ;)
Beat Poetry
Wednesday, 13 July, 2005 - 15:09
William Gibson recently wrote for Wired about the mash-up and cut-up techniques becoming so prominent in digital cultures, and the cut-and-paste ease of creating new work.
Gibson mentions the cut-up technique used by Williams Burroughs, and that he appropriated clips from American science fiction. Burroughs also, however, used the cut-up technique on his own pages of writing: he would write his work on sheets of paper which he would cut into pieces and then re-assemble. Apparently he even used to allow sheets to fall out while his work was in progress, and place them back randomly and leave them where they sat for publication. Burroughs demonstrated the technique in his essay on the subject.
This reminded me of a script I wrote a few years ago which will do the cut-up technique to any text you put into it - just to emphasise the fact that cut-and-paste production is getting ever easier... So I've put it together here: Beat Poetry Creator.
For more textual cut-up fun, try out the great The Cut-up Page, and there's loads more stuff at Wikipedia
