Not really in connection with the above, except at a very steep tangent of the type these poetry wallahs excel in, I found myself drawing up a list the other day of poets on my shelves who are crying out to be read over the next few months. It's an impressive little list (well, in truth, not so little all in all) and I must say I'm struck by how few of those on it would find themselves welcome at the typical school speech day: Frost, Hughes, Blake, Gunn, Causley, Larkin, Pope, Shelley, Walcott, Wright (James), Williams (William Carlos), Merill, Melville, Plath. A completely useless but vaguely entertaining exercise is to figure out which of them would be most likely to say something on such an occasion which would guarantee they'd never be invited again. I reckon Blake leads the field.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Waxing Poetical
A curious thing happened to me a couple of weeks back at work. I was walking near our leader boards - at least, that's what I think they're known as - you know, the lists they put on school walls of the names of past prefects and the like - when my attention was captured by one headed Poetical Leaders. The old heart leapt for a very few moments, long enough for me to realise I was looking at a far more mundane, but vastly more reputable, list of worthy Political Leaders. And then I got to considering that the (presumably accidental) production of poets is something that any sensible institution would remain stoically silent about. I know my own secondary school remained firmly tight-lipped about the fact that the supremely disreputable Anthony Burgess was an old boy, or at least when I was there it did. (Not exactly a poet, though the poems that sometimes punctuate the novels are rather good, but a novelist and musician which is just as bad.) It's reassuring to know there are fields of endeavour that cry out to be disowned by the great and good.
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4 comments:
Followed by Hughes, probably. The thing about poets is that they're a lot like prophets.
I 'wasted' my morning reading Geoffrey Hill's Orchards of Syon. Now, that's one son of Albion who has too many powerful words in him.
Yes, I reckon Ted was more than capable of upsetting a few folk on his day. Although his lovely stuff for kids - I'm thinking Poetry In The Making as well as the verse - suggests schools should have been putting out the red carpet for him.
But Hill would scare the students. He certainly frightens me. In a good way.
I love his 'Tales of the Early World' and other creation myths. Still read them occasionally. A sort of upgraded version of Kipling and his Just-So stories, which were refreshingly jingoism-free.
I was going to ask if that was the same as How The Whale Became and realised it wasn't. Which means there's a lot more great Hughes for kids I haven't read. Yowza! The Kipling analogy applies also to the stories in the Whale collection.
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