Getting Poetic

I've been sort of preparing a lecture for a Literature Seminar that's coming up this Saturday. I say 'sort of' as to the unpractised eye I reckon I could be mistaken as doing not too much of anything, except to open the odd book now and again and generally look dreamily distracted. But appearances deceive. I think pretty much the whole thing is now in my head as I've been running through a few ideas, and thoughts of poems to use to illustrate them, quite intensely - and, importantly, enjoyably - over the last two weeks.

Unfortunately I now have to prepare a few slides; it isn't that I really want them or need them, but everyone seems to expect this sort of thing nowadays. And they'll sort of help me to keep on track, I guess.

Anyway, to get to the real point of all this, I found myself dipping into Alfian Sa'at's A History Of Amnesia and my Oxford Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, in recent days just to check whether the poems I had in mind to pass comment on were appropriate for my purposes - which they were - and then just getting lost in the delights in both books. The little sequence of Mr Chia poems in Amnesia struck me as possessing a quite remarkable power, something I'd unaccountably failed to register when I first encountered the collection, and I found myself discovering delights afresh in Hopkins tucked away in poems I've somehow come to disregard over the years. The Bugler's First Communion springs to mind.

I honestly can't quite grasp the fact that generally people are not turned on to poetry in the way I am. Not that I mind that. If it isn't your cup of tea find something you can enjoy, say I. But something in me suspects you're missing out big time.