Playing Around

Found myself briefly waxing lyrical with regard to Don Paterson's Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets yesterday afternoon whilst quaffing the cup that cheers with ex-student and rising poetic talent Daryl. It wasn't so much that I was trying to convey how enamoured I found myself of the good Don's take on the mighty fourteen-liners, though enamoured in that direction is basically what I am, as endeavouring to convey my enthusiasm for what I sense could become a whole new way of doing lit crit (well, new to me anyway.) Thinking back to the highly pleasurable experience of reading his commentary (and the sonnets themselves) it's the sense of play and sheer fun of it all that remains with me.

I was trying to recall the section in which Paterson makes this explicit and I've just looked it up to see if it's as resonant for me now as it was when encountering Sonnet 90. It is, possibly even more so:

Serious literary criticism, far enough; but overly serious literary criticism does literature a wee bit of a disservice, because it fails to honour the spirit of play in which the work was conceived. Can't we all just lighten up? When did we become so circumspect? It's all just... monkeys speaking to each other, not a deep interrogation of the nature of physical law. But it's another symptom of the extent to which the scientific research model has infected the Humanities, which have succumbed to terminal physics envy... The truly perverse thing is that science writing discovered this decades ago, and is full of the kind of wry, free, outrageously speculative and ludic stuff that was supposed to be our birthright.

It strikes me that nattering about lit and stuff on-line might usefully go some way to restoring a sense of proportion about these matters. A place to go and play. Lighten up, people!