Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 31
December 29, 2014
Cardiff Library Service
This is the text of my email to various Cardiff councillors, copied to the Western Mail, about the proposed cuts to the city's library service. If anyone's interested, there's a petition at https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save-cardiff-library-service and the email addresses to contact are: newsdesk@walesonline.co.uk (Western Mail), Phil.Bale@Cardiff.gov.uk (leader of the council), Sue.Lent@Cardiff.gov.uk (deputy) and Peter.Bradbury@Cardiff.gov.uk (libraries portfolio)
Dear Councillors
I am aware that all councils are being starved of cash by central government and therefore cannot provide the level of public service they should and would wish to provide. I have considerable sympathy for the difficult decisions they have to make.
However, it was a wise man who observed that if you think educating people is expensive, you should see what ignorance costs. Giving up another two floors of the central library, losing a great deal of stock in the process, and closing seven branch libraries is no way to maintain Cardiff's status as a cultural capital. It isn't simply a matter of books, vital though those are. The computing facilities are also extremely important to those who cannot afford to be online at home, while the social benefits for older folk of coming together to read newspapers and magazines can actually be a saving in the long run, if it helps them continue in the community.
I am a Welsh writer, publishing with a Welsh house, and, insofar as I identify with any locality, it would be Cardiff, where I wrote most of my books. Though I no longer live in Cardiff, my son's family does (indeed my daughter-in-law is a librarian by training) and I myself lived in Canton for decades. The Carnegie library there was once set on fire by vandals and much stock was lost (by happy chance, Dante's Inferno escaped as I had it out on loan at the time). I published a poem about the incident, hoping the perpetrators would end up in hell, but I didn't realise, at the time, that the council itself might prove the more damaging vandal. As both a Welsh writer and a reader, I would ask you to reconsider whether such sweeping cuts are really unavoidable.
Dear Councillors
I am aware that all councils are being starved of cash by central government and therefore cannot provide the level of public service they should and would wish to provide. I have considerable sympathy for the difficult decisions they have to make.
However, it was a wise man who observed that if you think educating people is expensive, you should see what ignorance costs. Giving up another two floors of the central library, losing a great deal of stock in the process, and closing seven branch libraries is no way to maintain Cardiff's status as a cultural capital. It isn't simply a matter of books, vital though those are. The computing facilities are also extremely important to those who cannot afford to be online at home, while the social benefits for older folk of coming together to read newspapers and magazines can actually be a saving in the long run, if it helps them continue in the community.
I am a Welsh writer, publishing with a Welsh house, and, insofar as I identify with any locality, it would be Cardiff, where I wrote most of my books. Though I no longer live in Cardiff, my son's family does (indeed my daughter-in-law is a librarian by training) and I myself lived in Canton for decades. The Carnegie library there was once set on fire by vandals and much stock was lost (by happy chance, Dante's Inferno escaped as I had it out on loan at the time). I published a poem about the incident, hoping the perpetrators would end up in hell, but I didn't realise, at the time, that the council itself might prove the more damaging vandal. As both a Welsh writer and a reader, I would ask you to reconsider whether such sweeping cuts are really unavoidable.
December 21, 2014
Off on an idiomatic tandem...
Metaphors do wear out sometimes, in the sense that the field from which the metaphor is drawn becomes unfamiliar, so that its meaning is no longer clear to those wishing to use it, and when that happens, the metaphor is liable to get changed. This makes sense, when it is changed to something that does carry meaning to the speaker. For instance, I used to know a nice old gentleman to whom old-fashioned bicycles were more familiar than geometry, which was why, when a conversation had strayed from the subject, he was apt to say "I think we've gone off on a tandem". This may, technically, have been incorrect, but it made just as much sense in the context as "gone off at a tangent" (as well as being vastly more original and entertaining). Ditto the fishermen's union spokesman, annoyed at new European quotas, who claimed his members were being treated as political prawns. A small insignificant fish, frequently the prey of larger species, would do just as well as a minor, frequently-sacrificed chess piece to make his point, and better, if he wasn't an habitual chess player.
What's harder to understand is when an idiom gets changed to something that couldn't possibly make any sense to anyone. "Toe the line", meaning to follow orders exactly, is clearly enough visualised in terms of schoolchildren or soldiers standing along a line marked on the floor. Possibly schools don't actually do this any more. But "tow the line", as we often see it written down by students these days, can only mean to haul a rope behind one, and it isn't easy to fathom how they get any relevant meaning out of that.
At least, though, there is a possible meaning. What on earth is in the minds of those who, wishing to say that something is up for debate, say "it's a mute point"? OK, they don't get "moot" because the Anglo-Saxon word for a meeting where you debate things is no longer familiar. But why would a debating point be silent? Then there's the impossible-to-visualise "off his own back" for "off his own bat". Again one can see how, in an era where cricket is less familiar, people might be missing the point that while it takes two players to score a run, it is only credited to the one whose bat it came off - hence, off his own bat: on his own initiative. But what on earth could "off his own back" possibly mean? Changing one idiom, the sense of which one no longer understands, to another that makes no better sense (or even any sense at all) does seem a bit baffling.
What's harder to understand is when an idiom gets changed to something that couldn't possibly make any sense to anyone. "Toe the line", meaning to follow orders exactly, is clearly enough visualised in terms of schoolchildren or soldiers standing along a line marked on the floor. Possibly schools don't actually do this any more. But "tow the line", as we often see it written down by students these days, can only mean to haul a rope behind one, and it isn't easy to fathom how they get any relevant meaning out of that.
At least, though, there is a possible meaning. What on earth is in the minds of those who, wishing to say that something is up for debate, say "it's a mute point"? OK, they don't get "moot" because the Anglo-Saxon word for a meeting where you debate things is no longer familiar. But why would a debating point be silent? Then there's the impossible-to-visualise "off his own back" for "off his own bat". Again one can see how, in an era where cricket is less familiar, people might be missing the point that while it takes two players to score a run, it is only credited to the one whose bat it came off - hence, off his own bat: on his own initiative. But what on earth could "off his own back" possibly mean? Changing one idiom, the sense of which one no longer understands, to another that makes no better sense (or even any sense at all) does seem a bit baffling.
December 16, 2014
Review of "The Cost of Keys" by Sue Rose (Cinnamon)
Some time ago, I reviewed Sue Rose's chapbook Heart Archives, published by Hercules Editions. It was then a sequence of 14 sonnets, inspired by Boltanski’s Les Archives du Coeur, a long-term project to record heartbeats and store them on a Japanese island. The sonnets were each accompanied by a photo of something meaningful to Rose, taken with an iPhone, her own archival device - a multi-media project, then.
Now the sequence, expanded to 21 poems, has become part of a full-length collection, The Cost of Keys, Rose's second from Cinnamon. (Her first, From The Dark Room, was reviewed here.) Here the poems must stand alone, without the photographs, which they do perfectly well, though the reading experience is obviously different - less immediate, wore worked-for.
Heart Archives ends a collection which moves seamlessly through various themes and images. The "keys" of the title poem, which are door keys, morph in the next poem into piano keys, which in turn lead on to other musical instruments in the succeeding poems. Other leitmotifs develop and run through the book: water in various forms, photography, islands, above all, memories and archives. What is it, by the way, with keys in titles all of a sudden? Jean Sprackland's Sleeping Keys, Marianne Burton's She Inserts The Key, now this?
The description of that title-poem key:
Like a flag cast in iron, a stiff wind
caught in its holes and grooves
sets a tone for the collection: an exact, unexpected image that gives an immediate sensory impression. This happens again and again, making for a very visual, tactile read - the image of Murano glass "like bonbons, poisonous with sugar" not only comes alive off the page but, as an effective image should, slants our vision of the object. Another constant tactic is the merging of present with past and future, and this is very skilfully done indeed. At the beginning of "Guided Tour", we could be in the ruins of Pompeii or Herculaneum; by the second verse, doubt creeps in and by the third we know we are looking back from the far future at our own time or something very near it. Later we shall meet "Herculaneum" as a poem title, plus "Time Capsule", and both hint back at this poem. And in "Time Lapse", the year's exposure of a Toronto skyline recorded with a pinhole camera and
savedtransports us straight back to Herculaneum. By the end, we have a very strong sense of continuity, of the strands of blood, history, cultural imagery that bind our present to the past and will bind our future to our present.
for eternity in the ether
while being erased
forever by the hot glare
of a scanner
The verbal skill throughout this collection, in fact, is impressive. She's also quite brave, using words like "palimpsest" and "cadences" that some critic will surely object to as "too poetic". Well, prove they don't work in the context, say I, and the only time I did think something could have been said in a fresher way was the "snowfield" bedsheet and "ice" heart of "Lacrimoso".
There is a lot of bearing witness in this collection, and many people who aren't alive any more. Yet I would not call it nostalgic; what is gone is not idealised and the poet's insistence on memory comes with the consciousness that nothing remembered can wholly die and that there is no need to "escape" to the past, because it is part of the present. The final poem of the chapbook "Heart Archives" is still the poem with which she chooses to sign off both that sequence and this collection: "D25072049", in which she recognises that our immortality lies in human memory:
The vessel for my remainsThe down-to-earth tone there is typical: as in her first collection, this is a poet who can use deeply personal, emotive material and still avoid sentimentality or self-pity.
will be those who carry part of me
in their histories.
December 6, 2014
sheenaghpugh @ 2014-12-06T10:09:00
I hate the List Season. Best books of the year, favourite books of the year, call it what you will: it takes up pages of newspapers that would otherwise be devoted to book reviews and it's boringly predictable. Novelists recommend their besties and are in turn recommended by them. Critics recommend whatever is abstruse, unreadable and will make them look incredibly clever, not forgetting along the way to marvel at why this choice has not proved more popular with the general reader, otherwise known as you crowd of ignoramuses who aren't as discerning as Mr Critic. Celebs from other fields name whatever has won an award or been much talked about and is therefore a safe choice. Poets are seldom asked to take part at all, but those few who are asked take immense care not to name, at all costs, any book of poetry in their choices.
There are, of course, honourable exceptions in all fields - even the poetry field, where the much-sniped-at Andrew Motion, as usual, has been recommending poetry in order to rectify to some small extent its general neglect by the newspapers. Whatever one thinks of his own poetry, few living poets have done more to advance the genre as a whole, both via his marvellous creation of the Poetry Archive and, in a smaller but still important way, by actually using lists like these in a productive way.
There are, of course, honourable exceptions in all fields - even the poetry field, where the much-sniped-at Andrew Motion, as usual, has been recommending poetry in order to rectify to some small extent its general neglect by the newspapers. Whatever one thinks of his own poetry, few living poets have done more to advance the genre as a whole, both via his marvellous creation of the Poetry Archive and, in a smaller but still important way, by actually using lists like these in a productive way.
December 1, 2014
James Elroy Flecker and the Turkish Lady
I like adopting personae in poems, partly because I intensely dislike the notion that lyric poems are (or should be) autobiographical and From The Heart. Poems, for me, are a way of being other, of entering a different viewpoint and consciousness, and that applies to reading as well as writing, for just as there is nothing more liberating for a writer than to inhabit another akin, so there is nothing more fascinating (and, often, revealing) than watching another author do so. Below is an example of an author, already working through the mask of translation, interposing a fictional persona as well, and I'm interested in wondering to what end.
James Elroy Flecker's "The Hammam Name" has a playfulness and wildly imaginative humour that have always appealed to me. Briefly, it concerns a young man who goes to the "hammam" or public bath (the word "name" in the title is, I think, the early 20th-century equivalent of "celebrity"). This lad is so impossibly beautiful (or is imagined to be so by the narrator) that not only human beings but inanimate objects fall in love with him on sight. Soap melts with love, a window shatters, bubbles burst like breaking hearts. The hammam's personnel are no more immune: witness the swooning shampooer's priceless line about the full moon.
The poem announces itself as being a translation "from a poem by a Turkish Lady", and this is where the business of persona comes in. It is indeed a translation, and a pretty faithful one by accounts I've seen (I'm no scholar of Turkish, but Flecker was). But this Turkish Lady is a fiction: the original author was in fact one Mehmet Emin Beligh of Larissa, an 18th-century male Ottoman poet.
On the face of it, there's one very obvious reason why Flecker might have wanted to put the poem in a female voice – in a male persona, it's extremely homoerotic, a thing of which Edwardian England might, at least overtly, have disapproved more than 18th-century Turkey did. But I'm not sure this wholly explains the Turkish Lady. After all, the reactions of the male bath-house personnel and customers are unequivocal and in no way played down. Just as educated English audiences were used to accepting, with varying degrees of enthusiasm or reluctance, the fact that Classical Greeks and Romans had more adventurous attitudes to sex than modern Christians, so they knew also that these things were managed differently out East. If Flecker wanted to distance himself from the poem's homoeroticism, all he needed to do was flag it up as a translation from its actual author.
What the Turkish Lady does, it seems to me, is add an extra layer of distance and fictionalising. In the first place, she isn't herself a witness to any of this: she can't be. The hammam was a single-sex environment: women were not necessarily barred, but they would not go at the same times as men. The Lady sees what happens in the first few lines: her young idol walking down the street toward the hammam. From then on, her own imagination and yearning attraction supplies the rest. She projects her feelings on to objects and people who, however hopeless their desire, are at least in contact with the boy in a way that she, in a segregated society, can never be. The soap may melt and the shampooer faint, but they do at least touch him, see him in a state of undress. Bitterness is born of beauty, she says, and the final three words about the frozen water have an emotional impact I don't think they would have in a male voice. Spoken by the man who wrote it, the poem is essentially funny and playful; the boy's inaccessibility more an amusing poetic conceit than anything else. In the voice of Flecker's invented Turkish Lady, it is still playful and imaginative, but the hunger behind it speaks more powerfully and the whole thing becomes more about fictionalising and reshaping.
The Hammam Name by James Elroy Flecker
Winsome Torment rose from slumber, rubbed his eyes, and went his way
Down the street towards the Hammam. Goodness gracious! people say,
What a handsome countenance! The sun has risen twice to-day!
And as for the Undressing Room it quivered in dismay.
With the glory of his presence see the window panes perspire,
And the water in the basin boils and bubbles with desire.
Now his lovely cap is treated like a lover: off it goes!
Next his belt the boy unbuckles; down it falls, and at his toes
All the growing heap of garments buds and blossoms like a rose.
Last of all his shirt came flying. Ah, I tremble to disclose
How the shell came off the almond, how the lily showed its face,
How I saw a silver mirror taken flashing from its case.
He was gazed upon so hotly that his body grew too hot,
So the bathman seized the adorers and expelled them on the spot;
Then the desperate shampooer his propriety forgot,
Stumbled when he brought the pattens, fumbled when he tied a knot,
And remarked when musky towels had obscured his idol's hips,
"See Love's Plenilune, Mashallah, in a partial eclipse!"
Desperate the loofah wriggled: soap was melted instantly:
All the bubble hearts were broken. Yes, for them as well as me,
Bitterness was born of beauty; as for the shampooer, he
Fainted, till a jug of water set the Captive Reason free.
Happy bath! The baths of heaven cannot wash their spotted moon:
You are doing well with this one. Not a spot upon him soon!
Now he leaves the luckless bath for fear of setting it alight;
Seizes on a yellow towel growing yellower in fright,
Polishes the pearly surface till it burns disastrous bright,
And a bathroom window shatters in amazement at the sight.
Like the fancies of a dreamer frail and soft his garments shine
As he robes a mirror body shapely as a poet's line.
Now upon his cup of coffee see the lips of Beauty bent:
And they perfume him with incense and they sprinkle him with scent,
Call him Bey and call him Pasha, and receive with deep content
The gratuities he gives them, smiling and indifferent.
Out he goes: the mirror strains to kiss her darling; out he goes!
Since the flame is out, the water can but freeze.
The water froze.
James Elroy Flecker's "The Hammam Name" has a playfulness and wildly imaginative humour that have always appealed to me. Briefly, it concerns a young man who goes to the "hammam" or public bath (the word "name" in the title is, I think, the early 20th-century equivalent of "celebrity"). This lad is so impossibly beautiful (or is imagined to be so by the narrator) that not only human beings but inanimate objects fall in love with him on sight. Soap melts with love, a window shatters, bubbles burst like breaking hearts. The hammam's personnel are no more immune: witness the swooning shampooer's priceless line about the full moon.
The poem announces itself as being a translation "from a poem by a Turkish Lady", and this is where the business of persona comes in. It is indeed a translation, and a pretty faithful one by accounts I've seen (I'm no scholar of Turkish, but Flecker was). But this Turkish Lady is a fiction: the original author was in fact one Mehmet Emin Beligh of Larissa, an 18th-century male Ottoman poet.
On the face of it, there's one very obvious reason why Flecker might have wanted to put the poem in a female voice – in a male persona, it's extremely homoerotic, a thing of which Edwardian England might, at least overtly, have disapproved more than 18th-century Turkey did. But I'm not sure this wholly explains the Turkish Lady. After all, the reactions of the male bath-house personnel and customers are unequivocal and in no way played down. Just as educated English audiences were used to accepting, with varying degrees of enthusiasm or reluctance, the fact that Classical Greeks and Romans had more adventurous attitudes to sex than modern Christians, so they knew also that these things were managed differently out East. If Flecker wanted to distance himself from the poem's homoeroticism, all he needed to do was flag it up as a translation from its actual author.
What the Turkish Lady does, it seems to me, is add an extra layer of distance and fictionalising. In the first place, she isn't herself a witness to any of this: she can't be. The hammam was a single-sex environment: women were not necessarily barred, but they would not go at the same times as men. The Lady sees what happens in the first few lines: her young idol walking down the street toward the hammam. From then on, her own imagination and yearning attraction supplies the rest. She projects her feelings on to objects and people who, however hopeless their desire, are at least in contact with the boy in a way that she, in a segregated society, can never be. The soap may melt and the shampooer faint, but they do at least touch him, see him in a state of undress. Bitterness is born of beauty, she says, and the final three words about the frozen water have an emotional impact I don't think they would have in a male voice. Spoken by the man who wrote it, the poem is essentially funny and playful; the boy's inaccessibility more an amusing poetic conceit than anything else. In the voice of Flecker's invented Turkish Lady, it is still playful and imaginative, but the hunger behind it speaks more powerfully and the whole thing becomes more about fictionalising and reshaping.
The Hammam Name by James Elroy Flecker
Winsome Torment rose from slumber, rubbed his eyes, and went his way
Down the street towards the Hammam. Goodness gracious! people say,
What a handsome countenance! The sun has risen twice to-day!
And as for the Undressing Room it quivered in dismay.
With the glory of his presence see the window panes perspire,
And the water in the basin boils and bubbles with desire.
Now his lovely cap is treated like a lover: off it goes!
Next his belt the boy unbuckles; down it falls, and at his toes
All the growing heap of garments buds and blossoms like a rose.
Last of all his shirt came flying. Ah, I tremble to disclose
How the shell came off the almond, how the lily showed its face,
How I saw a silver mirror taken flashing from its case.
He was gazed upon so hotly that his body grew too hot,
So the bathman seized the adorers and expelled them on the spot;
Then the desperate shampooer his propriety forgot,
Stumbled when he brought the pattens, fumbled when he tied a knot,
And remarked when musky towels had obscured his idol's hips,
"See Love's Plenilune, Mashallah, in a partial eclipse!"
Desperate the loofah wriggled: soap was melted instantly:
All the bubble hearts were broken. Yes, for them as well as me,
Bitterness was born of beauty; as for the shampooer, he
Fainted, till a jug of water set the Captive Reason free.
Happy bath! The baths of heaven cannot wash their spotted moon:
You are doing well with this one. Not a spot upon him soon!
Now he leaves the luckless bath for fear of setting it alight;
Seizes on a yellow towel growing yellower in fright,
Polishes the pearly surface till it burns disastrous bright,
And a bathroom window shatters in amazement at the sight.
Like the fancies of a dreamer frail and soft his garments shine
As he robes a mirror body shapely as a poet's line.
Now upon his cup of coffee see the lips of Beauty bent:
And they perfume him with incense and they sprinkle him with scent,
Call him Bey and call him Pasha, and receive with deep content
The gratuities he gives them, smiling and indifferent.
Out he goes: the mirror strains to kiss her darling; out he goes!
Since the flame is out, the water can but freeze.
The water froze.
November 30, 2014
New year, new reading....
My next reading will be at the StAnza poetry festival, St Andrews, in March 2015. I'll be at the launch on Wednesday 4th (Byre Theatre, level 2 foyer, Abbey St: free, at 18.30) and the next day, Thursday 5th, I have the great pleasure of reading with the renowned Anne Stevenson in the Five O'Clock Verses slot (Parliament Hall, South Street, 17.00, £5.75/£3.75). StAnza is a terrific festival; hope some of you can make it there.
November 26, 2014
Words and gaps
Apparently one's nephews and nieces can be referred to, collectively, as one's niblings (by analogy with siblings but more endearing). I like this word. I don't know who invented it, or when, but it's always good when someone comes up with a word we didn't have and genuinely needed. Another such, I fear, is the unkind but forensically accurate Japanese neologism "bakkushan", a weird macaronic mix of English "back" and German "schön", meaning someone who looks gorgeous from behind but proves a fearful disappointment on turning round. That is very much a thing. So is someone who was once a parent but now is one no longer (and no, "bereaved parent" will not do; it needs a proper dedicated word, like widow or orphan, not just a definition).
Although I don't know a word for that in any language, one advantage of being a linguist is that you get to assemble a collection of these handy, ultra-specific words, which may not exist in your own tongue but do in others. When I hear people moaning because times have changed and they can no longer smoke indoors, drive half-drunk or catcall young women unchallenged, I think of them as "buivshi", the word Soviet Russia sometimes used to characterise people whose thought processes were stuck in pre-revolutionary times. It means "the former people", or "people of former times", and in that is reminiscent of our own "has-beens", but the meaning is different. Has-beens are people who were once noted, even famous, at what they did, but are now either out of style or past their best - an eighties pop star or an ageing boxer might be a has-been. Buivshi are people who belong in the past, who can't adapt to change. The closest in English might be "dinosaur", but apart from being a shade metaphorical, that connotes not just extinction but power, something that in its time was awesome, and doesn't quite convey the contempt in "buivshi".
Blumenkaffee, coffee so weak you can see the pattern of flowers on the inside of an old-fashioned china cup, is my favourite German contribution to this eccentric collection. Languages rich in compound words are especially good at coining new ones, but all languages have these words that are so particular and apposite, you can't think how your own tongue has done without them. They don't all catch on, or stay in the language. Blumenkaffee seems to have survived the demise of pretty cups with patterns inside, but the English "maffick", meaning to celebrate in the streets, came into use after the street celebrations of victory at Mafeking and soon died out again, though street celebrations did not. I hope niblings will survive.
Although I don't know a word for that in any language, one advantage of being a linguist is that you get to assemble a collection of these handy, ultra-specific words, which may not exist in your own tongue but do in others. When I hear people moaning because times have changed and they can no longer smoke indoors, drive half-drunk or catcall young women unchallenged, I think of them as "buivshi", the word Soviet Russia sometimes used to characterise people whose thought processes were stuck in pre-revolutionary times. It means "the former people", or "people of former times", and in that is reminiscent of our own "has-beens", but the meaning is different. Has-beens are people who were once noted, even famous, at what they did, but are now either out of style or past their best - an eighties pop star or an ageing boxer might be a has-been. Buivshi are people who belong in the past, who can't adapt to change. The closest in English might be "dinosaur", but apart from being a shade metaphorical, that connotes not just extinction but power, something that in its time was awesome, and doesn't quite convey the contempt in "buivshi".
Blumenkaffee, coffee so weak you can see the pattern of flowers on the inside of an old-fashioned china cup, is my favourite German contribution to this eccentric collection. Languages rich in compound words are especially good at coining new ones, but all languages have these words that are so particular and apposite, you can't think how your own tongue has done without them. They don't all catch on, or stay in the language. Blumenkaffee seems to have survived the demise of pretty cups with patterns inside, but the English "maffick", meaning to celebrate in the streets, came into use after the street celebrations of victory at Mafeking and soon died out again, though street celebrations did not. I hope niblings will survive.
November 15, 2014
Why don't you ask what it says about ostriches?
Dear AQA
I've just been discussing online, with a student, the incredibly stupid and irrelevant question you set him or her on an "unseen poem", namely my "The Beautiful Lie", see below. You ask "What do you think the poet is saying about parenthood?"
Please read said poem and tell me where in it there is any mention of parenthood, or indeed any parents. It's about a young child discovering, for the first time, how to interpret the world differently, i.e. tell a lie, and how he realises this is the doorway to artistic creativity, the key to telling stories, painting pictures, making up characters. Due to this daft question you have set, the student has supposed that the lie at the centre of the poem must in fact be a Bad Thing and that the poem's "message" (I'm sure you think poems must have a message) is that parents should discourage lying. Admittedly the student has, in order to arrive at this interpretation, had to ignore all the positive vocabulary that builds up around the "lie" from the title on. But that's easily done; he or she has simply assumed that the celebration of the "beautiful lie" and all it leads to must be "ironic".
In the poem there's a grandmother, a grandson and an unnamed narrator who chooses not to reveal his or her relationship to the boy. This narrator spends the whole time undermining what he/she has already said: giving us "facts" and then admitting they may have been misremembered or simply invented. We shall never know, because that's what writers do. Much as I generally agree that the interpretation of a poem is a matter for reader as well as writer, you do need to back up said interpretation from the text, and if you can find me so much as a single phrase in the text that suggests the poem says anything at all about parenthood, I'll be mightily surprised. It's things like this that make me think it would be better if poetry were not taught (and certainly not tested) in schools at all, rather than by those who have no understanding of it.
The Beautiful Lie
He was about four, I think... it was so long ago.
In a garden; he'd done some damage
behind a bright screen of sweet-peas
- snapped a stalk, a stake, I don't recall,
but the grandmother came and saw, and asked him:
"Did you do that?"
Now, if she'd said why did you do that,
he'd never have denied it. She showed him
he had a choice. I could see, in his face,
the new sense, the possible. That word and deed
need not match, that you could say the world
different, to suit you.
When he said "No", I swear it was as moving
as the first time a baby's fist clenches
on a finger, as momentous as the first
taste of fruit. I could feel his eyes looking
through a new window, at a world whose form
and colour weren't fixed
but fluid, that poured like a snake, trembled
around the edges like northern lights, shape-shifted
at the spell of a voice. I could sense him filling
like a glass, hear the unreal sea in his ears.
This is how to make songs, create men, paint pictures,
tell a story.
I think I made up the screen of sweet peas.
Maybe they were beans; maybe there was no screen,
it just felt as if there should be, somehow.
And he was my - no, I don't need to tell that.
I know I made up the screen. And I recall very well
what he had done.
I've just been discussing online, with a student, the incredibly stupid and irrelevant question you set him or her on an "unseen poem", namely my "The Beautiful Lie", see below. You ask "What do you think the poet is saying about parenthood?"
Please read said poem and tell me where in it there is any mention of parenthood, or indeed any parents. It's about a young child discovering, for the first time, how to interpret the world differently, i.e. tell a lie, and how he realises this is the doorway to artistic creativity, the key to telling stories, painting pictures, making up characters. Due to this daft question you have set, the student has supposed that the lie at the centre of the poem must in fact be a Bad Thing and that the poem's "message" (I'm sure you think poems must have a message) is that parents should discourage lying. Admittedly the student has, in order to arrive at this interpretation, had to ignore all the positive vocabulary that builds up around the "lie" from the title on. But that's easily done; he or she has simply assumed that the celebration of the "beautiful lie" and all it leads to must be "ironic".
In the poem there's a grandmother, a grandson and an unnamed narrator who chooses not to reveal his or her relationship to the boy. This narrator spends the whole time undermining what he/she has already said: giving us "facts" and then admitting they may have been misremembered or simply invented. We shall never know, because that's what writers do. Much as I generally agree that the interpretation of a poem is a matter for reader as well as writer, you do need to back up said interpretation from the text, and if you can find me so much as a single phrase in the text that suggests the poem says anything at all about parenthood, I'll be mightily surprised. It's things like this that make me think it would be better if poetry were not taught (and certainly not tested) in schools at all, rather than by those who have no understanding of it.
The Beautiful Lie
He was about four, I think... it was so long ago.
In a garden; he'd done some damage
behind a bright screen of sweet-peas
- snapped a stalk, a stake, I don't recall,
but the grandmother came and saw, and asked him:
"Did you do that?"
Now, if she'd said why did you do that,
he'd never have denied it. She showed him
he had a choice. I could see, in his face,
the new sense, the possible. That word and deed
need not match, that you could say the world
different, to suit you.
When he said "No", I swear it was as moving
as the first time a baby's fist clenches
on a finger, as momentous as the first
taste of fruit. I could feel his eyes looking
through a new window, at a world whose form
and colour weren't fixed
but fluid, that poured like a snake, trembled
around the edges like northern lights, shape-shifted
at the spell of a voice. I could sense him filling
like a glass, hear the unreal sea in his ears.
This is how to make songs, create men, paint pictures,
tell a story.
I think I made up the screen of sweet peas.
Maybe they were beans; maybe there was no screen,
it just felt as if there should be, somehow.
And he was my - no, I don't need to tell that.
I know I made up the screen. And I recall very well
what he had done.
November 4, 2014
The stuff of stars
Let them enjoy their little day,
Their humble bliss receive.
Oh! do not lightly take away
The life thou canst not give!
Thomas Gisborne, in that verse, was exhorting his reader to avoid treading on a worm. Anyone who takes it on himself to abridge a human life had better have a bloody good reason, ie one very much better than profit, spite or possessiveness. I can just about see a justification, in a case where someone's life does far more harm than good in the world, particularly if it threatens the lives of others.
But Anne Cluysenaar was a witty, warm, cosmopolitan woman and a thought-provoking poet. I met her several times and always had fun in her company. If she'd died in the way of nature; well she was 78; one would boast, with Chaucer's young drunks, "we wol sleen this false traytour Deeth" and then realise ruefully that there's nothing to be done. But she was, apparently, murdered, and that makes me very angry. Do we get so much time here, that we can afford to lose any? She was still writing, she published a book this year and I don't suppose her friends and family were at all ready to lose her. I'd need a lot of convincing that she ever did more harm than good, or that whoever assumed this right was able to give the world anything as worthwhile as "Whatever we're made of, it wants to know/
how it came to be what it is." Here's the rest of that poem of hers:
Hunting the Higgs
No wonder they love a laugh, the physicists.
What ever they find or don't, it's OK.
Symmetries of the world just remnants
of those which, if perfect, would only have led to
no world at all – anti-matter, matter
would have cancelled each other out. Maybe.
Or maybe not, if the theory is at fault.
And if it is? More exciting still.
Whatever we're made of, it wants to know
how it came to be what it is. In us,
for a while at least, the stuff of stars
gets a glimpse of its own precarious life.
Like a single life, that will soon be gone.
Universes before, maybe, or after
our own, we won't ever get to explore.
They make up what is, though. And here we are!
October 21, 2014
Double Bill anthology
I have a poem in a new anthology of poems inspired by popular culture, Double Bill, ed. Andy Jackson, pub. Red Squirrel Press. It has poems by a great many different poets, on subjects from Frank Sinatra to Bagpuss - mine, which is called "Oral English", is about Julian & Sandy from Round the Horne and was inspired by an anecdote of Barry Took's about a puzzled letter he once received from a Japanese gentleman who was trying to improve his colloquial English with the aid of The Bona Book of Julian and Sandy. His letter went as follows: Ichigoro Yuchida to Barry Took: "Dear Sir, I am reading with an teacher, The Bona Book of Julian And Sandy. Mainly for the purposes of picking up slangs and very colloquial expressions. My English teacher is well trained in the job, and quite able in every way as a language teacher. Yet he still has some difficulty handling the queer and funny languages, brimming over the pages. I should be more than happy if you would kindly answer the following questions and let me know what they mean in plainer language. One, naff is it, page 25. Two, he's got the polari off hasn’t he. Three, but did you manage to drag yourself up on deck, page 27. I am sorry but I can't see what Mister Horne meant. Sincerely yours, Ichigoro Yuchida..." Took replied, with urbane courtesy, and a correspondence ensued.
You can buy Double Bill here. And here's the poem:
Oral English
Ichigoro Yuchida, keen to improve
his colloquial English, puzzles over
a text with his (equally baffled) teacher.
They can't seem to find dolly old eek
in the phrasebook. And why, during a shipwreck,
should Mr Horne laugh when our heroes
drag themselves up on deck? So many queries…
in the end, they think best to seek wisdom
from the writer, which is how they come,
courtesy of Mr Took, to knowledge
of some comic stereotypes, a secret language,
a national habit of wryness, a way of talking
as if one could make a joke of anything,
of code, of hiding from the law, of love.
You can buy Double Bill here. And here's the poem:
Oral English
Ichigoro Yuchida, keen to improve
his colloquial English, puzzles over
a text with his (equally baffled) teacher.
They can't seem to find dolly old eek
in the phrasebook. And why, during a shipwreck,
should Mr Horne laugh when our heroes
drag themselves up on deck? So many queries…
in the end, they think best to seek wisdom
from the writer, which is how they come,
courtesy of Mr Took, to knowledge
of some comic stereotypes, a secret language,
a national habit of wryness, a way of talking
as if one could make a joke of anything,
of code, of hiding from the law, of love.
