This is very good, so I thought I would share it:
I bought Brian's new collection yesterday. It was published this week.
Now I admit that as I own around 100 volumes of poetry I am probably not amongst the average reading public, most of whom never go near the stuff, but Brian's work is about as accessible as it gets, and his commentary on why he wrote each of the poems (366 of them, for each day of the year) is fascinating as well. I recommend it as bedtime reading, if nothing else, and all with the ideas implicit in the above. Available from my favourite bookseller.
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“Truth is like poetry.
And most people fucking hate poetry.”
A quote from the film ‘The Big Short’ – one of the better non-doc films about the 2008 crash – ‘Margin Call’ being the other one.
🙂
£11.59 from http://www.hive.co.uk with free postage and a percentage of profit to your favourite bookshop. Living in the north east, I always select Seven Stories, the national centre for children’s books in Newcastle.
Toppings is my local store…..
Called in yesterday to get it
Might I suggest that Mr Bilston hold back on versification until he has mastered something of metre and rhyme. He could study, oh, I don’t know, some of Kipling’s poems
I think you need to understand poetry a little better
Sorry, but rhyme, in particular, is incidental to it
Perhaps you ought to read it out aloud. The cadence and near rhyme sound okay to me. I think you’ll find that kids nowadays have given up asking, “Does it have to rhyme, miss?”
I doubt whether Gerard Manley Hopkins The Windhover would pass as a poem according to your rules, but it’s a beautiful poem.
Precisely
You are right
And if I have been hard on ardj in my response I think it is because he does not understand what you clearly do
@Richard Murphy
I would hate to see what Mr Bilston might do in an attempt at vers libre.
But you are right, I do need to understand poetry a bit better. My BA in literature from Cambridge went nowhere near giving a full understanding. It left me with a very shaky grasp of Anglo-Saxon versification, and much of Middle English literature is still beyond me. And on leaving Cambridge I was only beginning to cope with people like Charles Olson, or grasp where the stresses come in a line of Grace Paley, to feel comfortable with the sinuosities of Kaddish, of Blaise Cendrars, of Skelton. And that is without considereing my awe before Rimbaud or Villon, or the faux-simplicity of Heine.
I do not propose here to go into Chiinese or Russian poetry, languages I do not know enogh of to read other than in translation, though I am sure you can help me. But let us make a start: perhaps you would care to say whether you agree with recently deceased Katherine Duncan-Jones, the Arden editor of Shakespeare Sonnets or with William Empson or with Don Paterson about Sonnet 94, They that have power to hurt… ? I look forward to being enlightened.
As I say, you seem to have big gaps in your education. Where is modern poetry in all that, which is most of what I read? How about rap?
But more than that, what you have really missed is the fact that poetry is actually all about what it is to be alive and you clearly have little or no comprehension of that. Cambridge taught you about academic pedantry, and even snobbery, but little else it seems.
My granddaughter lives in Ely and worked in Cambridge for two years to save money before she went to university to study English literature. Having lived in Cambridge for two years she decided to go to York university. I was pleased then, and am even more pleased now.
My lowly BEd from the Peterborough Annexe of Bishop Grosseteste is why I only studies Hopkins and Lawrence, etc. I’m pleased about that, too.
ardj, what do you make of D.H. Lawrence’s Snake? Another beautiful poem. I like John Clare’s poetry, too, but that’s probably a bit lowbrow.
I don’t know John Clare, much
But what I think about poetry is it works when it speaks to us. Like all art if it opens insights we would not have otherwise had then it has achieved a goal
Over intellectualising it can miss that essential fact
That inevitably means there is not inherently good or bad poetry, there is just poetry that works better or worse
Mine is terrible on that basis. It does not stop me appreciating it
@ Richard Murphy
This is ridiculous. You boast of owning 100 or more books of poems: I have to wonder if you actually read any of them, since you object to me indicating that I might actually have read a little poetry. You fail to recognize that Cendrars (admittedly he died as long ago as 1961), Olson or Paley are modern poets. You cast quite unwarranted aspersions on my ability to enjoy life (of which you know nothing – would you accept such a charge against a mere chartered accountant ? Try reading Wallace Stevens, the insurance company executive – I will spare you Eliot the banker); and you fail to recognize that Villon, Skelton and Shakespeare wrote about life.
I was hoping to avoid this but you persist in misunderstanding even the verses you are trying to defend. It is not a poem about life in any sense of an insight into how life works, on a scale large or small, that could not be expressed differently, which is what for instance The Windhover manages in phrases like “and striding High there, how he rung upon the erin of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy”. “If you can get the job” is a supposed re-take on a (not very good but broadly admired) poem, and its derivative nature tends from the start to depreciate its quality.
But it falls apart from the start.: “If you can get the job when all around you” leads one to anticipate another iambic pentameter,just as Kipling infused drive into his original. But unless you put an accent on the “ged”, “Lies ravaged from what it is you’ve done” comes to a stop in the middle of the line, and you have to pick yourself up to go on and make sense of it. Now one could argue that this creates an effect of shock at the devastation. But I doubt that was the intention of a writer who could go on to: “And if integrity you have but none”: certainly an iambic pentameter but so clumsily written, against the flow of the metre and normal syntax, to no purpose but to cobble up a line. “And also of integrity you’ve none” would be a simpler and more forceful expression of the thought. The last line of the verse lacks half a foot, whichever way you read it, and is again a disastrously clumsy phrase: it should have been “And sadly say that you did all you could”
I see no need to excavate this disaster further, but perhaps you can see that this lifeless object is not even funny, as it lacks sharpness, vigour and wit, not to mention that is is not the work of a craftsman, which for all his faults, you cannot say about Kipling.
Politely, I disagree
And I think you protest much too much by still utterly missing the point of what Bilston has done
We shall have to agree to differ, which I did, of course, say was inevitable, but you missed that too
Bilston is trying to write a savage attack on Johnson. He is not very successful. Perhaps, if he tried his hand at prose, the concatenation of faults, and how they might appeal to a constituency so corrupt and jaded as the Tories, might possibly be more effective. (Personally i would b e inclined to stick to people I know can write like John Crace or Marina Hyde.)
This is so snide and elitist that I am going to use that rule that says that if I would not welcome a commentator saying this in my house then I need not do so here.
You obviously know vastly more about poetry than I do, but I can’t stand pseudo snobs – and I can think of no better word for you.
You are now banned. Treat it the same as I’d never invite you back to dinner again if you made such a comment at my table.
Sorry for thie misprint. The lines from the Windhover should read:
“and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy”.
@Jenw
Have not read all Clare, but a wonderful writer, with new words like ‘oddling’ which captures perfectly the idle actions of a crow, and with wonderful detailed glances at the world around in a manner that I, a country boy but short-sighted, never managed – but wish I had. If you like Clare you may enjoy writers from a slightly earlier time like Smart , Cowper or Goldsmith
“Snake” is a terrific poem, and captures, for me, the shock of discovering at three in the morning a five-foot long Montpellier viper in my kitchen, come in from the woods (while my small children slept). Alll hail the sapeurs-forestières who rescured me or perhaps it. But the Lawrence poem is a more profound study of the experience, though I admit to being puzzled by the appearance of the albatross. Lawrence repays futher selective reading (and there’s frankly too damned much, as with Ezra Pount) – but poems like “Piano” are very fine indeed.
https://northeastbylines.co.uk/i-want-my-country-back/
Poetry at its most modern and immediate, a bit like Bilston’s reworking of If.
I see nothing wrong with him starting with “If you can get the job…” After all, that’s what Johnson was hoping to do. That’s all it was to him, a job. Lucrative, but not as much as any other job he could get.
Thanks