Poetry

"The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese"
G K Chesterton

About a week ago I promised a blog post about poetry - I had big plans for reading a book of Poems cover to cover over the course of this week and then writing up the experience at the weekend. Fate has interveened and thanks to catching a bug on Monday I've had rather more time on my hands than I planned but also a lot less inclination to read a book of prose than I had thought I would.

I think it will help if I describe my first introduction to poetry when I was at school. I'm pretty sure we did read the odd poem when i was at primary and middle school but we only really started analysing them when I got to high school. My first impressions were " what a complete pile of crap!" though to be honest thanks to the efforts of the staff at Prudhoe County High I was turned off  all forms of english literature for years. When it came to choosing poems and novels for us to study the faculty had clearly got their heads together and thought "what is the most misserable and depressing collection we can assemble?" They clearly worked hard on this as my main memories of the texts we studied were..........

• Two books about missfit kids growing up in grim industrial towns - in each case novel ended with child having dreams shattered.
• A Seamus Heany poem about a hot summer/frogs and another one about drowning kittens (i'm really not joking here!).
• The Crucible - a play by Arthur Millar, dramatising the Salem Witch trials - where, suprise suprise, there was a miserable plot/ending (Laura has since told me that the play was wrtten as an allagory of McCarthyism - an important detail our english teachers neglegted to mention when we were studying it).

We did at least get to study one Shakespeare play (Romeo and Julliet) which made up for things a little bit but the whole GCSE experience turned me off any form of classic literature for the next decade. I have recovered from this a bit but my knowledge of poetry remains patchy at best.

Anyway, I've now started dipping into two books of poetry.... a Penguin anthology of Victorian Poetry and Rapture by Carol Anne Duffy (the poet laureate) both picked out by Laura at Tynemouth market a few weeks ago. So far so good, I've enjoyed some of the Victorian ones more than others, this makes sense with them being by a range of authors but the Carol Anne Duffy book is very easy to read and have enjoyed nearly all of it, this despite it being a collection of romantic poems - not something i thought i would have liked much.

Writting my own poem is still a long way off, and getting it published will be more difficult than i imagined (the evening chronicle does not have a poetry column!) but I'll report progress on this as it occurs.

 

my current reading list