As you may know, I’m fond of a mini-book, mini poetry books in particular, and I came across these recently among my memorabilia. They’re two little leather-bound books of poetry, ‘Moments with Shakespeare’ and Gems from Shelley’.
They’re both dated 1909, one says it’s from ‘Jack’. One of my parents (I think my Dad) did have an uncle Jack. In fact his daughter who we knew as ‘cousin Joan’ did appear in a poem of mine once. When Joan died some of her effects came to him and then through him to Mum and then to me.
So maybe these booklets belonged to Joan’s mother. I like to think of them being carried around in a concealed pocket, to be brought out for a moment or two of reflection now and then.
This is from a reading I did in Eastbourne earlier this year and the poem appeared in The Interpreter’s House in June. Apologies for the sound quality and there are a couple of visual glitches – I never have much luck with video!
If you’ve been at a reading I’ve given you may have heard the snooker poem… it’s a bit of fun, my homage to snooker genius Ronnie O’Sullivan. I’m not sure what it adds to the ‘after Christopher Smart’ oevre, but I hope there’s entertainment value to it. It helps to know a wee bit about Ronnie, and about snooker (147 is the maximum you can score, by potting all 15 red balls, the black 15 times, and then all the colours in order.)
At the weekend I was watching Ronnie playing in the Masters and was overcome by the need to get the poem down on video. I’d had a glass of wine at the time and couldn’t recite the whole thing in one take, and the lighting and editing are a bit rough but HEY – it gets better as it goes along, so hang in there… maybe I’ll re-do it more slickly one of these days!
Just the other day Don Share posted on Twitter a link to a recording of Robert Frost reading ‘The Road Not Taken’. How wonderful to hear it in the poet’s voice. Here it is on YouTube:
Matthew Hollis, in his 2011 biography of Edward Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France, tells of Thomas’s distress at this poem, taking it so personally, in fact, that it was the final push that sent him off to war (and his death). This, despite Frost trying to reassure him the poem wasn’t meant as an admonishment for Thomas’s (self-perceived) cowardice or indecision, but rather a very mixed message indeed, full of ironies and what the poet called ‘the fun of the thing’.
In this early internet age of ‘fear of missing out’ – one of the truly troubling aspects of social media – the idea of being haunted by the road not taken, or the lives we might have lived or perhaps we feel we ought to be living, seems extraordinarily relevant.
As Philips puts it, “We have an abiding sense, however obscure and obscured, that the lives we do lead are informed by the lives that escape us,” going on to argue that our ‘wished for’ or fantasy lives, the ones we could have/might have lived, are as much a part of us as our real lives, and as Popova says, “the most ideal of these missed-out-on experiences reveal a great deal about the realest aspects of our lives.”
This is a fascinating read which got me thinking about so many aspects of online behaviour, not just FOMO or how the medium seems to fan the flames of envy, but also the holding power of online communities, fantasy worlds and games. I wrote an academic paper on the subject fifteen years ago entitled ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave’ – props to the first person to tell us in the comments what song that line comes from!
I was just reading this post on Rebecca Gethin’s blog and from there followed a link to Hannah Silva’s blog, which led me to watch some videos of her performing. Hannah’s amazing ‘sound poetry’ made me think again about the Magma theme ‘the music of words’ – I hope the editors are planning to include something by her.
… and then the mesmeric ‘Threshold’ seems to push the boundaries of poetry to its limits. As someone in the comments suggested, it’s not dissimilar to what some composers have done with music, for example Berio’s Sequenza for Voice which I once heard/saw performed by the wonderful soprano Lesley Jane Rogers. It’s a stunning piece of music, and Mozart it ain’t.
Feels like a breath of fresh air to stumble on something like this and find myself challenged out of my poetic comfort zone.
