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livSo April is sometimes National Poetry Month in the Nation of Internet. And there's an uptick in poetry on my d-roll and in my internet life generally, and this is pleasing. One that caught my eye recently was from zarhooie: The sciences sing a lullabye. Really made me smile, especially
I also learned from Facebook that someone I knew slightly at school was a poet, and also that she died a couple of years ago. I had, honestly, almost forgotten who Megan was until I saw FB posts about an event being held in her memory. We were sometimes friends, in some way; she was part of the train crowd who commuted quite long distances to school by train. She was somewhat prickly and drama-prone, and I was impatient and unsympathetic, so the bond-between-social-outcasts interactions we had never quite blossomed into ongoing friendship. I'm glad to know she did well for herself in the few decades she had, and sorry that it was so few.
And my brother-the-poet managed to get a very short slot on Radio 4 talking about poetry and masculinity. If you're in the right time and place to have access to iPlayer, it's from about 1hr 54 minutes in Saturday's Today. He reads a little snippet from Jean Binta Breeze, putting on a Jamaican accent to match the patois in which her poem is written. Raised-by-the-internet liberal me feels a bit weird hearing my not at all Jamaican brother "doing" accents like that. But equally, reading that poem in the approved poetry reading south-east English middle class dialect would be doing it a huge disservice, and really how often do you ever hear poems by non-British anglophone women on Radio 4 at all? Everything else mentioned in that little 6 minute slot before the 9 o'clock news is absolutely obvious, Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin, Wilfred Owen. All good poets, all dead white men who spoke and wrote in standard English. Sometimes Irish and Scottish poets get a look-in, though they have to be very famous indeed to counterbalance writing in clearly marked regional English.
In any case, Sam's accent when he's just participating in the discussion rather than officially declaiming poetry is... markedly different from my accent, let's say. You wouldn't guess that he was raised by the same RP-speaking parents as me, attended the sister private school to mine, and has a degree from the same perceived-as-posh university I attended. He sounds, indeed, almost out of place on Radio 4. Which makes me think of all the gender theory stuff about how gender presentation is all performance; class presentation no less so!
When I happened to run into my brother in the pub the other day, he mentioned that the rest of the panel had expressed rather shocked reactions when he noted that
zarhooie: The sciences sing a lullabye. Really made me smile, especially Of course
You're tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
I also learned from Facebook that someone I knew slightly at school was a poet, and also that she died a couple of years ago. I had, honestly, almost forgotten who Megan was until I saw FB posts about an event being held in her memory. We were sometimes friends, in some way; she was part of the train crowd who commuted quite long distances to school by train. She was somewhat prickly and drama-prone, and I was impatient and unsympathetic, so the bond-between-social-outcasts interactions we had never quite blossomed into ongoing friendship. I'm glad to know she did well for herself in the few decades she had, and sorry that it was so few.
And my brother-the-poet managed to get a very short slot on Radio 4 talking about poetry and masculinity. If you're in the right time and place to have access to iPlayer, it's from about 1hr 54 minutes in Saturday's Today. He reads a little snippet from Jean Binta Breeze, putting on a Jamaican accent to match the patois in which her poem is written. Raised-by-the-internet liberal me feels a bit weird hearing my not at all Jamaican brother "doing" accents like that. But equally, reading that poem in the approved poetry reading south-east English middle class dialect would be doing it a huge disservice, and really how often do you ever hear poems by non-British anglophone women on Radio 4 at all? Everything else mentioned in that little 6 minute slot before the 9 o'clock news is absolutely obvious, Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin, Wilfred Owen. All good poets, all dead white men who spoke and wrote in standard English. Sometimes Irish and Scottish poets get a look-in, though they have to be very famous indeed to counterbalance writing in clearly marked regional English.
In any case, Sam's accent when he's just participating in the discussion rather than officially declaiming poetry is... markedly different from my accent, let's say. You wouldn't guess that he was raised by the same RP-speaking parents as me, attended the sister private school to mine, and has a degree from the same perceived-as-posh university I attended. He sounds, indeed, almost out of place on Radio 4. Which makes me think of all the gender theory stuff about how gender presentation is all performance; class presentation no less so!
When I happened to run into my brother in the pub the other day, he mentioned that the rest of the panel had expressed rather shocked reactions when he noted that
much of masculinity as an identity is the desire not to be described as feminine or gay. I live in such a bubble that that comment seemed almost a truism to me; is it really still controversial to mention the word "gay" or allude to gender theory on Radio 4 these days? Anyway, he has written what I think is rather an impressive blog post expanding what he meant by that comment. So I commend anyone who's interested in poetry and gender to his erudite yet accessible piece: Poems that make men cry.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-08 06:02 pm (UTC)I love that image of atoms dancing the shimmy!
(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-10 03:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-04-12 06:54 pm (UTC)