Read the papers

Comments (9)

• On November 5, 2008 at 2:49 pm Doodle wrote:

  Dunno about the papers, but this particular poem would not, for me, be in the category of “news that stays news.”
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• On November 5, 2008 at 3:09 pm Jordan wrote:

  Should. A sound like a rocket launcher.
  One theory holds that poets should shield themselves from dispiriting news and mediocre writing; another, nothing human’s alien.
  For now it looks safe to come back in the ink.
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• On November 5, 2008 at 3:18 pm Aaron Fagan wrote:

  “For every poet it is always morning in the world. History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History. There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise.” —Derek Walcott
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• On November 5, 2008 at 6:27 pm john wrote:

  Jordan,
  Should you “should” us about our “should”s? Should you or shouldn’t you?
  Seldom say “never,” that’s what I always say.
  Just don’t point that rocket launcher at me!
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• On November 6, 2008 at 2:40 am Desmond Swords wrote:

  No jot of wind to stir the leaves
  on a hush November night
  only fourteen silent ghosts
  from a goal down the road
  whispering of slavery
  and subjagation
  inequality and doubt -
  that the freedom
  of humanity’s inalienable
  democratic right
  to believe this love now
  in Kilmainham
  John MacBride and Pádraic
  Pearse, Thomas Clarke
  and Éamonn Ceantt
  is the poetry unfolding
  on a cold November night
  Con Colbert, Joseph Plunkett,
  Seán Heuston and Willie Pearse
  who move within the canopy
  dissolving tyranny and fear
  James Connolly, Seán MacDermott,
  Michael Mallin and Rosa Parkes
  faced on a bus in Alabama
  Little Rock – Arkansa
  and on the day of execution
  of the life but not idea
  Thomas MacDonagh – Michael
  O’Hanrahan and Edward
  Daly forged, for a people
  with their blood, into belief
  the whole world loves
  a creed of hope, for freedom
  and peace to live.
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• On November 6, 2008 at 12:09 pm Lavinia Greenlaw wrote:

  Should we shy away from saying a poet (or poem) should or should not …?
  Why is being absolute so wrong and so hard?
  Why am I not making statements but asking questions?
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• On November 11, 2008 at 12:43 pm Katy Evans-Bush wrote:

  Coming in a bit late, to say that this poem seems like the poet reads the papers enough; he’s not trying to be “topical” in that trendy short-term sense – is he? He’s talking about an eternal verity. I’ve just written a post on my own blog about Joyce Kilmer being killed in the Great War 1914-1918, and I wrote that language is one of the ways we know we’re civilised human beings.
  Surely, if it’s worth looking backwards at the fallen of our wars, it’s also all right – at this highly symbolic juncture – for a black poet to look backwards at the fallen of our other history?
  Jut as a side issue, Lavinia who wrote this post is English. I’m in London. Lots of people I know over here have failed to understand just this symbolic valkue of Obama’s victory; in fact, I myself, engaging with it on a purely political level, was surprised to find myself completely overcome (that word) on the morning of the day, blubbing like a baby in front of the TV. Suddenly all the marches, riots, news reports, rallies, scary stories, bad experiences and terrible national guilt of my childhood came rushing back at me, but wrapped in this wonderful shining vision: Obama. Poor man! Walcott’s poem takes us back much further than my own childhood memories, to the Big American Image, the slave on the plantation, and puts each of us in relation to that again.
  On my blog this morning I quoted also a poem by Tom Disch which says just this, that the person who reads more poems is better able to understand the tree. Maybe the person who knows how to read something more elemental, more eternal, than a newspaper is also better able to understand – especially if he or she didn’t have that particular tortured American upbringing – Obama’s symbolic victory, as well as his quotidian one.
  It’ll all be fine. I’m sure Derek Walcott sees the news. It’ll be how he knew Obama had won the election.
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• On November 13, 2008 at 11:09 am Lavinia Greenlaw wrote:

  Katy, I’m sorry you’ve got the impression that we here fail to understand what Obama’s election means. It has been a lead news item even in the tabloid press and I have been struck by how a whole range of people have grasped quite how symbolic this is and have the sense that things have been profoundly changed by this event, whatever happens next. It has forced us to examine ourselves too and there has been a lot of debate about whether or not a black candidate could be elected here.
  My question was not loaded against Walcott, or his poem. It just struck me that the reader’s comment articulated an interesting broader issue.
  We may not have been dancing in the streets but, you know, we get so embarrassed about showing our feelings and it’s always raining (it really is).
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• On November 13, 2008 at 3:54 pm Desmond Swords wrote:

  I think Obama’s win will be good for dissolving the illusion that rich white heads of state with immense privilige selected solely on the basis of who their parents are, are somehow divorced and play no part to the proliferation of gobble dee gook language that became manifest the longer the New labour project ran. Blair began with good intentions:
  “It is in principle wrong and absurd that people should wield power on the basis of birth, not merit or election . . . There are no conceivable grounds for maintaining this system. Tony Blair, 1996
  At the start it was all fair play and whiff of righting the obvious inequalities hampering the socialist party’s main aim since it negan in the factories of late Victorian britain, when Kier Hardie spelled it out in the 1894, sppeech in Parliamen about the future Edward VIII
  “From his childhood onward this boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score, and will be taught to believe himself as of a superior creation. A line will be drawn between him and the people whom he is to be called upon some day to reign over.”
  Somehow, the principles of the Labour movement, reversed entirely. That equality for all based on merit not blatant rigged selection, and few equate the degradation of language there over the last ten years, with a primary root cause. Until there is a fair system without a few flattered rich people with a half page of distraction before you get to the mister and miss they are as human beings, this pverty of eloquence among the English poets, will contnue perhaps. The greatest figurehead was moaning of blockage becuase his boss took no interest in him. What did he expect?
  Traditionally, the plum subsidised numbers, and even to be considered a poet in the English tradition, one simply had to attend one of two places which 99% of British peple in education, do not attend and for far too long, the English poetry establishment has been little more than an extension of the Oxbridge common rooms, and the perculiarly insular vernacular of a few priviliged people, foisted on the citiziens there as somehow that of the majority of people who have no understadning of it. Spent grumps a lot of these poets end up, as it is a pied system in clear bias, or was until very recently. To self-enoble as a poet can only happen from within, and no amount of backslappers ganged up all agreeing someone is marvelous, no amount of money ocan buy eloquence, and it’s great Obama’s in as it sends out a message, anyone can be what they want, and Poetry in perilous times, re-capture the spirit of the humanist intelligensia, sadly very few of whom are capable of engaging in bardic discourse in England, it is my experience. But as the teacher of this lore, perhaps I can help out the poets who cannot inspire the youth of the 21C Britian by their words alone, and show them how it is done by example rather than rhetoric.
  Yes we can.
  ditch the feudalist figureheads, and breathe free
  at last, dream of the promised land where the delusion
  is no more, no dying by the million for families at war
  internet, dialogic two way communication, at last free
  speech in the age of the Democractic landslide
  speaking in print, prose, poetry, the whole nine
  hazels in soft dappled showers of sienna light
  as it wavers and ripples in ageless dumb wisdom,
  folding through strings in a wind chime of history
  that ring a bell our mind cannot muffle. Animal
  voiced, the fictional eye-witness woven within,
  who’ll rock, outpour and apportion in proper enobling
  form, myths the chief creators mouth in works of air.
  yah
  love and peace
  gra agus siochain
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