Our July theme, Communication, fitted a mixed bag of ideas, from steam trains to smart phones.
Zoom also was a mixed blessing; great as long as it was working properly.
In Wole Soyinka’s ‘Telephone Conversation’, the speaker has no little difficulty describing to a prospective landlady what colour he is.
WH Auden’s Night Mail cleverly creates the varying rhythms of a steam train as it heads north with the post including ‘letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands’ – memorably causing a jug on a bedside table to ‘gently shake’.
Krysten Hill’s ‘Nothing’ explores the many ways that she can be diminished by the word – ‘You’re nothing’, ‘It’s nothing’; but in the end her student’s joy is redeeming – when he writes, ‘nothing can stop him’.
A few verses of Robert Browning’s ‘How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix’ (‘I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he’) set up the joke for ‘How we brought the good news from Aix to Ghent’, the well-deserved parody by Sellars and Yeatman of ‘1066 and all that’ fame.
Another great hand at comedy, Brian Bilston, skewers social trends in the splendid ‘For we shall stare at mobile phones’.
In ‘Whatever you say, say nothing’, Seamus Heaney tells how your name will likely betray which side of the sectarian divide you were born on.
In Pablo Neruda’s ‘I’m explaining a few things’, the heightened, even surreal, poetic language describes his life in a Madrid suburb and then erupts into the horror of the civil war bombardment. The vividness of the translation attracted compliments.
Pushkin’s long poem ‘Eugene Onegin’ hinges on the letter Tatyana writes to Onegin. In the extract read, post the letter scene, she waits anxiously for his reply. The ‘Pushkin sonnet’ rhyme-scheme is an interesting feature, although the translator didn’t replicate the pattern of masculine and feminine endings in the original Russian.
In Blake’s miniature psychodrama ‘A Poison Tree’ from Songs of Experience, the poison has also affected the poisoner.
In Stevie Smith’s ‘Not waving but drowning’, the dead man chillingly gives us to understand that he was too far out all his life.
Wayne Carson fits the Communication theme well with his song title ‘The Letter’ and its beginning ‘Give me a ticket for an aeroplane’, etc – as recorded by the Box Tops and Joe Cocker it sold a zillion records, but what terrible lyrics!
You can read Chris Short’s ‘Metaphorce‘ elsewhere on this site. This led to a suggestion that we might try to write poems using the cited figures of speech – as I have done in this report. I also suggested trying to include all the answers from a specific forthcoming Guardian Quick crossword.
Finally, none of us remembered to bring along any poem that celebrated the day – 14th of July. I note that Blake’s Songs of Innocence was published in 1789, the year of the fall of the Bastille.
Litotes = understatement by use of negative e.g. not a few, not bad: Meiosis = understatement as litotes and other; e.g. some chicken, some neck!: Synecdoche = use of a part for the whole or vice versa, e.g. New faces. England (cricket team): Homonym = the same word (or one with the same sound) with different meanings e.g. hoarse/horse ; or lake (pigment) and lake (water body) having different etymologies: Periphrasis = in a round-about way, e.g. ‘The answer is in the negative’: Hyperbole = exaggeration (without deception intended), e.g. ‘a thousand thanks’.
I’d also like to encourage the other attendees at this meeting to add their observations about the poems read.
Great report of an excellent session! Hopefully we will ‘rise like lions’ to the challenge! Next time I will freeze my face when I want to. I refuse to be at the mercy of software!