Our October meeting was ‘a game of two halves’, and avoided being ‘all work and no play’. ‘Work is a 4-letter word’ (as is Poem), but in the second half we were concerned with 14-letter words or phrases as the basis for acrostic sonnets.
David Aldred’s excellent villanelle “Struggle” proposes that work is more rewarding than idleness. You can read it elsewhere on this site.
U A Fanthorpe’s “You will be hearing from us shortly” is a splendidly satirical account of a job interview.
In “The Chimney Sweeper” (William Blake), a happy dream consoles Tom while doing his grim work.
Like Tom’s visiting angel, Elizabeth Jennings’ “Night Sister” brings comfort. The poem has an unusual formal scheme.
The same poet’s “Diamond Cutter” evokes the meticulous and risky work involved, also throwing out various enigmatic ideas in its short span.
Helping to shift bales into the barn can be fun for the recipient of “Hay for the Horses”, while Gary Snyder shows us also the hard work of delivering it, year in year out, with wry humour.
Adrian Mitchell’s “Golo, the Gloomy Goalkeeper”, occupies himself with increasingly fantastic tasks as his expert team-mates keep the game always well away from his goal. The same poet vividly describes his experiences of work as a poet invited to schools, in “The Olchfa Reading”.
Ken Gambles read his own poem in which the barber is told how the Pope himself was impressed by one customer’s Cudworth Haircut – which is not, in this case at least, a euphemism for something the Barnsley Mafia mete out to their enemies. We also heard Ken’s “The Examination”.
Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” is a beautiful comparison of his father’s expertise with a peat-spade and the poet’s with a pen. In contrast, Heaney’s “Docker” is a brutal personification of the cranes and ships among which he works.
“My Father”, from Ted Hughes’ “Meet my Folks”, is the Chief Inspector of Holes. Definitely the sort of work where you never know what each day will bring.
BT proudly announced that they were replacing their usual advert for superfast broadband with the present Poet Laureate’s “Something Clicked” on 1 October to celebrate National Poetry Day 2020. Thus replacing one advert with another…. Simon Armitage’s poem is not exclusively about work, but it does tell us ‘now the commute’s a superfast hop and a skip from toothbrush to keyboard’, amongst many other fine expressions of how BT broadband can improve our lives. I don’t feel very comfortable with this, especially as BT’s earlier adverts for this service have been censured and their guarantee of £100 off, if it doesn’t work as promised, is not as generous as it is intended to appear.
There wasn’t time to read it, but we recommend revisiting the song “Shipbuilding” with Elvis Costello’s ingenious and moving lyrics.
We also noted that many poems by Thomas Hardy referring to various trades are not about the work, but about the little and large tragedies in the lives of the persons depicted. The Pine Planters, The Workbox, The Clock Winder, The Old Workman, and The Bird-catcher’s Boy are all affecting tales.
Finally regarding ‘Work’, mention must be made of Walt Whitman’s ‘A Song for Occupations’. His passion for list-making is indulged to the full here, in an exhaustive recitation of jobs from ice-sawing to pyrotechny.
Now to our second half. Three responses to the challenge to create an acrostic sonnet were read; “Mother Shiptons”, “Representation”, and “Toast”. These conformed very well to the demands of the challenge and went beyond those technical requirements to create engaging poems. They, and further contributions to this challenge, can be read elsewhere on this site.
Incidentally, we noted Robert Macfarlane’s acrostic poem (though not a sonnet) ‘Goldfinch’, recently published in The Guardian along with a splendid illustration by Jackie Morris. This is from their new book The Lost Spells, a follow-up to 2018’s widely popular The Lost Words.