Can I reply to everyone at once
Vera, Roger (any relation to Andrew Collett by the way?) thanks for yr
comments about the notes. I guess I thought that if the Waste Land can have
notes, so can I. But in future I willjust leave people to flounder. Joanne,
OK I will re write with more birds and I note that everybody hates the
ending. I was trying to make the ending anachronistic, maybe it is too
anachronistic
(in the same way that I am too sexy for my shirt)
Bob, I was aiming for an effect half way between Gerard Manley Hopkins and
the "kennings" of Anglo Saxon poetry I am pleased you found assonances of
the Eighteenth century pastoral in there but I think if I turn it into
See from the brake, the whiring pheasant springs
And mounts exultant on triumphant wings
It wouldbe a very different animal (or hedge)
Good stuff this. Sainsbury's spanish brandy at under £10 a bottle.
STEVE
----- Original Message -----
From: Bob Cooper <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, September 08, 2001 6:33 PM
Subject: Re: New sub: the Domesday Hedge
> Steve,
> I like reading yr poem. I keep reading it.
>
> And it really reminds me of the style and wit of 18th Century English
verse.
> Its pastoral lament seems similar to Goldsmith where he recognised the
> ending of rural ways of life with the advent of industrialisation. (Then
> came Wordsworth & Coleridge advocating a new approach to language in poems
> and a more personalised approach to the world around us). Have you thought
> of acknowledging the period even further in the style and form youre
using?
> Maybe developing the way sound works at the end of lines - no need for the
> rhyming COUPLETS that dominated what most people seem to read and remember
> from that century - but something a bit more subtle, some sound patterns
> that develops what youre doing with the words youre using anyway. Im
> thinking that because a good few line endings resonate with each other and
> satisfy the ear already. Your half-rhymes have a lingering sadness that
> would be lost if stronger rhymes were found. Subtle poem, subtle sounds.
Let
> the poem be like the hedge: not revealing its details, hiding things, yet
> as your poem is there with its complexities and simpleness of just being
> there.
>
> Im also thinking it seems a shame to end such a vividly active and visual
> poem (and a poem that plays with the almost lost words of our language so
> well) with such an abstract last word. I feel as if I dont want to be
> told what I may discover for myself.
>
> If you think you may follow Joannes comment and think of the birds and
> the wildlife - (hedges are council estates for birds and motorways for
> rodents!) then a quick skeg at John Clares poems, where he describes
living
> things and their environs so sensitively, may be enjoyable too (but his
use
> of, and way of choosing, words isnt the same as yours).
>
> And, because you are describing the hedge in the first lines anyway you
may
> be able to do something with the title (I sense Im being told its a hedge
> twice!). But theres plenty people do that, and, in the end, this may be a
> poem that can do no other... But its a possibility for tightening this up
> (and maybe getting into the poem, like Pushkin advocated, as if the first
> act of a play has already started).
>
> Bob
>
>
>
> >From: Steve Rudd <[log in to unmask]>
> >Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
> >To: [log in to unmask]
> >Subject: New sub: the Domesday Hedge
> >Date: Sat, 8 Sep 2001 00:04:15 +0100
> >
> >This is about a hedge near our office. I doubt it really is a Domesday
> >Hedge (though there ARE some, in the English Landscape), it's probably
> >about 18th century, but it just seemed a good metaphor for the way a lot
of
> >things have been changed this year. Apologies if you knew this already
but
> >the "Bishop's Terrier" mentioned, is an ecclesiastical land survey
(Terrare
> >= land) not a holier-than-thou Jack Russell. Pity.
> >The Domesday Hedge
> >
> >Nine hundred and fifteen is the age of the hedge
> >
> >Numbered by nine hundred winters' blast,
> >
> >By those same summers, sap-fed:
> >
> >It has been storm-tossed, wind-ruffled, rain-drenched,
> >
> >With its white webs autumn-dancing with dew:
> >
> >And mouse and shrew scampering beneath, squeak and patter,
> >
> >Feet rustling the years past, their poor small bones
> >
> >Becoming lost white patterns on leaf-mould
> >
> >Dappling the meadow paddock each autumn
> >
> >As the wind moans and the Keck nods its Queen Anne Lace
> >
> >Over strip, ridge and furrow, over the dun fallows watched by owls,
> >
> >Where Ealdormen rode the lanes to the whale-road,
> >
> >Counting your yards and furlongs, marking plough turns and headlands.
> >
> >While branches swung, heavy with dawn-birds, your lines were
> >
> >Enumerated by Thanes, grain-boundaries scratched on vellum,
> >
> >Demesned and enclosed, sake, soc, and quitrent,
> >
> >Rogation-beaten, part of the Bishop's Terrier,
> >
> >Boxing fields tilled by Shires with chestnut-buffed tackle.
> >
> >Bordered by lost generations of cow-parsley,
> >
> >Michelmas, Candlemas, Plough-Mondayed, and moon-wintered.
> >
> >
> >* * *
> >
> >How many more Springs, I wonder, will we see
> >
> >You quarter the field of vert proper, its fleurs-de-lys green-laid
> >
> >With your traceried escutcheon; now that a new plague
> >
> >Blackens your land, and shepherds pipe a bitter eclogue?
> >
> >And has the Norman's misnomer come home to roost at last, come true,
> >
> >As the smoke rises over silent byres, over dung still body-warm,
> >
> >And you become less of a hedge, an edge, and more anachronism?
> >
> >
> >
>
>
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