Hi Arthur,
Your response to what Christina and I have been writing again shows more
feeling and engagement with the subject than the poem shows. That makes me
tend to think that the poem may not be capable of getting what you want to
get across.
I mean, in your messages you write so well about what The Flats has done to
the people (the children) you know who live there... Perhaps they need to be
part of the writing.
I know you sometimes write where people figure predominantly in the
pieces... I remember how vividly you sketched the characters on a bus
journey earlier this year. And I got a real flavour of the place when you
wrote about the people on the far-away island earlier in the year! In poems,
like with photographs, people can infer place.
Might it be that poems that focus on particular images of the place
alternating with poems that focus on the people might create a sequence that
gets close to where your responses to our comments get?
It could be that one poem isn’t enough to capture the flavour. It might be
that one poem might come out too much like condensed soup, or maybe like
powdered soup, too thick - or too dry. I’m wondering, y see, how poems can
open out into what you think and feel instead of closing down to either
suppress them or give impressions of what you don’t feel.
Anyway, I’m hoping to get away for a couple of days. But, if y want, y can
reply with other thoughts, and what we’re saying can take things even
further.
Bob
>From: arthur seeley <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: The Flats (Christina, Bob)
>Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2002 08:20:52 +0100
>
>Sorry to be so long in responding to your long and thoughtful comments,
>both of you. I have had pleasant family affairs to attend to.
>I concede that the middle two strophes do paint a rather misogynistic
>picture of the inhabitants. The bestial imagery suggests their animal
>behaviour and I recognise that and it was intended ( with no offence to the
>animals).
>However I am not a misogynist.
>I do not hate them, I hate what happens to them and what I know they let
>happen to them.
>As far as, ' Here, all are guttural, stiff-tongued........' our recent
>OFSTED report found the only two defects with our school that provided a '
>loving and caring ' ethos for the children were truancy and absenteeism,
>which is the only area where we were above national averages, and the
>'children were very weak in the spoken and listening skills'. The glottoral
>stop is almost universal now and the streams of invective I hear pour from
>an angry 7 year old would blister paint and that's to his mother on the
>bus. I passed a group of baseball hatted youths the other day and they
>seemed to communicate with grunts and shrugged shoulders and snorts. Of
>course it could be my hearing is deteriorating.
>I do not travel abroad much at night these days but when I do I almost
>always witness gangs of drunken youths fighting or chasing or vandalising.
>None of what I describe is particular to The Flats but they are all endemic
>to the place.
>My eyes filled with tears at the end of term assembly when I saw bright
>happy faces singing and yet I knew what the future held for them. They sang
>' One more step along the road I go........" and I saw only the abyss.
>I wonder do they make The Flats what they are or do the Flats create them?
>Bob, I cannot say I have read the books you refer to but think, of the
>books I have read, that ' Last Exit to Brooklyn' comes very close.
>However I hope you will allow a crusty, often disenchanted, old man, who
>still carries the banner for them, to vent his bitter disappointment
>occasionally.
>I have seen so many blossoms fall and rot in slimy streets.
>Regards Arthur
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