Hi Colin,

You write: "I wrote it after reading the work of Ted Hughes, especially 
"Crow". TH must have known that a crow was another bird to sit alongside 
Nightingale, Skylark, Thrush and the other symbolic birds of literature. "

Yeh, I did think about Hughes's Crow (honest!). But I guess I think of Huge 
Ted's huge crow as not being as much a real bird in the real world but a 
mythical bird... I'd got the impression that you were focused more on 
this-worldy gannets on a this-worldly cliff!

I mean I was chatting to a mate yesterday (like y do in a pub when the 
football's not yet on the TV...) and, out of the blue, he mentioned he'd 
walked past a dead crown on the pavement on his way down. "I'd never seen a 
crow look like that!" he said, "It was dead, it was... real!" I guess you'd 
have to have seen the look in his eyes as he said these things to get the 
full significance of what he was saying but it was so far from Huge Ted's 
Crow as well. (We went on to chat about Crow, the book, but that then became 
a very different conversation...)

Huge Ted's nature poetry – and Crow, I guess, owes a lot to how he made his 
name with the Jaguar and The Thought Fox, etc – is often more visceral, more 
focused on one moment. But Crow is also something different – it seems to be 
offering a broody, dark, alternative metaphysic… It seems to be a crow in 
Huge Ted's head... and it seems to be the least quoted, perhaps least read 
and appreciated, of his books. Somehow I didn't (couldn't?) read about your 
gannets as being in the head... they seemed to be represented as out there 
and not (he says tapping his head) in here...

I guess, with your gannets, I’m suggesting that you need to signal what 
you’re doing a tad more clearly… help the reader (or, at least this reader!) 
step away from the realism that underpins, say, the poems about you and your 
children walking along the path and, more recently, splashing in the burn. 
Why am I suggesting a different approach? Because it’s rarely done? 
Probably! It reads so different to poems focused on people and where they 
are (and my reading's probably coloured by lots of what I've read before as 
well as what I read in your poem).

So, when you write: "Why not integrate different frames of reference and 
include the scatological and the sublime in one poem?"  I think you're 
asking a question that matters! (Well, it's a question that matters to me as 
well!). Playing with different registers in the same poem is fun - but, for 
me at least, not easy to pull off!

Bob


>From: Colin dewar <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: feedback/gannets
>Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2003 20:08:53 +0100
>
>Mike, Sue and Bob,
>
>A big TVM all round for the comments. The poem of course is about people 
>rather than gannets. I wrote it after reading the work of Ted Hughes, 
>especially "Crow". TH must have known that a crow was another bird to sit 
>alongside Nightingale, Skylark, Thrush and the other symbolic birds of 
>literature. There's an acknowledgement to "Crow" in my poem. I felt that as 
>a comment on existence (to all intents and purposes human existence) TH's 
>work had its limitations, that it was too polarised (his reaction I suppose 
>to what had gone before) and didn't incorporate much sense of the near 
>universal longing for transcendence. Why not integrate different frames of 
>reference and include the scatological and the sublime in one poem? A small 
>objection only. A greater objection I had was that "Crow" didn't include 
>any social component. When we look at other species to provide insight on 
>our own, it is substantially their social interaction that interests us. 
>There is a tradition of studying this in Zoology. In Matt Ridley's "The Red 
>Queen" for instance the author describes a colony of birds in such a way 
>that it seems he is describing people. His account is read as if they were 
>people. Then once he reveals the protagonists as birds, and you look back, 
>there is nothing inconsistent with avian life.
>
>I acknowledge that I stick my neck out more than Matt Ridley (and reverse 
>the comparison along the way). But do I go further than Huge Ted? Surely 
>not. If you read "Crow"  it is saturated with reactions to things that a 
>real crow would not experience. eg "Crow realised there were two gods" and 
>so on. So that's my mischievous question to Bob, Sue and Mike, who 
>criticised the anthropomorphism of the poem (and justly I think - so a bit 
>of Devil's advocate here): why can Huge Ted be allowed to do it but not 
>small Colin? Or should we be felled with the same scythe?
>
>Colin
>
>

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