Well, Lawrence, I like both the poem - said it aloud - and the exegesis! I
am glad others pointed to the switch in pace with the last verse cos I first
read it all at a pace, damaging the gear change near the end (just to mix my
metaphors). Thanks for both.
Andrew
On 28 July 2011 00:41, Lawrence Upton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Thanks, Doug and Barry
>
> I've been trying to do something with that brief narrow landscape for a
> long time. I go through it in a wheeled glass and metal box many days of
> the year.
>
> At first there are illusions of the rural; but closer / more intensely
> seen it's always unexpected and counter intuitive; and I've gone back and
> found it unexpected and counter intuitive again --
>
> I've long enjoyed that moment in Peacock's Headlong Hall where a garden is
> said to be designed to surprise the visitor and someone asks what happens
> if one visits twice. That's never answered.
>
> I have come recently to the idea that some urban scenes DO surprise a
> second time round but without any designer's intention. It's not seeing
> more in a made thing; but just emotionally banging each time into oddity.
>
> I can hardly remember the Peacock novel but I suspect that the aim was to
> surprise and delight; and I don't get much innate delight in this context.
> It's more the worried surprise of a cat of my acquaintance EVERY time the
> computer boots and goes bong.
>
> Trying to make a poem is one way to cope.
>
> and it's only making this poem - or maybe the poems leading up to it
> which no one will see - that I have fully absorbed how different this
> landscape is in its different stretches.
>
> That's ridiculous because it's obvious, once I have said it; but I am
> still trying to absorb how this works. It's not geological. That sense of
> hills of flowering bushes becoming valleys as the train moves only comes
> when lines branch; and the stretch between Croydon and Norwood is a tangle
> of joining and crossing lines.
>
> This may be the most visually interesting stretch; but perhaps it behoves
> me to make a set of poems for the different stretches
>
> Sometimes I take a _pretty route_ via Crystal Palace, not only a 19th
> century folly of a station (complete with shuttered off platform and
> stairs brightly lit all the time) but a slight rise which makes for
> variations on the illusions of the rural. I've been studying how the
> railway manages it to get up and down, branching off from the main north
> south multiple lines and then, where necessary, crossing over above those
> lines -- and it came to me last night that it's quite like the problem for
> 2 dimensional creatures in Dewdney's Planiverse, the rails abolishing the
> free movement in three dimensions.
>
> A comment which won't help those who don't know that book!
>
> & I have thought of something Rory Stewart wrote about coming back to
> London after walking across Afghanistan -- it was to do with the
> completeness of cover by asphalt and concrete and the outside of this city
> being like one room.
>
> I haven't quite got it yet -- or rather it was a perception of such oddity
> and penetration that I am still exploring it. I think my experience is
> slightly different to Stewart's -- and my ability to walk great distance
> possibly not so good -- and I see it -- the urban out there -- as a kind
> of rhetorical product
>
> I think.
>
> Er.
>
> It wasn't that easy to write but I am quite pleased with it and *very
> happy that you got something out of it.
>
> May the vacuum bless you both
>
> L
>
--
Andrew
http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
'Mother Waits for Father Late' republished available at
http://www.picaropress.com/
http://www.qlrs.com/poem.asp?id=766
http://frankshome.org/AndrewBurke.html
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