stephen, be careful of the whisky!
i too am not an acolyte of JHP, altho' i think he's an able poet i find
the claims implied for his work border on the absurd. i can't tell what
the devil Drew Milne's review of 'Not-You' meant at all. i can
sympathise with the statement that 'love of semi-conductors is not
enough' but don't know why anyone would want to put it in a poem.
in the meantime, here's a prosicle about our Liter-ature:
Evidence of Decay
or the Great Tradition's Dismay
AutoDavid lay in partial ruin on a disused factory's floor. Sadly,
sourly, he studied his steelgrey disarray: this missing here, that
missing there.
With a nod at Don Quixote, and a rueful countenance, but restored to
the possiblity of smiling, he raised himself to upright re-assemblance
and, recalling the notion of retrieval, he trundled down a chill and
torn-paper strewn floor.
‘What', he thought, ‘has happened to the promises of my birth. What has
happened to the glories of inheritance?'
As if in answer, or as if in mocking, bales of distorted quotations
awoke from the litter: the Ancient Mariner swaggered with his pet
albatross; Hamlet bored everyone with wedding snaps of Ophelia; Homer
declaimed peace on earth and deep interest in vegetarianism and was this
California circa 1969?; Jane Austen started shouting; Virgil cocked a
snook at Augustus; The Light Brigade charged Tennyson; Marcel Proust
incinerated his sickbed; Great Expectations won the National Lottery;
Tolstoy shaved his beard and turned into an arms dealer; Dante cut down
a forest while Alexander Pope said nice things about people and the soul
of William Shakespeare gave money away to all.
AutoDavid slowed, froze, stopped. He said (to himself), lowly,
surreptitiously, as if afraid of being overheard:
‘I'm getting too old for all this'.
© David Bircumshaw 1999
the odd italics missing because of e-mail, but nevertheless.
regards
david
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