Every month we award a bottle of Glengoyne 10 year old single malt – the finest whisky available to humanity – to a commenter…
There were two outstanding candidates for our Comment of the Month in June, both concerned with poetry.
Jonathan Law’s revolutionary but utterly convincing theory about why all English poetry is really about the weather provided one of those ‘scales fall from the eyes’ moments:
There’s a view, of course, that every literary work, however seemingly apolitical, speaks of the social and material conditions that produced it, and on some level reflects on the political events of its own day and ours. I once read an essay of Tom Paulin’s, in which he goes to great and ingenious lengths to show that Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ is really about the Peterloo Massacre. After many years of reading the stuff, I think I’m slowly coming to the opposite conclusion — that all English poetry, whatever its ostensible subject, is really about the weather. Yes, from ‘Westron wind when wilt thou blow’ and ‘In a somer sesoun whan softe was the sonne’ and ‘Whan Aprille with its shoures soote’ to the good bits of Coleridge and Keats and Shelley and Tennyson and Hardy and Eliot (“April is the cruellest month”, “Midwinter spring is its own season”), it’s not about love or politics or religion — these are the merest excuses for writing — it’s all just a bunch of people making conversation about the weather.
But Jonathan has already claimed a bottle of Glengoyne from The Dabbler (although he forgot to take it home with him, and we still haven’t managed to post it – sorry about that, on the case now). Just as deserving a winner is debut commenter Katie, who gave us a devastating, vertiginous Found Poem…
Poems are hiding all over the place in plain view. May I share one of mine? I found this in the Orienteering chapter of an old copy of the Boy Scout Handbook; the section was called “Find Your Way.”
With simple means
and using your own personal measurements,
determine a height you cannot reach
and a width you cannot walk.
Call loudly for help if you are alone,
and keep on calling.
Heartbreaking stuff. Well done to Katie – we’ll be in touch about the booze.
Please note our criteria will not be the same every month – we really could choose a winner for any reason at all, so keep commenting all, and do join in if you’ve never commented before!
