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"Coo er gosh, look at him posting about poetry."
"Ever since he got his fancy new Dreamwidth, he's changed, you know."
"Yeah. He wouldn't have posted about poetry on his old LiveJournal."
Crikey. You tell me if I'm being pretentious, and I'll summarise a discussion we had on the last night shift about farting, or something.
So last week a new Poet Laureate was, I suppose, laurelled. The incumbent, Carol Ann Duffy, is (according to the BBC) the first Scot and the first woman to hold the position in its 341-year history. It is unclear to what extent there has been prejudice in the past regarding selection. The BBC suggest that she was considered and rejected the last time the position was available in 1999 not due to her nationality or her gender but due to her previous partner. I haven't seen any suggestions that the selection this time was anything other than meritocratic, which is long overdue as well as the way it should be. Good luck to her; while writing royal poetry is a tradition rather than a requirement of the Poet Laureate position, I think I'd rather have had the events in the lives of the Windsor family of 1999-2009 to write about than the events of 2009-2019.
She is not the poet about whom I write today, though. The BBC also responded to the announcement by getting seven other poets to commit a little poetry upon the occasion; sometimes a very little. Now I have to admit, probably with less guilt than I should, that my taste in poetry - such as it is - is rudimentary at best, the like of Edmund Lear's nonsense poetry and such. I can't say that I had encountered the work of Carol Ann Duffy (and I wonder whether the middle name is a given name like that of Jamie Lee Curtis or a surname like that of Ian Duncan Smith?) beforehand, to my knowledge; I only recognised one of the seven other poets, Lemn Sissay, and that was from seeing the side of the Hardy's Well pub on the Curry Mile in Manchester.
However, out of the seven poets' work on the page, the two poems that spoke to me most were the two from Anneliese Emmans Dean, who is a poet, composer, wildlife photographer and performer from York. Now two poems do not a "favourite poet" make, but they're a fine start. The standard philistine line at this point would be to disclaim my knowledge of art followed by "but I know what I like", but that's being lazy at best. I don't claim that this will be any more than the most superficial or rudimentary sort of analysis, but writing about things I like is fun, and writing about things I like outside my usual genres... makes a change.
The short piece is a goof on one of the translations of the Prayer of St. Francis, which will resonate with many of my generation not only as a famous prayer but also as a hymn from school. The notion that a Poet Laureate might celebrate a royal wedding with a limerick is delightfully silly, and concluding a relatively reverent tribute with a throw-away killer line as a parenthetical remark tickles my funny bone.
( It's the longer piece, On The Role Of The Next Century's Poet Laureate, that really did it for me. Longish, plus analysis, but worth it. )It's a fast poem. It's a fun poem. I love it, and I don't generally sit down to take the time to react to poetry, but it's hard not to be grabbed by this. While I wish Carol Ann Duffy a prosperous reign as Poet Laureate - and has anyone said whether or not this will be a finite ten-year appointment like Andrew Motion's? - I'll be keeping my eyes open for more here. If I can't have someone on my Friends list become the next Poet Laureate (and, for instance,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
myfirstkitchen - in another ten years, why not?) then Anneliese Emmans Dean is, at this early stage, first choice in my putative Fantasy Poets League team.
Unrelatedly, Meg's sisterlatemodelchild has come to visit for a couple of weeks! I'm really glad she could make it here, we're all having lots of fun - including our lovely, silly cats! - and I think my sister-in-law is really enjoying the trip too, but a knock-on effect of space concerns is that I regard myself as "not online much" for at least the next week and a half.
"Ever since he got his fancy new Dreamwidth, he's changed, you know."
"Yeah. He wouldn't have posted about poetry on his old LiveJournal."
Crikey. You tell me if I'm being pretentious, and I'll summarise a discussion we had on the last night shift about farting, or something.
So last week a new Poet Laureate was, I suppose, laurelled. The incumbent, Carol Ann Duffy, is (according to the BBC) the first Scot and the first woman to hold the position in its 341-year history. It is unclear to what extent there has been prejudice in the past regarding selection. The BBC suggest that she was considered and rejected the last time the position was available in 1999 not due to her nationality or her gender but due to her previous partner. I haven't seen any suggestions that the selection this time was anything other than meritocratic, which is long overdue as well as the way it should be. Good luck to her; while writing royal poetry is a tradition rather than a requirement of the Poet Laureate position, I think I'd rather have had the events in the lives of the Windsor family of 1999-2009 to write about than the events of 2009-2019.
She is not the poet about whom I write today, though. The BBC also responded to the announcement by getting seven other poets to commit a little poetry upon the occasion; sometimes a very little. Now I have to admit, probably with less guilt than I should, that my taste in poetry - such as it is - is rudimentary at best, the like of Edmund Lear's nonsense poetry and such. I can't say that I had encountered the work of Carol Ann Duffy (and I wonder whether the middle name is a given name like that of Jamie Lee Curtis or a surname like that of Ian Duncan Smith?) beforehand, to my knowledge; I only recognised one of the seven other poets, Lemn Sissay, and that was from seeing the side of the Hardy's Well pub on the Curry Mile in Manchester.
However, out of the seven poets' work on the page, the two poems that spoke to me most were the two from Anneliese Emmans Dean, who is a poet, composer, wildlife photographer and performer from York. Now two poems do not a "favourite poet" make, but they're a fine start. The standard philistine line at this point would be to disclaim my knowledge of art followed by "but I know what I like", but that's being lazy at best. I don't claim that this will be any more than the most superficial or rudimentary sort of analysis, but writing about things I like is fun, and writing about things I like outside my usual genres... makes a change.
The short piece is a goof on one of the translations of the Prayer of St. Francis, which will resonate with many of my generation not only as a famous prayer but also as a hymn from school. The notion that a Poet Laureate might celebrate a royal wedding with a limerick is delightfully silly, and concluding a relatively reverent tribute with a throw-away killer line as a parenthetical remark tickles my funny bone.
( It's the longer piece, On The Role Of The Next Century's Poet Laureate, that really did it for me. Longish, plus analysis, but worth it. )It's a fast poem. It's a fun poem. I love it, and I don't generally sit down to take the time to react to poetry, but it's hard not to be grabbed by this. While I wish Carol Ann Duffy a prosperous reign as Poet Laureate - and has anyone said whether or not this will be a finite ten-year appointment like Andrew Motion's? - I'll be keeping my eyes open for more here. If I can't have someone on my Friends list become the next Poet Laureate (and, for instance,
myfirstkitchen - in another ten years, why not?) then Anneliese Emmans Dean is, at this early stage, first choice in my putative Fantasy Poets League team.Unrelatedly, Meg's sister
latemodelchild has come to visit for a couple of weeks! I'm really glad she could make it here, we're all having lots of fun - including our lovely, silly cats! - and I think my sister-in-law is really enjoying the trip too, but a knock-on effect of space concerns is that I regard myself as "not online much" for at least the next week and a half.