Ink Pink You Stink

When was the last time you read some poetry?

Years ago, about the last time you had the high school uniform on, I reckon. Not including you there Blaze, I know you often put a school uniform on but we are not talking about that today.

And why is it that hardly anyone cares for poetry? Why does poetry have a bad rep?

Now admittedly it doesn’t help itself. I feel sorry; I really do for English teachers having to “teach” poetry. Especially when there was no real attempt to link the content of what they taught to any of the current happenings in the world. Teaching a bunch of sweaty, disinterested school kids dozing off on a hot Queensland afternoon the following stanza from Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale is like being a Parking Inspector. A thankless task.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

         Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country green,

         Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!

O for a beaker full of the warm South,

         Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

                With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

                        And purple-stained mouth;

         That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

                And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Even now I want to like it and I almost get the appeal but then it drifts away from me. But like all things there is good, bad and in between in poetry. Maybe the trick is to be a little less restrictive about what poetry is.

As teenagers we were all mad keen to tell limericks like

There once was a man from Kent.
Whose dick was so long it was bent
To stay out of trouble
He put it in doubled
And instead of coming he went.

Laugh, we sure did and it is poetry of a sort so maybe teachers should of used limericks as a starting point in their opening of minds to the joys of verse.

Or even better why not use to song lyrics like Pink Floyd’s masterpiece “Comfortably Numb.” I know that lyrics are not quite the same as poems but close enough to help if the goal is to get a love for words and language instilled in us all.

‘There is no pain, you are receding,

A distant ship smoke on the horizon.

You are only coming through in waves,

Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying.

Or Mr. Billy Bragg’s great rhyming couplet below, a fantastic example of how poetry can paint beautiful mind images and generate powerful emotions.

“In the end it took me a dictionary to find out the meeting of unrequited,

while you were giving yourself for free at a party to which I was never invited.”

Poems sometimes pop up in movies. Context can help poems come to life for the reader so this helps. Four Weddings and A Funeral featured W H Auden’s awesome poem of grief “Funeral Blues.” The last stanza is below.

“The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.”

Of course as you get older and if you like to read, poetry becomes more and more appealing and you realise that not everything has to rhyme or be in iambic pentameter. Or you might be exposed to rigidly structured Japanese Haikus that even when translated, and as a result losing a lot of their craft, are quite wonderful and fantastic at conjuring a mental picture with lots of layers.

“A summer river being crossed

how pleasing

with sandals in my hands!”

You might remember something from school and you revisit it with some life experience under your belt and then realize fuck that is really quite wonderful. I experienced that with Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

    I took the one less traveled by,

    And that has made all the difference.”

I am saying all this because I have just finished reading a poem that is over 200 pages long. It is The Long Take by Robin Robertson.

Obviously this is a special poem. The Long Take is a poem, part stream of consciousness, and part narrative about a Canadian WW2 veteran struggling to cope post combat in New York and then California in the late 1940s and 1950s. It links his experiences on the streets to real life happenings in LA and San Francisco at the time. Most importantly the poem refers both in content and style to the great Film Noir movies being made and shown at the time. Dark films of sin, of gangsters and femme fatales, whisky and cigarettes, the mean streets and dark underbelly of the post war boom, jazz, corruption and paranoia.

Reading it is like watching a black and white crime movie but with everything in the written words. Not just dialogue and thoughts, but word pictures of the locations and the action. It is like a novel but it isn’t because like any good poem all the flab has been stripped away, everything conveyed with just the right amount and choice of words.

Below are two excerpts.

‘And there it was: the swell
and glitter of it like a standing wave –
the fabled, smoking ruin, the new towers rising
through the blue,
the ranked array of ivory and gold, the glint,
the glamour of buried light
as the world turned round it
very slowly
this autumn morning, all amazed.”

 “The next day, the carnival is gone.
All that’s left is the flattened grass
and trodden ground,
the litter of popcorn boxes,
Dixie cups and empty bottles.
It looks like the place
where some huge, fantastic beast had foraged
and lain for a while
before moving on.”

Those last four lines about a huge fantastic beast are perfect as a metaphor for a travelling carnival.

Give it a read if you like Bukowsky, Cain or Chandler or Ellroy.

Give it a read even if you don’t like poetry.

Relevant movies

Kiss Me Deadly

The Big Sleep

Double Indemnity

Or more recently Chinatown, LA Confidential

Relevant tunes

 Jazz baby, especially hard, fast, virtuosic Bebop - Check out Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk

And also laid-back West Coast Jazz

People like Chet Baker, Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck.

And if you feel like getting grabby with your favourite dame then something romantic like

Since I Fell For You, Tenderly