This Week: Puppet Furballs and Edward Lear
Perhaps rather surprisingly for a literature student, I'm not very hot on poetry. Sure there are poems and poets I like: Byron, Shelley and Keats are a good trio, with William Blake popping his head round the door a few times, Philip Larkin and Roger McGough, as well as John Betjeman and Ted Hughes are probably the only 20th century poets I can stand, while the newly-laureled Carol-Ann Duffy is a great source of mirth and angst (nobody does literature like the lesbians); but that's pretty much it. Ask me about American poetry, and I could only mark out Edgar Allan Poe, and name Jack Kerouac and Walt Whitman, though I've never even read anything written by the latter two. Venturing outside of the English language, I get even more stuck: I can tell you what a Haiku is, but I couldn't name a prominent Haiku poet. Even in Spanish and Latin American literature, only three names come to mind: Federico García Lorca, Rubén Darío and Pablo Neruda. In short, I'm shit at poetry.However, if there's one genre of poetry I can easily handle, it's Nonsense. Probably because a large majority of what comes out of my mouth can be classified as such. Edward Lear's The Owl and The Pussycat was probably the first poem I ever "understood". For some reason, I got it: it was just a load of rubbish, but put together in the right way, with a few well-placed made-up words, beauty could be created. Listen to Lord Purrpurr - of Fuzzberrys Fame - put it to music and maybe you'll understand; or maybe you won't, but does that matter?
Sanya you're quite made... That's a lovely clip though.
ReplyDeleteMy interest in poetry is absolutely minimal. I love words, I love language, but it just doesn't work for me.
It is a lovely tidbit, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteI know exactly what you mean. As I say, I enjoy some poetry, but I don't feel it as much as I do prose and drama. Although verse drama (ie most Renaissance drama, including Shakespeare, Jonson and Marlowe etc) is another matter.