A poetry meme has been filtering its way through a number of poetry blogs over time. Although largely cured of Instant Meme Response Syndrome, I’ve tagged myself with it…
1. The first poem I remember reading, hearing or reacting to was …
The collection ‘A Child’s Garden Of Verses’ by Robert Louis Stevenson. At around the same time – age 6 or 7, I believe – I was captivated by Stevenson’s poem ‘A Smuggler’s Song’ and Robert Burns’ ‘Sweet Afton’ (to which I composed a tune that I sang only to myself.)
2. A poem I was forced to memorize in school…
I was never forced to memorise a poem. But the first poem I went out of my way to learn by heart was Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’. I was 15 and in the first throes of my epiphanic discovery of the First World War poets. I graduated swiftly to Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and then to writing my own Great War verse. I have preserved the small blue notebook in which all of these early efforts are contained to remind myself always of just how utterly frightful juvenilia can be.
3. I read poetry because …
…it makes language do things that language shouldn’t be able to do.
4. A poem I’m likely to think about when asked about a favorite poem is …
‘Death Of A Son’ by Jon Silkin, ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg, ‘Evans’ and ‘On The Farm’ by R.S. Thomas, ‘Autumn Journal’ by Louis MacNeice, ‘The Second Coming’ by W.B. Yeats, anything by John Burnside, Pauline Stainer or Amy Clampitt.
5. I write poetry, but …
…sometimes wish that when the hill seems too steep or the well is dry, the drive to write would diminish.
6. My experience with reading poetry differs from my experience with reading other types of literature …
…because although the journey is briefer, the reward is frequently significantly greater.
7. I find poetry …
…like oxygen.
8. The last time I heard poetry …
…was Adrian Mitchell reading ‘Tell Me Lies About Viet-Nam’ in a televised extract from Peter Whitehead’s film of the 1965 Poetry Olympics at the Albert Hall. Ginsberg was drunk, Harry Fainlight was booed off and Mitchell was majestic.
Servez-vous, m’sieur dame...
1. The first poem I remember reading, hearing or reacting to was …
The collection ‘A Child’s Garden Of Verses’ by Robert Louis Stevenson. At around the same time – age 6 or 7, I believe – I was captivated by Stevenson’s poem ‘A Smuggler’s Song’ and Robert Burns’ ‘Sweet Afton’ (to which I composed a tune that I sang only to myself.)
2. A poem I was forced to memorize in school…
I was never forced to memorise a poem. But the first poem I went out of my way to learn by heart was Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’. I was 15 and in the first throes of my epiphanic discovery of the First World War poets. I graduated swiftly to Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and then to writing my own Great War verse. I have preserved the small blue notebook in which all of these early efforts are contained to remind myself always of just how utterly frightful juvenilia can be.
3. I read poetry because …
…it makes language do things that language shouldn’t be able to do.
4. A poem I’m likely to think about when asked about a favorite poem is …
‘Death Of A Son’ by Jon Silkin, ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg, ‘Evans’ and ‘On The Farm’ by R.S. Thomas, ‘Autumn Journal’ by Louis MacNeice, ‘The Second Coming’ by W.B. Yeats, anything by John Burnside, Pauline Stainer or Amy Clampitt.
5. I write poetry, but …
…sometimes wish that when the hill seems too steep or the well is dry, the drive to write would diminish.
6. My experience with reading poetry differs from my experience with reading other types of literature …
…because although the journey is briefer, the reward is frequently significantly greater.
7. I find poetry …
…like oxygen.
8. The last time I heard poetry …
…was Adrian Mitchell reading ‘Tell Me Lies About Viet-Nam’ in a televised extract from Peter Whitehead’s film of the 1965 Poetry Olympics at the Albert Hall. Ginsberg was drunk, Harry Fainlight was booed off and Mitchell was majestic.
Servez-vous, m’sieur dame...