tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post7573006088939584761..comments2023-11-22T09:11:01.567+00:00Comments on George Szirtes: How many legs has a centipede?George Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08889600788146987089noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post-23577002642044920572011-11-02T10:25:36.721+00:002011-11-02T10:25:36.721+00:00Well of course I read it aloud as best I could. I ...Well of course I read it aloud as best I could. I don't think I did a bad job.<br /> <br /><i>...the critical equipment of kids today has been programmed to find, fix upon and favor, poetry of the pubby ennui school...</i><br /><br />That is a fair point for some, Coiri, though I suspect it is also the resistance to rhapsodic prose in advertisements that inures them to a certain tone. I cannot blame them for that. I never forget that the young have an vital stake in truth and honesty - both truth and honesty on their terms of course, both based on a certain scepticism about whatever is being offered to them. It may be that Dylan Thomas's high-octane vision will touch them later.<br /><br />There is an interesting contrast in Alice Oswald, who does go down very well with them because while her poems do have the potential for ecstasy they are also full of self-doubt and doubt about the capacity of language to 'become' the 'thing'. Her poem about the wind in which she leaves silences for the imagined wind to enter is probably the best case in point.<br /><br />I'll listen to Philip Madoc, Gwilyam. I know the Burton.George Shttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08889600788146987089noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post-52699691723145631442011-11-01T11:14:46.667+00:002011-11-01T11:14:46.667+00:00Of Fern Hill I think the Philip Madoc recording is...Of Fern Hill I think the Philip Madoc recording is the best I've heard. It's on You Tube together with a lovely green painting of Worm's Head, a magical place on the Gower, a place where the young Dylan tramped with his knapsack and picnic.Gwil Whttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03305768121713053837noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post-50792794206925245592011-11-01T10:04:23.182+00:002011-11-01T10:04:23.182+00:00Perhaps, reared on a diet of 'reality' med...Perhaps, reared on a diet of 'reality' media in which ecstatic imaginary excess has been squeezed out, the critical equipment of kids today has been programmed to find, fix upon and favor, poetry of the pubby ennui school that dominates the scene?<br /><br />Poems with a narrator speaking in a world recognisably their own. Working or middle-class voices speaking in non-challenging syntax and presenting a fairly straight picture with no unfashionable flowery bits.<br /><br />But then again, Fern Hill, for some, is over-rated.<br /><br />So much of Dylan's poetry relies on it being heard, like Hopkins. I had read Pied Beauty by him numerous times, but it was only when I heard it being recited by a gifted voice at a live poetry do, that the depth and power of it hit home.<br /><br />There's a brilliant recording of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhQwFf6Qb9U" rel="nofollow">The Leaden Echo & The Golden Echo</a> by Richard Burton that brings to life what a young undergraduate's ear today, used to the low-key conversational norms of modern delivery, could find dead on the page.CoirĂ FilĂochtahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15137576329670368944noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post-71986229516181358602011-11-01T09:03:27.910+00:002011-11-01T09:03:27.910+00:00Fern Hill was an actual farm occupied at one time ...Fern Hill was an actual farm occupied at one time by his aunt and uncle. <br /><br />It was written during the summer of 1945. <br /><br />He was influenced by the poems of D H Lawrence which he had recently read. "O the green glimmer of apples ... the wet walk of my brown hen ... tears on the windowpane ..."<br /><br />I think there's a genesis for this poem in his poem 'The force that through the green fuse' which poem in turn has its genesis in Wm Blake 'The Sick Rose'<br /><br />All that aside because of it's very Welshness I think he does cut it!Gwil Whttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03305768121713053837noreply@blogger.com