| Author |
Message |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, April 10, 2008 - 7:43 am: | |
Eliot has written about London in a way that few others have succeeded at; in convincingly evoking the place. Jon Silkin does the same in (for example) Lapidiary Poems. Tobias Hill attempts with partial success to do evoke place and time in various zones of London.
Osip Mendelsham argues (in a poem) that a poem acquires far greater depth and meaning if it *names* somewhere. I have been sceptical of this, but I think I now agree.
"I am only ever in a place." |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, April 10, 2008 - 8:24 am: | |
Seamus Heaney in District and Circle attempts to evoke place, but not entirely convincingly: what I take to be Euston Square, which is Yeats' territory, or perhaps Kings Cross.
Robin Robertson in Slow Birds does a terrific poem about the tube, however. A success. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, April 10, 2008 - 9:49 am: | |
Of course, this is partly what is significant about the Camden Town group.
The search to make humble Mornington Crescent the hero. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, April 10, 2008 - 10:28 am: | |
Morning Crescent - or even:
http://www.isihac.co.uk/games/ostttoae/ostttoae-d. html
And as for the magic of names:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUA-LEuo_XI |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, April 10, 2008 - 1:05 pm: | |
Apart from its slight verbosity Heaney's District and Circle seems to lack the sense of having a real subject thematically. An intruiging failure. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, April 10, 2008 - 1:45 pm: | |
Martin odd that you put that link Saxmundun to Aldeburgh because my sister has a holiday home in Aldeburgh which we sometimes use; it would be handy to have that line still there. Who put that up I wonder? |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, April 10, 2008 - 3:08 pm: | |
Only a blog link to help, I'm afraid.
I haven't been to Aldeburgh in 30 years - but I've fond memories of family holidays there about 1970: this house (it was sugar-pink then) -
http://www.suffolkcam.co.uk/aldeburgh_fantasia.jpg
- an astonishing fish and chip shop, and the Martello Tower, which never looked quite the same once I'd read "A Warning to the Curious."
Lucky you to go back there! |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - 1:10 pm: | |
Grayson Perry on Unpopular Culture:
http://tinyurl.com/6xuq2g |