Poetry for the masses

Hey!

It’s National Poetry Day.

Ah, poetry…

drifts off with a dopey expression

I must go down to the sea again
To the lonely sea and the sky
I left my vest and socks there
I wonder if they’re dry?

Spike Milligan’s brilliant parody of John Masefield

We ‘did’ poetry at school but we ‘did’ it in the same way that we ‘did’ history and ‘did’ geography.

The concepts those dead poets were trying to hand to us across the years were too huge for schoolchildren to understand; the language too old fashioned and far too grand.

And the meanings were much too obscure for our prepubescent brains to even begin processing.

Why were we forced to sit there learning meaningless words by rote?

Tiger, Tiger burning bright
In the forest of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake.

And yet the only thought that bothers a thirteen year-old child, sitting in a classroom while s/he is being force-fed this work is that the words don’t even rhyme!

The poem has no relationship to that child’s universe and because of this disconnection it has zero meaning and bucket-loads of negative equity in the value department.

See what I did there?

I used imagery to make my point – Blake’s imagery doesn’t work.

But disconnection doesn’t stop with one 18th Century poet.

There are more modern poets, some of them still alive (Mr Motion!), whose work is as obscure.

And through that obscurity it is also rendered meaningless – to most of us.

So, as this is modern day National Poetry Day here’s my contribution (click here):

And for the bandwidth-challenged, you’ll just have to read the following lines in a Mancunian accent:

Outside the take-away, Saturday night
a bald adolescent, asks me out for a fight
He was no bigger than a two-penny fart
he was a deft exponent of the martial art
He gave me three warnings:
Trod on me toes, stuck his fingers in my eyes
and kicked me in the nose
A rabbit punch made me eyes explode
My head went dead, I fell in the road

I pleaded for mercy
I wriggled on the ground
he kicked me in the balls
and said something profound
Gave my face the millimetre tread
Stole me chop suey and left me for dead

Through rivers of blood and splintered bones
I crawled half a mile to the public telephone
pulled the corpse out the call box, held back the bile
and with a broken index finger, I proceeded to dial

I couldn’t get an ambulance
the phone was screwed
The receiver fell in half
it had been kung fu’d

A black belt karate cop opened up the door
demanding information about the stiff on the floor
he looked like an extra from Yang Shang Po
he said “What’s all this then
ah so, ah so, ah so.
he wore a bamboo mask
he was gen’ned on zen
He finished his devotions and he beat me up again

Thanks to that embryonic Bruce Lee
I’m a shadow of the person that I used to be
I can’t go back to Salford
the cops have got me marked
Enter the Dragon
Exit Johnny Clarke

Kung Fu International, John Cooper Clarke – a poet for today, not a poet for yesterday.