Hey!<\/p>\n
It’s National Poetry Day.<\/p>\n
Ah, poetry…<\/p>\n
drifts off with a dopey expression<\/em><\/p>\n I must go down to the sea again Spike Milligan’s brilliant parody of John Masefield<\/em><\/p>\n We ‘did’ poetry at school but we ‘did’ it in the same way that we ‘did’ history and ‘did’ geography.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n And the meanings were much too obscure for our prepubescent brains to even begin processing.<\/p>\n Why were we forced to sit there learning meaningless words by rote?<\/p>\n Tiger, Tiger burning bright William Blake.<\/em><\/p>\n 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!<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n See what I did there?<\/p>\n I used imagery to make my point – Blake’s imagery doesn’t work.<\/p>\n But disconnection doesn’t stop with one 18th Century poet.<\/p>\n There are more modern poets, some of them still alive (Mr Motion!), whose work is as obscure.<\/p>\n And through that obscurity it is also rendered meaningless – to most of us.<\/p>\n So, as this is modern day National Poetry Day here’s my contribution (click here):<\/p>\n And for the bandwidth-challenged, you’ll just have to read the following lines in a Mancunian accent:<\/p>\n Outside the take-away, Saturday night I pleaded for mercy Through rivers of blood and splintered bones I couldn’t get an ambulance A black belt karate cop opened up the door Thanks to that embryonic Bruce Lee Kung Fu International, John Cooper Clarke – a poet for today, not a poet for yesterday.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nTo the lonely sea and the sky
\nI left my vest and socks there
\nI wonder if they’re dry?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nIn the forest of the night
\nWhat immortal hand or eye
\nCould frame thy fearful symmetry?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\na bald adolescent, asks me out for a fight
\nHe was no bigger than a two-penny fart
\nhe was a deft exponent of the martial art
\nHe gave me three warnings:
\nTrod on me toes, stuck his fingers in my eyes
\nand kicked me in the nose
\nA rabbit punch made me eyes explode
\nMy head went dead, I fell in the road<\/p>\n
\nI wriggled on the ground
\nhe kicked me in the balls
\nand said something profound
\nGave my face the millimetre tread
\nStole me chop suey and left me for dead<\/p>\n
\nI crawled half a mile to the public telephone
\npulled the corpse out the call box, held back the bile
\nand with a broken index finger, I proceeded to dial<\/p>\n
\nthe phone was screwed
\nThe receiver fell in half
\nit had been kung fu’d<\/p>\n
\ndemanding information about the stiff on the floor
\nhe looked like an extra from Yang Shang Po
\nhe said \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What’s all this then
\nah so, ah so, ah so.
\nhe wore a bamboo mask
\nhe was gen’ned on zen
\nHe finished his devotions and he beat me up again<\/p>\n
\nI’m a shadow of the person that I used to be
\nI can’t go back to Salford
\nthe cops have got me marked
\nEnter the Dragon
\nExit Johnny Clarke<\/p><\/blockquote>\n