Poetry Technology

Are there any poetry apps? And if not, why not? Poet-techies out there (there must be one, at least), I'd like to be able to listen to poets reading poetry at the touch of a screen. Am I just one voice crying in the wilderness?

Poets I like

Oh I do like Annie Freud. Especially in The Mirabelles. Only she could have a poem with the title "The Breast-Fed and the Un-Breast-Fed." And the poem be fabulous, to boot.

Similes 'n' metaphors 'n' that

Back after a short haitus. Time is tight, as ever, and so reading has been adapted to fit what little time is available. I'm rather pleased, as it's meant I've been reading a lot more poetry. Delighted to discover Alice Oswald's new book, Memorial, an interpretation of Homer's Iliad. Oh, it's good.

Read, if just for the wonderful similes which tumble out with the relentlessness of the war and destruction they describe. But Oswald's The Thing In The Gap Stone Stile remains my favourite collection of hers.

Just to prove she's also a dab hand with a metaphor, here - on a seasonal note - is her description of frost (from "Pruning In Frost"):

Last night, without a sound,
a ghost of a world lay down on a world,

and again:

All life's ribbon frozen mid-fling


Wowzers. It's not all new-fangled stuff though. I've enjoyed a lingering re-visit to Ezra Pound's shorter poems.



It's hard not to read them without superimposing that slow, rumbling voice of his over the top, which only adds to the richness of the experience. He's another one who can work a simile - here, from "The Garden" :

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anaemia.

How's that for an opening sentence? You've gotta love him. Apart from the fascism. And the insanity.
In the spirit of mixing similes 'n' metaphors 'n' that, I'll leave you with this: in the way an ancient heiffer heaves herself up from rest and makes her way, in a swaying plod across the field, I set out upon the wooden hill to Bedfordshire. Reader, goodnight.

I'm feeling a bit Pam Ayres

So...

And at my back I often hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near

On this occasion prompting me to pick up Ted

So ticking clocks instead of poems fill my head.

The time is just announced: twelve forty-five

And so away goes pencil, Rachel, notepad. I must drive

To school! My small boy must be retrieved

And Flora woken from her sleep. She will be grieved!

But what can I do? My writing must fit in

With childcare, mess, meal prep and tidyin'.

Perfect Morning

My perfect morning occurred on the recent Bank Holiday. With three children, a lie-in is not really a possibility, but there are advantages to rising early. The day dawned clear and forget-me-not blue, with a heat already in the air that promised a scorching day ahead. Mr Pram took the children downstairs for breakfast in the garden, ran me a bath and brought me breakfast in bed. Wholemeal toast, honey and a cup of Yannoh, a feather duvet, silence, sunshine and an Iris Murdoch (The Nice And The Good). Couldn't think of a better start to the day. If only every day began this way, I'd be in permanent Mary Poppins mood.

The Schlock of the New

I'm finding it harder and harder to find contemporary writers that I love. There are some I like. Patrick Gale. Helen Simpson. Some I really like - Esther Freud springs to mind. I'm always a little bit excited when she has a new book due out (I really must get a life).




But none I love, in the way that I love Antonia White, or Charlotte Bronte, or Wodehouse. I find myself more and more agitated these days trawling round Waterstones trying to find the book that'll hit the spot. Nothing's exciting. Everything's too tame and boringly middle class. Nobody dares any more. So although I threw down Nancy Mitford in exasperation last week, I still enjoyed the utter revelling in privilege in which she indulges. It felt good to be irritated.





No fettering of taste and correctness. Boldness. That's what's lacking now, and honesty. Nobody dares to offend anyone, or if they do, it's calculated - someone trying desperately to uncover a new taboo. Even then they're coming from that same place of Guardian-reading earnestness that taints everything with a liberal, moral high ground.

So for sheer kicks I sought out the politically incorrect and the truly shocking. I read Flannery O'Connor. Fabulous.

I tossed aside the fluffy and emasculated horror of The Gruffalo at Little Boy's bedtime and instead read to him(with relish) a 1930s version of Hans Christian Andersen's The Tinder Box, complete with deliciously frightening descriptions of the dog with eyes as big as towers that swivelled round and round. He loved it, along with the graphic details of cutting off the witch's head with a sword.

I balanced out the terror by making chocolate cornflake cakes with him the next day (organic cornflakes, natch), so could still profess to being a good and thoughtful mummy. I over-reached myself a couple of days later, however. Spurred on by escaping the good and the bland, I re-told him the story of Little Red Riding Hood and decided to reclaim the wolf's true horror from the sing-songy cartoon versions of modern fairy tale books. Eschewing books completely, I told the tale with gusto, creeping up close to him to narrate the wolf's part with, if I say so myself, impressive lupine veracity. Sheer fright overtook him and he cracked me hard between the eyes with the heel of his hand. I really did see stars. I bet that's never happened to Julia Donaldson.