I Won't Let You Down

One of my favourite songs from the eighties, Ph.D's I Won't Let You Down was a Top 10 UK hit in April 1982, when I was a highly suggestible fifteen year old.

Thankfully, I'm still pretty suggestible. Just not fifteen anymore.

By the way, if you can't remove the ad strip when watching this, click the arrows (bottom right) to watch it on full screen.

13 Teeth: Peacock and Pig

From Jane Smiley's '13 Ways of Looking at the Novel' to Mark Gwynne Jones' '13 Teeth: Peacock and Pig'.

The brand-new issue of Horizon Review will be up on the Salt website in a few weeks. Can't really guarantee when, as my role ends when I transfer the files over to Salt.

However, before issue 3 is superceded by all that lovely new material in issue 4, I want to draw people's attention back to one of my favourite items in the last issue, a short film of the extremely talented and mesmerising Mark Gwynne Jones and the Psychicbread, performing

13 Teeth: Peacock and Pig

It's nothing short of miraculous. It's also a tiny bit slow to warm up, so give it a good minute or two if you're not used to live poetry performances. And if you ever get a chance to see this band live - or Mark Gwynne Jones performing solo - do please take the opportunity. Excellent, mythic stuff!

Handbags and Gladrags

Preparing a synopsis to send off next week, feeling good about this coming weekend's trip to Liverpool for the inter-university 9-ball pool championships, and working on a poem that 'won't come right' to borrow Ian MacMillan's phrase in his poem about Ted Hughes.

Today's mood is Stereophonics: Handbags and Gladrags.

Mort à la poesie

Some mid-summer break entertainment for you. "Death to Poetry." And a very odd film to accompany that sentiment.

Single Column! Single Column!

It's been ages since my last post, for which mea culpa, I've been enormously busy with some Latin texts I've been studying, plus there's the small matter of Horizon Review which is due to launch around the end of this month.

I shall cobble together something about poetry for next week, as I do have a few things on the back burner which I'd like to discuss on Raw Light, with perhaps the odd snippet from recent poems.

Meanwhile, this is my mood this morning: gladiatorial!

The Human League: Music and Poetry

Yesterday, on a whim and in a rush of fond nostalgia, I bought another copy of a lost CD of The Human League's Greatest Hits. Listening to the tracks this afternoon, such as 'Being Boiled' above, from 1982, I could feel myself slipping almost instantly back into "Jane in the early 80s" mode:

Ra-ra skirts
Drainpipe jeans
Legwarmers
Adam Ant make-up
Aerobics
Industrial-strength hair gel
Polka-dots

There's a pleasure to these moments of nostalgia but a curious frustration too, as I realise how poorly such acts of reminiscence translate to reading poetry. It's true that, more often than not, I can remember where I first read a poem, and even how it impacted on me, but I don't experience the same mildly Proustian being-steeped-in-the-past sensation, as though for a few seconds I was actually there again, back in that time.

Presumably the rhythms of this music, hot-wired into my head as a teenager, perhaps by being listened to at moments of intense adolescent emotion, perform that instant miracle of nostalgia?

If so, surely the rhythms of a poem should approximate to the same effect? Yet they don't seem to, not for me anyway. Why not?

Basically, is it rhythm, or is it the compulsive repetition of particular pop songs, and their accompanying riot of emotions - god, X is never going to look twice at me! what a fool I made of myself! - that forces them in so deep?

And how can we replicate that effect with poetry - if at all?

My Mood Today

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: Walking on the Milky Way

And now for something completely pointless

Before we leave the fraught topic of Annie Freud, here's a dainty morsel from You Tube which I found when googling her name in an attempt to discover something beyond the fact that she "works as a teacher and embroiderer" ...

now I know that she too likes Moleskin notebooks.