I see from my history that I missed out 2023 but started threads on UK National Poetry Day in 21 and 22 so I thought I’d resurrect the idea and ask, this time, for posters to share poems they find positive, uplifting or inspiring at a time when the world seems grim all round. I have three young children with barely a care in the world, shielded as they are so I can tune out on a daily basis. Instead of my default reposting of Thomas Hardy’s the Darkling Thrush which fits the bill, I’ve gone with this Roger McGough poem that I’ll run past my kids tomorrow.
I met Roger once in a Ladbroke Grove pub and he seemed genuinely delighted to meet someone who’d read one of his books voluntarily outside an official reading or similar event. He discussed some of his poems that I remembered and was happy to show me stuff he was working on. I talked to him about John Hegley and the eccentric Irish poet Pat Ingoldsby and was pleased to see he appeared alongside Hegley a few days later and has regularly featured Pat Ingoldsby on his radio show. He seemed like a lovely man. Anyway here’s the poem…
The friends that you find
Whom you’ll never forsake.
Oh the dreams that you’ll dream,
May the good ones come true.
Being young is an adeventure
How I wish I were you.
Today is the tomorrow we worried about
Yesterday and all last night.
and as days go, as days they do.
it seemed to go all right.
So dream your dreams and journey
Be tomorrow foul or fine
so you can say at the end of it
‘Amazing! Today was mine.’
Dammit! Only a part of it cut and pasted properly and I can’t edit the original post. Here’s my second attempt. I should also have said that he appeared with John Hegley years later not days.
The poem is called Tomorrow Has Your Name On It
Tomorrow has your name on it
It’s written up there in the sky
As you set out on a journey
in search of the How? and the Why?
Oh the people you’ll meet
The bright and the mad
The sights to be seen
The fun to be had.
Oh the dreams that you’ll dream
The chances you’ll take
The prizes you’ll win
The hands that you’ll shake.
But don’t let your dreams
Get too big for their boots
don’t hanker after the flimflam of fame
If you hunger for mere celebrity
You’ll be drawn like a moth to the flame.
For having dreams is not enough;
You must get down and do your stuff.
Take the ready with the rough.
Ride the punches, and my hunch is
You’ll succeed when life gets tough.
And it will!
(That’s also written in sky
In a cobwebby corner of the Milky Way
A squillion zillion miles away)
Bullies will want to bully you
For that’s what bullies do
And you’ll feel small and miserable
(Don’t worry, I would too).
Even Big Bad Wolves have nightmares,
One of the reasons they howl at the moon.
Being scared is Nature’s medicine.
Not nice, but it’s over soon.
There’ll be days you’re made to feel foolish
When your head seems made out of wood
When you blush, mumble and shuffle
Feel embarrassed and misunderstood.
Things will get lost or stolen
Life doesn’t turn out as you’d planned
You get sick and then you get better-
What’s gone wrong? You can understand.
Take your time.
Sing your own songs and laugh out loud.
weep, if you need to
But away from the crowd.
Disappointments will ebb and flow
Like the tide upon the shore
But an angry storm will quickly go
And the sun rise up once more.
Oh the dreams that you’ll dream
The promises you’ll make
The friends that you find
Whom you’ll never forsake.
Oh the dreams that you’ll dream,
May the good ones come true.
Being young is an adeventure
How I wish I were you.
Today is the tomorrow we worried about
Yesterday and all last night.
and as days go, as days they do.
it seemed to go all right.
So dream your dreams and journey
Be tomorrow foul or fine
so you can say at the end of it
‘Amazing! Today was mine.
“But don’t let your dreams
Get too big for their boots”
He has a wonderful turn of phrase.
Here, from Keats, is a slightly older poem, a sonnet which to my delight someone posted on my Facebook feed this week.
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
By John Keats
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44481/on-first-looking-into-chapmans-homer
I googled and learnt that the poem has had many admirers from Poe to P.G.. Wodehouse to Watcher of the Skies Hitmaker Peter Gabriel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_First_Looking_into_Chapman%27s_Homer
Briefly met and chatted to Philip Larkin, who like me was born and grew up in Coventry, during a 1978 student occupation of Hull Uni’s Administration Offices in my last year of my American Studies course there.
I was outside the occupation and sharing a joint with a friend of mine called Martin Flynn (RIP) who was Publications Officer when PL strolled past. Understandably concerned the occupation would spread to the Uni library which he ran, PL was far more interested in quizzing Marttn than he was in me.
At that point, PL hadn’t published anything for a long time and I took the bold step of asking him if he was still writing. He told me that he still wrote but had reached that stage of his life where when he woke up in the morning all he could think about was death.
A few years later, I was working in Bahrain where I picked up a ruinously expensive two-day old copy of the Times and learned he had died. The paper’s obit also included the last poem he was then believed to have written.
Its topic? Waking up in the morning and thinking about death
That would be Aubade. I don’t know if it was his last poem as it was published several years before he died, but he was conscious that his muse had left him and wrote very little in his later years.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48422/aubade-56d229a6e2f07
Here’s a Shakespearian gem beautifully read by Dame Judi.
Arnie’s comment is hilarious.
“Read”, you say? Are you saying she used a teleprompter thingy? Or someone held up cards? You’d think she could have memorised it for the telly, the lazy feck. She does read nicely though.
Thanks for gently correcting me there @Gary.
Recite is better perhaps but it sounds stíff and formal.
Schoolkids in England can enter a special contest for reading poetry by heart:
https://poetrybyheart.org.uk/
A rather decent article about the value of learning a poem by heart.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-you-learn-when-you-learn-a-poem-by-heart/
Incidentally, I am rather ashamed to point out that yesterday, while you celebrated National Poetry Day, Sweden celebrated…..Cinnamon Bun Day.
Shame on me! I forsook the ardour of the Bard of Avon for the soft, sticky buns of Södermalm.
Well I started the thread and it wasn’t National Poetry Day in Ireland where I live. I just aimed to animate the UK Massive on here who make up the majority. What the contributions so far lack in quantity, they make up for in quality.
At a recent event I met Beth Calverley, The Poetry Machine. Basically you chat with her for ten minutes or so then she types out a poem from scratch on her Brother Typewriter. I chatted about my love of music from “borrowing” my sisters LP`s, to first gig (Ultravox at Manchester Apollo) to arranging the music for my sisters funeral. This is what she wrote…
STANDING ON THE SEATS
You at nine or ten, stealing records
from your sisters bedroom,
Northern Soul starting your obsession,
then at twenty at Manchester Apollo
in your blue mac, standing on the seats.
You`ve never been able to play yourself
but you can keep the beat of an audience
alive, your instrument is passion,
the clap in your hands, the whistle
in your lips, screaming encouragement
to show them you feel it. The truth
in their lyrics. The meaning in their music.
And when you arranged your sister`s
funeral songs, it was your way
of standing on your seat
cheering her on. Northern Soul
never stops, Still nine or ten at heart ,
stealing her records,
at sixty two, playing them back to her.
All done in about ten minutes…astonishing.
https://thepoetrymachine.live/
I’m a big fan of Simon Armitage, and this early poem pretty much sums up my feelings towards my former employer when I took early retirement 4 years ago.
Because I am done with this thing called work,
the paper clips and staples of it all.
The customers and their huge excuses,
their incredulous lies and their beautiful
foul-mouthed daughters. I am swimming with it,
right up to here with it. And I am bored,
bored like the man who married a mermaid.
And I am through with the business of work.
In meetings, with the minutes, I have dreamed
and doodled, drifted away then undressed
and dressed almost every single woman,
every button, every zip and buckle.
For eighteen months in this diving-helmet
I have lived with the stench of my own breath.
So I am finished with the whole affair.
As for this friendship thing, I couldn’t give
a weeping fig for those so-called brothers
who are all voltage, no current. I have
emptied my locker. I should like to leave
and to fold things now like a pair of gloves
or two clean socks, one into the other.
This is my final word. Nothing will follow.
(Robinson’s Resignation)
Arguably, the end of Tennyson’s Ulysses has been rather devalued – by detaching the final six lines from the whole and repeating ad nauseum…but I do like it. I’ve copied the second half here.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Old AW pal Lenny Law made me chuckle on twatter, listing his 3 favourite poems, to mark National Poetry Day. I confess I forget the name of the first two worthys mentioned, but his mention of My Friend Billy (uncredited), for the third, was very droll.
I always liked this version and would recite it to my son when he was small.
Der Jammerwoch
Robert Scott
Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven
Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben;
Und aller-mümsige Burggoven
Die mohmen Räth’ ausgraben.
»Bewahre doch vor Jammerwoch!
Die Zähne knirschen, Krallen kratzen!
Bewahr’ vor Jubjub-Vogel, vor
Frumiösen Banderschntzchen!«
Er griff sein vorpals Schwertchen zu,
Er suchte lang das manchsan’ Ding;
Dann, stehend unterm Tumtum Baum,
Er an-zu-denken-fing.
Als stand er tief in Andacht auf,
Des Jammerwochen’s Augen-feuer
Durch tulgen Wald mit Wiffek kam
Ein burbelnd Ungeheuer!
Eins, Zwei! Eins, Zwei! Und durch und durch
Sein vorpals Schwert zerschnifer-schnück,
Da blieb es todt! Er, Kopf in Hand,
Geläumfig zog zurück.
»Und schlugst Du ja den Jammerwoch?
Umarme mich, mien Böhm’sches Kind!
O Freuden-Tag! O Halloo-Schlag!«
Er schortelt froh-gesinnt.
Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven
Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben;
Und aller-mümsige Burggoven
Die mohmen Räth’ ausgraben.
Despite not knowing German..
It sounds better in German.
It’s why I put it, there’s a French version which doesn’t work.
Here’s one of mine which those bods at The Spectator kindly published a year or so ago-
“Did you ever fantasize about joining the Twenty Seven Club?”
Sure, which serious wannabe poet hasn’t? I mean,
that Keatsian/Chattertonian quit-while-you’re-ahead
vibe is a persistent buzz and trope– think Dean,
Hendrix, Joplin or Jim– but let’s face it, once dead
that’s that, it won’t matter how perfect a cadaver
you bequeathe to the world since worms and fire
are immune to beauty so, these days, no, I’d rather
be a grump pushing my mortal span to the wire
and look forward to eighty and a sympathetic nurse
who will listen to my drivel as she wipes my arse
than fall prey to that adolescent narcissistic curse
promoting a life and oeuvre so limited and sparse.
Whilst the benefits of middle age may be obscure
it’s an extension at least, no doubt about that
so Shelley and Rimbaud can sod off early and pure–
I’ll plod on and persist, unworshipped and fat.
I think this is poetry (Ambulance – Jeff Tweedy)
Once, just by chance
I made a friend in an ambulance
I was half man, half broken glass
She had a needle but I wasn’t afraid
I’d slap the cuffs right on my wrists
I’d get so high I’d arrest myself
For honeysuckle on a buckle
Broken teeth biting on my belt
High in a trance
My life smeared right past
In a blue light I thought she was dancing
But she was just holding my cold hand
‘Cause everything can shine
Even the devil sometimes
And while I was busy dying
My Lord, she made some other plan
Traveling salesmen, carrying trunks
You can smell thеm coming like skunks
In the distance, if your еyes can focus
That’s how God once spoke to us
Trying not to laugh
They pronounced me dead at half past
And that priest, he pissed his pants
When he heard me start to say hello
Everything can shine
Even the devil sometimes
While I was busy dying
My Lord, she made some other plan
That’s excellent @dai.
Now I want to hear it with the music.
First live performance on day of release for Cruel Country, I was there!
Upon the verdant hills where wildflowers bloom,
The whispering winds in gentle breezes play,
I wander through the glades, where shadows loom,
And find the heart of Nature’s sweet array.
The lark ascends, its melody takes flight,
While brooks, like silver ribbons, dance and weave,
In every rustling leaf, in fading light,
I feel the pulse of life, and I believe.
O solitude, thou art my faithful friend,
In quiet moments, wisdom starts to grow,
As Time, with all its burdens, starts to bend,
I glimpse the truth that only Nature knows.
So let my soul, like clouds in azure skies,
Embrace the world, where beauty never dies.
—————————-
And now for the reveal.
A friend asked an AI program (I don’t know which one) for a sonnet in the style of Wordsworth and that’s what it came up with.
Not bad.