I have been taking a deep look at the theme of ‘the moon’ and ‘moon poetry’. Considered by some as cliché the moon has fascinated us from the beginning of time. For the poet themes such as stillness, loneliness, beauty – for modern man we now have to consider if we want to return to the moon – could we start a colony on the moon, mine the moon? Who owns the moon? These are the issues (and more) that we are dealing with now. For myself, with a scientific background in geology, I am curious, we do need to study the moon and perhaps return. I regret ‘Moon Landing’ by W.H. Auden. It is a ‘grumpy’ poem reflecting the negative attitudes to the 1969 moon landing. It seems ‘dated’ now to say that NASA was a ‘boys club’ and that no girl would have thought of travelling to the moon – especially after the film ‘ Hidden Figures ’. I thought for a start I would compare one of the classic ‘Old poems’ number 7, From Arthur Waley’s ‘Chinese Poems’ with ‘Sad Steps’ by Philip Larkin. Number 7 ...
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ReplyDeleteAn experiment.
I’m not sure if it is even repeatable, I decided to take some fairly bland pop music lyrics – the sort that are the background to all our lives. They play constantly everywhere. You probably know them off by heart even though they might have been written in five minutes on the back of a cigarette packet.
What if you take those lyrics, add a surreal dimension, a dream dimension, a stream of consciousness dimension and re-write them. I found it enjoyable.
At first I just printed off lyrics and re-wrote. Then it all got mixed up with different verses and verses being mixed in. Reading it back, I can tell where number 1 came from but the rest? Their origin is lost in history.