More Spares

The muddied colours of sleep, the mind mixing its palette.

The veneration for the opaque, hermetically sealed poem suggests a kind of hopeful necrophilia: listening intently for that muffled knocking, the corpse masturbating in its coffin.

On Radio 4, a woman on the joys of wandering naked in a garden with fellow naturists, sniffing the roses, etc. As if, while enacting a reversal of Adam and Eve’s discovery, they should forget to notice each other’s nakedness, forget to notice each other. And that, essentially, is what ‘naturism’ is, dressing for indifference, as if this were, somehow, a virtue.

The oldest ‘profession’ is hardly something as civilised as a prostitute. Instead, try: hunter / torturer / executioner.

Everyone nourishes a secret desire to be owned, my people.

The Poet’s Lounge: the one place where they are obliged, by law, to serve language that’s 100 proof.

That tabloid shriek of disgust –– ‘Animals!’ –– is an unforgivable insult to the whale, the shrike, the hyena.

Human and humane are almost always antonyms.  

Recently I heard a respected scientist declare that he never gives anything to beggars. Ideally, every good scientist is equipped with a well-honed curiosity and a hunger for evidence. To dismiss beggars en masse, on no evidence apart from their status as indigent people, suggests a profound lack of equipment. It is very bad science.

Auden (who sang the praises of the permeable limestone landscape) called poetry ‘memorable speech.’ I think great, or even just good, poems should have at least an element of this; they should resonate in the way that a good song or piece of music does. If they manage this I will forgive them much, including a good deal of impermeability.