For poets everywhere
March 24th 2009 02:07
Poetry, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912)
I taught my daughter to whistle and I taught her how to play chess. I am a modest man, but it does surprise me that I have yet to be awarded a Nobel Parenting Prize. I mean, some of life's most important skills - reading, writing and a grasp of dinkum Aussie vernacular - are easy things to teach in comparison. It took considerably more time to teach Ava how to whistle than to ride a bike. It was easier discussing the concepts of multiplication and division than the fact that pawns move forwards and take diagonally and listen carefully while I tell you about en passant.
One day, however, I realised that there is an even greater mountain to climb. A K2 of cultural nurturing. I refer, of course, to the appreciation of poetry.
Nothing intimidates me more than poetry, except perhaps the people who appreciate it. Somewhere beyond even them, occupying a sort of literary Elysium, are the people who actually write the stuff.
At school I was introduced to the divinities of both poetry and literature. I remember names like Chaucer, Coleridge and Milton from the former group. On the latter, my school was less classical and more American. I was fed Melville, Fitzgerald and Salinger. Two blokes named Shakespeare and Kipling seemed to have had their feet in both camps.
Gods of the literary firmament all, but none of them ever spoke to me. On the poetry side, I left school thinking Yeats was a misspelling of Keats. And I couldn't understand why all authors didn't just write enthralling science fiction like John Wyndham.
Some years later, someone gave me a copy of Lord Wavell's Other Men's Flowers, with the message that "many people" had learned to appreciate poetry because of this book. "Not me," I thought, smiling what I hoped was a grateful smile while planning never, ever to open the thing.
But I did, and for the first time I was moved by poetry. Why wasn't I ever told to read it with the heart? Some time after that I read for the first time WH Auden's "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone," an experience from which, maybe 25 years later, I still haven't fully recovered. Later again I was introduced by friends to the disparate yet equally moving work of poets like Omar Khayyam, Goethe, Dylan Thomas and Carol Ann Duffy.
All of which leads me to the arrival, on that day of realisation, of a seven-year-old, school-weary Ava carrying a pile of homework material, amongst which was a printed slip of paper containing the following:
There was some stuff she couldn't eat.
A monster forced to face defeat,
She spat it out along the street -
The dinner ladies' veg and meat
And that pink muck they serve for sweet.
But ...
She's undeniably great.
She's absolutely cool,
The dragon who ate
The dragon who ate
The dragon who ate our school.
I would like to say that my initial reaction was: Dr Seuss? Ogden Nash? Walter de la Mare?
But in fact my initial reaction was: Panic!
Poetry, school! School, poetry!
Then I took some deep breaths. Then I thought Ava's poem was interesting in terms of introducing kids to poetry: two distinctly different verses in terms of composition but both with an infectious rhythm; appealingly terrifying images such as monsters and veggies; the juxtaposition of advanced adverbs and buzz adjectives, and the ultimate thrill of the image of a dragon eating your school. How cool is that!
Then I did an Internet search and found that the poem was written by Nick Toczek, to whom I dips me lid. Then I wrote everything above. And through it I came, finally, to terms with the fact that poetry is no longer the intimidating mystery I once thought it was.
I just hope one of my teachers is reading this.
image: www.1st-art-gallery.com
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