Is Your Poetic License Expired?
Can rock 'n' roll and poetry nestle comfortably alongside each other or does the mere mention of the latter make rock fans suspicious? Excuse me while I reminisce . . . At school they made us read Keats. Nightingales; orchards, castle feasts: all those things that had absolutely nothing to do with my life! And yet it still didn't manage to put me off-poetry altogether.
Is Your Poetic License Expired?
LETTER FROM BRITAIN
Penny Valentine
by
Can rock 'n' roll and poetry nestle comfortably alongside each other or does the mere mention of the latter make rock fans suspicious? Excuse me while I reminisce . . . At school they made us read Keats. Nightingales; orchards, castle feasts: all those things that had absolutely nothing to do with my life! And yet it still didn't manage to put me off-poetry altogether. I sneaked into the library at lunchtimes, eating a bar of chocolate that added to my painful teenage acne, sniffed and sobbed over purely accidental "finds"
like Christina Rossetti and her mad passion for nuns ana incest;"Wilfred Owen's poems of the First World War made all the more traumatic by the knowledge that he's joined—at 21—all those bodies wasted on foreign' fields. Poetry brought me passion (at that time about the only kind—vicarious—-I'd known) and seemed to slot in nicely with visits to Japnes Dean in East Of Eden (seven times and going through a box of Kleenex on every occasion, I swear).
Now we all know I was a wimpy little girl.