The Poetry Wall

In the foyer of the English department was a large noticeboard where students could pin up their poems and musings, in a collage of careless scribblings on paper and more earnest typed pages that took themselves far more seriously. Roughly 99.8% were rubbish. Most sensitive poetic souls (wisely) published their work unsigned, as most poems were covered over in scathing comments, palimpsests of abuse.

Pennies in the Dross

The nice ones would catch your gaze like a bright penny in the grass. They’d pull you in for a moment, into their world of trenchant lines, or transporting paragraphs. Dave Fair's stand out in memory. I recognised his handwriting on some great little anonymous poems that’d pull you right in. I can’t recall any to repeat here, but I do remember an ending I liked:

“… and always

the wall pushes me

back into the sea,

where i was mad.”

Well, I thought it was pretty deep at the time.

Found Genius?

I found some of my first year poems the other day, in an old box of letters, photos, and keepsakes. Excited, I scanned the pages for transporting evocations of distant afternoons, campus perves freeze-framed in polaroids of ink, or just the roiling throes of the melodrama of my 19 years, seen from the mast I’d lashed myself to.

Dog Vomit Omelette

No such luck. Page after page was indecipherable, ham-fistedly scribbled dross. In my earnest attempts at a pastiche of Smiths’ lyrics, Bob Dylan, and T.S. Eliot, I’d created a dog vomit omelette of trite shite. I showed my ‘work’ to Dave Fair once (and only once). He hmmmed through a few of them, and with an eventual, defeated sigh, he said, “That line there" (somewhere in 16 pages of foolscap) "has got…something. Needs work though".

Uncle Ron and e.e. cummings

Ron Hall, or Uncle Ron, was my favourite English professor. Short, avuncular, and smiling, he had the twinkly sort of face that made you just want to pinch his cheeks. I went to his tuts two years’ running, and those whimsical, lyrical sessions in his safe, cosy study were one of the few tutorials I actually looked forward to.

Every Wednesday, at the after lunch English lecture, he’d read poems that students had recommended. The first one I recall was e.e. cumming’s “somewhere i have never travelled”, early on in first year. A fiftysomething husband, married for what then seemed an impossible number of years, he read what he called “this lovely little love poem” with such tenderness and timbre that at that green age, on that afternoon, I had a stirring of the idea of love that could span mellowed decades, not callow months.

somewhere i have never travelled

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

any experience, your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility: whose texture

compels me with the colour of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

- e.e. cummings (1926)