It's a throwback to when I was doing English Lit A Level, and my best friend had recently lost her Dad. At any hint of death, and she would run out of the classroom in tears. I probably spent the majority of that year in the toilets consoling her. I dreaded those lessons, and I used to pray each class that we wouldn't be doing gloomy stuff like W.B. Yeats, because I knew where it'd end up.
Maybe I should give them another go after all these years.
If you feel its right to do so, then go for it. It'd be sad to attribute all that misery to poetry, especially predicated on adolescence......(I have finished a degree tonight)
With all the shit going on, do we actually need a poet laureate? I assume it's a paid position; and for all the benefit it'll bring to the nation I reckon the money'd be better spent on a fireworks display or something. Maybe some dancing robots. People love dancing robots.
I like all kinds. I love Auden, Ibsen, Voltaire and soppy stuff (like Elizabeth Barrett Browning), Adrian Henri. I don't really have a type, I'm just not a huge fan of miserable stuff like T.S. Eliot or D.H. Lawrence. That's probably just because I'm thick.
Adrian Henri is da bomb
Ain't that the poetic truth.
Edit: WAS
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"Metal on metal
Heads start to bang
Denim and leathers
Chains that clang"
With all the shit going on, do we actually need a poet laureate? I assume it's a paid position; and for all the benefit it'll bring to the nation I reckon the money'd be better spent on a fireworks display or something. Maybe some dancing robots. People love dancing robots.
I'm sure a decent proportion of the population would be happy if the government used lottery money to have Jade Goody's cadaver stuffed and mounted in a glass cage outside the new Olympic Stadium, but fuck 'em - people get too much of what they want these days as it is, there's nothing wrong with occasionally giving them what they should have instead.
As for the cost, even based on 30m taxpayers they could pay her a cool £250,000 a year and it would cost each of us less than a penny. That said, £250,000 would buy us a T-800. I can't see them getting it dancing though.
Never really heard of her before today and not really got into much poetry since my A-level days. Quite liked that though. If it's bleak then I've usually got a bit of time for it.
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"Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire"
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds
