Access All Areas

December 2013

I mentioned in a previous post that, following an external drive failure, I lost most of the image files I had made with a camera I had bought – second-hand, as usual, a Panasonic G3 – some time in the latter half of 2012, and which I was still using as my main camera during my Innsbruck residency in summer 2014. It was an excellent camera – still is – but shortly thereafter I made the move to Fuji, persuaded that the larger sensor would give even better results.

How much did I lose? Well, I save my files in monthly sub-directories ("folders", if you must), so there will have been something like twenty or more G3 folders on that disk, of which just four have survived, dating from October 2013 to January 2014. It was entirely my fault: instead of sending the failed drive straight to a professional recovery service, I attempted to do it myself. Duh. Luckily, some of the better photos have survived because I had saved them elsewhere; not least on the CD of exhibition-quality images I sent to Innsbruck in 2014 as a backup, just in case my box of eighty or so prints failed to arrive intact, on time, or at all. But many of the pictures you would have seen (still can see!) posted on this blog during those months from 2012 to 2014 have gone. [Sad face emoji...]

So I thought I'd take a nostalgic trawl through these surviving images, just to see what is still in there, and also what the subsequent decade-plus of experience in processing "raw" files might enable me to make of them now. At that time I was in my last year of working at the Southampton University library, and still taking more or less daily photo-excursions around the campus during my lunch hour. As so many have remarked, access is a photographer's most useful tool, and my staff ID card coupled with familiarity and curiosity were pretty much an "access all areas" pass and, if necessary, skeleton key. I doubt there were many people other than, say, the security and janitorial staff who knew the more interesting nooks and crannies of the Highfield Campus as well as I did in those days.

I'm sure I must have become a familiar curiosity on campus over the years, that bearded loony with the camera, although perhaps not on the scale of the sometime professor of mathematics who used to wander the place shouting incomprehensible greetings and occasionally losing his half-mast trousers, precariously belted with string. As a result, I rarely seemed to attract any unwanted attention when I was out and about, conducting my lunchtime photographic explorations in odd corners.

Graduation ceremony marquees, October 2013

I remember one day in April 2014, however, that was different. I was hunkered down inside my favourite telephone box one lunchtime, squinting through the viewfinder at the array of fresh tape-marks, stickers, and abrasions, all nicely backlit in the spring sunshine, when the door was pulled open. By malign coincidence, it seemed the one and only person on campus not in possession of a mobile phone wanted to use the pay-phone. "Sorry," I said, standing up, "I'll come out." "No, it's OK," he said, "I just wondered what you were doing?"

Now, I suppose it's possible that, from the outside, it may have looked a bit odd, suspicious even, to see a man squatting down inside a phone box. Phone boxes do sometimes get used for purposes other than telephonic communication, although rarely in broad daylight in the centre of a university campus. Nonetheless, it takes a certain kind of guileless curiosity actually to open a kiosk door simply in order to find out what someone who is clearly not on the phone might be doing in there. I must admit I was tempted to play the situation for laughs, but instead I waggled my camera, and said, cheerily, "Taking photographs!"  "But why? What on earth of?" he replied.

This is always a tricky one to negotiate. I could see he was genuinely baffled, and perhaps even concerned for my sanity. It's easy to forget quite how far beyond most people's conception of "normal" any photography is that does not involve close relatives, holidays, or safely-accredited subjects like sunsets, cute kittens, porn, etc. The beauty of a digital camera, however, is that you can show, not tell. "Here," I said, "Have a look", and put the camera into "chimping" mode. I showed him an image or two not unlike the ones below, taken a few months earlier.

I could see he wasn't convinced. Which was quite disappointing, and even a little insulting, so – with my best "Good day to you, sir!" expression – I firmly shut the door and carried on. There's none so blind as them as will not see, as the old folk used to say.

So, to double down on the nostalgia, this week I walked over to the campus for the first time in quite a while. I might look a bit scruffy and timeworn these days, but at least my trousers are secure. I used to go over there quite regularly as part of one of my walking circuits, but as the years passed I saw fewer and fewer familiar faces, and I began to feel like a ghost passing unseen through the lives of hundreds of young students, an ever increasing percentage of whom were now clearly Chinese.

This week I saw no one and nothing much that I recognised. "My" campus has pretty much gone: demolition and rebuilding have been non-stop during the past dozen years. The telephone boxes have gone, of course, but the whole look and feel of the place has changed, the way a house you used to live in will have changed after several subsequent inhabitants have altered and added and updated the place to their satisfaction. I remember hearing that the architects had been given a "nautical" brief (it's Southampton, geddit?) and much of the campus does now look as if various massive cruise ships have run aground. Of course, massive cruise ships actually look more like office blocks than ships, so that's perhaps not so surprising.

Oh, and my ID card no longer lets me through the library turnstiles. Do I care? I'm not sure that I do. To get in, I'd have to explain that, some twelve years ago, I was once a person of some substance hereabouts. "Cringe", is the word, I think. And besides:

Terrific... First you lose the TV remote...

Still, if you know where to look, there are still a few spots where the shop-worn pleasures of wabi sabi can be found; ageing 60s architecture, mainly – although the Faraday Building, once thought worthy of celebration on a stamp, is long gone – plus some tatty portakabins, that once served as stopgap offices, labs, and workspaces. No doubt they'll be gone soon, too. It may be some time before I come back again to find out.

Right is Wrong

Self-portrait in a convex mirror

David Hockney has this thing, explored at length in his book Secret Knowledge, about the use of optics by the Old Masters. When you look at his evidence, it's obvious that he's onto something, but – when you think about the practicalities of painting in oils in the centuries before electric light – it equally clearly can't explain everything that looks a bit "lensy", such as objects that appear to be out of focus. A painting isn't a passive reproduction of what can be seen via some lens-based viewing device. But lenses and projected images have been around for a long time, and it would be an odd artist who wasn't intrigued by them or who refused to take advantage of them.

When it comes to optically-assisted art, most people probably think of something like the camera obscura, a distinctly immobile set-up really only suitable for (very) still lifes, landscapes and the like. [1] There is one permanently installed in a small room at the top of a tower near to the Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol, which – unless it is an uncharacteristically sunny day – projects a dim, rather uncanny live image of whatever is going on outside – traffic on the bridge and visitors admiring the Avon Gorge, mainly – onto a large white concave disc, around which a dozen or so people can stand in the darkened room, like a sort of optical seance. It's a little underwhelming, to be honest, and impossible to photograph (don't think I haven't tried).

But there is also a cunning and portable optical device known as the camera lucida which, in ordinary daylight, will display a virtual image of the subject, viewed through a prism, so that it appears to be projected onto a paper surface below, where it can be traced. I once had the opportunity to try one of these and, although it does take a bit of getting used to, it really can help to get a sketch onto paper quickly and accurately, so long as the subject doesn't move. The end result, obviously, is still entirely dependent on the user's drawing skills. There's a nice explanatory video on YouTube, made by a guy who 3D-printed his own version of a very portable camera lucida. It would be unfair to make any comment on his actual drawing skill.

I have no idea how much something like a camera lucida would actually have been used by artists – after all, the ability to draw from life was once a basic art-school discipline – but the convenience, sophistication, and simplicity of photography has clearly replaced any such optical devices, as well as, regrettably, diminishing the importance of life-drawing skill in much contemporary practice. Which has had consequences. I have to say it amuses me when I see amateurish photographic distortions – converging verticals, say – transcribed into their paintings by artists who have simply reproduced their own lens-based source material. You do have to wonder whether a certain feeling of shame about this semi-secret dependence on photographs – what, you can't draw from life? – may partly explain the ongoing prejudice in the art world against photography as an art medium (see my two-part rant Original Print).

Of course, the low angle of the rising or setting sun will cast images of a shadowy sort onto any suitable surface, most noticeably at this time of year in northern latitudes. It makes you very aware of how photography was prefigured, in principle, before anyone worked out how to preserve such evanescent projections as these, that solidify, shift, and fade with the changing mood of the sunlight. Plato's allegory of the cave might well be seen as an early imagining of the camera obscura; we might even say that our modern-day obsession with the images and dubious information laid before us on our various screens makes Plato's actual philosophical point more acutely. That is, that we mistake those pretty shadows for the Real Thing, and are deludedly happy to go on doing so.

Now, I've had the following rant before but, seeing as we're talking about optics and old masters, I think it's worth indulging in again. You may know the highly-regarded poem "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" by John Ashbery, and the painting by Parmigianino on which it is based. Well, whether you do or not, I invite you to consider that poem's opening lines:

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand
Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
And swerving easily away, as though to protect
What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams,
Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together
In a movement supporting the face, which swims
Toward and away like the hand
Except that it is in repose.

Now consider Parmigianino's painting:


Um, the right hand?? It strikes me that someone should have had a quiet word with Mr. Ashbery before the poem was published. Too late now. As a proudly left-handed man, this peculiar error has brought me to a spluttering halt every time I have attempted to read this lengthy and difficult poem. I mean, honestly! If you're going to be making clever play with mirror tropes, this would be a good one to get right, right from the start.

I know... I'm aware that this does make me sound like one of those pedants who couldn't watch the film Zulu because Lieutenant Bromhead (Michael Caine) uses a Webley Mk. VI rather than the Adams Mk. III actually used by officers at Rorke's Drift, or because so many extras are using anachronistic Lee-Enfield rifles in place of Martini-Henrys (no, not that sort of martini or that sort of Henry, idiot). Although TBH there are much better reasons for not watching that film. But these things matter... Don't they?

OK, maybe not so much in a film, where anachronisms and improbabilities abound – why is everyone always so effin' good-looking, and with such perfect teeth, for a start? – but it surely casts doubt on a major poet's powers of observation if he doesn't get something quite so elementary right (especially when it's indisputably left...). It's very strange. But the even stranger thing, though, is that I seem to be the only person ever to have noticed this, or at least thought it worthy of comment (although I'd be happy to be corrected in that regard, if you happen to know better). I have even checked by practical experiment whether, by some optical wizardry, a convex mirror reflects differently to a regular one (it doesn't, although a concave mirror is another matter altogether). [2]

Perhaps all poetry commentators and critics are right-handed, or try never to look at themselves in a mirror? It wouldn't surprise me. Or perhaps they just think, Hmm, that's odd, must be deliberate, Ashbery's no fool... I wonder what he can have meant by that?

Experimental proof: this leftie's self-portrait in a convex mirror

1. Photographer Abelardo Morell has invented a travelling camera obscura tent, with which he photographs the scene outside the tent as projected onto the ground inside. The resulting images can be very intriguing indeed.

2. One possible explanation: The poem was published in August 1974. Is it possible Ashbery saw the painting reproduced in a book in which the image had been flipped horizontally, either accidentally or on purpose? It does happen. AFAIK Parmigianino's painting was not reproduced in the early editions of Ashbery's book of the same name, whereas – tauntingly – it is now routinely put on the cover.

January 2014

Southampton University campus

Southampton University campus

Southampton University campus

A photo I took on New Year's Day on Clevedon Pier reminded me of one I had taken some years previously, featuring two women silhouetted in a bus shelter in Brighton. Seeking it out in my backfiles I finally discovered it in one of the few surviving folders of image files taken with my Panasonic G3, most of which were lost in a hard drive failure. The pictures in this post are all from that folder, dating from January 2014.

In retrospect, January 2014 was a major turning point in my life. Both of our children were away at university, I was a month away from my 60th birthday and just six months from taking early retirement in the summer, when I would also be having a second solo exhibition of my photography and a 10-day residency in Innsbruck, Austria. I think I could have been forgiven for feeling a certain cautious optimism about the coming years. I would finally have time, motive, and opportunity. The prospect of a modest late-life, alternative career didn't seem unrealistic.

Brighton bus shelter

Brighton seafront

I don't think you have to have "experimented" with psychotropic substances of any sort to have sometimes experienced a certain overwhelming feeling of impending revelation, a conviction that the veil of appearances is about to be lifted to reveal the true nature and workings of the world. Or maybe you do. Whatever, that's the sort of feeling that comes back when I look back at these photographs; you probably see them rather differently. Similar veils, screens, reflections, and Platonic shadows have always been a recurring feature in my photography. However, so far at least, what has been revealed behind them has been nothing more than pipes, wires, and scaffolding. Perhaps that's all there is, and the world is simply what it seems to be? I'm not sure whether that's comforting or deeply disappointing.

Brighton seafront

Brighton seafront

Brighton seafront

As it happens, this piled clutter of pillars and fixings is what was recovered of Brighton's West Pier, after it was destroyed in 2003 by a great storm and two arson attacks, and then carefully sorted and stashed beneath the seafront boardwalk, like skeletal remains awaiting some future resurrection. Or perhaps it's more like some enormously complex assembly kit for which the instructions have gone missing. Lots of luck with that... One fully-functioning pier is quite enough, really.

Turnstable Country

As a birthday celebration for my partner, we went up to London last weekend to see the exhibition Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals at Tate Britain with our two children and their partners. I don't know whether it's a symptom of advancing age or an impatience with the desire of our national art institutions to pack 'em in (both pictures and visitors) as often as possible, but I have to say I am not very keen on these so-called "blockbuster" exhibitions. As I wrote in the post Go Van Gogh, following a visit to the National Gallery's Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers show:

All blockbuster exhibitions are exhausting, I find, particularly when they feature an overwhelming quantity of work by just one blockbuster artist, some of whose blockbuster pictures are so familiar – from posters, coasters, postcards, tea towels, key fobs, fridge magnets, and whatever other gift-shop tat can carry a reproduction of an image – that they have ceased being works of art and become a blockbuster brand, even recognisable by people who don't care about "art" at all. To be honest, I'd rather come across a few deservedly famous paintings when walking through a gallery, like bumping into old friends on the street, than navigate whole roomfuls of major and minor masterpieces which, however thoughtfully curated, is always more like attending a reunion or a wedding, where the meeting-with-people quotient of a "high-functioning introvert" like me gets stretched a little thin. "Hello, 'Trunk of a Tree', I believe you know 'View of Arles', we were at Montmajour together in 1888? Oh, do excuse me, but I've just spotted 'The Yellow House' talking to 'The Bedroom', and I must have a word..."

I mean, I enjoy a top-quality Constable or Turner as much as anybody, but to trudge through room after room after room of not dissimilar paintings, a good 80% of which fall somewhat short of "masterpiece" status, eventually becomes a negative experience. The first couple of rooms always feel revelatory – Good grief, Turner was sixteen when he painted that? – but thereafter most shows are bogged down by the curatorial desire to impose some thematic orchestration, in this case to construct a parallel narrative out of the lives of what were, in the end, two rather different professional painters trying to make a living in a very different world to ours. In those days you were entirely dependent on sales and patronage: there were no grants or lucrative prizes to reward your personal artistic "genius", not even for turning the lights on and off, or letting gallery visitors remove your clothes with scissors.

In the end, it can feel a bit too much like being trapped inside a catalogue raisonné, and I, at least, always find myself looking for small visual pleasures as a relief from the, um, bigger picture superimposed by the curators. Which Constable paintings show swallows skimming the water? for example. Or amusing trivia: I enjoyed the name of this particular donor, for example:

E. Farquhar Buzzard... Now there's someone who must have had some character-building experiences at school. Or, look, here's yer actual John Constable's collapsible sketching chair on a plinth:

Very nice... Don't think I wasn't tempted to hop up and give it a try.

Which is not to say that the exhibition didn't have an effect on me. On a very brief visit to Mottisfont Abbey on Saturday I seemed to be walking through a landscape of just the sort conjured up on canvas by the painters of that time. The light and the clouds were exhilarating – all four of these photographs were taken within a single 20 minute period – even though the meadows were very marshy underfoot, and almost impassable in places. What wouldn't the likes of Turner or Constable have given for a device that could sketch a view with such fidelity in just 1/200th of a second? But then, what wouldn't you give to be able to sketch like a Constable or a Turner?

It is an Ancient Blogger

So, Christmas and New Year...

Fun as it is to see it enacted on a primary-school stage, not many of us in these sceptical days – surely even those of a "Christian heritage" – put much credence in the enchanting but somewhat dubious Christian origin story. After all, its more credibility-stretching aspects must rely, at best, on the sole testimony of mother Mary, stand-in dad Joseph having quietly and somewhat mysteriously dropped out of the narrative along the way (what, you'd never noticed that? So much for "patriarchy"...). Angels, too, seem to have become even more scarce than shepherds in subsequent centuries, which is a pity, I think. [1]

I dare say the theologians have neat, hand-wavy explanations to tidy all this up to their own satisfaction, but they have never seemed particularly inclined to share these with the rest of us: too difficult and too profound, no doubt, for their simple-minded flock of metaphorical sheep to grasp (that would be us). Or perhaps rather too transparently aligned with Old Testament messianic prophesies and cunningly superimposed onto long-standing pagan winter festivities (see my post It's All About the Children).

More prosaically, of course, not everyone on the planet regards January 1st as the start of a New Year, or even as "January 1st", but let's not get into that. Packaging the two events together works for us, not least because such propitiously-timed seasonal goings-on have been going on in these light-starved regions forever. Come back, sun, please come back! Oh, all right, since you ask so nicely... Hooray! Party Time! For school-kids, working stiffs and wage-slaves (that's most of the population, I'd imagine) it's a welcome break from the workaday norm, a week or two studded with twinkling lights, seasonal treats, and officially-endorsed occasions for anticipation and celebration.

It has been becoming a much more private and secular holiday over the years, too. It has been a while since any kids came round to knock on our door "carolling", even in its vestigial form, i.e. waiting for the door to open and launching into a truncated, 10-second chorus of "We wish you a merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!" Unlike Hallowe'en's trickle treating [2], I don't think either carollers or most carollees had much idea of what was supposed to happen next, which led to nothing more than a series of awkward doorstep moments. Even the Rotarians seem to have given up trawling the streets around here with their canned carols blaring from a van, and rattling their collecting buckets. I don't miss it; "Silent Night", indeed.

Speaking purely personally, Christmas lost most of its charm for me around age 11 when my sister – eight years older than me – left home under the very traditional shadow of a hastily-arranged marriage. My parents seemed suddenly to fade into a perpetually-tired middle-age but then, and worse from my p-o-v, quickly settled into the role of doting grandparents. Christmas from then on rarely took place under our own roof, and I found I had been handed a minor walk-on part as "churlish teenage uncle". So I would take every opportunity to escape and begin the study of the ways of delinquency with like-minded friends, hanging about in various dark and frosty corners. Which was actually a lot more "magical" than Christmas, although not without risk: I was careful and I was lucky, but a few of us didn't make it out of our teens alive or without the unwanted gift of a brand-new criminal record. 

Having your own children revives the fun of Christmas, of course, but brings with it the stress of actually having to make the fun happen. It takes some kind of domestic saint to prepare a celebratory meal with unaccustomed ingredients and for an unusual quantity of diners, including at least one vegetarian and/or other dietary restrictions, or to take joy in ensuring that the right gifts have been bought and that an acceptable balance of generosity between recipients has been achieved. The whole thing is a nightmare of potentially disastrous pitfalls: a turkey that has resisted roasting for hours beyond the calculated timing, let's say, and served up by an angry cook far later than scheduled to a sullen and sarcastic family – accompanied by overcooked, warmed-up vegetables – is nobody's idea of a festive feast. Or so I'm told. 

Sadly, any compensatory seasonal sparkle does begin to fade once your children are no longer lighting up the house with the exuberant wattage of their excitement, and really just want to escape and study the ways of delinquency with their like-minded friends. Nothing brings on the indigestion quite like lying awake at 3 a.m., wondering when your teenage daughter will stagger home from a night out clubbing, all the while mentally apologising to your deceased parents for having done much the same to them. Or, ah, so I imagine.

Since those anxious years, for us Christmas has evolved into a more relaxed family get-together on neutral ground: generally a rented cottage near the sea in Dorset, big enough to let the different folks indulge their different strokes – it is frankly impossible to read in the same room as whooping kidults playing Mario Kart – but cosy enough for congenial gatherings around the table or a log-burning stove. From there, the two of us will generally retreat to our Bristol flat for a quiet New Year, returning here to Southampton before Twelfth Night, like Tudor aristocrats. Which reminds me of one of those strange marginal annotations Coleridge added to the 1817 edition of The Ancient Mariner, from Part IV:

In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.

No servants await us at home, of course, but we have their 21st century equivalents: there's milk on the doorstep, the heating is on, there's food in the freezer, and the Wi-Fi leaps eagerly back into action. As does the Ancient Blogger:

I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.

 

1. My partner's niece, having grown up in the distinctly cross-cultural environment of Bristol, as a child referred to Muslim women in hijabs or other head coverings as "shepherds", due to their resemblance to children dressed up for a Nativity play. I know! I'm afraid it's a coinage too cute not to adopt, at least safely in private.

2. Another cute and useful coinage by a neighbour's small son.

Raking

I really meant to put up some of the photographs I took over our Christmas / New Year break today but, unexpectedly, it SNOWED here during the night on Sunday – a whole five millimetres I'd guess, easily enough to bring the entire county to a standstill – and Monday was a classic blue-skies freezing-cold winter day, so... What else was I going to do?

Although, actually, once I'd got over the novelty of the sugar coating on the pots and frozen water dishes in the back garden (sorry about that, thirsty birds, but the hammer just bounced off!), it was the brilliant raking light that kept me outside all afternoon. There is something exhilarating about the sensory contradiction between bright sunshine and temperatures hovering around 0° C. It's a sort of natural sauna effect that is probably deeply boring to those living in frostier latitudes, but down here on the south coast is a rare treat. I did keep all my clothes on, though.

Good Bones

Strange, isn't it, how things can "go viral" and yet pass you by. But then, not everybody catches a real virus like flu either, even in an epidemic. An inoculation against the latter helps, of course – I had mine months ago – and keeping well away from social media is a sensible measure if you don't want to get coughed over by me-too merchants anxious to share whatever it is they've just caught off the web.

So when I came across a poem recently, "Good Bones", looking for something quite different, I was surprised to learn, according to Wikipedia, that:

Smith's poem "Good Bones", originally published in the journal Waxwing in June 2016, has been widely circulated on social media and read by an estimated one million people. A Wall Street Journal story in May 2020 described it as "keeping the realities of life's ugliness from young innocents" and noted that the poem has gone viral after catastrophes such as the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, the May 2017 suicide bombing at a concert in Manchester, England, the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, and the coronavirus pandemic. PRI called it "the official poem of 2016".

Who knew? Maybe you did. Certainly, not many poems get that sort of distribution; most poets would kill for 1% of that million. In fact, they'd give it serious consideration for just 0.1%. Here it is:

Good Bones, by Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

It's a good poem, although it could be better – you  might say it has the bones of a very good poem – but I can see how the way it wears its world-weary heart rather rhetorically on its sleeve meets a certain need that would cause it to go viral. I like those opening five lines best, a little reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop with an astringent dash of Ashbery, and the subsequent repetitions of "though I keep this from my children" are nicely-judged and will speak to any parent who put some youthful effort into having "a past" worthy of a little evasiveness.

There's an awful lot of self-styled poetry out there on the Web; most of it that I have seen (which is not much, admittedly, not even anywhere near that homicide-worthy 0.1%) being little more than some "beautiful" or "sad" sentiments broken up into lines without rhyme, rhythm, or reason. It may be unfair, but take the line breaks away, even from a poem like "Good Bones", and you're often left with what amounts to a passage of heightened prose or perhaps a soliloquy from a play. Although it's interesting how, in the case of "Good Bones", the repetition of "I keep this from my children" now becomes rather odd, perhaps a sign that reads, CAUTION! POET AT WORK. Here it is again:

Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

The genre known as "found poetry" makes the opposite move, of course: by inserting line breaks into prose text it can be rendered into poetry, or at least something very like it. I have always been susceptible to accidental poetry myself, ever since stumbling across the haiku-adjacent mantra "There is no ozone by the sea, only the smell of rotting seaweed" in Clyne and Williams' General School Chemistry at the age of 15, followed a few years later by the discovery of the "Accidents" section in Palmer's Index to the Times (e.g. "Henry Ford, Sawn Asunder by a Circular Saw at St. Pancras Steam Saw Mills"); see my post Quiet Fun.

Then there's the form known as the "cento" (pronounced "sento", not "chento", apparently, something I can never remember [1]), basically a poem made up entirely of lines lifted from other poems. There's a good one, "99 Poems", in Stephen Knight's volume The Prince of Wails (downloadable PDF here):

The last poem, called "99 Poems" ... is a collection of 99 lines borrowed with great affection from elegies and epitaphs and maybe other sources too, perhaps film, across the centuries, and arranged by first letter from A to Y, starting with the beautiful line (possibly Thomas Hardy?) – A face that, though in shadow, still appears – and ending with the simple physicality of Your hands. Both images – the dead who re-appear and the father’s hand which holds his child’s – recur throughout the book, gaining power along the way. And it can be no accident that this last poem ends on the letter Y, not Z: there is no final letter in the alphabet of this wonderfully haunting collection.
Chris Beckett, londongrip.co.uk

But for me the ultimate example of finding poetry where none was intended is A Humument by Tom Phillips, in which an entire novel, A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, is repeatedly ransacked for a secret narrative hidden among the Victorian verbiage, exposed by burying the rest of the page in decorative art, and linking islands of text together by following typographical "rivers":

If you've never come across A Humument, then I recommend that you get hold of a copy of at least one of the "trade" editions published by Thames & Hudson (there have been six such editions since 1980, all different) before they become collectors-only items following Tom's death in 2022. And if anyone out there has a copy of the mustard-yellow jacketed third (a.k.a. "second revised") edition they'd be willing to sell me – it's the only one I haven't got – I'd be very happy to hear from you.

In a way, you might even see found poetry as an analogue of "art" photography (hey, "only connect..."). How? Well, you find poetic little jewels lurking among the prose of the world, isolate them in your frame and, in the case of a book or sequence, link and present them as a new, coherent whole that generates a new, greater significance. Or not. Obviously, most people do not use photographs in their lives as an art medium, of course, any more than they use a pencil or, indeed, language itself that way. Rather, they see and use photographs as unique records of something important – family, friends, holidays – or as stimulation – a gaudy sunset, adorable cats and dogs, or (so I'm told) scantily-dressed young people. In a very similar way, certain popular poems are used not for literary purposes, but to add a little sprinkling of dignity, or as a stimulus for tears or laughter, at special occasions. A poem is a pre-packaged, high-impact selection of words that, like a ready-meal, can save a lot of effort at a difficult time. Of those million-plus readers of "Good Bones", I wonder how many went on to see what else Maggie Smith had written?

In the same way, W.H. Auden's poem now generally known as "Funeral Blues" has had an afterlife similar to "Good Bones" as a reading at funerals, due entirely to its use in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. So although to speak of "popular poetry" is something of a contradiction in terms, it is instructive to look at the results of a BBC poll of the 100 most popular poems in Britain, published as an anthology in 1996. The only list of the book's contents I could find is here. "Funeral Blues" is already in with a bullet at no. 19 (still with the title "Twelve Songs IX"), just two years after the release of Four Weddings. But 1996 is a long time ago now, and I'd be surprised if many younger folk today have ever come across most of those poems, not least those that were, in my day, primary-school poetry favourites such as Walter de la Mare's "The Listeners", or even anthology perennials and "poetry corner" regulars like, well, pretty much everything else on that list. I get the impression that most of those surveyed had probably encountered the same few anthologised poems in the course of their school studies – the time when poems make the most lasting impression – but never actually became poetry readers.

Of those few that did become poetry readers, of course, their choices of "favourites" will have been so diverse as to render them statistically insignificant in a poll like this. Such is the nature of statistics, if not of poetry-reading. To anyone for whom poetry is as important a part of their life as, say, music, this sort of ranking is completely beside the point. To resort to this sort of off-the-peg Big Occasion poem is to regard poetry as something rather like the empty church visited in Larkin's poem "Church Going": a place where "all our compulsions meet, / Are recognised, and robed as destinies". Or perhaps even like the football World Cup, when everyone suddenly becomes an armchair pundit for a few high-stakes games every four years, and then moves on; a very different thing from following your team from the stands through every wet weekend of yet another disappointing season.

But ours is a game of two halves, and this game
the semi they went on to lose; from here
it’s all down, from the First to the foot of the Second,
McGrandle, Visocchi and Spankie detaching
like bubbles to speed the descent into pitch-sharing,
pay-cuts, pawned silver, the Highland Division,
the absolute sitters ballooned over open goals,
the dismal nutmegs, the scores so obscene
no respectable journal will print them; though one day
Farquhar’s spectacular bicycle-kick
will earn him a name-check in Monday’s obituaries.

Don Paterson, from "Nil Nil"

So, seeing as we've just had a Big Occasion, here, once again, is  a strong candidate for my own favourite Christmas poem, by Thomas Hardy:

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so. 

(Published in The Times, Christmas Eve 1915)

In the end, there's virality, there's popularity, and then there is longevity. A work of art like a poem or a novel might achieve all three, probably at different stages in its life, but in the end it's only longevity – a high score in the Test of Time and a certain imperishable quality – that counts. Who now would ever have heard of W.H. Mallock if it were not for Tom Phillips' appropriation? Will anyone have heard of Tom Phillips, either, 100 years from now? We'll never know. But we can be pretty sure that "good bones" alone or a blunt appeal to our emotions will never be enough to ensure the longevity of a work of art, and these are the chief characteristics of all those perfectly decent poems and pictures piling up in the wastepaper baskets of history.

1. It is pronounced "sento" because the name is derived from a Greek word for a patchwork. Why it is not therefore "kento" I don't know. Worse, being derived from Greek, some people claim its plural is not "centos" but "centones". Pedants! Do they also refer to several octopuses as "octopodes", I wonder? The cento is hardly one of the mainstream poetic forms, though, and gets taken out of the versifier's wardrobe even less frequently than some virtuoso straitjacket like the villanelle.

The Parable of the Poisoned Arrow

In a very early post (Don't Ask Me, 2009) I wrote:

I have always liked the idea that the Buddha regarded certain questions as unanswerable: the so-called "Undetermined Questions." That is, when asked these particular questions, he simply said ... nothing. Depending on which tradition you listen to, there are either fourteen or ten such questions, but to a hyper-logical Western mind there seem at root really only to be four questions, which have been expanded -- in what seems like an anticipation of the user-satisfaction questionnaire -- by the addition of supplementaries, so that "Is the world finite? Or not? Or both? Or neither?" counts as four questions. If you added "At weekends?" I suppose there'd be five.

But the core questions are:

Is the world eternal?
Is the world finite?
Is the self identical with the body?
Does an enlightened being exist after death?

All good questions, but you can see why the Buddha might choose to stare meaningfully into the distance at that point. In many ways, this is a more helpful response than the wheel-spinning scholasticism of the Christian church grappling with such questions, or the linguistic nit-picking of philosophers in later centuries. It's not quite "Don't know, don't care" but you can imagine a certain amount of serene finger-tapping going on whenever those questions came up.

Now, I'm no scholar (I'm also not a Buddhist), so it has taken me 16 years finally to come across The Parable of the Poisoned Arrow.

It seems a certain monk, Malunkyaputta, found this silence deeply annoying. You can imagine him lying awake at night, fuming: Why doesn't he just answer the fucking questions? He either knows the answers, or this is all a con-job, and he's not the Buddha, just a very naughty boy! I know I shouldn't, but tomorrow I'm going to insist that he gives me some answers, or I'm outta here! So, stepping up as a convenient straight man for another Great Teaching, he did.

Siddhartha "Buddha" Gautama's answer goes on a bit – time was not a pressing matter in the serene days before mobile phones or even clocks and watches – and in its descent into ever finer detail you can detect a certain sarcasm, I think. You can read the whole thing here on Wikipedia, in what I trust is an accurate translation. But, essentially, what he is saying is: Hey, you! You've been shot with a poisoned arrow! Do you really want to know all this irrelevant stuff – the name, rank, and number of the guy who shot it, blah blah blah, all the way down to the brand of bowstring he uses – or do you want me to pull the damn thing out and treat the wound? Your choice! Die of pointless time-consuming curiosity, or be saved. Time is running out, idiot!

To repeat what I said in that earlier post: in many ways, this is a more helpful response than the wheel-spinning scholasticism of the Christian church grappling with such questions, or the linguistic and metaphysical nit-picking of philosophers in later centuries. "So, is this "Jumping Jesus!" you cried out to when the arrow hit you of the same substance or of a similar substance to God?" "Can an arrow exist without being perceived in someone's mind (or, in your case, arm)?" Who knows? Who cares? Get this bloody arrow out of me! It hurts! Professionally speaking, you might say this is religion as ER surgery, rather than cloistered theology. And all the better for that, too.

All of which somehow puts me in mind of this beautiful song by K.D. Lang, "Simple", from her album Hymns of the 49th Parallel:

"Love will not elude us: love is simple..." Now there's a New Year's message to take to heart.

So, as the final day of the year approaches I wish you all the best for 2026! But do watch out for those poisoned arrows, real or metaphorical. Should you get hit by one  – it happens – follow Dr. Siddhartha's advice and don't waste time wondering about the who, what, when, or why: just accept that "life hurts", as Doc S. likes to say, and get it seen to right away. Keep it simple.