Tag: Me

I was really annoyed by an article in the paper on the campaign to get ‘Intelligent Design’ taught in schools as an alternative to natural selection. Hence the ditty in the last post.

But I would like to come up with a more substantial poem on the subject.

apes/angels.

The angels are winning in Kansas.

scared of the inner ape

Oh nothing could be finer
than to be in Carolina
where everyone’s the work
of an intelligent designer

apesouls

appendices/lower back pain yadda yadda yadda.

QUOTATION:A hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits. ATTRIBUTION:Charles Darwin (1809

more on foxes as symbols of… something

There are of course many London subcultures which are not very visible, not because they are marginalised, but because they are outnumbered – pearly kings, City guilds, Morris dancers, punks, model plane enthusiasts. Are they less interesting?

As night falls, London fills with foxes

shadows in the yellow darkness

slip away.

trot, nose down.

pause (still, frozen, something) and look at you

And of course marginality isn’t simply ethnic etc – West Indians, Bangladeshis, Turks are clearly recognised as part of the London scene; but not so much Somalis, Poles etc.

Oddness which *isn’t* tied to ethnicity, sexuality, religion etc might be more interesting.

Masons.

The sex trade is marginalised (and indeed nocturnal, to some extent) though it must be as big a part of the London economy as fish and chips.

Perhaps something less literal – philosophicopsychological, f’rinstance. Or more spatially driven.

I notice ‘pollarded’ trees everywhere now. Nearly every tree in the city has been hacked around at one point or another.

artificiality/naturalness

The *appearance* of naturalness

The difficulty is communicating the background info (actually I’ve changed my mind about this).

The way knowledge changes your perceptions.

A tree only has to be cut once to be visibly scarred/reshaped for ever. There’s an easy sentimental poem in that which I *don’t* want to write. Or an easy Man vs. Nature one.

Other things that show the evidence of their history?
People, obviously. Anything else?

A more general look at trees being shaped by their circumstances? position, weather etc.

Moo Mixer – It’s a tasty tornado in your hand!

~ An editorial note: two things come together. The increasing dormancy of stormy petrel, and a galling realisation, in the face of Eduardo’s call for blogger’s notebooks (see the PB for details): not only have I hardly written any poetry recently, but I haven’t even got any notebook-jottings I could offer as evidence of thought. So begins an experiment in online notebooking. Who knows if it will sustain. ~

walking through suburban London at night, you see many foxes. Where do they live?

I assume in the little areas of dead land – the spaces between; undeveloped plots, railway cuttings, the irregular bits left unowned and unwalked. Under garden sheds.

so they become a symbol for interstitiality in all its forms.

fox-space.

human lives in the interstices: the semi-visible lives of Rwandan, Somalian communities in London. Little churches with extravagant-sounding names (between a greengrocer and a post-office? something banal). The sudden appearance of hundreds of Koreans in Trafalgar Sq. when they beat Italy (Spain? both?) in the World Cup.

The mentally ill?

tip of the iceberg

Linguistic fox-space? The elusive, the marginal – thieves’ cant, cockney rhyming slang.

Poems as foxes – operating in the spaces between obvious. Or operating from the margins to make use of the public spaces of language when people’s attention is elsewhere.

Picking up the immigrant theme – possible intersection with the idea of buddleia (exotic, colourful, hardy, naturalised) as a flower to represent London: using the unused spaces, the building lots, railway arches, walls.

Is the nocturnalness interesting?

Is it interesting that foxes are more visible in the city than the country?

Peregrines nesting on the Dome.

I suppose rats are interstitial, too, but they live in sewers and things, which is a rather different relationship to the people around them. Still, a thought.

Reminds me of another theme I’ve considered before: specialism vs. generalism in wildlife. We tend to admire the specialists – the cheetah, the hummingbird, the arctic tern – as some kind of peak of evolution/aesthetics. But we are generalists. The adaptable species – the rats, the pigeons, the sparrows – are our natural kin. Sort of.