Poetry.

[slemslempike]

It's National Poetry Day! And lots of people on my flist have also been talking specifically about women poets. I combine the two with this extract from Dimsie Among the Prefects. One of the original rules of the Anti-Soppist League was that no member should write poetry (poetry being dreadfully soppy, of course). The ASL was formed when they were juniors, but there is no less need for watchfulness in Div 1. Jean Gordon, however, was found out at the beginning of term to be a secretly budding poet. This was reluctantly allowed to pass, so long as she kept to suitable subjects like the dear old school. However, later in the term, she is discovered deviating from these clear rules:

'What's the matter with Jean's poetry?' queried Dimsie, diverted for the moment into this side issue. 'I thought that was all settled at the council meeting, weeks ago.'

'So it was,' answered Erica, glaring at the mutinous Jean, who was sharpening a pencil with a silent disdain which did not attempt to excuse itself. 'And instead of being grateful to us, and realizing what a narrow squeak she'd had of being chucked out because of it, she goes and takes advantage of our kindness to write stuff like this.'

She handed across the torn lead of an exercise-book and Dimsie read with growing enjoyment:

Not the fair land that smiles with wood and meadow
Touches my heart to-day,
Not the tall mountains in their silent grandeur,
Where the cloud-shadows play.
Only the sea, so restless in its tossing,
Soothes this sad soul of mine,
Telling the story of a ceaseless longing
More bitter than the brine.
Oh, for a heart which was my own, and beats not!
Oh, for a love gone by!
Oh, for a light which never more for me will
Glow upon earth or sky!

The poetess had been watching Dimsie's face with anxious expectation. If she were to dissolve into tears as Rosamund had done, it would have a most telling effect on Erica's hard heart, for Erica would rightly consider that to make Dimsie weep must be an achievement of no common order. Jean saw efforts for composure in her reader's face, and her spirits, blighted by Erica's scathing criticism, began to rise again; indeed she hardly knew how Dimsie could fail to be moved by the pathos which had almost brought tears to her own accustomed eyes as she wrote it.

Dimsie reached the last line, and then, to the author's disgust and amazement, exploded in such a peal of laughter, that she rolled off her perch on to Erica's lap, and clung to her weakly, while struggling to suppress her mirth.

'Oh Jean, Jean! and we never knew you'd been crossed in love! "More bitter than the brine." It's so - so touching! Is there any more of it?'

'Yes, heaps! How can you laugh at stuff like that?' protested Erica, wrathfully. 'There's about ten verses beginning "Come back, my only love, across the muirs". I counted a dozen poems, and in every one of them somebody is dead! And she has the cheek to think she can go on being an Anti-Soppist after this!'

'Well, you settled it was quite all right for me to make up poetry,' said Jean, sulkily, 'and now you kick up a fuss because you don't like the sort I do. It's so horribly unreasonable of you.'

My bathroom book at the moment is Germaine Greer's collection 101 Poems by 101 Women, which is arranged chronologically, and I'm up to Christina Rossetti. Unfortunately the poems have got longer than I like, and since I am thankfully currently free from intestinal difficulty I am not managing to get through them so easily. I mostly like poems rather than poets, but here are my ten:

Diane Di Prima
Lenore Kandel
Grace Nichols
Wendy Cope
Fleur Adcock
Sappho
Jackie Kay
Carol Ann Duffy
Sylvia Plath
Everyone in The Virago Book of Wicked Verse

I don't care if the last one's a cheat, I think of it as an entity, and it's the first book of poetry I ever bought myself. I was 15/16 and on holiday in Wales with my family and my childhood best friend Chloe and her family. I had blue hair and I was sulking because if I hadn't been on holiday I would have been going to see Dinosaur Jr with my soon-to-be-boyfriend Daniel. We went to the bookshop in Machynlleth, where I spent all my holiday money on my book, and Chloe bought A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man because she loved the line "when you wet the bed first it is warm and then it is cold". We read our respective books when we went to bed that night huddled under blankets because it was technically summer but we were in a damp cottage up what might have been a mountain with no heating.