HOME Sunday,1 September 2002

At the various poetry workshops I've attended, the question is often asked: Why write in blank verse? Why not write in rhyme?   And the answer is given, casually, "Sometimes the right word is hard to find."   Now, that does not seem to me like a very good reason. In fact, it is hardly a reason at all. A professional writer is telling you that he/she takes the easy option. Admittedly there are an awful lot of words in the English language, but you can find most of them in a half decent dictionary, and if you have any idea of what you are trying to say, you will find the right one for the job reasonably quickly. (And if the dictionary fails you, there is always the thesaurus.) But perhaps they mean it is hard to find the right rhyming word? So what? Nothing is ever easy all the time.   There's a popular misconception that poetry is something natural which should simply gush out like a fresh water spring. The reality, of course, is that there are very few things as unnatural as poetry. The trick is getting it to sound natural and that, oddly enough, takes a great deal of work.   Personally, I think that there is something in between poetry and prose, that is neither one nor the other, and it should be given a category of its own. At the moment, all that does not qualify as prose is lumped together under the heading of "poetry".   A lot of the trouble stems from the fact that there are people who want to write poetry without going to the trouble of trying to compose it. At the same time, there are people who want to write, period, but find prose too challenging, so instead they churn out unconnected phrases and call the result "poetry".   Is it any wonder it's so hard to sell the stuff?

HOME Wednesday, 4 September 2002

I have just read in the newspaper that the government's advisor on racial hatred has called for stiffer penalties by judges on those whose crimes were racially motivated. All that this kind of nonsense is likely to provide is even greater racial tension, for the ordinary "native" Joe will see quite clearly that the "foreign" Joe is being better protected against thugs than himself.   Thugs are thugs, no matter what their reasons are, and if people are truly equal in their rights, then that equality should be shown in the administration of the law. Sometimes I despair that society will ever be fair and just. We have "rights for women", "rights for children", "rights for gays", "rights for criminals", "rights for victims" and God only knows how many other "rights for a section of the community" groups. Whatever happened to "rights for people"? After all, every human being on the face of this earth is a person, and the abiding rule should be that the "rights" of one person should never infringe on the "rights" of another.   Orwell was commenting on a totalitarian society in Animal Farm when he had the pigs display the notice "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others", but unfortunately, it is not only totalitarian societies that practice this ethos.   Surely, after several thousand years of infancy, it is time that humans grew up and rose above such pettiness. It has been a long enough childhood.