"Soft September"

[banjo]

I'm not one who claims to have any interest in poetry as such- for me, poetry is a song looking for a melody, but this one I do like. I was a shop steward for about 13 irksome years because no other fekker was stupid enough to take two paces forward, and one year the MD posted a letter to everyone as the annual wage negotiations had finally broken down after some five months of entrenchment. In it he referred to A.E.Housman whom he described as "that most English of poets".

A.E.Housman is very well known for his collection of poems called "A Shropshire Lad", so popular with the homesick shell-shocked and mustard gas addled troops in the trenches of Flanders fields, but this is from a later collection, apparently written to cheer up a dying colleague. The MD appropriated the words "Soft September" to describe the doldrums in which the company found itself, and hence "Jam Tomorrow". ("Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose" immediately sprang to mind) but I never forgot that newsletter, and resolved to look up A.E.Housman. Much later, I bought a pocket book of "A Shropshire Lad" in the merchandising shop at Stokesay Castle, Shropshire, but eventually I gave up trying to find "soft September" in all the poems therein. Google-fu to the rescue, and that is how I discovered that it wasn't actually within "A Shropshire Lad" at all.

The thing I can't abide about poetry generally is that incessant and earnest droning delivery most seem to fall into. That Liverpudlian poet, Roger McGough doesn't deliver his recitations in that stereotypical monologue, and he is somewhat more acceptable to me for that. This link has the poem "Tell Me Not Here, it Needs Not Saying" containing the words "soft September" typed out, but scroll down and play the video of the lovely lass reciting it so nicely and with apparently joyful enthusiasm.

www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/tell-me-not-here-it-needs-not-saying/

For me, any scant attraction to poetry is all about wonderment at the relevance of words being delivered just that little bit faster than my brain can process the context, and THAT makes me want to rewind again and again. It is emphatically nothing whatsoever to do with a load of baseball-cap-on-backwards scrotes gyrating about in some seemingly unchoreographed routine, and pointing their fingers up in the air at random with their arrises hanging out of their stretchy pants, and chanting 4 to the bar doggerel about mashing up, smashing up, abusing women, fighting, stabbing and so on. You recognise that mental picture? Do I need to justify that gross generalisation? Not sure really- possibly, but I do feel it's about time some of them justified what they come out with. This is not targetted at a demographic, rather at a culture that folks seem to emulate in their helter-skelter rush to identify with a peer group (or perhaps lead it) just as we all did as youngsters ...

でつ e&oe ...