Attention all Literature students
So I got all my mock exam results today. So I did slightly better than I was expecting, but what the hell. Shields up, full red alert against Complacency.
We were going through our Literature paper today, discussing a poem by Derek Walcott (Nobel Prize for Literature) from one of the questions...and it really is a very, very obscure poem. Not obscure in that no one's ever heard of it (although I certainly hadn't, when I went into the exam...which just goes to show how much I study for Literature), but obscure in its allusions and references. The poet just assumes you're going to know that "veiled queen whose girth as comfortable as cushions" is a reference to Queen Elizabeth, and that "Papa! Papa!" isn't a call for a patriarchal figure, but an invocation of the name of a despotic Haitian leader, and that "changing of the statues" is a satirical mockery of the British changing of the guards. Talk about presumptuous. Bah. I don't suppose he's a Nobel Literature Prize winner for nothing, but really, I think there's something to be said about making poetry accessible as well as intelligent. Bah.
Which brings me on to something I've always wondered about. Those of you who do Literature will know what I mean when I say "critical analysis" of a poem, and you'll all be familiar with the vast amount of - dare I say it - bullshit that you can come up with about a poem. E.g.:
"The informal, lower-case term "gri-gri" is a stark contrast to the formal (and therefore unfamiliar) upper-case syntax of "Whitehall" and "White Papers". This is an important distinction which implies not only the incongruence of these "White Papers" and the "Independence Parades", but also serves to emphasize the "otherness" of the Parades to the persona, thus allowing the reader to sympathize with him."
Load of bollocks. Now my point is, we can sit here and analyze poems until Chaucer's cows come home, but how much of what we are reading from the poem was actually intended to be read? I mean, did Derek Walcott, when penning the abovementioned poem ("Parades, Parades"), actually intend for those "White Papers" to be taken as a symbolic example of the "otherness" of British colonialism? Or was he writing - dare I say it - a whole load of bollocks, and is having a ball of a time laughing at us Year 13 students trying to muster some semblance of analytical sophistication in our A-level essays? Do all poets do this??
I remember, way back in Year 12, that we had an assignment to write a poem of our own. I wrote one entitled "Balloons". When I gave it to (I think it was) William to analyze, he came up with this very sophisticated interpretation of how it symbolically represented the evolution of a fetus in the womb, and was a social comment on the fallability of women's rights in a modern, increasingly asexual society. He concluded that the poem was suggesting that the human race was doomed to self-imposed extermination.
And I had written about a kid blowing up a balloon.
I learned some valuable lessons from this. Heed my words, fellow literature students.
Anyway, spent most of the evening watching my gorgeous kickboxing instructor, well, kickbox...while, of course, kicking myself for not having the foresight to bring a camera (shirt off and everything, ooer. Ditzy enough? :P).