Poem For The Day is a poetry anthology, as you can probably tell from the title. It presents a poem for each day of the year, including February 29th. It’s not really my book, it was one of my mum’s books, I’ve just held on to it for some reason. That’s going to be changing though, because this is one of the ones I will be getting rid of. I’ll probably donate it to the charity shop, along with all the others I decide I don’t want to keep anymore. Now I was very close to throwing this one out last time I went through “pruning” my book collection, but I kept hold of it for a reason that is rather similar to what I was talking about at the end of the last post.
Poetry as an idea is held in very high regard by a lot of people, but I’ve just never been able to really appreciate it. Or at least I don’t feel like I have, there are a few (and I really mean a few, a mere handful) poems that I really appreciate and have enjoyed or found helpful in some way, but even with those I feel like there’s something I’m missing. The very structure of poetry is something that has always seemed overwhelming to me, there are all these complex rules and different things going on at once. Metre and iambs and line breaks, I just don’t know where to start and I’ve always felt very restricted by it. I think I mentioned before me and my friend both wrote things of our own, and I never paid attention to any of those kinds of rules. I couldn’t explain to you what makes the structure of the sonnet form for example, I understand why the more intuitive aspects of poetry appeal to people like rhyme and the use of symbolism or imagery but that’s it really. Conjuring up a pretty picture, or a rather frightening or unpleasant one for that matter, isn’t a technique exclusive to poetry however. Anyone can do it, it takes no real talent. The best work, or at least what seems to be considered so by those who know what they’re talking about, does far more than pair similar sounding words.
I don’t have any interest in writing poetry though, I just want to be able to get the same enjoyment from reading it that so many other people seem to be able to and I can’t. That’s what I’m getting at when I talk about how restrictive it can be, it requires study to enjoy it. No other art requires that. Yes if you have an understanding of the complexities of say music theory for example, you will gain a far deeper appreciation for the music you already love (whether it be a famous piece from the classical period or a pop song you have fond memories of), but you do already love them. You can be a layman and find beauty in any of the other fine arts, and in fact that initial response you have to a particular work might be what inspires you to learn more.
I have another poetry book that I will be keeping however, it’s The Puffin Book of Fantastic First Poems. See my mum, unlike me, did seem to genuinely like and enjoy poetry. Both reading it and writing her own. In fact she had a collection of her own published, and my uncle and I were recently asked for copyright clearance by the national poetry library on some of her work. There are a few copies here at home but they’re with my dad’s books. Thinking back, I imagine she bought this puffin book for me in the hopes of inspiring that same love of poetry she had within me. To be honest, looking back it does seem that at the time she was right. I have very fond memories of this book, I can remember distinctly how much fun I had reciting my favourite ones over and over. That’s the reason I’m going to be keeping it, I know I said last week that I shouldn’t let sentimentality stop me from holding on to things that I don’t really value, but I do really value it. There are definitely other books from my childhood that I remember fondly which I will be getting rid of, because as I said I don’t plan to return to them and I doubt I’ll have children to pass them on to. I do return to this puffin book every few years though, and I think having that portal back to my early childhood can be helpful sometimes. It’s not just the poems contained inside, it’s the delightful watercolour illustrations, it’s my name scribbled on the inside of the cover, the tears and slight damage.
That I was reading these poems aloud, back when I first got this book as a child, is I think what gave me such an appreciation for them. After all poetry is meant to be spoken ultimately, not read. Again there’s this romantic idea people have of certain poems that are special to them and that they’ve memorised being something they can repeat to themselves in times of great peril or distress. Providing them with a sense of hope, or at the very least respite from the darkness surrounding them, like the shining light of Earendil’s star in Frodo’s phial. Or there’s the image of ancient greek hoplites reciting long passages of the Iliad to their comrades on the eve of battle to remind themselves of their noble ancestors. Poetry is this thing we all have great respect for, but it never seems to quite live up to the hype. Or maybe this is just another reason for me to feel like a stupid person, it’s hard to tell. Maybe anything other than poems for little children is too complex for me, or maybe if I’d have grown up in a time before thousands of TV channels and millions of youtube videos I’d have developed differently in this regard.
There are some “real” poems (for adults, or whatever) that I like too, “On A Portrait Of A Deaf Man” is one I’ve returned to quite a few times over the last half decade. In fact for one of my final GCSE exams (those are the tests we take around the age of 15 here) I wrote an analysis of it. If I read what I wrote for that today I’d probably be quite unimpressed with myself, after all I was only a teenager with a much poorer understanding of things than I realised at the time. However I think that maybe the fact that I had to spend a lot of time really thinking about every line might be why I was able to develop an appreciation for this poem when I so rarely can.
The poem itself is an elegy for the poet’s (Sir John Betjemen) father, so if you are a regular here you’ll understand why it resonated with me. I think what’s so special about it is the honesty, there’s no hiding the grief felt by the poet here. One heartfelt expression from someone still grieving, is more helpful than a hundred people who’ve “been there”. You can feel it in the way he keeps returning to the gruesome imagery of decay and rot, I know how those thoughts can torment someone following a death. My mother wasn’t buried she was cremated, but for me the way she looked when I went to see her in the chapel of rest wouldn’t leave me. Several times a day every day for months, this image of her corpse would pop into my head. I was terrified just to go to sleep at night. It was horrific, she didn’t even look like the same person. They had tied her hair back in a ponytail, she never wore her hair like that. The state of mind of the poet mirrored my own at the time so closely, it’s remarkable really. The regret he expresses for things left unfinished also stuck with me, it was really helpful at the time and even reading it again nowadays I find it comforting.
I’ve spent way too much time just on these two books, when there’s a lot to get through. I tried with this daily poem idea, but I just couldn’t get anywhere. For a few months once I did read the suggested poem every day, and I felt nothing. It was a chore that I gained nothing from. Maybe I’ll be able to slow down mentally one day, and take my time and try to find what so many others can in poems. If I do, I imagine I will seek out a collection that touches on themes I care about already rather than a book like this one which seemingly has no consistent idea running through it. The poems inside could have been picked totally at random. I do have one more small collection of poems, it’s a tiny little thing. The Lord Tennyson edition of the English Poets in Pictures series. It’s a nice book, certainly the oldest I own as it was published in 1941, but after thinking about it I have decided I’ll be getting rid of it as well. I’m just not going to actually read it, I already know. If I were to keep it, it’d be as decoration, and I don’t want that.
Ok, moving on to something else now. I’m going to talk about the Harry Potter books. I own all seven, and this extra little book of short stories set in the same world. If I’m being honest I’d already made my mind up on these from the start, in fact it was me seeing them collecting dust recently that made me decide to finally do this clear out. I’m never going to read them again, and even if I do have kids one day I don’t think I’d want to give them these to read. Not that I’d have a problem with it, there’s nothing offensive or unhealthy for a developing mind in them, there’s just nothing especially meaningful or useful either. I’m not sure what the point of any of it is, what is the “message” you’re meant to take away from these books. Maybe something about friendship, I will say that because the books went on so long they were able to show friendship in a way that is quite unique. I think that, more than what some people speculate about how J. K. Rowling included a lot of traditional archetypes and ancient themes (possibly not entirely intentionally) or whatever, is what really appealed to so many people back when the Harry Potter phenomenon was really at it’s height.
See I was a little late for that, I went to a midnight release for the final book when I was about nine or ten with a friend of mine (and our parents of course) and I hadn’t even actually read all of them yet. I actually read the books in the wrong order, because I already knew the basic story outline from the films that were out at the time. It was that midnight release that got me interested in reading the books actually. I read the later books, then went back to read the ones which had films out already. By the time the “second phase” of Harry Potter mania was at it’s peak with the last film release I was already kind of over it. The time period where I was really a “fan” was in between these two moments in popular culture. What I remember appealing to me (at least consciously) wasn’t these ancient motifs that thousands of essays/ blogs and youtube videos might suggest as the reason behind the series’ success, but the little character moments.
These books are character driven ultimately, that’s what the common thread is between it and the thousands of other copycat stories in the torrential storm of crappy YA novels that followed the success of Harry Potter. There are also certain tropes, and story beats too, but the appeal really is in the characters. They feel like friends to a lot of the people reading. If I wanted to be snide I’d say they’re glorified soap operas, but that would be quite reductive as they’re obviously more than that (some anyway), I’ll say instead they both satisfy the same desire. Not only that, but they also all buy into this all too prevalent meme going around nowadays of the “relatable, flawed character”. That’s what I don’t like. I don’t mind character driven stories, or stories more generally speaking. By that I mean stories told for the sake of telling a good story, I hope I didn’t give the wrong impression earlier talking about how there didn’t seem to be any “message”, sometimes there doesn’t need to be. A good adventure tale is a perfectly valid thing.
In fact a good counter to the Harry Potter books (and all the copycats) as far as character driven fiction goes would be the A Song of Ice and Fire books by George R. R. Martin. Of course, they’re better known as just the Game of Thrones books after the TV show (and first book) today. They are absolutely character driven, the very structure of the story is a series of POV style chapters named after the person whose perspective you’re getting. The style of writing is even slightly different in each case to further bring you into the specific inner world of each character. The collection of any one character’s chapters is usually a self contained story of it’s own, especially in the later books, but they also weave together and in that you see the complex nature of the feudal hierarchy that is fundamental to this story. Reading it you really get the sense of this delicate environment of unwritten rules about who can say what and to who and under what circumstances. The complexity of the world and specifically the relationships between everyone (which the show completely dropped after season 1, and could’ve done a better job of showing even then) is what makes these books so compelling.
Now there’s so much more to these books than that as well. The very presentation of such a political and social system is obviously also a way of him criticising it and others that he considers analogous. Which by the way I don’t necessarily agree with, in fact I think from what interviews I’ve seen and read I might quite fundamentally disagree with Martin on some crucial things. Religion, social organisation, human nature, politics, gender roles, all things that these books touch on. As I said though these books aren’t really about any of those things, rather Martin himself is about those things and therefore they can’t help but come out in this incredibly complex world he’s built. The world and plot come second to the characters and their development, it’s clear upon reading that even some major plot points that could have a crucial affect on the ending of the story were only thought up during the writing of the later books. Yet he’s had an outline of where the major characters will grow and develop from the start.
Now the characters in this story are certainly mostly “grey” in a sense, but I don’t think any of them can be considered relatable. In fact the attempt to make these characters this way in the show is one of the many reasons for why it has disappointed so many people. To be clear George is just as on board the bandwagon of hating on the traditional presentation of heroes and villains, morally perfect paragons of virtue fighting against real evil, because god forbid people have any kind of figure to aspire to emulate right? Nevertheless he doesn’t fall for the “flawed protagonist” and “sympathetic villain” memes, there are no main characters or antagonists really. There are characters who are set up to be, and then you end up in their head several books later. You’re not meant to have a favourite, if anything I think you’re meant to feel a bit alienated. This system the characters live in, it’s so different and the characters have a mindset that really does seem closer to people from the middle ages than people alive today. I’m not saying that the books are able to completely recreate the complexity of medieval courtly life but they do a pretty good job. Yes the characters might deal with insecurities and feelings and desires that people do today, but it expresses itself quite differently.
Now go back to Harry Potter, the characters are just like normal people, they’re your friends. They’re the people you grew up with, in more than one sense for a lot of people who were around a similar age as the characters when the books were coming out. Harry Potter is an archetypal “flawed protagonist” as are the major secondary characters (although weirdly enough, Voldemort is actually quite a traditional “truly evil” antagonist), they’re literally schoolkids who go through all the usual ups and downs that people go through at that age. Sure they’re thrust into these fantastical circumstances with all kinds of crazy creatures and bad guys to stop but that stuff is kind of secondary. In fact the surrounding plot and world seem to be even less important than in ASOIAF. J. K. Rowling just seems to have grabbed any and every kind of folkloric myth she comes across and shoved it all together. This is where all the ideas about her tapping into some kind of Jungian mind meld or whatever come from. It’s just not true though, the reason these books are so loved is not because a bunch of modern teens felt some kind of spiritual pull from witches and werewolves, it’s because in some sense they see the main characters as friends.
There’s this quote I remember hearing that was attributed to Nietzsche, but could be fabricated, it doesn’t matter really. It was about Thus Spoke Zarathustra his famous novel (which I haven’t read, in fact I’ve read nothing from Nietzsche) and he was talking about how he felt it had taken on a life of it’s own. The idea was that the book had grown beyond him, that when he read it back to himself he felt he gained a new insight. His own work, that he had written with great care as a means of expressing his own views, was now teaching him something new. I just thought it was funny, because the way people like me who haven’t actually read his work conceive of the man is as someone who everyone has a different interpretation of. The many different explanations of what he believed and was trying to say can sometimes seem wildly different, yet these people who might completely disagree with one another both on Nietzsche and everything else, both think that there’s something of great value to be found in his writings.
Now I’m not comparing ASOIAF to any great philosophical work, it is essentially just genre fiction and I know that any “real intellectual” would sneer at it just as much as they would at the Harry Potter books. All I want to say is that I see a very similar thing happening. There are a lot of blogs and youtube channels which are dedicated to talking about and analysing these books, on top of that there are a lot of political, philosophical and miscellaneous ones who have also made posts about them, and the interpretations vary quite a bit. For every worthwhile or interesting one there’s ten morons who have nothing of value to add (like me) but that’s the case even with actual “real profound works of literature” also. Even though George R. R. Martin himself is pretty explicit about his views, there are people who will argue that they interpret what the book has to say about things such as politics or philosophy entirely differently. The books have kind of outgrown him, and George isn’t just a guy who has opinions, he’s a guy who has strong opinions. He was an anti war activist in his youth and an atheism advocate, and many of his other short stories from the 70s are far more explicitly political. On the other hand J. K. Rowling from what little I do know about her seems like a very fair weather friend to any cause she associates herself with. She’s just on board with the consensus of her time for the most part, which for now is social progressivism and economic liberalism with cushions.
I think that this is why despite both books (or at least both stories) occupying a similar role in popular culture, one inspires all these interesting people to read and re-read the books and come up with all kinds of interpretations and the other does not. That’s why I’m not going to ever read the Harry Potter books again and will be giving them away, and why I am very much looking forward to the completion of the story of ASOIAF and will read them all again some day. I also realise now that I’m going to have to split this post up into more parts than I thought last week. I hope this was an enjoyable or interesting read.
Ramblings of a neurotic mess 