‘s a very difficult business writing stuff about
art exhibitions and stuff that is related to a poet like T S Eliot well – well-nigh
impossible. Back in some time warp this generation of academics who read the
“classics” fluently in latin and greek and wrote "modern" poetry in the sense that Picasso painted modern art. A generation and type long gone who were about during my
distant childhood and I think would now be regarded as a bit of an alien
species.
Is it “So intelligent, So elegant”? it would certainly have
been easier to have done; Old Possum’s book of Practical Cats. Easier for me that is – to write about it.
Anyway I wandered around Turner Contemporary, The Waste Land,
with Eliot reading it on my headphones, well apart from the fortune teller,
abortion victim and so on, unless Eliot did a very good impersonation of a woman.
Exepting Old Possum, it’s The Four Quartets wot’s mi fave and I can declaim.
I have to fess up here that I can’t really understand The
Waste Land that well - is, too far up the academic ladder as it were.
I think in Turner Contemporary something connected, the
gallery was very busy and photography is allowed, so I took some photos.
I would think back in the 1920s Eliot would have considered
himself as part of an experimental movement in modern art and literature.
I took some photos, for anyone keen here are the links to
the photographic raw material
‘ere is the Margit bit:
“My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised a ‘new start.’
I made no comment. What should I resent?”
“On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.”
la la
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
burning
The last stanza being the bit about the confessions of St
Augustine of Hippo, not the Thanet and Canterbury saint but the other Augustine.
The rest has always been a bit of a mystery to me.
Eliot once told an aspiring writer that he wrote poetry using
a small drum to help with the rhythm of the verse.
Then there is the influence of David Lodge and the bit in his
novel Small World where Persse McGarrigle is writing a book on the influence of
TS Eliot on Shakespeare, a humorous novel which cuts to the quick at times in this
context.
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.