Music For the Grid

I have the document of all poems open as well as this blog page and I cannot decide which to write this lunchtime. The poem is about the Big Bang (after the Hawking programme the other night) and I am struggling to work out how it should finish. Philip Larkin (I know that it sounds pompous to mention his name with reference to my own feeble efforts) sometimes took years to complete a poem but mine are usually polished off in the 50 minutes available to me at lunchtime. I should really try and create some structure to what are normally un-rhymed, un-metered ramblings, what I have heard described by one traditional poet as like playing tennis without the net. (It was Robert Frost - I love the Internet). Actually, having looked at this last poem of mine and tweaked a few words, it is actually quite structured - with form though no rhyme. I am not going to have a go at rhyme here because a well-formed one is one of the most satisfying concepts around. Of course, a forced one has the potential to jarr quite badly - think McGonagall though of course he has charms beyond what you could expect from such bad verse.

I have actually noticed a few odd, unintended rhymes creeping in to my recent stuff. Maybe the great and complex rhyme structures of Larkin are seeping in and making themselves felt subconsciously. There is just so much stuff to do.

I want to write about the whole terrorist/war on terrorism thing but I feel that I cannot comment on such a complex thing. Yes the bottom line is that blowing people up is a big wrong thing and that if I equate the West's idea of terrorism with the various actions taken by the west in what after all has a retaliatory or revenge component alongside the business elements of overrunning a country, I am in danger of being labelled - what I don't know but I can see some red faces and steming ears out there. I did think that there was a view that when Saddam became the pariah, business sat back and worried that it had lost its market in Iraq and that now they are breathing a sigh of relief that things are back on track. But now of course things are far from on track. Some people say that it is ungrateful of the Iraqis to turn on their liberators. It did not happen in Germany after the war. Well maybe it did and as many people say, good will prevail in Iraq and it will be difficult to find anyone who supported the uprising in a few years. Most of this ignores the cultural aspect. Britain and the US were culturally similar to the Germans, in my opinion far more so in 1945 than they are now but the real thing that upsets me now is the fact of good ol' boys swaggering through a country which they think they understand and patently do not. Deep down I do feel that The US and British Governments think they are on the side of the angels and right and truth and all that but that they cannot get to a realisation of the possible mistakes they make in the way they go about achieving a good and safe world. We do not know the future and so I am quite able to take part in a bit of fence sitting about what the world will be like in a few years' time; we did not foresee the current uprising and apart from the atrocious hostage-taking going it seems to be a small contained thing. The hostage thing seems to just be a meme that will quickly run its course. In the meantime it derails efforts to rebuild which is what is needed badly. My wishy-washy, leave-them-to-it attitude from before the war (the Iraq war this time) does nothing to help the situation on the ground now. This does not mean I have changed my mind but instead that I think we should move forward. I have no views on how that should be achieved - there may be no solution other than civil war. We have been here before. Indonesian Independence and following coups resulted in so many people being killed. These and worse things have happened under the radar of the west and will keep happening. Maybe as the tendrils of the news organisations spread to ubiquity, we will see all of this bad stuff all the time. This may make us think.