Tom Has Seen Her. Sept. I Must!

(From Chris L. Harris on Flickr)

I should read more plays - I've been trying to get through Taming of the Shrew for years but I eventually located a copy of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard at the library and it's a hoot - deep and interesting, about science, history, literature and sex - stuff about chaos theory and thermodynamics and a tortoise. I'm not sure I'm quite up to understanding all of it and I'm sure that much is lost because I don't read the required nuances into the performance. I was annoyed at missing it on the Radio some months back and this is unfortunately the only way I can experience it. Of course it will be repeated at some point in the future. No links just in case the wiki article gives away the plot, though it's so rich I'm not sure it would matter that you did know what happened - it would just raise your anticipation of a meaty bit of dialogue at the point of revelation. And it has old mad/bad/dangerous-to-know Byron in it as well. Well sort of in it.

And so to poetry - Sylvia Plath is the subject of tonight's Poet's Guide to Britain, specifically her poem Wuthering Heights which was not one I'd remembered in any real depth but which is actually one of her best. Ted Hughes also wrote one with that title - every person with any poetic leanings who walks those moors must feel like doing so but I think his is in Birthday Letters and therefore more likely to be a response to Plath's poem. Birthday Letters is up there with Arcadia as a piece of real depth and importance - so much more that some of Hughes' ramblings about gutting rabbits, the cleansing flow of Devon rivers and how we are all in thrall to the White Goddess.

Good luck to Carol Ann Duffy. I wasn't being entirely serious the other week and I'm actually quite looking forward to something from her. It was ironic that many people knee-jerked about how poetry had gone downhill since Wordsworth, who I seem to recall only took the job of laureate if he didn't have to write anything official - and he didn't. I suppose the argument will then be extended to the idea that CAD has not actually written anything worthy of comparison to Wordsworth even before getting the gig. My reply to that would be that poetry moves on and anything striking a mad-keen Wordsworth fan as wonderful these days would look like parody. Stuff 'em I say. Write what you want Carol.