Milton in Guantanamo

I hope life is as sweet as a mango for you today as I sit here in glorious Birmingham sunshine. I’ve just iplayered that Milton programme with Armando Ianucci from last weds on BBC2….and it was fascinating. If you’ve not yet seen it, do so now then come back here and carry on reading! Just before it, I’d  read a pompous piece by Giles Coren (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/giles_coren/article6390720.ece) about how no one cares about poetry anymore, which mainly referenced Oxford University people like himself as proof of that… but as I and no one in my social circle have had the Oxbridge experience I think he’s a bit out of touch with the real world beyond his privileged position. His Dad was a famous writer and broadcaster, so Giles will have grown up in a house with certain literary assumptions that those of us who grew up in houses with few books beyond a dictionary and a copy of the TV times and AA road map of Britain do not have as our background references. My definition of poetry has nothing to do with an exclusive literary club. The best poetry gigs I’ve been to have been in pubs/bars/festivals and I’ve taken mates who work on building sites along who’ve had a blast. The kind of poetry that’s got me and my non Oxbridge contemporaries excited lives very much in the real world.

I remember reading a poem written by the Dad of Rhys Jones, the 11 yr old boy shot dead in Liverpool in 2007. It was printed in all the tabloid papers at the time of his funeral, and currently has 147, 000 references on Google for it, not bad for something Giles sees as irrelevant. The poem was a tribute from a Dad to his murdered son, and about how he hoped Rhys would be playing football in heaven with the likes of George Best now. It’s a very moving piece that was an outpouring of heartfelt emotion at the worst imaginable time in someone’s life; it was real and I remember it vividly today. University has nothing to do with an instinctive desire to put into words intense emotions. Something Giles isn’t interested in, as I don’t believe he understands that a world of people who matter exist outside of broadsheet newspapers. I’m not knocking universities or Oxbridge specifically, but they have only one part to play in a nation’s connection to poetry which is much broader.

Often at times of birth/marriage/death we all find ourselves looking to verses from someone else who can mirror back what we are feeling when we are swamped by such extreme emotions we can’t imagine ever regaining balance again. But I digress, it was fascinating that in the Milton programme (- which as I’ve never studied or read Milton was an interesting introduction to me of such a famous work) they featured a man who’d been in Guantanamo Bay – Moazzam Begg. He spoke of how Guantanamo Bay was full of solitary confined prisoners writing poetry at the same time. Yet none of them knew each other was engaged in such an activity, and most had no history or tradition of personally writing poetry – but it is such a powerful instinct to write poetry when everything else has been stripped away from you. It was being written in all languages he said, and when you were starved of human interaction with the outside world, the desire to communicate all your deepest thoughts and feelings came out as poetry. Bingo – how much more contemporary do we need to be than to hear some of the poetry written by those caught up in one of the biggest injustices of our history? It formed part of their survival mechanism, and they didn’t need a professor of poetry to inform them on how to construct it – it was a raw outpouring of humanity in an extreme situation. I’ll add it to my list of poems to look up as I’d be interested to read more about their work, and opinions on George Bush……

In the tv programme they talked of Milton’s time in prison and how his writing changed after that experience, which paralleled the Guantanamo reference. They also spoke of how he went gradually blind, and then used to wake very early and have to wait for hours for those close to him to awake in order to dictate his words to them. As I sit here typing almost as quickly as I can think, I am profoundly affected to imagine any of us on this project being forced to simmer our words for hours and having to depend on the assistance of others to communicate our ideas. How lucky are we? I’ll try not to take that for granted again, and when I struggle with the ‘luxury’ of ‘writer’s block’ as it were, be grateful that at least I can see the blank page filling up with scrawled out rubbish words. I’ve worn glasses since I was three years old and was liberated by contact lenses aged 14 from a life being called ‘four eyes/ frog face/ speccy’ etc, which as well as ‘giraffe/stick insect/ lamp post’ due to being tall was getting ridiculous! I still have appalling eyesight now and in the gym when I have no lenses/specs on I can only really detect people by their voices to say hello to. ( I once thought I saw a guy I used to work overnight radio shifts with and said to him, ‘O Adam I do miss our nights together’… only to find it wasn’t him, and some poor guy was about to call security for assistance:) Maybe one day I’ll be totally unable to see, a friend of mine is almost blind and disguises it so well that we forget and often bump into him forgetting he can only see blurry shapes now with no sense of distance. He quite enjoys that when it’s cute young girls though, as he’s currently single……

Anyway, as well as the prison thing, they mentioned that when Milton finally had Paradise Lost ready for the printers, they said ‘well it doesn’t rhyme’….. so he had to write an explanation for them to publish with the book that basically said ‘well no, it doesn’t rhyme, and it doesn’t have to, and some poets write rubbish things just to make it rhyme and I’m not gonna do that.’ Interesting that such discussions have been ongoing for years… and I sometimes rhyme, and get called a ‘Rhyme Whore’ by mentor Jo Bell – must get the t-shirt printed with that on…… and sometimes I don’t rhyme – I’m on the fence with that one. If you write – how do you determine it? Do you decide beforehand that it will or won’t rhyme, like blowing dandelion ghost filaments incanting, ‘he loves me, he loves me no… it rhymes, it rhymes not’ or does the piece itself suprise you by it’s rhyme or lack or if? I find this usually happens. I once wrote something as B’ham Laureate that I forced to rhyme, and I can honestly say it’s one of the worst things I’ve ever written that I tried to take back, but unfortunately it was too late and it was already out there, so I just had to let it go. And no, I’m not going to tell you the name of it, the shame still lingers though, as I killed it with rhyme when it sooooo shouldn’t have done:)

Time for ice cream I think, and later on to try and iplayer some of other poetry programmes I’ve missed due to a mad busy couple of weeks. I helped judge the BBC’s kids poetry event, Off By Heart and have yet to see the final of it….. they had Benjamin Zephaniah as one of the brilliant final judges, but chose Jeremy Paxman to host it – a bizarre choice for a show of 6 – 11 year olds as he was his usual humourless self, poor kids bore it well though – they’re made of stronger stuff than your average politicians:)

Inspired writing to you for now.x