193 Is That a Poem?

In August 2020, I wrote about the Queen’s English Society (QES). Click to See  

I make occasional contributions to its quarterly magazine, Quest.  Most articles published in Quest are serious forays into aspects of the English language such as the use of punctuation or the seeming demise of the apostrophe.  

My offerings are always of a much lighter tone than the others such as how much I hate Scrabble or how I abhor the use of phrases like “twenty-four/seven” and “any time soon.”  I’ve had 22 pieces published so far and the feedback that appears after any of them shows that the Quest readers have spotted that I am not a serious, intellectual man of letters.

About two years ago, the QES introduced a quarterly poetry competition.  I have found this event to be somewhat problematic.  The first difficulty I encountered was working out, what is a poem?

I’ve always thought that a poem is a piece of writing in which the words are arranged in a way that conveys information, emotion, and above all, has rhythm or pattern.

I don’t believe that rhyme is essential in a poem although I do feel that rhyme or assonance can add to the beauty of poetry.  I very much enjoy reading “Poem in October” by Dylan Thomas and I have found that its rhythm is improved by reading it to myself in an imagined Welsh accent.

After reading the QES winning poems in the early competitions, I realised that my idea of what a poem is differs from that of the judge.

Theft  

By the time I return, he’s in love  

with someone else. They live  

in a garden with clothes lines  

flapping, the sound of children.  

He sits there, sketching,  

delicious slivers of drawing.  

She leans on her elbows,  

watching. They can’t see me.  

I creep round the edges.  

One of their children  

has lost a blue shoe, I find it  

under a rose bush, I pick it up,  

it’s mine now. Mine.  

This is a winning “poem” according to the QES judge but I find it pretentious and poorly punctuated prose with random line-length.  It is not a poem – in my opinion.

No one lives in a garden and clothes lines can’t flap. The comma after ‘flapping’ should be a full stop but then, ‘The sound of children.’ isn’t a sentence.  

Why the comma after ‘sketching’ and what on earth is ‘a sliver of drawing.’?  There should be full stops after ‘shoe’ and ‘bush’.

Why do poems with rhyme seem to be so out of fashion nowadays?  £5,000 was awarded to the winning poem in the latest Poetry Society national competition.  The whole thing is 26 lines long.  Here are the first six:

The Time I was Mugged in New York City

I told people that the travel sickness pills
made me stupid. I entered JFK with a red
suitcase and no one to greet me. A man
came up to me, dressed in black. I found
myself in a car park by an expensive van
and he was holding my luggage. Get in, he said. 

How on earth can that piece of prose be described as a poem?  It has neither rhythm nor pattern and certainly no rhyme.  Remove the random line length and it no longer even pretends to be a poem:

The Time I was mugged in New York City

I told people that the travel sickness pills made me stupid. I entered JFK with a red suitcase and no one to greet me. A man came up to me, dressed in black. I found myself in a car park by an expensive van and he was holding my luggage. Get in, he said. 

£5,000?  WTF!

I have never been tempted to write a poem on the QES competition’s set theme.  I don’t think much of set themes.  

No one ever said to Keats anything like, “John, I would really like you to write a poem about the song of the Nightingale.  Can you get something to me by end of the month please?”  

No, Keats was inspired by hearing its song while sitting in a garden in Hampstead.  I think it’s interesting that the word “Nightingale” doesn’t appear anywhere in the 80 lines of the poem.  I wonder if it would have had the lasting world-wide acclaim and admiration if Keats had titled it “Ode to a Pigeon” rather than “Ode to a Nightingale”.

During Covid, I was moved to write a poem.  It is actually a parody of “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” by W B Yeats.

Yeats imagined the thoughts of an Irish airman who had volunteered to fight for the United Kingdom during the first world war.  

Ireland gained independence in 1921 and in 1918, when that poem was written, no Irishman would sign up to fight out of loyalty or patriotism to the UK.  The airman just wanted to fly.

This is Yeats’ first verse:

I know that I shall meet my fate 

Somewhere among the clouds above; 

Those that I fight I do not hate, 

Those that I guard I do not love; 

My version was written as a result of a trip to Tesco when I (and everyone else within 40 miles) heard that they had toilet rolls in stock.

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere in Tesco’s push and shove.

Those that I barge, I do not hate

Those that I don’t, I do not love.

My shopping is just essential

And will only fill two small bags.

Their urge to buy seems exponential

Topped up with toilet rolls and fags.

No rise in price could bring them grief

Nor driving rain keep them away.

It was all done through gritted teeth 

I ventured forth that dreadful day.

I balanced all, brought all to mind.

Was it all really so worthwhile

To find the worst in humankind

By standing in a Tesco aisle?

Most songs, especially those written more than 50 years ago, are melodic poetry and many have haunting memorable tunes. 

Here are the first two verses of ‘You Belong to Me”.  It was written in 1952 and despite the final line of every verse being perhaps a little threatening, it is basic poetry.

See the pyramids along the Nile 
Watch the sun rise on a tropic isle
Just remember, darling, all the while
You belong to me.

See the marketplace in old Algiers
Send me photographs and souvenirs
Just remember when a dream appears
You belong to me.

Virtually all the lyrics of the Beatles’ songs have a fundamental poetic element to them.  This is the first verse of “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You”, one of their earliest songs from 1964.

I don’t want to kiss or hold your hand

If it’s funny try and understand

There is really nothing else I’d rather do

‘Cos I’m happy just to dance with you.

Modern songs just aren’t the same.  Here is the opening passage of “Shape of You”, Ed Sheehan’s best-selling song, ever.  It spent 14 weeks at Number 1, and its total combined sales at the moment stand at 5.09 million:

The club isn't the best place to find a lover
So the bar is where I go
Me and my friends at the table doing shots
Drinking fast and then we talk slow
Come over and start up a conversation with just me
And trust me I'll give it a chance now
Take my hand, stop, put Van the Man on the jukebox
And then we start to dance, and now I'm singin' like

See what I mean?  

You probably can't remember the tune either.

169. Plagiarism

I’m a member of the Queen’s English Society.  (QES) 

For £20 a year I get a very interesting quarterly magazine called ‘Quest’ and the satisfaction that I am supporting a worthwhile organisation.  

It is not evangelical.  It doesn’t try to preserve the English language the way that the Académie Francais does for French.  Its objective is “to promote the maintenance, knowledge, understanding, development and appreciation of the English language as used both in speech and writing”.  

Every edition of Quest has a number of articles on the English language, most of which I find interesting.  In the current magazine there is a piece on the correct and the unnecessary use of the hyphen.  How about this for an interesting assertion in a recent article?

“English grammar is an algebra that uses fuzzy logic based on norms, conventions and, most important of all, euphony.”

(I never read an article in Quest without a dictionary to hand.)

It also has the occasional joke.  The first joke I remember in it from some years ago was:

Dale, a Yorkshire farmer’s favourite sheepdog, died.  The farmer was distraught and he took photos of the dog to a goldsmith in Leeds and asked if he could make a statue of Dale out of gold.

“Do you want him 18 carats?”

“Nay lad.  Eatin’ bone.”

Occasionally it asks searching, philosophical questions such as:

If father is Pop, how come mother’s not Mop?

The Spring 2013 issue of the Quest magazine arrived in the middle of April.  I started reading an article on page 17 titled, “Attending to the Language”.

What do you call people who go on a course? Are they attenders?  No, they are not.  Apparently, they are attendees.  

“This is something I once wrote about on my blog,” I thought.  (Click here)

I have just seen that the spell check on my Mac has underlined ‘attenders’ as being a spelling mistake but ‘attendees’ remains unblemished and clear.

“Hang on.  This is my post.  I remember using that phrase "unblemished and clear".  Someone’s been to my blog, read my post and lifted it.  The plagiaristic bastard!”

I jumped up and went to find Caroline.  “Look at this!  Look at this!  Some bugger’s stolen my post.”

“Let me see.”

I handed her the magazine and she started to read.  She turned the page and a little later, looked up at me.  She was smiling. 

“What are you laughing at?  It’s not funny.”

“Do you know who wrote it,” she asked.

“Is it someone I know?”

“Not as well as me,” she said.

I looked to the bottom of the page she passed to me and there was the bastard’s name:

             Terry Wilton

I went to my Hotmail “sent” folder.  I had sent that contribution to QES in June 2010, nearly three years ago.  I had completely forgotten about it.

Some day, Playboy Magazine may publish the letter I sent to them in October 1968.  I can’t remember exactly what it was about now but I do remember it was carefully written in my very best and neatest handwriting.

104. Fewer Amounts

“Barcelona have a great club. But in 200 years of history they have won the European Cup only once. I have been managing for a few years and I have already won the same amount.”   

You may know or can guess who said that and you may also have spotted that there are at least two grammatical errors: 'have' (should be 'has') and 'amount' (should be 'number'). The speaker may be forgiven, however, because he is Portuguese. Jose Mourinho, as modest as ever, was speaking in what is for him, his second language.

I was lying in bed one Saturday morning shortly after Christmas, listening to the Today programme on Radio 4.  I had almost gone back to sleep, made drowsy listening to the thoughts and opinions of some long retired professional footballer whose passing skills twenty years ago had shown much more insight into the game than his thoughts do nowadays, when suddenly I was wide awake. 

I heard the presenter, Sarah Montague, who was interviewing a hospital administrator about overcrowding in A & E.  She said,

“Your figures for the amount of patients that you see coming through the door….”

The following morning I was watching Sunday Politics on BBC1 when Patrick McLoughlin, the Minister of Transport, said to Andrew Neal,

“I didn’t sell any (electric cars) but the amount that was sold….”

And then, five minutes later on a different topic, he told Neal,

“We have seen increases in the amount of people using the railways.”

The next day, on Monday morning, again listening to Today, I heard Gordon Corera, the BBC Security Correspondent, speaking on the subject of potential terrorists in France.  He told us that if you speak to French officials,

“they will say one problem is simply due to volume: the amount of people they’re looking at.”

In three consecutive days I had heard three intelligent, educated people, whose jobs demand that they communicate regularly and clearly with the public, using the word ‘amount’ when in my opinion, they should have said, ‘number’.

On Thursday of that same week, Helen King, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police told her interviewer that,

“….with the amount of Range Rovers stolen in Kensington and Chelsea, officers are now instructed to stop that make of vehicle to see if the legal owner is driving it.”

Footballers often seem to get it wrong.  Terry McDermott, who once played for Liverpool wrote,

“The amount of goals being conceded by Liverpool from set-pieces is a huge worry.”

Steve Claridge on Football Focus told us that the score line in Middlesbrough’s win against Manchester City in a cup match,

“wasn’t a true reflection on the amount of chances they created.”

In 2002 Roy Keane, sometime footballer, talking about his autobiography said,

"The amount of fights I've had in Cork would probably be another book.” 

Maybe the problem lies in the dictionary definitions.  In my dictionary, each word contains the other word in its meaning:

AMOUNT: the total of things in number….

NUMBER: a quantity or amount…..

Someone I know went skiing in Colorado and he wrote on his blog,

“The amount of suitable clothes needed was a problem.”

I resisted the temptation to comment with something like: “The amount of clothing” or “The number of clothes”.  I didn’t because I didn’t want to appear an irritating pedant but another reason was that, maybe, I would not have been right.

Oliver Kamm claimed in his Times column that the insistence on ‘fewer’ for number was a shibboleth of recent invention and should be ignored.  He went on to say that the choice of ‘fewer’ or ‘less’ is about style, not grammar.  Would he argue that also applies to ‘amount’ and number’?

According to the book “Good and Bad English” by Whitten and Whittaker, ‘less’ applies to degree, quantity or extent; ‘fewer’ to number and surely that rule must apply to ‘amount’ and ‘number’ too.  Just as ‘less’ takes a singular noun (less clothing) and ‘fewer’ a plural noun (fewer clothes), so it must be ‘the amount of clothing’ and ‘the number of clothes’.

But is that the case?  At the AGM of the Queen's English Society in 2013, I asked the guest speaker, the renowned grammarian, N M Gwynne, “When speaking to a monotheistic believer, should I, as an atheist, say that I believe in one less god than you or one fewer?”

 “Fewer” was his immediate response and he was dismissive of my contention that as ‘god’ is a singular noun in that context, it should be “one less”.  I tried to argue that “one less god” would be incorrect if I were talking to a Hindu or a person from some other polytheistic religion, but not if I were talking to a Christian or a Moslem who believe there is only one god.  Apparently I was wrong.

Does it really matter?  No, I don’t think it does.  I have heard it said that ‘fewer’ (clothes) is what educated people think educated people say, and so anyone saying ‘less’ risks being thought of as ignorant. 

The purpose of language is to communicate clearly, accurately and understandably, one’s thoughts, ideas, emotions, demands, hopes, instructions and desires.  I cannot envisage any situation when lives would be lost, money goes astray, an army is defeated or chaos ensues because someone said ‘amount’ when he or she should (possibly) have said ‘number’.

But it always jars with me!

"The amount of people who don't turn out at general elections"

Allegra Stratton, BBC Radio 4, February 2nd 2015