Thursday, October 07, 2004 AD
National Poetry Day (1): Sprawl
Today is National Poetry Day, which is as good an excuse as any for posting a semi-random selection of poems (or at least, extracts with links to the full text). This is not a "canonical" exercise in naming the best poems ever written or even my own favourites, just two or three poems which I particularly enjoy and which sprang to mind last night.
First up: a poem by Australian poet Les Murray, The Quality of Sprawl:
First up: a poem by Australian poet Les Murray, The Quality of Sprawl:
Sprawl is the qualityRead the whole thing here.
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image. [...]
...Sprawl is never brutal,
though it's often intransigent. Sprawl is never Simon de Montfort
at a town-storming: Kill them all! God will know His own.
Knowing the man's name this was said to might be sprawl.
Sprawl occurs in art. The fifteenth to twenty-first
lines in a sonnet, for example. And in certain paintings.
I have sprawl enough to have forgotten which paintings.
Turner's glorious Burning of the Houses of Parliament
comes to mind, a doubling bannered triumph of sprawl -
except he didn't fire them. [...]
Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.
Reprimanded and dismissed,
it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
of possibility. It may have to leave the Earth.
Being roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek
And thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl.
