UK: Money, Motion and a Poem for the Millennium

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From today's Electronic Telegraph:

Money, Motion and a poem for the Millennium By Sandra Barwick

ANDREW MOTION, the Poet Laureate, has celebrated the Millennium in a poem which combines themes of eternal renewal and fear of the future.

He has also dismissed the "cash for couplets" controversy, following his decision to sell his poem exclusively for a four-figure sum, as "absolutely silly", saying he is sure that Alfred, Lord Tennyson, would have done the same. The first rights on his poem 2000: Zero Gravity, describing his vision of eternity, were sold exclusively to a Sunday newspaper.

Mr Motion told the Mail on Sunday: "The poetry world is very small and full of green-eyed, snapping fish." Both the Queen and the Prime Minister had assured him that he was under no obligation to write anything, he said. Inspiration for the poem, which was commissioned by the paper this autumn, came as he was sitting by a Canadian lake.

In an elegant run around the Millennial theme, Motion describes sympathising for a moment with those who imagine the world might end "and we and our companions topple into space/together, into nothing".

A Coleridge-type vision then possesses the poet, as though he is floating above the Earth. "I saw the whole world at a distance and complete,/a marbled O with veins of strung-out cloud." Then comes the music of the spheres, sounding "like a groan of infinite/dead-weight, but sweet as well" and the Sun's passage "a definite dark curtain-edge drawn/steadily across, so what it surged towards/seemed always threatened".

But the world appears in colour, "polished back to life" as the Sun passes and the poet watches the Earth spin for a day, or "a thousand years". This divine view point is swiftly followed by the poet's return to his present existence in his kitchen with its "frowsly smell" of "stuff beginning to get glued and brown, and burn". Though Motion retains a mixture of condescension and empathy for the "sad Flat-earthers" and their fear of the "dark ahead", he ends the poem on a highly conventional note of hope: his garden apple tree is "tipped with crystals where the buds will come,/and after that the morning and the thaw."

Mr Motion says the message of his poem is that "we see the shadow of time moving across the Earth and end up believing that there is a chance to make things better but it is essentially up to us".

Alan Ross, editor of London Magazine, said: "I can't stand those kind of things. It's a boring idea. I'm sure he's done it as well as most but the whole concept is utterly trivial."

-- Old Git (anon@spamproblems.com), December 27, 1999

Answers

"THOUGHTS ON THE MILLENNIUM, Being A Few Quid Short Today"

"I thought I'd share with you my thoughts on all this hype
Since I'm a few quid short today
And some stupid newspaper will prob'ly fawn and set it all in type
As an immortal exclusive
For which I'll really drain their bank account
And buy myself some crates of bubbly.
[Oops - I accidentally rhymed two words above,
As the perceptive reader will perceive perceptively
- Goshdarn, there's Alliteration creeping in:
This damn thing will turn itself into an an elegant Sonnet
If I'm not careful,
And I won't get a penny for it from any of the daily rags]
Now whose long-dead style and imagery can I adapt,
to show the vigour of the human race,
Particularly that of poets with lots of time on their hands
After climbing out of bed and staring at the wall
And realizing that they're a few quid short today..."


-- John Whitley (jwhitley@inforamp.net), December 27, 1999.

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