THE ARTS PAGE

Hi – I have been assigned the task of elevating the tone of this publication by the introduction of an ‘Arts Page’. This is something for which I am singularly fitted: although ‘blog’ policy demands that I do not reveal my name, I will just say that at my old school (a well known educational establishment for young ladies, which begins with ‘R’ and ends with ‘n’) I was president of the literary society and edited the school magazine.
I spurned the offer of a place at Oxford University, believing it to be an institution dedicated to the perpetuation of the class system in this country, ensuring that power remains in the hands of a bourgeois elite.
As a ‘gap year’ I worked in one of my father’s shoe factories, somewhere up north – I can’t remember the name of the place. Unfortunately, the cold and the damp did not suit my chest and so I moved back to London to pursue a career as a literary critic.

Anyway – to business. The idea is, that from time – depending upon the demands of my busy schedule – I will take a piece of writing, a poem in this case, and ‘de-construct it’. (I will explain what it means). Okay?



A poem by the post-modernist, Walter Thrugg, called simply

The City.

Winter skids across an autumn sky
In the thick air
Glue streets stick the fronts of
Black terraces to
Shattered pavements
While smoke-stack hatted men conjoin listlessly
On windy corners to moan
Incessantly
Over better days, over the moon, over bar the shouting
And vituperating dogs strain snarling at authority’s leash
In a gnashing of mistaken loyalty –
And nurses grease perambulator wheels
Surreptitiously, in the park
While waiting for their lovers -
When a penumbriacal moon stoops down
To comfort denizens of forgotten alleyways
Recognizable only by the whites of their eyes
Flashing like well-sucked gob-stoppers
In the stygian gloom.

And this is the city?
And I, a city dweller?

Be gone

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In this poem Walter is railing against the desperate meaninglessness of life in a Northern industrial city.

The skidding autumn sky needs no explanation.

The ‘smoke-stack hatted men’ is a metaphor for the factory workers, miners, road sweepers and all the others who give freely of their labour – and illustrates the starkness, the grimness of working class existence.

The ‘vituperating dogs’ strain at the leash of capitalism, which is, at the moment, holding the workers in check out of ‘mistaken loyalty’ (this leash is strained to breaking point and will soon snap).

The ‘denizens of forgotten alleyways’ is a metaphor for working class women, who have to share communal wash-houses in stinking alleyways. Grinding poverty, back-breaking work over ‘dolley-tub’ and ‘mangle’ leave these women with neither energy or time to indulge in ‘lovers’ – unlike the nurses in the park, with their crisp-white uniforms and shiny faces.
(‘grease the perambulator wheels’ is of course a sexual allusion – let us be under no illusions about that – these lackies of the upper classes would not soil their manicured hands with machine oil)

Walter ends with a cry of anguish: Is this the city? Am I a city dweller? He has been brought face to face with the dreadful reality – and his complicity in it. He wants to be gone.