Feest Isolation Days – 5 June
How many of you have sat on a tube train in London and read a Poem on the Underground as your train rattled along the noisy tracks? Some ideas take off and we are all beneficiaries. Spreading poetry via tube train ad spaces was the brainchild of an American woman who moved to London and stayed.
Judith Cherniak wrote to Tube bosses back in 1986 and outlined her plans. She was inspired by a scene from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” when lovesick Orlando pins his dreadful sonnets on trees. Judith thought sharing poems that weren’t in the least bit dreadful might be inspiring to commuters. Transport for London agreed, and after teaming up with the Arts Council, and the British Council, “Poems on the Underground” was born. There have been more than five hundred poems sitting alongside advertisements since the initiative began. Cities all over the world have set up similar schemes, a real tribute to the success of the programme!
One specific poem that I encountered en route to some meeting or other has always stayed with me. It perfectly sums up, for me, the head of the British government today.
The poem is short and fits neatly onto an ad board, as do all Poems on the Underground. My favourite was written by Roger McGough who writes poetry and more. He holds several degrees and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Liverpool in 2006. He was Fellow of Poetry at Loughborough University and Honorary Professor at Thames Valley University. Roger was awarded a CBE in 2004. His poem:
I wanna be the leader
I wanna be the leader
Can I be the leader?
Can I? I can?
Promise? Promise?
Yippee I’m the leader
I’m the leader
OK so what shall we do?
Remind you of anyone? To be fair to the current PM, I have sat in many committee meetings with Chairs who equally had no idea how to lead. But to give those guys (and gals) their due, they weren’t trying to lead an entire country!
If the little poem inspires you and you want another fix, you can purchase a Poems on the Underground book from all good bookstores (and Amazon).
I wanna be the leader….
…no I don’t! I want a quiet un virus infected life and want someone to organise our way of life safely until that is possible. Boris? Would you mind doing your job properly? You wanted it, now you’ve got it!
A first! I never interpreted a cartoon before, but thought it might be useful on this occasion! I only knew one of these….
–A sestina is a poem with six stanzas of six lines and a final triplet, all stanzas having the same six words at the line ends in six different sequences.
–The pantoum is a form of poetry similar to a villanelle in that there are repeating lines throughout the poem. It is composed of a series of quatrains; the second and fourth lines of each stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the next stanza.
–Haiku is a Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five, traditionally evoking images of the natural world.
Love the idea of a poetry industrial park!
With love,
Kathy x