waylaid

but excerts from an interview with Stephen Fry in The Times, on the eve of the publication of his new book, The Ode Less Travelled, a beginners' guide to poetry writing. The article is by Catherine Shoard.



Fry: "The strength and confidence that we associate with the Victorians we also associate with things like empire, poverty, social injustice, sexual hypocrisy. We can't seem to separate them. So if you're white and privately educated and you start talking about the virtuosity of Western enlightenment then it sounds as if you're basically grinding a boot into the face of Muslims and the Third World."

But political correctness shouldn't take all the blame. Far from it - the chief cause of bad verse, says Fry, is laziness.

"You cannot work too hard at poetry," he says, tapping his saucer for extra emphasis. "People are bad at it not because they have tin ears, but because they simply don't have the faintest idea how much work goes into it. It's not as if you're ordering a pizza or doing something that requires direct communication in a very banal way. But it seems these days the only people who spend time over things are retired people and prisoners. We bolt things, untasted."

He puffs contemplatively on a full-strength Marlboro, and pours more tea.

"It's so easy to say, 'That'll do.' Everyone's in a hurry. People are intellectually lazy, morally lazy, ethically lazy …"

Morally lazy?

"All the time. When people get angry with a traffic warden they don't stop and think what it would be like to be a traffic warden or how annoying it would be if people could park wherever they liked. People talk lazily about how hypocritical politicians are. But everyone is. On the one hand we hate that petrol is expensive and on the other we go on about global warming. We abrogate the responsibility for thought and moral decisions onto others and then have the luxury of saying it's not good enough."

The solution? Poetry, thinks Fry. "At its best poetry engages with the realities of existence. That's why it's so grown up. It's the absolute opposite of this Disney idea that if you dream hard enough you can get anything - that's so manifestly not true. Good art has a skull showing. We just need to knuckle down and produce it."'

O generation of the thoroughly smug
and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing.


Ezra Pound

Long live our friend the revolver !

Long live our friend the machine-gun!

--Israeli terrorist chant


One April morning in the sixth grade, we became, first by

accident and then by premeditation, trout fishing in America

terrorists.

It came about this way: we were a strange bunch of kids.

We were always being called in before the principal for

daring and mischievous deeds. The principal was a young

man and a genius in the way he handled us.

One April morning we were standing around in the play

yard, acting as if it were a huge open-air poolhall with the

first-graders coming and going like poolballs. We were all

bored with the prospect of another day's school, studying

Cuba.

One of us had a piece of white chalk and as a first-grader

went walking by, the one of us absentmindedly wrote "Trout

fishing in America" on the back of the first-grader.

The first-grader strained around, trying to read what was

written on his back, but he couldn't see what it was, so he

shrugged his shoulders and went off to play on the swings.

We watched the first-grader walk away with "Trout fishing

in America" written on his back. It looked good and

seemed quite natural and pleasing to the eye that a first-

grader should have "Trout fishing in America" written in

chalk on his back.

The next time I saw a first-grader, I borrowed my friend's

piece of chalk and said, "First-grader, you're wanted over

here."

The first-grader came over to me and I said, "Turn

around."

The first-grader turned around and I wrote "Trout fishing

in America" on his back. It looked even better on the second

first-grader. We couldn't help but admire it. "Trout fishing

in America." It certianly did add something to the first-

graders. It compleated them and gave them a kind of class

"It really looks good, doesn't it?"

"Yeah."

"There are a lot more first-graders over there by the monkey-bars."

"Yeah. "

"Lets get some more chalk."

"Sure."

We all got hold of chalk and later in the day, by the end of

lunch period, almost all of the first-graders had "Trout fishing

in America" written on their backs, girls included.

Complaints began arriving at the principal's office from

the first-grade teachers. One of the complaints was in the

form of a little girl.

"Miss Robins sent me, " she said to the principal. "She

told me to have you look at this."

"Look at what?" the principal said, staring at the empty

child.

"At my back, " she said.

The little girl turned around and the principal read aloud,

"Trout fishing in America."

"Who did this?" the principal said.

That gang of sixth-graders," she said. "The bad ones.

They've done it to all us first-graders. We all look like this.

"Trout fishing in America.' What does it mean? I just got

this sweater new from my grandma. "

"Huh.'Trout fishing in America', " the principal said."Tell

Miss Robins I'll be down to see her in a little while," and

excused the girl and a short time later we terrorists were

summoned up from the lower world.

We reluctantly stamped into the principal's office, fidgeting

and pawing our feet and looking out the windows and yawning

and one of us suddenly got an insane blink going and putting

our hands into our pockets and looking away and then back

again and looking up at the light fixture on the ceiling, how

much it looked like a boiled potato, and down again and at the

picture of the principal's mother on the wall. She had been a

star in the silent pictures and was tied to a railroad track.

"Does 'Trout fishing in America' seem at all familiar to

you boys?" the principal said. "I wonder if perhaps you've

seen it written down anywhere today in your travels? 'Trout

fishing in America.' Think hard about it for a minute."

We all thought hard about it.

There was a silence in the room, a silence that we all

knew intimately, having been at the principal's office quite a

few times in the past.

"Let me see if I can help you," the principal said. "Perhaps

you saw 'Trout fishing in America' written in chalk on

the backs of the first-graders. I wonder how it got there."

We couldn't help but smile nervously.

"I just came back from Miss Robin's first-grade class,"

the principal said. "I asked all those who had 'Trout fishing

in America' written on their backs to hold up their hands,and

all the children in the class held up their hands, except one

and he had spent his whole lunch period hiding in the lavatory.

What do you boys make of it . . . ? This 'Trout fishing in

America' business?"

We didn't say anything.

The one of us still had his mad blink going. I am certain

that it was his guilty blink that always gave us away. We

should have gotten rid of him at the beginning of the sixth

grade.

"You're all guilty, aren't you?" he said. "Is there one of

you who isn't guilty? If there is, speak up. Now. "

We were all silent except for blink, blink, blink, blink, blink.

Suddenly I could hear his God-damn eye blinking. It was very much

like the sound of an insect laying the 1, 000, 000th egg of our

disaster.

"The whole bunch of you did it. Why? . . . Why 'Trout

fishing in America' on the backs of the first-graders?"

And then the principal went into his famous E=MC2 sixth-

grade gimmick, the thing he always used in dealing with us.

"Now wouldn't it look funny, " he said. "If I asked all your

teachers to come in here, and then I told the teachers all to

turn around, and then I took a piece of chalk and wrote 'Trout

fishing in America' on their backs?"

We all giggled nervously and blushed faintly.

"Would you like to see your teachers walking around all

day with 'Trout fishing in America' written on their backs,

trying to teach you about Cuba? That would look silly, wouldn't

it? You wouldn't like to see that would you? That wouldn't do

at all, would it?"

"No," we said like a Greek chorus some of us saying it

with our voices and some of us by nodding our heads, and

then there was the blink, blink, blink.

"That's what I thought, " he said. "The first-graders look

up to you and admire you like the teachers look up to me and

admire me, It just won't do to write 'Trout fishing in America'

on their backs. Are we agreed, gentlemen?"

We were agreed.

I tell you it worked every God-damn time.

Of course it had to work.

"All right, " he said. "I'll consider trout fishing in Ameri-

ca to have come to an end. Agreed?"

"Agreed. "

"Agreed ?"

"Agreed. "

"Blink, blink. "

But it wasn't completely over, for it took a while to get

trout fishing in America off the clothes of the first-graders.

A fair percentage of trout fishing in America was gone the

next day. The mothers did this by simply putting clean

clothes on their children, but there were a lot of kids whose

mothers just tried to wipe it off and then sent them back to

school the next day with the same clothes on, but you could

still see "Trout fishing in America" faintly outlined on their

backs. But after a few more days trout fishing in America

disappeared altogether as it was destined to from its very

beginning, and a kind of autumn fell over the first grade.


Richard Brautigan

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this:
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Boy, yaar, they sure called me some good names of late:
e.g. opportunist (dangerous). E.g. full-of-hate,
self-aggrandizing, Satan, self-loathing and shrill,
the type it would clean up the planet to kill.
I justjust remember my own goodname still.

Damn, brother. You saw what they did to my face?
Poked out my eyes. Knocked teeth out of place,
stuck a dog's body under, hung same from a hook,
wrote what-all on my forehead! Wrote 'bastard'! Wrote 'crook'!
I justjust recall how my face used to look.

Now, misters and sisters, they've come for my voice.
If the Cat got my tongue, look who-who would rejoice—
muftis, politicos, 'my own people', hacks.
Still, nameless-and-faceless or not, here's my choice:
not to shut up. To sing on, in spite of attacks,
to sing (while my dreams are being murdered by facts)
praises of butterflies broken on racks.

Salman Rushdie