The Wicked Fairy at the Manger - UA Fanthorpe

My gift for the child:

No wife, kids, home;

No money sense. Unemployable.

Friends, yes. But the wrong sort –

The workshy, women, wogs,

Petty infringers of the law, persons

With notifiable diseases,

Poll tax collectors, tarts;

The bottom rung.

His end?

I think we'll make it

Public, prolonged, painful.

Right, said the baby. That was roughly

What we had in mind.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3813257/Christmas-Poems-by-UA-Fanthorpe.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/5252820/UA-Fanthorpe.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/u-a-fanthorpe-poet-who-championed-the-underdog-and-whose-work-was-rooted-in-english-history-1677685.html

 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/02/obituary-u-a-ua-fanthorpe

"You need to find the dance"

Les Murray
"You need to find the dance. It might take a few weeks, it might take 20 years. The poem will say to you, you're not right for me yet. The poem has to dance as well as think and dream. And you have to get the dance right."

poetic language

"For Kristeva, the semiotic expresses that original libidinal multiplicity within the very terms of culture, more precisely, within poetic language in which multiple meanings and semantic non-closure prevail. In effect, poetic language is the recovery of the maternal body within the terms of language, one that has the potential to disrupt, subvert, and displace the paternal law."
p. 102

" ... Kristeva describes the maternal body as bearing a set of meanings that are prior to culture itself."
p. 103 

"... this libidinal source of subversion cannot be maintained within the terms of culture, ... its sustained presence within culture leads to psychosis and to the breakdown of cultural life itself ... "
p. 103

from Gender Trouble, Judith Butler 1999, Routledge  NY.

'Down Underworld'

"One of the miracles of good writing is that it can take something a reader would just as soon steer clear of in real life, and transform it into something he can attend to with sympathetic, even affectionate, interest."

p. 132 The Atlantic, October 2011
B. R. Myers