Poems for Everyone Else: Recent Episodes
roger jenkins
Some of my favourite poems , either for the content, or the form, or the fact they come to life when they leap off the page and onto the tongue and into the ear.
Sadly this is a poem that sprang to mind on several hopeful occasions in my youth. The loved ones didn't walk on my dreams, just walked away in another direction and in such a manner I didn't care to note if they were treading softly or not.
My father's favourite poem and the last one he ever heard before he drifted into painkiller sleep and succumbed to lung cancer. It was read to him by a Filipino nurse, who resourcefully whipped out her phone and googled Innisfree when he asked her to read it.
A fantasy. a fiction. Goh Chok Tong (Singapore's second Prime Minister) dancing on a bar top? With (Lee) Hsien Loong (Prime Minister #3) and Tony Tan (Deputy PM and future President) and Abdullah Tarmuggi (Speaker of the House)??!! Dream on! Enjoy!
Written for a drama at CHIJ St Nichholas Girls School about the changing roles of women in singapore, the starting point for this is very definitely Gilbert and Sullivan's song in The Mikado. But scrub away the comedy and see what's underneath . . .
This is a traditional English folksong which I know through the wonderful performances of Tim Hart and Maddy Prior
This is the original, not the Simon and Garfunkel text from their wonderful song-version.
I use this poem with tudents, asking them to make a storyboard of eight frames, capturing the long. the medium and the close-up shots (perhaps the very close-ups of the tears falling?) Poetry can be so cinematic. How old are the man and the woman? And who would you cast as your leads?