Lady Felicia Strope's Poetry Agony Column
Q. Dear Lady Felicia,
My husband and I live in a small, end-of-terrace
house in Walsall. He works intermittently in retail. I am a severely house-bound
house-poet of long standing - I mean sitting, of course. Our working hours are
gruesomely incompatible. He returns from Debenhams Local at 10pm - he was never
one for supping and womanising till all hours with the menfolk. That is the
moment when the rampant poetry virus usually has me in its grip in the dining
room, which also triples as our study and larder/kitchen. My books and papers
are everywhere, wildly spread as the sea. When, bursting through the door with
his inane fat grin, he sees me like this, words in odd orders streaming all
over the place, he begins to roar and then to rend my manuscripts with his
remaining three black teeth. Do you have any help for us? I so much want to
nurture the virus as and when.
Amanda
Gage
Answer
My dear darling Amanda,
My dear darling Amanda,
The fastest to work would be MOGADON, which is
available from GLAXOSMITHKLONE in flat-packed, fat-strapped pillule-packs of
144 a pop. That would cost you £79.50. If you buy it directly through Strop
& Strope, we can almost certainly guarantee you a retrospective discount of
20%, should you choose to re-order in the future. That should lay him out until
he needs to be roused for that so called 'work' of his.
Yours,
Felicia
Strope
Q. Dear
Lady Felicia,
My wife Erma and I lead a sequestered life in the
former coal-mining belt of Nottinghamshire. I heaved coal all my working life.
Since the terrible winter of 1963, Erma and I have spent all our leisure hours
working on an extended Petrarchan sonnet sequence about the decline of the coal
industry. About five years ago we hit a terrible wall which we have not yet
succeeded in breaching: the vernacular of the coal mining industry, rich as it
is when the glasses move from hand to hand, gives us little flexibility in the
matter of rhyme words. Can you advise us what steps we should take to move the
sequence forward? We are now both seventy-seven years of age, and we dread
tumbling sideways into the grave, hand in hand, with the sequence not only
unfinished, but also unpublished.
Ronald Makeshift
Answer
I would suggest that you fling open the back door
and see what is to be seen out there. If there is a dog at the fag end of your
meagre property, chase it. If a woman walks by - of no matter what age -
wolf-whistle her. In short: get yourself a life, man.
I am employed as a night cleaner in a local
industrial intoxicants factory. When I return from work at 6.30am, whistling as
I walk, it is then that I begin work on the poetry. That is the hour when I
experience what I can only describe as a poetry surge. In recent weeks my
maddening husband has taken it upon himself to buy and then partially install a
new set of black louvred blinds in my work room. He insists on keeping these
blinds closed night and day in order, as he explains 'it' to me, to maintain the
lowest possible light levels, lest his precious collection of early nineteenth
century watercolours (which adorn the walls suffer six-deep) suffer irreparable
damage. This means that, having in former times entered a room full of the
promise of morning, I now return to a space plunged into the crepuscular gloom
of oncoming night. The poetry impulse has been arrested and, needless to say, I
find myself in dire straits. What would you recommend.
Nora Filmington
Dirk
Kampf
Answer
Our
precious younger son Eamon never stops versifying, morning to night. No surface
is safe from the fruits of his green felt tips. He has a particular fondness
for translating the Imitations of
Martial. In fact, the poet Martial has so taken possession of his mind and his
body that, having first dressed himself top to toe in full Roman military
regalia, he struts and sings as he writes, clip board and the usual bristle of
stubby felt tips in hand. Yesterday he kicked his leg up so high that he
dislodged the plaster bust of Tennyson that has lived beside the ormolu clock
in the inglenook since my childhood. Can you offer us any help?
Answer
If you
too have POETRY ISSUES, large or small, mild or severe, that you wish to share
with Lady Felicia Strope, the world's only fully-police-checked Poetry Agony
Aunt, please do not hesitate to get in touch!