Sunday 15 June 2008

Simon Turner - The New Rock and Roll

I've made peace, finally, with the fact that my obtuse ramblings about Dorothy Wordsworth and Prunella Clough never attract any comments, so I've decided to grasp the populist nettle and kickstart a follow-up to George's 'computer games and poets' post from a few weeks back. This time round, it's poets and their rock-star equivalents. Not all that strange, considering poetry's continuously being dubbed the new 'rock and roll', and besides, Simon Armitage has come out as a frustrated rock star, blowing the lid on the whole gaff - all poets, basically, are frustrated musicians. My ideal career would be as a noise metal impressario - if Lightning Bolt are reading and have a position for an untrained but enthusiastic triangle player, let me know - but, as it stands, I have to make do with being a poet for now. So I thought I'd kick things off with a pairing I came up with while idly chopping onions the other evening: Geoffrey Hill and Bob Mould. Both are venerated within their fields - Hill as the last great English modernist in the Eliot vein; Mould as the 'godfather of grunge' - and both have suddenly hit an astonishingly productive stage in their careers (Hill, before The Triumph of Love, could never have been labelled prolific, whilst Mould, prior to Modulate, had threatened to go into semi-retirement). And, just as Mould has latterly discovered a passion for electronic music, so Hill, in Without Title, professes his admiration for bluegrass and Jimi Hendrix, which, let's be honest, none of us could have seen coming. They even look a little bit alike, see?


Now: suggestions from the floor for some more rock / verse pairings?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

More Prunella Clough please! Just coz we don't comment doesn't mean it isn't appreciated. No dubming down of Gists & Piths!