Well, it’s always fun doing this, fitting other words to an old tune. (Stevie Smith, ‘A Turn Outside’
Stevie Smith sang a lot of her poems in performance. Often, her subtitles include instructions about the tunes which they should be sung to.
It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong
(But often we all do wrong)
As the truth is I think he was already stuck
With Kubla Khan.He was weeping and wailing: I am finished, finished,
I shall never write another word of it,
When along comes the Person from Porlock
And takes the blame for it.
Coleridge’s Person from Porlock had a good few outings in the mid-twentieth-century.
My first name, Wystan,
Rhymes with Tristan,
But – O dear! – I do hope
I’m not quite such a dope.
For the last few days, I’ve been preoccupied by Shaun Tan’s illustrations for the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Tan created sculptures corresponding to 75 of the fairy tales, each photographed and presented alongside a snippet of the original narrative.
The Cambridge Quarterly has just published my review essay on Elisha Cohn’s very thought-provoking book Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (Oxford, 2016). You can read my review here.
The book is also brilliantly discussed in one of the v21 Collective’s ‘Collations’, linked to here. And you can read the thoughts of Raphael Lyne, editor of CQ, about the book over here on his blog.
Mrs Killick’s Luck is, I think, the strangest of Stevie Smith’s literary involvements. Which is saying something for an author who captioned a book of cat photographs.
We’re lucky, in Oxford, to have the Ashmolean Museum. It’s free, it’s beautiful; it runs amazing events; its collections are stunning. And last Friday, the museum very kindly allowed me to run a peripatetic class on Victorian literature, as we walked around its galleries.
