Love Tove Jansson

These paragraphs from "The Spring Tune" out of Tales from Moomin Valley get me every time:

"It's the right evening for a tune, Snufkin thought. A new tune, one part expectation, two parts spring sadness, and for the rest, just the great delight of walking alone and liking it.
He had kept this tune under his hat for several days, but hadn't quite dared to take it out yet. It had to grow into a kind of happy conviction. Then, he would simply have to put his lips to the mouth organ, and all the notes would jump instantly into their places.
If he released them too soon they might get stuck crossways and make only half a good tune, or he might lose them altogether and never be in the right mood to get hold of them again. Tunes are serious things, especially if they have to be jolly and sad at the same time.
But this evening Snufkin felt rather sure of his tune. It was there, waiting, nearly full grown - and it was going to be the best he ever made.
Then, when he arrived in Moominvalley, he'd sit on the bridge and play it, and Moomintroll would say at once:  That's a good one.  Really a good one."

Well, my trio of literary followers... do you feel like that when you write?

If you liked the image the rest of the story is even better. Get the book.  I've also always been fond of "The Fillyjonk who was afraid of Disasters", "A Tale of Horror" and... heck all the rest of the tales in it.

I know, I know... That was a terrible poem

But that's precisely the reason I like it. For me it's terrible for all the right reasons and none of the wrong ones. And, as I said, I wanted my first ever blog post to be something I could always improve on.  The blame for that poem,  if blame must be laid, lies firmly with whoever put a bunch of Spike Milligan books on the bookshelves when I was a child.

I don't understand poetry at all by the way.  I've written a few arrangements of words on the page and called them poems since that first one.  Back in  2000ish I even sat an undergraduate course in Poetry writing, for which I scored a final mark of  "A+".  That didn't mean any of it was publishable of course, and looking back on those poems now I tend to agree with the people who told me so at the time.  That doesn't mean that I won't at times publish the odd few verses here if and when the mood takes me.

If you did ask me what I thought poetry was, however, I would say that any poem is a sort of mnemonic.  Like Roy G. Biv reminds us the order of the colours of the rainbow; like "first class goods do an excellent business" tells us in which order to place sharps in a key signature, a poem acts like a mnemonic aid to clearly call to mind an event, an image, a feeling, or a state of mind. 

Of course this function of poetry which I (have decided to) call mnemonic is more subtle and complex than the simple memory aids we remember from science and music classes.  The triggers for memory or understanding in poetry come from the combination of sounds in the chosen words, the particular images evoked by metaphor and sometimes the coherence or lack of coherence of the language used.  As with mnemonics as we understand them, without any key to understanding a poem may be meaningless to anybody except its author.

This reminds me. My poem needs a better title. Does anybody have a suggestion?

There. Having disavowed any understanding of poetry I have gone on to attempt to explain it.  I'm afraid this is what you will come to expect of me. 

All the best
The Gedle