I Don't Understand Poetry

This post is meant as a bit of an encomium of Ian McMillan, Bard of Barnsley and potential Patron Saint of Speech Radio - though, on re-reading, I'm a bit worried that it won't sound like it.

The other morning, he posted this on twitter:

I love this poem by Norman Nicholson

The poem in question is called "Five Minutes".  Here it is:

"I'm having five minutes," he said,
Fitting the shelter of the cobble wall
Over his shoulders like a cape. His head
Was wrapped in a cap as green
As the lichened stone he sat on. The winter wind
Whined in the ashes like a saw,
And thorn and briar shook their red
Badges of hip and haw;
The fields were white with smoke of blowing lime;
Rusty iron brackets of sorel stood
In grass grey as the whiskers round an old dog's nose.
"Just five minutes," he said;
And the next day I heard that he was dead,
Having five minutes to the end of time.

I've always had a problem with poetry.  I simply don't get it; and this poem is a good example of why.  I don't understand why it can't be rendered as a paragraph, for one thing:

'I'm having five minutes,' he said, fitting the shelter of the cobble wall over his shoulders like a cape.  His head was wrapped in a cap as green as the lichened stone he sat on.  The winter wind whined in the ashes like a saw, and thorn and briar shook their red badges of hip and haw; the fields were white with smoke of blowing lime; rusty iron brackets of sorel stood in grass grey as the whiskers round an old dog's nose.  "Just five minutes," he said; and the next day I heard that he was dead, having five minutes to the end of time.

It'd be - for my money - a slightly over-baked paragraph; writing as such throws into relief what is over-done about it ("red badges of hip and haw"?  Hmmm), but for the life of me I can't see what's missing.  Indeed, it seems to be that the piece is more successful when rendered as prose, because the line breaks are distracting.  Why are they where they are?  (I can't tell that there's a rhythmic need; and the rhyme structure is too tenuous. A-B-A-C-D-E-F-E-G-H-I-F-A-G, if I've counted correctly.  Oooh: wait: 14 lines.  So does that make it a sonnet?  And why does that matter?)  In the prose version, you don't have to worry about that; but you do have the freedom to stress what you will - to pick out the rhythms and rhymes as they present themselves, without the prompt.

Anyway: I replied to McMillan, because... well, because Twitter makes you think that that's OK.  "I have never understood poetry," I wrote.  "Why couldn't this be (overbaked) prose?  Who/ what should I read to see what I'm missing?  I believe I *am* missing something, but what?  I feel like a blind man in a gallery".

Am I Still Charlie?

One of the things that makes it hard to defend Charlie Hebdo is Charlie Hebdo's habit of publishing stuff that's hard to defend.  In particular, I'm thinking of the editorial published on the 3rd: "How Did We End Up Here?".  In this article, it seems that the magazine is placing the blame for Islamist violence not only on Muslims (which is trivially true, inasmuch as that non-Muslims are unlikely to take up the Islamist cause), but on all Muslims (which is trivially false, and feeds into a rather unpleasant right-wing narrative).

Having said that, we do need to be clear about what, exactly, Charlie is supposed to have done, and why, and what our response should be.  The Independent's piece on criticism of the editorial gave much more attention to the critics than to the editorial itself.  (Admittedly, this later article did make the case for the other side.)  And I'm fully signed up to the principle of charity when it comes to assessing people's arguments; even if they screw up the argument, the thing for which they're arguing may still be worthwhile.  So we ought to take the best possible interpretation of a given article, and dismiss it only to the extent that a charitable reading is not possible.  For some things, the dismissal will come fairly quickly; for others, it'll take longer; and for some it'll be late, if it comes at all.

Photo: Exeter Express and Echo

Based on the application of that principle, I don't think that the Charlie editorial is quite as bad as it might appear at first.  It certainly does have the whiff of the train-wreck about it  in certain respects; but upon examination, my sense is that things could probably be worse; it seems analogous to the weekend's bump between trains in Plymouth.  There were no serious injuries caused when the trains bashed into each other - but it's clear all the same that someone can't have been paying attention, and the damage is going to need more than a bit of paint to put right.  As for Great Western, so for Charlie.

(At least, I think so.  Look: writing about this stuff is always going to be difficult, so I make no claim that what follows is anything more than thinking aloud.  But since this is a blog rather than an academic analysis, and I'm writing under my pen-name rather than ex cathedra, I reserve the right to throw stuff out there pretty much as it occurs to me.  So, suitably disclaimered, here we go.)

The first thing we should note is that Charlie is, and always has been, fiercely irreligious, and fiercely anti-clerical.  The image on the right is the cover it published on the first anniversary of the murders in its own office.  It's god who's fingered as a the guilty party here.  Religion is not going to get an easy time in its pages - and it is no harder or softer on Islam than on any other religion.  The figure in the image could be Allah, or Yahweh, or anyone: the name and the particular mythology don't matter one bit.  So the background for any article is a presumption that religion, or at least the encroachment of religion into the public realm, is something to be resisted.  With that noted, how should we read the editorial?

The trivial answer is that, at the very least, we should read it.  And some of it is, I think, misjudged.  But it's worth quoting at length, all the same.  (I'm tempted to C&P the whole thing, except that I think that this is already going to be quite a long post, and there's really no need; you can follow the link above if you're really bothered.)  And it starts off well - if vaguely - enough:

Why India? Why Brits?

Cross-posted from the other blog.

Julie Bindel had a piece in The Guardian the other day about India's surrogate mothers.  It makes for pretty grim reading.  Even if the surrogates are paid, and are paid more than they might otherwise have earned, there's still a range of problems that the piece makes clear.

For one thing, the background of the surrogates is an important factor.  Bindel writes that

[s]urrogates are paid about £4,500 to rent their wombs at this particular clinic, a huge amount in a country where, in 2012, average monthly earnings stood at $215.

It's tempting, at first glance, to look at the opportunity to be a surrogate as a good thing in this context: these women are earning, by comparative standards, good money.  But, of course, you have to keep in mind that the standard is comparative.  If your choice is between doing something you wouldn't otherwise do and penury, doing the thing you wouldn't otherwise do looks like the better option.  But "better option" doesn't imply "good option".  So there's more to be said there; more questions to be asked.  Choosing x over y because y is more awful doesn't mean that x isn't.  It might be a good thing; but it might not be.  There might be economic - structural - coercion.  Choosing to become a surrogate might be a symptom of there being no better alternative.

A related question is this: are the women really making a free choice in offering their reproductive labour even assuming that the terms are economically just?  Possibly not:

I have heard several stories of women being forced or coerced into surrogacy by husbands or even pimps, and ask Mehta if she is aware of this happening.  “Without the husbands’ [of the surrogates] consent we don’t do surrogacy."

Note (a) the non-denial, and (b) the tacit acceptance that it's the husband's decision anyway.  That's not good.

(In a wholly different context, I've recently been reading David Luban's Lawyers and Justice, and - in a discussion about lawyers cross-examining complainants in rape cases, he makes this point:

([H]ere we have two people who are confronted by powerful institutions from which protection is needed.  The defendant is confronted by the state [that is: in any criminal trial, the defendant does need protection from the power of the state - IB], but the victim is confronted by the millennia-long cultural tradition of patriarchy, which makes the cliché that the victim is on trial true.  From the point of view of classical liberalism, according to which the significant enemy is the state, this cannot matter. But from the point of view of the progressive correction of classical liberalism, any powerful social institution is a threat, including diffuse yet tangible institutions such as patriarchy. (p 151)

(The sentiment would seem to apply here.  A view of human agency that sees liberty as being mainly or only about avoiding state interference is likely to miss all kinds of much more subtle, insidious pressures that are liberty-limiting.  Economic factors are such pressures.  The idea of the wife as property is another.)

I do wonder if readers of this blog might help out with answering one more question, though. One of the startling claims is that

[a]pproximately 12,000 foreigners come to India each year to hire surrogates, many of them from the UK.

I don't know how many "many" is, but let's take as read that it's more than none.  It's a statistic that raises a question for Ophelia Benson over at Butterflies and Wheels:

Why India? Why not hire surrogates at home?
Because India has a lot of poor people, that’s why. Because the price is a fifth of what it would be at home. Because it’s a perfect setup for rich pale people to exploit very poor brown women.

I don't think that that's quite got it.  As I commented on Ophelia's piece, this wouldn’t easily explain the UK factor.  As the article makes clear, commercial surrogacy is illegal here; surrogates are allowed only to recoup reasonable expenses.  Surrogacyuk.org suggests £7000 – £15000 as a guide for the “price” (I know I shouldn't use that word, but you know what I mean) in the UK; but if Indian surrogates are paid £4500, and the clinic is still making up to £18000 on the transaction (assuming I’ve not misread the article), the Indian market is likely to be more expensive for commissioners, even without the cost of travelling to India to begin with.

So why do Brits use Indian surrogates?

Here's a hypothesis.  In the UK, surrogacy arrangements aren’t enforceable, the woman who gives birth is automatically recognised as the mother, and a Parental Order is required for the commissioning mother/ couple to be legally recognised as having parental status.  I don’t know what the legal niceties are in India, but my guess is that that side of things is probably a bit easier to deal with.  After all, if the procedure there is as free-wheeling as Bindel suggests, keeping track of exactly who gave birth to whom and with whose eggs isn’t going to be foolproof.

Is that it?  Is there any other reason why people from the UK might commission an Indian surrogate mother?