Thank God for that. All day I have been humming the first bars of what I know without the slightest hesitation of doubt is a Thelonious Monk tune: dum-dah // duh-dah-dee-dah-dee-dah // duh-dah ... But which?

Epistrophy? Bemsha Swing? Straight No Chaser? ... no ... but it is (appropriately enough) Nutty!

...


The arrival of John Wilkinson's collection of prose writings The Lyric Touch over Christmas has sent me back to the poems with renewed vigour & interest - Proud Flesh, in particular. (It had been rereading John James in early December & Wilkinson's essays on the aforementioned which occasioned the purchase). In turn, such are the contrived workings of my mind, I spend a good half an hour upstairs searching through boxes of old photocopies & magazines trying to track down an interview with JW. I am adamant that it's in Parataxis only to discover it was in Angel Exhaust and then that the particular paragraph I was after (concerning JW's habits of composition) occurred not in an interview at all but the introductory speech he delivered before a reading.

I hope that's clear to everyone. Phew.

Anyway, what I'd forgotten was JW's thoughts on government mental health care policy and the pervasive influence of managerialism. I read these paragraphs now - ten years after initial publication - almost with tears in my eyes for the lucidity of his writing and the way he diagnoses and predicts how this infection will spread into every nook and cranny of what we call modern society.

And the wonderful defiance against goal-oriented thinking and predictable outcomes that comes at the close of his penultimate paragraph:

"To feel alive means to say, I went looking for this or that which I thought I wanted, and instead I found something which mattered to me more."

Perfect.

Surely one of the best definitions of why poetry - indeed art in general - matters.