need to find myself or wear identity badges, in terms of place. The chameleon –
c’est moi!
Q19 and 20. Regarding place issues, JM wrote, ... Confined places make people
mad. So do open spaces ... I ’m sure that, individually and collectively, people have
always been influenced for good or ill by their immediate surroundings. (I t might
be more pertinent to ask about the effects that people have on places.) I t’s hard to
choose a single example, but let’s take John Cowper Powys’ A Glastonbury
Romance. Before I read this book, I was already familiar with the setting; the
Glastonbury ruins, Powys clarifies for me the idea of spirit of place by the sheer
power of his language.
(d) Reader 3. J.C. (Teacher of English literature, community worker and film
producer.)
Q1. The respondent said, ... I read to extend my domain, as if in the process of
reading I not only increase my understanding of the world but also tame it to some
extent ... aid internal ... to live at some sort of ease within a recognised chaos.
Many of the things I read are often banal (despite this I often find hidden details
with these items fascinating) – shopping lists, weather reports, maps newspapers,
business reports. When it comes to literature I usually read several books at the
same time – autobiographies, children’s books, histories, short stories, screenplays,
novels. The genre that I prefer in my reading is poetry ... Because of its passion, its
intensity, its beauty, its deep reach into the psyche and its independence of thought
due to its complete inutility. My favourite authors of poetry are Ovid (translated –
unfortunately I can’t read the original Latin) and Edward Lear.
Of his current reading, Ted Hughes’ Tales from Ovid, the respondent said, it is
breathtaking in capturing the spark of the original tales ... I am always knocked out
by the modernity of his [ Ovid’s] thought, his clarity, the sophistication and
immediacy of his approach and the pure sense of life in his work. At the other end
of the spectrum I adore many of the non-sense poems of Edward Lear. The Owl
and the Pussycat is perhaps one of the most simple, beautiful and elegant poems
written in English. His playfulness with language and his reaching into child-like
fantasy is liberating. The respondent elaborated further on this later in response to
Question 4 by saying that poetry is often located internally so the setting becomes
the backdrop of my own mind.