Almanac Poetry: said hamlet
Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard, by Eugene Delacroix, oil on canvas, 1839. Louvre Museum, Paris. [Wikimedia Commons.]
said hamlet
buggered if I know
said hamlet
i am but mad
north-north-west
though today I’ve
lost my compass
(Acknowledgements: this poem first appeared in a slightly different form in Redoubt, 1995; then in my first book-length collection, Vigorous Vernacular, Picaro Press, 2008, reprinted in 2018 by Ginninderra Press.)
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About
Kevin Densley is a graduate of both Deakin University and The University of Melbourne. He has taught writing and literature in numerous Victorian universities and TAFES. He is a poet and writer-in-general. His fifth book-length poetry collection, Please Feed the Macaws ... I'm Feeling Too Indolent, was published in late 2023 by Ginninderra Press. He is also the co-author of ten play collections for young people, as well as a multi Green Room Award nominated play, Last Chance Gas, published by Currency Press. Other writing includes screenplays for educational films.
Was he though? :) I have carried his advice to the acting troupe, Suit the word to the action and the action to the word, with me through my travels and travails. Haven’t always practiced it but I guess that is called living.
Cheers
Interesting, Rick. Thanks for your response.
I find Hamlet a fascinating puzzle of a play.
For me it is a compendium of some of the most compelling ideas of human relations and behaviours and shortcomings. It is a well that never runs dry.
You’re so right, Rick.
The play is such a rich vein to mine.
Perhaps Hamlet is also like a Rubik’s cube that one can never quite finish, too. And without going into detail here, I find T S Eliot’s opinion of the play as being lacking/not entirely successful as a piece of writing, highly interesting. To me (and my memory of Eliot’s famous essay on Hamlet is foggy, I admit), Eliot is basically writing words to the effect that with this play Shakespeare has bitten off more than he can chew in creative terms. Of course, this is only one – admittedly major – opinion.
Popping my head in to say that both Hamlet and Eliot played a fairly significant part in my high school English education almost 20 years ago, KD. I moved classes and in the space of a term covered Hamlet (performed an excerpt) and The Waste Land. I wrote a creative epistolary between Eliot and Ezra Pound in the aftermath of WW1 and post-Waste Land publishing; both that and my Hamlet assessment saw my grades rise and my love of writing and language renewed.
P.S. I also like today’s poem!
Thanks for your comments, JL. I enjoyed hearing about your encounters with both Hamlet and those key modernists, Eliot and Pound – such encounters can be highly influential ones, in terms of shaping one’s developing view of the world.
As Eliot wrote at the end of The Waste Land (and how wonderful is that poem overall!): ‘Shantih Shantih Shantih’.