Hi! How’s it going?
Not quite looking at the camera…but smiling!
Today I got to relax in a busy restaurant at lunchtime, across from the man I have chosen to spend my life with, and engage in some scribbly mutual ignoring 😉
I know it wasn’t long ago that we did the same thing in a café at breakfast time, but there is something even better about a weekend date: knowing that our kids are having a really fab time without us, instead of ‘just’ being in their weekday education and us having to clock-watch!
(They really did have fun, lots of models and artwork to show for it! You rock, Mother dear! *Waves*)
I gave myself a challenge, nonetheless, and saved a Jimpix screenshot for my 15 minute session. Dun, dun duuuunnnn…
I didn’t look at the words, just copied it to my Facebook and retrieved it while waiting for dessert to be served. The generator was a bit mean to me! I wrote all the words at the top of my notebook page, feeling sure today would be the day I would fail to get anything near a sequential poem out of the randomness!
From Jimpix
I smiled when I saw yawl had come up again! At least I knew it was a type of sailing boat this time around…
I started by looking up ‘JSON’ because I was totally stumped, thinking it was maybe a company I’d never heard of? Turns out it is:
“short for JavaScript Object Notation, and is a way to store information in an organized, easy-to-access manner.” [emphasis is from the link]
I groaned…
Next to be Googled was ‘whoreson’, and it did, indeed, mean what it sounded like. I groaned again, scanned Wikipedia for Chichester facts, and set the timer.
I managed to write the below, check all the words had been included, and get hubby to read it; all in under 9 minutes! Yay, that means even the initial searching bit came within my 15 minute window, and I thought I was letting myself off with that part today!
Chichester Adept Flag Bounds England Yawl British Whoreson JSON
As he sat, for the last time,
Outside Chichester Cathedral;
He reflected how adept he’d been
At fitting in here –
Flying the flag for justice.
But now he could escape them –
The bounds of England – in his yawl.
No longer, perhaps, looked upon
By the British as some Whoreson.
(As if, somewhere in their JSON, they
Had gained a fatal glitch)
After I was home, I decided to do a wee search and see if Chichester had any migrant dealings, and found this article about the government outlining plans to lodge 200 displaced males at a time in Earnley, which is just up the road. With all the daily ongoing news reports, I had a migrant in mind when writing the poem, but had not been aware of this specific proposal from just over a year ago.
I had also read a bit more around JSON (while hubby was placing our drink orders in a café we moved onto) and the link says of using the programme:
“By enclosing the variable’s value in curly braces, we’re indicating that the value is an object. Inside the object, we can declare any number of properties using a “name”: “value” pairing, separated by commas.”
I try to use JSON in the poem as a metaphor for the way we are all programmed, and when looking at it this way, it seemed fitting that the very code is segregated – and immediately talks about enclosing, variables, objects, names, and value!
As you will be well aware by now, if you’ve read a few of my posts, my subconscious writes my poems; so I am intrigued by how the yawl is referred to by the speaker as ‘his’. Going back to the JSON link above, it goes on to point out:
“A slightly more complicated example involves storing two people in one variable. To do this, we enclose multiple objects in square brackets, which signifies an array. For instance, if I needed to include information about myself and my brother in one variable…” [emphasis is from the link]
I wondered if the boat was a signifier of wealth that the speaker in the poem had accrued since moving to England, and
Baby travelling notebook page
whether that now contributed to him thinking he had been freed from people’s narrow view of him – broken the code they use when referring to migrants, if you will.
What story did you hear coming through the poem? Did you think of migrants when reading the generator’s words at first?
Let me know in the comments 😉
February 26th, 2017 at 10:38 pm
[…] [I would have thought Shelley’s Ozymandias would have been the first poem my brain would go for, I almost felt apologetic when it didn’t! But, according to the notes in the link I found, Larkin was writing about something he’d seen in Chichester Cathedral…so obviously my subconscious was still playing with historic random words?! (Remember this?)] […]