Jean-Simeon Chardin, Basket of Peaches and Red and White Grapes with Wine Cooler and Stemmed Glass Oil on canvas (1759)"Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine - good God, how fine. It went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy - and its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry" (from The Letters of John Keats (1795-1821))
Helen Dunmore, novelist and poet, describes (My Hero: John Keats) how for her "at school, poems were all about meaning, and that did'nt correspond to what I experienced when I tried to write them. Keats knew that you could write with a nectarine in one hand, and the juice would run into a poem".I like this thought and I believe that the importance of the senses currently tends to be sidelined in favour of the conceptual and the rational. I love rationality as well and think there it has its own poetry, but that it needs to be balanced with the unpredictability of the senses. It has taken me a long time to accept this. SORRY THIS IS RATHER A PONDEROUS POST but I have wanted to include for some weeks.
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