Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

(For Angela)

Today we will be discussing Paul Auster’s novel CITY OF
                                                             GLASS and its role as both a post-modern and Anti detective novel.
Outside the day is as grey as the nubs of old chewing gum
fossilized to the underbelly of almost every table.
The diggers roar and shriek and grind their way through crusts of
                                                                                   tarmac,
clearing the way for more bland blocks, and I dream of mythic
                                                                               universities;
the ones that smelt of wood and lavender polish. The ones with long
                                                                                       halls
and sweet, dog-eared lecturers with a passion for tweed jackets,
malt whisky and the occasional cigar; the ones with grounds
crowded with honeysuckle and rose-woven architraves,
where students read with their backs pressed against oak trees,
got high on poetry and the thick, spicy scent of knowledge.

Note the allusions to Edgar Allen Poe on page 72,
Note the fractured, frustrating closure of the novel,
Note the way the plot unfolds in static dynamics.
The lecturer is dark and beautiful. Her foreign tongue
turns bland words into delicacies but she speaks too fast,
grins, laughs, gesticulates wildly and I can’t concentrate
on what she’s saying. All I can think about is whether her curls
smell of coconuts, whether she dabs Frangipani onto her wrists
before she comes to work, whether she drinks her coffee black.

It is a novel that confuses your expectations. Its protagonist
is not a hard-boiled detective. The text is peppered with red
                                                                                herrings.
The girl beside me has drawn an exact replica of Botticelli’s Venus
in the margin of her page. Now she is filling it in
with pink and lime green highlighter pens.
Nicola is droning on about buses whilst Gemma sketches bunny
                                                                                    rabbits
with a flashing pen topped with purple marabou.
The lecturer is almost dancing now. Do you all understand??
Everyone nods vigorously but no one does. No one understands
Freud’s theory of THE UNCANNY. No one understands that
words can be like liquid, words can dance, words can eat
                                                                                  themselves.

Fear has an object, whereas dread has nothing.
Note the allusions to The Tower Of Babel. Consider the issues
of fate and chance, the mapping of the city, the mapping of the body.
I, myself, am doodling. I am drawing barbs, whorls of spikes
and question marks. I am drawing flying fish.
The girl in front of me is texting beneath the table. A phone,
with a James Bond ring tone, goes off at the back of the class.
Gemma is now carefully applying pastel kitten stickers
to the lid of her lilac pencil tin. Do you understand?? I nod.
Everything is questioned. The word becomes the word.
I am dreaming of a dark French café where I drink warm brandy
and knowledge is served to me on a plate with
a hard-boiled detective, two red herrings and a wedge of waxy Brie.