loopy letters of love

she'd have been garrotted at Trinian's

Damn it. I had a terrific idea today – well, I had an idea that would be fun for me, and that amounts to the same thing. I was listening to a local pop radio station, golden oldies – depending on your era. It was one cheesy 90s housey-housey rave trance and techno classic after another, which is always good fun for me. And I thought – with poetry on my mind, after reading one blog post after another about it – O, I know what would be a good idea.

I could write a series of 'After a line from' poems! But, instead of taking the first line from another writer's poem, and building a whole new cathedral of words upon it... I could take the first line (or maybe the standout line from the chorus) of an earworm-worthy 90s dance classic. Like say 'Ride On Time', or 'You've Got The Love'. Or 'You Might Need Somebody'! Shola Ama, baby!

...and then make something completely other out of it. Something that you wouldn't catch on a dancefloor. A quiet meditation on death, or love, or gardening, say.

Yes! It's a well-worn tradition. Not my own idea, of course. People have been doing the same thing for years. And for that matter setting it as homework, making a parlour game of it, producing new creations out of old classics. And – traditionally – that's what you do, the accepted procedure: to name your derivative poem 'After a line from xxx by xxxx'. All attribution and credit present and correct – no attempt to filch the prestige of the original idea.

But beyond the signalling of the format, the citing of the original creative spark – I was damn sure that it was a poetic format that had an actual name, dammit.

But what? I had a vague notion that it might be a clerihew. But a quick resorting to search engine services proved me wrong. I'm not overly educated regarding formal poetry structures – O, the power of understatement. But what little information I did possess proved insufficient. Not a rondel, not a sonnet – bloody hell no – not a villanelle either.

I knew there was an answer, though – and I knew how I knew, too. I'd first come across the phenomenon at ten or eleven years of age – in a boarding school story by Ann Digby.

The Trebizon school stories were moderately popular at the time, although I found them a bit bland. Compared to the traditional exemplars of the genre – Enid Blyton, basically, and perhaps the Chalet School, and of course St. Trinian's – they were botched, uneasy half-arsed 1980s creations, products of the time. Hardly able to flat-out condemn private education, given that they were trading on its snob appeal – and yet offering half-hearted sops to the red flag, with school scholarships for plucky lower-middle class heroines. (Definitely lower-middle. Not actual proles, darling.) Doubtful about the seductive charms of the aristocracy, even in an era in love with Princess Diana, and gifting the school involved with a cohort of upper-middle bourgeoisie, banker's brats and doctor's daughters.

Sign o' the times, right? Thatcherite union-breaking, miners' strikes, all that jazz. Not exactly down with the workers, but unable to uninhibitedly embrace the decadent allure of the aristocracy, blatant capitalist privilege and unearned elitism.

Not like these days, eh? Fucking Mumford, and his clueless hairy flippin' progeny, in fruitless search of a tune in a tin bath. Tom Hiddlestone, ex-Eton, ex-Dragon School, ex-Cambridge, the scrappy urchin nobly urging us to reach for the stars. Cheers, Tom.

But I was an uncritical young reader – anything including cornflake packets and the Reader's Digest, basically – and I swallowed the books down whole. Including one installment of the series, which included a school poetry competition. And what poetry format did our plucky heroine choose, as her competition entry?

Yep. She picked a line by – ooh, I want to say Wordsworth, but it was probably someone more obscure – a first line. And she wrote herself an 'After A Line From...' poem. Except, I'm pretty sure that in the book, she knew what the format was actually called, and – admirably – used the correct term. Well, admirably for a twelve or thirteen year old character. Considering that I still can't locate the appropriate word, myself.