Bear with me. I’m testing out a new approach, partly so that Share Your Toys, going forward, exactly synchs up with my Substack, Stray Bulletin. Social media being what it is, I don’t expect Substack to last (this blog was itself once a Tumblr), but it’s currently the place to connect with a slightly wider audience. So the aim is to post there, backing everything up as I go.

When I started Stray Bulletin I tried to fully embrace Substack’s ‘newsletter’ model, structuring each post as a multi-item column reporting on developments across the board. It’s a fun way of documenting things, but very hard to keep it up, as you might have gathered from how much I tried to stuff into the multi-part ‘I goon-march …’ post. Easier, from this point, I think — I hope! — to post about one or two things at a time and sort the posts into categories.

It might not work. But let’s give it a try.

For National Poetry Day on the 2nd of this month, the Poetry Society asked me to put together a resource on the theme of ‘Play’, using two poems that had won prizes in National Poetry Competitions of past years. You can access it here. It discusses the poems in questions, poses questions for further classroom discussion, and suggests several writing exercises based on them.

I chose to write about ‘The Crab Man’ by Eliot North and ‘Don’t Put your Daughter into Space, Mrs. Kirk’ by Valerie Laws, two very different, enjoyably juicy pieces. Before I get into either of them, though, the theme itself needs addressing:

Play – the theme of this year’s National Poetry Day – tends to be associated with lightness. We sometimes describe a poem or poetry collection as ‘playful’ by way of reassuring the audience that the poet has no particular drum to beat, no designs on their readers, no dark secrets. But there’s something a little bit dishonest about this. Play, after all, is fundamentally disruptive – that’s why it’s so often confined, spatially and temporally, to sandboxes, games and ‘playtime’ , where a limit can be placed on its effects. We treat it in this way – almost as a volatile substance – because we know meaningful play is a process of discovery that breaks and reshapes boundaries, including those we’ve grown fond of, those we rely upon.

This is by way of excusing the fact that part of the reason I was drawn to ‘The Crab Man’ was the hope that it might be about a half-man, half-crab. It isn’t — not on its surface anyway. But why not try to make this interpretation work?

This is a poem made out of tight, cautious steps — its spare couplets creep ever closer to the figure of its title, who is made more frightening by the capitalised article (not ‘the Crab Man’ but ‘The Crab Man’, like ‘The King’). Whoever is being addressed by the speaker of the poem is headed toward some kind of confrontation with him. And while various contextual clues enable us to recognise The Crab Man as one who breaks open the shells of crabs to remove and sort the meat – a normal enough job – the door is left just wide enough for us to imagine him as a kind of mutant. His ‘red robes’ are reminiscent of the rusty or scarlet plating of various crab species, and his cleaver, ‘Smashed over and over’, could be a giant crushing claw. The ‘chainmail door’ and ‘swish of metal skirts’ obviously refer to the chain fly screen at a seafood processing plant. But then again, what about a curtain of silver sea, the light glinting off it metallically, closing around a person and over their head?

I’ll leave you to explore the rest via the link above.