Essay Questions

How is the poem "Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn" an allusion to John Keats' poem?

The title of the poem already alludes to the Romantic poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats. Keats was fascinated by the artwork on an urn, and the way it depicted both the lives of people at the time it was made, and also different ideas and philosophies of the time. Keats was obsessed with the idea of being remembered after he his death, and found the way in which the urn was a piece of "frozen time" to be fascinating - it was as if each urn was a pre-photography era photograph album.

Turnbull is alluding to this poem and also paying homage to it in some ways. He is creating a modern version of Keats' romantic ode for today's society. The main way in which he modernizes this is by referencing Grayson Perry, who is an artist known for his ceramic vases that portray modern social scenes at odds with the classical nature of the vase. This is what Turnbull is producing too, in his poem; he is taking modern poetic references, such as young hooligans wearing Burberry, and juxtaposing them with the classical nature of a Romantic poem.

What was the poet's inspiration for the poem "Getting in Touch with Our Feminine Side?"

Turnbull states that when he was writing his poetry, he was writing it for performance on a stage. He grew tired of seeing drama students at performances showing their politically correct credentials by portraying the lower class characters with Dick Van Dyke style Cockney accents, or thick generic Northern English accents. They were one-dimensional portrayals that were intended to sum up in one accented syllable after another what it meant to be a masculine working class bigot. The idea for the poem came to him whilst watching one such performance.

He tried to write the poem in the form of a song because at this early stage in his career he was still struggling with the issues of meter and form. However, over the years he became more adept and revisited this poem, which had the correct balance of first-person conversation and narrative authority.

What is the poet trying to tell us in his poem "Radioactive Kid"?

This poem is really a bitter and ironic statement about pollution and the effect it is having on not only future generations, but on every living generation today. The kid is describing the different chemicals that are falling, disguised as rain. He is not soaked by rain as we used to know it, but rain as we have created it with our irresponsible behavior and sloppy attitude towards pollution. He also warns that in generations to come the human genome will be irreparably damaged and altered by the exposure to chemicals in the atmosphere, and that future humans will not be the same as the humans we have always been. It is both a warning and a telling off.