by Michael Swan

Annual Conference
Words pour out
bounce off the front row
swirl round the lamps
eddy in the corners
drift down, end up
in heaps on the floor.
In the evening
the cleaners sweep them up
and load them
into the recycling bins
ready for next year.

Lecture Notes 1
The people sit and listen.
The speaker stands and speaks.
Outside, the raindrops glisten.
The minutes stretch to weeks.

Lecture Notes 2
The words chug along
one after another.
There are first-class words
and second-class words.
They are all clean and comfortable.
Sometimes they stop
and an idea
gets in or out.
But not very often.

Lecture Notes 3
Sitting
through an appalling
three-hour sermon
on the Doctrine of Free Will
Leonardo sketched in his mind
the geometry
of the Virgin of the Rocks.

Beethoven
used a tedious lecture
on the history of the flute
to work out the scherzo
of the Second Symphony.

All I achieved
in an hour
on Interactive Language Testing
was a note
that we need to buy fishfood.

Lecture On Semantics
This man who jokes of homonyms
with twinkles of pedantic joy
—incredible though it may seem—
was once a normal little boy.

Seminar
(for Irene)
It seems that the topic
can be divided
into seventy-nine categories
and our relationship with it
into nineteen categories
giving in all
fifteen hundred and one
intersections.

Where are you in all this, baby?

Spelling Is Very Important
Spelling is very important,
the speaker explained.

I could not agree more.

Necessary is correct.
So are separate,
mortgage,
polite,
work,
obey
and holiday at the seaside.

Haert is not correct.
Lov is wrong.
Dispair, weap, hugg,
the majik of a kis—
these get no marks.

After The Talk
“I was interested in what you were saying
about inductive and deductive approaches
to grammar learning.
I mean
how far can you maintain the opposition
between on the one hand
Bacon’s paradigm of the scientific method
and on the other
Newtonian-type systems
in the light of all we have learnt
from Max Planck onwards?”

“Absolutely.
Anything one says in this area,
is, as you imply,
subject to the caveat
that hypothesis formation
is a two-way process
with a complex epistemological status.
Popper’s good on this,
isn’t he?
And wouldn’t it be fun
to try out
a quantum approach to grammar?
Good to talk to you.”

Fifteen-love.

The Linguist
“Please forgive me,”
he said in Welsh
“for not speaking your language well.”
They cheered him to the echo.

“Excuse my ignorance
of your subtle and elegant idiom,”
he said in Japanese
to the welcoming committee.
They were lost in admiration.

“I am embarrassed
at my poor command of Icelandic,”
he confessed
to deafening applause.

“Be so good
as to make allowances
for my lack of fluency.”
The Manchurian delegation
was spellbound.

“Please forgive me,”
he said to his wife
“for my frequent absences.”
She did not appear to understand.

From Young Turk To Old Fart
Yeah, well,
you get all this airy-fairy crap
from academics
who, face it,
wouldn’t recognize a real student
if one came up and bit them;
but after you’ve been in the business
for a certain length of time
you do tend
to become increasingly aware
of underlying patterns;
and indeed,
my experience leaves me in little doubt
that many of the relevant pedagogic parameters
can be subsumed,
mutatis mutandis.

God, it goes so fast!