While Judith Chernaik deserves credit for establishing Poems on the Underground (Editorial, 19 January), very few of the poems chosen have caught what it is like down there. My own book, Poems NOT on the Underground, published in 1996, sought to address this anomaly.
Thus, with apologies to Philip Larkin: “They fuck you up, the Northern Line trains / They may not mean to, but they do / They say they’re coming though Camden / Whereas you know they’re stuck at Waterloo.” It ends: “Governments hand on misery to man / It deepens like the Northern Line itself / Get off the trains as early as you can / And don’t commute at all if you want your health.”
Roger Tagholm
London
• Homer (the epic poet, not Bart’s dad) was on to our poor attention span way before the Netflix top brass (Matt Damon is right: phones + Netflix means we are now in the pub bore age of cinema, 19 January).
The Odyssey is oral poetry. Homer couldn’t count on his audience keeping in their heads who was who or why one god had a beef with another. That’s why Telemachus is invariably described as “sensible” (even when his actions are otherwise), Penelope is frequently called “wise” and the sea, we constantly reminded, is “wine-dark”.
If director Christopher Nolan does hold up his fight sequences to fill us in on the plot of the forthcoming multiplex blockbuster, he will have the ancient bard on his side.
John Keenan
Brighton
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