Graffiti, Dyslexia & Poetry by Caroline Lawrence

I was in Bath Spa last weekend for the Bath Kids Lit Festival and went to hear David (Skellig) Almond and Sally (I, Coriander) Gardner talk about how they write. Both of them struggled at school, especially Sally. She was severely dyslexic and only learned to read when she was fourteen. But she said she always loved the shape of words. The Coca-Cola logo seemed particularly beautiful to her, and immediately identifiable. David Almond said he also noticed words as art. He was especially attracted by graffiti. Sally agreed, and added that many graffiti artists are dyslexic; they love words and their art is a way of expressing that love.

Their discussion of graffiti got me thinking. One of the things I am always interested in is the continuity of human behaviour throughout the ages. Ancient Romans loved graffiti, and so do their modern counterparts.

I was in Naples the week before last, visiting sites connected with the Roman poet Virgil. As a classical archaeologist and historian, I knew should be taking photos of columns and amphitheatres but my camera kept snapping the amazing graffiti I saw everywhere. On the one hand I feel dismay, that the Italians should so mar their buildings. But on the other hand I admire much of it. I appreciate the beauty of shape, colour and form that David Almond and Sally Gardner were praising.

Some of the Neapolitan graffiti is pure image: no words of any kind. They can be funny, beautiful, startling. For example, a bollard animated into a face.

Some graffiti has words, slogans or acronyms embedded or "hidden" within.

You find wholes buildings covered with graffiti.

Some of the messages are quotes, like this one (below) by movie director and poet Silvano Agosti: Don't put flowers in the window of a prisoner's cell [because if one day the door should open, he will not want to leave.]

Political slogans are popular, e.g. Tremonti & Napolitano are slaves of the middle-class.

And, just as in Roman times, sometimes graffiti expresses longings and passion. Each one suggests a story behind it, or a hundred stories!

"What a beautiful life"

"No dream"

"The future is not written"

Recently I was reading NAWE magazine and admired a creative writing exercise in which the teacher led her class around school to collect random lines from various places such as fire extinguishers, school notices and other signage. They they shuffled the phrases to make poetry.

You could do the same thing using graffiti in a city. So you might put together images such as a the ones above to make a poem like this:

WHAT A BEAUTIFUL LIFE

NO DREAM

THE FUTURE IS NOT WRITTEN

I'M HERE

I LOVE YOU RAFFAEL

Next time you're a passenger in a car, on a train or simply walking, look around and take note of the beauty and poetry of graffiti. Oh, and watch out for the Punk Beasts, too!

Caroline Lawrence is author of The Roman Mysteries & The P.K. Pinkerton Mysteries. She is currently working on ways of retelling Virgil's Aeneid and visited The Land of the Sibyl with Andante Travels. 

How it all began...by Adèle Geras

When I was seven years old, in 1951, this is what I was reading. There wasn't much of anything else around at the time. I didn't come to Enid Blyton properly till I was about eight, in North Borneo. While I lived in Nigeria, from 1950 - 1952 or early 1953, I mostly read OUR ISLAND STORY (and I've written about this experience on this blog in the past. Here is the link: http://the-history-girls.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/blog-post.html and a book called TALES OF TROY by Andrew Lang. It's not the kind of thing you'd think of giving a seven-year-old to read nowadays but I adored it and could recite long passages from the book off by heart. I read it all the time, eagerly, avidly, and I fell in love from that moment with the story of the Trojan War.

On every single recto page are the words: ULYSSES, SACKER OF CITIES, almost as though this were a kind of subtitle to the legend on the verso pages: TALES OF TROY. This obviously planted something in my mind because I've always taken the side of the Trojans in the war that lasted so many years and that ended with the most famous city destruction of them all, though there have been a few contenders more recently for this dubious honour.

One of the chief attractions of this book is the illustrations. I'm putting up two examples. This one because I used to love declaiming the words that accompany the drawing of the mortally-wounded Paris, throwing himself on Oenone's mercy. I'm going to quote the words I loved so much, just because I still love them. "Lady, despise me not and hate me not, for my pain is more than I can bear. Truly it was by no will of mine that I left you lonely here, for the Fates that no man may escape led me to Helen. Would that I had died in your arms before I saw her face! But now I beseech you in the name of the Gods, and for the memory of our love, that you will have pity on me and heal my hurt and not refuse your grace and let me die here at your feet."
Oenone's expression conveys perfectly what she's feeling: a mixture of still-burning love, pity for a wounded man and a good bit of "I'm not going to be tricked into listening to your blandishments, you bastard!"

The picture of Helen on the walls of Troy, pointing something out to Priam, was my favourite drawing of all. I think it's the dress. I just longed to own one precisely like that and it's still my benchmark for all 'classical' garments.

So this is where my interest in all things classical began. I went on to read Virgil's Aenied Book 2 and then Book 4 while at school. I didn't study Ancient Greek but read translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I read, as student of French, LA GUERRE DE TROIE N'AURA PAS LIEU by Jean Anouilh. And in the fullness of time I wrote my own novel, TROY, which is the story of five normal teenagers who just happened to have grown up during the time that their city was besieged by Ulysses. And we know who he was, do we not? The Sacker of Cities. It's a story that's endured for thousands of years and every time someone retells it, it lives again. I am proud to have taken my place in a long line of writers who've been inspired by this tale.

P.S. TROY is out of print, but probably findable in a library near you.