-(from my lecture on “How a Modern Poet Dresses”)…
A poet often wears a hat on his head. He calls this his “Lamb Chop”. Poet’s hats come in all shapes and sizes, though the most common style seen adorning the heads of young poets today is a small, dark blue, velvet number, oval-shaped – quite minimal in design and rather fetching [see Fig.1].
Professor Gallstone of the Institute of Poetic Physics found that the style of this most popular hat actually helps keep poems inside the head of the poet for longer, keeping the ideas and words more resistant to the corrosive elements of time and place which can be so detrimental to the lyrical verses that come like magic to the mind of the poet, and sometimes have a tendency to leak from the basin of the brain where they wash about like water in a tilting rock pool.
So we see, even in the most apparently insipid items of clothing, the poet is protecting himself not just from the elements but also from what Gallstone has termed “Poetic Conduction”, a polite term for what is essentially a destructive process for the poet attempting to commit his words to paper in these increasingly chaotic times.
Fig 1: A sketch of the hat in question.
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