Poem: ‘For Jon, Pam, Tom and Katie up in the air’

Letters

Vol. 13 No. 6 · 21 March 1991

From E.L. Smith

Ian Pople’s poem ‘For Jon, Pam, Tom and Katie up in the air’ (LRB, 24 January) raised questions of perception and memory. In particular, we noticed an apparent inaccuracy in the name of a well-known street here in Bangkok, Soi Cowboy, which the poem called ‘Soi Carboy’. An accidental slip of the poet’s memory? A conscious transformation of the caballero appellation? Or perhaps it is a cleverly mimicked dysfunction of memory designed to capture the elusiveness of places visited for only a few days – a verisimilitude of forgetting.

E.L. Smith
Bangkok