Things have changed at The National Art School since I taught there through the seventies, eighties and nineties. More things haven’t changed, which gives this poem have an historic interest. It was written in 1992
You have entered a place of great beauty and power.
It is dark, it is quiet and you have to enquire.
There’s a queue and a test, best dressed is poor.
The machinery’s broken, don’t break the door!
Of winning and status, of dreamed success,
Qualifications, B. A. / R. S.
If you think you can make it, then make it again.
To make it from here, is to break from the pen.
The messages, the lessons, are etched in the walls
The veins are the teachers who lurk in the halls.
They think, but they’re actually carried along
Their voice is a trick laid down by the song.
The waves are the students who slightly demur
They ripple and tease a distant shore.
The water is left in puddles and pools.
And each generation walks through the news.
There’s lock, stock and barrel, a range and a zoo.
Every opinion is riding, make that one, make that two.
We know that it’s happening. It’s happened before.
There’s a clock in the passage, a knock on the door.
The hour is coming, the hour is here.
The hour comes every year.
To be neither in fashion nor out of date
To be neither too early nor ever too late.
To be part of the middle of a missing core,
Is never to need to ask for more.
Michael Snape 1992