Poetry

So I just found this blog post that I wrote way back in July and never published on here, so here we go...

We’re back on poetry again. It’s been a while.

In my recent selection from Sheffield city centre library (which was incredibly Lit-geeky and which I’ve already blogged on two texts from – Planet Narnia and O Pioneers! ) I took a random book about poetry: The Strength of Poetry by James Fenton (2001). The contents page promised writing about Philip Larkin, W.H. Auden, Wilfred Owen and Sylvia Plath amongst others so I thought, let’s give it a go. The first chapter talks about Michelangelo and other Italian Renaissance artists; the way they learned from, or were secretive towards, each other. By the end of the first page we feel that Fenton definitely has a unique way of looking at things. His writing can be by turns beautiful and amusing, and he’s always brutally honest. He picks up on usual things about poets – Owen’s juvenilia (hilariously pompous), the way Larkin is credited with expounding things everyone thinks but no one says but how ridiculous that actually is when you think about what he is saying, Auden’s dual influences of William Blake and Henry James. Seamus Heaney’s Irishness is discussed, the influence of life on poetry in Plath and, running through all, what it means to be a ‘poetess’. Fenton points out that feminising nouns like this can completely change their meaning: a ‘priestess’ is not at all the same thing as a ‘priest’ as it has much more pagan connotations. Similarly a ‘poetess’ is not the same thing as a ‘poet’. He charts the struggles and differences of opinion amongst several women poets as to what it means to be a woman and a poet, quoting Germaine Greer: ‘The more women adored poetry, the less able they were to write it... It is less crucial for women to work out how men did this to women than it is to assess the extent to which women did this to themselves.’

All in all, it is at once varied and coherent as a selection of thoughts on modern poetry. It is also amusing, clear and – wonder of wonders for a book on poetry! – interesting. It also made me want to read more Larkin, Plath and Heaney and to discover new writers (for me) such as Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore.

While on the subject of poetry, let’s talk Donne (again). In the same lit haul I picked up John Stubbs’ biography Donne: The Reformed Soul (2006), which I’ve been after for a while. ... My main gripe with it is that Stubbs uses Donne’s poetry to prove things about his life. I can understand this in that it is difficult to write a biography about a man who’s been dead for nearly 400 years and who lived in an age where documentation was not seen as especially important (hence why we have so little information about Shakespeare). However we are always being told not to confuse the poet and the voice in the poem, and although it seems reasonable that Donne drew from his own experience and potentially parts of his own personality in his poems – which are known for their startling voices – to use lyric poetry as proof of some particular personal opinion on Donne’s part seems to me a fallacy. Poets don’t always say what they mean in their poems and are notoriously unreliable; we never know when they are using their own opinions or assuming someone else’s and unless we have other biographical evidence to prove our point I feel we would be better off leaving our insights of a poet drawn from his craft out of it.

Poetry in a foreign language...

It's been an incredibly long time since my last post; I imagine this is because the more you leave such things, the greater the task of returning to it feels. In any case, a lot has happened since my post on Cold Comfort Farm, Bright Star and various other things. I am now back in the UK, my 'year' abroad in Tours finished and my year abroad project written (it was about the roles of women on three chateaux in the area around Tours if you are particularly interested!). Although I've got used to it again I do miss France and speaking French. I hope to go back at some point in August, though.

In a weeks' time I start something called the Student Associate Scheme; a project to encourage students in Higher Education to take up teaching, specifically in 'shortage' subjects (maths, science and modern foreign languages). I'll therefore be spending three weeks as a classroom assistant, learning about the British secondary school system from the opposite perspective. Should be interesting! It will be especially intruiging for me to compare teaching English in France to teaching French in England.

One thing I tried once or twice while an 'assistante' was to use poetry. We are fortunate to have such a broad and beautiful range of poetry in our language, and it would be a shame for my students to have missed out on it. I used a few different ones - 'little tree' by e.e.cummings at Christmas and 'i carry your heart with me', also by cummings - amongst them, and got some really positive responses ranging from poetical analysis to emotional response. I was expecting to give a Shakespeare lesson to one particularly bright class but it sadly didn't happen; I was planning to look at a sonnet or two. I did one exercise a few times with a couple of different classes, using Jenny Joseph's famous 'Warning':

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.


I didn't give it to my students like this, though; I gave it to them in pairs on a piece of paper, with some words blanked out. For example:
'When I am an old woman I shall wear ______
With a red _____ which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me'
I asked them to fill in the gap with words they felt were appropriate to make their own poem. I supplied some words if they asked - 'spit', 'brandy', 'beermats' - but in general the vocabulary isn't too demanding. At first it took a while for some students to understand what I was asking. They whispered with panicked faces, "But Madame... we don't know the words, we will be wrong!". I tried to explain that they should use their imaginations; there is no wrong answer as long as the poem makes sense. After a few false starts almost everyone finished and we read them aloud.

I wish I'd kept some copies because some of them were truly hilarious, updating the 1961 poem with a real 21st century feel. I seem to remember hearing things like:
'When I am an old woman I shall wear a leather skirt
With a red g-string which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me'
and:
'And eat only hamburgers and fries for a week
And hoard money and drugs and alcohol'
Even the students agreed that their versions were better than the original!

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In other news, I've been reading a lot more blogs in the past year. Five of the best are without a doubt:
http://www.cakewrecks.com/
http://1000awesomethings.com/
http://www.trufflegirls.com/
http://bookshelfporn.com/
http://thxthxthx.com/

Some of my favourite blogs are the ones my friends write; from spiritual reflection to journalism they remind me what wonderful, interesting and talented people I know. I feel like I would like to make this blog more interesting and accessible; perhaps the answer is to write shorter but more regular blogs on random literature-related things. We'll see how that goes...!

Stars...

The stars speak simply
of Your beauty.
Delight in creation
and in eternity
combined.
The moving, endless song
of wonder and of awe
is sung, light years close to You,
breathed from greatness to greater.

Yet here the pinpricks fade elegantly
with the joyful expectancy of dawn.
Eternity ever adores.

Snow

Just because of this beautiful weather, while it lasts...

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes–
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands–
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Louis Macneice (1907 - 1963)

"Encore une fois, les photographies de Valérie Jouve ne se contentent pas de répéter l’expérience de l’aliénation urbaine car ce qui fait retour en elle, au titre de « tout juste passé », ce n’est pas seulement la perte de capacité de la photographie à véhiculer le sens, mais celle de l’espace urbain lui-même. Tentatives de se réveiller dans la pénombre de l’instant vécu, elles nous font ressentir la difficulté qu’il y a à appréhender le fait que le domaine urbain ne porte plus, aujourd’hui, d’aspirations à l’expérience individuelle et collective comme il a pu le faire auparavant. Ces aspirations auront finalement été absorbées par la dématérialisation croissante de l’espace dominant des réseaux électroniques, de la technologie des médias et du marketing global."

"Yet again Valérie Jouve’s works do not merely reiterate the experience of urban alienation, for what inheres within them, in the sense of the “just-passed” or the “recently forgotten”, is not only the capacity of the photographic image to convey meaning, but urban space itself. Like trying to awaken to the blindness of the lived moment, one senses in these works the difficulty of grasping the fact that the urban realm no longer carries with it all those prior aspirations of individual and collective experience it once did. For those aspirations have finally been absorbed in the increasing dematerialization of the dominant spaces of electronic networks, media technology, and global marketing.”


OK, so is it just me or does this make no sense? I've just been exploring this artist's work (along with Mohamed Bourouissa and Denis Darzacq, who are great - especially Darzacq's La Chute, if you like photography check it out) for a French module I've been taking and had an exam on, mainly focussing on how contemporary French artists look at la banlieue (French inner cities is the closest I can get to describing it, but they tend to be on the edges of the city) which actually turned out to be pretty interesting. However, I don't think I'd be alone in saying that jargon such as the above (quoted from the 'blurb' in the sleeve of a book of Jouve's work I borrowed from the library) is really offputting and unhelpful for those of us not well-versed in art and photography.

I read an article in The Independent the other week which was really interesting (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/days-like-these-to-like-a-work-of-art-you-have-to-know-something-about-it-this-worries-me-1419196.html) about the appreciation of art. The columnist has gone to the Tate Modern in London to see the Mark Rothko exhibition with an intelligent friend and, after considering the colours of the works, 'I remembered reading a quotation from Rothko himself, which added to my discomfort: "The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their colour relationship, then you miss the point."I didn't like the feeling that I was being judged on my reactions by the artist himself. My educational background is in literature where, by and large, once they've published a thing, authors leave you to your own devices. It's up to you what you get out of it. And yet here was an artist from beyond the grave telling me that even though I liked his paintings, the way I liked them was wrong.'

Blurbs like this in art books have the same impression on me. It's not just that they make no sense (if anyone manages to work out what's actually being said in the quote above, please let me know!), it's that there's supposedly a particular way to interpret them. While I was complaining about this the other day, a friend pointed out that poetry is exactly the same - only interesting and meaningful for the initiated. I think I've tried to show before that this needn't be the case. I believe that good poetry should have something about it that goes beyond metaphor and form, that touches people's hearts and minds because the words themselves connect with the memories and experiences of the reader. I think this was William Wordsworth's aim, expressed in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798). His idea was to take his experiences and emotions and put them into poetry in such a way that any person could read it and relive what he had experienced. I don't know how successful he was in this but I like to think that everyone can find a poem that tugs at something within them.

This has been quite long, but I leave you with an example of a poem that many people who have been in love for a long time find it fairly easy to relate to, Shakespeare's sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose Worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood" ~ T.S. Eliot

... And I am going to prove it. These days poetry is far less read than almost any other type of literature, which is desperately sad. Perhaps it is because it takes more effort to read a poem - it is not written, like in a novel, as ordinary, continuous, even lines where sentences cohere together. Sometimes we are bedazzled by it, seeing it so exalted and highly viewed that we worry we will not ever be able to understand its "hidden meanings", which we are convinced all poems possess. Yes, they usually do, if they are good poems (although even bad poems contain hidden meanings!). What it is important to realise is that often when a poet writes a poem, they draw on their own individual experiences and associations, as well as what literary critics and professors call "tropes" - poetic images and themes which continue throughout literary history (for example the symbolic linking of the rose with love). So we can unravel some of poetry through these ideas which we come across many times, but sometimes we have no hope because we don't share the poet's experience - or occasionally their historical timeframe and socio-cultural background and awareness among other things. This is where our own experience comes into play.

There are lots of technical terms for techniques used in poetry, and some of them enhance our enjoyment and understanding of it as we see what effect metre or rhythm has on the poem's overall effect and thus meaning (I recommend Stephen Fry's 'The Ode Less Travelled' for the person interested in poetry but ignorant of the technicalities). However, not understanding or knowing these terms does not at all need to hamper our appreciation of poetry. I find that often the sound of the words of a poem in my head, or on my mouth as I read them aloud, bring about emotions and associations even before I begin to understand what the poet is talking about - a great example is Keats; try 'Ode to Autumn' ('Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness' - how beautiful!!) and 'Ode to a Nightingale' and I hope you'll see what I mean!! You can find these poems, and any others I mention, on poemhunter.com or hopefully in any good English poetry anthology from a library.

So appreciation of poetry need not be a scary or elitist thing - just read the poem slowly, aloud if possible, and let it speak to you and connect with your own experience; you may then find it easier to understand. Savour the sound - English really is a beautiful language and poets exploit that beauty to convey their meaning.

Here is one of my favourite poets, who I am very far from understanding, e.e.cummings, with 'i carry your heart with me' (and the typing/grammatical 'errors' are intentional; it was his style).

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)


I love that second stanza (verse), especially the line: 'this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart'. I couldn't explain why, and this is the wonder of poetry. I love the unusual way of expressing love as comparing it with something so huge and incomprehensible by humans - what is literally keeping the stars apart? Why should it not be love?

I was going to post a poem by John Donne - a very different poet but again a favourite of mine - but I find I've rambled and sermonised enough! Go explore poetry for yourself... please!!

I'm currently rather randomly reading a book intended for children, Gatty's Tale by Kevin Crossley-Holland, which takes a character from his medieval trilogy centred around a boy called Arthur (highly recommended!) and makes her the primary focus. I'm not sure if I'll blog on it, but it is a nice book, written in Crossley-Holland's unusual style, which combines poetry with fancy and a different way of seeing things. I'm also reading Philip Yancey's The Jesus I Never Knew, as something completely different, but am enjoying that too - it's interesting to see how much of our perceptions of Jesus are altered by our social, political, religious and historical perspectives.