September 2018 to July 2019

Welcome to a B….t free zone – poetry at no. 7

Alice Oswald won the T S Eliot Prize for her poem DART in 2003. With its roots in the poetry of Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Hughes and Heaney, you might expect something heavyweight and obscure. Not at all, she is a modernist but with a voice all her own. She’s lyrical and mystical and there are times when the writing seems hardly able to keep pace with its evocation of light, speed and whatever animates the natural world. All this creates an intriguing contrast to the voices of industry, work, human hopes and dreams that mutter along beside, hardly aware of and scarcely in competition with the river. In September we chose the walker, the naturalist, the water abstractor, the stone waller, the boat builder, the salmon netsman and poacher and the ferryman. We placed their experiences amidst the old man of the high places with which the poem opens and the fecundity of the sealswith which the poem ends, but like the river and life itself, doesn’t end…

Legacies and Inheritances, our theme for October, produced variety and much discussion about their value and importance to family life and a sense of who we are. Thomas Hardy’s The Spell of the Rosebegins as a Victorian/Medieval piece but glides on its ghostly path to explore a marriage at an impasse, with all the pain and grief that involves. Self-Made Man by Matt Harvey explores how we embrace what we inherit from our parents and balance that with a sense of our unique identity. When we heard Nina Parmemter’s The World Needs Poetry, we endorsed the poem’s sentiments and admired how well they are expressed. Two poems by Tony Harrison took us to a territory that he has long inhabited with passion and skill – working class identity, familial and societal relations. Marked with D. and Remains champion the underdog and reveal the value of the obscure, the poor and the overlooked. Anne Stevenson’s An Even Shorter History of Nearly Everything prompted discussion about the value of our icons and public art works, our deep and abiding interest in using our bodies as a starting point for sublime works of thought or art. Against our short time on the planet she raises the idea of the earth’s many layered body, parts of which we excavate to make our monuments. This is a poem that raises interesting ideas and questions without easy answers. Closer to the core of human experience was Carol Ann Duffy’s poem The Way My Mother Speaks, a beautifully composed reminder of how satisfying and affirming it can be to sense within us the signature, in speech, body or gesture, of those closest to us. Beannacht/Blessing by John O’Donohue ensured we ended the evening immersed in positive thinking and a sense of wellbeing.

Edward Thomas was a good choice for November, he was killed by an exploding shell at Arras in 1917. He doesn’t fit easily into the category of ‘war poet’ or ‘nature poet’, a sure sign that the encounter would be interesting. We read A Cat, Rain, As the Team’s Head-Brass, The Brook, Lights Out, Words, If I Should Ever by Chance, What shall I give? and The Combe. His innate melancholy and sense of despair, his longings for respite from consciousness make some of the poems painful expressions of alienation and isolation. He is technically very skilled and able to evoke a thrilling pleasure in the English countryside which is realistically rendered, with a powerful sense that this must be protected and we should stand up against the mechanised horror of proficient mass killing going on across the channel in the trenches or indeed, anywhere.

It was 6pm on December 11th and the BBC was telling me I was part of a national nervous breakdown so what better than to scroll down the page, find their recipe for Christmas punch and host the poetry Christmas party? Blowing away the jaded feelings about Christmas and the political jitters was a collection of surprising depth and charm, indignation and sweetness from Eleanor Farjeon with The Shepherd and the King and Earth and Sky, R S Thomas with The Nativity? No. and Christmas Eve.T S Eliot with Journey of The Magi, Dafydd Bach apMadogWladaidd with A Christmas Revel(Croesomewn Llys‘A Welcome in a Court’) in the original Welsh, e e cummings with Little Tree, Wendy Cope with A Christmas Song and Christmas Ornaments. You can always rely on John Betjeman confirming the tried and tested emotions with his 1954 poem Christmas. This was an entertaining evening with all the good and bad about Christmas exposed; ghosts of the past, grumbles of the present and lots of shared anecdotes about bizarre behaviour with Christmas cards!

 

With the country in seamless political crisis January called for an evening reading poems that conferred blessing on the listener. The peace, harmony and deep pleasure in nature could be found in nearly all these poems but there were warnings too. Respect the natural world, and safeguard it as losing it is unthinkable. The poems impressed on us how we can bring about wellbeing and blessing through the mind and the imagination; these are aspects of our experience that we can learn how to enhance. One way to do that is to share poems with like-minded people and the evening certainly achieved that. These were the poems that showed the way: Inversnaid by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emmonsales Heath by John Clare, The Meeting by Gavin Ewart, A Blessing by James Wright, Love after Love by Derek Walcott, Apache Blessing by EsraSlobock, An Irish Blessing (anon), Wild Geese by Mary Oliver, April Rise by Laurie Lee, Beannacht by John O’Donohue and The Guest House by Rumi.

 

T S Eliot is the marmite of the poetry cannon and so he proved to be in February. Some brought along their school copies, heavily annotated but none the wiser, which about sums up my own reading of The Waste Land in the sixth form. We read some early poems, Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night, and appreciated their elegance of expression, capturing of mood and evocation of the loneliness of urban life. We accepted them as imagistic and fragmentary, finding a coherent narrative would not take us to a poem’s heart. We then explored some of The Waste Land’s most famous lines and passages, appreciating their novelty and rootedness in the cultural literary past of all humanity, not simply the West. Marina was a fine example of Eliot’s later Christian experience, showing his interest in abiding human themes like loss and redemption. We ended the evening with a great rendering of Macavity: The Mystery Cat, marvelling at the allusions and cleverness of phrase across the whole spectrum of his work from desolation to fun.

 

The poetry of Wendy Cope brought laughter and a quiet sharing of ideas to the table in March. We admired her technical dexterity and range, her sensitive approach to the most difficult topics and especially how she uses straightforward language to wield considerable power and complexity of thought. These are the poems we pre-selected but we read many more: The Month of May, Engineers’ Corner, The Lavatory Attendant, Spared, Flowers,To My Husband, A Nursery Rhyme, The Waste Land: Five Limericks. She proved to us that being a humourist, an ironist, a satirist and writer of parodies is no second rate skill.

 

Over two meetings in April and May we compared and discussed the poetry of two fascinating poets who died recently, Helen Dunmore (5 June 2017, aged 64) and Mary Oliver (17 January 2019, aged 83). Finding two poems to compare is a simple exercise but asks you to think more deeply about what each poem is essentially about, how it works on you and the effects it achieves. It helps you justify your choices in a gentle but rigorous way. These two poets were worthy of two evenings (and more). For some Dunmore was preferred, her technical skill, doubts, ironies and admirable tough mindedness in the face of death were a respectful encounter. Others responded very warmly to the more accessible Oliver, with her glorious evocations of nature, her love of life and unembarrassed posing of the simplest most direct questions about why we are here. The simplicity could be a little gushing, but she is not America’s most read poet for nothing. She is the heir to Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, posing questions in the most direct manner, but leaving the complexities of an answer to you. We paired: Festival of Stone (Dunmore) with Breakage (Oliver),What I Can Do (Oliver) with Skips( Dunmore), Nightfall in the IKEA Kitchen (Dunmore) with The Ponds (Oliver), Hold out your arms (Dunmore) with When Death Comes(Oliver), My Life’s Stem was Cut (Dunmore) with Peonies (Oliver), Yellow (Dunmore and Oliver) with The Sunflowers (Oliver), How Would You Live Then?(Oliver) with In Praise of the Piano (Dunmore).

At our second meeting in the company of Oliver and Dunmore, we read: Franz Marc’s Blue Horses, Sleeping in The Forest, Moccasin Flowers, I’m Feeling Fabulous, Possibly Too Much So. But I Love It, How Would You Live Then?  Peoniesand Roses, Late Summer by Mary Oliver. Landscape from the Monet Exhibition at Cardiff, The Shaft, The Halt, In Praise of the Piano, My Life’s Stem was Cut and Smiles like Roses by Helen Dunmore.

In June we felt it was time to revisit some past favourites. We quickly found that the word ‘favourite’ simply didn’t cover all the poems we had listened to and made our own over the years. The search for just two, one someone else had introduced us to and one we had read to others, was an interesting exploration of what really matters to us about poetry: rhythm and rhyme? sound? associations? values? voice? All were most important to one or other of us and this had determined our choices. Fun it was too, to recall the moment we heard some of these poems and great to know how they had been squirreled away for personal reflection in times good and bad. Here were our favourites: He seems as fortunate as the gods (Sappho), You Begin (Margaret Attwood), The Guitar (Guy Clark), From a Railway Carriage (Robert Louis Stevenson), A Blessing (James Wright), A Marriage (R S Thomas), Inversnaid (Gerard Manley Hopkins), O That Abstract Garden (Ben Okri), I Sell My Daughter for 100 Won (Jang Jin-Sung), Hokusai Says (Roger Keyes), Summertime (Gershwin &Hetward), The Song of Wandering Aengus (W B Yeats), Tom o’Bedlam (anon).

We had our celebration of summer on a warm evening in July when our theme was very appropriately Light. The poems were descriptive for the most part and encouraged a mellow mood: Moonlit Apples, John Drinkwater, Light, Rabindranath Tagore, Why I Wake Early, Mary Oliver, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, Edward Lear, Ed è subito sera, Salvatore Quasimodo, ERAT HORA, Ezra Pound, Ballatetta, Ezra Pound and Bluebells, Dannie Abse. Mellow mood did not have it all its own way, with Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, Dylan Thomas, Even after all this time, Hafez and There’s a certain Slant of light, Emily Dickinson providing some contrast.

 

A full and enriching year – leaving the toad dissent at the door.