My wife and I have just returned from two days at the Ledbury Poetry Festival. We impulse-attended an enjoyable workshop by Jane Routh and Mike Barlow on short poems, ate delicious local beef and went ambling in the Malvern Hills in unsuitable footwear. But all of this was incidental to our reason for going: the opportunity to hear Owen Sheers and Deryn Rees-Jones read aloud. Continue reading
The Story as it Must be Told: Meirion Jordan
I first encountered Meirion Jordan’s poems at a reading at the Troubadour in 2010. For reasons long since forgotten I was in a vile mood. The last thing I felt like was listening to poetry, but James Methven was reading as part of a Seren line-up and I’d promised to go along for moral support.
It turned out to be one of the best poetry readings I can remember. Continue reading
Understanding Poetry #4: Feature Spotting
In his 1856 work Modern Painters the critic John Ruskin introduced an idea that has since had unintended consequences for a few hundred million schoolchildren. In response to the line “The cruel, crawling foam”, he writes:
The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the ‘Pathetic Fallacy‘. Continue reading
2013 Summer Challenge: Take a Poetry Book on Holiday
We’re entering the period when Sunday supplements tell us what assorted famous people will be reading / pretending to read on their holidays, or what the paper’s fiction editor recommends for the beach. You’ll occasionally spot a poetry book among the Booker-shortlisted doorstops and impressive historical biographies, but not often. The Guardian’s opening salvo for 2013 divides the world of books into “Fiction”, “Crime” and “Non-Fiction” – and the Guardian is at the more poetry-friendly end of the broadsheet spectrum.
This is unfortunate, because poetry makes ideal holiday reading. Continue reading
Poetry & the Art of Editing: Poetry Review 103:2
Magazines (or Periodicals if you’re feeling frisky) are the cardio-vascular system of contemporary poetry. Open any recent collection and you’ll find something like: “Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared”, then a list of magazine titles that either follow the Ronseal / exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin principle (Poetry; Poetry Review; Poetry Wales) or its near opposite (Magma; Archipelago; The North). Continue reading
A Delicate Mist: Owen Sheers
The challenge for anyone writing war poetry today is how to avoid sounding like a tribute act doing the Greatest Hits of 1914-1918 with smart bombs and modern line breaks. In his powerful new verse drama Pink Mist, Owen Sheers succeeds in this magnificently.
The poem tells the story of three school friends from Bristol who join the army and fight in Afghanistan. Much of it focuses on what happens after they return – one of them a double amputee, one mentally ill and the third killed by a roadside bomb. Continue reading
Understanding Poetry #3: Meaning vs Effect
A country classroom. A whiteboard. Morning.
Pupil: Please, sir, what does the assonance in line 3 mean?
Teacher: Well, erm, it’s a sad poem and the long “o” sounds are like someone moaning and wailing.
The trap here (which in one form or another has infected a lot of the way poetry is taught and read) is the assumption that everything in a poem has to be translated into a meaning that can be explained. Let’s compare this with what’s going on in another classroom in the same school: Continue reading
Close Reading: Catullus 51 / Obsession
Before too long in any discussion about translating poetry, it’s a fair bet that someone will either misquote the Italian “traduttore, traditore” (“translator, betrayer”) or misappropriate Robert Frost’s aphorism that “poetry is what gets lost in translation”. Both these phrases have survived in the meme-pool because there’s truth in them; but if we apply them too rigidly then we’ll miss two other important truths: that in poetic translation (as opposed to a literal crib) the original is really the stimulus for making a new poem; and that in a sense all poetry is translation (something that will have to be unpacked in a future post). Continue reading
In Different Voices: Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch has already established herself as one of the finest contemporary virtuosos of the dramatic monologue. Although there’s an element of this in every poem (the “I” of a poem is never entirely the “I” of the poet, even in the rawest confessional verse), something happens when a poem goes out of its way to use a voice that can’t belong to the person with their name on the cover, and in Wynne-Rhydderch’s poems that something is often magical. Continue reading
Close Reading: A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
One of the joys of close reading is that it allows us to look at a poem as words on the page, unencumbered by any received wisdom about its “themes” or “interpretation”. Sometimes this can lead us in surprising directions.
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal (William Wordsworth, 1798)
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years. Continue reading