Understanding Poetry #2: Lines

Last week we looked at some of the myths about understanding poetry and reacquainted ourselves with the joys of reading slowly. This week I want to look at the importance of lines and line-breaks.

The most obvious difference between poetry and prose is that poetry has line breaks whereas prose doesn’t (other than for practical typesetting purposes that don’t affect the meaning: two different editions of Robinson Crusoe with different font sizes might break the lines in different places without changing our experience of the book at all). Continue reading →

The Fascination of what’s Difficult: Ahren Warner

The opening lines of Ahren Warner’s new collection, Pretty, give a good idea of what follows: “Between the apocrypha / of Einstein defining madness // as the same thing done over, / expecting, in effect, causation to acquiesce // and Freud, in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur…”.

Several elements of Warner’s trademark style are evident here: the precise use of a rich vocabulary (“apocrypha”, “causation”, “acquiesce”); foreign words and phrases; unapologetic high-cultural references; great writing. Continue reading →

Understanding Poetry #1: Slowing Down

One of the phrases I least enjoy hearing is “I don’t understand poetry” (it’s up there with “bus replacement service” and “all-day carvery”). I don’t like it because it almost always turns out to be untrue, but also because it’s a category mistake: can you imagine someone keeping a straight face while saying “I don’t understand songs” or “I don’t understand prose”?

Thought not.

In reality the biggest problem is believing there’s something complicated to “understand” – something that needs decrypting or translating into non-threatening prose – in the first place. Continue reading →

Close Reading: Leda and the Swan

Looking in detail at how a poem achieves its effects (either out of copyright or with the author’s permission).

This week I want to look at a sonnet close up. And if you want to see how a sonnet works – what the form can be made to do when you pass a few thousand volts through it – there aren’t many examples as taut and disturbing as this one.

Leda and the Swan (W.B. Yeats, 1924)

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. Continue reading →

Night Thoughts: Fiona Sampson

Fiona Sampson’s haunting new collection, Coleshill, pulls off the difficult trick of evoking a real geographical place while at the same time transforming it into something magical and other.

The village of Coleshill lies at the intersection of three counties. These are profoundly liminal poems, obsessed by the boundaries between spaces and states of being. Over half the poems in the book are either explicitly set at night / twilight or else feature dreams or ghosts. Many of the remainder emphasize haze, blurring, shifting and floating. Reality often seems at risk of dissolving or being subsumed by internal forces. Continue reading →

Close Reading: Prufrock

A teacher friend has asked if I could do a close reading of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. I can’t reproduce the poem in full because it’s still in copyright in the UK, but it’s in the public domain elsewhere and you can read it here.

“Let us go then, you and I”. Seven of the most famous monosyllables in English poetry, leading us into a magical opening stanza: there’s the mystery of who’s speaking to whom; the still-disturbing image of the etherized patient; the impressionistic blur of backstreet detail. Continue reading →

The Sound of Time Passing: Deryn Rees-Jones and Fiona Moore

I’ve long been convinced that Deryn Rees-Jones is one of the most original and skilled poets writing today. By chance I settled down with her latest collection, Burying the Wren, in the same week I picked up Fiona Moore‘s The Only Reason for Time (on the strength of John Field’s review on the excellent Poor Rude Lines). Both books are in part responses to the premature death of a partner, and although it would be grossly reductive to say that they are therefore “about” bereavement, it’s nonetheless interesting to look at them side by side. Continue reading →

How Ancient is the Ancient Mariner?

My wife has been teaching the Ancient Mariner to her A-Level set, and over dinner we found ourselves exploring Coleridge’s trickery with tenses.

The outline of the poem we remember is simple: a (present-tense) fable about an old man and a wedding guest book-ends the old man’s much longer (past-tense) story of fall and redemption. We know the poem begins “It is an ancient mariner”, shifts to flashback with “there was a ship”, then finally pulls us back to the present as the wedding guest “goes like one that hath been stunned”.

But the poem we remember isn’t the poem Coleridge wrote. Here are stanzas 3-5 of the 1828 version: Continue reading →