Never too soon, I suppose, to start thinking about New Year’s resolutions. Not that I ever make any since they seem doomed to be abandoned.
How about this, I'm nevertheless wondering: I've never read the complete works of any major poet, so perhaps I should.
Ted Hughes not only read the complete poems of Yeats-- as a schoolboy -- but, he reckons (Letters), he knew them by heart.
One reason the resolution would be hard to carry through is that I can’t speed-read poetry. It has to be taken at reading-aloud speed.
Enacting the resolution would mean, for once, finishing what I've started, something I can do if for instance writing an article but not if exploring some area of knowledge for myself over a long period. But I'm not sure enacting it would even be wise; I tend to think that when I leave a thing half done to take up something else the impulse is often a sound one, and the sense that the other thing is exactly what I need right now is based on some real self-knowledge; my swerves off-piste and sudden redirections of attention are often fruitful.
But at a cost. I often regret that the rewarding book that I stopped reading part-way through in favour of some new pursuit, and that I know would have benefited me, has since been buried lower and lower in the pile, further and further from being picked up again. Some day I will go back, I resolve. And sometimes I do, perhaps years later.
Reading Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (finally -- published in 1952!), makes me now, off-piste, want to read late 18th century verse -- an unusual impulse in our day.
So first when Phoebus met the Cyprian queen,
And favour’d Rhodes beheld their passion crown’d,
Unusual flowers enrich’d the painted green,
And swift spontaneous roses blush’d around.
Websites and blurbs describe Davie as an ultra-conservative critic but his comments on extracts like this are brilliant and make me see them afresh. If this is ultra-conservatisim, let’s have more of it. (I won’t copy it out: it’s at Penguin, 1992, p.31; I think perhaps online as well.) If one wants examples of good ‘close reading’, go to Empson, Leavis and Davie.
That bit is from a poem by Shenstone, who I've never heard of. Nor have I heard of several of the other poets Davie quotes. I imagine Shenstone wrote whole volumes of verse, or one fat volume at least, and that Davie read the lot and that most was boring. With what attentiveness he must have been reading, though, for a passage like this to stand out as, in his words, subtle, remarkable and beautiful! My other problem with reading poetry is that after a few pages I can’t maintain that sort of freshness of response.
Perhaps a small dose every day would be sustainable and I’d get through, say Yeats or Milton, in a few months. It’s not going to happen, though.
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Monday, 26 December 2011
Sunday, 7 August 2011
English teachers: listen to this
Here’s a poetry workshop that I wish I’d heard when I was a teacher. Six days left to catch it.
Ruth Padel runs this session, the first of four, and she’s great (though I don’t understand her poetry). It takes place in Exeter, which is ok, but the other workshops will be in different places and I hope they’re in to cities, the north and other less well-heeled places. She starts with a terrific poem by Alice Oswald, perhaps my favourite English poet at the moment -- you can see it at that link, along with the poems by the workshop members.
I don’t think I ever taught poetry well until years after I was running PGCE sessions, and they were, to say the least, patchy. Not that I could have run a workshop like Padel’s with many of the kids I taught, but as preparation for teaching a poem a workshop like this would have been fantastic. And it represents a type of English teaching that I think has largely been lost.
Ruth Padel runs this session, the first of four, and she’s great (though I don’t understand her poetry). It takes place in Exeter, which is ok, but the other workshops will be in different places and I hope they’re in to cities, the north and other less well-heeled places. She starts with a terrific poem by Alice Oswald, perhaps my favourite English poet at the moment -- you can see it at that link, along with the poems by the workshop members.
I don’t think I ever taught poetry well until years after I was running PGCE sessions, and they were, to say the least, patchy. Not that I could have run a workshop like Padel’s with many of the kids I taught, but as preparation for teaching a poem a workshop like this would have been fantastic. And it represents a type of English teaching that I think has largely been lost.
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
Poetry taught at Walworth/Mina Road
Someone who was a student teacher on teaching practice at Walworth in about 1957 was invited by the head, Mr Rogers (who was an English teacher), to watch him teach a poetry lesson to a third or fourth year class.
The poem he taught (probably from a book) was the following and I wonder whether anyone else remembers that poem being taught either by Rogers or any other English teacher -- and what was the poetry book?
To a Young Child
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Any memories, please send them to us (the Walworth history research project) at walworthresearch@me.com.
The poem he taught (probably from a book) was the following and I wonder whether anyone else remembers that poem being taught either by Rogers or any other English teacher -- and what was the poetry book?
To a Young Child
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Any memories, please send them to us (the Walworth history research project) at walworthresearch@me.com.
Friday, 6 May 2011
Wm's swan: r to r to r
It's not a problem that I ever gave any thought to but you're probably right [Mark] we should be careful about giving free rein to adolescent turmoil -- amongst other reasons because what comes out ain't poetry.
I don't think I ever taught poetry writing well until I had undergraduates and then PGCE students when I did something a bit like your A level venture: I had them start by chopping up two different texts, scrambling them on the the computer and then using the bits as their raw material by making juxtapositions that might mean or suggest something. I liked the way it removed 'expression' right out of it. On the other hand, it may have been a cop out.
I don't think I ever taught poetry writing well until I had undergraduates and then PGCE students when I did something a bit like your A level venture: I had them start by chopping up two different texts, scrambling them on the the computer and then using the bits as their raw material by making juxtapositions that might mean or suggest something. I liked the way it removed 'expression' right out of it. On the other hand, it may have been a cop out.
Wm's swan: response to response
| This by email from Mark, for the very good reason that he... ...can’t be coerced into signing up to Google to respond on the blog, so here goes: What does it tell us about teaching poetry? Don't? or 'can't'? From my perspective, teaching poetry - the writing of - is about first, technique, or form (but really just drawing on a limited palette of features, so that much classroom poetry ends up sounding the same); and second, about the expression of feeling - which ends up with propositional statements, rhymed or alliterated, or metaphoricalised. And feelings expressed being of a safe, conventional sort - no feeling murderous, horny, rapturous. Is it possible, or desirable, to have teenagers meddling with the inchoate in a classroom? Not a little too volatile, this letting rip? But most of all, is a classroom a place where the un-sensical can be contained, handled, explored? I think I taught two good poetry lessons when I was a teacher. The first, on teaching practice at York, played with They Dream Only of America, by John Ashbery. My mentor said she'd be in the staff room; I'd need her in about 20 minutes... The second was on 'difficult' contemporary poetry with an A level group. They weren't very academic, and quite perplexed by Pauline Stainer, John Ash (not bery), Robert Crawford I think. A cruel and unusual set text. Best way in was to let them have a go themselves - to write something arcane, obtuse, condensed, free-form. Best work they ever did, and still in my attic somewhere. To my shame and regret I'd said I'd get it published, but never did. What liberated them was the permission to behave like wanky poets; to let rip. It was playful - they weren't handling things that were out of their control, as I think William was; it was consciously a performance, which gave them a get-out, and an alibi. |
Monday, 2 May 2011
Swans and pots of greed
On their mitchellreidamerica blog (April 27th) Mark reports of William (British teenager currently at school in America) -- and I now pass it on with W’s permission -- that
Wm’s class’s latest assignment was to each respond to a different photograph. His was of two swans on a lake, and here it is, followed by his account of it:
Swan Song
A singing swan was on the lake
A bell ringing in the land forever the land of the swan
A singing swan was on the lake
Two hands clinging together in the partnership of the swan
A singing swan was on the lake
A man kneeling at the altar of desperation in the church of the swan
A singing swan was upon the lake
A cart wheeling eternally into the sunset that was of the swan
A man with a gun was on the lake
A pot of greed in the golden palace of the swan
A singing swan was on the lake
An innocent child blind to the outside world of the swan
A ringing shot was heard on the lake
A bird flying off the cliff of the mountain that was of the swan
A singing swan was on the lake
A ripple of terror among the reeds of the lake of the swan
A cry was heard on the lake
The last salute of the soldier who died in battle for his country, which was the country of the Swan.
Mark comments on what William was doing, and here’s my two penn’orth.
William evidently has the gift of letting his imagination rip -- uninhibited chains of association, one idea or word setting another off. What the association was isn’t always clear, probably not to him even. Where did the bell come from as early as the second line? how does a pair of swans on a lake suggest that, or how does the pair ‘swan’ and ‘lake’ suggest it?
What about ‘the land of the swan’? the photograph would have shown the lake, but the thought that the lake is in a land -- which means not our land -- has to have come from somewhere else.
Sometimes it’s language making its own connections: carts don’t wheel but there are cartwheels, so that says they do. That’s a poet’s gift, to have a sense of the original sharp meanings that have been muffled over time in composite formations.
Wittgenstein said that while most language has serious stuff to do -- ordering, informing, requesting, seducing, naming -- poetry is language that doesn’t. Instead it’s language idling, like a car engine in neutral, not driving anything, just doing its own thing. He also, I think, spoke of language on holiday, playing.
If that’s the case, then the job of the poet, or some sorts of poet, or all poets some time, is to stand aside and let the engine tick over, let language (associations, chains of thought) just get on with it and do its stuff. The hard thing for most of us is letting that happen.
But the idling engine throws up things that work, are usable, remain of value. It’s possible that never before has any human uttered the collocation, ‘the altar of desperation’, but once one has we recognise what it’s saying and it will stay with us resonating. The poet may have been surprised when it came up, but once it was there, a fact of life out in the open on page or screen, he may have decided to buy into it: ‘Yes, I'll go with that -- it can be not just words twittering away but me saying it; I don’t mind meaning it; it can go out as me saying it.’ Or as the poem saying it, since a poem isn’t the poet speaking in any simple way.
Some poetry works by leaving gaps, creating holes with fuzzy edges. Thus, I have a strong sense that there’s a connection between these two lines:
A man with a gun was on the lake
A pot of greed in the golden palace of the swan
but it’s a great dramatic coup to get from the man having some mean and selfish motive to the concreteness of a pot of greed -- like a pot of gold in a (princess’s?) palace. [Later: Hmm -- W & M now tell me the Pot of Greed is a card in an anime game called Yugioh.]
Some of this poem is doing the sort of thing Rimbaud invented and that still seems like genius and just what was needed, tipping us out of Victorianism into modernness. If I was teaching English I’d give the kids a good dose of him.
But some of the good stuff is quite conventional, as poetry goes, but still original and vivid: ‘A ripple of terror among the reeds’ is great.
William protests that he wasn’t intending any deep meaning. That’s rather the point -- the process churns meaning up anyway.
Wm’s class’s latest assignment was to each respond to a different photograph. His was of two swans on a lake, and here it is, followed by his account of it:
Swan Song
A singing swan was on the lake
A bell ringing in the land forever the land of the swan
A singing swan was on the lake
Two hands clinging together in the partnership of the swan
A singing swan was on the lake
A man kneeling at the altar of desperation in the church of the swan
A singing swan was upon the lake
A cart wheeling eternally into the sunset that was of the swan
A man with a gun was on the lake
A pot of greed in the golden palace of the swan
A singing swan was on the lake
An innocent child blind to the outside world of the swan
A ringing shot was heard on the lake
A bird flying off the cliff of the mountain that was of the swan
A singing swan was on the lake
A ripple of terror among the reeds of the lake of the swan
A cry was heard on the lake
The last salute of the soldier who died in battle for his country, which was the country of the Swan.
Mark comments on what William was doing, and here’s my two penn’orth.
William evidently has the gift of letting his imagination rip -- uninhibited chains of association, one idea or word setting another off. What the association was isn’t always clear, probably not to him even. Where did the bell come from as early as the second line? how does a pair of swans on a lake suggest that, or how does the pair ‘swan’ and ‘lake’ suggest it?
What about ‘the land of the swan’? the photograph would have shown the lake, but the thought that the lake is in a land -- which means not our land -- has to have come from somewhere else.
Sometimes it’s language making its own connections: carts don’t wheel but there are cartwheels, so that says they do. That’s a poet’s gift, to have a sense of the original sharp meanings that have been muffled over time in composite formations.
Wittgenstein said that while most language has serious stuff to do -- ordering, informing, requesting, seducing, naming -- poetry is language that doesn’t. Instead it’s language idling, like a car engine in neutral, not driving anything, just doing its own thing. He also, I think, spoke of language on holiday, playing.
If that’s the case, then the job of the poet, or some sorts of poet, or all poets some time, is to stand aside and let the engine tick over, let language (associations, chains of thought) just get on with it and do its stuff. The hard thing for most of us is letting that happen.
But the idling engine throws up things that work, are usable, remain of value. It’s possible that never before has any human uttered the collocation, ‘the altar of desperation’, but once one has we recognise what it’s saying and it will stay with us resonating. The poet may have been surprised when it came up, but once it was there, a fact of life out in the open on page or screen, he may have decided to buy into it: ‘Yes, I'll go with that -- it can be not just words twittering away but me saying it; I don’t mind meaning it; it can go out as me saying it.’ Or as the poem saying it, since a poem isn’t the poet speaking in any simple way.
Some poetry works by leaving gaps, creating holes with fuzzy edges. Thus, I have a strong sense that there’s a connection between these two lines:
A man with a gun was on the lake
A pot of greed in the golden palace of the swan
but it’s a great dramatic coup to get from the man having some mean and selfish motive to the concreteness of a pot of greed -- like a pot of gold in a (princess’s?) palace. [Later: Hmm -- W & M now tell me the Pot of Greed is a card in an anime game called Yugioh.]
Some of this poem is doing the sort of thing Rimbaud invented and that still seems like genius and just what was needed, tipping us out of Victorianism into modernness. If I was teaching English I’d give the kids a good dose of him.
But some of the good stuff is quite conventional, as poetry goes, but still original and vivid: ‘A ripple of terror among the reeds’ is great.
William protests that he wasn’t intending any deep meaning. That’s rather the point -- the process churns meaning up anyway.
Saturday, 23 April 2011
...and poems in the car
At the risk of signing up to a bloggers’ mutual admiration society, since there’s a nice reference to this one (i.e. mine) in Mitchell Reids in America, I nevertheless recommend it, not least because here there’s another way in which poetry can play a part in life, this time in a sociable and indeed a family context, which wasn’t at all Stéphane Hessel’s situation.
It’s apparently to be a short-lived blog since the Mitchells and Reids in question are only in America for another few weeks. While it’s very enjoyable about being there, I hope they continue on what it’s like to be back. As Mark says, having to write each day is good for us.
There’s a question left for me in there, too -- but I need more time to think about it.
There’s a question left for me in there, too -- but I need more time to think about it.
Knowing poems by heart
I could, if more organised, have made a collection of testimony about the value people have found in knowing a stack of poetry by heart. I remember George Steiner somewhere talking about running an underground seminar over several years in, perhaps, Czechoslovakia. From time to time a student would stop appearing, only to turn up again months later explaining they’d been in prison where, lacking pen and paper, they’d occupied themselves in translating Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin from Russian to English, a poem over 200 pages long in the translation I looked at.
When our friends in other classes were told that their French master, Twelves, had told them how as a student he used to pace Sheffield Station reciting French verse in his head, I'm afraid we put that down along with his general demeanour to absurd Victorian stuffiness and lack of a real life.
I did, myself, though, use to know enough chunks by heart to keep myself happy for a while, though they weren’t very long -- 20-30 lines max, like the opening of the Canterbury Tales and, more arcanely, Dryden’s ‘Absolom and Achitophel’ which I thought hilarious, which in fact it is -- which makes me less dismissive that some that pupils might gain by reading Dryden. And speeches from Othello, as a result of starring in the school play (as Third Gentleman, around whom, as I explained in a long-lost article in a school magazine, the whole plot really turned).
I'm still taking Philosophie Magazine, because I think it’s good for me though I don’t get round to reading much of it. In the monthly feature, ‘Les Philosophes: L’Entretien’ the March issue has an interview with Stéphane Hessel, who I’d never heard of. Though trained in philosophy and involved in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, he is also a poet. Arrested in the Resistance he spent time in the camps:
The experience of Buchenwald, Rottleberode and Dora...showed me that knowing long poems by heart is an immeasurable resource. It’s as if you have opium on you, a substance that makes an arduous situation bearable. At Buchenwald I’d recite Paul Valéry’s Cimetière Marin Rilke’s Orphée and Villon’s La Ballade du Pendu to myself. Poetry is one of my vertical columns. It was like a medicine, it enabled me to hold on in the camps. It was more of a medicine for my soul than philosophy.
Not sure of my translation of some bits of that.
It seems to me that the fact that poetry can work like this is important and is insufficiently taken account of, let alone explained.
When our friends in other classes were told that their French master, Twelves, had told them how as a student he used to pace Sheffield Station reciting French verse in his head, I'm afraid we put that down along with his general demeanour to absurd Victorian stuffiness and lack of a real life.
I did, myself, though, use to know enough chunks by heart to keep myself happy for a while, though they weren’t very long -- 20-30 lines max, like the opening of the Canterbury Tales and, more arcanely, Dryden’s ‘Absolom and Achitophel’ which I thought hilarious, which in fact it is -- which makes me less dismissive that some that pupils might gain by reading Dryden. And speeches from Othello, as a result of starring in the school play (as Third Gentleman, around whom, as I explained in a long-lost article in a school magazine, the whole plot really turned).
I'm still taking Philosophie Magazine, because I think it’s good for me though I don’t get round to reading much of it. In the monthly feature, ‘Les Philosophes: L’Entretien’ the March issue has an interview with Stéphane Hessel, who I’d never heard of. Though trained in philosophy and involved in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, he is also a poet. Arrested in the Resistance he spent time in the camps:
The experience of Buchenwald, Rottleberode and Dora...showed me that knowing long poems by heart is an immeasurable resource. It’s as if you have opium on you, a substance that makes an arduous situation bearable. At Buchenwald I’d recite Paul Valéry’s Cimetière Marin Rilke’s Orphée and Villon’s La Ballade du Pendu to myself. Poetry is one of my vertical columns. It was like a medicine, it enabled me to hold on in the camps. It was more of a medicine for my soul than philosophy.
Not sure of my translation of some bits of that.
It seems to me that the fact that poetry can work like this is important and is insufficiently taken account of, let alone explained.
Sunday, 28 November 2010
More on teaching poetry
In the last post that I’ve just put up I mentioned my perplexity when it came to ‘teaching’ formally simple, minimalist (unrhetorical, non-adjectival) poems like those that came out of Europe (and Israel) after the Second World War, or for that matter ostensibly ‘simple’ lyrics like Shakespeare’s songs or Blake’s Songs of Innocence.
I believed in the value of students reflecting on poems in small group discussions and in writing, but it was hard to get these to happen at a satisfying level with all but a minority of trusty regulars. In turning the students to talking or writing, what I wanted above all to avoid was the usual routine of asking questions, turning the thing into an exercise with tried recipes or a sort of comprehension exercise. In writing I searched for a genre that would encompass the sort of mixed, miscellaneous, affect plus intellect, association plus analysis that James Britton named (unfortunately because it was misleading) the Expressive. (The name was misleading but the thing existed all right -- he exactly identified a form of language use that was characteristic, perhaps dominant, in children of primary and early secondary school age -- that is, on those occasions when they were able to write what came naturally.) This would be a first step on a long transition from naive immediate response to the more specialised, functionally differentiated literary essay -- but one which the writer would as it were wear comfortably and have recourse to as productive means of discovering his or her own thoughts because the latter arose from his or her own responses, questions and puzzlements rather than from a teacher’s preemptive inquisition. My transitional genre would have educational value rather than being primarily a means of testing the student.
I set out my thoughts on this ‘missing link’ genre and reported on my attempts to get it to happen at Crofton Secondary Modern School near Wakefield (1973-77) in Finding a Language (1980) -- try the skip outside your nearest library. But I think I only once found what I was really looking for. A student called Karen -- forgotten her surname, sorry, probably 4th year (year 10) in a mixed ability class, wrote something in response to a (translated) poem by Karl Krolow. Karen’s writing delighted me because she wasn’t one of the reliable regulars on whom I could count because they were already by background or whatever inclined in a literary and studious direction; I think I’d hardly noticed her work before she came up with this.
I’ve put both the poem and Karen’s piece below. I used them quite a bit in talks, workshops and courses and somewhere in an article.
Now my question is this: was I the only English teacher struggling to find a genre in which students responding to poems could be expansive, intelligent, generative and undirected? I don’t recall (with my highly defective memory) reading any other examples of student writing that seemed like attempts to meet the same lack. Why wasn’t it, isn’t it, a huge issue? surely teachers don’t actually like the stuff most of their kids write about poetry? or think it’s of much value? or perhaps I've just forgotten or have been oblivious a body of good work on the issue.
Anyway, here are Krolow and Karen (bless her -- I owe her a few royalties):
VIOLENCE
Out of hiding it came,
Raised dead metal to life.
The last negotiators
Peeled off their gloves
And left. Their smiles
A coinage withdrawn
Out of hiding it came.
The place it looked at
Is lost.
The doors fly open,
The windows get smashed.
Ashes and mortar
Scatter into eyes.
Lips shut
Under thumps from fists.
The squalid night holds ready
Its attacks and black minutes.
Soon the hearts
Will stop beating
Behind the curtain of rust.
Out of hiding it came.
It will manhandle us.
We may still leave the house
And gaze into the sky of bulbs.
But in the suburbs
The slogans are posted,
Soon the street fighting
Will reach us.
Soon we shall be alone
With the muzzles of guns.
Which of us shall be
The first to fall forward
Across his table?
Karl Krolow
translated by Christopher Middleton
The poem I will write about is a very good and mature one. It is mainly about beating people up and murdering and all that sort of stuff. It has three paragraphs and the beginning of each one it starts off with the words `Out of hiding it came'. I think this is to express and make you want to reach out of the air and into the poem and it makes you feel as if you were there. It is about some men who have a job of some sort to do. They collect their weapons from a place unknown to be used again later.
They go, and like experts peel off their gloves with a serious look on their face. The quiet place now becomes a death scene. A door is kicked open and windows are smashed, the people, whoever they are set a fire going. The bits of ashes fly into open eyes and loudmouths with their mouths open. The experts thump and abduct limbs from their normal position. Pain, tears and blood and sweat mix together. It must smell like a slaughter-house, a sickly smell. The smell of death. The black and evil night sits quiet and still not moving a muscle. No police sirens sound, just a deathly and unearthly evil, smelly silence.
The fire is ablaze now, orange, red and then to crimson and a murky brown colour. The fire burns. Soon all will be left is a few bits of wood and metal and rust and bodies, cold and stiff - dead.
After this outside it can still kill. What is it? No body knows for sure. They can guess and say but they don't know for sure. It could kill you and mutilate you. You can leave your home, but it is still there, waiting, waiting. In the suburbs, posters stuck on walls, fences and around lamp-posts. Maybe they say, things like `Kill the mods' or `Down with the Protestants'.
Soon all the fighting in the street all around town will reach you. You don't know when, but it will, and it will hurt. You will soon be all alone with a cold stretch of metal under your chin and in your stomach then they will blast your guts to the other side of the suburbs. You will wonder which of you will be the first to lay dead in some dark alleyway or in a corner of a room or in bed asleep. That would be best. In bed asleep. But you will die in a scene of death. Everybody dreams of death. That's all everybody thinks about. What would be worse though is to die after watching your wife and her baby being shot in the head, and their eyes popping out. A lot of people would not tell on violent people because they would be scared of getting beat up. Most violence occurs in America and Ireland. I wonder if the writer, Karl Krolow, likes violence or has had any bad experiences.
The men that he speaks of in his poem sound like real smoothies or old time gangsters. I think more people are killed by violence than by accident. I expect there is more violence in the world than there was years ago. Violence starts in a lot of people when they are young, like squashing insects and grabbing cats tails. Parents start off violence sometimes, by telling their children to be big and to fight back. In the poem they write about violence as if it was an everyday chore. Which it is really. Especially with teens and people in the United States of America. In the poem violence happens at night-time. The night-time expresses the word insanity. I wonder if Karl was speaking about a certain race of people in a certain part of the world. The form of violence used in the poem is by murder. There are many more forms of violence. Violence causes devastation all over the world. Why did Karl write this poem? Maybe it was to show everyone what violence is doing to us and to the world. Maybe he is trying to teach us a lesson. I don't see any point in violence. Why can't people just accept each other's differences and make do with it? I believe in using violence in self-defence. How much longer will violence carry on? I don't know why but barking dogs remind me of violence. If we were all blown up by a few atom bombs, it would end all violence and you would not be able to feel a thing.
I suppose you could call it `violence ending in violence'. I think this poem makes you think as if there is something out waiting to get you. I like the idea of `violence ending in violence'.
(Karen)
I believed in the value of students reflecting on poems in small group discussions and in writing, but it was hard to get these to happen at a satisfying level with all but a minority of trusty regulars. In turning the students to talking or writing, what I wanted above all to avoid was the usual routine of asking questions, turning the thing into an exercise with tried recipes or a sort of comprehension exercise. In writing I searched for a genre that would encompass the sort of mixed, miscellaneous, affect plus intellect, association plus analysis that James Britton named (unfortunately because it was misleading) the Expressive. (The name was misleading but the thing existed all right -- he exactly identified a form of language use that was characteristic, perhaps dominant, in children of primary and early secondary school age -- that is, on those occasions when they were able to write what came naturally.) This would be a first step on a long transition from naive immediate response to the more specialised, functionally differentiated literary essay -- but one which the writer would as it were wear comfortably and have recourse to as productive means of discovering his or her own thoughts because the latter arose from his or her own responses, questions and puzzlements rather than from a teacher’s preemptive inquisition. My transitional genre would have educational value rather than being primarily a means of testing the student.
I set out my thoughts on this ‘missing link’ genre and reported on my attempts to get it to happen at Crofton Secondary Modern School near Wakefield (1973-77) in Finding a Language (1980) -- try the skip outside your nearest library. But I think I only once found what I was really looking for. A student called Karen -- forgotten her surname, sorry, probably 4th year (year 10) in a mixed ability class, wrote something in response to a (translated) poem by Karl Krolow. Karen’s writing delighted me because she wasn’t one of the reliable regulars on whom I could count because they were already by background or whatever inclined in a literary and studious direction; I think I’d hardly noticed her work before she came up with this.
I’ve put both the poem and Karen’s piece below. I used them quite a bit in talks, workshops and courses and somewhere in an article.
Now my question is this: was I the only English teacher struggling to find a genre in which students responding to poems could be expansive, intelligent, generative and undirected? I don’t recall (with my highly defective memory) reading any other examples of student writing that seemed like attempts to meet the same lack. Why wasn’t it, isn’t it, a huge issue? surely teachers don’t actually like the stuff most of their kids write about poetry? or think it’s of much value? or perhaps I've just forgotten or have been oblivious a body of good work on the issue.
Anyway, here are Krolow and Karen (bless her -- I owe her a few royalties):
VIOLENCE
Out of hiding it came,
Raised dead metal to life.
The last negotiators
Peeled off their gloves
And left. Their smiles
A coinage withdrawn
Out of hiding it came.
The place it looked at
Is lost.
The doors fly open,
The windows get smashed.
Ashes and mortar
Scatter into eyes.
Lips shut
Under thumps from fists.
The squalid night holds ready
Its attacks and black minutes.
Soon the hearts
Will stop beating
Behind the curtain of rust.
Out of hiding it came.
It will manhandle us.
We may still leave the house
And gaze into the sky of bulbs.
But in the suburbs
The slogans are posted,
Soon the street fighting
Will reach us.
Soon we shall be alone
With the muzzles of guns.
Which of us shall be
The first to fall forward
Across his table?
Karl Krolow
translated by Christopher Middleton
The poem I will write about is a very good and mature one. It is mainly about beating people up and murdering and all that sort of stuff. It has three paragraphs and the beginning of each one it starts off with the words `Out of hiding it came'. I think this is to express and make you want to reach out of the air and into the poem and it makes you feel as if you were there. It is about some men who have a job of some sort to do. They collect their weapons from a place unknown to be used again later.
They go, and like experts peel off their gloves with a serious look on their face. The quiet place now becomes a death scene. A door is kicked open and windows are smashed, the people, whoever they are set a fire going. The bits of ashes fly into open eyes and loudmouths with their mouths open. The experts thump and abduct limbs from their normal position. Pain, tears and blood and sweat mix together. It must smell like a slaughter-house, a sickly smell. The smell of death. The black and evil night sits quiet and still not moving a muscle. No police sirens sound, just a deathly and unearthly evil, smelly silence.
The fire is ablaze now, orange, red and then to crimson and a murky brown colour. The fire burns. Soon all will be left is a few bits of wood and metal and rust and bodies, cold and stiff - dead.
After this outside it can still kill. What is it? No body knows for sure. They can guess and say but they don't know for sure. It could kill you and mutilate you. You can leave your home, but it is still there, waiting, waiting. In the suburbs, posters stuck on walls, fences and around lamp-posts. Maybe they say, things like `Kill the mods' or `Down with the Protestants'.
Soon all the fighting in the street all around town will reach you. You don't know when, but it will, and it will hurt. You will soon be all alone with a cold stretch of metal under your chin and in your stomach then they will blast your guts to the other side of the suburbs. You will wonder which of you will be the first to lay dead in some dark alleyway or in a corner of a room or in bed asleep. That would be best. In bed asleep. But you will die in a scene of death. Everybody dreams of death. That's all everybody thinks about. What would be worse though is to die after watching your wife and her baby being shot in the head, and their eyes popping out. A lot of people would not tell on violent people because they would be scared of getting beat up. Most violence occurs in America and Ireland. I wonder if the writer, Karl Krolow, likes violence or has had any bad experiences.
The men that he speaks of in his poem sound like real smoothies or old time gangsters. I think more people are killed by violence than by accident. I expect there is more violence in the world than there was years ago. Violence starts in a lot of people when they are young, like squashing insects and grabbing cats tails. Parents start off violence sometimes, by telling their children to be big and to fight back. In the poem they write about violence as if it was an everyday chore. Which it is really. Especially with teens and people in the United States of America. In the poem violence happens at night-time. The night-time expresses the word insanity. I wonder if Karl was speaking about a certain race of people in a certain part of the world. The form of violence used in the poem is by murder. There are many more forms of violence. Violence causes devastation all over the world. Why did Karl write this poem? Maybe it was to show everyone what violence is doing to us and to the world. Maybe he is trying to teach us a lesson. I don't see any point in violence. Why can't people just accept each other's differences and make do with it? I believe in using violence in self-defence. How much longer will violence carry on? I don't know why but barking dogs remind me of violence. If we were all blown up by a few atom bombs, it would end all violence and you would not be able to feel a thing.
I suppose you could call it `violence ending in violence'. I think this poem makes you think as if there is something out waiting to get you. I like the idea of `violence ending in violence'.
(Karen)
Wednesday, 17 November 2010
Waterloo train of thought: recognising a good poem
Walking through the pedestrian underpass by Waterloo Station I was thinking of the crap poem I hated and despised that used to be on the wall but is now largely painted out, thank God -- some sad, happy-hippy effort.
I was thinking that most of my English colleagues would agree it was crap. Equally we’d mostly agree on which poems were any good.
Which doesn’t mean there is such a thing as a good or bad poem poem, and that it’s a matter of recognition. The fact that we share some sense of what a good poem is doesn’t mean goodness is a feature of it per se. This sense is something we’ve got from a particular training or socialisation and is, in that trite phrase, ‘socially constructed’.
That doesn’t, however -- this was the following thought -- make our judgement purely subjective. What we share is a really shared thing, a real thing, a thing per se; it exists all right, between us, and enables certain performances. Of course it’s a mental, virtual and cognitive reality, but it’s real in its effect. It’s real specifically in enabling skilled performances.
It enables any one of us, independently of anyone else, to make a valuation, to evaluate a poem as good or not when we encounter it for the first time. But not only that: it’s also a resource of perception, having which means that we notice certain features and find things presenting themselves in particular ways, with certain features perhaps ‘salientised’, others appearing in finer detail than they would to a reader who lacked this shared resource, and so on. With it we observe distinctions and samenesses, and also recognise a certain field of external allusion, to other works and to the world. It makes what we read more significant, more interesting, more subtle or bold and more artful.
I suppose this is what Eliot’s longed-for ‘tradition’ was supposed to supply, or a shared literary culture. No doubt, it’s a real resource, a powerful cognitive amplifier, and much of what it enables us to see is real. So, it’s good to have this sort of ‘cultural capital’ in our kitbag.
The thing, though -- and this where the Eliots, the Leavises and most English teachers of the 1950s and earlier were at fault -- is to be humble with it. The thing is to recognise that other groups too can have their equivalent shared resource, and that what those resources make appear in works is as real as what ours do. The two ‘socially constructed’ ways of seeing are simply incommensurable -- it doesn’t normally seem possible (perhaps I'm wrong here?) to slide from one way of seeing to the other.
Thus: the said English teachers despised pop culture and TV as ‘meretricious’ (a word they loved but never defined and which appears simply to mean they didn’t like it). Along comes another generation, brought up with soaps, kids cartoons and comics but equally well educated and they love this despised stuff stuff and make endless discriminations (that favourite Leavisite word) between the different examples. Their resource (what shall we call it? template? model? standard? none of those seems right) makes things which we find poor, thin and trivial rich, complex and interesting to them.
I was thinking that most of my English colleagues would agree it was crap. Equally we’d mostly agree on which poems were any good.
Which doesn’t mean there is such a thing as a good or bad poem poem, and that it’s a matter of recognition. The fact that we share some sense of what a good poem is doesn’t mean goodness is a feature of it per se. This sense is something we’ve got from a particular training or socialisation and is, in that trite phrase, ‘socially constructed’.
That doesn’t, however -- this was the following thought -- make our judgement purely subjective. What we share is a really shared thing, a real thing, a thing per se; it exists all right, between us, and enables certain performances. Of course it’s a mental, virtual and cognitive reality, but it’s real in its effect. It’s real specifically in enabling skilled performances.
It enables any one of us, independently of anyone else, to make a valuation, to evaluate a poem as good or not when we encounter it for the first time. But not only that: it’s also a resource of perception, having which means that we notice certain features and find things presenting themselves in particular ways, with certain features perhaps ‘salientised’, others appearing in finer detail than they would to a reader who lacked this shared resource, and so on. With it we observe distinctions and samenesses, and also recognise a certain field of external allusion, to other works and to the world. It makes what we read more significant, more interesting, more subtle or bold and more artful.
I suppose this is what Eliot’s longed-for ‘tradition’ was supposed to supply, or a shared literary culture. No doubt, it’s a real resource, a powerful cognitive amplifier, and much of what it enables us to see is real. So, it’s good to have this sort of ‘cultural capital’ in our kitbag.
The thing, though -- and this where the Eliots, the Leavises and most English teachers of the 1950s and earlier were at fault -- is to be humble with it. The thing is to recognise that other groups too can have their equivalent shared resource, and that what those resources make appear in works is as real as what ours do. The two ‘socially constructed’ ways of seeing are simply incommensurable -- it doesn’t normally seem possible (perhaps I'm wrong here?) to slide from one way of seeing to the other.
Thus: the said English teachers despised pop culture and TV as ‘meretricious’ (a word they loved but never defined and which appears simply to mean they didn’t like it). Along comes another generation, brought up with soaps, kids cartoons and comics but equally well educated and they love this despised stuff stuff and make endless discriminations (that favourite Leavisite word) between the different examples. Their resource (what shall we call it? template? model? standard? none of those seems right) makes things which we find poor, thin and trivial rich, complex and interesting to them.
Thursday, 11 November 2010
On Certain Survivors
On our research project we’re planning a book of our findings and have been trying to think of a title that reflected the notion that developments in English teaching in London after 1945 should be seen within the more general process of post-war reconstruction. I’d come up from somewhere in the back of my mind with Out of the Ruins: [plus the usual more explanatory subtitle].
It occurred to me a couple of days ago that where the phrase came from was an East German Poem by Gunther Kunert that I used to use in school a lot and that came from an anthology by Michael Hamburger. (I see I've mentioned this before -- see this this.
Now I’ve found the poem, as typed out by me long ago, and ‘out of the ruins’ doesn’t come from there at all, so the mystery remains (maybe it’s from David Lodge’s Out of the Shelter, a quite early novel that I’d read only recently about coming out of the war) but it’s such a great poem that I'm moved to share it here.
On Certain Survivors
(Uber einige Davongekommene)
When the man
Was dragged out from under
The debris
Of his shelled house,
He shook himself
and said:
Never again.
At least, not right away.
Gunther Kunert, trans. Michael Hamburger (I think)
From East German Poetry, An Anthology. Carcanet, 1972
I've found the book second-hand on Amazon (of course) - practically free as so often these days -- public libraries and university libraries discarding stock like crazy -- so it’s on its way and I'll be able to check I typed the poem correctly.
PS How many of the many brilliant poems from communist East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia get used in English lessons these days as they were by me and lots of others in the 1970s?
It occurred to me a couple of days ago that where the phrase came from was an East German Poem by Gunther Kunert that I used to use in school a lot and that came from an anthology by Michael Hamburger. (I see I've mentioned this before -- see this this.
Now I’ve found the poem, as typed out by me long ago, and ‘out of the ruins’ doesn’t come from there at all, so the mystery remains (maybe it’s from David Lodge’s Out of the Shelter, a quite early novel that I’d read only recently about coming out of the war) but it’s such a great poem that I'm moved to share it here.
On Certain Survivors
(Uber einige Davongekommene)
When the man
Was dragged out from under
The debris
Of his shelled house,
He shook himself
and said:
Never again.
At least, not right away.
Gunther Kunert, trans. Michael Hamburger (I think)
From East German Poetry, An Anthology. Carcanet, 1972
I've found the book second-hand on Amazon (of course) - practically free as so often these days -- public libraries and university libraries discarding stock like crazy -- so it’s on its way and I'll be able to check I typed the poem correctly.
PS How many of the many brilliant poems from communist East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia get used in English lessons these days as they were by me and lots of others in the 1970s?
Sunday, 26 September 2010
Josipovici and Lucy
I've been reading about Gabriel Josipovici’s new book, Whatever Happened to Modernism?, including an article by him in the New Statesman, and now I've got the book. I've been trying to formulate what I think about it all but am still too muddled to manage a general comment.
In general, though, for Josipovici, Modernism and its predecessors (back to Cervantes and Rabelais) was a response to the ‘disenchantment of the world’ that came with the loss of the certainties of the medieval world. Moderns works were attempts to retrieve whatever was retrievable or at least to give voice to the sense of loss. (That’s a very crude provisional formulation: the argument is far more complex and subtle than that.)
Wordsworth was one who, if I understand Josipovici aright, managed such a retrieval. Josipovici first speaks of Wordsworth’s Boy of Winander who ‘“was taken from his mates, and died/ In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old.”’ He says (p.57)
To arrive at that point he must also have understood that dying in childhood, far from being a mere accident, was the boy's destiny; or, to put it more neutrally, that death and life form part of the same warp and weft and must be grasped as one. That this is what the poem, at its deepest, is saying is confirmed by another group of poems written in those miraculous years, the so-called 'Lucy' poems, especially the greatest and most compressed of them:
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Lucy, we learn from the other poems in the cycle, died, like the Boy of Winander, while still a child. What this poem asserts and the others merely hint at is that by dying she fulfilled herself and that now in death she really is what the poet always sensed her to be, as mortal and immortal as the earth itself. Wonderfully, he conveys that this is a dynamic, not a static state: she is not beneath the earth but, like the rocks and stones and trees, 'rolled round in earth's diurnal course’... (57)
On the issue of interpretation, I'm not sure he’s right: the poet might rather be despairing that Lucy is now nothing more than the rocks and stones, in contrast with the shining star that she had been in ‘She dwelt among th’untrodden ways’ (‘Fair as a star, when only one/ Is shining in the sky’). In that preceding poem, after all, he ends ‘But she is in her Grave, and Oh!/ The difference to me.’
But if the speaker believes (rather than is trying to convince himself) that Lucy is ‘as mortal and immortal as the earth itself’ and that ‘death and life form part of the same warp and weft and must be grasped as one’, he doesn’t comfort me in my own secure conviction that an individual human life is a flash in the pan and isn’t part of anything larger, except as a component of ‘Gaia’ or as minutely affecting the earth’s ecology. Nor do I understand what such a belief would be like.
I'm touched, rather, by the fine vision of the unity of life and death -- all rolled round together on the planet; it affects me though I don’t buy it intellectually; so that whether or not the speaker, or Wordsworth, really believes it it is irrelevant to me as a reader of poetry.
I recognise that, in the crudity of my 21st century sensibility, I don’t feel with any great force a sense of loss and deprivation at not living in an ‘enchanted’ world of spiritual certainties, though, if Modernism springs from that sense, as experienced by artists, musicians, poets and writers who feel more deeply than me, then its works touch me nevertheless.
But when Josipovici says (p.55) that ‘art, in the hands of the greatest masters [such as Wordsworth], will always find a way out of the impasses philosophy and cultural history reveal’, I need more convincing -- at least in relation to philosophy. Whatever it is that art does, I doubt if it’s that, I'm afraid, attractive though the idea is.
In general, though, for Josipovici, Modernism and its predecessors (back to Cervantes and Rabelais) was a response to the ‘disenchantment of the world’ that came with the loss of the certainties of the medieval world. Moderns works were attempts to retrieve whatever was retrievable or at least to give voice to the sense of loss. (That’s a very crude provisional formulation: the argument is far more complex and subtle than that.)
Wordsworth was one who, if I understand Josipovici aright, managed such a retrieval. Josipovici first speaks of Wordsworth’s Boy of Winander who ‘“was taken from his mates, and died/ In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old.”’ He says (p.57)
To arrive at that point he must also have understood that dying in childhood, far from being a mere accident, was the boy's destiny; or, to put it more neutrally, that death and life form part of the same warp and weft and must be grasped as one. That this is what the poem, at its deepest, is saying is confirmed by another group of poems written in those miraculous years, the so-called 'Lucy' poems, especially the greatest and most compressed of them:
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Lucy, we learn from the other poems in the cycle, died, like the Boy of Winander, while still a child. What this poem asserts and the others merely hint at is that by dying she fulfilled herself and that now in death she really is what the poet always sensed her to be, as mortal and immortal as the earth itself. Wonderfully, he conveys that this is a dynamic, not a static state: she is not beneath the earth but, like the rocks and stones and trees, 'rolled round in earth's diurnal course’... (57)
On the issue of interpretation, I'm not sure he’s right: the poet might rather be despairing that Lucy is now nothing more than the rocks and stones, in contrast with the shining star that she had been in ‘She dwelt among th’untrodden ways’ (‘Fair as a star, when only one/ Is shining in the sky’). In that preceding poem, after all, he ends ‘But she is in her Grave, and Oh!/ The difference to me.’
But if the speaker believes (rather than is trying to convince himself) that Lucy is ‘as mortal and immortal as the earth itself’ and that ‘death and life form part of the same warp and weft and must be grasped as one’, he doesn’t comfort me in my own secure conviction that an individual human life is a flash in the pan and isn’t part of anything larger, except as a component of ‘Gaia’ or as minutely affecting the earth’s ecology. Nor do I understand what such a belief would be like.
I'm touched, rather, by the fine vision of the unity of life and death -- all rolled round together on the planet; it affects me though I don’t buy it intellectually; so that whether or not the speaker, or Wordsworth, really believes it it is irrelevant to me as a reader of poetry.
I recognise that, in the crudity of my 21st century sensibility, I don’t feel with any great force a sense of loss and deprivation at not living in an ‘enchanted’ world of spiritual certainties, though, if Modernism springs from that sense, as experienced by artists, musicians, poets and writers who feel more deeply than me, then its works touch me nevertheless.
But when Josipovici says (p.55) that ‘art, in the hands of the greatest masters [such as Wordsworth], will always find a way out of the impasses philosophy and cultural history reveal’, I need more convincing -- at least in relation to philosophy. Whatever it is that art does, I doubt if it’s that, I'm afraid, attractive though the idea is.
Friday, 6 August 2010
Are novels poetry?
(There seems to be an unwritten etiquette about keeping blog postings quite short. Well, in this I'm violating it, but don’t know where else to put it. Apologies if it’s too much to read on a screen.)
Somewhere recently I read a mention of a comment by Leavis (FR Leavis, critic, fl. 1930s-50s) that a particular novel by, I think, Dickens, was truly or genuinely poetic. I should look at Leavis to see what he meant by ‘poetic’, though probably he wouldn’t have spelled it out, being dead set against definition and theory.
But I wonder if what he meant is anything like what occurred to me a few weeks ago in reading, finally, the last three novels in Anthony Powell’s sequence of twelve, A Dance to the Music of Time. More importantly, irrespective of Leavis, are novels a sort of poetry, or like poetry, or something quite different? (And thus, I suppose, is ‘literature’ essentially one sort of thing or several?)
Novels create and present (two verbs but one process) their own ‘world’, an interlinked set of characters, situations, times, places, relationships and so on. That’s perhaps the most obvious thing you might say about fiction, and not the first thing you’d say about poetry where you’d be more likely to point to the prominence of patterned form -- rhyme, metre, prosody, structure, patterns of images etc -- and perhaps the expression or activation of feeling.
But in this bout of novel-reading what struck me more than once was a quite different awareness, to do with the sort of speech act a novel was. Yes, a world was being created by the narration but I found myself noticing rather what the author was doing rather than saying, which was, as if were, miming narration, and speculation, reflection, comment, interpretation, evaluation and so on.
Let me try to explain. Here’s a typical passage:
BAGSHAW WAS AT ONCE ATTENTIVE to the idea of an American biographer of X. Trapnel seeking an interview with himself. In fact he pressed for a meeting to hear a fuller account of Gwinnett's needs. Television had made him more prolix than ever on the line. One was also increasingly aware that he was no longer Books-do-furnish-a-room Bagshaw of ancient days, but Lindsay Bagshaw, the Television 'personality', no towering magnate of that order, but, if only a minor scion, fully conscious of inspired status. He suggested a visit to his own house, something never before put forward. In the past, a pub would always have been proposed. Bagshaw himself was a little sheepish about the change. Complacent, he was also a trifle cowed. He attempted explanation.
'I like to get back as early as possible after work. May prefers that. There's always a lot to do at home.'
The idea of Bagshaw deferring, in this manner, to domesticity, owning, even renting, a house was an altogether unfamiliar one. In early life, married or single, his quarters had been kept secret. They were in a sense his only secret, everyone always knowing about his love affairs, political standpoint, prospects of changing his job, ups and downs of health. Where he lived was another matter. That was not revealed.
Now what would normally impress me about such a piece of writing, in so far as I surfaced at all from my immersion in the ‘world’, was how real, convincing, detailed and plausibly interconnected that world was, despite being nothing but imagination. (And in the case of a world sustained over twelve volumes and some seventy fictional years the achievement is the more incredible.)
The passage is the start of a chapter (chapter 4 of Temporary Kings); the end of the previous one was about an unconnected incident in a bus station. Yet I immediately latch onto the references: Bagshaw, his television career, his marriage to May and his bohemian past; Trapnel; Gwinnett, the American biographer: I know so much about this world that even casual references can be picked up. Yet the whole thing’s made up; nothing in it is true, though we compulsively read on for what we can’t help taking as further information, receiving it as knowledge of the truth despite our all the time knowing perfectly well that’s it’s fiction.
In so far as I pause to wonder, that’s what I normally wonder at, the achievement of that vast coherent invented world. On this reading though, in the perspective I'd for some reason fallen into, albeit intermittently, the striking thing was not the density and extent of the world or its purely invented nature but the fakeness of the operation being conducted, its character as charade or shadow play. The author is performing an elaborate mime of informing, devoid of any actual referent or substance, yielding nothing in the way of knowledge, generating not a jot of informedness in the reader. If he was really narrating I could go and check on his report but in this case it’s all fake. There’s nothing real to check on apart from other parts of the narration.
So the possibility strikes me that it’s exactly that that we should be experiencing in a novel, attending, with at least part of our consciousness, precisely to the pretend nature of its moves; and that it’s in affording that sort of experience that a novel can be poetry.
If that’s right, it seems there are two levels at which one might read in that way. One registers what the speaker or utterer is doing, the other what the language is doing.
The appropriate responses in the first mode would be something like, ‘Look, he’s pretending to tell us about something that happened,’ or ‘Now he’s doing an imitation of reporting someone’s speech’ or ‘This is like someone taking something someone’s reported to have done and commenting on what it might have meant’ -- all wonderfully realistic even though nothing’s behind it. It’s a telling-like procedure as a demonstration of telling, and it never -- no matter how many volumes it fills -- turns into the real thing. It goes through the motions but the machine isn’t connected. (Wittgenstein’s ‘language idling’ like a motor, or ‘playing’?)
And these are often speech acts depending on speech acts, references referring to previous references referring to previous ones etc. etc., and not one of them anchored to anything actual in the real world (except entities like biographers and television and marriages) but only to virtual entities that are artefacts of thought and language rather than direct reports from reality.
But what the text might also be presenting -- the second mode -- is language doing its stuff.
The representation that we might be being invited to wonder at and enjoy might be language’s formal operations: the prolixity, catholicity and flexibility of its summonings and combinings, in syntax and prosody, across discursive domains -- every evocation of some sense or meaning the obverse of some formal balletic move. ‘There’s that simple declarative clause telling us something very specific that happened, but now look, here comes a clause in a different mood containing the more typical way things went, and next there’s an evocation of X by means of .... etc.’
Thus, for example:
Bagshaw’s attentiveness to the idea of an interview and his pressing for a meeting suggests but doesn’t confirm his talking to the narrator. But where and how is inserted only with ‘prolix on the line’, that casually added adverbial, specifying ’telephone’, in a sentence that’s about something quite different, the fact that television’s made him so -- and that has no bearing on the rest of the episode, except in being connected thematically to the next bit, his television personality, which again has nothing to do with the surprise of the proposal to meet at his house, and is presumably being ‘laid down’ as a marker that can, perhaps much later, be referred to.
Back to the simple past tense for a speech: ‘he suggested’... Verb, that could equally have been done with a noun.
‘a visit’...: Noun, that could equally have been done with a verb.
‘something never before put forward’ -- passive, somewhat strangely as it could mean never in the history of the world. Combination of the formal concision of that passive clause linked to the main by apposition (at least that’s what it was called at school) and not by a ‘which was’ or similar with a teacher’s-‘bad-English’ vagueness of reference: is the something the suggestion or the visit?
‘In the past, a pub would always have been proposed’: ‘in the past’ belongs to a temporal thread that has already occurred three times and maintains it in consciousness: working backwards, never before -- ancient days -- than ever -- had made.
That passive again.
Proposed = suggested? elegant variation? No, because he’s now less assertive -- indeed sheepish and cowed.
Now, this bit I like very much:
Bagshaw himself was a little sheepish about the change. Complacent, he was also a trifle cowed. He attempted explanation.
Not sure why himself: to reintroduce him as a human agent after those passives suggesting the bringing about of actions as if by impersonal forces? Now an ordinary feeble and vulnerable man?
a little, a trifle
sheep, cow.
Simple statements in one-clause sentences, three of them. Direct, though softened by those two down-playing adverbials; but still not simple and direct as in informal speech: there’s the formality (if that’s the term -- as if elevating these minor goings on in the private sphere to the status of history, making authoritative summation appropriate) of complacent, again that appositional construction instead of something wordier.
Complacent, he was also a trifle cowed: co- co-; 3 syllables, 1.
Those two sentences, as if expressing care to get the precise terms -- and diffident about claiming too much. Then, bang! the finality of that 3-word statement, with, again, the formality, this time of noun-for-verbal-construction: He attempted explanation.
I'll leave it there. Is something like that what it means for a novel to be ‘poetic’?
I don’t know -- am I saying anything more than that novels (some at least) repay attention to style? meaning the choices of syntax, lexis, sentence length, sound, prosody? Well, I wanted to say something more by that idea of awareness of ‘language doing its stuff’, but I don’t feel I’ve caught what I was after in that illustration.
My exegsis, I realise, would make the poeticness of a novel a matter largely of what goes on at the level of page, paragraph, sentence, clause, word -- whereas surely it has to be partly about what goes on at a larger scale. But I think I'm right that poetry directs attention with particular intensity onto language; that it can indeed be seen as being about language. Some poetry, anyway.
May come back to it.
Somewhere recently I read a mention of a comment by Leavis (FR Leavis, critic, fl. 1930s-50s) that a particular novel by, I think, Dickens, was truly or genuinely poetic. I should look at Leavis to see what he meant by ‘poetic’, though probably he wouldn’t have spelled it out, being dead set against definition and theory.
But I wonder if what he meant is anything like what occurred to me a few weeks ago in reading, finally, the last three novels in Anthony Powell’s sequence of twelve, A Dance to the Music of Time. More importantly, irrespective of Leavis, are novels a sort of poetry, or like poetry, or something quite different? (And thus, I suppose, is ‘literature’ essentially one sort of thing or several?)
Novels create and present (two verbs but one process) their own ‘world’, an interlinked set of characters, situations, times, places, relationships and so on. That’s perhaps the most obvious thing you might say about fiction, and not the first thing you’d say about poetry where you’d be more likely to point to the prominence of patterned form -- rhyme, metre, prosody, structure, patterns of images etc -- and perhaps the expression or activation of feeling.
But in this bout of novel-reading what struck me more than once was a quite different awareness, to do with the sort of speech act a novel was. Yes, a world was being created by the narration but I found myself noticing rather what the author was doing rather than saying, which was, as if were, miming narration, and speculation, reflection, comment, interpretation, evaluation and so on.
Let me try to explain. Here’s a typical passage:
BAGSHAW WAS AT ONCE ATTENTIVE to the idea of an American biographer of X. Trapnel seeking an interview with himself. In fact he pressed for a meeting to hear a fuller account of Gwinnett's needs. Television had made him more prolix than ever on the line. One was also increasingly aware that he was no longer Books-do-furnish-a-room Bagshaw of ancient days, but Lindsay Bagshaw, the Television 'personality', no towering magnate of that order, but, if only a minor scion, fully conscious of inspired status. He suggested a visit to his own house, something never before put forward. In the past, a pub would always have been proposed. Bagshaw himself was a little sheepish about the change. Complacent, he was also a trifle cowed. He attempted explanation.
'I like to get back as early as possible after work. May prefers that. There's always a lot to do at home.'
The idea of Bagshaw deferring, in this manner, to domesticity, owning, even renting, a house was an altogether unfamiliar one. In early life, married or single, his quarters had been kept secret. They were in a sense his only secret, everyone always knowing about his love affairs, political standpoint, prospects of changing his job, ups and downs of health. Where he lived was another matter. That was not revealed.
Now what would normally impress me about such a piece of writing, in so far as I surfaced at all from my immersion in the ‘world’, was how real, convincing, detailed and plausibly interconnected that world was, despite being nothing but imagination. (And in the case of a world sustained over twelve volumes and some seventy fictional years the achievement is the more incredible.)
The passage is the start of a chapter (chapter 4 of Temporary Kings); the end of the previous one was about an unconnected incident in a bus station. Yet I immediately latch onto the references: Bagshaw, his television career, his marriage to May and his bohemian past; Trapnel; Gwinnett, the American biographer: I know so much about this world that even casual references can be picked up. Yet the whole thing’s made up; nothing in it is true, though we compulsively read on for what we can’t help taking as further information, receiving it as knowledge of the truth despite our all the time knowing perfectly well that’s it’s fiction.
In so far as I pause to wonder, that’s what I normally wonder at, the achievement of that vast coherent invented world. On this reading though, in the perspective I'd for some reason fallen into, albeit intermittently, the striking thing was not the density and extent of the world or its purely invented nature but the fakeness of the operation being conducted, its character as charade or shadow play. The author is performing an elaborate mime of informing, devoid of any actual referent or substance, yielding nothing in the way of knowledge, generating not a jot of informedness in the reader. If he was really narrating I could go and check on his report but in this case it’s all fake. There’s nothing real to check on apart from other parts of the narration.
So the possibility strikes me that it’s exactly that that we should be experiencing in a novel, attending, with at least part of our consciousness, precisely to the pretend nature of its moves; and that it’s in affording that sort of experience that a novel can be poetry.
If that’s right, it seems there are two levels at which one might read in that way. One registers what the speaker or utterer is doing, the other what the language is doing.
The appropriate responses in the first mode would be something like, ‘Look, he’s pretending to tell us about something that happened,’ or ‘Now he’s doing an imitation of reporting someone’s speech’ or ‘This is like someone taking something someone’s reported to have done and commenting on what it might have meant’ -- all wonderfully realistic even though nothing’s behind it. It’s a telling-like procedure as a demonstration of telling, and it never -- no matter how many volumes it fills -- turns into the real thing. It goes through the motions but the machine isn’t connected. (Wittgenstein’s ‘language idling’ like a motor, or ‘playing’?)
And these are often speech acts depending on speech acts, references referring to previous references referring to previous ones etc. etc., and not one of them anchored to anything actual in the real world (except entities like biographers and television and marriages) but only to virtual entities that are artefacts of thought and language rather than direct reports from reality.
But what the text might also be presenting -- the second mode -- is language doing its stuff.
The representation that we might be being invited to wonder at and enjoy might be language’s formal operations: the prolixity, catholicity and flexibility of its summonings and combinings, in syntax and prosody, across discursive domains -- every evocation of some sense or meaning the obverse of some formal balletic move. ‘There’s that simple declarative clause telling us something very specific that happened, but now look, here comes a clause in a different mood containing the more typical way things went, and next there’s an evocation of X by means of .... etc.’
Thus, for example:
Bagshaw’s attentiveness to the idea of an interview and his pressing for a meeting suggests but doesn’t confirm his talking to the narrator. But where and how is inserted only with ‘prolix on the line’, that casually added adverbial, specifying ’telephone’, in a sentence that’s about something quite different, the fact that television’s made him so -- and that has no bearing on the rest of the episode, except in being connected thematically to the next bit, his television personality, which again has nothing to do with the surprise of the proposal to meet at his house, and is presumably being ‘laid down’ as a marker that can, perhaps much later, be referred to.
Back to the simple past tense for a speech: ‘he suggested’... Verb, that could equally have been done with a noun.
‘a visit’...: Noun, that could equally have been done with a verb.
‘something never before put forward’ -- passive, somewhat strangely as it could mean never in the history of the world. Combination of the formal concision of that passive clause linked to the main by apposition (at least that’s what it was called at school) and not by a ‘which was’ or similar with a teacher’s-‘bad-English’ vagueness of reference: is the something the suggestion or the visit?
‘In the past, a pub would always have been proposed’: ‘in the past’ belongs to a temporal thread that has already occurred three times and maintains it in consciousness: working backwards, never before -- ancient days -- than ever -- had made.
That passive again.
Proposed = suggested? elegant variation? No, because he’s now less assertive -- indeed sheepish and cowed.
Now, this bit I like very much:
Bagshaw himself was a little sheepish about the change. Complacent, he was also a trifle cowed. He attempted explanation.
Not sure why himself: to reintroduce him as a human agent after those passives suggesting the bringing about of actions as if by impersonal forces? Now an ordinary feeble and vulnerable man?
a little, a trifle
sheep, cow.
Simple statements in one-clause sentences, three of them. Direct, though softened by those two down-playing adverbials; but still not simple and direct as in informal speech: there’s the formality (if that’s the term -- as if elevating these minor goings on in the private sphere to the status of history, making authoritative summation appropriate) of complacent, again that appositional construction instead of something wordier.
Complacent, he was also a trifle cowed: co- co-; 3 syllables, 1.
Those two sentences, as if expressing care to get the precise terms -- and diffident about claiming too much. Then, bang! the finality of that 3-word statement, with, again, the formality, this time of noun-for-verbal-construction: He attempted explanation.
I'll leave it there. Is something like that what it means for a novel to be ‘poetic’?
I don’t know -- am I saying anything more than that novels (some at least) repay attention to style? meaning the choices of syntax, lexis, sentence length, sound, prosody? Well, I wanted to say something more by that idea of awareness of ‘language doing its stuff’, but I don’t feel I’ve caught what I was after in that illustration.
My exegsis, I realise, would make the poeticness of a novel a matter largely of what goes on at the level of page, paragraph, sentence, clause, word -- whereas surely it has to be partly about what goes on at a larger scale. But I think I'm right that poetry directs attention with particular intensity onto language; that it can indeed be seen as being about language. Some poetry, anyway.
May come back to it.
Saturday, 12 June 2010
Coriolanus and Hazlitt again
This follows my last but one posting. Uttara Natarajan has kindly let me see her paper, which is part of a chapter that will appear in July in a Continuum volume in their Great Shakespearean series.
It seems Hazlitt published the same argument only one week later and in that version it’s quite clear that it’s a specific attack, on the ‘Modern Poets’, namely Coleridge, Wordworth and Southey, and Wordsworth in particular for his shameful commemoration ode celebrating the reactionary ruling power and the slaughter at Waterloo. In this case poetry clearly is siding with tyranny, but while imagination is certainly drawn to the fearful, vast and awesome, so it can be to the good, and there is no reason why poetry should always make the oppressor the more impressive and sympathetic. In King Lear, indeed, the good is as potent as the evil.
That’s the argument and Uttara’s case seems convincing.
The point that’s of educational relevance, however, remains-- and it’s not Uttara’s purpose in her chapter to address it. If Imagination is so drawn to what impresses the emotions, and poetry is the faculty of imagination, then isn’t the other faculty, that of understanding, left at a serious disadvantage? And isn’t this a worry for education?
What is there to animate the activity of the head and understanding that is comparable to that poetry that sets the heart on fire?
Sunday, 6 June 2010
Coriolanus and curriculum
Hazlitt, in his essay on Coriolanus, writes about imagination, the faculty that makes poetry, and understanding, that that informs analytical and deliberative prose, as follows:
The imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty: it takes from one thing to add to another: it accumulates circumstances together to give the greatest possible effect to a favourite object. The understanding is a dividing and measuring faculty: it judges of things, not according to their immediate impression on the mind, but according to their relations to one another. The one is a monopolizing faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of present excitement by inequality and disproportion; the other is a distributive faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of ultimate good, by justice and proportion.
If this is right, it needs to appear in a theory for English. It implies that any hope in the curriculum of integrating the experience of literature with the study of history or sociology in schemes of single-subject ‘humanities’ is doomed to failure, if the integration is to be one of substance and not just of timetabling. If education is primarily about the Enlightenment concerns with understanding, knowledge and reason, then any intense exposure to literature, or at any rate poetry, would seem to work against education’s purpose.
But surely Hazlitt’s wrong?
Well, note how he goes on:
The one is an aristocratical, the other a republican faculty.
HIs reason for bringing up the distinction between imagination and understanding in an essay on Coriolanus is that Shakespeare’s poetry all goes to the ‘aristocratical’ Coriolanus and none to the people in its democratic, undifferentiated mass, and that that’s in the nature of poetry.
On Saturday there was the tenth annual Hazlitt Study Day in Oxford. Uttara Natarajan’s opening lecture addressed this issue by suggesting, on the basis of related writings by Hazlitt, that his point wasn’t general but was meant to relate only to the specific context of this play. But her talk was so interesting that I constantly set me off thinking, so I kept finding I’d missed key things she said.
If I can get the written version I'll come back to the issue again.
Thursday, 13 May 2010
Alice Oswald
Someone, might have been Carol Ann Duffy, wrote the other day that the best poets writing in Britain are Don Patterson and Alice Oswald. There are lots of poets I don’t know but of those I do I agree those two are the best, though I’ve only just got to Oswald.
I’d knew of her Dart, about the River Dart in Devon, and had read bits in reviews and bookshops, but I’ve been reading A Sleepwalk on the Severn, about the moon and the Severn Estuary -- tidal of course, the mud uncovered half the time and under twenty foot of water for the rest. Bits are spoken by a chorus, the moon, the wind and the sleepwalking poet who takes notes.
Though it’s not always easy to see what is being literally ‘meant’, reading the Sleepwalk is intensely pleasurable. There’s a high density of phrases that pull me up sharply with their freshness: e.g. from the second and third stanzas of the whole thing:
Swans pitching your wings
In the reedy layby of a vacancy
Where the house of the sea
Can be set up quickly and taken down in an hour
All you flooded and stranded weeds whose workplace
Is both a barren mudsite and a speeded up garden....
And later, the moon rising above the mud:
She begins to climb
In her slimy death sheath
Very strong-willed and tugging
Tied to the earth
And I like the frequent use of colloquial language and contemporary ‘unpoetic’ references:
But it’s like searchlights out here
I keep being followed by a strip of light
I keep seeing the moon
Mother of all grasses
Will re-read. Looking forward to Dart.
I’d knew of her Dart, about the River Dart in Devon, and had read bits in reviews and bookshops, but I’ve been reading A Sleepwalk on the Severn, about the moon and the Severn Estuary -- tidal of course, the mud uncovered half the time and under twenty foot of water for the rest. Bits are spoken by a chorus, the moon, the wind and the sleepwalking poet who takes notes.
Though it’s not always easy to see what is being literally ‘meant’, reading the Sleepwalk is intensely pleasurable. There’s a high density of phrases that pull me up sharply with their freshness: e.g. from the second and third stanzas of the whole thing:
Swans pitching your wings
In the reedy layby of a vacancy
Where the house of the sea
Can be set up quickly and taken down in an hour
All you flooded and stranded weeds whose workplace
Is both a barren mudsite and a speeded up garden....
And later, the moon rising above the mud:
She begins to climb
In her slimy death sheath
Very strong-willed and tugging
Tied to the earth
And I like the frequent use of colloquial language and contemporary ‘unpoetic’ references:
But it’s like searchlights out here
I keep being followed by a strip of light
I keep seeing the moon
Mother of all grasses
Will re-read. Looking forward to Dart.
Tuesday, 4 May 2010
New poems from old East Germany
I rarely like the poems in the London Review of Books but the issue I'm up to in my pile, 25th March, has ‘Five Poems by Günter Eich translated by Michael Hofmann’. I've come across Eich before because some time in the early 1970s the journal Modern Poetry in Translation had an event at the Royal Festival Hall. I think that’s where my then wife and I saw the magical combination of Pablo Neruda, six-foot Chilean ambassador to Paris with native Andean nose and fine brown suit, who read his poems in Spanish, and Alastair Reid translating into his own fine verse in a rich, soft American voice. Perhaps as a result of that we bought the anthology published by Carcanet, Postwar German Poetry in Translation, translated by Michael Hamburger. I wish I still had it but it seems unobtainable, though I have since bought a volume by one of the poets represented, Peter Huchel, again translated by Hamburger. Günter Eich was in there too.
The volume was full of lovely stuff, some of which was well received by my 1st and 2nd year pupils (11-12) at Walworth School. Perhaps I'll put some in this blog later -- I have copies of the ones I typed out for them.
According to Hamburger, the general idea of this postwar German poetry was ‘minimalist’: after the horrors of the Nazis and the Second World War, rhetorical flights and elegant verse-turnings seemed out of place. The barest means sufficed: no similes, no ‘poetic’ vocabulary, no sentiment. The style of bureaucratic prose might be employed, as if it’s all that’s left to us, as sometimes (and for the first time?) in The Waste Land (I think -- need to check this) and certainly in Auden-Spender-MacNeice (been re-reading the latter -- wonderful): e.g. Eich: There are times I know that God / is most concerned with the fate of snails; or Whoever is on a reasonable footing with horror / can expect its coming with equanimity.
Here are a couple of the Hoffmann’s new Eichs -- I hope he’ll forgive me if I add his plug at the end:
Memorial
The moors we wanted to hike have been drained.
End of August
The white bellies of dead fish
At night, the bus taking the football team home
The volume was full of lovely stuff, some of which was well received by my 1st and 2nd year pupils (11-12) at Walworth School. Perhaps I'll put some in this blog later -- I have copies of the ones I typed out for them.
According to Hamburger, the general idea of this postwar German poetry was ‘minimalist’: after the horrors of the Nazis and the Second World War, rhetorical flights and elegant verse-turnings seemed out of place. The barest means sufficed: no similes, no ‘poetic’ vocabulary, no sentiment. The style of bureaucratic prose might be employed, as if it’s all that’s left to us, as sometimes (and for the first time?) in The Waste Land (I think -- need to check this) and certainly in Auden-Spender-MacNeice (been re-reading the latter -- wonderful): e.g. Eich: There are times I know that God / is most concerned with the fate of snails; or Whoever is on a reasonable footing with horror / can expect its coming with equanimity.
Here are a couple of the Hoffmann’s new Eichs -- I hope he’ll forgive me if I add his plug at the end:
Memorial
The moors we wanted to hike have been drained.
Their turf has warmed our evenings.
The wind is full of black dust.
It scours the names off the gravestones
and etches this day
into us.
End of August
The white bellies of dead fish
loom among duckweed and rushes.
Crows have wings to enable them to escape death.
There are times I know that God
is most concerned with the fate of snails.
He builds them houses. We are not His favourites.
At night, the bus taking the football team home
leaves a white trail of dust.
The moon shines in the willowherb,
in concert with the evening star.
How near you are, immortality – in the wings of bats,
in pairs of headlights
nosing down the hill.
Günter Eich (1907-72) was a poet, translator from Chinese and writer of radio plays. Angina Days, a selection of his poems translated by Michael Hofmann, is due in May from Princeton.
Günter Eich (1907-72) was a poet, translator from Chinese and writer of radio plays. Angina Days, a selection of his poems translated by Michael Hofmann, is due in May from Princeton.
It’s on order. If it arrives in time I'll take it with me to Berlin later this month.
Sunday, 10 January 2010
Kermode on English and poetry
Frank Kermode’s Not entitled: a memoir (London, Flamingo, 1997) is enjoyable on a number of grounds: for its accounts of growing up a Manxman, of war service in the navy, of academic posts in provincial universities and Cambridge (the last truly awful), but not least for his comments on the state of English studies, whereby it seems students now do anything except actually read the stuff.
Here are a couple of quotes. These ring a bell for me not because I've taught literature at university level but that I've taught students who’ve studied it and who are preparing to be English teachers.
In the first bit, he’s despairing of teaching literature to students who have been brought up on ‘Theory’, and has begun to wonder whether the best preparation might be a course in writing poetry.
Recently, however, I have encountered, in a graduate literature class, students who have been taught to write poems as a major part of their studies. Belatedly, I am almost convinced that this is where the study of literature ought to begin.
I read a poem by George Herbert and come to one of those lines that might be used as tests of a genuine understanding of poetry: "to sever the good fellowship of dust," or "Then shall the fall further the flight in me," or, more difficult, the remarkable ninth line of the sonnet "Prayer" (you need the whole poem to see why that line is perfect). I look up and see faces, on cue, gleaming with the experience of poetry: "The land of spices; something understood." Books are written about such topics as Herbert's understanding of Calvinism and so forth; and that's fine, these are real subjects. But the owners of those faces probably understand Herbert better than the learned authors who shuffle, cough in ink, and read Calvin.
But we cannot begin again. In this respect things are as they are, and will almost certainly get worse. (197-8)
And this, about the state of things in general:
The academy has long preferred ways of studying literature which actually permit or enjoin the study of something else in its place, and the success of the new French approaches has in many quarters come close to eliminating the study of literature altogether; indeed, there are many who regard the word as denoting a false category, a term used to dignify, in one's own interest, one set of texts by arbitrarily attributing to them a value arbitrarily denied to others. This position many find grateful, either because it saves trouble or because they have ideological objections to the notion that certain sorts of application can detect value here and dispute it there; or because they are, as it were, tone-deaf, and are as happy with the new state of affairs as a professor deaf from birth might be if relieved of the nightmare necessity of "teaching" the Beethoven quartets. (219)
Here are a couple of quotes. These ring a bell for me not because I've taught literature at university level but that I've taught students who’ve studied it and who are preparing to be English teachers.
In the first bit, he’s despairing of teaching literature to students who have been brought up on ‘Theory’, and has begun to wonder whether the best preparation might be a course in writing poetry.
Recently, however, I have encountered, in a graduate literature class, students who have been taught to write poems as a major part of their studies. Belatedly, I am almost convinced that this is where the study of literature ought to begin.
I read a poem by George Herbert and come to one of those lines that might be used as tests of a genuine understanding of poetry: "to sever the good fellowship of dust," or "Then shall the fall further the flight in me," or, more difficult, the remarkable ninth line of the sonnet "Prayer" (you need the whole poem to see why that line is perfect). I look up and see faces, on cue, gleaming with the experience of poetry: "The land of spices; something understood." Books are written about such topics as Herbert's understanding of Calvinism and so forth; and that's fine, these are real subjects. But the owners of those faces probably understand Herbert better than the learned authors who shuffle, cough in ink, and read Calvin.
But we cannot begin again. In this respect things are as they are, and will almost certainly get worse. (197-8)
And this, about the state of things in general:
The academy has long preferred ways of studying literature which actually permit or enjoin the study of something else in its place, and the success of the new French approaches has in many quarters come close to eliminating the study of literature altogether; indeed, there are many who regard the word as denoting a false category, a term used to dignify, in one's own interest, one set of texts by arbitrarily attributing to them a value arbitrarily denied to others. This position many find grateful, either because it saves trouble or because they have ideological objections to the notion that certain sorts of application can detect value here and dispute it there; or because they are, as it were, tone-deaf, and are as happy with the new state of affairs as a professor deaf from birth might be if relieved of the nightmare necessity of "teaching" the Beethoven quartets. (219)
Saturday, 22 August 2009
No, but they're there all right
(...to the question, Do you believe in ghosts?)
"Surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of [Niels] Bohr's country house, a visiting scientist said he didn't believe that horseshoes kept evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr answered: 'Neither do I; I have it there because I was told that it works just as well if one doesn't believe in it.'" [Slavo Zizek, 'Berlusconi in Tehran', London Review of Books, 31 (14) 2009]
So perhaps with transcendence in poetry? Of course there isn't another order of reality behind this one, one of which we're occasionally vouchsafed a glimpse through art or liminal experience, a surreality beyond reality. But because poetry states nothing and makes no claims (its sentences are only playing at being statements, like statements being quoted at us) it can have its cake and eat it: it avoids condemnation for superstitious belief but enjoys the benefit of experiencing superstition as reality. It's saying nothing that's untrue but it isn't in the business of saying at all; it claims no truth so can't be lying; but it nevertheless puts into our consciousness awareness of the very thing it's escaping the accusation of superstitiously believing.
So in its woods there spirits, in its deserted towns a brooding presence, over its vast waters a universal Something. And for us they're there all right, but who could ever accuse us, we who explain so dispassionately in our essays 'How Yeats creates the effect of...'?
"Surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of [Niels] Bohr's country house, a visiting scientist said he didn't believe that horseshoes kept evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr answered: 'Neither do I; I have it there because I was told that it works just as well if one doesn't believe in it.'" [Slavo Zizek, 'Berlusconi in Tehran', London Review of Books, 31 (14) 2009]
So perhaps with transcendence in poetry? Of course there isn't another order of reality behind this one, one of which we're occasionally vouchsafed a glimpse through art or liminal experience, a surreality beyond reality. But because poetry states nothing and makes no claims (its sentences are only playing at being statements, like statements being quoted at us) it can have its cake and eat it: it avoids condemnation for superstitious belief but enjoys the benefit of experiencing superstition as reality. It's saying nothing that's untrue but it isn't in the business of saying at all; it claims no truth so can't be lying; but it nevertheless puts into our consciousness awareness of the very thing it's escaping the accusation of superstitiously believing.
So in its woods there spirits, in its deserted towns a brooding presence, over its vast waters a universal Something. And for us they're there all right, but who could ever accuse us, we who explain so dispassionately in our essays 'How Yeats creates the effect of...'?
Monday, 8 December 2008
Signs along the Thames
I wrote this one before the world collapsed and wasn’t able to post it. It’s strikingly out of date now the season has truly changed, earth is hard as stone etc., but anyway here it is...
SURBITON, where I live, is boring but the river, ten minutes from the flat, compensates. Along this side a ‘promenade’ (wide asphalted path with seats bearing plaques naming dead Thames-lovers) goes down to Kingston-upon-Thames, 15 minutes away. If you cross Kingston bridge you can walk up the opposite side to Hampton Court.
This morning [a couple of weeks ago] I did this side, but it was cold, damp and uninviting. The other day, though, [even longer ago] late in the afternoon it was exhilarating. Most of the photos I took aren’t worth showing. The tall trees (poplars and horse chestnuts) the line the other bank are wonderful but I've never got a good shot of them. Against a winter sky they were magnificent, one with a single crow perched heraldically on the topmost branch.
The last good time along there was earlier in November, when autumnal mistiness reminded me of the smoky days around Plot Night (November 5th, Guy Fawkes night) when we kids were out gathering wood for the bonfire (chumping, it was called). This week it’s winter, the trees are bare and the skies and water dramatic.
My only sub-half-decent photos:
Whenever a scene in nature seems charged with significance (that crow was clearly a sign), a response learned no doubt from Romantic poetry (though what about ‘the crow makes wing to the rooky wood’…), I think of the poetry of Peter Huchel, translated by Michael Hamburger. I found it in the 1960s in, I think, a Carcanet anthology, East German Poetry in Translation, or perhaps in the journal Modern Poetry in Translation, and used it in teaching. One of my favourites (from the new Anvil Peter Huchel: The Garden of Theophrastus) is ‘Swans Rising’. I don’t read German but love reading it opposite Hamburger’s translation.
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