Poetry

Autumn and a favourite poem

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Autumn Leaves

Autumn leaves

I was lying in front of a sunny window reading my current novel this afternoon when an urge came upon me to write about one of my favourite poems. It’s one of the few I can recite from heart. The poem is “Spring and Fall” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and it goes like this:

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 and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Spring and Fall Quilt, 1985

Spring and Fall Small Quilt, 1985

Now, I know you Northern Hemisphere people are enjoying spring and looking forward to the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, but down here in the south it is autumn which is, for me and I suspect many of us, a bittersweet time. Sweet because the weather is usually mild and stable, and the light soft and warm, but bitter because there’s a chill in the air, the days are shortening and the frosts are coming. It is for this paradox – and its implications, its recognition of our mortality – that I love Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall”.

What I love about this poem is what I love about Hopkins in general. Firstly there’s his heart that is so openly on show in all his poems, both the religious crisis poems and the ones about life and nature. Then there’s the tone, which is, in this poem, rather melancholic. After all, he is telling the child, Margaret, that what she’s really grieving for, though she’s unaware of it now, is her own mortality. I also love his rhythm (which he called “sprung rhythm“) and how in this poem there’s a jolt towards the end when he makes his main point.  And associated with this, the rhyme, which is appropriately simple here for a poem addressed to a child. But most of all, I love his language, particularly his imagery and the neologisms (like “wanwood leafmeal”). Or, perhaps, not quite most of all … I think most of all I love the way the language so perfectly matches the heart.

The older I get, the more I understand and love this poem!

Do you have poems that come back to you again and again at different points in your life?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Capital women poets

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Since Australia’s capital, Canberra, is celebrating its centenary in 2013, it seems timely to devote a few Monday Musings posts – scattered throughout the year – to its literature. Comparatively speaking, Canberra is a small city, but it is rich in poets, past and present, female and male, so I’ve decided to make my first topic Canberra’s women poets. I’ll write, as I usually do in these sorts of posts, about a representative few. They all appear in The invisible thread, Canberra’s centenary anthology about which I’ve written before.

Judith Wright (1915-2000)

Australian high country (Mt Stilwell)

Australian high country (Mt Stilwell)

Wright spent the last 28 years of her life in the wider Canberra region, and is arguably Canberra’s best known woman poet. She was a prolific writer, and a committed environmentalist and Aboriginal rights activist. Her poetry ranges over a huge range of subjects from the bush, birds and nature, through life and relationships, to all sorts of social justice and political issues. Like her contemporary Patrick White, she was not afraid to speak out about the issues that concerned her. As pretty well every biography reports, she took part in an Aboriginal Reconciliation March in Canberra not long before she died at the age of 85.  Several of her poems, including “Bullocky”, “Woman to man”, and “South of my days”,  are anthology standards. A self-confessed lover of our bush, I adore this from “South of my days”:

low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite-
clean, lean, hungry country. …

I also like the lesser known (to me, anyhow) poem selected for The invisible thread, “Counting in sevens”, in which she counts off her years in, yes, sevens:

Seven threes are twenty-one.
I was sailing my own sea,
first in love, the knots undone.

Rosemary Dobson (1920-2012)

Another grand dame of Australian poetry, and also a prolific one, Dobson moved to Canberra in 1971 with her husband Alec Bolton. I’ve written about them before in my Literary Couples post. Like Wright, she turned her hand to many forms of writing and also worked as an editor. Both women knew that to make a career out of writing, you wrote … but in Dobson’s case she also translated – Russian poetry! I quoted a couple of her poems in the post I wrote after her death, including the one she wrote to/for Christina Stead. The poem from which I’ll quote here, though, is the intriguing “Child with a Cockatoo” in which a child, sitting for a painting by Simon Verelst in a time before the discovery of Australia, is given a sulphur-crested cockatoo, presaging Europe’s future contact with the southern land:

That sulphur-crested bird with great white wings,
The wise, harsh bird – as old and wise as Time
Whose well-dark eyes the wonder kept and closed.

Susan Hampton (b. 1949)

I must say I know Susan Hampton more as the editor, with Kate Llewellyn, of The Penguin book of Australian women poets, than as a Canberra-based poet, but I’ve discovered that she’s lived in Canberra since 1993. Her poems, from what I’ve seen, tend to be personal with a witty, whimsical or poignant edge, such as this one about “Hands” which starts

for some reason are battered and speckled,
the claws of an old hen poke through the skin.
I stare at my hands the way Escher
makes you stare at his …

I know the feeling … and isn’t that partly what poetry is about?

Melinda Smith

Now Smith, who has been in Canberra, on and off apparently, since 1989, is new to me, but I do love her cheeky poem in The invisible thread. It’s titled “No bed” and here is its beginning:

When love is on the wrong side of the sheets
romance must give way to expedience
and, short of coupling in the public streets,
all places serve at love’s convenience.

Kerry Cue at Poem Pig quotes another of Smith’s poems, “Mother love”. It’s a beautifully structured poem but you’ll have to go to Poem Pig to see that, as I’m just going to quote a verse:

Heaving itself onto an empty beach,
the sea still finds the energy to give.
I start a task whose end I’ll never reach.
I give you life, not knowing how you’ll live.

And here are the first two lines of a poem called “Virginia Woolf” from Smith’s own blog, Mull and Fiddle:

Veiled in muslin,
intellect like a steel ribbon.

“Intellect like a steel ribbon”. Love the combination of strength and fragility, masculinity and femininity, solidity and fluidity, in that image.

Penelope Layland (b. 1962)

My last poet – but there are many more in Canberra, including one I’ll review soon – has spent pretty much all her life in Canberra. I’m most aware of her through her work as a journalist and columnist but she is also a poet. I’m rather tickled that the poem of hers included in The invisible thread speaks to an earlier Monday Musings, that about the “lost child” theme in Australian literature. The poem was published in 2005 and doesn’t feel dated. The “myth” clearly resonates still. The poem starts:

They search the stock dams first –
neighbours, solid men feigning nonchalance,
the self-righteous, the busy-bodies, the merely excited
and somewhere the father, whose looks keep going
to the bush beyond, gathering itself.

And there you have it … an all too brief introduction to some of our capital women poets.

Who are your favourite women poets?

Vale Rosemary Dobson (Australian poet)

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Last time I wrote about poet Rosemary Dobson was in my post on Australian literary couples but my post today is a sadder one as Dobson died this week, just a week or so after her 92nd birthday. She had a long career as a poet, starting soon after World War 2. When she first came to recognition, winning awards in the 1940s, she was described as the granddaughter of English poet and essayist, Austin Dobson, who was well-known in his time.

Dobson moved to my city – well, she was here first, in fact – in 1971 when her husband Alec Bolton became the National Library of Australia’s first Director of Publications. I knew Alec, as his office was next to mine for a few years in the late 1970s. He was a charming, lovely man who, first as a hobby and then a retirement project, managed his own small press which printed, among other works, some of his wife’s poetry. It’s nicely fitting that the poem used in our newspaper’s front page article on her death is one she dedicated to him:

The kitchen vessels that sustained
Your printed books, my poems, our life,
Are fallen away. The words remain –
Not all – but those of style and worth.

(from “Divining Colander”)

The poem goes on to use the “colander” as a metaphor for sifting out the bad from the good.

Dobson was active in Canberra poetry circles and well-known to our poets, some of whom I’ve written about here, such as Geoff Page and Alan Gould. But, she was known more widely too, having won several significant literary (and other) awards, including:

  • Patrick White Award for Literature (1984)
  • Grace Leven Prize for Poetry (1984)
  • Order of Australia for Services to Literature (1987)
  • Australia Council’s Writers’ Emeritus Award (1996)
  • The Age Book of the Year Award for Untold lives (2001)
  • NSW Premier’s Special Award (2006)

In a review of a recently published collected edition of her work, titled, Collected, Australian writer David Malouf described her as “the last of a generation of Australian poets – Judith Wright, David Campbell, Gwen Harwood – who in the 1940s and ’50s remade Australian poetry, and then, by remaking themselves, helped remake it a second time in the ’70s.” He also refers to a poem of hers which appears in The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (1986) which I like to dip into every now and then. The poem is dedicated to Christina Stead, whom Dobson knew, and is about Stead’s dying:

I sit beside the bed where she lies dreaming
Of Pyrrhic victories and sharp words said

[…]

Suppose her smouldering thoughts break out in flame,
Not to consume bed, nightdress, flesh and hair
But the mind, the working and the making mind

That built these towers the world applauds

(from “The Nightmare”)

I reckon that effectively conveys Stead’s strength and feistiness – and Dobson’s affection and admiration for her. “The Nightmare” is one of five poems of hers, from her mid career I think, included in the anthology. They demonstrate some of Dobson’s variety, her seriousness and her humour, but there’s no way I can do justice to her career here, now. Before I conclude though, I must say that what I found interesting, when I researched her life a little a few years ago, was that she and poet David Campbell, also produced anthologies of Russian poetry that they had translated.

For a lovely, brief summary of her life and contribution to Australian poetry, check out the podcast from ABC Radio’s Books and Arts Daily.

Australian poetry will miss her …

Monday musings on Australian literature: The other David Campbell and the sin of misattribution

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Much to my chagrin, the “other” poet named David Campbell drew to my attention recently to the fact that I had twice, in my blog, (mis)attributed a poem he’d written to the wrong David Campbell. The poem is “The Last Red Gum” and I first wrote about it in my post on The magnificent River Red Gums and then again, because it seemed relevant, in my post on Richard Allen and Kimbal Baker’s book Australia’s remarkable trees.

The David Campbell to whom I thought I was referring is the one who lived much of his life in my neck of the woods, that is, in the Australian Capital Territory and neighbouring areas of New South Wales. He did write a lot about nature and the landscape. In fact, his Wikipedia article (to which I’ve linked his name at the beginning of this paragraph) includes quotes from two poems about trees – “In summer’s tree” and “Snow gums”. It’s not surprising really that, at first glance, I thought I knew who I was quoting. This David Campbell wrote many volumes of poetry, edited anthologies and won some of our top poetry awards. He died in 1979.

However, the “other” David Campbell is very much alive – and just as well, because he was able to ensure I righted my wrong. He lives in Victoria and is a member of the Federation of Australian Writers. He too has won several poetry awards and has published volumes of poetry. While he also writes in free verse, his first love he says is bush poetry. As a lover of Banjo Paterson, I can relate to that. This Campbell is keen, he writes on his website, “to promote traditional poetry, particularly in terms of the assistance that a mastery of rhythm and rhyme gives to any form of writing”. He argues that this form of poetry “is accessible to all”. Like the first David Campbell, he has also written short stories (and appeared in Black Inc’s Best Australian stories, 2005).

In 2011, Campbell won the Bronze Swagman award for his poem about dementia, called Wasteland. You can read it on the ABC’s Western Queensland website. It’s a simple, accessible and moving poem.

And so, I apologise to this later David Campbell and hope he doesn’t mind if I quote another verse from “The Last Red Gum”, because I do like this poem and its environmental message:

Dead gums in Lake Mulwala

Dead gums in Lake Mulwala, on a late autumn afternoon

At Mulwala and Chowilla there are remnants of our kind
in a place where verdant floodplains used to be.
Now a ghostly red gum graveyard is the only thing you’ll find
and a desert is the only sight you’ll see
(from “The Last Red Gum”)

Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned “another” Australian David Campbell, the singer and son of rocker Jimmy Barnes! It clearly pays to be careful in your research – something I with my librarian-archivist background should have been well aware of!

Have you ever been guilty of misattribution – and how did you handle it?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Japanese poetry in Australia

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Engraved writings by Suiin Emi, Onomichi

Haiku by Suiin Emi, along the Path of Literature in Onimichi, Japan

Papa Gums loves to give me clippings of obituaries that he knows will interest me. Last week, from his hospital bed, he gave me one for an Australian poet I’d never heard of, Janice Bostock. She was, according to the obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald, “one of Australia’s leading writers of Japanese poetic forms”, and won awards here and overseas. She particularly loved haiku.

Haiku, I must say, was the only form of Japanese poetry I had heard of until my first trip to Japan in 2006 when, on the railway station of our son’s tiny town of Tsugawa, we met an ex-teacher at his school who was heading off to her annual tanka conference. Tanka? Well, we discovered that tanka is an older Japanese verse form than haiku, and its basic structure is 5-7-5-7-7 “onji” (which we roughly translate to “syllables”). I guess most people reading this blog will know that haiku’s structure is 5-7-5. And here endeth the lesson on Japanese verse forms because the story is far more complicated than I’ve presented here, both in terms of these forms and other forms I haven’t mentioned. You can Google if you want to know more!

Bostock, who is briefly mentioned in the Wikipedia article on haiku in English, described haiku as “one-breath poems”, meaning that each poem “spans the length of one breath”. She also, and this was another new thing to me, practised a variation of haiku called “one line haiku”. Here is one quoted in her obituary:

no money for the busker I try not to listen

The obituary says that Bostock created the market for haiku in Australia by founding a journal called Tweed. She also wrote – and this of course appeals to me – The gum tree conversations. This was a series of articles aimed at showing “the relevance of haiku to the Australian landscape and experience”. Eventually her work led to the foundation of the Australian Haiku Society in 2000, of which she was patron at the time of her death. She was clearly a busy, engaged and passionate woman.

And so, haiku is alive and well in Australia … and it seems appropriately so. John Bird, who co-edited The first Australian Haiku Anthology with Bostock, has described haiku as follows: “a brief poem, built on sensory images from the environment. It evokes an insight into our world and its peoples.” As I understand it, haiku tends to involve the juxtaposition of two ideas or images in a way that a relationship is drawn between them. Australia, with its stark, dramatic environment, its odd vegetation and its strange creatures, must provide excellent subject matter for this sort of writing. Here is an Aussie haiku by E.A. Horne:

Brown paddock
Brown sheep
Blue bloody sky.

You can feel the pain of a farmer facing drought! It’s from an article first published in 2006 in the Australian poetry magazine, Five bells. Reeves, the author, says that “Contemporary haiku rarely consist of 17 syllables, may be written in one to four lines, and don’t have to be about the seasons. What they seek to retain is the brevity, clarity, immediacy and resonance of Japanese haiku and to record and share a moment of seeing”. I’m no expert in haiku, but it’s a form that appeals to me – because of this brevity that gives rise to a spareness, an attempt to pare to the essence of a thing. There’s no opportunity in haiku for effusive or loquacious explorations!

Tanka poems show a similar restraint and so, because it’s nicely appropriate, I’ll conclude with one of those:

our front yard gum
grown from a sapling
to a giant –
all those black cockatoos
fair exchange for a lawn

(Michael Thorley, Eucalypt Issue 1, 2006)

Are you familiar with – and do you like – these tiny poetic forms?

Ginny Jackson, The still deceived

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Brother Gums and his partner, who live in our southernmost state, Tasmania, often give me books by local writers, many of whom I may not easily come across on “the mainland”. Their offering last Christmas was one of these, The still deceived, a collection of poems by Ginny Jackson. It was published by one of Australia’s wonderful, small independent presses, the Ginninderra Press. Tragically, Jackson died before the book was launched, though she did, I am told, see a copy. The cover image is a somewhat cryptic lithograph titled “High noses” by Jackson – a talented woman clearly – and the cover design is by her son Evan Dowling.

The title is that of the last poem of the book, and it puts a seal on the overall theme of the collection which has to do with the challenges we humans face in trying to understand, to make sense of, the life we find ourselves in. The last three lines are:

Even the less deceived
don’t seem to get it –
mortality, eternity.

There is a melancholic (“the slow crank of a melancholic tune”), even bleak, thread running through the poems. I don’t think this means that all the poems were written in the shadow of her imminent death. However, the last poems in the book do confront mortality head on, which could suggest that the 65 poems are presented chronologically in the order they were written. But maybe not. The idea of death is also a logical way to conclude a collection that deals, as this one does, with the challenges of existence.

And so to look at the collection a little more closely. The first poems could be loosely described as vignettes from a life though they are not so much about particular experiences as about the ideas and feelings engendered by the things we experience. The first poem, “Scientific method”, rather archly sets the scene for her exploration of the ways we humans misunderstand or misinterpret the things we see and experience:

When you’re first sent to the frontier
…
the sketches you bring back
will really be of your own world

and in doing so we “miss the hum of truths”.

The middle poems are about life cycle – about love, pregnancy, motherhood, and middle age, and about aging relatives. Some of her lightest poems are here, such as in her descriptions of babies (“Joy comes combing up your limbs” in “Baby love”) and children. “Domestic” conveys the monotony of housework in a nursery-rhyme-like jingle: “In the kitchen with the grimy doors/the pot is calling the kettle black”.

Moth (Courtesy: Myriorma, from flickr, using CC-NC-BY-SA 2.0)

Moth (Courtesy: Myriorma, from flickr, using CC-NC-BY-SA 2.0)

And then of course are the final poems which deal very specifically with death. I particularly like “Getting off the bus”:

It’s hard to get off right,
with dignity, it’s hard to leave
as they pull off from the curb,
a swaying cargo, brightly lit
of all the living, trundling on,
into their future lives.

What a devastatingly apposite image. And “Moths” whose behaviour is described as:

Like the story of this life
which flings itself at timelessness
while overhead the speedy flash
of multiple sunrises clash
with quick uncomprehended dusks.

There is a welcome and refreshing variety in the poems – in form and tone, as well as in subject. She uses rhyme at times – including, even, rhyming couplets – which provides a lovely change of pace. Much of her imagery draws from nature (“even the flight of a bee/forms a tacking jig with destiny”) and several poems describe Tasmania albeit often contrasting the power and permanence of nature (“and yet the tree’s roots grasp the rock,/the sea forever smashes on the shore”) with change wrought by humans (“where forests, still, are daily trashed”) and “our insect brevities”. But then there’s the occasional more industrial image, as in “Metal”. There are poems that don’t quite work, which may be because the image is too obscure or the logic not quite right, or simply because the connections don’t work for me. Poetry is such a personal thing. I enjoyed this collection for its world view, its intriguing imagery and the challenges it offered me.

I’m tempted to compare Jackson with Dorothy Porter who put her collection, The bee hut, together as she, too, was dying of cancer, but they are different. There’s more action and anger, and, paradoxically, also more joy in Porter’s poems, than in Jackson’s quieter, more resigned poems which see humans as either powerless (at best) or foolish (at worst). I’ll end though on a positive image. It’s a poem (“On planting”) praising trees, and it ends thus:

I wish we could all be as loyal.
If we could talk
only as that bright rush of leaves,
a haze of sun or moonlight
on our heads, softly embracing
one another and the sky.

If indeed …

The still deceived
Port Adelaide: Ginninderra Press, 2010
72pp.
ISBN: 9781740276122

Weekends with T.S. Eliot (2)

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Jeanette Winterson (b. 1959), British writer

Jeanette Winterson, 2005 (Image: Courtesy Mariusz Kubik, via Wikipedia using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

We are all everyone and everyone is us. (Fiona Shaw, talking about The waste land)

Last weekend I finished the Perspectives section of The waste land app, by listening to Fiona Shaw, Frank Turner and Jeanette Winterson. The fascinating thing is that they all say the same things, albeit in slightly different ways.

Timeless, universal, undated

Shaw talks about the timelessness of the poem, saying it doesn’t need to be brought up to date. Cities still exist, we still commute, we still visit suspect clairvoyance, she says. She also argues for its universality in the sense that we can be Hector sitting in the chair, or ourselves. We may only have one life but through poems like this we can also have many different lives. But we readers know this don’t we.

Turner’s take is a little different. He likens Bob Dylan to Eliot suggesting that both were “bottom feeders of the culture around them”. Putting it another way, he says they both have a “prophetic voice of judgement”, like prophets from the Old Testament. And you can’t get more timeless than that!

Winterson argues that Eliot, way back in 1922, saw where we were going: The waste land, she says, is “about now”, and is not “dated in any way”.

Captures the twentieth century

I love Shaw’s description that Eliot

Scraped a rake around the 20th century and gathered a leaf mould heap of what it was about.

Not bad, if you agree with her, for a poem written in the first quarter of the century.

Turner, similarly, describes the poem as “zeitgeisty”. He says Eliot identified that the forward progression that had been happening from the Renaissance to the first World War had come to an end. The waste land documents, he says, the failure of the progressive idea.

Winterson and Turner both call it a prophetic poem. While many saw a bright future after World War I, Eliot, says Winterson, saw the spiritual malaise coming. She suggests that if Eliot visited London and New York today he would not be surprised to see the economic crisis we are in, the way we have forgotten all values except “making money”.

Reinventing the language of poetry

Shaw talks of the way Eliot mixes banality (the throbbing of cities and machines) with lyricism (“the violet hour” for example). Turner, likewise, talks of how Eliot’s language can be angular and uncomfortable, and then suddenly be intersected with something lyrical, with more traditional “poesy”. Winterson articulates all this beautifully by describing how Eliot recognised (consciously or unconsciously?) that the language of poetry needed replenishing. He used, she says, fresh, direct, colloquial language, “the language of the everyday” to express “eternal things, the big ideas”.

As I listened to these various perspectives and how each saw the relevance of The waste land to now, I wondered whether it has been continuously relevant over the nearly 90 years since it was published – and somehow I think it has been. World War 2, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the troubles in Ireland, not to mention strife in the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa and South America. Even when on the surface – as in the 1920s – life has seemed comfortable for many, there has been something not quite right, and so:

What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
(from “V. What the thunder said”)

I’ll just leave it at that.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Australian Poetry Library (online)

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Henry Lawson

Henry Lawson, circa 1902. (Presumed Public from the Sydney University library, via Wikipedia)

It seems appropriate now, when I’ve been exploring the iPad app for TS Eliot‘s The waste land, to introduce the Australian Poetry Library website that was launched in late May. Essentially a digital library, it contains over 42,000 poems from over 170 poets. That’s a pretty good start, particularly when the poets range from pioneers like Henry Lawson to current poets like Les Murray, Tracy Ryan and Alan Gould (whose novel, The lakewoman, I reviewed recently).

The home page is clean and bright, if a little busy. Here is the main content (of which some is dynamic ensuring new content for each return visit):

  • Talking poetry: a selection of poems. Click on a poem and you are taken to a page for that poem where you can hear it read, and follow further navigational links. When I looked at it today, two of the six poems were by Gould, and one was by Rosemary Dobson whose late husband used to work in the office next door to mine (way back when). These readings must surely engage more people in poetry.
  • Featured glossary term: a definition of a poetic term – sestina when I looked – plus the opportunity, a click away, to explore the glossary further. I can see myself checking this out in future.
  • Features: a selection of poets. Click on a poet and you are taken to his/her page containing an image; a biography, bibliography and a further reading list; and a list of poems that you can click on to read. I would love it if the further readings – particularly journal articles – were hyperlinked to the full content, but I didn’t find any that were. I expect copyright is an issue.
  • Review: a review of a poem
  • Poems: a couple of poems from the site
  • Themes and occasions: a list of categories to help find poems on likely topics such as Animal poems, Anniversary poems, Love poems and so on. A nice idea.
  • Poetic forms: a list of forms and styles, such as Iambic Foot, Haiku, that can be clicked on for a definition. (Strangely, the clicked-to page contains some empty clickable headings for titles, surname, and first name, as well as the definition.)
  • Search

There are also useful menu bars/tabs. The main one for the site contains the following self-explanatory options regarding the content: Home, Poets, Poems, Guest collections. The other is geared to the users of the site: For teachers, Glossary, Poetry resources, FAQ and My selections. Overall, the site is easy to navigate, and should appeal to (and be useful for) the general public, educators and students, and the poets themselves.

So that’s the rundown. It’s a lovely site. I checked for several poets and most of them were there – with access to extensive lists of their poems. For Geoff Page, whose verse novel The scarring I reviewed here, there are 857 poems. That alone would keep me well occupied for the next little while! But, not all poets are there. Bruce Dawe and Kevin Hart, for example, are not. Chances are, as the FAQs tell us, this is because permission was not given (by the poet, or the publisher, or whoever owns those rights) to reproduce the poems. This is a POETRY not simply a POET site, so providing the poems is integral – and must have been a challenge to negotiate. The site does, however, allow for some monies to be paid to the poets, when visitors to the site choose to download their “My selections”.

There is an issue though regarding updating. According to the FAQs, no more poems are being added at present. They say: “It is intended that subject to funding, the editorial team will open the site for inclusion of more poetry”. This runs a little counter to the media release on the site’s launch. It says: “The site will continue adding new poets as well as critical and contextual material including interviews, photographs and audio/visual recordings which will be a boon for students, teachers and other researchers.” Hmm … according to this release, the project received the highest ever ARC Linkage Grant for a humanities project and yet, ongoing funding is clearly an issue. I do hope that this great start is not all it is!

And now, just because I do like a bit of nonsense, and because this poem is about poetry and is out of copyright, I’m going to end with “Who wrote the Shakespere plays”, by W.T. Goodge (1862-1909):

No lover of poetry, I,
For the qualification is lacking,
And indeed it were vain to deny
That I couldn’t tell Browning from Blacking.

But Shakespere’s the author, I’ll vow,
And nothing my faith can be shakin’,
For it would be ridiculous, now,
If we talked about “Lamb’s Tales of Bacon”.

With thanks to Lisa of ANZLitLovers for drawing my attention to this site.

Weekends with TS Eliot

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Reading TS Eliot's SELECTED POEMS

Reading TS Eliot's Selected poems (Image: Courtesy RubyGoes via Flickr, using CC-BY 2.0)

Breakfast in bed is my weekend treat. It’s when I kick back with a book and simply relax – except this weekend and last I kicked back instead with my iPad and app for TS Eliot‘s The waste land. What fun I am having and intend to have over a few more weekends.

So, what have I been doing?

Fiona Shaw’s performance

Well, last weekend I pottered around the app checking out what’s there and how to navigate it, trying a couple of the readings (but not listening to the whole), and so on. And then I listened to/watched Fiona Shaw‘s performance of the poem. This is a performance rather than a reading. She uses gesture and limited movement (around the upper storey room in a house in Dublin somewhere) to convey the drama, humour and mystery of this rather tricky poem. If you hold the iPad in landscape orientation, Fiona Shaw’s performance fills the screen. However, if you rotate it to portrait orientation, the poem appears below the image with the text synchronised to the performance. This is what I did and, being a textual person, I preferred it this way. I loved seeing the words played out on the screen – and she was almost word-perfect.  I didn’t time it properly but it took, I’d say, 15-20 mins. I’d recommend this as a good way to start re-acquainting yourself with the poem if, like me, it’s been an embarrassing number of decades since you last read it.

Perspectives, from Seamus Heaney, Paul Keegan, Jim McCue and Craig Raine

I said above that I am a textual person and that’s true but, paradoxically I suppose, the thing that most grabs when I’m reading is rhythm and sound (something I’m loving in my current read, Kim Scott‘s That deadman dance, but that’s for later). And so, I have always loved TS Eliot:

In the room women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo
(from ‘The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock”)

And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots.
(from “Preludes”)

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
[…]
This is the dead land
This is the cactus land
(from, of course, “The hollow men”)

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
(from “W. What the thunder said” in The waste land)

…  and so on. Staccato or sing-song, repetition or not, rhyming or not. It gets into your bones.

This weekend I decided to explore the Perspectives section of the app which is where various luminaries talk about aspects of Eliot and the poem. I listened to/watched Irish poet Seamus Heaney, poetry editor from Faber and Faber Paul Keegan, Eliot expert Jim McCue, and English poet and academic Craig Raine …. and I gained some new perspectives! I’m not going to comment on all they say since you really should explore this app yourself (if, that is, you have access to an iPad). I’ll just focus on an aspect that most comment on, one way or another – Eliot and sound.

Heaney comments on the “musicality” of the poem. Paul Keegan goes a little further. He suggests that
“acoustic things, tonalities” are what attracts people more, today, to the poem than the “monolithic meanings”. These “acoustic things” though do convey meaning, don’t they, particularly when the allusions elude us. I do not, I admit, “get” all the allusions, but I love the sound of the poem and can sense his concerns even if I may not be able to articulate them in an analytical way.

Somewhat related to this, Keegan argues that Eliot showed it was possible for a poet to write without knowing exactly what larger meanings he was conveying. He suggests that Eliot didn’t necessarily know what he was getting off his chest and that he was more interested in “what poems do than in what they say”. This rather ties back to sound doesn’t it? Or, it does for me. What his poems “do” to me is complex – they move me emotionally but can often mystify me intellectually. They can sound at times like nonsense and yet you “feel” or “hear” something profound. How does he do that? Anyhow, Keegan expands his point, suggesting that Eliot’s poetry encouraged a new fearlessness about poetry “having to make sense, forensic sense”. It freed up, he says, some of those questions*.

Jim McCue’s contribution is a short but interesting one on the history of the poem’s publication. And then, Craig Raine takes up the sound issue again, but from a slightly different perspective. He describes Eliot, the American born English poet, as, really, a world citizen. The waste land is full of “voices” – something conveyed well by Shaw in her performance – from around the world including, most obviously, Germany, France and India. It’s like, Raine says, changing the radio dial (which was still a fairly new technology then.) He also describes the poem as “a fantastic operatic selection”, a not surprising description, I suppose, for a poem which Eliot considered titling “He do the police in different voices”!**

A technical (sort of) note

The app doesn’t always behave exactly as I would expect or like. Changing the orientation will sometimes bring a surprising result and take you away from where you were. It’s not hard to get back as there’s always the Home icon available at the bottom, but it can be disconcerting.

* I will though come back to meaning in my next post after I’ve finished the “Perspectives” section of this App.
** From Dickens’ Our mutual friend

Monday musings on Australian literature: Contemporary poetry and music

/ Whispering Gums / 13 Comments

telegrams tremble like leaves from a wintering tree
and the spider grief swings in his bitter geometry
– they’re bringing them home, now, too late, too early.
(from “Homecoming” by Bruce Dawe)

Last night I was lucky enough to attend a private function at which a small, local, male a capella group, the Pocket Score Company, performed. Their repertoire is primarily early music (medieval and Renaissance) but last night they also sang one modern composition set to a poem by Australian poet Bruce Dawe. The poem, bitterly titled “Homecoming” (1968), is about the bodies of soldiers being brought home from Vietnam. The composer is, I believe, Philip Griffin. As far as I can work out, he was born in England, grew up in Western Australia and now lives in New Zealand but info about him is pretty minimal.

My main point here, though, is not Philip Griffin but the close relationship between poetry and music. I often hear people who love to read say they’d like to read poetry, particularly contemporary poetry, but find it difficult … and it sure can be, but, set to music, poetry can suddenly become way more comprehensible. There is a lot of synergy between poetry and music – just think ballads, for a start – and I have touched on the poetry-music relationship in past posts on musical ensembles. Today, though, I decided to do a quick Internet search to see what else I could find. One exciting idea I discovered was the Pure Poetry Project  which was established by Bronwyn Blaiklock and the Ballarat Writers Inc.

The first Pure Poetry event occurred in 2004 and focused on the performance of new poetry and new music rather than expressly requiring a crossover between the two. However, this year, it was decided to specifically encourage integration between the two art forms:

selected poets and composers have been asked to write specific new works in a two-part process. In the first part composers have been asked to musically respond to recently written poems, whilst poets have been asked to respond to recently composed works. The second part of the process is more of a direct collaboration where poet and composer work together to create a new work. (Anthony Lyons, composer)

The recital took place in May this year, in Ballarat. It sounds like an exciting event and I would love to have been there.

Australian poet Les Murray, photographed at hi...

Les Murray, 2004 (Courtesy: Brian Jenkins, using CC-BY 3.0, via Wikipedia)

Another exciting project combining contemporary poetry and music is that between The Song Company (whom I’ve reviewed here before) and Australian poet Les Murray, in which composers from around the world have set selected Murray poems to music. One of the composers, Andrew Ford, asked Murray many years ago about an early collaboration with the Song Company and his view on the relationship between poetry and music. Murray said:

… My wife’s very musical, and some of the family are, and I think all of the Murrays believe that music was the art that mattered. I’ve always had rather a poor ear I think and tried to make music out of words. But I have this instinct to stretch words out to the edge, where they start crumbling away in music. […] I’d love to write a good song, and particularly a good hymn before I check out of this profession. But yes, we’re all hovering on the edge of music, we’re always hovering on the edge of all the other arts I guess. Dance, for one; a lot of dance underlies poetry.

Finally, another musical ensemble I have reviewed here before, the Griffyn Ensemble, also regularly performs modern poetry set to music, and sometimes poetry recited alongside music, at their concerts.

None of these ideas are new of course. Poetry has been set to music for centuries and it clearly still is – but it can be hard to find, party because it may not be promoted as such. I’d love to hear of other collaborations and events, in Australia or elsewhere.