A Favourite Poet

Right away, I’m struggling with the brief. Perusing the collections in my bookcase I can possibly narrow it down to five. Robert Lowell, Philip Larkin, Sharon Olds, Robert Hass, Michael Donaghy, and that’s just the ones on the top shelf. Truth be told there’s not many poets I dislike, and those I do are mostly contemporaries. For those versifiers I love are either well-established or dead. Many of in which I found by chance, in anthologies like Bloodaxe’s Being Human for instance, or the Penguin Book of American Verse, all of which has led me to some wonderful finds (with the exception of Larkin all of the poets mentioned above). 

If I ever feel my poetic soul is lacking, and the muse is missing, I return to these anthologies. My go to favourite being Contemporary American Poetry edited by A.Poulin and Michael Waters. A book dating from the early nineties. My own copy which is missing a cover and defaced in marginalia is beside me currently. Each and everyone of the seventy poets included have one time or another been my favourite.

I open the book at random to rediscover a gem, C.K. Williams. An American poet who died in 2015 is the eponymous master of the long line, with a standard line being between twelve to twenty syllables. Verging on the prosaic, Williams is a plain spoken philosopher in disguise (an oxymoron I know). In the vein of his namesake and fellow New Jerseyan native William Carlos Williams his voice is simple, his poems plenty, and every inch of his stylistic voice is permeated with the tint of dread: “They are poured into the earth / like nails; move an inch, / they are driven down again. / The earth is sore with them.” 

C. K. Williams

Williams' biggest theme is suffering, especially from those outliers of society: the homeless, the dispossessed etc. He explores their plight, but shy’s away from pontificating. He is a philosopher without a system, merely content just to tell us a story. I get my narrative drive from him. 

There’s no single anthologised poem Williams is known by (maybe The Gas Station). My personal favourite being the poem She, Though from his 1993 collection Some of The Forms Of Jealousy, a twelve page epic, about a pseudo artist, and the couple they attach themselves too. It’s a poem about inspiration and sacrifice and off course jealousy. It reminds me of another blissfully bleak story in Michael Donaghy’s poem Black Ice And Rain. 

There’s nothing I can take out of context from She, Though without wrecking it, so I’m going to close my eyes turn a page and bring down my finger: 

'I’d believed that art was everything, the final resolution of all my insecu-

                rity and strivings. 

Now I realised that in attempting to create a character in art, someone who 

                would live for art, 

I’d turned away from something in myself, some lapse I hadn’t glimpsed, 

                and, more shocking still, 

I knew that architecture, poetry, and painting weren’t the self-containing 

                glories I’d imagined, 

but that they, too, could have evasions lurking in them, grievous cosmic 

                flinching from reality. 

Art wasn’t everything, nothing could be everything, but more crucially, 

                art needed you:' 

Needing art, I flip the book to another favourite.

Jamie.

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Being Human

It seems only right that I asked my daughter, Raven, to join me on the blog this week.  She memorised the eponymous poem some time ago but most of it has now been replaced in her head by less useful material such as the periodic table, quotes from Supernatural and unforgettable scenes from fanfiction.  Personally, I think if your name is Poe you're going to write poetry.  Likewise, if your name is Raven you're going to rave, or make a lot of noise, or scare sickly writers.  Something like that.

Raven decided to honour 'he of the macabre symbol' with this poem:

Poe

Edgar Allen Poe quoth the word nevermore
Eighty five years before the Second World War
Wed his sickly cousin, who was only thirteen
Then killed off his players like young Usher Madeline.
Renowned world wide as an author workaholic
But also for his tenancy as demon alcoholic.
His image is iconic, as is his facial fur
His hands were always busy with ink or liqueur.
Til his untimely demise put a stop to his quill
Discovered in the early hours of Boston's autumn chill.


And from the words of a long dead poet inspiring a young, new poet to a very short review of something equally wonderful.  Last night David Riley and I drove to Manchester University to see the staging of Neil Astley's incredibly popular poetry collection, Being Human.  Three players took to an economical set to perform a selection of poems from the anthology.  If you want to read what the audiences and critics have said, go here. I don't think the praise goes far enough.  David and I are ruined for poetic performances for the foreseeable future.  Je ne regrette rien.

Being Human: Poetry in Performance is like a concentration of every momentous life event from birth to death, wrapped up in all those quiet moments, the shrieks and the murmurs.  It pulls in love and war, fear and hope and it reminds at every moment what it is to be human, to share this experience of living.  These powerful, rich, poignant, careful poems are embodied by the players so that the emotions are raw and close.  I cried several times.  I cried out of sadness, at the futility of war and harm, I cried at the beauty of the human condition, at the depth of loss and at the empathy which reminds us that we are the same for all our differences.  More than anything else, this performance nourished me to my core.  I can still feel its warmth at my centre.

Put simply, I cannot recommend this highly enough.  This is exactly what poetry in performance should do.  Every word was clear and every image delivered with a simple honesty.  I can honestly say I understood every poem.  One piece, an excerpt from Turkish Poet Edip Cansever's Table, was performed several times with a different emphasis on each occasion.  The poem is about life and what we choose to put on our table.  By performing it with a positive slant, then with an angry attitude and finally as a group performance, an extra dimension was added to that poem which neatly summed up the idea that life is what you make of it.  Both David and I were moved by Doris Kareva's poem, Shape of Time, and its hopeful message of unity.  There wasn't a dull moment in the hour long event.

If you want to see how powerful poetry is.  If you want to know how poetry must be performed.  If you want to know what binds us and why we need each other.  If you are breathing.  You must see this performance.  You'll have to travel a bit further to catch it next but trust me on this, it is absolutely worth the journey. 

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