Month: November 2012

Poetry Book Society; free membership and free competition for students

Sue Watling Poetry competitions , ,

The Poetry Book Society*  is offering free membership to students in UK higher education. Members have access to an online version of the Bulletin, the PBS quarterly review as well as 25% discount on books. The Society is currently inviting entries to its first Student Poetry Competition.  The closing date is 5th December 2012 and will be judged by George Szirtes winner of the 2004 T S Eliot prize  for his collection Reel.  All that’s needed is to select student from the online membership form and attach a digital photo of a current student card.

*The Poetry Book Society was founded in 1953 by T S Eliot and friends to ‘propagate the art of poetry’ by bringing the best new poetry to readers.

the power of love versus poetry

Sue Watling Defining Poetry, Poets Past and Present , , ,

Valerie Eliot 1926 – 2012

T S and Valerie Eliot

When Valerie Fletcher married T S Eliot the poetry stopped. He was 68. She was 31. They appear to have been happy but there was no more poetry. The Waste Land,  The Four Quartets  and with the rest of Eliot’’s modernist output were all written earlier. Biographical details on the life of T S Eliot are scattered across the internet and make it tempting to connect the poetry and psyche. Maybe we can only write our best when we are in difficult relationships or situations and shows how poetry requires tapping into the deeper layers; the universal experiences of grief and angst. Or do we simply get old. And what about love?

 What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

 The Waste Land. I The Burial of the Dead

 

Poetry for Remembrance

Sue Watling Defining Poetry, War Poetry , , , ,

Poppies photographed by Sue Watling

D-Day veteran Dennis B Wilson, nearly 70 years after writing poems on the front line, has published  Elegy of a Common Soldier, a book of WW2 poetry.   The website http://dennisbwilson.com contains Mr Wilson’s Plea for ‘Real’ Poetry where he describes modern poetry as ‘incomprehensible to all but a few’.

‘It seems to me to be completely pointless, and a waste of time, to write something that no one else can understand.  A poet is only completely successful if he has awakened in the mind of the reader an echo of his or her own emotional experiences, who may not themselves have been able to put their feelings into words.  I believe that modern poetry shares with modern art the operation of the ‘Emperor’s clothes syndrome,’ whereby many of its adherents do not really understand it but are unwilling to admit their ignorance in case they are thought to be stupid or uninformed.’

Poetry may be one of the most contextual of arts.  While the universality of thoughts, feelings and emotions provide common threads from Catallus to the current day, social influence changes. It helps to read poetry with a sense of the environment it was written in. Challenged by early 20th century modernism, poetic style has been freed from traditional restraints, and for many this is a deterrent to engaging with poetry. For Wilson, modern poetry is not poetry.

‘ It seems to me that to write a passage of prose and then divide it into broken lines at the whim of the writer, (which I assume to be the process involved), presents no difficulty.’

Instead, he calls for a return to metrics.

‘The true poet… has to write his thoughts in words of the correct number of syllables, with the accent in the right places, in a recognizable metric form and, (usually), with words that rhyme where needed’.

Defining poetry is not easy. Like most modern art forms, high degrees of subjectivity can be involved in naming and labelling words as poems. On days like today, 11 November, Armistice Day, the context is paramount.  Poetry for Remembrance provides one of the finest definitions of all.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

From For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon 

Bring on the poems…

Sue Watling Poetry and Higher Education , ,

The Council for the Defence of British Universities  have formed a coalition to defend universities against the erosion of academic freedom and the marketisation of higher education. They are highlighting the lack of space in the curriculum for ideas.

There’s no better way to introduce creative and critical thinking than poetry.

Too many people say they don’t like poetry but this often derives from misconceptions of what poetry is. Too much early exposure to historical poets writing in different times and cultures can be off-putting. Poetry needs a new image. Song lyrics are poetry set to music as are hip hop and reggae. Advertising and marketing slogans are poetry. If education is about stretching boundaries and having different ways of looking at the world, then education needs to include poetry.

Poetry offers alternative ways of seeing, subversion with language, opportunities to try doing something differently, being brave, being creative, having fun.

Poetry is the search for original imaginative use of metaphors, similes  clichés. In poetry, every word matters; it teaches vocabulary, editing, rhythm, structure. What’s not to like?  Sites like Poetry Archive  and The Poetry Foundation offer free access to poetry. It’s the only way forward. Bring on the poems.

visual or oral, how do you prefer yours?

Sue Watling Uncategorized ,

Is poetry best read in solitude or listened to in public?  How do you prefer yours? Visual? Audio? The Guardian piece Deconstructing poetry on the radio asks if discussing poetry can make a good radio programmes.  This raises interesting questions about interpretation and resonance. Is the potential effect of a poem diluted by not having the visual structure and word pattern on the page? Do assonance and alliteration benefit most from sound or vision? Or does it all depend on the poem or poet?

Radio 4’s Poetry Workshop returned on Sunday 4th November. In it, Ruth Padel travels around the country visiting local poetry groups and inviting people to read aloud their poems for discussion.  It’s a bit like a book club but you bring your own work. The application to DIY to poetry education. ‘Fathers’ was the theme for poems in the first programme while the technical issue was ‘line breaks’. Prose rarely have to worry about line breaks but when it comes to rhyme and rhythm the line break takes on an importance of its own. Removing or adding line breaks can change not only the look but also the feel of a poem whether it’s on the page or being recited.  Poetry Workshop offers free access to auditory power of poetry and is well worth the experience.  Broadcast at 4.30pm on Sundays, it’s repeated at 11.30pm the following Saturday or available on iplayer