Too Hot
And it really is. It's pretty much as hot as it was when K- and I were on a week's holiday in Seville, about this time last year - only in that location the pressure of work was off and afternoon siestas and lots of rest in general, not to mention air conditioning, was definitely on. I had planned to stay at home, continuing anthology formatting at the kitchen table, while Ebony remained for the most part flopped at my feet. However an email arrived concerning paperwork which necessitated me making my way in to a hot airless office and corridor albeit only for a brief circuit of photocopies and stoppoffs. Too hot, really. Back home I sat on the bed and a little squirrel suddenly appeared outside the broad glass door. One wonders what wildlife will appear next - foxes, frogs, squirrels, and of course cats, so far, and counting.
Pleased I had to go into work though as I picked up the latest Poetry Review which awaited me in the post room. Lots in it that needs a proper read but I was amused by the Wendy Cope poems. Now I like Wendy Cope and find her enormously useful for teaching poetic forms - villanelles, haiku, sonnets, limericks et al proliferate in Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis and the subsequent Serious Concerns. Interestingly, another woman poet for forms I find is Sylvia Plath, rather to my own surprise, but that's a different story altogether. Here in the 'Cosmopolis' Edition of the Review Cope has three poems; one a triolet which promises to be a useful compliment to the Cope example I already use ('I used to think all poets were Byronic/ Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know/ And then I met a few. Yes, it's ironic/ They're mostly wicked as a ginless tonic...') but also a little snipe on the poetic avant garde and their demand for complex, over rigorous aesthetics:
I've little patience with this kind of thing -
This trite, post-modern, easy listening.
I hoped for something far more challenging.
This isn't avant-garde enough.
It simply isn't hard enough.
It isn't avant-garde enough for me
('The Radical'; first stanza)
The implication is that aesthetic or general readerly satisfaction is lost - for Cope's speaker at least - if they are denied the challenge of readerly puzzling over the meaning of the presented text. Later the poem identifies the need for the writer to agonise/ antagonise too - so a positive, universalist outlook isn't really expected after such poetic ruminations.
Oh dear. I remember, inconsequentially enough although I will be writing more about Fr Robert next week, speaking to an old priest in Norwich, years ago, about our respective secular (well, that's open to debate) passions - poetry and maths. Fr Robert confessed a liking for a tough mathematical challenge, even as a nonogenerian. In his earlier life he had taught maths at Westminster School to the likes of Tony Benn. I said that I had for many years felt the same about poetry - I liked a compact text I could puzzle over, draw out the nuances of; enjoy the musicality of and sometimes putting aside my stoked-up hunger for semantic interpretation. The wise priest laughed at this, eyes twinking.
I suppose that I have tried to offer work in this field in at least 50% of my own poems. And I would always argue that the role of poetry is to push language beyond its comfort zone, to forge new figures of speech and resonant connections and musical cadences which challenge and feel right too. I'm not sure I've ever deliberately done 'difficult' in the sense of deliberately compact coded meaning for a postgrade to dissect and write their Master's on one day: only the damned clever need apply. I'm interested in but not entirely convinced by Geoffrey Hill's claim that 'that which is difficult/ preserves democracy'; though he is a profound and formidable poet.
It's a much more intuitive process than that. Listening with the inner ear for what sounds and sense(s)are there and can be drawn into a harmony which is not too sweet but not discordant misery either. Oh but it's easy to talk about it. Much harder to put into poetic practice, whether avant-garde practice or not.
Pleased I had to go into work though as I picked up the latest Poetry Review which awaited me in the post room. Lots in it that needs a proper read but I was amused by the Wendy Cope poems. Now I like Wendy Cope and find her enormously useful for teaching poetic forms - villanelles, haiku, sonnets, limericks et al proliferate in Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis and the subsequent Serious Concerns. Interestingly, another woman poet for forms I find is Sylvia Plath, rather to my own surprise, but that's a different story altogether. Here in the 'Cosmopolis' Edition of the Review Cope has three poems; one a triolet which promises to be a useful compliment to the Cope example I already use ('I used to think all poets were Byronic/ Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know/ And then I met a few. Yes, it's ironic/ They're mostly wicked as a ginless tonic...') but also a little snipe on the poetic avant garde and their demand for complex, over rigorous aesthetics:
I've little patience with this kind of thing -
This trite, post-modern, easy listening.
I hoped for something far more challenging.
This isn't avant-garde enough.
It simply isn't hard enough.
It isn't avant-garde enough for me
('The Radical'; first stanza)
The implication is that aesthetic or general readerly satisfaction is lost - for Cope's speaker at least - if they are denied the challenge of readerly puzzling over the meaning of the presented text. Later the poem identifies the need for the writer to agonise/ antagonise too - so a positive, universalist outlook isn't really expected after such poetic ruminations.
Oh dear. I remember, inconsequentially enough although I will be writing more about Fr Robert next week, speaking to an old priest in Norwich, years ago, about our respective secular (well, that's open to debate) passions - poetry and maths. Fr Robert confessed a liking for a tough mathematical challenge, even as a nonogenerian. In his earlier life he had taught maths at Westminster School to the likes of Tony Benn. I said that I had for many years felt the same about poetry - I liked a compact text I could puzzle over, draw out the nuances of; enjoy the musicality of and sometimes putting aside my stoked-up hunger for semantic interpretation. The wise priest laughed at this, eyes twinking.
I suppose that I have tried to offer work in this field in at least 50% of my own poems. And I would always argue that the role of poetry is to push language beyond its comfort zone, to forge new figures of speech and resonant connections and musical cadences which challenge and feel right too. I'm not sure I've ever deliberately done 'difficult' in the sense of deliberately compact coded meaning for a postgrade to dissect and write their Master's on one day: only the damned clever need apply. I'm interested in but not entirely convinced by Geoffrey Hill's claim that 'that which is difficult/ preserves democracy'; though he is a profound and formidable poet.
It's a much more intuitive process than that. Listening with the inner ear for what sounds and sense(s)are there and can be drawn into a harmony which is not too sweet but not discordant misery either. Oh but it's easy to talk about it. Much harder to put into poetic practice, whether avant-garde practice or not.
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