Watery Words
Well I’ve had better weeks to be honest – so much teaching with an avalanche of mid term marking and MA dissertations to turn around too, and one’s barrel gets pretty full. On top of this I’ve been dealing with last-minute editorial glitches on our creative writing anthology, including one particular editorial slip that was entirely my fault. Hopefully, caught and dealt with in time for the launch, but inevitably adding to anxiety levels. Keeping one’s nerve – carrying on – that’s the biggest challenge of all. Chatting in some haste (can one chat in haste?) to a colleague in the photocopy room, we found ourselves quoting Beckett: I can’t go on, I’ll go on. It really does feel like that sometimes, doesn’t it? And a bad idea to wish one’s life away at any stage I know, but because of the immense pressures of the teaching term I can’t help feeling sort of pleased as the hours and days and weeks melt away, gradually but continuously, towards Christmas. Drop by drop into eternity.
Meanwhile the weather has deteriorated considerably, with thundery rain much of the working week and today too. Donner and Blitzen seemed unsettled, dashing out and back through the catflap in the kitchen and treading their muddy wet paws into the lino, carpets, and, I regret to report, a certain amount of academic paperwork too. I am reminded of the class I take on Tuesday nights, an introductory level creative writing group, where this week we were discussing plot creation and the importance of asking ‘what if?’ – the generic story and scenario-creating prompt. What if, what if. I have the students jot down as many what if ideas as they could in five minutes, from the subtle and delicate (she missed the bus, he lost the letter) to the cosmic and preposterous (aliens land). What if it rained and never stopped raining, someone asked. Indeed. A new Flood, a twenty-first century watery apocalypse. We would all be cast back into the ocean.
With this background I have been reading a lovely MA Dissertation this afternoon – it would be unethical to quote author and title but it is all to do with the ocean, and poetry of the ocean. As a creative writing project is comprises mainly new, original work, but also contains an interesting reflective essay. As the student is Greek she draws on her own poetic heritage, particularly the work of Odysseus Elytis, someone new to my own poetic reading. Here, lest I forget it, is an example from ‘Aegean’ (translated and available in an Anvil Selected Poems) :
Playthings, the waters
In their shadowy flow
Speak with their kisses about the dawn
That begins
Horizoning –
And the pigeons in their cave
Rustle their wings
Blue awakening in the source
Of day
Sun-
…
Waves in the light
Revive the eyes
Where life sails towards
The recognition
Life –
Something lucid and intensely beautiful in these lines, I think. I like the elision of the pigeon wings with the rustling of the waves, as though an imagist-like fusing of two distinct observations is taking place, and the hidden affinities of the world brought to light in language. And indeed Elytis is praised for a metaphysical dimension to his writing, elevating the world of the senses ‘to a level that is sacred’. ‘Such a metamorphosis not only resolves apparent dissonances but also makes it possible for one element in the poet’s inner and outer landscape to become another – a morning’s mood a tree, summer a naked youth, a girl an orange’ (from the introductory essay by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard). It is not the case that the ocean subsumes all so much as helps transform and connect in its shadowy flow, its elemental play. Of course this is the sunlit world of the Mediterranean, not the pelting rain of north London in November. But it offers a glimpse of a kind of connectivity and buoyancy that I would do well to remember in squally storms ahead.
Meanwhile the weather has deteriorated considerably, with thundery rain much of the working week and today too. Donner and Blitzen seemed unsettled, dashing out and back through the catflap in the kitchen and treading their muddy wet paws into the lino, carpets, and, I regret to report, a certain amount of academic paperwork too. I am reminded of the class I take on Tuesday nights, an introductory level creative writing group, where this week we were discussing plot creation and the importance of asking ‘what if?’ – the generic story and scenario-creating prompt. What if, what if. I have the students jot down as many what if ideas as they could in five minutes, from the subtle and delicate (she missed the bus, he lost the letter) to the cosmic and preposterous (aliens land). What if it rained and never stopped raining, someone asked. Indeed. A new Flood, a twenty-first century watery apocalypse. We would all be cast back into the ocean.
With this background I have been reading a lovely MA Dissertation this afternoon – it would be unethical to quote author and title but it is all to do with the ocean, and poetry of the ocean. As a creative writing project is comprises mainly new, original work, but also contains an interesting reflective essay. As the student is Greek she draws on her own poetic heritage, particularly the work of Odysseus Elytis, someone new to my own poetic reading. Here, lest I forget it, is an example from ‘Aegean’ (translated and available in an Anvil Selected Poems) :
Playthings, the waters
In their shadowy flow
Speak with their kisses about the dawn
That begins
Horizoning –
And the pigeons in their cave
Rustle their wings
Blue awakening in the source
Of day
Sun-
…
Waves in the light
Revive the eyes
Where life sails towards
The recognition
Life –
Something lucid and intensely beautiful in these lines, I think. I like the elision of the pigeon wings with the rustling of the waves, as though an imagist-like fusing of two distinct observations is taking place, and the hidden affinities of the world brought to light in language. And indeed Elytis is praised for a metaphysical dimension to his writing, elevating the world of the senses ‘to a level that is sacred’. ‘Such a metamorphosis not only resolves apparent dissonances but also makes it possible for one element in the poet’s inner and outer landscape to become another – a morning’s mood a tree, summer a naked youth, a girl an orange’ (from the introductory essay by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard). It is not the case that the ocean subsumes all so much as helps transform and connect in its shadowy flow, its elemental play. Of course this is the sunlit world of the Mediterranean, not the pelting rain of north London in November. But it offers a glimpse of a kind of connectivity and buoyancy that I would do well to remember in squally storms ahead.
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