The Poetry Room

Behind all ideas is a field.
Meet me there.
Rumi

Our last session of the season in the Poetry Room was extremely summery, festive and friendly – almost as if it were the group’s birthday and everyone very happy to celebrate the past 18 months and the news that we can carry on for the next 2 years. We ate and drank and laughed and cried as everyone shared with the group one of their favourite poems (an almost impossible task, as we all agreed) – from 6th century BC China to a spanking new poet from Salt, covering the gamut of stirring political pieces, steamy love poems and inspiring reminders of what is important.

We gathered feedback at the end to pass on to New Writing North. If you weren’t able to attend last night but have something to say about the sessions – what you like/things that don’t work for you – do post something here or contact Olivia at NWN directly. We mooted the possibility of looking at the TS Eliot Prize shortlist in the autumn and folk seemed excited at the prospect. Looking forward to it already.

Meanwhile here’s a list of the work that was read last night – all cracking good poems and worth looking at again. Many many thanks to all of you who have made the Poetry Room such a vibrant success. We’ll keep you posted about our starting date in September/October. Till then, have a wonderful summer. xxx

Geography Lesson – Carol Rumens
Poem for the Rooftops of Iran – via YouTube
Lupins – Seamus Heaney
Shema – Primo Levi, Faber edition
Tao Te Ching, No. 58, translated by Stephen Mitchell
Podding Peas - Valeria Melchioretto, published by Salt
To My Mother – George Barker
Wild Geese – Mary Oliver
Skeins of Geese – Kathleen Jamie
Old Crofter – Norman MacCaig
Sonnet 17 – Pablo Neruda, from 100 Love Sonnets, trans. Stephen Tapscott
‘Lovers think they are looking for each other’ - Rumi
The Bait – John Donne
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning – John Donne
The Moth – Miroslav Holub
Tuesday June 4, 1991 – Billy Collins

(Apologies for any errors that might have surfaced in the transcription.)

John Donne appeared twice over the course of the evening but Rumi was quoted three times… so it seems only right to give him the last word:

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.

Thirteen of us met to read and discuss TS Eliot’s The Waste Land & Other Poems. It was a stirring night – most people there had strong feelings about Eliot, and The Waste Land in particular. Even though no one was willing to admit they ‘understood’ the poem, we were all happy to appreciate its power, its sonority and the impact of its stark disjunctions. Testament to the fact that a good poem can’t be paraphrasable into prose and that, however depressing the subject matter, the art of it is transformed into something inspiring and beautiful.

We began with hearing everyone’s initial responses to the book – mostly all positive, even if slightly confounded. A recording of Eliot himself reading Journey of the Magi quickly got us in the mood – his voice so cultivated and precise, failing to declare his American origins. We admired the poem’s striking details, almost journalistic in their matter of factness, and then the stunning ending - ‘this Birth was/Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.’

In an attempt to avoid becoming lost in the labyrinth of notes and allusions in The Waste Land, we read the poem in ensemble choral fashion to hear the richness of the sounds, the closely woven texture of the multiple voices. Eliot made a special appearance for A Game of Chess, playing with the voices in the pub, funny and horrific at the same time, catching us between laughter and tears. Everyone appreciated the chance to directly inhabit the words themselves rather than staying on the outside, struggling to make sense of a poem that defies reason and analysis; at Eliot’s own admission he’d sent readers on ‘a wild goose chase’ with the notes, added to fill out the first edition. Later he also declared the poem was less ‘an important bit of social criticism’ than ‘the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling’ and much of his later work was more thoroughly aligned towards tradition in both content and subject matter.

Nevertheless, in 1922 The Waste Land caught the mood of a world shocked by what WWI had unleashed, ready for the cultural changes expressed in Modernism. As change seems to keep on happening, it continues to be relevant in our current uncertain times. The critic IA Richards said it is ‘a perfect emotive description of a state of mind which is probably inevitable for a while to all meditative people’.

The evening was particularly invigorating – our oldest poet so far seemed to elicit a different response than some of the newer contemporary poets. Here there was familiarity, the sense of spending time with an old friend, the pleasure of revisiting our own and literature’s past, aware how closely they’re woven together.

Next time in the Poetry Room, Anna will be taking us through another classic collection, Douglas Dunn’s Elegies. Tuesday 26th May at 6.30pm – look forward to seeing you there. Meanwhile, do add any comments, remarks or suggestions here. There are lots of (very quiet) people registered with this site – we’d love to hear from some of you.

Everyone admired Pascale Petit’s courage in writing the poems in The Zoo Father.  We needed to summon some courage of our own reading them.  Once more, folk appreciated the support of the group in tackling ‘difficult’ poems: stirring themes of abuse, betrayal and loss were transformed here into work of shocking beauty and tenderness.

The poems enact rituals of transference and empowerment, using symbols drawn from the author’s travels in the Venezuelan Amazon.  They sing with birds and violins, shimmer with octopuses and sunlight, rattle with stones and shrunken heads.  The selection we read in the session took us through the ‘story’ of a dying father, a sick mother, a lost childhood and the reclaiming of personal power and the coming to terms with a legacy of half a hectare of French vineyard.  The poems are compact and unornamented, inhabiting a non-linear, non-rational reality, not unlike a shamanic dreaming.  Pascale Petit’s training as a sculptor also contributes to the sense of how these intensely physical poems were shaped.

It was tempting to ask questions about the autobiographical background but, as we usually do in the Poetry Room, we tried to keep returning to the body of the text, trusting what the poet wished to illuminate and make public, remembering the appreciation is always enhanced by focussing on the craft.

The two men present admitted some discomfiture at the father’s treatment of his daughter, offering a valuable perspective on this work, which makes no simplistic, generalised judgements but, again bravely, says what is hard to say and at the end of the evening left us all uplifted and deeply impressed.  We parted with the cry of kingfishers calling us home – Tchi chee kwee kwee.

We’ll be exploring very different territory in next month’s Poetry Room when we’ll be looking at TS Eliot’s classic collection The Waste Land and Other Poems – Tuesday 28th April at 6.30 pm in Blackwell’s.