Katy Evans-Bush: The Poetry Workshop

And I forgot to flag this up, for those in the London area: a new poetry workshop, being run by Katy Evans-Bush, whose poetry is published by Salt and whose Love Ditty of an 'eartsick Pirate, an affectionate and hilarious take on Eliot's Prufrock, in Piratese, can be found at the Horizon Review website.

Katy's workshop will meet at the Lamb Pub, 94 Lambs Conduit Street, London WC1
6.30-8.30pm, Wednesdays
The price is £125 a term
Starts September 23rd

See Katy Evans-Bush's website for details of how to join.

Is Verse Drama Dead?

Becket, pictured in a stained glass window at Canterbury Cathedral
We hear occasionally of new verse dramas being produced on radio or on the stage but never with any great trumpeting along the lines of 'Verse drama is back!'

Many of us would think of T.S. Eliot's 'Murder in the Cathedral' as one of the last critically acclaimed verse dramas; not exactly a recent work though, is it? Verse drama simply isn't popular. It makes people uncomfortable.

Speaking verse? As a character in a play? The concept itself sounds old-fashioned and highfalutin. As though the playwright is a little too big for his/her costume drama boots. None of us are Shakespeare or Racine, after all.

So although verse drama is still being written, it tends to be sidelined whenever it resurfaces in public - nothing of any real importance, pleasantly arty and worthwhile, perhaps, but not to be lingered over by the critics.

Can we shake off that 'worthy but dull' image of the verse drama? How do we turn around the predictable 'lovely but I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole' reaction of so many producers and publishers?

Is the effort worth making, or is verse drama irretrievably dead?

An Island, Greek?

I've been meaning for ages to post up this super little snippet of T.S. Eliot from The Frontiers of Criticism, but buying some selected critical prose of his today has given me the final nudge.

It amuses me mainly as someone who struggles with the odd classical poem myself, but also because I keep misreading it as "I should imagine myself to be a Greek island ..."

'What matters most, let us say, in reading an ode of Sappho, is not that I should imagine myself to be an island Greek of twenty-five hundred years ago; what matters is the experience which is the same for all human beings of different centuries and languages capable of enjoying poetry, the spark which can leap across those 2,500 years.'

T.S. Eliot: The Frontiers of Criticism (1956)

Postscript to Epic Poems (& 'The Lyric Principle')

While tidying my study yesterday - yes, the annual clean-out has finally occurred - I found a note I'd made and lost some months ago of a superb quotation from 'On Poetry and Poets', a collection of essays by T.S. Eliot.

The quotation I'd noted down is from 'The Music of Poetry' (see how closely Paterson follows in the great man's footsteps?) and is relevant to me in connection with my last few posts on Alice Oswald and the writing of a long poem and on the structure of three modern epic poems. The following should serve rather well as a postscript to those entries:

'It would be a mistake, however, to assume that all poetry ought to be melodious, or that melody is more than one of the components of the music of words. Some poetry is meant to be sung; most poetry, in modern times, is meant to be spoken – and there are many other things to be spoken of besides the murmur of innumerable bees or the moan of doves in immemorial elms. Dissonance, even cacophony, has its place: just as, in a poem of any length, there must be transitions between passages of greater and less intensity, to give a rhythm of fluctuating emotion essential to the musical structure of the whole; and the passages of less intensity will be, in relation to the level on which the total poem operates, prosaic – so that, in the sense implied by that context, it may be said that no poet can write a poem of amplitude unless he is a master of the prosaic.'

Plus, the footnote accompanying that last point:

'This is the complementary doctrine to that of the 'touchstone' line or passage of Matthew Arnold: this test of the greatness of a poet is the way he writes his less intense, but structurally vital, matter.'

Now, you have to admire Eliot's mastery of prose - let alone the prosaic - in the passage I've just quoted. For a start, it's highly Latinate, in a way we rarely see anymore, not merely in his word selection, but more interestingly in his sentence structure, with its elegant asides, caveats and micro-clauses. But beyond that, his ability to make good solid sense, even with all that scaffolding in place, is what allows his criticism to stand out from other twentieth-century critics and to continue in its relevance to poets today.

This, of course, is the crux of that whole passage, at least for the purposes of my own earlier discussions on the writing of long or epic poems: in a poem of any length, there must be transitions between passages of greater and less intensity, to give a rhythm of fluctuating emotion essential to the musical structure of the whole ...

This seems to indicate that epic poetry follows the same pattern as other works of literature of any length - i.e. novels, theatrical dramas, screenplays - and that this is done, not simply to accommodate Eliot's nod to musical rhythm, though that is hugely important in the overall scheme, but also for our comfort as readers/listeners. Unending conflict and other excitements begin to be unpleasant, and eventually ludicrous, if suffered at length. (You often see impossibly manic sequences in comic films, for instance, to great effect.) So in a longer poem, a poet needs the quieter movements to recover from and prepare for the heights.

Assuming you have any heights, that is ...

Notes on Three Epic Poems

This is in response to a request made on the last blog post for me to expand on some ideas I've had about the structure and composition of long poems, largely with reference to a piece of scrap paper on which I scribbled a few notes the other week. So, as you can imagine, there may need to be a little creative 'filling in' of the blanks if I'm to construct a coherent argument from my scrap.

I'm not sure if T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets can be categorised as an 'epic' poem, but I'm going to consider it as such for the purposes of this post. The other two long poems under discussion here are Alice Oswald's Dart and Christopher Logue's War Music.

Each of the highlighted links above will take you to a site where you can read an extract from the work in question; in T.S. Eliot's case, you can listen to a recording as well. The Dart link also gives some interesting information on the genesis and researching of the poem.

Back to my scrap of paper. Basically, I am in the process of writing a long poem on Warwick Castle, and although I've actually begun writing it in 'note form', I am still not sure how the finished piece will be constructed. Though each day that passes brings me nearer to deciding that.

One day, I began wondering how other poets had gone about constructing their long poems, and naturally enough reached for the nearest scrap of paper so I could begin making some notes.

My apologies to any academics who have come to this blog hoping for erudite insights into the construction of epics, but my mind works in a fairly haphazard and approximate manner when thinking about poetry. Such inaccuracies are vital, of course, because they allow me room to breathe, creatively speaking.

Here is what I wrote:

Dart

continuous structure (i.e. one discrete poem)

non-linear narrative

fluid interweaving of times, places & historical periods

many voices: rarely the poet's own; marginal notes to indicate change of speaker

similar rhythms & line lengths throughout, with occasional shifts for light and shade, and to develop 'characters'; extended lyric approaching the fluidity of music - or water

*

War Music

divided into books or sections, based on the original (but one poem thematically)

straight linear narrative, with asides

'authorial voice' - not the poet's own. Also reported speech and dramatised mini-scenes/sequences

alternating rhythms, loose pentameter, close to speech patterns, exclamatory, staggered lines, more like dramatic verse than extended lyric

*

Four Quartets

4 poems in 5 sections each

interweaving of times and places, historical events

poet's own voice, also instances of reported speech or allusions to other poets and writings

stable base rhythm & line length with serial departures; free verse skirting iambics and dactylics, alternating movements to achieve balance, short with long, an attempt at music



What I drew from the loose threads and observations above - not looking at the actual poems behind them but recollecting them as best I could, so I apologise for any mistakes - was a far stronger sense of what it entails to write long. It also allowed me to see, if not how I should go about it, at least how I shouldn't.

For instance, I had originally thought of emulating the very clear-cut structure of Four Quartets. But in the process of exploring these other options, I realised how unsuited that would be to my own poem, and perhaps to my personality. Such a defined form would eventually feel like a straitjacket. I was also aware that the publishing history behind these four poems didn't fit my vision for the Warwick Castle poem, which will be considerably shorter and less suited to being written in 'sections'.

Similarly, while the dynamic power and dramatic range of War Music were very tempting, Logue's style wasn't quite right for me. The publishing in 'sections' business was out, and I love a broad canvas, but perhaps not that broad.

So the short straw fell to Dart, in the end. However, there were still doubts. Was this more fluid, all-of-a-piece, poem really the way to go? What if I began that way and found I couldn't sustain the poem without a more defined narrative structure to hang my poetry on?

In my frustration, I began wondering whether it might not be simpler just to combine the best elements of all three, but couldn't see how to do that without creating a sort of Frankenstein's monster of a poem.

Perhaps a long poem was simply beyond my scope, anyway; I might end up writing the first fifty lines and run out of bottle.

I wasn't really sure which way I was going to swing until the other day when I started looking again at notes taken during an interview at the Aldeburgh Festival, where Alice Oswald - an inveterate country walker, especially at night - had advocated the use of 'field notes'. Which was, I suddenly realised, precisely what I'd been doing as I began to write my own long poem.

Almost by instinct, I hadn't launched in there with a definite form or structure or even voice in mind, but had come at it sideways, employing a more fluid and ad hoc approach ... that of taking 'field notes' towards the eventual poem. And perhaps the poem will end up being the field notes, nothing more.

NB. POSTSCRIPT to this entry available here.

TS Eliot: On Influence & the Tyranny of Readers

In discussion with Roddy Lumsden after an ecopoetry debate last week, I put forward the hope that my new book of poetry represented a new direction for me. Roddy, with his usual cynicism, responded that poets often think their latest books represent new directions, when they rarely do.

Looking at my manuscript of Camper Van Blues again in the light of this conversation, I couldn't manage to divide my poetry from my personal desire to move on, and so was unable to reach a decision on the question.

Having to face the possibility that my wish to grow and develop as a poet, although powerful and sincerely felt in itself, might not be enough to make it actually happen, made me turn for comfort and guidance to that old stalwart in my life: literary criticism.

TS Eliot, writing on 'Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry', tells us:

"When a poet alters or develops, many of his admirers are sure to drop off. Any poet, if he is to survive as a writer beyond his twenty-fifth year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express. This is disconcerting to that public which likes a poet to spin his whole work out of the feelings of his youth; which likes to be able to open a new volume of his poems with the assurance that they will be able to approach it exactly as they approached the preceding."

So, if we accept Roddy Lumsden's comment at face value, and take it on board alongside TS Eliot's above, this suggests a certain poetic complicity at work.

If development has stalled at a particular point in a poet's career, has the poet failed to move on because of some inherent limitation, or are they afraid to move on stylistically in case their readers - editors being among the first and most influential of those - refuse to go with them?

The full text of TS Eliot's 'Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry' is available as a free e-book at Project Gutenberg.