A Bloody Difficult Woman?
The Society gathered in the Court Hall to hear South African
born poet Douglas Reid Skinner’s talk entitled “The Muse Answers Back”. The
speaker had a wide experience of life and after leaving South Africa had lived
in the USA and England, trying his hand at an impressive array of jobs. For
several decades he had written and published poetry including translations from
Italian and Hebrew. Simultaneously he was engaged in a thoughtful exploration
of the creative instinct – his Muse.
Douglas set his stall out early, promising the audience an
intellectual white-knuckle ride as we shot the rapids of the neocortex and its
associated higher mental functions before pausing for breath in the still, deep
waters of emotion and memory that constitute the brain’s limbic system where he
said “the bodies are buried”. Some in the audience visibly blanched wondering
if this was going to be a two glasses of wine lecture, rather as Sherlock
Holmes identified certain challenges as two pipe problems.
Douglas developed the theme of a relationship with his Muse
using readings from two recent volumes of his poetry – Blue Rivers and Liminal,
telling us he regarded the acts of reading and writing as ritual.
Beloved caught a
tantalising elusive Muse
For exactly when we
entrust to language
What we meant or we
mean, it disappears-
Untitled
opened with an epigraph in French
from Lorand Gaspar alluding to the extra hidden charge, “more bang for your
buck”, which words within a poem seem to carry and the
meanings readers extract “which are not in the words” of the poem. And still
the Muse hovered outwith Douglas’ reach
But there is no way of
knowing who
You are or where you
live,
For In the Line of Sight Skinner uses an allegory to help explore the
essence of a poem as it bursts from the marks on the paper
… , this now in which
your eyes
follow the dark lines of
language – grey geese or
great cranes lifted on
steady wings and into flight
Vacillation
details the ploys the poet uses to
try and tame his creative angel – walks on the beach, listening to Beethoven’s
Sixth - only to end in bathos and morning-after regret
‘I reckon there’s
nothing left to say’
Or so it seemed until
the following day..
The speaker sketched out the various stratagems he had used
to come to terms with his Muse, telling himself:
·
1) you must be lost before you can be found
· 2) sleep on problems – conscious life is only a fraction of the real me
·
3) acknowledge the reciprocal relationship between
living and writing – the more you do of one, the less of the other
Worryingly, he had heard the sound of his own heart
battering him into submission.
He concluded with a
reading of Termites Are Busy, a
personal Apocalypse which reveals that his Muse is completely in charge
…
This is my bandwagon
and it doesn’t roll an inch unless I say so
and that the Muse is a she!
Having entered the Court Hall under a cloud of unknowing,
the Winchelsea audience passed into the autumn evening, each apparently under
an effulgent turban as their respective neocortical neuronal networks crackled
with rapid-fire creative impulses and brooded on the meaning of metapoetics.
Perhaps it was to be a busy evening for a host of Muses!
Thanks to our speaker, Douglas Skinner, for permission to print this example of his work:
Bottles of Scent
Because the forgotten
outweighs the remembered
as an ocean a pond,
the fleeting, the shadowed,
the velleities that limn
and almost correspond
to what was once hymn
or haunting day long,
ineffable, yet possible,
you suddenly wake
in the half-light of dawn
to a rise-and-fall song
that engenders recall
of hands that you held,
bottles of scent,
a dress with blue flowers,
the chair near the door,
a cup of weak coffee,
the voice that could call
through window and wall,
the voice that could salve
the wounds and the gall.
