September Meeting: Review by Bill Doherty

 

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.