Some Verse from Andrew Bamji

Writing Poems

On the whole I find it best

To write verse when I’m somewhat stressed;

Because (I find this truly hurts me)

When relaxed the Muse deserts me.

Confessional

I rather wish that I could write

Fine literature, and nothing trite;

You may think I love comic verse

But truthfully there’s nothing worse.

A crime it is, and one quite chronic

Writing rhymes that are ironic,

Funny, flip, facetious fun

That might be wrote by anyone.

So how I wish that I could pen

Romantic stuff, like Keats, for then

I might set up a firm foundation

For a serious reputation.

Oh! Sweet love! Concept ethereal!

Such a wealth of great material –

But then again, life could be tough.

For who would buy the wretched stuff?

Sebastian Faulks reviews “A Little History of Poetry” by John Carey (Yale £14.99 pp 302) (from Sunday Times Culture supplement, 15 March 2020)

Last summer I tried to proselytise two people who said they couldn't see the point of poetry. l read them extracts from Tennyson’s Ulysses, Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach and Charles Causley’s Eden Rock, finishing with Donal Og, a Gaelic ballad that goes like an arrow to the synapses where the currents of heart and tear duct meet. They sat there stony-faced. It was like watching two people for whom both Bach’s St Matthew Passion and the Beatles’ Penny Lane are just noise. Poetry functions in a part of the brain we may be losing — an area connected to our past, where remembered speech rhythms helped to develop consciousness in preliterate societies. It is therefore possible that an inability to appreciate poetry is not a failing of taste or education, but an evolutionary phenomenon, like a lack of wisdom teeth. Another problem for poetry is the way it is, or at least used to be, taught. We children of the Sixties, the derided baby-boomers, were given collections called Poetry for Pleasure or similar, which began with Alfred Noyes, “Come down to Kew in lilac time”, followed by the most bathetic second line in all literature: “(it isn’t far from London!)” It was hard to know which made you want to vomit more, the bracket or the exclamation mark. It has been claimed that today’s undergraduates are not expected to read whole books, let alone long poems that deal with experiences alien to their own. John Carey’s hectic, reader-friendly introduction to poetry gloriously ignores these problems.  lt is redolent of a time when grammar school sixth formers studied Milton in class and the Romantics on reading camps in the summer holidays. Its assumptions are unencumbered by critical theory or identity politics. It believes that the work of poetry is to open up to its readers an emotional variety and grandeur far beyond the limits imposed by the trifling boundaries of their own selves; that poetry’s aim is not to confine or confirm, but to transcend. Typical of Carey’s approach are superb short essays on Donne and Yeats, which show how individual and gifted they were, how very much of their respective times, yet how it was, paradoxically, the fierce pursuit of their idiosyncrasies that allowed them to strike universal chords. Even if you think you know everything about the household names, Professor Carey has read them more recently. I found myself searching for an unfamiliar Shakespeare sonnet and intend to follow his advice on Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale: “Treat yourself, and read it again.” As readers of this newspaper (Sunday Times) will know, Carey combines high scholarship with a disdain for elitism. In his memoir The Unexpected Professor he recounted his dislike of the venerated Don Quixote — “boring and hateful”. In this new book, Dante is too interested in torture and sadism for his, or our, good; Petrarch is turgid;  Wordsworth’s best poems ' cannot bear comparison to those of Coleridge. Disagreeing with the author is part of the process: it may be that Kubla Khan is the greatest poem in English, but if it is greater than Tintern Abbey, it is, I would suggest, by a margin that even VAR would struggle to establish. If there is a hint of donnish table talk here, there is also considerable research, particularly into the work of female poets who have not had their due. Charlotte Mew and Christina Rossetti are upwardly revalued; Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop are preferred to the lofty and obscurantist Robert Lowell. Some 18th-century female poets are recognised for almost the first time outside academe. The pace is furious. Hymns, ballads, sagas, poems in Chinese, Japanese, German (big shout for Rilke) and Italian are flattened like ducks in a shooting gallery; a hundred years of history is often summarised in two sentences. Sometimes the price exacted by the publisher's word limit is too high; Thom Gunn surely needed more than one short paragraph. However, the critical edge remains unblunted and the quotations well chosen, making you long for more. This book should send its readers running to their local independent bookshop, or at least to YouTube to hear Tennyson speak his verse, recorded onto a wax cylinder. Try reading aloud John Clare’s I Am! or Henry Vaughan’s They Are All Gone into the World of Light without choking. You can? Perhaps your genome has lost its vestigial link to a poetic past. There may be another reason, however. I’m not sure poetry lovers were born ready to feel the mournful logic of Philip Larkin or the sprung rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins resonate deep within. Some of the taste was acquired by reading and by diligence; “sheer plod”, after all, “makes plough down sillion shine”. And does TS Eliot's phrase “the vacant interstellar spaces” in East Coker resonate with a fraction more power because it is harmonising in your unconscious with Milton’s line from Samson Agonistes describing the hero’s blindness as being like the moon “hid in her vacant interlunar cave”? And so this fizzing, exhilarating book is given weight by a melancholy subtext: the fear that its readership may not be there. From where l sit, the most compelling evidence for the existence of the poetic hunger on whose existence this book is predicated is its melancholy, long withdrawing roar. I hope l’m wrong. As a lifelong Oxford professor as well as a much-read newspaper critic, John Carey must know his audience. And if there are enough enthusiasts to make this book the bestseller it deserves to be, then we need not go gentle into that good night, but can all breathe easy into our face masks as we self-isolate to the soundtrack of a George Herbert podcast.

Short excerpt:

THE FIRST POEM

Nearly 4,000 years ago in western Asia, the Epic of Gilgamesh was etched into clay tablets with bits of reed. It's the oldest known surviving literary work, and one that we think of as poetry, although we know nothing of its author(s) or how it was originally perceived. It pioneered what would become two of poetry’s perennial subjects, love and death, and uses mythological motifs that later, through Homer, became an essential part of western poetry's imaginative universe.   

February Meeting:Word Painting in Music; Roxanna Panufnik with Richard Thomas.

Roxanna Panufnik is one of the UK’s leading present-day composers, well known for her melding of words and music, or “word painting”.  She leads an exceptionally busy life, so we were lucky to be able to tempt her down from London for a Friday evening visit, albeit not one of our traditional Third Fridays.  Maybe the unaccustomed day, the atrocious weather and possibly her talk’s somewhat unliterary-sounding title, were together responsible for the rather low turnout for what proved to be a fascinating and inspiring multi-media event – a talk with musical and graphic illustration.

Roxanna began by pointing out that many composers, past and present, have used music to “paint” words, citing among others Haydn, Schubert and Britten, but explained that she would concentrate on her own experience as a current practitioner.  Much of her work involved settings of established and traditional texts - both lay, such as her recent “Four Choral Seasons” for the Bach Choir, which included words by Rosetti, Manley-Hopkins, Binyon and Shakespeare; and liturgical, embracing Jewish, Sufi and Zen, as well as Christian, material – a reflection of her deep interest in World Music.  By way of illustration Roxanna played a video excerpt* from "Zen Love Song" from her "Love Abide" CD.  She pointed out that the Zen Love Song was of particular musical interest as she was using a traditional Japanese lullaby (inJapanese)

along with an English translation of words by the 15^th century Zen master Ikkyu Soyun.  The multi-media presentation of this first illustration was provided by synchronised animations of a stylised oriental bird dipping his head forlornly in time to the music against a dreamy background in the manner of a Japanese print, created by Roxanna’s sister-in-law, the talented “VJ” Mischa Giancovitch.  (A “VJ”, so Roxanna explained, is a Video Jockey - like a Disc Jockey, but one who mixes visuals in time to music.)  

Asked whether she had ever used her own words, perhaps to boost a libretto for a new opera or, more specifically, when she was reconstructing the semi-forgotten 18^th century Anglo-Barbadian singspiel “Inkle and Yarico”, Roxanna said that she had never had the courage to use any but other people’s words, even when working on a subject as bizarre as a music-painting of the experiences of someone trapped in an overturned yacht in the Southern Ocean.  In this case she set the words of the sailor himself, Tony Bullimore, as adapted by the narrator, Richard Stilgoe in her "The Upside-Down Sailor", from which we heard an extract.

Roxanna agreed that instrumental music, as an abstract form, could be inspired by words Recently she had composed a piece for trombone and piano based on Pablo Neruda’s “The Queen”.  She would select a text and follow the emotional and atmospheric structure, purely through instruments. Her next audio example was inspired by Viola/Cesario’s “Willow Cabin” soliloquy from Twelfth Night.  This first materialised as her “Olivia” string quartet, but the commissioners also asked her to create an optional part for children’s chorus.

Roxanna told us that all her work was usually the result of commissions, though some of these had come about after she had read or heard words that cried out to be set to music.  The prime example, part of which she played to us, in a performance narrated by Simon Russell Beale, resulted from hearing, at Sir John Tavener’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey, his daughter Theodora bravely read his “99 Words for My Darling Children”.

Roxanna acknowledged that she had inherited musical genes from her father, the late émigré Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik, who had been granted political asylum by Britain, naturalised, and later knighted.  Though of Jewish descent on her (British) mother’s side, she had been brought up in a more or less atheist family.  Later, after her father’s death, she became a practising Roman Catholic, latent in her Polish ancestry.  However she drew on all kinds of spiritual inspiration, not just Christianity – World Religion as much as World Music.  And as it happened her absorption in word painting owed little to her father, who had concentrated mainly on instrumental composition.

Knowing that the Society had recently enjoyed a talk on Julian of Norwich prompted Roxanna to use, as her final illustration of pure, intentional word-painting, her setting of Julian’s reassuring “All Shall be Well” text combined with a prayer that Polish Knights used to sing before going into battle 900 years ago.

 
The meeting ended with questions from the audience and an erudite and witty vote of thanks by Bill  Doherty.  

* The whole YouTube clip can  be reached by CLICKING HERE