READING ALOUD - W.S.Merwin Reads - The Love for October

 

When you read W.S.Merwin's biography, you see very little that tells you what sort of a man he was. Extremely productive and driven as a poet, the delicate thoughtful nature of his writing, is often like turning over and examining a tumbling stone. A common trope in his poetry is to see everything as if viewed through the framing of a particular window. There is a certain unknowable insularity to his character and writing, I can't imagine he was ever the life and soul of a party, did he ever get drunk and out of control? Married three times might indicate he could've either been difficult to live with, or was drawn towards women that he really was incapable of fully meeting. 

The Love of October, reflects on youthful perception. saying in its first line

'A child looking on ruins grows younger
but cold
and wants to wake to a new name
I have been younger in October
than all the months of spring'  

As indeed he once was. Born right at the end of September, October was indeed Merwin's first month alive in this world. So his choice of this poem as one to read aloud, has some strong personal links for him.

READING ALOUD - Tenuous & Precarious by Stevie Smith

 

One of the UK's most beloved cantankerous poets, Stevie Smith was born in Hull, but spent much of her adult life in Palmers Green, London. That she briefly, til the age of three, inhabited the same city as Phillip Larkin, seems remarkable, but I suspect they'd never have got on.  A bookish curmudgeonly batchelor meets a semi-depressive spinster obsessed with death and a mordant sense of humour. Far too much feline levity on show. 

In this poem Tenuous & Precarious, Smith plays with ordinary words that sound like they aught to be Roman names, but are not. And they are words that become in some way critical of family life. As in her most famous poem Not Waving, But Drowning, it is a mistake to judge the outward appearance of this poem as lacking in seriousness of intent. Its needling and has sharp edges, her delivery has a tone that stops short of scathing, but only just. Here is a woman who had her struggles with being visible in a male dominated world. And so she chose to write poetry? Always the disparaging ironic lilt, its to keep you at a distance. 

All the figures in the poem appear to be male, with the possible exception of the cat. They all have their dangers and downsides that a woman is often made most aware of. They all appear to be dead, which sort of leaves you with one Roman Finis, the end of the genetic line. It maybe that this was how Stevie Smith viewed herself and her life, as a type of reduction to what seemed possible given her circumstances.

Tenuous and Precarious
Were my guardians,
Precarious and Tenuous,
Two Romans.

My father was Hazardous,
Hazardous
Dear old man,
Three Romans.

There was my brother Spurious,
Spurious Posthumous,
Spurious was Spurious,
Was four Romans.

My husband was Perfidious,
He was Perfidious
Five Romans.
Surreptitious, our son,
Was Surreptitious,
He was six Romans.

Our cat Tedious
Still lives,
Count not Tedious
Yet.

My name is Finis,
Finis, Finis,
I am Finis,
Six, five, four, three, two,
One Roman,
Finis.

written by Stevie Smith

READING ALOUD - Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas

 

Thomas was the first poet I became a fan of. The verbal power of his words is further amplified in this recording of the poet performing one of his most famous poems. It has all the sing song quality of a Welsh priest intoning from his Sunday pulpit. Clearly enunciated, emotionally over heightened, muscularly musical in its delivery. In many ways Dylan Thomas heard today, you could easy hear this as a parody of the poet. As though this was recited in another epoch.

But imagine it being read in a club or small assembly room, and how overwhelming the imaginative power of it could be. The rolling cascade of its rhetoric coming towards you. This is baroque poetry born from a robust and richer valley, than the conversational plainsong of many contemporary writers. 

And Thomas here is raging famously - against the dying of the light - the futile fight we put up against our mortality, the decay of our minds and bodies. And in Thomas's case, he raged against that which he most feared, the dying of his talent and creativity, that his best work was behind him. Something which. in part, drove him to drink.

READING ALOUD - Bluebird by Charles Buckowski

 

I think the most disarming thing about the sort of man Charles Buckowski was, is that he liked to let you know he really didn't need your approval of him, nor the life he led, nor like the poetry he wrote.  He wrote because he needed to. For a large part of his life he worked for the Post Office, he came home, started drinking and wrote into the early hours of the following day. Underneath his carefully maintained bar fly reputation, bad temper and fights, lay this deeply damaged man. Read his autobiographical book Ham on Rye, and you are shown what having fucked up parents in your childhood can do to you.

Buchowski was frequently defensive or guarded, but in his poetry something wiser and kinder would occasionally be allowed to blossom. In the rough hewn conversational style of them, a perceptive insightfulness catches you unawares.  Here in this poem Bluebird he lets you glimpse one fragment of the sensitive fragile bird of the man, held captive by the controlling, alcoholic, life coarsened persona.  It shows you something, not just about the psychology of Buckowski, but of most men.

READING ALOUD - Kae Tempest - Europe Is Lost

If any artist caught the zeitgeist of the UK in the time of 2016 - post financial crash, post Brexit, at the dawn of First Term Trump, the pandemic not even dreamed of yet, it was this poem by Kae Tempest. As ever, they write accessibly and yet at the same time surprise you with the sophistication of the imagery they use. It's both ancient and modern, both of the street and of a tradition. Tempest never forgets where the poetic form originated and where they want to take it now. Its political, personal and punchy.

This live recording on KEXP captures the ongoing rolling syllabic momentum of Tempest at their performing best. There is a central character, there is Tempest there too observing, there is the world outside barren, hostile and alienated from the humanity it houses. And then there is us watching, caught up in the listening of it too.

READING ALOUD - David Whyte - Everything Is Waiting For You

 

Good poetry often misses its point with deliberate ease. Modern poets can tend to disguise their meaning behind an artifice of obscurity and erudition. It maybe clever, but its rarely wise. You often find, like the tombs of Muslim heroes of old, that there maybe an elaborately wrought coffin to view on the surface, but there is no body to be found within. It's symbolism is an empty one, an echo without a resonant chamber.

David Whyte's poetry, at its best, will never be found empty of meaning or potency. But neither is it weighed down in a clumsy, portentous or leaden way, nor by expressing itself within the easy understanding of a flowery sentiment. It is the embodiment of its depths that strikes you about Whyte's poetry. One that is never so obvious, that its understood in the moment, you grasp it and quickly move on. There is still an air of mystery in the elucidation to draw your return to it. Here poetry encapsulates, it strikes a vein of recognition like a vestigial bell.  

Gaston Bachlard once described poetry as being like throwing a pebble into a deep pond - that it touches the depths before the ripples of it break the surface.