1 00:00:18,850 --> 00:00:25,900 Good evening, and thank you for joining us for this evening's lecture given by the professor of poetry here at the University of Oxford. 2 00:00:25,900 --> 00:00:32,260 Alice Oswald. My name is Philip Bullock and I'm director of the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. 3 00:00:32,260 --> 00:00:36,760 We're delighted to host this evening's event as part of our live event series itself. 4 00:00:36,760 --> 00:00:43,790 Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding students for the future, Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. 5 00:00:43,790 --> 00:00:47,750 Alice has kindly agreed to take questions from the audience, so if you do have any, 6 00:00:47,750 --> 00:00:54,960 please put them in the YouTube chat during the lecture and we'll do our very best to answer as many as we can at the end of the discussion. 7 00:00:54,960 --> 00:00:59,690 Tote is delighted to be collaborating with the English faculty in hosting this evening's lecture, 8 00:00:59,690 --> 00:01:05,400 so it's my great pleasure and great honour to welcome Professor Ross Bannister to tell us more. 9 00:01:05,400 --> 00:01:12,360 Rose Pallister is professor of 18th century studies tutorials fellow at Mansfield College and the chair of the English Faculty Board. 10 00:01:12,360 --> 00:01:16,530 She has published widely on the novel and on women's writing in the 18th century and 11 00:01:16,530 --> 00:01:22,920 is currently writing a book about the role of sister in the invention of the novel. Rose, thank you so much for sharing Alice's lecture. 12 00:01:22,920 --> 00:01:26,890 So without further ado, I'd like to hand over to you now. Thank you. 13 00:01:26,890 --> 00:01:34,150 Thank you, Philip, for the introduction and to torch for supporting English faculty live event this evening. 14 00:01:34,150 --> 00:01:40,860 Welcome again to all of you is watching at home. The professor of she gets a public lecture each term. 15 00:01:40,860 --> 00:01:45,690 The post has been in place at Oxford since the lectures were first conceived in 1788. 16 00:01:45,690 --> 00:01:52,860 In order that quote, the reading of the ancient poets should give keenness and polish to the minds of young men, 17 00:01:52,860 --> 00:01:58,680 as well as to the advancement of more serious literature, both sacred and human. 18 00:01:58,680 --> 00:02:01,230 Much has changed since that conception. 19 00:02:01,230 --> 00:02:10,920 We've questioned what counts as serious literature and who decides that we now make keen the minds of students, regardless of their sex or gender. 20 00:02:10,920 --> 00:02:16,110 We read and discuss the most modern alongside the ancient poets. 21 00:02:16,110 --> 00:02:17,040 In some ways, though, 22 00:02:17,040 --> 00:02:25,470 the legacy remains and is brought to life most splendidly in the thick of our current and forty six professor of poetry Alice Oswald. 23 00:02:25,470 --> 00:02:30,180 She's a keen classicist in conversation with the voices of the ancient past. 24 00:02:30,180 --> 00:02:35,610 Perhaps most memorably with Homer's Iliad in her memorial of 2011 and with his odyssey in her 25 00:02:35,610 --> 00:02:43,920 recent collection Nobody 2019 A Poetry Makes a mythic human and the human mythic poetry, 26 00:02:43,920 --> 00:02:48,210 she commented in her election statement is an ancient memory system. 27 00:02:48,210 --> 00:02:54,750 It asks to be heard out loud, or at least read in the manner of a musical score. 28 00:02:54,750 --> 00:03:00,720 Professor Oswald knows how to use her voice to speak for poetry and from poetry. 29 00:03:00,720 --> 00:03:09,550 I can't think then, of a better poet to give the first ever online lecture by a professor of poetry at Oxford. 30 00:03:09,550 --> 00:03:16,060 For too many across the world, this is a time of grief and loss. And Professor Osborne's lecture will speak to that experience today. 31 00:03:16,060 --> 00:03:21,740 To her topic is the uncanny connexion of grief with water. 32 00:03:21,740 --> 00:03:26,120 Water is the element that has consistently flowed through her imagination. 33 00:03:26,120 --> 00:03:33,740 She is in her element with water, her element is water, and I'm honoured to invite her to deliver her lecture for this term. 34 00:03:33,740 --> 00:03:45,770 Its title is an interview with Water, and I'm pleased to hand over to Professor Alice Oswald for her lecture. 35 00:03:45,770 --> 00:03:49,310 Hello. Can you see me? We can, you can. 36 00:03:49,310 --> 00:03:57,920 OK. Hello. And I'm grateful as well for you, rose and to talk for providing the English faculty. 37 00:03:57,920 --> 00:04:06,980 It does seem rather ironic that I should be speaking to people through a computer screen when live performance has always been my personal manifesto. 38 00:04:06,980 --> 00:04:14,240 It is still my manifesto, and it's what I speak about again today in spite of in on YouTube. 39 00:04:14,240 --> 00:04:23,640 I don't want to give up on the physical performance of poetry, even if it means moving it outdoors into the streets while we're all under lockdown. 40 00:04:23,640 --> 00:04:27,930 Anyway, as a marker of where we are today, and because it fits the themes of my lecture, 41 00:04:27,930 --> 00:04:35,590 I'd like to start by reading a poem by Jericho Brown called Middle. 42 00:04:35,590 --> 00:04:46,040 And this poem is about the murder of Emmett Till in 1955 in Mississippi. 43 00:04:46,040 --> 00:04:54,210 We do not recognise the body of Emmett Till. We do not know the boy's name, nor the sound of his mother's wailing. 44 00:04:54,210 --> 00:05:00,960 We have never heard a mother wailing. We do not know the history of this nation and ourselves. 45 00:05:00,960 --> 00:05:09,680 We do not know the history of ourselves on this planet because we do not have to know what we believe we owe. 46 00:05:09,680 --> 00:05:14,870 We believe we own your bodies, but have no HP or. 47 00:05:14,870 --> 00:05:19,370 We destroy the body that refuses use. We use maps. 48 00:05:19,370 --> 00:05:24,410 We did not draw. We see a sea, so cross it. 49 00:05:24,410 --> 00:05:30,350 We see a moon lander. We love land so long as we can take it. 50 00:05:30,350 --> 00:05:35,150 We can't take that sound. What is a mother wailing? 51 00:05:35,150 --> 00:05:43,760 We do not recognise music until we can sell it. We sell what cannot be for me by silence. 52 00:05:43,760 --> 00:05:49,430 Let us help you. How much does it cost to hold your breath underwater? 53 00:05:49,430 --> 00:05:53,330 Wait, wait. What are we? What? 54 00:05:53,330 --> 00:06:14,260 What on earth are we? What? It is a wonderful gift to be able to swim in rivers, especially on bright, clear days like this. 55 00:06:14,260 --> 00:06:17,920 If you step into an inverted version of the world, 56 00:06:17,920 --> 00:06:26,780 the water fits around you like a velvet suit and you float along seemingly decapitated by reflections. 57 00:06:26,780 --> 00:06:33,980 Of all the gifts offered to us by water. I'm going to speak today about gift of reflection. 58 00:06:33,980 --> 00:06:40,450 The liquid in permanent, unstable gift of similarity. 59 00:06:40,450 --> 00:06:46,060 Similarity, by the way, is not the same as saying if you want to hear sameness, 60 00:06:46,060 --> 00:06:51,970 you can bring certain public institutions and you will be told your goal is important to us. 61 00:06:51,970 --> 00:06:57,550 You are held in a queue and will be answered shortly. Your call is important to us. 62 00:06:57,550 --> 00:07:02,980 You are held in. A few will be answered shortly. Your call is important to us. 63 00:07:02,980 --> 00:07:08,650 You are held in a queue and will be answered shortly. Your call is important to us. 64 00:07:08,650 --> 00:07:14,970 You are held in a queue and will be answered shortly. 65 00:07:14,970 --> 00:07:23,850 The recorded message is a new kind of poetry, a machine spoken poetry available on everyone's phone any time of day, 66 00:07:23,850 --> 00:07:33,510 and it communicates a machine's belief in sameness or stubbornness, which is a terrible thing to carry in your pocket. 67 00:07:33,510 --> 00:07:37,260 As an antidote to that message, if you want to witness similarity, 68 00:07:37,260 --> 00:07:45,530 you should look at water whose reflections are always being carried by currents in the air. 69 00:07:45,530 --> 00:07:52,040 I keep a bucket of rainwater under my window, and it lights me that green leaves reflected in a bucket. 70 00:07:52,040 --> 00:07:58,910 I'm not quite green. I don't know what colour they are at certain moments early in the day. 71 00:07:58,910 --> 00:08:03,860 They might be called pre-agreed, but then the clouds change or the wind moves. 72 00:08:03,860 --> 00:08:15,000 So it's not. And all at once, they seem bright, dark and blind, silvery, then foggy, emerald. 73 00:08:15,000 --> 00:08:25,630 Samuel Johnson. Used this idea of agitated reflection, we vote the difference between spoken and written language. 74 00:08:25,630 --> 00:08:34,420 In the preface to his dictionary, he wrote about impossibility of defining words in that passing unrecorded form. 75 00:08:34,420 --> 00:08:37,390 While our language is yet living, he says. 76 00:08:37,390 --> 00:08:47,530 And variable at a caprice of everyone that speaks it, these words only shifting their relations and can be ascertained in a dictionary, 77 00:08:47,530 --> 00:08:57,880 then a grove in the agitation of a storm can be accurately delineated from its picture in the water. 78 00:08:57,880 --> 00:09:00,940 I love to imagine the other kind of victory, 79 00:09:00,940 --> 00:09:08,230 a liquid shifting not yet Britain's own victory is exactly what we should bring to home as language to remind 80 00:09:08,230 --> 00:09:16,860 ourselves that what looks like the same that's on the page will transform into similarity in performance. 81 00:09:16,860 --> 00:09:26,930 The pink fingered dawn, the approach it brings word to repeat those phrases in print is to drive the reader mad with sameness. 82 00:09:26,930 --> 00:09:41,190 The repeat performance with altered posture and varying levels of exhaustion or light or both is to offer the gift of similarity. 83 00:09:41,190 --> 00:09:46,930 Agitated similarity is Homer's gift, and it is his element. 84 00:09:46,930 --> 00:09:53,890 It behaves like water. It throws everything is a trembling reflection. 85 00:09:53,890 --> 00:10:01,260 Under its sway, the journey of a deceased looked like, but is not the same as Johnny Islamica. 86 00:10:01,260 --> 00:10:07,440 The rage of Agamemnon looked like, but is not the same as the rage of Achilles. 87 00:10:07,440 --> 00:10:14,970 Odysseus wakes just as Penelope sleeps and then sleeps just as she wakes and his marriage copies itself 88 00:10:14,970 --> 00:10:24,220 backwards in the marriage of Agamemnon and then forwards again in America's arsenal failed to confuse. 89 00:10:24,220 --> 00:10:28,790 Penelope Moon's like a Nightingale and a Nightingale. 90 00:10:28,790 --> 00:10:36,600 More like the human. Homeless adjectives which keep reappearing in new colours. 91 00:10:36,600 --> 00:10:45,430 A record for the same agitation. The Earth is called life getting lost as a man, large brains into it. 92 00:10:45,430 --> 00:10:56,350 Achilles is swift footed while he sits idle. And there is agitated or animated similarity between crying and the father of Achilles and also 93 00:10:56,350 --> 00:11:07,730 between Cuba and the mother of a vicious and between Calypso LRP and between Afeni and all swallows. 94 00:11:07,730 --> 00:11:15,170 But at heart of all this resemblance, as it were the in the poem cloth. 95 00:11:15,170 --> 00:11:25,300 There is the simile itself. The extended simile is Homer's particular double over style of thinking. 96 00:11:25,300 --> 00:11:35,540 There are about 215 extended similes in the Iliad, almost another hallucinated poem floating above the main one. 97 00:11:35,540 --> 00:11:45,980 In the Odyssey, there are only half a dozen, and I'd like to read you the eeriest things. 98 00:11:45,980 --> 00:11:55,710 So the great singer sang at a delicious liquified is run up under his eyelids onto his feet. 99 00:11:55,710 --> 00:12:04,080 As when a woman crumbles over and mourns her husband, he has fallen in full view of his city and his family. 100 00:12:04,080 --> 00:12:07,950 He was trying to delay the stroke of grief for his children. 101 00:12:07,950 --> 00:12:18,660 She sees him dying and gasping, drapes herself on his body, screaming a shrill sound and the men behind hitting her head and shoulders. 102 00:12:18,660 --> 00:12:24,990 With that is. And they lead her away to slavery to suffer hard work and sadness. 103 00:12:24,990 --> 00:12:29,520 And her face is sucked in pitiful grief. 104 00:12:29,520 --> 00:12:39,320 So additions was pouring out it, difficulties from his eyelids. 105 00:12:39,320 --> 00:12:43,120 I'll read it again, because it's always hard to take in poetry. 106 00:12:43,120 --> 00:12:51,630 So the great singer sang at a distance liquefy, the tears run out under his own, it's onto his cheek. 107 00:12:51,630 --> 00:12:59,400 As when a woman crumbles over and mourns her husband, he has fallen in full view of his city and his family. 108 00:12:59,400 --> 00:13:08,140 He was trying to delay the stroke of grief for his children. He sees him dying and gasping, drapes herself on his body, 109 00:13:08,140 --> 00:13:15,100 screaming a shrill sound and the men crying are hitting her head and shoulders with this is. 110 00:13:15,100 --> 00:13:22,150 And they did away with slavery to save her hard work and sadness, and her face is soft, 111 00:13:22,150 --> 00:13:33,330 thin with pitiful grief, so additions was pouring out of it from his eyelids. 112 00:13:33,330 --> 00:13:42,360 Oral poems keep moving, and so should oral predict. But there are two good reasons for pausing to think about this passage. 113 00:13:42,360 --> 00:13:48,870 First of all, it is a simile about liquefaction, which seems to emerge from the actuality of water. 114 00:13:48,870 --> 00:13:57,840 So you could say that it is a similarly about similarity. Secondly, and more importantly. 115 00:13:57,840 --> 00:14:05,540 This is a passage about Ted. Tears as the messengers of similarity. 116 00:14:05,540 --> 00:14:08,930 The way that would have interrupts the narrative with her weeping, 117 00:14:08,930 --> 00:14:16,850 not as a ghost or a sign or a memory, but as a stranger in the language with her own vivid existence, 118 00:14:16,850 --> 00:14:27,230 the way her scream goes on, damaging the mind that tells me something about grief itself and how poetry might rise to meet. 119 00:14:27,230 --> 00:14:35,710 So the great singer song, but dishes liquefied, the tears ran out under his eyelids on his feet. 120 00:14:35,710 --> 00:14:43,990 As when a woman crumples over and mourns her husband. He has fallen in full view of his city and his family. 121 00:14:43,990 --> 00:14:55,160 He was trying to delay the stroke of grief for his children. He sees him dying and gasping, drapes herself on his body, screaming a sharp sound. 122 00:14:55,160 --> 00:15:02,230 The men behind hitting her head and shoulders with this is. And they lead to a way to slavery. 123 00:15:02,230 --> 00:15:09,250 Her hard work and sadness and her face is sucked in with beautiful grief. 124 00:15:09,250 --> 00:15:18,230 So audacious was pouring out its operatives from his opponents. 125 00:15:18,230 --> 00:15:23,230 Just to give you some context, this is Odyssey book eight. 126 00:15:23,230 --> 00:15:27,760 Odysseus, on his way home from Troy, has lost his ship. 127 00:15:27,760 --> 00:15:36,730 His companions, his raft and her swam inland to Asia, where he is listening to a poetry cycle. 128 00:15:36,730 --> 00:15:48,740 He is in disguise, and the put a blind man to the motorcades is telling a story about addiction in petrol, and he, as you can hear, is weeping. 129 00:15:48,740 --> 00:15:57,230 And it is the second time this has happened in the same book, only 500 lines earlier, the same put Democrats on a different song. 130 00:15:57,230 --> 00:16:02,160 Odysseus and Odysseus in the sky started weeping. 131 00:16:02,160 --> 00:16:09,500 The whole thing happened with the same opening line. So the great poet sang but Odysseus. 132 00:16:09,500 --> 00:16:18,110 The great poets own, but it is just taking his Blue Ridge gun in his hands, threw it over his head and hit his face. 133 00:16:18,110 --> 00:16:22,720 Ashamed to let the Asians see his stage. 134 00:16:22,720 --> 00:16:34,020 This earlier version has no similar, but the spirit of similarity is radiant, especially when you imagine the piece in performance. 135 00:16:34,020 --> 00:16:38,640 According to you, atheists of Thessalonica, when Ruto's performed the Odyssey, 136 00:16:38,640 --> 00:16:44,180 they would always wear blue and when reciting the Iliad, they will read. 137 00:16:44,180 --> 00:16:50,570 Some of the energy of this passage must derive from the peripheral of that of its performance. 138 00:16:50,570 --> 00:16:56,150 Watching the route towed and under a blue bound to describe a business under a blue cloud, 139 00:16:56,150 --> 00:17:04,460 listening to the monarchists in a blue gown not far from the fictional sea and its googong not far from the actual sea. 140 00:17:04,460 --> 00:17:14,640 It's as if a whole line of aural poets was suddenly reflected all together in the water column. 141 00:17:14,640 --> 00:17:19,750 Go back to the bucket of water. To wave a blue down of it. 142 00:17:19,750 --> 00:17:27,200 And ask what kind of. What is that colour, which Homer calls for for you? 143 00:17:27,200 --> 00:17:34,700 It is not exactly calculated as a couple, but nothing is a settled colour, whereas home as word is agitated. 144 00:17:34,700 --> 00:17:40,520 It derives from Chiba or furrier, which means the rule without breaking. 145 00:17:40,520 --> 00:17:51,290 So it is already a fluid world, a heaped up word, a word with under-12, not a patent, but an emanating from the nature of water. 146 00:17:51,290 --> 00:17:55,490 You get a true sense of puffery. You need to see the sea in it. 147 00:17:55,490 --> 00:18:02,270 And for Homer, the sea is unhuman full of strange creatures, mist coloured, unknowable. 148 00:18:02,270 --> 00:18:06,740 This is my favourite word. It is a spiritual meaning unfenced. 149 00:18:06,740 --> 00:18:14,050 If you want to imagine the colour of riches, it's gone. You will have to swim out into the unfenced place. 150 00:18:14,050 --> 00:18:19,660 The place a lot of definitions. But of fascination. 151 00:18:19,660 --> 00:18:28,830 Yes, I'm afraid you will have to find your way to the volume of nonsense victory. 152 00:18:28,830 --> 00:18:34,980 There you will discover a Dark Lake Worth. An adjective for adolescents. 153 00:18:34,980 --> 00:18:44,090 A sea world used also of death smoke plus missed blood. 154 00:18:44,090 --> 00:18:57,210 Between bluish purple and the. It appears mid ocean when the wind perhaps makes a network of glowing glitter on Boswell moved sideways. 155 00:18:57,210 --> 00:19:04,350 As when a big sea swells with noiseless waves. It is used of the heart. 156 00:19:04,350 --> 00:19:16,560 Meaning his heart was a heaving, not quite broken weight. It indicates a surface that suggests a death, a mutation of Thutmose or Noiseless, she. 157 00:19:16,560 --> 00:19:24,080 A sea creature, a quality of case, any inlet or iodine or shaded stone. 158 00:19:24,080 --> 00:19:30,350 A type of algae or rockfish, anything excessive or out of focus or subliminal. 159 00:19:30,350 --> 00:19:39,080 For example, swimmer seen from underneath a rotting smell list of low sounds and evening shadow or sea god. 160 00:19:39,080 --> 00:19:50,640 A whole catalogue of simmering grudges, storms, waves, solitude or deep water, including everyone who has drowned in it. 161 00:19:50,640 --> 00:19:57,720 To be purple is to lose one day, only to be nothing to grieve without surfacing, 162 00:19:57,720 --> 00:20:04,950 to suffer the effects of she likes to be either sleepless or weightless and cut off by dreams. 163 00:20:04,950 --> 00:20:18,100 Find yourself in the silence underneath an overhanging way, but or thereabouts the colour of a bluish violet ultramarine. 164 00:20:18,100 --> 00:20:27,950 So the great poet and Odysseus taking his bluish gown in his big hands, threw it over his head and hit his face. 165 00:20:27,950 --> 00:20:33,960 Ashamed to let the patients see his face. 166 00:20:33,960 --> 00:20:43,680 The game goes over the head like away, the human sits under the sea floor with saltwater pouring from his arms. 167 00:20:43,680 --> 00:20:52,570 It is one of those places the form of the poem carries us forward the form of the language, the Spanish. 168 00:20:52,570 --> 00:21:00,190 Offering is a word with water inside it, like a bucket down in the middle of a line. 169 00:21:00,190 --> 00:21:05,800 Already, if you look out at the world, you can see the widows similarly underneath it. 170 00:21:05,800 --> 00:21:15,500 But Homer is not yet ready to make that gift. With magnificent theatricality, he draws a blue gown across the mind. 171 00:21:15,500 --> 00:21:27,280 And we like the fashions. I left looking at it, waiting. 172 00:21:27,280 --> 00:21:39,620 Irma is the foremost poet of the visible. Homer delights in surfaces, but the surface of water is complicated by transparency. 173 00:21:39,620 --> 00:21:48,680 And its transparency is complicated by refraction. Water is never the same as itself. 174 00:21:48,680 --> 00:21:53,780 Rivers can only exist as similarities lakes reflect more than their own volume. 175 00:21:53,780 --> 00:22:00,950 And what's more, when you look at water allows you to exist quite a bit more darkly. 176 00:22:00,950 --> 00:22:08,920 When you look at it again, it evaporates as if moving in and out of existence simply required a bit of some. 177 00:22:08,920 --> 00:22:16,300 Then it reappears as Frost perfectly symmetrical as if discovering pre drawn diagrams and thinner. 178 00:22:16,300 --> 00:22:28,440 Then it reappears as tears so that any attempt to describe the surface of water allows you to hide your face and inspect your thoughts. 179 00:22:28,440 --> 00:22:37,670 All these wavelengths are part of the word porphyria. Physics or nature of what is metaphysical? 180 00:22:37,670 --> 00:22:48,350 Meaning that its surface expresses more than itself. So I need to turn left here. 181 00:22:48,350 --> 00:22:59,620 Understand the tears of the dishes. I need to make a detour into the very different world of John Donne, a so-called metaphysical poet. 182 00:22:59,620 --> 00:23:03,490 Samuel Johnson invented the idea of metaphysical poetry, 183 00:23:03,490 --> 00:23:12,610 and he complained that the man who wrote it to impassive and leisurely and cannot be said to have imitated anything. 184 00:23:12,610 --> 00:23:17,770 Johnson, who spent eight years compiling his victory of the English language and forgot to 185 00:23:17,770 --> 00:23:24,710 include words he might be said to have forgotten to see again when he made that remark. 186 00:23:24,710 --> 00:23:29,380 Here is a poem by Dunn called An Addiction of Weeping. 187 00:23:29,380 --> 00:23:34,090 Which might be roughly described as a mutation of the gene. 188 00:23:34,090 --> 00:23:54,400 It is a poem about salt water, which is also a passionate poem, which is also centrally involved in looking out what water is. 189 00:23:54,400 --> 00:24:04,050 Valediction of weeping. Let me put forth my tears before they face whilst I stay here. 190 00:24:04,050 --> 00:24:11,580 Well, they face coins and they start with a. And by this vintage, they are something worse. 191 00:24:11,580 --> 00:24:14,460 But thus they be pregnant of the. 192 00:24:14,460 --> 00:24:28,370 Fruits of much grief, their emblems of more when a tearful start, though, falls which it bore so that I am nothing, then when on a day that sure. 193 00:24:28,370 --> 00:24:40,560 On a round ball, a workman that have copies by and lay in Europe, Africa and Asia and quickly made that which was nothing all. 194 00:24:40,560 --> 00:24:47,070 So does each to which the death were a globe in a world by that impression, 195 00:24:47,070 --> 00:24:54,510 growth till date is mixed with mine do overflow this world by water sent from B my heaven dissolve. 196 00:24:54,510 --> 00:25:02,810 It's a. More than Moon throwing it up seas to drown me in my spell. 197 00:25:02,810 --> 00:25:09,480 We may not get in line on that for there to teach the sea what it may be two to. 198 00:25:09,480 --> 00:25:15,670 Let not the wind and sample find to do any more harm than a purpose of. 199 00:25:15,670 --> 00:25:21,070 Since they went, I see one another's breath with. 200 00:25:21,070 --> 00:25:29,590 This is cruel and haste the other day. 201 00:25:29,590 --> 00:25:35,830 I'm going to read it again, I think without the script, because it's always nice to hear a poem, Alice. 202 00:25:35,830 --> 00:25:39,760 So it's what's here. Could I just interrupt very briefly? Yes. 203 00:25:39,760 --> 00:25:44,440 Could you just move your camera a little bit so that people can see the bottom of your face? 204 00:25:44,440 --> 00:25:49,010 We've had some people who are struggling. If they if they need to lip read a bit, that's better. 205 00:25:49,010 --> 00:25:52,750 That's why that is. That's right. 206 00:25:52,750 --> 00:25:57,760 I can't see myself. So I was like, Okay, thank you. Thank you so much. 207 00:25:57,760 --> 00:26:06,120 I apologise about that. OK, here's the poem again valediction of weeping. 208 00:26:06,120 --> 00:26:15,100 Let me put forth my theories before they face whilst I stay here, although I face coins them and I start super. 209 00:26:15,100 --> 00:26:25,890 And by this vintage, it's something worth for, thus they be pregnant of the fruits of much grief, their emblems of more. 210 00:26:25,890 --> 00:26:34,790 When a tearful though, falls, which it all so thunder then when on a day that she'll. 211 00:26:34,790 --> 00:26:46,070 On a round ball, a workman that hath copies by Ken Lay and Europe, Africa and in Asia and quickly make that which was nothing. 212 00:26:46,070 --> 00:26:55,460 Oh. So does each to which data where a globe gay world by that impression growth. 213 00:26:55,460 --> 00:27:04,530 Till that, it is mixed with mine to overflow this world by water sent from the my home dissolve itself. 214 00:27:04,530 --> 00:27:09,890 Oh, more than the draw, not at sea to drown me in nice, fair. 215 00:27:09,890 --> 00:27:13,610 Wheat need not dead in arms, but for bear to teach the sea. 216 00:27:13,610 --> 00:27:22,710 Well, it may be due to. Let not the wind example find to do me more harm than it property. 217 00:27:22,710 --> 00:27:41,820 Since, though, and I say one another's breath where size most is cruellest and hates the others. 218 00:27:41,820 --> 00:27:48,150 Don was not an oral poet. But nor was he exactly a poet. 219 00:27:48,150 --> 00:27:56,130 His work would have been circulated in manuscript form, and it was normal for her friends to adjust a word here or there, if that seemed fitting. 220 00:27:56,130 --> 00:28:03,060 So you could say that during Ben's life on its own was held in a fluid or at least this state, 221 00:28:03,060 --> 00:28:08,670 and in keeping with this, it achieves a slippery balance between two modes of thinking. 222 00:28:08,670 --> 00:28:17,270 The syntax sounds like a calculation discrimination, but the imagery, it's all watery senselessness. 223 00:28:17,270 --> 00:28:22,310 Two light years mixed with mine to overflow this world by water sent from the. 224 00:28:22,310 --> 00:28:31,110 My heaven resolved to. The dislocation between the tone and form is what makes the poem hard to read. 225 00:28:31,110 --> 00:28:35,820 People are sometimes unsure how much its complexity with its urgency. 226 00:28:35,820 --> 00:28:40,200 It is so clearly a premeditated performance of the here and now. 227 00:28:40,200 --> 00:28:47,430 Let me pour forth whilst I stay here with me, not dead in my arms. 228 00:28:47,430 --> 00:28:57,300 But before criticising the Times governments, one ought to glance down the bucket of water, that is what tears are made of lament at its most extreme. 229 00:28:57,300 --> 00:29:04,170 Always have to encounter water. And we need someone like Dunn to keep an eye on that absurdity. 230 00:29:04,170 --> 00:29:08,490 Sold off each to which theatre were closed. 231 00:29:08,490 --> 00:29:21,370 A bulk buy that impression grown till date is mixed with mine overflow this world, they would just sit and see my heaven dissolve in some. 232 00:29:21,370 --> 00:29:29,410 Inside a tier, as if in a mirror dunces copies of copies of weepies like grant quotes in Odyssey eight. 233 00:29:29,410 --> 00:29:40,150 And these weapons are reflecting each other's tears and provoking more until the sphere or C of the weeping is dissolving and dissolved. 234 00:29:40,150 --> 00:29:45,220 That is what you might call a pirate on an unfenced description of water, 235 00:29:45,220 --> 00:29:52,450 and its language is close to the guns 50 97 account of an actual seabird in which I am the son, 236 00:29:52,450 --> 00:29:57,640 which would teach me how difficult east west they might. 237 00:29:57,640 --> 00:30:07,600 All things are one and that one none can be, since all forms uniform deformity of cover. 238 00:30:07,600 --> 00:30:12,070 Trust a vote on the high seas, said Conrad, a few hundred years later, 239 00:30:12,070 --> 00:30:17,500 trust a vote on the high seas to bring out the irrational that looks at the bottom of every thought. 240 00:30:17,500 --> 00:30:26,430 Sentiment, sensation. Emotion. For all its cleverness, Dunn's poem brings out that high irrationality. 241 00:30:26,430 --> 00:30:41,030 It thinks its way to the bottom of the reports on the confusion becomes the where the mind's world by means of tears, turns into the bodies. 242 00:30:41,030 --> 00:30:48,010 I am using water as a way of reading Homer, and I'm using dung as a way of reading water. 243 00:30:48,010 --> 00:30:51,510 Dunn has carried me into the heart of. 244 00:30:51,510 --> 00:30:59,580 I am under the purple wave now inside the salt water that condenses out of thought and comes weeping from all humans. 245 00:30:59,580 --> 00:31:07,080 And here at its invisible starting point, I find water offer in two subtleties of similarity. 246 00:31:07,080 --> 00:31:20,860 It offers me homeless vision, which is an extended simile, and it offers me dance, which you could say is an extended metaphor or spiritual metaphors. 247 00:31:20,860 --> 00:31:28,010 I think of metaphor as a kind of nutrition whereby one idea gets eaten and digested by another. 248 00:31:28,010 --> 00:31:33,440 Male and female in Dunn's poem is old transform tears, 249 00:31:33,440 --> 00:31:43,430 become fruits and emblems and nothing and spheres and siege everything trans substantiates into something else as it is done. 250 00:31:43,430 --> 00:31:52,050 Who was brought up Catholic but became Anglican in his 20s had found a way to perform communion service in secret. 251 00:31:52,050 --> 00:31:59,520 All his love poems work obsessively for this puzzle change substance, but unlike Homer, 252 00:31:59,520 --> 00:32:06,400 what Don offers is not the gift of similarity, but the gift of communion. 253 00:32:06,400 --> 00:32:13,620 Mark Butler's free and mark in this how little with nice to me is it sucked me first. 254 00:32:13,620 --> 00:32:19,970 You know, it's up to an industry to not be. 255 00:32:19,970 --> 00:32:30,770 But oh, self traitor, I do bring the spider logs, which can substantiate all. 256 00:32:30,770 --> 00:32:40,300 Similarly, moves in the other direction. And instead of reducing one thing to another, it proliferates, it reverberates, 257 00:32:40,300 --> 00:32:46,240 whether wherever there is simply it is as if the poem sprouts another whole poem. 258 00:32:46,240 --> 00:32:56,060 It is much more like pregnancy than nutrition. About 30 years ago, I sent some poems to the Oxford professor of poetry. 259 00:32:56,060 --> 00:32:59,950 The answer came back not enough for. 260 00:32:59,950 --> 00:33:10,770 I remember turning Career Insurance 2.0 in book, noticing the way she refuses to be absorbed into thought he will not be digested. 261 00:33:10,770 --> 00:33:14,520 Features a likeness with a deceased, but keeps the difference. 262 00:33:14,520 --> 00:33:22,920 She goes on screaming. It seemed to me at the time her vitality was directly linked to the spaciousness. 263 00:33:22,920 --> 00:33:30,450 Simone, if she had been a metaphor for her status, getting closer to the woman in the poem or to the women, 264 00:33:30,450 --> 00:33:39,480 for example, in Adrienne Rich's poem Women about whom the poet writes this. 265 00:33:39,480 --> 00:33:43,760 I have a poem, she says, written in the sixties called Winning. 266 00:33:43,760 --> 00:33:50,540 It begins My three sisters are sitting on rocks black obsidian for the first time in this light. 267 00:33:50,540 --> 00:34:00,440 I can see who they are. And she goes on to say, I have seen a parent lost because look at Richard's three sisters on the simplest level, 268 00:34:00,440 --> 00:34:07,800 such a reading is factually incorrect since Adrienne Rich has won just not three. 269 00:34:07,800 --> 00:34:10,740 But more than that, even supposing that Adrienne Rich, 270 00:34:10,740 --> 00:34:19,230 the individual had three sisters and lives by medical on one level is still her speaking on one level, 271 00:34:19,230 --> 00:34:24,360 I can look at another woman who is not my blood, her sister or on another level. 272 00:34:24,360 --> 00:34:31,340 All three sisters are asker of the poet. So. 273 00:34:31,340 --> 00:34:42,890 Poetry is full of that kind of fiction. Those various levels and aspects by means of which metaphor tries to detect something immaterial. 274 00:34:42,890 --> 00:34:57,410 But that is not what Homer is doing. Homer is looking out beyond the south, is taking imagination seriously as an external and collaborative force. 275 00:34:57,410 --> 00:35:07,880 His mind, his friends, is not closed in the skull, but moving in and out of the lungs, discovering someone actually in the air. 276 00:35:07,880 --> 00:35:20,840 Homer wants to express the clarity and other notes of grief, and for that purpose, he has need of sympathy. 277 00:35:20,840 --> 00:35:29,150 Metaphor transposes a known similarly realigns of a that is what I've done, looked deeper and deeper into the fear, 278 00:35:29,150 --> 00:35:35,150 whereas Homer moves his vision to and fro, examining the action of weeping. 279 00:35:35,150 --> 00:35:41,300 Homer has to step. He has to get from one thing to another by means of a slow crossing wound. 280 00:35:41,300 --> 00:35:46,430 The Greek word hosts. I don't know how to translate that word. 281 00:35:46,430 --> 00:35:52,310 It's unfortunate that the English word asked, which is the correct way to introduce a verb comparison. 282 00:35:52,310 --> 00:35:59,690 It's a weak, quiet, old fashioned word. It sounds dusty, like something you would find a Victorian door handles it. 283 00:35:59,690 --> 00:36:09,540 Don't drop. A word, I think, which is designed for comparing notes is altogether more vigorous, but it just ought to chop. 284 00:36:09,540 --> 00:36:17,080 It sticks out of the line like a glinting knife. I need something softer and swift. 285 00:36:17,080 --> 00:36:23,800 Homeless world is a rough breeding, followed by omega undulating last letter of the alphabet, 286 00:36:23,800 --> 00:36:30,030 followed by s as if the wind had heaped up water and then broken it into sounds. 287 00:36:30,030 --> 00:36:35,290 Host, it is hard to pronounce unless you are the wind. 288 00:36:35,290 --> 00:36:44,850 Whenever I read it, I think of weight altering a stretch of water and then altering it again, hosts host. 289 00:36:44,850 --> 00:36:59,030 Two rebels either side of it, like it is, as if the bluish wave because the boat had unfolded and revealed its underneath. 290 00:36:59,030 --> 00:37:03,560 While it is breaking before we reached this at the end of quotes, 291 00:37:03,560 --> 00:37:10,210 I'd like to turn left again to show you a series of ways by the artist Sarah Semblait. 292 00:37:10,210 --> 00:37:12,660 Sara teaches anatomy at the Ruskin. 293 00:37:12,660 --> 00:37:22,990 And if you visit her in Christchurch, you will find all kinds of buried objects twisted but severed wings, stuffed owls and a kingfisher finger bones, 294 00:37:22,990 --> 00:37:35,470 open field moths, seeds, skulls to bones and three waslike like human photos, one with scoliosis, which help her to understand which is it things. 295 00:37:35,470 --> 00:37:48,500 Suppose they comprise a kind of material, actually. But if Sarah wants to draw something moving, growing, living, it makes use of water. 296 00:37:48,500 --> 00:37:54,750 Twenty years ago, Sarah started studying the Thames, Italy, where it goes over the wind. 297 00:37:54,750 --> 00:37:58,890 I listen acutely to water. I draw it sound. 298 00:37:58,890 --> 00:38:08,130 Well, does it smell? She describes how she developed an ability to see water patterns because design of the we're making the water. 299 00:38:08,130 --> 00:38:12,820 So the design of the where the water keep returning to one shape. 300 00:38:12,820 --> 00:38:21,840 So, for example, she made these two sketches by waiting for the water to repeat itself and then marking down another line and then another. 301 00:38:21,840 --> 00:38:26,790 Noticing as she went along, that the speed of the water could only be caught if she drew quickly. 302 00:38:26,790 --> 00:38:32,940 That's another one of. My drawings are all made with fine line of lack of rage, he says, 303 00:38:32,940 --> 00:38:41,840 and declines very fast over the smoothness of the dismantled Moleskine notebook, which goes for the slippery speed of its surface. 304 00:38:41,840 --> 00:38:46,760 So she learnt to draw water by looking at patterns in the with. 305 00:38:46,760 --> 00:38:55,240 And as a counterforce to the bones and stuffed birds, Sarah carries these water currents wherever she goes to remind her to look at things liquid. 306 00:38:55,240 --> 00:39:01,810 Last winter on a residency in Honolulu, she took out the drawings again and decided to get some weights. 307 00:39:01,810 --> 00:39:08,060 Here they are. I hope. The first one. 308 00:39:08,060 --> 00:39:12,170 This one, I think it is the first one is formalised, made in the presence of water, 309 00:39:12,170 --> 00:39:17,600 but later on in a perfectionist mood that hotel Sara said this about it. 310 00:39:17,600 --> 00:39:26,850 I think the hotel room reworking collapsed into Athens because I could no longer hear or smell or taste it or could see the water. 311 00:39:26,850 --> 00:39:36,060 If reading is a kind of internal drawing, then sketch reminds me how easy it is to read over enthusiastically turning poems and systems in your head. 312 00:39:36,060 --> 00:39:40,530 I prefer this next one. Buckley treated by maid. 313 00:39:40,530 --> 00:39:50,430 You can see the torn page and the ink walked off. And if you hold it's thick and paper, you can feel the hope with a first rate performance by water. 314 00:39:50,430 --> 00:40:00,060 And I think it followed by some sketches she made on the back looking at the outlines of water in the back of the paintings. 315 00:40:00,060 --> 00:40:04,650 Sarah is off to something more lucid, the flourish of a falling wave. 316 00:40:04,650 --> 00:40:11,780 It's neither incoherent nor over coherent. A paradox between movement and movement. 317 00:40:11,780 --> 00:40:17,560 Here is a series of drawings made while watching waves break over a rock. 318 00:40:17,560 --> 00:40:21,290 Informed by the moment, but not dissolved in it. 319 00:40:21,290 --> 00:40:29,840 She says all of my drawings rely on all of my senses, I touch or hold subjects, especially plants, whenever possible. 320 00:40:29,840 --> 00:40:40,360 I hear really important smell and taste, and this is all a kind of same. 321 00:40:40,360 --> 00:40:52,620 Any one of those sketches would make the translating Greek word hosts surge of change provisional and mobile like a breaking wave. 322 00:40:52,620 --> 00:41:02,020 So the great singer sang, but Odysseus liquefied. The tears run out under his eyelids, on his cheeks, host as a woman, 323 00:41:02,020 --> 00:41:08,020 crumpled over and mourned her husband, he has fallen in full view of his city and his family. 324 00:41:08,020 --> 00:41:13,120 He was trying to delay the traumatic moment for his children. Do you see him dying? 325 00:41:13,120 --> 00:41:17,800 And so it's been great, Cecil from his body screaming a shrill sound. 326 00:41:17,800 --> 00:41:22,870 And the man behind or hitting her head and shoulders with spears and lead her away. 327 00:41:22,870 --> 00:41:29,740 That slavery to suffer hard work and sadness and her face is sucked thin with pitiful grief. 328 00:41:29,740 --> 00:41:36,450 So additions was pouring out. It happened to its from his own. 329 00:41:36,450 --> 00:41:38,940 What you miss in that translation, oh, 330 00:41:38,940 --> 00:41:48,330 the rolling diameters which are like the cylinders of a great similarity machine on which everything gets processed in apartments 331 00:41:48,330 --> 00:41:55,470 because of the hexamer to there is a structural alignment running down through the poem with which just one weeping to another. 332 00:41:55,470 --> 00:42:02,820 But as it matches one rosy fingered dawn or one winged or one road trip to another. 333 00:42:02,820 --> 00:42:12,250 There is no stopping it. Over those cylinders goes the shrillness supplement, get flattened into shrillness of grasshoppers when seabirds, 334 00:42:12,250 --> 00:42:20,140 sirens and the pilfering of water comes out comes out in the same colour as the hot. 335 00:42:20,140 --> 00:42:32,130 At least that is how it appears when you were reading the Odyssey and the keep coming at you like a recorded message. 336 00:42:32,130 --> 00:42:37,080 Think I have a recorded message? Listen, you are calling knows you are waiting. 337 00:42:37,080 --> 00:42:41,340 Please try later. The person you are calling knows you are waiting. 338 00:42:41,340 --> 00:42:46,410 Please, please try later. The person you are calling knows you are waiting. 339 00:42:46,410 --> 00:42:55,460 Please try later. Eating, please try again later, the person you called knows you are waiting. 340 00:42:55,460 --> 00:43:00,500 Please try again later. The person you called knows you are waiting. 341 00:43:00,500 --> 00:43:05,930 Please try again later. 342 00:43:05,930 --> 00:43:13,370 And of course, this crime was not in the first place, recorded and in performance, as Pina Bausch said, repetition is not repetition. 343 00:43:13,370 --> 00:43:17,600 It's something more like the varying resemblances of wage. 344 00:43:17,600 --> 00:43:26,780 Humour speaks not in cylinders, not as an answer machine, but in undulations hosts as a woman crumples over hosts. 345 00:43:26,780 --> 00:43:32,470 So Odysseus poured out his. And who exactly is this woman? 346 00:43:32,470 --> 00:43:40,300 I've seen her in the dark space, just behind my eyes and sometimes in front of them is in shock, so her knees have given way to keep crumbling over. 347 00:43:40,300 --> 00:43:47,440 She flashes past screaming and ignited the allies. She has no name, and nor does her city it might destroy. 348 00:43:47,440 --> 00:43:54,250 It might just as well be Minneapolis. She is like Odysseus, but in that likeness, she could not be more different. 349 00:43:54,250 --> 00:44:04,330 Who is she? If this were a film, we would probably find out the scene would be presented as a flashback hoax, the image phase to the city of Troy. 350 00:44:04,330 --> 00:44:07,660 Here is a deceased killing a man. He has his knee on the man's neck. 351 00:44:07,660 --> 00:44:13,120 We see the man dying and gasping for breath. Here is the widow screaming a shrill sound. 352 00:44:13,120 --> 00:44:17,620 The scream fills up the cinema hosts. The image fades back to feature. 353 00:44:17,620 --> 00:44:24,490 Scream keeps going. In that film version, the widow has the status of a memory or a ghost. 354 00:44:24,490 --> 00:44:31,630 She is a victim of a vicious lot, its psychology. That connexion is causal and therefore fixed. 355 00:44:31,630 --> 00:44:42,280 In Homer's version, there is only ideology. The wave of weeping moves through both characters, but they keep status of the difference. 356 00:44:42,280 --> 00:44:47,470 Odysseus in one world and the widow in another as subhuman. 357 00:44:47,470 --> 00:44:55,390 Johnson might have put it, that connexion is living variable and can no more be ascertained in a victory and approved 358 00:44:55,390 --> 00:45:04,800 in the amputation of a storm can be accurately delineated from its picture in the water. 359 00:45:04,800 --> 00:45:12,040 So thank you. I am now going to be happy to answer some questions and go back to roots. 360 00:45:12,040 --> 00:45:21,190 And I think. Hello. Thank you so much, and that was gripping and moving in the fullest sense of the word. 361 00:45:21,190 --> 00:45:27,730 We have a lot of people asking questions and I will start. 362 00:45:27,730 --> 00:45:35,780 Well, let's start with with with one that starts with where you started. How did you come to the subject of water today for your lecture? 363 00:45:35,780 --> 00:45:39,980 I think I seldom leave the subject to water. 364 00:45:39,980 --> 00:45:52,640 I'm very keen on swimming and rivers, but I suppose as well as that, I've always been very interested in that particular simile about a woman weeping. 365 00:45:52,640 --> 00:46:04,190 And I've never really known how to answer the question of why at the highest pitch of our emotion, we dissolve into water. 366 00:46:04,190 --> 00:46:06,800 So that kind of weird connexion that when you're swimming, 367 00:46:06,800 --> 00:46:12,560 you know you're swimming in the same liquid as grief at its most intense has bothered me for for a long time. 368 00:46:12,560 --> 00:46:18,510 I think that's really interesting. One of the questions we had was, can you speak to the road of tears as a meeting of grief and water? 369 00:46:18,510 --> 00:46:25,580 And I suppose that's what you're describing is that moment of encounter with water, which is also an encounter with grief. 370 00:46:25,580 --> 00:46:32,390 Yes. Tonight I'm that's a a a Jewish legend connected to the story of Adam and Eve 371 00:46:32,390 --> 00:46:38,690 that says that humans were originally given tears as a compensation for death. 372 00:46:38,690 --> 00:46:49,040 And I think that's I love that idea. It's a really bad bargain to get these little drops of water in exchange for dying. 373 00:46:49,040 --> 00:46:56,960 But if you think about it, it's actually quite a lot as well to be given something physical and actual victims, 374 00:46:56,960 --> 00:47:06,020 which either through destruction or as an anaesthetic or simply through the assailant presents you with of how the body connects with the mind. 375 00:47:06,020 --> 00:47:12,260 They sort of move you through grief, I suppose. And I'm just going to ask a little question of my own because I was so struck 376 00:47:12,260 --> 00:47:17,990 with that metaphor that you were giving us and you're working it through. So I simile from home. 377 00:47:17,990 --> 00:47:23,180 I wanted to ask a bit about time in that and how you perceive that simile working in time. 378 00:47:23,180 --> 00:47:28,280 You talked about hallucinatory poetry floating above other poetry. 379 00:47:28,280 --> 00:47:32,840 Is this an interruption? Is it happening at the same time? 380 00:47:32,840 --> 00:47:40,830 I was thinking particularly about Denise Riley's wonderful time lived without its flow and this idea that Greece suspends time, 381 00:47:40,830 --> 00:47:44,660 but you are still living in time and whether there's something going on in that. 382 00:47:44,660 --> 00:47:48,200 Yeah, Denise talks a lot about the stuckness of Greece, doesn't she? 383 00:47:48,200 --> 00:47:53,960 And how how it is actually occupies a different time from ordinary, everyday time. 384 00:47:53,960 --> 00:47:58,370 And I think it's it's a brilliant thing to say, and that's exactly right. 385 00:47:58,370 --> 00:48:02,690 And I've always been fascinated by the way Homer's similes occupy that time as well, 386 00:48:02,690 --> 00:48:08,990 so they always change into the present tense from the main part of the poem, which is in a sense. 387 00:48:08,990 --> 00:48:11,990 And I suppose it's perhaps a bit like the idea of the dream time. 388 00:48:11,990 --> 00:48:19,340 It's it's as if there is a continuous present in which at our highest pitch emotion or understanding we can, 389 00:48:19,340 --> 00:48:23,180 we can sort of look down ordinary time and get a different perspective. 390 00:48:23,180 --> 00:48:35,300 When I'm still on tears, we have a question that says, why are tears symbolically considered culturally pure when other bodily emissions, 391 00:48:35,300 --> 00:48:45,920 saliva and blood have an abject quality viewed as impure and probably not the right person to answer that. 392 00:48:45,920 --> 00:48:52,910 But eyes are the windows of the soul, so it might seem that is other some sort of liquid of the soul, 393 00:48:52,910 --> 00:49:03,590 whereas urine tight earwax saliva come from different windows of the body, which are not necessarily connected with the show. 394 00:49:03,590 --> 00:49:12,440 But. I don't think I really have the right answer, only my own opinion and eyes are very fascinating thing, 395 00:49:12,440 --> 00:49:17,790 so that's why perhaps to get a kind of status videos. 396 00:49:17,790 --> 00:49:23,600 We have two questions that I think a connexion connected ones, an extended way in one's a short way of asking the same thing. 397 00:49:23,600 --> 00:49:29,620 So one of our listeners gets a quote from Mrs. Dalloway from Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 398 00:49:29,620 --> 00:49:35,320 where she says this late age of the world's experience had bred in them all all men and women. 399 00:49:35,320 --> 00:49:43,120 A well of tears, tears and sorrow. Courage and endurance. A perfect, upright and stoical bearing. 400 00:49:43,120 --> 00:49:49,000 What do you make of Wolf's confluence of grief and compassion, nurture and forbearance in this quote? 401 00:49:49,000 --> 00:49:54,490 And how do you think we might make our own current collective well of tears productive? 402 00:49:54,490 --> 00:50:03,360 And then a more direct way, I suppose, by asking that question is, has the current global situation influenced your work? 403 00:50:03,360 --> 00:50:14,650 I'm. Well, in terms of the first part of the question, I suppose I I still do think I do not want to stop, 404 00:50:14,650 --> 00:50:21,270 which is I think the great thing about certainly about poetry is that it doesn't get stuck in lament. 405 00:50:21,270 --> 00:50:28,530 I think it has this this kind of rhythmical aspect to it, which moves it through things. 406 00:50:28,530 --> 00:50:33,810 It's got kind of dance and song going on alongside whatever grief it might express. 407 00:50:33,810 --> 00:50:39,620 So I I myself. Wouldn't want to get stuck in that. 408 00:50:39,620 --> 00:50:45,440 Well, it is, I think that one of the great things about certainly about poetry I don't know 409 00:50:45,440 --> 00:50:50,900 about the novel really is that it does present two things at the same time. 410 00:50:50,900 --> 00:50:59,930 So you can tend to grief at the same time as sort of just the joy of the music of the poem. 411 00:50:59,930 --> 00:51:05,700 And probably with. Second part of the question, 412 00:51:05,700 --> 00:51:15,060 I think that it's quite important to wait and not know too quickly how these extraordinary times are going to have affected people. 413 00:51:15,060 --> 00:51:22,170 Perhaps one of the things that poetry demands is that you kind of you don't necessarily listen to the surface of your mind. 414 00:51:22,170 --> 00:51:29,380 You wait until the underneath has something to say, and that can generally take a couple of years, I think. 415 00:51:29,380 --> 00:51:34,890 So who knows? There are some who say it have made any difference at all. 416 00:51:34,890 --> 00:51:45,870 I certainly think it's given enough kind of solitude and quietness for people, at least to sort of churn things over quite a lot. 417 00:51:45,870 --> 00:51:50,550 A question here from Dan Rather or although we're still with rhythm. 418 00:51:50,550 --> 00:51:56,700 Alice has such a strong sense of rhythm when reading poetry. Sometimes a natural rhythm and all the more revealing for it. 419 00:51:56,700 --> 00:52:02,020 Has she allowed her poetry to be set to music and if so, what she happy? 420 00:52:02,020 --> 00:52:03,370 I love working with musicians. 421 00:52:03,370 --> 00:52:12,280 I think the best of those collaborations has been when I and the musician kind of take it in turns and listen to each other. 422 00:52:12,280 --> 00:52:22,270 I haven't so much enjoyed a kind of formal relationship. I've occasionally written operas and things like that or watch dogs. 423 00:52:22,270 --> 00:52:28,120 And I find that a bit less satisfactory because perhaps it's vain of me. 424 00:52:28,120 --> 00:52:36,010 But the music is really the serious thing in that collaboration, and it tends to be told when you start out on it. 425 00:52:36,010 --> 00:52:49,730 But only 10 percent of your words will be heard or something. So I love working with musicians, but in a slightly more jazzy way, I think. 426 00:52:49,730 --> 00:52:55,850 OK. Many questions coming in, I'm just trying to order them in my head. 427 00:52:55,850 --> 00:53:04,570 Sarah asks, Does the surface of the water represent our sense perceptions and our imaginations, which led to uncertainties in our life? 428 00:53:04,570 --> 00:53:11,910 So do you think that agitation is about the state of uncertainty? 429 00:53:11,910 --> 00:53:19,020 And I think that what fascinates me about the surface of warfare is that it isn't just surface you can see through it. 430 00:53:19,020 --> 00:53:22,260 And it also looks back at you with Richard Burton. 431 00:53:22,260 --> 00:53:28,680 So it is the one that surface and this always this is why I get interested in it whenever it crops up in homer. 432 00:53:28,680 --> 00:53:31,290 It's the surface that is so it's so. 433 00:53:31,290 --> 00:53:37,860 Whereas Homer always responds to the kind of the actual and the visible on the surface when he's talking about water. 434 00:53:37,860 --> 00:53:46,300 He can't help sort of reading somebody's mind or going into a different kind of world altogether. 435 00:53:46,300 --> 00:53:57,120 And. I think that although I used the word education quite a lot in its lecture, partly because it's we don't using it, 436 00:53:57,120 --> 00:54:01,830 I think that the movement of water doesn't have to be just an uncertainty. 437 00:54:01,830 --> 00:54:10,180 It can be a sort of energy. And I think that's really what I love about the movement of water is. 438 00:54:10,180 --> 00:54:17,460 But it stops you getting stuck, and from the point of view of poetry, that means it kind of. 439 00:54:17,460 --> 00:54:23,500 It gives you all the vitality of life performance rather than the printed page. 440 00:54:23,500 --> 00:54:27,130 I have a lot of people are asking about similes and metaphors. 441 00:54:27,130 --> 00:54:32,890 I think this is a rather brutal question, and you may have already answered it by selecting the matter with somebody you selected. 442 00:54:32,890 --> 00:54:42,120 If you had to pick one simile or metaphor in a poem, which would it be? 443 00:54:42,120 --> 00:54:50,580 Well, obviously that one that I spoke about has always haunted me. 444 00:54:50,580 --> 00:54:57,780 But then I do also love the similes in the Iliad because they just get you to such a very different world. 445 00:54:57,780 --> 00:55:02,880 I also think the thing about human similes is that they're not so much similes as dissimilar 446 00:55:02,880 --> 00:55:09,510 as they tend to grow far enough that you are then ending up in a very different place. 447 00:55:09,510 --> 00:55:17,800 And the one that springs to mind is one that never made it into my version of the Iliad, which is about two men killing and tied. 448 00:55:17,800 --> 00:55:24,840 It's a really strange vision of people extracting pieces, and so I'll throw that one. 449 00:55:24,840 --> 00:55:30,570 And Ariel has a wonderful, watery name for us. Can translations be written on water? 450 00:55:30,570 --> 00:55:36,630 In other words, where would you say derivative works stand in relation to the originals? 451 00:55:36,630 --> 00:55:39,150 That's how she puts it. It's such an interesting question, 452 00:55:39,150 --> 00:55:48,570 because I think that poetry in the 20th century in the 21st century has completely changed its meaning because a conception. 453 00:55:48,570 --> 00:55:52,560 There are so many translations of good poems, 454 00:55:52,560 --> 00:56:00,390 and that has changed what we think of as a poet because always before defined as that, which can't be translated. 455 00:56:00,390 --> 00:56:06,030 So we need translation desperately because we need to sort of fertilise the English language. 456 00:56:06,030 --> 00:56:09,450 But I wonder whether. 457 00:56:09,450 --> 00:56:21,120 Translations of poems don't include silence, because the silence is something that the poet deliberately places a particular point in the language. 458 00:56:21,120 --> 00:56:26,310 And if you translate it, you're not going to have your silences in the same places. 459 00:56:26,310 --> 00:56:33,540 So it does give a very different experience, and I think even writing translations on water wouldn't. 460 00:56:33,540 --> 00:56:37,440 Bill, nothing would. 461 00:56:37,440 --> 00:56:44,790 And and you ask the very specific question about she was wondering about Cordelia and how her tears come to represent compassion and forgiveness, 462 00:56:44,790 --> 00:56:51,330 in a sense, go beyond grieving to do duties, do work beyond grieving. 463 00:56:51,330 --> 00:57:02,750 Well, I think tears do work beyond language beyond thought, which is perhaps why they're valuable beyond grieving. 464 00:57:02,750 --> 00:57:04,610 They certainly take you beyond grieving, 465 00:57:04,610 --> 00:57:15,180 but I think what it would strikes me with her is is her silence and the fact that it's her body that speaks rather than I'm not. 466 00:57:15,180 --> 00:57:21,760 We have a question is what about. 467 00:57:21,760 --> 00:57:29,540 So this is what Alice said about water reminds me of the watercolours by W.A. and their sense of randomness and beautiful accidents, 468 00:57:29,540 --> 00:57:34,940 is that randomness something that you try to include in your own poetry? 469 00:57:34,940 --> 00:57:39,380 I wonder what William Collier would think are being called random because he was 470 00:57:39,380 --> 00:57:45,680 very careful as he sort of guides the water into its locks and smudges very, 471 00:57:45,680 --> 00:57:52,220 very carefully. And there's a huge amount of material artistry in what he does. 472 00:57:52,220 --> 00:58:01,730 But yes, he is interested in allowing water to express itself on the paper, and that's very much my way of working, too. 473 00:58:01,730 --> 00:58:14,720 I like to set things up with a strong enough frame, but something other than myself is then free to make its mark on tries to invite randomness in. 474 00:58:14,720 --> 00:58:23,480 And then one has to be careful that perhaps like Sarah's smudged rains smashed drawing, it doesn't go so far that you can't then read it. 475 00:58:23,480 --> 00:58:29,690 And so I think that the question is always getting a balance between control and lack of control. 476 00:58:29,690 --> 00:58:33,080 Just wanted to share with you guys a message from who says, 477 00:58:33,080 --> 00:58:38,600 I work with grieving children and we use a lot of watery references puddle jumping in and out grief, 478 00:58:38,600 --> 00:58:44,150 wading through rivers, getting stuck in seeds, being knocked over by tsunamis of grief, she says. 479 00:58:44,150 --> 00:58:51,290 Maybe water and grief always flow together. And then another question a specific question from Mary says, 480 00:58:51,290 --> 00:58:58,090 How has your attitude to water changed or developed over the years that you've been writing about water? 481 00:58:58,090 --> 00:59:06,080 And I'm not sure that my attitude, the water has changed, but I suppose I've chosen different types of water. 482 00:59:06,080 --> 00:59:13,670 It was lovely to be able to write a story of a river when I wrote a post that has such a clear beginning, middle and ending. 483 00:59:13,670 --> 00:59:17,300 So the poem was already extracted for me. 484 00:59:17,300 --> 00:59:24,350 I have written quite a lot about rain, and that's always a treat because rain is such a beautiful sound, it's already a poem. 485 00:59:24,350 --> 00:59:31,010 The great challenge for me was writing about the sea, which I tried to do in my book Nobody. 486 00:59:31,010 --> 00:59:36,340 And I suppose for me, the sea is. 487 00:59:36,340 --> 00:59:44,620 Is that which you can't write about? So that was like kind of trying to jump into something impossible unfenced, unfenced? 488 00:59:44,620 --> 00:59:56,630 Exactly. Yeah. And a more scientific question, would you be able to speak on water as gas or solid to these function as poetic modes? 489 00:59:56,630 --> 00:59:59,130 I wish I were more of a scientist. 490 00:59:59,130 --> 01:00:07,880 And I understand from my second son that water is very remarkable when it's solid, for example, because it is lighter than its liquid state. 491 01:00:07,880 --> 01:00:15,170 I've got that right. And I think he's strangely whether it's a gas or a solid or a liquid. 492 01:00:15,170 --> 01:00:18,200 And certainly, I suppose to me, what I love is the transitions. 493 01:00:18,200 --> 01:00:29,630 I love the way water and the frost or the steam, but I don't think I'd be qualified to write scientifically about. 494 01:00:29,630 --> 01:00:33,590 And this is one as we're moving sort of further through our questions. 495 01:00:33,590 --> 01:00:39,500 And Krista and Joe says that you're the most captivating readers you've seen perform live. 496 01:00:39,500 --> 01:00:50,270 And how did the experience of reading alone to the lens differ from reading to a room filled with rapt faces, responsive and reflecting back to you? 497 01:00:50,270 --> 01:00:58,250 Yes, it's I'm still going to be going on a live performance because it's a very different experience and that kind of anxiety about the button 498 01:00:58,250 --> 01:01:08,090 on the computer that scroll the script and then the terrible moment when you rose had just informed me that I wasn't actually visible. 499 01:01:08,090 --> 01:01:15,170 I think that I have seen some quite good performances actually online, so I'm sure there is. 500 01:01:15,170 --> 01:01:20,390 And I love the fact that it can go around the world and that it's very democratic. 501 01:01:20,390 --> 01:01:29,890 So I certainly think it's a good thing. But. There is something different about the human body, I suppose, 502 01:01:29,890 --> 01:01:41,320 and a human conversation that happens when you hear people saying with boredom or rustling sweet papers, you know you've got to pick up speed. 503 01:01:41,320 --> 01:01:49,340 So I think it's for me very important to have the feeling that my words are landing someone. 504 01:01:49,340 --> 01:01:54,140 I think we should probably wrap up, we're almost out of time. 505 01:01:54,140 --> 01:02:07,330 One comment from an anonymous figure says listening is if I wrote a poem while listening to your inspiring lecture, I wish I could multitask that way. 506 01:02:07,330 --> 01:02:11,270 Hello. Thank you very much. So shall I say goodbye? No, I'm going to have to. 507 01:02:11,270 --> 01:02:15,800 I'm going to formally thank you so you will be with us for a little bit longer. 508 01:02:15,800 --> 01:02:20,150 I could not do much longer, so I want to thank you for your lecture this evening. 509 01:02:20,150 --> 01:02:28,740 I'm a bit lost for simile to capture it. Thank you very much for going to offer your lecture in this way tonight and France from audience questions. 510 01:02:28,740 --> 01:02:33,500 And we've had people viewing from all over the world Brazil, Japan, all over the UK, Denmark, 511 01:02:33,500 --> 01:02:40,910 Belgium, Croatia, Saudi Arabia, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Pakistan, South Africa, USA, 512 01:02:40,910 --> 01:02:48,980 all of us, wherever we are, I'm sure, have been moved, probably also agitated by the flow of your analysis, 513 01:02:48,980 --> 01:02:53,870 and it's reflecting 10 some Martin Nelson to homer to Donald Asian rich. 514 01:02:53,870 --> 01:02:58,580 And we're really grateful to you, Alice. Many thanks to you once again. 515 01:02:58,580 --> 01:03:02,580 Thank you very much. Thank you. And thank you all for listening. 516 01:03:02,580 --> 01:03:08,300 And thank you also to all those involved in making tonight possible, including the teams at torch in the English faculty. 517 01:03:08,300 --> 01:03:12,750 I want to thank all your viewers at home for watching and all your wonderful comments and questions. 518 01:03:12,750 --> 01:03:18,690 The audio of Alison's inaugural lecture in November 2019 and audio of lectures by the past 519 01:03:18,690 --> 01:03:23,220 two incumbents of the Post are freely available to the public on English faculty website, 520 01:03:23,220 --> 01:03:28,530 and this lecture will join them there soon. Torch continue their live event series next week. 521 01:03:28,530 --> 01:03:34,260 On Thursday 2nd July at five p.m., They'll be joined by Professor Home UK Barber from Harvard University. 522 01:03:34,260 --> 01:04:25,008 Do tune again and again then, if you can. In the meantime, thank you once again for watching and goodbye.