1 00:00:10,200 --> 00:00:13,300 Good evening, everybody. Can you hear me properly at the back? 2 00:00:13,320 --> 00:00:18,210 Great. Thank you very much for that very kind introduction. 3 00:00:18,660 --> 00:00:28,800 And thank you for the chance to come back to Oxford, where I paid my dues at the Dphil student in the mid to late 1980s. 4 00:00:29,340 --> 00:00:34,229 I'm fairly graduate students among you. I'd like to say that in my experience, 5 00:00:34,230 --> 00:00:40,350 few things in life are more challenging than navigating the isolation and uncertainty 6 00:00:40,590 --> 00:00:45,830 of this stage of study while having to construct a book length argument, 7 00:00:45,840 --> 00:00:52,470 each sentence of which has to be defended. It toughens you up, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. 8 00:00:53,220 --> 00:01:00,270 This is even more daunting if you experience mental illness or addiction during that period as I did. 9 00:01:02,220 --> 00:01:09,900 All good education should cause what feels like an intellectual nervous breakdown in the student. 10 00:01:10,800 --> 00:01:21,600 Otherwise, the institution isn't doing its job of challenging them to abandon old ideas and to grow for the vast majority of students. 11 00:01:22,020 --> 00:01:28,830 This is a benign process, somewhat stressful, but which can nevertheless be negotiated. 12 00:01:29,970 --> 00:01:33,300 What you don't want is an actual nervous breakdown. 13 00:01:34,350 --> 00:01:40,050 Then it is the duty of the university and the NHS to catch the bodies as they fall. 14 00:01:42,220 --> 00:01:47,950 Due to poor life choices, addiction and a tendency to depressed to depression. 15 00:01:48,640 --> 00:01:57,910 I found myself in Oxford mid theses in such emotional pain that I referred myself to the university counselling service. 16 00:01:59,050 --> 00:02:09,520 There I was seen before sessions by a perceptive woman in a sky blue polo neck sweater who worked out the terms of my difficulties with me. 17 00:02:10,750 --> 00:02:21,250 However, this wasn't enough. I was lucky enough to have, as my GP, the excellent late doctor and person to whom I'm very grateful, 18 00:02:21,730 --> 00:02:32,770 who referred me for therapy to the Watford Hospital. There I was enrolled not entirely willingly in group therapy, which I found exquisitely painful, 19 00:02:33,280 --> 00:02:39,760 but which gave me the impetus to move out of the baffling and destructive situation in which I found myself. 20 00:02:41,680 --> 00:02:47,590 This was already a vast improvement in the mental health provision when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, 21 00:02:48,160 --> 00:02:56,200 where a crisis in my second year led to a diagnosis of anxiety from a GP and two weeks in the college sick bay. 22 00:02:57,340 --> 00:03:02,710 There I was allowed to chain smoke, shake and hyperventilate to my heart's content. 23 00:03:04,000 --> 00:03:07,750 I'll be forever grateful to those who argued that I should be alive, 24 00:03:07,780 --> 00:03:17,680 allowed a holding space for the worst of my panic to die down and for it to become clear what steps I needed to take in order to recover. 25 00:03:19,450 --> 00:03:27,490 I decided to take the rest of the year off. This was called Degrading a label, which didn't help my spirits. 26 00:03:27,910 --> 00:03:32,260 As I sat on the train, pulling up to Cambridge, feeling as if my life was over. 27 00:03:33,490 --> 00:03:39,790 After a period away, working in the men's clothing department of Marks and Spencers in Cardiff, 28 00:03:40,510 --> 00:03:44,710 among other things, this was deeply therapeutic, I might add. 29 00:03:45,040 --> 00:03:49,660 I returned the following academic year and very happily finished my degree. 30 00:03:50,800 --> 00:03:56,110 What helped me in both these cases was the humanity of those in charge, 31 00:03:56,530 --> 00:04:05,800 of those who cared for me and helped me to devise the best possible way for me to tackle the issues that had temporarily. 32 00:04:06,040 --> 00:04:08,710 But with terrifying consequences. Paralysing. 33 00:04:11,090 --> 00:04:21,800 Both crises occurred before the the advent of SSRI antidepressants and today's burgeoning of counsellors therapists. 34 00:04:23,150 --> 00:04:24,860 When I returned to live in Wales, 35 00:04:25,220 --> 00:04:34,100 I was referred to a psychiatrist who was also a qualified psychotherapist as rare as hen's teeth, especially in Wales. 36 00:04:35,060 --> 00:04:41,000 This was a piece of miraculous good luck, especially as doctor Scorer was a serious reader of poetry. 37 00:04:41,810 --> 00:04:49,730 I was able to see him on the NHS for over a decade, first weekly, then fortnightly, and then when the need arose. 38 00:04:50,780 --> 00:04:54,800 Even in pre austerity days, this should never have happened. 39 00:04:55,370 --> 00:05:01,040 It did because a compassionate individual took it upon himself to hold a 40 00:05:01,040 --> 00:05:06,560 conversation with me of a quality that enabled me to change the grammar of my life. 41 00:05:08,000 --> 00:05:15,200 It was a rescue from the dysfunctional monologue in my head, out into the sunlight, the dialogue. 42 00:05:16,310 --> 00:05:22,400 This exchange takes work and commitment and requires great precision of language. 43 00:05:24,200 --> 00:05:32,120 I've gone into this history at some length because the lack of mental health provision for young people has been in the news so much recently. 44 00:05:33,380 --> 00:05:38,750 Even though I as out as it's possible to be about my experience of mental illness. 45 00:05:39,320 --> 00:05:45,680 Having written a book about it Sunbathing in the Rain, I'm aware of the shame I feel about my condition. 46 00:05:46,730 --> 00:05:56,240 This, I believe, is one of the symptoms of the illness. I feel that Professor Steve West, vice chancellor of the University of the West of England, 47 00:05:56,240 --> 00:06:05,030 suggestion that students should declare mental health problems as they apply for a place is problematic. 48 00:06:06,080 --> 00:06:15,170 I understand that the desire is here to support students, but when I applied for my own place in school, 49 00:06:15,170 --> 00:06:19,130 from school, I back upon, I didn't even know what my issues were. 50 00:06:19,730 --> 00:06:25,040 And B, even if I had and even if confidentiality were guaranteed, 51 00:06:25,580 --> 00:06:31,640 I would find it very hard to believe that it wouldn't reduce my chances of being accepted. 52 00:06:34,540 --> 00:06:42,790 What ties the art of poetry with the promotion of mental health is the commitment to conversation rather than soliloquy. 53 00:06:45,010 --> 00:06:49,120 The talking therapies have always been at the forefront of treatments for depression. 54 00:06:49,870 --> 00:06:53,050 They have been shown to be at least as effective as medication. 55 00:06:54,220 --> 00:06:58,330 This much depends in part on the quality of that exchange. 56 00:06:59,500 --> 00:07:06,250 I fear that cognitive behavioural therapy or CBT is too often used as a cut price form of therapy, 57 00:07:06,820 --> 00:07:13,720 though it does have its uses in reframing as a reframing device for minor to mild depressive issues. 58 00:07:14,950 --> 00:07:21,460 I also have my doubts about the current fashion for mindfulness as a panacea for mental distress. 59 00:07:22,600 --> 00:07:29,170 As research shows, the technique can be very effective, but it needs highly skilled teachers, 60 00:07:29,590 --> 00:07:35,110 which can't be provided in sufficient numbers by the current general rollout. 61 00:07:36,340 --> 00:07:46,600 The whole point of the technique is to teach the subject to pay less attention to the babbling of the ego consciousness mindlessness, if you like. 62 00:07:47,740 --> 00:07:55,810 It's very easy to do the opposite, to become even more enmeshed in that destructive pattern, and that will get us nowhere. 63 00:08:04,890 --> 00:08:12,240 Much is made of the therapeutic properties of poetry these days, with arts organisations offering the habits of art, 64 00:08:12,570 --> 00:08:17,490 both for the reader and the practitioner as a way of improving health outcomes. 65 00:08:18,600 --> 00:08:24,240 I believe passionately that the act of participating in good art is essential to personal 66 00:08:24,480 --> 00:08:30,540 and social wellbeing and that to make access harder to it is to make us lesser beings, 67 00:08:31,260 --> 00:08:36,089 both in terms of our personal mental health and in the vigour of our ability to 68 00:08:36,090 --> 00:08:40,920 think critically about important decisions we make socially and politically. 69 00:08:41,730 --> 00:08:50,670 I think of art as a vaccine that helps protect our collective immune systems from the worst that we can do to ourselves and to others. 70 00:08:51,810 --> 00:08:59,310 It's fashionable at the moment for those who advocate the arts to argue that in some situations it should be prescribed in the national health. 71 00:09:00,390 --> 00:09:09,720 If we're going to do that, even rhetorically, then we have to ask the question who like Nice is going to ensure good practice? 72 00:09:10,830 --> 00:09:20,430 But if poetry therefore is a therapy, then it follows logically that it must be able to harm as well as heal the poet's patient. 73 00:09:21,330 --> 00:09:27,150 I've seen arts bodies arguing for money from public health budgets to put into art interventions. 74 00:09:27,990 --> 00:09:34,110 If art is considered as therapeutic, then isn't it honest to ask if it can endure as well as heal? 75 00:09:34,920 --> 00:09:39,840 So what are the poisons which are associated with the art of poetry? 76 00:09:41,580 --> 00:09:48,360 I want to talk about the benefits, of course, as well. Language is what makes us social beings. 77 00:09:49,230 --> 00:09:55,590 The Russian poet and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, who was sentenced to hard labour in the USSR, 78 00:09:56,430 --> 00:10:04,409 claimed the poetry shows human evolution happening at the sharp end, hardly surprising them. 79 00:10:04,410 --> 00:10:11,990 The poets who practice language under the most extreme, formal and syntactical constraints should know a little about costs, 80 00:10:12,000 --> 00:10:16,590 about the costs and benefits of deploying the forces of eloquence. 81 00:10:18,460 --> 00:10:25,720 Often a writer's work comes before his or her family, health, financial well-being, anything. 82 00:10:26,320 --> 00:10:36,520 So it would have more effect than anything else. This is because refusing to vacation feels more frightening to the artist than material disaster. 83 00:10:38,230 --> 00:10:48,060 Dostoyevsky, the author of Crime and Punishment, spent four years in the Gulag where he wasn't able to write on his release. 84 00:10:48,070 --> 00:10:51,460 He was terrified that he wouldn't be able to start again. 85 00:10:52,330 --> 00:10:59,469 In a letter to his brother, he speculated how many forms still alive and created by men. 86 00:10:59,470 --> 00:11:06,760 A new will perish, extinguished in my brain or dissolved like poison in my bloodstream. 87 00:11:07,450 --> 00:11:11,800 Yes. If it's impossible to write, I will die better. 88 00:11:12,010 --> 00:11:15,580 15 years imprisonment with pen in hand. 89 00:11:17,140 --> 00:11:26,680 Notice here the image of poison in the blood. Dostoyevsky can't have known that the blood chemistry of depressives depressives is compromised. 90 00:11:26,980 --> 00:11:31,300 So that not writing is here, identified with the writer's destruction. 91 00:11:33,600 --> 00:11:41,190 In the last four years, I've been working with Robin Williams on a translation of the Welsh language, Taliesin Poetry into English. 92 00:11:41,880 --> 00:11:50,100 That's for Penguin Classics. The historical Taliesin was a follower of several warlords in the sixth century. 93 00:11:53,180 --> 00:12:00,530 A contemporary of a Nigerian who wrote the earliest poem and wells, when the language was spoken as far north as Edinburgh. 94 00:12:01,160 --> 00:12:10,640 This Taliesin left wonderful poems evoking the glamour of warfare and the material richness of court life. 95 00:12:11,150 --> 00:12:15,200 I think a poet earned quite a lot of money from his patron. 96 00:12:15,560 --> 00:12:27,020 However, later, medieval poets turned the actual poet Taliesin into a character in a myth and then wrote poems which they ascribed to that character. 97 00:12:28,040 --> 00:12:33,010 That work can be very obscure, but it is gloriously imaginative. 98 00:12:33,020 --> 00:12:37,500 For example. This is the poet speaking. 99 00:12:37,820 --> 00:12:40,910 I was in many forms before my release. 100 00:12:41,240 --> 00:12:46,220 I was a slim, enchanted sword. I believe in its play. 101 00:12:46,460 --> 00:12:50,780 I was a drop in a the sparkling of stars. 102 00:12:51,080 --> 00:12:55,430 A word inscribed a book in priest's hands. 103 00:12:55,820 --> 00:12:59,690 A lantern shining for a year and a half. A bridge. 104 00:12:59,750 --> 00:13:03,840 A crossing over three school. Others. I was a path. 105 00:13:03,860 --> 00:13:06,950 I was eagle. I was a coracle at sea. 106 00:13:07,400 --> 00:13:11,690 I was bubbles in beer. I was a raindrop in sorrows. 107 00:13:12,140 --> 00:13:15,470 I was a sword in the hand. I was a shield in battle. 108 00:13:15,740 --> 00:13:20,840 I was a harp string. Enchanted to nine years in water foaming. 109 00:13:21,080 --> 00:13:24,350 I was tender in fire. I was a forest. 110 00:13:24,350 --> 00:13:32,310 A blaze. This shape shifting shows how volatile the poet's sense of self can be. 111 00:13:32,850 --> 00:13:40,290 Sometimes I feel that I leave my body so often by losing my imagination that I'm in danger of never finding it again. 112 00:13:41,370 --> 00:13:48,210 The American poet Marianne Moore, who was a destructive provider of her own poems, confessed to Grace Sillman. 113 00:13:48,810 --> 00:13:52,350 I aspired to have a taproot, but I don't have one. 114 00:13:54,860 --> 00:14:02,660 The Astoria Taliesin. The story of Taliesin is a bardic or quasi bardic creation myth. 115 00:14:03,680 --> 00:14:13,430 It links the Bard to a number of White's widespread folkloric scenes and locates him firmly in the West and North Wales of the sixth century. 116 00:14:17,170 --> 00:14:20,420 The location of the location. 117 00:14:20,950 --> 00:14:26,230 The myth involves a woman called Caldwell Woman of the Cauldron, 118 00:14:27,700 --> 00:14:39,250 and the store is located in FinTech in Bala Lake in North Wales Capital, and has a son called Merav about the pitch Black Sea raven. 119 00:14:39,730 --> 00:14:44,590 That is a cormorant and he was hideously ugly. 120 00:14:45,580 --> 00:14:55,660 So in order to compensate him for his appearance, cannot win prepares a magical brew designed to endow his son with poetic inspiration. 121 00:14:56,770 --> 00:15:05,300 She employs Guion to feed the fire into the cauldron as the potion has to simmer for a year and a day. 122 00:15:05,320 --> 00:15:16,030 So it needs somebody to stir it. But just as it's ready for drinking three drops from the cauldron fly out and Scald Williams hand, 123 00:15:16,690 --> 00:15:20,990 he puts it to his mouth and so receives the inspiration meant for murder. 124 00:15:23,140 --> 00:15:25,750 He is pursued by the furious Herod when, 125 00:15:26,140 --> 00:15:35,020 through a protracted shapeshifting sequence in which Guion turns himself into a hair and she pursues him as a greyhound, 126 00:15:35,320 --> 00:15:42,250 he becomes a fish and see an otter. He transforms into it, transforms into a bird and see into a hawk. 127 00:15:42,970 --> 00:15:48,100 It ends when Queen as a grain of wheat is swallowed by origin as a hen. 128 00:15:49,000 --> 00:15:55,150 She subsequently gives birth to him and abandons the child to the river in a leather bag. 129 00:15:55,870 --> 00:16:03,520 He's rescued and renamed Taliesin and grows up into a uniquely skilful poet. 130 00:16:06,770 --> 00:16:12,470 It's worth going back to the story for a moment to consider the source of poetic ability. 131 00:16:13,520 --> 00:16:18,920 I won't trouble you with the recipe for creativity here, though I've taken note of it myself. 132 00:16:19,340 --> 00:16:28,670 But whoever drank the first three drops of it would be knowledgeable in the different varieties of poetry and full of the spirit of prophecy. 133 00:16:29,300 --> 00:16:32,690 The writer goes on, and I'll read you some of the Welsh just for fun. 134 00:16:33,440 --> 00:16:40,370 I have yet to hear Willie, but I could see the fishing hymn or the ace sort a tree down a bracelet on the by-line. 135 00:16:40,730 --> 00:16:47,870 And when we can katarzyna and our high board and a B took the definite are going to talk Occupy Athens, Russia. 136 00:16:48,230 --> 00:16:50,400 You shall look Gwendolyn finally. 137 00:16:53,060 --> 00:17:04,430 So this is talking about courage when and she also saw that all that use of these herbs excepting the three drops that led the way was of the 138 00:17:04,430 --> 00:17:15,230 strongest poison which could be strong in the world and which would break the cauldron into pieces to spill the poison on top of the earth. 139 00:17:16,970 --> 00:17:23,990 It can't be unreasonable to speculate that some of the poison might even head to the first three poetic drops, 140 00:17:24,500 --> 00:17:31,730 especially when it's been speculated that the name Goya itself might mean a little prototypical poison. 141 00:17:32,450 --> 00:17:37,670 So cooking and poetry are closer allies earlier than you might have expected. 142 00:17:39,470 --> 00:17:43,550 A few years ago, we celebrated the centenary of Dylan Thomas's work. 143 00:17:44,450 --> 00:17:48,020 I took the opportunity to reread his poetry very closely. 144 00:17:48,620 --> 00:17:55,340 I'm not convinced me that Thomas was a far greater genius than I or many of his critics have given him credit for. 145 00:17:56,450 --> 00:18:04,340 Generally, though, people seem to be much more interested in Thomas as a representative of the course of artist than in his writing. 146 00:18:05,600 --> 00:18:13,940 Elizabeth Bishop, who met him shortly before his untimely death, do note not to alcohol poisoning, but a medical error. 147 00:18:15,020 --> 00:18:21,709 In a letter to a friend fearing for Thomas, she wishes that poets should have a self. 148 00:18:21,710 --> 00:18:35,160 Don't have self. Sorry, I'll start that again. Poets should have self-doubts left out of their system completely. 149 00:18:35,970 --> 00:18:39,330 As one can see, most of the surviving ones seem to have. 150 00:18:40,620 --> 00:18:48,060 But look at Paul Coll. That's Robert Lowell and Marianne, who hangs on just by the skin of our teeth. 151 00:18:48,090 --> 00:18:55,710 That's Marianne. More hands on just by the skin of our teeth and the most elaborate paranoia I've ever heard of. 152 00:18:57,870 --> 00:19:06,150 As his life became more chaotic. And after his first prodigious years as a poet, Thomas was finding it increasingly difficult to write. 153 00:19:07,140 --> 00:19:17,130 We know that before his death, he was planning to write a long poem in the character of Thomas, in the Endnotes, he wrote. 154 00:19:17,160 --> 00:19:26,220 Thomas was planning to adopt the persona of the gods, hence the author, The First Call's Architect. 155 00:19:26,550 --> 00:19:32,670 Lamplighter The Beginning Words The Anthropomorphic Bull, or Martin Black. 156 00:19:32,670 --> 00:19:38,160 Paula the Quintessence Scapegoat, Martyr Maker. 157 00:19:38,640 --> 00:19:45,210 He on top of the hill in heaven. Thomas is being more than a shapeshifter here. 158 00:19:45,720 --> 00:19:48,510 He was planning to speak as a god himself. 159 00:19:49,260 --> 00:19:57,690 A risky position, especially when combined with a local centric religious tradition and a word based artistic genre. 160 00:19:59,400 --> 00:20:03,930 At other times, Thomas seems to regard words themselves as divinity. 161 00:20:08,020 --> 00:20:09,190 And this is Thomas again. 162 00:20:11,030 --> 00:20:23,300 Such sound storms and ice blasts of words, such sloshing of humbug and humbug to such staggering peace, such enormous laughter, 163 00:20:23,810 --> 00:20:33,950 such and so many blinding bright lights breaking across the just the waking wits and splashing all over the pages in a million bits and pieces. 164 00:20:34,310 --> 00:20:43,040 All of which were words, words, words. And each of which was alive forever in its own delight and glory. 165 00:20:43,040 --> 00:20:54,820 And oddity and light. In this passage, Thomas seems to have replaced God with language. 166 00:20:55,810 --> 00:21:04,660 That's all very well. But what happens to a poet who can't write anymore, who feels that he's been rejected by the language God? 167 00:21:06,160 --> 00:21:10,030 It's not difficult to see how this might drive one to despair. 168 00:21:11,680 --> 00:21:14,800 This is romantic only for people who haven't experienced it. 169 00:21:17,030 --> 00:21:21,140 I find that if I'm not writing, I almost inevitably fall ill. 170 00:21:22,400 --> 00:21:25,940 But don't think for a second that the muse is a compliant force. 171 00:21:26,870 --> 00:21:33,139 Here's what I wrote in Sunbathing in the Rain about her or him or his poetry 172 00:21:33,140 --> 00:21:38,570 has acquired a fluffy image which is totally at odds with its real nature. 173 00:21:39,260 --> 00:21:43,340 It's not pastel colours, but blood red and black. 174 00:21:44,240 --> 00:21:49,460 If you don't obey it as a force in your life, it will take you to pieces. 175 00:21:51,800 --> 00:21:56,450 Such a drive may mean simply that writing is a powerful displacement activity. 176 00:21:57,410 --> 00:22:02,990 But I won't suggest that this danger is mitigated by how the arts tune us inevitably 177 00:22:03,260 --> 00:22:08,150 out of the self and towards communication with the rest of human society. 178 00:22:09,530 --> 00:22:15,410 My case for the resilience of poets relies on a certain view of the collective nature of language. 179 00:22:16,520 --> 00:22:25,130 It's not the creation of an individual ego, but the result of centuries of disputation, conflict and reconciliation. 180 00:22:25,910 --> 00:22:34,100 When a poet speaks every word, she uses rings with the echo of that word placed in other poems by her forebears, 181 00:22:34,520 --> 00:22:37,880 and also with those of the future writers. 182 00:22:38,450 --> 00:22:44,000 For example, when I'm describing a bird, my is memory. 183 00:22:44,120 --> 00:22:51,730 Also, here is this medieval lyric, and you need to know that a musket in this context is a male sparrow. 184 00:22:53,180 --> 00:22:58,350 The Latin refrain means fear of death undoes me. 185 00:23:00,420 --> 00:23:12,000 In water state so and I b t mode not this controller but near as I went on a merry morning, I heard the birds both weep and sing. 186 00:23:12,510 --> 00:23:17,970 This was the tenor of her talking to Ma Marty's controller back to me. 187 00:23:18,930 --> 00:23:25,860 I asked the bird what she meant. I am a musket both fair and gent for drag of death. 188 00:23:25,860 --> 00:23:31,919 I am also sent t mama this concerto back to me when I shall die. 189 00:23:31,920 --> 00:23:39,930 I know no day what country your place I cannot say where for this song sing I may t more 190 00:23:39,930 --> 00:23:47,309 modest control Batman hears who cries when he should die to his father He can say Father, 191 00:23:47,310 --> 00:23:58,440 He says infinity T must is control back to me All Christian people behold and see this world is such a vanity and replete with necessity. 192 00:23:58,950 --> 00:24:05,010 T more marches control Batman wake I or sleep, eat or drink. 193 00:24:05,370 --> 00:24:08,969 When I of my last m do think for greater fear. 194 00:24:08,970 --> 00:24:12,780 My soul does drink t mama to counter Batman. 195 00:24:13,710 --> 00:24:20,430 God grant disgrace him for to serve and be at our end when we starve street Sorry 196 00:24:20,670 --> 00:24:26,970 stir and from the fiend he us preserve to our mouth this control about to me. 197 00:24:28,880 --> 00:24:35,590 Not only is this a dialogue between the bird and the poet, it's etymological range covers two cultures, 198 00:24:35,780 --> 00:24:40,790 cultures, classical and early modern and all the times in between. 199 00:24:41,990 --> 00:24:48,740 This speech act is a bridge between periods rather than a mote separating nations from each other. 200 00:24:50,330 --> 00:24:56,810 If the fear of death and does the Speaker, then its expression in the poem builds him or her up again. 201 00:24:57,920 --> 00:25:06,830 Well, my writing, we're not talking to ourselves, but to language itself and everybody who speaks it and answers come back. 202 00:25:07,370 --> 00:25:14,630 A feedback loop created by form. The willingness to listen to this is what makes a writer great. 203 00:25:24,640 --> 00:25:27,760 I've got a second quote from Dostoyevsky here. 204 00:25:27,760 --> 00:25:31,420 And it's about the nature of good language. 205 00:25:32,290 --> 00:25:43,060 A man who lies to himself and believes his own lies become unable, becomes unable to recognise truth either in himself or in anyone else. 206 00:25:43,450 --> 00:25:49,570 And he ends up losing respect for himself and for others when he has no respect for anyone. 207 00:25:49,810 --> 00:25:57,790 He can no longer love. And in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, 208 00:25:58,120 --> 00:26:02,890 indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. 209 00:26:03,850 --> 00:26:08,350 And it all comes from lying. Lying to others and to yourself. 210 00:26:09,950 --> 00:26:17,209 It's not hard to think of the fake communication made easier by the social media like president and those 211 00:26:17,210 --> 00:26:23,450 like President Trump and those like President Trump and Vladimir Putin who are committed to its practice. 212 00:26:24,530 --> 00:26:31,760 Dostoyevsky was talking about great art, but it's striking to me how these politicians exhibit some artistic qualities. 213 00:26:32,630 --> 00:26:39,980 Trump is a performance artist of genius. He knows how to harness strong emotions to a few words, 214 00:26:40,970 --> 00:26:49,670 how to project an imaginative scenario with total conviction, and how to ensure an audience suspends its disbelief. 215 00:26:50,960 --> 00:26:54,920 As we know, he plays fast and loose with the fast and loose the truth. 216 00:26:55,610 --> 00:27:00,260 Furthering his own aims by creating confusion rather than clarity. 217 00:27:01,550 --> 00:27:06,200 Here I remember that Stalin was a poet and Hitler a failed painter. 218 00:27:07,220 --> 00:27:17,690 Vladimir Putin, I notice, has a way of using words with a surface truthfulness to conceal, but not hide his actual atrocities. 219 00:27:18,740 --> 00:27:25,280 A tiny example of this comes from the time when the submarine Kursk sank with all hands. 220 00:27:26,450 --> 00:27:34,220 His response to an American TV host's question is both a literal truth and betrays a breathtaking callousness. 221 00:27:34,550 --> 00:27:44,360 Given that it took about ten days for the search party to have been set up and the host asks what happened to the submarine? 222 00:27:45,140 --> 00:27:53,410 Putin says it's sunk. I believe you can see this in many of his public pronouncements. 223 00:27:55,090 --> 00:28:06,280 Ursula Le Guin, poetry and fantasy writer, calls these mirror words, each of which reflects the truth and none of which leads anywhere. 224 00:28:08,080 --> 00:28:13,570 I wasn't in the least surprised to see that not one poet took part in Trump's inauguration. 225 00:28:14,680 --> 00:28:18,160 The two types of discourse aren't compatible. 226 00:28:19,470 --> 00:28:28,810 The literary critic Martha Frye warned there was only one way to degrade mankind permanently, and that is to destroy language. 227 00:28:31,230 --> 00:28:36,840 Even though poetry's repeatedly called the dying art, it always neglects to die. 228 00:28:38,070 --> 00:28:41,160 This is because it uses language at its most resilient. 229 00:28:42,210 --> 00:28:49,830 Some of the broadsheets this week ran censorious articles criticising advertising for corrupting the English language. 230 00:28:50,460 --> 00:28:58,260 Examples are Find your happy Feet more amazing, or the new slogan of the Wales Tourist Board. 231 00:28:58,530 --> 00:29:08,860 Find your epic. This instantly made me want to use this kind of language in a poem as an experiment. 232 00:29:08,880 --> 00:29:16,660 Rather than joining in with the condemnation. For a poet, this kind of innovation is an opportunity not to be missed. 233 00:29:17,310 --> 00:29:25,139 If it can be used in the service of form and beauty, rather than simply selling you a car or a holiday, though you should all go to Wales. 234 00:29:25,140 --> 00:29:28,890 It is worth a visit. Let me be clear. 235 00:29:28,890 --> 00:29:37,740 I'm not talking here about language that is wilfully misused to disguise meaning to frustrate communication between equals. 236 00:29:40,020 --> 00:29:43,680 In her book about manic depression touched by fire, 237 00:29:44,370 --> 00:29:50,580 Kay Redfield Jamison attempted to recreate no attempted to create meaningful statistics 238 00:29:51,150 --> 00:29:56,580 by extrapolating figures for mental illness from the writings and lives of dead poets. 239 00:29:57,630 --> 00:30:00,030 Her conclusions was startling. 240 00:30:00,720 --> 00:30:11,010 The poets are 40 times more likely to be manic depressive than the rest of the population and eight times more likely to commit suicide. 241 00:30:12,150 --> 00:30:15,810 However, statistics can go both ways. 242 00:30:16,800 --> 00:30:30,180 A massive study reviewing other studies in 1998 found that of 29 studies considered 15 found no link between creativity and mental illness. 243 00:30:30,930 --> 00:30:34,530 Nine found the link and five were agnostic. 244 00:30:35,760 --> 00:30:40,380 The American Wallace Stevens called the poet's work the stronger life. 245 00:30:42,260 --> 00:30:47,400 An emphasis that I share. Poets work is generally ignored. 246 00:30:47,570 --> 00:30:53,180 Extremely badly paid, if at all, and socially isolated. 247 00:30:53,870 --> 00:30:59,900 It's a quite self-questioning rumination on difficult issues and long stretches of time 248 00:31:00,260 --> 00:31:05,210 when you have no idea of what you're doing or whether it'll be of any value at all. 249 00:31:06,260 --> 00:31:16,670 In this situation, I'd say that far from being casualties or wimps writers of the essay, yes, the written words in these poems, 250 00:31:16,680 --> 00:31:23,240 resolution and independence worked was words that asserted We poets in our youth begin in gladness. 251 00:31:23,540 --> 00:31:26,960 But there of in the end come despondency and madness. 252 00:31:28,220 --> 00:31:39,620 John Berryman, the great American religious poet, killed himself in 1972, but in her memoir, Poets in Their Youth, Eileen Simpson, his widow, 253 00:31:39,830 --> 00:31:46,370 noted that his father had killed himself aged 40 and argued that her husband's 254 00:31:46,370 --> 00:31:51,830 writing had have given him 17 more years than would otherwise have been the case. 255 00:31:53,980 --> 00:31:57,160 So what is good speech? Virtuous speech. 256 00:31:57,250 --> 00:32:02,020 In the original medical sense of bringing strong benefits to the user. 257 00:32:10,030 --> 00:32:16,839 When my husband was diagnosed with stage four lymphoma over a decade ago and he's still in remission, 258 00:32:16,840 --> 00:32:21,190 I should tell you, I sent a long poem in the hospital. 259 00:32:22,990 --> 00:32:30,610 This made me think about how excuse me, this made me think about how my own writing fits into the whole process of healing him. 260 00:32:30,820 --> 00:32:36,760 Not that I was healing him. Perhaps I was healing myself of the shock. 261 00:32:38,650 --> 00:32:44,770 Anyway, this was my updating of the classical invocations of the gods in an epic poem. 262 00:32:46,330 --> 00:32:49,780 And this is a book called A Hospital Odyssey. So it is an epic. 263 00:32:55,120 --> 00:33:00,130 I've said already that I won't feel well till this poem is finished. 264 00:33:00,670 --> 00:33:03,940 And I find what I mean about health and loving. 265 00:33:05,620 --> 00:33:11,350 It's a hospital. This place I'm constructing line by line with clinics in it. 266 00:33:11,590 --> 00:33:17,140 And somehow it comes open to anyone. Words in my health. 267 00:33:17,620 --> 00:33:22,990 The struggle to hear and transcribe the two behind what I'm given by word of mouth. 268 00:33:23,590 --> 00:33:26,860 It's the only work that can make me immune to lying. 269 00:33:28,000 --> 00:33:35,890 May my language gene grant me haemoglobin and many platelets potency deep inside bone marrow. 270 00:33:36,880 --> 00:33:42,040 My safety lies with other poets who shown the way they took through shadows. 271 00:33:42,550 --> 00:33:51,040 Milton will be with me now. I want to capture what it is to care for someone you love who's very ill. 272 00:33:51,850 --> 00:33:57,430 How quickly you age as you see them suffer. You do anything to make them well. 273 00:33:58,000 --> 00:34:01,540 But you can't. Now help me, Virgil. 274 00:34:02,170 --> 00:34:10,390 Give me the strength of your long sinews to capture that brave but painful smile couples exchange when they both know the score. 275 00:34:11,410 --> 00:34:15,760 Help me to draw on wells that are clean and kind and plentiful. 276 00:34:16,990 --> 00:34:25,000 What do you say when someone you love is dying and there's nothing you can do to stop it happening and you're alive and well, 277 00:34:25,180 --> 00:34:29,050 nowhere near through adoring them and you can follow. 278 00:34:30,760 --> 00:34:34,750 One body is never enough. My reach is long. 279 00:34:35,590 --> 00:34:40,270 Of one thing You can be sure I'll never give up on this endless search for you. 280 00:34:40,690 --> 00:34:45,280 And it's my only cure to touch you. Yes, stranger. 281 00:34:45,970 --> 00:35:00,530 I mean you. The real expert on mindfulness is the Buddha, who declared words can have the power both to destroy and heal. 282 00:35:01,460 --> 00:35:05,630 When words about true unkind, they can change our world. 283 00:35:16,150 --> 00:35:20,650 And I just want to read another little clip from Hospital Odyssey. 284 00:35:20,980 --> 00:35:24,940 It's about it's a kind of cosmology of crisis. 285 00:35:29,230 --> 00:35:36,550 It's a long story. But Morris, who is the carer, is in outer space. 286 00:35:36,910 --> 00:35:44,350 I told you it was a long story, but and she can see Hardy, her husband, for the first time. 287 00:35:50,060 --> 00:35:57,620 Mm hmm. So they're both in in danger in outer space. 288 00:35:58,550 --> 00:36:08,030 Maybe not them. But this is what Hardy saw from his dying marriage, spending over him and behind to the vibrant, 289 00:36:08,030 --> 00:36:14,360 dazzling cool of the sun, rich and red, as he mccrum the 50 million degrees. 290 00:36:15,080 --> 00:36:22,550 He was overcome by the knowledge that everything out there was, in truth, his own body with filaments of light. 291 00:36:23,210 --> 00:36:32,150 We're talking with everywhere at once. And we were never meant to be sort of a single line was to repent in the space time continuum. 292 00:36:32,660 --> 00:36:37,040 That's prose. No, it's more like the drive of poetry. 293 00:36:37,790 --> 00:36:46,880 It's always when I rhyme, there's always a nanosecond before I've chosen a word when I perceive all its homophones at once. 294 00:36:47,300 --> 00:36:54,200 Before the end words probability wave collapses before I take a chance on one meaning when my 295 00:36:54,200 --> 00:37:01,370 mind revolves with the quantum mechanics that makes stars evolve from the tiniest jitters. 296 00:37:02,810 --> 00:37:09,530 We're born to catastrophe. Galaxies fly away from each other in identical forms. 297 00:37:10,070 --> 00:37:12,350 Matter never sees fit to die. 298 00:37:12,680 --> 00:37:23,810 And if life is a transfer of energy from one state to another, this poem from me to you, then this continual exchange must be our purpose. 299 00:37:24,680 --> 00:37:29,930 Infinities. Birdsong continues just beyond the range of our human hearing. 300 00:37:30,860 --> 00:37:34,970 Love is the hinge on which it's on, which it all turns. 301 00:37:41,190 --> 00:37:46,000 My experience. All right, Just check. 302 00:37:47,820 --> 00:37:59,160 Oh yeah. My experience of writing poetry since I was age seven is that it's the best tool I have for working out what the truth of any situation is. 303 00:37:59,700 --> 00:38:02,880 Though therapy and prayer are both fundamental in my life. 304 00:38:03,780 --> 00:38:11,010 When I teach university students. What strikes me is how baffled they are by their own poor language skills. 305 00:38:12,300 --> 00:38:21,150 These are not the fault of the university, but of schools, many of which haven't taught the students how to use language to find out what they mean. 306 00:38:21,510 --> 00:38:31,830 And it's certainly not the fault of the students. This involves labour failure, obsessive redraughting, and who in their right mind wants to do that? 307 00:38:32,880 --> 00:38:37,530 Well, precisely. Those people who know that they're mad that they're not well. 308 00:38:38,310 --> 00:38:47,550 Only pain drives you hard enough to brave these confusions and to move forward towards clarity, which is the only thing that can save us. 309 00:38:49,170 --> 00:38:58,830 And a conversation with others which more than kills exercise is the most potent tool we have in our personal and collective armoury. 310 00:39:00,150 --> 00:39:05,820 The great Welsh language poet Bobby Jones goes even further on the routine. 311 00:39:05,820 --> 00:39:09,540 The only and the more involve death. 312 00:39:09,930 --> 00:39:12,990 You are afraid of me because I'm a poet. 313 00:39:13,890 --> 00:39:21,720 Now there's a reason for writing away from ill health, the abuse of power and towards an extravagant sanity. 314 00:39:22,020 --> 00:39:33,330 Thank you very much. So as someone whose favourite poetry publication is called Three Drops from a Cauldron, I found that absolutely delightful. 315 00:39:34,890 --> 00:39:40,180 Vice Chancellor Catherine the Caroline's gentle Folk. 316 00:39:40,200 --> 00:39:47,120 ALL Thank you. Five years ago, I curated a pop up installation at Modern Art Oxford about mental health. 317 00:39:47,750 --> 00:39:55,040 I called it What There Is Instead of Rainbows, and I asked people to send me something about the time when they were at the lowest point. 318 00:39:56,050 --> 00:40:00,610 One of the pieces I was sent was a photo journal documenting a teenage road trip 319 00:40:00,610 --> 00:40:04,900 the artist had taken with her best friend who would be dead just two years later. 320 00:40:05,900 --> 00:40:12,260 Their story showed perfectly the way that at our lowest points, we still find connection with art, 321 00:40:13,010 --> 00:40:19,400 with others, and even however fleetingly in those connections with joy. 322 00:40:20,150 --> 00:40:27,530 And when I knew goodness was coming to give this wonderful talk. It was those things and that piece to which I was instantly sent back. 323 00:40:28,490 --> 00:40:35,120 The piece was called We Were Making Fairy Tales, and that title is one that I shamelessly purloined. 324 00:40:38,610 --> 00:40:43,200 We were making fairy tales. We were knights of rhyme. 325 00:40:43,350 --> 00:40:48,390 So high a mix made by marks in the belly of the sky. 326 00:40:49,320 --> 00:40:54,210 We married hope and disappointment and anointed pages with them. 327 00:40:54,900 --> 00:41:01,080 We took notes of rage and fear and moments of tenderness and made their dreams. 328 00:41:01,080 --> 00:41:09,270 And we stayed with them. We took shame and it pinpoint made them summon every poet to make wages for our souls with them. 329 00:41:09,720 --> 00:41:14,700 We were making fairy tales. We were Bonnie and Clyde. 330 00:41:15,060 --> 00:41:21,390 We were Jekyll and Hyde. We were the moon and Tide. We were a skin that only had one side, dammit. 331 00:41:21,410 --> 00:41:30,480 We got park and ride. We were making fairy tales while they were getting by. 332 00:41:30,960 --> 00:41:44,190 All the people at their 9 to 5, the morning swarm, performing caffeinated rituals in their concrete hives, burnt out mines still leaking empty lines, 333 00:41:44,190 --> 00:41:47,940 echoes of the decades where their lives were left behind, 334 00:41:48,660 --> 00:41:58,020 their white lightning vanes ablaze through days of mediocrity and nights of getting high and mornings coming down and never getting dry. 335 00:41:58,590 --> 00:42:02,560 But we. We were making fairy tales. 336 00:42:03,520 --> 00:42:11,440 We trailed gingerbread rhymes and threads of twine through the labyrinthine minefields in our minds. 337 00:42:12,250 --> 00:42:22,600 We folded syllables into origami cranes and poems, into paper planes and flew into the sun like speeding guitars, 338 00:42:22,600 --> 00:42:32,200 repeating the fastest bars of every riff the Pistols ever played and scratched our names inside the eyelids of its flames. 339 00:42:33,380 --> 00:42:43,110 And your anger. With so pure and your stanzas were so raw and the heavens were so sure that every drop of agony was true. 340 00:42:43,950 --> 00:42:47,810 The mermaids sang. In stereo for you. 341 00:42:49,270 --> 00:42:53,730 We were making fairy tales. But now I'm looking in at. 342 00:42:54,640 --> 00:43:00,030 Shadows. The the slowly growing thin through windows that are slowly filling in. 343 00:43:01,340 --> 00:43:04,670 And the silence instead of once upon a time. 344 00:43:05,670 --> 00:43:14,530 And their silence. Stealing lines from rhymes and times, from memories and melodies from all our tunes. 345 00:43:15,560 --> 00:43:21,570 And the silence. Healing all our sacred wounds. 346 00:43:22,970 --> 00:43:29,600 And. That's. Thank.