Good evening, everybody. Can you hear me properly at the back?
Great. Thank you very much for that very kind introduction.
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.
I'm fairly graduate students among you. I'd like to say that in my experience,
few things in life are more challenging than navigating the isolation and uncertainty
of this stage of study while having to construct a book length argument,
each sentence of which has to be defended. It toughens you up, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.
This is even more daunting if you experience mental illness or addiction during that period as I did.
All good education should cause what feels like an intellectual nervous breakdown in the student.
Otherwise, the institution isn't doing its job of challenging them to abandon old ideas and to grow for the vast majority of students.
This is a benign process, somewhat stressful, but which can nevertheless be negotiated.
What you don't want is an actual nervous breakdown.
Then it is the duty of the university and the NHS to catch the bodies as they fall.
Due to poor life choices, addiction and a tendency to depressed to depression.
I found myself in Oxford mid theses in such emotional pain that I referred myself to the university counselling service.
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.
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,
who referred me for therapy to the Watford Hospital. There I was enrolled not entirely willingly in group therapy, which I found exquisitely painful,
but which gave me the impetus to move out of the baffling and destructive situation in which I found myself.
This was already a vast improvement in the mental health provision when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge,
where a crisis in my second year led to a diagnosis of anxiety from a GP and two weeks in the college sick bay.
There I was allowed to chain smoke, shake and hyperventilate to my heart's content.
I'll be forever grateful to those who argued that I should be alive,
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.
I decided to take the rest of the year off. This was called Degrading a label, which didn't help my spirits.
As I sat on the train, pulling up to Cambridge, feeling as if my life was over.
After a period away, working in the men's clothing department of Marks and Spencers in Cardiff,
among other things, this was deeply therapeutic, I might add.
I returned the following academic year and very happily finished my degree.
What helped me in both these cases was the humanity of those in charge,
of those who cared for me and helped me to devise the best possible way for me to tackle the issues that had temporarily.
But with terrifying consequences. Paralysing.
Both crises occurred before the the advent of SSRI antidepressants and today's burgeoning of counsellors therapists.
When I returned to live in Wales,
I was referred to a psychiatrist who was also a qualified psychotherapist as rare as hen's teeth, especially in Wales.
This was a piece of miraculous good luck, especially as doctor Scorer was a serious reader of poetry.
I was able to see him on the NHS for over a decade, first weekly, then fortnightly, and then when the need arose.
Even in pre austerity days, this should never have happened.
It did because a compassionate individual took it upon himself to hold a
conversation with me of a quality that enabled me to change the grammar of my life.
It was a rescue from the dysfunctional monologue in my head, out into the sunlight, the dialogue.
This exchange takes work and commitment and requires great precision of language.
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.
Even though I as out as it's possible to be about my experience of mental illness.
Having written a book about it Sunbathing in the Rain, I'm aware of the shame I feel about my condition.
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,
suggestion that students should declare mental health problems as they apply for a place is problematic.
I understand that the desire is here to support students, but when I applied for my own place in school,
from school, I back upon, I didn't even know what my issues were.
And B, even if I had and even if confidentiality were guaranteed,
I would find it very hard to believe that it wouldn't reduce my chances of being accepted.
What ties the art of poetry with the promotion of mental health is the commitment to conversation rather than soliloquy.
The talking therapies have always been at the forefront of treatments for depression.
They have been shown to be at least as effective as medication.
This much depends in part on the quality of that exchange.
I fear that cognitive behavioural therapy or CBT is too often used as a cut price form of therapy,
though it does have its uses in reframing as a reframing device for minor to mild depressive issues.
I also have my doubts about the current fashion for mindfulness as a panacea for mental distress.
As research shows, the technique can be very effective, but it needs highly skilled teachers,
which can't be provided in sufficient numbers by the current general rollout.
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.
It's very easy to do the opposite, to become even more enmeshed in that destructive pattern, and that will get us nowhere.
Much is made of the therapeutic properties of poetry these days, with arts organisations offering the habits of art,
both for the reader and the practitioner as a way of improving health outcomes.
I believe passionately that the act of participating in good art is essential to personal
and social wellbeing and that to make access harder to it is to make us lesser beings,
both in terms of our personal mental health and in the vigour of our ability to
think critically about important decisions we make socially and politically.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I've seen arts bodies arguing for money from public health budgets to put into art interventions.
If art is considered as therapeutic, then isn't it honest to ask if it can endure as well as heal?
So what are the poisons which are associated with the art of poetry?
I want to talk about the benefits, of course, as well. Language is what makes us social beings.
The Russian poet and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, who was sentenced to hard labour in the USSR,
claimed the poetry shows human evolution happening at the sharp end, hardly surprising them.
The poets who practice language under the most extreme, formal and syntactical constraints should know a little about costs,
about the costs and benefits of deploying the forces of eloquence.
Often a writer's work comes before his or her family, health, financial well-being, anything.
So it would have more effect than anything else. This is because refusing to vacation feels more frightening to the artist than material disaster.
Dostoyevsky, the author of Crime and Punishment, spent four years in the Gulag where he wasn't able to write on his release.
He was terrified that he wouldn't be able to start again.
In a letter to his brother, he speculated how many forms still alive and created by men.
A new will perish, extinguished in my brain or dissolved like poison in my bloodstream.
Yes. If it's impossible to write, I will die better.
15 years imprisonment with pen in hand.
Notice here the image of poison in the blood. Dostoyevsky can't have known that the blood chemistry of depressives depressives is compromised.
So that not writing is here, identified with the writer's destruction.
In the last four years, I've been working with Robin Williams on a translation of the Welsh language, Taliesin Poetry into English.
That's for Penguin Classics. The historical Taliesin was a follower of several warlords in the sixth century.
A contemporary of a Nigerian who wrote the earliest poem and wells, when the language was spoken as far north as Edinburgh.
This Taliesin left wonderful poems evoking the glamour of warfare and the material richness of court life.
I think a poet earned quite a lot of money from his patron.
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.
That work can be very obscure, but it is gloriously imaginative.
For example. This is the poet speaking.
I was in many forms before my release.
I was a slim, enchanted sword. I believe in its play.
I was a drop in a the sparkling of stars.
A word inscribed a book in priest's hands.
A lantern shining for a year and a half. A bridge.
A crossing over three school. Others. I was a path.
I was eagle. I was a coracle at sea.
I was bubbles in beer. I was a raindrop in sorrows.
I was a sword in the hand. I was a shield in battle.
I was a harp string. Enchanted to nine years in water foaming.
I was tender in fire. I was a forest.
A blaze. This shape shifting shows how volatile the poet's sense of self can be.
Sometimes I feel that I leave my body so often by losing my imagination that I'm in danger of never finding it again.
The American poet Marianne Moore, who was a destructive provider of her own poems, confessed to Grace Sillman.
I aspired to have a taproot, but I don't have one.
The Astoria Taliesin. The story of Taliesin is a bardic or quasi bardic creation myth.
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.
The location of the location.
The myth involves a woman called Caldwell Woman of the Cauldron,
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.
That is a cormorant and he was hideously ugly.
So in order to compensate him for his appearance, cannot win prepares a magical brew designed to endow his son with poetic inspiration.
She employs Guion to feed the fire into the cauldron as the potion has to simmer for a year and a day.
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,
he puts it to his mouth and so receives the inspiration meant for murder.
He is pursued by the furious Herod when,
through a protracted shapeshifting sequence in which Guion turns himself into a hair and she pursues him as a greyhound,
he becomes a fish and see an otter. He transforms into it, transforms into a bird and see into a hawk.
It ends when Queen as a grain of wheat is swallowed by origin as a hen.
She subsequently gives birth to him and abandons the child to the river in a leather bag.
He's rescued and renamed Taliesin and grows up into a uniquely skilful poet.
It's worth going back to the story for a moment to consider the source of poetic ability.
I won't trouble you with the recipe for creativity here, though I've taken note of it myself.
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.
The writer goes on, and I'll read you some of the Welsh just for fun.
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.
And when we can katarzyna and our high board and a B took the definite are going to talk Occupy Athens, Russia.
You shall look Gwendolyn finally.
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
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.
It can't be unreasonable to speculate that some of the poison might even head to the first three poetic drops,
especially when it's been speculated that the name Goya itself might mean a little prototypical poison.
So cooking and poetry are closer allies earlier than you might have expected.
A few years ago, we celebrated the centenary of Dylan Thomas's work.
I took the opportunity to reread his poetry very closely.
I'm not convinced me that Thomas was a far greater genius than I or many of his critics have given him credit for.
Generally, though, people seem to be much more interested in Thomas as a representative of the course of artist than in his writing.
Elizabeth Bishop, who met him shortly before his untimely death, do note not to alcohol poisoning, but a medical error.
In a letter to a friend fearing for Thomas, she wishes that poets should have a self.
Don't have self. Sorry, I'll start that again. Poets should have self-doubts left out of their system completely.
As one can see, most of the surviving ones seem to have.
But look at Paul Coll. That's Robert Lowell and Marianne, who hangs on just by the skin of our teeth.
That's Marianne. More hands on just by the skin of our teeth and the most elaborate paranoia I've ever heard of.
As his life became more chaotic. And after his first prodigious years as a poet, Thomas was finding it increasingly difficult to write.
We know that before his death, he was planning to write a long poem in the character of Thomas, in the Endnotes, he wrote.
Thomas was planning to adopt the persona of the gods, hence the author, The First Call's Architect.
Lamplighter The Beginning Words The Anthropomorphic Bull, or Martin Black.
Paula the Quintessence Scapegoat, Martyr Maker.
He on top of the hill in heaven. Thomas is being more than a shapeshifter here.
He was planning to speak as a god himself.
A risky position, especially when combined with a local centric religious tradition and a word based artistic genre.
At other times, Thomas seems to regard words themselves as divinity.
And this is Thomas again.
Such sound storms and ice blasts of words, such sloshing of humbug and humbug to such staggering peace, such enormous laughter,
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.
All of which were words, words, words. And each of which was alive forever in its own delight and glory.
And oddity and light. In this passage, Thomas seems to have replaced God with language.
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?
It's not difficult to see how this might drive one to despair.
This is romantic only for people who haven't experienced it.
I find that if I'm not writing, I almost inevitably fall ill.
But don't think for a second that the muse is a compliant force.
Here's what I wrote in Sunbathing in the Rain about her or him or his poetry
has acquired a fluffy image which is totally at odds with its real nature.
It's not pastel colours, but blood red and black.
If you don't obey it as a force in your life, it will take you to pieces.
Such a drive may mean simply that writing is a powerful displacement activity.
But I won't suggest that this danger is mitigated by how the arts tune us inevitably
out of the self and towards communication with the rest of human society.
My case for the resilience of poets relies on a certain view of the collective nature of language.
It's not the creation of an individual ego, but the result of centuries of disputation, conflict and reconciliation.
When a poet speaks every word, she uses rings with the echo of that word placed in other poems by her forebears,
and also with those of the future writers.
For example, when I'm describing a bird, my is memory.
Also, here is this medieval lyric, and you need to know that a musket in this context is a male sparrow.
The Latin refrain means fear of death undoes me.
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.
This was the tenor of her talking to Ma Marty's controller back to me.
I asked the bird what she meant. I am a musket both fair and gent for drag of death.
I am also sent t mama this concerto back to me when I shall die.
I know no day what country your place I cannot say where for this song sing I may t more
modest control Batman hears who cries when he should die to his father He can say Father,
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.
T more marches control Batman wake I or sleep, eat or drink.
When I of my last m do think for greater fear.
My soul does drink t mama to counter Batman.
God grant disgrace him for to serve and be at our end when we starve street Sorry
stir and from the fiend he us preserve to our mouth this control about to me.
Not only is this a dialogue between the bird and the poet, it's etymological range covers two cultures,
cultures, classical and early modern and all the times in between.
This speech act is a bridge between periods rather than a mote separating nations from each other.
If the fear of death and does the Speaker, then its expression in the poem builds him or her up again.
Well, my writing, we're not talking to ourselves, but to language itself and everybody who speaks it and answers come back.
A feedback loop created by form. The willingness to listen to this is what makes a writer great.
I've got a second quote from Dostoyevsky here.
And it's about the nature of good language.
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.
And he ends up losing respect for himself and for others when he has no respect for anyone.
He can no longer love. And in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses,
indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal.
And it all comes from lying. Lying to others and to yourself.
It's not hard to think of the fake communication made easier by the social media like president and those
like President Trump and those like President Trump and Vladimir Putin who are committed to its practice.
Dostoyevsky was talking about great art, but it's striking to me how these politicians exhibit some artistic qualities.
Trump is a performance artist of genius. He knows how to harness strong emotions to a few words,
how to project an imaginative scenario with total conviction, and how to ensure an audience suspends its disbelief.
As we know, he plays fast and loose with the fast and loose the truth.
Furthering his own aims by creating confusion rather than clarity.
Here I remember that Stalin was a poet and Hitler a failed painter.
Vladimir Putin, I notice, has a way of using words with a surface truthfulness to conceal, but not hide his actual atrocities.
A tiny example of this comes from the time when the submarine Kursk sank with all hands.
His response to an American TV host's question is both a literal truth and betrays a breathtaking callousness.
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?
Putin says it's sunk. I believe you can see this in many of his public pronouncements.
Ursula Le Guin, poetry and fantasy writer, calls these mirror words, each of which reflects the truth and none of which leads anywhere.
I wasn't in the least surprised to see that not one poet took part in Trump's inauguration.
The two types of discourse aren't compatible.
The literary critic Martha Frye warned there was only one way to degrade mankind permanently, and that is to destroy language.
Even though poetry's repeatedly called the dying art, it always neglects to die.
This is because it uses language at its most resilient.
Some of the broadsheets this week ran censorious articles criticising advertising for corrupting the English language.
Examples are Find your happy Feet more amazing, or the new slogan of the Wales Tourist Board.
Find your epic. This instantly made me want to use this kind of language in a poem as an experiment.
Rather than joining in with the condemnation. For a poet, this kind of innovation is an opportunity not to be missed.
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.
It is worth a visit. Let me be clear.
I'm not talking here about language that is wilfully misused to disguise meaning to frustrate communication between equals.
In her book about manic depression touched by fire,
Kay Redfield Jamison attempted to recreate no attempted to create meaningful statistics
by extrapolating figures for mental illness from the writings and lives of dead poets.
Her conclusions was startling.
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.
However, statistics can go both ways.
A massive study reviewing other studies in 1998 found that of 29 studies considered 15 found no link between creativity and mental illness.
Nine found the link and five were agnostic.
The American Wallace Stevens called the poet's work the stronger life.
An emphasis that I share. Poets work is generally ignored.
Extremely badly paid, if at all, and socially isolated.
It's a quite self-questioning rumination on difficult issues and long stretches of time
when you have no idea of what you're doing or whether it'll be of any value at all.
In this situation, I'd say that far from being casualties or wimps writers of the essay, yes, the written words in these poems,
resolution and independence worked was words that asserted We poets in our youth begin in gladness.
But there of in the end come despondency and madness.
John Berryman, the great American religious poet, killed himself in 1972, but in her memoir, Poets in Their Youth, Eileen Simpson, his widow,
noted that his father had killed himself aged 40 and argued that her husband's
writing had have given him 17 more years than would otherwise have been the case.
So what is good speech? Virtuous speech.
In the original medical sense of bringing strong benefits to the user.
When my husband was diagnosed with stage four lymphoma over a decade ago and he's still in remission,
I should tell you, I sent a long poem in the hospital.
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.
Not that I was healing him. Perhaps I was healing myself of the shock.
Anyway, this was my updating of the classical invocations of the gods in an epic poem.
And this is a book called A Hospital Odyssey. So it is an epic.
I've said already that I won't feel well till this poem is finished.
And I find what I mean about health and loving.
It's a hospital. This place I'm constructing line by line with clinics in it.
And somehow it comes open to anyone. Words in my health.
The struggle to hear and transcribe the two behind what I'm given by word of mouth.
It's the only work that can make me immune to lying.
May my language gene grant me haemoglobin and many platelets potency deep inside bone marrow.
My safety lies with other poets who shown the way they took through shadows.
Milton will be with me now. I want to capture what it is to care for someone you love who's very ill.
How quickly you age as you see them suffer. You do anything to make them well.
But you can't. Now help me, Virgil.
Give me the strength of your long sinews to capture that brave but painful smile couples exchange when they both know the score.
Help me to draw on wells that are clean and kind and plentiful.
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,
nowhere near through adoring them and you can follow.
One body is never enough. My reach is long.
Of one thing You can be sure I'll never give up on this endless search for you.
And it's my only cure to touch you. Yes, stranger.
I mean you. The real expert on mindfulness is the Buddha, who declared words can have the power both to destroy and heal.
When words about true unkind, they can change our world.
And I just want to read another little clip from Hospital Odyssey.
It's about it's a kind of cosmology of crisis.
It's a long story. But Morris, who is the carer, is in outer space.
I told you it was a long story, but and she can see Hardy, her husband, for the first time.
Mm hmm. So they're both in in danger in outer space.
Maybe not them. But this is what Hardy saw from his dying marriage, spending over him and behind to the vibrant,
dazzling cool of the sun, rich and red, as he mccrum the 50 million degrees.
He was overcome by the knowledge that everything out there was, in truth, his own body with filaments of light.
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.
That's prose. No, it's more like the drive of poetry.
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.
Before the end words probability wave collapses before I take a chance on one meaning when my
mind revolves with the quantum mechanics that makes stars evolve from the tiniest jitters.
We're born to catastrophe. Galaxies fly away from each other in identical forms.
Matter never sees fit to die.
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.
Infinities. Birdsong continues just beyond the range of our human hearing.
Love is the hinge on which it's on, which it all turns.
My experience. All right, Just check.
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.
Though therapy and prayer are both fundamental in my life.
When I teach university students. What strikes me is how baffled they are by their own poor language skills.
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.
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?
Well, precisely. Those people who know that they're mad that they're not well.
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.
And a conversation with others which more than kills exercise is the most potent tool we have in our personal and collective armoury.
The great Welsh language poet Bobby Jones goes even further on the routine.
The only and the more involve death.
You are afraid of me because I'm a poet.
Now there's a reason for writing away from ill health, the abuse of power and towards an extravagant sanity.
Thank you very much. So as someone whose favourite poetry publication is called Three Drops from a Cauldron, I found that absolutely delightful.
Vice Chancellor Catherine the Caroline's gentle Folk.
ALL Thank you. Five years ago, I curated a pop up installation at Modern Art Oxford about mental health.
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.
One of the pieces I was sent was a photo journal documenting a teenage road trip
the artist had taken with her best friend who would be dead just two years later.
Their story showed perfectly the way that at our lowest points, we still find connection with art,
with others, and even however fleetingly in those connections with joy.
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.
The piece was called We Were Making Fairy Tales, and that title is one that I shamelessly purloined.
We were making fairy tales. We were knights of rhyme.
So high a mix made by marks in the belly of the sky.
We married hope and disappointment and anointed pages with them.
We took notes of rage and fear and moments of tenderness and made their dreams.
And we stayed with them. We took shame and it pinpoint made them summon every poet to make wages for our souls with them.
We were making fairy tales. We were Bonnie and Clyde.
We were Jekyll and Hyde. We were the moon and Tide. We were a skin that only had one side, dammit.
We got park and ride. We were making fairy tales while they were getting by.
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,
echoes of the decades where their lives were left behind,
their white lightning vanes ablaze through days of mediocrity and nights of getting high and mornings coming down and never getting dry.
But we. We were making fairy tales.
We trailed gingerbread rhymes and threads of twine through the labyrinthine minefields in our minds.
We folded syllables into origami cranes and poems, into paper planes and flew into the sun like speeding guitars,
repeating the fastest bars of every riff the Pistols ever played and scratched our names inside the eyelids of its flames.
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.
The mermaids sang. In stereo for you.
We were making fairy tales. But now I'm looking in at.
Shadows. The the slowly growing thin through windows that are slowly filling in.
And the silence instead of once upon a time.
And their silence. Stealing lines from rhymes and times, from memories and melodies from all our tunes.
And the silence. Healing all our sacred wounds.
And. That's. Thank.