[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Some. Welcome.
So I will be speaking today on upping the ante.
A word choice, quotation and allusion in poems. Raise the stakes.
It's a cliché of the poetry workshop to talk about what is at stake in the poem, whether anything is at risk.
I don't know what is at stake here for the speaker as a common enough utterance,
I suspect this language enters our poetic discussions largely from Robert Frost.
Um, a poet who like to talk about poetry as performance and as competition.
Think tennis without a net. Consider the end of his two tramps in mud time only where love and need are one.
And the work is play for mortal stakes. Is the deed ever really done for heaven and the future's sakes?
The speaker of the poem is splitting wood in his yard.
In the uncertain weather of an April day. Mud time is an actual micro season.
Or maybe a fifth season in Vermont. I suppose this is from a Vermont travel web page.
Ten ways to Celebrate Mud Season in Vermont.
Um, so it's an actual time and, uh, a place he's enjoying the physical work of splitting wood with the axe, the satisfaction of a job well done.
Um, he says good blocks of oak. It was a split as large round as the chopping block, and every piece I squarely hit fell, splintered.
This as a cloven rock. The blows that a life of self-control spares to strike for the common good that day.
Giving a loose my soul I spent on the unimportant woods.
This is an angry frost. And some barely controlled rage.
But the tramps need the work to make a living.
Their logic trumps the logic of a poet who is doing worth the work, partly to take out his fury or frost frustration on an inanimate object.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks. They judged me by their appropriate tool, except as a fellow handled an axe.
They had no way of knowing a fool. And in the end, it is their practical logic that wins out.
And all their logic would fill my head as that I had no right to play with what was another man's work for gain.
My right might be love, but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain, theirs was the better.
Right? Agreed. But yield who will to their separation?
My object in living is to unite my avocation and my vocation.
As my two eyes make one in sight. Only where love and need are one.
And the work is play for mortal stakes. Is the deed ever really done for heaven?
And the future seeks for us? Talk here of vocation and avocation.
Work and play and then of play for mortal stakes makes for an hour's poetica, and in some ways resembles in its rhetoric Yates's Adams curse.
Except here one does not labour to be beautiful, but plays on work at work, or works at play.
I think Frost describes this poem somewhere as being against Hobbes.
And this poem in some way is maybe not the best poem to start with.
In a talk about upping the ante. It doesn't do that move which the other poems we're going to look at here do,
where it suddenly pushes all of its chips into the middle of the table and hazard it all on the turn of a card or the role of a die.
But it does introduce two ideas here that are important to me.
The notion of risk and the notion of play.
Art is play, but important.
Art is where something and maybe everything is at risk.
So this talk is also an excuse, um, to look at some of my favourite poems, poems that share a strategy of this bold move,
this all in poems that know when to hold them, when to fold them, and when to walk away.
There are poems that do something daring with a wild card register shift an allusion or a quotation.
Um, and I'll start with register.
I suppose our ideas of register in language maybe come to from music register as being the range of a musical instrument.
Um, but I also think of registers in art where, um, on a Greek vase, for instance,
there might be a band up here and a band up here and a band up here,
and they're different registers, but something like Athena's Helmet, for instance, might pop out into another register.
So these are about words that kind of poke out of the register and register shift.
Oops. Yeah. The first poem that I'd like to look at is Robert Francis's Sheep.
If, as Frost says, the ultimate goal of a poet is to lodge a few poems where they are hard to get rid of.
I think Francis meets this criterion, even if he is only known today for a couple of poems, including this one and the picture.
Um, but there are 5 or 6 of his poems that are well worth knowing.
Um, he's a poet who lived his whole life pretty much in Amherst, a place which specialises in poets that lived their whole life in Amherst.
Um, he had Frost for a mentor. Sheep.
From where I stand the sheep stand still as stones against the stony hill.
The stones are grey and so are they. And both are weathered, worn and round, leading the eye back to the ground.
Two mingled flocks, the sheep, the rocks.
And still no sheep stirs from its place, or lifts its Babylonian feet.
This deceptively simple poem and it is a favourite of mine, seems perhaps to have a random assortment of long and short lines,
some humorously pulled up short, but on inspection the pattern is more consistent than it would appear.
We have rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter that alternate with couplets of iambic demeter.
All of the rhymes are monosyllabic, although one notes there is sophisticated rhyming across parts of speech, and all but the last four lines,
where the sheep and the rocks at first put into relation to one another as simile,
come to resemble each other more and more, until they are indistinguishable and equivalents.
The idea of sheep blending into the landscape is hardly new.
Lucretius makes a point of it in dairy. I'm not natural.
In his first century BC didactic epic on the atomic theory.
Um, he's talking about what it looks like to see a flock of sheep moving but at a great distance,
often a woolly flock of sheep upon a hillside, crops a verdant pasture, all a spangle with the dews, fresh drops.
And where the grass entices them, they wander one by one.
As the plump lambs skim. As the plump lambs gambol and kick up their heels in fun.
But when we view them from afar, the distance blurs the scene until it's just a patch of white against a field of green.
Lucretius point is about movement, while Francis's is about stillness.
But both have to do with landscape and the human eye, and both hinge on sheep, which itself is telling about the timelessness of the scene.
Before we get to that last explosive Babylonian, which to me just comes out of nowhere.
We have a line that seems to prepare us for an upping of the ante, a slight raising of the stakes before the poem goes all in.
And that word to me is weather worn.
It takes up a full three syllables of octal syllabic real estate, and that second line of the couplet leading the eye back to the ground,
is language from art history or art appreciation, the ground being literal ground, but perhaps also the ground of a painting.
Leading the eye suggests painterly intent. So something enters.
Something human enters the picture at that moment, a kind of time fullness.
But Babylonian, this takes up at least four syllables, arguably five, even expanding the syllabic real estate to nine syllables.
What to even say here? Nothing prepares us for it, and we are left dazed.
Or I am left dazed. What register would you even call it?
It's not Anglo-Saxon. Mesopotamian, Assyrian.
Here I am reading a poem. I think I'm in Massachusetts, looking at some old dirty sheep.
And whether worn rocks. We go from timelessness to deep historical time in an instant.
And I can see those Babylonian faces stony, impassive, curled about with stylised wool and coiling horns.
The end makes me want to just reread the poem and have the explosion again.
It's the simplicity of a children's poem and the ancient wisdom of a cuneiform tablets.
That's a nice sheep. Let's look at another poem that makes a similar move, if to a somewhat different effect.
Michael Donaghy, an American born poet of Irish ancestry who lived much of his creative life in London, died at the age of 50.
20 years ago this year. He is a poet whose every poem seems to approach its subject by a different strategy.
They are each as strikingly different as poems with a family resemblance can possibly be, and this is a favourite of mine.
The Buckeye. Look out, slim!
These girls are trouble. You dance with them, they dance you back.
They talk it broad, but they want it subtle. And you got too much mouth for that.
Their secret grooves, their sacred grove. Not clever, not ever nor loud nor flaunt.
I know you, slim. You're a jerk for love.
The way you talk is the what you want.
You want numbers, you want names. You want to cheat at Rouge and Noir.
But these are initiated dames.
The how they move is the what they are.
The title efficiently tells us that we should be holding Euripides play about the arrival of Dionysus to Thebes in mind,
with its prudish and narrow minded leader, pantheist Saruman, who is doomed to be ripped apart by raving meanies including his own mother.
Already. There's a pleasing dissonance of the title and the insouciance of the first line, the Bacardi.
Look out, slim! These girls are trouble, slim.
Seems to me the right word for the kind of abstemious, thin skinned person.
Pantheist is a guy unaware of his own naivety.
Who will serve, who will learn to be sorry. All right.
The poem's not even 14 lines long. It zips past.
Slim thinks he knows a thing or two, and he even cheats at cards.
Rouge noir. I had to look up. It's another name for patience or solitaire, although solitaire would fit the metre and the rhyme scheme.
But perhaps it also, with its red and black, suggests roulette.
The ruse suggests to me the sophistication of the women who aren't as innocent as they seem.
And the noir brings in a whole genre of film.
Indeed, this poem made me realise how brilliant it would be to do the Buckeye as film noir.
It fits perfectly. Don't even get me started. So I think that rosy noir ups the ante a bit.
The French presents a different, more sophisticated register to slim or jerk,
as there is a dissonance between Secret Groove and Sacred Grove, where we have a sobering even of the vowels.
But the word that says all in to me is initiated.
Again, its expansion of syllabic real estate says something about its weight and importance.
There is no other word in the poem longer than two syllables, and a preponderance of the words in the poem are monosyllables and sort of Anglo-Saxon.
But this word makes my hairs stand on end.
Dionysus is present. The situation is serious.
It is real. And I like how this adjective is attached to Dean's.
A hard bitten word right out of film noir like broad.
But here that is elevated as the veil is dropped from our eyes without initiated to see an older meaning.
Ladies of rank and station and power.
Slim pantheist doesn't have chance.
I'm going to move from Register to Illusion. And I would just like to point out that play is at the heart of illusion.
Illusion, after all, has the word play inside of it and lootera um, to play towards or at to wink at.
Maybe we might say illusion is playful and it is a pleasure.
I think this would be clearer if we literary types were referred to illusions as Easter eggs,
the way people who consume popular culture and video games refer to those
inside jokes that reveal another level of the game the pleasure of recognition,
the reward of paid attention, the wink and elbow language of delight.
Illusion is often not pivotal to the comprehension of a work, but it is pivotal to the full enjoyment of it.
And, um, I'm going to take this opportunity to look at another favourite poem of mine.
Just a whole anthology of favourite poems, um, in a skiing road July evening by Patrick Kavanagh.
The bicycles go by in twos and threes, there's a dance and Billy Brennan's barn tonight.
And there's the half talk, Code of Mysteries and the wink and elbow language of delight.
8:30. And there is not a spot upon a mile of road.
No shadow thrown that might turn out a man or woman.
Not a foot for tapping sequences of stone.
I have what every poet hates. In spite of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight of being king and government, a nation, a road, a mile of kingdom.
I am king of banks and stones.
And every blooming thing. I hardly know of a more charming sonnet, and its use of proper nouns is unparalleled,
from the date line of the title to the inclusive familiarity of Billy Brennan, someone whom, it seems it feels like we ought to know.
But you will see where I'm going here and where. For me, the poem lets me know this poem is playing for higher stakes.
When I share this poem in workshops or seminars, I always wait a while before glossing.
Alexander Selkirk. I think the poem works without our knowing exactly who he is.
The name has a formality and grandeur in which Billy Brandon is entirely lacking.
Alexander, after all, is the name of a conquering emperor.
It's registered as Greek and ancient. Selkirk also feels to me hard and exotic, and shares with Alexander those hard choices.
Um, it means a whole church. But as far as, uh, an American reader like me is concerned, it might be Seleucid.
Um, Kavanagh could have written Robinson Crusoe here, and it would just about fit and scan the same just about.
Anyway, it could be slotted in here and it would be a much more obvious and accessible allusion.
But Alexander Selkirk goes beyond allusion to Easter egg.
Statius Robinson Crusoe is based on the real life misadventures of the Scottish privateer and casts castaway Alexander Selkirk,
but somehow having the real life person with his less well-known name and certainly his less English sounding name to me,
both seems to call on a more private myth, and seems to place Billy Brannan and the speaker in that world as much as vice versa.
He might be someone the speaker knew as well.
The poem's earlier readers might have known about Selkirk from another poem, which was available in the widely popular Palgrave Golden Treasury.
William Cooper's 1780 To the Solitude of Alexander Selkirk, which begins I am monarch of all I surveyed.
My right there is none to dispute. From the centre all round to the sea I am Lord of the thousand.
The brute of solitude. Where are they charms that sages have seen.
And they face, but are dwell in the midst of alarms. Then rain in this horrible place.
Um. This is where the phrase monarch of all I survey comes from.
Um. It's a case where the reference of the poem has probably become more exotic and strange with time.
Um, but I think the move of invoking Selkirk is a bold play nonetheless, and the whole poem lands on that splendid,
shimmering pun, every blooming thing, as the rather strange raising of the stakes beautifully pays off.
So Kavanagh does something similar, although to different effects, with proper names in his powerful sonnet epic.
But I'm not going to look at that one today. Dreams on 14.
Is the most famous or anyway the most anthologised of Bergmans dream songs.
Um, something about it being 14 and having a kind of strong vault into it makes me think of it as sonnet like, even though it's not 14 lines.
The Dream songs feature John Berman's alter ego Henry, of whom he says he is an imaginary character,
not the poet, not me, a white American in early middle age,
sometimes in blackface that has proved problematic, who has suffered an irreversible loss,
and later in an interview, he says, Henry does resemble me and I resemble Henry.
But on the other hand, I am not Henry.
You know, I pay income tax, Henry pays no income tax, and bats come over and stall in my hair and [INAUDIBLE] them.
I'm not Henry. Henry doesn't have any bats.
So there are some bats in the belfry here. You will guess. Probably where I am going in this poem and where my attention falls.
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all the sky flashes the great seasons.
We ourselves flash and yearn. And moreover, my mother told me as a boy repeatedly ever to confess you're bored means you have no inner resources.
I conclude now I have no inner resources because I am heavy, bored people's bore me.
Literature bores me, especially great literature.
Henry bores me with his plights and gripes as bad as Achilles, who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills and gin look like a drag.
And somehow a dog has taken itself and its tail considerably away into mountains where sea or sky leaving behind me wag.
We have two proper names in the poem Henry capitalised and Achilles not capitalised.
Achilles is, for me the poem's hinge, the poem's joint, the poem's heel.
It changes everything before it, and it changes everything after it.
It seems to come out of nowhere. Henry is as bad as Achilles, whose plights and gripes make up the kernel of the West's fundamental epic.
Achilles is the point at which the speaker's boredom and irritation climaxes, but it also changes what went before.
Achilles is himself a figure of rage and boredom and irritation.
Staying out of battle and sullenly and sulkily strumming his lyre by the sea.
But even before that, almost his first conversation in the poem is with whom?
It's with his mother, a sea goddess who listens to his plights and gripes and promises to take them to Zeus, the flashing sky god.
So Achilles takes us back to that conversation of mother and son, and to the sea and the sky at the beginning of the poem.
Um, and after the poem it is enlarged, um, by this crisis.
We have tranquil hills, which contains all of the sounds of Achilles and the eye, and the double L connects them visually.
So Achilles almost dissolves and becomes tranquil hills and gin.
The poem is enlarged by the crisis, but unlike Achilles in great literature, and ends on what I think of as a celestial dog,
considerably for me, always contains stars disappearing into mountains or sea or sky.
A relief from Henry and the self. It's a short poem of huge shifts and scope, ending on a pun of a monosyllable.
The wag of the dog. The speaker as wag.
Now you may be saying at this point, Alicia, aren't you really just talking about the kitty?
Many of my examples are classical allusions, and I had better lay my cards on the table.
Here is what I am talking about Philip Larkin's dismissive the common myth Kitty a figure of speech itself arguably from cards,
the kiddie being the common fund of money, um, at stake in the middle of the table.
And maybe what I am talking about is the myth kiddie.
Classical references do tend to leap out to me, and it is possible that these are quite personal reactions, not readily transferable.
Results may vary. Um, if we look at his statement as a guiding principle, I believe that every poem must be its own,
solely so freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief in tradition or a common myth,
kiddie or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last,
I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary unders, trappers letting you see they know the right people.
Yes. So, um, the statement, uh actually comes with a footnote.
When de J. Enright was compiling poets of the 1950s, he wrote to his contributors asking for a brief statement of their views on poetry.
I assumed he would use their replies as raw material for an introduction.
I was rather dashed to find them printed verbatim. So it's a curiously snobbish, anti snobbish statement.
People, though people tend to know when they read poets writing about poetry and about in about what put say about themselves in their poems.
People take that with a grain of salt.
But what I have noticed is people do not lend that great of thought to what poem poets write about in prose, about their poetry.
But let me tell you, that is just as suspect. After all, this is a poet whose most famous poem takes its somewhat inscrutable title.
This be the verse from Robert Louis Stevenson s Requiem and his poem A grep out groping back to bed after
a [INAUDIBLE] takes for its title the sad steps of Sydney's sublime sonnet from masterful and stellar,
with how sad steps O moon that climb us the skies.
It would be hard to be more obliquely name dropping than that.
Miss Kitty intrigues me again, because it's the part in a card game where all the money is gathered.
But I should just say I am fond of tradition and the common miss Kitty, and casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets,
but done in such a way as to surprise and enlarge the scope of the poem.
And I note just a few sentences before this famous abjuration, Larkin remarks.
In fact, it would be true to say that I make a point of not knowing what poetry is, or how to read a page, or about the function of myth.
I was thinking of an example. Maybe, um, where just invoking classical references does not, I think, raise the ante.
And my view would be the world is too much with this, um, where we end with Proteus and Triton,
um, a kind of winding up of the poem there in a counterfactual statement.
Um, they are beautiful, but rather melancholy and ornamental, and I almost feel like they're coming out of a painting or something.
Um, Ozymandias, though I will say, I think is making that move partly because of what seems to be the low stakes of the beginning of the poem.
I met a traveller from an antique land who said, and although he has, um,
shown his tipped his hand a little bit with the title Ozymandias takes up enormous real estate.
It is an exotic Greek version of Ramses the Second.
So it's already slightly distance to us. It's the biggest word, but the second biggest, I think, is pedestal.
And it's interesting to me. Or that's one of the second biggest words. Um, how pedestal and aussi mandalas are inverted.
It's almost as if, um, Ozzy man is just upside down.
So I think one of these works this way and one of these doesn't.
Um. In terms of non-classical examples,
I think generally my examples of this upping the ante come where you would expect a poem to raise the stakes three quarters through the poem,
as in Ozymandias, or right at the very end. Occasionally the upping upped the ante is, though, from the get go or the first stanza,
keeping the poem in a high state of tension from the beginning, as the reader wonders how the bets going to pay off.
Um, two examples of this spring to mind Elizabeth Bishop Sandpiper and Robert Frost provide provide, which we will also look at.
The roaring alongside he takes for granted. And then every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, cynical, awkward, in a state of controlled panic.
A student of Blake. The beats, hisses like fat.
On his left. A sheet of interrupting water comes and goes and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs. He runs straight through it, watching his toes, watching rather the spaces of sand between them, where no detail too small.
The Atlantic drains rapidly backwards and downwards as he runs.
He stares at the dragon grains. The world is a mist.
And then the world is minute and vast and clear.
The tide is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focussed. He is preoccupied.
Looking for something. Something. Something.
Poor bird. He is obsessed.
The millions of grains are black, white, tan and grey mixed with quartz grains.
Rose and amethyst. In this playful poem, a precise observation, um, and of course, thus making it also an artist poetica.
And if there is a better sound description than the beach hisses like fat, I do not know it.
And I always think of this poem when cooking bacon. I'm always tickled at the point where Bishop calls the sandpaper.
The sandpaper. A student of Blake. For me, this deliberately literary allusion is almost a breaking of the fourth wall of the poem,
which on one level purports to simply describe the actions of the sandpaper.
But no. Here is a poem. Pay attention to its poem. This, um, sets out in the very first stanza, but then drops it entirely.
Blake rhymes conveniently with shake, but then so would a weight, which might work just as well.
Almost just as well. Indeed, Bishop could have tucked Blake safely into an epigraph,
and even given us the reference directly from Auguries of innocence to see a world in a
grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower holds infinity in the palm of your hand,
and eternity in an hour. But she doesn't.
She makes the sandpiper a student of Blake, and I have an image of a student flipping through pages in a controlled panic before an exam.
We don't need to know the line from Blake to enjoy or appreciate the poem, but I think it does up the ante,
I think, to connect the poem in this way to auguries of innocence and to the world.
Heaven, infinity and eternity does something to stand.
Paper is a failed student of Blake, not seeing the world in a grain of sand, but seeing the grains of sand in the world, seeing things as they are.
I would also say that Amethyst. Um, if not, maybe a upping of the stakes here.
Is it paying off? Um, there at the very end, in its jewelled Greek register, um, and amethyst means sober or, um, drunk.
So there's a kind of wakefulness, I think. And amethyst kissing at the ends.
Like fact. Like the withdrawal of the tide.
France. Provide. Provide. Is the subject of an anecdote of Robert Fitzgerald, um,
that he and Robert Gerald and Randall Gerald were floating in a quarry pool in Ohio when they were at Kenyon,
when Gerald suddenly realised he knew, without having made any conscious effort, the entire poem by heart.
He started quoting it and realised he had effortlessly memorised this poem,
the strong beginning, perhaps as a way of imprinting on the memory all that follows.
Um, so the poem makes a move now familiar to us, although extremely rare,
and Frost himself and Frost is much better at adhering to Larkin's stewing of allusion and name dropping um, than Larkin.
Um, but here is the exception to prove the rule.
Provides provide the witch that came, that withered hag to wash the steps with pale and rag was once the beauty of a shack.
The picture pride of Hollywood. Too many and too many fall from great and good for you to doubt the livelihood.
Die early and avoid the fate. Or, if predestined to die late.
Make up your mind to die and state. Make the whole stock exchange your own.
If need be. Occupy a throne where nobody can call you crone.
Some have relied on what they knew, others on simply being true.
What works for them might work for you. No memory of having starred atones for later disregard or keeps the end from being hard.
Better to go down dignified with button friendship at your side than none at all.
Provide. Provide. By now you are all ahead of me.
Hollywood in a Frost poem is pretty surprising, but my goodness, what is going on with Abhishek?
Um, trios of rhymes are hard to pull off in English.
Um, we have, since many of the rhymes here are monosyllables with occasional splashes out into two and three syllable words.
Fate, late state, um, thrown.
Crown. New. True. You start hard, but we have some longer words in the rhyme position Hollywood and likelihood disregard dignified and provide.
Abhishek, however, is of another order, less a rhyme than a conjuring.
Hag, peel and rag seem to recombine in their letters and sounds to form the name,
as if the speaker suddenly recognises the old lady before him from a silent film of an earlier era.
We might and we might not know who Abhishek is.
In an anthology or a textbook. There will be a footnote, but this is not how the poem was intended to appear.
And I think, um, this kind of obscurity is the point.
He could have made the same point with a more recognisable name, Cleopatra, say, or the Queen of Sheba.
Um, someone beautiful and exotic. Um, but part of this, of course, is it's easier to rhyme.
ABBA Chag Sheba doesn't rhyme with very much, so it has several advantages, being more vaguely exotic.
One of them, and as we have seen with these episodes of the antes, um, it really sticks out.
But there's often a second word that reinforces the bold choice as a deliberate rather than a random move.
And here I think we have that secondary surprise of Hollywood, a glamorous place we do not expect,
and a Frost poem, although we might have forgotten that for all his Vermont business, he was born in California.
I might put us in mind, vaguely, of sword and sandal movies about the Old Testament.
We might or might not associate her with the last days of King David, when she has brought a young virgin to his bed as a literal bed warmer.
Um, now, King David was old and stricken in years, and they covered him with clothes, but he got no heat.
Wherefore his servant said unto him. Let there be sort for my lord the king a young virgin, and let her stand before the king,
and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat.
So they brought sort for a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of Israel, and found Abhishek Asuna, mite, and brought her to the king.
And the damsel was very fair and cherished the king and ministered to him.
But the king knew her not. So. This is, uh, besides, um, cameo moment in the Old Testament.
Um. So. If we know the story.
The name conjures up innocence, youth, and the possibility of sex.
In other words, the perfect role for a Hollywood starlet discovered on the casting couch.
Um, I know that there's a great danger of being reductive here.
Uh, but I do have a theory that Frost may be thinking of a literal instance.
Um, the case of Betty Blythe, whom you see pictured, um, a sex symbol of the silent film era, known for exotic roles such as her 1921 Queen of Sheba,
of whose elaborately skimpy costumes she remarked, I wear 28 costumes, and if I put them on all at once, I couldn't keep warm.
Um, a movie that if it doesn't have an ABBA shag the film itself has now lost does
include King Solomon and King David and other characters that intersect with ABBA.
Sex brief narrative.
Um Blythe made a fortune selling the land that would become the Sunset Strip and lost everything in the stock market crash of 1929,
and lived to a ripe old age in poverty. But I digress.
One of the things Abersoch does here, in combination with Hollywood, is to make the poem top heavy,
a bit unstable, and there is a certain nervousness with which the reader rolls down the rest of the poem.
Having invoked these specificities, frost and obscures any kind of development of the reference.
The unnamed starlet who once played Abhishek and has fallen on hard times, is a parable of hard bitten capitalism.
The stakes are already high at the beginning of the poem.
Total financial ruin, along with the loss of youth and beauty,
the only further intensification we have a fairly flat diction and straightforward American speech is the hard one.
Barton, which has an old fashioned hand spun texture and the repetition of the terrifying exhortation at the end provide, provide.
Skipping along to quotation, which is another breaking of the fourth wall.
Proper names are one kind of illusion. Quotation is maybe a different kind of intersection with one work in another.
Um, but it can be a kind of extreme registers, registers, shift breaking of the fourth wall to a certain extent.
Bishop did that with the deliberate, not quotation of Blake.
But here is another favourite poem of mine, and my favourite example of this kind of bold play.
Sunlight on the garden. The sunlight on the garden hardens and grows cold.
We cannot cage the minute within its nets of gold.
When all is told we cannot beg for pardon.
Our freedom as freelances advances towards its end.
The earth compels upon it. Sonnets and birds descend.
And soon, my friend, we shall have no time for dances.
The sky was good for flying. Defying the church bells.
And every evil iron siren. And what it tells the earth compels.
We are dying, Egypt. Dying and not expecting pardon.
Hardened in heart anew. But glad to have sat under thunder and rain with you.
And grateful to for sunlight on the garden.
Written in the aftermath of Magnus's devastating divorce from his first wife, Mary Ezra, and written in Hampstead.
At this address, only yards away, perhaps from where Keats wrote ode to a Nightingale and originally titled simply song.
This poem is one of the most intricately and ingeniously wrought music boxes in the language not only end rhymed ABBA Baba.
So again, trios of rhymes, which is not easy, with the a rhyme returning at the end, and a ring structure.
But there are those nose to tail cornering rhymes.
Garden hardens minute within it. Lances advance a sonnet upon it.
Flying defying iron siren pardoned hardened under thunder.
If you want to challenge yourself, why don't you write a poem imitating this rhyme scheme and see how that goes.
Um, even without the quotation, this would be a beautiful poem.
But to me, the quotation takes this poem from a perfect poem to a great one.
Tightly controlled, the poem suddenly throws up its hands, goes off the rail, pushes all of its chips into the middle of the table.
What the [INAUDIBLE] is Egypt doing in Hampstead?
Most of you will correctly place this quotation from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, but I don't think it's necessary to know it.
And if we go look at the the original, it's not super helpful.
Antony has been, um, mortally wounded, and he's lifted up, uh, in this kind of aria, um, you know, to Cleopatra where he's going to die in her arms.
And he says, I am dying, Egypt dying. Give me some wine and let me speak a little.
And Cleopatra says, no, let me speak, and let me rail so high that the false housewife fortune breaker wheel provoked by my offence.
And McNeice. We. No changes. I am dying, Egypt.
Dying too. We are dying, which is much more suited.
Suitable to a divorce and less suitable to a play.
Egypt. The illusion and the quotation appear to be entirely out of proportion to the situation of the poem.
A domestic dissolution that is not a tragedy. Indeed, the note of the poem is one of forgiveness.
For me, the effect is of someone so overwhelmed with the emotion that they lack their own words.
Words fail and memory and quotation invited perhaps by the rhyme, rush into the vacuum to the poet's aid.
The poem becomes entangled with ancient tragedy. A wormhole opens up and cosmic winds blow through the vast emptiness between them.
It is terrifying as well as tender, and it brings to my mind a quotation from another song.
Paul Simon's Graceland. Graceland. And I see losing love is like a window in your heart.
Will everybody sees you're blown apart. Everybody feels the winds blow.
Just how I feel about that poem. Then why is it not moving forward?
There we go. I was going to look at another example of where I think the classical allusions or the elusiveness or quotations do not up the ante.
And one of these examples, I think, because I was thinking of Hampstead,
is ode to a Nightingale, um, where it's just part of the poem's brocaded texture.
Um, my heart aches and and drowsy numbness pains my senses.
The hemlock I had drunk or empty. Some dumb dull opiate to the drains.
One minute passed and Lethe words and sunk. It is not through empty of thy happy lots.
But being too happy in thy happiness. That thou light winged dryad of the trees, and some melodious plots of beach and green and shadows,
numberless singers of summer and full throated ease.
O for a draught of vintage that hath been cooled along age.
And the deep delve and earth tasting of flora, flora and the country.
Song. Blessed flows keep a green and all this hemlock.
Lethe words Dryad, flora, hypocretin are all classical, more or less.
But they're part of the ornamental surface and the loading every rift with or beautiful, but not for the most part, intensifiers.
Keats's classical learning here is worn superficially, and, as Byron remarks,
reminds us snarkily um, he did not have Greek, just as he really promised.
Something great, if not intelligible, without Greeks contrived to talk about the gods of late, much as they might have been supposed to speak.
So that's a very snarky remark on Mark on Keats. If anything, one of the startling, um,
curiosities of this poem is that it manages to avoid checking the box of the one
classical allusion every poet is bound to check with Nightingale's prophecy.
And Filomena are nowhere in this poem. And if you think about it, that is strange.
There is no chug jug here. But then I realised that maybe I was wrong and there was a bold move after all,
an upping of the ante, um, by a dramatic downshift in register about three quarters of the poem.
In stanza seven of eight stanzas, Keats suddenly shakes off the ornamental classical references Bacchus and his pards and goes for something
one suspects he has a deeper intimacy with the biblical story of Ruth that was not born for death.
The mortal bird. No hungry generations tread thee down.
The voice I hear this passing night was heard in ancient days by Emperor and Clown.
Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path through the sad heart of Ruth when sick, for whom she she stood in tears amid the alien corn.
I think there's something about the biblical reference amidst the nest of classical references and the kind of plainness of Ruth,
which is this monosyllable? Um, it could be an English name.
Um, it has its own meaning in English. And he envisions, um, her homesickness as she's with the gleaners gathering the corn,
and she's had to leave her homeland hearing a nightingale and thinking back to her homeland,
where she heard a nightingale, which is not in the Bible at all.
But it's this wonderful, um, imagining that he does.
And for me, perhaps, um, that is, after all, that upping of the ante moment.
So I thought I would close with this poem, I believe somewhere recently, um,
someone remarked in a newspaper that this is the poem for our time, and I think, um, much, much could be said for that being the case.
A disused shed in County Wexford by Derek Mann.
Let them not forget us. The weak souls among the US fiddles from safaris with the story.
It's for j G Farrow. Even now, there are places where I thought might grow.
Peruvian mines worked out and abandoned to a slow clock of condensation and echo trapped forever, and a flutter of wildflowers in the lift shaft.
Indian compounds where the wind dances and the door bangs with diminished confidence.
Lime crevices behind rippling rain barrels.
Dog corners for bone burials, and in a disused shed in County Wexford, deep in the grounds of a burnt out hotel.
Among the bathtubs and the wash basins, a thousand mushrooms crowded with keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament, or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire so many days beyond the rhododendrons.
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud. They have learnt patience and silence.
Listening to the rooks querulous in the high woods.
They have been waiting for us in a fight or a vegetable sweat since Civil War days,
since the gravel crunching, interminable departure of the expropriated mycologist.
He never came back. And light since then is a keyhole resting gently after rain.
Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew, and once a day, perhaps, they have heard something a trickle of masonry,
a shout from the blue, or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.
There have been deaths. The pale flesh flaking into the earth that nourished it.
And nightmares born of these. And the grim dominion of stale air and rank moisture.
Those nearest the door grow strong. Elbow room.
Elbow room. The rest dim in a twilight of crumbling utensils.
And broken pitchers groaning for their deliverance have been so long expectant that there is left only the posture.
A half century without visitors in the dark.
Poor preparation for the cracking lock and creak of hinges.
Magi moon men powdery prisoners of the Old Regime.
Webb throated, stalked like triffids, wracked by drought and insomnia.
Only the ghost of a scream at the flashbulb firing squad.
We wake them with shows there is life. Yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now. Soft food for worms.
They lift frail heads and gravity and good faith.
They are begging us. You see in their world this way to do something, to speak on their behalf.
Or at least not to close the door again. Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii.
Save us. Save us. They seem to say, let the God not abandon us who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live. You with your light metre and relaxed itinerary.
Let not our naive labours have been in vain.
At first, there's no rhyme in these attractive ten line stanzas, um,
which I would put in the category of prior Spencer in stanzas which have their own history.
The second stanza has a plausible slant rhyme on Cloud and Woods.
The third feature, a departure, is suggestive, but then there's a full rhyme on Rain and Lane, and a skewed one on mildew and blue rhymes.
Slant and fall start to multiply until the penultimate and the ultimate stanzas, where it starts to almost dominate.
They feel sonically more inevitable and locked into place.
This poem is dense in its textures, inclusively, sonically and in its imagery.
Um, written in 1972, shortly after Bloody Sunday on January 30th, and published in 1973.
The poem's title for me, partly evokes and its specific and yet obscure locality.
James writes 1961 lying in a hammock at William Duffy's farm.
Um, and we might remember that the last line of that poem is I have wasted my life.
The dedication to J.G. Farrell, um, calls to mind the writer's novel troubles.
And the epigraph from George, the Ferris's story might remind us of what would at the time been the recent death of the Nobel laureate poet in Athens.
Um, in 1971, his funeral turned into a massive protest against the oppressive military junta in Greece.
Um, so that quotation, I think, brings not just ancient Greek mythology, but perhaps an idea of modern politics and strife.
Within the poem, the crowd of mushrooms likened variously to moon men, magi, powdery prisoners of the old regime, and wonderfully, triffids.
Each of these giving us fresh visual takes on the fungus, sometimes speak or seem to speak in the first person plural.
And I think this connects them with their cries for elbow room.
Elbow room with Sylvia Plath chorus of meek edible mushrooms.
So many of us, so many of us.
The flashbulb firing squad sets us up for the Mortal Stakes raising of the last stanza with its line lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii.
I think it is important that we have both Treblinka and Pompeii, which is a triangulation of place names with Wexford in the title.
I think we also saw that triangulation of um, uh, very specific, um, nouns in, um, the Kavanagh poem.
Um, so you have this triangulation of place names, things where bad things,
places where bad things have happened through human evil and natural disaster.
Things have happened to crowds of the named and the anonymous, the unremembered, weak souls among the asphodel.
Neither Treblinka nor Pompei would work quite so well by themselves.
Name checking and extermination camp from the Holocaust by itself risks an inappropriate disproportionality.
A frivolous ness, perhaps, but the triangulation with Pompeii for historical distance,
and where rhyme gives it an inevitability, and with Wexford for the presence,
topicality expand the poem's vast scope through its narrow aperture,
and the poignant pun of light metre reminds us of the poet's place as photographer and witness.
There is a further nod to Greek poetry and the Cavafy, an echo of let not the God abandon us, which I think will remind us of the God abandons Antony.
He is the supreme poet of historical irony. Once man raises the stakes, he keeps them raised.
Man came to resent the popularity and staying power of this poem, as Yeats did.
Um, the lake Isle of Innisfree or Larkin, this be the verse poets don't control what poems are enshrined by the public.
Um, and recently, um, someone, uh, said in an English paper, um, it is the poem for our time.
It's a poem that could speak for the drowned refugees in the Mediterranean, or those buried under the rubble of Gaza and mass graves in butcher,
those washed away in the floods of climate change or starved and manmade famines.
It speaks not only of the troubles, but of trouble.
While the sun and moon endure elects a chance.
But troubles, sure it ups the ante.
It plays for mortal stakes, and the risk pays off in spades.
People.