Good evening, and thank you for joining us for this evening's lecture given by the professor of poetry here at the University of Oxford.
Alice Oswald. My name is Philip Bullock and I'm director of the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.
We're delighted to host this evening's event as part of our live event series itself.
Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding students for the future, Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
Alice has kindly agreed to take questions from the audience, so if you do have any,
please put them in the YouTube chat during the lecture and we'll do our very best to answer as many as we can at the end of the discussion.
Tote is delighted to be collaborating with the English faculty in hosting this evening's lecture,
so it's my great pleasure and great honour to welcome Professor Ross Bannister to tell us more.
Rose Pallister is professor of 18th century studies tutorials fellow at Mansfield College and the chair of the English Faculty Board.
She has published widely on the novel and on women's writing in the 18th century and
is currently writing a book about the role of sister in the invention of the novel. Rose, thank you so much for sharing Alice's lecture.
So without further ado, I'd like to hand over to you now. Thank you.
Thank you, Philip, for the introduction and to torch for supporting English faculty live event this evening.
Welcome again to all of you is watching at home. The professor of she gets a public lecture each term.
The post has been in place at Oxford since the lectures were first conceived in 1788.
In order that quote, the reading of the ancient poets should give keenness and polish to the minds of young men,
as well as to the advancement of more serious literature, both sacred and human.
Much has changed since that conception.
We've questioned what counts as serious literature and who decides that we now make keen the minds of students, regardless of their sex or gender.
We read and discuss the most modern alongside the ancient poets.
In some ways, though,
the legacy remains and is brought to life most splendidly in the thick of our current and forty six professor of poetry Alice Oswald.
She's a keen classicist in conversation with the voices of the ancient past.
Perhaps most memorably with Homer's Iliad in her memorial of 2011 and with his odyssey in her
recent collection Nobody 2019 A Poetry Makes a mythic human and the human mythic poetry,
she commented in her election statement is an ancient memory system.
It asks to be heard out loud, or at least read in the manner of a musical score.
Professor Oswald knows how to use her voice to speak for poetry and from poetry.
I can't think then, of a better poet to give the first ever online lecture by a professor of poetry at Oxford.
For too many across the world, this is a time of grief and loss. And Professor Osborne's lecture will speak to that experience today.
To her topic is the uncanny connexion of grief with water.
Water is the element that has consistently flowed through her imagination.
She is in her element with water, her element is water, and I'm honoured to invite her to deliver her lecture for this term.
Its title is an interview with Water, and I'm pleased to hand over to Professor Alice Oswald for her lecture.
Hello. Can you see me? We can, you can.
OK. Hello. And I'm grateful as well for you, rose and to talk for providing the English faculty.
It does seem rather ironic that I should be speaking to people through a computer screen when live performance has always been my personal manifesto.
It is still my manifesto, and it's what I speak about again today in spite of in on YouTube.
I don't want to give up on the physical performance of poetry, even if it means moving it outdoors into the streets while we're all under lockdown.
Anyway, as a marker of where we are today, and because it fits the themes of my lecture,
I'd like to start by reading a poem by Jericho Brown called Middle.
And this poem is about the murder of Emmett Till in 1955 in Mississippi.
We do not recognise the body of Emmett Till. We do not know the boy's name, nor the sound of his mother's wailing.
We have never heard a mother wailing. We do not know the history of this nation and ourselves.
We do not know the history of ourselves on this planet because we do not have to know what we believe we owe.
We believe we own your bodies, but have no HP or.
We destroy the body that refuses use. We use maps.
We did not draw. We see a sea, so cross it.
We see a moon lander. We love land so long as we can take it.
We can't take that sound. What is a mother wailing?
We do not recognise music until we can sell it. We sell what cannot be for me by silence.
Let us help you. How much does it cost to hold your breath underwater?
Wait, wait. What are we? What?
What on earth are we? What? It is a wonderful gift to be able to swim in rivers, especially on bright, clear days like this.
If you step into an inverted version of the world,
the water fits around you like a velvet suit and you float along seemingly decapitated by reflections.
Of all the gifts offered to us by water. I'm going to speak today about gift of reflection.
The liquid in permanent, unstable gift of similarity.
Similarity, by the way, is not the same as saying if you want to hear sameness,
you can bring certain public institutions and you will be told your goal is important to us.
You are held in a queue and will be answered shortly. Your call is important to us.
You are held in. A few will be answered shortly. Your call is important to us.
You are held in a queue and will be answered shortly. Your call is important to us.
You are held in a queue and will be answered shortly.
The recorded message is a new kind of poetry, a machine spoken poetry available on everyone's phone any time of day,
and it communicates a machine's belief in sameness or stubbornness, which is a terrible thing to carry in your pocket.
As an antidote to that message, if you want to witness similarity,
you should look at water whose reflections are always being carried by currents in the air.
I keep a bucket of rainwater under my window, and it lights me that green leaves reflected in a bucket.
I'm not quite green. I don't know what colour they are at certain moments early in the day.
They might be called pre-agreed, but then the clouds change or the wind moves.
So it's not. And all at once, they seem bright, dark and blind, silvery, then foggy, emerald.
Samuel Johnson. Used this idea of agitated reflection, we vote the difference between spoken and written language.
In the preface to his dictionary, he wrote about impossibility of defining words in that passing unrecorded form.
While our language is yet living, he says.
And variable at a caprice of everyone that speaks it, these words only shifting their relations and can be ascertained in a dictionary,
then a grove in the agitation of a storm can be accurately delineated from its picture in the water.
I love to imagine the other kind of victory,
a liquid shifting not yet Britain's own victory is exactly what we should bring to home as language to remind
ourselves that what looks like the same that's on the page will transform into similarity in performance.
The pink fingered dawn, the approach it brings word to repeat those phrases in print is to drive the reader mad with sameness.
The repeat performance with altered posture and varying levels of exhaustion or light or both is to offer the gift of similarity.
Agitated similarity is Homer's gift, and it is his element.
It behaves like water. It throws everything is a trembling reflection.
Under its sway, the journey of a deceased looked like, but is not the same as Johnny Islamica.
The rage of Agamemnon looked like, but is not the same as the rage of Achilles.
Odysseus wakes just as Penelope sleeps and then sleeps just as she wakes and his marriage copies itself
backwards in the marriage of Agamemnon and then forwards again in America's arsenal failed to confuse.
Penelope Moon's like a Nightingale and a Nightingale.
More like the human. Homeless adjectives which keep reappearing in new colours.
A record for the same agitation. The Earth is called life getting lost as a man, large brains into it.
Achilles is swift footed while he sits idle. And there is agitated or animated similarity between crying and the father of Achilles and also
between Cuba and the mother of a vicious and between Calypso LRP and between Afeni and all swallows.
But at heart of all this resemblance, as it were the in the poem cloth.
There is the simile itself. The extended simile is Homer's particular double over style of thinking.
There are about 215 extended similes in the Iliad, almost another hallucinated poem floating above the main one.
In the Odyssey, there are only half a dozen, and I'd like to read you the eeriest things.
So the great singer sang at a delicious liquified is run up under his eyelids onto his feet.
As when a woman crumbles over and mourns her husband, he has fallen in full view of his city and his family.
He was trying to delay the stroke of grief for his children.
She sees him dying and gasping, drapes herself on his body, screaming a shrill sound and the men behind hitting her head and shoulders.
With that is. And they lead her away to slavery to suffer hard work and sadness.
And her face is sucked in pitiful grief.
So additions was pouring out it, difficulties from his eyelids.
I'll read it again, because it's always hard to take in poetry.
So the great singer sang at a distance liquefy, the tears run out under his own, it's onto his cheek.
As when a woman crumbles over and mourns her husband, he has fallen in full view of his city and his family.
He was trying to delay the stroke of grief for his children. He sees him dying and gasping, drapes herself on his body,
screaming a shrill sound and the men crying are hitting her head and shoulders with this is.
And they did away with slavery to save her hard work and sadness, and her face is soft,
thin with pitiful grief, so additions was pouring out of it from his eyelids.
Oral poems keep moving, and so should oral predict. But there are two good reasons for pausing to think about this passage.
First of all, it is a simile about liquefaction, which seems to emerge from the actuality of water.
So you could say that it is a similarly about similarity. Secondly, and more importantly.
This is a passage about Ted. Tears as the messengers of similarity.
The way that would have interrupts the narrative with her weeping,
not as a ghost or a sign or a memory, but as a stranger in the language with her own vivid existence,
the way her scream goes on, damaging the mind that tells me something about grief itself and how poetry might rise to meet.
So the great singer song, but dishes liquefied, the tears ran out under his eyelids on his feet.
As when a woman crumples over and mourns her husband. He has fallen in full view of his city and his family.
He was trying to delay the stroke of grief for his children. He sees him dying and gasping, drapes herself on his body, screaming a sharp sound.
The men behind hitting her head and shoulders with this is. And they lead to a way to slavery.
Her hard work and sadness and her face is sucked in with beautiful grief.
So audacious was pouring out its operatives from his opponents.
Just to give you some context, this is Odyssey book eight.
Odysseus, on his way home from Troy, has lost his ship.
His companions, his raft and her swam inland to Asia, where he is listening to a poetry cycle.
He is in disguise, and the put a blind man to the motorcades is telling a story about addiction in petrol, and he, as you can hear, is weeping.
And it is the second time this has happened in the same book, only 500 lines earlier, the same put Democrats on a different song.
Odysseus and Odysseus in the sky started weeping.
The whole thing happened with the same opening line. So the great poet sang but Odysseus.
The great poets own, but it is just taking his Blue Ridge gun in his hands, threw it over his head and hit his face.
Ashamed to let the Asians see his stage.
This earlier version has no similar, but the spirit of similarity is radiant, especially when you imagine the piece in performance.
According to you, atheists of Thessalonica, when Ruto's performed the Odyssey,
they would always wear blue and when reciting the Iliad, they will read.
Some of the energy of this passage must derive from the peripheral of that of its performance.
Watching the route towed and under a blue bound to describe a business under a blue cloud,
listening to the monarchists in a blue gown not far from the fictional sea and its googong not far from the actual sea.
It's as if a whole line of aural poets was suddenly reflected all together in the water column.
Go back to the bucket of water. To wave a blue down of it.
And ask what kind of. What is that colour, which Homer calls for for you?
It is not exactly calculated as a couple, but nothing is a settled colour, whereas home as word is agitated.
It derives from Chiba or furrier, which means the rule without breaking.
So it is already a fluid world, a heaped up word, a word with under-12, not a patent, but an emanating from the nature of water.
You get a true sense of puffery. You need to see the sea in it.
And for Homer, the sea is unhuman full of strange creatures, mist coloured, unknowable.
This is my favourite word. It is a spiritual meaning unfenced.
If you want to imagine the colour of riches, it's gone. You will have to swim out into the unfenced place.
The place a lot of definitions. But of fascination.
Yes, I'm afraid you will have to find your way to the volume of nonsense victory.
There you will discover a Dark Lake Worth. An adjective for adolescents.
A sea world used also of death smoke plus missed blood.
Between bluish purple and the. It appears mid ocean when the wind perhaps makes a network of glowing glitter on Boswell moved sideways.
As when a big sea swells with noiseless waves. It is used of the heart.
Meaning his heart was a heaving, not quite broken weight. It indicates a surface that suggests a death, a mutation of Thutmose or Noiseless, she.
A sea creature, a quality of case, any inlet or iodine or shaded stone.
A type of algae or rockfish, anything excessive or out of focus or subliminal.
For example, swimmer seen from underneath a rotting smell list of low sounds and evening shadow or sea god.
A whole catalogue of simmering grudges, storms, waves, solitude or deep water, including everyone who has drowned in it.
To be purple is to lose one day, only to be nothing to grieve without surfacing,
to suffer the effects of she likes to be either sleepless or weightless and cut off by dreams.
Find yourself in the silence underneath an overhanging way, but or thereabouts the colour of a bluish violet ultramarine.
So the great poet and Odysseus taking his bluish gown in his big hands, threw it over his head and hit his face.
Ashamed to let the patients see his face.
The game goes over the head like away, the human sits under the sea floor with saltwater pouring from his arms.
It is one of those places the form of the poem carries us forward the form of the language, the Spanish.
Offering is a word with water inside it, like a bucket down in the middle of a line.
Already, if you look out at the world, you can see the widows similarly underneath it.
But Homer is not yet ready to make that gift. With magnificent theatricality, he draws a blue gown across the mind.
And we like the fashions. I left looking at it, waiting.
Irma is the foremost poet of the visible. Homer delights in surfaces, but the surface of water is complicated by transparency.
And its transparency is complicated by refraction. Water is never the same as itself.
Rivers can only exist as similarities lakes reflect more than their own volume.
And what's more, when you look at water allows you to exist quite a bit more darkly.
When you look at it again, it evaporates as if moving in and out of existence simply required a bit of some.
Then it reappears as Frost perfectly symmetrical as if discovering pre drawn diagrams and thinner.
Then it reappears as tears so that any attempt to describe the surface of water allows you to hide your face and inspect your thoughts.
All these wavelengths are part of the word porphyria. Physics or nature of what is metaphysical?
Meaning that its surface expresses more than itself. So I need to turn left here.
Understand the tears of the dishes. I need to make a detour into the very different world of John Donne, a so-called metaphysical poet.
Samuel Johnson invented the idea of metaphysical poetry,
and he complained that the man who wrote it to impassive and leisurely and cannot be said to have imitated anything.
Johnson, who spent eight years compiling his victory of the English language and forgot to
include words he might be said to have forgotten to see again when he made that remark.
Here is a poem by Dunn called An Addiction of Weeping.
Which might be roughly described as a mutation of the gene.
It is a poem about salt water, which is also a passionate poem, which is also centrally involved in looking out what water is.
Valediction of weeping. Let me put forth my tears before they face whilst I stay here.
Well, they face coins and they start with a. And by this vintage, they are something worse.
But thus they be pregnant of the.
Fruits of much grief, their emblems of more when a tearful start, though, falls which it bore so that I am nothing, then when on a day that sure.
On a round ball, a workman that have copies by and lay in Europe, Africa and Asia and quickly made that which was nothing all.
So does each to which the death were a globe in a world by that impression,
growth till date is mixed with mine do overflow this world by water sent from B my heaven dissolve.
It's a. More than Moon throwing it up seas to drown me in my spell.
We may not get in line on that for there to teach the sea what it may be two to.
Let not the wind and sample find to do any more harm than a purpose of.
Since they went, I see one another's breath with.
This is cruel and haste the other day.
I'm going to read it again, I think without the script, because it's always nice to hear a poem, Alice.
So it's what's here. Could I just interrupt very briefly? Yes.
Could you just move your camera a little bit so that people can see the bottom of your face?
We've had some people who are struggling. If they if they need to lip read a bit, that's better.
That's why that is. That's right.
I can't see myself. So I was like, Okay, thank you. Thank you so much.
I apologise about that. OK, here's the poem again valediction of weeping.
Let me put forth my theories before they face whilst I stay here, although I face coins them and I start super.
And by this vintage, it's something worth for, thus they be pregnant of the fruits of much grief, their emblems of more.
When a tearful though, falls, which it all so thunder then when on a day that she'll.
On a round ball, a workman that hath copies by Ken Lay and Europe, Africa and in Asia and quickly make that which was nothing.
Oh. So does each to which data where a globe gay world by that impression growth.
Till that, it is mixed with mine to overflow this world by water sent from the my home dissolve itself.
Oh, more than the draw, not at sea to drown me in nice, fair.
Wheat need not dead in arms, but for bear to teach the sea.
Well, it may be due to. Let not the wind example find to do me more harm than it property.
Since, though, and I say one another's breath where size most is cruellest and hates the others.
Don was not an oral poet. But nor was he exactly a poet.
His work would have been circulated in manuscript form, and it was normal for her friends to adjust a word here or there, if that seemed fitting.
So you could say that during Ben's life on its own was held in a fluid or at least this state,
and in keeping with this, it achieves a slippery balance between two modes of thinking.
The syntax sounds like a calculation discrimination, but the imagery, it's all watery senselessness.
Two light years mixed with mine to overflow this world by water sent from the.
My heaven resolved to. The dislocation between the tone and form is what makes the poem hard to read.
People are sometimes unsure how much its complexity with its urgency.
It is so clearly a premeditated performance of the here and now.
Let me pour forth whilst I stay here with me, not dead in my arms.
But before criticising the Times governments, one ought to glance down the bucket of water, that is what tears are made of lament at its most extreme.
Always have to encounter water. And we need someone like Dunn to keep an eye on that absurdity.
Sold off each to which theatre were closed.
A bulk buy that impression grown till date is mixed with mine overflow this world, they would just sit and see my heaven dissolve in some.
Inside a tier, as if in a mirror dunces copies of copies of weepies like grant quotes in Odyssey eight.
And these weapons are reflecting each other's tears and provoking more until the sphere or C of the weeping is dissolving and dissolved.
That is what you might call a pirate on an unfenced description of water,
and its language is close to the guns 50 97 account of an actual seabird in which I am the son,
which would teach me how difficult east west they might.
All things are one and that one none can be, since all forms uniform deformity of cover.
Trust a vote on the high seas, said Conrad, a few hundred years later,
trust a vote on the high seas to bring out the irrational that looks at the bottom of every thought.
Sentiment, sensation. Emotion. For all its cleverness, Dunn's poem brings out that high irrationality.
It thinks its way to the bottom of the reports on the confusion becomes the where the mind's world by means of tears, turns into the bodies.
I am using water as a way of reading Homer, and I'm using dung as a way of reading water.
Dunn has carried me into the heart of.
I am under the purple wave now inside the salt water that condenses out of thought and comes weeping from all humans.
And here at its invisible starting point, I find water offer in two subtleties of similarity.
It offers me homeless vision, which is an extended simile, and it offers me dance, which you could say is an extended metaphor or spiritual metaphors.
I think of metaphor as a kind of nutrition whereby one idea gets eaten and digested by another.
Male and female in Dunn's poem is old transform tears,
become fruits and emblems and nothing and spheres and siege everything trans substantiates into something else as it is done.
Who was brought up Catholic but became Anglican in his 20s had found a way to perform communion service in secret.
All his love poems work obsessively for this puzzle change substance, but unlike Homer,
what Don offers is not the gift of similarity, but the gift of communion.
Mark Butler's free and mark in this how little with nice to me is it sucked me first.
You know, it's up to an industry to not be.
But oh, self traitor, I do bring the spider logs, which can substantiate all.
Similarly, moves in the other direction. And instead of reducing one thing to another, it proliferates, it reverberates,
whether wherever there is simply it is as if the poem sprouts another whole poem.
It is much more like pregnancy than nutrition. About 30 years ago, I sent some poems to the Oxford professor of poetry.
The answer came back not enough for.
I remember turning Career Insurance 2.0 in book, noticing the way she refuses to be absorbed into thought he will not be digested.
Features a likeness with a deceased, but keeps the difference.
She goes on screaming. It seemed to me at the time her vitality was directly linked to the spaciousness.
Simone, if she had been a metaphor for her status, getting closer to the woman in the poem or to the women,
for example, in Adrienne Rich's poem Women about whom the poet writes this.
I have a poem, she says, written in the sixties called Winning.
It begins My three sisters are sitting on rocks black obsidian for the first time in this light.
I can see who they are. And she goes on to say, I have seen a parent lost because look at Richard's three sisters on the simplest level,
such a reading is factually incorrect since Adrienne Rich has won just not three.
But more than that, even supposing that Adrienne Rich,
the individual had three sisters and lives by medical on one level is still her speaking on one level,
I can look at another woman who is not my blood, her sister or on another level.
All three sisters are asker of the poet. So.
Poetry is full of that kind of fiction. Those various levels and aspects by means of which metaphor tries to detect something immaterial.
But that is not what Homer is doing. Homer is looking out beyond the south, is taking imagination seriously as an external and collaborative force.
His mind, his friends, is not closed in the skull, but moving in and out of the lungs, discovering someone actually in the air.
Homer wants to express the clarity and other notes of grief, and for that purpose, he has need of sympathy.
Metaphor transposes a known similarly realigns of a that is what I've done, looked deeper and deeper into the fear,
whereas Homer moves his vision to and fro, examining the action of weeping.
Homer has to step. He has to get from one thing to another by means of a slow crossing wound.
The Greek word hosts. I don't know how to translate that word.
It's unfortunate that the English word asked, which is the correct way to introduce a verb comparison.
It's a weak, quiet, old fashioned word. It sounds dusty, like something you would find a Victorian door handles it.
Don't drop. A word, I think, which is designed for comparing notes is altogether more vigorous, but it just ought to chop.
It sticks out of the line like a glinting knife. I need something softer and swift.
Homeless world is a rough breeding, followed by omega undulating last letter of the alphabet,
followed by s as if the wind had heaped up water and then broken it into sounds.
Host, it is hard to pronounce unless you are the wind.
Whenever I read it, I think of weight altering a stretch of water and then altering it again, hosts host.
Two rebels either side of it, like it is, as if the bluish wave because the boat had unfolded and revealed its underneath.
While it is breaking before we reached this at the end of quotes,
I'd like to turn left again to show you a series of ways by the artist Sarah Semblait.
Sara teaches anatomy at the Ruskin.
And if you visit her in Christchurch, you will find all kinds of buried objects twisted but severed wings, stuffed owls and a kingfisher finger bones,
open field moths, seeds, skulls to bones and three waslike like human photos, one with scoliosis, which help her to understand which is it things.
Suppose they comprise a kind of material, actually. But if Sarah wants to draw something moving, growing, living, it makes use of water.
Twenty years ago, Sarah started studying the Thames, Italy, where it goes over the wind.
I listen acutely to water. I draw it sound.
Well, does it smell? She describes how she developed an ability to see water patterns because design of the we're making the water.
So the design of the where the water keep returning to one shape.
So, for example, she made these two sketches by waiting for the water to repeat itself and then marking down another line and then another.
Noticing as she went along, that the speed of the water could only be caught if she drew quickly.
That's another one of. My drawings are all made with fine line of lack of rage, he says,
and declines very fast over the smoothness of the dismantled Moleskine notebook, which goes for the slippery speed of its surface.
So she learnt to draw water by looking at patterns in the with.
And as a counterforce to the bones and stuffed birds, Sarah carries these water currents wherever she goes to remind her to look at things liquid.
Last winter on a residency in Honolulu, she took out the drawings again and decided to get some weights.
Here they are. I hope. The first one.
This one, I think it is the first one is formalised, made in the presence of water,
but later on in a perfectionist mood that hotel Sara said this about it.
I think the hotel room reworking collapsed into Athens because I could no longer hear or smell or taste it or could see the water.
If reading is a kind of internal drawing, then sketch reminds me how easy it is to read over enthusiastically turning poems and systems in your head.
I prefer this next one. Buckley treated by maid.
You can see the torn page and the ink walked off. And if you hold it's thick and paper, you can feel the hope with a first rate performance by water.
And I think it followed by some sketches she made on the back looking at the outlines of water in the back of the paintings.
Sarah is off to something more lucid, the flourish of a falling wave.
It's neither incoherent nor over coherent. A paradox between movement and movement.
Here is a series of drawings made while watching waves break over a rock.
Informed by the moment, but not dissolved in it.
She says all of my drawings rely on all of my senses, I touch or hold subjects, especially plants, whenever possible.
I hear really important smell and taste, and this is all a kind of same.
Any one of those sketches would make the translating Greek word hosts surge of change provisional and mobile like a breaking wave.
So the great singer sang, but Odysseus liquefied. The tears run out under his eyelids, on his cheeks, host as a woman,
crumpled over and mourned her husband, he has fallen in full view of his city and his family.
He was trying to delay the traumatic moment for his children. Do you see him dying?
And so it's been great, Cecil from his body screaming a shrill sound.
And the man behind or hitting her head and shoulders with spears and lead her away.
That slavery to suffer hard work and sadness and her face is sucked thin with pitiful grief.
So additions was pouring out. It happened to its from his own.
What you miss in that translation, oh,
the rolling diameters which are like the cylinders of a great similarity machine on which everything gets processed in apartments
because of the hexamer to there is a structural alignment running down through the poem with which just one weeping to another.
But as it matches one rosy fingered dawn or one winged or one road trip to another.
There is no stopping it. Over those cylinders goes the shrillness supplement, get flattened into shrillness of grasshoppers when seabirds,
sirens and the pilfering of water comes out comes out in the same colour as the hot.
At least that is how it appears when you were reading the Odyssey and the keep coming at you like a recorded message.
Think I have a recorded message? Listen, you are calling knows you are waiting.
Please try later. The person you are calling knows you are waiting.
Please, please try later. The person you are calling knows you are waiting.
Please try later. Eating, please try again later, the person you called knows you are waiting.
Please try again later. The person you called knows you are waiting.
Please try again later.
And of course, this crime was not in the first place, recorded and in performance, as Pina Bausch said, repetition is not repetition.
It's something more like the varying resemblances of wage.
Humour speaks not in cylinders, not as an answer machine, but in undulations hosts as a woman crumples over hosts.
So Odysseus poured out his. And who exactly is this woman?
I've seen her in the dark space, just behind my eyes and sometimes in front of them is in shock, so her knees have given way to keep crumbling over.
She flashes past screaming and ignited the allies. She has no name, and nor does her city it might destroy.
It might just as well be Minneapolis. She is like Odysseus, but in that likeness, she could not be more different.
Who is she? If this were a film, we would probably find out the scene would be presented as a flashback hoax, the image phase to the city of Troy.
Here is a deceased killing a man. He has his knee on the man's neck.
We see the man dying and gasping for breath. Here is the widow screaming a shrill sound.
The scream fills up the cinema hosts. The image fades back to feature.
Scream keeps going. In that film version, the widow has the status of a memory or a ghost.
She is a victim of a vicious lot, its psychology. That connexion is causal and therefore fixed.
In Homer's version, there is only ideology. The wave of weeping moves through both characters, but they keep status of the difference.
Odysseus in one world and the widow in another as subhuman.
Johnson might have put it, that connexion is living variable and can no more be ascertained in a victory and approved
in the amputation of a storm can be accurately delineated from its picture in the water.
So thank you. I am now going to be happy to answer some questions and go back to roots.
And I think. Hello. Thank you so much, and that was gripping and moving in the fullest sense of the word.
We have a lot of people asking questions and I will start.
Well, let's start with with with one that starts with where you started. How did you come to the subject of water today for your lecture?
I think I seldom leave the subject to water.
I'm very keen on swimming and rivers, but I suppose as well as that, I've always been very interested in that particular simile about a woman weeping.
And I've never really known how to answer the question of why at the highest pitch of our emotion, we dissolve into water.
So that kind of weird connexion that when you're swimming,
you know you're swimming in the same liquid as grief at its most intense has bothered me for for a long time.
I think that's really interesting. One of the questions we had was, can you speak to the road of tears as a meeting of grief and water?
And I suppose that's what you're describing is that moment of encounter with water, which is also an encounter with grief.
Yes. Tonight I'm that's a a a Jewish legend connected to the story of Adam and Eve
that says that humans were originally given tears as a compensation for death.
And I think that's I love that idea. It's a really bad bargain to get these little drops of water in exchange for dying.
But if you think about it, it's actually quite a lot as well to be given something physical and actual victims,
which either through destruction or as an anaesthetic or simply through the assailant presents you with of how the body connects with the mind.
They sort of move you through grief, I suppose. And I'm just going to ask a little question of my own because I was so struck
with that metaphor that you were giving us and you're working it through. So I simile from home.
I wanted to ask a bit about time in that and how you perceive that simile working in time.
You talked about hallucinatory poetry floating above other poetry.
Is this an interruption? Is it happening at the same time?
I was thinking particularly about Denise Riley's wonderful time lived without its flow and this idea that Greece suspends time,
but you are still living in time and whether there's something going on in that.
Yeah, Denise talks a lot about the stuckness of Greece, doesn't she?
And how how it is actually occupies a different time from ordinary, everyday time.
And I think it's it's a brilliant thing to say, and that's exactly right.
And I've always been fascinated by the way Homer's similes occupy that time as well,
so they always change into the present tense from the main part of the poem, which is in a sense.
And I suppose it's perhaps a bit like the idea of the dream time.
It's it's as if there is a continuous present in which at our highest pitch emotion or understanding we can,
we can sort of look down ordinary time and get a different perspective.
When I'm still on tears, we have a question that says, why are tears symbolically considered culturally pure when other bodily emissions,
saliva and blood have an abject quality viewed as impure and probably not the right person to answer that.
But eyes are the windows of the soul, so it might seem that is other some sort of liquid of the soul,
whereas urine tight earwax saliva come from different windows of the body, which are not necessarily connected with the show.
But. I don't think I really have the right answer, only my own opinion and eyes are very fascinating thing,
so that's why perhaps to get a kind of status videos.
We have two questions that I think a connexion connected ones, an extended way in one's a short way of asking the same thing.
So one of our listeners gets a quote from Mrs. Dalloway from Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway,
where she says this late age of the world's experience had bred in them all all men and women.
A well of tears, tears and sorrow. Courage and endurance. A perfect, upright and stoical bearing.
What do you make of Wolf's confluence of grief and compassion, nurture and forbearance in this quote?
And how do you think we might make our own current collective well of tears productive?
And then a more direct way, I suppose, by asking that question is, has the current global situation influenced your work?
I'm. Well, in terms of the first part of the question, I suppose I I still do think I do not want to stop,
which is I think the great thing about certainly about poetry is that it doesn't get stuck in lament.
I think it has this this kind of rhythmical aspect to it, which moves it through things.
It's got kind of dance and song going on alongside whatever grief it might express.
So I I myself. Wouldn't want to get stuck in that.
Well, it is, I think that one of the great things about certainly about poetry I don't know
about the novel really is that it does present two things at the same time.
So you can tend to grief at the same time as sort of just the joy of the music of the poem.
And probably with. Second part of the question,
I think that it's quite important to wait and not know too quickly how these extraordinary times are going to have affected people.
Perhaps one of the things that poetry demands is that you kind of you don't necessarily listen to the surface of your mind.
You wait until the underneath has something to say, and that can generally take a couple of years, I think.
So who knows? There are some who say it have made any difference at all.
I certainly think it's given enough kind of solitude and quietness for people, at least to sort of churn things over quite a lot.
A question here from Dan Rather or although we're still with rhythm.
Alice has such a strong sense of rhythm when reading poetry. Sometimes a natural rhythm and all the more revealing for it.
Has she allowed her poetry to be set to music and if so, what she happy?
I love working with musicians.
I think the best of those collaborations has been when I and the musician kind of take it in turns and listen to each other.
I haven't so much enjoyed a kind of formal relationship. I've occasionally written operas and things like that or watch dogs.
And I find that a bit less satisfactory because perhaps it's vain of me.
But the music is really the serious thing in that collaboration, and it tends to be told when you start out on it.
But only 10 percent of your words will be heard or something. So I love working with musicians, but in a slightly more jazzy way, I think.
OK. Many questions coming in, I'm just trying to order them in my head.
Sarah asks, Does the surface of the water represent our sense perceptions and our imaginations, which led to uncertainties in our life?
So do you think that agitation is about the state of uncertainty?
And I think that what fascinates me about the surface of warfare is that it isn't just surface you can see through it.
And it also looks back at you with Richard Burton.
So it is the one that surface and this always this is why I get interested in it whenever it crops up in homer.
It's the surface that is so it's so.
Whereas Homer always responds to the kind of the actual and the visible on the surface when he's talking about water.
He can't help sort of reading somebody's mind or going into a different kind of world altogether.
And. I think that although I used the word education quite a lot in its lecture, partly because it's we don't using it,
I think that the movement of water doesn't have to be just an uncertainty.
It can be a sort of energy. And I think that's really what I love about the movement of water is.
But it stops you getting stuck, and from the point of view of poetry, that means it kind of.
It gives you all the vitality of life performance rather than the printed page.
I have a lot of people are asking about similes and metaphors.
I think this is a rather brutal question, and you may have already answered it by selecting the matter with somebody you selected.
If you had to pick one simile or metaphor in a poem, which would it be?
Well, obviously that one that I spoke about has always haunted me.
But then I do also love the similes in the Iliad because they just get you to such a very different world.
I also think the thing about human similes is that they're not so much similes as dissimilar
as they tend to grow far enough that you are then ending up in a very different place.
And the one that springs to mind is one that never made it into my version of the Iliad, which is about two men killing and tied.
It's a really strange vision of people extracting pieces, and so I'll throw that one.
And Ariel has a wonderful, watery name for us. Can translations be written on water?
In other words, where would you say derivative works stand in relation to the originals?
That's how she puts it. It's such an interesting question,
because I think that poetry in the 20th century in the 21st century has completely changed its meaning because a conception.
There are so many translations of good poems,
and that has changed what we think of as a poet because always before defined as that, which can't be translated.
So we need translation desperately because we need to sort of fertilise the English language.
But I wonder whether.
Translations of poems don't include silence, because the silence is something that the poet deliberately places a particular point in the language.
And if you translate it, you're not going to have your silences in the same places.
So it does give a very different experience, and I think even writing translations on water wouldn't.
Bill, nothing would.
And and you ask the very specific question about she was wondering about Cordelia and how her tears come to represent compassion and forgiveness,
in a sense, go beyond grieving to do duties, do work beyond grieving.
Well, I think tears do work beyond language beyond thought, which is perhaps why they're valuable beyond grieving.
They certainly take you beyond grieving,
but I think what it would strikes me with her is is her silence and the fact that it's her body that speaks rather than I'm not.
We have a question is what about.
So this is what Alice said about water reminds me of the watercolours by W.A. and their sense of randomness and beautiful accidents,
is that randomness something that you try to include in your own poetry?
I wonder what William Collier would think are being called random because he was
very careful as he sort of guides the water into its locks and smudges very,
very carefully. And there's a huge amount of material artistry in what he does.
But yes, he is interested in allowing water to express itself on the paper, and that's very much my way of working, too.
I like to set things up with a strong enough frame, but something other than myself is then free to make its mark on tries to invite randomness in.
And then one has to be careful that perhaps like Sarah's smudged rains smashed drawing, it doesn't go so far that you can't then read it.
And so I think that the question is always getting a balance between control and lack of control.
Just wanted to share with you guys a message from who says,
I work with grieving children and we use a lot of watery references puddle jumping in and out grief,
wading through rivers, getting stuck in seeds, being knocked over by tsunamis of grief, she says.
Maybe water and grief always flow together. And then another question a specific question from Mary says,
How has your attitude to water changed or developed over the years that you've been writing about water?
And I'm not sure that my attitude, the water has changed, but I suppose I've chosen different types of water.
It was lovely to be able to write a story of a river when I wrote a post that has such a clear beginning, middle and ending.
So the poem was already extracted for me.
I have written quite a lot about rain, and that's always a treat because rain is such a beautiful sound, it's already a poem.
The great challenge for me was writing about the sea, which I tried to do in my book Nobody.
And I suppose for me, the sea is.
Is that which you can't write about? So that was like kind of trying to jump into something impossible unfenced, unfenced?
Exactly. Yeah. And a more scientific question, would you be able to speak on water as gas or solid to these function as poetic modes?
I wish I were more of a scientist.
And I understand from my second son that water is very remarkable when it's solid, for example, because it is lighter than its liquid state.
I've got that right. And I think he's strangely whether it's a gas or a solid or a liquid.
And certainly, I suppose to me, what I love is the transitions.
I love the way water and the frost or the steam, but I don't think I'd be qualified to write scientifically about.
And this is one as we're moving sort of further through our questions.
And Krista and Joe says that you're the most captivating readers you've seen perform live.
And how did the experience of reading alone to the lens differ from reading to a room filled with rapt faces, responsive and reflecting back to you?
Yes, it's I'm still going to be going on a live performance because it's a very different experience and that kind of anxiety about the button
on the computer that scroll the script and then the terrible moment when you rose had just informed me that I wasn't actually visible.
I think that I have seen some quite good performances actually online, so I'm sure there is.
And I love the fact that it can go around the world and that it's very democratic.
So I certainly think it's a good thing. But. There is something different about the human body, I suppose,
and a human conversation that happens when you hear people saying with boredom or rustling sweet papers, you know you've got to pick up speed.
So I think it's for me very important to have the feeling that my words are landing someone.
I think we should probably wrap up, we're almost out of time.
One comment from an anonymous figure says listening is if I wrote a poem while listening to your inspiring lecture, I wish I could multitask that way.
Hello. Thank you very much. So shall I say goodbye? No, I'm going to have to.
I'm going to formally thank you so you will be with us for a little bit longer.
I could not do much longer, so I want to thank you for your lecture this evening.
I'm a bit lost for simile to capture it. Thank you very much for going to offer your lecture in this way tonight and France from audience questions.
And we've had people viewing from all over the world Brazil, Japan, all over the UK, Denmark,
Belgium, Croatia, Saudi Arabia, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Pakistan, South Africa, USA,
all of us, wherever we are, I'm sure, have been moved, probably also agitated by the flow of your analysis,
and it's reflecting 10 some Martin Nelson to homer to Donald Asian rich.
And we're really grateful to you, Alice. Many thanks to you once again.
Thank you very much. Thank you. And thank you all for listening.
And thank you also to all those involved in making tonight possible, including the teams at torch in the English faculty.
I want to thank all your viewers at home for watching and all your wonderful comments and questions.
The audio of Alison's inaugural lecture in November 2019 and audio of lectures by the past
two incumbents of the Post are freely available to the public on English faculty website,
and this lecture will join them there soon. Torch continue their live event series next week.
On Thursday 2nd July at five p.m., They'll be joined by Professor Home UK Barber from Harvard University.
Do tune again and again then, if you can. In the meantime, thank you once again for watching and goodbye.