1 00:00:00,540 --> 00:00:03,930 Thank you all for coming. The life and death of poetry, 2 00:00:03,930 --> 00:00:11,310 I hope I won't kill the whole thing by my own technological know how because I've tried to bring some slides and audio clips. 3 00:00:11,310 --> 00:00:18,510 So forgive me if there are some gaps in the lecture while I kind of fuss around them. 4 00:00:18,510 --> 00:00:34,080 This is not a lecture about the wasteland. It is an assembly of voices invoked by and including the wasteland in order to let me read that poem more. 5 00:00:34,080 --> 00:00:40,170 Refreshingly, Elliott called it rhythmical grumbling, 6 00:00:40,170 --> 00:00:49,050 and I have always resented the spell cast by his gloom a cloud which goes on darkening 7 00:00:49,050 --> 00:00:55,860 because of the poems status as the most important poem of the 20th century. 8 00:00:55,860 --> 00:01:04,110 The most translated poem in the culture. 9 00:01:04,110 --> 00:01:11,550 What exactly is going on when the most important poem speaks to us like this? 10 00:01:11,550 --> 00:01:18,210 What is that sound high in the air murmur of maternal lamentation? 11 00:01:18,210 --> 00:01:31,290 Who are these hooded hordes swarming over endless plains stumbling in cracked earth ringed by the flat horizon only? 12 00:01:31,290 --> 00:01:37,650 I don't like Eliot's technique of summoning a crowd in the same tone of voice as Dante, 13 00:01:37,650 --> 00:01:47,400 but without Dante's pity or Chaucer's warmth or Homer's mighty perspective of forgiveness. 14 00:01:47,400 --> 00:01:58,890 Eliot is a satirist and a satirist, is a brilliant critic rather than a compassionate fellow traveller. 15 00:01:58,890 --> 00:02:08,460 For that reason, the religious transformation at the end of the wasteland always seems to me to be a private one. 16 00:02:08,460 --> 00:02:23,400 The thunder and reanimating rain sweep into me as lyric events, internal thought events, not epic ones. 17 00:02:23,400 --> 00:02:34,490 However, I have recently had to admit that the process of reading a poem begins with geography. 18 00:02:34,490 --> 00:02:47,200 For five years, I have been trying to read Elliott through eyes accustomed to Devon, which could not make sense of his urban patterns. 19 00:02:47,200 --> 00:02:54,390 Years ago, I moved to Bristol and something beyond my thinking something just behind the 20 00:02:54,390 --> 00:03:02,220 retina and before the visual cortex began to accept not Eliot's metaphysics, 21 00:03:02,220 --> 00:03:11,900 but his sequencing. The way the verses move round each other, incognito, like strangers, 22 00:03:11,900 --> 00:03:23,630 like people on a pavement looking sideways and down to read the wasteland in a city is like lining up. 23 00:03:23,630 --> 00:03:35,480 Two mirrors can see itself in the poem, and the poem can see itself in the city and in this doubled world. 24 00:03:35,480 --> 00:03:43,070 I am sometimes confused to notice a figure from the streets flitting ahead of me through the text. 25 00:03:43,070 --> 00:03:48,120 A woman crossing the road with heavy bags. Is she from my world? 26 00:03:48,120 --> 00:03:56,510 Or Eliot's? I saw her briefly as I turned the page and behind her a line of diminishing reflections. 27 00:03:56,510 --> 00:04:05,190 Ending in endlessness. That is what happens when you place one mirror in front of another. 28 00:04:05,190 --> 00:04:15,900 That is how the world aids itself to poetry so that every poem given the right reflective surface is half made of paper. 29 00:04:15,900 --> 00:04:35,640 And half made of life. Discovery is so enthralling to me that I am tempted to ask some questions, have my categories become too simplistic? 30 00:04:35,640 --> 00:04:43,440 Might a written down poem be treated more like an oral poem permitted to alter from one occasion 31 00:04:43,440 --> 00:04:54,120 to the next book become less like a permanent record and more like an improvising prompt? 32 00:04:54,120 --> 00:05:01,000 Should the reader take more responsibility for the images provoked by a poem? 33 00:05:01,000 --> 00:05:08,350 And even as literature is literary and language gets flattened and photocopied onto dead trees, 34 00:05:08,350 --> 00:05:13,750 and Elliot claims that every poem is an epitaph and the engine of the wasteland 35 00:05:13,750 --> 00:05:21,700 is the zombie movement of that corpse being recalled by water in section four. 36 00:05:21,700 --> 00:05:29,380 Nevertheless, the reader is part of the picture and the reader is alive. 37 00:05:29,380 --> 00:05:44,470 Ephemeral, three dimensional, dramatic, ordinary, unknowable and is entitled to ask What ails the wasteland? 38 00:05:44,470 --> 00:05:49,360 What makes a poem depressing rather than life giving? 39 00:05:49,360 --> 00:05:57,940 And it's poetry under pressure from its quiet, medium has grown more and more lyric in its scope. 40 00:05:57,940 --> 00:06:08,920 Since personal truth is the kind most accessible to the solitary writer, then at times of collective disturbance, could the reader. 41 00:06:08,920 --> 00:06:18,320 Should the reader be responsible for bringing in a chorus? 42 00:06:18,320 --> 00:06:33,410 Elliott provides one answer to these questions. In his poem A Note on war poetry, he says the enduring is not a substitute for the transient, 43 00:06:33,410 --> 00:06:41,540 neither one for the other, but the abstract conception of private experience at its greatest intensity. 44 00:06:41,540 --> 00:06:50,860 Becoming universal, which we call poetry, may be affirmed in verse. 45 00:06:50,860 --> 00:07:01,160 Not a little text, so I'm going to read it again. The enduring is not a substitute for the transient, neither one for the other, 46 00:07:01,160 --> 00:07:06,320 but the abstract conception of private experience at its greatest intensity. 47 00:07:06,320 --> 00:07:22,580 Becoming universal, which we call poetry, may be affirmed in verse right or only half right. 48 00:07:22,580 --> 00:07:35,840 It's not the case that the feat of becoming universal is begun by the writer, but needs to be completed over and over again by the reader right now. 49 00:07:35,840 --> 00:07:44,710 How shall I complete my copy of the wasteland? 50 00:07:44,710 --> 00:07:52,240 About two months ago, in April, I decided to read Elliot and Bristol simultaneously. 51 00:07:52,240 --> 00:08:01,450 Over the course of 30 days. This experiment would be a kind of rite of spring, and if I performed it correctly, 52 00:08:01,450 --> 00:08:11,860 I could expect warm weather to move over the city, bringing first thunder and then real revivify in rain and new leaves. 53 00:08:11,860 --> 00:08:18,230 That is, after all, what Elliot set out to achieve. 54 00:08:18,230 --> 00:08:24,590 In the year before publishing his poem, he had been to the London production of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, 55 00:08:24,590 --> 00:08:31,850 in which a woman dances herself to death to ensure the fertility of the Earth. 56 00:08:31,850 --> 00:08:37,980 Elliott was impressed by Stravinsky's music, which he later described like this. 57 00:08:37,980 --> 00:08:40,750 Heather Stravinsky's music be permanent or ephemeral? 58 00:08:40,750 --> 00:08:47,380 I do not know, but it did seem to transform the rhythm of the steps into the scream of the motor home. 59 00:08:47,380 --> 00:08:52,150 The rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, 60 00:08:52,150 --> 00:09:03,710 the roar of the underground railway and the barbaric cries of modern life, and to transform those despairing noises into music. 61 00:09:03,710 --> 00:09:09,620 The music of the wasteland moving through blocks of voices, cuts, 62 00:09:09,620 --> 00:09:23,690 quote rhythmic cells and swift transitions towards drumming and drumming and final collapse is a rite of spring to which we are all invited. 63 00:09:23,690 --> 00:09:29,930 And that is where I shall take you in this lecture, which is not really a lecture, but a carnival. 64 00:09:29,930 --> 00:09:38,210 An April walkabout in the company of T.S. Eliot, as well as at Burton Bristol. 65 00:09:38,210 --> 00:09:43,850 Playwright, poet and historian Dante Tour Guide to the after-world Lucy, 66 00:09:43,850 --> 00:09:51,710 English poet and historian of performance poetry Ben Haggerty, carrier of the ancient tradition of storytelling. 67 00:09:51,710 --> 00:10:02,060 Ian Hamilton Finney. The lament of a lost totality. The Hat Street poet Homer poet of Troy Jane, the drunk woman with the rucksack. 68 00:10:02,060 --> 00:10:03,440 Linton Kwesi Johnson. 69 00:10:03,440 --> 00:10:13,580 Great revolutionary poet Edwin Morgan, dead Scottish poet Danny Pandolfi, living performance poet and curator of the Lyra Festival. 70 00:10:13,580 --> 00:10:21,200 Jenny Pearson, storyteller Aaron Saroyan, electric poet True Thomas, the prophet from Northumberland. 71 00:10:21,200 --> 00:10:29,870 Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller singer storyteller Stone Waller, along with graffiti artists John Mozer. 72 00:10:29,870 --> 00:10:44,150 Avoid sexy mish mint cloth Beck's face first sketched goose sodje one ism nick a stuffy summer. 73 00:10:44,150 --> 00:12:25,610 And nights, as well as night, dusk, rose west and others remind me. 74 00:12:25,610 --> 00:12:57,340 And. The state police said the sentences offered all the freedoms and distortions of the cerebral, 75 00:12:57,340 --> 00:13:05,080 well, the readers world in which the mind slides over the memory like a sledge down a slope. 76 00:13:05,080 --> 00:13:10,070 Mary Mary. Hold on tight. 77 00:13:10,070 --> 00:13:19,090 Stretch of time movement backwards from spring to a single hour to a night of reading, then forwards again to the whole of winter. 78 00:13:19,090 --> 00:13:25,240 The first line widens as the focus narrows. Death and life swap places. 79 00:13:25,240 --> 00:13:30,910 The speaker is first invisible, then plural and female, then singular. 80 00:13:30,910 --> 00:13:38,860 Before heading south with a suggestion of feathers, there are no rules to help you navigate the gaps between opposites. 81 00:13:38,860 --> 00:13:46,830 You have to keep tobogganing over emptiness. Mary Mary hold on tight. 82 00:13:46,830 --> 00:13:53,070 I used to find my way into the wasteland through the opening in that personal pronoun. 83 00:13:53,070 --> 00:13:58,630 I read much of the night and fly south in winter. 84 00:13:58,630 --> 00:14:09,130 I used to think a reader was a book servant, and as a reader sliding my eyes down slopes of paper to the edge and emptiness between pages. 85 00:14:09,130 --> 00:14:19,720 I followed the laws of literature downwards from one reference to another to land at last in London, in pentameter with here and there a rhyme. 86 00:14:19,720 --> 00:14:31,120 As if, after all, the tradition of Dante and Shakespeare and Webster Spencer while still working on fog of a winter dawn. 87 00:14:31,120 --> 00:14:37,270 A crowd flowed over London Bridge. So many I had not thought death had undone. 88 00:14:37,270 --> 00:14:43,330 So many sighs, short and infrequent were exhaled. 89 00:14:43,330 --> 00:14:54,370 And each man fixed his eyes before his feet flowed up the hill and down King William Street. 90 00:14:54,370 --> 00:14:59,920 But about two months ago, in April, the cruellest month I, the reader, 91 00:14:59,920 --> 00:15:06,790 put down the wasteland and walked outside and a man in white with a white splurge on his 92 00:15:06,790 --> 00:15:13,990 nose stepped off the pavement and handed me the Bhagavad Gita saying Shanti Shanti Shanti, 93 00:15:13,990 --> 00:15:22,600 a woman in a crimson hijab, was running barefoot with a covered dish and someone was sitting under a tree singing drink drink. 94 00:15:22,600 --> 00:15:26,150 The country is on the brink. You know life doesn't last long, sir. 95 00:15:26,150 --> 00:15:31,570 Almost passed, so you better raise your glass and paint a bit of Bristol in your song, sir. 96 00:15:31,570 --> 00:15:39,010 He looked surprised to find this huge voice coming out of him, as if a stranger had been living in his chest with the lights out, 97 00:15:39,010 --> 00:15:43,630 and every time he heard himself, he offered a sweeping mediaeval gesture. 98 00:15:43,630 --> 00:15:53,710 And suddenly, as if invoked by this song, a drunk woman appeared labouring uphill towards me, bent double looking down not just drunk, 99 00:15:53,710 --> 00:16:05,080 but grieving, falling, wailing, breathless, exhaling short, infrequent sighs, she said she had a broken spine and couldn't get home. 100 00:16:05,080 --> 00:16:12,160 Constant jangle of sorrow, leaning against railings, moaning like a two year old carrying too much. 101 00:16:12,160 --> 00:16:16,040 I took her tripping scarves. She kept asking Why? 102 00:16:16,040 --> 00:16:24,640 Why, why? Then, once her under character spoke firmly in a deep voice, I needed Veronique. 103 00:16:24,640 --> 00:16:29,560 Then back to horror, literally doubled up with hurt, puffing up the hill. 104 00:16:29,560 --> 00:16:33,760 I said by way of interview, Would you trust me to take your rucksack? 105 00:16:33,760 --> 00:16:40,030 She said, No. Who are you? I said, Alice. She said, What do you do? 106 00:16:40,030 --> 00:16:45,640 Gardening? I said. And poetry. She stopped. 107 00:16:45,640 --> 00:16:50,890 She altered, illuminated. She said she loved poetry. 108 00:16:50,890 --> 00:16:54,550 She had a book in her rucksack. She rummaged. She couldn't find it. 109 00:16:54,550 --> 00:16:56,170 That didn't matter. It was not. 110 00:16:56,170 --> 00:17:05,350 It is not the thing in the book that matters, but the fact of poetry is existence, the tradition of poetry that she was from Wales. 111 00:17:05,350 --> 00:17:09,640 We Welsh. We love poetry. She rummaged. She straightened. 112 00:17:09,640 --> 00:17:22,930 She walked upright, almost lifted up the hill. Not by the thought of gardening, but by the thought of poetry against all odds, the survival of poetry. 113 00:17:22,930 --> 00:17:28,840 I saw it actually bring her back to life. A sort of goddess of collapse. 114 00:17:28,840 --> 00:17:36,520 A waterfall became a human. It was April. 115 00:17:36,520 --> 00:17:43,330 I was reading much of the night, and as I turned the page, I saw that woman labouring towards me with her rucksack rummaging for a book. 116 00:17:43,330 --> 00:17:49,660 Perhaps the very book I was reading, whose pages faced each other like diminishing mirrors behind each surface, 117 00:17:49,660 --> 00:18:02,230 the facsimile of some previous surface. First, we had a couple of feelers down at Tom's place that was old Tom Boyle to the eyes blind. 118 00:18:02,230 --> 00:18:04,040 Don't you remember that time after a dance? 119 00:18:04,040 --> 00:18:13,330 Top hats and all wee and silk cut Harry, an old Tom took us behind, brought out a bottle of fizz with old Jane, Tom's wife, and we got Jo to sing. 120 00:18:13,330 --> 00:18:21,520 I'm proud of all the Irish blood that's in me. There's not a man can say a word agin me first draughts. 121 00:18:21,520 --> 00:18:28,900 Elliott began the wasteland like that, introducing himself as one of a crowd of drinkers. 122 00:18:28,900 --> 00:18:37,960 The Lyons a homage to Joyce, but also a recollection of music hall and Ballard, and a night spent drinking in Boston. 123 00:18:37,960 --> 00:18:45,430 It feels as if a carnival is starting up and the reader prepares to be intoxicated. 124 00:18:45,430 --> 00:18:52,930 I need a drink, but Elliot, the critic Elliot the reader, made a decision. 125 00:18:52,930 --> 00:18:58,000 He took a pencil and lightly crossed out the whole page like a law enforcer. 126 00:18:58,000 --> 00:19:10,080 Warning drinkers off the streets and instead of Old Tom, our first true glimpse of him is that Rita staying up half the night before heading south. 127 00:19:10,080 --> 00:19:16,230 Elliot never destroyed the first page, but sent it with the rest of the manuscript to his friend John Quinn, 128 00:19:16,230 --> 00:19:20,070 knowing that Quinn was a collector and would value it. 129 00:19:20,070 --> 00:19:26,280 John Quinn, a lawyer and patron of the arts, had offered financial assistance to both ££ and Elliot. 130 00:19:26,280 --> 00:19:32,190 So it was a simple act of gratitude to send him the first draught of the wasteland. 131 00:19:32,190 --> 00:19:42,420 Elliot had a sense of the home's value, but I think he also had a sense that the poems attentiveness to the past had its own past, 132 00:19:42,420 --> 00:19:51,480 and that LB editing, as well as his wife's remarks and his own discarded passages, formed part of its tradition. 133 00:19:51,480 --> 00:19:54,090 He ruefully remarked in the 1950s, Well, 134 00:19:54,090 --> 00:20:04,230 the fate of that manuscript or typescript with his blue pencil slings on it is one of the permanent so far as I know minor mysteries of literature. 135 00:20:04,230 --> 00:20:14,820 Sure enough, Old Tom came to light in Quinn's papers in 1968 so that now there are two wastelands the sermonising one, 136 00:20:14,820 --> 00:20:20,040 which guides a reader from a death to an attempted resurrection, 137 00:20:20,040 --> 00:20:31,300 and the Carnival one published in facsimile in 1971, with old Tom leading the procession and silk hat Harry beside him. 138 00:20:31,300 --> 00:20:36,370 Not the Ali, a fly cop came along looking for trouble, committing a nuisance, he said. 139 00:20:36,370 --> 00:20:40,840 You come onto the station, I'm sorry, I said it's no use being sorry, he said. 140 00:20:40,840 --> 00:20:53,480 Let me get my hat, I said. Starts up, people begin to cross boundaries. 141 00:20:53,480 --> 00:21:02,840 The reader becomes the writer, the writer becomes the reciter, the living and the dead walk alongside each other. 142 00:21:02,840 --> 00:21:09,830 The seven opening sentences become seven hecklers. The crossed out characters take command and silk hat. 143 00:21:09,830 --> 00:21:17,240 Harry's hat, which used to appear to me in tattered black cloth with mould shimmer when you tilted it. 144 00:21:17,240 --> 00:21:28,820 This hat has become something quite extraordinary, which I witnessed moving towards me in April on a steep street between houses about two foot high, 145 00:21:28,820 --> 00:21:42,680 a pile of colour and fake flowers, silvery scraps, windmills, feathers, shiny, indefinable things and underneath it, a poet lifting his hat a little. 146 00:21:42,680 --> 00:21:48,300 He offered me a menu on which a list of poems with prices was written that day. 147 00:21:48,300 --> 00:21:54,590 Special cost £50. It must have been an amazing poem and. 148 00:21:54,590 --> 00:22:00,320 There were others at various values, sweet poems, sour poems or whatever. 149 00:22:00,320 --> 00:22:06,890 I paid £3 for a mid-length poem and a chance to interview the poet. 150 00:22:06,890 --> 00:22:12,200 I'm ashamed that I have forgotten the poem, although I remember the intensity of its delivery. 151 00:22:12,200 --> 00:22:16,640 I remember much rhyming and punching and people stepping round us. 152 00:22:16,640 --> 00:22:26,840 And afterwards, this conversation. This, he said, this is basically what the birds would do travelling round, trying to sell poems. 153 00:22:26,840 --> 00:22:32,780 Not all of them. I said a little on my guard and uncomfortable and needing the defence of my opinions. 154 00:22:32,780 --> 00:22:40,800 What about Thomas Reimer true Thomas, who was coerced to tell the truth for the rest of his days and therefore couldn't sell anything? 155 00:22:40,800 --> 00:22:43,100 Thomas is a full Spaniard written by Walter Scott. 156 00:22:43,100 --> 00:22:48,170 He said true, Thomas was a neurotic with anxieties about the truth, whereas me, he said, I'm a fool. 157 00:22:48,170 --> 00:22:54,680 I come from a long line of tricksters. I was a fund raiser once, he said, stopping people on the streets, 158 00:22:54,680 --> 00:22:59,540 and I started doing a poem as part of the pictures I used to work up the case studies into verse. 159 00:22:59,540 --> 00:23:04,010 Now that's what I call functional poetry. You've got intro problem solution. 160 00:23:04,010 --> 00:23:10,880 What we're doing about it and then ask for money back. I was recently walking down a canal, he said, and there was a couple. 161 00:23:10,880 --> 00:23:16,640 I said, Can I do a poem for you? And whipped out my menu? They were taken aback, just me and them on a canal on a Sunday. 162 00:23:16,640 --> 00:23:21,770 Yes, there are times when I'm performing and I can see my client being ripped out and restructured, 163 00:23:21,770 --> 00:23:27,140 and space and time do that narrowing thing and then clunk. I love it. 164 00:23:27,140 --> 00:23:31,700 I'm comfortable with this kind of discomfort, he said, because I used to play bass guitar. 165 00:23:31,700 --> 00:23:35,600 My roots are in rock and metal, but when I took out the music, I suppose I sort of softened. 166 00:23:35,600 --> 00:23:41,690 The thing is that I'm very confused and I'm happy with that. I once wrote a poem in hexadecimal, he said, which is computer code. 167 00:23:41,690 --> 00:23:45,980 You've only got 15 characters that was batshit crazy, but I'm always trying to undermine myself. 168 00:23:45,980 --> 00:23:53,000 I ebb in and out of rhythm. I compose on the phone and memorise what I write, and then sometimes I write something and forget it, OK? 169 00:23:53,000 --> 00:23:58,580 So that was just a leaf in the river. In a way it goes. I'm always trying to evolve, he said. 170 00:23:58,580 --> 00:24:03,650 Always looking for the ubiquitous word that could come from anywhere. I never know what I have until I perform it. 171 00:24:03,650 --> 00:24:11,690 Sometimes I have to pause to let a car go past. But at my back, from time to time, I hear the sound of horns and motors in the spring. 172 00:24:11,690 --> 00:24:17,000 And when I'm out in my hat, if I meet children, there's joy straightaway. 173 00:24:17,000 --> 00:24:21,740 But then I come across old, bitter man with no sexuality that just a mist of hatred. 174 00:24:21,740 --> 00:24:28,040 I don't care. But now my hat, his hat, as I've mentioned, is about two foot high. 175 00:24:28,040 --> 00:24:35,330 A pile of kind of fake flowers, silvery scraps, windmills, feathers, shiny, indefinable things when he's without it. 176 00:24:35,330 --> 00:24:39,830 He has glasses and leans forward like a puppet left on a peg. 177 00:24:39,830 --> 00:24:45,590 Oh yes, my hat, his female. She is the expression of my higher self. 178 00:24:45,590 --> 00:24:50,510 My tradition made of things, gifted bits of stuff picked up at festivals. 179 00:24:50,510 --> 00:24:54,620 She is my confidante, my wife. I speak to her. I charge her up. 180 00:24:54,620 --> 00:25:06,530 The intention builds and builds till it's no longer myself. Oh yes, there are some things best not spoken of. 181 00:25:06,530 --> 00:25:13,220 It was April that cruellest of months when poets ought to be sitting inside. 182 00:25:13,220 --> 00:25:22,900 Close reading the wasteland. But the closer I read, the more the poem becomes mere rubric asking for a congregation. 183 00:25:22,900 --> 00:25:26,900 Oh, that Shakespearean rag. It's so elegant. So intelligent. 184 00:25:26,900 --> 00:25:32,030 What shall I do now? What shall I do? I shall rush out as I am and walk the street with my head down. 185 00:25:32,030 --> 00:25:41,630 So it's not just that the city has altered the poem, but by the time I rushed out to walk the street with my head on. 186 00:25:41,630 --> 00:25:48,800 So the poem has altered the city someone has been through in the night and stencilled four 187 00:25:48,800 --> 00:25:54,530 lines of poetry on a wall and someone else has scrubbed them out now from the nearness. 188 00:25:54,530 --> 00:26:00,680 What does it say now? From the menace? The mere gloss, the mere land under the mist? 189 00:26:00,680 --> 00:26:03,230 Something, something something. 190 00:26:03,230 --> 00:26:19,050 Is this Bill Wolff, or is it a new poem written by the mist itself, turning that ancient poem into columns of rubbed out shadows? 191 00:26:19,050 --> 00:26:28,980 It is just as Elliot warned me. The past is being altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. 192 00:26:28,980 --> 00:26:34,500 There are shadows behind shadows, voices behind voices. 193 00:26:34,500 --> 00:26:42,360 Dead poets carried like a virus in the flesh. Dead storytellers whose stories keep speaking in the living room. 194 00:26:42,360 --> 00:26:50,370 And here is someone standing in her garden in excitable air, remembering one of the Scottish travellers who taught her storytelling. 195 00:26:50,370 --> 00:26:53,790 Let me tell you about Duncan Williamson, she says. 196 00:26:53,790 --> 00:27:05,170 So attentive to the audience of shrubs and me and the cat walking across that she has to hold on to things to stop the stories from stealing her away. 197 00:27:05,170 --> 00:27:11,830 Let me tell you about Duncan Williamson, she says, if you gave him the floor, you couldn't stop him for three days. 198 00:27:11,830 --> 00:27:16,870 He was exhausting. He was born in a tent. His mother was born in a cave. 199 00:27:16,870 --> 00:27:20,590 He was a traveller. He trained as a stone waller. He was a horse trader. 200 00:27:20,590 --> 00:27:26,800 He spoke Scottish count. He stole stories from his grandmother's pocket while she was sleeping. 201 00:27:26,800 --> 00:27:30,940 The truth is just another. Duncan never spoke much about himself. 202 00:27:30,940 --> 00:27:34,390 How are you? Duncan, you'd say. And he'd say well enough. 203 00:27:34,390 --> 00:27:40,660 You know, there was once a king who had three daughters. He would talk in a roundabout way. 204 00:27:40,660 --> 00:27:45,940 Part of his tradition was to make up the tradition. He was a wonderful singer. 205 00:27:45,940 --> 00:27:52,420 He would get down on one knee and look you in the eye. And that is how his repertoire passed into writing. 206 00:27:52,420 --> 00:29:03,660 A woman from Chicago fell in love with him, and that was that. 207 00:29:03,660 --> 00:29:12,460 A man with eyes closed, tilted forwards, flushed, heartless, tremulous singing folk songs, 208 00:29:12,460 --> 00:29:19,270 hearing his voice filled out by the arch, lingering on erotic hints and half notes, he can't see it. 209 00:29:19,270 --> 00:29:25,720 But along the line of the brickwork, it says, topple in luminous white paint, which lights up whenever a car goes through. 210 00:29:25,720 --> 00:29:33,040 I'm not sure whether the instruction is to him or the bridge, but they both keep standing just about. 211 00:29:33,040 --> 00:29:39,550 Ladies and gentlemen, this is not Eliot's unreal city. It is Bristol City of slam and spoken word. 212 00:29:39,550 --> 00:29:43,540 The slave trade and the statue of Colston rode into the river. 213 00:29:43,540 --> 00:29:52,030 And now, from the nearness under the mist, a motorway like a thin blue pencil in line by Ezra Pound has cut two communities in half, 214 00:29:52,030 --> 00:29:55,660 and the crossed out voices won't stay silent. 215 00:29:55,660 --> 00:30:04,180 April 2nd, 1980 42 years ago, in the cruellest month, riots broke out in the Black and White Cafe in St Paul's. 216 00:30:04,180 --> 00:30:12,250 And to mark the date, Linton Kwesi Johnson is performing in Bristol on April the 2nd 2022. 217 00:30:12,250 --> 00:30:17,860 I caught sight of him in the morning leaning smoking against a wall and was reminded of that 218 00:30:17,860 --> 00:30:24,010 passage in the Odyssey about a poet walking through a city with more faith around him. 219 00:30:24,010 --> 00:30:32,290 The grace of shape speech crowning his head as if the poems had floated visibly from his mouth and formed a smoke ring. 220 00:30:32,290 --> 00:30:40,210 Although even as I think this, I can hear Linton Kwesi Johnson saying sharply that some have the privilege of studying Greek and Latin, 221 00:30:40,210 --> 00:30:47,080 and it's all very well to make these associations. But for the average reader, that kind of poetry doesn't work. 222 00:30:47,080 --> 00:30:57,910 What I'm interested in, he said. What I'm interested in is finding the music and the language skipping rhymes, old times sayings. 223 00:30:57,910 --> 00:31:03,220 I'm interested in poetry that sings. Yes, there is something musical in Elliott, he says. 224 00:31:03,220 --> 00:31:07,180 I absolutely love the love song of Alfred J. Prufrock. 225 00:31:07,180 --> 00:31:15,760 But then in my late teens, I became intoxicated by the elegant extravagance of Christopher Okigbo. 226 00:31:15,760 --> 00:31:22,420 Aren't you interested in oral traditions? I asked. And he answered, Not really. 227 00:31:22,420 --> 00:31:26,980 The difference between the scribble and the oral is always extremely problematic. 228 00:31:26,980 --> 00:31:31,630 He said that it's in the language itself that you find the oral tradition. 229 00:31:31,630 --> 00:31:38,320 He said there are phrases in the Bible and phrases his grandmother used, which are all the poetry you need. 230 00:31:38,320 --> 00:31:42,370 A fool's thought is his own comfort chicken Mary. 231 00:31:42,370 --> 00:31:50,020 But Hawk Dania Young Bird don't know about the Hurricane Hardy picnic Pitney Rockstone know. 232 00:31:50,020 --> 00:31:53,410 He said he was not interested in landscape poetry either, 233 00:31:53,410 --> 00:32:00,400 even though he grew up in the hills of Clarendon and all the different plant forms and the sound of a storm they register in the conscience. 234 00:32:00,400 --> 00:32:09,490 But Derek Wolcott has already spoken for that, he said. Whereas I came to poetry through politics, I was there at the Brixton riots, he said. 235 00:32:09,490 --> 00:35:47,710 I am part of the rebel generation. I thought. 236 00:35:47,710 --> 00:36:14,880 What? OK. 237 00:36:14,880 --> 00:36:19,240 That happened in Penguin Classics. 238 00:36:19,240 --> 00:36:26,740 The line shapes land on the surface of your eye and you have to reveal them in and lay them out in the quiet place of the mind. 239 00:36:26,740 --> 00:36:30,280 And if you are anything like me, then whenever you think of the poem, 240 00:36:30,280 --> 00:36:38,620 the piece of paper remains inwardly visible, holding everything very thin and still and rectangular. 241 00:36:38,620 --> 00:36:42,910 It is an effort to keep a written poem moving. 242 00:36:42,910 --> 00:36:51,070 You have to keep walking outside to remember the mysterious on paper innis of the world. 243 00:36:51,070 --> 00:36:59,710 But when you hear that poem, the actual air is altered, St. Paul's is altered, the crossed out world becomes visible, 244 00:36:59,710 --> 00:37:08,350 shivering voice ripples move out from the speaker and something wing like the gear changes it's humming and is drifted sideways, 245 00:37:08,350 --> 00:37:10,300 like when you walk into a pillar of sunlight. 246 00:37:10,300 --> 00:37:17,980 In a world where midges are suspended in an airborne auditorium being lifted up and down by the same sound as agitates 247 00:37:17,980 --> 00:37:25,450 the leaves and then a gust comes through and the hissing overhead shifts the whole swarm suddenly to one side. 248 00:37:25,450 --> 00:37:29,650 That is the nature of the spoken word the audible, 249 00:37:29,650 --> 00:37:42,590 amplified winged word close in kind to the life of insects who feel and float and hum with the same instrument. 250 00:37:42,590 --> 00:37:46,070 And then again, when a poem starts blowing through a room, 251 00:37:46,070 --> 00:37:52,760 your whole canopy is shaken as if four people had taken hold of your skin at each corner and wafted it up and down. 252 00:37:52,760 --> 00:38:00,590 And if the poet is a thinker and a watcher, if the poet has a warm sense of justice as Linton Kwesi Johnson does, 253 00:38:00,590 --> 00:38:08,360 then you'll be followed out of the building by a swarm of sounds, a bloom whose structure rebalances the air. 254 00:38:08,360 --> 00:38:14,450 And that is the haze that lies over the city and makes a drunk woman walk easily 255 00:38:14,450 --> 00:38:24,140 uphill because the book in her rucksack partakes of the same pattern of life, 256 00:38:24,140 --> 00:38:32,180 given voices from the audience. I was there at the first Bristol Slam says when I thought I can do that and my life changed. 257 00:38:32,180 --> 00:38:37,460 I woke up and became a poet. I came to it age 14, says another. 258 00:38:37,460 --> 00:38:44,150 Don't get me wrong, I was writing poems and exercise books, but then I heard rap, underground rap and scat singing. 259 00:38:44,150 --> 00:38:51,620 The whole tradition going back through Linton, Kwesi Johnson, the beats, the Dubs, the music of Reggae and Langston Hughes. 260 00:38:51,620 --> 00:38:57,470 And the third says Linton was a huge influence to me. 261 00:38:57,470 --> 00:39:03,800 The skill of poetry is being able to listen to hear other voices. 262 00:39:03,800 --> 00:39:08,210 I have Caribbean parents, he said. But our home was always open to everybody. 263 00:39:08,210 --> 00:39:13,580 A Ukrainian soldier lived with us for four years that b young Asian women escaping from their families. 264 00:39:13,580 --> 00:39:19,010 My dad's eccentric, hard drinking friends, not to mention eight brothers and sisters. 265 00:39:19,010 --> 00:39:23,120 Hip hop AP English patois Creole. 266 00:39:23,120 --> 00:39:36,260 I have so many selves, he said to me. The skill is to be able to listen and hear my other voices and someone who is not there, 267 00:39:36,260 --> 00:39:41,840 someone who has travelled the world to research the training required for shaped speech, 268 00:39:41,840 --> 00:39:47,510 which is not the same as written down speech, nor is it the same as ordinary speech. 269 00:39:47,510 --> 00:39:56,480 This one contains inside his head a whole paragraph which widens the city as he walks, he says. 270 00:39:56,480 --> 00:40:04,490 I've watched A6 competing to compose spontaneous verse in perfect metre and rhythm on subjects given by the audience, 271 00:40:04,490 --> 00:40:10,850 with two inch needles placed between their lips to reduce the available vocabulary, he says. 272 00:40:10,850 --> 00:40:16,940 I've listened to a Gujarati praise singer, consciously bringing energy to his voice chat by chat. 273 00:40:16,940 --> 00:40:23,840 As the emotion intensified, I've watched a 16 year old Pan Vani Singer make 3000 villages, 274 00:40:23,840 --> 00:40:30,410 follow her improvised songs through the epic twists and turns of the Mahabharata. 275 00:40:30,410 --> 00:40:36,800 I watched a Chinese woman strike her drum in such a way that your mind cannot wander. 276 00:40:36,800 --> 00:40:43,700 I've listened to the man in griots Kora conjure up the shimmering armour of a distant army. 277 00:40:43,700 --> 00:40:48,590 I've heard a Rajasthani kabuki storytellers wife sing long lines of narrative, 278 00:40:48,590 --> 00:40:54,110 warding off barrenness and encouraging fertility as she held an oil lamp to illuminate 279 00:40:54,110 --> 00:40:59,240 the secret details of a scroll painting in the desert under stars a primal, 280 00:40:59,240 --> 00:41:08,810 dramatic effect that could reach back to the paintings in the caves at Lascaux. 281 00:41:08,810 --> 00:41:24,390 John Moser Avoid sexy mesh mint cloth Beck's face first sketched goose sage one ism nysc story. 282 00:41:24,390 --> 00:41:28,260 Graffiti is the voice of the passing by. 283 00:41:28,260 --> 00:41:36,330 The tradition goes back to the caves via 1960s New York, when people started leaving their tags in impossible places. 284 00:41:36,330 --> 00:41:41,220 Subways, high hoardings, train cars, lift shafts. 285 00:41:41,220 --> 00:41:49,920 The tag was a kind of personal advert, a boast as if to say I was here and I was winged at the time. 286 00:41:49,920 --> 00:41:53,220 Winged words land here at night, 287 00:41:53,220 --> 00:42:02,790 spray cans lined up on the kerb and a sound system fills up the space so that the writers can hide inside loudness inside fumes. 288 00:42:02,790 --> 00:42:11,460 One person sits there as if on God with eyes down. The other is shaping huge orange letters at various times. 289 00:42:11,460 --> 00:42:16,680 Various ephemeral instructions issued to the sleeping city. 290 00:42:16,680 --> 00:42:22,980 A avoid in squished capitals gone by the following night. 291 00:42:22,980 --> 00:42:37,170 Then believe then soup and virus set forth in Gothic and then gone and once for a whole week night was 292 00:42:37,170 --> 00:42:43,830 written on the outside arch in black lettering with silver edges as if the Moon was coming up behind it, 293 00:42:43,830 --> 00:42:50,340 as if ancient night herself had passed that way with a spray can and then gone. 294 00:42:50,340 --> 00:42:58,650 And a year later, I passed dusk in a playground, clouded grey letters with daylight blue behind them. 295 00:42:58,650 --> 00:43:00,450 No doubt it will have passed by now. 296 00:43:00,450 --> 00:43:08,780 It is all part of the performance of the language in this city that these words print themselves into you and then get painted over. 297 00:43:08,780 --> 00:43:18,570 Avoid haunts me for a couple of days, then soup then and luminous jackets arrive with grey paint and clean the whole 298 00:43:18,570 --> 00:43:24,630 thing off within an hour of them going nudge and loopy green letters like a weed. 299 00:43:24,630 --> 00:43:30,840 It looks amazing on its own against all that grey. But by the following day, a cartoon bird has landed next to it. 300 00:43:30,840 --> 00:43:36,330 Signed Sally. Some people call it graffiti. 301 00:43:36,330 --> 00:43:42,450 Some call it word art, and the different names summon different traditions. 302 00:43:42,450 --> 00:43:47,520 In the 1960s, just as the fashion for graffiti was growing popular in the U.S. 303 00:43:47,520 --> 00:43:53,370 Ian Hamilton Finley invented the concept of the one-word poem with title of any length. 304 00:43:53,370 --> 00:43:59,580 These two elements forming as it were a corner which would then contain the meaning. 305 00:43:59,580 --> 00:44:02,190 He asked for contributions for his magazine. 306 00:44:02,190 --> 00:44:20,430 Poor old tired horse and Edwin Morgan offered this title before cool, beautiful thing vanishing with the single word blue as its content. 307 00:44:20,430 --> 00:44:26,460 Hugh McDermott was infuriated by what he saw as a betrayal of the seriousness of modernism. 308 00:44:26,460 --> 00:44:30,810 He refused to have his work published in any book that contained Hamilton Finley, 309 00:44:30,810 --> 00:44:35,190 even though David Jones, the most serious and the most epic of the modernists, 310 00:44:35,190 --> 00:44:37,440 was a quiet pioneer of word art, 311 00:44:37,440 --> 00:44:45,810 and his long poem in parentheses succeeds in combining the stillness of inscription with the movement of myth and ordinariness. 312 00:44:45,810 --> 00:44:55,470 But that's another story for a later lecture. Then there is our Saroyan American minimalist writer born in 1943, 313 00:44:55,470 --> 00:45:05,340 who's in the Guinness Book of Records for writing the shortest poem in existence a four legged m, so wrote one word poems without titles. 314 00:45:05,340 --> 00:45:14,000 For example, his poem Light spelt elegy HGH. 315 00:45:14,000 --> 00:45:20,940 I would love to see that word graffitied on a dark wall. He called it an electric poem. 316 00:45:20,940 --> 00:45:26,160 He said apparently the crux of the poem is to try and make the ineffable, which is light, 317 00:45:26,160 --> 00:45:31,380 which we only know about because it illuminates something else into a thing. 318 00:45:31,380 --> 00:45:37,170 An extra G.H. does it. It is sculptural on that level. 319 00:45:37,170 --> 00:45:47,500 In effect, he said, the single word is a new reading process instant and continuous like electricity. 320 00:45:47,500 --> 00:45:53,200 So it would seem, finally, in the 100 years since the wasteland was published, 321 00:45:53,200 --> 00:46:00,850 or at least in the 30 days since I started rereading it, that the written down language has been able to grow. 322 00:46:00,850 --> 00:46:07,510 First flesh, then wings, then light itself as if coming back to life again, 323 00:46:07,510 --> 00:46:16,360 returning to its earliest singlets existence inscriptions carved by sunlight into ice haiku, 324 00:46:16,360 --> 00:46:19,480 swift rain signs coming and going over stones, 325 00:46:19,480 --> 00:46:29,830 legible letter shapes of geese and printouts of animals so that it is hard to say which is the signifier and which is the signified. 326 00:46:29,830 --> 00:46:40,720 As I watch the silvery ink of a snail crawling over a wall on which someone has felt tipped, Rose West knows best. 327 00:46:40,720 --> 00:46:46,060 That snail knows as well as anyone what Rose West knows, which we none of us know. 328 00:46:46,060 --> 00:46:51,940 And there are spiders slowly crossing out. Not yet upset. 329 00:46:51,940 --> 00:46:58,120 Written perhaps by the same winged character in red wax crayon in a doorway. 330 00:46:58,120 --> 00:47:06,460 And here and there, I keep noticing amongst ordinary shadows the stencilled shadow of a human with the tag. 331 00:47:06,460 --> 00:47:09,940 I was here, but I disappear. 332 00:47:09,940 --> 00:47:20,710 I caught it on the railway bridge as I walked over and a stag was passing underneath me in April, barking a personal advert amongst the ash trees. 333 00:47:20,710 --> 00:47:36,897 I was here in this improbable place. And yes, as I remember it now, it was raining with a hint of thunder.