The poems behind the curtain
It’s Back to School time! The first class to resurrect itself in this season of fruitfulness is going to be the Thursday lunch-hour special, the Close Reading session. It starts next week, on the 16th, and runs for six weeks (though we’ll be skipping the 14th because we have a very exciting but low-key family event coming up on that day, so it will take seven weeks). I love this session! We simply take one poem, which I send to the group the day before, and we talk about it for 45 minutes.
You might think, 'what is there to say about one, possibly very short, poem for 45 whole minutes?’ — but in fact, we’ve been known to run over time because people are still discovering exciting aspects they want to share with the group. Even when we finish dead on time we all know there’s more we could have said.
The aim of this activity really, is to cover as wide a variety of styles, content and associations as possible — though it also reflects my reading at the time. I aim to surprise — whether with the unfamiliar, or the new, the over-familiar that needs a new reading, or the old. I want poets and poetry readers not to be afraid of things outside their usual reading. Because the most surprising thing of all about poetry is that every poem you’ll read, from now or from 400 years ago, represents a person sitting by themselves in a room (they’re by themselves even if there are ten people there), writing something down, and not knowing whether it will work or not. The poets we imagine we’re bored with because we were force-fed them at school were often just as uncertain as we are now — and often unappreciated, because they were the ones writing in a different way. Keats died at only 25 convinced he had failed.
People imagine the old poets were all posh, or rich: Dead White Men, as if that meant anything. They really weren’t. They wrote in kitchens, insane asylums, hayricks, battlefields, schoolrooms, at their work desks, often secretly. Mary Robinson (second from top left above) taught from age 14 in the school her single-parent mother ran, and started writing poetry for money (those were the days) when she was in debtors prison with her wastrel of a husband; she got them out. And there’s an equally interesting story to tell about every one of these poets.
I only bring poems I love. They’re poems I’m excited by and can’t wait to talk about, usually just chosen a day beforehand. Some I’ve only just discovered; others I know I will never not be excited by. One of last term’s poems I’ve been giving to classes for ten years, and even then the discussion in this class threw up new angles I’d never seen before. It’s invaluable: put a group of heads together and really talk about the most amazing thing in the world: how a poem works.
To cut to the chase. What are you going to get? What will we be reading? Well -- no one knows, yet. And I won’t be repeating any poems. But for a peek behind the curtain, here are the poems we looked at in the first two six-week courses. I’m not a systematic record-keeper, so I’ve had to reconstruct the list. You may already know some, or all, or none of these poems (or poets), but if you join us I can just about guarantee that you’ll love the conversation.
Wheelbarrow, by Jen Hadfield 2021
Cirque d’Hiver, by Elizabeth Bishop, 1940
No Swan So Fine, by Marianne Moore, 1932
the mississippi river empties into the gulf, by Lucille Clifton 1996
Sofas, Fogs and Cinemas, by Rosemary Tonks c1967
Kubla Khan, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1816
La Belle Dame Sans Merci, by John Keats c1819
London Summer’s Morning, by Mary Robinson 1800
A Great Man’s House, by Wislawa Szymborska c1970
The Men, by Pablo Neruda 2000
extract from Autumn Journal, by Louis MacNiece 1939
Because of the Times, by Caleb Femi 2020
two from Astrophel and Stella, by Sir Philip Sidney c1596
Something to Show for It, by Luke Allan 2021
More info here. The fee for all six sessions is £40. If you’re interested, drop me a line.
KEY TO THE PHOTOGRAPHS:
l-r top: Jen Hadfield, Mary Robinson, Luke Allan, Lucille Clifton
l-r bottom: Wislawa Szymborska, Caleb Femi, Louis MacNiece, Samuel Taylor Coleridge