I was lucky enough to spend a week in New York recently. Here is one of a series of passing reflections on what I felt and found.
I finally came to appreciate Hart Crane's poem, "To Brooklyn Bridge." We teach this on one of my OU courses, but I find it quite challenging, a dense poem that erratically and fleetingly shifts from one sense impression to the next. It begins:
How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—
Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
—Till elevators drop us from our day...
The first stanza is innocuous enough, but by the second things start to become more confused. How can our eyes be as apparitional as sails? It's not until we read on that we might figure that it's not eyes themselves that are like sails, but the 'page of figures' that they look at, cooped up in some financier's office.
I'm not going to pretend that I 'get' this poem as a whole just yet - things get even more grammatically complex as each stanza evolves in this manner. However, one thing I do now 'get' are the descriptions of the bridge itself, the addressee of this ode. Here for instance is the eighth stanza:
O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry,
Standing on the middle of the bridge, I suddenly appreciate that 'harp and altar' reference. The wires are indeed harp like, curving to the top of each stanchion.
The road surface, perfectly horizontal, lies flat across the bay, just like an altar. I have of course seen plenty of photos of Brooklyn Bridge before, but it's only once standing there, the lines and surfaces and structural integrity of the whole enveloping me, that the image suddenly works.
Then there's this:
O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
The curve is evident enough, there in the shape of the wires. Again, I have seen this in photographs before now. However, in still images the lines of perspective are narrowed and the sweep of the whole cannot be encompassed into a screen or 6 x 4 print. It's only when physically there that the panoramic scale of Crane's lines and the relationship they convey between the river and the bridge makes more sense, and the neologism of the curveship seems more justified. It is indeed like a ship, bearing down on Manhattan, its prow that pointed arch between which the skyscrapers loom larger as one walks across.
Labels: American literature, Brooklyn Bridge, Hart Crane, New York, poetry
My
poetry writing has dropped off over the last couple of years. Partly, this is because I am no longer immersed in it, as I was as an undergraduate. Without the training in slow-paced appreciation poetry reading brings, and without the subconscious cues of rhythm working in the back of my mind through the day, I seem not to have the same impulse to spend a patient hour, two hours writing. I can't remember precisely when I wrote the last poem published on this site, "
The Spaceman," but it must be over a year ago now.
So I am happy that today, suffering from a bout of endoftermitis, and not feeling inspired to do my
conventional work, I decided to revisit a couple of poems I had half-written in the last twelve months. And after sitting down to them properly, I think I have them in a state where they can go online, for your comments and advice.
As I have said, I don't necessarily like discussing the origins for my poems, except where this discussion forces me to interrogate and understand my motivations and execution of ideas, so I do not want to say anything more about the two here. Instead, in classic exam style, please read and discuss "
Pass Over" and "
Radio Ga Ga" now!
Labels: English Literature, poetry
If the previous Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, brought publicity to the role because of his private life, the current Laureate, Andrew Motion, has made himself very deliberately into a public intellectual and literary commentator. In recent weeks, he has made the headlines with everything from the publication of his
new autobiography to his comments on
literary archives to his choice of
books teenagers should be reading to his
complaints about the decline of poetry.
Andrew Motion came to Newcastle last week to lecture on "Reading for Life: Children, Books and Culture." If nothing else, this was an opportunity to put a three-dimensional face and a speaking voice to a dominant name in British letters. His lecture was authoritative and light-hearted in equal measure, and centred on his own experiences of reading as a child, particularly the moment when, reading
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he realised that beneath the story were submerged depths of symbolism. Although reading is something which develops cumulatively rather than being revolutionised by the turn of one page, all writers like to have a work which they point towards as being the one which changed them from a reader to a creator of literature. For my (humble) self, I maintain that the most significant book I have read (or, rather, had read to me), was
Goodnight Mr. Tom, by Michelle Magorian. It was this book that taught me that a story can be ambiguous, can initiate complex and contradictory responses which have a moral effect quite unlike that experience which comes with the predictable "happy ending" of fairy tales. At the end of his reflective lecture, Motion read an elegy to his recently departed father;
Goodnight Mr. Tom was the source for one of the
earliest poems I wrote as a mature reader and writer, and it, too, is dedicated to my Dad (thankfully, still very alive).
Emotionally, then, I am very much in sympathy with Motion. Where I differ is from his conservative and, in my opinion, slightly naive sense of the political and cultural scene as it stands today. The second part of Motion's lecture was a complaint about the relative absence of poetry from our cultural life. Working regularly in primary and secondary schools, Motion noted that younger students have a terrific ability to imagine and embrace all sorts of subjects and forms in creative writing, but that this is often stifled when, at puberty, the imagination suddenly becomes uncool, and is no longer moulded by schools with an eye on league tables and model G.C.S.E. answers. Children are often voracious readers and writers, but once they get older we are happy for them, in Motion's wonderfully caustic phrase, to "Scrape along the C/seabed of expectation."
So far, this is entirely understandable and a common argument. But Motion takes it one step further, arguing that young people should also be reading books such as
Ulysses and
The Waste Land. Because of this, the "elitist" bullet has predictably been fired at him by social commentators in the press, and he backtracked somewhat in his lecture, admitting that when he made the list for the Royal Society of Literature of the ten books he thought they should be reading, the "they" he had in mind were those who would go on to study English at university. Nevertheless, he said, he wanted his list to be a defence against shrinking horizons, to say to children - in a way that was not said to him at school - that anything is out there to be read, that there is no such thing as a specifically adult book. Again, this may be commendable in theory, but in practice it is slightly naive: would Motion be responsible for the bullying that would be directed at anyone at a state secondary school who has a copy of Joyce in his bag, rather than a Playstation Portable? One suspects that, although Motion has spent a lot of time running creative writing classes in primary and secondary schools, these have generally taken place in the classrooms of inspirational teachers, and not behind the bike sheds, where the only rhythms to be heard are those of growing masculinity. Indeed, even at university the number of people who read
Ulysses, let alone actually enjoy the lengthy experience, is probably smaller than Motion believes; certainly (as I will talk about in my next post) this postgraduate is not alone in never having completed it. And Motion noticeably failed to discuss whether, if good adult literature is automatically available for children, it is a good thing that adults today seem as likely to be reading
His Dark Materials or
Lord of the Rings or
Harry Potter as
Wuthering Heights.
However, I believe Motion was on the right track when he suggested that one of the reasons for the decline of poetry (and good literature generally) from the life of individual readers is that it is no longer used by people in public life. If politicians were subtly to start to highlight the importance of reading as a democratic principle (as
Gordon Brown has done), letting us glimpse the plural lives of others, then we might have more respect both for politicians and for books. Likewise, Motion has pointed to cult musician Pete Doherty's announcement that poetry saved him whilst he was in prison. Motion notes that young people have locked onto the concept of the "troubled young genius who gives up their life to their work." Implicitly, he is suggesting that the Romantics (drugged up on opiates, troubled and passionate) ought to be every bit as accessible to youngsters as a
Baby Shambles album. However, one is sceptical as to whether Motion would follow this logic to its logical conclusion: if poetry deals in pop's business, would he be willing to teach music lyrics to his English Literature students at Royal Holloway? One suspects he would not go this far, although to be fair to Motion, he did review Christopher Rick's
study of Bob Dylan in positive tones.
Nevertheless, even though Motion does not quite convince me as an architect of change, that is not to say that I do not appreciate his efforts; his lasting legacy will be to have turned the laureateship from an outmoded and quaint role (with its annual terse of wine as payment) into a serious and central platform from which to speak on literary issues of the political day. When Motion steps down, let's hope he is replaced by someone who is fully attuned to the media and popular culture. After all, poets above all other professions should be great spin doctors for literature.
Labels: Andrew Motion, English Literature, poetry
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