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What day was supposed to be poetry day? Monday was it? Well, never mind. I am, as Krusty the Klown once said, a lazy, lazy man, so I'll do my poetry thing whenever I can muster the initiative. This may be often, or it may be never, only time will tell.
There, that got your attention, didn't it?My recent reading, The Redress of Poetry, a collection of Seamus Heaney's lectures delivered while Professor of Poetry at Oxford includes a stirring treatment of Brian Merriman's "An Chúirt Meánoíche".
It’s interesting to note how many of the great artistic movements got their names from insults hurled by their critics. The work of a group of Parisian artists was described as not painting, but mere “impressions??? and thus was born Impressionism. Later, in that same city, artists were derided as savage and primitive; “Fauves???, in short.
A combination of factors, most notably my own lassitude, caused the great poetry project to fall into abeyance in recent times. My reading continued during this fallow period, but was limited to work by poets I’d already written about here – the lesson being to only buy slim volumes, so that I don’t spend weeks on end waiting to finish a poet, before I can move on to write about a new one.
Not much peotry here in recent times, for which I apologise. My excuses are threefold. Firstly the weather.
Yes, yes, I’m two days late, even taking into account the fact that I pushed poetry day back to Tuesday. No excuses for such tardiness are acceptable, which is just as well, as none are forthcoming. My appetite whetted by reading some of their poems in anthologies, next on my list of poets to read are Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, two American poets of the middle century.
Poetry, as I mentioned last week, is so filled with distilled meaning that it can be read only at a fraction of the pace of prose. Thus, Seamus Heaney’s Opened Ground, which I bought a month and a half ago, is an ongoing presence in my reading life.
Poetry is harder work than prose. Certainly its harder to write, but it takes more out of the reader too, being distilled and concentrated with meaning in a way that most prose is not. For example, I'm currently working my way through Shakespeare's Sonnets at a rate of only five or six per evening.
Of all the many entertaining characters I encountered in reading Rachel Cohen’s brilliant set of interlinked mini-biographies of American artists, “A Chance Meeting???, the one I would most like to meet, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, would be the poet Marianne Moore. I think what impressed me most about her was the sheer style of her eccentricity.
Poetry, though traditionally the most hallowed of literary forms, is not one which is likely to bring one fame and fortune. Even the most successful poets will struggle to make a living, scrapping up grants, bursaries and teaching jobs wherever they can. Poetry then, is something you have to really want to do, and that goes all the more for the poet writing in a minority language.
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