When Carolyn Howard
Johnson reviewed my poetry book Fool’s Paradise as
“Very experimental. Wholly original” I was surprised. Of course I
don’t think of what I write as particularly original, what I write
feels normal. So Caroline’s review made me think, after all
Caroline is a multi award-winning poet.
As I have said in
previous post I was blessed with being taught by an inspiring
creative English teacher – Elizabeth Webster – who introduced me
to the work of some wonderful and great poets. In particular she
introduced me to the work of the British poets of the early to mid
twentieth century – T S Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Louis MacNeice. And
surprise, surprise the works she first introduced me to were all
verse plays: Murder in the Cathedral by T S
Eliot, Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas and The
Dark Tower by Louis MacNeice.
Those early readings
were etched into my memory and, I suspect, my poetic DNA. Every year
at this time on the cusp of winter I find myself repeating the lines
from the opening chorus of Murder in the Cathedral:
Since
golden October declined into sombre November
And the apples
were gathered and stored, and the land became brown sharp points of
death in a waste of water and mud
What is more under her
direction I acted in a number of verse plays – including Under
Milk Wood and plays by another British verse play writer
Christopher Fry. Plays like Under Milk Woodand Louis
MacNeice’s Dark Tower were written to be performed
on radio, the BBC was a major sponsor of verse drama. But the roots
of poetic dramas are deep in the beginnings of theatre. When I was
twelve or thirteen I performed in a production of Alcestis by
Euripides, first performed in the 5th century BC. I can still
remember some of the lines:Daughter of Pelias fare thee well. May
joy be thine in the sunless houses.
Just listen to the
cadences in that one line. And of course there was Shakespeare. I was
playing Caliban in The Tempest at the age of twelve,
loving the poetry in the play (Caliban has the isle is full
of voices speech) and realizing how verse can by woven into
drama. Later I was to play Viola in Twelfth Night – another
character with some great poetry.
The poetry group at the
Arts Centre, which Elizabeth ran and of which I was a member, gave
regular readings and in one of these we performed MacNeice’s The
Dark Tower and in another extracts of Blood
Wedding by Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. The poetry
group with its emphasis on reading aloud taught me the importance of
poetry as performance. Some of the best poems, even when not written
to be read by different voices, are dramatic. And some, such as
Eliot’s Four Quartets, although not written as
plays nevertheless have different voices woven into them. My long
poem called Poem for Voices, is the same.
You can see why writing
poetry for different voices is so natural to me. I don’t
always write for voices, many of my poems are to be spoken by one
voice. But writing for voices allows me to explore textures, emotions
and forms in a unique way. This approach, which was once so
prevalent, is now so unusual that Carolyn comments on it. Have I
developed it further? I don’t know. It’s just how I write
sometimes. But then it does seem to me that if people claim their
work is original and experimental it almost certainly isn’t.
