Well, time to catch up. So much (too much) has happened! A couple of weekends ago I spent Saturday at Manchester’ Contact Theatre, taking part in UNSUNGFEST, an independent festival of art, poetry, performance and music. 

Matt Byrne, Festival Organiser Extraordinaire, de-stresses with a well-earned pint

It was a brave venture, organised by Matt Byrne, Justin Dooley and James Byrn. They took over the whole theatre space for the day and had a constant, rolling audience with people coming in and out throughout the day from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

My share was the 7 p.m. slot, reading poems with fellow Manchester poets Jon Glover and Linda Chase – both notable teachers of creative writing as well as local celebrities. It was a great session: Jon magisterial, reading his moving and nearly-surreal poems about adventures in America (snakes under the house!) and the weirdness of having MRI scans; Linda, chromatic in the spotlight with matching red shoes, hair and A4 binder, entertaining us with her sexy and colourful poems about love on the bohemian fringes of the US counterculture.

Jon Glover: impressive, moving, surreal

Before that I was able to catch a good set from Steven Waling and Simon Rennie (loved a line from his poem ‘Carbon Copy’ – ‘The cocooned insect dreams the same dream as the dozing philosopher’. I can imagine Blake coming up with that!) And a fine reading from the sensitive Helen Tookey, with her haunting, introverted poems coloured and perfumed by the Wirral seashore.

Out of the Shadows: Helen Tookey - a fine, sensitive poet

Matt organised the whole thing on a shoestring and it was an amazing achievement. Let’s hope he’s already planning next year’s FEST and that it won’t remain UNSUNG!

At last I’m in paperback. My book Travels on the Dance Floor has just appeared in the new format – and at half the price! – from publishers Andre Deutsch.

I’m pleased that they’ve kept the same funky, deeply colourful, slightly gritty look for the cover design (a bit pale in this jpeg – the one at right is more accurate!) – I wanted it to reflect the look of the beautiful, battered buildings of Cuba and other Latin American cities, where nothing is pristine, but the used-and-abused look only adds to the charm of the cityscape.

But they have added a corner-flash saying that Travels was listed as Authors’ Club Dolman Best Travel Book 2009 – something I’m very proud of, even though the actual prize was won by a more scholarly tome. It was a very short short list, believe me.

What has delighted me even more than the listing has been the wonderful response I’ve had from readers – and by no means only from people who dance. People still come up to me in the street, at parties, at literary events, or they email me, to tell me how much they enjoyed it. Typical comments have been ‘I tried to read slowly because I couldn’t bear it to finish.’ ‘It was written so beautifully that I could see everything in my head like a movie in full colour.’ 

Hector - Panama City bus artist

Am I boasting? Of course. But I’m also full of gratitude that I’ve been able to give readers so much enjoyment. A matter of sharing the delight I myself took in the adventure.

Travels sometimes gets referred to as my ’salsa book’, but the truth is that I used dance as a way into Latin American and Caribbean culture generally: a way to get close to people, to learn from them, to explore the sides of these countries that the tourists don’t get to see.

I travelled through Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and ended up in Miami, Fla. I took lessons in the local dance styles in each country, and I explored the clubs and dance halls. I met magicians and pagan priests, policement and prostitutes, poets and musicians. I met a guy who made a living painting pictures on the sides of buses, an haute couture designer,  and several lunatics. All of them were fascinating. And I met them pretty much on equal terms. I got robbed, I got arrested, I got lost, and I had the most wonderful time – better than I could ever have imagined.

Aïda: her Colombian smile brightened stressed-out Caracas!

I fell in love with these countries, their music, their culture and their people. And since I wrote the book with total honesty – and absolutely no regard for political correctness - I have to say that I fell in love above all with Latin American women, surely some of the most beautiful in the entire world. You will meet many of them in the book, and I hope you’ll be as enchanted by them as I was.

Whether or not you dance salsa, tango or anything else, enjoy!

StAnza was bustling with poets, book buyers and enthusiasts

Well, that was a busy week. StAnza and the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival both within 7 days! Last Thursday I was in St Andrews, enjoying the gusty sea air and the company of a crowd of wonderful poets from all over the UK and the world, at the StAnza poetry festival: Kei Miller (Jamaica via Glasgow), Jean Sprackland (Lancashire), Jacob Polley (Carlisle), Andrew Foster (Grasmere), Seamus Heaney and Dennis O’Driscoll(need I say Dublin? – And two of the most delightful people it’s ever been my good luck to meet); Victor Rodriguez Nuñez (Cuba), Marco Fazzini (Venice) – I could go on for a long time. It was wonderful, it was stimulating, and it was great fun.

Even signing a book, Seamus can't resist good conversation!

Heaney gave a fantastic reading – a whole evening (pretty physically taxing but he stood up to it in fine form), the first half all new poems and the second the more familiar and indeed classic. Recent poems show a lot of influence from Virgil, interestingly, but still with that very close appreciation of poeple, place sand objects, and the words handled like pieces of well-polished stone picked up, weighed and fitted beautifully into a structure. A great evening. And there was jazz afterwards.

Jean Sprackland and friend enjoy a chat in a St Andrews pub

Earlier in the day I’d given my lecture, ‘Myth, Magic and the Future of Poetry’ (for the full text, just scroll down from here) and the following morning I read with Jean Sprackland, a delightful session because our poems seemed to interplay in so many ways, tossing themes and images to and fro. Interesting. I’m hoping to meet up with Jean in Manchester, since I gather she teaches at MMU.

It was quite painful to leave St Andrews, with its hordes of highly literate poetry-lovers, its excellent pubs and its amazing patchwork of stone houses and ruined monuments. A magical place. I love it, and I hope to be back soon.

This week it was the Sunday Times Oxford Literary festival. I wasn’t privileged to be part of the main festival this time around because I don’t have a new book out (must work harder!). But I was invited to take a ‘Master Class’ (how proud that made me feel!) for novel-writing students at the course that runs alongside the main Festival.

Rose Solari gave a powerful reading at Blackwell's bookshop

I was also lucky enough to be asked to read at Blackwell’s in the Festival Fringe along with several very fine poets, including US poet Rose Solari, whose work I love, and Jane Draycott, a marvellous lyricist and author of two superb books, Prince Rupert’s Drop and The Night Tree and a new collection, Over, which looks like being a beautiful work judging by the few poems she read from that (it’s out in April).

The Master Class was at Corpus Christi College, and I was booked to talk about ‘creative non-fiction’ (which always sounds to me like a synonym for fibbing: as in, ‘I wasn’t lying, I was engaging in a bit of creative non-fiction!’ But in reality it seems to mean experience-based nonfiction that needs creative shaping. So I talked about travel-writing, and how I wrote Travels on the Dance Floor - shaping personal experience, letting things happen in such a way that I could also bring out the characters, the colour, the stories and the meanings without making anything up.

It seemed to go OK. The students were lovely, Jem Poster is a most intelligent ring-master and interrogator with a nicely quizzical and original mind (he’s also an excellent novelist). The other tutor, I’m delighted to say, was Sarah Hall, and it was wonderful to meet this charming, laughing, elphin and deeply intelligent writer in person. I’d found the idea of speaking in front of a Booker shortlisted author quite alarming and was delighted to find that she was such good company and not at all intimidating. Nice to know too that I’d been able to include the locations of her epic novel Haweswater in my Literary Guide to the Lake District when I revised it in 2005. It isn’t often that I meet someone I’ve put into a reference book!

We wound up the evening with a drink or two at the Bear pub round behind the High Street. Oxford remains as beautiful and evocative as ever: no wonder I dream about it several times every month, as I have ever since I stopped living there in 1971. It’s a place that doesn’t easily let go of the imagination.

Here’s the text of the lecture I gave yesterday at StAnza, the St Andrews Poetry Festival:

MYTH, MAGIC AND THE FUTURE OF POETRY

 A dozen years from now, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land will be a hundred years old. This poem, which ever since its first appearance has seemed to epitomise the modern, the poem of our own immediately recognisable condition, will have been with us for a century. I find this an extraordinary thought, and I hope you do also.  It seems to me that it is time to ask ourselves where poetry is going, and what it can do for us, in a world that has altered immeasurably since Eliot wrote his fractured masterpiece.

            Eliot’s poem was a diagnosis. It drew on myth to suggest that something was missing from the life and consciousness of the twentieth century, and that the result was an impoverishment, a spiritual desert. It was left to another twentieth-century poet, Robert Graves, to add a prognosis or prediction. In The White Goddess, first published in 1948, Graves not only attempted to reconstruct the goddess-worship of ancient Europe, but, in a chapter entitled ‘The Return of the Goddess’, predicted the breakdown of modern civilisation, which he foresaw taking place because of a neglect of the feminine consciousness and a violation of the natural environment. ‘Agricultural life’, he wrote, ‘is rapidly becoming industrialized’… ‘the more exhausted by men’s irreligious improvidence the resources of the soil and sea become, the less merciful will [the returning Goddess’s] mask be, and the narrower the scope of action she grants.’  The function of poetry, he announced (perhaps a little implausibly) ‘was once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family of living creatures among which he was born…it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down and brought ruin on himself and his family. “Nowadays” is a civilization in which the primem emblems of poetry are dishonoured. In which serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus-tent; ox, salmon and boar to the cannery; … and the sacred grove to the saw-mill.’ Both Graves and Eliot have turned out to be remarkably prescient. But it has become clear in the past few years that we are reaching the end of an age. As surely as the people who lived in fifteenth-century Europe, we are entering the point of transition between historical periods. These things don’t happen all at once. They are messy and fuzzy processes that seem to have no single cause. But I have no doubt at all that anyone in this audience could immediately list half a dozen factors which indicate a vast alteration in the nature of the world. At the top of these lists would be climate change, which with the rise of sea levels is already altering the world’s physical map; then would come the linking of most of the world’s populations by means of the internet; followed perhaps by the returning of world economic power to the east and to China in particular; the discovery of planets outside the solar system; the popular diffusion of the ideas of quantum physics. And so on. You can extend your own list from there on. Already the first human populations have had to be moved from islands lost to the rising sea levels. Many more will follow.

            If humans survive the immense transformations that lie ahead, and they surely will, then the arts will survive also in some form. And at the centre of them will be, in some form, poetry. I say ‘at the centre’ because, though the attention it gets in public may vary as time goes by, poetry is the fundamental art form because it works in language, which is the fundamental human skill.  Poetry is apparently the most insubstantial of things, embodied in breath or ink, alive only at the moment it is heard or read, continuing if at all only in closed pages or the mortal memory. Yet because it works in language, and moulds language to its purposes, poetry has a vast leverage. We know our world above all through language, and so an art that refreshes and changes the use of language can change the way people name the world, how they view it and how they understand it.

            Modern empirical science has almost no interest in the question of how poetry originates, where it comes from. In pre-modern cultures the case was very different, and the accounts that have survived of the origins of poetry tell us a great deal. In these accounts, poetry doesn’t come first of all from the everyday world. It comes from somewhere else, and it comes from the gods. The earliest account of the composition of a poem in English is in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England, written in about AD 731. It’s the story of Caedmon, a farm worker who was unusual, in that age of oral culture, in being unable to sing and improvise verses. According to Bede’s account Caedmon left a social gathering one evening to avoid being embarrassed when his turn came to sing. He went out to the stable to attend to the horses, and settled down there to sleep. Now

a person appeared to him in his sleep, and saluting him by his name, said, “Caedmon, sing some song to me.” He answered, “I cannot sing; for that was the reason why I left the entertainment, and retired to this place because I could not sing.” The other who talked to him, replied, “However, you shall sing.” ­ “What shall I sing?” rejoined he. “Sing the beginning of created beings,” said the other.

 Caedmon found himself singing verses about the creation of the world. His poem about the Creation, as it survives, has only nine lines. But Caedmon is, amazingly, the earliest English poet whose name we know and the poem, known as ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’, is the earliest significant surviving Old English poem. We have no other evidence about the Anglo-Saxon view of poetic inspiration, pre- or post-Christian; but the story tells us clearly that it was regarded as coming from a spiritual, superhuman source.

            If we go outside the Christian world at the same period we find stories which point in the same direction, but are far more extravagant. For the Norwegians and Icelanders of Caedmon’s time, one of the supreme gods was Odinn, the god of poetry and in some accounts also the creator of men. Odinn himself spoke only in poetry, and he bestowed on his favourite, the hero Starkath, the gift of being able to make verses as fast as he could talk.

            But where did Odinn get poetry from? Well, when the two warring tribes of gods, the Aesir and the Vanir, made peace, they sealed the peace by each spitting into a jar. They then formed a human figure out of their spittle. This human figure was called Kvasir. hew came to life, ‘and he was so wise that there was no question which he could not answer’. Kvasir was killed by two dwarfs, who drained off his blood into three barrels. They mixed the blood with honey, and brewed in the three barrels ‘such a mead, that everyone who drinks it becomes a poet or a man of learning.’ The barrels of mead were guarded by a giantess called Gunnlöth. But how did Odinn get it? Well, Odinn slept with the giantess Gunnlöth for three nights, and she granted him three sips of the mead. By his magical powers, Odinn emptied one barrel at each sip and so drank the whole lot.

            This extremely visceral story tells us that poetry is (first) the saliva of the gods; then it is (secondly) the blood of Kvasir, the man who knows everything; then (thirdly) it is the mead brewed by the dwarfs, kept by Gunnlöth and stolen by Odinn. We can take this in many directions. Remembering the use made of saliva for fermentation in nomadic cultures, and the similarity of the name Kvasir to words such as the Russian kvass for beer, we have poetry as an intoxicant, a kind of alcohol. But saliva is from the mouth. If poetry is first the saliva of the gods, then it is linked to divine speech and breath, as well as to ingesting food, and both fermenting and swallowing drink. It’s blood and honey – life, death and love. But remember too that Kvasir could answer any question. So poetry is universal wisdom.

            Moving south-westward to Wales, we find a Celtic myth of the origin of poetry in the Mabinogion, in the story of Taliesin. Here, poetry originates in the Cauldron of Inspiration, which was prepared by the enchantress Ceridwen, who boiled up a cauldron of inspiration and wisdom (we notice again the pairing of poetry and knowledge, as with Kvasir). The cauldron was full of special herbs, and it had to boil continuously for a year and a day. Every day Ceridwen had to gather fresh herbs, so she would leave Little Gwion, Gwion Bach, to stir the cauldron while she was out. But one day, as the cauldron bubbled, three drops flew out and fell, boiling hot, on Gwion Bach’s finger. Naturally he put his finger in his mouth, and instantly he became able to see into the future. And he saw that when the year and a day were over, Ceridwen was going to kill him. So he ran away, and once he had stopped stirring the pot it broke in two and spilled the magical liquid.

            Ceridwen went after Gwion Bach, and he changed himself into a hare to escape her. But she turned herself into a greyhound and hunted him. The two of them went through a series of changes until finally Gwion Bach turned himself into a grain of wheat on the floor of a barn, and she turned herself to a hen and swallowed him. Ceridwen thought she was rid of him but she found she was pregnant and after nine months she gave birth to him as a beautiful boy. She could not bear to kill him. He became known as Taliesin or ‘Shining Brow’, and even as a child his poems were so fine that he became the greatest bard of his time. He was also an enchanter, because the intoxicating drink in Ceridwen’s cauldron brought magical knowledge as well as poetic inspiration.

            The connection between poetry and magical powers was equally emphasised in medieval Ireland. Here the poet was known as a fili, a word which meant originally ‘seer’. Poets in early medieval Ireland were expected to have powers of clairvoyance. I quote from the Celtic scholar John Carey:

Various early legal sources make it clear that anyone aspiring to be recognised as a master poet or ollam, must not only be fully trained and artistically gifted but must also possess the clairvoyant faculty known as imbas forosnai, the ‘great knowledge which illuminates’. This imbas could reveal the secrets of the past, present and future; and…its source…is consistently located in the native Otherworld of the hollow hills, the realm of the old gods.

 Carey tells us that a master poet’s job included ‘warding enchantments away from the king at Hallowe’en’. In the early Irish epic the Tain or Cattle-Driving of Cuailnge, which dates from before the 6^th century, Queen Medb, about to set out with her army to invade Ulster, sees a young woman approaching, driving a chariot.

She wore a speckled cloak fastened around her with a gold pin, a red-embroidered hooded tunic and sandals with gold clasps. Her brow was broad, her jaw narrow, her two eyebrows pitch black… You would think her lips were inset with Parthian scarlet. She had hair in three tresses: two wound upward on her head and the third hanging down her back, brushing her calves… Her eyes had triple irises. Two black horses drew her chariot, and she was armed.

            ‘What is your name?’ Medb said to the girl.

                        ‘I am Fedelm, and I am a woman poet of Connacht.’

                        ‘Where have you come from?’ Medb said.

                        ‘From learning verse and vision in Alba,’ the girl said.

‘Have you the imbas forasnai, the Light of Foresight?’ Medh said.

‘Yes, I have,’ the girl said.

            ‘Then look for me and see what will become of my army.’

                        So the girl looked.

            Medb said, Fedelm, prophetess; how seest thou the host?’

                        Fedelm  said in reply:

                        ‘I see it crimson, I see it red.’

 Since Fedelm is a poet, it is assumed that she can see the future – albeit not a future that Medb welcomes, since it means the slaughter of her army.

            In India at around the same period, poetic inspiration was thought of as the milk of a goddess. In the Saundaryalahari or Flood of Beauty, dating from the 9^th or 10^th century, the poet writes:

The milk of your breasts, O daughter of the mountain,

I think is as if from your heart

there flowed an ocean of the milk of poesy;

            when the Dravida child tasted this as you gave it to him in compassion,

            he became the poet laureate of the master poets.

 Again poetry is in the keeping of a goddess; and again it is a drink – this time of divine milk.

            A similar idea prevailed also in the classical Mediterranean world of Greece and Rome. Greek poets attributed their poetry to the experience of being taken over by one or more of the Muses. The Muses were Goddesses who lived on Mount Helicon, and were in charge of a spring of divine water that gave inspiration to those who drank from it. Yet again we have the idea of poetic inspiration as a drink, and in the keeping of supernatural women.

            I have recalled to us these myths because I want us to remind ourselves of the depth, the importance, of what poets do, and the fundamental part that poetry plays, whether visibly or invisibly, in a culture. And here, of course, by poetry I mean all genuinely creative use of language, all fresh metaphor, all song, all new and expressive transferring of words which enriches our consciousness and thus our world.

            What would it mean for us in the present day to enter the fortress of Gunlöth and drink her mead – a brew of saliva, blood and honey which sounds to us horrifying and repellent? What would it mean for us to burn our fingers on the stew of medicinal and psychoactive plants boiled together in Ceridwen’s cauldron? Looking at these myths, it is clear that what they transmit is the memories of a shamanic role, of ordeals and initiations into the depths of consciousness from which – as a dying Alaskan female shaman told the anthropologist Knud Rasmussen in the 1920s – songs ‘take shape…and rise up like bubbles from the depths of the sea, bubbles seeking the air in order to burst. That is how sacred songs are made.’ [Halifax, 30]

            We as poets must be prepared to dive deep into that ocean of contemplation  – the silence, if you like, between words and things – precisely that aporia or gap which the deconstructionists argue cannot be crossed or bridged. It is the poet who bridges that abyss, for an instant, with his or her own body and mind. And even in an age when there seems to be no specific training for poets and no vestige of  the frightening shamanistic initiations which the myths seem to commemorate, such initiations can descend as if from nowhere, breaking through in dreams or in sheer inspiration. Most of us probably know Sylvia Plath’s poem, ‘The Hanging Man’:

            By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.

            I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

            The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard’s eyelid:

            A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.

            A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.

            If he were I, he would do what I did.

The poem is enigmatic in its full meaning. But it manages, amazingly, to combine a personal experience with recollections of the Tarot card of the Hanged Man, the crucifixion of Christ, and the ordeal of Odin, Norse god of poetry, who learned his wisdom and his poetry, according to one story, by hanging for nine nights upon the world-tree Yggdrasill, pierced with a spear, sacrificed as an offering, himself to himself.

            Reading a poem such as this, it is easy to forget that it was written by the same Sylvia Plath who diligently attended Robert Lowell’s creative writing seminars, wrote her early poems with the systematic use of a rhyming dictionary, and sent out poem after rejected poem to the magazines with the persistence of a professional secretary. The imaginative initiation was granted to one who had put in the work, and made the systematic effort.

            Again, Robert Graves found himself seized, in 1944, by what he described as ‘a sudden overwhelming obsession’ which ‘took the form of an unsolicited enlightenment on a subject I knew almost nothing about….my mind worked at such a furious rate all night, as well as all the next day, that my pen found it difficult to keep pace with the flow of my thought.’ Within a very few weeks, Graves had written a 70,000-word first draft of The White Goddess. Graves was aware that he had undergone a spiritual initiation, and his prefatory poem to The White Goddess is a paean of praise:

            All saints revile her, and all sober men

            Ruled by the god Apollo’s golden mean –

            In scorn of which we sailed to find her

            In distant regions likeliest to hold her

            Whom we desired above all things to know,

            Sister of the mirage and echo.

But, like Plath, Graves had earned his initiation. He had mastered Latin and Greek early in life, and had acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of classical literature and the Bible. He had fought and been seriously wounded in the First World War. He had once sold all his books simply in order to buy the complete Oxford English Dictionary, which he claimed to consult at least once every day. He was a careful and even obsessive reviser of his poems. Once again, the inspiration was given to the poet who had put in the groundwork.

            This might remind us of the ancient Welsh triad: ‘Three things that enrich the bard: Myth, poetic power, a store of ancient verse.’ In a largely oral tradition, poets were expected not only to have talent – ‘poetic power’ but also both to have in their memories a full knowledge of the corpus of myths of their tradition, and also to have memorised the works of previous poets. Learning all this constituted a tough poetic education. Again, the dimension of shamanistic visionary experience was based on a foundation of systematic hard work and poetic training.

            But why should myth be important? (And by myth, I should say that I mean a story that deals with fundamental matters, and whose date and authorship are unknown.) The answer is that we should attend to myth because the mythologies of the world – all and any of them – offer us a timeless mirror in which we can find our own problems and dilemmas reflected, freed from the pressures our personal viewpoints. Myth can be a powerfully transformative agent. To illustrate this, I should like to cite two examples, one extremely personal and the other entirely global. Both of the, I think, illustrate the huge dynamic of myth.

            First, the personal instance. The story is told by the poet Myra Schneider in her book Writing Your Self.  In 2006 Myra Schneider was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. She recalls:

I didn’t give much conscious thought at first to the fact that I had lost a breast. I was too preoccupied with recovering from the operation, coping with the follow up treatment and being determined to make the most of life. Beneath the surface, though, I was acutely aware of being different. Fixed in my mind was an image of a world full of two-breasted women in which I was an oddity. This view surfaced in a poem called ‘The Cave’ in which a voice accused me of being ‘one-breasted’ and ‘hardly a woman’. I confronted the voice, but this didn’t dispel my image of myself.

 But then a friend read the poem and wrote to Myra:

 When I came to the point where the voice reproaches you with the phrases ‘one-breasted,/ hardly a woman’  I found myself thinking, ‘Ah, but in the ancient myths the most powerful women of all were, precisely, one-breasted’; and I wondered if you had looked, or might find it fruitful to look, at the mythology surrounding the Amazons. They were a subject of fascination and a certain amount of fear to the ancient Greeks at least, and a very frequent image in graphic art, especially vase-painting. And although very martial in their doings, they were certainly not thought of as unfeminine, but rather in some odd way as too feminine for comfort.

There is extensive material on them in Graves’s Greek Myths; and one recalls that Hippolyta,  Theseus’s queen who turns up importantly in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was an Amazon. Possibly other important characters in myth and literature were too. No doubt there are full-length books about them. At any rate, I wonder if there is something here worth looking into?

 Indeed there was. The name ‘Amazon’ actually means ‘lacking a breast’. As Myra Schneider writes, ‘[the] words opened a door. I saw myself in a completely new light and soon afterwards I wrote [the poem] “Amazon”’. Here it is:

For four months

all those Matissse and Picasso women

draped against

plants, balconies, Mediterranean sea, skies

have taunted me

with the beautiful globes of their breasts as I’ve filled

my emptiness

with pages of scrawl, with fecund May, its floods

of green, its irrepressible

wedding-lace white, buttercup-gold,

but failed to cover

the image of myself as a misshapen clown

until you reminded me

that in Greek myth the most revered women

were the single-breasted

Amazons who mastered javelins and bows, rode

horses into battle,

whose fierce queens were renowned for their femininity.

Then recognising the fields I’d fought my way across

I raised my shield

of glistening words, saw it echoed the sun.

 The myth had given Myra Schneider an entirely new view of her predicament. Most importantly, perhaps, she no longer felt alone; in addition, she now felt both powerful and feminine again, as if she had joined a new tribe of women. For such healing, myth is a profound resource. – one of the deepest things one can call on in troubled times. There is nothing, however terrible – blindness, suicide, incest, mutilation – which is not somewhere woven into the tapestry of myth and from which meanings still applicable in the present day cannot be not drawn forth. And I would say that the application of myth to our own situations is in itself a poetic act, an act that draws on the deep shamanic resources we looked at earlier.

            Myra Schneider’s discovery that she was herself an Amazon is an example of personal rediscovery through myth. I want to add a literally global example. This is the naming of the Gaia hypothesis, the theory that the earth and its biosphere form a self-regulating entity which controls its own temperature and other internal conditions. It was the novelist William Golding, a friend of the theory’s proponent, James Lovelock, who proposed the name Gaia for the planetary entity Lovelock was describing. I have no hesitation in calling Golding’s choice of name a poetic act, and it has led the term Gaia for the living earth to become known to millions of people who have never heard of Golding and perhaps have hardly heard of Lovelock either. I am not of course concerned with whether or not Lovelock’s theory is scientifically correct. Gaia was the primordial Earth Mother of Greek myth, and my point is that by choosing this distinctive, previously little-known, but fundamental name (it occurs in the most basic and primitive Greek creation-myths) Golding not only focused Lovelock’s hypothesis around a single word, but provided the earth, seen from this standpoint, with a rediscovered aura of sacredness. Seen through this word, the earth is a goddess, she is a mother, she is powerful, she is vulnerable, above all she is alive. Do you want proof that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world? Consider the long-term effects of the word Gaia.

            But there is something else to this, something profoundly important. For by renaming the earth as a goddess, Golding has helped people to rediscover a sense of the earth’s sacredness. Until quite recently, we have been living through a period when one of the principle missions of the leaders of human culture was the abolition of sacredness. The results on the whole have not been good. The last hundred years have seen experiments in the forceful reshaping of human society which may well lead future historians to dub the twentieth century The Age of Genocide. The record in the non-human world has been no better, because the same period has seen an indiscriminate and short-term application of technology which has obliterated species on earth on such a scale that scientists themselves are now calling the current loss of biodiversity ‘The Sixth Great Extinction’. An essential part of these disasters has been the belief that nothing, and nobody, is sacred. The sociologist Max Weber identified this process precisely as ‘the progressive disenchantment of the world’ and saw it as an essential component of modernity. It is surely exactly this “progressive disenchantment of the world.”"progressive disenchantment of the world.”that was the subject of Eliot’s Waste Land.

            Where shall we find new sources of fruitfulness? As the Buddha points out in the opening words of The Dhammapada, ‘Mind precedes all things.’ In the attitude with which we approach something, in our view of it, lies the seed of what we shall make of it. It is time for our world view to change. Some have called for ‘a re-enchantment of the world’. But the world does not need ‘re-enchanting’. Its magic has never gone away. It is we who have developed tunnel-vision, who have learned, laboriously and painfully, to exclude respect and meaning, let alone any sense of the sacred, from our world-view.

            I want to now to change scale again, from the world to the human body and body-image. The neurologist Oliver Sacks, in a remarkable memoir called A Leg to Stand On, recalls how he suffered an extremely serious injury to his leg, damaging the nerves, muscles and tendons. The leg healed, as far as its mechanical and biological functioning was concerned, but he found to his horror that it no longer felt a part of him. During its time immobilised in a plaster cast and with a temporary loss of sensation due to nerve damage, his mind and brain had at some deep level ceased to experience the leg as part of his body. When he touched the leg within the cast, ‘The flesh beneath my fingers no longer seemed like flesh. It no longer seemed like material or matter. It no longer resembled anything….Unalive, unreal, it was no part of me – no part of my body, or anything else.’ [48-9] ‘The leg, objectively, externally, was still there; [but] it had disappeared subjectively, internally…I had lost the inner image, or representation, of the leg.’ [50] ‘What was disconnected was not merely nerve and muscle but, in consequence of this, the natural and innate unity of body and mind.’ [96]

            Sacks’s leg had ceased to be part of his body-image. It was fully healed, but he had forgotten how to use it. The leg was effectively paralysed because in losing the sense of it as a part of himself, he had also lost all memory of how he had been able to do things with it. It was terrifying. The turning-point for Sacks came when he listened to a recording of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. Listening to the music, he felt, he says, ‘a hope and an intimation that life would return to my leg’. Later, when the physiotherapists insisted that he try to walk by placing one foot in front of the other, he still unable to walk until, suddenly, the memory of the music came back. ‘Into the silence…came music, glorious music, Mendelssohn fortissimo!…and as suddenly, without intending whatsoever, I found myself walking, easily, with the music…and in the very moment that my motor music, my kinetic melody, my walking, came back, in the self-same moment the leg came back…I believed in my leg, I knew how to walk. On investigation Sacks found that this experience of limb-alienation was far from rare. Though it had never properly been documented, it was not infrequent for a perfectly-recovered limb to be experienced by patients as something dead, external, and no part of their own body. And this total psychological loss of the limb from their body-image was also felt as an impoverishment of the self.

            And now I come to the point. I believe it is possible that with regard to the biosphere, perhaps with regard to the whole planet, we have suffered, culturally, a similar amnesia, a similar ‘limb-alienation’. That which is seamlessly a part of our being, on which we depend for life, and with which we are entirely interwoven as it enters not only our eyes and ears but our lungs, our mouths, our skins and our bloodstream, the living world around us, has, like Sacks’s leg, been forgotten in a very deep sense. It appears to us as something separate from ourselves, an object called ‘nature’ or ‘the environment’, which we push out of the way, cynically exploit, or simply collide with, not realising that it is in fact an extended portion of our own body and mind. This is the point to which Weber’s ‘progressive disenchantment of reality’ has led us. What is required is not a re-enchantment of the world but a recovery of the sense of our integration with it – for better and for worse. Otherwise we have little future.

            And just as Sacks’s recovery of the power to walk, and his recognition that his leg was truly a part of himself, was precipitated by music, I believe that poetry has a part to play in the recovery, the re-membering of our world. And this is because, poetry works in language, and language is that which is at the source of our experience of the meaning of the world.

            In arguing for a recovery of a sacred vision of the world through a poetry that draws on the language of myth, I am not of course arguing for a revival of religion as we know it. Religion – dogmatic religion – is precisely what happens when myths become rigid and are taken, falsely, as facts. When this happens, it is precisely their poetic meaning that is lost. Myth itself – true myth – is inherently tolerant, many-sided, polytheistic. It is full of multiple viewpoints and multiple gods and it invites us to constant reinterpretation. You may recall that earlier in this lecture I mentioned that Odin acquired his poetic powers by stealing the mead of inspiration from the Giantess Gunnlöth. Later I said something quite different, that he acquired his poetry by hanging as a sacrifice for nine nights on the world tree Yggdrasil. Is this a contradiction? No, these are just alternative versions, alternative stories. The ancient writers on Greek myth are full of statements beginning ‘Some say that Zeus did this; other, however, say…’ and something quite different follows. Scientists and priests may argue over the authenticity of the Turin shroud. Poets and myth makers look at it and see a wonderful symbol around which they can weave stories and insights which reach towards a deeper truth, many different truths. Sacredness might almost be defined as an infinite potential for generating meanings. It is that meaningfulness of the world which it is the task of poets to bring back.

            As Ovid perceived, Metamorphosis – transformation – is a fundamental characteristic of myth. As Ted Hughes sums it up in his Tales from Ovid, ‘to tell how bodies are changed/Into different bodies.’ This applies whether we are looking at the loving wife and husband  Baucis and Philemon, who were transformed into intertwined oak and linden trees when they died, or at the African creation myths, where a god creates man or woman from a lump of clay which then comes to life and acts with free will. The central presence of metamorphosis or transformation in myth testifies to our experience that transformation is also the central fact of our own lives. We change throughout our lives: the baby transforms to the old man or woman. Our food comes from the earth and transforms into our bodies which themselves end as earth or ash. It is clear that Ted Hughes, when he wrote his Tales from Ovid,  recognised that he was himself writing at the end of an era. He writes ‘The Greek Roman pantheon had fallen in on men’s heads. The obsolete paraphernalia of the old official religion were lying in heaps…[The Metamorphoses] establish a rough register of what it feels like to live in the psychological gulf that opens at the end of an era…We certainly recognise this.’ [Hughes, 11]

            In recent British and Irish poetry, the signs are that our sense of the end of an era is leading us to rediscover not only the mythology we think of as ‘classical’ – that is, from the ancient Mediterranean region – but also the myths of the North. The twenty-first century began with Seamus Heaney’s masterly version of Beowulf, and not far behind it, in 2007, came two translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by two leading poets, Simon Armitage and Bernard O’Donoghue. None of these versions has any difficulty at all in making us feel the human relevance of the stories they tell. Surely one reason for this is that the world has grown more dangerous. Monsters, apparitions and the darkness of the unknown are all around us. The future is uncertain, and human community more important than ever.

            In contemporary poetry, the versatility and richness of myth as a vocabulary for newly envisioning our situation continues to be as prominent as ever. Dreaming of return to a lost lover, Carol Anne Duffy in Rapture takes the image of Ithaca, the long-sought homeland, from the Homer’s Odyssey:

            And when I returned,

            I pulled off my stiff and salty sailor’s clothes,

            slipped on the dress of the girl I was,

            and slid overboard.

            A mile from Ithaca, I anchored the boat.

            The evening softened and spread,

            the turquoise water mentioning its silver fish,

            the sky stooping to hear.

            My hands moved in the water, moved on the air,

            the lover I was, tracing your skin, your hair,

            and Ithaca there, the bronze mountains

            shouldered like rough shields,

            the caves, where dolphins his,

            dark pouches for jewels,

            the olive trees ripening their tears in our pale fields…

The late and much-missed Mick Imlah, whose warm and humorous voice I still miss, calling me from the TLS to commission a review of some new biography, significantly took as the epigraph of his final book Edwin Muir’s remark that ‘no poet in Scotland now can take as his inspiration the folk impulse that created the ballads…’ Imlah’s point, of course, was absolutely to disagree with Muir and to show that the folk-memory, the ballad, the legend had once again become possible. Imlah treats them with wit, farce and parody but also often with pathos, as in the poem ‘Michael Scot’, about the legendary Scottish wizard who

            spurned his shepherd’s birthright, and rode south

            on a grey mare, after the star of knowledge…

- travelled to Palermo to become an alchemist,

            [and] went upstairs at night to play with fumes

            and phosphor, and many a weird and future thing

            hallooed from the pink mist of his magicking.

Michael Scot renounced his magic, but still ended up in Dante’s Hell, with his head screwed round backwards on his body as one of the diviners who impiously foretold the future (though not, apparently, his own).

            The return and flourishing of these timeless, fantastic and yet intimately moving stories and images in recent poetry is, I think, a welcome sign, an indication of a renewed expansion and flexibility of the imagination which is connecting us beyond our time to the imaginative riches of the human inheritance as a whole. And we have of course only started in recent decades to see the riches of African, MesoAmerican, Indian and Islamic legends and mythologies entering the mainstream of British writing.

            The American poet Louise Glück has spoken of ‘myth’s helpless encounter with the elemental’. This is something which we all share. In birth, death, sex, love, illness, time, whatever may happen to ourselves or to our society, we all helplessly encounter elemental forces. Myth provides us not with answers but with a way of surviving, a refreshed vision, however painful. In Louise Glück’s recent poem ‘Persephone the Wanderer’ the poet, questioning why she should be alive, and speculating that she has lived many times before, becomes Persephone herself, asking why she should return to the earth in spring. She says:

            I think I can remember

            being dead. Many times, in winter,

            I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him,

            how can I endure the earth?

            And he would say,

            in a short time you will be here again.

            And in the time between

            you will forget everything:

            those fields of ice will be

            the meadows of Elysium. [Avernus, Carcanet, 2006]

Our world will always appear to us to move between these two conditions. Sometimes it will be ‘fields of ice’; at other times we shall see it as an Elysium. We have seen more than enough fields of ice during this winter just past: fields of ice, and sheets of water as well. If the scientists are right about climate change we may well see more and worse. But my hope for future decades of the twenty-first century will be that even at the worst times we shall find the myths, the timeless and fundamental stories, which will give us a language to imagine, render meaningful and reshape our predicament. Perhaps we can hope that the poems which will embody our predicament, as The Waste Land embodied the predicament of the twentieth century, will be enriched by a renewed sense of the sacredness of life, of our planet, and of existence as such. That there will be water ‘under the shadow of this red rock’, and that the Hanged Man of self-sacrifice and transformation – evoked but absent in Eliot’s poem – may once more be present. Our world, and our lives, will always oscillate between a kind of paradise and a kind of hell, and when we find that the perspectives of our selves, and our poems, are rendered helpless or powerless, it is to the timeless and implacable yet infinitely forgiving world of the myths that we shall have to turn.

            I recall once again, and find a curious kind of comfort in, Louise Glück’s phrase about ‘myth’s helpless encounter with the elemental’. Whatever happens there will be hard times ahead. And it will be the task of poets to hang like Odin on the tree of sacrifice, to steal the mead of the giantess, to climb to the spring of the Muses, or simply to listen like Caedmon to the angels – bringing the new words, and the new songs, which will enable humanity, like Glück’s Persephone, once more to ‘endure the earth’; and perhaps even to love it.

[ENDS]

I’m just taking a break from packing for the journey up to St Andrews for StAnza – the St Andrews Poetry Festival www.http://www.stanzapoetry.org).

St Andrews

Sorley MacLean

The theme of this year’s Festival is ‘Myth and Legend’, apparently, so I’m going to speak on ‘Myth, Magic and the Future of Poetry’, at 3.30 pm on Thursday.

The blurb – not too pretentiously, I hope – is:

It seems clear that (as Robert Graves predicted sixty years ago in ‘The White Goddess’) we are approaching the end of an historical era. Climate change and many other factors are already altering the world fundamentally. To find an adequate creative response, poets will need to look again at the deep roots of their art. The lecture will explore ways in which an awareness of myth and a sense of the shamanistic role of the poet, may help us to survive and even flourish imaginatively in a world very different from the one we thought we knew.

and I’ll be reading my poems with Jean Sprackland at 11.30 on Friday.

Seamus Heaney

A few days ago I was in London and, as I usually do, I found time to drop in at my favourite bookshop, Treadwell’s of Covent Garden.

Treadwell’s is certainly London’s most magical bookshop; and I don’t just mean that metaphorically. Besides holding a large range of poetry, fiction, history and biography, Treadwell’s specialises in the occult: magic, mythology, folklore, witchcraft, druidry, paganism, ancient religions – and all that appertains thereunto. Besides scholarly works and popular surveys they sell grimoires and collections of spells, ranging from teen-friendly paperbacks to leather-bound, limited-edition tomes that can set you back upwards of a thousand pounds.

And they don’t just stop at books. They sell every imaginable type of herb and incense. They sell pure beeswax candles. They sell magic wands (wooden or crystal, just as you choose). They have silver chalices of every size, and athames (traditional witches’ knives) in a variety of designs.

Part of the joy of Treadwell’s is that you never know what extraordinary thing you’re going to find. Last time I was there, their ‘occult antiques’ display included a 1930s Egyptian sorcerer’s ring. This time, one showcase had a display of ’snakeskin parchment’; and, yes, it was actual snakeskin. Not my personal writing-surface of choice, but I suppose if you had the right spell it might be just what you would want.

The sofa that really refreshes your browser

If I’m making it sound scary or barbaric, I’m getting it wrong, because Treadwell’s is also the cosiest and most welcoming bookshop I know. You can browse as long as you like over the endless fascinating second-hand books, many of them very cheap indeed. If you’re there more than a few minutes, you’ll probably be offered tea or coffee, and you can enjoy it on the comfortable Browser’s Sofa. You can even have a personal tarot reading done while you wait.

Treadwell’s also hosts a fascinating programme of talks, lectures and courses on countless magical and spiritual topics, from both academics and practitioners (two categories that are not mutually exclusive, thank goodness). I’ve spoken there myself on Robert Graves and The White Goddess, and in the autumn of 2010 I’m going back to speak on ‘Gods, Dreams and Magicians in Latin America’.

Owner Christina spreads a strange enchantment...

There’s always been some shop in London where those of a mystical and magical bent congregated. In the 1920s it was Watkins’s of Cecil Court; post-1945 it was Atlantis near the British Museum. Both are still going strong, and good luck to them; but nowadays the real focus of the cosmic crystal, I’m sure, is Treadwell’s. You can find them at 34 Tavistock Street, London WC2E 7PB (website www.treadwells-london.com) and I recommend a visit for the sheer fun of it. Though I should warn you that there is a curious enchantment about the shop: somehow I never seem able to leave without buying something. Quite uncanny.

I have to say in conclusion that if it weren’t for Treadwell’s, this blog probably wouldn’t be here. Last year a businessman from New Orleans called Ken McCarthy was passing by. He’d just finished reading a book on Haitian Vodun and noticed that Treadwell’s wanted second-hand magical books. He dropped in and made them a gift of it, taking in their lecture programme at the same time. He came back for a lecture, and it was mine. We talked, became friends, he invited me to New Orleans (I’ll tell you all about that another time!), he told me I should have a blog, and he put me in touch with the guys who set this one up. The rest is history. Or rather, the rest of this particular post is a video clip: the owner of Treadwells, Christina Oakley-Harrington, talking to Richard and Judy about the Toad Spell. Yes, really. Enjoy!

I visited the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas in 1997. The visit turned out very differently from what I had expected, and I wrote an account soon afterwards. Here it is again for those who missed it when it appeared in the magazine PN Review.

* 

August 1997 was an exceptionally hot month, and on one of its hottest afternoons I found myself following a faint footpath across rough sheep-pasture in the north-west corner of Anglesey, heading for Llanfairynghornwy.

I was in a state of trepidation, and not at all sure I was doing the right thing. The sweat induced by a slow progress uphill, over the acres of long dry grass, through rusted iron gates and over stiles built into dilapidated grey stone walls, did nothing to raise my confidence as the horizon shimmered and the village came into view, straggling along the side of a low hill. I plodded on in a spirit of grim determination.

For several years I had come with my family every summer to stay on a farm at Cemlyn, not far from Cemaes Bay. It was, in good weather, a quietly marvellous place. The sea was five minutes’ walk away. The roads were tiny and led only to other farms, or petered out by the shore, so cars were a rarity. A lighthouse, spectacular at sunset, blinked on the horizon in one direction; in the other, gently rolling fields stretched away to the skyline, dotted with sheep and the occasional house or ruined, enigmatic stone farm building. Seals groaned and hooted in chorus from the rocks, or lolled in the shallow offshore waters, occasionally lifting a round, doglike head to return one’s gaze, relaxed and supercilious. Children could be left to run wild over the fields or seashore whilst the adults did pretty much the same at a slower pace.

And every year, at some point during our visit, the farmer in whose house we stayed would tell me, as if for the first time, that I should visit R. S. Thomas, who, he said, lived nearby. Thomas, he would continue, was seen occasionally at the local church – a tiny ancient stone building, dedicated to an obscure Celtic saint, overlooking the sea from a nearby headland. Thomas had even taken the service there on occasion. Every year I would consider the suggestion and decide against following it. Not that I was at all reluctant to meet Thomas. On the contrary, I’d admired his poetry since I’d first encountered it at school. The notion of meeting him face-to-face was an attractive one. But it was also daunting. I had heard that Thomas was reclusive, that he didn’t like the English, and that he resented them above all as holiday-makers in his country. I would embody, I thought, everything he most disliked. In any case there was no obvious way of testing the water. No one seemed to know his address, though they could describe the house, and his telephone number was (of course) ex-directory.

I’m not sure what changed my mind. Partly, I suspect, the encouragement of my wife, generally braver about these things than I am myself. Also, perhaps, some intuitive sense that the years were passing, that the opportunity might not recur – followed (as in so many of life’s less comfortable situations) by the reflection that, at worst, the person concerned could only tell me to go to hell.

And so I found myself at last in Llanfairynghornwy, turning right at the village church and taking the road over the brow of the hill. The house was easily recognisable: a large former farmhouse with a traditional Anglesey courtyard, the various buildings converted into separate dwellings. There was a view towards the sea, about a mile away, and a large garden, evidently well-watered since it showed no sign of desiccation. An open hatchback was parked in the courtyard and a white-haired woman was unloading bags of shopping.

As I approached she turned towards me. It struck me that she was beautiful, and I was startled by the intensity of her pillar-box-red lipstick, a perfect match for the cardigan she wore despite the heat. There was now no turning back so I introduced myself and asked if R. S. Thomas lived here. I also presented my one small visiting card, in the form of a suggestion that Mr Thomas might remember an enthusiastic review of his Later Poems which I had once written for the T.L.S. It was, of course, the right house. The lady disappeared inside, and I could hear her calling ‘Ronald!’, followed by sounds of muted conversation.

Then Ronald loomed at the door, instantly recognisable: craggy face, white hair, towering height. He wore a blue shirt and grey trousers (as with many elderly men, the trousers somehow seemed to extend a long way up) and a tie exactly the shade of deep red favoured by traditional Labour Party supporters. If he was inwardly cursing my intrusion, he gave no sign of it. His welcome was subdued but unambiguous, and he asked me to come in. I had expected a Welsh accent, but he spoke with an almost exaggeratedly perfect English enunciation recalling BBC radio broadcasts from the 1940s and ’50s. The old phrase ‘cut glass’ floated into my head. I followed him along a passage (his walk a little shaky, a little shuffling, but his bearing very erect) into a cool, attractive sitting-room with stone walls, hefty exposed wooden beams, large windows and antique furniture, including some sofas covered with a sumptuous, satiny Chinese print fabric – Sanderson or the like. There were a great many books, and half of one wall was taken up entirely with the brown spines of something (periodical or vast reference work?) called British Birds.

Thomas seemed interested in the fact that I knew Professor Brian Cox, editor of the Critical Quarterly and my former boss, evidently an old friend, so we made conversation about him and other mutual acquaintances. Any tension rapidly dispersed. The lady in red was introduced to me as Betty: I assumed her to be Thomas’s wife, only learning long afterwards that they lived together as unmarried friends. She soon disappeared, returning with a tea tray loaded with, amongst other things, a rectangular lemon-iced sponge cake, cut into precise squares. (It was a very good cake, and when I said so Thomas looked gratified. ‘I made it myself,’ he confided, ‘in an off moment.’)

I suppose he asked me what I was doing in the area; at any rate I mentioned that I’d taken my son to fish from the old breakwater at Holyhead the previous day. Thomas immediately produced extensive information about which parts of which breakwater were the best for fishing. ‘My father worked on one of the Holyhead ferries,’ he said, ’so I had a marvellous childhood. I could ride on the ferry-boats whenever I wanted.’ Holyhead, he said, was now very run down and had terrible drug problems, ‘but then it’s the same everywhere, isn’t it?’ Lately, after living for a long time in the Lleyn Peninsula, he had, as a keen ornithologist, moved to Anglesey for the birds. ‘But the birds are not nearly as interesting here as in the Lleyn. Though we do go down to Cemlyn occasionally, if there’s an unusual bird there…’

Holyhead is a strangely Irish town, its buildings and general atmosphere strongly coloured by the daily traffic with Dublin. I asked Thomas if he he’d had much contact with Irish writers in his youth. His eyes lit up and he explained that at the beginning of his career he’d been ‘taken up’ by Seamus O’Sullivan, editor of the Dublin Magazine, and had spent a good deal of time in Dublin. ‘O’Sullivan was an oldish man then, but still something of a dandy. Good clothes, close-cropped silver hair, attractive to women. And every so often he would produce a poem and show it round, saying “What do you think of this? I wrote it the other day…” But everyone knew that it had been in a drawer for twenty years. It was very sad. He couldn’t accept that he was no longer writing poems. Sheer vanity.’ O’Sullivan had advised Thomas to try the New English Weekly, ‘and that,’ he said, ‘is where my first poem appeared.’

Was Thomas himself, I wondered, still writing poems? ‘Still writing,’ he said, ‘but whether anyone else would call them poems is another matter. Anyone,’ he added, ‘can be pardoned for writing rubbish, but there’s no excuse for publishing it!’ Such aphorisms came from time to time throughout the afternoon; another was ‘Never believe what a man says in his poems. Art is art because it’s not nature, that’s my belief.’

I was curious to know what Thomas, as a uniquely gifted master of the short free-verse line, would think of William Carlos Williams. It turned out that he liked ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’ but was dismissive of the shorter poems, and had no time for ‘frippery like “Red Wheelbarrow”‘. He couldn’t really imagine, he said, how people could write poetry at a typewriter, ‘let alone a computer’. Williams, he thought, must have been ‘a very odd man.’

In current British and Irish poetry he saw no value whatsoever; or at any rate, ‘nothing of any significance.’ ‘Heaney?’ I ventured. ‘A better prose writer than a poet,’ was the reply. The only poet of any substance, he thought, was Geoffrey Hill. He asked me if I’d seen Hill’s latest book, Canaan. I said I’d read a few of the poems in Agenda and hadn’t much liked them, so I’d avoided looking at the book itself for fear of disappointment. ‘I’m afraid you were right,’ said Thomas. ‘But he has been very ill lately, he’s had heart trouble and so on, and I suppose it’s affected his poems. But his publishers should have noticed the lapse in quality even if he didn’t.’

Thomas had recently met Czeslaw Milosz at the house of Dennis O’Driscoll, a mutual friend, and they’d got on well. Thomas thought Milosz ‘a very nice man’. (‘A very physically powerful man too,’ Betty added.)

Since I was then working with Kathleen Raine on Temenos Academy Review I asked Thomas if he knew her. Not really, he said. He’d met her at Vernon Watkins’s memorial service. He didn’t greatly like her poems, though there were ‘a few good ones’. He had included four of them in his Penguin Book of Religious Verse. He had heard her speak on some occasions, and been mildly amused at her self-esteem; he claimed to have heard her refer to herself as ‘the world’s leading Blake scholar’.

Betty had a good deal to say on the associated subject of Gavin Maxwell, author of Ring of Bright Water, for whom Kathleen Raine had cherished an unrequited passion (chronicled in The Lion’s Mouth, the third volume of her Autobiographies). Betty had, it seemed, lived with her first husband next door to Maxwell, and had had to look after ‘the blessed otters’ when he was away. They had been a huge handful. ‘And,’ she said, ‘don’t believe half of what Gavin said about them in his books.’ I asked whether she had been bitten (otters are ferocious biters, and the broadcaster Terry Nutkins, a former Maxwell protégé, lacks a finger to prove it). ‘No,’ said Betty, ‘but then my husband was a hunting man and he wasn’t going to stand any nonsense from a couple of otters.’ That seemed to settle it.

Betty also knew the explorer Wilfred Thesiger (‘A very nice, genuine man,’ put in Ronald). Gavin Maxwell had, said Betty, conceived a notion that he would like to go to the Arabian ‘Empty Quarter’ with Thesiger, so they had met in London to talk about it. Ten minutes had been long enough to convince Thesiger that under no circumstances would he go to the Empty Quarter or any other place on earth with Maxwell. ‘Thesiger,’ Thomas summed up, ‘had nothing of the playboy in him. Whereas Maxwell…’

Somehow we got on to the subject of  poetry readings. Thomas was wary of Performance Poets. He wouldn’t, he said, want to read on the same platform as one of them (an unlikely scenario, it seemed to me, though I didn’t say so), ‘those people who use drums and jazz and things, I think I should come off very much the worse, very discomfited.’ Ted Hughes he thought a good reader, of ‘plainness and intensity’. He found himself irritated, he said, by ‘poets who end the last line with “thank you very much” as if it were the last words of the poem. W. B. Yeats used to do that. Are they anxious to get away?’ (‘Or maybe just polite,’ Betty put in.)

Thomas said he had travelled to read at a festival at Cley in Norfolk, agreeing to go partly because it is a famous bird-watching site. One section of the audience turned out to be made up of local fishermen and the like, and ‘afterwards one of them came up to me confidentially and said, “Now you’re a real poet, you are.” I was very pleased at that.’

Betty said that even now and despite his lack of gimmicks, teenagers in Thomas’s audiences seemed enthralled by him. ‘You do have to rehearse to go on the reading circuit,’ said Thomas. ‘Ronald’s training for the ministry has probably helped there,’ added Betty.

In due course the conversation turned to the question of what work I was doing. I said I was editing De Quincey’s complete writings, and also Graves’s The White Goddess. Rather to my surprise both Thomases turned out to be enthusiastic about De Quincey. ‘Especially,’ said Ronald, ‘”The Flight of the Kalmuck Tartars”‘. Betty asked how my eyes were standing up to the work, adding that ‘one thing about poetry is that you don’t have to bother so much with footnotes’. I pointed out that some poets – Southey for example – had used a great many. Was there a correlation: the more footnotes, the worse poet? Thomas cited David Jones as a counter-example, ‘though some of his could have been better omitted. It’s annoying to find a reference to Llangollen and then a note saying “pronounced Thlangothlen” or something like that. You’d be better off without that kind of thing; but then David Jones was always very meticulous.’

As for Robert Graves, Thomas thought him ‘a good poet and a good influence’. John Crowe Ransome, also a good poet, ‘came entirely from his [Graves's] work.’ Graves had written too much, Thomas thought, but considering the period when he had lived, yes, he had done well. (I was unable to get elucidation of this tantalising remark about the ‘period’.) Asked what he thought of The White Goddess, Thomas said he’d never read it. ‘More Kathleen Raine’s department than mine,’ he added, whereupon Betty hazarded the suggestion that perhaps Kathleen Raine had been one of Graves’s ‘mistresses’. Ronald rejected this idea firmly. ‘I don’t think so. No, Kathleen Raine was a bluestocking; and Graves, like Yeats, preferred them…’ The sentence was left unfinished, but its drift was clear enough.

Betty mentioned that she was trying to fill gaps in their collection of Thomas’s own books. They lacked, especially, copies of his first three volumes (The Stones of the Field, An Acre of Land and The Minister), and also ‘a little book for children’ (which I cannot identify). Booksellers, she said, offered his early books at around £150 ‘and they won’t reduce them, even for the author, even without the jacket.’ ‘Well,’ said Thomas, ‘they’re not in the bookselling trade for love.’

It was getting towards evening so I left soon afterwards, with invitations from the Thomases to visit again. I never did, though we exchanged one or two letters and Thomas sent a good poem for Temenos Academy Review (where, through no fault of mine, it failed to appear). Within a few months the Thomases left Anglesey for another part of Wales, and some two years after that R. S. Thomas died.

To me, that afternoon at Llanfairynghornwy is still a bright and happy spot in memory, and I remain deeply grateful to the poet and his remarkable companion. Nothing of great significance, perhaps, was said or done. Still, an encounter between a famously ‘cantankerous’ Welsh Nationalist poet and a holidaying Englishman arriving unannounced on his doorstep might have been expected to turn out rather differently. Since his death, R. S. Thomas’s reputation as a poet has shown no sign of sagging, nor do I believe that it will. His integrity and independence have never been doubted. But it seems worthwhile putting on record that his virtues also included generosity, hospitality, wit, and the baking of excellent cakes.

During the recent cold weather, whenever I managed to drive anywhere through the snow I was accompanied by a deep, rolling, slightly guttural voice, with an accent you’d have found hard to place. West Country? Irish? North-Eastern?

John Haines: quietly intense eco-poet

Actually the accent was Alaskan, and the voice was that of John Haines, former Poet Laureate of Alaska, on a CD someone sent me from the US. I found Haines’s poems riveting, with their dreamlike, slightly surreal images, their subtle rhythms, and their intense focus on the natural environment. Haines, born in 1924, arrived in Alaska as a young man at a time when the government would give you a piece of land if you were prepared to live there.  He built himself a house out of wood and lived as a fur trapper, hunting elk and bear and gaining an unrivalled knowledge of the landscape and ecosystem. He also wrote poems.

Haines uses a short-lined free verse that asks you to consider carefully each image. The poems build, stage by quiet stage, and much of their quality comes from a combination of the stark beauty of their images with the unanswerable finality of the propositions they offer:

The door is open

and the shaggy frost-fog

bounds across the floor

and wraps itself about my feet…

…I feel

its breath deep in my bones.

 

A spirit in it wants

to draw me out past

the whitening hinges

into the cold, enormous rooms

where it lives.

 

Out there a flickering pathway

leads to a snowy grave

where something in me

has always wanted to lie…

Haines also has a remarkable sense of the very ancient history of the region’s peoples, particularly the ancestors of the Inuit and the Native Americans who came into the continent from Asia some forty thousand years ago:

Among the quiet people of the frost,

I remember an Eskimo

walking one evening

on the road to Fairbanks.

 

A lamp full of shadows burned

on the table before us;

and the light came as though from far off

through the yellow skin of a tent…

 

Thousands of years passed.

People were camped on the bank

of a river, drying fish

in the sun. Women bent over

stretched hides, scraping

in a kind of furry patience…

 

We were away for a long time.

The footsteps of a man walking alone

on the frozen road from Asia

crunched in the darkness

and were gone.

Besides his very fine Collected Poems, The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer, Haines has written an autobiography, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire, which is essentially a meditation on his many years in this austere, dangerous and immensely beautiful landscape.

Although a few years ago he was a candidate for the US Laureateship, he seems virtually unknown in the UK. The fine CD I was given seems unobtainable. But at least his books can be bought, and should be. His is an authentic voice, of great integrity,  less self-dramatising than Gary Snyder, more thoughtful and muted.  As a hunter (whatever one’s urban discomfort with killing) he had to learn to live not only close to animals but even as one of them: something that gives at times a shamanic quality to his poems. Here he tells how he lured a moose by making the noise of a rival moose rubbing its horns on a tree:

I went to the edge of the wood

in the color of evening,

and rubbed with a piece of horn

against a tree,

believing the great, dark moose

would come, his eyes

on fire with the moon…

In that poem, ‘Horns’, the moose survives. A companion poem (‘A Moose Calling’) is darker and sadder:

Who are you,

calling me in the dusk,

 

O dark shape

with heavy horns?

 

I am neither cow

nor bull -

 

I walk upright

and carry your death

in my hands…

Quietly and without fuss, perhaps disconcertingly so, John Haines is that recently much-trumpted thing: an eco-poet. We should be reading him. He’s made my life deeper and richer. I recommend him.

Chris McCully: poetry, fishing, and fine conversation

I had tea at the Cornerhouse with Chris McCully, who’s over from the Netherlands for a couple of days. Chris is a polymath: fine poet, serious fishing writer (he has a book on the way about sea trout ecology, on which he’s a leading expert), scholar of Old English poetry and historical linguistics. He writes regularly for Trout and Salmon magazine, and teaches linguistics and literature at Groningen University.

 We’re planning to write an article together about Tom Rawling, one of the finest Lakeland poets of the 20^th century and (like Chris) a scientific specialist on sea trout, who worked with Hugh Falkus, the famous naturalist and fisherman who revolutionised knowledge of these enigmatic fish. Not that I know anything about fishing: that’s Chris’s department. (Come to think of it, so is poetry. So where do I fit in?)

 We walked down to the neo-Gothic splendours of the John Rylands Library for a reading by James Fenton. Fenton, a taciturn and hugely impressive man, gave a powerful reading, starting with his elegy for the much-missed poet and editor Mick Imlah, who died, after far too short a life, in January 2009. Fenton’s elegy (due to appear in tomorrow’s TLS) was almost classical in its poise, brevity and intensity.

Jan Wilkinson, Rylands Director, talks to poet and publisher Michael Schmidt (centre) and James Fenton (right)

 Fenton went on to read a selection of his poems, with a particular emphasis on poems about war, on which he writes with peculiar intensity. He was a foreign correspondent in Cambodia during the last years of its war, so he knows the truth at first hand.

 Much of Fenton’s poetry draws on traditional ballad forms, as modified by Auden and  Kipling. Sometimes this can be immensely forceful though at moments it also, I feel, slightly flattens out subtleties. The ballad form is a dangerous friend. I asked him afterwards if he was conscious of the dept to Kipling and he said he was, but pointed also to Brecht, a model I hadn’t suspected. But it made sense. There’s a direct, unashamed and sometimes bitter plain-speaking in his rhymes that many contemporary poets would be afraid to use.

Dove Cottage: De Quincey lived here from 1809 after Wordsworth left

I went up to Grasmere yesterday: a special occasion. Thomas De Quincey (the ‘English Opium-Eater’) died 150 years ago that day, on December 8 1859. To mark the occasion, and to celebrate the fine new biography of De Quincey by my old friend Robert Morrison, the Wordsworth Trust decided to recreate ‘a winter’s evening at Dove Cottage’ just as De Quincey loved it, and recorded it in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: a roaring fire, candlelight, an ‘eternal teapot’ and ‘a decanter of ruby-coloured laudanum’ – though yesterday mulled wine served as a very acceptable substitute. And of course the weather was terrible, just as De Quincey liked it. After all, as he said, why pay for coals and candles if you’re not getting a proper winter for your money?

Rob was signing copies of his new De Quincey biography

Rob’s biography – the first since my own life of De Quincey came out in 1981 – is a great read, as well-written as you’d expect from a scholar of De Quincey, one of the best-ever prose stylists. And it’s packed with new information about the extraordinary life of England’s most famous literary drug addict. I’ll slot in a link to the book right here: it’s highly recommended. Ideal Christmas present, in fact.

A new life of De Quincey was much-needed because when Rob and I and nine other editors researched our 21-volume edition of De Quincey’s complete Works in 2000-3, we dug up so much new information that I knew my biography was now out of date. Rob took on the job and has produced an amazingly fresh story full of insights that even I never dreamed of.

Rob and I discussed De Quincey – his addiction, his dreams, his wonderful writing, his phenomenal memory, his part in the making of modern literary biography, and many other aspects – with a moving crowd of around a hundred people in those candlelit cottage rooms where De Quincey lived and wrote, where he met Wordsworth for the first time, and where he dreamed of (or did he really meet?) the terrifying Malay addict who so unexpectedly knocked at his door one day.

If you were there, I hope you enjoyed it all. If you missed it, you can still catch Rob, when he gives the Bindman Lecture, ‘Thomas De Quincey and the Lake District’, at the Wordsworth Trust on Saturday 12 December at 3 pm. See www.wordsworth.org.uk for details.

Afterwards I dropped in for tea and mince pies with some old friends, Tim Melling and Liz Cooper at Nab Cottage, Rydal, where De Quincey courted Margaret Simpson, the beautiful daughter of a local farmer. Nab Cottage, a fine traditional Lakeland farmhouse on the shore of Rydal Water,  is now a B&B and language school ( www.rydalwater.com and www.nabcottage.com ). They told me that during the recent floods they had water coming under the door (the house is right between the lake and the slopes of the fell with consequent water runoff) but it didn’t get serious and everything is now fine. Though it was pelting with rain outside as we talked!

Nab Cottage still has a small built-in writing cupboard with fold-down

Tim and Liz relax in the 'Opium Den': once De Quincey's writing space?

desk, and since De Quincey owned the place briefly in the 1820s he may well have written there. Tim and Liz keep the room decorated as an ‘Opium Den’ in his memory.

They also got out their copy of the fascinating game Transformation which they tell me originated at Findhorn. Although it’s a board game it seems to provide real-life challenges and counselling for players, and they tell me it can actually change the lives of people who play it. I wasn’t able to stay long enough to play it (Liz tells me she has trained as a ‘facilitator’ to play the game in enhanced mode with people who seriously want to transform!) but I heard enough to want to give it a try. I’m putting a link in, but this is not an arbitrary plug because I am buying this myself. I delight in any spiritual/psychological/divination-type thing, and this one looks really good . If anyone out there has played Transformation and can write a comment about it, please get in touch; I’d love to hear from you!