Author Archive
Lavinia Greenlaw
A broader question
G. And what have you found in Iceland?
C. What have we found? More copy, more surface,
Vignettes as they call them, dead flowers in an album –
The harmoniums in the farms, the fine-bread and pancakes,
The pot of ivy trained across the window,
Children in gumboots, girls in black berets.
R. And dead craters and angled crags.
Louis MacNeice, ‘Eclogue From Iceland’
This sign greeted me when I arrived in Iceland just before Christmas. I heard no harmoniums, ate no pancakes and wore no beret, but the landscape and twenty-hour nights disarranged my vision and so my economy.
Lavinia Greenlaw
Recessive festive
universal tinge of sober gold ... (Keats, Endymion)
Photo borrowed from my daughter, bauble paid for in full.
Lavinia Greenlaw
Hevenyssh
Like the growth of crystals: a formative will and the impossibility of adopting any other mode.
Lavinia Greenlaw
Set aside
Last weekend, walking along this beach, I wondered about all the bad poems and paintings this landscape has inspired. It’s the Suffolk coast between Walberswick and Dunwich (a dangerously “poetic” place because most of it fell into the sea)*.
I once sat on a judging panel for a poetry prize when, exhausted by how much was out there, we began to discuss giving a different kind of award. It would be for not writing (or at least publishing) any poems for a specified period. In European agricultural policy, where farmers have been paid to leave land uncultivated so that it can recover, this is called set aside.
Setting aside the who … how about the what? Which words, phrases, devices, angles, subjects, etc., would you pay good money not to see in a poem again?
I’d start with decorative taxonomies – those lists, in particular of artist’s colours and birds. No more alizarin, no more godwits.
And any form of epiphany other than the manifestation of Christ to the Magi, also known as January 6th.
And anything liminal, lambent or ludic.
*That is not Dunwich on the horizon. It is a nuclear power station and will have inspired bad poems all of its own.
Lavinia Greenlaw
The plain shape of things
Something stops making sense, won’t stay still, can’t be grasped, and then you come across the plain shape of it – a simple version that says ‘This is what I mean.’
Once when I was broken-hearted, I went to stay in a place where it rained every day. Each morning when I opened my door and set out along the path, I found a heart-shaped puddle. If anyone had been anywhere near, I would have said ‘Look, a heart-shaped puddle,’ and they would have said ‘Yeah right,’ and seen the heart because I had told them it was there.
The heart-shaped puddle meant nothing but I had to stop myself acting upon it and that meant something.
Lavinia Greenlaw
Tune thy music to thy heart
In Berlin this week, I wandered into a dark room next to this building site and found myself not in a silent disco but a silent singalong.
‘Tune thy music to thy heart,’ Thomas Campion proposed. These people sure did.
Lavinia Greenlaw
Further “poetic”s
Now that there is renewed hope that action can bring about change, are we going to see a return to explicitly political art?
I went to see the dance company DV8’s latest production, To Be Straight With You, which is described on their website as ‘a poetic but unflinching exploration of tolerance, intolerance, religion and sexuality.’
If someone described a poem that way, I would expect the worst:
Lavinia Greenlaw
Read the papers
And the London Times today published a poem written by Derek Walcott for Barack Obama. The comments, largely positive, include the suggestion that the poet read the papers more often. Should he? Should we?
Lavinia Greenlaw
Black ice and rain
The changes in the weather here have become less gradual, more brutal. Hailstones fall out of a blue sky. There is snow in October and then there isn’t.
It is four years since the sudden death of Michael Donaghy, at the age of 50. Donaghy was an American of Irish descent, who went to the University of Chicago, where he edited The Chicago Review, before settling in London in the 1980s. His poetry was the subject of this year’s T.S. Eliot lecture, given by Sean O’Brien, which focuses on Donaghy’s “Black Ice and Rain” in which a man at a party follows a woman into her bedroom and tells her how he met a woman at a party… O’Brien concludes:
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IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010
A selection of new work from Dorothea Grossman; new poems by Lavinia Greenlaw, David Yezzi, A.E. Stallings, Gerald Stern, and Dan Gerber; translations of Carlo Betocchi, and Mahmoud Darwish; an Editorial on Ruth Lilly; an exchange between Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch; an essay by Chen Li; and a review by Daisy Fried.
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Poetry Off the Shelf: David Baker
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