The Poetry Voice

Lauren Frederick reads two poems from her new collection, "I saved a set for you.' The book is available on Amazon.

If you don't know the story, read on. ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ is a fourteenth century poem that survives in  a single manuscript. The story begins in King Arthur’s court at Christmas when a huge green knight on a huge green horse rides into the court and challenges everyone to a game. He will stand one blow of his own axe as long as he can return the blow in a years’ time.No one at the court wants to take him on, but as Arthur finally gets up the young Gawain gets in first. He effortlessly decapitates the Green Knight who then gets up, picks up his head, remounts his horse and says ‘see you in a years’ time’.The rest of the story tells how Gawain is tested and discovers the limits of his idealism. He bravely sets out to keep his word, is undaunted by the physical hardships of a terrible journey, and finally arrives at a castle where his host tells him the place he seeks is just a few hours away, so why doesn’t he stay for three days. The host then proposes a game. He will go hunting each day and give Gawain whatever he kills, and Gawain will give him whatever he gains during the day.For the first two days the host’s wife visits Gawain in his bedroom. His morality tested, Gawain gently rejects her advances, and she gives him a kiss. Each day the host returns, gives Gawain what he hunted, and Gawain gives him the kiss.  On the third day the Lady gives him a Green Girdle which she says will protect him against the Green Knight. Gawain does not give this to the host.He rides out to the Green Knight’s ‘chapel’. Twice the Green Knight goes to strike and twice Gawain flinches. The third time he strikes, but only nicks his neck.When Gawain returns to Arthur’s court he is mortified. He failed the final test and tried to cheat. He wears the green girdle as a badge of his shame. But everyone in the court thinks this is daft, and starts to wear green girdles as well.The story opens the debate. Gawain is true to his code, but as a human being he has tried to avoid death. Should he feel ashamed? Or are the people in the court right? 

In the Book of Genesis, Abraham (Abram) is tempted by God, who tells him to sacrifice his only son. Obediently Abraham takes Isaac, and is prepared to kill him, but God interrupts and offers him an animal to sacrifice instead. One wonders about the conversation between father and son on the way home. Owen’s poem revises the well-known story. The old man refuses to sacrifice the Ram of Pride and goes on with the slaughter. As statement the poem’s effective, as a poem it’s heavy handed. The archaic diction and syntax evokes the memory of the prose of the King James Bible; but the ‘belts and straps’ and ‘parapets and trenches’ seem an unnecessary attempt to force the link between the Biblical sacrifice to the trenches and parapets of the first world war, manned by young men with belts and straps. At the risk of being heretical, I think Leonard Cohen’s lyric to the song ‘The story of Isaac’ makes the point more powerfully, and more effectively.

John Dressel (b1934) I worry about my pronunciation of people’s names, so if I have mispronounced John Dressel’s I apologise. Like Hamlet, (who appeared in the previous post) Goliath has escaped the facts of his story. Recently a news headline read; ‘Firm wins in David and Goliath legal battle’. The writer of the headline was confident that the reader would know that this meant a battle between a small firm and a much bigger one. The writer was also positioning the reader to see the smaller as heroic and admirable, and the bigger as the bad guy in the case. The story of David and Goliath has entered into popular discourse, and people who have never read the Bible know enough to make sense of that headline. But there’s no reason why we should automatically sympathise with David, or with every small entity taking on a larger one. Dressel’s poem makes this point, playfully. This poem is taken from 'Twentieth Century Anglo-Welsh Poetry', edited by Dannie Abse and printed by Seren/Poetry Wales Press 1997, reprinted 1998.

Gwyn Thomas (1936-2016) This is the first of a short run of poems in which poets use other works of literature or characters from literature to make a point or to consider an idea. Hamlet is one of the most famous characters in the western tradition, so much so that he has escaped his play and lives a life of his own. People who have never seen a version of the play or read it have heard of him. ‘To be or not to be’ entered everyday speech so long ago it may be used without any knowledge of what the rest of the speech contains. It’s a young man struggling to verbalise a reason for either living or dying. Anyone can be driven to ask ‘what is the point’ or ‘what is the meaning of life’. You don’t need to be haunted by what may be the revengeful ghost of your father, or suspect your mother of adultery with your regicidal, fratricidal uncle. Once the religious and philosophical answers have been rejected, the purpose of life becomes finding a a purpose that will make life seem desirable. As Thomas says in this poem, it doesn’t have to be a desire to win an olympic medal or climb mount Everest. Growing onions will do it. Only when you have a reason to live, that matters to you, will you fear death, and only having feared death will you have lived. I found this poem quoted at the end of Tony Conran’s introduction to ‘Welsh Verse; Translations by Tony Conran.’ Poetry Wales Press 1986. I knew of Gwyn Thomas as a translator of The Mabinogion and his reputation as a poet. I know very little about this poem except I assume it’s translated by Tony Conran from Welsh. If anyone knows differently please let me know.

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) I have been rereading Yeats. I recommend everyone with an interest in English poetry should do. It’s difficult to think of a collected poems which has so many great poems in it, or where the quality improves chronologically. This poem sits at the end of his ‘Last Poems’. It’s not a great poem by his standards, but the honesty of it is appealing. Old men are just young men in failing bodies and Yeats was acutely aware of this. The last two lines express an impossible wish but also acknowledge and accept what has passed. If you wanted to, you could ask yourself which is the more human response: the men obsessed with politics, or the man admiring the girl. You could also ask yourself which one of the two is less likely to start a war.

This poem is an extract from 'Talking to Cameras', the first part of the sequence ‘Texts for a Film’. I laughed the first time I read it. As he explains, a Birmingham screwdriver is a hammer, I grew up in Coventry, about 20 miles away, and ent to university in Birmingham. I've often heard the phrase. It’s one of those faintly humorous regional insults that abound in the UK, suggesting something about the craftsmanship and craftsmen from Birmingham. But Fisher takes what is an insult and turns it into a mediation on a way of thinking. It’s the shift, and the humour, that distinguishes this poem. The poem is taken from ‘The Long and Short of it, poems 1955-2010 (new edition 2012) Bloodaxwe books.

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939) Who are you writing for? For anyone writing poetry the question seems essential. At some point in his career Yeats had wanted to be a national poet, writing for and on behalf of his country. But in this poem he renounces that ambition, having, he says, discovered that the people he thought we was writing for and about are not worthy. He renounces them for an imaginary figure, a solitary fisherman. And in the poem’s most memorable image, Yeats hopes that before he’s old, he will have written him one poem ‘as cold/and passionate as the dawn’. You can spend some time admiring those two adjectives, and the effect they create. Hugh Kenner suggested the difference between Yeats and Pound, or Yeats and most poets, was that Pound, once he’d left London, could sit in relative isolation at his typewriter in Rapallo telling himself he was a genius and dismissing any rumours of negative response to his work as the sniping of lesser interigences. Yeats, standing in the wings at the abbey theatre was forced to confront an often baffled, sometimes hostile audience. It might be one of the reasons Yeats’ poems improved as he got older.

The second of these two poems was written in response to the first. A.E.Houseman (1859-1936) was one of the leading classical scholars of his day. Today he’s remembered as the author of ‘The Shropshire Lad’ , one of the most well known collections of poems from the first quarter of the last century. I suspect his mercenary army owes a lot to Xenophon’s classic account of how ten thousand Greek soldiers marched to the sea after their Persian paymaster was killed in battle. Hugh MacDairmid (1892-1978), one of the significant Scottish poets of the twentieth century, had a less romantic view of mercenaries. which i suspect might be shared by those unlucky enough to have encountered them.

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) Technically this isn’t a poem, but an extract from Beckett’s novel 'Watt' where it’s set out as continuous prose. But it’s too much fun to read to leave out on the grounds that it’s not ‘a poem’. If you want to tie your head in knots you can try to define ‘poetry’ and ‘poem’. Whatever your definition there will always be a liminal case that challenges the definition. Beckett’s prose is also often a lot funnier than the stern photos of Beckett would lead you to expect. So go along for the ride. And enjoy.