A Poetess on Radio 4

Listening to Radio 4 as I took my morning bath, I heard an interview with the winner of the T. S. Eliot poetry prize. She read one of her poems, which was about (what her poetry is about).

 I found it quite incomprehensible, not just in some respects puzzling, but so baffling that I could find no clue as to what it was supposed to convey, unless that bafflement was itself the message.

Between the ages of about 15 and my early 40's I used to read a fair amount of poetry, but then gradually lost interest.

I quite like the cheerful jingle of humorous light verse, but have come to mistrust what is called 'serious' poetry. That now strikes me as an attempt to present difficult ideas with obscure indirection, so that the wilful impenetrability of the exposition shall match the intractability of the subject matter.

If we are to get to grips with difficult ideas, we need to be discuss them in a very different way,  in the plainest of plain prose, possibly augmented  in emergencies by a little symbolic logic.

As the prize was set up by Eliot and the winner was a young lady living on one of the Shetland Isles, the following thoughts of Eliot's seem pertinent:

Under the bamboo

Bamboo, bamboo

Under the bamboo tree

Two live as one

One lives as two

Two live as three

Under the bam

Under the boo

Under the bamboo tree.

Where the breadfruit fall

And the penguin call

And the sound is the sound of the sea

Under the bam

Under the boo

Under the bamboo tree.

Where the Gauguin maids

In the banyan shades

Wear palmleaf drapery

Under the bam

Under the boo

Under the bamboo tree.

Tell me in what part of the wood

Do you want to flirt with me?

Under the breadfruit, banyan, palmleaf

Or under the bamboo tree?

Any old tree will do for me

Any old wood is just as good

Any old Isle is just my style

Any fresh egg

Any fresh egg

And the sound of the coral sea.

T.S.Eliot, Sweeney Agonistes, Fragments of an Agon.