Tuesday 13 January 2009

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.

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