The Poetry Challenge this month

Poetry in the parks is re-launched this month.

Avondale Park and Cremorne Gardens have designated seats in them (an idea brought from Gunnersbury and Battishill Parks), and other park benches will have poetry books provided by the Library Service placed on them by the park keepers.

What is poetry? For William Wordsworth it was “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings ... (taking) its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity”; to Steven Fry it is “a primal impulse with us all”; and to most kids on the street probably just a ‘load of old bollocks!’

All of us, I suspect, have a horror story of school lessons spent trying to come up with the answer to the question: ‘So what is the poet trying to tell us?’ Despite having had apparently meaningless nursery rhymes drilled into us as babies (“Ring - a ring of roses ...” signs of the plague! ), I suspect few were ever really inspired to look further than the classroom clock and freedom into which the slowly ticking hands would eventually release us.

I thank my Mum: she used poetry to capture my imagination and encourage me to relocate myself into a world of pea green boats that put out to sea with the owl and the pussy cat, and the like.

But poetry doesn’t just stop there!

It has the power to comment on social disasters such as in Dambudzo Marechemo’s indictment upon Robert Mugabe’s “free” Zimbabwe (The Oracle of the Povo) and even to change the world for the better: Walt Whitman’s “I dream’d in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth ...” must have provided inspiration for Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, given in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

It has within it music: “Do you remember an inn / Miranda? / Do you remember an inn? And the tedding and the spreading / Of the straw for a bedding ...” (Hilaire Belloc).

And it has the means to capture the very essence of the passage of time as in Rupert Brooke’s “Tenderly, day that I have loved, I close your eyes, / And smooth your quiet brow, and fold your thin dead hands ...” or Wordsworth’s “fair lady at her casement ....doth herself divest / Of all her radiant garments, and reclines / behind the sombre screen of yonder pines ...”.

Poetry has the ability to bring order to disordered thoughts through the discipline of its various meters and forms (from acatalectics to Zen haiku). It has inspired writers such as Stephen Fry to write books on the subject (‘The Ode Less Travelled’ came out of a discussion of the components of a villanelle) and, using blank verse (“playing tennis without nets” according to Auden), it has encouraged generations to try to free themselves of one set of bonds in order to just become tied up in others: “Freedom. Freedom. Prison of the free.” (L. Durrell). Poetry can inspire or it can make you just smile; it can uplift (Blake’s Jerusalem) or make us want to weep, as Keats is reputed to have done when reading Spencer’s “sea-shouldering whale”.

So here’s my challenge: using the excuse of enjoying the fresh air that our wonderful parks and gardens provide, stop at the poetry seat and, if you haven’t done so before: read a poem.

It will change your day:

“To see a World in a grain of sand

And Heaven in a wild flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.” (W. Blake).

A blog about Poetry

The cat long since departed from my feet and, my god daughter not yet awake in the house next door, silence fills my home – disturbed only by the tapping of my fingers on the keys of a laptop balanced precariously on the dictionary I keep beside the bed (how else to quiet the lexical koans that intrude at 3 in the morning?). Beside me, from an assortment of books, poems stare lifelessly up at the ceiling or, if the spine not yet broken by impatient hand, gasp for breath, face down into the bedclothes. Words start their unsteady journey from my tangled thoughts across the screen that replaces “Dickensian” candle and quill.

I pause and, turning note scribbled pages (“merde”!) of Keats, dip once more into a poem of my youth:

“And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old.”

It is of course impossible for a girl to sleep in the lap of a legend ... or so we like to think! But there she lies and has always lain, a pre-Raphaelite, gorgeous goddess, adored for ever in alexandrine order.

Order? But surely has not poetry always been the means of escaping the “order” of the disordered world into which I have found myself? Order requires rules, regulations, religion, templates and obedience. Order requires clothes, buildings, streets, employment. Order requires, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years - a lifetime of routine. And yet I seek a place into which I can flee and indulge in the loveliness, weep in awe of the depth of peace and spirituality, or silently cry at the high emotion or gut wrenching ghastliness of this – yes, ordered too, world.

Poetry also requires order and in it is to be found the ordered (metrical) art of all seasons, the ordered (rhythmic) craft of all races, people of all shapes, sexualities, colours, sizes and in its ordered substance, Poetry fashions and tempers through an often eloquent rhyme, a sword of thought, of spirit and truth with which to, at times and with mathematical precision, cut down the disorder of our minds and the world around us.

“Freedom, Freedom, Prison of the free!” – wails Lawrence Durrell. He could have been describing Poetry.

Blank or free verse mostly holds little for me: in its particular disorder are to be often found the un-fettered and, un-resolved, doodling of an undisciplined artist. The voice is noise rather than music and the thoughts as a consequence little more than the tenuously connected words often seen in a power-point Mind Map.

In the brevity and complexity of a haiku, the ordered repetition of a villanelle, or the questionable humour of a clerihew, rules and order dictate the form through which the poet skilfully crafts thoughts, observations, feelings and stories from words.

Ah, there’s the rub of it: words!

What would poetry be without words? Words, language, communication. The screen scribbles a green line underneath that last sentence. Intrigued, I press the computer’s Help key and the anonymous sage within Microsoft advises me: “Fragment. If the marked words are an incomplete thought, consider developing this thought into a complete sentence by adding a subject or verb or combining this text with another sentence.” He (the author has to be male, surely?) then provides the following examples: “Instead of ‘Meteors the entire night’ consider ‘We watched meteors the entire night’."

Indeed! In that fragment on meteors are the music, evocation and poetry of the universe; in that sentence, a rather dull evening spent in the company of a group of cardigans watching planets.

And so, having offended my (genuinely) very dearest friends through whose binoculars and telescopes I have gratefully watched, in absolute awe, the differently configured constellations of the Aborigines in the Australian Outback, and those of the ancient Greeks in clear skies over Palm Springs, my fingers return to the keyboard as this blog seeks conclusion. “Madeline” next door wails the new day to life, the cat returns from his dawn patrol, stares critically at the books strewn where he had lain earlier and with a deep sigh, curls up and closes his eyes. The day has begun . . .