Poetry Talks, Prizes and Book of the Week

It's a packed post today, as Mr Gardner reports on last Saturday's Edward Thomas Prize Poetry Lectures, 2023 (and announces the winner), plus we have our usual Book of the Week - Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata, recommended by Edward Buss.

Edward Thomas Prize Poetry Lectures

Mr Gardner

Saturday saw the return of the English Department’s annual poetry lectures, with five speakers from the Lower and Upper Eighth presenting on poets of their choice. There was a pleasing and impressive variety in the selections of this year’s participants, with poems in disparate forms from different periods, together providing an eclectic array of voices and ideas.

 

Edward Thomas  

Rufus Goodman’s polished and well-structured presentation guided us through Dylan Thomas’ ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’, a passionate and moving imagined address to a father near death, through which the experiences of the dying and the living are placed both in tense dialogue and antagonistic confrontation. 

Dylan Thomas

Though this was the most well-known of all five poems, the lecture was novel and engaging in its reading, particularly in its exploration of how natural imagery is harnessed by the poet to convey to us the otherwise obscure perspective of a man confronting the brink of his existence.

Christina Rossetti’s ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ was the focus of the second lecture. Just like a Pre-Raphaelite canvas, something more sinister and troubling seems to lurk under the ornate, attractive surface of this poem: a superficial ‘prettiness’ that points to more murky depths, at the same time as it sheens them from direct view. 

Christina Rossetti, sketched here by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Frederick Websper was as methodical as he was insightful in digging out the disturbing undertones of this intricate sonnet, framing his reading through an impressive variety of social, biographical and cultural-aesthetic contexts.

In ‘Chaplinesque’, Hart Crane chooses to bring a considerable degree of abstraction and poetic ambiguity to his exploration of a cultural icon who, on the surface at least, may seem relatively unambiguous. 

Hart Crane

This is a difficult poem, constructed as it is through an insistent juxtaposition of self-consciously opaque imagery. Mani Collins did not shy from the complexities here, moving sequentially through these twists and turns, guiding us as readers through Crane’s exploration of the strange yet compelling model of humanity Chaplin’s endearing silliness projects.

Up next was the rise-and-fall-and-quest-again narrative kaleidoscope of Bob Dylan’s ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. It is difficult to know how to approach these lyrics from an analytical perspective, something Max Swinnerton rightly acknowledged from the outset by noting that Dylan would probably hate what he was about to do. 

Bob Dylan, recording Blood on the Tracks (the album on which 'Tangled Up in Blue' appears)

That said, his approach of offering attractively open-ended readings of the various threads of experience the text brings together was thought-provoking, and avoided foreclosing on overall meaning in a way that the songwriter would surely appreciate. Through these observations the lecture framed effectively the song’s strange tone of purgatorial optimism and its disorienting mix of nostalgia and disenchantment, listlessness and adventure.

 
Daniel Harden brought the lectures to a close with his sensitive close reading of Andrew Motion’s ‘Fresh Water’. Like the river that lends the poem its form and thread, the placidity of the poet’s earlier memories veil more troubling currents that emerge as the text’s autobiographical vignettes meander downstream. 

Andrew Motion

Memory here is a flowing-over and a dredging, a simultaneous veiling and sifting, and the lecture’s focus on moments of poetic ingenuity and linguistic flair were effective in uncovering the subtleties that underly the poem’s beguilingly jejune surface.

Winner and Runner-Up
I would like to express again my gratitude to this year’s participants. A short lecture, especially when presenting on material and ideas an audience has not encountered before, is a particularly challenging form of public-speaking; there’s a real art to briefly and engagingly introducing a text and then developing a clear and precise reading.

 

Every one of this year’s lectures made clear the speaker’s passion for their chosen work, and each provided insight and eloquent reflection. However, to my mind there were two lectures that stood out in particular for their clarity, and out of these two, one that further impressed with its breadth of engagement in such a brief allotted time.

 
The runner-up of the 2023 Edward Thomas Prize Poetry Lectures:
Rufus Goodman

And the winner:

Frederick Websper

Thank you also to the participants in the audience vote. The result here reassured me that I had made a sensible overall decision, with equal votes electing joint audience winners: Rufus Goodman & Frederick Websper.

If you were unable to attend the lectures but would like to read the poems that were discussed, you can find a copy of them here.  Congratulations to Fred, to Rufus and to all the lecturers on such a fabulous programme.  

And now to our book of the week - probably one more suited to older readers.  

Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata
Recommended by Edward Buss

Life Ceremony is a modern, unusual collection of 13 short stories from the award-winning Japanese author Sayaka Murata. I discovered this book because it was given to me by a family member as I am interested in Japanese literature. 

Originally written in Japanese and later translated into English by Ginny Tapley Takamori, the content ranges widely and wildly, from a curtain’s jealous view of a young relationship to a grown man kept as a pet by two young schoolgirls. While the stories are undoubtedly distant from everyday experience, or reality for that matter, the way that Murata presents them with her very prosaic style of writing makes them seem closer and possibly real, and the oddity of the stories makes you incredibly eager to turn the page. The content in the stories is, however, not for the faint of heart, as it covers and normalises actions such as cannibalism in one story and using dead people as a resource in another.

In stories such as ‘Time of the Large Star,’ Murata creates an inverted world, with the night becoming the time of activity and sleep becoming impossible. This seemingly fairytale scenario wouldn’t be as special without the realism of the emotions that Murata places into the story, as a girl cries as she realises that she will never be able to experience sleep again. This theme of inversion continues throughout the stories as a binding force, however the stories never blend together in any way due to their complete difference in terms of plot and character. The book itself seems like a dream in its contracted, surreal plot lines and dystopian future ideas, which in a way brings the reader closer to the stories as the strange ideas of the mind are set down in an expert fashion.

Sayaka Murata

The book also covers the idea of deviance from the social norm, with differences in complex ideas such as sexuality and potential psychiatric diagnoses a common theme within the stories. These ideas aren’t always explicitly expressed within the stories however they make the book more relatable for those who may share similar characteristics, without in any way distancing it from those who don’t.

Therefore, I highly recommend this book as it takes the darkest imagination and differences of humans and portrays them in such a realistic way that it seems plausible even in the context of the unheard-of scenarios in the book.

Many thanks to Edward, and to Mr Gardner, for their contributions to today's post.