BHM SPS: poem of the week

To celebrate Black History Month, this week's posts feature writers engaged with this year's theme, 'reclaiming narratives'.  Today, Alex Frydas introduces poet Lee Mokobe.

Lee Mokobe's slam poem, What It's Like to Be Transgender, offers a touching exploration of the experience of growing up transgender and the struggle to embrace one's identity, particularly within the confines of a deeply religious community, like the one Lee was raised in South Africa.

Poems of the Week

In honour of yesterday - Blue Monday, allegedly the most depressing day of the year - our first post of 2024 celebrates (if that is the right word) the morose, misanthropic, melancholic and often downright downbeat Philip Larkin.  

Philip Larkin (photo: Rogers/RBO)

4C have been studying Larkin's poetry, and capturing his bleak vision and disenchanted voice beautifully in their own writing. Many thanks to Mr Harris for curating their contributions.  

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  

Poetry Friday ...

As well as reviews, articles and recommendations, the Book Blog also features occasional creative writing posts. Today's is a poem written by Mr Harris, which was partly inspired by Philip Larkin's poem 'Going, Going' (you can hear a recording of Larkin reading this poem here) and particularly by Walt Whitman's 'I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing' - which you can read here.  

'As we wait on a packed train home'

As we wait on a packed train back home,
Trying to suffocate the noise of boys blaring
That rough racket from their phones, I stare
Out at the hedgerows that tumble past my window.

Late on a May Bank Holiday, white freckles
Of blossom, like a recent memory, soon
Blurred and behind us, to wilt in the June sun.
My eyes ache to focus on something so fickle,

So I turn to the fields beyond, shifting sands of green

And yellow, then clumps of semi-detached houses,
Rushing through a station where scattered crowds
Clutch at the last light from the sinking summer’s eve.

We burst through them onto pastures new, no high
Boundaries to break my eyeline and in the distance
Stood a farmhouse, cool and slow, indifferent
To the oak that had rooted in the living room and climbed

Up through the ceiling, splintering floorboards as it forced
Its way into the bedroom, where broad branches battered
At the sky and finally, upon breaking through, unanswered
In its stone tomb, flowering in defiant, lusty green. Time unlost.

I turn to you still frowning at my side, straw-haired and sun-kissed,
And smile. You reach over and hold my hand, as you always do,
And we sit in our own silence. In that way we whistle through
The fields and years together. The noise around us unmissed.

Many thanks to Mr Harris for sharing his poem: if you'd like to read more poetry on the blog, you can find Mr Anthony's poem 'The Spin' here.  We're always happy to publish creative work - just send it to any member of the English department. And if you're interested in getting more involved in creative writing at SPS, there are plenty of opportunities: Mr Harris runs the SPS creative writing society, which kicks off with its first meeting on Tuesday 21st September, at 12:40 in E7, and you can contact Mr Gardner (mtg@stpaulsschool.org.uk) if you'd like to contribute to our creative and critical writing magazines, or become part of the editorial team.  So get involved, and share your writing with a wider audience - have fun!  

Andrew Marvell at 400

It's 400 years since the birth of poet, satirist, politician (and spy?) Andrew Marvell: in today's post, Hari Collins reflects on the writer's work.  

T.S. Eliot wrote that Andrew Marvell’s most characteristic quality was ‘wit’, which Eliot defined as ‘a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace’. Like most of Eliot’s judgements, this is stimulating but basically wrong. For there is something more important beneath the tough reasonableness – a universal disgust, an horror of the world and all the chaos, violence and disorder it contains. This disgust is always expressed in polite terms, which leads to a strange experience of dissonance in the reading of Marvell's poetry, akin to talking to a person who is very obviously highly repressed. Like many such people, Marvell flees into a world of perfect art, of Platonic love, elegant gardens and music, which does not contain the upsets of ordinary life – and again like many such people he finds the order and remoteness of this world as unsatisfying as the real one. Thus in the end, Marvell’s disgust becomes absolutely all-consuming, and no refuge seems possible. Marvell gives us a subtle vision of hell; beneath the reasonable Metaphysical poet is a melodramatist.

How To Grow Your Own Poem

Some of you may have seen in the news or on Twitter the increasing prominence of the inspirational teacher and poetry guru Kate Clanchy.  Her students have been especially active during lockdown, publishing moving and inspiring works about life during the pandemic.  Follow her on Twitter and you will get a daily offering of one of her students' poems, some of whom have gone on to win national awards.

Check out her Twitter feed here: https://twitter.com/KateClanchy1

She has published a number of books, but her most recent, How to Grow Your Own Poem promises to be both inspirational and to offer you a chance to develop your creative skills at the same time.  The poems in the book are designed to help provoke a rich response in you, the reader, and there are exercises to help you write something of your own.  Why not try it out over the coming weeks?  Please do share your creative efforts with your teachers and remember that the school's creative magazines Areo and Pandaemonium (run by Mr Gardner) are always looking for submissions.

If you're someone who prefers criticism to creativity, perhaps check out Stephen Fry's useful and accessible book, The Ode Less Travelled as an alternative.  You'll learn a lot about literary techniques as well as learning about different ways of constructing your own verse.

Wordsworth 250

Wordsworth's birthday celebrations have been cancelled, but don't worry!

If you are looking for something to do this weekend, why not take some time to visit the online celebration of it being 250 years since William Wordsworth was born?

http://www.wordsworth250.com/index.html

Celebrations have been disrupted for obvious reasons, and so the Wordsworth Project has gone online.  It started as something where the Wordsworth family could share recordings of different generations reading poems that spoke particularly to them, but it has since expanded to become "a permanent and living archive for anyone wanting to explore Wordsworth's poetry or submit their own personal reading."

You'll find readings of many of Wordsworth's most famous poems, and this might be an ideal way into his work if you aren't familiar with it.  Equally, if you are a Wordsworth aficionado, hearing someone else read is always a fascinating insight into how they interpret a particular poem.

There are also instructions on how to submit your own recording if you are so minded!

This might also be the perfect time to read Jonathan Bate's new work Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World.

Poem of the Week

Poem of the Week: 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'


This week we don't have a Book of the Week, but a Poem of the Week, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's masterpiece 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'.

It is being showcased as part of a Big Read organised by Philip Hoare, who was previously responsible for the Moby Dick Big Read and the author of the wonderful non-fiction study of whales Leviathan.

The Ancient Mariner Big Read is available here: https://www.ancientmarinerbigread.com

Today marks day 11 of the Big Read.  It has taken three years to organise, although the lockdown timing of it might make you think that it was something conceived of more recently, perhaps in the style of the ill-fated 'Imagine' tribute by Gal Godot.  Thankfully, this has been more thoroughly thought-through, and it is well worth your time.  Jeremy Irons began it, and it has contributors as diverse as Iggy Pop, Hilary Mantel, Tilda Swinton and the winner of the Foyle young poets award 2020.

Each reading is accompanied by contemporary artwork.  More details are available in Philip Hoare's article for the Guardian.

If you are minded to, you should certainly check out Leviathan itself, and there's always Moby Dick to return to, or to read for the first time, if you are ever in need of being in the company of greatness.

Interview: Kate Tempest

Teddy Ackery

I decided for my extended project to write about the poet/writer/rapper Kate Tempest, whose work I have been deeply interested in for the past couple of years. I e-mailed her management with several questions for Kate, and to my amazement she actually replied. I felt these answers should be shared as they are thought-provoking, and provide a deeper insight into her work. I highly recommend checking out any of her music or poetry if you are interested by this subject matter.

Why do you feel ancient mythology needs to be re-explored, such as in your work Brand New Ancients? 

For me, the old stories are helpful because they encourage us to situate ourselves more fully in the present. They remind us of the timelessness of the human experience. I find great comfort in remembering that we all stand on a line that goes way back to the beginning.

But I don't think they need to be re-explored. They don't need anything. To be honest with you, I just loved to read the old stories as a child and as a teenager, and when I started writing my own, they were there in the background. My internal landscape was populated with people I knew and loved from where I grew up and also the characters from the old stories that I used to read all the time. And that's why my earlier work especially is populated with so many references to mythology and South East London.

Can Rap Be Considered Poetry?

Rob Norris

Rap has always operated in an undefinable grey area, half in poetry, half in music. Its roots can be traced back to Africa, centuries before hip-hop existed, when the griots of West Africa would deliver stories rhythmically over a simple instrumental compromised of traditional drums and sparse instrumentation. Rap has since evolved, incorporating jazz and other genres before modern hip hop was born.

Here is the first argument as to why rap can never be poetry. Since its conception, rap has always been paired with the musical backing. Had the music been added later, then there is an argument to be made that rap is just a natural evolution of pure poetry. However, since there has been a clear separation from the beginning, there remains a distance between the art forms. A rapper cannot write a song and remove the music and call it poetry, in the same way a poet cannot add music to a poem and call it rap.

Reading Queer: The Spin

The Spin 
Mr Anthony

Poem of the Day

Keats, 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'

John Keats wrote the following poem after an evening devouring George Chapman's translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Keats develops the idea of the reader as voyager or astrologer, discovering new worlds through his encounter with the literature of the past. The importance and immediacy of a personal experience is stressed - the speaker of the poem 'had [...] been told' about Homer, but the first hand experience of his work is revelatory.

Much have I travel'd in the realms of Gold,
And many goodly States and Kingdoms seen;
Round many western Islands have I been,
Which Bards in fealty to Apollo hold;
But of one wide expanse had I been told,
That deep-brow'd Homer rul'd as his demesne;
Yet could I never judge what men could mean,
Till I heard CHAPMAN speak out loud and bold.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout CORTEZ, when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific, — and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise,—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

This month marks the 200th anniversary of the poem's publication in December 1816, and 2016 is also the quartercentenary of the publication of Chapman's full translation of Homer, the first to appear in English, in 1616.

Paterson

Recommended by Miss McLaren

If the triumph of Donald Trump has dented your faith in America, Jim Jarmusch’s latest film, Paterson, might give you hope. The picture it paints of the USA is the antithesis of Trump’s: sensitivity and warm-hearted kindness against bullying petulance; diversity and tolerance against bigotry; integrity and honesty against swaggering untruths. If Trump is about building walls and closing minds, Paterson is about keeping them open.

National Poetry Day

Yes, today is John Colet Day. But it's also National Poetry Day -

- and this year is the 21st anniversary of the UK's annual celebration of poetry, and all things poetical.

The day is a chance to break with the tyranny of prose for 24 hours by sharing poetry in every conceivable way. Every year has a different theme: this year's theme is light.

You can follow events on Twitter, via the hashtags #nationalpoetryday and #thinkofapoem. The most creative of the day's tweets will be added to the Blackpool Illuminations.

Poems on the Underground will be broadcasting live at Covent Garden and Oval tube stations throughout the day, and the BBC will be launching 'Contains Strong Language', a season dedicated to the disruptive power of poetry: for more details, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/27wq69x1zsvNcPbcJmFrJfF/about-the-season