Poetry and Choices at LSE

[graham]

As so often is the case, a series of events planned months ago, before the financial crisis, seems to have suddenly become much more topical!

Amazing as it seems, when LSE asked Poet in the City to programme events as part of its first Arts Festival the hottest topic in popular economics was whether it was possible to 'nudge' consumers into more healthy or responsible choices in the supermarket aisles. Since then the world seems to have changed, and our choices along with it.

Poetry seems to be a useful and oblique way to examine the subject of choices, and perhaps offers a few counter-cultural perspectives on the new world in which we live. Ben Okri's amazing session on Sat lunchtime seemed especially relevant, as he gave a fabulous explantion of why poetry was perhaps our most important mode of communication, and mounted a passionate defence of the spiritual dimension in human lives. I think that those who attended the event felt that they had been very privileged to spend time with a very big-souled artist.

The poets who took part in the evening Poetry and Choices event at LSE touched on all sorts of different choices, from career choices to personal and political choices. It was Robert Minhinnick who, at the end of the evening, responding to a question about the financial crisis, said that it was just as though we had all awoken from a dream, and that we must now go back to the things that make up the essentials of life, what we eat, and the poetry we listen to around the fire.

(I shall leave it to Ben Gwalchmai to address the poets who read at the equally successful New Audiences event on Sun afternoon)

My question is both Ben Okri and the other poets is as follows: Can poets help to create new narratives to help us make sense of our lives? As myth-makers and storytellers, can they provide both comfort in adversity and inspiration for new beginnings?

[John Mole]

Yes they can. I think that's a large part of the point and effect of poetry, always bearing in mind what Samuel Johnson said ( and W.H.Auden was fond of quoting ): "The aim of writing is to enable readers a little better to enjoy life or a little better to endure it.' This can't be a prescriptive agenda, though. Every good poem is a 'new beginning' and every failure a green shoot wilted. It's as simple, or complex, as that. As someone in the LSE audience suggested, the poems from the past which have lasted are those which resist paraphrase, in which the line has not gone dead. They contain what Laura Riding and Robert Graves - in their 'A Survey of Modernist Poetry' - called 'the eternal difficulties that make poems immortal.' These are the poems which continue to engage, and by doing so provide consolation ( not easy comfort ) and inspiration. Who knows which poems written today will do this? I feel pretty certain, however, that they will not have been written with the conscious intention of helping us to 'make sense of our lives', or of becoming part of a programme for personal, social or political 'improvement'. They will make their own occasion, and I think we should be grateful for that.

[vivienne-rosch]

That's interesting. I wonder what Ben Okri would say to that. Ben threw up a serious challenge during the Q&A accompanying his wonderful readings at lunchtime on Saturday. This challenge to all of us, and specifically to contemporary literature, was that it lacks the spiritual aspect. Ben said something like “The spiritual is a major aspect which is missing in contemporary literature. Yet everybody senses there is something more. It is important to put this back into the picture and story of humanity.”

John, if I understand him rightly, is inclined to distrust programmatic writing, as would many today. Ben, please do explain to us and tell us more about what it is that you wish to re-introduce into contemporary literature, in a world that has lately been addicted to consumption and seeking status and celebrity, and is now haunted by banking crisis, recession, unemployment and climate change, what is it that we need and that literature can give us?

And on another topic, as both a wonderful poet and great novelist, Ben was asked to make comparisons between the two genres. Asked about the differences between them, after the slightest of hesitations, he allowed this wonderful stream of metaphors to bubble up:

Poetry is silence and prose is speech.
Poetry is hearing and prose is listening.
Poetry is seeing and prose is looking.
Poetry is meditation and prose is contemplation.
Poetry is spiritual and prose is psychic.
Poetry is timelessness and prose is time.

In each of these comparisons, the poet seems the writer more remote from the mundane physical and psychic reality in which most of us spend most of our time, whereas the story-teller is enmeshed in the physical fabric of things, the world of the senses in space and time.

Ben: is the story-teller’s role to provide meaning for this life, the poet’s to point to what you called transcendence, the “immeasurable, around us as well as a part of us”?

John, Jo, Jane, Robert: what do you believe is the poet's calling, rather than that of the novelist? And will this go towards answering the queastion of the doubting Thomas in Saturday evening's audience who just could not "get it", understand what was poetry in what he had been listening to?
Vivienne

[post-futurist1]

Some very interesting points arose on Saturday and Sunday - Saturday, the choices we make as economic agents, as social commentators in creating poetry and as social agents in finding someone who can "...tolerate living with a poet" as Robert Minhinnick put it so well. Just as some very interesting points have been raised here.

I am unsure that poets need to create comfort but, by creating poetry, create stimulus - often challenging stimulus - to make us consider our lives and the lives of everything around us. Environment, Infosphere, society - I would posit that it is the poet's place not to comfort nor to make myth by which we follow but to give us means to 'meditate' [as Ben Okri put it] for ourselves.

Our New Audiences event was focused mainly on our choices as people - and for the poets - as writers. Andre Mangeot reading about his progression as a writer in a poem only 56 words long - please, anyone, correct me if I'm wrong on the exact count. Nandita Ghose reading about her childhood and racist stereotypes that she chooses to appropriate to her own advantage in the poem 'Gollywog'. Caroline Bird's choice in 'If you couldv'e seen where I was last week' was to begin a journey that led to writing and AF Harrold's choices were numerous - choosing comedy as a means of defence, choosing drama and earnesty as a means of letting those close to him come to terms with his 'Last Will and Testament of A F Harrold' and many more.

Our Sunday New Audiences event was both fun and furiously engaging - I'm sure anyone in the audience will agree that a good time was had by all. I know that, by the end, I couldn't contain my laughter. Thank you to all our poets.

My question to the forum, like Robert Minhinnick's amidst Saturday's Poetry and Choices event is: if this is a dream, and we were all to wake up tomorrow as something entirely different - what would your job be? Would you still be writers? Poets? Crafts(wo)men? Or something entirely different?

[Jane Duran]

Can poets help to create new narratives to help us make sense of our lives? This is happening continually: one of the great appeals of poetry is the way it explores experience and feeling and arrives at an insight or revelation. Poets are always interpreting and delving into experience past or present to come to some sort of truth or resolution. But the poet can only choose the images, ideas and sensory impressions that resonate personally with him, the things that matter to him, that move or inspire or anger. Thus how poets respond to a given situation, or the form of their response, depends upon this rather intricate relationship between who they are, their own experience and limitations, and language. The actual process of writing must remain fluid, there is a sort of receptive state, I think Jo talked about ‘open-ended’ choices, so that this very dynamic interaction can bear fruit. This individuality is what gives poetry depth, enabling it to speak with greater insight about the human condition. The reader’s participation in the exploration and revelations offered by a poem is also dynamic.

Vivienne’s question about prose vs poetry: perhaps one way of approaching this is to ask why we need and read poetry. Reading a wonderful novel suggests words like ‘immersion’, ‘gripped’, ‘compelling’, ‘engrossed’, ‘moved’; the detail of a good novel, let’s say a great novel, invites you to enter its world, it lifts you out of your own world and you seem to live in it until sadly you come to the end. All that detail and profusion of character, landscape, story is also reflected in how it looks on the page. The prose more or less covers the page from margin to margin, it walks deliberately through the complexity of the narrative.

Poetry in contrast is allied to song, it has shape and rhythm, it relies heavily on sound and sound patterns. It connects the most disparate places, images and times, it is a search for truth and a distillation of emotion and much more besides. It can remain a search, unresolved. Unlike prose, poetry uses space on the page generously, it floats on the page, its meanings are also revealed through the use of space, silence and suggestion. Every comma, every ‘and’, every line break, every word matters in the poem, how the poem looks on the page and how it sounds to the ear. There is an ‘essential’ quality about it, and the insights it gives can become part of our lives and thought processes, we can certainly be moved and changed by it.

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