Why is modern poetry difficult? Talk by Professor Geoff Ward
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- čas přidán 8. 06. 2024
- In this lecture at Madingley Hall, Professor Geoff Ward tries to get to the source of the discomfort that many readers experience in their encounters with modern poetry. He asks whether schools are to blame for instilling a fear of poetry, or whether poetry itself has taken any wrong turnings following the innovations of T S Eliot, the Surrealists, and others. In this critical but also autobiographical account, he takes us on a journey at whose end the difficulty of poetry is shown to be not so much a mountain to climb, as a pleasure to be enjoyed.
Professor Geoffrey Ward PhD FRSA has been Principal of Homerton College, University of Cambridge since 2013, prior to which he worked as Vice Principal and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. His critical books include Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (1993, 2002) and he has published several collections of his own poetry, most recently Worry Dream (2013). He writes and presents occasional broadcasts on American writers for BBC Radio 3, and is a member of the editorial board of The Cambridge Quarterly.
They can hide inside their complexity;
Simplicity to them is too messy.
illuminating and entertaining. Thank you Professor Ward
It takes great skill to express rich, complex ideas both beautifully and simply, to be lucid yet ambiguous. All good art is ambiguous, as ambiguity allows for multiple interpretations. Yeats once said (roughly) that a fine poet must think like a sage and use common speech. It would benefit poetry greatly if aspiring writers would regard the above as a touchstone or guideline. The public's general indifference to poetry is due in no small part to the fact that many poets don't follow that guideline.
A compelling and fascinating talk. I still have a copy of your first slim volume, published by one Frank Whitbourn in Horsham. He was, of course, one of those brilliant English teachers who inspired his students.
I am Brazilian poet, like the poetry of England. Learning English with Cambridge
An excellent talk! Science and poetry do need to talk to each other, although as Terry Gifford stresses in 'Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry', poetry has a responsibility to get the science right. This requires us to avoid the temptation of unquestionably accepting mavericks like Rupert Sheldrake, and being more rigorous in our scrutiny of attractive metaphors, working like scientists to test them against evidence.
Thank you, Sir.
Simply superb
Thanks lots.
Most excellent behaviour
thank you
"Poets muddy their waters to make them look deep." - Friedrich Nietzsche
...and exploit their experiences
(also Neitzsche)
How else ? I say.
Emily Dickinson patiently waits for the mud to settle and says……….look it’s shallow, it’s sham, it’s brittle like glass.
Dressed as a pontifical don, Prof Geoff disarms you with his lightness of touch while dispensing a wealth of knowledge about the infinite variety of poetry. His style, despite the formidable sheaf of notes on the lectern, is not unlike that of a fleet-footed sherpa escorting you to the sunlit uplands of Mt Helicon and Parnassus while regaling you with the lore of the flora and fauna on either side of the precarious trail. More of Prof Geoff Ward on youtube and podcasts ! He serves you a wholesome libation that makes you thirstier for the heady Hippocrene.
I am NOT a Poet, Sattar!
I am NOT an expert on anything but I have quite a strong knowledge of The Beatles.
I have a liking ( being eccentric ) of some of the lesser known British Poet Laureates.
Among my favourite poets ( again be eccentric ) are -
Thomas Shadwell ( c.1642 - 19 November, 1692 )
Colley Cibber ( 6 November, 1671 - 11 December, 1757 )
Nicholas Rowe ( 20 June, 1674 - 6 December, 1718 )
Thomas Warton ( The Younger ) ( 9 January, 1728 - 21 May, 1790 )
William McGonagall ( c.March, 1825 - 29 September, 1902 )
Alfred Austin ( 30 May, 1835 - 2 June, 1913 )
WH Auden ( 21 February, 1907 - 29 September, 1973 )
J Bronowski ( 18 January, 1908 - 22 August, 1974 )
To quote Byron ( 22 January, 1788 - 19 April, 1824 )
"I dote upon the thoroughbread look!"
That is why I feel excited and thrilled to contact a Professor!
I love the line by Philip Larkin ( 1922 - 1985 )
From 'The Sea' from 'High Windows' ( 1974 )
"And further off a white steamer stuck in the afternoon."
With Best Wishes!
Cheers - Mike.
Hallelujah, Mike. Having grazed on a lush pasture of poets, you've been holding one back. Out with it. The Muses are eager to baptise you. ' Lay your sleeping head my love,/ human on my faithless arm,/ time and fevers burn away/, individual beauty from/ thoughtful children...' WH Auden
Thanks for the reply, Sattar!
"But let me just say before I go,
I think it is the most lovely country I know.
Clearer than Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on
The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton.
Coal mines, slag heaps, pieces of machinery,
They were and are my ideal scenery."
From 'Letter to Lord Byron'
WH Auden ( 1907 - 1973 )
Although Auden was born in York, I think The Black Country was in its own way as rooted in belonging for Auden as The Lake District for William Wordsworth ( 1770 - 1850 ) or Swansea for Dylan Thomas ( 1914 - 1953 ).
Cheers - Mike.
Professor Geoff says he doesn't like the sardonic wit of Alexander Pope ( 1688 - 1744 ) but I adore Pope's satirical put down of Colley Cibber ( 1671 - 1757 ) in Pope's mock epic 'The Dunciad' in which Pope proclaimed Cibber as 'King of the Dunces', following a back stage spat between the two of them over a crocodile.
"In merry old England it was once was the rule,
The King had his poet and also his fool,
But now were so frugal I have you to know it
That Cibber can serve both for fool and for poet!"
That is what happens when someone messes with genius!
Cibber joined in the mockery himself, he adopted the pseudonym 'Francis Fairplay' and called himself a comedian rather than a poet and in his 'An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber' admitted his laureate poetry is so bad that people should drop their trousers in the street to give it the respect that it deserves.
"While sits and smarts and smarts and sits,
Where hissings not uncivil,
Well send thy parts to thy deserts,
And send it to the devil!"
He was actually no worse a British Poet Laureate than the 4 previous laureates.
Personally, I do not consider Modern Poetry difficult. It is just the angle we look at it. I believe that, firstly, we should read it when we are young; secondly when we are in our middle age and thirdly when we are old or on death bed. Just like the novels of Leo Tolstoy. Every time, our point of view of Modern Poetry will be different (I would say more refined).
That applys to everything.
What is meant by difficult? What is difficult to me is the need for a certain type of bio in order to be considered a serious poet.
AMEN!
agreed.
Right there with you other fine gentlemen and gentlelasses.
'A certain type of bio'?
interesting
Did the professor answer the question? Did he attempt to answer the question?
The professor did not even make an attempt. This must be Oxbridge clickbait?
Of no consequence, even to poetry.
Complexity
We often see
As pretense to profundity
Simplicity
Implicitly
As precourse to fecundity
I hope you don’t mind me sharing the following poem, one of my all time favorite meta poetic poems by a poet named “Howard Dull” titled “Suibhne Gheilt” that I recently chanced upon. When I read it, I became speechless. And most of my poetry friends consider this as one of their all time favorites.
It was published in a 1970s anthology titled “ Open Poetry” and proves that once Poetry hits you in your heart, you could be the worst nefarious scoundrel with kings at your bidding and Empires at your command but you will be transformed and never again return to your former Self.
~~
Suibhne Gheilt
1
He has haunted me now for over a year
that madman Suibhne Gheilt
who in the middle of a battle
looked up and saw something
that made him leap up and fly
over swords and trees
- a poet gifted above all others -
11
How could a proud loud mouth
who yelled KILL KILL KILL
as he plowed done the enemy
- heads rolling off of his sword -
be so lifted up
( or fly up
as those below saw it
- wings beating)
be so suddenly gifted
with poetry
and nest so high
in Ireland’s tall trees?
Is there a point
where all paths cross?
And why am I so drawn to him
that all my questions
seem shot in his direction?
“And they ran into the woods
and threw their lances
and shot their arrows
up through the branches”
What parallels could I ever hope to find -
my refusal to fight
( weaseling out on psychiatric grounds)?
my leaving my country behind?
my poetry?
“and my wife wept
on the path below. . .
Oh memory is sweet
but sweeter is the sorrel
in the pool in the path below”
I fly down every night
to eat
111
Sweeney like the rest of us would have been better off if he had never anything to do with women.
But the point of it lies hidden
in a pool of milk
in a pile of shit
for you to see
when a milkmaid smiles
Sweeney like the rest of us flies down
and when she pours the milk
into the hole her heel made in the cowdung
Sweeney like the rest of us kneels down and drinks
and dies on the horn the cowherd hid in it.
So before you have anything to do with women
remember Sweeney the bird of Ireland
lying on his back
in the middle of that path
in the moonlight.
1V
And on my way home
this morning
( my wife
waiting)
my shadow
racing up the path ahead of me
I saw something
( a black stone?)
thrown
at the back of its head
ducked
and spun around
so fast
I almost fell down
- it was a bird
flying up into a tree
V
No good could come out of this war
out of what burns in the heart of our highly disciplined
John Q. Killer as a whole village bursts into one flame -
the villagers streaming like tears
towards the forest
cover his helicopter’s blades
blow the leaves off and
and the flame towards. . .
as we sit in front of our bubbles watching our president
( whose bubbletalk no one can escape and he is a little bit
mad -calling the reporters in for an interview while he’s
sitting on the bubble having
a bubble movement) and first
lady climb into their big bubble bed an Lucy, born of
their own bubbles, crawls in between -
“ Mah daddy has so many
troubles
turning the world into a bubble
and sick of crossfire -
the cries of the women and
children flying over his head -
he stumbled down to the
riverbank and found,
the wreckage twisted around the tree
behind, his skull. . .
Noises, there are noises,
noises that can of themselves drive
a man mad -NOISES!
But last night the Stockhausen penetrated from the four
sides of the auditorium, stripping each layer of feeling
and thought until all that was left was something the size
of a nut - so tiny, so hard, so impenetrable it was alone
in the middle of an infinite space. . .
-Howard Dull
~~
ps: Howard Dull was such an obscure poet that he never published a book and ( to my knowledge) never published another poem. But OMG, this was so brilliant that in my opinion it should be read and studied at the college level.
All love in isolation from Miami Beach, Florida,
Al
I would love this poem if it weren’t filled with very thoughtful excrement.
I would love this poem if it weren’t filled with very thoughtful mundane images. 2:46
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15.00
Enjoyed your poems. And your unique word choices enhanced the poems emotional impact and kept me engaged throughout.
I’m a poet specializing in Japanese forms: haiku, tanka, haibun, kyoka, senryu. I hope you don’t mind me sharing a tanka and my haiku, a tribute poem to Bashō’s frog with commentary by the late AHA founder and poet Jane Reichhold who considered my Basho haiku among her top 10 haiku of all time. What an honor.
Here’s the Bashō poem and commentary:
Bashō’s frog
four hundred years
of ripples
At first the idea of picking only 10 of my favorite haiku seemed a rather daunting task. How could I review all the haiku I have read in my life and decide that there were only 10 that were outstanding? Then realized I was already getting a steady stream of excellent haiku day by day through the AHA
forum.
The puns and write-offs based on Basho's most famous haiku are so
numerous I would have said that nothing new could be said with this
method, but here Al Fogel proved me wrong. Perhaps part of my delight in this haiku lies in the fact that I agree with him. Here he is saying one thing
about realism-ripples are on a pond after a frog jumps in, but because it refers back to Basho and his famous haiku, he is also saying something about the haiku and authors who have followed him. We, and our work, are just ripples while Basho holds the honor of inventing the idea of the
sound of a frog leaping is the sound of water
As haiku spreads around the world, making ripples in more and larger ponds, its ripples are wider-including us all. But his last word reminds us all that we are ripples and our lives ephemeral. It will be the frogs that will remain.
~~
And my tanka:
returning home
from a Jackson Pollock
exhibition
I smear my face with paint
and morph into art
~~
-All love in isolation
from Miami Beach,
Florida,
Al
When modern poetry is difficult (and it very often is) it is because it has moved out of the realms of the countryside bard and migrated to the halls of the university. When one requires a degree or a PhD to comprehend a poem, it becomes a thesis and not a poem. Poetry no longer lives in the public sphere. In our colleges and universities, it is still very much alive - it subsists in small and stuffy rooms over-occupied by academics smugly giggling over brandies at the cleverness of each others’ verse. In short - it is not dead but rather zombified and very much alive in a largely inaccessible limbo.
Perfectly said! Alas!
@@garymelnyk7910 I wish it were not so! I really do!
You don't need a degree. Modern poetry is difficult to comprehend because the problem of comprehension is at its forefront. Crane never graduated high school yet is very difficult to understand whereas Eliot spent many years at Harvard and Oxford and wrote a PhD on F. H. Bradly and is also very difficult to understand. Not to mention that Yeats isn't any easier than Whitman or Homer (if you'd like to compare it to the "countryside bard").
@@eskybakzu712 I think you did not quite get what I was trying say. Poetry need not be understood in order to be comprehended. It is the miscomprehension that bothers me. Misunderstanding something is fine. But the tradition of poetry comprehension has been pulled out of general society, like an unwanted thorn. It has been placed under a microscope and is now analyzed to death by the few, and written about in textbooks that are so deeply analytical that it loses its original intention: something in which everyone partook, from the illiterate twit at the pub, to the brainy pedagogue on campus.
...small and stuffy rooms... academics smugly giggling over brandies... Where, exactly, did you go to school? It sounds like a dreadful experience (as well as a dreadful school) and I am sorry that you had to endure such things as part of your poetic education. I hope that it was good brandy, at least!
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In case you can't sleep.
first
gatekeepers need to have their keys stolen.. modern poetry is not difficult, the issues aren’t difficult.. this lecture is nonsense… horribly disparaging snide remarks
I think you mean why does modern poetry suck
Expert meandering , self medicate w fact, unresolvable strangeness
Bad start
Poor pronunciation of the German interpolations; could do better!
Charles Bukowski was the greatest poet and short story writer of all time. And anyone who leaves him out of the great modern poets or shirt story writers are either jealous or ignorant.
For instance:
“Peace”
I thought the dove
was the bird of
peace
but here they were shooting them out
of the brush
and climbing up the sides of mountains
and banging them down;
and everywhere the doves went
there were the
hunters
blasting and beaming and blasting,
and one man who didn’t
in the slightest
resemble a dove
was shot in the shoulder;
and there were many complaints
that the doves
were smaller and scarcer
than last year,
but the way they fell
through the air
when you stung the
life
out of them
was the same;
and I was there too
but I couldn’t shoot anything
with a paintbrush;
and a couple of them
came over to my canvas
and stood and stood and stood
until I finally said,
for God’s sake
go look at Picasso and Rembrandt,
go look at Klee and Gauguin,
listen to a symphony by Mahler,
and if you get anything
out of that
come back
and stare at my canvas!
what the hell’s wrong with
him? the one guy
said.
he’s nuts. they’re all nuts,
the other guy said. anyhow,
I got my 10 doves.
me too, his buddy said, let’s
go home: we can have them
in the frying pan
by 2:30.
-Charles Bukowski
The only valid reason to consider Bukowski as the greatest poet and short story writer of all time is to have only read Bukowski and absolutely no one else.
Even Bukowski was not foolish enough to think himself as good, never mind better, than Eliot, Yeats, Stevens. Comparing him to such poets only diminishes his work as no one could seriously advocate such a stance
@@christopherreynolds4446 Alot of the old poets have the problem of not stringing all sentences to build up a scene. Most of the old poets usually have distinct lines. It feels written line by line in mind instead of the whole poem in mind. Thats why people like Bukowski the "peace" poem for example is a perfect example of what Im saying.
Bukowski?
Vile alcoholic drivel IMO.
Sophorific.
Sopomoric?
😴😴😴😴😴
Awweh, somebody needs an Adderall to focus on complex ideas, how cute 😚
Poetry on poetry taught by a professor of poetry disappearing up its own arse.
Modern poetry is difficult because it is a symptom of a confused and degenerate culture.
Hard to listen to, it's trash besides the household names
About what I expected: self congratulatory rambling nonsense.
Where’s Bukowski? The greatest American poet and short story writer of all time. For starters via poetry collection.
“ the days run away like wild horses over the hills” ( at least 10 immortal poems from this collection)
~
Short story collection:
“ erection, ejaculation, exhibitions, and general tales of ordinary madness”
Here are immortal stories from this collection:
“ the blanket”
“ the most beautiful women in town”
“ life and death in the charity ward”
“ Animal Crackers in my Soup”
“ The birth life and death of an underground newspaper”
-Al Fogel