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~ Posted by Emma Hogan, January 18th 2012

There was low cloud over London today. From the Intelligent Life offices, we could see the top of the Shard—the 1,016ft building which opens in 2013—disappear into the sky. If we craned our necks to the right, we could also see Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, both muted in the grey light.

As studies have shown, particularly in regard to hospital patients, an attractive view can be good for your health. One of the key turnaround moments in 19th-century literature occurs in George Eliot's "Middlemarch" when Dorothea wakes after a tumultuous night, looks out of the window at other people going about their jobs and realises that "She was part of that involuntary palpitating life".  read more »

~ Posted by Emma Hogan, January 10th 2012  read more »

~ Posted by Tim de Lisle, December 13th 2011

It takes a lot to drag some poets into prose. Last week Alice Oswald, a poet so admired that she appeared on school syllabuses before she was 40, withdrew from the shortlist for the T.S. Eliot Prize because it is backed by a company, Aurum Funds, that “exclusively manages funds of hedge funds”. Another nominee, John Kinsella, joined her in pulling out. Oswald, a former winner of the prize, has a piece today on the Guardian op-ed page, expanding on her decision. Whatever you make of her stance—and a colleague on The Economist site has been sharply critical—there is great pleasure to be had from Oswald’s piece.

It’s often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don’t mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking. It goes lower than rhetoric, lower than conversation, lower than logic, right down to the very faint honest voice at the bottom of the skull. You can hear that voice in a letter written by the 16th-century poet Thomas Wyatt to his son: “No doubt in any thing you do, if you ask yourself or examine the thing for yourself afore you do it, you shall find, if it be evil, a repining against it. My son, for our Lord’s love, keep well that repining…”

That is the best instruction you could ever give a poet.  read more »

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• Books
• Poetry

Robert Bringhurst is a poet out of time. Last year, Cape published his “Selected Poems”, which collects work from his 40-year career. Much of it rubs against the grain of contemporary poetry. Bringhurst’s writing is direct, crystalline and more interested in the world outside than the personality inside. It also shows a preference for the past rather than the present, invoking ancient literature and myth, from the Bible to the Haida stories of his native Canada (of which he is a scholar and translator). In his poem “Deuteronomy” he assumes the voice of Moses; in “The Stonecutter’s Horses” the voice of the poem belongs to Francesco Petrarca, an Italian scholar and poet from the 14th century known as the father of humanism. “These / poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant / as elm leaves,” he writes in “These poems, she said”, channelling his critics, who have accused him of being dry and distant. But while he is never emotionally indulgent, his poems are nevertheless full of passion—for the natural world and for the voices and stories of the past.    

As well as 15 collections of poetry, Bringhurst has published 13 books of prose on subjects from moral philosophy to typography. More Intelligent Life spoke to him about his love of Greek philosophy, his preoccupation with death, and how the Bible is a misinterpreted work of literature.   

What does Greek philosophy—which you reference in your poetry—teach us about the modern world?    read more »

Since the announcement in 2005 that London would host the Olympic games, the event has been greeted with a mixture of excitement, ambivalence and dread. Given the low profile of the Cultural Olympiad, an affiliated programme that began in 2008, it is easy to feel sceptical about the lasting impact of the games, culturally and architecturally. 

So the recent launch of “Winning Words” at the Globe Academy in Southwark made for a nice surprise. Sponsored by Bloomberg, with help from Arts Council England and various other donors and groups, “Winning Words” is a new poetry venture from the Forward Arts Foundation (the folks behind the Forward prize, reviewed here). An ambitious project, it includes a permanent installation in the Olympic Park, and is designed to encourage Londoners to study and create poetry. Selected works will soon be seen on electricity pylons in the East End and also, more conventionally, online, where 150 selected poems will be available for use in schools and by youth groups.

But the more tangible, and far more exciting, aspect of the project are the poetic works that have been commissioned to be permanently plastered around the Olympic Park. Five poets—Carol Ann Duffy, the poet laureate, along with Lemn Sissay, Jo Shapcott, Caroline Bird and John Burnside, who just won the Forward prize—have all responded with poems that respond to the often rocky heritage of East London.   read more »

After 20 years, the Forward prize has a reputation to live up to. Sponsored by the London-based Forward Arts Foundation, this annual poetry competition (or “bardic booker”) has consistently gathered some of the finest writers of contemporary British poetry. Previous winners, including Thom Gunn, Don Paterson, Alice Oswald and Jackie Kay, have tended to be poets who managed that rare feat: crafting poems that are innovative, readable and startlingly good. 

This year was no exception. Winning the first-collection category, Rachel Boast’s poetry combines acute observations with a certain levity, making her first book, “Sidereal”, a delight to read. The late R.F. Langley, who won the best single poem, was possibly the most conservative choice in his category. Only three other poems were nominated for the prize, including one called “Song The Breasts Sing To The Late-in-Life Boyfriend”, by Sharon Olds, and others by Alan Jenkins and Jo Shapcott. I wished that there had been a larger selection of individual poems to choose from. It is not often that a prize is awarded for a single poem, so it is a shame the Forward didn't create a longer shortlist to better recognise the many possibilities afforded by such a compact medium.   read more »

Amid the flurry of last-minute bets for Bob Dylan (once rated by bookies at 100/1), a relatively unknown Swedish poet, Tomas Tranströmer, has won the Nobel prize for literature. “He is a poet but has never really been a full-time writer,” explained Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which decides the award. Though Mr Tranströmer has not written much lately, since suffering from a stroke in 1990 that left him partly paralysed, he is beloved in Sweden, where his name has been mentioned for the Nobel for years. One newspaper photographer has been standing outside his door on the day of the announcement for the last decade, anticipating this moment.  

Born in 1931, Mr Tranströmer began publishing poems when he was in his early 20s. He has been translated into 60 different languages since then. But his output is notably sparse—you “could fit it into a not too-large pocket-book, all of it,” Mr Englund says. Mr Tranströmer wrote poetry while working full-time, first as a psychologist and then at the Labour Market Institute in Västerås. Any fame he has enjoyed has been of the quiet, understated sort. In announcing Mr Tranströmer’s victory, the Swedish Academy has praised an oeuvre that is “characterised by economy” and that grants “fresh access to reality”. He is the first poet to win the award since Wislawa Szymborska in 1996.   read more »

Theodor Adorno famously declared in 1951 that to write poetry after Auschwitz was “barbaric”. Mindful of the limits of words, generations of poets still strive to use them to describe the impossible. 

“Poetry and the State”, an event that took place on September 20th, was haunted by this problem: how to put into words events that leave you speechless. Organised by the poetry initiative “Poet in the City”, the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation and Amnesty International, the evening aimed to show the relevance of poetry in making “a public statement with a universal reach”. The five poets who gave readings were connected, in some way or another, to humanitarian causes. They included Timothy Allen, a former aid worker, Zuzanna Olszewska, a fellow from Oxford who conducts anthropological studies with female Afghan refugees, and Carlos Reyez Manzo, Amnesty’s first poet in residence, who survived torture under Pinochet’s regime in Chile.  

This makes it a difficult event to criticise. But although there were moments of joy in the readings—for instance, the concluding lines in Mr Allen’s translation of Ho Chi Minh’s “Prison Diary” from the Vietnamese, “my poems are made of steel / and each is an act of resistance”—on the whole, the evening did not hold together. It felt as if the poets had been chosen more for the problems they wrote about rather than how well they wrote. The question of translation only seemed pertinent when Amarjit Chandan read from his poems both in Punjabi and English, creating a delightful interplay between the two languages.   read more »

St Pancras Station is a fitting place to encounter the work of Lavinia Greenlaw, a British poet and novelist. Artangel and the Manchester International Festival have commissioned Miss Greenlaw’s project “Audio Obscura”, a sound installation on the concourse adjacent to the Eurostar entrance, which opened in London on September 13th (having premiered in Manchester in July). Through individual headphones, up to 30 people can listen to a series of overlapping monologues and fragments, as if overhearing the thoughts of commuters walking by.
 
For a poet interested in fleeting moments and “the body’s memory of a stranger”, this immersive set-up is apt. Miss Greenlaw roots her poetry in the everyday, making the familiar suddenly strange. “Audio Obscura” is similarly an experience that juxtaposes artful sound with the daily hustle. As a participant, I found the effect of the first ten minutes startling. Moving about in the crowd, with the ordinary sounds of the station blocked out, I momentarily forgot that I was wearing cumbersome headphones and walking slower than everyone else, as the throngs rushed past to catch a train or meet someone. In the soundscape Miss Greenlaw has created, people seem to mutter their thoughts or observe others from afar. This world blends seamlessly with that of St Pancras, blurring seductively with the bystanders walking nearby. Like members of a Greek chorus, the inadvertent performers of the train station switch identities and take on different parts. Where before I may have wondered where my fellow commuters were headed, in “Audio Obscura” I began to wonder who could think these thoughts.
   read more »

Poetry rarely causes neck pain, however much you may dislike it. Slight physical discomfort may have marred the 200th issue launch of PN Review on September 12th, as the choice of venue—the Cartoon Museum in Bloomsbury—required the poets to read their work from a balcony above the craning audience huddled below. Yet there was much to enjoy and distract from the occasional crick.

Originally published as “Poetry Nation” in 1973, the PN Review has been championing contemporary poetry, translations and literary debate for over 40 years. Michael Schmidt, one of the co-founders, still edits the magazine, which is run in conjunction with Carcanet Press in Manchester. With their beautifully presented publications and eclectic mix of writers, both Carcanet and PN Review are staggering on in an increasingly difficult financial climate, helped by the continuing (though diminished) support of Art Council England. With international contributors and an increasingly global audience, they have certainly moved on from Carcanet’s original intention to bring together works exclusively from Oxford and Cambridge.  read more »