Given the etiquette and conventions surrounding a Poet Laureate, it was refreshing to see Carol Ann Duffy both capturing the ‘gold, silver or bronze’ mood of the recent Olympics, but also risking a tilt in the direction of some bigger, …
Among the many wonders of the world
Where is the equal of this creature, man?…Nothing seems beyond him, except death.
Death he can defy but not defeat .Seamus Heaney
‘The Burial at Thebes’ 2004
A quiet, slightly stunned …
Citing ‘La Trahison des Clercs‘ (‘The Treason of the Scholars’ – Julien Benda, 1927) George Monbiot recently raised some important questions about the need for ‘a disinterested class of intellectuals which acts as a counter to prevailing mores’ (If scholars …
Continue reading The Search for Public Intellectuals: Should Poets Apply ? »
In Poetry Matters, as you may know, we’ve been trying to spark some discussion across the poetry community about its apparent detachment from the unprecedented issues of social, political and economic degeneration all around us.
Could it be something …
Continue reading We Asked – Where Have All the Poets Gone? TLS Joins the Search. »
Monday 18 February 2013, BBC Radio Four, 10 pm was a significant date, place and time to be – especially if you have the condition of England and its poetry at heart. For the first time since it was broadcast on Channel Four in the 1980s, to deafening cries of ‘disgusting’ and ‘censor !’, its poet/author Tony Harrison was to be heard reading his poem ‘V’ on air. The text has been long available, of course, on the page, but the censorious critics had, no doubt (correctly ),supposed that keeping it off the airways was a bigger imperative than the banning of print. Perversely, they were ‘right’ – for no one who heard Harrison’s reading could fail to be deeply moved or doubt the poem’s integrity.
Continue reading Who Owns The Language ? Poet Harrison Repeats the Question »
Frederic Raphael’s review ( TLS December 2012 ) of ‘The Richard Burton Diaries’ ( editor Chris Williams, Yale University Press ) popped through my letter box at about the same time as my Winter helping of ‘Poetry Review’ and ‘Poetry …
‘There is absolutely nothing else like it! I am impressed by the scope and depth of the volume. (‘ The Poetry of Business Life’ 1994 ) I read through the table of contents with the conviction that this could be the book on the subject. It brings together all sorts of work that people don’t know or haven’t connected. The Introduction is also fine ……….At any rate Bravo ! Both business people and literary people should see it . A superb book ! … ‘
Dana Gioia, Poet, Librettist, Essayist.
Former Chairman, Federal Endowment for the Arts
USA.
‘The Poetry of Business Life’, I wrote in the preface to my 1994 anthology , is more than a title. It is an assertion and a challenge. ‘The Poetry of Love’ would have no such implication, since Love is …
Sir David Hare: ‘Mere Fact, Mere Fiction’ 2012.
“ If you set to writing plays in the postwar years, it was necessary, or at least expected, to pass through a portal of approval. In prospect, this gave a comfortable, orderly feeling to the idea of being a British dramatist. Kenneth Tynan, ….guarded the portal on one side from his position at the Observer. Harold Hobson … guarded the other side from the Sunday Times. A novice playwright had every reason to expect that a life in the theatre would involve attracting and then retaining the interest of at least one of these two men. Hobson’s name was inextricably linked with Beckett’s and with Pinter’s. Tynan’s fortunes rose with his advocacy of the work of Osborne. These were the writers they championed and whose view of the world fired them up. They were interlinked by a profound correspondence of belief.
“Today, no such correspondence exists. No living theatrical figure is associated with any particular critic ….. to work seriously in the British theatre it is no longer necessary even to know the name of the Observer’s theatre critic. ….. “
“When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concerns, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses …. The artist becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society… President JF Kennedy