Muse of Fire meets Society of Poets
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 News’ from my friends of the Poetry Society. Both brought welcome promise of enjoyment
Why, then, should the uninhibited soundings-off of a long dead, larger-than-life, mid-20th century thespian have locked on more immediately to what I and many others see as issues still critical to contemporary poetry, than the very latest Poetry News and impressive show-pieces from its leading professional Society ? Burton, remember, was never himself a practising, fully-paid-up or professionally accredited poet – simply the exquisite ‘ reader ’ of others’ work.
For the schoolboy me, it was the rich, Welsh baritone of Burton’s voice which first brought poetry alive – even while Dylan Thomas’s own radio readings of Under Milk Wood were still brilliantly around. Burton, Olivier, Neville and Scofield were serving up a rich feast of Shakespearean and other poetry from the living stage – light years before and beyond the thin gruel of so much contemporary ‘performance’ poetry.
Such voices seemed the appropriate extensions of a poet’s – even a Shakespeare’s – own, delivering its intended resonances, properly nuanced, beyond the scripted page and into the empowered possession of the hearer – the ‘sounds coupling to form a memory’ of Derek Walcott; or the more startling ‘ Art is an instrument of war’ of the uncompromising Picasso…
“What do you think an artist is? ” Picasso asked. “An imbecile who has only eyes if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet? How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”
Poetry too ?
Either way, the artist’s ( here, poet’s) message has to be fully delivered to have its chance of invoking action, reaction or the nod of comprehension. Which is why Burton’s scathing comments on the inability of so many lauded poets to read or speak their own verse competently remain surprisingly apposite. Here he is on Auden, with whom he ‘read’ once at Oxford :
“His own (Auden’s) reading was the usual toneless monotony of the poet reading his own stuff. Dylan was an exception. But listen to Yeats or TS Eliot. I think that once the mould of form was smashed by a master or series of masters, Pound or Eliot perhaps in poetry … anybody can fool you. And will. And we’ll never know they’re mucking us about….”
One interesting revelation of Raphael’s review is that the young Burton, as an RAF recruit in the early days of the Second World War, found himself on a short-course at Oxford where he starred in an OUD’s performance of Measure for Measure, directed by Neville Coghill. From which time, Raphael conjectures, “ he was always haunted by a sense of what he was missing – the autonomy ( as he imagined it ) of a writer and a bookman .”
I find it relatively easy to envisage him as potential writer, as well as speaker, of poetry – and, judged by his comments on poetry and poets ( as well as fellow actors ), it seems unlikely to have been of the ‘genteel’ variety. Certainly he became progressively disenchanted with the worlds of Hollywood and celebrity film, but too late to vanquish the other harpies pursuing him.
I continue to believe – with Picasso – in the kinetic power of art, and that poetry must not be made an exception under the contemporary cultish pressures towards introspective self-revelation, social disengagement and fostered obscurity. Which is why admiration – at The Poetry Society’s impressive nourishment of new talents, for instance – is tempered by disappointment at its relative neglect of the poetries of involvement. Whatever we put on the 2013 agendas of maximum concern – economic melt-down, climate change, poverty gaps, the Syrian mayhem, the young unemployed, an ever-ageing population – it is imperative that poetry is there, in the thick of it , not only in the quiet boudoir and ‘creative-writing-school’ pavilion. The world needs it – not least the health of poetry itself.
There is some progress in poetry’s social involvements and relevancies, even though little acknowledged by its traditional establishments. Since the 1980s, ‘business’ and the work-place – in which the majority of us spend our days – have been progressively opened up to poetry’s influence, its language of relationships infiltrating what Charles Handy called “ the arid deserts of too many of our businesses .”
Dana Gioia, John Betjeman. Gavin Ewart, Wendy Cope, Peter Porter, Michael Ivens, Ted Kooser, James Autry and many others around the world participated in my anthology ‘The Poetry of Business Life’ ( Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, 1994). Gioia’s critique of the poetic significance of this development appears in an earlier blog.
www.ralphwindle.com/articles/poetry-matters
Even more vibrant has been the role of poetry in the major cross-disciplinary programmes of
arts/science creative interaction stimulated by the Darwin/Snow anniversaries, and my own and others’ work since 2000 with various groups and universities, such as the brilliant arts/science Encounters programmes at Sheffield University. Established poets such as Jo Shapcott, Ruth Padel, Jon Glover, Robert Crawford and many new writers have made major contributions to this field, in which music, theatre, ballet and visual arts are also excitingly involved.
It would be good to have the Poetry Society voice raised for the necessary cause of a more socially involved poetry-of-action, not to replace but to supplement the more introspective muse.
Time for a more robust 2013 agenda ?
Ralph Windle.