A Year in Poetry September 2017 - July 2018

We began the season as a group of nine and now there are eight of us; we are poorer for the loss of Patsy Hudson, who died on 31 May 2018. We loved Patsy for her sense of humour, her off-the-wall stories and her commanding reading voice. She was stoical, fun loving, unpredictable and a great companion. I have her photo on my desk as I type and she is looking at me now with a mischievous smile. I wish I had known her in her prime; but I’ll settle for the 6 years and be grateful that she chose to be one of our founding members in January 2012.

            In September we played host to Equality - something to get really passionate about. We chose poems that engaged strongly with some of the biggest struggles the world has seen: with race, class and gender. We also read poems that took a step back and asked questions about what the term means and how far it is achievable. Damastes (also known as Procrustes Speaks) by Zbigniew Herbert, The Saint-Denis Basilica by Frances Combes and Liberty, Equality, Fraternity by Wilfred Scawen Blunt provided a fitting introduction; all were sceptical about the meaning and application of the word in the past and present. The Two of Us by Simon Armitage and Breaking the Chain by Tony Harrison provided some clever and perceptive insights into social class divisions in Britain. Strange Fruit by Abel Meeropol and Equality by Maya Angelou took us to the despair and hope of the struggle for racial equality in the United States. We ended the evening with Adrienne Rich’s Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev which pays homage to the bravery and sisterhood of eight Russian women climbers who perished on Mount Lenin in 1974.

            In October, The Merseysound gave us a splendid evening of wit, urban romance, wordplay and wonderfully astute insights into life in Liverpool and the fan base beyond. Some personal memories were shared along with one or two confessions which added to the hilarity and nostalgia of the evening. We quoted widely, read favourite lines and explored the biographies of Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten. We had the complete collection to choose from and could have made more evenings out of it, but this is what we chose:

Roger McGough: You and I, There’s Something Sad, Come Close and Sleep Now,

Adrian Henri: Tonight at Noon, Song for a Beautiful Girl Petrol Pump Attendant on the Motorway, Country Song

Brian Patten: Where are you now, Batman?, Little Johnny’s Confession.

Thank you, Merseysound poets – we love your version of our youth.

            Fire was our November theme, producing a variety of interpretations. Celia Congreve’s Traditional Firewood Poem was a rich source of information about how different types of wood burn in domestic fires, the kind of knowledge we don’t usually have today. John Dryden’s The Fire of London gave an edge-of-the-seat account of how the flames engulfed London’s poorest streets in 1666. We followed this with two poems about the sun’s powerful fires; both were responses to Pieter Brueghel’s painting The Fall of Icarus (1560s) which is in the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels: Musee des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden and December, written a couple of decades later by William Carlos Williams. Autumn Fires by Robert Louis Stevenson was a perfectly composed elegy to the glories of the season in which autumn bonfires play a part. Did I turn off my tongs? by Pam Ayres introduced a change of mood with her down to earth and very funny account of forgetting and worrying and how both can rule our lives. Ice and Fire (Edmund Spencer) used metaphor to speak of passionate love and icy indifference and Derek Walcott’s A City's Death By Fire was both metaphor and possibly memory of conflagration on his island of St Lucia. Fire and Ice by Robert Frost, Making Fire by Joseph Marinus, The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon all testified to the power of fire as an image for human affairs, passionate feeling and the desolation of world war.

            We had an entertaining evening listening to ballads at our Christmas celebration in December. We began with a small memorable piece that expresses what country music (ballads) means to people, very simple and therefore something everyone could identify with. In An Older England, Felix Dennis writes about those classic myth-making moments in English writing that we return to when we want to be reminded of who we are (even though we know they are fictions). There were old favourites too, classics like Sir Patrick Spens, Scarborough Fair and Canadee-i-o. We had two dialect ballads, The Legend of the Lambton Worm and Oh Dear Me/The Jute Mill Song. We closed the evening with the anonymous The Farmer’s Boy, Kipling’s A Smuggler’s Song and a melancholy return to Pete Seeger’s Where have all the Flowers gone? We must record here too, an excellent poem read by Lynn, written when she was a young woman living in Canada.

            January usually suggests something to do with weather so we went with the season and chose The Elements. Half the group chose poems about the physical elements of wind, rain and so on: Wild Iron by Allen Curnow, Water by Jonathan Kingsman, Weathers by Thomas Hardy, and Storm Warnings by Adrienne Rich. We noticed a gradual shift from recording the physical sensations of climate to using weather as a metaphor for the mind and emotions. The rest of us chose poems about elements in the Periodic Table: Oxygen by Roger McGough, Gold by Thomas Hood, Power by Adrienne Rich. These took us to breathing, greed, history and feminism. We ended in good heart, listening to Tom Lehrer accompanying himself on the piano singing Elements at high speed.

            We sped through the snow and cold of February and March with Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, long and lively enough to take up two evenings. This poem was a great find as no one had read it. Even if you owned The Complete Works you would probably have missed it lying neglected in the back of the edition. It was a great pleasure to read aloud and finding out about its historical context, its explorations of themes and styles that Shakespeare returned to many times in the later plays, was a fascinating way to spend two evenings. It addresses both women’s and men’s emotions, it celebrates passionate love but also acknowledges the pain and complications inherent in the dark side of desire.

            In April we listened to the sound of rivers through a clutch of poems that talked about the power and meaning of rivers in the human imagination, the nature of rivers and the wild life they support. We read: an extract from Alice Oswald’s Dart (voices and mythology), Wordsworth’s Upon Westminster Bridge (national icon, magisterial), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Looking-glass River (underwater world alive with movement, sound and sights), Christina Rossetti’s Spring Quiet (longing for riverside peace), Jerome Kern’s Ol’ Man River (sunt lacrimae rerum), John Betjeman’s Henley-on-Thames (messing about in boats), Langston Hughes’ The Negro Speaks of Rivers (rivers as a metaphor for depth of experience), Tennyson’s The Brook (rhythm, the senses, the endurance of nature), Charlotte Bronte’s Speak of the North (the power in the spirit of landscape), and Vernon Scannell’s A Day on the River (nature in every sense expressed through language).

            Exciting times in May when we spent the evening reading William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. We watched a couple of short films, courtesy of The British Library (see Discovering Literature) to set the scene. The first one explored the social, economic and political circumstances of life in London in the late eighteenth century – a thrilling, terrifying place and Blake’s response to it is vivid and caustic, his empathy for the poor, especially children, make his poems very powerful and full of echoes of our own times. Later we watched a film showing how he worked as an engraver and print maker. All this and powerful emotions expressed with deceptive simplicity created some lasting impressions of the man who wrote Jerusalem.

            In June we chose a selection of poems by Alice Oswald. She is probably the most challenging poet we have read and for some of us her allusiveness, language and emotional coolness meant she failed to ignite a true spark. Others appreciated her unique style and vision, her attempt to find new ways of responding to being alive - from the cosmos to the humble cricket. We read Various Portents, Owl, Lovesong for Three Children, Two Voices, Shadows, an extract from DART, Another Westminster Bridge, and Daisy and Primrose. These certainly vary in difficulty from the highly oblique to the funny and sharply observant.

            Our summer party evening in July was enlivened by some fun, our theme being: Rhymes, Parodies, Short Verses, Witticisms and their origins. Fascinating Aida’s Cheap Flights went down a storm. There’s no one as Irish as Barack Obama by Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys took us back to those heady days of 2009 (and our present woes). A Was an Apple Pie (anon), A Policeman’s Lot by Wendy Cope, My Love has got a red, red nose by Peter A Booker, Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, by Roald Dahl, But Don’t Kiss Me by Pam Ayres and Oh, Hollow! Hollow! Hollow! from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience all provided the right amount of escapism for the rest of the evening.

Patsy’s absence was felt.