Posts Tagged ‘Canterbury’

Padel, Thematic, Cathedral


2010
01.21

There was an element of theatre in Ruth Padel’s reading of her poems. Not only did she bring alive the narrative charge of her poems but she also did different voices for the characters in her poems, usually Darwin or his wife since she was mostly reading from Darwin: A Life in Poems. The book is an unusual and ambitious project but the poems she read were not groaning under the weight of the lofty idea. They were tender, humourous, down-to-earth, and they made Darwin more human which is not easy to do with legends. Some are available here.

Disappointingly (but expectedly), the Q&A session after the reading had few questions on poetry. Darwin, spirituality and conservation vied for attention, and obviously more people are interested in these than in poetry. I think there were one or two interesting questions about whether she would ever turn (return) from science towards poetry. The unsaid words here were ‘real’, ‘normal’, something like that. I may be paraphrasing this badly but I think the attempt was to understand whether she would move away from the specific themes she’s been attached to so far, whether she would ‘free’ her poetry to go where it will.

So is themed poetry restricted in some way? Is poetry directed towards a cause glancing away from other areas of truth it could discover? On the other hand, judges on award panels seem to think that big concerns are important for poetry. Re: Judge’s comments on Philip Gross winning the TS Eliot Prize for The Water Table and Roddy Lumsden’s comments on that.

Does anyone else have a problem with this preference for themed books as opposed to miscellanies. Surely that’s an American thing, arc and concept and all? I’m happy with either, but claiming it as a strength which goes towards a prize win is odd, no?

Ditto with ‘big concerns’ – are we giving prizes for ‘big concerns’ now? Big concerns, whatever they are, are great, but surely not a reason to award a prize?

So which side of the fence are you on?

Back to Padel: some of us got to meet her the next day for an informal discussion and lunch,  a generous three hours during which the questions were more focused. We talked about some nitty-gritty stuff like craft and performance but it didn’t graduate to a very evolved discussion on poetics. I’m not sure why. The time was probably short and the group a bit diverse (playwrights, fiction-writers, poets). She clearly believes in modernist ideas of compression, avoiding abstractions and so on. I would’ve been interested to know how she responds to poetry written in a very different aesthetic. Or what she feels about Language poetry, which is more recent.

Anyway, relatedly, I’ve started my three months of poetry-and-not-much-else at the University of Kent. The room is all tidy lines, the air outside is crisp and cold, my fingers have not frozen yet. The snow has stopped but there are some meager patches of it lying around. The quiet is so big I could float in it.

I’m thrilled to have access to books we normally don’t get in India. The high point of my day was reading Don Paterson’s Nil Nil at an English pub outside the cathedral. The picture of the cathedral is a bit blurry because my hands had gone numb in the cold.

In the spirit of the season


2009
12.16

…I’ve changed back to the camels which is cheery (I think) and plan to deal only in happy stuff for a while. Wait, that might mean I have nothing to write about. But we shall take that risk.

Next month I leave for Canterbury where for three months I will be reading, writing, walking about and trying to keep my toes unfrozen. Of course, I’m very excited about all this. Most of all, about the mountains of free time to do nothing but stare at my blank screen and will poetry to come. More seriously, I’m looking forward to traveling England and attending poetry readings and performances in London.

I also seem to have developed an irrational fear of not getting enough spicy-tangy food to eat in those three months. Which would explain why I’ve been hastily eating every kind of chaat, thali, curry, tandoori and biriyani that I can lay my hands on. Maybe I fancy I’m a camel. By the time I get there, I’m going to be a blimp.

Besides eating, I’m looking for a coat and boots to fight the winter there. This means that I have to spend a lot of time trying to get inside shops. Sometimes, I manage this. But often I do not, because of sheer lack of stamina and will power. On Sunday, we drove down Commercial Street and the entire city was doing their Christmas shopping. A sea of people rustling packets with that curiously determined look that shoppers acquire — beady eyes, sweat on the upper lip, steely jaw. We drove down the street in awe. He cursed the shops, the people, the traffic. I slumped in my seat as if I was being led to the torture chamber. Predictably, we didn’t find parking, heaved a sigh of relief and quickly left to get a drink instead.

I decided to go back on a weekday morning, and am now convinced that this is the only way to do it without getting stampeded. People who have to go to offices will have to take the morning off, but what’s half a day’s pay for health, sanity — and who knows — life? Of course, if everyone does this, then Monday mornings will be as bad as weekends. So on second thoughts, strike that suggestion.

Anyway, I did some shopping that I liked. Goobe’s Book Republic on Church Street has expanded their collection and I bought two poetry books: Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf and Margaret Atwood’s Selected Poems II. Quite pleased. For the uninitiated, Goobe is a bookshop and a library so you can rent or buy, or first rent and then buy if you like the book. I think it’s totally cool.

The year end is full of ‘best of’ and Rob Mackenzie’s holding a poll over at Magma Poetry on what was the best poetry collection of 2009. Of course, most (none?) of these books are available here but I like to look at the lists so that when I buy online, it’s easier to choose what to go broke on. The usual votes for Alice Oswald and Don Paterson but another name that cropped up quite often is Orphaned Latitudes by Gerard Rudolf.

Lastly, I’m not very fond of having to choose what I liked best in a year mainly because I tend to like too many different things at the same time but here are the poetry books I bought / got in 2009 roughly in order of acquisition (not all of them were published this year):

  1. Bearings by Karthika Nair
  2. Boki by Nitoo Das
  3. Night River by Keki N. Daruwalla
  4. Nights and Days by James Merill
  5. Isla Negra by Pablo Neruda
  6. Human Dark with Sugar by Brenda O’ Shaughnessy
  7. View From An Escalator by Liesl Jobson
  8. Bantu Ghost by Lesego Rampolokeng
  9. Poems by Mongane Wally Serote
  10. The Poet Lied by Odia Ofeimun
  11. The Boiling Caracas by Odia Ofeimun
  12. Glumlazi by Pravasan Pillay
  13. Romancing the Dead by Gary Cummiskey
  14. Beowulf by Seamus Heaney
  15. Selected Poems II by Margaret Atwood