ALAN BENNETT: THE TIME I SAW T.S. ELIOT ON A TRAIN PLATFORM

From Keeping On Keeping On, by Alan Bennett

The Legendary Playwright On His Brush With The Great Poet

T.S. Eliot I only saw once, some time in 1964. It was on the old Central Station in Leeds, long since demolished, which was the terminus for the London trains. I was with Timothy Binyon, with whom I had been at college and who in 1964 was a lecturer in Russian at Leeds University and was also teaching me to drive. In the early 1960s there had been a long overdue attempt to reactivate the slot machines which all through the war years and after had stood empty and disconsolate on railway platforms, a sad reminder of what life had been like before the war. Now briefly there was chocolate in the machines again and cigarettes too; it had taken 20 years but austerity was seemingly at an end. One beneficiary of this development was a rudimentary printing machine to be found on most mainline stations. Painted pillarbox red it was a square console on legs with a dial on the top and a pointer. Using this pointer, for sixpence or a shilling one could spell out one’s name and address which would then be printed onto a strip of aluminium which could be attached to one’s suitcase, kitbag or whatever. Astonished to find such a machine actually working after decades of disuse, Binyon and I were printing out our names watched by a friendly middle-aged woman who was equally fascinated.
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It was at this point the train came in and after most of the passengers had cleared there came a small procession headed by the friendly lady, whom I now recognized as Mrs. Fletcher, a customer at my father’s butcher’s shop, followed by her daughter Valerie pushing a wheelchair with, under a pile of rugs, her husband T.S. Eliot; all accompanied by a flotilla of porters. It was only when this cavalcade had passed that the person we were waiting for made her appearance—namely the current editor of the London Review of Books, Mary-Kay Wilmers, who at that time worked for Faber and Faber and whose titular boss Eliot had been.
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T.S. Eliot died early the following year. Timothy Binyon, having produced a definitive biography of Pushkin, died in 2004 and now Valerie Eliot has died. I only met her a couple of times, though was persuaded to attend her funeral if only because, through her family coming to our shop, I had known her longest—if in some respects least. What Valerie Eliot did do, though, was to send me the notes her husband had made on the inside of his program after their visit to Beyond the Fringe:

An amazingly vigorous quartet of young men: their show well produced and fast moving, a mixture of brilliance, juvenility and bad taste. Brilliance illustrated by a speech by Macmillan (Cook), a sermon (Bennett) and an interview with an African politician (Miller, who otherwise reminded us of Auden). Juvenility by anti-nuclear-bomb scene, anti-capital-punishment scene and the absence of any satire at the expense of the Labour Party. Bad taste by armpits and Lady Astor speech (?). Still, it is pleasant to see this type of entertainment so successful.

A Dead Rose

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

O Rose! who dares to name thee?

No longer roseate now, nor soft, nor sweet;

But pale, and hard, and dry, as stubble-wheat,—

Kept seven years in a drawer—thy titles shame thee.
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The breeze that used to blow thee

Between the hedgerow thorns, and take away

An odour up the lane to last all day,—

If breathing now,—unsweetened would forego thee.
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The sun that used to smite thee,

And mix his glory in thy gorgeous urn,

Till beam appeared to bloom, and flower to burn,—

If shining now,—with not a hue would light thee.
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The dew that used to wet thee,

And, white first, grow incarnadined, because

It lay upon thee where the crimson was,—

If dropping now,—would darken where it met thee.
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The fly that lit upon thee,

To stretch the tendrils of its tiny feet,

Along thy leaf’s pure edges, after heat,—

If lighting now,—would coldly overrun thee.
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The bee that once did suck thee,

And build thy perfumed ambers up his hive,

And swoon in thee for joy, till scarce alive,—

If passing now,—would blindly overlook thee.
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The heart doth recognise thee,

Alone, alone! The heart doth smell thee sweet,

Doth view thee fair, doth judge thee most complete,—

Though seeing now those changes that disguise thee.
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Yes, and the heart doth owe thee

More love, dead rose! than to such roses bold

As Julia wears at dances, smiling cold!—

Lie still upon this heart—which breaks below thee!
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On January 25 we will celebrate the use of the rose as a poetic symbol or metaphor. Please bring your own illustration of this for reading and discussion and, if you wish, post it first on the blog via the CONTACT US page, or email it to me directly.

“Not a heartbeat, but a moan”: Nicole Sealey

A Conversation with Amy Gall

One might not expect a collection of poetry with subject matter as diffuse as a lynching and the board game Clue to hang together. But Nicole Sealey’s second book, Ordinary Beast, manages to perfectly blend the heartbreaking and the hilarious — often in a single stanza. A timely and haunting meditation on love, gender, race, and the body, Ordinary Beast is already receiving high praise, landing on NPR’s most anticipated Poetry Books of 2017 list and Publishers Weekly‘s Top 10 Poetry Books of 2017.
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When she is not writing, Sealey is the executive director of Cave Canem, an organization that cultivates and supports the work of black poets, with its fellows going on to win, among other awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the NAACP Image Award. Sealey credits the poets she has worked with through Cave Canem with keeping her on her literary toes.
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I spoke with Sealey during the harried days before her book launch about the importance of accessible language in poetry, self-care, and the many meanings of love. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation. —Amy Gall

Read the complete interview

 

She, to Him – I [1866]

Thomas Hardy

When you shall see me in the toils of Time,

My lauded beauties carried off from me,

My eyes no longer stars as in their prime,

My name forgot of Maiden Fair and Free;
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When, in your being, heart concedes to mind,

And judgment, though you scarce its process know,

Recalls the excellencies I once enshrined,

And you are irked that they have withered so;
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Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame,

That Sportsman Time but rears his brood to kill,

Knowing me in my soul the very same

One who would die to spare you touch of ill!

Will you not grant to old affection’s claim

The hand of friendship down Life’s sunless hill?

“Go, lovely Rose”

By Edmund Waller

Go, lovely Rose—

Tell her that wastes her time and me,

That now she knows,

When I resemble her to thee,

How sweet and fair she seems to be.
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Tell her that’s young,

And shuns to have her graces spied,

That hadst thou sprung

In deserts where no men abide,

Thou must have uncommended died.
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Small is the worth

Of beauty from the light retired:

Bid her come forth,

Suffer herself to be desired,

And not blush so to be admired.
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Then die—that she

The common fate of all things rare

May read in thee;

How small a part of time they share

That are so wondrous sweet and fair!
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Listen to the Oklahoma State University Concert Chorale (Z. Randall Stroope, Composer/Conductor) sing “Go, Lovely Rose.”
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A reminder that we will celebrate the use of the rose as a poetic symbol or metaphor on January 25, 2018. Please bring your own illustration of this for reading and discussion and, if you wish, post it first on the blog via the CONTACT US page, or email it to me directly.

The Lost Poetry of Paradise

A thousand years ago, the Iberian peninsula was a cultural oasis – until a million of its Arabic manuscripts were destroyed. Benjamin Ramm explains how its poetry lives on.
On 9 December 1499, the citizens of Granada awoke to a scene of devastation: the smouldering remains of over a million Arabic manuscripts, burnt on the orders of the Spanish Inquisition. The scale of cultural desecration is difficult to comprehend – it stands alongside the burning of the Mayan codices by Conquistadors 60 years later, and the destruction of the library at Alexandria.
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A thousand years ago, as much of Europe languished in the Dark Ages, the Iberian peninsula was a cultural oasis, the brightest beacon of civilisation. Under the Umayyad dynasty, the caliphate of Al-Andalus stretched from Lisbon to Zaragoza, and centred on the Andalusian cities of Córdoba, Granada and Seville. From the 8th Century, the caliphate oversaw a period of extraordinary cross-cultural creativity known as La Convivencia (the Coexistence).
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Al-Andalus was characterised by cultural hybridity and a spirit of openness, attracting scholars and merchants with spices from India and China and songs from Iraq and Syria. The translation of long-neglected Greek works of philosophy helped lay the intellectual foundations of the Renaissance, and made Al-Andalus the cultural capital of Europe for over 300 years.
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Read the complete article

A humourous reminder from The New Yorker that we will feature poetry from the Tang Dynasty on November 23

Download (from Sharon): POETRY OF THE T’ANG

Today’s Birthday, Sharon Olds

Born in San Francisco on November 19, 1942, Sharon Olds earned a BA at Stanford University and a PhD at Columbia University.
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Her first collection of poems, Satan Says (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Olds’s following collection, The Dead & the Living (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), received the Lamont Poetry Selection in 1983 and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
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Her other collections include Stag’s Leap (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize; One Secret Thing (Random House, 2008); Strike Sparks: Selected Poems(Alfred A. Knopf, 2004); The Unswept Room (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); Blood, Tin, Straw (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999); The Gold Cell(Alfred A. Knopf, 1997); The Wellspring (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); and The Father (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992); which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Point Pelee

By Stephen Rybicki

During the Fall, monarchs

Descend upon Pelee

Like the laughter of children

Among the gardens of Eden

On a journey south to Mexico

With hundreds of miles to go

A layover stop for them—

They blow in with the wind

And drop like a quilt

Of orange and black patches

Covering the entire island to

Flutter in the weeds and trees

As if the north air were speaking—

The trick is to get in close

To one, backlit by the sun

On a leaf, to see how singular

And delicate each wing is

A skeleton in transparency

Which composes the colony—

And consider how life

Began eons ago with milkweed

Scattered across the countryside

The sky falling, and the sun

Coming down to rest on this island.
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Stephen Rybicki is a poet and reference librarian at Macomb Community College, and lives in Romeo, Michigan.

The Roman de la Rose

The Roman de la Rose is the work of two authors. Begun by Guillaume de Lorris around 1230 and continued by Jean de Meun approximately forty years later, the Rose is probably the most influential work written in the Old French vernacular. In the centuries following its composition, major poets like Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Eustache Deschamps, and Francois Villon continued to write in a tradition dominated by the work which, in some manuscripts, extends to 21,750 lines. In the early 15th century, the Rose was still capable of sparking heated literary debate in France. Other national literatures felt the effect of the Rose as well. The English poets John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer and the Italian poets Dante and Petrarch were astute readers of the work.
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The Roman de la Rose is an allegorical love poem which takes the form of a dream vision. The 25-year-old narrator recounts a dream he had approximately five years previously, which has since come to pass. In his dream he journeyed to a walled garden in which he viewed rosebushes in the Fountain of Narcissus. When he went to select his own special blossom, the God of Love shot him with several arrows, leaving him forever enamored of one particular flower. His efforts to obtain the Rose met with little success. A stolen kiss alerted the guardians of the Rose, who then enclosed it behind still stronger fortifications. At the point where Guillaume de Lorris’ poem breaks off, the protagonist, confronted with this new obstacle to the realization of his love, is left lamenting his fate. Jean de Meun concludes the narrative with a bawdy account of the plucking of the Rose, achieved through deception, which is very unlike Guillaume’s idealized conception of the love quest.
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Read the complete History and Summary of the Text  of The Roman de la Rose  by Lori J. Walters
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Read the full text of The Roman de la Rose (in English).
Download PDF version: the_romance_of_the_rose_illuminated__manuscripts
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Watch Helena Phillips-Robins (Cambridge University Library) discuss  the history of The Roman de la Rose.
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A reminder that we will celebrate the use of the rose as a poetic symbol or metaphor on January 25, 2018. Please bring your own illustration of this for reading and discussion and, if you wish, post it first on the blog via the CONTACT US page, or email it to me directly.