Is My Team Ploughing?

‘Is my team ploughing,
  That I was used to drive         
And hear the harness jingle   
  When I was man alive?’         

Ay, the horses trample,           
  The harness jingles now;       
No change though you lie under          
  The land you used to plough.

Some A.E. Housman for you today. Above are the first two verses of 'Is My Team Ploughing?', Poem XXVII from A Shropshire Lad, published in 1896. You can read it in full here at The Poetry Foundation, and below is a video of a performance by Dan Kempson of the beautiful setting by George Butterworth.

Butterworth composed the his settings for a selection from A Shropshire Lad in 1911 - 12, before the start of the First World War. He died only a few years later, aged just 31, at the Battle of the Somme, and his music is a poignant reminder of what is lost in war.




A thought: is the setting of poems to music a precursor to the filmpoem?

A Bit of Grammatical Light Relief

I bought 'A Choice of Comic and Curious Verse' in 1975, when I was twelve. It's been one of my cherished possessions ever since. The spine is cracking, the glue is decaying, the pages are yellow and there is a stain on the cover. But the poetry is still brilliant - the complete range from wry to hilarious, with a smattering of rather rude.

Here's one of my favourites, by the German poet Christian Morgenstern, and translated by RFC Hull, better known for translating the works of Jung! I have no idea how this works in German, but I love it in English.

The Werewolf by Christian Morgenstern, tr. R.F.C. Hull

There's another translation here along with more information about Morgenstern, but I think the translation above is by far the better!

If anyone knows of an anthology currently in print which contains this (or any) translation of 'The Werewolf', I'd be very grateful if they could give me the details.

Ekphrastic Prompt 5: In Your Own Background

'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus', Bruegel

One of the most famous poems which responds to a work of art is Auden's 'Musee des Beaux Arts', which famously zooms in on and out from the figure of Icarus falling to his death in Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1558 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'. Icarus is a tiny figure, and Bruegel's genius is in the way in which this strange death is situated in the 'everydayness' of a C16th landscape, where, in Auden's words

...the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

This made me think of other pictures by Bruegel - those crowd scenes where all those ordinary people must also have their stories that no one else knows or cares about. And paintings by other artists: the people in background of Ford Madox Brown's 'The Last of England', or the followers in Gozzoli's Procession of the Magi, a picture full of ordinary people who are not the main focus of the image.

Gozzoli's 'Procession of the Magi'

But today's prompt does not use a painting by a famous artist. It uses an image created by you.

Most people take photos - if you are anything like me, you take quite a lot! And when you are on holiday, focussing your camera on a building, or a church, or your child playing on the beach, you quite often take pictures which contain people you don't know. Have a look at your holiday snaps; find one with strangers in it. If it's a digital photo on your computer, zoom in on someone. If it's not digital, you'll just have to make your eyes work a bit harder. Is there someone there who looks out of place? Someone whose expression hides something? That's your springboard, your Icarus. Write about that person, that crowd, that location. Write about your relationship with that person - because you have one now, now that you've noticed them. Or think of it another way - what if you were the stranger in someone else's holiday snaps?

So this prompt is a kind of echoing ekphrasis, springboarding you, as writer, off the Auden/Breugel motif of people unaware or uninterested in what is happening in the background to their lives, to find the people you didn't notice in a day in your own life. Could be interesting!


With thanks to Sally Flint, whose suggestion to write a poem from an image of someone you don't know led me to this idea. 


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Film Poems, Poetry Films

I've been getting quite interested in multimedia presentations of poetry recently, in particular what has become known as the 'filmpoem' or 'poetry-film'. This is not just a video of someone reading a poem (the like of which I also enjoy watching), but the creative use of film and image to accompany the text and/or a recording of a poem.

Here is a film created by Alastair Cook, with the wonderful Ian McMillan reading his poem 'The Water Doesn't Move, The Past Does', from The Poetry Society:



The Water Doesn't Move, The Past Does from The Poetry Society on Vimeo.


The poet Robert Peake has several excellent film poems on his website. Here he has collaborated with sound artist Valerie Kampmeier to make a film of his poem 'Treatment in Outline'. I think this is an example of how, as Alastair Cook says on his website,  a film poem 'may be able to open up poetry to people who are not necessarily receptive to the written word', or indeed poetry as a genre. It uses visual image and music to enhance the meaning of the spoken word, the different media all intertwining, reflecting and echoing each other.



Robert Peake: Treatment in Outline

'Innocent Beat' by Martha McCollough goes a step further than both of these. In this film text, spoken word and image are all inextricably linked. It is hard to imagine them being separated out into their component parts - the film is an organic whole. The viewer has to pay attention at all levels to fully access the poem: text weaves across the screen in counterpoint to spoken words, and the way these interact with each other and the soundscape adds even deeper levels to the experience. This, I think, is extremely innovative poem-making - the poem as film, rather than the poem through film.



Martha McCollough: Innocent Beat

I think I'm going to have a go at making some film poems myself - but don't hold your breath, they may be some time coming. The last time I tried doing something on Windows Moviemaker my son told me it was like something made by a ten-year-old. So I've quite a way to go before I can even hope to produce something as sophisticated as these!

The Fathers

Today's post is a link to Catherine Smith's wonderful poem, The Fathers - one of the increasing number of poems that can make me cry. I first came across it in her collection Lip (Smith Doorstop, 2007), and then rediscovered it recently in the Bloodaxe anthology Being Human.

Having lost my father earlier this year, I find the poem speaks very clearly to me as I sit by myself, drinking coffee, waiting.

Linguistics and Writing

All writers are interested in language. I know that's a sweeping statement, but it's true. They've got to be - otherwise they wouldn't be writing. They would be painting, or making silent films, or crocheting tea cosies or throwing pots in order to express themselves. And I think that knowing more about the tools of your trade is not only fascinating, but vital. So here are three books about language and linguistics that I've found interesting, useful, and quite often inspiring.

Introducing Linguistics by RL Trask and Bill Mayblin (Icon Books, 2005) is a graphic guide to language theory. Although it's full of quirky cartoons and illustrations, it doesn't compromise on subject matter. It's a great introduction to the subject, covering both the history of linguistics and current linguistic theories. 

Below is a sample page. And this particular one led me to the much more complicated and fascinating Women, Fire and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff (University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Language Myths, edited by Laurie Bayer and Peter Trudgill (Penguin, 1998), is a collection of twenty one essays exploring misconceptions about language. For example, there are essays that address the myths that some languages don't have grammar, that modern English is being ruined, that women talk too much, and that word meanings should be fixed. A fascinating range, and very readable. Great if you want a quick language theory fix, and good subject matter for dinner party conversations!

Mark Turner's The Literary Mind (OUP, 1996) is a bit more heavy going, but well worth the read. In it, he draws on cognitive linguistics and literary theory to explore the idea that humans understand life and the world around us through what is more commonly thought of as 'literary' thought. Turner says, 'Parable is the root of the human mind - of thinking, knowing, acting, creating, and plausibly even of speaking. But the common view, firmly in place for two and a half millennia, sees the everyday mind as unliterary and the literary mind as optional'. So anyone who is interested in literature and storytelling in any form will find this book very interesting and highly relevant. 

Shelfie: Penguin Modern Poets

The wonderful Penguin Modern Poets series

I bought my first Penguin Modern Poets when I was thirteen. I was staying with my uncle and aunt in Dumfries in Scotland, and spent much of my days wandering around the town, revelling in a new kind of freedom five hundred miles away from home. I visited the museum with its wonderful Camera Obscura several times, and I also spent a lot of time in bookshops, where I discovered these slim black volumes. At the cost of 20p or 4/- (both decimal and pre-decimal currencies were marked on the back) I could afford several, so I went home with numbers 2,4,6 and 7, and numbers 13 and 16 which were far more expensive at 25p! I think they must have been old stock, because by the time I bought The Mersey Sound (number 10) six months later, I had to fork out 75p.

I've been adding to the collection ever since, letting serendipity guide me: I don't seek them out, but wait for them to appear before me in charity shops and village fetes. It's like a very quiet mission: I'm playing a long, slow game. One day I might have them all - I'd particularly like number 24, which features Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Kenward Elmslie, and 26 which is Dannie Abse, DJ Enright and Michael Longley.

But I'm reminded of the old Arthur C Clarke story about the monks who wanted to discover all the names for God. They set a computer running to discover all the permutations possible, but when the program had finished and they had what they wanted, they suddenly noticed that one by one, the stars were all going out. The purpose of the Universe had been fulfilled. So perhaps I ought to make sure that there is always a space on the shelf - just in case.