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America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders is back for its second season! Kay Adams welcomes the women who assemble the squad, Kelli Finglass and Judy Trammell, to the Netflix Sports Club Podcast. They discuss the emotional rollercoaster of putting together the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Judy and Kelli open up about what it means to embrace flaws in the pursuit of perfection, how they identify that winning combo of stamina and wow factor, and what it’s like to see Thunderstruck go viral. Plus, the duo shares their hopes for the future of DCC beyond the field. Netflix Sports Club Podcast Correspondent Dani Klupenger also stops by to discuss the NBA Finals, basketball’s biggest moments with Michael Jordan and LeBron, and Kevin Durant’s international dominance. Dani and Kay detail the rise of Coco Gauff’s greatness and the most exciting storylines heading into Wimbledon. We want to hear from you! Leave us a voice message at www.speakpipe.com/NetflixSportsClub Find more from the Netflix Sports Club Podcast @NetflixSports on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and X. You can catch Kay Adams @heykayadams and Dani Klupenger @daniklup on IG and X. Be sure to follow Kelli Finglass and Judy Trammel @kellifinglass and @dcc_judy on IG. Hosted by Kay Adams, the Netflix Sports Club Podcast is an all-access deep dive into the Netflix Sports universe! Each episode, Adams will speak with athletes, coaches, and a rotating cycle of familiar sports correspondents to talk about a recently released Netflix Sports series. The podcast will feature hot takes, deep analysis, games, and intimate conversations. Be sure to watch, listen, and subscribe to the Netflix Sports Club Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Tudum, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes on Fridays every other week.…

A Mouthful of Air: Poetry with Mark McGuinness

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Poems to take your breath away. Listen to contemporary poets reading their poems and talking about what went into them. You will also hear Mark McGuinness reading classic poems and sharing his thoughts on what makes them great.

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A Mouthful of Air: Poetry with Mark McGuinness

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A Mouthful of Air: Poetry with Mark McGuinness

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From The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning 43:13

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Episode 81 From ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning. https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/81_From_The_Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin_by_Robert_Browning.mp3 Poet Robert Browning Reading and commentary by Mark McGuinness From ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ By Robert Browning Into the street the Piper stept, Smiling first a little smile, As if he knew what magic slept In his quiet pipe the while; Then, like a musical adept, To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled, And green and blue his sharp eyes twinkled, Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled; And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered, You heard as if an army muttered; And the muttering grew to a grumbling; And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling; And out of the houses the rats came tumbling. Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats, Grave old plodders, gay young friskers, Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, Cocking tails and pricking whiskers, Families by tens and dozens, Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives – Followed the Piper for their lives. From street to street he piped advancing, And step for step they followed dancing, Until they came to the river Weser Wherein all plunged and perished – Save one who, stout as Julius Caesar, Swam across and lived to carry (As he the manuscript he cherished) To Rat-land home his commentary, Which was, ‘At the first shrill notes of the pipe, I heard a sound as of scraping tripe, And putting apples, wondrous ripe, Into a cider-press’s gripe: And a moving away of pickle-tub-boards, And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards, And a drawing the corks of train-oil-flasks, And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks; And it seemed as if a voice (Sweeter than by harp or by psaltery Is breathed) called out, Oh rats, rejoice! The world is grown to one vast drysaltery! So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon, Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon! And just as one bulky sugar-puncheon, Ready staved, like a great sun shone Glorious scarce an inch before me, Just as methought it said, Come, bore me! – I found the Weser rolling o’er me.’ Podcast transcript First of all today, we interrupt our usual programming for a little good news. I’ve just discovered this week that last year, The Guardian newspaper included A Mouthful of Air in a list of five of the best poetry podcasts , with a nice review. I’m not sure how I missed it at the time, but it’s always nice to see something like this, as a sign that I’m making some progress in my mission to bring poems to the world. Obviously, reviews aren’t my main motivation for doing the show, that’s always been about finding a poem I love and sharing it with you and seeing if you like it too. But what a review does do is let me know that the podcast is getting out there in the world and connecting poems with listeners in the way I want it to. So before we move on, I would like to congratulate you on your good taste in listening to A Mouthful of Air, and to thank you for listening and helping me get the poems out there. And thank you also, if you have liked or reviewed or shared the podcast in any shape or form, it is tremendously helpful in finding new listeners to the show. Okay, on with the poetry! Today’s piece is another poetic version of a traditional story that proved to be very influential. A couple of episodes ago, we looked at Ovid’s retelling of the story of Daedalus and Icarus in his Metamorphoses . This time we have Robert Browning and his 1842 version of the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Like Daedalus and Icarus, this is almost certainly a tale you’re already familiar with, so once again, the pleasure we derive from the poetic version comes from seeing what the poet does with the material. Starting with the legend itself, I looked into this, in preparation for the podcast. And amazingly, it turns out that the story of the Pied Piper does seem to have a basis in an actual historical event in the town of Hamelin in Lower Saxony in Germany. Numerous accounts from the Middle Ages onwards attest that in 1284, something occurred in the town that resulted in the loss of 130 children. One of the oldest texts is inscribed in Latin on a house in the town of Hamelin. It states: ‘In the year 1284, on the day of Saints John and Paul, on 26th of June, 130 children born in Hamelin were lured by a Piper, clothed in many colours, to Calvary near the Koppen, and lost.’ ‘Calvary near the Koppen’ refers to a local hill or mountain, and this is just one of many accounts from the Middle Ages onwards that records the same date and the same number of children being spirited away from the town. Interestingly, the part of the story where the Piper gets rid of the rats is a later addition, and doesn’t appear until 1559. So something does seem to have happened in Hamelin in the 13th century that meant the town lost a significant number of children. and scholars and historians are still investigating and debating exactly what could have led to this very strange and unsettling legend. Explanations include illness, possibly the plague. Or St. Vitus’ Dance, the dancing mania that swept Europe in the late Middle Ages, and there is a documented case of a group of children jumping and dancing about 12 miles between the German towns of Erfurt and Arnstadt, in 1237. Another possible explanation is a landslide or sinkhole that may have swallowed up some of the town’s citizens. One theory that seems to hold quite a bit of scholarly credence is the idea of emigration to Eastern Europe. In this explanation, ‘children of the town’ wouldn’t necessarily have meant young children; it could simply have meant people who were born in the town. So, in this scenario, it may well have been young adults who were persuaded by a government recruiter whose job was to encourage Germans to emigrate to Eastern Europe, for political and economic reasons. There’s some quite interesting research by one scholar who started with the surnames in Hamelin town records from the 13th century and then searched telephone directories in 20th-century Poland, and found quite a few names occurring in both places. So it’s possible the exodus from the town involved people who went willingly, lured by the promises of a recruiter. As we know, whether you’re recruiting for the military or for overseas expeditions or timeshares in holiday homes, these are typically pretty smooth and charming people. So it’s perhaps not a huge leap to see how a persuasive recruiter could be transformed into the Pied Piper of legend. So that’s the possible historical basis. And of course, Hamelin is an actual town, and if you go there today, apparently they really embrace the legend for the benefit of tourists. You can go and see the ‘Bungelosenstrasse’, the street where no drums are played. Apparently, it’s a local by-law that you’re not allowed to play drums or make music on this street. Looking at it purely as a legend, Browning’s poem was based on an early 17th-century version of the story, which included the rats. I’ve just read you an excerpt from his longer poem. So to refresh our memories: the tale begins with the citizens of Hamelin being very distressed and by a rat infestation in their town. And just as the Mayor and the Corporation are debating what on earth they can do about it, the Piper appears. He is wearing pied colours – mixed red and yellow in Browning’s version, obviously very reminiscent of a jester. He promises to rid the town of the rats if they will pay him a thousand guilders. The Mayor says, ‘Well, if you can do that, absolutely, we’d even pay you fifty thousand!’ So, quick as a flash, the Piper goes out into the street and plays his pipe to lure away the rats, in the passage we’ve just heard. After the rats are gone, he returns for payment. But of course, the Mayor and the Corporation are rather loath to pay up, especially as the rats are all dead. They say, ‘Well, he’s not exactly going to bring them back to life, is he?’ So instead of a thousand guilders, they say, ‘Come, take fifty.’ And the Piper is having none of this. He insists, and threatens consequences if they break their promise: And folks who put me in a passion May find me pipe after another fashion. But the Mayor stupidly replies, ‘Do your worst’. Whereupon the Piper goes out into the street again and starts piping once more. And this time, of course, it’s the children of the town who fall under the spell of his music, who are lured away, and vanish into a hole in the mountainside, along with the Piper. We get a version of the immigration theory at the end of Browning’s poem, where he says that the children emerged from the mountains into Transylvania, where their ‘outlandish ways and dress’ marked them out as different to the locals. So that’s the story, and whatever its historical basis, I think it’s pretty clear that the Piper in the legend is an archetypal figure: a trickster, an envoy from the otherworld. A bit like the Green Knight in Gawain and the Green Knight , who appears at King Arthur’s court and challenges the knights to a Christmas game. Or indeed, like the many fairies and witches and other magical beings who appear to humans in fairy stories, extract a promise of some kind, and then take revenge when the humans break their promise. And Browning does a wonderful job of evoking the strangeness of the Piper, when he introduces him in an earlier part of the poem: And in did come the strangest figure! His queer long coat from heel to head Was half of yellow and half of red; And he himself was tall and thin, With sharp blue eyes, each like a pin, And light loose hair, yet swarthy skin, No tuft on cheek nor beard on chin, But lips where smiles went out and in – There was no guessing his kith and kin! Another interpretation of the poem sees the Piper as the archetypal artist who, as we know, often has a lot of trouble getting paid. You know, for all the praise, gratitude, and superlatives society likes to shower upon great artists, it’s amazing how often it struggles to pay them enough to eat. One scholar even links the story to Browning’s own sense of grievance over an unpaid invoice. Sometimes the most mundane things can inspire the most magical poetry. But I don’t think we need to pin down the Piper too narrowly. To me, what makes him such a compelling figure is his strangeness, his unwillingness to fit into the usual categories of common sense and daily life. And I think we can agree that Browning’s poem is a wonderfully vivid and magical version of the story. It’s characteristic of him in being a very entertaining poem. These days, I think Browning is a little bit overlooked as a poet, certainly in comparison to Tennyson , who is probably our go-to major male Victorian poet. But Browning is a really enjoyable poet to read. He does a lot of storytelling and dramatic monologues, and his poems are very often very entertaining. They are page-turners. It’s a bit of a sad comment on our image of poetry that it’s remarkable when a poet is considered entertaining, but it’s certainly true of Browning. This was one of the most famous poems in his collection, Dramatic Lyrics . It was published nearly three decades after the Grimm’s Fairy Tales version – the Grimms’ version came out in 1816, Browning’s in 1842. But Browning’s poem has been even more influential than Grimms’ Fairy Tales in popularising the story, at least in the English-speaking world. And listening to this excerpt, about the trick the Piper plays on the rats, I think we can see why. It is an absolutely entrancing poem, which, of course, is entirely appropriate, given that the subject of the poem is entrancement or enchantment. Right from the beginning of this passage, and indeed throughout the poem, the rhyme and the rhythm are integral to the poem’s effect. Let’s listen again to the opening lines: Into the street the Piper stept, Smiling first a little smile, As if he knew what magic slept In his quiet pipe the while; Then, like a musical adept, To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled, And green and blue his sharp eyes twinkled, Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled; These lines are characteristic of his method throughout the whole poem. We start with five lines of interlocking rhymes: ‘stept,’ ‘smiled,’ ‘slept,’ ‘while,’ ‘adept.’. And then we have a run of three rhymes together: ‘wrinkled,’ ‘twinkled,’ and ‘sprinkled.’ Not only three rhymes in a row, but three double rhymes, rhyming on two syllables. And the effect is heightened by the fact that the third rhyme is in a line that contains that lovely image of his eyes twinkling like a candle-flame when salt is sprinkled on it. Even in 1842, this kind of rhyming would have been considered a bit much, over-egging the pudding. I think one way Browning gets away with this is that it’s a children’s fairy story, so maybe adults are more likely to be indulgent of such ‘jingling’ rhymes, to use Milton ’s word. Obviously, Milton would have shuddered in horror listening to this poem. And it’s not just rhyme that creates the trancelike effect – this also comes from the rhythm. Browning’s metre is rather unusual for 19th-century English literary poetry in that it’s not written in syllable stress metre , where there is a relatively fixed pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, like iambic pentameter, which we’ve heard a lot on this podcast, which goes ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM. ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ is written in stress metre , which means there are a regular number of stresses in a line, but there can be a varying number of syllables. It was relatively rare in literary verse, but it’s a very common metre in traditional ballads, which makes it appropriate for a legend like this. And Browning is absolutely masterful in the way he can speed up or slow down at different points in the action, for dramatic effect. Most of the lines in this poem have four stresses in the line, but the length of the line can vary a lot, from the very short: In to the street the Pi per stept , This line has only eight syllables, and we can really feel the Piper stepping slowly and carefully into the street. But a few lines later, when the rats are on the loose, we find these two longer lines, with eleven syllables each: And the grum bling grew to a migh ty rum bling; And out of the hou ses the rats came tum bling. So those extra syllables prompt the reader to pick up the pace, almost leaping from stress to stress, like the rats leaping and tumbling into the street. Another way Browning varies the rhythm is by occasionally using a line with only three stresses. So listening again to the opening four lines: In to the street the Pi per stept , Smi ling first a li ttle smile , As if he knew what ma gic slept In his qui et pipe the while ; The first three lines establish the four-stress rhythm, and then when we get to ‘quiet pipe the while,’ there are only three beats: In his qui et pipe the while ; And of course, this is the moment when the Piper pauses before he starts to play. So that missing beat creates a wonderful little dramatic pause, before the action gets under way. Then there’s the amazing moment when the rats make their entrance: And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered, You heard as if an army muttered; And the muttering grew to a grumbling; And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling; And out of the houses the rats came tumbling. Listen again to these two lines: the first one has only three stresses, then the next one has four: And the mu ttering grew to a grum bling; And the grum bling grew to a mi ghty rum bling; Can you hear that? Isn’t the way the line grows longer wonderfully mimetic of the sound of the rats growing louder and louder? And of course it’s no coincidence that this is another run of three double rhymes – ‘grumbling’, ‘rumbling’ and ‘tumbling’. Browning is using all the sound effects and technical wizardry at is disposal. And for me, this scene is as good as anything in a Disney movie. It continues with this fantastic description of the rats: Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats, Grave old plodders, gay young friskers, Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, Cocking tails and pricking whiskers, Families by tens and dozens, Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives – Followed the Piper for their lives. What we’ve got here, of course, is a list, which is a technique that Browning employs repeatedly and very effectively in this poem. As I’ve said before on the podcast, poets love lists – they’re a kind of verbal cornucopia, that allows them to express the abundance and diversity of life. And of course in this case, it’s a mesmerising vision but also a horrifying one, since the multiplication of the rats is precisely what the townsfolk are so keen to avoid. So we’ve got this amazing description of all the rats tumbling through the streets of the town and into the river: From street to street he piped advancing, And step for step they followed dancing, Until they came to the river Weser Wherein all plunged and perished Notice that we’ve got another three-beat line here: Where in all plunged and per ished Because this is another dramatic pause, as we contemplate the rats drowning in the river. And then the next line starts with a dash, because the camera’s zooming in on the solitary rat who escapes to tell the tale: Until they came to the river Weser Wherein all plunged and perished – Save one who, stout as Julius Caesar, Swam across and lived to carry (As he the manuscript he cherished) To Rat-land home his commentary, And in case you were wondering about my pronunciation of the river’s name: in German, of course, it should be ‘VAYzer’, but Browning is obviously rhyming it with ‘Caesar’, and he is clearly not a man for half-rhymes, so I’m going with ‘VEEzer’. So the rat is taking his ‘commentary’ home to ‘Rat-land’. It’s like the classic battlefield sadism, where an entire army is wiped out, but the victorious general spares one soldier from the carnage, so he can go and tell the folks at home what happened to their loved ones. And the rat’s commentary opens a magic portal inside what was already a very magical poem. The rat tells us what it was like for the rats to hear the Piper’s music: ‘At the first shrill notes of the pipe, I heard a sound as of scraping tripe, And putting apples, wondrous ripe, Into a cider-press’s gripe: And a moving away of pickle-tub-boards, And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards, And a drawing the corks of train-oil-flasks, And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks; What do we find here? Not two, not three, but four full rhymes in a row: ‘pipe,’ ‘tripe’, ‘ripe’ and ‘gripe’. As the magic takes effect, the poetry gets more and more densely woven. In fact the magic is so strong, the lines start rhyming at both ends, because we have four lines starting with the same syntactic pattern: ‘And a moving…’ ‘And a leaving…’ ‘And a drawing…’ ‘And a breaking…’ And this is another delightful list. It’s also a really wonderful imaginative leap that Browning takes, showing us what the rats must always be focusing on: they’re listening out for sounds of food being left out, of doors being left ajar, of flasks being uncorked, of apples being squeezed in a cider press. It’s a sign of a great storyteller, a really imaginative writer, to be able to enter into the consciousness of a rat in this way, its ‘interiority’, as the scholars would say. And then we get, another magic portal inside the magic portal of the rat’s consciousness, as we hear the imagined voice of the rat describing the imagined voice he hears in the piper’s music: And it seemed as if a voice (Sweeter than by harp or by psaltery Is breathed) called out, Oh rats, rejoice! The world is grown to one vast drysaltery! So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon, Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon! And just as one bulky sugar-puncheon, Ready staved, like a great sun shone Glorious scarce an inch before me, Just as methought it said, Come, bore me! — I found the Weser rolling o’er me.’ Notice that this section begins with another three-stress line – And it seemed as if a voice – which creates another dramatic pause before the rats’ final frenzy of hunger. And the fact we’re now listening to the imagined voice of the music described by the imagined voice of the rat inside the imaginary world of the story means we’re are several layers deep in imagined realities. I’ve talked about the technique of nested story loops before, in Episode 76 about Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ , and about the hypnotic effect they have on a reader or listener, which I know about from my days as a hypnotherapist. So Browning has taken us really deep down the rabbit hole – or rather the rat hole! And as we reach the climax of the sequence about the rats, not only does the rhythm speed up and the syntax get shorter and choppier; not only do we get ‘psaltery’ and ‘drysaltery’ rhyming on three syllables, which is borderline absurd; not only do we get the internal rhymes, rhymes within the line, of ‘munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,’; but we also get a run of four rhyming lines in a row, with every rhyme a full double rhyme, rhyming on two syllables: So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon, Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon! And just as one bulky sugar-puncheon, Ready staved, like a great sun shone And the effect of this verse is intoxicating for us as readers and listeners, just as the rat is intoxicated by its feverish hunger. And it’s at this moment of orgiastic frenzy, when the rat seems to hear a barrel, a puncheon, inviting it to bore through it with his teeth, that he teeters over the brink and into the river: And just as one bulky sugar-puncheon, Ready staved, like a great sun shone Glorious scarce an inch before me, Just as methought it said, Come, bore me! – I found the Weser rolling o’er me.’ And that was the end of all the rats but this one, who survived to tell the tale. And then the poem goes on with the villagers ringing the town bells with joy, and then the argument between the Mayor and the Piper, and of course, the Piper taking his terrifying revenge. Here is the rest of the poem , do go and read it all. Because the description of the Piper spiriting away the children is just as vivid and entrancing as the sequence with the rats, but it’s also heartbreaking, because none of us really worry about the rats, however much we hear about their interiority. But of course, none of us would want the children to be spirited away. And by the time it ends, ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ is a really haunting poem. Like any good folktale or fairy tale, it mixes darkness and light. It begins with the shining, jingling rhymes, the fun, the vividness of the storytelling, and yet it leaves us, just like the Piper’s music, in a very pensive state. We don’t feel the grief of the townsfolk as fully as they do, but I do think we are left with the feeling, ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I’. There’s something deeply troubling about this poem, a sense that those of us living in civilised comfort can be challenged by a voice or a figure or a melody, a piece of art that comes from the otherworld, that speaks of magical, mysterious things. And we can be challenged by this, with a sense that our comforts are bought a little too cheaply, and there may be a payback we don’t anticipate. I also think there’s a part of us that wants to hear the sound of that music, and that maybe longs to answer the call, to be spirited away in search of something we’re missing, in spite of everything we leave behind. OK let’s have another listen to the Piper enticing the rats away. And I for one will be listening to this with envy as well as pleasure, because if I’m honest this is a poem that I really wish I’d written myself. I’m really in awe of Browning’s skill, and I doff my cap to the poet as well as the Piper. From ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ By Robert Browning Into the street the Piper stept, Smiling first a little smile, As if he knew what magic slept In his quiet pipe the while; Then, like a musical adept, To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled, And green and blue his sharp eyes twinkled, Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled; And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered, You heard as if an army muttered; And the muttering grew to a grumbling; And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling; And out of the houses the rats came tumbling. Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats, Grave old plodders, gay young friskers, Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, Cocking tails and pricking whiskers, Families by tens and dozens, Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives – Followed the Piper for their lives. From street to street he piped advancing, And step for step they followed dancing, Until they came to the river Weser Wherein all plunged and perished – Save one who, stout as Julius Caesar, Swam across and lived to carry (As he the manuscript he cherished) To Rat-land home his commentary, Which was, ‘At the first shrill notes of the pipe, I heard a sound as of scraping tripe, And putting apples, wondrous ripe, Into a cider-press’s gripe: And a moving away of pickle-tub-boards, And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards, And a drawing the corks of train-oil-flasks, And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks; And it seemed as if a voice (Sweeter than by harp or by psaltery Is breathed) called out, Oh rats, rejoice! The world is grown to one vast drysaltery! So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon, Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon! And just as one bulky sugar-puncheon, Ready staved, like a great sun shone Glorious scarce an inch before me, Just as methought it said, Come, bore me! – I found the Weser rolling o’er me.’ Robert Browning Robert Browning was an English poet who was born in 1812 and died in 1899. His early works were met with mixed reviews, but he later achieved critical acclaim with collections like Men and Women and Dramatis Personae . Hew as renowned for his mastery of dramatic monologue and psychological insight. He was married to the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, forming one of literature’s most celebrated partnerships. When he died in Venice, his body was returned to England where he was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. A Mouthful of Air – the podcast This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple , Spotify , Google Podcasts or your favourite app . You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email . The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman . A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Listen to the show You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms Related Episodes From The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning Episode 81 From ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning.Poet Robert BrowningReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessFrom ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ By Robert... Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll Episode 80 Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll Stephanie Burt reads ‘Poly Beach House’ by Tonee Mae Moll and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.This poem is from: Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after StonewallAvailable from: Super... Daedalus and Icarus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses translated by Arthur Golding Episode 79 Daedalus and Icarus from Ovid's Metamorphses, translated by Arthur Golding Mark McGuinness reads and discusses Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.Poet Ovid, translated by Arthur GoldingReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessDaedalus and... The post From The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning appeared first on A Mouthful of Air .…

A Mouthful of Air: Poetry with Mark McGuinness

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Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll 34:50

vor 6 weeks34:50

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Episode 80 Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll Stephanie Burt reads ‘Poly Beach House’ by Tonee Mae Moll and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness. https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/80_Poly_Beach_House_by_Tonee_Mae_Moll_read_by_Stephanie_Burt.mp3 This poem is from: Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall Available from: Super Gay Poems is available from: The publisher: Harvard University Press Amazon: UK | US Bookshop.org: UK | US Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll a thin film floats over the weekend an unerotic tension of sucked stomachs and bathroom breaks snuck in while the rest stroll on the boardwalks and one of us allows her ache for tasting every thing to overwhelm the ever- present whisper of the end of the season and one of us says nothing as she slips out to watch the sun rise over an ocean that loathes us and one of us says they’re scared the undine inside won’t be seen before the moon collides with the sea and all of us feel it. After a swim I carve εσχατος in the sand and my body wishes I had the time to cover up my bad tattoos—O apocalypse, we just want a summer. When wasn’t The End hiding behind the sun? Interview transcript Mark: Stephanie, welcome to the show. Stephanie: Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. Mark: Well, I’m very happy you’re here. And just as a note to the listener, if you’re a regular… Stephanie: [Sings] Mark: If you are a regular… Stephanie: That was a note to the listener! Mark: [Laughter] – Oh, very good! – regular listener to the show, you will notice we’re starting slightly differently to usual, because normally my first question is to the poet who wrote the poem, where did the poem come from? But today I’m very pleased to welcome Stephanie Burt, who is an esteemed poet, but she’s also here today in her capacity as an editor. So this poem is from an anthology called Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall . Now, if you follow contemporary poetry, particularly in the US, then Stephanie will need no introduction to you, but if you are relatively new to poetry, then she is a poet and critic and the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. She has published several poetry collections, the latest of which is We Are Mermaids . She has a book about Taylor Swift coming in the fall, aka the autumn. And for me personally, she’s also been an inspiring guide to the contemporary US poetry scene. So for all of those reasons, I am delighted to welcome you to the show today, Stephanie. Stephanie: Thank you. I like being here. Thank you for having me. Mark: So before we home in on this particular poem that you’ve read, could you give us a little bit of an introduction to the new anthology, Super Gay Poems , and just tell us what you’re trying to achieve with this book. Stephanie: So a lot has happened in the lives and the cultures and the possibilities for what we now call LGBTQ+ people since the late 60s, since the Stonewall uprising in 1969, which is a convenient marking point, it’s a well-publicised inflexion point for the visibility and literally the pride of queer people, especially in the rich Anglophone countries from which the majority of poetry in English is still coming. And like any major change in what’s available in a large group of people’s lives, that change gets reflected and considered and refined and reshaped by poets and in putting together a sort of big box of, it was originally going to be 30, but it turned out to be 50, and then 51, we can pretend it’s 50, but maybe like round numbers. Mark: Fifty-ish. Stephanie: Fifty-one poems from all over the English speaking world, or, at least many parts of it that reflect many ways of being queer, many kinds of queer joy and queer grief and queer friendship and queer eroticism and queer child care and queer elder care. I hoped to put together at once a book of poems I really like that have a lot of internal variety, that are fun to read and rewarding to read and rewarding to reread and reread, and a collection of ways to see queer lives, queer means of flourishing and recovering and continuing and being ourselves, which also means learning our history, and in some cases, commemorating our dead. And these are poems that do all of those things. And this book, if I did it right, connects several generations of queer poets. It connects, thematically and emotionally, several different ways of writing. It offers ways to put into memorable language many different ways of living in the world, some of which seems specifically queer, and some of which are just interesting ways of living, engaging ways of living that happen to include queer people, right? And together, it’s all super gay. It’s also international, which is a different fish from the last time I wrote a book with a structure, and that book was entirely American. This book is extremely not entirely American. Mark: So it’s a very ambitious book in its scope and in its variety. And zooming in on the poem that you’ve read for us today, ‘Poly Beach House’ by… Stephanie: Zoom! We zoomed in, sorry, zoom, we zoomed in. Mark: We zoomed in… by Tonee Mae Moll, what attracted you to this poem? What do you think it brings to the book? Stephanie: I mean, I love it. I love the affect. I love the ambivalence. I love the way that it combines the erotic potential of, ‘Let’s get our whole polycule together in a beach house and see who wants to go to bed with whom’, and the less often described and quite interesting, at least to me, aspects of: what do you do the next morning? What do you do with day three or day five of your holiday? What is it like to make a life with multiple adults, all of whom have their own daily wishes and needs and sort of velleities? I also love the way that it handles the multiplicitous feeling of impending apocalypse that many of us have had over the past 10 or 15 years, which is not limited to queer people, but which at least some queer people and some trans people feel in a notable way, which is, what do we do with the sense that we might be at the end? What do we do with the way we want to go on with our lives together, maybe need to go on with our lives together, maybe should go on with our lives together? Taking a stroll on the beach with someone we’re into, making toast, watching the sunrise, going on holiday, coming home, doing our jobs. But then it can feel like our world is ending, or the whole world is ending. The sea will swallow the sand, the sea will swallow your city, the sea will swallow your state. The political end of things like the rule of law may swallow you personally. How do you represent in a way that is not balanced, but comprehensible and available and even sociable and conversational? How do you balance the feeling that everything is going to end, maybe soon, with our wish to maintain our friendships and our romances in our daily life? Which, let’s be honest, there is a temptation to throw away everything and walk into the sea if you are terrified of the apocalypse. And there’s a temptation to try to be Superman or Jean Grey or some other superhero with absolutely unlimited power and try to hold back the apocalypse yourself. And the truth is, even if you have powers, even if you have social and intellectual and financial power, you probably don’t have Superman-level power, or Jean Grey-level power. If you don’t know who Jean Grey is, she’s from the X-Men , and there are other podcasts for that. And if you do what you can to, try and help your friends and try to make your microclimate and your workplace and your conurbation a better place to be, good for you, but you still need a holiday. You still want to maintain your friendships and your romances. And you’re not going to be able to hold back the apocalypse by yourself. And I love the way that this poem hauntingly, dejectedly even, presents those mixed feelings about the idea that everything is maybe going to be over soon, but you still have your romances and your friendships and your loves and your life. There are a couple of other things I love about it, if I can go on. Shall I? Mark: Yeah, please do. Stephanie: Okay. So it’s also a poem that has some really lovely free verse tercets . It is a poem that has one line at the beginning, ‘A thin film floats over the weekend,’ which is a complete independent clause. It could be a sentence if you want it to be, and then a bunch of unrhymed tercets. The rest of the poem comes in three-line units, three or four pieces of free verse. So it’s maybe a little bit… When you have tercets, it’s always a little bit of an allusion to Dante’s Divine Comedy , which comes in three-line units and is about a guided tour from hell all the way to heaven. It is the reverse. It’s the upside-down version of a number of famous poems, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ about trying to face a coming apocalypse. Shelley’s poem ends, ‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind?’ Mark: I know. Wonderful. Actually, I did Shelley’s Triumph of Life on the podcast as a way of talking about terza rima before, because he was just amazing at that. And again, that’s another apocalyptic poem. Stephanie: Yes. Yeah. And I think, yeah, this is an apocalyptic poem, but it’s also an ironic apocalyptic poem that treats the apocalypse as just another day. When wasn’t it an apocalypse, right? Mark: Yeah. It’s got a wonderful, like you say, mixed tone, mixed feelings, mixed perspectives from the setup of ‘Poly Beach House.’ And you think, ‘Okay, great, weekend away. Romantic, erotic implications of that.’ And then, we’re in the prosaic reality of sucked stomachs and bathroom breaks. And then this extraordinary ending. Stephanie: Yeah. There’s a lot of things I wanted to sort of highlight about the poem before we even get back to the ending, one of which is that it’s also a regional poem. Tonee Mae Moll grew up in Reno, Nevada, and then served in a number of different places in the US military in the early 2000s, and has written a memoir about that, which is described in Super Gay Poems , but has made her adult life after her military service in greater Washington, D.C., in D.C., and Maryland and Delaware. And this is almost certainly set in the beaches and resorts of the Atlantic coast in Maryland and Delaware. And my guess is it’s at Rehoboth Beach, which if you think about Brighton, if you’re in Britain, it’s not quite Brighton, but it is a nightclub, nightlife-friendly, queer-positive space where you can take in the Atlantic and go for a swim. And it’s also that entire shoreline is quite threatened by global climate change and sea level rise. So the humming, I mean, it’s already here, the present catastrophe of sea level rise is not abstract the way it would be in, I don’t know, Denver, perhaps. It’s visible. So it is a poem that is both a regional poem and a poem about sea level rise and climate change. And it’s also, of course, a poem about the practicalities of a polyamorous life. And polyamory, which, if you haven’t encountered the word, it just means having or being open to having multiple committed or long-term or regular romantic and sexual partners. It is a bit different in most of its meanings from being a swinger or having an open marriage, which means that you’ve got one partner, and maybe you take somebody else to bed, and it is different from just sleeping with lots of people and staying connected to no more than one of them, which is also fine if that’s something you want to do. That doesn’t appeal to me. What has turned out, for me, and this is a bit personal, the poem spoke to me personally in a way that some of the other poems I love that didn’t go into Super Gay Poems did not speak to me personally. The poem is a bit personal to me because I’m from the Washington, D.C., area, and I am personally familiar with the delights and the emotional rewards and the practical, often comedic difficulties of having and, keeping and being really loyal to multiple romantic partners. And one of the running jokes, if you move in poly communities, is that your most important romantic partner is Google Calendar. You’ve probably heard that before. If not, you will. And the practicalities and the emotional reward and the friendships and solidarity that comes out of being part of a polycule, which is a term you can probably guess what it means, and especially out of being in the kind of polycule where you do things with and you hang out with your metamors – a metamor is your partner’s partner, your girlfriend’s boyfriend or your girlfriend’s girlfriend or whatever. That’s a metamor. Not all of us want to be or get to be friends with our metamors, but I think it’s better if you can, and that’s the kind of situation that’s here. And there’s so much companionship and so much feeling in the mostly unerotic, as Moll says, sense of community in this beach house, where you go out of the beach house, and the sun is rising. And as we move through the poem, we go from the practicalities of living with and waking up next to your loved ones, and from the sociability of this kind of party scene, like something in Frank O’Hara, to the temporary solitudes that have always been associated with lyric poetry. And as we get those solitudes, one per stanza in the second and third and fourth stanzas, we watch the sunrise, which is supposed to be romantic and welcoming, and then the sense that the world hates us. And I love ‘All the things over an ocean that loathes us’ can mean. It can mean sea level rise is going to be destroyed. Rehoboth Beach eventually. It can mean the sea has reason to resent humanity for polluting it and killing marine life, or endangering marine life. It can also mean that being queer, and especially at this moment, being trans, means regarding your own social group and your own community as a defence against a larger world that’s trying to kill us. A lot of us feel that way. And then that last stanza about how one of us feels, ‘one of us says they’re scared / the undine inside won’t be seen’. If you don’t know, an undine is a water spirit, a spirit associated with a body of water in a way that a dryad, for example, might be associated with a tree. And so an undine can be regarded as akin to, or can be regarded as a kind of mermaid. Part human and girl or woman and part water creature. It is a very familiar and common – and I’ve written about it elsewhere and elsewhere in Super Gay Poems – trope where trans girls and trans women identify or over-identify with mermaids. In fact, that’s the basis of the leading, ‘Let’s help trans people charity’ in the UK, right, Mermaids. They do a lot of good work, Mermaids gender. That’s not a coincidence. That’s not just because somebody saw The Little Mermaid Disney movie and liked it. For a number of reasons, there’s a very strong cross-generational identification that appears to arise spontaneously in separate populations between trans femmes and mermaids. And someone who says they’re ‘scared / the undine inside won’t be seen / before the moon collides with the sea’, that may seem bizarre or hard to interpret or idiosyncratic in the way that, for example, a lot of Dylan Thomas is idiosyncratic. And honestly, Tonee Moll at her best has some things in common with Dylan Thomas, not least the interest in water. But if you’re used to seeing mermaids and thinking trans girls, and you know what it looks like to see the moon over the ocean, that is a fairly transparent line. One of us is afraid that she won’t get to live visibly in public as herself before the end of the world or the end of her world. And the end of the world or the end of her world could mean sea level rise destroys our city or destroys civilisation, or it could mean the end of her life because we all have finite lifetimes. Or it could mean a kind of social and political apocalypse, which seems closer now for Americans, especially those in and near Washington, D.C., than it would have, let’s say, 10 years ago. So that’s a thing. So there’s this fear of being erased or destroyed or crushed along with all of us at the beach, along with the sociability and the mixed feelings that come from going on a vacation with your polycule and waking up feeling like you might have cling film over your mouth because you have morning breath. ‘Poly’, of course, can refer to polymers and plastics. It’s such a good pun. And then we get to the end. Shall I go on? Mark: Yes, because it’s quite an ending, isn’t it? Stephanie: I know. It’s okay to go in the ocean. We are mermaids. Tonee Moll or her sort of avatar goes for a swim and just delightfully carves in the sand, writes in the sand, where it will not last, where it will be erased, a Greek word that means the end or the end of everything. Eschatology is the study of the end times or the end of the world. And the word εσχατος / eschatos , which sometimes appears in English as eschaton , which is just another form of the same Greek word, has particular associations with the Christian apocalypse, as in the Book of Revelation. So carving eschatos in the sand is an extraordinarily, I almost want to say, satirical gesture. You are inviting the end to itself be erased, but you’re also showing that you can’t stop thinking about the apocalypse in the way that the most famous writer of things on sand in English, Edmund Spenser, in his sonnet sequence ‘Amoretti,’ says that he can’t stop writing his beloved’s name in the sand. And then by the end, we get a turn from the reader and the self, the people we might assume that this poem addresses, to the apocalypse itself. ‘Oh, apocalypse, we just want a summer.’ And again, it’s Shelley. And, ‘The trumpet of a prophecy! Oh Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ But Shelley actually rather thinks that he has the authority to speak to the forces of nature because he’s Shelley and he’s full of himself, as wonderful as he is. Tonee Moll has some modern doubts. ‘I just wanted a summer.’ It’s like that punk song from the 80s, ‘I only wanted a Pepsi.’ And the wonderful polyvalent end where Moll actually capitalises ‘The End’, ‘When wasn’t The End / hiding behind the sun?’ It reminds us that it always feels like the end of the world. It has felt like the end of the world many, many times. We have survived and lived through so many emergencies. Maybe we’ll get through this one too. And there’s always going to be another eclipse, and there’s always going to be a night that follows day. Oh, so we’ve just heard from her via email. And it turns out, and this appears to be new, that Tonee Mae, although there is a space in it, is the complete first name, and she should be referred to where possible as Tonee Mae, rather than Mae being the middle name. Mark: Right. I’m wondering if eschatos , it’s a wonderful idea, writing a word in the sand. And to me, I was thinking, is this a bit of uplift, the fact that it’s a word from a dead language that has survived? Stephanie: Yes, it absolutely is. Mark: And Tonee Mae is writing. She’s a writer. I mean, isn’t our ambition that our words will live? And is there a flicker of hope there that eschatos has survived? Stephanie: There absolutely is a flicker of hope there. And I want to say that the hope comes not so much from the fact that classical Greek is a dead language. People don’t speak the kind of Greek that you learn to, read Sappho or Plato anymore. Because, of course, modern Greek is very alive, and it’s not that different. We know that classical Greek is intended because of the diacritics . But it’s not that, it’s just that the concept of the eschaton has survived a change almost from one civilisation to the next. And something of poetry and poetics and culture and experience and erotic attachment and friendship, the poem suggests, will survive this apocalyptic moment, just as it has survived prior apocalyptic moments. Mark: Thank you, Stephanie, for a really eye-opening take on an eye-opening poem. I mean, it’s one that you can read at first and think, ‘Okay, I think I’ve got what I’ve got from that.’ But like all good poems, when you go back, there’s layer upon layer in it, and you’ve really done a wonderful job, as you always do, of showing us the extra layers within this poem. So thank you so much, Stephanie. Stephanie: Thank you. And I’m so glad I was able to include this poem, and I’m so glad that you let me talk both about the representation of kinds of persons in Super Gay Poems , right? I really wanted something about queer poly relationships and about the variety of kinds of attitudes and feelings because poems are not … if they’re worth rereading, they’re not just representations of their demographics, they’re representations of ways of living in the world and feeling and using language. Thank you so much for having me. Mark: It’s a pleasure. And with such a terrific and I think well-timed anthology, Stephanie, that’s Super Gay Poems from Harvard University Press. So let’s have a listen once more to Tonee Mae Moll’s poem, ‘Poly Beach House’, and I, for one, will be hearing new things in it this time around. Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll a thin film floats over the weekend an unerotic tension of sucked stomachs and bathroom breaks snuck in while the rest stroll on the boardwalks and one of us allows her ache for tasting every thing to overwhelm the ever- present whisper of the end of the season and one of us says nothing as she slips out to watch the sun rise over an ocean that loathes us and one of us says they’re scared the undine inside won’t be seen before the moon collides with the sea and all of us feel it. After a swim I carve εσχατος in the sand and my body wishes I had the time to cover up my bad tattoos—O apocalypse, we just want a summer. When wasn’t The End hiding behind the sun? Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall ‘Poly Beach House’ is from Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall edited by Stephanie Burt, published by Harvard University Press. Available from: Super Gay Poems is available from: The publisher: Harvard University Press Amazon: UK | US Bookshop.org: UK | US Tonee Mae Moll Dr Tonee Mae Moll is a queer and trans writer and educator in Baltimore. Her debut memoir, Out of Step , won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award, and was featured that year on the American Library Association’s annual list of notable LGBTQ+ books. Her latest poetry collection, You Cannot Save Here , won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Tonee Mae holds a PhD in English from Morgan State University and an MFA in creative writing and publishing art from University of Baltimore. Her scholarly work explores feminist pedagogies and epistemologies, poetry, and punk. She is a Gemini. Stephanie Burt Stephanie Burt is Donald and Catherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard. She writes, co-writes, and assembles books of poems and literary criticism, as well as writing about pop music, comic books, nonrealist fiction, mermaids, and queer joy: she’s here to talk about Super Gay Poems , out now from Harvard University Press. Her book about Taylor Swift will appear in October. The most recent book of her own poems is We Are Mermaids . Photo: Jessica Bennett A Mouthful of Air – the podcast This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple , Spotify , Google Podcasts or your favourite app . You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email . The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman . A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Listen to the show You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms Related Episodes From The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning Episode 81 From ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning.Poet Robert BrowningReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessFrom ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ By Robert... Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll Episode 80 Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll Stephanie Burt reads ‘Poly Beach House’ by Tonee Mae Moll and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.This poem is from: Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after StonewallAvailable from: Super... Daedalus and Icarus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses translated by Arthur Golding Episode 79 Daedalus and Icarus from Ovid's Metamorphses, translated by Arthur Golding Mark McGuinness reads and discusses Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.Poet Ovid, translated by Arthur GoldingReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessDaedalus and... The post Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll appeared first on A Mouthful of Air .…

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Daedalus and Icarus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses translated by Arthur Golding 45:02

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Episode 79 Daedalus and Icarus from Ovid’s Metamorphses , translated by Arthur Golding Mark McGuinness reads and discusses Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses . https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/79_Daedalus_and_Icarus_from_Ovid_s_Metamorphoses_translated_by_Arthur_Golding.mp3 Poet Ovid, translated by Arthur Golding Reading and commentary by Mark McGuinness Daedalus and Icarus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses Translated Arthur Golding As soon as that the worke was done, the workman by and by Did peyse his bodie on his wings, and in the Aire on hie Hung wavering: and did teach his sonne how he should also flie. I warne thee (quoth he), Icarus, a middle race to keepe. For if thou hold too low a gate, the dankenesse of the deepe Will overlade thy wings with wet. And if thou mount too hie, The Sunne will sindge them. Therfore see betweene them both thou flie. I bid thee not behold the Starre Bootes in the Skie. Nor looke upon the bigger Beare to make thy course thereby, Nor yet on Orions naked sword. But ever have an eie To keepe the race that I doe keepe, and I will guide thee right. In giving counsell to his sonne to order well his flight, He fastned to his shoulders twaine a paire of uncoth wings. And as he was in doing it and warning him of things, His aged cheekes were wet, his hands did quake, in fine he gave His sonne a kisse the last that he alive should ever have. And then he mounting up aloft before him tooke his way Right fearfull for his followers sake: as is the Bird the day That first she tolleth from hir nest among the braunches hie Hir tender yong ones in the Aire to teach them for to flie. So heartens he his little sonne to follow teaching him A hurtfull Art. His owne two wings he waveth verie trim, And looketh backward still upon his sonnes. The fishermen Then standing angling by the Sea, and shepeherdes leaning then On sheepehookes, and the Ploughmen on the handles of their Plough, Beholding them, amazed were: and thought that they that through The Aire could flie were Gods. And now did on their left side stand The Iles of Paros and of Dele and Samos, Junos land: And on their right, Lebinthos and the faire Calydna fraught With store of honie: when the Boy a frolicke courage caught To flie at randon. Whereupon forsaking quight his guide, Of fond desire to flie to Heaven, above his boundes he stide. And there the nerenesse of the Sunne which burnd more hote aloft, Did make the Wax (with which his wings were glewed) lithe and soft. As soone as that the Wax was molt, his naked armes he shakes, And wanting wherewithall to wave no helpe of Aire he takes. But calling on his father loud he drowned in the wave: And by this chaunce of his those Seas his name for ever have. His wretched Father (but as then no father) cride in feare: O Icarus, O Icarus, where art thou? tell me where That I may finde thee, Icarus. He saw the fethers swim Upon the waves, and curst his Art that so had spighted him. Podcast transcript This is a very well-known story – the tale of Daedalus and Icarus. I’m sure you were familiar with it even before I read this version, and it would have been equally familiar to the earliest readers of Ovid’s Metamorphoses , written around the time of Jesus. The first recorded references to Daedalus, the master craftsman, engineer, and artificer of the ancient Greek world, go back to about 1400 BC, so by the time Ovid wrote the Metamorphoses , the story of Daedalus was already very old. Ovid – full name, Publius Ovidius Naso – was a Roman poet born into a wealthy family at a time when the Roman authorities were particularly keen on poetry. Augustus was the first Roman emperor, and his regime used poetry as a tool for political propaganda and cultural consolidation. It saw poetry as a way of legitimising Augustus’ rule and celebrating Roman values, emphasising the stability of his reign after years of civil wars. That’s why the poets of this era are known as Augustan poets. So this was a time of great opportunity for poets, but, as Ovid learned the hard way, it was a fine line to walk. While having the authorities’ attention was great if you were saying what they wanted to hear, crossing the line could land you in big trouble. Which is exactly what happened to Ovid: at the height of his fame he was exiled to what Romans considered the barbarian wastes of Moesia, a province on the Black Sea. The exact reason for his exile remains a mystery to this day. According to Ovid himself, in one of his poems, it was due to ‘a poem and a mistake’. There’s been much speculation about what the mistake was, but the poem in question was almost certainly the racy and explicit Ars Amatoria , ( The Art of Love ). And we get a sense of a poet walking a fine line all the way through the Metamorphoses . On the one hand, it’s a poem written in the grand epic style – Ovid was clearly aiming to compete with Virgil, who had already produced his great Augustan epic, The Aeneid . So this is a high-flown compendium of famous and supposedly edifying myths from ancient Greece. But on the other hand it’s a, highly entertaining collection of tales that are not only dramatic and exciting, but also, dark, violent and disturbing. As well as lots battles, betrayals and deceptions, there is an extensive catalogue of sexual crimes and transgressions. Now fast forward 1,500 years, and we find this poem being translated by Arthur Golding, an English gentleman born in the 1530s. Golding was a keen translator, like many of his contemporaries. Sixteenth-century England was a time of great enthusiasm for rediscovering Greek and Roman literature, just as the artists of Renaissance had been rediscovering the sculpture and visual art of the ancient world. So this translation is very much part of that broader cultural trend. At the time, knowledge of Latin and Greek literature was considered something an educated person really ought to have. Which is how a book like the Metamorphoses , despite its X-rated content, ended up as a standard set text in grammar schools across England. Any child lucky enough to receive that kind of education would have learned Latin, and very likely encountered Ovid’s Metamorphoses . One such student was a William Shakespeare, at the grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon. He would have had enough Latin to read the original, but it’s also clear he knew Golding’s version extremely well, and it was one of his favourite books, providing source material for his poems and plays. So when I read this translation, it feels like I’m reading over Shakespeare’s shoulder. And it wasn’t just Shakespeare. The Metamorphoses is one of the most influential books in European culture. If you walk into any gallery of paintings from the 16th to the 19th century, it’s like stepping into a lavishly illustrated edition of the Metamorphoses , scenes from the poem are all over the walls. And the poem continues to be a source of inspiration for poets. In 1998 Ted Hughes published his versions of the Metamorphoses , Tales from Ovid – it’s one of his best books, definitely worth checking out. Around the same time, there was also an anthology called After Ovid: New Metamorphoses , featuring versions of Ovid’s stories by some of the best-known poets of the nineties. So what kind of poem is the Metamorphoses ? It’s a huge anthology of stories, organised around the theme of metamorphosis – an ancient Greek word meaning ‘transformation’. That’s Ovid’s great insight. He looked at all these ancient Greek myths and realised the common thread running through them was change – people, gods and other beings transformed from one shape into another. And that becomes the organising principle of the poem. It’s a sequence of tales of transformation – ‘Of shapes transformed to bodies strange’, in the very first line of Golding’s translation. That’s the central theme of the poem. It’s also the big theme of life, is it not? You and I are not the same as we were a few years ago, and we’ll be very different a few years from now. The world will be different too. So yes, it’s a cliché – and it was a cliché even in Ovid’s time – but one that still rings true: change is the only constant. Zooming in on today’s story, Daedalus and Icarus, I deliberately chose one you’d already know, so that we can share the same experience as its first readers: that moment of recognition – ‘Ah, I know this one’ – followed by curiosity to see what Ovid does with it. And what strikes me is that in the modern imagination, when we think of the story of Daedalus and Icarus, we tend to focus on Icarus as the symbol of hubris – a Greek word meaning pride and presumption, ambition that oversteps the mark, when he flies too high and gets too close to the sun. And then of course the wax melts, the wings disintegrate, and Icarus plummets into the sea. But in this version it’s Daedalus who is the focus of the cautionary tale. It’s his ambition, as a craftsman, as an artist, as an engineer, that is under scrutiny. He’s the one who creates the plan, designs the wings, devises the escape – and it’s his hubris, his daring to meddle with nature, that ultimately leads to tragedy. An apparently this was an innovation in Ovid’s version of the story – earlier Greek versions focused on Icarus’ disobedience in ignoring his father’s advice. But in Ovid, Icarus is a passive, almost peripheral figure. He doesn’t speak. We’re told that he cries out to his father as he falls, but we don’t hear his voice. He’s introduced a little earlier in the narrative – just before the passage I read – and described simply as ‘Icarus, his son, a pretty lad’. Later on, he’s referred to as ‘his little son’. And when we see Icarus fly, it’s only as a follower, Golding uses the words ‘follower’ and then ‘follow’ to describe him, within four lines of each other, so it’s clear what his role is. In the earlier part of the story, before the passage I’ve just read, both Daedalus and Icarus are prisoners of King Minos on Crete. Daedalus has been engaged by Minos to built the labyrinth to house the Minotaur. And once the job is finished Minos, doesn’t want to let such a valuable asset walk free. But Daedalus looks up at the sky and thinks, ‘Well, Minos may control the sea and the land, but he can’t rule the air.’ And then we get this wonderful passage describing Daedalus’ construction of the wings out of feathers and wax: to uncoth Arts he bent the force of all his wits To alter natures course by craft. And orderly he knits A rowe of fethers one by one, beginning with the short, And overmatching still eche quill with one of longer sort, That on the shoring of a hill a man would thinke them grow. His skill is described as an’ uncouth art’ used ‘to alter nature’s course by craft’. And the implication is that this is not a good thing. It’s unnatural in the pejorative sense – he’s interfering with the order of nature, bending it to his will. He’s crossing a line. And in doing this he is just one of many characters in the Metamorphoses who try to imitate the gods or to compete with their abilities, like Ariadne, who dared to claim she was a better spinner than the goddess Minerva, or King Pentheus who mocks the worship of Bacchus and refuses to recognise him as a god. It’s a recurring theme of the poem – mortals who are foolish and daring enough to challenge the gods, and then come unstuck. And because this is such a familiar tale, we all know Icarus is going to die when the wax holding his wings together melts in the sun. And that allows Ovid to foreshadow the tragedy, to point the finger first at Daedalus, whose ‘uncouth art’ was altering nature. And then, just before the passage I’ve read for you, theres is a really unsettling description of Icarus playing with the very wings that, as we know, are going to bring about his death: There stoode me by him Icarus, his sonne, a pretie Lad. Who knowing not that he in handes his owne destruction had, With smiling mouth did one while blow the fethers to and fro Which in the Aire on wings of Birds did flask not long ago: And with his thumbes another while he chafes the yelow Wax So here’s Icarus playing in his father’s workshop, while his dad hammers and glues and whistles. Icarus is just playing with the wings. He doesn’t know he’s holding his own destruction in his hands. He’s blowing the feathers to and fro with that smiling mouth , and with his thumbs, he’s rubbing the wax. And, of course, we know that it’s the wax that’s going to kill him. The sense of foreboding gets stronger when Daedalus gives Icarus the lecture before they set off: I warne thee (quoth he), Icarus, a middle race to keepe. For if thou hold too low a gate, the dankenesse of the deepe Will overlade thy wings with wet. And if thou mount too hie, The Sunne will sindge them. Therfore see betweene them both thou flie. I bid thee not behold the Starre Bootes in the Skie. Nor looke upon the bigger Beare to make thy course thereby, Nor yet on Orions naked sword. But ever have an eie To keepe the race that I doe keepe, and I will guide thee right. And this is every parent ever, isn’t it? Giving their child instructions before they set off on a journey: ‘Don’t talk to strangers. Always keep your ticket handy. Do what the teacher says.’ That sort of thing. It’s Polonius in Hamlet , talking to Ophelia and warning her about the dangers of men and the big bad world. And again, it’s poignant because we know that this is exactly the fate that is awaiting Icarus. It’s foreseen, foreknown, foreshadowed – and yet utterly inescapable. Then we get the Daedalus’s final farewell to his son before they take flight: He fastned to his shoulders twaine a paire of uncoth wings. And as he was in doing it and warning him of things, His aged cheekes were wet, his hands did quake, in fine he gave His sonne a kisse the last that he alive should ever have. And after that, Ovid expands on the moment with this slightly ridiculous but also oddly moving image of the mother bird flapping her wings, trying to teach her fledglings how to fly: And then he mounting up aloft before him tooke his way Right fearfull for his followers sake: as is the Bird the day That first she tolleth from hir nest among the braunches hie Hir tender yong ones in the Aire to teach them for to flie. So heartens he his little sonne to follow teaching him A hurtfull Art. Note that phrase: ‘a hurtful Art’. The art that is going to hurt, that’s going to kill his son. And then they’re off! They’re up in the sky. It’s like the moment in the famous animation of The Snowman , when they take a few steps forward and suddenly they’re walking in the air. And we get this great description of their flight through the eyes of people on the ground: a fisherman, a shepherd and a ploughman: The fishermen Then standing angling by the Sea, and shepeherdes leaning then On sheepehookes, and the Ploughmen on the handles of their Plough, Beholding them, amazed were: and thought that they that through The Aire could flie were Gods. This is terrific isn’t it? Like a movie shot where the camera pans across a crowd of onlookers, looking up in wonder at Superman flying overhead. And they think that those flying through the sky must be gods. And this is another way of highlighting the ambition – the presumption – of Daedalus, daring to compete with the gods. Let’s take another look at that ploughman on the ground – because you may well have seen him before, even if you’ve never read Ovid’s poem. If you’re an art enthusiast, you probably thought of Bruegel’s famous painting of Icarus – depicting the boy plunging into the sea while a large and ploughman in 16th century dress drives a horse-drawn plough in the foreground. And if you’re a poetry enthusiast, then you may remember that same ploughman in W. H. Auden’s famous poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ . Auden writes about how, in Bruegel’s ‘Icarus’, ‘the ploughman may / Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, / But for him it was not an important failure’. So what we have here is an intriguing artistic lineage: Ovid’s poem provides the best known version of this well-known story. Bruegel paints the scene, probably in the late 1550s. About ten years later, the story is translated into English by Arthur Golding, but Golding has almost certainly not seen the painting. Then in the 1930s Auden writes his poem about the painting, where the ploughman appears again. So the ploughman is emblematic of the conversation between artists and poets that is being carried on over thousands of years. When people talk about ‘artistic tradition’, it can sound dry and academic. But to me it’s more accurate and more fun to think of it as a conversation or maybe a ball game – Ovid booting the ball upfield to Bruegel, Bruegel tossing it to Auden, and Golding racing up on the other side of the pitch. And if you’re a poet or an artist yourself, then maybe you too can join in the game… OK, so Daedalus and Icarus fly past a series of islands and it’s all going swimmingly, until the boy, ‘with honeyed thoughts’, catches a ‘frolic courage’, a playful urge, and suddenly breaks away. He can’t resist flying higher and higher, and he forsakes his guide. ‘Of fond desire to fly to heaven, above his bounds, he stide.’ – and that’s it, that’s his downfall. The nearness of the sun melts the wax. And as soon as the wax is softened, ‘his naked arms he shakes’ – he’s flailing, with nothing to keep him aloft, like a cartoon character who’s run off a cliff and suddenly realises there’s nothing beneath him. He calls out for his father, but he’s too far gone – ‘he drowned in the wave’. Then the perspective shifts to Daedalus: His wretched Father (but as then no father) cride in feare: ‘O Icarus, O Icarus, where art thou? tell me where That I may finde thee, Icarus.’ He saw the fethers swim Upon the waves, and curst his Art that so had spighted him. That line – ‘His wretched father (but as then no father) cried in fear’ – is devastating. The main clause is ‘His wretched father… cried in fear’, but inserted into it is that haunting parenthetical phrase: ‘but as then no father’; from that moment, he was no longer a father. He had been a father, but now the child is gone. I can’t speak to the Latin original, but in Golding’s English, the syntax does so much emotional work. Sometimes, grammar can bring a tear to your eye. Another notable aspect of Golding’s translation is his use of rhyming couplets, which are a great tool for maintaining momentum and knitting the poem together. And Golding takes his place in a long line of poets who have used rhyming couplets for narrative poetry, from Chaucer before him and to later poets such as Andrew Marvell and John Dryden, and eventually to the great master of the English couplet, Alexander Pope. And some of these couplets provide moments of wit or even poignancy – like the couplet describing Daedalus’ reaction to Icarus’ death: He saw the fethers swim Upon the waves, and curst his Art that so had spighted him. The feathers swim – but Icarus, does not. That contrast is brutal. The very invention Daedalus has been so proud of is what kills his son. The wings survive, the feathers float, but the boy is gone. So I think Golding’s use of rhyme here is superb. There’s also something very interesting going on in the metre of Golding’s translation. You may have noticed when I read the poem aloud, and you’ll certainly notice it if you look at the text on the website, that the lines are very long. For example, let’s go back to the beginning of the passaged I read: As soon as that the worke was done, the workman by and by That’s one line. And then: Did peyse his bodie on his wings, and in the Aire on hie That’s another line. Now, if you’re a regular listener to this podcast, you’ve heard a lot of poetry written in iambic pentameter – ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM – five beats to the line, typically ten syllables. But Golding’s lines are much longer than that, they are in iambic heptameter, meaning they have seven iambic feet: ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM. Did peyse his bodie on his wings, and in the Aire on hie This line is normally called a ‘fourteener’ , because it typically has 14 syllables. The extra syllables give the line a roomier feel, like ordering a grande coffee, or flying business class and enjoying the extra legroom. Why did Golding choose the fourteener meter instead of iambic pentameter? One reason is that he didn’t feel a pressure to use the pentameter the way later poets would. By the end of the 16th century, iambic pentameter would become a popular metre in England, and a dominant one in the 17th century. But in Golding’s time, English poetry was still finding its way. Poets were experimenting with different metres and verse forms. For example, this was the time when the sonnet form, which was an Italian import, became popular among English poets, beginning with Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey. Blank verse first appeared in English in Howard’s translation of Virgil; he wrote this about 1540, but it wasn’t published until the 1550s, and it was only in the 1560s that blank verse was used for plays on the London stage. Which meant it would have been a new and experimental form when Golding translated Ovid in the 1560s. So this was a time when poets were trying out different metres and seeing what English poetry could do. And Golding wouldn’t have felt the same pressure to conform to iambic pentameter as he might have done a hundred years later. Another reason Golding uses fourteeners is that the metre used by Ovid in the Metamorphoses , dactylic hexameter , is also a pretty capacious line. In Latin, the metre was based on long and short syllables rather than stressed and unstressed syllables in English, so they don’t map across exactly. And translators sometimes struggle to compress the amount of information in the six feet of a typical Latin hexameter into the five feet of an English pentameter. By using fourteeners, Golding gets a little more room to play with the language and stay true to the expansive feel of the Latin original. I think there’s also an element of personal taste in his choice. Golding’s style in his Metamorphoses is lush, expansive, and sensuous, it’s as though his Muse likes a little extra room to breathe, and the fourteener gives that room. Yet another influence on Golding’s meter comes from English ballad metre , which we heard back in Episode 22 with the traditional ballad ‘The Unquiet Grave’ . Now, at first this might seem counterintuitive, because ballads and fourteeners look very different on the page. But listen to the opening lines of today’s passage: As soon as that the worke was done, the workman by and by Did peyse his bodie on his wings, and in the Aire on hie Can you hear it? The seven beats of the fourteener are starting to fall into groups of four beats, then three beats – four beats, then three beats. So these are two lines of heptameter, but they could easily be read as four lines of a ballad stanza, which alternates lines with four beats, then three. Like this stanza from ‘The Unquiet Grave’: ‘Cold blows the wind to my true love, And gently drops the rain, I never had but one sweetheart, And in greenwood she lies slain. This is a natural quirk of English poetry: once you go beyond five feet, the line has a tendency to break into two smaller parts. You may remember Episode 58 , where we looked at a sonnet by Sir Philip Sidney, which was written in iambic hexameters, and the six feet in each line sounded like they were breaking into two shorter lines of three beats each. So, in many of Golding’s fourteeners, we can hear that four-beat and three-beat pattern: As soon as that the worke was done, *comma* the workman by and by Did peyse his bodie on his wings, *pause* and in the Aire on hie This pause within a line is known as a caesura, and many lines in Golding’s Metamorphoses follow the same pattern, with the caesura after the fourth beat. Which means he’s tapping into the English ballad tradition, which would have been very familiar to English readers and listeners at the time, as a metre associated with storytelling. Golding does make an effort to vary the pattern. For example, sometimes the pause occurs earlier in the line, like in this one: Hung wavering: and did teach his sonne how he should also flie. And in that line we looked at earlier, we can hear two pauses, before and after that heartbreaking phrase ‘but as then no father’: His wretched father (but as then no father) cried in fear So it looks like Golding was aware of the dangers of slipping too comfortably into the four-three pattern. And I think we can see why other poets have found the fourteener a bit tricky to handle. It’s like driving a car where the steering feels a little off or the gearbox is a bit sticky – you have to keep compensating for it if you want to have a smooth ride. But Golding was certainly not the last person to use the fourteener. A great example is George Chapman’s translations of Homer later in the 16th century, which we’ll probably explore in a future episode. The fourteener has even survived into niche corners of modern culture, such as in the video game Dragon Quest XI , where Queen Marina , one of the characters, speaks exclusively in fourteeners. So it’s a meter that still pops up in surprising places! So let’s take one more listen to Ovid’s version of the story of Daedalus and Icarus, and appreciate the gorgeousness, the energy, and the emotional resonance that Golding brings to his translation. Daedalus and Icarus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses Translated Arthur Golding As soon as that the worke was done, the workman by and by Did peyse his bodie on his wings, and in the Aire on hie Hung wavering: and did teach his sonne how he should also flie. I warne thee (quoth he), Icarus, a middle race to keepe. For if thou hold too low a gate, the dankenesse of the deepe Will overlade thy wings with wet. And if thou mount too hie, The Sunne will sindge them. Therfore see betweene them both thou flie. I bid thee not behold the Starre Bootes in the Skie. Nor looke upon the bigger Beare to make thy course thereby, Nor yet on Orions naked sword. But ever have an eie To keepe the race that I doe keepe, and I will guide thee right. In giving counsell to his sonne to order well his flight, He fastned to his shoulders twaine a paire of uncoth wings. And as he was in doing it and warning him of things, His aged cheekes were wet, his hands did quake, in fine he gave His sonne a kisse the last that he alive should ever have. And then he mounting up aloft before him tooke his way Right fearfull for his followers sake: as is the Bird the day That first she tolleth from hir nest among the braunches hie Hir tender yong ones in the Aire to teach them for to flie. So heartens he his little sonne to follow teaching him A hurtfull Art. His owne two wings he waveth verie trim, And looketh backward still upon his sonnes. The fishermen Then standing angling by the Sea, and shepeherdes leaning then On sheepehookes, and the Ploughmen on the handles of their Plough, Beholding them, amazed were: and thought that they that through The Aire could flie were Gods. And now did on their left side stand The Iles of Paros and of Dele and Samos, Junos land: And on their right, Lebinthos and the faire Calydna fraught With store of honie: when the Boy a frolicke courage caught To flie at randon. Whereupon forsaking quight his guide, Of fond desire to flie to Heaven, above his boundes he stide. And there the nerenesse of the Sunne which burnd more hote aloft, Did make the Wax (with which his wings were glewed) lithe and soft. As soone as that the Wax was molt, his naked armes he shakes, And wanting wherewithall to wave no helpe of Aire he takes. But calling on his father loud he drowned in the wave: And by this chaunce of his those Seas his name for ever have. His wretched Father (but as then no father) cride in feare: O Icarus, O Icarus, where art thou? tell me where That I may finde thee, Icarus. He saw the fethers swim Upon the waves, and curst his Art that so had spighted him. Ovid Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) was a Roman poet who was born in 43 BC and died sometime around 17AD. Born in Sulmo, he was educated in Rome and initially trained for a legal career before turning to poetry. His most celebrated work, the Metamorphoses *, is a sweeping mythological epic spanning the world’s creation to the deification of Julius Caesar. Composed in dactylic hexameter, it blends myth, history, and transformation into a unified vision of change. Though immensely popular, Ovid was exiled by Augustus in 8AD for reasons still debated. His Metamorphoses profoundly influenced the development of Western art and literature. Arthur Golding Arthur Golding was an English translator who was born in 1536 and died in 1606. Educated at Cambridge and the Inner Temple, Golding moved in prominent Protestant circles and was half-brother to Lord Burghley, chief adviser to Elizabeth I. Though he translated over a dozen works, his 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses became his legacy, shaping English Renaissance literature with its vivid storytelling. While Golding’s Puritan leanings might seem at odds with Ovid’s pagan myths, his version balances both literary artistry and a desire for moral instruction. A Mouthful of Air – the podcast This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple , Spotify , Google Podcasts or your favourite app . You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email . The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman . A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Listen to the show You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms Related Episodes From The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning Episode 81 From ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning.Poet Robert BrowningReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessFrom ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ By Robert... 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A Mouthful of Air: Poetry with Mark McGuinness

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Desire Path by Jude Rosen 32:59

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Episode 78 Desire Path by Jude Rosen Jude Rosen reads ‘Desire Path’ and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness. https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/78_Desire_Path_by_Jude_Rosen.mp3 This poem is from: Reclamations from London ’ s Edgelands Available from: Reclamations from London’s Edgelands is available from: The publisher: Paekakariki Press Desire Path by Jude Rosen Through this green swathe, how many feet have gone? Ah! the difference the trampling to mud makes when the trampled grass becomes a path. We follow a whim, taking the diagonal trail through Lammas Meadow – on the desire path extending freely to those who come after, who may be lured by the emerald field, become immersed in its pasture, one foot after the other, leaving a single line without a tar or gravel scar churning up the past or effacing it. Strange how walking has changed the course of grass and repossessed the Lammas lands – the right to graze surpassed by the right to roam, pass through, reflect, pass on. Interview transcript Mark: Jude, where did this poem come from? Jude: Well, I think it came from the coming together of a number of different experiences. First of all, I was walking the Lammas lands , which are ancient open green spaces. Lammas lands were originally where commoners, people without power or property, had customary rights to graze their animals after the harvest. And I was part of an artistic collective that was resisting the Olympic encroachment onto the marshlands, the green wild that we still have it in Hackney and Walthamstow and Stratford. Mark: Right. And this was the 2012 Olympics in London? Jude: This was the 2012 Olympics in East London. And it was really destroying the wild ecology of this place through concreting over and fencing off and evictions of people, particularly marginal people and students and asylum seekers and people on low income who lived on the edge. And it also destroyed the one of the last industrial villages. So in a way I was involved, and walking was both a sort of poetic and political practice. It was kind of contemplative and reflective. So observing and actually going through these spaces, experiencing them as part of everyday life. And so the whole sequence of the book, but in this poem, it’s all in blank verse , or it’s largely in blank verse, which is the sort of the rhythm of walking and breathing. And it’s, predominantly, it has this unrhymed five beat line. Mark: Great. So long time listeners will, of course, recognize blank verse as being unrhymed iambic pentameter, ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM, the five iambic beats. Because we did a whole mini-series on it from Marlowe through Shakespeare and Milton and Wordsworth . So it’s great to hear that you are continuing that grand tradition, Jude. And like Wordsworth, you’re doing it via walking. Jude: I think that’s really important because it’s really poetry coming out of the body, not just the mind, but actually walking and breathing and words being somehow all integrated. And some of that is the influence of psychogeography , which I was also somewhat immersed in at the time. Mark: Which is? Jude: Psychogeography really is the idea that the geography, the physical environment is also imbued with spiritual and emotional and cultural power. It’s not simply grass and trees and leaves and plants. The idea is that there’s actually a kind of cosmic energy and ley lines, they’re called. The point for me is not really a kind of New Age notion. For me, it’s really the embodiment of history and language and the historic presence of people who’ve gone before our predecessors in the landscape, and particularly in the marshes, because the marshes have been like a sponge absorbing waves of immigrants, and they’ve got different signs and different kinds of burial grounds, and they’re places where rubbish is, full of pits and waste and recycling. So it’s this whole remaking, which is like an ongoing historical process. And if you walk in it, you see it and you’re part of it. And in a way that’s. I think one of the impulses in ‘The Desire Path’ is that by walking it, you’re also remaking it. You’re leaving a light imprint. The path, the idea of the desire path, is often that it’s an alternative path to that imposed by authority, by the state. It’s not about ordinance, maps and official signage, so they’re often short cuts or the ways round, and they express something of the autonomy of walkers and of people using that path. And in a way that’s that’s one of the strongest impulses in the poem is about how we can read the design. By walking it, we participate in it and we walk in the path of our predecessors. Mark: Wonderful. So it’s like that brown stripe across a lawn or a field where people have forged their own path. And I hadn’t realised until I read your poem that that actually had a name, that that is the desire path. Jude: And the one I was walking was right across the Lammas meadow. And it is a diagonal right through the hay meadow. Of course, when there’s no hay, the hay is gone. And so that’s how it came. And a phrase came to me from a poem called ‘Grass’ by a Bulgarian poet, who is very, very famous in Bulgaria, Blaga Dimitrova : ‘I’m not afraid that they trample me. The trampled grass soon becomes a path.’ Mark: Wow. What a line. Jude: Yeah. And she wrote, I think in the context, both of male oppression, of being downtrodden or trampled by men, because she was quite a powerful politician in Bulgaria after the fall of the Soviet Union after 1989. And also I think it was more broadly, I suppose, against state oppression. So that idea of it goes from the individual body to something much bigger. ‘The trampled grass soon becomes a path.’ It only soon becomes a path by other people following in your footsteps. So it becomes an image really from individual resistance to collective resistance. So that also that that rang in my mind as I was walking. So I think that’s where the poem came from. Mark: It’s wonderful. And I love the way you linked the act of poetry and the rhythms of walking, the rhythm of the body with the rhythm of metre, which has always been one of my arguments for it, is that if you really want to feel a poem in your bones, then you need some rhythm. But also, you know, I love the title of your book, Reclamations from London’s Edgelands . So the poems themselves are reclaiming the land. Jude: Yeah. Mark: I know that the edgelands, the marshlands, have got a long history of being claimed and reclaimed from the sea and from various human groups. But it’s really interesting that you say even in a kind of a what is ostensibly a nature poem here or a poem about going for a walk, that there’s a political aspect to this for you. Jude: Yes, but a different kind of politics to what is usually assumed to be politics. It’s not polemical. It’s not messaging through a poem. It’s not using the poem as a vehicle. It’s actually through the practice of both walking and writing. So as a sort of forms of resistance to a certain kind of – well, specifically, it was against the sort of Olympic machine that got going and has redeveloped the whole area and privatized land and done many things and claimed many things which it wasn’t responsible for. But yeah, I think I think that was the main impulse behind the poem and behind that it wasn’t an idea to, you know, a concept to attack the state. It was through an alternative way of being and of practice – challenging and retrieving language. Because a lot of the book is there – there are a number of verbatim poems in it, which come from redundant workers, from residents who were displaced. So I wanted to, in a way, make the marshes have a kind of chorus of different voices and have that in the in the book as well. Mark: Yeah, those are really terrific monologues because I think the material came from interviews, some of which you had conducted. Jude: Yes. Mark: And we really do hear these voices from the past coming through, who worked in and on the river and then the factories and some of the scrapes they got into, the stories behind the area are fascinating. And also this – so I’m looking again now at this phrase right at the end where you talk about, ‘Strange how walking / has changed the course of grass and repossessed / the Lammas lands – the right to graze’ – that phrase is jumping out at me now – ‘the right to graze surpassed / by the right to roam, pass through, reflect, pass on.’. So that right to graze was the old common land, right? Jude: Yes. Mark: Everyone had the right to graze their sheep or their cow or their pig or whatever they had on the common land. Was it towards the end of the 18th century, it really gathered pace that there was enclosures by private landlords? And that became very controversial politically. And it’s interesting, you know, linking the right to graze with the right to roam. Jude: Yes. I mean, those lands, the Lammas lands were actually taken over by what was then the district boards, and then it became the London County Council, and then district council, that Hackney actually took over the Lammas lands and made them the marshes that were given ‘in perpetuity’ to the people of the borough, for their recreation and enjoyment. And it’s those rights which were passed down from customary grazing rights from medieval times, to becoming common lands which were under the local authority, they were supposed to be securing forever, really for recreational purposes, rather than development roads or housing. And it also has been very vital in being part of the protection of the green lungs of London, for the air quality and general health of the population. And it’s those rights and those lands that are continually being encroached on. And so that’s part of the – the Olympics was one very particular, but there have been many others, I know there will be future – attacks really on our common wild greens on which we all depend for life. Mark: So this is wonderful, Jude. I mean, I used to live in East London, and I know this part of the city, and I think you’ve caught the atmosphere of it really wonderfully throughout the whole book. It’s like going for a going for a walk with a really well-informed guide because you’re seeing the landscape and the cityscape through your eyes and you can see all the little, you know, the ‘tar or gravel scar churning up the past’. You really bring it alive in the poetry. And zooming in a bit more on this particular poem, how did you know it began with that walk? And you’ve got the rhythm of the blank verse. I mean, how did that evolve into the form you have now? Jude: Well, the form is an Italian sonnet but without the formal rhyme endings. You’ve probably talked about the sonnet before in other podcasts. Mark: We had Mimi Khalvati talking about the Italian sonnet. She read her sonnet on the fried egg. Jude: Yes. Well, the Italian sonnet came rather naturally because it’s sort of philosophical and meditative and this is really a meditation on time and desire. So I think it just came out like that, literally. But I think this very important, what makes the poem really more than anything is, is the two aspects. There is a sound pattern that comes from this ‘Ah’, which to me is the sound of desire that infuses the whole poem. Mark: Right. Jude: And I think the sound pattern is based on that long ‘Ah!’. So you have ‘Ah!’, ‘path’, ‘after’, ‘pasture’, ‘after’, ‘tar’, ‘scar’, ‘past’, ‘grass’, ‘surpassed’, ‘pass’. And I think that’s one aspect of the sound pattern. And then it’s got this consonant, this hiss of these hard ‘s’s, evoking a sort of squelch of feet on grass, I think. Mark: For me it also suggested the wind in the grass. Jude: Then you’ve got ‘grass’, ‘pasture’, ‘course’, also ‘surpassed’, ‘pass’ again – those ‘s’s. But then along with that. ‘Ah!’ and those ‘s’s you’ve got this ‘m’, the ‘m’s which are also of desire, you know, ‘mud makes’ but it’s really the ‘trampling – ‘trampled’, ‘whim’, ‘Lammas’, ‘emerald’, ‘immersed’, ‘roam’. And so I think the whole poem in sound you know, combines a sort of ‘ah-ing’and ‘umming’ [laughter]. And I think that sound, that ‘Ah!’, suggested them. So that in all the possible choices of words, I was I think, drawn to those long ‘ah’s. And then that ‘m’. I don’t that was conscious, but I think it was dictated in a way, by that long ‘ah’ and that ‘m’. Mark: In the second line. ‘Ah, the difference the trampling to mud makes.’ That’s like the tuning fork for the whole poem, isn’t it? Jude: Yeah. You know, trampling mud you don’t usually think of as a positive thing. And I think this was kind of saying that, that when we make a mark, we put down a mark like that. It’s a suggestion for everybody. I mean, one of the things that came to mind, if I can give another metaphor, is when you walk in a cathedral and you go on the steps of a cathedral and they are bowed in the middle where so many feet have passed and the hard thing has worn away as Brecht would say. I get a little tingle. When I think of all the people who have gone before me and those who will come after. And I think that’s the other thing that comes together in this poem, that the first and last lines end on the same rhyme. Mark: Yes! Jude: ‘how many feet have gone’, and ‘pass on’. And in a way, it bookends it. It frames it. And I think that is another movement in the poem, which is about the meditation on time, that we participate in something. And we in a way, in that sense actively relate to our environment by walking and observing and engaging with the space. But also we leave something behind and it’s also about passing something on. And so there’s a kind of awareness of history as the present, but also a moment on a path, you know, and going on into the future. Of course, it sort of touches on death but not in a negative sense, but this participating in something and always aware of history in the present so that we’re aware of our predecessors as we move forward or we move on. And I think that’s partly why – the lyric poem is always about time and love and death. Mark: Great subjects! Jude: And I suppose this poem is really focuses on our participation in something bigger than ourselves, but in which we all have a place. That’s the thing about common lands and the and the ecology of our lives. The desire path is a path we can make, we can remake and leave for others. So it’s a sort of metaphor for – also treading lightly. You know, it’s leaving a single line ‘without a tar or gravel scar’. It’s it’s a different kind of passing through than a road or the extension of the M11, which which was also fought over in that area. Mark: I absolutely love what you’ve done with that first and last line. I mean, it’s a really bold move to have the rhyming couplet enclosing the entire sonnet. That’s quite unusual. But what you’ve done, I think, is marvellous because you’ve got like you say, you’ve got ‘Through this green swathe, how many feet have gone?’ Those are the feet from the past. And then at the end, as you say, this is us now with ‘the right to roam, pass through, reflect, pass on’. So you’ve got past and future. You’re kind of neatly joining there. And it’s only, as you talked about it just then that I picked up on the triple meaning of ‘pass on’. Jude: Yes. Mark: You’ve got ‘pass on’ as ‘moving on’, but you’ve also got ‘pass on’ as ‘leaving something behind, passing it on for other people’, and also, heartbreakingly, ‘pass on’ as in ‘dying’. Jude: But I think. I think it makes it a lovely, I think it makes death something positive, rather than just negative or a tragedy, because if you pass on and are able to pass on something beautiful and healthful and – it’s like passing on breath, you know, to be able to breathe fresh air. I think that’s rather wonderful. Mark: And I think that’s exactly what you’ve done with this poem. You’ve passed on something beautiful for the rest of us to enjoy. Jude: I hope so. That’s very kind of you Mark: Well, let’s listen and savour that. And maybe listen out for those sound patterns that Jude was just talking about so eloquently. So thank you very much, Jude, for sharing this from a wonderful collection, Reclamations from London’s Edgelands . Jude: Thank you. Desire Path by Jude Rosen Through this green swathe, how many feet have gone? Ah! the difference the trampling to mud makes when the trampled grass becomes a path. We follow a whim, taking the diagonal trail through Lammas Meadow – on the desire path extending freely to those who come after, who may be lured by the emerald field, become immersed in its pasture, one foot after the other, leaving a single line without a tar or gravel scar churning up the past or effacing it. Strange how walking has changed the course of grass and repossessed the Lammas lands – the right to graze surpassed by the right to roam, pass through, reflect, pass on. Reclamations from London’s Edgelands ‘Desire Path’ is from Reclamations from London’s Edgelands by Jude Rosen, published by Paekakariki Press. Available from: Reclamations from London’s Edgelands is available from: The publisher: Paekakariki Press Jude Rosen Jude Rosen is a second generation immigrant of the Jewish East End, former historian and urban researcher who now works with refugees. As a poet, she explores the relationship of language to place, drawing on archival and oral histories, local ecology and etymology discovered through walking. Her pamphlet A Small Gateway , was published by Hearing Eye in 2009. Reclamations from London’s Edgelands , (Paekakariki, 2024) grew out of artistic resistance to Olympic redevelopment. Poems from the collection are performed on poem and living history walks ( poemwalks.wordpress.com ). She is currently revising a long poem of refugee journeys and a sequence on Gaza. A Mouthful of Air – the podcast This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple , Spotify , Google Podcasts or your favourite app . You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email . The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman . A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Listen to the show You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms Related Episodes From The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning Episode 81 From ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning.Poet Robert BrowningReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessFrom ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ By Robert... Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll Episode 80 Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll Stephanie Burt reads ‘Poly Beach House’ by Tonee Mae Moll and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.This poem is from: Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after StonewallAvailable from: Super... 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Self Portrait 1981 Self Portrait of the poet as Cassius Clay 1982 by Nick Makoha 44:08

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Episode 77 Self Portrait 1981 Self Portrait of the Poet as Cassius Clay 1982 by Nick Makoha Nick Makoha reads ‘Self Portrait 1981 Self Portrait of the poet as Cassius Clay 1982’ and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness. https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/77_Self-portrait_1981_Self-portrait_of_the_poet_as_Cassius_Clay_1982_by_Nick_Makoha.mp3 This poem is from: The New Carthaginians Available from: The New Carthaginians is available from: The publisher: Penguin Amazon: UK | US Bookshop.org: UK Self Portrait 1 of 2 by Nick Makoha If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all. – E. Faga 1 1981 That midsummer and the D’Angelo concert is sold out at Brixton. Fuck! I can’t tell you what he whispered to security but here’s a picture of Icarus and me backstage with two press cards pinned to our chests. And to think four hours ago I was clocking off work. They have only just let in the crowd. You can hear the hum through the tannoy. The thing about Icarus is he has a microchip for a mouth. You say it he will name it. You name it he will play it. Once after his dad had died I caught him beating his chest after a month of fasting and prayer. They were more like songs really – the way the words fell away from his bones. Anyway, he is calling Keyon Harrold, the trumpet player from The Vanguard, ‘Kenya’. Asking him things like How do you create an open field in the band and if he believes in the equation of the Freedom Principle even in light of the Palestine situation . D’Angelo has popped two cassettes into a deck. Icarus calls him Smoke. My bladder is about to cut loose. When I return, they are huddled around the tape deck like tribesmen eating jerk chicken, listening to a jamming session from the morning’s rehearsal in silence. Smoke must have taken the picture because he is the only one not in it. Icarus is in the centre with his wings fanning and closing. 2 the Poet as Cassius Clay 1982 To forgive someone requires two incidents in your life. The most obvious is the incident that like fire must be redeemed by fire. Here’s the match. A young journalist is speaking to camera – but her eyes struggle to find the centre. She is talking about my country the way a wino pees Pepsi into a can. This is being broadcast round the world. Except for the countries she is in. Hmm! She’s using her diaphragm to say things outside the range of her common experience. We are what you talk about before you cut to the news desk for an update on the Olympics. The only part you will remember is that the Queen’s daughter has qualified for the British riding team. And not that the body on the ground belonged to another body. And that he fought to stay alive the way the journalist fights with her mic or fights to beat the falling darkness or fights away a pair of mosquitoes that hover between her breast and right eye – hover between her lip and right breast. The cameraman has the engine running and is using the back of the pickup as a tripod while he rolls himself a smoke. Watch his lens searching for the sweetness of death. If only the dead could awaken. The lighter belongs to the body on the ground, so do the smokes, and so does the country in which we watch him. The mosquitoes know this – that is why they are unhinged – and now so do you. The second point of forgiveness sits in the future like the woman I will one day love and the country in which I will one day live. Forgive me. My heart is a vicious wolf that moves like the cloud of God searching for the true shape of history searching for the weight of a love lost. My mother was a river, my father was a boat – both separated by a sack of light Interview transcript Mark: Nick, where did this poem come from? Nick: So this poem came from a series of poems that I was working on that – the term is called ekphrasis when you take a piece of art and you use poetic language not necessarily to describe the painting, but the connection between the painting and yourself and the artist. And the particular artist that I was looking at was Jean-Michel Basquiat and initially that wasn’t intentional. It’s just that I’d gone to see his work at the Boom for Real retrospective at the Barbican, and I was so moved by the work, I cried, I burst into tears. I’ve never done that before in public. Just seen a painting or a bunch of his paintings and burst into tears one after the other and literally weeping. At the time I didn’t know what to make of it. I wasn’t trying to write any poem. I was literally just coming, I’d done a workshop with a friend of mine and I was just coming well, given free tickets and I was just observing the painting. I’d never seen a Basquiat painting before in person in my life, but when I started actually working on this collection that at the time wasn’t even called The New Carthaginians , it was called The Welcome Table , I knew I needed three characters, of which I would be one of them as the poet. I didn’t know that the second character would be Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the third character would be Icarus. And what I wanted to do was what he does with paintings. He turns paintings into poetry, so I wanted to turn poetry into a painting. And so these there are actually two titles in the one title. So the first part of it is Self Portrait 1981 , which is one of his paintings, and the second one is Self-portrait of the Poet as Cassius Clay , which is another painting. And what I wanted to do was the self-portrait of the Black body. So one of them is a Self portrait of the poet as Cassius Clay. One of them is this kind of self portrait, of course. But because they’re using Basquiat, they’re also, it’s also a portrait of him, if that makes sense. And that was what I was trying to achieve. And they’re basically two poems that sit side by side with each other and they work as what I call a new form called the footnote poem. And so you read part one of the poem and then the story elevates to another register, and you read part two. So I didn’t think of this at the time. So it sounds very ‘Oh, you know what you’re doing’. I didn’t, I was just writing from just kind of this raw emotion. And what I did before I wrote these poems is actually I’d been to the retrospective. But then I decided to go to another retrospective that was put on by his sisters in New York, and that was called King Pleasure . And so I had to go back to see the paintings again and other works. And I was again moved and then I had about 40 poems that I really liked. I mean, 40 paintings call them poems, but 40 paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat that I really liked. And then from those I would I would, I would just day by day write a poem. And then some of them connected as these two do. So I didn’t make them initially connect, but I saw parallels. I thought, okay, what if I was to find a way to connect them in the way that Basquiat that he did these diptychs and triptychs. So diptychs and triptychs are moments in time. So a triptych is three scenes, one that represents the past, one that represents the present and one that represents the future. And so when you put them all together, the past, present and future, you have the time all of time happening at once. And one of the things I wanted to do was play with time. So technically there are two poems here, but when you put them together, there’s a third poem. So that is the past, the present and the future. Once again, I’m not as clever as it sounds! At the time I didn’t know what I was doing. These were just creative instincts that I was playing with. And part of that, yeah, part of the problem was, and the reason I was playing with this is because I was, I was trying to tell a story. So this, The New Carthaginians is my life story. I’m looking at my life story. I’m from Uganda originally, and with my first book I was looking at the Amin regime and I was trying to look at like the eight years or nine years of that regime. I wrote a play called The Dark , which looked at one day, which is the day that my mom smuggled me out of Uganda. And then for some reason, the curiosity was still there. So I wanted to look at a specific seven days and there’s seven days of history in Uganda that’s called the Entebbe hijacking . And I wanted to parallel that with all the important moments of history in life, to look at the world through that, particularly the African lens but particularly the East African lens and more particularly the Ugandan. So that’s what I was trying to achieve with the whole collection. And those three characters myself, the poet myself from Michel Basquiat, the painter and the Black Icarus, all live in present time. And I’m using them to move through time and how they talk about different histories to kind of understand my exile life here in the UK and also to give a voice to the East African voice, if that makes sense. Yeah. Mark: Yeah. So there’s a lot going on in this poem and also in the in the whole book. And, if you’re listening to this and feeling a little bit overwhelmed right now, that’s actually, I think, overwhelmed in a good way is part of the experience of this book. There’s so much richness with so many different perspectives and things going on. And so there’s a lot for us to unpack. But before we do that, Nick, in terms of your poem, I’d like to go back to that experience when you first encountered the Basquiat painting face to face. Looking back, what do you think it was about those painting things that was so powerful for you? Nick: I mean, there’s. I mean, there’s so many ways to answer why Basquiat’s paintings mean so much to me. I think I want to say this humbly. I think if I had known him, he would have been my friend. And I’m not saying that because he’s famous. It’s just the many things that I realized that he was into I was into when I went to the King Pleasure retrospective in New York, and I was looking through his collections, many of the books he read, I’d read, the music he was into, I was into. And he kind of reminds me that he’s a collage of several of my friends in many ways. So I was like, you’d be the sort of guy, I’ll probably go check out a concert and eat some food, talk. I might not see him for a while because he’s famous, but it would be like that. I’m not saying, I’d see him every day I’m not trying to elevate myself to some kind of status, but he just seemed like a friend on some level. That was one. I think the other thing I learned when I went travelling across America looking at Basquiat paintings across these different museums in New York and LA and Atlanta is I realized that the thing about Basquiat is that he centres the Black body in time in history. And that’s kind of what I was trying to achieve. So I realized the crying – he’d given me a codex or a key into how I could write these poems, because the struggle was, I mean, every poet has this. But I, particularly as a writer of colour, as a Black poet, as an African poet, you always question: How will they – will they even have interest in my story? How do I make it relevant to contemporary time? Because the story is not in the news. The stories that they have of my country are not the ones that I’m trying to tell. So that was I think when I saw that it’s almost like I’d seen a pathway that would allow me to navigate my narrative in a way that was both interesting to the reader, but also interesting to me, to move the reader and move myself. Because if it doesn’t move me, there’s no point in me writing it. And if it doesn’t move the reader there’s no point me saying it, you know? Mark: So one thing that struck me, Nick, looking at Basquiat’s – you picked up on the phrase ‘exploded collage’, I think, from one of his critics, to describe what he does, which is, when you look at those images, they are overwhelming. They mix images, they mix words, they have crossed out words. They have all kinds of interesting and playful stuff going on. And I think your book is very much in that spirit. I mean, even in this poem that you’ve read today, for instance, as you said, you’ve got the three different characters, you’ve got the poet Basquiat and Icarus, who seem, at some stages in the book to be the same person, at some stages different people. You’ve also got that coming out formally, in the fact that you use footnotes extensively, so that there’s at least a two-level text going on, which is what happens with footnotes. So again, if you’re listening to this and you want to see this, go and have a look at the website, you’ll see the poem and you’ll see which bits are footnotes and which bits are the ‘main text’, in inverted commas. On the one hand footnotes can seem a bit academic. But on the other hand, I think the way you’re using them is anything but. Could you say something about that formal decision? Nick: The footnote is a device used in academic settings, but that’s not what I was trying to do. What I was trying to do is enter a level of surrealism. I was trying to signify another body or human experience. There is what is happening in the world. And then there’s what we’re experiencing, particularly as a Black body. You live an Afro-Surreal life in the sense that there’s the world that you are in. And then there’s the truth that I mean, for example, if you think about George Floyd , I had an Afro-Surreal experience when I saw what happened to him in the sense that I saw a Black man being killed for literally having $5 in his pocket and people not believing that. And so I have as a Black body, I have to think, Oh, my God. Should I not carry £5? Should I tell the truth? So that surrealism means that there is a narrative that is happening in the world and then there’s a narrative I have to accept as a Black body. And so the footnote kind of allows two worlds to exist at once. And I wanted that parallel track, and I wanted it in a way that was more than just a series of poems, or these are connected poems. I wanted to play with time. I wanted to be able to move you into the future, but also feel that you’re in the present, but also feel like you’re in the past and feel, no disconnection with either one and feel no kind of disorientation. So that’s what the footnote poem did. But I also found that by accident, so that it was it was me trying to answer that that question was like, how do I bring all of this history together? The other thing about Basquiat, what you said about the exploded collage is that he was trying to – he actually said in a quote, “I’m trying to put the whole of history onto one page”. And I mean, I have a sequence in the book called ‘Codex’, for example, and I was trying to do the same thing even before I’d met Basquiat. I’d actually gone to see Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Arundel at the British Library. And I had this idea in my head before, I’d actually even seen a Basquiat painting. And the idea was, I wondered if I could put the whole of my emotions, my history, my life, my, my loves into one poem. So I started these poems just called ‘Codex’. And then I went, I guess, when I saw Basquiat, then I realized he was doing the same thing, that the tears were this kind of kinship. This way I say to you, he feels like a like a friend. Not because I’ve never met him, but there were so many things that we were trying to do the same. And I feel that he achieved them and he was kind of almost like a like a spirit guide in that kind of way. And that’s what I was trying to do. So when you feel you feel these poems, you’re moving through time, you’re moving through space, you’re moving through histories, you’re moving through bodies for understanding, for recognition, if that makes sense. Mark: Yeah. And that chimes very much with my experience of reading this book. Because it is, really, it’s one long poem. It’s made up of several sequences, but it’s – sometimes you read a poetry collection and you read a poem and you read another poem, and it’s like there’s a space between them, and you can dip in and dip out. But I sat down and read this all the way through It was more like the feeling of reading a novel. You know, where you’re just totally absorbed in that world for the duration of the book. It’s got that level of intensity, but also capaciousness. Like you say, it includes a lot of history and culture, different time zones, lots of elements of your own life, but also the history of Uganda. And if we can just zoom in on how that plays out in this particular poem, maybe we could just start to talk about the two parts of the poem and how they talk to each other. So on the one hand you’ve got this D’Angelo concert, Brixton – I assume this is the Brixton Academy? Nick: Yeah. Mark: Getting into the venue when it’s sold out. And that whole sequence with Icarus who on the one hand is a mythical creature, but somehow he’s right there in the photo with his wings. And then the second part is much more centred around the public reporting and portrayal of the Entebbe hijacking. So, I mean, how do you see the relationship between these two? Nick: I mean, there are many doors in, but I’ll try and give you a few! So basically, Basquiat, Icarus and myself are the new Carthaginians. And there are two paintings by Turner that are called, well, there there are actually ten paintings from Turner that deal with Carthage. And the reason I’ve chosen Carthage is, going back to that episode where I told you why I burst into tears at looking at the Basquiat retrospective. In The Aeneid , Aeneas does the same thing when he looks at the frescoes on the Temple of Juno. He bursts into tears when he sees the whole of his history on the wall. Mark: Oh yes. Nick: So he’s seeing his life in the present, but he’s seeing what’s happened in the past, and he’s also seeing the future in the forming of Carthage. And so in many ways, through those three characters, the new Carthaginians and in my vision, Icarus is alive. He’s Black, but he didn’t die the way it’s depicted in myth. He has a different myth. So I’m also creating a new myth. So that’s the context of these poems. One of them is dealing with, I’ve played with the timeline, but one of them is dealing with a concert I went to and trying to generate that. And that is kind of, I guess, relatively present time. But it’s also dealing with when I’m in these spaces and how the past of Uganda floods back in and how they sit parallel with each other. So it’s looking at how a lot of times the reportage or the way that my country’s reported on, the way it is seen through the Western gaze, and I’m holding it up to the light, trying to give it an African gaze. And the reason I did that is, when we when they talk about the Entebbe hijacking, which is a horrible thing to happen in any in any situation, but whenever they talk of that situation, they never actually talk of the people of Uganda. So, if we parallel that to sadly, what happened at 9/11 or 7/7, when you think 9/11 they talk of the people of New York, it is their story. And we have compassion for that. When it was 7/7, they talk of the people of London and it is it is their story and we have compassion for that. But they never talk of the people of Uganda in that way. And so I just wanted to turn the camera, if that makes sense, so that they can see the people. So I am one of those people. So even though I might be at the D’Angelo concert enjoying myself, and even though you might turn to the news and see something else, I’m one of those people. And I’m one of the people who I guess is here, but they are the people who will not be part of history because they’re not even looked at. That’s what the portrait is. It’s a way of centring that story rather than having it towards the periphery of the painting. And you said something that actually touches me. And it means in many ways – I mean, I hope the book goes on to do very well, but it’s one of my secret passions for the book was I wanted it to read, even more than a novel, like it’s one big mural. It’s one painting. And when Basquiat was creating his work, a lot of times he would work on several paintings at once. And that’s how I worked on these poems. I was working on them as if it was one. I would go from one to the next to the next. When one idea fades, I’ll jump into another poem, one other, and I would keep that energy going. So it really means a lot that you feel the arc of the book. Mark: Yeah. I mean, it’s an intense experience. I heartily recommend it, but you’ve really got to be able to sit down and give it the time and attention it deserves. So picking up on what you were just saying, it sounds like, in your use of the footnotes and multiple perspectives here, the background becomes the foreground. The people of Uganda, the lives, the cause. So the Entebbe hijacking, there’s a lot of movie versions aren’t there? And they usually centre on how it seems from the outside. So the original hijack was in Athens. Could you just walk us though that? Nick: Yeah. So I mean, it’s really important what you’re saying there. So when, when you talk about the Entebbe hijacking there, that there are several components. It was a plane that left Tel Aviv, then went to Athens. That was it. And then it was supposed, I think I think was supposed to go to I don’t know if it was Paris or New York, one or the other. But anyway, some hijackers got on and then it was diverted to Benghazi. And then at Benghazi, they refuelled, they were allowed to refuel, and then they asked many African countries if they could land on the tarmac. And the only country that was willing to accept that was Uganda, because Idi Amin was in charge at the time and the plane was there for seven days. Hence the seven-day focus that I’m looking at for many reasons. One is because of the way the world related to Idi Amin and Uganda changed after that and understandably so. But then what happened is, what is usually in the films, there was this great rescue by the Israeli Defence Force. Their leader, Yoni was killed and a few others were injured. Some of the hostages were killed. I think all the hostages were killed. Some civilians were killed. And they always tell the story. But whenever they tell the story, the only real Black gaze is on Idi Amin and his villainy. But there’s nothing about how it impacted the people of Uganda. So my concern isn’t what people already know – the Western gaze, the Western reportage, the Western heroism. It’s more about: what about the people of Uganda? Even though it happened on Ugandan soil, there is no Ugandan story, which is which I wanted to deal with, that erasure. But not just that. I also wanted to deal with the impact. Because of that situation I had to leave the country. You know, there’s a part of me thinks that I might not have even been a poet if I hadn’t had to leave my country because I needed a language in which my whole self could be expressed. Mark: Really? Nick: You know, in poetry, I’m fully the person I need to be. Whereas in the world, when I step into the West, I’m a Black. I have to identify as a Black body and I’m usually an ‘other’. I’m usually a minority. When I go back to my country, I’m seen as if I’ve left. So I’m never fully myself. But in poetry land, inside of the new Carthaginians, my whole self is realised. And so this is a contemporary inquiry into exile, into that that fracture and into the banality and into that metic. When I say metic , it means, you know you’re a citizen, but you don’t feel fully integrated, not for any choice of your own, but in the way that the world receives you and perceives you. Mark: So, the personal and the political, if you like, are nested one inside the other. There’s these two different perspectives or multiple perspectives, on the world stage but also in your life, you embody that. Nick: Yes, absolutely. You say it better! Come with me. And we can explain this a lot easier! Yeah. [Laughter] Mark: I don’t think I’m as articulate as you about this Nick! And so the hijacking was 1976. So how old would you have been then? Nick: In 1976, I would have only been 2 at the time. I left in 1979. So thats when my mom, she was actually doing a PhD here and she had to come back and she smuggled me out and I’ve retold that as a play that happened that taught in the UK in 2019. But I wanted to not just look at that. That is like a focal point, but it isn’t the whole story. What I really wanted to look at was this enquiry into exile from an East African body. So I’m looking at my life and parallel history. So Basquiat’s history, Greece’s history, Carthage, and other moments in time. So I’m looking at them and seeing what is the impact of this on me in exile and through the different gaze of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Icarus and myself. Mark: And so if the reader’s feeling disoriented on entering the world of the book, actually, that’s really mirroring your disorientation that you’re describing, that, you’ve been living through? Nick: If they’re feeling disorientated, it means that they understand. If it’s clear to them, then it probably means that they’ve probably gone through some of the experiences I’m talking about. Mark: Right. Nick: But if they’re disorientated, that’s part of it. I think that’s part of the achievement of the book. And I hope I’ve done it in a way that doesn’t seem like you think, ‘Oh, he doesn’t know what he’s doing’. You think, ‘Oh’ – I’m I hope that when they’re going through the disorientation, you’re going through an understanding, of not just yourself, but also of me and not just me, but other people or other types of existence, you know? Mark: I always felt I was in good hands in this book. I felt like you were taking me somewhere and you had an instinct for where that was, even if maybe, as you said, you hadn’t articulated it all consciously. There’s a real drive to the narrative to take us through. And clearly there’s a lot of hurt in this experience. You know there’s a lot of hurt in the depiction of your country. There’s a lot of hurt in your own experience of exile and prejudice and being an outsider and so on. But, the second part hinges on forgiveness, doesn’t it? And you say , ‘To forgive someone requires two incidents in your life. The most obvious is the incident that, like fire, must be redeemed by fire.’. And that wonderful phrase, ‘Here’s the match.’. That’s the cue for the journalist and that’s the hurt. But towards the end, you come in with the second point of forgiveness. So I’m really curious about how that hinge of forgiveness works. Nick: Yeah. I mean, it’s something I look at a lot, just on my own personal self-development, is this idea of forgiveness. I mean, if you think about the first part of the poem which is dealing with war, but also the second one, which is dealing with relationship, forgiveness is the hardest thing to do. And I’m talking from a personal perspective. I’m not looking outward, I’m looking inward. And so I really want to inquire that. And, this is just my rudimentary thinking. You realize that forgiveness is a gift of God. And to be able to forgive someone is, is not only, a blessing on one level, but it’s also a release or a cleansing. And I think in many ways that was my ambition for myself, is like I don’t want to just look at this and it be another book about exile. I wanted to kind of interrogate it with a sense of purpose to kind of, I guess, heal myself, bring myself closer to who I am. I have some deep understanding, but it would mean that I’d have to look at things that hurt me outwardly and inwardly, or ways in which I’ve hurt other people, outwardly and inwardly. And so I was trying to get as close to the fire of that as possible, no pun intended. But I was really trying to – I was like, in this idea of the codex, I was trying to put everything into one poem. I was like: could I confront myself and tell the truth for myself without trying to sugar-coat it? Could I confront my history without trying to be manipulative or sit, on one side? And the only way I could enter into that authenticity was through this passage of forgiveness. Mark: I think that’s a beautiful description. And it’s really hard to paraphrase this book or reduce it to a political position. You know, however much politics is in the air in it. And I think it comes across as a very human book, both in the experience you describe and the spirit that comes through it. Because after all the suffering, all the dislocation, whatever, it’s also a very beautiful book. And I would really encourage the reader to check out, to just sit down and read the whole book through and savour the beauty as well as the dislocation, the suffering and so on. Nick: Thank you. Okay, so before we wrap up, I just want to say thank you. I’ve really enjoyed, I mean, I can’t wait to hear it back, but I’ve really enjoyed this and regardless of the technical difficulties, that was a beautiful interview. Thank you. Mark: Well, thank you, Nick. And yes, behind the scenes you’re listening to the cleaned up edited version. But we did have some technical challenges and Nick was super patient with that. So let’s hear the poem again and appreciate the multifaceted world of Nick’s poetry. Self Portrait 1 of 2 by Nick Makoha If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all. – E. Faga 1 1981 That midsummer and the D’Angelo concert is sold out at Brixton. Fuck! I can’t tell you what he whispered to security but here’s a picture of Icarus and me backstage with two press cards pinned to our chests. And to think four hours ago I was clocking off work. They have only just let in the crowd. You can hear the hum through the tannoy. The thing about Icarus is he has a microchip for a mouth. You say it he will name it. You name it he will play it. Once after his dad had died I caught him beating his chest after a month of fasting and prayer. They were more like songs really – the way the words fell away from his bones. Anyway, he is calling Keyon Harrold, the trumpet player from The Vanguard, ‘Kenya’. Asking him things like How do you create an open field in the band and if he believes in the equation of the Freedom Principle even in light of the Palestine situation . D’Angelo has popped two cassettes into a deck. Icarus calls him Smoke. My bladder is about to cut loose. When I return, they are huddled around the tape deck like tribesmen eating jerk chicken, listening to a jamming session from the morning’s rehearsal in silence. Smoke must have taken the picture because he is the only one not in it. Icarus is in the centre with his wings fanning and closing. 2 the Poet as Cassius Clay 1982 To forgive someone requires two incidents in your life. The most obvious is the incident that like fire must be redeemed by fire. Here’s the match. A young journalist is speaking to camera – but her eyes struggle to find the centre. She is talking about my country the way a wino pees Pepsi into a can. This is being broadcast round the world. Except for the countries she is in. Hmm! She’s using her diaphragm to say things outside the range of her common experience. We are what you talk about before you cut to the news desk for an update on the Olympics. The only part you will remember is that the Queen’s daughter has qualified for the British riding team. And not that the body on the ground belonged to another body. And that he fought to stay alive the way the journalist fights with her mic or fights to beat the falling darkness or fights away a pair of mosquitoes that hover between her breast and right eye – hover between her lip and right breast. The cameraman has the engine running and is using the back of the pickup as a tripod while he rolls himself a smoke. Watch his lens searching for the sweetness of death. If only the dead could awaken. The lighter belongs to the body on the ground, so do the smokes, and so does the country in which we watch him. The mosquitoes know this – that is why they are unhinged – and now so do you. The second point of forgiveness sits in the future like the woman I will one day love and the country in which I will one day live. Forgive me. My heart is a vicious wolf that moves like the cloud of God searching for the true shape of history searching for the weight of a love lost. My mother was a river, my father was a boat – both separated by a sack of light The New Carthaginians ‘Self Portrait 1981 Self Portrait of the poet as Cassius Clay 1982’ is from The New Carthaginians by Nick Makoha, published by Penguin. Available from: The New Carthaginians is available from: The publisher: Penguin Amazon: UK | US Bookshop.org: UK Nick Makoha Dr Nick Makoha is a Ugandan poet, winner of the 2021 Ivan Juritz Prize and the Poetry London Prize. In 2017, Nick’s debut collection, Kingdom of Gravity , was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and was one of the Guardian’s best books of the year. He was the ICA 2023 Writer-in-Residence. He was the 2019 Writer-in-Residence for The Wordsworth Trust and Wasafiri. He is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow and Complete Works alumnus. He won the 2015 Brunel African Poetry Prize and the 2016 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Prize for his pamphlet Resurrection Man . The New Carthaginians is his latest collection, published in 2025. NickMakoha.com Photo © Dirk Skiba A Mouthful of Air – the podcast This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple , Spotify , Google Podcasts or your favourite app . You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email . The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman . A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Listen to the show You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms Related Episodes From The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning Episode 81 From ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning.Poet Robert BrowningReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessFrom ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ By Robert... Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll Episode 80 Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll Stephanie Burt reads ‘Poly Beach House’ by Tonee Mae Moll and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.This poem is from: Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after StonewallAvailable from: Super... 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A Mouthful of Air: Poetry with Mark McGuinness

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Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll 31:16

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Episode 76 Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll Mark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘Jabberwocky’ by Lewis Carroll. https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/76_Jabberwocky_by_Lewis_Carrol.mp3 Poet Lewis Carroll Reading and commentary by Mark McGuinness Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!” He took his vorpal sword in hand; Long time the manxome foe he sought— So rested he by the Tumtum tree And stood awhile in thought. And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back. “And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” He chortled in his joy. ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. Podcast transcript This is one of the most famous nonsense poems ever written. You’ve probably heard it already. And you probably already know that it’s famous for being full of invented words that dazzle and beguile its readers. Yet somehow, we are able to make sense of the nonsense. But is it really full of made-up words? And is it really so surprising that we can follow it? Imagine if the poem had begun with the second stanza: “Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!” What would you make of this opening? You’d probably wonder what a frumious Bandersnatch was. But the rest of it would be pretty obvious from the context. The Jabberwock is clearly some kind of monster, with jaws that bite and claws that catch. The Jubjub bird is a species of bird – you wouldn’t know what kind, but unless you’re an ornithologist, there are plenty of exotic birds in this world that you’ve never heard of, so you’d mentally file it with the rest of them. Out of the twenty-two words in the stanza, only four of them are invented. So the opening wouldn’t be hard to follow, even if you were curious to know more. The same goes for the next stanza: He took his vorpal sword in hand; Long time the manxome foe he sought— So rested he by the Tumtum tree And stood awhile in thought. Out of twenty six words, only three are invented. So the language wouldn’t be a showstopper: we might wander what a vorpal sword looks like, or exactly what makes a foe manxome, or how big a Tumtum tree is. But none of this would hinder us following the action. And the same goes for the next three stanzas – the invented words are eye-catching, but there aren’t that many of them. So the secret hiding in plain sight is that most of ‘Jabberwocky’ isn’t that difficult to understand. No more difficult than a passage from Tolkien that mentions elves and dwarves and names like Mordor and Minas Tirith. If it weren’t for that spectacular opening stanza, the poem probably wouldn’t have such a reputation for outrageous use of language. But I think you’ll agree it’s quite the opening: ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. Out of twenty three words, there are ten invented words, and one dictionary word, ‘gyre’, that was such an obscure word in 1851, when the first version of the poem was written, that it might as well have been made up. It was certainly rare enough for Carroll to feel he needed to write a note explaining that it should be pronounced with a hard ‘g’. Later on it was a favourite word of W. B. Yeats, and I can’t help wondering whether Yeats first noticed it in ‘Jabberwocky’. Anyway. That means there are 11 strange words out of 23 in this opening stanza, almost half the stanza, so no wonder it feels like it’s chock-full of strangeness. And in the other five stanzas, there are only 18 more invented words in total, so they are spread much thinner through the rest of the poem. It’s like buying one of those sandwiches that has been cut in two: on the shelf, it looks like it’s chock full of delicious filling, but when you unwrap it you discover that the edges are mostly bread and butter. And I want to stress, this isn’t a criticism. Well, it’s a criticism of the sandwich. But it’s praise for the poem. Because whatever else it is, ‘Jabberwocky’ is also an example of a master illusionist at work, using all the linguistic and imaginative resources he can muster to achieve maximum effect with minimal effort. Having so many strange words in the opening stanza makes a first impression that is so ostentatiously rich and strange that it stamps itself indelibly on our memory, and influences our perception of the rest of the poem. And repeating the stanza at the end of the poem means that our final impression of the poem is the same as the first one – of a dense and beguiling forest of words that we have somehow managed to wander through without getting lost. As a practising poet I am in awe of Lewis Carroll’s skill in creating this illusion. So let’s take a closer look at how he does it… So firstly, the poem is very short. Just six stanzas, and one of them is repeated. So he only really has to dazzle us with one really dense and clever stanza. The rest of the poem can have just enough strangeness to maintain the illusion. Secondly, the action is really simple: a hero goes into a forest, kills a monster and comes back in triumph. It’s an archetypal scenario that even children – especially children – are very familiar with, from fairy stories and legends. So there’s not much chance of us losing the thread of the plot. On top of this, Carroll uses rhythm and rhyme in a skilfully entrancing way. It’s written in a kind of ballad stanza , with three tetrameters , four-beat lines, followed by a final trimeter , a line with only three beats. And there’s lots of alliteration (repeated consonants), assonance (repeated vowels) and internal rhyme (rhyme within a line instead of at the end of the line). All of which has a spellbinding effect, lulling our conscious mind into a perhaps false sense of lucidity. Clive James once said that W. H. Auden’s poetic skill could make anything sound ‘truer than true’, and I think there’s a similar effect going on here. Another thing Carroll is very clever about is the types of invented words that he uses. In the first stanza there are two invented verbs, ‘gimble’ and ‘outgrabe’, and that unusual word, ‘gyre’: ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. So because the verbs are so strange, it’s really hard to figure out exactly what’s going on in this stanza, and some scholars are still debating it. Which means the reader feels quite disoriented on reading this, but it doesn’t really matter, because nothing crucial is happening here. It’s what film directors call an establishing shot – a camera shot that sets the scene by showing us the environment in which the action will take place. It’s scenery. So it’s fine, in fact it’s desirable, that we feel a little disoriented and giddy, as if we’ve just stepped onto a fairground ride. But when the action starts, Carroll doesn’t take this kind of risk. In the rest of the poem there are only three more invented verbs: ‘whiffling’, ‘galumphing’, and ‘chortled’, plus the obscure verb ‘burbled’, which are all pretty easy to understand from the context. So at the crucial moments in the action, the verbs make it nice and clear what’s happening: the hero ‘took’ his sword, he ‘sought’ the foe, he ‘rested’ by the Tumtum tree, he ‘stood’ awhile in thought, and he ‘left’ the Jabberwock dead. Have a listen to the verbs in the central three stanzas: He took his vorpal sword in hand; Long time the manxome foe he sought— So rested he by the Tumtum tree And stood awhile in thought. And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back. It’s nice and clear what’s happening, isn’t it? Even ‘galumphing’ is close enough to ‘galloping’ to be understood at a first reading. There are still a decent number of strange words, but notice that these are mostly adjectives: the ‘vorpal’ sword, the ‘manxome’ foe, ‘uffish’ thought, the ‘tulgey’ wood. So even if we’re not sure what they mean, we never lose the thread because the nouns are all clear: a sword, a foe, the hero’s thought, and the wood. There is of course one very important noun at the heart of the poem: ‘the Jabberwock’ itself. But we’re given a lot of information about the Jabberwock in plain English: it has jaws that bite and claws that catch and eyes of flame. So it’s obviously a monster of some kind, and as all monster movie directors know, the monster you don’t quite see is the scariest monster of all, because you fill in the details with your imagination. There’s also a terrific piece of onomatopoeia , words designed to imitate sounds, at the climax of the action: The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! It’s like a cartoon, isn’t it? We really hear and see the sword despatch the Jabberwock with a swift one-two. And there are also some wonderful invented words used to express the speaker’s delight at the hero’s success: “And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” He chortled in his joy. So we’ve got another adjective here, ‘beamish’, and the connotations of ‘beaming’ are pretty obviously appropriate in this context. And then that delightful line: O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! So no problems here: these are wonderfully exuberant exclamations. And we’re all used to yelling strange words at moments of triumph, as anyone will attest who has ever shouted ‘yippee!’, ‘hooray!’, ‘yee-haw!’ or ‘hup hup huzzah!’. We never find out who this speaker is, who first warns the hero to ‘beware the Jabberwock, my son’, and then celebrates his return. Perhaps it’s a proud parent, or perhaps ‘my son’ is just a term of affection. But dramatically of course, an audience is required for any self-respecting hero. So Lewis Carroll is a very clever poet, not just in his ability to invent words, but also the way he artfully deploys these new words, front-loading the poem with lots of them, but measuring them out judiciously in the middle. And using invented verbs when he doesn’t mind confusing us, but mostly adjectives when he wants us to follow the action. Another way he gets away with so much nonsense is in the delightfully suggestive sound of the words. We’ve got the onomatopoeia of ‘snicker-snack’, as well as ‘whiffling’, ‘burbled’ and ‘chortled’. And also words that are suggestive of other words: ‘slithy’, as Humpty Dumpty tells Alice, means ‘lithe and slimy’; ‘fruminious’, according to Carroll himself, combines ‘fuming’ and ‘furious’; ‘gimble’ suggests ‘nimble’; ‘mimsy’ suggests ‘flimsy’, and so on. In his massive book about how poetry works, The Poem , Don Paterson talks about the role of phonesthemes in poetry. His definition of a phonestheme is ‘a point of sound-sense coincidence’. In other words, it’s where we find a cluster of words that sound similar, and which have similar or related meanings, even though there might be no etymological connection, in terms of the history of the words. For example, the sound ‘gl’ occurs in words describing sight or reflected light, such as glisten , glare , glow , glint , gleam , glass , glance , glitter and so on. Poets love this kind of thing, because it gives them plenty to work with. One definition of poetry could be the art of marrying the sound of words with their sense. So Lewis Carroll was a highly skilled poet. And no wonder that when Alice comes across this poem in the novel Through the Looking-Glass , she says: ‘Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas — only I don’t exactly know what they are.’ Another aspect of language that I think Carroll exploits really well is the tendency of the human mind to fill in the gaps in perception to help us navigate the world, and gaps in language when we’re reading a challenging text. You may recall the internet meme years ago, that pointed out that we can often understand words whose letters have been scrambled , as long as the first and last words are in the correct position. And we’re all familiar with the experience of reading a book and finding an unfamiliar word – do you bother to look it up? Or can you guess the meaning from the context? Often, guessing feels easier than the effort of looking it up. This is part of the experience of learning to read, as I’m currently rediscovering in my quest to learn Japanese. I often find myself looking at a Japanese sentence with one or two words I don’t know. It reminds me of what it was like when I was a child and wanted to keep reading a story, rather than looking new words up in the dictionary, so I did my best to figure out new words for myself. All of which is to say, that there are qualities inherent in language that make it possible for us to derive a kind of sense from even the weirdest of words, and Carroll knew this, or intuited it, and managed to tread the finest of lines between sense and nonsense when he wrote ‘Jabberwocky’. Zooming out from individual words to the poem as a whole, we can see that the structure of the poem is also key to its effect. We’ve already noted the hypnotic effect of the regular metre and stanza form. And if we look at the content of the stanzas, we can see that they are neatly symmetrical: Firstly, we have that establishing shot of the opening stanza: ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. Then the mysterious speaker appears to warn our hero about the monster: “Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!” Next we get three stanzas of action, right in the middle of the poem: He took his vorpal sword in hand; Long time the manxome foe he sought— So rested he by the Tumtum tree And stood awhile in thought. And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back. After that, the final two stanzas are a mirror image of the first two. So in the second-to-last stanza, the speaker of the second stanza reappears: “And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” He chortled in his joy. And finally, as we know, Carroll repeats the first stanza, so that we end our journey where we began, as if the spell has been lifted, and we find ourselves in the same place where we began, but with the sense of having been somehow transported: ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. Given that Lewis Carroll was the pen name of the mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, we can assume this symmetry is no accident. In fact, this kind of structure is quite common in storytelling, it’s called a nested loop , because different elements or storyline nested inside another, so that you go deeper into the structure, then back out again. It’s used in works as diverse as the movies Pulp Fiction and Inception, and the British children’s TV show Bagpuss. I learned the technique when I was a hypnotherapist – because nesting different stories or levels of stories inside each other has a disorienting effect on conscious mind, so that with each new level, the subject goes deeper into a trance state. And there’s definitely something a little trancelike going on ‘Jabberwocky’. Especially when we remember that Carroll placed the poem inside a longer story, the novel Through the Looking-Glass. Alice finds a book written in a strange script, and it’s only when she remembers that she’s in a looking-glass world that she realises it’s printed in reverse, so she needs to look at the pages in a mirror to read them. So what we have is a poem reflected in a mirror inside a story about a world inside a looking-glass that turns out to be a dream. And the poem itself is written in a symmetrical form where the beginning mirrors the end. Which makes it one more level in the seemingly endless levels of the Alice books. So the cumulative effect of Carroll’s various techniques – inventing suggestive new words, placing them artfully where they will have the greatest effect, exploiting quirks of language and tricks of perception, structuring the poem and the novel like a hall of mirrors, and using rhyme and other sound patterns to heighten the effect – is of a master illusionist at work. He uses music and misdirection and to a dazzling effect that is somehow also flattering to us as readers. On the one hand the poem is bafflingly strange, but on the other, we can somehow make perfect sense of it! Curiouser and curioser, as Alice might say. Or if you ask me, cleverer and cleverer. And I really don’t intend to spoil the magic by point out the cleverness of the poem’s construction. Because for me at least, this is a magic trick that still works even when you know how it works. I’ve enumerated different techniques, but the real magic of the poem – and maybe of poetry itself – is the way they all work mysteriously together, and create something greater than the sum of its parts. Something that almost feels alive. So let’s hear the poem again and enjoy the sensation of being lost in a forest of strange words, but somehow able to see the wood for the trees. Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!” He took his vorpal sword in hand; Long time the manxome foe he sought— So rested he by the Tumtum tree And stood awhile in thought. And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back. “And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” He chortled in his joy. ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. Lewis Carroll Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an English author, mathematician, logician, and photographer who was born in 1832 and died in 1898. A lecturer at Oxford University, he excelled in mathematics and logic, publishing scholarly works under his real name. He is best known for his literary classics Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Carroll was also a pioneer in early photography and there is an ongoing controversy about some of his subject matter. He was a skilled writer of nonsense verse, and many of his poems appear inside his novels. His prose and verse are distinguished by a unique blend of logic and fantasy that has enchanted readers for generations. A Mouthful of Air – the podcast This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple , Spotify , Google Podcasts or your favourite app . You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email . The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman . A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Listen to the show You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms Related Episodes From The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning Episode 81 From ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning.Poet Robert BrowningReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessFrom ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ By Robert... Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll Episode 80 Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll Stephanie Burt reads ‘Poly Beach House’ by Tonee Mae Moll and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.This poem is from: Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after StonewallAvailable from: Super... Daedalus and Icarus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses translated by Arthur Golding Episode 79 Daedalus and Icarus from Ovid's Metamorphses, translated by Arthur Golding Mark McGuinness reads and discusses Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.Poet Ovid, translated by Arthur GoldingReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessDaedalus and... The post Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll appeared first on A Mouthful of Air .…

A Mouthful of Air: Poetry with Mark McGuinness

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A Modest Love by Sir Edward Dyer 29:08

vor 30 weeks29:08

29:08

Episode 75 A Modest Love by Sir Edward Dyer Mark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘A Modest Love’ by Sir Edward Dyer. https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/75_A_Modest_Love_by_Sir_Edward_Dyer.mp3 Poet Sir Edward Dyer Reading and commentary by Mark McGuinness A Modest Love by Sir Edward Dyer The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall, The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat; The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small, And bees have stings, although they be not great; Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs; And love is love, in beggars as in kings. Where rivers smoothest run, deep are the fords; The dial stirs, yet none perceives it move; The firmest faith is in the fewest words; The turtles cannot sing, and yet they love: True hearts have eyes and ears, no tongues to speak; They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break. Podcast transcript This poem is sometimes printed with the title ‘A Modest Love’, and sometimes without, so it may well be that the title was added later. But whether or not it’s called ‘A Modest Love’, it’s definitely a modest love poem: it’s brief, it’s understated, it reveals hardly anything about the speaker and nothing at all about his beloved, and there’s just one little flash of emotion, right at the end. In short, it embodies the virtues it describes. You could say the poem is too modest for its own good – because you have very likely never heard of Sir Edward Dyer, and I’ve only read a few of his poems. But after considering Emilia Lanyer’s poetry a couple of episodes ago, I thought it would be nice to read a poem by another overlooked poet of the same period. Dyer was a courtier under Elizabeth I. His poetry was actually well-known and highly regarded among his contemporaries. Gabriel Harvey bracketed him with the great Sir Philip Sidney , who we read in Episode 58, as one of the ‘ornaments of the court’. And in his Arte of English Poesie , George Puttenham described him as, ‘Maister Edward Dyar, for Elegie most sweete, solemne, and of high conceit.’ And yet I’ve just been through several of my historical anthologies of English poetry, and couldn’t find him in most of them. It just goes to show how fickle and fleeting poetic fame can be. To add insult to obscurity, his most famous poem, ‘My mind to me a kingdom is’ , is now considered to be quite likely written by someone else. What remains of his corpus is mostly fairly conventional love poetry, featuring lots of nymphs and shepherds, and maidens and swains, and Petrarchan antitheses of the kind we saw in the episode on Sidney. And it’s not a criticism to say he was conventional. He lived and wrote in a time and place when poets generally felt no need or desire to shatter conventions. And yet… he’s left us a poem that challenges the idea that great passions have to be shouted from the rooftops to be adequately expressed. Here’s how he starts to make his case: The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall, The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat; The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small, And bees have stings, although they be not great; So he’s presenting us with a list of things that seem small and insignificant, but which have something that is significant relative to their size: even the shortest trees have a tops; little sparks have heat; ants have ‘gall’ secretion of the liver, which was believed at the time to provoke resentment and resistance; flies ‘spleen’ which was associated with high spirits or courage; ‘And bees have stings, although they be not great’. Plus there is that delightful detail of slender hairs casting tiny shadows. That line really comes into focus, doesn’t it? I did wonder if Dyer had looked at hairs in a magnifying glass, which is possible, but the microscope wasn’t invented until after his death, so he didn’t live to see the popular fascination with microscopes later in the 17th century. Another possibility of course is that if you’re close enough to see individual hairs and their shadows, then you’re either looking at your own hair, or you are very close to someone else and their hair. So maybe we can pick up a subtle erotic charge in this line. So the first four lines of the poem are a catalogue of small and apparently insignificant things that turn out, on a second glance, to have something remarkable about them. The poem is like one of the miniature portraits of Elizabethan courtiers painted by Nicholas Hilliard : its small details reward close inspection. Then in the next line, we get a shift of perspective: Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs; The seas are the first appearance of something big and huge and deep, suggestive of depth of passion. But then they are immediately contrasted with ‘shallow springs’, as if the poet is skipping past this expansive vision to a more modest image, those ‘shallow springs’. Then the first stanza closes with a disarmingly direct statement: And love is love, in beggars as in kings. Isn’t that wonderful? ‘And love is love’ – surprisingly plain, after all the clever comparisons. Because up to this point, everything in the poem has been an implied comparison: the trees, the ant, the sparks, the hairs, the bees, and the shallow springs each illustrate some aspect of the ‘modest love’ of the title. So it does actually start to matter whether the title, ‘A Modest Love’, is authorial or not. If we read the first stanza without the title, the way it’s printed in a lot of anthologies, the ending becomes more surprising – it’s like a riddle that keeps us guessing about what he’s talking about, until the answer is revealed in the last line: The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall, The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat; The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small, And bees have stings, although they be not great; Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs; And love is love, in beggars as in kings. But even if we do have the title as a clue, it’s not really giving much away. After all, this is an Elizabethan courtier, writing in an established lyric mode that is overwhelmingly associated with love poetry, so you don’t have to be Gollum to guess the answer to the riddle. And either way, it’s a wonderfully candid last line. It’s not remotely revolutionary, but it does suggest that in love at least, everyone is equal, from the beggar to the king. And the speaker is clearly positioning himself as a beggar rather than a king: his love may be more like the shallow spring than the vast ocean of other lovers, more like the beggar than the king, but ‘love is love’, as he says. It’s an element that cannot be reduced, an experience that is the same for everyone. Part of what makes this stanza work so well, and feel so satisfying at the end, is the skill with which Dyer balances regularity and variation. It’s written in a six line stanza form, which we can break down into a quatrain rhyming alternate lines, ABAB. So the rhymes go: ‘gall’, ‘heat’, ‘small’, ‘great’; and then a rhyming couplet at the end, ‘springs’ and ‘kings’. To most modern English speakers, of course, at least in this country, ‘heat’ and ‘great’ sound like half-rhymes, but that’s just because our pronunciation has shifted since the 16th century; they would have been full rhymes when Dyer wrote them. And in the second stanza, the same goes for ‘fords’ and ‘words’, ‘move’ and ‘love’, and ‘speak’ and ‘break’. These days we know this form as the Venus and Adonis stanza , because it was used by Shakespeare in his poem of that name, which was a smash hit bestseller in Elizabethan England. But Dyer didn’t necessarily copy it from Shakespeare – Venus and Adonis wasn’t published until 1593, by which time Dyer may already have written his poem. And the stanza was already so well established that the young King James VI of Scotland, the future James I of England, wrote a treatise on poetry in 1583 in which he described this form as ‘Common verse’, and said it was the correct stanza form to use, ‘In materis of love’. So Dyer probably felt he was simply using the right tool for the job. So the stanza form and its rhyming pattern are perfectly regular. And the metre is very regular too. The poem is written in iambic pentameter , the familiar ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM we all know from school, and Dyer uses it in a thoroughly regular and conventional way, which you can hear if I read it in an exaggerated way: The low est trees have tops , the ant her gall , The fly her spleen , the litt le sparks their heat ; The slen der hairs have sha dows, though but small , It sounds awful like that, doesn’t it? But it helps you tune into that rhythm which is ticking away in the background throughout the poem. And this regularity was very typical of 16th century poetry in England, it wasn’t until later in the century when Shakespeare and his friends were using iambic pentameter for drama, that they introduced a lot of variation in the metre, to make it more natural and expressive of their characters’ emotions. But even courtly lyric poets like Dyer were starting to experiment with some variations in the metre, and we find one example in this stanza: Seas have their source , and so have sha llow springs ; Did you hear that? Right at the beginning, I put the stress on ‘seas’, instead of ‘have’, so the line kicks off with a stressed syllable, and disrupts the iambic flow. Now I could have read it with the stress on have: Seas have their source , and so have sha llow springs ; But that sounds a bit odd, doesn’t it? And it doesn’t make as much sense. If Dyer had referred to the sea in the previous line, then maybe he could have gone on to say ‘Seas have their source ’, expanding on a subject he’s already introduced. But he’s introducing ‘seas’ for the first time, and contrasting it with shallow springs, so makes sense to stress ‘seas’. Plus, of course, it’s the first BIG thing, he’s introduced, to contrast with all the small things. So it makes sense to stress it, as out of step with all the other examples he’s just given. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, and how the iambic pentameter went from being very regular and orderly to much more variable and expressive, then have a listen to episodes 26 and 28, about Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare . But the essential point here is that Dyer is using a regular metre with great skill, and varying it with just enough expressiveness to stop it becoming monotonous, and to signal the strength of the speakers feeling in an appropriately modest and subtle way. Another way Dyer introduces variation in this stanza is in the different classes of image he uses: trees from the plant world; the ant, the fly and the bee, from the animal kingdom; sparks from the element of fire; and seas and springs from the element of water. And all of these are from nature, before we finally enter the human world of beggars and kings. Yet another way Dyer balances regularity and variation to keep things interesting is in the verbs he uses. For most images, he uses the verb ‘have’ to indicate their properties: ‘the lowest trees have tops’; ‘bees have stings’; ‘Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs’. And in the first two lines, the ant, the fly and the little sparks are all governed by the same verb, ‘have’. But notice how Dyer avoids repetition by only using the word ‘have’ once: The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall, The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat; Imagine if he’d written: The lowest trees have tops, the ant has gall, The fly has spleen, the little sparks have heat; It sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? But Dyer skilfully avoids this by allowing the first use of ‘have’ to govern the following clauses, and using ‘her’ and ‘their’ to fill out the metre: The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall, The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat; And in the next line, he changes the verb from ‘have’ to ‘cast’: The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small, He could have used ‘have’ in this line: The slender hairs have shadows, though but small, But it’s just a bit too predictable isn’t it? It feels sharper and nimbler when he shifts the verb to ‘cast’. And in the final line, of course, the verb changes from ‘have’ to ‘is’: And love is love, in beggars as in kings. To appreciate the full effect of all these little variations, just imagine if Dyer had unthinkingly used ‘have’ throughout the stanza: The lowest trees have tops, the ant has gall, The fly has spleen, the little sparks have heat; The slender hairs have shadows, though but small, And bees have stings, although they be not great; Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs; We all have love, the beggars and the kings. It’s like nails down a blackboard, isn’t it? Sometimes you have to break a poem to appreciate how delicately it has been made. OK hopefully we can agree Dyer has done a terrific job of the first stanza. On to the second and final stanza: Where rivers smoothest run, deep are the fords; The dial stirs, yet none perceives it move; The firmest faith is in the fewest words; The turtles cannot sing, and yet they love: True hearts have eyes and ears, no tongues to speak; They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break. I’m not going to spend as much time on this stanza as the first, because a lot of what I said about the first one applies to this one too. It’s as understated in its form as its subject. It’s written in the same regular stanza, with very slight variation in the metre. It uses a similar list of comparisons to expand upon the central point. The image of ‘rivers’ in the first line picks up on the watery imagery of ‘seas’ and ‘springs’ from the previous stanza. But there is one crucial difference, which we can detect once again in the verbs: the first stanza was very static, with things ‘having’ various attributes, and love ‘being’ love. Even ‘cast’ isn’t really an action; the hairs don’t really ‘cast’ shadows, the shadows are simply a result of light shining on the hairs and being block. In the second stanza, however, things are in motion: rivers ‘run’, turtles ‘love’ (I’m pretty sure he means ‘turtle dove’, which was conventionally associated with love in Elizabethan poetry, rather than the creature with flippers and a shell) and ‘The dial stirs’ – this shadow is moving, even though if so slowly that ‘none perceives it move’. All of which prepares us for the shift in the final couplet, from hearts that ‘have’ things to hearts that do things: True hearts have eyes and ears, no tongues to speak; They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break. Ah. That last line gets me every time. It’s literally heartbreaking, isn’t it? And this kind of thing is very hard to do – it could easily have been sentimental or unintentionally comic. And it’s a fine line, but for me it really works. And one reason it works is that it’s a release from the skill and control and sophistication of the rest of the poem. All of that artfulness earns him this moment of honesty, where he blurts out his true feeling: and then they break. It’s terribly English, terribly buttoned up. But if you’re aware of the social codes, and alert to the subtlety of Dyer’s language, it’s very moving. I can’t help thinking of Anthony Hopkins in the movie Remains of the Day , playing the repressed butler Stevens, who struggles to confess his love for the housekeeper, Miss Kenton. Sometimes, as Dyer says, The firmest faith is in the fewest words; This poem is small but beautifully made, and you have to examine the details carefully to appreciate its workmanship. It’s like a hand made watch that keeps time quietly but steadily, its little mechanisms spinning and whirring and occasionally chiming quietly. A watch that evidently meant a great deal to someone when it was made, many years ago. And maybe a great deal to someone else as well. Even though we never get a glimpse of that person. So let’s wind up Dyer’s watch and have another listen. A Modest Love by Sir Edward Dyer The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall, The fly her spleen, the little sparks their heat; The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small, And bees have stings, although they be not great; Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs; And love is love, in beggars as in kings. Where rivers smoothest run, deep are the fords; The dial stirs, yet none perceives it move; The firmest faith is in the fewest words; The turtles cannot sing, and yet they love: True hearts have eyes and ears, no tongues to speak; They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break. Sir Edward Dyer Sir Edward Dyer was an English poet and courtier who was born in 1543 and died in 1607. He served as a diplomat and enjoyed the favour of Queen Elizabeth I, though his ambitions for higher office were never realised. Dyer’s poems are marked by their lyric skill and introspective tone. Some of them have a philosophical depth that embodies the spirit of Elizabethan humanism. A Mouthful of Air – the podcast This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple , Spotify , Google Podcasts or your favourite app . You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email . The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman . A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Listen to the show You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms Related Episodes From The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning Episode 81 From ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning.Poet Robert BrowningReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessFrom ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ By Robert... Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll Episode 80 Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll Stephanie Burt reads ‘Poly Beach House’ by Tonee Mae Moll and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.This poem is from: Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after StonewallAvailable from: Super... Daedalus and Icarus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses translated by Arthur Golding Episode 79 Daedalus and Icarus from Ovid's Metamorphses, translated by Arthur Golding Mark McGuinness reads and discusses Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.Poet Ovid, translated by Arthur GoldingReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessDaedalus and... The post A Modest Love by Sir Edward Dyer appeared first on A Mouthful of Air .…

A Mouthful of Air: Poetry with Mark McGuinness

1
Empathy by A. E. Stallings 27:20

vor 34 weeks27:20

27:20

Episode 74 Empathy by A. E. Stallings A. E. Stallings reads ‘Empathy’ and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness. https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/74_Empathy_by_A_E_Stallings.mp3 This poem is from: This Afterlife: Selected Poems Available from: This Afterlife: Selected Poems is available from: The publisher: Carcanet Amazon: UK | US Empathy by A. E. Stallings My love, I’m grateful tonight Our listing bed isn’t a raft Precariously adrift As we dodge the coast guard light, And clasp hold of a girl and a boy. I’m glad we didn’t wake Our kids in the thin hours, to take Not a thing, not a favorite toy, And we didn’t hand over our cash To one of the smuggling rackets, That we didn’t buy cheap lifejackets No better than bright orange trash And less buoyant. I’m glad that the dark Above us is not deeply twinned Beneath us, and moiled with wind, And we don’t scan the sky for a mark, Any mark, that demarcates a shore As the dinghy starts taking on water. I’m glad that our six-year old daughter, Who can’t swim, is a foot off the floor In the bottom bunk, and our son With his broken arm’s high and dry, That the ceiling is not seeping sky, With our journey but hardly begun. Empathy isn’t generous, It’s selfish. It’s not being nice To say I would pay any price Not to be those who’d die to be us. Interview transcript Mark: Alicia, where did this poem come from? Alicia: I think I must have written it in 2016, given partly the ages of the children here. They’re older now. I live in Greece. So, this was during the first very intense wave of migration that was partly from the Syrian War, but also, there were people coming over from various places, Afghanistan, Iraq, and arriving mostly on the island of Lesbos. But in 2016, a lot of these arrivals were also coming into Athens, and I was involved in some volunteer work and so on. But I became very intensely aware of people with children, the ages of my children, coming over in very precarious situations on very precarious boats and dinghies and so on. And there were a lot of drownings. And this, I think, partly comes out of sort of dropping my children off at the school bus and going back to the house and opening up a Facebook volunteers page and realising that two shipwrecks with maybe a total of 37 people had drowned off of Lesbos, a lot of them children, and just realising there’s a school bus of children who have just drowned, and kind of wanting to write about this, but also being concerned that I not exploit someone else’s experience. How do I write about this from my own point of view? And also kind of questioning that point of view. So, I would also add that ‘empathy’ in Greek is not quite as positive a word as it is in English. Mark: Oh, what connotations does it have? Alicia: Well, the English word, I think, is a relatively recent coinage, I want to say Victorian. And before that, you would use sympathy to feel with someone. But empátheia, in Greek, has a sense of maybe feeling against someone, this idea of maybe even hostility. So, I was kind of interested in the word empathy itself, which I think has a bit of privilege in it. I think sympathy, the idea of feeling with someone is different from kind of trying to get into their consciousness. I think that can be problematic. Mark: And I’m curious as well about this. You could maybe call it, I don’t know, the poet’s conscience. How do you write about something that is other people suffering, that is big, that is a public issue maybe, and yet do it in an authentic way? Because there’s lots of ways we can respond to that as citizens, in the usual discourse, in prose, in conversation, and so on. But how do you come at this as a poet? Alicia: Well, I think in this case, I frame it very consciously as, you know, we are not these people. And the thing about negatives, I think Anne Carson has written about this, the great thing about negatives in poetry is that it incorporates the positive as well. So, you can say ‘we are not those people’ and then invoke those people. So, there’s a way you can have your cake and eat it, too, with that framing device of the negatives. I mean, I’ve written some other poems about this also, and they were in the form of epigrams because I think the epigram, which has been used for thousands of years for drownings in the Aegean, if you look at the Greek Anthology , this anthology of ancient Greek poems, it has that kind of maybe slight ironic distance. I think there has to be some kind of distance to it. So, in this case, there’s the framing device of the family who are not having to flee, but, also invoking the terrors, I think, of what that would be of fleeing. So, perhaps this poem is trying to have its cake and eat it, too. Mark: I mean, it’s something that we’re all confronted with on a daily basis. On the one hand, we have our own lives, however privileged or unprivileged that may be, and then there’s this parallel reality that is coming at us through our phones, through the various types of media night and day. And it’s almost like there’s a split-screen effect for life. And I think maybe that’s what you capture with the negative aspect here. Alicia: Perhaps. I think it also came out of having dreams and so forth. And this feeling, which is not an uncommon trope, I guess in poetry, of the bed being like a boat itself and thinking about people who are not in beds, but actually in boats. So, there was a bit of maybe metaphorical overlap there. Mark: And the association with children as well. I mean, you have that wonderful poem about ‘all the fairy stories are about going to bed’ and sleep, and that’s an association in your work. Alicia: Well, and I think as parents, your basic anxiety is keeping your children safe. And so, in that sense, it is easy to empathise on a certain level with people who are trying to do that for their children. But I remember just very… there’s a lot of just factual truth in the poem. You know, my daughter couldn’t swim, and my son had this broken arm. And I just thought, ‘My God, if I were at sea with them, how terrifying that would be.’ And there was this sense, too, because I do live in Greece, that when my children would go to the beach and be playing in the Aegean, that this water is touching other children in a different way. Mark: So, there’s that doubleness all the way through. And how did you get started with the poem? I mean, is the finished text that we’ve got here fairly close to how it ended up, or was there a process of evolution? Alicia: This poem, I think, came out very close to how it is now. I’m sure there was some tinkering with adjectives and word choices and maybe an occasional rhyme. But it came out quite quickly, and I basically left it alone. There are other poems, that I work at very hard and for a very long time and really struggle with. This one kind of came out more or less as it was. I think it sort of started in this kind of song meter, these kind of short lines with these envelope stanzas so that the quatrains are not rhyming ABAB, but ABBA, which is, I guess, another kind of mirroring in the poem, but also these short lines, which are very songlike. And I deliberately left some wonky rhymes in there. I like ‘raft’ and ‘adrift’, partly for their wonkiness. I don’t know if I have some other ones. Maybe not. You know, I liked that I had ‘rackets’ and ‘jackets’, which I think is a kind of fun rhyme. And the last line, I think, is a bit metrically wonky. I sometimes read it different ways. And I left that on, too, that felt true to the poem to have this kind of slight stumbling last line where it’s not entirely clear how the stresses might fall and it doesn’t matter. And it’s got that maybe off rhyme or slightly wrenched rhyme with ‘generous’ and ‘die to be us’. So, to a certain extent, it was quickly done. And then I felt that the rough edges were part of the poem. And so, part of the process was leaving it alone. Mark: Right, right, not tidying it up too much. So, I had that reaction to the last line. I love the fact that, you know, ‘Not to be those who’d die to be us’ – you’ve got to do a lot of sorting out of the negatives and the positives and the syntax. And when you describe it as a slightly wrenching, I mean, it’s almost like the mental contortions we have to go through to live in a world where we’re holding all these realities simultaneously in our mind. Alicia: Yeah, I mean, it’s a good argument for the last slide. I hadn’t thought about it that deeply, but I am aware that it’s not smooth and it’s not perfect. And there are times when I write poems, and I really try to get that perfect, smooth surface. And this, I really wanted to leave the rough edges on. So, I’m glad that it seems to work. Mark: And even so, I mean, your version of rough edges is a lot sharper and crisper than a lot of poets. I mean, you’ve got this wonderful facility with form, with rhyme. You know, we always know everything is very well considered. I mean, did you have any hesitation about using regular form with rhymes for a subject like this? I mean, the cliche about this kind of form is it’s too neat and tidy for the world. Alicia: I think some of what the sort of song meter going here, and by that, I just mean something shorter than a pentameter line, does have a kind of childlike and lullaby-like association with it. So, for me, it’s good for poems about children. And if you think about it, a lot of nursery rhymes and lullabies have a kind of sinister depth to them. I think that’s not uncommon. So, I quite like that combination of the simpler kind of sing songiness that goes here with a trimeter with three beats in a line. And the subject matter, to me, I think that that can be effective. Mark: As you’re saying that, I’m noticing things like, ‘a girl and a boy’. I mean, that could be Hansel and Gretel. It’s a kind of classic fairy tale trope. And I guess the journey, it can be romanticised certainly in poetry, in songs, and so on, and nursery rhymes. But it’s anything but romantic here. And you’ve got so many kind of really telling little details like the lifejackets, no better than bright orange trash, and less buoyant. Alicia: I think with the lifejackets, I should also add that my husband is a journalist and was at that time going over to Lesbos, and you would see these mountains of lifejackets because, people would take them off and deposit them on the beach. And the thing was that a lot of these lifejackets were not regulation lifejackets. And if you end up in the water in them, you will drown. So, some of that is factual details that come from having a journalist husband. Mark: And your own experience of actually volunteering and helping out, did you feel it’s a different poem because of that than if you’d, say, read about it? Alicia: I’m not sure. Trying to think. This must have been in about February or March of 2016. Yes, I was doing some volunteer work, maybe not as much as I ended up doing, that at that time involved going to the Port of Piraeus and helping solidarity groups pass out whatever it was we were passing out that day, you know, oranges or, baby carriers. That was a big thing. And things changed in late March of 2016 because before that, people who had arrived in Greece could simply walk up through Germany and the borders were open. But late, I want to say March 20th or so of 2016, those borders closed, and then you had a kind of backing up of people stuck in Greece. But I think one of the things that did strike me almost immediately, again I had young children at the time, was seeing children who looked very much like my children, they are half Greek, also could pass for Syrians, wearing the same clothes that the kids were into the same things. You know, they missed their Lego and their pet, they left at home, and are, wearing the Spider-Man shirt, or so forth. So, there was this kind of overwhelming sense of our positions could easily be reversed. Mark: And also, I mean, I live in the UK, and so people arrive here on boats in pretty well identical circumstances to this. I know you were writing it in Greece because I know the context, but it could have been written by a British poet, and you wouldn’t have to change very many details, I don’t think, if any. Alicia: Yes, unfortunately, it is still a very topical poem. One would wish that it were more dated. Mark: I think that was the feeling I had was that my admiration for the poem and the fact that you’d nailed the subject was tempered by… But also, I wish you didn’t have to write a poem like this. And also, just the idea that empathy is something that you need… maybe in the modern sense is in pretty short supply. Alicia: Yes, I think there has been a sea change in some of that. I remember when we had early arrivals in Greece, a lot of people were very welcoming to these new arrivals. Greeks on the island of Lesbos, I think about 60% of the native population there are descended from Asia Minor refugees from 1922. And so, we’re within just a couple of generations of being refugees themselves. And there was this sense of kind of recognising what this is like and what migration is like. And I think a lot of attitudes kind of can come from the top, from the government kind of setting the tone for how people deal with arrivals. And people can, I think, rise to the occasion, or there can be an emphasis on distrust and scarcity of resources. So, it has been interesting to watch kind of the changes in public sympathies, empathies, and otherwise. Mark: And the ending, I mean, it’s really hits you in the face. ‘Empathy isn’t generous, it’s selfish.’ Did that come to you? Was that in your mind all along? Was it as much of a surprise to you as it was for me as a reader? Alicia: I think it must have been something of a surprise. I might have been thinking in the back of my mind, balancing the Greek meaning with the English meaning, and maybe not sure how to end the poem. And then I think I just thought, ‘Let’s just say the thing, let’s just say it, and see what happens.’ Generally, I don’t know an ending to a poem until about maybe two-thirds or three-fourths through. At about that point, I might see an exit strategy, but I wouldn’t have started with this idea or stanza. And I think I’ve really tried in the poem to kind of carry through this thought experiment with the details of the thought experiment. But, I couldn’t end within the thought experiment. I had to go back to the frame, which is, ‘This is all I’m imagining from a point of safety.’ Mark: Right. So, the thought experiment ends with, imagining the children, ‘Our son with his broken arm’s high and dry, / That the ceiling is not seeping sky, / With our journey but hardly begun.’ That’s the end of the I’m-grateful-that-this-isn’t-happening-to-us. And then it’s a bold move, I guess, syntactically and in terms of the point of view, as well as what you’re saying. But my goodness me, is that an ending! Alicia: Well, I think partly, there’s a sort of limit to the empathy. You know, ultimately, you can imagine changing places, but you would not change places. And, just thinking about how much people had paid literally and metaphorically and how, we would all of us pay that price to get to safety if we had that choice. Mark: Yeah. I mean, to end up with that contemplation of price, in a way, is just as brutal as the statement, empathy isn’t generous. Alicia, thank you for coming and reading such a heartbreaking poem and for being generous in your appraisal of ‘Empathy,’ the poem, and empathy, the concept. Alicia: Thank you for this interesting conversation. I enjoyed it. Empathy by A. E. Stallings My love, I’m grateful tonight Our listing bed isn’t a raft Precariously adrift As we dodge the coast guard light, And clasp hold of a girl and a boy. I’m glad we didn’t wake Our kids in the thin hours, to take Not a thing, not a favorite toy, And we didn’t hand over our cash To one of the smuggling rackets, That we didn’t buy cheap lifejackets No better than bright orange trash And less buoyant. I’m glad that the dark Above us is not deeply twinned Beneath us, and moiled with wind, And we don’t scan the sky for a mark, Any mark, that demarcates a shore As the dinghy starts taking on water. I’m glad that our six-year old daughter, Who can’t swim, is a foot off the floor In the bottom bunk, and our son With his broken arm’s high and dry, That the ceiling is not seeping sky, With our journey but hardly begun. Empathy isn’t generous, It’s selfish. It’s not being nice To say I would pay any price Not to be those who’d die to be us. This Afterlife: Selected Poems ‘Empathy’ is from This Afterlife: Selected Poems by A. E. Stallings, published by Carcanet. Available from: This Afterlife: Selected Poems is available from: The publisher: Carcanet Amazon: UK | US A. E. Stallings A.E. Stallings is an American poet who studied Classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford. She has published four collections of poetry, Archaic Smile , Hapax , and Olives , and most recently, Like , a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has published three verse translations, Lucretius’s The Nature of Things (in rhyming fourteeners!), Hesiod’s Works and Days , and an illustrated The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice . A selected poems, This Afterlife , was published in 2022. She is currently serving a term as the Oxford Professor of Poetry. A. E. Stallings ’ Website Photo: Kostas Mantziaris A Mouthful of Air – the podcast This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple , Spotify , Google Podcasts or your favourite app . You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email . The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman . A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Listen to the show You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms Related Episodes From The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning Episode 81 From ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning.Poet Robert BrowningReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessFrom ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ By Robert... 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From Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum by Emilia Lanyer 42:15

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Episode 73 From Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum , by Emilia Lanyer Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum by Emilia Lanyer. https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/73_From_Salve_Deus_Rex_Judaeorum_by_Emilia_Lanyer.mp3 Poet Emilia Lanyer Reading and commentary by Mark McGuinness From Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Lines 745-768) By Emilia Lanyer Now Pontius Pilate is to judge the Cause Of faultlesse Jesus , who before him stands; Who neither hath offended Prince, nor Lawes, Although he now be brought in woefull bands: O noble Governour, make thou yet a pause, Doe not in innocent blood imbrue thy hands; But heare the words of thy most worthy wife, Who sends to thee, to beg her Saviours life. Let barb’rous crueltie farre depart from thee, And in true Justice take afflictions part; Open thine eies, that thou the truth mai’st see, Doe not the thing that goes against thy heart; Condemne not him that must thy Saviour be; But view his holy Life, his good desert: Let not us Women glory in Mens fall, Who had power given to over-rule us all. Till now your indiscretion sets us free, And makes our former fault much lesse appeare; Our Mother Eve , who tasted of the Tree, Giving to Adam what she held most deare, Was simply good, and had no powre to see, The after-comming harme did not appeare: The subtile Serpent that our Sex betraide, Before our fall so sure a plot had laide. That undiscerning Ignorance perceav’d No guile, or craft that was by him intended; For, had she knowne of what we were bereav’d, To his request she had not condiscended. But she (poore soule) by cunning was deceav’d, No hurt therein her harmlesse Heart intended: For she alleadg’d Gods word, which he denies That they should die, but even as Gods, be wise. But surely Adam cannot be excus’d, Her fault, though great, yet hee was most too blame; What Weaknesse offred, Strength might have refusde, Being Lord of all the greater was his shame: Although the Serpents craft had her abusde, Gods holy word ought all his actions frame: For he was Lord and King of all the earth, Before poore Eve had either life or breath. Who being fram’d by Gods eternall hand, The perfect’st man that ever breath’d on earth, And from Gods mouth receiv’d that strait command, The breach whereof he knew was present death: Yea having powre to rule both Sea and Land, Yet with one Apple wonne to loose that breath, Which God hath breathed in his beauteous face, Bringing us all in danger and disgrace. And then to lay the fault on Patience backe, That we (poore women) must endure it all; We know right well he did discretion lacke, Beeing not perswaded thereunto at all; If Eve did erre, it was for knowledge sake, The fruit beeing faire perswaded him to fall: No subtill Serpents falshood did betray him, If he would eate it, who had powre to stay him? Not Eve , whose fault was onely too much love, Which made her give this present to her Deare, That which shee tasted, he likewise might prove, Whereby his knowledge might become more cleare; He never sought her weakenesse to reprove, With those sharpe words wich he of God did heare: Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke From Eves faire hand, as from a learned Booke. If any Evill did in her remaine, Beeing made of him, he was the ground of all; If one of many Worlds could lay a staine Upon our Sexe, and worke so great a fall To wretched Man, by Satans subtill traine; What will so fowle a fault amongst you all? Her weakenesse did the Serpents words obay, But you in malice Gods deare Sonne betray. Whom, if unjustly you condemne to die, Her sinne was small, to what you doe commit; All mortall sinnes that doe for vengeance crie, Are not to be compared unto it: If many worlds would altogether trie, By all their sinnes the wrath of God to get; This sinne of yours, surmounts them all as farre As doth the Sunne, another little starre. Then let us have our Libertie againe, And challendge to your selves no Sov’raigntie; You came not in the world without our paine, Make that a barre against your crueltie; Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny? If one weake woman simply did offend, This sinne of yours hath no excuse, nor end. Podcast transcript In 1999 Carol Ann Duffy published The World’s Wife – a book of poems in the voices of the wives, lovers and significant others of some of the ‘great men’ of history, literature and mythology. It included poems spoken by Mrs Midas, Mrs Aesop, Mrs Darwin, Queen Herod, Frau Freud and Pilate’s Wife, as well as Salome, Medusa, Delilah, Queen Kong and Elvis’s Twin Sister. It’s a dazzling collection, full of clever and witty and timely take-downs of patriarchal pretensions, and I thoroughly recommend it. And what I have just read you is a poem that is not a million miles away, in its basic approach, from Duffy’s subversive feminist project, except that this one was published 400 years ago. It is another monologue in the voice of the wife of Pontius Pilate . She makes only a fleeting appearance in the Bible, in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 27 Verse 19, at the point where Pilate, the Roman Governor of Judea, is sitting in judgment on Jesus: When he was set down on the judgment seat, his wife sent unto him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him. We don’t learn anything else about Pilate’s wife, but this kind of thing is irresistible to poets, and Carol Ann Duffy and Emilia Lanyer have both seized on this little kernel of story and expanded it into poems that pass a kind of judgment on the men who judged and executed Jesus. If you follow contemporary British poetry, you’ve almost certainly heard of Carol Ann Duffy, but even if you’re a fan of Renaissance poetry, it’s possible that Emilia Lanyer is a new name to you. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum was the first book of original poetry published by a woman in England, but it failed to make a splash, and wasn’t reprinted for almost four centuries, and she was left out of anthologies of the period until quite recently. So who was Emilia Lanyer? She was born in London in 1569 to an English mother, Margret Johnson, and a Venetian immigrant father, Baptiste Bassano, who was a musician at the court of Elizabeth I. Growing up in a family of musicians, she may well have become an accomplished player herself, but what is more surprising is the fact that she received an excellent education, which was very unusual for a girl at the time, especially from the servant class to which musicians belonged. In her terrific book Eve Bites Back , Anna Beer says we don’t know for sure where Lanyer got her education, it may well have been at the household of the Countess of Kent , but in that case we don’t know why the Countess would have bothered to do this for such a lowly person. What we do know for sure is that the adult Emilia Lanyer, an intelligent and educated woman and accomplished musician, became the mistress of one of the most powerful men in England – Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon , cousin of Queen Elizabeth and her Lord Chamberlain. He also happened to be patron of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company of players who included William Shakespeare. She evidently enjoyed the high life at court, until she became pregnant with Carey’s child and was swiftly paid off and married to Alfonso Lanyer, another court musician. In recent years some scholars have identified Emilia Lanyer with the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and her book was first reprinted in 1978 under the title of The Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady . But we don’t care about that, do we? It’s just boring gossip, isn’t it? And it reduces her to a minor character in Shakespeare’s story, rather than a very accomplished and interesting poet in her own right. Her contemporaries saw her as a mistress, a wife, and a mother, but she evidently saw herself as a poet. In another passage from Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum , addressed to the Countess of Cumberland, she claimed that this vocation was hers from birth: And knowe, when first into this world I came, This charge was giv’n me by th’Eternall powres, Th’everlasting Trophie of thy Fame To build and decke it with the sweetest flowres That virtue yeelds; Is this just hyperbole to flatter her patron? Maybe. But I also think it bespeaks a real sense of vocation and commitment, and the sense of confidence and responsibility that comes from being given a ‘charge’, a duty, by ‘th’Eternall powres’ – especially in an age where many of the readers of poetry would have scoffed at the idea of a woman poet. So Lanyer makes some bold claims for herself as a poet, but she can really back them up, as we can see from the passage I’ve read for you today. It’s from the longest poem in Lanyer’s book, what we would today call the ‘title poem’ of the collection: ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’, which is Latin for ‘Hail God, King of the Jews’. It’s a devotional poem that begins with the Passion of Christ, and segues into a disquisition on Adam and Eve and the role of men and women in original sin. So just to refresh our memories, in Christian theology the death and resurrection of Christ was necessary in order to redeem humanity from sin and grant them salvation in heaven. Where did sin come from? The Garden of Eden, where the serpent tempted Eve to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and she then gave the fruit to Adam, who ate it too. And of course this was the one tree whose fruit God had explicitly told Adam he wasn’t allowed to eat. And because of this, generations of Christian theologians blamed the origin of sin on Eve, and claimed that her weakness and sinfulness had been inherited by women. Which is one reason Lanyer found herself living in a society where it was taken for granted and written into law that women should be ruled by men, who were much stronger and wiser than them. So that’s the backdrop to this poem, in which we hear the voice of Pilate’s wife pleading with Pilate not to condemn Jesus to death. And in the poem, Lanyer very wisely says nothing that contradicts scripture, which would have got her into trouble. But she does give us a very unusual slant on the material. Because Pilate’s wife points out that everything being done to Jesus is being done by men, not women: Let not us Women glory in Mens fall, Who had power given to over-rule us all. She describes the killing of Jesus as ‘man’s fall’, as opposed to the ‘fall from grace’ associated with Eve, and makes the radical claim that this sets women free from the consequences of their ‘former fault’, since it appears ‘much less’ by comparison: Till now your indiscretion sets us free, And makes our former fault much lesse appeare; Then Pilate’s wife begins an extraordinary defence of Eve: Our Mother Eve , who tasted of the Tree, Giving to Adam what she held most deare, Was simply good, and had no powre to see, The after-comming harme did not appeare: The subtile Serpent that our Sex betraide, Before our fall so sure a plot had laide. Far from being the source of evil, Eve was ‘simply good’, and ‘had no powre to see’ the consequences of her actions; her mistake was down to the ‘subtile Serpent’, who easily outwitted her ‘undiscerning ignorance’. Not content with defending Eve, Pilate’s wife lays the blame firmly on Adam: But surely Adam cannot be excus’d, Her fault, though great, yet hee was most too blame; What Weaknesse offred, Strength might have refusde, Being Lord of all the greater was his shame: This is a brilliantly executed judo move on the argument for patriarchal power. If, as we are told in the Bible, men derive their power and authority over women from Adam, who was Lord of all, including Eve, then surely it follows that men must be responsible for their own sin? If Eve was so much weaker than Adam, then surely Adam’s strength could have refused what she offered? He was the one in charge, so surely he should take the blame? It’s hard to argue with the logic. And it must have been galling for Jacobean male readers to read such a cogently argument coming from a supposedly inferior woman. So it’s not hard to guess why her book disappeared after a single printing. And Lanyer, channelling Pilate’s wife, really hammers the point home: Adam had been granted power power over land and sea, so how come he was won over by a single apple? If Eve was at fault, she was persuaded by a clever adversary in the serpent, but Adam had no such excuse – Eve simply offered him the apple and he took it and ate it without offering the least resistance. Lanyer is careful not to say that Eve was blameless, but says that her sin was less than that of Adam, for several good reasons that we find in the Bible: she was weak and therefore persuaded by the clever serpent; her weakness meant she could not have persuaded Adam with argument, and she didn’t even try to do this; and she had no idea of the consequences of her actions. And even the evil that was in her must have ultimately come from Adam, since the Bible clearly states that she was made out of Adam’s rib: If any Evill did in her remaine, Beeing made of him, he was the ground of all; It’s probably no coincidence that these lines occur just after Lanyer has reminded us that men owe their knowledge, which they take such pride in, to Eve: Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke From Eves faire hand, as from a learned Booke. So in this reading, Adam gave Eve evil, and she gave him knowledge in return. It doesn’t sound like a very fair exchange, does it? Then Pilate’s wife returns to the judgment of Jesus, and tells her husband that killing Jesus will be even worse than Eve’s crime, because of the motive: Her weakenesse did the Serpents words obay, But you in malice Gods deare Sonne betray. Eve sinned through weakness, but malice is worse than weakness. Pilate’s wife then expands on the theme with a terrific stanza making the contrast unmistakable: Whom, if unjustly you condemne to die, Her sinne was small, to what you doe commit; All mortall sinnes that doe for vengeance crie, Are not to be compared unto it: If many worlds would altogether trie, By all their sinnes the wrath of God to get; This sinne of yours, surmounts them all as farre As doth the Sunne, another little starre. Isn’t that final couplet marvellous? This sin of yours is so much greater than all the other sins put together as the sun is bigger than a tiny star: This sinne of yours, surmounts them all as farre As doth the Sunne, another little starre. But she hasn’t finished yet. The final stanza I’ve read today contains an astonishing appeal for liberty: Then let us have our Libertie againe, And challendge to your selves no Sov’raigntie; You came not in the world without our paine, Make that a barre against your crueltie; Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny? If one weake woman simply did offend, This sinne of yours hath no excuse, nor end. Give us our freedom, don’t take all the sovereignty, the power, to yourselves; you only came into the world through our pain, the pain of childbirth, so surely that should prevent you from being cruel to us? Your fault is greater, so why shouldn’t we be your equals? One weak woman ‘simply’, i.e. ignorantly, did offend, but your sin ‘hath no excuse, nor end’. This is startling stuff, in a deeply patriarchal society. And the poem isn’t just challenging established gender relations. Class and rank and equality are recurrent themes throughout Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum , and it’s startling that this passage, with its revolutionary language about ‘liberty’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘tyranny’, was published in 1611, thirty years before the English Civil War began. It’s amazing that the book was published at all. Not only because it would have been harder for a woman to persuade a publisher to take her on, but also Jacobean books were liable to censorship, to prevent subversive or seditious ideas finding their way into print. But somehow Lanyer managed to get her book published. For her, it may well have felt like a failure – there’s no evidence that it made any impression on contemporary readers. It wasn’t reprinted in her lifetime. And in spite of featuring dedications and appeals to numerous prominent women, it did not secure any lucrative patronage for its author. On the other hand, maybe – and I really hope this was the case – maybe she felt vindicated, in spite of her lack of worldly success as an author. I hope she did feel that she had discharged some of that ‘charge’ she felt had been given to her at birth by ‘th’Eternal powres’. And… her poetry has survived because she made the effort to publish it, against the odds. And what poetry it is. It challenges the patriarchal religious establishment, not only in its argument but in the fact that she – a commoner and a woman – is making the argument in skilful and sophisticated verse. And her verse is not just clever, it’s witty and entertaining, even 400 years later. From the point of view of poetic craft, Lanyer’s book is a virtuoso performance, she uses a series of different stanza forms in different poems, with consummate skill. The title poem, which I’ve read from today, is in ottava rima , an eight-line stanza form that originated in Italy, which rhymes ABABABCC – i.e. you’ve got three ‘A’ rhymes, in the first, third and fifth lines, interwoven with three ‘B’ rhymes, in the second, fourth and sixth lines. And the last two lines of the stanza are a rhyming couplet. You may recall back in Episode 54, about Shelley , I talked about the difficulty of writing terza rima in English, because it’s made up of interlocking triple rhymes, i.e. three lines sharing the same rhyme. A lot of these poetic forms originated in Italian, which has a lot more rhyming words than English does, so it’s harder to do them in English. And ottava rima is another verse form with triple rhymes, it has two triple rhymes in every stanza. I’ve written some ottava rima myself, a translation from the Portuguese poet Camões , and I can assure you it’s really hard work. One of the most famous examples of ottava rima in English is Lord Byron’s long poem Don Juan , where he makes a virtue of necessity, by using a lot of polysyllabic rhymes for comic effect. Here he is taking a swipe at poor Coleridge: And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing, But like a hawk encumber’d with his hood, Explaining Metaphysics to the nation — I wish he would explain his Explanation. I think we can detect something of this effect here and there in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum , where Lanyer also rhymes on multiple syllables, such as: For, had she knowne of what we were bereav’d, To his request she had not condiscended. So she not only rhymes the two syllables of ‘perceav’d’, ‘bereav’d’ and later on, ‘deceav’d’, but also rhymes ‘intended’ with the last two syllables of the long word ‘condiscended’. (The word ‘condescended’ here means ‘agreed’, so it’s just saying that she agreed to go along with the serpent’s request.) And I do think it’s intentionally funny, rhyming on the final two syllables of that long word. It helps to lightens the tone, which feels more like a witty retort to patriarchy, rather than a laboured rebuttal. And then a few stanzas later, we find this very Byronesque final couplet, rhymed on the final two syllables: If Eve did erre, it was for knowledge sake, The fruit beeing faire perswaded him to fall: No subtill Serpents falshood did betray him, If he would eate it, who had powre to stay him? Again, this lightens the tone and gives me the impression that she’s not just criticising Adam, she’s mocking him – the one thing that many powerful men, even to this day, cannot stand. So we’ll hear the poem again in a moment, so that we can savour the daring, the cleverness and the wit of Lanyer’s poem once more. But before we do that I’d just like to give a shout out and thank you to Podcast Review , one of the most useful and respected guides to good podcasts, because for the third year running, A Mouthful of Air has been included in their list of the best poetry podcasts . The list has expanded to 11 shows this year, and one of the new additions is Close Readings from the London Review of Books , so it’s great to be on the list alongside such an esteemed literary publication, as well as shows from The New Yorker and the Poetry Foundation in the US. So a big thank you to Podcast Review and to Alice Florence Orr for her kind review. It’s so kind in fact that I would blush to quote it, but if you’d like to read it and remind yourself of what a discerning listener you are, for listening to A Mouthful of Air, then I’ll put a link in the show notes, or you can just Google ‘best poetry podcasts’ and you should find it. OK, time to listen to Pilate’s wife berating her husband once again. From Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Lines 745-768) By Emilia Lanyer Now Pontius Pilate is to judge the Cause Of faultlesse Jesus , who before him stands; Who neither hath offended Prince, nor Lawes, Although he now be brought in woefull bands: O noble Governour, make thou yet a pause, Doe not in innocent blood imbrue thy hands; But heare the words of thy most worthy wife, Who sends to thee, to beg her Saviours life. Let barb’rous crueltie farre depart from thee, And in true Justice take afflictions part; Open thine eies, that thou the truth mai’st see, Doe not the thing that goes against thy heart; Condemne not him that must thy Saviour be; But view his holy Life, his good desert: Let not us Women glory in Mens fall, Who had power given to over-rule us all. Till now your indiscretion sets us free, And makes our former fault much lesse appeare; Our Mother Eve , who tasted of the Tree, Giving to Adam what she held most deare, Was simply good, and had no powre to see, The after-comming harme did not appeare: The subtile Serpent that our Sex betraide, Before our fall so sure a plot had laide. That undiscerning Ignorance perceav’d No guile, or craft that was by him intended; For, had she knowne of what we were bereav’d, To his request she had not condiscended. But she (poore soule) by cunning was deceav’d, No hurt therein her harmlesse Heart intended: For she alleadg’d Gods word, which he denies That they should die, but even as Gods, be wise. But surely Adam cannot be excus’d, Her fault, though great, yet hee was most too blame; What Weaknesse offred, Strength might have refusde, Being Lord of all the greater was his shame: Although the Serpents craft had her abusde, Gods holy word ought all his actions frame: For he was Lord and King of all the earth, Before poore Eve had either life or breath. Who being fram’d by Gods eternall hand, The perfect’st man that ever breath’d on earth, And from Gods mouth receiv’d that strait command, The breach whereof he knew was present death: Yea having powre to rule both Sea and Land, Yet with one Apple wonne to loose that breath, Which God hath breathed in his beauteous face, Bringing us all in danger and disgrace. And then to lay the fault on Patience backe, That we (poore women) must endure it all; We know right well he did discretion lacke, Beeing not perswaded thereunto at all; If Eve did erre, it was for knowledge sake, The fruit beeing faire perswaded him to fall: No subtill Serpents falshood did betray him, If he would eate it, who had powre to stay him? Not Eve , whose fault was onely too much love, Which made her give this present to her Deare, That which shee tasted, he likewise might prove, Whereby his knowledge might become more cleare; He never sought her weakenesse to reprove, With those sharpe words wich he of God did heare: Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke From Eves faire hand, as from a learned Booke. If any Evill did in her remaine, Beeing made of him, he was the ground of all; If one of many Worlds could lay a staine Upon our Sexe, and worke so great a fall To wretched Man, by Satans subtill traine; What will so fowle a fault amongst you all? Her weakenesse did the Serpents words obay, But you in malice Gods deare Sonne betray. Whom, if unjustly you condemne to die, Her sinne was small, to what you doe commit; All mortall sinnes that doe for vengeance crie, Are not to be compared unto it: If many worlds would altogether trie, By all their sinnes the wrath of God to get; This sinne of yours, surmounts them all as farre As doth the Sunne, another little starre. Then let us have our Libertie againe, And challendge to your selves no Sov’raigntie; You came not in the world without our paine, Make that a barre against your crueltie; Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny? If one weake woman simply did offend, This sinne of yours hath no excuse, nor end. Emilia Lanyer Portrait of an unknown woman, possibly Emilia Lanyer, by Nicholas Hilliard Emelia Lanyer was an English poet who was born Emilia Bassano in 1569 and died in 1645. The daughter of a court musician, Emilia made connections with the inner circle of Queen Elizabeth I’s court. She somehow received an education that enabled her to write the learned and witty poetry in her collection Salve Deus Rex Judæorum , which was the first book of original poetry published by a woman in England, in 1611. It contains a passionate defence of women’s virtue and piety, featuring one of the earliest feminist critiques of traditional biblical gender roles. Her work sank into obscurity until the 20th century, but is gaining increasing recognition for its formal mastery, its groundbreaking stance on women’s rights and its religious and political commentary. A Mouthful of Air – the podcast This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple , Spotify , Google Podcasts or your favourite app . You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email . The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman . A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Listen to the show You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms Related Episodes From The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning Episode 81 From ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning.Poet Robert BrowningReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessFrom ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ By Robert... 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Reddest Red by Z. R. Ghani 37:46

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Episode 72 Reddest Red by Z. R. Ghani Z. R. Ghani reads ‘Reddest Red’ and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness. https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/72_Reddest_Red_by_Z_R_Ghani.mp3 This poem is from: In the Name of Red Available from: In the Name of Red is available from: The publisher: The Emma Press Amazon: UK | US Bookshop.org: UK Reddest Red by Z. R. Ghani Be a darling and imagine. The reddest of all reds— changeable in velvet, the usurper in broadcloth; smooching the ground, cheek to cheek, in Louboutins. I’m here, I’m always here, itching to breathe, vital under your skin, trumpeted by pulse. I need to exist, as the poison arrow’s target; dirty on the warrior’s face; a flag rippling like a dragon overhead. You wish you could know my names, all secret, sacred, and true, but call me whatever you want, I don’t care, or summon me as rose, claret, vermilion, ladies-blush, lust; evoke me from ruddy, madder, brazilwood, orchil, cochineal, urucum—I need to exist. For no other colour in two lengths of cloth makes a gentleman and keeps him that way, and there’s nothing I can’t improve with a scandal, though I’m happiest reclining on a girl’s pretty lips, pitying potential left to rot, lesser reds that shall but one day bloom into me if they dare. Know me as a fiesta in everything I star in: I tickle a tree and it’s autumn, I tap someone and they blush, I storm into a battlefield and it’s a field of poppies, all the time living my best life, as I always will, me, Shakti, dancing like a graceful madwoman in the flames of a star, roaring myself redder (yes, it’s possible), and charging back down to Earth in the pope’s fresh socks, diving into a dazzling Diwali of fireflies as they, for a flare-and-sigh, jaunt through my impermanent soul. But I need to exist. Shed me, if you must, on your wedding night: sari cloth, petticoat, silk blouse swaying with the bed, or pin me as a bindi on your third eye like a sun, so when they look at you they’ll see me first, exalted. How fortunate I am to be a colour, let alone Red. Interview transcript Mark: Zaina, where did this poem come from? Zaina: This poem was inspired by a book I read. It’s called My Name is Red by a Turkish writer called Orhan Pamuk. it’s such a beautiful novel. It talks about red and art and miniaturism in such kind of flair and floral language, but not done in a saccharine way. It’s so beautiful. And it is a murder mystery, but the way it’s written is it’s written from different perspectives, different narratives. And you’ll have a tree talking, for example, or the colour red, or blood in this novel, which I found really creative. And I thought, ‘I want to…’ – because it’s so poetic. I wanted to write a poem kind of very similar to that, or just inspired by it, but obviously not copying it. So I began writing about it, inspired by that. And also, at the same time I was writing, I had these other poems, about Persephone and Hades in this pamphlet and nature and all these things. And I really wanted to unify all these poems and write an introductory poem. And this is what this is in this pamphlet. It’s the first poem. And to be honest, how it came together is it’s just automatic writing, which is when you just put pen to paper and you just write what is in your head and you don’t think too much. I just wanted it to flow, because that’s how I imagine red would be if it was a person. It would just be so confident. It doesn’t need to overthink anything. It believes in itself so much. It’s self-serving. Mark: No self-esteem issues with red! Zaina: No self-esteem issues. Yeah. And I just wanted to include all these references, which I found when I was researching, the history of red. And, there’s kind of references to fashion, to natural dyes. When I was researching it, I was very surprised to find that it’s not just a… it’s a masculine colour. Red is also a masculine colour, not just a feminine colour. I always thought it was a feminine colour. So I kind of talk about, ‘no other colour in two lengths of cloth makes a gentleman’, which is… Mark: Is that the redcoat, the soldier? Zaina: Yes, it is. Yeah. So the British Army used to wear red, in the Napoleonic Wars, which is funny to me to wear red on the battlefield. But yeah, it just kind of expresses confidence, doesn’t it? To your enemy. Mark: Right, right. So it’s had quite a fluid history in terms of the associations. Zaina: Yes. Mark: And, I’m really curious about this thing about the novel because I would never have guessed that this came from a novel. And maybe we don’t need to know that because it’s not dependent on it. It’s almost like the spirit has flown out of the novel. Sometimes you read a poem and it’s really obviously linked into another work of art, whether that’s a novel or a painting or whatever. And you kind of…it feels like it’s in dialogue. I mean, to what extent do you feel like this is in dialogue with the Pamuk novel, or do you feel that it’s kind of flown free and come its own thing? Zaina: I agree with you. I think it’s flown freely from that. It was just the starting point. It was the inspiration. But when I was writing this, because it was done in the technique of automatic writing, it just kind of became its own creature, its own thing. And that’s good in a way because I didn’t want it to be linked with this novel. I just wanted to write a poem that was in this voice, in this red, that red is speaking to you. That was inspired by the novel, but this voice is its own voice, and it just came out of that automatic writing. Mark: And it’s interesting that red in the poem says, ‘Call me whatever you want, / I don’t care,’ or, ‘Summon me.’ It’s like this is the spirit of red that you’re channelling through the automatic writing. Zaina: Yes. So it is witchy in a way, it looks like a spell. Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Zaina: And when I think of red, I do associate it with the kind of darker symbolism of red, which is witchcraft and blood, thinking about the Incas and the Aztecs who would probably use it, a pigment of red in ritual, and they wore it in their headdresses, their clothing, they put it on their face. That’s what I mean by ‘dirty on the warrior’s face’ as well. Mark: What was it like for you as a poet channelling that voice? Is it exciting? Is it scary? Zaina: It was exciting because, I am not a very, very confident person, I wouldn’t say, and I’m quite reserved. And one of the reasons why I did write this poem is because I wanted to channel that confidence and that pride and be completely uninhibited, you know. Mark: Yeah. Zaina: Yeah, sometimes you just want to step outside of yourself, you know. And I think, for example, actors can do that. They just can go mad and become someone else. Mark: Yeah. That’s quite true. Zaina: And I think poets can do that in a way as well, you know. It is a dramatic monologue, and there are lots of dramatic monologues in this pamphlet too, because one of the motivations behind writing this was just to step out of myself and just feel liberated from being held back so much. And that’s what red means to me, it’s just freedom. Mark: Well, you’ve done a tremendous job there, because there’s not a moment of hesitation right from the beginning. ‘Be a darling and imagine.’ I mean, that’s so kind of… it’s seductive and confident and taking us into its confidence, but it’s confidence, I guess, in both senses. But we’re doing what it’s going to tell us because we are going to imagine… Zaina: Yes, so the first line, yes, ‘Be a darling and imagine,’ that’s sort of talking about this poem but this pamphlet is about readership, it’s about how readers interpret what they read and they make it their own. So as readers, we take in what we read, and we use our experiences to process what we read. And, interpretation is so important. We all see the world differently, we see colours differently, I’m sure. So the imagination in this pamphlet is so, so important. It’s such a core part of this. You know, it’s a major theme here. And that’s why I really wanted to get that word at the forefront. Yeah. Mark: And for anyone who hasn’t read the pamphlet In the Name of Red , this is the first poem in the pamphlet. So this is really, on the one hand, it’s the voice of red, but it also seems like it’s the voice of the poet. ‘Be a darling and imagine.’ It’s like Shakespeare at the start of Henry V , telling the audience to ‘work, work your thoughts, and in imagination, see a siege’, orsomething like that. And he’s saying, ‘Look, you have to join in if this play is going to work, because we’re just some guys on a stage with some threadbare props.’ But you invite the reader to join in and to imagine and participate in the book right from the beginning. Zaina: Yes. Well, another inspiration for this pamphlet was Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. And she talks to the reader a lot in the novel, she addresses the reader, I’m feeling like this, this is happening to me. And as a reader, when you’re addressed, you’re more attentive and you want to do what the writer says. And I really wanted to include that element of talking to the reader directly. Because as a writer, that gives you so much power. And I think red would want all the power. You know, as a person, you just want to control everything. So yeah, that’s another kind of element to that, speaking to the reader, because there is a relationship between the writer and the readers, kind of a symbiotic relationship. The writer provides the work but the reader brings the spirit and the life to the work, they bring it to life, I think. A piece of writing is nothing without the reader. That’s why, I think. Mark: Right. And very often, it’s an assumed relationship, isn’t it? But maybe in poetry, particularly, some poets like to play with that relationship and be quite artful like you’re doing here. And, it’s always been a theme on the podcast to how much does the ‘I’ of the poem, how closely does that align with the ‘I’ of the poet? Now, clearly, on one level, this doesn’t align because as you say, it’s a dramatic monologue. But then the game has got another level, because, behind that, as we’ve seen, maybe there is the poet’s voice as well. Zaina: Yeah, definitely where there’s a repetition of ‘I need to exist.’ That sort of reflects my urge sort of to prove myself as a writer because this is one of the first things I’ve ever written, this book. I’m not a very experienced poet. And yeah, I need to exist. So it’s kind of from the heart. I want to be part of this poetry world. I want to be here. I need to exist. Yeah, I would say that’s me speaking there from the heart. Mark: ‘I’m here, I’m always here, itching to breathe, vital / under your skin, trumpeted by pulse.’ Isn’t that wonderful, ‘trumpeted by pulse’? Yeah, it’s a joyous poem of announcement, isn’t it? Zaina: Yeah, it’s saying, ‘I’m here, and I’m not going to go away. I want to inhabit all these things. I am versatile. I can morph into different things,’ as a poet can, a poet can inhabit so many different characters and write about so many things. And poetry is so free. It’s not like prose where you do have to think about structure but you can just be so free about it. It is a form of art, I would say, poetry more than it’s about writing. Mark: And obviously, there’s so much verbal richness in this, I mean, all the words for red you’ve got: rose, claret, vermilion, ladies-blush, lust, ruddy, madder, Brazilwood, orchil, cochineal, urucam. I mean, I had to look some of these up. Did you have all of these at your fingertips? Did you have to look some up? Were there others that didn’t make the cut? I mean, how do you deal with such a kind of richness of description? Zaina: Yeah, I did do my research, to begin with. I wanted a variety of different things, claret being, wine, vermilion is a pigment, but it’s also used in Hinduism. You know, the wives would wear red on their hairline to show that they’re married. And there’s these kind of juxtapositions. You know, there’s that kind of, following the rules, religion, and then there’s lust and being free and not being afraid to be sexual almost. And that’s what colour is, it inhabits all these different ideas. And it’s just free to do that. And that’s what I wanted to show. There’s just so many things you could write about colour. And that’s why it is such a long poem because there’s just so much to include. But yeah, I wanted to include as much as possible and be as varied as possible. Mark: Well, also, another thing I noticed is obviously there’s an embarrassment of riches when it comes to adjectives to describe a colour, but I love the way you use verbs as well. So you say, ‘I tickle a tree / and it’s autumn’. That’s just delightful. ‘I tap someone and they blush. / I storm into a battlefield and it’s a field of poppies.’ I mean, you get a shiver down the spine when you realise the implications of that. Zaina: Yeah. Again, it’s just showing how varied this colour is. It’s elegant, it’s delicate, but also it can storm into a battlefield. It’s powerful. It’s almost like I’m writing about a trickster god, like Loki . He could be in the myths, he could be very serious, but most of the time he’s just joking around. So I’ve always been fascinated by these trickster gods because yeah, they do very, very big things. They can destroy the universe if they could, but at the same time, they don’t take themselves seriously. They’re just joking around most of the time. Mark: So Loki is from Norse mythology, but you’ve also got Shakti from India… Zaina: Yeah. So I include a lot of Hindu references because when I think of red, of all the cultures, I think Hinduism really adopts red. Shakti is a very important goddess in Hinduism. She is the wife of Shiva, one of the creator gods, but she’s sometimes seen as more powerful than Shiva and she has many different guises. Sometimes she’s a demon slayer. Sometimes she’s the goddess of death, karma, and sometimes she’s a little bit more benevolent and kinder. But this is introducing this theme of femininity and women not just being, one-dimensional. We have a good side, but also there are times when we do lash out. It’s introducing… You know, I talk about my Mum a lot in this pamphlet, Persephone, mythical character, and myself. You know, there’s this very chaotic poem in this pamphlet about Alice in Wonderland and it’s just so mad, called ‘The Red Queen’ and she’s all mad in the book. So it’s kind of looking at mental health in a way as well. Mark: And it’s also really nice as an opening poem. This one colours the other poems, it’s like we’ve got spatters of red from this in things like ‘The Red Queen’ and some of the other poems later. I think that’s one of the real pleasures of a collection of poems, is the way the poems start to refract and reflect each other and speak to each other. Zaina: Yes. This was definitely supposed to be an introduction to all the other themes in the book, kind of getting yourself ready for the chaos that follows. It’s not all chaotic. There are moments of reflection and contemplation and pauses, but this is a very chaotic, mad pamphlet. Mark: So picking up on the writing process. I’m going to pick up that thread from the automatic writing. How close was your first automatic draft to what we see on the page today? Zaina: I’d say it’s very close. I had to revisit the list of reds, rose, claret, vermilion. I think I took some things out and added… I think urucum was the last thing I added. Mark: And what’s that? That’s one of the ones I had to look up. What is urucum? Zaina: It’s a plant. It gives off pigments of red and it’s used in South America by Indigenous people. Yeah. And they rub it on photographs to protect themselves, to protect their spirit. It’s kind of used as protection. Mark: So was the form basically there? You’ve got this wonderful almost like a helter-skelter of it’s all one verse paragraph and there’s a lot of enjambment, a lot of lines spilling over the sense from one line to another and so on. Was that pretty well established in the original draft? Zaina: I had to revisit where everything ends, the line endings, the enjambment, making sure that it had a sort of rhythm to it, it wasn’t just blocky and prosaic. I wanted it to flow like a poem. And the ‘Be a darling and imagine’, that’s where it all started, ‘Be a darling and imagine’, ‘Okay, I’ve got that now. Now this is…’ Everything else flowed from that, you know. So yes, it was automatic writing but I had to start from ‘Be a darling and imagine’. Once I got that, I just wrote it down from there and it was pretty much like this with some tweaking here and there, but yeah. Mark: Yeah, so fine-tuning, but this is… And it does have that kind of freshness, that energy of the… I really feel that automatic voice coming through, all the way to the end where you have quite a bold ending certainly formally, where you’ve got two lines. So we’ve got one long verse paragraph and then we get these two lines on their own, including one of the boldest enjambments I think I have ever seen. So you’ve got, ‘How fortunate I am to be a colour, let alone’ – line break – ‘Red.’ And it’s red with a capital R and a full stop afterwards. I mean, how did you get to that? Did that just spill out? Did you think about that? Zaina: No, so that came afterwards. I didn’t know how to finish this kind of flowing of words, yeah. I didn’t know how to finish this. You know, I could go on forever and then I thought, ‘Okay, I’ve kind of come to an ending here with the sun and the bindi and when they look at you, they’ll see me first.’ I thought, ‘Okay, it doesn’t sound like an ending, it’s kind of coming to an ending but it’s not ending.’ And yeah, I spent ages trying to find how to end this and then maybe it should just kind of go back into itself, this red, what am I? Essentially, ‘I am a colour, I’m fortunate to be a colour’. And yeah, it just came. One day it just came to me. And this is the beauty about poetry is that you can just put it to one side but it’s still in your mind. Okay, you’re carrying it around with you while you’re shopping and you’re going out or whatever and it’s still in your mind, and one day something just drops, and this line is one that just sort of dropped while I was doing something that was not even related to poetry. And yeah, it was all on one line and then I thought, ‘No, we need red on its own at the end because it loves itself so much, it needs to be on its own, kind of standing on this platform and loving itself. Mark: It’s brilliant, I love it. And I also love that story about you patiently waiting for the ending because, there’s a lot of stories of poets getting the inspiration for the beginning of a poem, you know, Coleridge and ‘Kubla Khan’ and so on, but we don’t often hear the story of the poet wandering about and ransacking their brains and going for walks until they get the ending, but very often that’s the case, isn’t it? Zaina: Yes. Mark: You’ve got most of it but haven’t found the ending yet and it’s kind of irritating and it can’t let you go. But if you’re patient, as you were, and receptive, then sometimes it will drop into your lap. Zaina: Yes, I find it more difficult to finish a poem. I’d never know when to finish it really and you can kind of keep on writing forever, especially for a poem like this, where the subject is vast. But yeah, some poems I find it very, very difficult to find that impactful ending. And the best thing to do, and that’s my advice, is just to wait, and instead of chasing it, let it come to you. I think a lot of writers do that. You just wait for it to come to you because it does. You just need to have some faith. Mark: It’s a little bit when you’re trying to remember the thought you just had. The harder you try the more elusive it is, but then if you maybe stop to think of something else it will pop into your mind. It’s a bit like that. Zaina: Yeah, I think with anything creative, when you put too much effort into it, when you try to restrict it too much with thought, it does the opposite of what you want. You need to let it flow. You need to let go a bit and then kind of everything sort of falls into place. It needs to be effortless. It needs to feel effortless. You shouldn’t try too hard. Mark: Yeah. Well, thank you, Zaina, you know, just as the poem could have gone on forever. I think, we could talk all morning about all the different aspects of this poem, but I really think this is maybe a good chance for us to have a listen to it again and appreciate that in the light of the conversation we’ve just had. So Zaina, thank you very much for coming on the show and sharing such a delightful poem. Zaina: Thank you so much for having me. Reddest Red by Z. R. Ghani Be a darling and imagine. The reddest of all reds— changeable in velvet, the usurper in broadcloth; smooching the ground, cheek to cheek, in Louboutins. I’m here, I’m always here, itching to breathe, vital under your skin, trumpeted by pulse. I need to exist, as the poison arrow’s target; dirty on the warrior’s face; a flag rippling like a dragon overhead. You wish you could know my names, all secret, sacred, and true, but call me whatever you want, I don’t care, or summon me as rose, claret, vermilion, ladies-blush, lust; evoke me from ruddy, madder, brazilwood, orchil, cochineal, urucum—I need to exist. For no other colour in two lengths of cloth makes a gentleman and keeps him that way, and there’s nothing I can’t improve with a scandal, though I’m happiest reclining on a girl’s pretty lips, pitying potential left to rot, lesser reds that shall but one day bloom into me if they dare. Know me as a fiesta in everything I star in: I tickle a tree and it’s autumn, I tap someone and they blush, I storm into a battlefield and it’s a field of poppies, all the time living my best life, as I always will, me, Shakti, dancing like a graceful madwoman in the flames of a star, roaring myself redder (yes, it’s possible), and charging back down to Earth in the pope’s fresh socks, diving into a dazzling Diwali of fireflies as they, for a flare-and-sigh, jaunt through my impermanent soul. But I need to exist. Shed me, if you must, on your wedding night: sari cloth, petticoat, silk blouse swaying with the bed, or pin me as a bindi on your third eye like a sun, so when they look at you they’ll see me first, exalted. How fortunate I am to be a colour, let alone Red. In the Name of Red ‘Reddest Red’ is from In the Name of Red by Z. R. Ghani, published by The Emma Press Available from: In the Name of Red is available from: The publisher: The Emma Press Amazon: UK | US Bookshop.org: UK Z. R. Ghani Z. R. Ghani lives in London. She graduated with a B.A. in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University in 2012. Her poems, which explore themes of identity, femininity, religion, and nature, have been published in literary journals such as Magma , Black Bough Poetry and The Willowherb Review . In 2021 her first collection of poems was shortlisted in the Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition. In the Name of Red is her first poetry pamphlet. Twitter: @zr_ghani A Mouthful of Air – the podcast This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple , Spotify , Google Podcasts or your favourite app . You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email . The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman . A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Listen to the show You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms Related Episodes From The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning Episode 81 From ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning.Poet Robert BrowningReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessFrom ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ By Robert... Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll Episode 80 Stephanie Burt reads Poly Beach House by Tonee Mae Moll Stephanie Burt reads ‘Poly Beach House’ by Tonee Mae Moll and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.This poem is from: Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after StonewallAvailable from: Super... Daedalus and Icarus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses translated by Arthur Golding Episode 79 Daedalus and Icarus from Ovid's Metamorphses, translated by Arthur Golding Mark McGuinness reads and discusses Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.Poet Ovid, translated by Arthur GoldingReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessDaedalus and... The post Reddest Red by Z. R. Ghani appeared first on A Mouthful of Air .…

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Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats 39:18

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A Mouthful of Air: Poetry with Mark McGuinness

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