Insensibility by Wilfred Owen : Poem Guide : Learning Lab : The Poetry Foundation

Insensibility by Wilfred Owen : Poem Guide : Learning Lab : The Poetry Foundation

Insensibility by Wilfred Owen : Poem Guide : Learning Lab : The Poetry Foundation

Insensibility by Wilfred Owen : Poem Guide : Learning Lab : The Poetry Foundation

Learning about Figurative Language by Rebecca Hazelton

Learning about Figurative Language by Rebecca Hazelton

Margaret Atwood and the Future Library…….

English: Margaret Atwood - Munich 19.10.2009 Deutsch: Margaret Atwood - Literaturhaus München - Lesung am 19.10.2009 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“As a child, I was one of those who buried treasures in jars, with the idea that someone, some day, might come along and dig them up....That is what the Future Library is like, in part: it will contain fragments of lives that were once lived, and that are now the past. But all writing is a method of preserving and transmitting the human voice.” 







In Daily News, Margaret Atwood will be the first of one hundred writers to contribute a manuscript to the Future Library, which will collect one hundred stories that will not be revealed or read until 2114.

Related articles

• Margaret Atwood Will Time Capsule a New Book May 26th on Periscope
• Margaret Atwood Adds Manuscript to Future Library

The challenges of performing verse…….

William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939), Irish poet and dramatist (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Nobel Prize laureate WB Yeats was born 150 years ago this June. Poet Nick Laird analyses his unique reading style and describes the challenges of performing verse.

I once read in Dublin with a poet who turned up with what looked like a small wooden suitcase. It turned out to be a sort of buttonless accordion, which, as she read each poem, she slowly opened out to 90 degrees, playing a constant low atonal wheezing throughout. I was surprised – though not as surprised as at a poetry festival in Herefordshire when another contemporary burst into a passionate folk song after she’d read her first piece, a sequence she repeated for the rest of her set. The entire audience – all four of them – went mad for it, though I did subsequently find they comprised her immediate family.

Poets read their poems in all kinds of styles: those who are hunched and intense or relaxed and conversational, or those who hector or lecture their audience, or over-explain or apologise, or crack gags to puncture the slightly tense silence that descends in each poem’s wake. What is now rare is the kind of quavery shamanic intoning – as if summoning demons – practised by WB Yeats, who was born 150 years ago this June.

English poet William Morris rejected the notion of reading his poems as if it were prose

The Irish poet made a series of radio broadcasts for the BBC in the 1930s. He seemed to know even then that his reading manner was going out of style. “I am going to read my poems with great emphasis upon their rhythm, and that may seem strange if you are not used to it,” warned Yeats when introducing the Lake Isle of Innisfree in a 1931 recording. “I remember the great English poet, William Morris, coming in a rage out of some lecture hall where somebody had recited a passage out of his Sigurd the Volsung. ‘It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble,’ said Morris, ‘to get that thing into verse.’ It gave me the devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.”


Although all poets – at least all good ones – write in a relationship to rhythm (if not in strict iambs or dactyls or anapaests), techniques now are much more lightly demonstrated. Yeats, though, straddled many periods. He was born in the middle of Victoria’s reign, and his own work began the Celtic Twilight, those soft-focused, eerie lyrics of faeries and gods of the 1880s, but ended with a distinctly clean and modern tone and sensibility with the Last Poems of 1939.

He wrote the Lake Isle of Innisfree in 1888, when he was 23. He was on the Strand in London, he explains, when he heard “a little tinkle of water”, and stopped outside a shop where a ball was balanced on a jet of water – an advertisement for “cooling drinks” – and it set him to thinking of Sligo and lake water.

Just after Yeats was tramping down the Strand, Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson made two of the earliest audio recordings of poetry. Tennyson’s, made on a wax cylinder in 1890, has him thundering through the Charge of the Light Brigade. The poem’s short stressed dactylic lines echo the galloping horses, and at some point someone – presumably Tennyson – becomes his own Foley artist and starts a weird knocking sound, trying to imitate the noise of the hooves. Even Tennyson, it seems, was a bit worried that the words weren’t quite enough.

Robert Browning made one of the earliest audio recordings of poetry

Robert Browning’s recording shows a similar fear of dead air, as radio producers now call it. It’s also a classic example of buckling under pressure. In 1889 he was at a dinner party thrown by his friend Rudolf Lehmann, the German artist. A sales manager for Thomas Edison’s Talking Machine, Colonel Gouraud, was also there and had brought along a phonograph. Browning agreed to recite his poem How They Brought The Good News from Ghent to Aix. Again, this is a poem about horses, and his recital has something of the jaunty, excitable tone of a Grand National commentator: “I sprang to the saddle, and Joris, and he; I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three… ” Then he forgets the lines and does something I think all poets should do if they find themselves in a similar fix: he recites his own name twice, very loudly, and then shouts out: “Hip hip hooray, hip hip hooray, hip hip hooray!”.

For crying out loud

Though both Tennyson and Browning recite their poetry with regard to the rhythm, neither have the singular incantatory oddness of Yeats, of what Heaney has called his “elevated chanting”. We might note that Yeats came to poetry through an oral tradition. He wrote, in the 1906 essay Literature and the Living Voice, that “Irish poetry and Irish stories were made to be spoken or sung, while English literature has all but completely shaped itself in the printing press.” The oral culture in Irish poetry was strong – it is strong – and there is a sense still that the poem should not just be memorable but able to be memorised.

Yeats came from the bardic tradition, in which bards were a professional caste of scholarly, highly trained craftsmen. They attended special colleges for up to seven years to master the technical requirements of syllabic verse that used assonance and half-rhyme and alliteration. The bardic poems were oral history and songs of praise, designed to propel the names of famous kings and the details of their other-worldly deeds down through the ages. The men – and they were all men – were tasked with passing on the accumulated lore of Irish history and legend, and Yeats’s speaking style has something of that eldritch gloom about it: it’s a voice intoning through a banquet hall in candlelight. He wrote, in The Coat, “I made my song a coat, / covered with embroideries / out of old mythologies…”

Although Yeats constantly remade his style throughout his writing life, trimming off the finery of Victoriana, its frills and archaic reversals, to a modern, hard-edged style – what he called “passionate, normal speech” – his formal reading manner remained in the broadcasts he made a few years before his death. And yet it’s true to say that his engagement with the medium was profound. He was at the very beginning of radio culture: the idea of audience for early Yeats was limited to either reciting to a room of faces or communing in silence with a single reader on the page. When he wrote about his radio talks, it’s clear that for Yeats the very technology brought about a new sense of intimacy.

He had previously held off reading more personal poetry. On his American tours, for example, when asked for love poetry, he would respond that he refused to read “any poem of mine which any of you can by any possible chance think an expression of my personal feelings, and certainly I will not read you love poems”. But the radio made possible for Yeats a new kind of conceptual space for reading his more private writing aloud and in public, and in the snug of the studio he was happy to whisper into the ear, as it were, of the audience. “You would all be listening singly or in twos and threes; above all that I myself would be alone, speaking to something that looks like a visiting card on a pole… it would be no worse than publishing love poems in a book.”

Next Meeting of Pimento Poets: 8th June, 2015

Just a reminder that the next Pimento Poets get-together will be on Monday…..8th June at the Pimento tearooms starting at 10.30 a.m.

Cheers Vernon

Pimento Poets: VE poems by Shirley Bell.

In conjunction with the Poetry at Teatime readings on the 31st May, 2015.


VE Poetry by Shirley Bell


Dancing in the Forties

And here you are, walking away from the war you always said
had stolen your youth. Cowering in the pantry cellar
while bombs lit up the gasometer in a giant candle and houses
turned to dust and spars of wood like spillikins.
You talked about the soldier that you dumped
and that his mother said how cruel "you girls" could be.
It's hard to picture you, soldering parts of planes, and flirting
with my dad who wasn't sent away to fight, like Tony, in the sand.
And seventy years have leaked away, like them.
Today VE Day commemorations flood the television,
with memories and my sister and I are waiting for yours
to pour out too. But you remember nothing.
The past has all been painted out with the pastel wash
of the walls in your nursing home. Yet you loved to dance
I see you amongst the crowds, all twirling in circles and
throwing their sorrows in the air like military caps.
And somewhere perhaps a band's still playing in your head,
And somewhere you're still dancing.

English: Bluebell wood (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Thinking about VE Day in a bluebell wood in May


This, it's said, is the County's finest bluebell wood.
Their blue smoke fills the spaces in the trees and rises
up, through the broken litter of the coppicing that cycles
every fourteen years. Blue on blue on blue.
And the ghostly girls are gathering the flowers that are
dying in their arms. They droop their sorrowful heads
and garland their white brows for the ones who won't come
back. They died as they were plucked. Blue on blue on blue.
The celebrations are happening somewhere else. People
are cheering and kicking up their heels. They lie in fountains
and perch on lampposts like ungainly birds. While blue
on blue on blue, those girls are gathering the bouquets of the dead.




Copyright by Shirley Bell

Pimento Poets: Poetry at Teatime

'Poetry at teatime' by the Pimento Poets. A special performance of wartime poetry in conjunction with the 1940s weekend at Lincoln. Details below........

Pimento Poets: Poetry at Teatime on 31st May, 2015

On Sunday 31st May, 2015:




For a great afternoon: Come and listen to readings by Pimento Poets  from 3.p.m until  4.p.m.in Pimento Tearooms.

'Poetry at teatime' by the Pimento Poets. A special performance of wartime poetry in conjunction with the 1940s weekend at Lincoln. 

A Norfolk April by Paul Mein.

 A Norfolk April

We struggle to keep upright,
walking along the sea wall, inches
above angry, bran waves, racing hard,
fast before the cruel-cold of a north-easter;
they break, dirty-white and dangerous,
against the stone wanderers,
imported to defend the coast,
or slap, relentless, against
stoic, thick-planked groynes
stretched between their metal supports,
spotted like an old man's arms
rusted by too much sun.

In the troughs
innocent marbling
gentle froth forming
dissolving swiftly
taking on the power
of racing crests.
Further out, taller end-posts drown quietly,
Gormley figures resigned to their fate.
Still further, the horizon's razor-cut;
deep-sea indigo spills into the sky beyond sight.

Man's work in digging, the sea's in rising -
a blurring of boundaries, a landscape at mercy,
where tides make uneasy those who live where they touch,
eyes casting constantly to combinations
of seasons, the moon, the winds,
creating a rushing, spilling, tree-salting force
which turns fresh water brackish, soaks doubt into hamlets
abandoned to sea-swallow and planners' priorities.

Across column-ploughed fields,
crisp-bordered by hedging,
we see the clear-edged certainty
of flint and stone towers,
churched to the heavens,
pointing to salvation for lost congregations.

©   Paul Mein  1/5/15