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 Dylan Thomas |
Poetry: ‘Gossip’ and ‘Mismatched shoes’ written by ‘pigs’
FOR the serious poet, art is anything but therapeutic,” said the Torriano poet Leah Fritz in the poetry magazine Acumen in 1995.
“Sylvia Plath’s poetry did not alleviate her tragic illness... Dylan Thomas’s fluid out-pourings of words did not cure his alcoholism.”
She did not mention the disease of SP and DT’s ancestors going back countless lifetimes.
“The whole world is a hospital endowed by a ruined millionaire,” TS Eliot, the poet with a strong sense of his own and other people’s history, reminds us all in East Coker.
Charles Simic, Andrew Motion’s opposite laureate across the pond, hits the nail on the head in The Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations: “Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.”
“Poetry’s a zoo in which you keep demons and angels,” said Les Murray. “Poetry is gossip,” said Liam Rector. “Poetry is language in orbit,” said Seamus Heaney.
Are these the three mismatched shoes Simic had in mind?
Ted Hughes, faithful to the end to his beloved pigs, said: “Poets are like pigs, only worth money when they’re dead.”
The 17th-century poet Robert Herrick offers further food for thought in Dreams:
Here we are all, by day; by night we’re hurl’d By dreams, each one into a several world.
But he has a sense of history, the chronic absence of which Alan Bennett laments in his play The History Boys, culminating in the one line destined straight for The Oxford Book of Quotations: “History is just one bloody thing after another.”
Do Not Go Gentle: Poems for Funerals, edited by Neil Astley, is worth buying for Daniel Liebert’s translation of Why Cling by the Persian Sufi poet Rumi:
Why cling to one life
till it is soiled and ragged?
The sun dies and dies
squandering a hundred lived every instant
God has decreed life for you
and He will give
another and another and another
In other words, in an absence of any sense of history, we will have to make do with continuity, whether we like it or not.
JOHN HORDER
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