The 2014 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival runs for the 7th-9th November and this weekend Ink Sweat & Tears is featuring poems on the theme of ‘Poetry & Disobedience’ which is the subject of the IS&T-supported Short Takes this year.
Disobedience to the rules is a prerequisite when attempting to create anything new
The Critics’ Chorus
‘How he got to the point of thinking this sort
of thing was a poem is a good and appalling question . .’
– Donald Davie
………………
Of course they were right:
The poem lacked a certain tightness,
Its inventions were chaotic.
In the bleak farmhouse Rimbaud
remembering the jewelled spider webs,
the smoking pond, the banished sideshows.
Of course they were right:
The poems were not fit to be taken seriously,
Mere candyfloss, the efforts of an upstart.
In Rome coughing up the rose-shaped phlegm
Keats taking the final opiate,
exiled among the fumes of poppies.
Of course they were right:
He could have found all he wrote
In the dustbins he emptied.
Where’s Hyatt now?
Still drinking the blind wine?
Ghost-junk still flowing in ghost-veins?
Of course they were right:
So much of what she wrote was doggerel,
Mere child’s play.
In a London suburb Stevie,
Blake’s grandchild,
fingering a rosary made of starlight.
Of course they were right:
In all the poems something went astray,
Something not quite at home in their world,
Something lost.
It was something to do with what the poem lacked
Saved it from oblivion,
A hunger nothing to do with the correct idiom
In which to express itself,
But a need to eat a fruit far off
From the safe orchard,
Reached by no easy pathway
Or route already mapped.
From Selected Poems (Penguin Books)
Brian Patten was born in 1946 in Liverpool and lives in Devon. He left school at 15 and worked as a junior reporter. At 16 he edited and produced the magazine underdog, which gave a platform to the underground poets in Liverpool. His work first appeared in the bestselling The Mersey Sound (1967) and it was during the 1960’s that he made his name as one of the Liverpool Poets. Now one of the UK’s favourite poets, he has published more than 50 collections for children and adults, most recently Collected Love Poems (2010).
In addition to featuring in the Short Take (tonight 8.00 – 8.15pm), he is appearing in a Q&A session and has the coveted late night performance slot on Saturday night. To find out more, see the festival programme here.