Lumiere: Lithographs by Odilon Redon, The Fitzwilliam Museum

The only thing to be regretted about the female nudes, shrieking demons and religious irony in Odilon Redon’s work is that they make it difficult simply to discuss these extraordinary lithographs; you almost have to defend them. Yet by defending them one also runs the risk of making them out to be less harrowing, less engrossing than they truly are. Indeed, as the Fitzwilliam’s dazzling current exhibition makes clear, this French Symbolist made a stylistic principle out of his ability to shock. His renderings of death and trauma are both too alive with pathos and too well crafted to feel gratuitous .

Most recognised for his use of pastels and oil, the marginal status of Redon’s drawing is celebrated by the small, wood panelled room in which they are now displayed. Here, set curiously off from the permanent collection, are fewer than thirty examples of Redon’s artistic vision and virtuosity. But in Lumière this economy of selection is not frustrating. Because Redon is so visually rewarding; with virtually every lithograph there is simply an overwhelming amount to perceive on the paper

This is indicated by the abstract, even absurdist, titles Redon gave to each artwork: ‘Death: my irony surpasses all’ or ‘And the eyes without heads were floating like molluscs’. Although such statements may sound flatly undrawable, it's great to see Redon’s, often successful, attempts to sketch them. In the particularly striking ‘Isis’, for instance, the eponymous mother cradles a child, her brightly etched features partly obscured by a wave of blank ink, darkening as it swirls from the picture plane.  An intense gesture which points us beyond the work itself, Redon is always striving towards - before slipping past -  shockingly luminous moments like this, where his mind’s eye and those of the viewer are beautifully united. 

Decade in Books

Speaking in a rare 2003 interview with CBS, when asked about contemporary fiction, the writer Philip Roth concluded crankily “Oh I don’t think in twenty or twenty-five years people will read these things at all…there are just other things for people to do.” Yet the tinges of melancholy in Roth’s remarks,  his despairing attitude towards modern life,  would feed into and animate some of the decade’s most memorable books. In an age increasingly defined by growth in technology, secularism, and the standardization of culture, writers, like humanity, are being challenged as never before.

Responses to such a challenge have been varied. The decade’s most illustrious books were those from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, a fact more easy to lament than it is to deny. Whatever your reservations about Rowling’s tiresome, adverb-heavy prose style, her stories provided a  source of escapism craved by children and parents alike. They refract the realism of Tom Brown’s School Days through the fantasy genre, creating a magical world where the English schoolboy stereotype can suffuse unhindered by normal reality. Similarly sensationalist was Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, in which the typical detective story is taken to the furthest extreme.

Readers unsatisfied with the Potter phenomenon could look back, however, to Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ for more imaginative pleasures. Published in 2000,  The Amber Spyglass brought the trilogy to its climax, threading a coming of age narrative through moral and theological discussion. But what was so uplifting in Pullman’s rationalist vision would infect two of the decade’s most notable pieces of non fiction: Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Martin Amis’s The Second Plane. Although no-one would doubt Dawkins’s skills as a scientist, in this vitriolic 2006 work it is not problem-solving but problem causing that recurs. Writing with all the zeal of the evangelists he describes, Dawkins won 8.5 million readers by refusing to analyse religion on its own terms. In Amis’s 2008 collection of essays the same penchant for aggro prevails, where questions of terrorism and faith are addressed in suavely condescending prose.

But more enjoyable than Potter, more significant than Pullman and more probing than Dawkins were the works of four big, mind-altering novelists. Ian McEwan’s Atonement  and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin excelled ethically and aesthetically, lighting up modern concerns about childhood through dilemmas of authorship and what it means to play out a fictional role. Better still were the exuberant, modernist debuts from Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer, whose novels White Teeth and Everything is Illuminated poignantly elaborate the nuances of ethnic identity. Indeed, on the evidence of such writing it is less likely that Roth’s prophecy will prove true than that, in twenty five years time, Smith and Foer’s novels will be acknowledged as modern classics.

Originally published in Varsity.

Poetry Goes Digital: poetryfoundation.org

No account of twentieth century poetry could be complete without some mention of the trail blazed by Harriet Monroe, the poet come essayist come founder of Poetry Magazine. Writing and editing prolifically between 1891 and 1936, during the halcyon days of the Modernist movement, Monroe cut an inspired and remarkable public figure amongst a literary establishment that she empowered and facilitated, advising poets as important as Hart Crane and Ezra Pound.

Since its inception in 1912 Monroe’s magazine championed new and formally innovative writing, giving both famous poems their first appearances in print. Announcing her generous editorial attitude, Monroe declared “The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine – may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half shut, against his ample genius!” and paraphrased Whitman’s idea that “To have great poets there must be great audiences too” as the magazine’s maxim. Today these tenets are maintained by Chicago’s Poetry Foundation, an online organisation which, whilst allowing visitors free access to its content on their computers, continues to distribute Poetry Magazine in printed form.

 I speak with Katherine Coles, director of the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Institute, about her budding project of “…ensuring a vigorous presence for poetry in various forms of new-media outlets.” The conviction behind this rather weighty aim is illuminated by a commodious supply of audio recordings and lectures, blogs, and video documentaries which complement a searchable archive of verse that includes excerpts from Chaucer and children’s literature alike. Indeed, after ingratiating myself a little with some of the above (the chance to hear three separate recordings of Pound’s ‘Cantico del Sole’ being a particular delight) I begin to wonder whether Coles’s comment that “We don’t expect new media to replace the book, though we do think the book will change somewhat” isn’t slightly tentative. Though distinctly better staffed and funded than is typical for a website of its kind, (its team convenes academics and ex-investment bankers backed by a $200 million grant) the Poetry Foundation deploys its resources with the same unlikely openness endorsed by Monroe almost a century ago, allowing great poetry to animate accessible technology with a view to building a larger and more sensitive community of readers. If literary history must take an electronic turn, then I think this might just be a valuable one.

Originally published in Varsity.

Underrated: Hart Crane

“Life preservers were thrown overboard. A life boat was lowered; some claim they saw an arm raised above the water.”

That is from Philip Horton’s report of Hart Crane’s dramatic suicide in 1932. Here “an arm” is an indefinite reference: Horton doesn’t mention Crane’s arm but only ‘an arm’, depersonalising the poet even as he reaches out for help. All attempts at rescue failed, and Crane’s body was never retrieved from the water. His name was inscribed onto his father’s gravestone a year later, appended with the words ‘Lost at Sea’. These tragic biographical details remind us of a poet who, in reading as in life, deserved more attention; a piece of sunken literary treasure.

The son of divorced parents, Crane stood out amongst the modernist scene of the 1920s as an autodidact, having abandoned school at age sixteen in order to travel to New York and begin writing. Add Crane’s homosexuality to his lack of a secure home and educational credentials, and a remarkably marginal figure emerges. Yet throughout his short life Crane wrote poetry of thrilling lyricism and epic scope. He rejected the pessimism of T.S. Eliot, in favour of pursuing “spiritual events and possibilities as real and possible now as in the time of Blake.” To grasp these possibilites Crane fell in love, with Emil Opffer and with the Brooklyn Bridge. Out of these relationships came ‘Voyages’ and ‘The Bridge’, a series of triumphant love lyrics and the visionary long poem to which he had always aspired. Taken together they represent the most challenging American poetry, blazing with rhetorical energy and providing a rapturous alternative to ‘Prufrock’ and ‘The Waste Land’.  

Written in a style not unfit for the Renaissance stage, ‘Voyages’ invites us to share in the heartbreak and desire that inspired Crane. Better still is ‘The Bridge’, a sprawling and miscellaneous work which reads as a poetic picture book of American life. It fuses everyday speech, jazz and pop culture with Platonic myth, allusion and the most abstract, metaphorical poetics. From his apartment building Crane could see Brooklyn Bridge, and came to view it as capable of uniting all his influences and ideas. Let me conclude by quoting his address to it: 

                      Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift

                      Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,

                      Beading thy path – condense eternity:

                      And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

A complete and ‘unfractioned’ symbol in which ‘eternity’ is condensed, Crane speaks beautifully to the bridge as though a friend.  And yet his poem was met with scorn, reviewers deeming it the desperately sentimental work of an immoral, homosexual artist. Now, we should forget such prejudices and take Crane’s flailing arm in ours.

Originally published in Varsity

Lunartic Laureate

Review – To the Moon: An Anthology of Lunar Poems

Ever since her inaugaration as poet laureate this May, it’s become increasingly clear that Carol Ann Duffy will not stay still. In the past month alone we’ve witnessed the publication of her New and Collected Poems for Children, Mrs Scrooge: A Christmas Tale, and now this appealing if somewhat wishful anthology of what Duffy terms Lunar Poems.  Although readers familiar with her poetry are likely to have already passed judgement upon it, we are now invited to make decisions about her reading habits. 

For Duffy, the material collected here is representative of a larger artistic truth, namely that “the moon has always been, and always will be, the supremely prized image for poets – a mirror to reflect the poetic imagination; language’s human smile against death’s darkness.” While there is something overdetermined in such a cloying metaphysical generalisation, a darkness is pulling observably over our skies this autumn from as early as four pm. 

The purpose of Lunar Poems is to show just how symoblically pregnant the moon has been for writers, a brightness visible out of the darkness which “gives us a real sense of our time on this planet”. To do so Duffy ranges chronologically across literary history for examples to prove her hypothesis, carefully devoting equal attention to ancient, Renaissance, Romantic and Modernist verse. Many of her suggestions suffer, consequently, from a sense of predictability. It is admittedly comforting to linger over Edward Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ once again, before being lead gently into Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ by way of Robert Browning; but comforting the reader like this is unlikely to provide them with any startlingly existential sense of their time on this planet. These accepted classics are a long way from Hart Crane’s warped ‘Chaplinesque’, which appears (somewhat incongruously) mid way through the volume. Crane’s tense lyric interrupts a string of seven poems each with the word ‘moon’ in their title, and seems to have had the status of ‘Lunar Poem’ foisted upon it by Duffy. Its lines ‘…but we have seen / The moon in lonely alleys make / A grail of laughter of an empty can’ are governed by the moon, but more poignantly allow the figure of Charlie Chaplin to surpass his clownish nature under its milky transcendent glow.

Originally published in Varsity

New Cambridge Writers

New Cambridge Writers

Someone, I was thinking, needs to think more generously about poetry in Cambridge. We were sat there inside the Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio, a big black cube which dominates the English Faculty basement. It was a Saturday night. This term’s New Cambridge Writers event drew excitably towards its close. Putting a small, gifted and largely female group of student writers on view, the evening stood as further evidence that the Judith E. Wilson is a truly terrific venue. 

Situated directly beneath the library and lecture theatres on the ground floor, the studio hosts and enables more informal and zany occasions for us to let off our literary steam. It’s nice to imagine the disapproval of certain dons, their research interrupted by snatches of poetry and song echoing sporadically from the floor below. Although attending New Cambridge Writers was, admittedly, a fairly civilised experience, its complimentary wine and biscuits were counterpointed by the gusto and immediacy of many readings. Poems from Richard Osmond and Laura Kilbride bookended the proceedings, and stood out as visceral, self-consciously perfomative pieces. Osmond prefaced each poem with witty and inclusive anecdotes, rationalising his inspirations (Japanese food and a particularly extortionate type of coffee machine) before dramatising them with clarity and concentration. The final poet to read, Kilbride voiced her work with an endearingly nervous energy. Her sequence of nine fourteen-line poems was performed using various hand gestures, along with decisive changes in tone which resolved themselves in something close to rapping. Kilbride threw words as though weapons at her audience, forcing us to press up against their meanings and sounds. 

Yet the evening’s quieter poets (Alice Malin, Julia Rampen, Annie Katchinska and erstwhile Varsity critic Colette Sensier) also held the audience’s attention. Their writing shared an emphasis on personal memory, and exhibited a shy ambition to communicate painful truths. Amidst the more direct observations in Sensier’s brief but memorable poem ‘Holocaust’, the line ‘hanging like half a story from your grandmother’s sleeve’ emerged. Deft and electric, lines such as this would show up and surprise me throughout the evening.  But what was good about New Cambridge Writers also has its logical conclusion in a trickier question: why are such events so hard to come by? Whilst no one would deny that it takes guts to share and broadcast your writing, New Cambridge Writers demonstarted some of the pleasures in doing so. When Trevor Joyce, this year’s Judith E. Wilson poetry fellow, made a short speech he focused on ‘organisation’, and the need to make the most out of all things literary. Cambridge is a small town where word travels fast. So let’s have more words, travelling faster and in interesting directions.

Originally Published in Varsity

Cambridge Literary Review

Review: Cambridge Literary Review

Last year’s interminable anniversary celebrations were met with some cynicism upon the pages of this newspaper, and I remember my silent agreement. Dazed by the vertigo of their own prestige, the University went about whipping up money and publicity for what seemed like 800 years. Out of the swirling vortex of profit, however, comes the Cambridge Literary Review, a rather recondite volume of Cambridge’s new poetry, prose and criticism, established this autumn after the ‘…realisation that this town is awash with great writers but sorely lacking in creative fora.’ Thus, this intimidatingly generous 250 page publication, which does indeed accommodate a plethora of writing if under a somewhat particularised definition of greatness.

An emphasis upon formal innovation and what many would be tempted to label ‘difficulty’ underlies much of the verse collected in the opening 70 pages, resulting in a reading experience which moves us perhaps cerebrally before emotionally. With the exception of an excerpt from John Wilkinson’s ‘The Swing’, we wait some ten pages for the emergence of a first person pronoun, and when one appears it is within the rather apt question ‘Did you know I wrote an honors thesis | at Ohio State on Isherwood?’ 

And yet the perceived academese of the material is never self-satisfied and often yields up moments of humour and of poignancy. Ian Patterson’s poem ’60 Windows’ presents a perfect case in point, compressing ‘phrases taken from page sixty of sixty novels’ into a sequence of tercets that contains a similar intertextuality of emotion and perspective. Equally welcome are the Feature: On Cambridge Poetry and Essays section, where wider, more contextual discussions are offset by exercises in Cambridge’s trademark ‘practical criticism’ which provide lucid, accessible readings of the kind of complex poetry endorsed by the CLR. But should these explanatory sections actually preceed the prose and poetry, we might be better prepared to meet them on their own demanding terms. Though the general quality and precision of its content is difficult to dispute, whether the CLR will effect more than an interested minority seems like another question entirely. 

Originally published in Varsity