June 16th, 2009
The first four poems between Jennifer Wainwright and Loveday Why are now up. One noticeable thing about this sequence is how meticulously, and distinctively, the poems are paced. The ‘reeling’, ‘cantering’, ‘tangible speed’ of Why’s ‘Copeland’ is countered by a slowed-up sense of attendance in Wainwright’s ‘Just Visiting’, and ‘Hunger’. As well as sharing this command of momentum, there are recurring images of eyeballs, tongues and gullets; and there are hot things cooling down.
On the screen, you can see how both poets have their stanzas bulge about the middle. We’ve been planning the re-launch of the website this week, and thinking about the representation of these visual aspects on a screen, as well as the mechanics of reading sequences of poems online.
A couple of forthcoming exhibitions – Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. at the ICA, and Harland Miller at the Baltic – take the way words look as their subject matter. Artist and novelist Miller has imagined books with glib northern titles like ‘Gateshead Revisited’, and ‘Scarborough: Have Faith in Cod’. These are painted as reproductions of iconic Penguin paperbacks – an ultimate textual / graphic brand. Meanwhile, the ICA’s exhibition of text-based art practices is inspired by the concrete poetry movement, which explored the literary and graphic potential of language.
Here’s Philip Larkin being surly in his Paris Review interview, making a defence of looking at poetry, as opposed to listening to it:
Hearing a poem, as opposed to reading it on the page, means you miss so much – the shape, the punctuation, the italics, even knowing how far you are from the end. Reading it on the page means you can go at your own pace, taking it in properly.
We’ll be putting that to the test at our Livestarlings event, with readings from the site a week on thursday at the Betsy Trotwood pub in London. Do come.
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March 4th, 2009
In the first of our fortnightly guest posts, Daisy Hildyard looks at one history of writing in response.
Many English poets in the seventeenth century, from Ben Jonson and John Donne, to Andrew Marvell and John Milton, wrote poems that were responsive to or attentive of other people’s poems. Such poems took up the themes and means of their predecessors; sometimes exaggerating them to satirical effect, sometimes in praise, sometimes in disagreement. Many of Donne’s Verse Epistles, Elegies and Satires, and Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter, were written under these circumstances.
A specific form of responsive poetic engagement within a small, niche social group became known as ‘coterie poetry’. Coterie poets met at salons, or exchanged epistolary poems, in which they related news or exchanged advice. The poems were varied. But often, the authors would write narrative poems in which they took for themselves and for their friends alternative names from classical mythology. Sometimes these poems were published in print, more often they remained in manuscript circulation within polite society.
It was not a phenomenon limited to the English. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, a group of young Dutch men and women were said to regularly meet at Muiden Castle near Amsterdam, where they wrote poems in response to one another’s poems. The central figure of this ‘Muiderkring’ group was the poet and playwright Pieter Corneliszen Hooft, resident of Muiden, who invited the company of nobles, writers and scientists, both male and female, including the polymath Constantijn Huygens, the playwright Joost van den Vondel, and the artist and poet Anna Visscher. A nineteenth-century portrait of the group shows them crowded round a small writing table, with a young woman standing, apparently reciting her poem from a sheaf of paper, while a young man seated to her right takes up his goose-feather pen.
In fact, recent scholarship has found it unlikely that the Muiderkring group met at all, that most of the members of the so-called group could never have set foot in Muiden castle. Many Dutch literary scholars now agree that the men and women knew and interacted with one another only through the poems and writings which they exchanged, and which remain. It has been suggested that such a group could be called a ‘virtual coterie’.
Tags: Coterie, Daisy Hildyard, John Donne, Muiderkring
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