Good evening, and thank you for joining
us for this evening's lecture given by the Professor of Poetry
here at the University of Oxford, Alice Oswald.
My name is Philip Bullock and I'm Director of TORCH, The Oxford Research
Center in Humanities. We're delighted to host this
evening's event as part of our live events series
itself part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for
the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.
Alice has kindly agreed to take questions from the audience so if you do
have any please pop them in the YouTube chat
during the lecture and we'll do our very best to answer as many as we can at the
end of the discussion. TORCH is delighted to be collaborating
with the English faculty in hosting this evening's lecture.
So it's my great pleasure and great honor to welcome Professor Ros Ballaster to tell us more. Ros Ballaster is Professor of 18th
Century Studies, Tutorial Fellow at Mansfield College, and the chair of the
English faculty board. She has published widely on the novel
and on women's writing in the 18th Century
and is currently writing a book about the role of theatre in the invention of
the novel. Ros, thank you so much for sharing
Alice's lecture so without further ado, I'd like to hand over to you now thank
you. Thank you Phillip for the introduction, and to
TORCH for supporting our English faculty live event this evening. Welcome again
to all our viewers watching at home. The Professor of Poetry gives a public
lecture each term the post has been in place at Oxford
since the lectures were first conceived in 1708
in order that " the reading of the ancient poets
should give keenness and polish to the minds of young men
as well as to the advancement of more serious literature
both sacred and human". Much has changed since that conception; we've
questioned what counts as serious literature and who decides that
we now make keen the minds of students regardless of
their sex or gender. We read and discuss the most modern
alongside the ancient poets in some ways though the legacy
remains and is brought to life most splendidly
in the figure of our current and 46th Professor of Poetry, Alice Oswald
she's a keen classicist in conversation with the voices of the ancient past
perhaps most memorably with Homer's Iliad in her memorial of 2011
and with his Odyssey in her recent collection 'Nobody', 2019.
Her poetry makes a mythic human and the human
mythic poetry. Poetry, she commented in her election statement,
'is an ancient memory system. It asks to be heard out loud,
or at least read in the manner of a musical score.'
Professor Oswald knows how to use her voice to speak
for poetry and from poetry.I can't think then of a better poet
to give the first ever online lecture by a Professor of Poetry at Oxford.
For too many across the world this is a time of grief and loss,
and Professor Oswald's lecture will speak to that experience today too
her topic is the uncanny connection of grief with water
water is the element that has consistently flowed through her
imagination she is in her element with water her
element is water and I'm honored to invite her to deliver
her lecture for this term her title is 'An Interview with Water' and
I'm pleased to hand over to Professor Alice Oswald
for her lecture. Hello can you see me? We can.
You can okay. Hello and I'm grateful as well to you Ros and to TORCH for
providing this platform with the English faculty. It does
seem rather ironic that I should be speaking to people through a computer
screen when live performance has always been my personal manifesto it
is still my manifesto and it's what I speak about
again today, in spite of being on YouTube. I don't want to give up on the physical
performance of poetry even if it means moving it
outdoors into the streets while we're all under lockdown
anyway as a marker of where we are today and because it fits the themes of my
lecture I'd like to start just by reading a poem by Jericho Brown
called 'Riddle' and this poem is about the murder of
Emmett Till in 1955 in Mississippi. We do not recognize the body/ Of Emmett
Till. We do not know/ The boy's name nor the sound/Of his mother's wailing. We have/
sound of his mother's wailing Never heard a mother wailing. /
We do not know the history/ Of this nation in ourselves. We/
Do not know the history of our-/Selves on this planet because/ We do not have to know what/We believe we own. We believe/ We own your bodies but have no/Use for your tears. We destroy/ The body that refuses use. We use/
Maps we did not draw. We see/ A sea so cross it. We see a moon/
So land there. We love land so/ Long as we can take it. Shh. We/ Can't
take that sound. What is/ A mother wailing? We do not/
Recognize music until we can/ Sell it we sell what cannot
be/ Bought. We buy silence. Let us/
Help you. How much does it cost/ To hold your breath
underwater?/ Wait. Wait. What are we?/ What? / What on Earth are we? What?/ [END OF POEM]
It is a wonderful gift to be able to swim in rivers
especially on bright clear days like these
you step into an inverted version of the world the water fits
around you like a velvet suit and you float along seemingly
decapitated by reflections of all the gifts offered to us by water
I'm going to speak today about its gift of reflection. The liquid,
impermanent, unstable gift of similarity. Similarity by the way, is not the same as
sameness. If you want to hear sameness you can
ring certain public institutions and you will be told "Your call is
important to us you are held in a queue and will be
answered shortly. Your call is important to us you are
held in a queue and will be answered shortly your call
is important to us. You are held in a queue and will be
answered shortly your call is important to us. You are
held in a queue and will be answered shortly." The recorded message is a new kind of
poetry a machine spoken poetry available on everyone's phone at any
time of day and it communicates a machine's belief
in sameness or stuckness which is a terrible thing
to carry in your pocket. As an antidote to that message if you
want to witness similarity you should look at water whose
reflections are always being buried by currents in the
air. I keep a bucket of rain water under my
window and it delights me that green leaves
reflected in a bucket are not quite green. I don't know what
color they are. At certain moments early in the day they
might be called pre-green, but then the clouds change or the wind
moves a surface mark and all at once they seem bright dark
and blind silvery then foggy emerald. Samuel Johnson used this
idea of agitated reflection to evoke the difference between spoken
and written language in the preface to his dictionary.
He wrote about impossibility of defining words
in their passing unrecorded forms "While our language is yet living" he said
"and variable at the caprice of everyone that speaks
it these words are hourly shifting their relations and
can no more be ascertained in a dictionary than a grove in the
agitation of a storm can be accurately delineated from its
pictur in the water". I love to imagine that other kind of
dictionary: a liquid shifting not yet written down
dictionary is exactly what we should bring to
Homer's language to remind ourselves that what looks like sameness on the
page will transform into similarity in performance.
The pink finger dawn the dark proud ship the winged word.
To repeat those phrases in print is to drive the reader
mad with sameness. To repeat them in performance with altered posture and
varying levels of exhaustion or light or voice
is to offer the gift of similarity. Agitated similarity is Homer's gift,
and it is his element. It behaves like water
it throws everything into trembling reflection.
Under its sway the journey of Odysseus looks like,
but is not the same as, the journey of Telemachus.
The rage of Agamemnon looks like, but is not same as,
the rage of Achilles. Odysseus wakes just as Penelope sleeps and then
sleeps just as she wakes and his marriage
copies itself backwards in the marriage of Agamemnon and then
forwards again in the marriages of alcinois aeolus and
zeus Penelope mourns like a nightingale
and a nightingale mourns like a human Homer's adjectives which keep
reappearing in new colors are rippled by the same agitation.
The earth is called 'life-giving' just as a man's blood drains into it.
Achilles is 'swift footed' while he sits idle.
And there is agitated or animated similarity between Prion
and the father of Achilles, and also between Hecuba
and the mother of Odysseus and between Calypso
and Penelope, and between Athene and all swallows. But at heart of all this resemblance
as it were the pleat in the poem's cloth there is the simile itself. The extended simile is Homer's
particular doubled over style of thinking. There are
about 215 extended similes in 'The Iliad' almost another hallucinated poem
floating above the main one. In 'The Odyssey' there are only half a
dozen and I'd like to read you the eeriest of these. "So the great singer sang, but Odysseus
liquefied. The tears ran out under his eyelids onto his cheek.
As when a woman crumples over and mourns her husband,
he has fallen in full view of his city and his family
he was trying to delay the stroke of grief for his children.
She sees him dying and gasping, drapes herself on his body screaming a
shrill sound. And the men behind are hitting her head
and shoulders with their spears, and they lead her away to slavery, to
suffer hard work and sadness, and her face is sucked in with pitiful
grief. So Odysseus was pouring out pitiful
tears from his eyelids."
I'll read it again because it's always hard to take in poetry
"So the great singer sang, but Odysseus liquefied. The tears ran out under his
eyelids onto his cheek as when a woman crumples
over and mourns her husband he has fallen in
full view of his city and his family he was trying to delay
the stroke of grief for his children. She sees him dying and gasping drapes
herself on his body, screaming a shrill sound. And the men
behind are hitting her head and shoulders with
their spears. And they lead her away to slavery, to
suffer hard work, and sadness, and her face is sucked in with pitiful
grief. So Odysseus was pouring out pitiful tears
from his eyelids." Oral poems keep moving and so should
oral critics but there are two good reasons for
pausing to think about this passage. First of all, it is a simile about
liquefaction, which seems to emerge from the actuality
of water. So you could say that it is a simile
about similarity. But secondly, and more importantly,
this is a passage about tears- tears as the messengers of similarity.
The way that widow interrupts the narrative with her weeping,
not as a ghost, or a sign, or a memory, but as a stranger in the language, with
her own vivid existence. The way her scream goes on damaging the
mind, that tells me something about grief
itself and how poetry might rise to meet it.
"So the great singer sang but Odysseus liquefied
the tears ran out under his eyelids onto his cheek.
As when a woman crumples over and mourns her husband
he has fallen in full view of his city and his family, he was trying to delay
the stroke of grief for his children. She sees him dying and gasping,
drapes herself on his body screaming a sharp sound,
and the men behind are hitting her head and shoulders with their spears.
And they lead her away to slavery, to suffer hard work and sadness,
and her face is sucked in with pitiful grief.
So Odysseus was pouring out pitiful tears from his eyelids." Just to give you some context this is
'Odyssey' book eight. Odysseus on his way home from Troy
has lost his ship, his companions, his raft,
and has swam inland to Phaeacia where he is listening to a poetry recital.
He is in disguise and the poet a blind man called Demodocus, is
telling a story about Odysseus in battle and he, as you can hear, is
weeping. And it is the second time this has
happened in the same book only 500 lines earlier
the same poet Demodocus sang a different song
about Odysseus. And Odysseus in disguise started weeping, and the whole thing
happened with the same opening line 'So the great poet sang, but Odysseus'
'The great poet sang but Odysseus taking his bluish gown
in his big hands threw it over his head and hid his face, ashamed to let the
Phaeacians see his tears'. This earlier version has
no simile but the spirit of similarity is
radiantly present especially when you imagine the piece in
performance. According to Eustathius of Thessalonica
when rhapsodes performed 'the Odyssey' they would always wear blue and when
reciting the 'Iliad' they wore red. Some of the energy
of this passage must derive from the peripheral effects of its performance
watching a Rhapsode end under a blue gown, to describe Odysseus
under a blue gown, listening to Demodicus in a blue gown,
not far from the fictional sea in its blue gown,
not far from the actual sea. It's as if a whole
line of oral poets were suddenly reflected, forming together
in that watery colour. To go back to the bucket of water to
wave a blue gown above it and ask 'what color?'
What is that color which Homer calls porfurium
it is not blue exactly it gets translated as purple
but purple is a settled color whereas Homer's word is agitated
it derives from the sea verb porfurion which means to roll without breaking
so it is already a fluid word a heaped up word
a word with underswell not a pigment but an emanation from the nature of water
to get a true sense of porphyrion you need to see the sea in it
and for Homer the sea is unhuman full of strange creatures
missed colored unplowable and this is my favorite
word it is a peritone meaning unfenced if you want to imagine the colour of Odysseus' gown you will have to swim out into the
unfenced place the place not of definitions but of affirmations
yes I'm afraid you will have to find your way to the p volume
of Johnson's unwritten victory there you will discover a dark light
word an adjective for edgelessness a c
word used also of death smoke cloth mist
blood between bluish purple and cobalt move it appears
mid-ocean when the wind perhaps makes a network of backblowing glitters that the
underswell moves sideways as when a big sea swells with noiseless
waves it is used of the heart meaning his
heart was a healing not quite broken wave it indicates
a surface but suggests a depth a mutation of flatness or noiseless
sheen a sea creature a quality of caves any
inlet or iodine or shaded stone a type of algae or rockfish anything
excessive or out of focus or subliminal for
example a swimmer seen from underneath a rotting
smell a list of low sounds an evening shadow
or sea god a whole catalogue of simmering grudges
storms waves and solitudes or deep water
including everyone who has drowned in it to be purpled is to lose one's way
or name to be nothing to grieve without surfacing
to suffer the effects of sea light to be either
sleepless or weightless and cut off by dreams
find yourself in the silence underneath an overhanging way
that or thereabouts is the color of a bluish violet ultramarine
gown so the great poet fang but Odysseus taking his bluish gown in
his big hands drew it over his head and hid his face
ashamed to let the Phaeacians see his tears
gown goes over the head like a wave the human
sits under its sea color with salt water pouring from his eyes
it is one of those places where the form of the poem hurries us forward
the form of the language pulls us back or furion is a word with water inside it
like a bucket down in the middle of a line
already if you look hard at the word you can see the widow's simile underneath it
but Homer is not yet ready to make that gift
with magnificent theatricality he draws a blue gown across the mind and we
like the Phaeacians are left looking at it, waiting. Homer is the foremost poet of the
visible Homer delights in surfaces but the
surface of water is complicated by transparency
and its transparency is complicated by refraction
water is never the same as itself rivers can only exist as similarities
licks reflect more than their own volume and what's more when you look at water
it allows you to exist twice but more darkly
when you look at it again it evaporates as if
moving in and out of existence simply required a bit of sunlight
then it reappears as frost perfectly symmetrical
as if discovering pre-drawn diagrams in thin air
then it reappears as tears so that any attempt to describe the surface of water
tells you to hide your face and inspect your immune thoughts all these waverings are part of the word
porfurion the physics or nature of water is
metaphysical meaning that its surface expresses more
than itself so I need to turn left here to
understand the tears of Odysseus I need to make a detour into the very
different world of John Donne a so-called metaphysical poet Samuel Johnson invented the idea of
metaphorical poetry and he complained that the men who wrote
it were too impassive and leisurely and cannot be said to have
imitated anything Johnson who spent eight years compiling
his victory of the English language and forgot to
include the word 'sea' might be said to have forgotten to sea
again when he made that remark. Here is a poem by Donne called 'A
Valediction of Weeping' which might be roughly described as an
imitation of the sea it is a poem about salt water which is
also a love poem a passionate poem which is also densely
involved in working out what water is A Valediction of Weeping Let me powre forth/ My teares before thy face, whil'st I stay here, For thy face coines them, and thy stampe they beare,/ And by this Mintage they are something worth, /For thus they bee/ Pregnant of thee;/ Fruits of much griefe they are, emblemes of more,/ When a teare falls, that thou falls which it bore,/ So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore./ On a round ball/ A workeman that hath copies by, can lay/ An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,/ And quickly make that, which was nothing, All,/ So doth each teare,/Which thee doth weare,/ A globe, yea world by that impression grow,/Till thy teares mixt with mine doe overflow/ This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so./ O more then Moone,/ Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare,/ Weepe me not dead, in thine armes, but forbeare/ To teach the sea, what it may doe too soone;/ Let not the winde/Example finde,/ To doe me more harme, then it purposeth;/
Since thou and I sigh one anothers breath,/ Who e'r sighes most, is cruellest, and hasts the others death. [END OF POEM]
I'm going to read it again, I think without the script up, because it's
always nice to to hear a poem -Alice sorry it's Ros here
could I just interrupt very briefly- Yes
Could you just move your camera a little bit so that people can see the
bottom of your face? We've had some people who are struggling
if they if they need to lip read. That's better. Like that
Is that? That's perfect. I can't see myself so I can't
but okay thank you Ros thank you so much
I apologize about that okay here's the poem again. 'A Valediction
of Weeping'. Let me powre forth/ My teares before thy face, whil'st I stay here, For thy face coines them, and thy stampe they beare, And by this Mintage they are something worth,/For thus they bee/ Pregnant of thee; / Fruits of much griefe they are, emblemes of more,/ When a teare falls, that thou falls which it bore,/ So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore./ On a round ball/A workeman that hath copies by, can lay/ An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,/And quickly make that which was nothing, All,/
So doeth each teare,/Which thee doth weare,
A globe, yea world by that impression grow, Till thy teares mixt with mine doe overflow/ This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so./ O more then Moone,/ Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare,/ Weepe me not dead, in thine armes, but forbeare/ To teach the sea, what it may doe too soone;/ Let not the winde/Example finde,/ To doe me more harme,
the wind example find to do me more harm than it purposeth;/
Since thou and I sigh one anothers breath,/ Who e'r sighes most, is cruellest, and hasts the other's death. [END OF POEM] Donne was not an oral poet but nor was he
exactly a print poet his work would have been circulated in
manuscript form and it was normal for friends to adjust
a word here or there if that seemed fitting
so you could say that during Donne's lifetime
this poem was held in a fluid or at least viscous state
and in keeping with this it achieves a slippery balance between two modes of
thinking the syntax sounds like a calculation a
discrimination but the imagery is all watery
fencelessness "Till thy teares mixt with mine doe overflow/This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so./" The dislocation between tone and form is
what makes the poem hard to read people are sometimes unsure how
to match its complexity with its urgency it is so
clearly a premeditated performance of the here
and now. "Let me powre forth"
"Weepe me not dead, in thine armes" But before criticizing the poem's
doubleness one ought to glance down at the bucket of water,
that is what tears are made of. Lament at its most extreme will always have to
encounter water, and we need someone like Donne to keep an eye on that absurdity. so does each tear which lead us where
the globe gay world by that impression groan
till thy tears mixed with mine you overflow this world
by waters sent from thee my heaven dissolved itself inside a tear as if in a mirror Donne see
copies of copies of weepers a bit like blue gown poets in Odyssey
8 and these weepers are reflecting each
other's tears and provoking more until the sphere or sea of their weeping
is dissolving and dissolved that is what you might
call apeiron - an unfenced description of
water and its language is close to Donne's 1597
account of an actual sea voyage in which I
and the sun which should teach me had forgot
east west day night all things are one and that one none can be
since all forms uniform deformity that cover trust a boat on the high seas said
conrad a few hundred years later trust a boat on the high seas to bring
out the irrational that lurks at the bottom of every
thought sentiment sensation emotion for all its cleverness
Donne's poem brings out that high sea irrationality
it thinks its way to the bottom of thought and reports on the confusion to
be found there where the mind's world by means of tears
turns into the bodies I am using water as a way of reading
Homer and I'm using Donne as a way of reading
water Donne has carried me into the heart of
weeping I am under the purple wave now inside
the salt water that condenses out of thought and comes
weeping from all humans and here at its invisible starting point
I find water offering two services of similarity it offers me
Homer's vision which is an extended simile
and it offers me Donne's which you could say is an extended metaphor
for serious metaphors I think of metaphor as a kind of
nutrition whereby one idea gets eaten and digested by another male
and female in Donne's poem dissolve and transform
tears become fruits and emblems and nothings
and spheres and seeds everything transubstantiates into something else as
if Donne, who was brought up a Catholic but
became Anglican in his twenties had found a way to perform a communion
service in secret all his love poems work obsessively at
this puzzle of change substance that's unlike Homer
what Donne offers is not the gift of similarity
but the gift of communion mark butler's flee
and mark in this how little that without a nice to me
is it sucked me first and now and in this flea our two bloods mingles
me but oh self-traitor I do bring the
spider love which transubstantiates all simile moves in the other direction
in instead of reducing one thing to another
it proliferates it reverberates whether wherever there is simile it is as if the
poem sprouts another whole poem it is much more like pregnancy than
nutrition. About 30 years ago I sent some poems to
the Oxford Professor of Poetry and the answer came
'not enough metaphor'. I remember turning for reassurance to that widow
in book eight noticing the way she refuses to be absorbed into thought
he will not be digested she shares a likeness with Odysseus
but keeps the difference she goes on screaming
it seemed to me at the time that her vitality was directly linked to the
spaciousness of simone if she had been a metaphor her status
would have been closer to the woman in Donne's poem
or to the women for example in Adrienne Rich's poem
'Woman', about whom the poet writes this i have a poem she says written in the
60s called woman it begins my three sisters are sitting
on rocks of black obsidian for the first time in
this light i can see who they are and she goes on
to say I have seen that poem glossed as a poem
about Rich's three sisters on the simplest level such a reading is
factually incorrect since Adrienne Rich has one sister not
three but more than that even supposing that
Adrienne Rich the individual had three sisters
the poem lives by metaphor on one level this is still her speaking
on one level I can look at another woman who is not my blood
and call her sister or on another level all three sisters
are aspects of the poet's self poetry is full of that kind of fiction
those various levels and aspects by means of which metaphor tries to
detect something immaterial but that is not
what Homer is doing Homer is looking out beyond the self
he is taking the imagination seriously as an
external and collaborative force his mind his friends is not closed
in the skull but moving in and out of the lungs
discovering someone actual in the air Homer wants to express the clarity and
otherness of grief and for that purpose he has need of
simile metaphor transposes a noun similarly
real lines of uh that is why Donne looks deeper and deeper
into the tear whereas Homer moves his vision to and
fro examining the action of weeping Homer has to step quickly
he has to get from one weeping to another by means of a small crossing
word the Greek word 'o̱s' I don't know how to
translate that word it's unfortunate that the English word
as which is the correct way to introduce a verb comparison
is a weak quiet old-fashioned word it sounds dusty like something you would
find among Victorian door handles in a junk shop. The word 'like'
which is designed for comparing mounds is altogether more vigorous
but its edges are too sharp it sticks out of the line
like a glinting knife i need something softer
and swift. Homer's word is a rough breathing followed by omega
the undulating last letter of the alphabet
followed by s as if the wind had heaped up water and then
broken it into sounds 'o̱s' it is hard to pronounce unless you are
the wind whenever I read it I think of waves
altering a stretch of water and then altering it again posts
posts two ripples either side of a likeness
it is as if the bluish wave the curve of a bowed back
had unfolded and revealed it's underneath while it is breaking before we reach the
hiss at the end of 'o̱s' I'd like to turn
left again to show you a series of waves by the artist Sarah
Simblet Sarah teaches anatomy at the Ruskin and
if you visit my room at Christ Church you will find all kinds of dead objects
twisted pods severed wings stuffed owls and a
kingfisher finger bones open heels moths
seeds skulls stones and three wasp-like human tortoise one with
scoliosis which help her to understand the
structures of things I suppose they comprise a kind of
material victory but if Sarah wants to draw something
moving growing living she makes use of water 20 years ago Sarah started studying the
Thames at Iffley where it goes over the weir. 'I
listen acutely to water' she told me, 'I draw its sound as well as its smell.'
She describes how she developed an ability to see water patterns because
design of the weir kept making the water sorry the design of the
wheel made the water keep returning to one shape
so for example she made these two sketches
by waiting for the water to repeat itself and then marking down another
line and then another noticing as she went
along that the speed of the water could only be caught if she drew quickly
that's another one of them 'My drawings are all made with fine liner
pen black or grey', she says, 'the wet pen tip glides very fast over the smoothness
of the dismantled moleskin notebook which I chose for the slippery speed of
its surface' So she learned to draw water by looking
at patterns in a weir and as a counter force to the bones and
stuffed birds Sarah carries these water drawings wherever she goes
to remind her to look at things liquidly last winter on a residency in Honolulu
she took out the drawings again and decided to sketch some waves
here they are I hope the first one this one I think it is
the first one is formalized made not in the presence of water but later on
in a perfectionist mood back hotel Sarah said this about it
'I think the hotel room reworking collapsed into baroque patterns
because I could no longer hear or smell or taste it or of course see the water'.
If reading is a kind of internal drawing then this sketch
reminds me how easy it is to read over enthusiastically turning poems and
pattern systems in your head I prefer this next one obliterated by
rain you can see the torn page and the ink
washed off and if you hold its thickened paper you
can feel the whole weather of the day first rate
performance by water and I think it followed by some sketches
she made on the back looking at the outlines of water on the
back of the paintings Sarah is after something more elusive
the flourish of a falling wave that is neither incoherent nor over
coherent a paradox between movement and moment
here is a series of drawings made while watching waves break over a rock
informed by the moment but not dissolved in it
she says 'All of my drawings rely on all of my senses
I touch or hold subjects especially plants
whenever possible I hear really important smell
and taste and this is all a kind of seeing any one of those sketches would make
good translation greek word hosts a surge of change
provisional and mobile like a breaking wave
so the great singer sang but odysseus liquefied
the tears ran out under his eyelids on his cheeks
posts as a woman crumples over and mourned her husband
he has fallen in full view of his city and his family he was trying to delay
the traumatic moment for his children she sees him dying and gasping drapes
herself on his body screaming a shrill sound and the men
behind are hitting her head and shoulders with
their spears and lead her away to slavery to suffer hard work and
sadness and her face is sucked thin with pitiful
grief so odysseus was pouring out pitiful
tears from his eyelids what you miss in that translation are
the rolling hexameters which are like the cylinders of a great
similarity machine on which everything gets processed into
patterns because of the hexameter there is a
structural alignment running down through the poem
which matches one weeping to another just as it matches one
rosy finger dawn or one winged word or one dark proud ship to another there
is no stopping it over those cylinders goes the shrillness
of lament and gets flattened into the shrillness of grasshoppers
winds sea birds sirens and the porphyrian of water
comes out comes out in the same color as the heart
at least that is how it appears when you are reading the odyssey
and the homeric formula keep coming at you like
a recorded message I think I have a recorded message. "The person
you are calling knows you are waiting, please try later
the person you are calling knows you are waiting please try later.
The person you are calling knows you are waiting.
Please try later please try again later. The person you
called knows you are waiting please try again later.
The person you called knows you are waiting please try again later." And of course this poem was not in the
first place recorded and in performance as Pina Bausch said
repetition is not repetition but something more like varying
resemblances of ways Homer speaks not in cylinders not as an
answer machine but in undulations hosts as a woman
crumples over hosts so Odysseus poured out tears
and who exactly is this woman I've seen her in the dark space just behind my
eyes and sometimes in front of them she's in shock so her knees have given
way she keeps crumpling over she flashes past screaming enigmatically
alive she has no name and nor does her city
which might be Troy but it might just as well be Minneapolis
she is like Odysseus but in that likeness
she could not be more different who is she
if this were a film we would probably find out
the scene would be presented as a flashback host the image phase to the
city of Troy here is Odysseus killing a man he has
his knee on the man's neck we see the man dying
and gasping for breath and here is the widow screaming a shrill sound
the scream fills up the cinema hosts the image fades back to faiisha
the scream keeps going in that film version the widow has the status of a
memory or a ghost she is a victim of Odysseus
lost to his psychology their connection is causal and therefore
fixed in Homer's version there is only
undulation the wave of weeping moves through both
characters but they keep status of their difference
odysseus in one world and the widow in another as Samuel Johnson might have
put it their connection is living and variable
and can no more be ascertained in a dictionary
than a grove in the agitation of a storm can be accurately delineated from its
picture in the water
so thank you. I am now going to be happy to answer some questions and go back to
Ros and I think - Hello
thank you so much Alice that was gripping
and moving in the fullest sense of the world we have
um a lot of people asking questions um and I will start um well let's start
with the with one that starts with where you
started so how did you come to the subject of water today
for your lecture? I think I seldom leave the subject of water I'm very keen
on swimming and rivers but I suppose as well as that I've
always been very interested in that particular simile about the
woman weeping and I've never really known how
to answer the question of why at the highest pitch of our
emotion uh we dissolve into water
so that kind of weird connection that when you're swimming you know you're
swimming in the same liquid as grief at its most intense has
bothered me for for a long time I think that's really
interesting one of the questions we had was can you speak to the role of tears
as a meeting of grief and water and i suppose that's what you're describing
it's that moment of encounter with water which is also an
encounter with with grief yes and there's a
a Jewish legend connected to the story of Adam and Eve that says
that humans were originally given tears as a compensation for death
and I think that's I love that idea it's a really
bad bargain you know to get these little drops of water
in exchange for dying um but if you think about it
it's actually quite a lot as well to be given
something physical and actual like tears which either through distraction or as
an anesthetic or simply through the sort of puzzle
that presents you with of how the body connects with the mind
they sort of move you through grief I suppose
and i'm just going to ask a little question of my own because i was so
struck with that metaphor that you were giving us and you're working it through
so similarly from Homer, I wanted to ask a bit
about time in that and how you perceive that
similarly working in time you talked about hallucinatory poetry
floating above other poetry is this an interruption
is it happening at the same time i was thinking particularly about Denise
Riley's wonderful time lived without its flow and this
idea that grief suspends time but you are still living
in time and whether there's something going on
in that. Denise talks a lot about the struckness of grief doesn't she and
how how it is actually occupies a different time from ordinary
everyday time and I think it's it's a brilliant thing
to say and it's exactly right and I've always
been fascinated by the way Homer's similes occupy that time as well
so they always change into the present tense from the main
narrative of the poem which is in a past tense and i suppose it's perhaps a bit
like the idea of the dream time it's it's as
if there is a continuous present in which at our highest pitch of emotion
or understanding we can we can sort of look down at
ordinary time and get a different perspective on it. Still on tears we have a question
that says why are tears symbolically considered culturally pure
when other bodily emissions: saliva and blood
are have an abject quality are viewed as impure?
I'm probably not the right person to answer that
but eyes are the windows of the soul so it might seem that
here's other sort of liquid of the soul uh
whereas urine, catarrh, earwax saliva uh come from different windows of
the body which are not necessarily connected with the soul um
but I don't think I really have the right answer only my own
opinion for that um eyes eyes are very fascinating things
so that's why perhaps tears get a kind of status
from emerging through the eyes we have two questions that I think are
connection connected one's an extended way and
one's another short way of asking the same thing so
um one of our listeners gives a quote from 'Mrs Dalloway'
um from Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway' where she says "this late age of the world's
experience had bred in them all all men and women are well of tears
tears and sorrow courage and endurance a perfect
upright and stoical bearing" what do you make of Woolf's confluence of grief and
compassion nurture and forbearance in this quote
and how do you think we might make our own current collective well of tears
productive? And then a more direct way I suppose
asking that question is has the current global situation
influenced your work? Well
in terms of the first part of the question,
I suppose I still do think, I don't want to stop at tears, I think the great
thing about certainly about poetry is that it
doesn't get stuck in lament I think it has this this kind
of rhythmical aspect to it which moves it through
things it's got kind of dance and song going on
alongside whatever grief it might express
so I myself wouldn't want to get stuck in that well
of tears I think that one of the great things about certainly
about poetry I don't know about the novelty, is that it does
present two things at the same time so you can enter grief at the same time
as sort of just the joy of the music of a poem and probably with second part of the
question I think that it's quite important to
wait and not know too quickly how these extraordinary
times are going to have affected people.
Perhaps one of the things that poetry demands is that you kind of
you don't necessarily listen to the surface of your mind, you
wait until the underneath has something to say
and that can generally take a couple of years I find
so who knows there are some who say it won't have made any difference at all
I certainly think it's given enough kind of solitude and quietness for people
at least to sort of churn things over quite a lot.
A question here from Dan; rather although we're still with rhythm, Alice
has such a strong sense of rhythm when reading poetry
sometimes our natural rhythm and all the more revealing for it
has she allowed her poetry to be set to music and if so was she happy?
I love working with musicians I think the
best of those collaborations has been when I and the musician kind of taken
turns and listened to each other I haven't so much enjoyed a kind of
formal relationship I've occasionally written operas and
things like that uh or words to offers and
I found that a bit less satisfactory because,
perhaps it's vain of me, but the music is really the serious thing
in that collaboration and it depends you tend to be told when you start out on it
uh but only 10 of your words will be heard or something
so I love working with musicians but in a slightly more
jazzy way I think. Okay,
many questions coming in, i'm just trying to order them in my own head.
Sarah asked does the surface of the water represent our sense
perceptions and imaginations which are two uncertainties in our life so do you
think that agitation is about an a state of uncertainty? I think that what fascinates me about
the surface of water is that it isn't just surface
you can see through it and it also looks back at you with reflection
so it is the one surface and I and this always this is why I get interested in
it whenever it crops up in Homer, it's the surface that isn't the surface
so whereas Homer always responds to the kind of the
actual invisible on the surface when he's talking about water he can't
help sort of reading somebody's mind or going into a
different kind of world altogether um
and I think that although I used the word agitation quite
a lot in this lecture partly because of Samuel
Johnson using it I think that the movement of water
doesn't have to be just an uncertainty it can be a sort of energy and I think
that's really what I love about the movement of water is
that it stops you getting stuck and from the point of view of poetry that
means it kind of it gives you all the vitality of live
performance rather than the printed page. Quite a lot of people
are asking about similarities and metaphors
I think this is a rather brutal question and you may have already answered it
by selecting the message the simile you selected.
If you had to pick one, simile or metaphor, in a poem
which would it be? Well obviously that one that I spoke about has always haunted me,
but then I do also love the similes in the Iliad because they just take you to such a very different world. I always think the thing
about Homer's similes is that they're not so
much similes as dissimiles they tend to grow far enough that you are then
ending up in a very different place. And the one that springs to mind is one
that never made it into my version of the Iliad which is about
some men pulling an ox hide it's a really strange
vision of people stretching a piece of skin so
I'll throw that one in. Ariel, who has a wonderful watery name for us,
asked can translations be written on water? In other words where would you say
derivative works stand in relation to the originals?
That's how she puts it. That is just such an interesting question
because I think that poetry in the 20th Century and the 21st Century
has completely changed its meaning because of translation.
There have been so many good translations of good poems
and that has changed what we think of as a poem which was always
before defined as that which can't be translated,
so we need translation desperately because we need to sort of fertilize the
English language. But I wonder whether
translations of poems don't include silence because the silence is something
that a poet deliberately places a particular
point in the language and if you translate it
you're not going to have your silences in the same places
so it does give a very different experience,
and I think even writing translations on water wouldn't
fill that in really. Anna asked a very specific
question about- she was wondering about Cordelia, and how
her tears come to represent compassion and forgiveness that in a sense go
beyond grieving, so do tears do work beyond grieving?
Well I think tears do work beyond language
beyond thought which is that's why they're valuable. Beyond grieving, they certainly take you beyond grieving
but I think Cordelia, what all strikes me with her, is is her
silence and the fact that it's her body that speaks rather than
her mouth. We have a question as well about
where's it um someone says what Alice said about water
reminds me of the watercolors by W Tillyer and their sense of randomness and
beautiful accidents is that randomness something that you
try to include in your own poetry I wonder what William Tillyer would
think of being called random because he does very careful,
he sort of guides the water into its blocks and smudges
very very carefully and there's a huge amount of mastery and
artistry in what he does. But yes he is interested in allowing
water to express itself on the paper
and that's very much my way of working too. I like to set things up with a strong enough frame
that something other than myself is then free to make its mark. One tries to invite randomness in and
then one has to be careful that perhaps like Sarah's smudged, rain-
smashed drawing it doesn't go so far that you can't then
read it. So I think that the question is always
getting a balance between control and lack of control. I just
wanted to share with you a message from Di,
she says 'I work with grieving children and we use a lot of watery references
puddle jumping in and out of grief wading through rivers getting stuck in
seas being knocked over by tsunamis of grief'.
She says 'maybe water and grief always flow together'.
And then another question for a specific question from Mary
says 'How has your attitude to water changed or developed
over the years that you've been writing about water?'
I'm not sure that my attitude to water has changed but I suppose I've
chosen different types of water it was lovely to be able to write the
story of a river when I wrote 'Dart' because that has
such a clear beginning middle and ending so the poem was already structured for
me. I have written quite a lot about rain
and that's always a treat because rain is such a
beautiful sound, it's already a poem. The great challenge for me
was writing about the sea which I tried to do in my book
'Nobody', and I suppose for me the sea is
is that which you can't write about so so that was like kind of
trying to jump into something impossible. Unfenced.
Unfenced, exactly. A more scientific question 'Would you be
able to speak on water as gas or solid, do these function as poetic
modes?' I wish I were more of a scientist and i
understand from my second son that water is very
remarkable when it's solid for example, because it is lighter than its liquid
state if I've got that right. And I think it behaved strangely whether
it's a gas or a solid or a liquid And certainly, I suppose for me what I
love is the transitions I love the way water turns into frost or turns into steam but I don't think i'd be
qualified to write scientifically about that.
This is one as we're moving sort of further through our
questions, and close to the end. Jo says that you're the most captivating
reader she's seen perform live, and how did the experience of reading
alone to the lens differ from reading to a room filled with rapt faces
responsive and reflecting back to you? Yes, it's -I'm still going to be going
on about live performance because it's a very different experience and that kind
of anxiety about the button on the computer that would
scroll the script down and then the terrible moment when you, Ros, had to
inform me that i wasn't actually visible. I think that I have seen some quite
good performances actually online so I'm sure there is-
and I love the fact that it can go all around the world
and that it's very democratic so I certainly think it's a good thing, but
there is something different about the human body I suppose. And a human
conversation that happens when you hear people sighing with boredom or
rustling sweet papers you know you've got to pick
up speed. So I think it's for me, very important to
have the feeling that my words are landing
somewhere. I think we should probably wrap up
we're almost out of time One comment from an anonymous reader listening who says 'I wrote a poem whilst
listening to your inspiring lecture'. Good! I wish I could multitask that way. Thank you very much, so shall I say
goodbye? No I'm going to have to going to formally thank you, so you will
need to be with us for a little bit longer.
So I want to thank you, Alice, for your lecture this evening.
I'm a bit lost for a simile to capture it. Thank you very much for agreeing to offer your lecture in this way tonight
and for answering audience questions and we've had people viewing from all over
the world: Brazil, Japan, all over the UK, Denmark
Belgium, Croatia, Saudi Arabia, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Pakistan, South
Africa, USA. All of us wherever we are
I'm sure, have been moved, probably also agitated by the flow of your analysis
and it's reflecting turns from Marilyn Nelson to Homer to Donne
to Adrienne Rich, and we're really grateful to you, so Alice, many thanks to you
once again. Thank you, very much thank you, Ros, and thank you all for listening. And thank you also to all those involved in
making tonight possible, including the teams at TORCH and the
English Faculty. And I want to thank all you viewers at home for watching and
all your wonderful comments and questions.
The audio of Alice's inaugural lecture in November 2019 and
audio of lectures by the past two incumbents of the post are freely
available to the public on the English faculty website,
and this lecture will join them there soon. TORCH continue their live event
series next week on Thursday 2nd July at 5 p.m. They'll be
joined by Professor Homi K. Bhaba from Harvard University, do tune
again in again then if you can. In the meantime
thank you once again for watching, and goodbye.
