Benny Bunter
Well-known member
It's not stupid it's amazing, read it again
Somewhere on one of these threads we talked about Frost at Midnight by STC it’s one of my favourites.I'm slowly coming round to the idea that Coleridge might have been an even bigger genius than Wordsworth.
Somewhere on one of these threads we talked about Frost at Midnight by STC it’s one of my favourites.
It made me think, for obvious reasons, of the whole story of the early 90s rave era turning from a utopian dream into the nightmare of darkside.
At that point it becomes appropriate to speak of technique rather than craft. Technique, as I would define it, involves not only a poet’s way with words, his management of metre, rhythm and verbal texture; it involves also a definition of his stance towards life, a definition of his own reality. It involves the discovery of ways to go out of his normal cognitive bounds and raid the inarticulate: a dynamic alertness that mediates between the origins of feeling in memory and experience and the formal ploys that express these in a work of art. Technique entails the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice and thought into the touch and texture of your lines; it is that whole creative effort of the mind’s and body’s resources to bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form. Technique is what turns, in Yeats’s phrase, ‘the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast’ into ‘an idea, something intended, complete.’
Lucky enough to meet and share a couple of pints with Heaney - he was as kind and generous as he comes across on the page. Spent a big chunk of that time talking about Pound, Logue’s Homer and the benefits of learning poetry by heart.
Read a few bits of Arthur Golding's translation of metamorphoses and they were superb (big Shakespeare influence) but I'm a bit put off by the idea of more modern translations for some reason. I know all translations do to some extent, but doesn't Hughes take massive liberties with the original stories? That sort of puts me off.Speaking of Hughes, I stuck on his "Tales from Ovid" audiobook the other night and listened to "Achteaon", absolutely fantastic