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First review by Diggory Dunn.
The BBC’s ongoing poetry season has produced some startlingly good, and some excruciatingly bad television, often within the same time-slot. Excellent documentaries such as Ian Hislop’s interesting and considered investigation into the history of poet laureateship, which provided an in-depth artistic and cultural analysis of perhaps the most political of poetic positions was at times fascinating. The outright condemnation of Wordsworth’s contemporaries at his acceptance of the position, the success of Tennyson in making the job his own and the poetic compromises made, willingly or begrudgingly by all laureates, made for great viewing.
At times, however, Hislop attempted to delve a little too deeply into the impossibly complex realm of poetics and artistic endeavour, over-extending the programme’s taut, slender and highly focussed remit. Straining his creative faculties to their banal and unimaginative limits, he states "The poet’s job is to transform something deeply personal, into something universal"... Where to begin? It is self-evident that Hislop is from the literary old-school, a structuralist who believes that old middle-class white men can decide what is ‘universal’, and that every poet’s artistic ambition should correspond to their potentially outmoded aesthetic and ideological models.
In a nut-shell, this has been the fatal flaw in the BBC’s poetic festivities. Literary and cultural theorists from the sixties onwards have endeavoured to open up literature to multiple, contrasting and thus thoroughly more interesting examination and analysis. In an age in which the author is dead, the BBC’s unremitting pursuit of the biographical seems tired. Every single one of the BBC’s programmes has focussed far too narrowly on an authocentric model of interpretation: "Wilfred Owen meant x, when he wrote y, and we can prove this by examining his correspondence to his mother." Modern literary criticism has moved away from this self-aggrandising, top-down and concrete discourse, into something open, fluid and un-tethered by relative trivialities of biography. These programmes are far more about the poets than poetry.
The ‘season’ has been blighted by a condescendingly didactic tone which has turned what has the potential to be vital, exciting and vigorous into a chintzy grandma’s book club affair in which quietly-spoken people discuss emotions, feelings and their favourite poet: hunch backed, tea-stained and frail in their favourite chair amongst the hollow shadows cast by lace curtains. This is a world, for instance, in which poetry is still called ‘verse’.
Indeed, tacked onto the orgy of televisual tackiness is an online vote to decide the ‘Nation's Favourite Poet’, which no doubt will involve a panel of celebrity advocates arguing their case to the public before a telephone vote. A sort of ‘Britain’s Got Poets’ literary circus.
The selection of material has been woefully predictable. Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot, Milton, established canonical names that have instilled fear and loathing into the hearts of school-children for decades. Where are the exciting, satirical and thoroughly naughty poets such as Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge and Yeats? Drug addicts, revolutionaries, sexually obsessed and on occasion incestuous, they produced equally inflammatory poetry and might incite something more than an empty stare and a dribble from an audience.
The BBC’s press office claims that the ‘season’s’ intention is to "inspire and motivate people to reacquaint themselves with the poetry greats. In addition it may also inspire them to discover their own poetic voice". I fail to see how this is supposed to be achieved without a more modern outlook. The reason people don’t consume poetry with the same voraciousness as in previous decades is because they connect it with a turgid world in which it is called ‘verse’, and it has meanings that produce a single explanation. As a result of this intellectual laziness, the BBC has thoroughly undersold poetry as an artistic medium. I doubt whether they have broadened their audience beyond the steadfast weekly listenership of ‘Poetry Please’. [Diggory Dunn]
Diggory, I am inclined to disagree...
How can you deny that a windswept Owen Sheers, traversing the Yorkshire Moors whilst reciting Sylvia Plath is not an utterly beguiling way to present poetry to the masses? Just one look into those wide blue or brown eyes (the camera never does linger quite long enough on his face) and I, for one, am hooked. Perhaps Sheers does focus rather a lot on the poet’s life but then it’s so often the story hidden in a painting, the history tucked beneath book, that draws you in.
Watching Sheers unravel the lives behind the lines in A Poet’s Guide to Britain I have begun to feel the intense sincerity of the small black words that grace a poet’s page. Instead of Matthew Arnold seeming a bit stiff and cold I now realise that he was just a wayward youth falling in and out of love with all kinds of things: women, religion, jobs. He was a poet who almost grew up through his verse (I know you don’t like that word). And without the lovely Owen Sheers slipping from poem to past pictures I wouldn’t have been able to break that aloof intellectual barrier that poetry, so often, seems to hold up.
And another thing: in labelling these programmes as throwbacks to a ‘chinzty grandma’s book club’ where people sit and sigh in ‘shadows cast by lace curtains’ you seem to miss the point. Firstly, there is nothing wrong with lace curtains: when the light shines through them they make pretty floral silhouettes on the wall, and secondly, just because the programmes are not so flamboyantly ‘out there’, just because Bansky isn’t painting the sky red with Wordsworth, doesn’t mean that they are not making bold leaps.
What were you looking for, a flurry of exclamation marks, presenters who jump up and down or collapse and cry when they read a poem? I for one have been moved by the softly sensitive approach of many of the presenters. Last night, I watched the comedian Robert Webb talk us through his life-long affair with T.S. Eliot as part of the second instalment from the series My Life in Verse. For Webb, apparently, it all began at school. Blah, blah, blah, the teacher was moaning on about Eliot, the students were all getting thoroughly bored, every mouth was yawning, and then, Webb informs us, it all changed. The teacher turned the page, cleared his throat and recited to a mesmerised audience ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. From that moment onwards poetry, for Webb, meant something.
Instead of a high brow showing off of intellect, Webb gives the most poignantly personal account of poetry I have ever seen. Following the lines of the poem the programme moves outwards in spiralling eddies. To begin with we learn of what the poem means in relation to Eliot, then what it means to Webb, and finally how it could touch anybody. Dancing precariously on what could be an egotistical self-indulgent, my life-my poem scenario, the programme manages to keep perfect balance. Even when Webb talks about his love, his wedding, his wife, the programme doesn’t topple over but offers up this new and beautiful example of how poetry can weave a lovely thread through life.
You end quoting the BBC’S press office intentions. Recalling how they hope to "inspire and motivate people to reacquaint themselves with the poetry greats" and how "it may also inspire them to discover their own poetic voice". Well, Diggory, in one last attempt to prove you wrong, as a result of the wonderful poetry on television, I will display how I too have been prompted to find my own poetic voice.
[Emily Mears]
Really good debate.
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