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- Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year 2022Wales's best-loved contemporary poet, one of the major poets of our endangered environment, returns to prose in Roots Home.As in At the Source (2008), she does something unusual with form. She combines two elements. Seven vivid essay-meditations, informed by (among others) Dylan Thomas, George Herbert and W. B. Yeats, explore the ways in which poetry bears witness to what is and what might be, presence and transcendence in a threatened world. The meditations precede a journal that runs from January 2018 to December 2020, concluding with a poem entitled 'Winter Solstice' - three years of living close to animals, mountains, and (in particular) trees, in human intimacy and lockdown. 'Listen! They are whispering / now while the world talks, / and the ice melts, / and the seas rise. / Look at the trees!...'This is necessary work. As she declares in 'Why I Write', the first meditation in Roots Home: 'Morning begins with my journal. I write in it most days, though not every day. It is friend and listener, to record, remember, rage and rhapsodise, a place for requiem and celebration. Words hold detail which might be forgotten - the way the hare halted as it crossed the lawn, the field where a rainbow touched down across the valley, the different voices of wind, or water, the close and distant territorial arias of May blackbirds.'
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Roots Home
Essays and a Journal
Gillian Clarke
CONTENTS
ROOTS HOME
WHY I WRITE
A pencil, a pen, a page. In town, at railway stations, airports, it is the stationers that draws me. The ranks of pens, pencil sets, reams of paper, a red notebook with a hard cover, a ribbon to mark the page, an elastic band to keep its contents safe. I must have it, just in case. I am travelling. What if I fill the one I am using? In those circumstances, on the road and homesick already, one more new notebook is irresistible. It is more than need. It is desire, for another unruled Moleskine for notes, research, for trying a line; desire for a new ruled, spiral-bound A5 for draft after draft of a poem; for yet another little black A6 art book with acid-free paper to write my journal in minuscule longhand at about thirty-five closely written lines a page – my current little black journal is number fifty. Before discovering these perfect art books, I used whatever notebook took my fancy, since I was given a five-year diary for Christmas when I was fifteen.
Morning begins with my journal. I write in it most days, though not every day. It is friend and listener, to record, remember, rage and rhapsodise, a place for requiem and celebration. Words hold detail which might be forgotten – the way the hare halted as it crossed the lawn, the field where a rainbow touched down across the valley, the different voices of wind, or water, the close and distant territorial arias of May blackbirds. One night many years ago, when our house was still a ruin, used only for summer camping, as we stepped out into the pitch-dark garden we saw green lights, like searchlights, wavering in the north-eastern sky. The midnight news confirmed it was the aurora borealis, recorded in my 6little black book with all the rest, trivia, weather and wonders. I write to remember, to record the smallest thing.
But before meaning, before writing, a word is a sound. It is voiced, sung, spoken, single and slow, by someone leaning over a cot or a pram, smiling and mouthing a word, or a little rush of words, a phrase, a sentence; or the mysterious music of nursery rhymes. We love the sound of words before we understand them. I loved them because I could not understand them. I liked the pattern they made in books before I could write them. I mimicked words I heard. Family legend tells that I was heard chanting and stamping out the rhythm to these words: ‘Ga puts Mentholatum on her sciatica, and Ceri soaks the clothes in Parazone.’ Ga was my grandmother, Ceri my aunt. I collected strange words grown-ups used. I scribbled pretend ‘words’ on my bedroom wall through the bars of my cot. The wall was an empty page. Even now, setting down the first, uncertain words when beginning a poem, I feel the seduction of a new page. Describing his writing process, the poet R.S. Thomas said that he took a pen and paper to see what words would do. The child, scribbling on a bedroom wall or a page, is doing what a poet does. The child’s first scribbled attempt at a word is primitive and instinctive. It is early man’s mark on a cave wall. You can see what R.S. Thomas meant by ‘seeing what words will do’.
I recently read of research into the development of language in babies. Scientists tested the babies’ brain-reaction to the sound of a word and to the object it named. The babies connected the word with the object, listened and watched the speaker, responding to the spoken word. Some time passed before each baby’s first attempt to say the word. It was concluded that a baby thinks about the word long before trying to say it.
I love that! Of course it does. The unspoken word is like the not yet articulated poem that awaits the pen, or the thought unspooling into a sentence in an essay or an article ready for 7the pen or tapped keys to let it grow, to stir, to become a human communication. It is like the brilliant line you think before you sleep, sure that you will remember it long enough to write it down in the morning. But by morning it has melted away, like the dream you forget the minute you are really awake. You need the pen, the scrap of paper, to keep it. I remember the poet, Irina Ratushinskaya, explaining how, in her Soviet prison cell, she wrote her poems by scratching them in soap before memorising them. Once written, typed, scratched in soap, crayoned on a wall, once they have a shape and a sound, they are real. You’ll remember them then, more or less, if the page blows away in the wind.
Sylvia Plath, in ‘Morning Song’, describes her baby trying her first ‘handful of notes’, as ‘clear vowels’ rising ‘like balloons.’ A baby’s first consonant is often ‘m’. Is that the source of Mam, Mum, Mama, that almost universal word? My husband’s aunt, Gwyneth Myfanwy, living contentedly in a care home in her nineties, suddenly stopped talking, or responding to talk. She slept a lot, and seemed preoccupied by vivid dreams. She was often heard calling out: ‘Mam! Oh Mam’, as if reliving her life and her childhood in her mind, calling, recalling, the mother she had cared for until her death aged a hundred and two. A few days later, Gwyneth died.
Might her last word, Mam, also have been her first? When we die, will losing the world precede losing the first and last word, as it seemed to do for Gwyneth Myfanwy, drowsing into a dream where all our words migrate from the borders of consciousness as life fades into silence?
After the word, the song and the rhyme, come stories, told and read aloud: my father’s retelling of traditional Welsh legends from the Mabinogi when we were on a ramble or on the road in the car, the bedtime stories my mother told me, pointing to each word as she read. I heard the sound, and saw the shape her finger showed me. A child soon tries the 8sound that belongs to the known shape. Familiar words are repeated, favourite stories told and retold. That early pleasure in repeated sounds, in short, echoing word groups, in spells, in rhymes, in legends where choices come in sets of three, as well as the mysterious music of nursery rhymes, are the makings of the literate person. In my case they were surely leading to the art of writing, and the love of and practice of poetry.
I don’t remember being taught to read. My mother read me stories, and as she read her finger followed the words, so I could hear the sound of each word-shape. Sentences and paragraphs guide the reader’s path through prose. A poem’s music is shaped by lines and verses. The form informs, tells us how to hear. The poem’s shape on the page is the sound you hear. A poem is like a page of music. The line is the bar line. It carries the word-music of poetry.
Before I was born, my father had travelled the world with the merchant navy, a wireless officer with the Marconi company, until his radio skills and bilingualism brought him a job as a broadcasting engineer at the BBC in Wales. In his radio cabin on board ship, tapping spells in Morse code, he sent messages across oceans: storm warnings, sightings of icebergs or wreckage. The radio transmitted cries for help, ships in distress heard too far off course to assist, as messages passed ship to ship, ocean to ocean across the world between men like him, nicknamed as ‘Sparks’, in their subterranean cabins. As I write, I remember how exciting it was to be told how, decades before the internet, the international language of Morse could cross the world, travel all round the globe which I loved to spin in the corner of my bedroom. Morse code was another magic alphabet which, much later, my father tried to teach me.
I remember ‘writing’, or scribbling, with a pencil my father had sharpened to a dangerously perfect point. My parents must have forgiven my graffiti and trusted my tool management 9because soon after the pencil, I was given a pen, and guided to drawing and writing paper. Above the hinged lid of my child-size desk was a shallow depression to lay the pen down between dips into the tiny inkwell. One Christmas I had a real fountain pen, a Conway Stewart in marbled green with a gold nib like a blackbird’s beak, nested in its own box; a bottle of blue Quink; proper notepaper with envelopes to match. I was seven. My mother thought it high time I wrote proper thank you letters.
Since then, no day is ever quite right without opening my journal to record, in black ink on a white page, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the weather, the world’s mood, the April return of the swallows, their flights over the garden, the mudcup of a nest in our porch, a gather of goldfinches, a flaunt of red kites over the field. I write because the page is a friend.
April has turned to May. This is a memory: walking the fields to feed the twin lambs of a ewe who had not quite enough milk for her growing twins. The lambs ran towards me while she watched, wary, but without fear. They nuzzled my pockets for their bottles, and soon emptied one each. The ewe called, and they returned to her. She nuzzled them to suckle her too, keeping the bond strong between them. We kept an eye on them, brought a bucket of sheep nuts for the ewe, a bottle for the lambs. But we are mere humans. The chemistry of the flock is mysterious and animal, and we are not part of it. I recall feeling a surge of joy at her trust and theirs, at that deep, inherited knowledge of where they belonged and what belonged to them: in Welsh it is known as cynefin. Joy too, which I share with my journal, at the greening of the avenue of twenty-four hornbeams we had planted in the last week of the last year of the last millennium. They were leafless sticks. Soon they scrawled leafy shadows on the grass between the two rows. Now they touch overhead, a green arcade. If I write it, here, in my journal, it is twice enjoyed. Because I write, I 10remember. Writing of events close to their happening involves a wide-awake mind and all senses alert in an effort to tell it true. To reread the journal is to live it again, more profoundly, given time to think. Poetry is a rhythmic way of thinking. If, in this reflective moment, a poem starts into life, a note in a journal opens itself to be shared with a reader. The hare in the gap, for example: the sudden heat of it, its breath, quiver, stillness, its aliveness saying, ‘you too are alive’. It records the nowness of now, the moment completely lived.
I felt every bit of me awake as I watched the hare, but a poem wasn’t ready. Literature was ready though. I recalled a brilliant few pages in one of Dylan Thomas’s stories, ‘The Peaches’, with a marvellous description of a child’s experience of consciousness. He writes of how alive he had felt, a boy playing wild games with a friend at his Aunt Annie’s farm, Fern Hill (which he calls ‘Gorsehill’ in the story) and how, and I quote: ‘I felt all my young body like an excited animal surrounding me, the torn knees bent, the bumping heart’, and ‘I was aware of me myself in the exact middle of a living story, and my body was my adventure and my name’.
‘In the exact middle of a living story’! ‘My body was my adventure and my name’! How I identify with that rich description of consciousness, of the aware young writer listening for language, alert for the truth of things.
Is consciousness a special human thing? My hare looked just as alive, as aware as I. Growing older, losing friends, the deaths of poets, sharpens consciousness and my need to write, to remember everything. In a poem written after the far too early death of my friend, the poet Frances Horovitz, I say: ‘I must write like the wind, year after year / passing my death-day, winning ground’. I often find myself saying, these days, after the deaths of Seamus Heaney, Dennis O’Driscoll, Dannie Abse, and others, ‘I must write like the wind’, ‘winning ground’.11
The act of writing involves not just observed experience, but reflection, remembering and recording. Nothing must pass unseen, unheard. The pen itself plumbs a poet’s energy. It is a rod to touch the wire between brain and word. The electric flash it makes is the first spark of a poem. Maybe the act of writing the journal sends a message home to the heart and out to the stars – like my father’s Morse code crossing oceans – field to house, journal to Moleskine, and on to the thrill of a poem’s first line, its first draft. The touch of pen on paper. But here is a contradiction. I write this on a laptop computer. I look up and see miles of hill country – as I do every morning – look down, and write. A poem is physical. I often first half-dream a poem and fall asleep hoping I’ll remember it. Then, only the pen can remember. Today, walking back from the fields, the dreamed ideas returned. Had a poem been brewing, I could not have begun without a pen. But this is not the hot spark of a poem, this is prose, the fast-flowing water of the mind. This goes smoother, quicker, more like speech, like breathing, or walking, less like the poem’s first wordless sounding of the deep, or a stone thrown into space. The poem, like drawing, needs the pen to see what words will do. It begins as an abstract thing, a body-and-mind sensation, like a not-quite-grasped concept in physics, mathematics, or faith. It is literally ‘at the back of the mind’, as if, could you turn quickly enough, you would catch it. Prose is like speech, and the speed of its flow goes faster on the computer. I write this to order thought. To write poem or prose I need weather and sky. I look up, observe, think. Prose runs as fast as thought. Prose is the hare racing the wind. The poem is the hare that halts on the lawn.
‘TRAMP. NOTHING IS UNTIL IT HAS A WORD’
I want to begin with the word ‘nothing’, but something won’t go away. I am eleven years old. I pedal up Plymouth Road, Penarth, on a summer Saturday morning. My daps are a dazzle of Blanco dried in the sun on the kitchen step. Mown grass, the powdery smell of blancoed daps, warm tar of the road. The spin of bicycle wheels. It feels like freedom.
I pick up shopping for my mother from the grocer, drop my bike outside the library, shoulder a bag of books and step into the shadow of the porch. The library is my Aladdin’s cave, my Secret Garden, my Treasure Island. I’m bringing six books back, and I’ll take six away. I feel excited. There’s a book I specially want and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. The library is a world of books, and every book is a world. Although it’s a public library, it’s my private place.
We had books at home: children’s books that were birthday or Christmas presents, A.A. Milne, Walter de la Mare, Arthur Ransome, Lewis Carroll; the William books, and Enid Blyton; Palgrave’s Golden Treasury; Grimm’s Fairy Tales; Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia; a brown and gold set of hardback Charles Dickens, the Brontës, and books my father loved like Moby Dick, Jack London’s Call of the Wild and White Fang. I read them all, over and over. Mostly, we used the library. No house could ever have satisfied my desire for books, or provided me with the frisson of finding for myself slightly risqué romances, like Ethel M. Dell, and E.M. Hull’s The Sheik, hiding on the shady shelves of the library, and books whose titles and authors I forget, but whose pages, people and atmospheres I still inhabit, as they inhabit me. Sometimes, 14I feel I’m stepping suddenly into a remembered room, with an open piano, maybe, a chair, a view, a familiar ambiance, or rowing over water to an island, or walking a path to the sea. Someone is with me, ahead or following. Who? Did I live that memory? Is it real? Or did I read it in a book?
In the first two minutes I’ve used three words that are on their way to nothing. Daps. Blanco. Grocer. Dying words. A word needs a meaning to pass between speaker and listener, writer and reader, or it’ll come to nothing. Sheenagh Pugh’s ‘Elegy for the Dead Words’ is written in the voice of an old teacher forced to emigrate, one future day, along with all Earth’s inhabitants, to a neighbouring planet. The poem laments the loss of words for all the things left behind. After a lovely litany of favourite words, the poem concludes: ‘Things that are dead we keep with words, but when the words die themselves; oh then they’re dead, and dead indeed’.
Dead words still have a ring about them when they leave common speech. They hold history, words no longer used or needed, words whose objects and purpose are gone, flicker and die, unheard, unread. ‘Daps’ (as we say in Wales) have become ‘trainers’, and I think the ‘Blanco’ with which we whitened them, before putting them on the step to dry in the sun, has gone too. Such words slip painlessly into silence, leaving our tongues long before they leave our memory, to be lost in word-history.
While tutoring poetry I often illustrate my sermon against latinates with this example: ‘I was proceeding along the highway when I perceived two persons’, seventeen syllables which I imagine spoken by a policeman bearing witness in court to impress the judge and jury. Translated into words a poet might speak cuts it to ten syllables: ‘I walked down the road and I saw two men’.
Gone the pompous ‘proceeded’, ‘highway’, ‘perceived’, ‘persons’, replaced by ‘walked’, ‘road’, ‘saw’, ‘men’. Even children 15guess the fictional speaker correctly, they know the difference between plain truth and elaboration. Compare the poetry of the authorised King James translation of the Bible with the prosaic literalism of the New English version.
Now words face a new danger: the Word Police, busy ‘correcting’ the language in an effort to control our thoughts and attitudes. They mean well, they don’t set out to lie or to silence poetry, but it is happening. As a poet I know that when our simple Anglo-Saxon words, whose sound and meaning speak plainly, are replaced by multisyllabic latinates, the intention and effect are to hide, to forget. The phrase ‘collateral damage’, denying the murder of innocent civilians in the Second World War, and again during the Gulf War of 1991, is an example. When those in control speak words no one trusts, truth dies, replaced by the rattle of latinate lies.
For those obsessed with ‘political correctness’ the blind and the deaf become ‘visually’ or ‘aurally impaired’. I wear hearing aids, my magic microphones. I am a bit deaf, not aurally impaired. Rightly banished are inaccurate, insulting words describing people with physical or mental conditions, words like ‘cripple’ and ‘lunatic’, scientifically incorrect, born of bigotry. Good riddance to them.
But this morning, doing the Guardian crossword set by ‘Tramp’ has me musing on good lost words, those we still need to tell our story, now endangered by the Word Police. I consider these things because I have suffered my first-ever act of censorship, and it is painful. My hurt is caused by the cutting of a word. The sentence where my word appears, and the man it describes, is heard in my voice-over for a short film, one of a series called ‘Revealing Wales’ made for the Royal Society of Architects in Wales.
I first wrote my piece as an essay commissioned by the RSAW, and it was published without fuss in 2016 as my preface to the book on Cardiff Civic Centre by John Hilling. 16It was well received by the author, the RSAW, and the publisher, the University of Wales Press. The film-makers invited me to record the essay as a voice-over for their film on Cardiff Civic Centre, a harmonious arrangement of fine white buildings along two wide, tree-lined avenues among parkland, a place I have known and loved all my life, especially as an undergraduate at the University.
I recorded the piece. The film was made. It is beautiful. Then down the line from someone titled Head of Content – a perfect example of pompous latinate language – at the Royal Institute of British Architects’ head office in London came the diktat: delete one word or we ban the film. My word was blue-pencilled – RIBA head office wields financial power over the RSAW.
I am careful with my words. They are my tools, my art, my truth, the stuff of the profession in which I am trusted: I see the cut as a dangerous intrusion into free speech, freedom of thought, word choice, and the long story of literature in which I play my small part. The offending word, the good, true word, for which there is no substitute, is in the opening paragraph, in which I list people I remember, people with whom I spoke, with whom I had shared the beauty of trees and lawns and white stone buildings. One was: ‘The tramp asleep on a bench in the park’.
‘Tramp’ offended the Head of Content at the RIBA. My tramp is a real, remembered person, the only individual mentioned in the list of those I recall in the Civic Centre’s parks and gardens. He is there for his own sake. Reading English in the University, I passed him as I walked through the park to lectures. ‘Morning,’ we’d say, with a nod and a smile. I once shared my sandwiches with him. Another time he said: ‘Been tramping west for the turnips. Nice to be back in Cardiff.’17
He was a man with ‘time to stand and stare’,1 and his example taught me to do so too. Tramping was his chosen way of life. He was not a walker, a traveller, a vagrant, a rough sleeper, nor any other inaccurate term or euphemism. He was a tramp, but my use of this simple, honest, single-syllable word was banned by the London office of the RIBA. Unless the word were cut from my voice-over, London would withdraw the money, and Wales and the RSAW would lose the film. It is an illiterate, urban judgment. Yet I think of great architecture as a kind of truth, as ‘poetry in stone’, just as poetry is truth in word-music. Both arts should despise passing fashion and ‘political correctness’, and speak plain truth.
Tramp. No word comes to mind without bringing its ambiance, association, story. My word has no fitting synonym. It is a word still understood by all those to whom I tell this sorry story. It belongs to a time and a place when men such as my tramp travelled the roads, to be welcomed as seasonal workers on farms, to be offered a meal and space to sleep in a barn or a hayloft, as welcome as the troubadours with their songs in medieval times. Tramp, the verb, and tramp, the noun, name a way of life and the man who lived it.
In 2017 I took part in a festival of Celtic music and poetry in Glasgow, organised by Celtic Connections. The festival theme was ‘Stand and Stare’, quoted from W.H. Davies’s poem, ‘Leisure’, set as a beautiful song, and movingly performed:
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare? –
No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:
18No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
W.H. Davies identified himself as a tramp. I have an ancestor who sometimes tramped with the poet. My husband’s great-uncle tramped between Ceredigion and South Wales for work. Here in Ceredigion, I used to see a tramp on a bicycle, all his earthly goods hanging from its frame, who sheltered close by in an empty thatch-roofed cottage when passing through. He was a crwydryn, a tramp; if he stayed in one place too long he got itchy feet. He loved to crwydro Wales, working where he could. Such men were valuable seasonal labourers.
One day, when I was young and lived at home in Penarth, a few miles from Cardiff, I waved to a man walking out of our drive into the lane called Tower Hill. He had been doing some gardening for us. Later that evening my mother sent me to fetch apples from the loft over the garage. There, beside the rows of fruit laid down to store for winter, I found a dinner plate licked clean on the floor beside an old mattress. I told my father. ‘Sh!’ he said. ‘Don’t tell your mother!’ A tramp had eaten and slept well that night, and I was happy. 19
Here, in Ceredigion, as well as in the city where I used to live, ‘tramp’ is a good word, used and understood along with its Welsh form, crwydryn, crwydro. A friend, a farmer’s daughter, hearing my complaint, responded with warmth: ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I remember tramps coming regularly to the farm to ask for work. My father was glad of them, and they got a meal and a night’s shelter and some cash.’
To kill a word is to kill truth, as writers have always known. To censor the tramp and his story is to pretend that he never existed. But he’ll be back. He will not be cleansed from history, from his place in the sun, napping on a bench in the park, or pausing to stand and stare. W.H. Davies identified himself as a tramp. What’s next for the word-killers? Will they burn all copies of his Autobiography of a Super-Tramp?
Children love words, the sound and taste, the tune and the mystery. They love tonguing the word, trying it out loud in mispronunciation, in rhyme, nonsense and naughtiness, those words they hear the grown-ups use. Early readers mispronounce the words they meet for the first time on a page: ‘izland’ and ‘Percy-phone in the Underworld’ were among my mistakes. Even in my A-level English class I was caught out by ‘mis-led’. ‘Mizled’, I read aloud, with a long ‘i’. They laughed at me, but added to the humiliation was my grief for the verb ‘to mizle’, which held more deceit, more spin than ‘misled’. It half-rhymes with weasel. I grieve for it still. I feel ‘mizled’ by the weasel words of our politicians rather than simply ‘mis-led’.
Nursery rhymes are the first poetry. They have everything necessary to qualify as great poems. They stay in the memory. They have rhythm and rhyme, mystery, strangeness, and a thrilling vocabulary a four-year-old doesn’t understand. Words like janitor, and sentinel. As in, ‘I’m in love with the janitor’s boy and he’s in love with me’, or ‘There was an old woman who lived in a wood – and an owl at the door as sentinel stood’. 20Later, when I became a mother, my elderly Auntie Phyllis came to stay. My three young children ran about the house giggling and chanting ‘Phyllis is a billis’. She expressed delight at their joy in the rhyming game – and I agreed with her. I did not explain that ‘billis’ was the children’s word for a penis. Such assonance and alliteration were the Beano and Dandy school of poetry, fun, pun and rhyme. Pansy Potter the Strong Man’s Daughter and the whole comic crew of alliteratively named characters. It was a good chapter in my and my children’s education, a poet’s apprenticeship, the years between nursery rhymes and Shakespeare. It sang alongside playground games, chanting, nicknames, dipping and spells. If it works, poetry is always a kind of spell. It was the same Aunt, railway clerk from Carmarthen, with little formal education behind her, who fell in love with words herself in her girlhood, reading her way along the public-library shelves, eventually to be stunned by the miracle of Shakespeare. It was she who took me, aged ten, to the old Memorial Theatre in Stratford to see King Lear, and to every subsequent production until I was twenty-two. Because she was ‘hard of hearing’, we sat in the first row of the stalls, close enough to see the sparkle of the actors’ spit in the spotlights. Theatre was bigger, brighter, louder than life. Yet it was a world I knew – of battles of will between father and daughter, of sulks and sisters and family rows – but more so. Books, then, seemed more real than life.
There, in the theatre, where the characters were live people, my whole body listened. I was eavesdropping on the grown-ups, as I did all the time at home. I’d learned to read their white lies, their whispers, their ‘not in front of the child!’ Here, on stage, was an old father showing up his daughter in front of everyone; and a girl too embarrassed, too angry, too sulky to say something just to please him. I knew the scene. The music of the language shaped the game they played with words like ‘nothing’. I had it by heart from that hour:21
My ten-year-old self in the front row felt sorry for both of them, the ‘foolish, fond old man’, the stubborn daughter. I was Cordelia. He was my father. Their words, their voices, have stayed in my mind ever since. Years later, when Sam Wanamaker, editing an anthology to help raise funds to rebuild Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, commissioned me to write a poem, remembering every detail, every word of that night, I wrote ‘Llŷr’, giving Lear the name of the Welsh king who inspired Shakespeare’s character:
‘and there I heard
That nothing is until it has a word.’
With a bit of luck, the right words come from the very stuff of the language around us, in our heads, our ears, enriched by listening and reading, nourished by the voices of poets living and dead. Words, especially the words that drop into your mind or off your pen onto the page as if appearing out of nowhere, are the gift a shared language brings. The English language we speak is full of quotations, whether or not we know it, and the dead poets contributed most of them. No poem written now lacks the echo of all the poems ever heard or read, reverberating in our collective mind. No poem is the only poem. Poetry should come naturally to everyone, the 22fun of word-song, the pleasure of listening and reading, the consolation and humanity of it. Poetry sings in the cadences of common speech, overheard and picked up, a coin found on the pavement. My best eavesdropping moment gave me a little poem called ‘Overheard in County Sligo’. I stole the first two lines, spoken at the Yeats School in Sligo by a local Irish woman to an American academic. She explained how she lost her chance to audition for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Her words were poetry:
I married a man from County Roscommon
And I live in the back of beyond
Truth, in ordinary human language, is poetry. A woman interviewed on radio after an earthquake in South America described the experience: ‘The earth shook its skin like an old horse.’ A bereaved mother declared, after her son died in a sectarian murder in Ireland: ‘Let no mother’s son be killed for my boy. Let’s have an end to all the mourning and the weeping.’
