Here are some more presentations which might help with revision:
Thursday 27 March 2014
Friday 21 March 2014
Dancing at Lughnasa
Here is the film version. it should carry a Government Health Warning as it does not follow the chronology of the play or keep the setting as claustrophobic. You might expect this as the literature is translated as entertainment. However, some of the scenes might paint a picture for you - especially the sisters' dance, which in the film is not until the end (about 1hr 14 mins in)
Tuesday 18 March 2014
An Interview with Dannie Abse - Welsh Retrospective
Almost two decades ago, I met Dannie Abse at a small recording studio in Battersea. He had agreed to be filmed by the English and Media Centre, the publishers of emagazine, for a video publication called The Poetry Pack. His video readings (some of which are also now viewable for free on The Poetry Station), were rich and resonant and highlighted the way in which, for Abse, the sound of the poetry is of great significance; the poem on the page needs to be heard aloud.
Now I am interviewing him for emagazine and, as he greets me at the door of his home in Golders Green, London, I am reminded of his spoken voice, the warmth and rhythms of which can be heard in his poems. At 90, with many collections of poetry and prose works to his name and a new anthology, Speak Old Parrot, just out, he remains one of the most active and important figures in the contemporary British poetry scene. I’m interviewing him about Welsh Retrospective, a collection set for WJEC, alongside the poems of Philip Larkin.
BB: What would you like A Level students to have in
mind when they’re studying your poetry?
DA: I think A Level readers are like any others. I would love
them to pay a great deal of attention and inhabit the poems, re-write them, as
it were, as they go along. I would like them to follow what I am saying, look
out for double meanings and go into each poem sober and come out feeling a
little bit drunk!
BB: Welsh Retrospective focuses strongly on your
poems about Wales and the title alone suggests a strong connection with a Welsh
tradition. Is that tradition important to you?
DA: I’ve said in the past that I feel that, with my Welsh and
Jewish background, I belong to two traditions of poetry, David in the Bible, who
played the harp, and Dafydd ap Gwilym, a fourteenth-century Welsh poet writing
at the same time as Chaucer, who also played the harp. Dafydd is so significant
that he should really be just as well known as Chaucer. Some people think that
the Welsh tradition of poetry is just about the subject matter but it’s also
about the language. People talk about the Welsh language washing down into the
English way of speaking.
Dafydd ap Gwilym invented certain forms of rhyming and I’m
also a poet who uses a lot of internal rhyming. I experiment with rhyme and knit
a poem together, musically. Sometimes when I have given poetry readings and
there are questions afterwards, I am asked, ‘Why don’t you rhyme?’ I take that
as a great compliment. They haven’t noticed that I’m writing them!
BB: Some critics have said that, although the
collection is about Wales, the poems are really much more about you and your
identity and that the poetry is rather like autobiography in verse form. What do
you think about that?
DA: There are autobiographical elements certainly. But some
people write autobiographically when they’re at their most impersonal, saying
‘you’ or ‘he’ or ‘she’ instead of ‘I’, and the other way round, so you need to
be aware of that in reading a poet’s work. But one writes out of one’s
experience, true or imagined.
People try to put me into compartments – the Welsh
compartment, the Jewish compartment, the medical compartment, the sports
compartment. It’s easy for critics to do that. I could, of course, bring out a
book of poems all about medical matters, or Jewish matters. In this case, it’s a
Welsh publisher who has asked me to do a book about Welsh matters and I’m
delighted to do that.
BB: What I love about the poetry is that, whatever
the ‘strands’, whatever the ideas or themes, it’s people that come to the
fore.
DA: Well, that’s supposed to be one of the characteristics of
Welsh people, that they’re interested in people. They are curious about their
neighbours and, as Dylan Thomas would have said, you see the curtains twitch
back, as in Under Milk Wood, with people looking at what their neighbours are
doing. Gossip is a great enterprise in Wales. In my poems I gossip about my
relatives, though they might not recognise themselves there. I like to amuse
myself and hope that I amuse other people too, so there’s humour there as well.
We can all sympathetically laugh at our relatives, can’t we?
BB: In some senses, the poems about people work as a
novel would – you introduce your ‘characters’ to the reader.
DA: I’m interested in stories and I’ve written novels. I
think all literature is drama really, with a dramatic impulse, whether it’s
autobiography, or novels or even poetry. I don’t make the distinction between
them.
BB: I’d be interested to hear you talking about the
places that have been important to you and appear in all your poetry
collections, including Welsh Retrospective.
DA: Ogmore-by-Sea and Cardiff are the two places that I’ve
written about most, I guess, especially Ogmore, and I continue to do so. It’s
not that I’ve set out to write about one or the other – it’s that one reacts to
where one’s living and one loves the place, or hates the place, or whatever.
It’s always been interesting to me that Graham Greene actually needed to hate a
place to write about them as the settings for his novels. I don’t hate the
places I write about but they are a strong dimension of the poems.
BB: Ogmore seems more joyful and soaked in childhood,
Cardiff more ambivalent.
DA: But there are some sad things that have happened in
Ogmore as well, and quarrels that I had with my wife. The one where I go
crawling back, using the word ‘crawling’ in both senses. Not only are the waves
crawling back but I’m crawling back towards land and I’m also crawling in the
sense of saying ‘forgive me, kid.’ Going back to Wales is more ambivalent now.
In 2005 we had a car accident and my wife, Joan, was killed, so now going back
is very different from going back when she was alive.
BB: Do you write for yourself, or do you feel that
you need a readership?
DA: In my new book, Speak Old Parrot, I write about the bus
that goes past Ogmore-by-Sea on the coast road and how it goes from Llantwit
Major to Bridgend and back from Bridgend to Llantwit Major. I’ve seen the bus go
by empty both ways. And so I found myself writing a poem about this, as an
allegory about poetry, among other things, about how terrible it must be to have
no passengers, no audience whatsoever, like Manley Hopkins, during his lifetime,
or certain other poets. You need passengers, or at least one passenger.
BB: What about yourself? Do you write for
yourself?
DA: There’s myself as well, and I contain multitudes, as the
poet Walt Whitman said. I have to satisfy myself. If I’m writing a humorous poem
I have to find that I laugh and if I’m writing a sad poem I have to feel sad. I
think feeling is important in poems – they shouldn’t just be cerebral. But by
writing about myself I’m also writing about everybody else as well. When I
mentioned talking humorously about relatives, your eyes lit up because you knew
about that, you thought about your own relatives and have the same universal
feelings. You don’t have to be Welsh and you don’t have to be Jewish to have
relatives!
BB: Do you see yourself more as a poet or a writer of
prose?
DA: No. Inspiration doesn’t come by appointment, so one has
to wait for a poem. It’s easier to write prose, so when I can’t write poetry I
turn to prose. You can work on a poem for such a long time, working on just a
page. You don’t spend four years on a page of a novel but with a poem that’s
possible. One is concerned with language in novels and prose generally but not
in the same way as a poem. I don’t agree with Valèry who said that your poem is
never finished, only abandoned. I do think a poem is finished when you can’t
make it any better, when it’s as good as it can be.
BB: The WJEC exam specification has paired your
collection with Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings. Can you tell me your thoughts
about that?
DA: I knew Philip Larkin. He was a very good chairman on a
committee and humorous and witty but he was stingy. He didn’t like taking girls
out in case he had to pay for them, when he was younger. I do admire his poetry
and I admire the sharpness of his images and his ability to actually feel in his
poems, unlike so many of the other Movement poets. [The Movement was a group of
poets in the 1950s and 60s, which included Larkin, Thom Gunn and Elizabeth
Jennings among others.] We’re quite different in many ways. He was right-wing
and I wasn’t. His father was a Nazi sympathiser and he used to take Philip to
Germany to show him how wonderful it was. So Philip had a hell of a background.
I think he had a curious attitude to me. So in a way it’s ironic that we’ve been
linked together, though I can understand it because we have got certain things
in common, when I look at his poems.
I often like to end poems on an image, or leave them
open-ended, rather than shut tight. Larkin does the same. I like the originality
of an image and I hope that I manage that sometimes. He does too. I think he
talks less about the ephemeral than I do. He looks back less, talks a bit less
about transience.
BB: The importance of place perhaps unites you as
well? And something about the way in which you deal with the commonplace and the
ordinary in poetic terms?
DA: Yes that’s true. One thing about Larkin is that I don’t
think he really understood about the sexuality in his poetry – I don’t think he
fully understood what he wrote. Take a poem like ‘Wedding Wind’. I was once on
the radio and talked about how in primitive societies people didn’t know how
babies came along and they thought the wind was the progenitor, a kind of
wedding wind. The wind is, in fact, the male semen really. I remember people
being very upset about my interpretation and phoning in, not happy about that. I
don’t think Larkin was aware of it himself. And if you think of the ending of
‘The Whitsun Weddings’ as well, I don’t think he was conscious of that either,
which is also true of many readers. That’s fine because a poet shouldn’t
necessarily be conscious of the underlying things – they can come from the
unconscious and remain there.
I think with Larkin, if he feels things he doesn’t want to
show that he’s feeling too much. As far as I’m concerned I’ve always remembered
Browning’s injunction:
Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul
As earth lies bare to heaven above!
Let us be unashamed of soul
As earth lies bare to heaven above!
I believe in a kind of openness – you sort of offer up your
relatives, your marriage, your own thinking, in your poetry.
BB: Is there anything else you’d want to say to A
Level students reading your poetry?
DA: Poets ask questions – they don’t give answers. The point
about reading poetry is to get pleasure out of it. I can’t see any other reason
for reading poetry. You might pick up bits of erudition along the way, as a
result of little things said that matter to you, like little mottos. Maybe with
luck, somebody might take bits from my poems. It’s nice to be useful in a poem –
one of my poems called ‘Epithalamion’ is often read at secular weddings and it’s
very nice to think that other people might be making good use of what I’ve
written.
This article first appeared in emagazine 62, December
2013.
Dannie Abse reading his poems
The first poem, Case History, expresses his identity as a Jew, as a Welshman and as a doctor. It is followed by Car Journeys down the M4, Cousin Sidney and My Neighbour Itzik.
A new edition of Dannie Abse’s selected poems Dannie Abse: New Selected Poems 2009 was published by Hutchinson to mark the 60th anniversary of the publication of his first anthology in 1949.
To hear Abse reading these poems, click below:
http://www.jewishrenaissance.org.uk/dannie-abse.html
Monday 17 March 2014
At Ogmore-by-Sea this August Evening
The 7th of my students' offerings:
At Ogmore-by-sea this August evening is a poem exploring the
ideas of the rhythmic settings of music, show business and a storm. Personally, I believe the poem is a personification of a storm commencing,
expressed through the highs and lows of music but also the sense of magic in
the way that it changes/effects all.
The first stanza begins with the somewhat calmer setting,
where it is compared with the “obstinate violin” showing the flowing/softness
of the notion of the river, which is introduced through the “estuary”. The
“estuary” symbolising the beginning into the journey into the sea, one of which
his father potentially embarked upon (could be a symbol of death). The tone set in this stanza is
atmospherically created through the setting of the evening, where it appears to
be "darker than the darkening evening" the pathetic fallacy used to
create an eary sense to this calming stanza, creating a juxtaposition between
the two. A spiritual sense is introduced with the violin and violinist becoming
"unified" to a sense of completing one another.
The second stanza's tempo becomes more upbeat, the sense of
"such power" creates a build up of an omnipotent spiritual flow
throughout each sentence. The power is influenced in the motif of the music,
where it "summons the night", tying in with the idea of the
"darkening evening". Some would see it as romantic, but looking into
the meanings of the poem, it appears to be more of an elegy to Abses own
father. The notion of moving further
forward is created with the pronoun "prow", but heading into a
"pale familiar" could this be suggesting death again? A pale, being
linked to light and some say when you die you 'go to the light', but this isn't
the end of this metaphoric journey.
The third stanza is silent, in this one the music has
stopped and in the composure of music it could be the scene building up the
suspense for the grand finale. It shows how the "tides in" and
"no foghorns howl", comparing the horn to a dog when it mourning
howl. Our persona, is either here having a spiritual sense to that he can see
his father, maybe it's the memory of being in his £favourite place" and
the silence of this stanza is reflecting on the silence of death and the
afterlife. Abse has a phase of reminiscing about his father, which is somewhat
like Larkin does with his own mother.
The final stanza, is the big finale, where the
"senseless conjuration" is enhanced throughout it- with the
metaphoric use of the verb, the persona continues to "wipe my smile
away", as he witnesses "his steleton stands" as this
"carnival" "spotlight fails", showing the end of the
journey and death. The personified shock of the "lighthouses"
conversation, which is in comparison to "of the tumult the sea",
which is the loud, confused noise especially cause by a large mass of people,
which could also be the sea of souls, that this metaphoric storm has taken with
it.
The Death of Aunt Alice
The 6th of my students' offerings:
Martyrdoms – someone that is willing to die for
a cause
The poem is triggered by the speaker thinking
about “Aunt Alice’s funeral” and then goes on to talk about his peculiar
memories of her and how her funeral didn’t reflect how she lived as it was “orderly”
where as she catastrophised everything, perhaps to make her life more exciting.
Aunt Alice “relished high catastrophe” and made
herself stand out from others, however at her funeral they were all “dressed in
black”, this could suggest that no matter how different we are in life, we all
amount to the same thing – death.
A link to Larkin is ‘For Sidney Bechet’, as this
was a poem devoted to a jazz musician that died and ‘The Death of Aunt Alice’
is devoted to the speaker’s aunt. Despite this similarity, Abse has written his
poem in a much more personal manner, as he described actual memories with her
whereas Larkin was more distant with his emotions. Also, Larkin’s poem ‘Nothing
To Be Said’ links to the theme of death being inevitable, like how it is described
in Abse’s poem. However, the way the inevitability of death is described is
much more light-hearted in Abse’s poem.
Typhoid – infectious bacterial fever
Imitations
The 5th of my students' offerings from group work:
‘Imitations’ by Danny Abse is a 3 stanza poem made up of 6
lines each. The poem has themes of family and change/time. The poem is
basically about the persona looking at his teenage son. He sees himself in his
teenage son and the son sees himself as a duplicate.
The poem is set in a house; this is shown by the quote in
the first stanza which says “In this house, in this afternoon room”. Throughout
the course of the poem, it appears that the seasons alternate between winter
and spring. It’s clear that it is winter during the first stanza because of the
fact that it mentions the “snowflakes whitewash the shed roof and the grass.”
The poem shows the slow progression of age.
Thursday 13 March 2014
Welsh Valley Cinema 1930s
The fourth of my student's commentaries:
Welsh Valley Cinema is about a cinema we
think set in the slums in the 1930’s. Back in the 1930’s we researched that
there was not much entertainment around especially for the working class. Round
about then the TV was being developed so we thought that the only entertaiment
around would be the cinema. The poem is based in Wales so we researched and found
out there was a cinema in Haverford West called ‘The Palace’. We think
that he may be referring to this cinema. The poem is about the cinema being an
escape for the working class, for them to imagine dreams of what they would
love to do, but by the end of the poem the people in the cinema are back to
reality once the performance was over- “sank to disappear, a dream
underground”. The word “thrill” suggests it was an excitement and a big thing
to go to. I imagine working in the mines was not fun, so the cinema was the
place to go.
We think that Welsh Valley Cinema has links
to Larkin's poem Sunny Prestatyn because the girls in the advertisements provide
an escapism for the viewers similar to the cinema. The working class dreams are
shown through a film and the posters portray the stereotypical women that most
men want. This poem is also similar to Essential Beauty because it's about people
who do not really go out to pursue what they want to do –“stare beyond this world, where nothing's made”. They think
that there is nothing outside the working class society that they cannot
achieve when really they can. We thought of Love Songs in Age because
the music is descibed as “musical asthma”, which implies that the music took
his breath away, similar to Love Songs in Age, as the music she has is “much-mentioned brilliance, love”. Meaning
that the songs mean a lot and are hard to put away- “ To pile them back,
to cry,”
A Scene from Married Life
The third of poems studied yesterday:
Links to Larkin Poems
This poem could be linked to ‘Wild Oats’ as Larkin also talks about a relationship.
However it differs from this poem because we are connected with Abse’s poems and because his poem describes a real marriage with a real woman we get a better insight into the relationship.
Vocabulary
Daps- plimsolls (dialect word from West Country and Wales)
Tusker Rock- A rock in the Bristol channel named after a Viking
Psychopomps – Angel-like creatures who have the job of escorting newly deceased souls to where they need to go.
Tusker Rock- A rock in the Bristol channel named after a Viking
Psychopomps – Angel-like creatures who have the job of escorting newly deceased souls to where they need to go.
1) The poem is
set in Ogmore
2) A couple fight
throughout this poem but then, towards the end, they agree to stop arguing but
they are soon fighting afterwards (suggested by “and then…”
3) Abse never
actually states that the persona is fighting – he uses words like “squabble”
and “squirm”. The situation is developed through the use of imagery and
metaphors to add more detail about feelings and the situation as time goes on.
4) The title
suggests that it is about a couple who are at a difficult time in their
marriage. They feel trapped and try to keep control of the situation. The poem
shows what marriage could be like and might act as a warning to those who might
get married.
5) It is
structured into stanzas and ‘stages’ in the argument. The structure reflects
the stages in the fight and the same amount of lines in each stanza might
suggest that it is normal to fight and there is a sense of repetitiveness.
6) Abse uses
metaphors, imagery and is always comparing the situation with other things such
as vengeance of the worm or the Cold War. This shows a use of hyperbole.
Links to Larkin Poems
This poem could be linked to ‘Wild Oats’ as Larkin also talks about a relationship.
However it differs from this poem because we are connected with Abse’s poems and because his poem describes a real marriage with a real woman we get a better insight into the relationship.
Elegy for Dylan Thomas - Abse
The second part of my students' group work:
This poem is about Dylan Thomas’ life and death and Dannie
Abse’s response to this which shows how Abse looks up to him. It shows Thomas’
unhappy marriage and how this could have led to his death through alcoholism.
His marriage could also be shown through the structure of the poem as it is
unorganised and uneven. The rhyme scheme also reflects this as there is no
regular proper pattern to which Abse writes this poem.
Red balloon: Abse
Here is the first of the work done by my AS Students in a lesson yeterday. They worked independently on one Abse poem in paris and threes, discussing and arriving at an understanding of the poem by close analysis of the text and then ended up with a summary of the poem and how it might illumicate their study of the Larkin volume "The Whitsun Weddings"
Red Balloon
Red Balloon
Commentary
This poem is symbolic of Abse’s religion which was Judaism.
Throughout the poem, the religion grows in importance in his day to day life
despite outside interference. Anti-Semitism
was rife across Europe at the time with the rise of Fascism in Nazi Germany at the time,
stereotypical views on Jews turned sour and many people , not just in Nazi
Germany, adopted these views and beliefs. This poem also brings out Abse’s
resilient nature because he sticks with his beliefs and continues to until he
needs help from close family. In regards
to linking this with Larkin, some poems that could be linked with this are :
Faith Healing and water. The obvious link to water is to do with the religious
side of the poem, also Faith healing can be linked because it describes some
women’s persistence in pursuing their beliefs despite popular opinion on the
contrary.
Tuesday 4 March 2014
Blog Links
Now that coursework is completely out of the way and we can embark on exam focus with a vengeance, it's time to get the blogs working for us. I will be asking you to blog about a minimum of 4 Abse poems a week and would like you to read each others' comments as well as your own.
See who can get the most page views. A prize for the most visited blog as we leave for exams!
Here are the links below to all the blogs you have created. Most of them are full of thoughtful and perceptive comments and it is good to see you confidently expressing your interpretations and practising your analytical techniques in these posts. This is very good practice for writing in a fluent and analytical way for the exam.
However, it is very disappointing that a minority of you still have not created a blog despite all the homework I have already set on the Larkin poems and on Abse's background. Please undertake to create a blog and blog about the poems immediately otherwise you will be at a great disadvantage when it comes to revision as your immediate responses to these poems will have faded by then.
All of you now please make sure your blogs about all Larkin poems are up to date - do a few a week or you will have too much to do over the Easter holiday revision period. But have a read of what people have already written and enjoy! By all means, comment on each others posts if you enjoy or agree with a post or be prepared to ask a question or challenge a view (politely). Make this into an interactive resource that you can use to support each other in the run up to exams.
Chelsea http://enlangsimnettc.blogspot.co.uk/
Olivia http://oliviasmithblog.blogspot.co.uk/
Abihttp://enlitnelsona.blogspot.co.uk/
Olivia http://oliviasmithblog.blogspot.co.uk/
Abi
But no blogs yet from Jacob. So please get on with this immediately!
Make sure your blogs are completely up to date with all the Larkin poems we have studied so far.
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