The Morag Morris Poetry Lecture 2008

IAIN SINCLAIR

THE POET JOHN CLARE AND THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

“My heart has left its dwelling-place
And can return no more…”

In 1841 the poet John Clare escaped from an asylum in Epping Forest and set out on an eighty mile journey to his home in Northborough, on foot and alone, searching for his lost love, Mary Joyce – a woman three years dead.

In this year’s Morag Morris Poetry Lecture, acclaimed poet and novelist Iain Sinclair pursues his ongoing obsession with the poet, retracing Clare’s long walk away from madness, engaging with a ghost whose once forgotten voice has become a strange and vital presence in contemporary culture.

Iain Sinclair

Iain Sinclair has lived in (and written about) Hackney, East London, since 1969. His novels include Downriver (Winner of the James Tait Black Prize and the Encore Prize for the Year’s Best Second Novel), Radon Daughters, Landor’s Tower and Dining on Stones (which was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize). Non-fiction books, exploring the myth and matter of London, include Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital and Edge of the Orison. In the 90s, Iain wrote and presented a number of films for BBC’s Late Show and has, subsequently, co-directed with Chris Petit four documentaries for Channel 4; one of which, Asylum, won the short film prize at the Montreal Festival.

Extract from Edge of the Orison

It is a sleeping country, unpeopled and overlit. The sky cloudless. Horizon soft as milk in a contact lens. We wade, knuckling irritated eyes, through golden cereal fields, missing the familiar sound of the road. This is the conclusion, so we hope, of a walk from Epping Forest to Glinton (once of Northamptonshire, then Huntingdon, now Peterborough). Fifteen or so miles, a literal last leg, after three days shadowing the A1, the Great North Road, dawn to dusk and beyond: in the traces of the mad poet John Clare.  

The Morag Morris Poetry Lecture 2009

J.H. PRYNNE

UNDERTONES OF WAR: THE POETRY OF EDMUND BLUNDEN

“We must go over the ground again …”

In this year’s Morag Morris Poetry Lecture, the poet J.H. Prynne considers the special order of challenge in writing memoirs such as Undertones of War (1928), the war-poet Edmund Blunden’s account of his harrowing, self-imposed return to the scene of conflict; to remember, to go back over the same ground. Noting that aroused commentary and response to warlike operations is a strong current concern of poets nowadays, Prynne traces this modern form of writing backward, to the Civil War writings of Walt Whitman.

J.H. Prynne

J.H. Prynne is Britain’s leading late Modernist poet. His austere, playful poetry challenges our sense of the world, not by any direct address to the reader but by showing everything in a different light, enacting slips and changes of meaning through shifting language. His collected Poems, thirty years in the making, was first published in 1999 and immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry.

“Shadow Songs” – from The White Stones (1969)

1

The glorious dead, walking
barefoot on the earth.
Treat them with all you
have: on the black marble
and let Nightingale come
down from the hills.
Only the procession is halted
as this spills down into
the current of the river:
their glorious death, if
such on earth were found.

2

And if the dead know this,
coming down into the dark, why should
they be stopped? We are too gentle
for the blind to see or be heard.
All the force of the spirit lies open
in the day, praise in the clock face
or age: the years, with their most
lovely harm. Leading the gentle
out into the wilds, you know they
are children, the blind ones, and
the dead know this, too.

The Morag Morris Poetry Lecture 2010

MICHAEL HOROVITZ

SPIRITUAL PARTNERS: MEMORIES OF ALLEN GINSBERG

On Friday 11 June 1965 the International Poetry Incarnation took place in London’s Royal Albert Hall. The event proved to be a landmark in the history of modern poetry. Booked for £450, and put together by a spontaneous Poets’ Cooperative in just over one week, the First International Poetry Incarnation attracted an estimated audience of 7,500 plus, the biggest recorded attendance for a poetry event in Britain in living memory.

This unprecedented confluence confirmed what had been developing underground over the previous six years or so by providing more public proff of the adventurous communications of the US Beat poets, the UK jazz, protest and experimental bards and continuing continental European energies with each other, and with vibrantly involved audiences. The event marked a climax to the poet Allen Ginsberg’s high-profile activities in Britain that June, and was also the evening which coordinated the emergence of the UK’s own counterculture.

In this year’s Morag Morris Poetry Lecture, Michael Horovitz, a poet who played a leading part in that happening, and documented the run-up to it as well as its wide-ranging consequences in his 1969 Penguin anthology Children of Albion, is coming to share his “recollections of and extrapolations from Allen’s life’s works.”

Michael Horovitz

Michael Horovitz is an English poet, artist, singer-musician and translator. Initially associated with the British Poetry Revival, Horovitz founded the New Departures anthologies while still an Oxford undergraduate, publishing William Burroughs, Stevie Smith and Samuel Beckett. His books include The POT! (Poetry Olympics 2005) Anthology which revisits the 1965 megagig, The Wolverhampton Wanderer (1971), and Growing Up: Selected Poems and Pictures (1979), Midsummer Morning Jog Log (1986, illustrated by Peter Blake), Wordsounds & Sightlines (1994 and 2001, cover by David Hockney), and A New Waste Land: Timeship Earth at Nillenium (2007). He has run the supranational Poetry Olympics at numerous venues including the Albert Hall and Westminster Abbey and elsewhere the world over since 1980. Horovitz is, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Christopher Logue, Tom Pickard and Joyce Johnson, one of the last living links to the Beat poets and their milieu.

The Morag Morris Poetry Lecture 2011

ROD MENGHAM

TWO AUTUMNS: REVISING MACNEICE

This lecture will focus on a reading of Louis MacNeice’s two long poems, Autumn Journal (1938) and Autumn Sequel (1953). The second can be seen as revising the first, but the first has a process of revision built into it. The “occasional” nature of the poet’s response to historical events and circumstances means that the overall design of the text is subject to constant adjustments, and the attempt to grasp the pattern in events turns into an experience of seemingly endless reorientations. The two poems cope with this challenge in related, but different ways. MacNeice can be shown devising subtly, but also decisively, different poetics in response to the unique historical contexts of these two acts of composition; the first in 1938, a time of the end of political hopes with the death of the Spanish Republic and the shame of Munich; the second in 1953, with the symbolic renewal of the coronation but also the death of Dylan Thomas, and with his death the symbolic end of a certain kind of poetry, occasioning a review of the nature and extent of its powers.

Rod Mengham

Rod Mengham is Reader in Modern English Literature at the University of Cambridge, where he is also Curator of Works of Art at Jesus College. He has written books on Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, Thomas Hardy and Henry Green, as well as The Descent of Language (1993) and numerous essays on modern poetry, art and fiction. He is also editor of the Equipage series of poetry pamphlets and co-editor and co-translator of Altered State: the New Polish Poetry (Arc Publications, 2003) and co-editor of Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (Salt 2005). He has curated numerous exhibitions, most recently, Jake and Dinos Chapman, In the Realm of the Senseless (Rondo Sztuki, Katowice: 2010-11). His own poems have been published under the titles Unsung: New and Selected Poems (Folio/Salt 1996; Second Edition 2001) and Parleys and Skirmishes with photographs by Marc Atkins (Ars Cameralis 2007).