Preview: Rimbaud and Verlaine in London – Mon 20th May Kings Place

From visiting US Student Bryan Pannill

Drugs, poetry, knives, love; now put in Paul Verlaine; add Arthur Rimbaud; here’s a dash (May – July 1873) of London; and voila: the witch’s brew. What is it they do? Romances sans Paroles—Romances without Words. That’s Verlaine. And for Rimbaud: Une Saison en Enfer — A Season in Hell.

Of course, nothing else could have been expected when the two “poètes maudits” first met in Paris in 1871. Verlaine was 28 years old, volatile, a revolutionary, an alcoholic, and in a disastrous marriage with Mathilde Mauté, when he first received a letter and poems from the 17-year-old Rimbaud.

The teenage poet was raised in Charleville, Ardennes by his mother, his father having left her with four children to pursue his army career. His mother devoted herself militantly to her children’s education. With such schooling, Rimbaud demonstrated very early his poetic genius, earning him Victor Hugo’s epithet “the infant Shakespeare.” Nevertheless, Rimbaud quickly grew to rebel against all conventions, social controls, and his mother’s own epithet, “ordinarily so tranquil.” He made three failed attempts to escape to Paris, both to flee the hometown he hated and to immerse himself in the capital’s literary circles. When Verlaine answered his letter with a train ticket, Rimbaud went.

Rimbaud is the poet who, at sixteen years old in 1871, famously wrote in a letter that “one must be a voyant, make oneself a voyant”—a “seer” in order to accesses a superior experience of reality. He, the poet, does so “through a long, immense and reasoned disorder of all the senses,” becoming through endurance of such suffering “le supreme Savant!” And he, at last, sees “l’inconnu!”—the unknown. Nevermind that he has lost “l’intelligence” of his “visions”—he’s still seen them! Such was Rimbaud’s poetic project; his method was self-induced “ineffable torture” by all forms of love, suffering, and madness.

Yes, one wonders if Verlaine knew what he was getting himself into. If he had, he would probably have called for Rimbaud all the sooner. Rimbaud arrived in Paris, and he quickly out-wore his welcome as Mathilde’s houseguest with such shenanigans as sun-bathing naked, shedding lice on passerby, and raising revolutionary hell with Verlaine in the Parisian streets. For his part, Verlaine drank and violently abused his pregnant wife. The two poets, now lovers, left Paris for London in September 1872.

House of Knives, Poet in the City’s new film with a script by award winning poet David Harsent, vivifies the poets’ stay at 8 Great College Street in London between May and July 1873. In this “saison en enfer,” each in search of “l’inconnu,” they sunk into absinthe, poetry, poverty, passion, and yes, knives. Theirs was, to quote the film, “a love that depends on conflict…and betrayal.”

After a particularly violent quarrel, Verlaine left London for Brussels in July. He claimed he would commit suicide if he failed to reconcile with his wife; she sued for divorce. But instead of death, Verlaine called for Rimbaud again, who came across the Channel. In the next inevitable fight, the fitful Verlaine drew his pistol, and shot Rimbaud in the wrist. Perhaps, instead, he should have given words another try; sans paroles, their romance ended with a bang.

During his ensuing two-year imprisonment at Mons, Verlaine published Romances sans Paroles  and Sagesse, poems inspired by his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Afterwards, he flitted between countries and teaching jobs. After his new love, his student Lucien Letivois, died in 1883, Verlaine descended again into drinking, drugs, poverty, and hospitals. He died in 1896. After reviving his poetry and celebrating its importance, the people of Paris elected him France’s “Prince of Poets” in 1984.

Arthur Rimbaud, after publishing Une Saison en Enfer and Illuminations, gave up writing for good at only twenty years of age. He began the life of a vagabond, drifting across Europe and the Far East, until cancer waylaid him, dying, in Marseilles. He died on November 10, 1881, at 37 years old.

Rimbaud’s and Verlaine’s poetry helped form the foundations of the French Symbolist movement, and they were instrumental in freeing poetry from verse. Culturally, their influence is extensive, inspiring artists from Pablo Picasso to Patti Smith to Jim Morrison. As Bob Dylan sings in “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” “Situations have ended sad / Relationships have all been bad / Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud.”

And today, the poets’ legacy continues in Poet in the City’s upcoming event Rimbaud and Verlaine in London. Join us on Monday, May 20^th for an exclusive premiere of the film House of Knives, as well as live poetry and discussion from award-winning poets Deryn Rees-Jones and UCL’s Tim Mathews.

How to Book:

Rimbaud and Verlaine in London takes place from 6.30pm on Monday 20th May 2013 in Hall One at Kings Place, 90 York Way, London, N1 9AG.

Tickets cost £9.50 from the Kings Place website www.kingsplace.co.uk  or £11.50 via the box office on 020 7520 1490

In search of Paradiso: Dante at Southwark Cathedral

Visiting US student Bryan Pannill on our Dante Alighieri event:

“Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

Dante Alighieri event at Southwark Cathedral

Change “midway” to “about one-fifth,” and “forest” to “city,” and then the first three lines of Dante’s Inferno aptly describe my state at the beginning of this year. I am studying English literature here in London for the semester, having arrived from the U.S. in January. I arrived to the dark and cold of London’s winter. And I arrived a little lost myself, having suffered the gradual disintegration of love. And with love had gone my faith for the world, for myself, for the things I believed in—words and poetry being among them. “The straightforward pathway had been lost,” Like Dante, “I cannot well repeat how there I entered, / So full was I of slumber at the moment / In which I had abandoned the true way.”

On Thursday’s spring evening in Southwark Cathedral with Poet in the City, I woke up. I woke to the hymns of the Merbecke Choir, to the wise words of Canon Mark Oakley and Professors John Took of UCL and Robin Kirkpatrick of Cambridge, and, of course, to Dante’s Divina Comedia, its excerpts read in English and Italian by, respectively, Timothy West and Graham Fawcett. The Cathedral was dressed in its amber light, and warm spring was outside, filling the vaulted stone ceiling with halcyon twilight. It made a fitting setting to celebrate the author of Paradiso.

But of course, we began with the Inferno. Took explained how the poet came to compose them. Dante was born in 1265 in Florence, and at only 9 years he met the love and muse of his life, Beatrice—meaning “the one who brings blessings.” Among those blessings for Dante was “the right understanding of love”: not love seeking its own, but love through which the soul rises out of itself, and into the earthly heaven of human communion. Dante explored this theme in his first book of poetry, Vita Nova (The New Life), and, although Beatrice died in 1290, love remained the center of his work. Indeed, in Took’s estimation, “Dante is the world’s greatest love poet”—a bold claim to make in the city of Shakespeare! But the evening would continue to defend it.

In 1302, Dante entered his Inferno with his permanent exile from his beloved Florence. In his loneliness and melancholy, he began to compose The Divine Comedy, published in 1314. It is a masterwork of three volumes, traveling from hell to heaven, and addressing earthly topics such as love, politics, religion, and poetry along the way. Professor Kirkpatrick devoted a few words to each of these. As much as Dante was a poet of love, he was also “the great hater” : his work criticizes the corrupted church and rising proto-capitalism, forces which were warping humanity’s celebration of God’s creation. Florence means “flourish,” but Dante hated how its new capitalism was turning its community into a wasteland of self-directed people. People who, to quote Oakley, “end up like Satan, thinking we are the center of the world, and frozen.” For Dante, our communities are the heart of ourselves; following Aristotle, he believed the lone individual is no individual at all. So we can begin to imagine the kind of hell that Dante’s lonely exile was for the poet. And depending on our own experiences, perhaps not as exiles but as “ex-pats” in this globalizing world, for example, our imaginative empathy becomes sympathy. Indeed, the Divine Comedy gives an account of the next life, and of a world 700 years gone, but it remains, as Took noted, a “traveling companion” for this one.

Out of this Inferno, the “pilgrim poet,” as Oakley calls him, rises through Purgatorio. This pilgrimage, this learning and unlearning, this dance with doubt, is faith itself, Oakley reflected. And poetry—the force that counters the reductionist, scientific literalism we may find convenient for eliminating our struggle by eliminating the mystery — “poetry is a vital word of faith.”

“But let dead Poesy here rise again,” Dante writes at the opening of Purgatorio, “O holy Muses, since that I am yours.” Dante surrenders himself to his Muse. And poetry, “the little vessel of my genius[,] now / … leaves behind itself a sea so cruel.” And it is through his poetry that “the human spirit doth purge itself, / And to ascend to heaven becometh worthy.” Poetry is the pilgrimage, and through surrender to it, the poet takes his first step towards Paradiso.

And to enter Paradiso, he surrenders himself to love, to caritas. So it is through poetry, Dante might say, that we arrive at human love and community and fulfillment—a paradise of people, of friends. And here we find the true power of Thursday evening, of that springtime celebration of poetry in a cathedral. Dante—with a little help from Poet in the City—had gathered over three hundred people together.

We were the “spectrum of difference” Dante loved: we hailed from London, from Europe, from across the world; and we wore sneakers, or suits, or, in the case of one man whose fashion I complimented, a sweater with sail-boats his mother picked out. And as we silently listened to the poet’s reverberating verse, and to the hymns of the choir, we found ourselves lifted out of ourselves, and rising towards the vaults of the cathedral’s ceiling, awash with amber evening light. During one hymn, we could hear the London Overground pass by outside. I watched as golden, glittering sunlight, reflected off the train’s no-doubt smudgy windows, trailed along the cathedral’s upper arcades.

And then we return again to ourselves, enlightened. The light and the song remains with us, as do the questions which Dante, through Canon Mark Oakley, sets for us. What do we make of ourselves? What do people become in our presence? And we ask not what will be done to us in an after life, but what to do with this life that is our present—in all meanings of the word. “Judgment is now,” said Oakley. He ended urging us to “practice Dante in your life: say ‘I love you’ to someone. That is the first glimpse of light into our hearts, and the first way of celebrating Dante. But if you’re English, you might need a glass or two first.”

~ Bryan Pannill

Scotellaro’s Call

While much beloved in his home town of Tricarico in the south of Italy, Rocco Scotellaro is still very much unknown to English speaking audiences, which is why I feel particularly strongly about this week’s upcoming launch of a new translation of his poetry.

Portrait of Rocco Scotellaro by Carlo Levi

Rocco Scotellaro was born in 1923 to a poor family from Lucania, an impoverished rural region in the south of Italy. The war and the death of his father forced him to leave his studies in Rome, and he returned to his home town of Tricarico, becoming the town’s mayor at the age of only 23. Scotellaro was highly familiar with the poverty faced by the rural farming community, and became actively involved in the struggle for land reform. This brought him into conflict with the landowners who had him imprisoned for corruption; however, the charges were spurious and Scotellaro was acquitted after two months. Although this experience left him disillusioned with politics, he never abandoned his commitment to the local community, and his poems confront the struggle of the poor farmers and express his love of the region.

Your Call Keeps Us Awake is a collection of 53 poems by Scotellaro, translated into English by Caroline Maldonado and Allen Prowle – many of which have been translated into English for the first time. The title is taken from a line of one of Scotellaro’s poems, “Despairing cuckoo, your call keeps us awake”. As Allen Prowle explains, “we chose it because it summed up for us what his poetry continues to do, sixty years after his death: it alerts us to the intolerable inequalities and divisions that exist in the world, but also celebrates the warmth and regenerative power of friendship and loyalty.”

The collection demonstrated the variety of Scotellaro’s poetry, from neo-realistic poems that address the difficulties of rural life, to poems that express his love for Lucania, and those that explore the cultural identity of the south. However, their relevance reaches far beyond the community in which Scotellaro lived and wrote. Allen Prowle writes:

“Scotellaro was born and lived in an impoverished part of southern Italy, far from any centre of political or cultural power. The lyrical power of his work, however, transcends place and indeed time, continuing to move and inspire long after the immediate post-war years in which he wrote.”

With readings in Italian and English, and an introductory talk by Modern Poetry in Translation‘s David Constantine, this Thursday’s book launch will give voice to a poet whose work deserves to be heard among a wider audience.

The event is taking place at Waterstones Piccadilly on Thursday 21st February 2013 at 6.30pm. Tickets cost £5 (£3 concessions) and can be purchased in person from Waterstones bookshop in Piccadilly or by telephoning Waterstones on 020 7851 2419 or emailing events@piccadilly.waterstones.co.uk.

Health Drop-In

I know its been a while since Poet in the City last posted one of these, but since I’m back and it’s a new year let’s start as we mean to go on.

Anyway, those of you who survived the drop-in on Tuesday 5^th at Waterstone’s Piccadilly would’ve undoubtedly been infected by poetryitis, an age old disease which causes its  victims to speak in verse and to think in metaphor. Authorities state that there was a hundred percent infection rate upon attendees.

As you may have guessed the theme was on health; a preview to our Poetry and Medicine event being held on Monday 4^th March at Kings Place, York Way. As usual, now follows a list of poems and poets read. If I have made any omissions or mistakes please feel free to scold me in the comments box below. Our next drop-in is on The Old Ways at our regular venue in Waterstones Piccadilly. Thank you  for the verse.

First Half

David Morley – The Gift

Lord Byron – She Walks in Beauty

Mary Oliver – University Hospital Boston

Wilfred Owen – Disabled

Ted Hughes – War

Mario Petrucci (Host) – One Flesh

Kate B. Hal (pia) – Dorothy’s Doctor

Murial Rukeyser – Yes

T.S. Elliot – East Coker (excerpt)

Racker Donnelly  (pia) – The Good Old Haze

David Neutra (pia)  - Tbiz Prayer

Eddie Ford (pia) – Waiting at the Doctors

Mark Price (pia) – The Stamp of One Effect

Lizzie Hausley (pia) – Speech Theraphy

Thom Gunn – Still Life

Louise Warren (pia) – Cell Death

John Updike – Colonoscopy

Second Part

Galway Kinnell – St Francis And The Sow

Mario Petrucci (host) – India

Roy Fisher – As He Came Near Death

Walt Whitman – The Wound Dresser

Mario Petrucci (host)- The Word to Which

John Gibbens (pia) – In Praise of Sleep

In Praise of Pluto

Jennifer Johnson (pia) – Between TheWords

Adrian Braugh (pia) – Are You All Right

Les Murray – Hearing Impairement

Richard Lee (pia) – Carcinoma

Eve Jackson (pia) – Women In Winter

Steve Rushton (pia) – I Wake Up This Morning

Samuel Becket – Letter 1957

Mark Price (pia) – Sleeping Sickness

Kate B. Hall (pia) – Mind Ornithologist

Phillip Larkin – The Building

Racker Donnelly (pia) – The Plague

John Donne- Death Be Not Proud

Richard Lee – Notes From A Cockroach Hospital

Polly Clark – Chaingo Massage

*pia – poets in attendance

From our Correspondent at the Poetry Parnassus

Over the past week I found myself in the bowels of the Royal Festival Hall listening to a discussion on death, and up at the heights of the roof garden listening to the scenes of a Latvian countryside.  I was a witness to the extraordinary sight of 100,000 poems falling from the sky, and risked my life watching a spoken word event in a skate park. From intimate readings to large gatherings I immersed myself in poetry.

But no matter how much I enjoyed these events it was the closeness and solidarity felt by being so close amongst the world’s poets. I frequently found myself critiquing an event with a member of the audience only to watch them read in the next event.  I found myself in heated discussions in subjects such as prose poetry with a well-known formalist and an avant-garde poet.

Seeing myself as a member of Poet in the City I was struck by all the poets I recognised and knew from past Pinc events. Not only the UK envoy Jo Shapcott , there were familiar faces such as: Imitiaz Dharker (Pakistan), Ellisa Biagnini (Italy), Nikola Mdzirov  (Macedonia), Seamus Heaney (Ireland) and many more.

On the Sunday leaving the Southbank with a bag full of poetry and head full of names, I left with the conclusion that there is a world of poetry beyond this city of ours and Poet In The City’s continuing mission to bring domestic and international, living and dead poets, to the attention of new audiences is as noble as ever. With organisations like Modern Poetry in Translation, and Carcanet, it is PinC’s shared role to maintain the spirit of Parnassus long after the poets arrive home and the London Olympics have come to an end.

A poetry event fit for Olympians

Poet in the City volunteer John Whiting on an evening of Olympic-inspired event Poetry & Sport at Kings Place hosted by Clare Balding and featuring poetry read by past Olympic medallists. 

Jayshree Viswanathan, PinC event manager introduced the participants noting that only Poet in the City could organise and event on the evening of an England World Cup football match. Unfortunately one of the stars the American track & field athlete Edwin Moses was unable to attend.

For those that attended it was a treat of an evening. The evening started and the discussion and poetry was punctuated with some exciting ‘sport-inspired’ music from Denys Baptiste and his jazz quartet. Clare Balding talked of the importance of the Olympic legacy quoting from Tennyson’s Ulysses (…To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.) words chosen to be carved, with others, on the Olympic wall. In introducing Tanni Grey Thompson she noted that in addition to winning gold medals she had set more than 30 world records and that she was now a Baroness and involved in House of Lords committees.

Tanni replied that she was an independent cross bench peer (working with a lot of old men) and that like training for sport most of it was boring but necessary to get to the good things. With Clare she discussed recent changes in attitude to Paralympic sports and that she and Chris Holmes were charged with the legacies side of Paralympics sports.

Tanni read three poems that had meant something to her:

Dignified by Sean Old Soldier’Brien;

The Present by Michael Donaghy; and

Talent by Carol Ann Duffy

Clare Balding introduced William Sieghart who was the inspiration behind the new compilation Winning Words which was launched that day and that many of the poems read were to be taken from the book William read Rudyard Kipling’s If – and following Romanian fencing medalist Laura Badea’s reading of three poems in Romanian he read an English translation of them. These were:

Running Girl by Gellu Naum;

A-Riding at Daybreak; and

A Lesson in Flight both by Nichita Stanescu.

Clare then introduced and interviewed Chris Holmes another prolific gold medallist, this time in swimming. Chris now works as Director of Paralympic Integration. Despite losing his sight suddenly at age 14 he considered that life has been a charmed journey for him. He had had 17 years of competitive swimming and the lessons he had learnt on the way helped him do his job today. He felt that poetry had parallels with sport in that it opened up that moment in which you learn about yourself.

He recited Happy the Man by John Dryden (…what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.) then told a story of his visit to one school where some pupils had thought he was Chris Hoy. One boy shouting out: “Oi mister. Where does your dog go when you are on your bike?” His dog was well behaved during the event but showed his dislike of Denys Baptiste’s saxophone.

The evening finished with William Sieghart reading:

What if this Road by Sheenagh Pugh;

High Flight (An Airman’s Ecstasy) by John Gillespie Magee;

Thinking by Walter D. Wintle; and

Invictus by William E. Henley.

John Donne: Poetry in the Cathedral

Queue outside St. Paul’s for the John Donne event

Watching St. Paul’s cathedral fill up with an estimated one thousand five hundred people for John Donne was a very special moment indeed!

Last night was Poet in the City’s biggest event to date, and it couldn’t have been in a more spectacular surrounding than under the dome of St. Paul’s cathedral, in the presence of John Donne’s effigy: the only item to survive the great fire of London in 1666.

With beautiful readings of John Donne’s poetry and sermons by actors Rosalie Jorda and Tom Deveson; illuminating talks from poet Jo Shapcott, Canon Treasurer Mark Oakley, and professors Peter McCullough and Mary Morrissey; and Benjamin Britten’s settings of Donne’s sonnets performed by world-class singer and Director of Music at St. Paul’s, Andrew Carwood, we were truly immersed into the life and work of this great poet.

In all of their talks, the speakers refuted the clear division that is often made between ‘Jack Donne’, young author of erotic and sensual poetry, and ‘Dr. Donne’, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral and writer of sermons and spiritual poems. In both his earlier and later writings you encounter the same fierce intellect and passion for language. Mark Oakley also gave a very honest talk on what John Donne means to him as a fellow clergy member at St. Paul’s, drawing on Donne’s own admissions of the inner conflicts and uncertainties of being a priest, including being easily distracted from prayer: “I neglect God for the buzzing of a fly, for the creaking of a door, for the rattle of a coach in the street”.

The whole evening was made extra special by the setting itself: watching the light gradually change as the sun set outside, in one of London’s most magnificent buildings, and looking up at the spectacular dome.

The writer Arnold Bennet once claimed that poetry could “empty buildings that had been full”. With around 1,500 people turning up to St. Paul’s for a poetry event last night, I think we proved him wrong!