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  #1  
Unread 10-20-2011, 04:23 AM
Tim Murphy Tim Murphy is offline
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Default Anna Adams, 1926-2011

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obit...nna-Adams.html

Here's a superb poem:

Wasp’s Nest

Beneath our lintel hung a papery breast
nippled with penetrating dark that pierced
the layered curtain of the Queen Wasp’s nest.

Out of this summer palace, princelings flew;
some hunted, some had building-work to do;
the population and the palace grew.

They fetched new wood-pulp, added paper ridges,
and, working backwards along selvages,
turbaned the nest in mummy-bandages.

A cabbage with grey leaves, drilled by a worm:
a pendent dome: a tumour on the beam:
a paper brain that hummed with thoughts of home:

the prison-chapel of a pregnant nun
who crouched in prayer, walled up from the sun,
to bear her thousand children one by one.

Her nursery, inverted tree of pods,
has hatched its hundreds, but the Queen still adds
more eggs, possessed by Summer’s dying gods.

The princes’ number dwindles. Still tight-laced
and elegant as ever – isthmus waist
links tiger-bustle to her pigeon-chest –

the venerable Queen within the walls
sits brooding over trays of cradle-cells
where perfect wasps lie dead beneath their seals.

A secret monument to Summer past,
she desiccates in darkness, grey with dust,
killed by the silent treachery of frost.
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  #2  
Unread 12-03-2011, 11:45 AM
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Steve Bucknell Steve Bucknell is offline
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Default Beware Post-Office-Georgian!

Thanks Tim,

I thought Sphereans might like this feisty short essay from Anna which appeared in Pennine Platform (ed. Brian Merrikin Hill) in 1981.

Georgian Forms?

A poet’s use of language should be as precise as possible, and that of a poetry critic should also succeed in saying what it means to mean, or else it demonstrates a lack of capacity for its chosen work: yet there are several critics who use such phrases as “Georgian forms” pejoratively, without convincing me that they know what they are talking about. I think I know what they mean, but my understanding involved some unravelling of Clique Dialect. These critics are usually those that I, as an anarchist, classify as Authoritarian Lefties who, in the name of free verse, insist that rhyme and metre should be forbidden as counter-revolutionary, “elitist” and altogether irrelevant, and that class-conscious howls of pain at human injustice are almost the only permitted forms of expression. This seems to me to be an odd form of liberation, particularly as all verse is, in fact, free, as, once let out of school, no one is compelled to write anything at all, let alone poetry, and the desire to do something difficult, and create an intricate artefact of language, is as entitled to its fulfilment as well as any other impulse to praise or blame, bless or curse, or express our gratitude or ingratitude for life. Poetry is the crown of free speech.

So what are these counter-revolutionary Georgian Forms that are supposed, on pain of death, to be avoided?

The original Georgian Poets were those who were included in the Georgian Anthologies edited by Eddie Marsh, and among them were Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen: all honourable men. The last was probably the best of them, and he wrote, very often, in sonnet form, and his model, in his pre-1914 years of “poet’s tearful fooling”, during which he learnt his trade and prepared his instrument for his task, was Keats. Perhaps Keats was a Georgian because George III was not quite dead in his lifetime, but his model was Shakespeare, who cannot possibly be called a Georgian, however elastic words might become; and the first sonnets were Italian, so they couldn’t have been Georgian either. Sonnet form is simply one of the tools of poetry, and it is the quality of a person’s thought that relates him to his time. Surely Dylan Thomas wasn’t a Georgian, although he too wrote in sonnet form, one of his models being Gerard Manley Hopkins. Is the “Altarwise by Owl Light” sequence Georgian because Thomas lived in the reigns of Georges V and VI ? I would classify him with the Metaphysical Succession, along with Blake, Donne, Yeats and other greats including Hopkins. Does ballad metre make a Georgian of Blake, or a few iambic pentameters make Georgians of us all? Of course not, and nor were the thirties poets Georgian, for all their couplets and villanelles. Poets have always been masters of traditional craft as well as original art, and ideally they add something new to the craft as well as the art.

I understand what is meant by Georgian Architecture, and I know that it was built in the time of the first four Georges and, coincidentally, Jane Austen, to say nothing of Blake, Fuseli, Mary Wollstonecraft, the American and French Revolutions, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Constable and Turner, to name but a few. I also understand what is meant by Post-Office-Georgian Architecture, which was built between the wars in the reigns of George V and George VI, in the time of Bernard Shaw, Baldwin, the Abdication and also Neville Chamberlain, while John Masefield was the seemingly immortal Poet Laureate. Post-Office-Georgian was dignified, bland, inoffensive and apparently traditional building, which disguised any new materials or techniques it may have been using, and thus failed to express the spirit of its time (unless the spirit of its time was humbug). I can accept that there is such a thing as Post-Office-Georgian poetry, and it is possible that John Betjeman writes it, but it is also possible, and more likely, that the mandatory free verse that is completely acceptable today, and even taught in school, is actually the Post-Office-Georgian of our time.

If it were not against my anarchist principles I would like to make a new rule for writers of Eliotese, and it would be that no one should be allowed to write one liberated line unless they had first passed a stiff exam in practical-cat-writing. After all, we are only free not to do something if we are actually capable of doing it, if we need to, and the best case of freedom is the construction of new forms, not the kicking to bits of old ones. Poets should not be book-burners.

Anna Adams. Pennine Platform. April 1981. ISSN 0306-14OX.

Last edited by Steve Bucknell; 12-03-2011 at 11:50 AM.
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  #3  
Unread 12-04-2011, 04:18 AM
Jerome Betts Jerome Betts is offline
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Tim and Steve, thanks for these. What a marvellous poem and good-humoured but trenchant essay.
Incidentally, Pennine Platform still comes out twice a year, now edited by Nicholas Bielby.
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Unread 12-04-2011, 08:19 AM
Andrew Frisardi Andrew Frisardi is offline
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Yes, much enjoyed these. Thanks, Tim and Steve.

Steve's mention of Brian Merrikin Hill made me pull out his selected poems, Dolphins and Outlaws, which I think still can be found at University of Salzburg Press. His service as an editor was so outstanding I get the impression that his own poetry is forgotten. I myself stumbled on it by accident and so bought his book. I recommend it.

Last edited by Andrew Frisardi; 12-04-2011 at 08:27 AM.
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  #5  
Unread 12-05-2011, 12:19 AM
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John Whitworth John Whitworth is offline
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I met Anna Adams a number of times at poets' does. She was a most pleasant woman, and a good poet too. The essay is a good one, isn't it?
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  #6  
Unread 12-05-2011, 03:48 AM
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Janice D. Soderling Janice D. Soderling is offline
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I'm sorry to hear this. I have enjoyed reading her work over the decades.
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  #7  
Unread 12-06-2011, 04:47 PM
Martin Elster Martin Elster is offline
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That's an excellent essay, Steve, and I love "Wasp's Nest," Tim. Thanks!
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