Celebrating MacCaig in style

This is The Library in Waxy O'Connor's pub in Glasgow, where I spent a delightful evening with seven others reading and discussing poetry in honour of Norman MacCaig's 100th birthday. The interesting thing was that I'd never met any of these people before (except Mr B - I met him 43 years ago), and that the medium of communication that brought me there was Twitter. (That makes it sound as if there was nothing else to interest about the evening, but don't be fooled)

I am grateful to Bill Boyd for instigating this evening on several counts. Let's begin with the prosaic. Instead of the usual Sunday of getting the dinner in the oven, eating it and then dozing in front of the telly till it was time for bed, we hied off to Glasgow, ate wonderful tapas in Café Andaluz (ah, the green chillies!), had coffee with Duffy (an irrepressible FP - again arranged via Twitter) and then realised a long-held ambition to visit the building with the flaming torches outside the portico. What is more, we both stayed awake, didn't yawn, and talked all the way home.

And, less prosaically - indeed, positively poetically - I found the desire to write welling up again. I realised how seldom I have the chance to share poetry, to enthuse and be understood, to listen and to discover new things and revisit old friends - and all this in the company of a group of people whose link was the poems of one man. Somehow that cut out all the distractions of shared lives, all the small gossipy details that distract, leaving us with the words, the ideas, the mastery and the mystery that is great poetry. We didn't need to be polite, to make small talk, to organise anything, and that was a release.

Of course it couldn't last. But we were outside in the freezing street before Bill realised that I was a certain Ewan's mother. And then we weren't discussing poetry at all. We were roaring with laughter. And that too was good. A good night, in fact. I look forward to the next one.

Norman MacCaig on God

This is the poem I read on Sunday which moved me to write again. I have Mr B to thank for pointing it out to me as we discussed the morning's readings. I can hear Norman MacCaig's voice in the words. I think it's great. I shall keep trying!

The big tease

When the flood went down
Noah was glad
in his gloomy way
and gave thanks to the Lord.

When the ram
made its pitiful noise
in the thicket
Abraham gave thanks to the Lord also.

They thought big in those days.
- Anyone who carried a joke
so far
must be the Lord.

Even Ishmael
had to admit it.

Norman MacCaig.

Enjambement - again

Thought I'd indulge myself with a post about enjambement. Not much chance of a wide readership for this one, but I must be missing the classroom or something.

The poem referred to in the previous post, R.S.Thomas' "Evans", uses enjambement in what I would recognise as two different modes. The start of the poem tells how the poet recalled his leaving of the sick man's house, and here the enjambement suggests an almost breathless haste, as if the visiting vicar, "appalled" at his failure to help the man in any way, cannot wait to be outside again.
Evans? Yes, many a time
I came down his bare flight
Of stairs into the gaunt kitchen
With its wood fire, where crickets sang
Accompaniment to the black kettle's
Whine, and so into the cold
Dark......

However, there is also the prominence of the words which start the lines: accompaniment, whine, dark - and "dark" is used here as a noun, as Thomas goes on to talk about "the dark/ silting the veins of that sick man", a dark that the light of faith cannot alleviate. A complex poem reflecting on the failure of a complex man to fulfil his secondary calling - that of priest - in the language that Thomas saw as his one refuge from a world "glib with prose."

As he grew older, Thomas used this device even more starkly, as here, from "Launching a Prayer":
The stripling posturing
before the hero;
the mature man
posturing before

God.

Here, the stanza break (this is a three stanza poem) emphasises, builds up to the word "God" - and Thomas always thought of God with awe.

I'd like to look briefly at favourite examples of enjambement from two other poets - my response to sorlil's comment yesterday. The first is from Norman McaCaig's "Visiting Hour". The poet, on his way to visit an apparently dying woman in hospital, writes:
I will not feel, I will not
feel, until
I have to.
Read that aloud and the jaw-clenching self-control is brought out by the marking of the line breaks as much as by the repetition of the words "will not feel".

Similarly, in T.S.Eliot's great poem "Journey of the Magi", one of the "wise men" who sought the infant Christ looks back over his life at that momentous journey so long ago.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?
As the old man dictates to a scribe, his hesitation as he searches for words to express his bafflement are there in the enjambement, along with the repetition that underlines his determination to convey his overwhelming question.

Great. It took me such a long time to realise this, but it was worth the wait. A final thought for the educators out there: it's when you're really fired up by something you teach, as I am by poetry of this calibre, that the magic happens. There is this awesome responsibilty not to let the poet down by your teaching - death by a thousand cuts to the teacher who cares not! I'll give R.S Thomas the last say on such moments:
But here once on an evening like this,
in the darkness that was about
his hearers, a preacher caught fire
and burned steadily before them.....
(The Chapel)