About This Podcast
Here is my first podcast.
PODCAST NO 1
Welcome to Touchstone.
This is a weekly poetry space.
Why poetry?
Well, it seems to me that currently, in this crazy, life-in-the-fast-lane existence we’ve all got now, the carefully constructed phrase and the dreamily distilled essence, that very alchemy of poetry, has been forgotten. So I want to remind everyone just how gorgeous the written word can be, how it makes our lives richer and suddenly more meaningful.
Here’s a selection of just a few of my favourite poems.
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is a man getting on in his years—facing his mortality—determined to do what he finds meaningful throughout the last of his days. Since the poet was born in 1809, he was just 24 when he penned it, not an elderly man at all. (Mind you, T.S. Eliot was only 29 when he wrote “Prufrock”—another favourite poem of mine.)
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Using classical mythology in what would have been for an educated person, the well-known and possibly well-loved character of Ulysses, allowed Tennyson to imagine how that man would have responded to the ageing process. Poets, however, do tend to be keenly aware of their own mortality—and that of others— as several of the poems I’m reading today may demonstrate.
“The Stolen Child” by W.B. Yeats is next. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for his poetry in 1923, the same year Ireland regained its independence from England. This poem has been interpreted as a literal stealing of a child by wicked fairies, however I’ve seen it as the more palatable explanation—perhaps even an attempt at solace—for the unbearable loss of a child. As an Australian, I am aware of many stories about children lost in the bush. So much easier to imagine a child stolen by fairies rather than dying alone in the wilderness. So much easier to imagine our children protected from the horrors that humankind is capable of dealing them.
“Overheard on a Salt Marsh” by Harold Munro is a poem I’ve often read to children, who seemed to have loved it as much as I do. Belgian born Monro was perhaps better known for his prose more than his poetry, which is a shame, for he loved poetry above all things. He was however a champion of other poets. He had a magazine called The Poetry Review and owned The Poetry Bookshop in London. Wilfred Owen apparently lived over this shop for a while. You’ll hear some of Owen’s poetry in a future podcast if you tune in to the Touchstone.
Judith Wright is an esteemed Australian poet. She was born in Armidale, in the New England district of NSW, in 1915. She lived near Braidwood, NSW, for the last three decades of her life to be near her lover of 25 years, H.C. “Nugget” Coombs, a famous Public Servant who worked in Canberra and was a tireless advocate for Indigenous Australians. Wright died in the year 2000.
The last poem for this episode is one I have adored for as long as I can remember:
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by Thomas Stearns Eliot. It caused a deal of controversy when it was published in 1917 for it is an early Modernist poem which broke with many traditionalist forms and fancies.
Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, in the United States, in 1888. He moved to England in 1914, becoming a British subject in 1927. He died in his Kensington home in London, in early 1965, of emphysema. In 1948 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for “his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.”
