Showing posts with label Alice Oswald. Show all posts

Thursday, July 12, 2018

Jeanette Winterson / Alice Oswald

Alice Oswald

Jeanette Winterson

March 11th, 2004

Alice Oswald is making a new kind of poetry. There is nothing fancy about it – she is doing the job, simple and enormous, of re-working the model for the twenty first century.

Of course she is not alone in this task, but she is in the front rank of writers, in poetry and prose, who are not content to work only with what exists already. Form and language must move forward, and there is nothing artificial about this. It is the job of writers to make sure that we do not speak a living language and write a dead one.

Oswald’s first volume of poetry – The Thing in the Gap-Stone Style, won the Forward Prize in 1996, and introduced us to a voice as distinctive as it is familiar. Familiar because her work is saturated by both the Classical and the English tradition, and distinctive because she sounds like nobody else. Her words come in fresh combinations. Her lineage is impeccable.

If Ted Hughes re-invented the Pastoral with his extraordinary poem, Thought-Fox, Oswald is Hughes rightful heir. She is a Nature poet, a spiritual poet, with the wildness of Hughes or John Clare, or Traherne. She turns the countryside into an inner landscape, a place not at odds with the more fashionable beats of the city, or a clichéd antidote to it, but as something which I can only call authentic desire. This is not the Nature of footpaths and theme parks, but the open space and untamed life that waits for us to find it again. Oswald finds it again – for poetry’s sake, and for ours.

She is not anti-Modernist – she has taken Modernisms fragments and rubble and found a way of chipping at them with different tools. It is as though she has made peace with what is, and now is making it new. There is no Oedipal slaying of the past, rather she re-births the past so that it is not lost.

Dart, is a poem about the river where Alice Oswald lives. She trained as a Classicist and now she works as a gardener on the Dartington Estate in Devon. Her note to the book tells us that for the past two years she has been recording conversations with people ho live and work on the river, to make what she calls ‘a sound map’.

Dart is a long poem – 48 pages – and it uses prose as well as poetry for its effects. This collision of writing has no slackness or jumble in it; it is a determination to use whatever is to hand to make the shape she wants – ‘The estuary’s my merchant. I go pretty much the length and breath of it scrudging stuff for some tiny stretch of wall. Looking for the fault lines and the scabs of crystals and the natural coigns which are right-angled stones for corners.’

Her quick descriptions are accurate and beautiful – ‘I knew a heron once, when it got up/Its wings were the width of the river.’ Eels are ‘bright whips of flow’. She finds ‘ duck’s nest in the leat with four blue eggs.’

This moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep, is a celebration of difference – the great variety of the natural world, and the escapes of the human spirit. Tamed by industrialisation and information, a part of us is still uncatchable as water.

Oswald stands in the flow of humanity, sieving us through language – ‘all names, all voices, Slip-Shape, this is Proteus, whoever that is, the shepherd of the seals,/driving my many selves from cave to cave.’

My three recommendations are:

The Thing in the Gap-Stone Style – Alice Oswald

How to Read a Poem – Ruth Padel

The Hawk in the Rain – Ted Hughes.

http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/journalism/alice-oswald/

Jeanette Winterson

Saturday, December 9, 2017

Portrait of the artist / Alice Oswald / 'As a child, I wrote in a little notebook I hid in a bush'

Two-thirds of the way through a poem, I enter a moment of absolute despair' ...
Alice Oswald. Photograph: Pako Mera

Portrait of the artist

Alice Oswald

Poet

'As a child, I wrote in a little notebook I hid in a bush. It was 20 years before I went public'

Interview by Susannah Herbert

What got you started?

At eight, I made a commitment to poetry. Until then, I thought I'd be a policeman. But I went a whole night without sleeping and the next day the world had changed. It needed a different language.

How do you write?

What does it mean to be a poet today?

To be a poet is as serious, long-term and natural as the effort to be the best human you can be. To express something well is not a question of having a top-class education and understanding poetic forms: rather, it's a question of paying attention.

Which artists do you most admire?

At the moment, I am fixed on Milton, but I always think Beckett is interesting. He's a pinhole writer: he created a darkroom of language through which, despite himself, light passes. And there's Samuel Johnson. I am slowly reading his dictionary.

Does poetry have a place in the modern world?

I don't think you should compromise what you need to say to scoop an audience. But I do work on projects to bring poetry into people's lives. I'm working on a 12-hour reading of Paradise Lost with the communities near where I live in Devon. We will perform all 12 books in Totnes next summer.

Where does a poem start?

The rhythm is always first.

How do you deal with distractions?

It's impossible to combine work and motherhood – I have three children, aged 9, 13 and 16 – but poetry starts from impossibility rather than possibility. I set up a bookstand next to the cooker so I can read as I cook. My cooking has always been terrible: it's worse now.

What music is important to you?

I work a lot with musicians, and I'm interested in how music sets up expectations and either meets or doesn't meet them. Poetry is a slightly different kind of music, beautifully limited.

Are there any songwriters who have influenced you?

I like Patti Smith's lyrics, and sometimes think I could be influenced by them. But she has a kind of cool that's beyond me.

What is your greatest ambition?

It's only ever to complete the next poem. When you start working you get drawn into the big human questions: how to live.

In short

Born: Reading, 1966.

Career:

Has written six collections of poetry. Her most recent, Memorial, reworks Homer's Iliad. Her first collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), won the Forward poetry prize for best first collection. In 2002, she won the TS Eliot for Dart, about the river in Devon.

High point:

"The period of excitement before writing a poem, when you sense something whole is in your head."

Low point:

"There are always technical low points: two-thirds of the way through a poem, I enter a moment of absolute despair."

THE GUARDIAN