December 11, 2024 • 57 mins
In this episode of The Open Door, panelists Thomas Storck, Andrew Sorokowski, and Christopher Zehnder interview Christopher Villiers on his book Versing the Mystery: Poems (December 11, 2024)
This collection of poems verses the mystery of God and Creation. Exploring the stories and characters of Scripture, Classical history and myth, the reader confronts the glory of God and is plunged into the depths of the human condition. This work deals with the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the ridiculous. Twenty-first century readers are confronted by their own needs and greeds reflected in the foundations of western civilisation. There are also more directly personal poems, of love, hate, success and failure, rooted in the life of a rhyming sinner inhabiting an English village near the sea. And if none of that appeals to you, then at least there are also owls campaigning for political office.
Versing the Mystery
This collection of poems verses the mystery of God and Creation. Exploring the stories and characters of Scripture, Classical history and myth, the reader confronts the glory of God and is plunged into the depths of the human condition. This work deals with the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the ridiculous. Twenty-first century readers are confronted by their own needs and greeds reflected in the foundations of western civilisation. There are also more directly personal poems, of love, hate, success and failure, rooted in the life of a rhyming sinner inhabiting an English village near the sea. And if none of that appeals to you, then at least there are also owls campaigning for political office.
Versing the Mystery
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to WCAT radio, your home for authentic Catholic programming.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Welcome to the Open Door with their host Thomas Stork
and co host Christopher's Anger and andrews Rakowski. Today we're
honored to have the English Catholic poet Christopher Villiers, who
with whom will talk about poetry as well as being
allowed to listen to some of his own poetry. Let
(00:30):
us begin as we do with prayer, name of the
Father's Son of the Holy Spirit. Amen, Come, Holy Spirit,
full the hearts of your faithful, and kindling them the
fire of your love. Send forth your spirit, and they
shall be created, and you shall renew the face of
the earth. Let us pray, Oh God, who has taught
the hearts of the faithful by the light of the
Holy Spirit, grant that in the same spirit we may
(00:52):
be truly wise, and everyone rejoice in His consolation through
Christ our Lord. Amen, and named the Father and Son
of the Holy Spirit. Men, well, Christopher Biliars, we'retty learned
to have you. And uh, it's a poetry as I see,
(01:13):
it has been kind of relegated to closet best in
today's world. And I know other people have said this
before before I have uh, can you address that point
of the of the place of poetry and perhaps give
some reasons why we think that might be the case, if.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
I shall certainly try. I believe there's some I mean,
it's interesting because you see even things like an Instagram,
there's a so called insta poets like RUPI Kerr. I'm
not saying there works necessarily any good, but you can
see there's some role for poetry in popular culture, and
I mean very converse of some kinds and say hip
hop lyrics can pop up in unexpected places. But you're
(01:54):
right to say that in general poetry, certainly serious literary
poetry does seem rather marginalized. It's not done obviously within England.
I come from an English context. By knowing little from
the American context, it seems to be a very interesting.
Catholic poet Dana Joya wrote an essay called it Does
Poetry Matter, and he was saying about how it seems
(02:15):
to be mainly poetry workshops and universities that produce poetry,
and that it's basically people creative writing courses, reading each
other's poems and nobody else. I think there is a
sense as you say that poetry has become marginal for
a variety of reasons. I mean perhaps with the birth
of new media. I mean with the Internet. We have
lots of people now who barely read books, who can
(02:36):
barely concentrate enough to read for a whole book. And
I think about poetry is it requires a good deal
of concentration. So you have others of media competing the
attention of poetry. Now, as I mentioned before, some people
use the Internet as a forum for poetry. And I think,
as you say, part of the issue with poetry is
that it requires a certain cultural basis for a whole
(02:59):
culture to have, say a sort of poetry they like,
say Robert Frost in the American context, say fifty sixty
years ago, or in my country the English poet John
Betchaman say sixty or fifty years ago. You need a
common culture, You need a certain sense of a common narrative,
common images, common frames of reference around which you can
(03:21):
form poetry. I think there are still people interested in
various ways about different types of poetry in verse, but
perhaps there's less a sense for common a common culture,
a group of people who actually interested reading the same poems.
Everything's fragmented and it's interesting. I mean, the Internet in
many ways is a blessing. You can read all sorts
of things on the Internet. I mean I probably would
(03:43):
not have been published without the Internet. I was discovered
weirdly enough on Facebook as a poet. But the point
is everything's very atomized now. People live in their own
small worlds. I think also with poetry and the humanities
in general, as a question of just a find its existence.
I know in my country fewer and fewer young people
(04:04):
are taking up the study of English literature after the
age of sixteen. They think, well, I'm not going to
find work unless I do something like computer science. And
there is a strong, sort of a certain narrow utilitarian
aspect to that. So I think some people perhaps poetry
is seen as sort of a flippery It's not seen
as important as it once was. It doesn't combine to
(04:24):
the sense of communal myths, of communal storytelling. I mean,
if you look at poetry how it evolved from an
oral culture, you no stories like the iLiads or later
on Beowulf. They emerge as as stories people told by
the fire around communities. It's how people understood themselves. The Greeks.
For the Greeks, the iLiads and the Odyssey by Homer
were almost like the Holy Scriptures are to Christians. It
(04:47):
was how they understood themselves. It was how they're their
frame of reference, and there was that group. Poetry is
very good at memorizing. It emerges from that sort of culture.
We perhaps don't have the same sense of a common culture,
or say a Western culture don't read the same books.
They don't ness whether if they read books at all,
it's often in small little groups. I mean my poet,
(05:07):
my publisher, Ruka Press is a fine publisher where you
get the sense a lot of the books are written
for redistively small niche audience, say, or interest in the
Latin mass. That's all that's very worthy and should be
of more interest abroad as culture, but it isn't. It's
sort of you have different groups in different little worlds,
and perhaps there isn't that sense of poetry of songs
(05:29):
of things unifying people. Does that answer your question?
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Yes? And it's interesting that you brought up the communal
aspect because certainly or poems like The Idiot were meant
to be recited in groups, as my understanding, and yet
for quite a while since maybe the Renaissance poetry has
been mostly something that individuals read in their study. M
(05:55):
I don't know if you're familiar with the book called
The Celestial Twins, Music and Poetry through the Ages by
American academic Kirby Smith, and his thesis is about music.
Poetry and music were originally quite intimately related, and when
they began to break apart, that was not necessarily healthy
(06:17):
for either of them.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
I haven't read that particular book, but you're right. I mean,
if you look at the Homeric epics, they were supposed
to be read to musical accompaniment, and of course with
the psalms and the scriptures to very important a lot
of the like the Biblical poetry was meant to be
accompanied to music. It's quite even say. You find many
people try and say that pop song lyrics are poetry.
And it's so I have to tell this speech. It
was it Paul Simon and Simon Garfuncle said, you know,
(06:42):
the people who call me a poet are people who
don't read poetry. You know, Wallis Stevens is poetry. I'm
just a good but I get your point of these. Ideally,
poetry does have a relationship with music. I mean, you
could have good song lyrics that don't work by themselves
as poetry, but you can have good poems at our music.
I mean this trinking your poet Robert Herrick in the
seventeenth century in England, a lot of his poems were
(07:04):
turned into songs. They're very musical, of course. I'm in
the Liza Reethnage. Slightly earlier you had Thomas Campions. There
is a relationship to music and poetry which is very important.
I mean poetry needn't I mean you call Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman's poetry. It does not use formal verse or rhyme,
but it is rooted in the cadences of speech. It
(07:26):
has a firm command of rhythm, the rhythm of language.
It is very musical. And Whitman himself was actually very
influenced by the opera as well as by the poetry
and poetic prose of the scriptures.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Yeah, Andrew, good morning, good morning.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
Yeah, and I apologize it took me almost turn minutes
to get the technology to work. Under know it was
just very small. Sorry about that. Good morning, good morning, Christopher, Andrew.
Is a way in where you will and I will.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
You know, I'm I'm in the United States, at least
a lot of just mass advertising still has a kind
of a very shallow verse rhyme even with it which
it seems like there's an element type of music. And
I don't know if that's probably true in Britain also,
but it's it's always been curious to me that the
(08:26):
it seems like this very shallow kind of poetry that's
just commercial. Nonetheless, there there's a perception that verse that
that I should say, rhythm and verse and and uh
ronic rhymes still matter, and yet a lot of serious
(08:49):
voices and uh you look up there, like in the
Kenyan Review, for example, you look at the poetry in there,
and it's just pros arranged in a curious way on
the page at least. So it's to me, yes.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
There's some time, I mean, there is good free verse
poetry a I meantioned for someone like Walt Whitman. I
just remember the saying by T. S. Eliot, no verse
is free if for a man and presumably a woman
who's trying to do a good job, you know, if
you're actually looking at it, even if it doesn't necessarily
use iambic pentameter or an aba rhyme scheme. You have
to control the language. You have to make it dance.
(09:25):
Do you to say it crudely? Prose is language, that
is walking poetry. The words dance. They have a certain
figurative quality, a certain rhythm to it. There's something about that.
And as you say some to be fair, I will
say this, though, every age has its bad poetry. If
you look at, say, the ear of Alfred Lloyd Tennyson,
(09:46):
who has caused poet lauriate for over forty years in
my country. His successor criticized Tennyson, Alfred Austen, was a
notoriously bad poet. Of course, one can write very bad
formal verse, and I think we often forget all the
bad poetry that was written earlier ages because we only
remember the good stuff. But as you see, I think
some poetry in this day and age it does it
(10:06):
is very prosaic. It's by people, I think sometimes to
write good verse without rhyme or meter, you at least
need to have learned those things in order to forsake them.
It's like a hermit. A good hermit is often someone
who spent many years in a monastery has learned all
the rules of monasticism and has internalized them, then you
(10:27):
can live apart from the monastery. I think sometimes that's
a bit like that with free verse. And of course
there's perhaps too many people writing poetry, because as you
talk about the creative writing courses, it's become an industry,
and that's quite dangerous at times. I mean, there should
be a place for poetry in academia, but perhaps there
are too many creative writing courses and it's gone too far.
(10:48):
It's become I say, people just write poetry for reasons.
Speaker 4 (10:54):
It seems to me that it's very popular here where
I live in California. It seems every and every other
person you meet is a poet because it's easy. You know,
you don't have to worry about rhyme or meter. But
I think the problem is that, in a way, I
think good free verse is extremely difficult because you cannot
rely on rhyme and meter. I mean, it's not that
(11:16):
difficult to use meter and to think of rhymes. If
you don't, if you can't rely on those for your effect,
everything will depend on your choice of words. So that
freedom of free verse actually entails an enormous responsibility to
choose exactly the right word at every point, and you
can't justify it by rhyme or by meter. It has
(11:38):
to be absolutely the best possible word. And that's why
I think good free verse is extremely difficult, just as
bad free verse is extremely easy. I don't know if
that's accurate, but that's my impression.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
There's something in that. I think adolescents of all ages
love the idea of freedom. Actually writing free verse, like
living a free life, that should requires a great deal of,
you know, skill and responsibility, and I think people aren't
always quite so keen on that. I mean the thing
is course, with rhyme and meter, sometimes that can be
a danger. It's perfectly possible to write verse that reads
(12:12):
like bad jingles, especially in a language like I'm reading
this Russian gentleman. And he was very interesting because he
said about in Russian, most words rhyme rather easily. With
something else. It's actually to write tolerable, not necessarily great,
but at least half decent. Verse is actually relatively easy.
He in Russian, he said, And he said, yes, English
has produced some of the greatest poets in the world,
(12:34):
but one almost needs to be a great poet to
write a great deal of verse without the rhyme seeming strained.
So it does require a certain discipline, as you say,
but free verse perhaps even more so. I mean, personally,
I couldn't be a free verse poet any more than
I could be a confusion monk. I deeply respect both vocations,
but I think in both cases are perhaps meant for
(12:54):
a select few. I mean it differs. I mean I
naturally a is some more chaotic person. So I need
rhyme and meter. I need that sort of discipline, and
I think for a lot of people you need. It's
like they say, sometimes you need to learn the rules
before you know when you can break them safely. That's
the thing. There's something in that, I think, and perhaps
there are too many people who write free verse without
(13:16):
of course, a lot of people on the issues is
a lot of people try and write poetry before they've
read and understood a lot of poems themselves. Actually, it's
like a craft. If you want to build a table
or a ship or whatever, you need to know a
bit about You need passionate inspiration. You also need to
know basic skills, how to use language, how to make
things fit together, you know, good good intentions may get
(13:37):
you to heaven, they won't necessarily make you a good poet.
You do need to actually know how to handle language,
and the rules of formal verse can be useful. It's
like sometimes almost like a wooden climbing frame for certain
kinds of plants, you know, they need that structure, they
need that sort of scaffolding. There's something I think in
that there are too many bad I mean, obviously to
(13:59):
write good poetriestally very difficult, and as you say, lots
of people they don't want to do the hard work,
and perhaps fevers can be a dangerous temptation for some people.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
I remember reading that, and I don't know whether this
is the case in England, but I remember reading that
there was for a while this sort of polemic between
the free verse people and the formal verse people, and
then it became very politicized. And then, of course, as
you can imagine, the people who preferred you know, Rhyme
and Meeter were classified as you know, conservatives, and the
(14:35):
free verse people of course as liberals, and it became
all the sort of political stance, and then you know,
and there were I guess journals and publishers who who
wouldn't and critics who you know, who looked down on
formal worse because it was associated with some sort of
reactionary mentality.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
I don't know whether that's the.
Speaker 5 (14:55):
Case, because it's simi in America, because there's the movement
known as the New Formalism, which began in the nineteen eighties,
and you had one or two poets free verse poets
basically saying it was like Reaganism in literary form, which
it wasn't to mean this one said, if you actually
looked at the New a lot of the poems were
quite diverse and encouraged a broad range of poems.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
I must say, briefly, one of the great ironies, Ezra Pound,
who did a great deal to popularize what's popular known
as free verse, was was anything but a liberal. He
was infamous for actually supporting Mussolini. He actually was put
in a mental hospital and nearly got executed after World
War Two because of his support for fascism and his
hatred of democracy, including American democracy. It's quite funny how
(15:34):
you can't divide whereasn't how many modernist writers did have links.
I mean, T. S. Eliot was hardly a liberal politically,
but people do assume for some reason, maybe just you
know this verse it reminds you of the hymns I
had to sing in church, or it feels starchy. I'm
going to say this is conservative, which I mean. It's
difficult to apply political labels to the arts. I mean,
(15:54):
I think art should Art should be obviously open to
political influences, that should be open to influenceive throughout life.
I don't think it can be easily sort of pegged
or boxed into political categories. But as you say, yes,
there is that certain idea that free verse means freedom,
free living, you know. I mean, I'm just thinking of
Alan Ginsburg. It's interested reading some of Alan Ginsburg's poetry
(16:16):
because I think the problem with Alan Ginsburg's poems a
lot of them needed to be performed by Alan Ginsburg himself.
Otherwise they came across as sort of flaccid and self indulgent.
You know, they lacked discipline. But that's that thing. There
is that certain idea that you know, if you take
away the corsetree of verse and rhyme, all be free.
You know, it's emancipation. But that's not quite the case.
(16:37):
It's like children thinking that being an adult is actually wonderful.
You know, you can choose when to go to bed,
but you also have to pay your bills and do things.
I think there's sort of parallel there. But but yes,
there is that certain idea that free versus somehow progressive,
and that formal versus reaction. But I don't think that's
always the case. I mean, wh Orden in the thirties,
he was he's in the nineteen thirties, he sided with communism.
(17:00):
He was quite politically radical, but he also used quite
traditional forms of verse a meta, So this doesn't actually work.
I mean, of course, some socialist Marxists would argued that,
you know, verse meta are what the workers want and
what the workers understand. You know, they wanted poetry that's
actually understandable to ordinary people who used to stor songs,
(17:20):
who are used to those sort of lyrics. Of a
lot of like the original modernist free verse was hardly
it was an elite practice. In many ways, it was
deliberately an elite practice. Someone like ts Eliott. You know,
he was writing quite a rarefied form of free verse,
and he knew it. He was very proud of this.
He didn't want necessarily, you know, ordinary people to always
(17:41):
understand what he was saying. So I think there is
sometimes a lot of projection going on. People project their
own ideas and hang ups onto the literature. So I
don't think there isn't get to just summarize. I don't
think there is an easy there can be an easy
categorization of different genres of poetry according to different types
of politics.
Speaker 6 (18:04):
I wonder, in terms of this question of what's happened
to poetry? Couldn't say have they asked the same question
what's happened to all the arts? In a way, yes,
I don't know what the situation is in England, but
my impression, well, in the United States, or it could
say what has happened to religion? Religion has been seen
(18:25):
as something that's privatized, something that that's of value because
it's a value to the person who holds it, but
it has no real objective value except maybe its effects.
I think the same thing with all the transcendentals beauty, truth, goodness,
et cetera. We come to the sense that the transcendentals
(18:47):
are also to be determined by each individual. So if
that's the case, what's beautiful is purely individual. What is
beautiful is purely ideos cretic, and when it becomes idio socrat,
and it's what's the point.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
Really.
Speaker 6 (19:03):
Finally, I don't think we take it seriously. What we
do take seriously what we call the stem subjects in
the United States. What we take seriously is engineering. We
take seriously the empirical sciences. Why because they produce things
which are tangible and are clearly of use to the society.
But things like poetry are maybe nice for some people,
(19:25):
but they're not really of central value anymore. So I think,
I mean, I'm wondering if that degree what we're seeing
is just an effect of some much larger phenomenon.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
Yes, I think there's there's there's something in what you see.
I think a lot of the culture in general has
become more marginal. It's not seen as quite so it's
of public importance. But poetry it seems a minor hobby.
I just remember I went to a party once, so
I said something about how I write poetry, and this
woman just we'll stop writing poetry and get a proper job.
You know, it's a dangerous distraction. You know, no one
(19:58):
needs these poems. You know it was quite funny though,
but sort of. I think people do think that you
don't necessarily need to write poetry, or I mean, one
should take these stories in the press, you know, with
a pinch of salt, you know, a little skeptically, because
they sensationalized matters. But there's one university and they were
simply stopping teaching about Sonnets. They thought, well, this is
(20:19):
some very dated thing. We don't need to teach people
about Sonnets. You know, if they have to do humanities
at all, they don't need this sort of fusty old stuff.
Perhaps they thought vaguely associated it with neo colonialism or something.
But you know, I think there is that sense, as
you say, of things being privatized, there's not a sense
of a common culture. And also cultural standards. Perhaps there's
(20:39):
the idea that the very idea of cultural standards assume
some dangerous form of authoritarianism, which there was a French
postmodernist Fuco basically seem to say that all forms of
authority were some sort of sinister plot of to take
power over people. I think there's perhaps an element of that,
as you say that people part is in the vidual
(21:00):
poetry has become seen as an individual thing, and people
don't like the idea of applying universal standards and as
perhaps the way people are taught poetry as well. I mean,
it wasn't always a good thing, but people used to
be have to memorize large amounts of poetry that they
don't anymore. And perhaps that's what the people don't memorize texts.
They don't engage with texts, with literature as much. I've heard,
(21:20):
essentially read stories about various universities and the professors complain
how their pupils, their students, they don't read, they don't
read books. Fully that even at proper elite universities, they
don't read as many books as they would have their
you know, their predecessors forty or so years ago, would
have done. People don't make time for literally it's not
seen as important. Partly, you say, for economic reasons, but
(21:41):
also perhaps our cultural standards have changed.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
If if we can call free verse, or some of
it at least genuine poetry, HM, can you do you
think that as possible to define a dividing line between
free verse poetry and what just masquerades as verse rearrangs
on the page. Because I'm trying to figure out what
(22:13):
the essence is that differentiates one from the other. And
I wonder if you could shed any light on that.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
Well, that's the thing poetry. It's not an easy thing
to define. It's an easy thing to love. Was it.
There was a a houseman, the poet. He gave a
lecture on poetry, and I think he upsets some of
his modernist contemporaries who are there in the audience, because, well,
poetry makes your hair stand up on the back of
your neck. Perhaps that's a crude thing, perhaps sort of
(22:39):
genuine free verse. When you read it, you feel I mean,
if you read is it when Lilac's Last in the
Doorway blooms by Witman, you read it and you can
feel it. You feel it's poetry. You sense this is
different from say a legal contract or a furniture assembly
instruction manual. You know you send it speaks to you
(23:00):
in a weird way, and not just like in a
way prose fiction. It may it sings, It may not
sing in verse and meter, but it has a certain rhythm.
It has an intensity of imagery or vision of sound
that is poetic. As I said earlier, prose walks. Sometimes
it walks very well and elegantly. Poetry dances. If it
(23:21):
dances inside you, maybe it's poetry. Forgive me, I'm not
actually trained as a literary critic, but that's a crude suggestion.
Speaker 6 (23:30):
Could you aristol if I remember correctly? Defined poetry is
the art of the metaphor, which I've always had some
problem with because there are a lot of poems that
have very few metaphors. But because one think as sosm
as I understand in Hebrew, that's certainly in English and
Latin or an art and meter, but we still call
(23:51):
the poetry. Yes, yeah, I think the definition aspect is
very difficult, you.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Know, because there are certain there's certainly pros that is
rich like that, it's full of metaphors and full of
suggestive imagery and so on. I mean, I'm thinking, for example,
if you're familiar with the first paragraph of Bellock's book
about Joan of Arc, it's one of the most rich
(24:20):
wordings I've ever seen of anything. It's incredible. Actually, I
don't suppose you could write a whole book like that,
because it would it would be too rich almost to read.
But but uh, it's not poetry. I don't think you
ever pretended it was poetry.
Speaker 6 (24:37):
It could be could be considered poetic. I mean, so
we we so poetry is. It's not like there's a
clear dem marcation, but we have the poetic and it's
more what's the term is it's more intense in what
we call poetry itself, because I don't think you could
simply define poetry by Ryan, especially not rhyme, because you could.
(25:03):
There were Greeks who roads medical treatises in verse, so
it wasn't poetry I would call poetry.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Now.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Of course, all the ancient Greek and Latin great poems
were written without rhyme. Ryan was a relatively late development
because Milton in his you know when he's think it's
his prefaced a Paradise lost a few years, he points out,
you know, in the tradition of the classical without rhyme.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
Right, rhyme is obviously neither you're there. But meter I'm
a little more hesitant to to say that that's notly sentual.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
I think, first without meet needs at least to appreciate
what meter means, even if it's free, it has to
have a certain relationship, has to have a certain discipline.
You know, the sounds have to have a certain pattern.
It's not I mean because because I meant we talked
earlier out you know the Bible. Of course, Whitman he
was influenced by the you know, the King James Bible,
in the poetry, the psalms and the poetic prose. And
(26:07):
I think is it may not necessarily have a meter,
but it does have a certain discipline of sound, and
I think he clearly used that. I think I think
perhaps you need a certain healthy understanding of meta before
you can write without it. And I think it's something
that needs to be taken seriously. Of course, as we
said before, meta it may sometimes sometimes be necessary, but
it's not sufficient. You can write things in met or
(26:30):
indeed rhyme, which aren't poetry. It's quite interesting sort of relationship.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Yeah, the bobal carbon prayer I used to I used
to be in mispellion in the book certainly has that
kind of rhythmic prose.
Speaker 6 (26:45):
Oh yes, yeah, maybe we should have asked quite Miss
Christopher thinks, when are you trying to accomplish by its
own political project? I mean, is there any goal or
it's just because you weren't writing poetry.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
Well, that's the thing I'll tell you, because I mean,
like a lot of you know, teenagers. Just as teenagers
get acne, they sometimes write bad poetry. So I did
a little of that, but it wasn't anything good. It
was weird. It wasn't until I was twenty five I
started writing a great deal of poetry. It was partly
because I'd read this book called The Artist's Way by
Julia Cameron, and it was quite slightly new, agingan odd,
(27:30):
but it had some good advice, and I started all
of a sudden, bits of verse started forming in my head.
It was quite peculiar, and when it came to lent
of twenty fifteen, I started writing religious poetry, mainly based
on meditations on the Bible as a spiritual exercise. So
in a way it became sort of I think partly
was just idea to use well for one of the
(27:50):
better words self development. I was I was a bit
of a loop. I was slightly drifting in life, and
I thought I would try something. But as it developed,
I decided I wanted in my own little way to
glorify God and perhaps be of some interest to my
fellow human beings. Because I would post some of my
poems on Facebook and suddenly I got people noticing them,
(28:11):
and my previous publisher. It's funny because she sort of
contacted me and asked if I wanted to publish This
is the end of near the end of twenty fifteen.
She asked if I wanted to publish a book. And
when I realized she wasn't trying to get money out
of me, she was actually not going to charge me,
I thought, well, why not. It's not an easy business
finding someone willing to publish poetry, believe me. So this
sort of happened. I mean, I didn't set out the
(28:32):
idea I'm going to become a published poet. It just
sort of I sort of stumbled into it by various means.
And I've tried to sort of I've tried to write
good poetry, or at least poetry which isn't completely bad
in a sense, to actually as an offering to God
and to others. And it's quite hardening. You know, I'm
not a you know, I don't sell millions of books,
(28:55):
but you know, I have people who read my poems
and tell me how they've touched my heart, and it
inspires me to carry on. I mean, part of me
occasionally wishes I was a successful incountant instead, but God
did not make me that way. So I suppose, if
if i'm I use the grand term of the project,
my project is simply, perhaps just light a little candle
(29:15):
of words before God.
Speaker 6 (29:19):
That the origin of your pedal, the vision in your
lads collection.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
Well, this is because I've had free books. I published
my current book. If I mentioned it, Versing the Mystery,
which has been published this year by Aruka Press, this contains, yes,
I shall hold it up, behold ah, thank you, bless you.
I appreciate this, But anyway they were. My first book
(29:46):
was a book of sonnets based on the Bible sonnets
from the Spirit. My second book, Petals of Vision, was
it sort of how can I put this? It's like
a pot pourri of various types of poetry. I have dragons,
I have funny poems, I have religious, I have all
sorts of poems. And my third book, Another Odyssey, was
based on Greek classical history and mythology, and also the
(30:07):
early Christian Church. And my current book includes basically the
best of poems for my three previous books, with some
new stuff, hopefully fewer typos, though I make no promises
about that.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Do you think that poetry is particularly important for Catholics
because for any reason?
Speaker 3 (30:27):
Well, yes, yes I do. First of all, of course,
there's a great deal of poetry in scripture, and God
would not allow his Holy Word to be so full
of poetry if you didn't think poetry was some importance,
is it? If you look within the liturgy, I mean
even Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote final liturgical poems, it is
deeply versed in Catholicism, you know, Christianity, Catholic Christianity certainly
(30:47):
is not a prosaic religion. It is not simply a
religion of you know, clear crisp instructions. It is not
like a legal contract or you know, as I said before,
it is something deeply mystical that involves all aspects of
the human condition. Human beings are not solely narrowly rational people.
(31:08):
We are not narrowly utilitarian creatures. We need poetry, we
need vision. Was if I'm a quote, he was no Catholic.
He was actually very sympathetic towards Catholicism and a fine
religious poet. For my quote, William Blake was his famous
words to see the world, to see a world in
(31:32):
a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower.
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, an eternity
in an hour. You know, through poetry, through the creative arts,
you know in general, within that we can find the infinite,
within the finite. We can see God in a sense.
(31:52):
We can sense the world beyond the quote idian, the
world beyond the daily grind. You know, we can actually
send there's more to human existence, because human beings are
made for something more than just this world. We're meant
for more. I think poetry is part of that. It
shows us there is something transcendent to existence, that you know,
(32:14):
that there's more to life than prose, just as there's
more to the world, to the universe than mere matter.
It's something that's passionate. It strikes the very soul. We
need poets, just as we need great visual artists to
actually make the word incarnate, to actually show the Gospel,
in the sense that poetry could actually lead us to
(32:34):
the divine. It's interesting. Gerard Manny Hopkins, who is actually
my favorite poet, he burned all his earlier poetry when
he became a Jesuit, but years later he realized that
actually writing poetry was part of his vocation. That's what
God wanted to actually to praise him, to actually to
speak to him as a poet, and to share that
(32:55):
with others. I mean, if you look at the psalms,
the psalms are often quite difficult, they're quite challenging, but
they're great poets. I mean Job, I could say the
Book of Job is a great prose poem. These these
are magnificent things. They're part of human existence, and I
think Catholicism should show the mystery of the universe, the passion,
the color, at times, the slightly bewildering and despairing elements
(33:19):
of the human condition. I mean, I have nothing in
principle against vernacular liturgy, but I fear at times some
of the liturgies, at least in the English language that
came out after Vatican Two, some of them were perhaps
too prosaic. They didn't actually articulate. They were some of
the mystery of existence and the idea of the mystery
of God and human nature. They are perhaps a little
(33:40):
too shallow. Perhaps it's a little unfair because you were
having to establish, like writing hymns a lot of in America.
At least you had all these Jesuits writing hymns very
quickly because they had to build up a musical vernacular,
musical culture where there hadn't been one before. And some
of those hymns may have been good, but a lot
of them were pretty awful. There's a sense thatism needs
to actually address and should it's best follow some addresses
(34:02):
the reality of the human experience, because it is truth
and poetry. Poetry can say things you can't quite say
in prose. You know, it can express things that you
know you can't articulate, just as you can't aways articulate
things in a solely, a narrowly rational logical manner. Sometimes
you need wild metaphors, You need things that don't strictly
(34:24):
make sense viewed prosaically. You need that, you need that passion,
you need that terror, you need all that almost magic
and mystery. And that is something the Catholic Church has
and which poetry has as well. I think it's a
fine marriage. And if Catholics divorce themselves entirely from poetry,
they they take away something of Catholicism. I mean, of
(34:46):
course Dante was a great poet. Dante, you have medieval
Catholicism in verse. You know, you have the ways the
philosophy and theologist Saint Thomas Aquinas articulated in brilliant poetry.
You also have some you know, political criping. That's another messa.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Yeah, it seemed to me sometimes that for Protestants, especially
maybe in the United States, it's always a question of
either or, whereas for Catholics it's usually a question of
both ends that we don't just say, oh, this is false,
defer this this is all true. No, there one might
be true in one way or partially true, or something
(35:25):
like that. So I think I agree that poetry can
do that that very much too. Yeah, I would, I
would think that.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
I mean, in the US we have you know, the
Catholic churches has been countercultural for a long time, and
today it seems that it is. My impression is that
it is less so, or at least it could be
much more so. But certainly one of the ways in
which Catholics could be countercultural would be through poetry. Because
we live in a sort of cultural and religious meliu
(35:57):
which is still dominantly broader or post Protestant, which I
think can be characterized as being prosaic and kind of
pragmatic in its general nature and Catholicism can be such
a counterculture. And again poetry would seem to be the
ideal medium, of course, also music and painting. But it
(36:20):
seems that it's not done. And if we look at
those essays by Dana Jaria that we were looking at,
one of which was written quite a while ago and
the other about ten years ago, he's saying that for
some reason Catholics have not been really playing the role
that they could and should be playing in US culture,
that they've sort of dropped the ball completely. I'm wondering
(36:41):
whether you have any comments on that.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
I have a few ideas, because I know to some
this is also true of Britain. Doesse I understand it's
in America? Traditionally, Catholicism was the religion of immigrants, people
who are often despised and marginalized. The non course, you
got the acronym wasp, white, Tanglo, Saxon Protestant, and so
somebody said that social based gradually broadened to include various
other white people. The sense that Catholics rotten Regina's foreign
(37:06):
They were seen as un American. You saw that in
the nineteen sixty presidential ELECTU. You know, there were those
who didn't want to vote for John F. Kennedy because
he was a Catholic. And I think perhaps a lot
of American Catholics were desperate to assimilate. They wanted to
be like everyone else. It's like the child at school,
the child at school who's pick bullied because he's different.
He doesn't necessary he won't necessarily think, well, maybe my
differences are good. Maybe when I grew up, these differences
(37:30):
will help me. They think, I want to be like
the other children. Why can't I be like the other children?
Why can't they accept me? And of course you had
to some ex it up and you had to summit
this in within England. Course, there's a lively tradition of
anti Catholicism in my country for various, you know, deep
seated historical reasons. But you know, all these people thinking,
you know, we don't want to be on the margins,
(37:50):
we want to be in the mainstream. The idea is
we didn't. Perhaps a lot of people they didn't nessarily want,
they didn't assally want to sort of have their own counterculture.
They wanted to be include. Did they want to be
taken in from the cold and be like everyone else?
Which can be a dangerous thing. And perhaps there was
because perhaps although in many ways the sense that of course,
after from the nineteen sixties onwards, a lot of Catholics
(38:13):
were accepted into broader society and were integrated and were allowed,
you know, they were allowed in public life without being
accused of, you know, being puppets of the Vatican. All
that was good. Perhaps the perhaps Catholics lost a sense
of otherness that was healthy. You know, there's an unhealthy
sense of otherness, but there's also a healthy one. I mean,
(38:34):
I remember when I was at Durham University in northeastern
England some years ago. I knew a lot of Catholics
and molder ones, and they just wanted to be like
everyone else, as if they actually, deep down were basically
liberal humanists. They've been brought up as Catholics, but they
found it slightly embarrassing in some ways, even if they
carried it on because they saw it's an inherited ailment.
(38:54):
But they didn't. They wanted to be integrated. They were
wary of anything that would set them apart from others.
It's just a says some people were desperate not to
offend the New York times or something that they want
to be the sort of people respected by the in crowd.
Perhaps there's an element of that.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
Well in England, at least at least Catholics could claim
that you had the there is no culture and it
had been stolen, or as in the US, we can't
even say that because it brought us in the project
from the vermin.
Speaker 6 (39:33):
The put I could put in a word for the
Germans in the United States who did resist assimilation a
long time in the spirit of German open mindedness in brotherhood.
But yeah, there was a there was a German communities
were actually established in the United States precisely to keep
them from being assimilated, and those existed for quite a while.
Speaker 4 (39:56):
Well today we have, of course the big in the
Great Story, at least in this part of the country,
and I think it's generally true, is immigration from Latin America.
And of course they aren't all Catholics. We know a
lot of them are Evangelicals, but that is, you know,
a possible source of a kind of Catholic resistance to
(40:17):
the culture. Dana Joya is an example of that. He's
an exponent of the Mexican yes, partly Mexican partly Italian.
But so you know, that's perhaps something to look for
because we have now a lot of poets of Hispanic
origin who write in English. Now, whether they're any good,
I have no idea, but they are making a beginning
(40:38):
to make an impact at least out here.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
Are they? In fact? Are they Catholics that well? That
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (40:44):
I mean, you know, it's not something they have advertised
as far as I know, but I mean I'm just
dimly aware of it, and I think that that's just.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Something to look for.
Speaker 6 (40:57):
I know, there's when we live in Californa, there was
a town that actually had an our Lydia Guadalupit procession,
the first sort of prey down the middle of the
street of the town. So if that kind of culture
could be maintained, I think it could be the font
of poetry, font of art, because it's we don't do
in the United States. We have patriotic processions like on
(41:20):
the Fourth of July, and sometimes local communities will have
celebrations of the local community. But we live in a
very unfestive culture as opposed to the Hispanic culture, which
is very festive, and I think that festivity could actually
help inspire the sense of art and desire to do art.
Speaker 3 (41:41):
So m I think a lot of arts, a lot
of poetry need you need a sense of locality. I
think it was w Ah Shorten who said, you know,
poetry should be a bit like cheese. You know, it
may have a regional origin, but it should be able
to be appreciated universally. I think we're saying with writers,
you need a sense of of loco, of a place.
You need to have a s understanding of place and
(42:03):
of community. Because I think a lot of people that live,
especially now, because people move so much, people move frequently
there so much as so much online traffic, there's a
sense of everything being very generic. There's not a sense
of actually of a sense of rootedness in a particular culture,
in a language, in the richness language. Well, that's something
(42:24):
we need to have a sense of community and common
stories and narratives.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
We want you to to read of your own poetry,
because you were very before. I have one question I'd
like to ask you. If you do that, what would
you say to listeners who perhaps never read poetry. What
would you could you say one word to them as
it or to make maybe reconsider that reading poetry might
(42:51):
be worthwhile.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
I swear poetry is worth rale, no matter how many
poets seem to be persuading you otherwise. You know, there's
some good stuff. I mean, I'm trying to think, well,
you know, if you want some light verse, you always
read some olden nash. You know, I think good light
vers is better than bad heavy verse. And I think
there's something said for having a sense of humor. I mean,
obviously from American Robert Frost, some of his poetry is brilliant.
(43:16):
Some of William Carlos Williams's poetry, you know, willim culture
tell us about the story of the urban America, whereas
Robert Frost is the rural America. But although Carlss is
free verse. So try and try to give up on poetry.
You know, read something, maybe read something funny to begin with.
But the poetry is about life. It has always something
(43:37):
to say about things. Also, perhaps from a Catholic perspective,
perhaps I would encourage people to read the Psalms. There's
the penitential Psalms, which always good for lent or advent.
There's you could read some passages from the Bible is
important and sometimes if you read really good hymns. The
best hymns have at least an affinity with poetry. They
(43:58):
can be enjoyed as poetry. I mean, I think if
it was it Christina Rossetti in the Bleak Midwinter, which
has turned into a very fine Christmas hymn, which was
originally a poem. I mean, reading some of the poems
of Christina Rosetti might be interesting for a Christian. But
please read, don't despair. Read some poetry. Read something you
remember from school. You know that you didn't entirely hate.
(44:18):
You know there's something out there for you. Just just
don't give up, please, And there's nothing else. Maybe you
should read some of my poetry. It's not all bad.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
I swear, thank you, nel Can you can you read
some of your poetry for us? Please?
Speaker 3 (44:31):
I shall now. A certain person or some importance recommended
this poem. I read this poem, so I shall read it.
It's based on my experiences many years ago in a monastery.
It's from the early morning service vigil. It's called vigil.
Now is a time for timelessness, before the dense ink
cloud of the night disperses. Monks assembled by the monastic
(44:56):
law begin chanting their pendulum verses. A mother rises in
the dark to feed a sacrifice of love to her
new child. The monks in prayer answer our world's need,
pleading redemption from our terrors. Wild nightmares walk the earth,
(45:17):
making us their prey. Fantasies swell in shadows. We need
light to see love clearly, to see Christ's new day
and daily battles, when by his love's might to the
immortal King our brief chart trial sing those monks who
sing to God in offering. I shall now read an
(45:43):
advent poem if I may short advent poem, advent another
advent waiting for a star to shine our way to Bethlehem.
Unwind the tangled web of will, the gate on bar
to Paradise now and a fresh vowl bind another year
full of empty foolings, life wasted solemnly in dull pursuits
(46:09):
of what shall follow us undergraves rulings, It's posing importance,
hard death refutes. Can Christ be born in this? Can
Christ be born in our heart? Stable amids, dunge and straw?
Is there room for Christ in me? New life s
worn so long ago? Is it stun still? New? Still law?
(46:33):
God's naked screaming glove be born in me again, sweet child,
and curse Old Adam's tree.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
No, I'm sorry, as Christopher if there were any poems,
picularly that the other Christopher that you want who to read.
Speaker 6 (47:00):
Arm shoes.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
Okay, sorry, I interrupt you.
Speaker 3 (47:04):
That's okay, here, Elaison. If you should mark iniquities, my King,
who know me better than I know myself, If you
should mark each dark and sordid thing, then I have
no help hope of eternal health, the death that does
not die, the starless night, the fruits of petty meannesses reaped,
(47:26):
the well of worthlessness, destructions, bite awake, in aching, misery steeped.
Save me, Lord from what I truly deserve, from all
the empty idols of my heart from false masters I
have striven to serve. Allow new redemption to take part
(47:47):
into your embrace. I escape from strife. Your arms wide
open on the cross of life. I want to read
if I may a little poem about Saint Antony of Egypt.
Saint Antony of Egypt, you fled the wilderness of busy
(48:08):
streets to taste the hidden streams in distant sands, the
bread of solitude as honeyed treats to hold the riches
of God empty hands. Demons mocked you. Beneath the scourging sun,
battles born daily inward war, through years of silted days, days,
(48:31):
God's will be done. Far from lounged townland's destructractioned spears,
you followed the Lamb wherever he went. He led to
desert's door, that you might pass as his defender. Half
the world was sent to hear you preach that world's
(48:51):
cares were but grass. Christ is true God. You Taughtise
his true man, and in your life lay lines of
God's true plan. I want to read just one more poem,
if I may on the apostle to the English. Saint
Augustine of Canterbury had quite a tough job with my people.
(49:12):
Saint Augustine of Canterbury afar off island full of fog
and rain, where the English live, whom I must convert,
must give them the Gospel, its truths explain, and from
their woodland idols must divert to follow Christ. I must
leave all behind, the life and people I know so
(49:34):
well to proclaim Christ with all heart, soul and mind,
to make His kingdom in these kingdoms. Dwell savages have
souls too, believes our Pope, and we must save them.
Crossing distant shores to bitter, blood stained tribes who need
our hope, whose broken bone bought land needs divine laws.
(50:01):
God loves them, and so for his sake must I,
as I prepared to sound his battle cry, Thank you,
thank you.
Speaker 2 (50:11):
I wonder if you could read, and maybe Andrew and
Christopher have some ones I'd like you to read. But
I was wondering if you read It's a little lighter
one here a dragon.
Speaker 3 (50:20):
Oh yeah, if I can fight art, it's good. It
came on the post. I do write funny poems, So dragon,
it is not easy being a dragon. Stupid men coming
around to kill you, waving swords and frets spun from
booze flagon. Don't want to kill them, but what can
you do. I would have liked a quiet life in peace.
(50:43):
I could have been a good slowworm or newte Instead,
these losers try me to decease, to grab their paws
on some imagined lute. I'm a big softy. Really. If
they'd call politely, they could come in and have tea,
and I would show them round, no need to brawl.
(51:04):
Then they could leave me in tranquility. Yes, you can
see my cave. It's not too cold. Just please don't
expect to find any gold.
Speaker 2 (51:18):
Thank you, Thank you. Right like that.
Speaker 3 (51:23):
Well, as with life in general, a little humor is
necessary in poetry from time to time.
Speaker 2 (51:29):
Do you have Are you working on another collection?
Speaker 3 (51:33):
Oh? I do? Try and keep writing poets you as
I feel exhausted. I mean this book it's over two
hundred pages. It's like, it feels like almost nearly a
decade's worth of work. I keep trying to write poetry.
I mean, the thing. The worst form of plagiarism is
often self plagiarism. I have to avoid sometimes trying to
write a pastiche of poems I've already written. But I
(51:55):
am trying to write poetry and to keep learning. I
think you have to keep like you have to keep,
especially with poet. A lot of some poets acause the
Romantic poets, Some of the Romantic poets, if they didn't
die young, they made people wish they'd died young. Think
of William Wordsworth. You lived to be about eighty, but
he wrote very little poetry of any worth in his
final decades. You've got to be open to new influences.
(52:16):
You've got to be avoid becoming ossified, becoming a fossil.
You've got to learn things. So I keep, I keep.
I should read more poetry. I keep trying to write
more poetry. And so maybe in a few years time
I'll write another I'll get another book published if I
if I can find if you know, if a Ruka
press or someone else is willing to publish me. Still
I shall, I shall do so. But I haven't any
(52:38):
imminent plans for a new book. But I shall try
and keep going.
Speaker 2 (52:42):
We didn't talk all today about narrative poems versus lyric poetry.
Speaker 3 (52:47):
No, that's a pity, because so I've heard people say,
sometimes people see poetry solely in lyric terms, which of
course is quite dangerous.
Speaker 6 (52:54):
I mean, so it's.
Speaker 3 (52:55):
Interest you look like the nineteenth century, you had the
rise of the novel, and you had novels on the
eightient central but a lot of poetry, I say, like
we've mentioned for the Eniad or the Iliad or the Odyssey,
you had a lot of narratives like well, Paradise lost
were told in verse. We sort of lost that. I'm
not sure that's an entirely good thing, but it is
(53:16):
a particular skill. I think writing good narrative verse because
I think someone there is more of a because I
remember someone mentioned for the New Formalist movement which started
in America from the eighties, there was sort of revival
of things like narrative verse, which perhaps is a good thing.
I mean, it's interesting because some of them, as you
can tell, I've written quite a few sonnets, and they
(53:36):
often quite lyrical, but they often also tell stories. I
think there's something to be said for having a little
lyricism in your narrative and something of a narrative in
your lyricism. I quite like mixing the two. Of course,
was it Wordsworth you had the lyrical ballads, which of
course was lyric poetry in the form of narrative ballads,
which in the eighteenth century had been seen as very
(53:56):
different things. I think there's something to be said for
not let poetry be too narrow. You have to be
open to new influences. So I'm very much in favor
of narrative poetry and wants more of it.
Speaker 2 (54:08):
See Lewis wrote, I believe two narrative poems. I haven't
read them. I don't know how good they are.
Speaker 3 (54:14):
I've read people. I know it sounds awfu because someone
said the great tragedy of C. S. Lewis. He could write,
he was a brilliant critic of verse. He went very
well in Paradise Lost on, you know, medieval literature and
Renaissance literer. He was a brilliant literary critic. He could
write brilliant novels. He could not write poetry. Because I
think someone said it's it's quite interesting because John Betchaman,
(54:35):
who became English poet laureate, actually was taught and axwored
by C. S. Lewis, and they hated each other for
a variety of reasons. I think partly Betchaman was lazy
and flippant and would test the patients for saint. But
the fact that Betchman was also ended up a poet
may have affected Lewis. It's sometimes easier to like poets
who were safely dead than ones who were alive. And
(54:55):
you might see his rivals, and I think the common
consensus is that, with some exceptions see C. S. Lewis
on the whole was not as great at poetry as
he was in prose.
Speaker 2 (55:05):
Yeah, there was a little poem that he wrote that
He prefixed a preverce to this Bold Miracles, which I
will just sign it, which I think is actually pretty good.
But yeah, I haven't read actually much of this book
at all.
Speaker 3 (55:19):
He did a funny little comment on was it T. S.
Eliot's The Love Song of Jail for proof of And
I said, I've tried in Vain to see if a
table was it a cloud? A table, any table resembles
a patient ephorized cloud, any cloud resembles a patient ephorised
upon a table in Vain, I simply wasn't able. Apparently
he was quite skeptical of Elliott's poetry and field.
Speaker 2 (55:44):
Well, thank you, thank you very much for being our
guest today.
Speaker 3 (55:48):
Thank you to relate something.
Speaker 2 (55:51):
We were delighted. We will be resuming after a little
break for Christmas Tide on January eighth, where our guests
will be. You sent the Uguis who is the editor
of the online review z Leeste, published in Chile. He's
an attorney and an academic. So let's end with a
(56:17):
ave to our lady and uh prayers for all our
work in the name of the Father's Son in the
Holy Spirit. Event you're Mary fillid Is, the Lord is
with the blesser of the aliment women, and blessed is
the fruit of their wound. Jesus, Holy Mary, Mother of God.
Pray for listeners now to Delaware death. Amen the name
of the Father, so the Spirit. Amen. Thank you, thank you,
(56:41):
thank you, all of you.
Speaker 1 (56:42):
Hi really, hello, God's beloved. I'm Annabel Moseley, author, professor
of theology and host of them Sings My Soul and
Destination Sainthood on w c AT Radio. I invite you
to listen in and find it inspiration along this sacred journey.
We're traveling together to make our lives a masterpiece and
(57:06):
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Speaker 2 (57:28):
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Speaker 2 (00:07):
Welcome to the Open Door with their host Thomas Stork
and co host Christopher's Anger and andrews Rakowski. Today we're
honored to have the English Catholic poet Christopher Villiers, who
with whom will talk about poetry as well as being
allowed to listen to some of his own poetry. Let
(00:30):
us begin as we do with prayer, name of the
Father's Son of the Holy Spirit. Amen, Come, Holy Spirit,
full the hearts of your faithful, and kindling them the
fire of your love. Send forth your spirit, and they
shall be created, and you shall renew the face of
the earth. Let us pray, Oh God, who has taught
the hearts of the faithful by the light of the
Holy Spirit, grant that in the same spirit we may
(00:52):
be truly wise, and everyone rejoice in His consolation through
Christ our Lord. Amen, and named the Father and Son
of the Holy Spirit. Men, well, Christopher Biliars, we'retty learned
to have you. And uh, it's a poetry as I see,
(01:13):
it has been kind of relegated to closet best in
today's world. And I know other people have said this
before before I have uh, can you address that point
of the of the place of poetry and perhaps give
some reasons why we think that might be the case, if.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
I shall certainly try. I believe there's some I mean,
it's interesting because you see even things like an Instagram,
there's a so called insta poets like RUPI Kerr. I'm
not saying there works necessarily any good, but you can
see there's some role for poetry in popular culture, and
I mean very converse of some kinds and say hip
hop lyrics can pop up in unexpected places. But you're
(01:54):
right to say that in general poetry, certainly serious literary
poetry does seem rather marginalized. It's not done obviously within England.
I come from an English context. By knowing little from
the American context, it seems to be a very interesting.
Catholic poet Dana Joya wrote an essay called it Does
Poetry Matter, and he was saying about how it seems
(02:15):
to be mainly poetry workshops and universities that produce poetry,
and that it's basically people creative writing courses, reading each
other's poems and nobody else. I think there is a
sense as you say that poetry has become marginal for
a variety of reasons. I mean perhaps with the birth
of new media. I mean with the Internet. We have
lots of people now who barely read books, who can
(02:36):
barely concentrate enough to read for a whole book. And
I think about poetry is it requires a good deal
of concentration. So you have others of media competing the
attention of poetry. Now, as I mentioned before, some people
use the Internet as a forum for poetry. And I think,
as you say, part of the issue with poetry is
that it requires a certain cultural basis for a whole
(02:59):
culture to have, say a sort of poetry they like,
say Robert Frost in the American context, say fifty sixty
years ago, or in my country the English poet John
Betchaman say sixty or fifty years ago. You need a
common culture, You need a certain sense of a common narrative,
common images, common frames of reference around which you can
(03:21):
form poetry. I think there are still people interested in
various ways about different types of poetry in verse, but
perhaps there's less a sense for common a common culture,
a group of people who actually interested reading the same poems.
Everything's fragmented and it's interesting. I mean, the Internet in
many ways is a blessing. You can read all sorts
of things on the Internet. I mean I probably would
(03:43):
not have been published without the Internet. I was discovered
weirdly enough on Facebook as a poet. But the point
is everything's very atomized now. People live in their own
small worlds. I think also with poetry and the humanities
in general, as a question of just a find its existence.
I know in my country fewer and fewer young people
(04:04):
are taking up the study of English literature after the
age of sixteen. They think, well, I'm not going to
find work unless I do something like computer science. And
there is a strong, sort of a certain narrow utilitarian
aspect to that. So I think some people perhaps poetry
is seen as sort of a flippery It's not seen
as important as it once was. It doesn't combine to
(04:24):
the sense of communal myths, of communal storytelling. I mean,
if you look at poetry how it evolved from an
oral culture, you no stories like the iLiads or later
on Beowulf. They emerge as as stories people told by
the fire around communities. It's how people understood themselves. The Greeks.
For the Greeks, the iLiads and the Odyssey by Homer
were almost like the Holy Scriptures are to Christians. It
(04:47):
was how they understood themselves. It was how they're their
frame of reference, and there was that group. Poetry is
very good at memorizing. It emerges from that sort of culture.
We perhaps don't have the same sense of a common culture,
or say a Western culture don't read the same books.
They don't ness whether if they read books at all,
it's often in small little groups. I mean my poet,
(05:07):
my publisher, Ruka Press is a fine publisher where you
get the sense a lot of the books are written
for redistively small niche audience, say, or interest in the
Latin mass. That's all that's very worthy and should be
of more interest abroad as culture, but it isn't. It's
sort of you have different groups in different little worlds,
and perhaps there isn't that sense of poetry of songs
(05:29):
of things unifying people. Does that answer your question?
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Yes? And it's interesting that you brought up the communal
aspect because certainly or poems like The Idiot were meant
to be recited in groups, as my understanding, and yet
for quite a while since maybe the Renaissance poetry has
been mostly something that individuals read in their study. M
(05:55):
I don't know if you're familiar with the book called
The Celestial Twins, Music and Poetry through the Ages by
American academic Kirby Smith, and his thesis is about music.
Poetry and music were originally quite intimately related, and when
they began to break apart, that was not necessarily healthy
(06:17):
for either of them.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
I haven't read that particular book, but you're right. I mean,
if you look at the Homeric epics, they were supposed
to be read to musical accompaniment, and of course with
the psalms and the scriptures to very important a lot
of the like the Biblical poetry was meant to be
accompanied to music. It's quite even say. You find many
people try and say that pop song lyrics are poetry.
And it's so I have to tell this speech. It
was it Paul Simon and Simon Garfuncle said, you know,
(06:42):
the people who call me a poet are people who
don't read poetry. You know, Wallis Stevens is poetry. I'm
just a good but I get your point of these. Ideally,
poetry does have a relationship with music. I mean, you
could have good song lyrics that don't work by themselves
as poetry, but you can have good poems at our music.
I mean this trinking your poet Robert Herrick in the
seventeenth century in England, a lot of his poems were
(07:04):
turned into songs. They're very musical, of course. I'm in
the Liza Reethnage. Slightly earlier you had Thomas Campions. There
is a relationship to music and poetry which is very important.
I mean poetry needn't I mean you call Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman's poetry. It does not use formal verse or rhyme,
but it is rooted in the cadences of speech. It
(07:26):
has a firm command of rhythm, the rhythm of language.
It is very musical. And Whitman himself was actually very
influenced by the opera as well as by the poetry
and poetic prose of the scriptures.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Yeah, Andrew, good morning, good morning.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
Yeah, and I apologize it took me almost turn minutes
to get the technology to work. Under know it was
just very small. Sorry about that. Good morning, good morning, Christopher, Andrew.
Is a way in where you will and I will.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
You know, I'm I'm in the United States, at least
a lot of just mass advertising still has a kind
of a very shallow verse rhyme even with it which
it seems like there's an element type of music. And
I don't know if that's probably true in Britain also,
but it's it's always been curious to me that the
(08:26):
it seems like this very shallow kind of poetry that's
just commercial. Nonetheless, there there's a perception that verse that
that I should say, rhythm and verse and and uh
ronic rhymes still matter, and yet a lot of serious
(08:49):
voices and uh you look up there, like in the
Kenyan Review, for example, you look at the poetry in there,
and it's just pros arranged in a curious way on
the page at least. So it's to me, yes.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
There's some time, I mean, there is good free verse
poetry a I meantioned for someone like Walt Whitman. I
just remember the saying by T. S. Eliot, no verse
is free if for a man and presumably a woman
who's trying to do a good job, you know, if
you're actually looking at it, even if it doesn't necessarily
use iambic pentameter or an aba rhyme scheme. You have
to control the language. You have to make it dance.
(09:25):
Do you to say it crudely? Prose is language, that
is walking poetry. The words dance. They have a certain
figurative quality, a certain rhythm to it. There's something about that.
And as you say some to be fair, I will
say this, though, every age has its bad poetry. If
you look at, say, the ear of Alfred Lloyd Tennyson,
(09:46):
who has caused poet lauriate for over forty years in
my country. His successor criticized Tennyson, Alfred Austen, was a
notoriously bad poet. Of course, one can write very bad
formal verse, and I think we often forget all the
bad poetry that was written earlier ages because we only
remember the good stuff. But as you see, I think
some poetry in this day and age it does it
(10:06):
is very prosaic. It's by people, I think sometimes to
write good verse without rhyme or meter, you at least
need to have learned those things in order to forsake them.
It's like a hermit. A good hermit is often someone
who spent many years in a monastery has learned all
the rules of monasticism and has internalized them, then you
(10:27):
can live apart from the monastery. I think sometimes that's
a bit like that with free verse. And of course
there's perhaps too many people writing poetry, because as you
talk about the creative writing courses, it's become an industry,
and that's quite dangerous at times. I mean, there should
be a place for poetry in academia, but perhaps there
are too many creative writing courses and it's gone too far.
(10:48):
It's become I say, people just write poetry for reasons.
Speaker 4 (10:54):
It seems to me that it's very popular here where
I live in California. It seems every and every other
person you meet is a poet because it's easy. You know,
you don't have to worry about rhyme or meter. But
I think the problem is that, in a way, I
think good free verse is extremely difficult because you cannot
rely on rhyme and meter. I mean, it's not that
(11:16):
difficult to use meter and to think of rhymes. If
you don't, if you can't rely on those for your effect,
everything will depend on your choice of words. So that
freedom of free verse actually entails an enormous responsibility to
choose exactly the right word at every point, and you
can't justify it by rhyme or by meter. It has
(11:38):
to be absolutely the best possible word. And that's why
I think good free verse is extremely difficult, just as
bad free verse is extremely easy. I don't know if
that's accurate, but that's my impression.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
There's something in that. I think adolescents of all ages
love the idea of freedom. Actually writing free verse, like
living a free life, that should requires a great deal of,
you know, skill and responsibility, and I think people aren't
always quite so keen on that. I mean the thing
is course, with rhyme and meter, sometimes that can be
a danger. It's perfectly possible to write verse that reads
(12:12):
like bad jingles, especially in a language like I'm reading
this Russian gentleman. And he was very interesting because he
said about in Russian, most words rhyme rather easily. With
something else. It's actually to write tolerable, not necessarily great,
but at least half decent. Verse is actually relatively easy.
He in Russian, he said, And he said, yes, English
has produced some of the greatest poets in the world,
(12:34):
but one almost needs to be a great poet to
write a great deal of verse without the rhyme seeming strained.
So it does require a certain discipline, as you say,
but free verse perhaps even more so. I mean, personally,
I couldn't be a free verse poet any more than
I could be a confusion monk. I deeply respect both vocations,
but I think in both cases are perhaps meant for
(12:54):
a select few. I mean it differs. I mean I
naturally a is some more chaotic person. So I need
rhyme and meter. I need that sort of discipline, and
I think for a lot of people you need. It's
like they say, sometimes you need to learn the rules
before you know when you can break them safely. That's
the thing. There's something in that, I think, and perhaps
there are too many people who write free verse without
(13:16):
of course, a lot of people on the issues is
a lot of people try and write poetry before they've
read and understood a lot of poems themselves. Actually, it's
like a craft. If you want to build a table
or a ship or whatever, you need to know a
bit about You need passionate inspiration. You also need to
know basic skills, how to use language, how to make
things fit together, you know, good good intentions may get
(13:37):
you to heaven, they won't necessarily make you a good poet.
You do need to actually know how to handle language,
and the rules of formal verse can be useful. It's
like sometimes almost like a wooden climbing frame for certain
kinds of plants, you know, they need that structure, they
need that sort of scaffolding. There's something I think in
that there are too many bad I mean, obviously to
(13:59):
write good poetriestally very difficult, and as you say, lots
of people they don't want to do the hard work,
and perhaps fevers can be a dangerous temptation for some people.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
I remember reading that, and I don't know whether this
is the case in England, but I remember reading that
there was for a while this sort of polemic between
the free verse people and the formal verse people, and
then it became very politicized. And then, of course, as
you can imagine, the people who preferred you know, Rhyme
and Meeter were classified as you know, conservatives, and the
(14:35):
free verse people of course as liberals, and it became
all the sort of political stance, and then you know,
and there were I guess journals and publishers who who
wouldn't and critics who you know, who looked down on
formal worse because it was associated with some sort of
reactionary mentality.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
I don't know whether that's the.
Speaker 5 (14:55):
Case, because it's simi in America, because there's the movement
known as the New Formalism, which began in the nineteen eighties,
and you had one or two poets free verse poets
basically saying it was like Reaganism in literary form, which
it wasn't to mean this one said, if you actually
looked at the New a lot of the poems were
quite diverse and encouraged a broad range of poems.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
I must say, briefly, one of the great ironies, Ezra Pound,
who did a great deal to popularize what's popular known
as free verse, was was anything but a liberal. He
was infamous for actually supporting Mussolini. He actually was put
in a mental hospital and nearly got executed after World
War Two because of his support for fascism and his
hatred of democracy, including American democracy. It's quite funny how
(15:34):
you can't divide whereasn't how many modernist writers did have links.
I mean, T. S. Eliot was hardly a liberal politically,
but people do assume for some reason, maybe just you
know this verse it reminds you of the hymns I
had to sing in church, or it feels starchy. I'm
going to say this is conservative, which I mean. It's
difficult to apply political labels to the arts. I mean,
(15:54):
I think art should Art should be obviously open to
political influences, that should be open to influenceive throughout life.
I don't think it can be easily sort of pegged
or boxed into political categories. But as you say, yes,
there is that certain idea that free verse means freedom,
free living, you know. I mean, I'm just thinking of
Alan Ginsburg. It's interested reading some of Alan Ginsburg's poetry
(16:16):
because I think the problem with Alan Ginsburg's poems a
lot of them needed to be performed by Alan Ginsburg himself.
Otherwise they came across as sort of flaccid and self indulgent.
You know, they lacked discipline. But that's that thing. There
is that certain idea that you know, if you take
away the corsetree of verse and rhyme, all be free.
You know, it's emancipation. But that's not quite the case.
(16:37):
It's like children thinking that being an adult is actually wonderful.
You know, you can choose when to go to bed,
but you also have to pay your bills and do things.
I think there's sort of parallel there. But but yes,
there is that certain idea that free versus somehow progressive,
and that formal versus reaction. But I don't think that's
always the case. I mean, wh Orden in the thirties,
he was he's in the nineteen thirties, he sided with communism.
(17:00):
He was quite politically radical, but he also used quite
traditional forms of verse a meta, So this doesn't actually work.
I mean, of course, some socialist Marxists would argued that,
you know, verse meta are what the workers want and
what the workers understand. You know, they wanted poetry that's
actually understandable to ordinary people who used to stor songs,
(17:20):
who are used to those sort of lyrics. Of a
lot of like the original modernist free verse was hardly
it was an elite practice. In many ways, it was
deliberately an elite practice. Someone like ts Eliott. You know,
he was writing quite a rarefied form of free verse,
and he knew it. He was very proud of this.
He didn't want necessarily, you know, ordinary people to always
(17:41):
understand what he was saying. So I think there is
sometimes a lot of projection going on. People project their
own ideas and hang ups onto the literature. So I
don't think there isn't get to just summarize. I don't
think there is an easy there can be an easy
categorization of different genres of poetry according to different types
of politics.
Speaker 6 (18:04):
I wonder, in terms of this question of what's happened
to poetry? Couldn't say have they asked the same question
what's happened to all the arts? In a way, yes,
I don't know what the situation is in England, but
my impression, well, in the United States, or it could
say what has happened to religion? Religion has been seen
(18:25):
as something that's privatized, something that that's of value because
it's a value to the person who holds it, but
it has no real objective value except maybe its effects.
I think the same thing with all the transcendentals beauty, truth, goodness,
et cetera. We come to the sense that the transcendentals
(18:47):
are also to be determined by each individual. So if
that's the case, what's beautiful is purely individual. What is
beautiful is purely ideos cretic, and when it becomes idio socrat,
and it's what's the point.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
Really.
Speaker 6 (19:03):
Finally, I don't think we take it seriously. What we
do take seriously what we call the stem subjects in
the United States. What we take seriously is engineering. We
take seriously the empirical sciences. Why because they produce things
which are tangible and are clearly of use to the society.
But things like poetry are maybe nice for some people,
(19:25):
but they're not really of central value anymore. So I think,
I mean, I'm wondering if that degree what we're seeing
is just an effect of some much larger phenomenon.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
Yes, I think there's there's there's something in what you see.
I think a lot of the culture in general has
become more marginal. It's not seen as quite so it's
of public importance. But poetry it seems a minor hobby.
I just remember I went to a party once, so
I said something about how I write poetry, and this
woman just we'll stop writing poetry and get a proper job.
You know, it's a dangerous distraction. You know, no one
(19:58):
needs these poems. You know it was quite funny though,
but sort of. I think people do think that you
don't necessarily need to write poetry, or I mean, one
should take these stories in the press, you know, with
a pinch of salt, you know, a little skeptically, because
they sensationalized matters. But there's one university and they were
simply stopping teaching about Sonnets. They thought, well, this is
(20:19):
some very dated thing. We don't need to teach people
about Sonnets. You know, if they have to do humanities
at all, they don't need this sort of fusty old stuff.
Perhaps they thought vaguely associated it with neo colonialism or something.
But you know, I think there is that sense, as
you say, of things being privatized, there's not a sense
of a common culture. And also cultural standards. Perhaps there's
(20:39):
the idea that the very idea of cultural standards assume
some dangerous form of authoritarianism, which there was a French
postmodernist Fuco basically seem to say that all forms of
authority were some sort of sinister plot of to take
power over people. I think there's perhaps an element of that,
as you say that people part is in the vidual
(21:00):
poetry has become seen as an individual thing, and people
don't like the idea of applying universal standards and as
perhaps the way people are taught poetry as well. I mean,
it wasn't always a good thing, but people used to
be have to memorize large amounts of poetry that they
don't anymore. And perhaps that's what the people don't memorize texts.
They don't engage with texts, with literature as much. I've heard,
(21:20):
essentially read stories about various universities and the professors complain
how their pupils, their students, they don't read, they don't
read books. Fully that even at proper elite universities, they
don't read as many books as they would have their
you know, their predecessors forty or so years ago, would
have done. People don't make time for literally it's not
seen as important. Partly, you say, for economic reasons, but
(21:41):
also perhaps our cultural standards have changed.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
If if we can call free verse, or some of
it at least genuine poetry, HM, can you do you
think that as possible to define a dividing line between
free verse poetry and what just masquerades as verse rearrangs
on the page. Because I'm trying to figure out what
(22:13):
the essence is that differentiates one from the other. And
I wonder if you could shed any light on that.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
Well, that's the thing poetry. It's not an easy thing
to define. It's an easy thing to love. Was it.
There was a a houseman, the poet. He gave a
lecture on poetry, and I think he upsets some of
his modernist contemporaries who are there in the audience, because, well,
poetry makes your hair stand up on the back of
your neck. Perhaps that's a crude thing, perhaps sort of
(22:39):
genuine free verse. When you read it, you feel I mean,
if you read is it when Lilac's Last in the
Doorway blooms by Witman, you read it and you can
feel it. You feel it's poetry. You sense this is
different from say a legal contract or a furniture assembly
instruction manual. You know you send it speaks to you
(23:00):
in a weird way, and not just like in a
way prose fiction. It may it sings, It may not
sing in verse and meter, but it has a certain rhythm.
It has an intensity of imagery or vision of sound
that is poetic. As I said earlier, prose walks. Sometimes
it walks very well and elegantly. Poetry dances. If it
(23:21):
dances inside you, maybe it's poetry. Forgive me, I'm not
actually trained as a literary critic, but that's a crude suggestion.
Speaker 6 (23:30):
Could you aristol if I remember correctly? Defined poetry is
the art of the metaphor, which I've always had some
problem with because there are a lot of poems that
have very few metaphors. But because one think as sosm
as I understand in Hebrew, that's certainly in English and
Latin or an art and meter, but we still call
(23:51):
the poetry. Yes, yeah, I think the definition aspect is
very difficult, you.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Know, because there are certain there's certainly pros that is
rich like that, it's full of metaphors and full of
suggestive imagery and so on. I mean, I'm thinking, for example,
if you're familiar with the first paragraph of Bellock's book
about Joan of Arc, it's one of the most rich
(24:20):
wordings I've ever seen of anything. It's incredible. Actually, I
don't suppose you could write a whole book like that,
because it would it would be too rich almost to read.
But but uh, it's not poetry. I don't think you
ever pretended it was poetry.
Speaker 6 (24:37):
It could be could be considered poetic. I mean, so
we we so poetry is. It's not like there's a
clear dem marcation, but we have the poetic and it's
more what's the term is it's more intense in what
we call poetry itself, because I don't think you could
simply define poetry by Ryan, especially not rhyme, because you could.
(25:03):
There were Greeks who roads medical treatises in verse, so
it wasn't poetry I would call poetry.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Now.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Of course, all the ancient Greek and Latin great poems
were written without rhyme. Ryan was a relatively late development
because Milton in his you know when he's think it's
his prefaced a Paradise lost a few years, he points out,
you know, in the tradition of the classical without rhyme.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
Right, rhyme is obviously neither you're there. But meter I'm
a little more hesitant to to say that that's notly sentual.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
I think, first without meet needs at least to appreciate
what meter means, even if it's free, it has to
have a certain relationship, has to have a certain discipline.
You know, the sounds have to have a certain pattern.
It's not I mean because because I meant we talked
earlier out you know the Bible. Of course, Whitman he
was influenced by the you know, the King James Bible,
in the poetry, the psalms and the poetic prose. And
(26:07):
I think is it may not necessarily have a meter,
but it does have a certain discipline of sound, and
I think he clearly used that. I think I think
perhaps you need a certain healthy understanding of meta before
you can write without it. And I think it's something
that needs to be taken seriously. Of course, as we
said before, meta it may sometimes sometimes be necessary, but
it's not sufficient. You can write things in met or
(26:30):
indeed rhyme, which aren't poetry. It's quite interesting sort of relationship.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Yeah, the bobal carbon prayer I used to I used
to be in mispellion in the book certainly has that
kind of rhythmic prose.
Speaker 6 (26:45):
Oh yes, yeah, maybe we should have asked quite Miss
Christopher thinks, when are you trying to accomplish by its
own political project? I mean, is there any goal or
it's just because you weren't writing poetry.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
Well, that's the thing I'll tell you, because I mean,
like a lot of you know, teenagers. Just as teenagers
get acne, they sometimes write bad poetry. So I did
a little of that, but it wasn't anything good. It
was weird. It wasn't until I was twenty five I
started writing a great deal of poetry. It was partly
because I'd read this book called The Artist's Way by
Julia Cameron, and it was quite slightly new, agingan odd,
(27:30):
but it had some good advice, and I started all
of a sudden, bits of verse started forming in my head.
It was quite peculiar, and when it came to lent
of twenty fifteen, I started writing religious poetry, mainly based
on meditations on the Bible as a spiritual exercise. So
in a way it became sort of I think partly
was just idea to use well for one of the
(27:50):
better words self development. I was I was a bit
of a loop. I was slightly drifting in life, and
I thought I would try something. But as it developed,
I decided I wanted in my own little way to
glorify God and perhaps be of some interest to my
fellow human beings. Because I would post some of my
poems on Facebook and suddenly I got people noticing them,
(28:11):
and my previous publisher. It's funny because she sort of
contacted me and asked if I wanted to publish This
is the end of near the end of twenty fifteen.
She asked if I wanted to publish a book. And
when I realized she wasn't trying to get money out
of me, she was actually not going to charge me,
I thought, well, why not. It's not an easy business
finding someone willing to publish poetry, believe me. So this
sort of happened. I mean, I didn't set out the
(28:32):
idea I'm going to become a published poet. It just
sort of I sort of stumbled into it by various means.
And I've tried to sort of I've tried to write
good poetry, or at least poetry which isn't completely bad
in a sense, to actually as an offering to God
and to others. And it's quite hardening. You know, I'm
not a you know, I don't sell millions of books,
(28:55):
but you know, I have people who read my poems
and tell me how they've touched my heart, and it
inspires me to carry on. I mean, part of me
occasionally wishes I was a successful incountant instead, but God
did not make me that way. So I suppose, if
if i'm I use the grand term of the project,
my project is simply, perhaps just light a little candle
(29:15):
of words before God.
Speaker 6 (29:19):
That the origin of your pedal, the vision in your
lads collection.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
Well, this is because I've had free books. I published
my current book. If I mentioned it, Versing the Mystery,
which has been published this year by Aruka Press, this contains, yes,
I shall hold it up, behold ah, thank you, bless you.
I appreciate this, But anyway they were. My first book
(29:46):
was a book of sonnets based on the Bible sonnets
from the Spirit. My second book, Petals of Vision, was
it sort of how can I put this? It's like
a pot pourri of various types of poetry. I have dragons,
I have funny poems, I have religious, I have all
sorts of poems. And my third book, Another Odyssey, was
based on Greek classical history and mythology, and also the
(30:07):
early Christian Church. And my current book includes basically the
best of poems for my three previous books, with some
new stuff, hopefully fewer typos, though I make no promises
about that.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Do you think that poetry is particularly important for Catholics
because for any reason?
Speaker 3 (30:27):
Well, yes, yes I do. First of all, of course,
there's a great deal of poetry in scripture, and God
would not allow his Holy Word to be so full
of poetry if you didn't think poetry was some importance,
is it? If you look within the liturgy, I mean
even Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote final liturgical poems, it is
deeply versed in Catholicism, you know, Christianity, Catholic Christianity certainly
(30:47):
is not a prosaic religion. It is not simply a
religion of you know, clear crisp instructions. It is not
like a legal contract or you know, as I said before,
it is something deeply mystical that involves all aspects of
the human condition. Human beings are not solely narrowly rational people.
(31:08):
We are not narrowly utilitarian creatures. We need poetry, we
need vision. Was if I'm a quote, he was no Catholic.
He was actually very sympathetic towards Catholicism and a fine
religious poet. For my quote, William Blake was his famous
words to see the world, to see a world in
(31:32):
a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower.
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, an eternity
in an hour. You know, through poetry, through the creative arts,
you know in general, within that we can find the infinite,
within the finite. We can see God in a sense.
(31:52):
We can sense the world beyond the quote idian, the
world beyond the daily grind. You know, we can actually
send there's more to human existence, because human beings are
made for something more than just this world. We're meant
for more. I think poetry is part of that. It
shows us there is something transcendent to existence, that you know,
(32:14):
that there's more to life than prose, just as there's
more to the world, to the universe than mere matter.
It's something that's passionate. It strikes the very soul. We
need poets, just as we need great visual artists to
actually make the word incarnate, to actually show the Gospel,
in the sense that poetry could actually lead us to
(32:34):
the divine. It's interesting. Gerard Manny Hopkins, who is actually
my favorite poet, he burned all his earlier poetry when
he became a Jesuit, but years later he realized that
actually writing poetry was part of his vocation. That's what
God wanted to actually to praise him, to actually to
speak to him as a poet, and to share that
(32:55):
with others. I mean, if you look at the psalms,
the psalms are often quite difficult, they're quite challenging, but
they're great poets. I mean Job, I could say the
Book of Job is a great prose poem. These these
are magnificent things. They're part of human existence, and I
think Catholicism should show the mystery of the universe, the passion,
the color, at times, the slightly bewildering and despairing elements
(33:19):
of the human condition. I mean, I have nothing in
principle against vernacular liturgy, but I fear at times some
of the liturgies, at least in the English language that
came out after Vatican Two, some of them were perhaps
too prosaic. They didn't actually articulate. They were some of
the mystery of existence and the idea of the mystery
of God and human nature. They are perhaps a little
(33:40):
too shallow. Perhaps it's a little unfair because you were
having to establish, like writing hymns a lot of in America.
At least you had all these Jesuits writing hymns very
quickly because they had to build up a musical vernacular,
musical culture where there hadn't been one before. And some
of those hymns may have been good, but a lot
of them were pretty awful. There's a sense thatism needs
to actually address and should it's best follow some addresses
(34:02):
the reality of the human experience, because it is truth
and poetry. Poetry can say things you can't quite say
in prose. You know, it can express things that you
know you can't articulate, just as you can't aways articulate
things in a solely, a narrowly rational logical manner. Sometimes
you need wild metaphors, You need things that don't strictly
(34:24):
make sense viewed prosaically. You need that, you need that passion,
you need that terror, you need all that almost magic
and mystery. And that is something the Catholic Church has
and which poetry has as well. I think it's a
fine marriage. And if Catholics divorce themselves entirely from poetry,
they they take away something of Catholicism. I mean, of
(34:46):
course Dante was a great poet. Dante, you have medieval
Catholicism in verse. You know, you have the ways the
philosophy and theologist Saint Thomas Aquinas articulated in brilliant poetry.
You also have some you know, political criping. That's another messa.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Yeah, it seemed to me sometimes that for Protestants, especially
maybe in the United States, it's always a question of
either or, whereas for Catholics it's usually a question of
both ends that we don't just say, oh, this is false,
defer this this is all true. No, there one might
be true in one way or partially true, or something
(35:25):
like that. So I think I agree that poetry can
do that that very much too. Yeah, I would, I
would think that.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
I mean, in the US we have you know, the
Catholic churches has been countercultural for a long time, and
today it seems that it is. My impression is that
it is less so, or at least it could be
much more so. But certainly one of the ways in
which Catholics could be countercultural would be through poetry. Because
we live in a sort of cultural and religious meliu
(35:57):
which is still dominantly broader or post Protestant, which I
think can be characterized as being prosaic and kind of
pragmatic in its general nature and Catholicism can be such
a counterculture. And again poetry would seem to be the
ideal medium, of course, also music and painting. But it
(36:20):
seems that it's not done. And if we look at
those essays by Dana Jaria that we were looking at,
one of which was written quite a while ago and
the other about ten years ago, he's saying that for
some reason Catholics have not been really playing the role
that they could and should be playing in US culture,
that they've sort of dropped the ball completely. I'm wondering
(36:41):
whether you have any comments on that.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
I have a few ideas, because I know to some
this is also true of Britain. Doesse I understand it's
in America? Traditionally, Catholicism was the religion of immigrants, people
who are often despised and marginalized. The non course, you
got the acronym wasp, white, Tanglo, Saxon Protestant, and so
somebody said that social based gradually broadened to include various
other white people. The sense that Catholics rotten Regina's foreign
(37:06):
They were seen as un American. You saw that in
the nineteen sixty presidential ELECTU. You know, there were those
who didn't want to vote for John F. Kennedy because
he was a Catholic. And I think perhaps a lot
of American Catholics were desperate to assimilate. They wanted to
be like everyone else. It's like the child at school,
the child at school who's pick bullied because he's different.
He doesn't necessary he won't necessarily think, well, maybe my
differences are good. Maybe when I grew up, these differences
(37:30):
will help me. They think, I want to be like
the other children. Why can't I be like the other children?
Why can't they accept me? And of course you had
to some ex it up and you had to summit
this in within England. Course, there's a lively tradition of
anti Catholicism in my country for various, you know, deep
seated historical reasons. But you know, all these people thinking,
you know, we don't want to be on the margins,
(37:50):
we want to be in the mainstream. The idea is
we didn't. Perhaps a lot of people they didn't nessarily want,
they didn't assally want to sort of have their own counterculture.
They wanted to be include. Did they want to be
taken in from the cold and be like everyone else?
Which can be a dangerous thing. And perhaps there was
because perhaps although in many ways the sense that of course,
after from the nineteen sixties onwards, a lot of Catholics
(38:13):
were accepted into broader society and were integrated and were allowed,
you know, they were allowed in public life without being
accused of, you know, being puppets of the Vatican. All
that was good. Perhaps the perhaps Catholics lost a sense
of otherness that was healthy. You know, there's an unhealthy
sense of otherness, but there's also a healthy one. I mean,
(38:34):
I remember when I was at Durham University in northeastern
England some years ago. I knew a lot of Catholics
and molder ones, and they just wanted to be like
everyone else, as if they actually, deep down were basically
liberal humanists. They've been brought up as Catholics, but they
found it slightly embarrassing in some ways, even if they
carried it on because they saw it's an inherited ailment.
(38:54):
But they didn't. They wanted to be integrated. They were
wary of anything that would set them apart from others.
It's just a says some people were desperate not to
offend the New York times or something that they want
to be the sort of people respected by the in crowd.
Perhaps there's an element of that.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
Well in England, at least at least Catholics could claim
that you had the there is no culture and it
had been stolen, or as in the US, we can't
even say that because it brought us in the project
from the vermin.
Speaker 6 (39:33):
The put I could put in a word for the
Germans in the United States who did resist assimilation a
long time in the spirit of German open mindedness in brotherhood.
But yeah, there was a there was a German communities
were actually established in the United States precisely to keep
them from being assimilated, and those existed for quite a while.
Speaker 4 (39:56):
Well today we have, of course the big in the
Great Story, at least in this part of the country,
and I think it's generally true, is immigration from Latin America.
And of course they aren't all Catholics. We know a
lot of them are Evangelicals, but that is, you know,
a possible source of a kind of Catholic resistance to
(40:17):
the culture. Dana Joya is an example of that. He's
an exponent of the Mexican yes, partly Mexican partly Italian.
But so you know, that's perhaps something to look for
because we have now a lot of poets of Hispanic
origin who write in English. Now, whether they're any good,
I have no idea, but they are making a beginning
(40:38):
to make an impact at least out here.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
Are they? In fact? Are they Catholics that well? That
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (40:44):
I mean, you know, it's not something they have advertised
as far as I know, but I mean I'm just
dimly aware of it, and I think that that's just.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Something to look for.
Speaker 6 (40:57):
I know, there's when we live in Californa, there was
a town that actually had an our Lydia Guadalupit procession,
the first sort of prey down the middle of the
street of the town. So if that kind of culture
could be maintained, I think it could be the font
of poetry, font of art, because it's we don't do
in the United States. We have patriotic processions like on
(41:20):
the Fourth of July, and sometimes local communities will have
celebrations of the local community. But we live in a
very unfestive culture as opposed to the Hispanic culture, which
is very festive, and I think that festivity could actually
help inspire the sense of art and desire to do art.
Speaker 3 (41:41):
So m I think a lot of arts, a lot
of poetry need you need a sense of locality. I
think it was w Ah Shorten who said, you know,
poetry should be a bit like cheese. You know, it
may have a regional origin, but it should be able
to be appreciated universally. I think we're saying with writers,
you need a sense of of loco, of a place.
You need to have a s understanding of place and
(42:03):
of community. Because I think a lot of people that live,
especially now, because people move so much, people move frequently
there so much as so much online traffic, there's a
sense of everything being very generic. There's not a sense
of actually of a sense of rootedness in a particular culture,
in a language, in the richness language. Well, that's something
(42:24):
we need to have a sense of community and common
stories and narratives.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
We want you to to read of your own poetry,
because you were very before. I have one question I'd
like to ask you. If you do that, what would
you say to listeners who perhaps never read poetry. What
would you could you say one word to them as
it or to make maybe reconsider that reading poetry might
(42:51):
be worthwhile.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
I swear poetry is worth rale, no matter how many
poets seem to be persuading you otherwise. You know, there's
some good stuff. I mean, I'm trying to think, well,
you know, if you want some light verse, you always
read some olden nash. You know, I think good light
vers is better than bad heavy verse. And I think
there's something said for having a sense of humor. I mean,
obviously from American Robert Frost, some of his poetry is brilliant.
(43:16):
Some of William Carlos Williams's poetry, you know, willim culture
tell us about the story of the urban America, whereas
Robert Frost is the rural America. But although Carlss is
free verse. So try and try to give up on poetry.
You know, read something, maybe read something funny to begin with.
But the poetry is about life. It has always something
(43:37):
to say about things. Also, perhaps from a Catholic perspective,
perhaps I would encourage people to read the Psalms. There's
the penitential Psalms, which always good for lent or advent.
There's you could read some passages from the Bible is
important and sometimes if you read really good hymns. The
best hymns have at least an affinity with poetry. They
(43:58):
can be enjoyed as poetry. I mean, I think if
it was it Christina Rossetti in the Bleak Midwinter, which
has turned into a very fine Christmas hymn, which was
originally a poem. I mean, reading some of the poems
of Christina Rosetti might be interesting for a Christian. But
please read, don't despair. Read some poetry. Read something you
remember from school. You know that you didn't entirely hate.
(44:18):
You know there's something out there for you. Just just
don't give up, please, And there's nothing else. Maybe you
should read some of my poetry. It's not all bad.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
I swear, thank you, nel Can you can you read
some of your poetry for us? Please?
Speaker 3 (44:31):
I shall now. A certain person or some importance recommended
this poem. I read this poem, so I shall read it.
It's based on my experiences many years ago in a monastery.
It's from the early morning service vigil. It's called vigil.
Now is a time for timelessness, before the dense ink
cloud of the night disperses. Monks assembled by the monastic
(44:56):
law begin chanting their pendulum verses. A mother rises in
the dark to feed a sacrifice of love to her
new child. The monks in prayer answer our world's need,
pleading redemption from our terrors. Wild nightmares walk the earth,
(45:17):
making us their prey. Fantasies swell in shadows. We need
light to see love clearly, to see Christ's new day
and daily battles, when by his love's might to the
immortal King our brief chart trial sing those monks who
sing to God in offering. I shall now read an
(45:43):
advent poem if I may short advent poem, advent another
advent waiting for a star to shine our way to Bethlehem.
Unwind the tangled web of will, the gate on bar
to Paradise now and a fresh vowl bind another year
full of empty foolings, life wasted solemnly in dull pursuits
(46:09):
of what shall follow us undergraves rulings, It's posing importance,
hard death refutes. Can Christ be born in this? Can
Christ be born in our heart? Stable amids, dunge and straw?
Is there room for Christ in me? New life s
worn so long ago? Is it stun still? New? Still law?
(46:33):
God's naked screaming glove be born in me again, sweet child,
and curse Old Adam's tree.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
No, I'm sorry, as Christopher if there were any poems,
picularly that the other Christopher that you want who to read.
Speaker 6 (47:00):
Arm shoes.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
Okay, sorry, I interrupt you.
Speaker 3 (47:04):
That's okay, here, Elaison. If you should mark iniquities, my King,
who know me better than I know myself, If you
should mark each dark and sordid thing, then I have
no help hope of eternal health, the death that does
not die, the starless night, the fruits of petty meannesses reaped,
(47:26):
the well of worthlessness, destructions, bite awake, in aching, misery steeped.
Save me, Lord from what I truly deserve, from all
the empty idols of my heart from false masters I
have striven to serve. Allow new redemption to take part
(47:47):
into your embrace. I escape from strife. Your arms wide
open on the cross of life. I want to read
if I may a little poem about Saint Antony of Egypt.
Saint Antony of Egypt, you fled the wilderness of busy
(48:08):
streets to taste the hidden streams in distant sands, the
bread of solitude as honeyed treats to hold the riches
of God empty hands. Demons mocked you. Beneath the scourging sun,
battles born daily inward war, through years of silted days, days,
(48:31):
God's will be done. Far from lounged townland's destructractioned spears,
you followed the Lamb wherever he went. He led to
desert's door, that you might pass as his defender. Half
the world was sent to hear you preach that world's
(48:51):
cares were but grass. Christ is true God. You Taughtise
his true man, and in your life lay lines of
God's true plan. I want to read just one more poem,
if I may on the apostle to the English. Saint
Augustine of Canterbury had quite a tough job with my people.
(49:12):
Saint Augustine of Canterbury afar off island full of fog
and rain, where the English live, whom I must convert,
must give them the Gospel, its truths explain, and from
their woodland idols must divert to follow Christ. I must
leave all behind, the life and people I know so
(49:34):
well to proclaim Christ with all heart, soul and mind,
to make His kingdom in these kingdoms. Dwell savages have
souls too, believes our Pope, and we must save them.
Crossing distant shores to bitter, blood stained tribes who need
our hope, whose broken bone bought land needs divine laws.
(50:01):
God loves them, and so for his sake must I,
as I prepared to sound his battle cry, Thank you,
thank you.
Speaker 2 (50:11):
I wonder if you could read, and maybe Andrew and
Christopher have some ones I'd like you to read. But
I was wondering if you read It's a little lighter
one here a dragon.
Speaker 3 (50:20):
Oh yeah, if I can fight art, it's good. It
came on the post. I do write funny poems, So dragon,
it is not easy being a dragon. Stupid men coming
around to kill you, waving swords and frets spun from
booze flagon. Don't want to kill them, but what can
you do. I would have liked a quiet life in peace.
(50:43):
I could have been a good slowworm or newte Instead,
these losers try me to decease, to grab their paws
on some imagined lute. I'm a big softy. Really. If
they'd call politely, they could come in and have tea,
and I would show them round, no need to brawl.
(51:04):
Then they could leave me in tranquility. Yes, you can
see my cave. It's not too cold. Just please don't
expect to find any gold.
Speaker 2 (51:18):
Thank you, Thank you. Right like that.
Speaker 3 (51:23):
Well, as with life in general, a little humor is
necessary in poetry from time to time.
Speaker 2 (51:29):
Do you have Are you working on another collection?
Speaker 3 (51:33):
Oh? I do? Try and keep writing poets you as
I feel exhausted. I mean this book it's over two
hundred pages. It's like, it feels like almost nearly a
decade's worth of work. I keep trying to write poetry.
I mean, the thing. The worst form of plagiarism is
often self plagiarism. I have to avoid sometimes trying to
write a pastiche of poems I've already written. But I
(51:55):
am trying to write poetry and to keep learning. I
think you have to keep like you have to keep,
especially with poet. A lot of some poets acause the
Romantic poets, Some of the Romantic poets, if they didn't
die young, they made people wish they'd died young. Think
of William Wordsworth. You lived to be about eighty, but
he wrote very little poetry of any worth in his
final decades. You've got to be open to new influences.
(52:16):
You've got to be avoid becoming ossified, becoming a fossil.
You've got to learn things. So I keep, I keep.
I should read more poetry. I keep trying to write
more poetry. And so maybe in a few years time
I'll write another I'll get another book published if I
if I can find if you know, if a Ruka
press or someone else is willing to publish me. Still
I shall, I shall do so. But I haven't any
(52:38):
imminent plans for a new book. But I shall try
and keep going.
Speaker 2 (52:42):
We didn't talk all today about narrative poems versus lyric poetry.
Speaker 3 (52:47):
No, that's a pity, because so I've heard people say,
sometimes people see poetry solely in lyric terms, which of
course is quite dangerous.
Speaker 6 (52:54):
I mean, so it's.
Speaker 3 (52:55):
Interest you look like the nineteenth century, you had the
rise of the novel, and you had novels on the
eightient central but a lot of poetry, I say, like
we've mentioned for the Eniad or the Iliad or the Odyssey,
you had a lot of narratives like well, Paradise lost
were told in verse. We sort of lost that. I'm
not sure that's an entirely good thing, but it is
(53:16):
a particular skill. I think writing good narrative verse because
I think someone there is more of a because I
remember someone mentioned for the New Formalist movement which started
in America from the eighties, there was sort of revival
of things like narrative verse, which perhaps is a good thing.
I mean, it's interesting because some of them, as you
can tell, I've written quite a few sonnets, and they
(53:36):
often quite lyrical, but they often also tell stories. I
think there's something to be said for having a little
lyricism in your narrative and something of a narrative in
your lyricism. I quite like mixing the two. Of course,
was it Wordsworth you had the lyrical ballads, which of
course was lyric poetry in the form of narrative ballads,
which in the eighteenth century had been seen as very
(53:56):
different things. I think there's something to be said for
not let poetry be too narrow. You have to be
open to new influences. So I'm very much in favor
of narrative poetry and wants more of it.
Speaker 2 (54:08):
See Lewis wrote, I believe two narrative poems. I haven't
read them. I don't know how good they are.
Speaker 3 (54:14):
I've read people. I know it sounds awfu because someone
said the great tragedy of C. S. Lewis. He could write,
he was a brilliant critic of verse. He went very
well in Paradise Lost on, you know, medieval literature and
Renaissance literer. He was a brilliant literary critic. He could
write brilliant novels. He could not write poetry. Because I
think someone said it's it's quite interesting because John Betchaman,
(54:35):
who became English poet laureate, actually was taught and axwored
by C. S. Lewis, and they hated each other for
a variety of reasons. I think partly Betchaman was lazy
and flippant and would test the patients for saint. But
the fact that Betchman was also ended up a poet
may have affected Lewis. It's sometimes easier to like poets
who were safely dead than ones who were alive. And
(54:55):
you might see his rivals, and I think the common
consensus is that, with some exceptions see C. S. Lewis
on the whole was not as great at poetry as
he was in prose.
Speaker 2 (55:05):
Yeah, there was a little poem that he wrote that
He prefixed a preverce to this Bold Miracles, which I
will just sign it, which I think is actually pretty good.
But yeah, I haven't read actually much of this book
at all.
Speaker 3 (55:19):
He did a funny little comment on was it T. S.
Eliot's The Love Song of Jail for proof of And
I said, I've tried in Vain to see if a
table was it a cloud? A table, any table resembles
a patient ephorized cloud, any cloud resembles a patient ephorised
upon a table in Vain, I simply wasn't able. Apparently
he was quite skeptical of Elliott's poetry and field.
Speaker 2 (55:44):
Well, thank you, thank you very much for being our
guest today.
Speaker 3 (55:48):
Thank you to relate something.
Speaker 2 (55:51):
We were delighted. We will be resuming after a little
break for Christmas Tide on January eighth, where our guests
will be. You sent the Uguis who is the editor
of the online review z Leeste, published in Chile. He's
an attorney and an academic. So let's end with a
(56:17):
ave to our lady and uh prayers for all our
work in the name of the Father's Son in the
Holy Spirit. Event you're Mary fillid Is, the Lord is
with the blesser of the aliment women, and blessed is
the fruit of their wound. Jesus, Holy Mary, Mother of God.
Pray for listeners now to Delaware death. Amen the name
of the Father, so the Spirit. Amen. Thank you, thank you,
(56:41):
thank you, all of you.
Speaker 1 (56:42):
Hi really, hello, God's beloved. I'm Annabel Moseley, author, professor
of theology and host of them Sings My Soul and
Destination Sainthood on w c AT Radio. I invite you
to listen in and find it inspiration along this sacred journey.
We're traveling together to make our lives a masterpiece and
(57:06):
with God's grace, become saints. Join me Annabel Moseley for
then sings My Soul and Destination Sainthood on WCAT Radio.
God bless you. Remember you are never alone. God is
always with you.
Speaker 2 (57:28):
Thank you for listening to a production of WCAT Radio.
Please join us in our mission of evangelization, and don't
forget Love lifts up when knowledge takes flight.
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The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.