Issue 1
Summer 2005 |
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Welcome to the first Greenwich Exchange newsletter |
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| In this edition |
| Information on new and
forthcoming titles |
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Warren Hope:
The Greenwich Exchange 20 Questions Interview
The first in our regular series quizzes the poet and critic. |
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‘Speech with song
in it’
Robert Nye reflects on the writing process and introduces some
poems from his latest Greenwich collection, The Rain and the
Glass:
99 Poems, New & Selected. |
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Latest titles from Greenwich
Exchange |
| Student
Guide to Dylan Thomas
by Peter Davies (110pp) |
| Student
Guide to Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale
by John Lucas (106pp) |
| Student
Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins
by Sean Sheehan (66pp) |
| Student
Guide to Poets of the First World War
by John Greening (152pp) |
| ‘The
Last Blackbird’ and other poems by Ralph Hodgson
edited and introduced by John Harding (62pp) |
| The
Rain and the Glass – 99 poems, New and Selected
by Robert Nye (122pp) |
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Forthcoming Titles from Greenwich Exchange |
Body of Truth
D. H. Lawrence: The Nomadic Years, 1919-1930 by Philip
Callow |
| Philip Callow is a respected novelist and poet,
as well as an acclaimed biographer of writers and painters.
Lawrence was both writer and painter and Callow’s book
renders its extraordinary subject comprehensible and sympathetic
without smoothing away Lawrence’s idiosyncrasies, flaws
or complexities. |
| Callow understands the intimate yet mysterious
ways artists’ lives affect and become their work. He manages
to trace subtle causes and effects between Lawrence’s
life and art, and he can helpfully interpret the work while
avoiding both the reductive and the merely fanciful. His brief
discussion of the notorious Lady Chatterley’s Lover is
especially judicious and full of insight. |
| Callow was born in Birmingham and studied engineering
and the teaching of English before he turned to writing. He
lives in the Cotswolds. |
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| Selected Poems by Martin Seymour-Smith |
| To the general public Martin Seymour-Smith (1928-1998)
is known as a distinguished literary biographer, notably of
Robert Graves, Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy. To such figures
as John Dover Wilson, William Empson, Stephen Spender and Anthony
Burgess he was regarded as one of the most independently-minded
scholars of his generation, through his pioneering critical
edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and his magisterial
Guide to Modern World Literature – he was first and foremost,
a poet. In this first collected edition of his verse since his
death, Martin Seymour-Smith’s affinities with the poets
of the seventeenth century become clear. He shares their love
of argument, ratiocination and a constant wrestling with the
self. As this collection demonstrates, at the centre of the
poems is a passionate engagement with man, his sexuality and
his personal relationships. |
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Yet more to come |
| W.B. Yeats, Joseph Heller, Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night |
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The Greenwich Exchange
'20 Questions' Interview with Warren Hope |
| (Author of Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney, and Philip
Larkin in the Student Guide series plus Norman Cameron: his
life, work and letters and a book of his own verse, Adam’s
Thoughts in Winter, all published by Greenwich Exchange) |
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| Warren Hope was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
in 1944. He was educated in the public – that is, the
free, state-supported – schools there, including Philadelphia’s
Central High School, generally considered one of the best high
schools in the country and dedicated to a college preparatory
curriculum. |
| Despite attending Central, Hope did not attend
college immediately and instead worked in a printing company
and joined the United States Air Force. Hope served as a helicopter
medic in Viet Nam, and a number of his poems are based on or
refer to his year-long tour of duty there. |
| After military service, he attended the Community
College of Philadelphia and then Temple University. While at
Temple, with a good library at hand, Hope read the poetry in
English of the twentieth century and made up his own mind about
it. It was then that he came across the poems of Norman Cameron
and began to consider the possibility of writing Cameron’s
life. He worked in advertising, public relations, and publishing,
eventually settling into a career at the Insurance Institute
of America. He was largely responsible for the editing and production
of insurance textbooks there. |
| His poems began to appear in little magazines
such as The Smith at about the time Hope married and began to
raise a family. The poems have continued to appear spasmodically,
in magazines and in a series of chapbooks published by R.L.
Barth. |
| The only full-length collection of Hope’s
poems is Adam’s Thoughts in Winter, published by Greenwich
Exchange. At the end of 1999 Hope took early retirement from
the Insurance Institute of America to concentrate on teaching
and writing. |
| He is at present the visiting professor at the
University of the Sciences in Philadelphia and he teaches part-time
at the Montgomery County Community College. |
|
20 Questions |
| 1. Which books are currently on your bedside
table? |
| 'The Elsewhere Community' by Hugh Kenner; Robert
Nye’s 'A Collection of Poems 1955-1988'; Henry Adams’
'History of the United States of America during the Administrations
of James Madison'; and Robert Frost’s 'Collected Poems
and Prose'. |
| 2.Who is your favourite writer? |
| Shakespeare, also known as Edward de Vere, seventeenth
Earl of Oxford. |
| 3.Which book has had the biggest influence
on your life? |
| Norman Cameron’s Collected Poems –
because it led me to spend twenty years or so on Cameron’s
life, work, family, friends, and so on. |
| 4. How do you like to relax? |
| By watching soccer – uh, football –
on TV or in person. |
| 5. Which living person do you most admire? |
| I don’t know. I’m sure there are admirable
people who are alive now, but they are unlikely to become known
in their lifetimes. |
| 6. Which historical figure do you most
admire? |
| Perhaps Ignace Semmelweiss, the man who eradicated
childbirth fever. |
| 7. Do you enjoy television and, if so,
which programme(s) do you like to watch? |
| I like watching soccer games and old movies on
TV. It seems to me to be a medium whose potential has largely
been squandered. |
| 8. Which objects do you always carry with
you? |
| Pen, paper, coins, keys. |
| 9. If you were an animal, which animal
would you be? |
| A Turtle. |
| 10. Do you believe in God? |
| Yes, but I think the real question is: Does God
believe in me? |
| 11. Where is your favourite place? |
| Ocean City, New Jersey – with Philadelphia’s
Penn Treaty Park a close second. |
| 12. What makes you happy? |
| Spring-like days that turn up to surprise us in
late winter. |
| 13. What makes you angry? |
| Pettiness and injustice – in myself and
others. |
| 14. What do you like most about yourself? |
| My Quixotic tendencies. |
| 15. What do you like least about yourself? |
| My cautious tendencies – and the way they
magnify minor worries. |
| 16. Which word or phrase do you most overuse? |
| Perhaps – perhaps. |
| 17. What is your greatest fear? |
| Incapacitation – through a stroke, for instance. |
| 18. Do you believe in love at first sight? |
| Yes. |
| 19. How would you like to be remembered? |
| I look forward to being completely forgotten. |
| 20. What do you wish you had known at
18 that you know now? |
| Money matters. |
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Robert Nye, author of
The Rain and the Glass:
99 Poems, New and Selected, writes about his poetry |
One afternoon in 1952 for no apparent reason I
fell asleep by a window in the front room of the house in an
Essex seaside resort where I was living with my parents. It
was winter and rain was beating against the glass. In my sleep,
which was deep, I dreamed a poem. In the dream it was night
and there was a different house and rain at another window.
There was no ‘I’ in the dream, only this other house
and the rain and the glass, and a very strong sense that the
dreamer was the rain and the glass, and all this coming as words
and rhythms heard and felt, blindly, not as things seen. The
essence of the dream was perhaps rhythm, but its substance came
as words.
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| When I woke I wrote these words down, adding punctuation
and (later) a title. I was 13 years old. It seemed to me that
for a moment I had fallen awake. It was after this dream that
I knew what I had to do for the rest of my life. |
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Listeners
Listening silence in the glass
The listening rain against.
All in the silent house asleep,
The rain and the glass awake;
All night they listen for a noise
No one is there to make.
All in the silent house asleep,
The rain and the glass awake;
Listening silence in the glass
The listening rain against.
All night they listen for a noise
Their silence cannot break. |
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| My new book 'The Rain and the Glass' contains
all the poems I have written since the publication of my 'Collected
Poems' in 1995, together with my own selection from that volume.
Here is one of the earlier ones, a poem which dates from the
time of the breakdown of my first marriage: |
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Familiar Terms You say I love you for
your lies?
But that’s not true.
I love your absent-hearted eyes –
And so do you.
You say you love me for my truth?
But that’s a lie.
You love my tongue because it’s smooth –
And so do I.
You say they love who lie this way?
I don’t agree.
They lie in love and waste away –
And so do we.
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| For me, the writing of poems is based on a trust
in inspiration – it happens – tempered by a mistrust
for the actual poem when it has been written down. Some poems,
like this one and the dream one, seem to come right first time.
Here, though, is a later poem which took many drafts but which
I hope reads like a moment’s thought: |
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The Rain Upon the Roof Listen. It is
the rain upon the roof
Telling of who you loved but not enough,
Whispering of what is otherwise elsewhere.
It would be sweet on such a night to die,
Kissing another’s lips, touching darkly,
Hearing the soft rain falling everywhere.
Save that the rain has voices which complain
You never loved enough, you were unkind,
You ran away, you left your heart nowhere.
Come back! Come back! The rain’s regret may cease
But I will love you till my dying breath,
And after, if there’s after anywhere.
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| I would say this: No good poem was ever written
which was the product wholly of the poet’s conscious mind,
when he or she sat down knowing the last line before they wrote
the first, or when they worked out the last line, and the lines
between, from their own wit, out of a desire to make a poem.
This is not an argument in favour of automatic writing. But
it is an argument for a poet being a kind of secretary to something
more than his or her own little self; and for a poem being an
inspired truthful utterance, not a game played with words and
ideas. |
| All this begs the question: What is poetry? Coleridge
called it “the best words in the best order”. Auden
called it “memorable speech”. Both definitions have
much to commend them so long as you recognise that notions of
order and memory imply measure. Poetry is certainly a measured
use of language, and I believe that Coleridge was saying that
if you put the best words in the best order then they will fall
into a pattern that seems inevitable and which will have the
telling force and efficacy of truth. This is a higher and more
romantic claim than Auden’s. But then I don’t think
poetry is ever just memorable speech. It is magical speech –
speech in which the words come in an order which could not be
changed without ruining the verity and power of the whole. |
| Rhyme serves a purpose in this, often, which is
not unlike the purpose of melody in music. Not only is it an
aid to memory, it satisfies an expectancy, and gives the pleasure
that comes from responding to a pattern. It is language singing
and dancing. You might even say that good prose consists of
avoiding meaningless rhyme-sounds and that good verse consists
of finding meaning (as well as emphasis) in rhyme-sounds. Rhyme,
judiciously used, can be a key aspect of measure. It is perhaps
the most mysterious of all sound-pattern repetitions. Though
not an essential constituent of poetry, it exercises an extraordinary
fascination over both poets and readers. It works. |
| Conflating Coleridge and Auden, I’d claim
that poetry is not just saying and not just singing. It is,
rather, speech with song in it, the song made by words made
to dance. Reading poetry is thus a physical experience as well
as an intellectual and emotional one. A.E. Housman recognised
this when he noticed that if he let certain lines of verse stray
into his head whilst shaving, they always made his beard bristle. |
| Here, finally, are two of the latest poems in
The Rain and the Glass. The first is about that feeling of déjà
vu which most of us have experienced, and the sense of eternal
recurrence which can be deduced from this. Simplicius was a
sixth-century Greek neo-Platonist who wrote on these matters,
but I cite him mostly because I like his name. |
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After Simplicius Time is a dream and
all we do
Will be the same again.
I’ll sit like this and talk with you,
Between my hands this cane.
And we shall kiss again, like this,
Again, and then again.
Again, and then again, like this
We’ll sit, I’ll have this cane
Between my hands, and we shall kiss
And talk, like this, again.
Dear, what I tell you now is true:
Time is a dream and all we do
Will be the same again.
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| The second poem turns upon a beatitude I found
in the ‘secret’ Gnostic gospel ascribed to the apostle
Thomas, Thomas Didymus, Doubting Thomas, words celebrating the
divine spark which is in all of us. It might be worth noting
that the poem wonders if such singular words are no more than
the calling of birds (or poets!) blown on the wind, as it were.This
poem was written in a sort of low fever in the summer of 2004.
In my fever I thought I could understand all that Gnostic stuff.
Now the fever has gone I have only the poem, without the understanding. |
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Words on the Wind I heard a voice calling
‘Do not be afraid
For blessèd is he
Who is what he was
Before he was made.’
They came on the wind
Those singular words
And on the wind went.
Perhaps all it was
Was the calling of birds?
Perhaps all there is
Is the calling of birds
As they’re blown on the wind
And we just mistake it
For singular words?
God knows I don’t know
But now night is falling
I am what I was
Before I was made,
And this is my calling.
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| The craft, as has been noted, is long to learn.
And the last lesson (like the first) may be that craft at best
is only half the story, for poetry is not a product of the will.
I have spent my life trying to write poems, but the poems gathered
in The Rain and the Glass came mostly when I was not. |
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Robert Nye
May 2005 |
