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The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities The category of the literary has always been contentious What is clear however is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought It is sceptically challenged from within for example by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history contextualized explanation or media studies It is shaken from without by even greater pressures by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading In this fascinating addition to the Literary Agenda series David Constantine argues that poetry matters It matters for individuals and for the society they are members of He asserts that poetry is not for the few but for the many and belongs and can only thrive among them speaks of and to their concerns The Poet considers both the writing and the reading of poetry which the Constantine views as kindred activities He examines what goes into the writing of a poem and considers what good there is in reading it Constantine also considers translation arguing that great benefit comes to the native language from dealings with the foreign also that all reading is a form of translation of texts into the lives we lead Altogether The Poet is an attempt with many quotations to show how poetry works what its responsibilities are and how it may help us in our real circumstances now Poetry Author David ConstantineBorn in 1944 David Constantine worked for thirty years as a university teacher of German language and literature He has published several volumes of poetry most recently Nine Fathom Deep 2009 He is a translator of H lderlin Brecht Goethe Kleist Michaux and Jaccottet In 2003 his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensbergers Lighter Than Air won the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation His translation of Goethes Faust Part I was published by Penguin in 2005 Part II in April 2009 He is also author of one novel Davies and Fields of Fire A Life of Sir William Hamilton His four short story collections are Back at the Spike the highly acclaimed Under the Dam Comma 2005 and The Shieling Comma 2009 which Born in 1944 David Constantine worked for thirty years as a university teacher of German language and literature He has published several volumes of poetry most recently Nine Fathom Deep 2009 He is a translator of H lderlin Brecht Goethe Kleist Michaux and Jaccottet In 2003 his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger s Lighter Than Air won the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation His translation of Goethe s Faust Part I was published by Penguin in 2005 Part II in April 2009 He is also author of one novel Davies and Fields of Fire A Life of Sir William Hamilton His four short story collections are Back at the Spike the highly acclaimed Under the Dam Comma 2005 and The Shieling Comma 2009 which was shortlisted for the 2010 Frank O Connor International Short Story Award Constantine s story Tea at the Midland won the BBC National Short Story Award 2010 and won the Frank O Connor International Short Story Award in 2013 for the collection Comma Press 2012 He lives in Oxford where for ten years he edited Modern Poetry in Translation with his wife Helen until 2011 David s short story In Another Country has been adapted into 45 Years a major Film4 funded feature film directed by Andrew Haigh and starring Tom Courtenay Charlotte Rampling This film won two silver bear awards at the Berlinale International Film festival in February 2015 David is also the author of the forthcoming novel released by Comma Press The Life Writer site_link I read this book cheering from the sidelines Constantine writes eloquently he advances a coherent argument as a translator and poet his examples are taken from a different range than usual Brecht and Holderlin play a significant part and the book rises to a triumphant eloquent end That is why the defense of poetry entails the larger campaign for a humane habitat in which it may flourish to its heart s content abundantly saying the human and not Just as an answering back against the inhumane but also why not in celebration of a society we are glad and proud of Is that too much to ask Too much or not enough We want than mere survival we want our due our redress lives fit to be looked at and poetry will help poetry at the heart of social life We don t want poetry to be read by a dwindling few but by an increasing many We want it commonplace companionable always there to be turned to in our ordinary lives customary and working wonders p139 Applause applause the crowd goes wild rises to its feet and the sound of isolated clapping in an almost empty theatre echoes disconcertingly There are generic problems which all books like this one face The first is simple but devastating Who is reading it I suspect even resent the use of the first person plural it s an insidious positioning technique but who is this we A large part of my endeavor will consist in trying to persuade any who need persuading that poetry springs from and belongs in the heart of society and that it does good there p3 I suspect that the only people who read books like this are people like me who want to believe them and students whose professors or teachers want them to believe them The people who don t believe that poetry is important are hardly going to shell out for a book like this let alone read it Or be impressed by the arguments The kind of structural social evils he describes are in place because of the amount of money and power people can gain in promoting and perpetuating them The second obvious generic problem is that the Defence of Poetry from Sidney to thsi seems to operate on the assumption that poetry can only be justified by claiming for it an external political or linguistic effect that is measurable in the world beyond the poem it does good there p3 If only we all read Poetry the argument has gone on drearily for over four hundred years the world would be a better place and language would be so much better Such claims from Sydney to the present day are either wishful thinking unsubstantiated either by external evidence or understandings of how language actually works or built from very specific cases where context was so important argued into a generality Constantine tends towards the latter a specific type of poem will have a specific type of effect on a specific type of reader which will produce a political reaction It s the last improbable step that justifies Poetry. Poetry poetryvine.com login Poetry Not poems Poetry in these arguments is never the sum of all poems but an abstraction which becomes the active subject in the sentence in the quote above it has intentions and a heart People say I don t like Poetry but I ve never heard any one say I don t like music I ve heard people say they don t like Jazz or Rap or Wagner But Poetry is a vagueness which can apparently cure warts and perform miracles It can achieve things which centuries of Christianity have failed to do if only Poetry bears very little relationship to the poems in the poetry journals or to the poems in highly touted single collections which litter my desk There are numerous reasons why people don t read poems But claims for Poetry load the poem with a burden very few poems can carry As one writer put it you have to pretend the butterfly is an elephant And it s obvious to everyone outside the charmed sealed acoustic of readers of books like this one that the butterfly is just a butterfly And pretending otherwise is a short cut to disenchantment So finally the question goes begging Why does Poetry need defending Not what is poetry good for or what might certain poems do but why does this capital P poetry need defending in the way music or prose or visual art don t Instead of making claims for an implausible external usefulness for the art perhaps it might be better to ask why the majority of people don t read it Never have done But as Defences go it s well written cogently argued and pulls in a fascinating range of examples 0199698473 truth is concrete 0199698473 Every writer has the right to grind an axe or hone a dagger blunt a cudgel or fire a brick roll a stone or call out names at the people walking in the street below Accuse rant grumble or complain Whatever But in a book intended to show that poetry matters David Constantine says some very odd things. Poetry clothing He begins slowly In the first section The Writing and Reading of Poetry Constantine bemoans what he sees as the falling status of literature then moves on to talk about what distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech He suggests that poetry signals its strangeness by form metre rhythm word order and other devices which say to the reader pay attention He argues that poetry is knowledge in the making a form of realization whereby the inchoate is given form via the particular a local habitation The writing of poetry embodies that realization process as does the reading Grounded in the particular the poem enables a clarity of private truth to resonate with common experience The reader understands not just the particularity of the poem but its illumination of general thoughts experiences and feelings The other becomes understandable as akin and yet remains fully particular and other. Is poetry considered fiction or nonfiction So far so good Constantine is talking about poetry at its best And he is providing one view of the writing and reading process Individuals differ As do poems and their writing and reading But by and large what he says makes sense One notable exception is an odd discussion about the writing process as an exercise in poetic archaeology Constantine quotes Robert Graves who suggests A true poem is best regarded as already existing before it has been composed with composition as the act of deducing its entirety from a single key phrase The poem is out there somewhere waiting to be found recorded and revealed to the public. Poetryko This is high altitude thinking quasi platonic in tone One can only wonder whether the poem pre exists the existence of the poet or if the poem comes into pre existence when the poet is born a simultaneous bipartite ontological event which enables the now pre existent poem to become an existent poem once the actual existent pre poet becomes a real poet and writes the poem Or something like that There are of course other possibilities But it is all metaphysics And who needs it Certainly not poetics. Poetry poetry In the second section Translation Constantine tackles a subject he knows well from personal experience He is a scholar of German literature and has translated Goethe Kleist H lderlin and Brecht He suggests there are two basic approaches to translation mimesis and metaphor The former aims to reproduce the foreign text the way it works as exactly as possible The latter goes for functional equivalence which captures the feeling the ebb and flow of the poem Some translators would argue this classification is too simple but Constantine s dichotomy does alert the reader to the basic challenge track the language and form or target the feeling Constantine prefers the feeling That is he opts for metaphor or functional equivalence in his translations Nonetheless he recognizes and is fair to the other approach as typified by translations by Michael Hamburger who expressly endorses mimesis Constantine uses Hamburger s work to make some important points about the need for a translator to understand the original poem and to serve the foreign text He also provides a translation exercise a poem by H lderlin which allows him both to promote a favourite poet and to illustrate the difficulties of translation even from a proximate language as German is to English. Poetry foundation Overall the section on translation works well It would have been helpful if Constantine had spoken about translations between distant languages such as English and Japanese As it is he has focused on what he knows best and neatly analyzed the thankless task of translation. Fiction poetry foundation The trouble begins with section three The Good of It And it continues in the final two sections The Office of Poetry and The Common Good It is here that Constantine grinds his axe in earnest He is unhappy with the social political and economic realities of the United Kingdom And he argues poetry can and should do something about it The argument is strained and at times his statements are beyond strange. Poetry jobs The third section starts well with a quote from Jeanette Winterson A tough life needs a tough language and that is what poetry is People who don t recognize that fact have had things pretty easy Those are fighting words The philistines are pampered wimps Don t let them get you down But he does. Poetry publishing companies Constantine talks about poetry giving pleasure exercising and opening the mind These are all good points He cites Schiller and Brecht to support the idea that self definition by opposition is diminishing it will stunt our humanity Another good point But he repeatedly gets drawn into the idea that poetry s purpose is to facilitate political and social change which somehow will eliminate unfreedom and enable everyone to lead full instead of partial lives This is dangerous ground. Poetry cat Constantine talks over and over again about people living partial lives Even poets however large and universal their achievement live as they manage to live in the real circumstances of particular time and place which is to say they perforce live partially What can this possibly mean There is no ideal life against which all else is partial Reality is what we have and we live our full life in it Can we choose to live differently from how we are living today Yes we can Are we limited in that choice Of course we are We are not gods or super heroes or mythical beings who can ignore the laws of space and time or the contingencies of being human So what That does not make any life partial It makes it particular And that is what poetry is all about That is what poetry shows us Indeed that is the great gift of poetry seeing the particular clearly for what it is. Poetry install Constantine s suggestion that there is a whole life out there waiting to be lived if only politics or social circumstances were different is both distracting and diminishing It distracts us from our actual lives to some unreal undefined greater humanity Instead of bringing clarity through the particular Constantine muddles things by his insistence on some vague amorphous unachievable ideal the whole life the truly human There can be no doubt that individual lives as well as social and political structures can be improved But Constantine s talk of whole and partial lives shines no light on these matter and is not helpful It is a confusion A distraction. Poetry in motion The notion of a whole life also diminishes us we are too little We are crippled We are impaired But wait suggests Constantine There is a solution politics If only we can change this or that in the political system if only we can gain power displace the other party put our program in place then all will be well We will be able to become whole We will become truly human. Poetry poetry The world of if only is an ugly place It has been visited by too many societies too often in the past and the results are well known Too many demagogues have learned how to use the fantasy of if only to manipulate people gain power and turn life from bad to worse It is dangerous to help them tell their tales. Poetryko Claiming a salvific role for poetry is not asking too much it is misguided Poetry at its best brings clarity to what is seen or felt or thought obscurely It shows It does not tell And consequently different readers will take different sustenance from each poem they read Individuals differ For example some love risk Others hate it And that specific difference has huge implications for their approach to life politics and society It also has implications for what they will draw from a poem Constantine seems either not to know this fact or to be unwilling to accept it as a fact He wants everyone the same politically at least He wants his side to win And he thinks it is poetry s task to help him win On that last point he is wrong. Poetry books to read Constantine is not malicious He wants to think of poetry as being He sees things he doesn t like in his society and he wants them to change He wants to think poetry can change them It can t At its best poetry can enliven people What they then do depends on who they are Despite its oddities including a very peculiar discussion of women and poetry in the final section this is an interesting book Poetry runs through it Unfortunately there is also a steady flow of political anger that muddies the discussion of what poetry is and does and can do The resulting confusion is not helpful to politics or to poetry 0199698473 Every writer has the right to grind an axe or hone a dagger blunt a cudgel or fire a brick roll a stone or call out names at the people walking in the street below Accuse rant grumble or complain Whatever But in a book intended to show that poetry matters David Constantine says some very odd things. Poetry python He begins slowly In the first section The Writing and Reading of Poetry Constantine bemoans what he sees as the falling status of literature then moves on to talk about what distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech He suggests that poetry signals its strangeness by form metre rhythm word order and other devices which say to the reader pay attention He argues that poetry is knowledge in the making a form of realization whereby the inchoate is given form via the particular a local habitation The writing of poetry embodies that realization process as does the reading Grounded in the particular the poem enables a clarity of private truth to resonate with common experience The reader understands not just the particularity of the poem but its illumination of general thoughts experiences and feelings The other becomes understandable as akin and yet remains fully particular and other. Poetry install So far so good Constantine is talking about poetry at its best And he is providing one view of the writing and reading process Individuals differ As do poems and their writing and reading But by and large what he says makes sense One notable exception is an odd discussion about the writing process as an exercise in poetic archaeology Constantine quotes Robert Graves who suggests A true poem is best regarded as already existing before it has been composed with composition as the act of deducing its entirety from a single key phrase The poem is out there somewhere waiting to be found recorded and revealed to the public. Poetry install This is high altitude thinking quasi platonic in tone One can only wonder whether the poem pre exists the existence of the poet or if the poem comes into pre existence when the poet is born a simultaneous bipartite ontological event which enables the now pre existent poem to become an existent poem once the actual existent pre poet becomes a real poet and writes the poem Or something like that There are of course other possibilities But it is all metaphysics And who needs it Certainly not poetics. Poetry foundation In the second section Translation Constantine tackles a subject he knows well from personal experience He is a scholar of German literature and has translated Goethe Kleist H lderlin and Brecht He suggests there are two basic approaches to translation mimesis and metaphor The former aims to reproduce the foreign text the way it works as exactly as possible The latter goes for functional equivalence which captures the feeling the ebb and flow of the poem Some translators would argue this classification is too simple but Constantine s dichotomy does alert the reader to the basic challenge track the language and form or target the feeling Constantine prefers the feeling That is he opts for metaphor or functional equivalence in his translations Nonetheless he recognizes and is fair to the other approach as typified by translations by Michael Hamburger who expressly endorses mimesis Constantine uses Hamburger s work to make some important points about the need for a translator to understand the original poem and to serve the foreign text He also provides a translation exercise a poem by H lderlin which allows him both to promote a favourite poet and to illustrate the difficulties of translation even from a proximate language as German is to English. Poetry jobs Overall the section on translation works well It would have been helpful if Constantine had spoken about translations between distant languages such as English and Japanese As it is he has focused on what he knows best and neatly analyzed the thankless task of translation. Book poetry The trouble begins with section three The Good of It And it continues in the final two sections The Office of Poetry and The Common Good It is here that Constantine grinds his axe in earnest He is unhappy with the social political and economic realities of the United Kingdom And he argues poetry can and should do something about it The argument is strained and at times his statements are beyond strange. The discovery of poetry free pdf ebook The third section starts well with a quote from Jeanette Winterson A tough life needs a tough language and that is what poetry is People who don t recognize that fact have had things pretty easy Those are fighting words The philistines are pampered wimps Don t let them get you down But he does. Poetry jobs Constantine talks about poetry giving pleasure exercising and opening the mind These are all good points He cites Schiller and Brecht to support the idea that self definition by opposition is diminishing it will stunt our humanity Another good point But he repeatedly gets drawn into the idea that poetry s purpose is to facilitate political and social change which somehow will eliminate unfreedom and enable everyone to lead full instead of partial lives This is dangerous ground. EPub poetry foundation Constantine talks over and over again about people living partial lives Even poets however large and universal their achievement live as they manage to live in the real circumstances of particular time and place which is to say they perforce live partially What can this possibly mean There is no ideal life against which all else is partial Reality is what we have and we live our full life in it Can we choose to live differently from how we are living today Yes we can Are we limited in that choice Of course we are We are not gods or super heroes or mythical beings who can ignore the laws of space and time or the contingencies of being human So what That does not make any life partial It makes it particular And that is what poetry is all about That is what poetry shows us Indeed that is the great gift of poetry seeing the particular clearly for what it is. Poetry in urdu Constantine s suggestion that there is a whole life out there waiting to be lived if only politics or social circumstances were different is both distracting and diminishing It distracts us from our actual lives to some unreal undefined greater humanity Instead of bringing clarity through the particular Constantine muddles things by his insistence on some vague amorphous unachievable ideal the whole life the truly human There can be no doubt that individual lives as well as social and political structures can be improved But Constantine s talk of whole and partial lives shines no light on these matter and is not helpful It is a confusion A distraction. Poetry books for teens The notion of a whole life also diminishes us we are too little We are crippled We are impaired But wait suggests Constantine There is a solution politics If only we can change this or that in the political system if only we can gain power displace the other party put our program in place then all will be well We will be able to become whole We will become truly human. Poetry clothing The world of if only is an ugly place It has been visited by too many societies too often in the past and the results are well known Too many demagogues have learned how to use the fantasy of if only to manipulate people gain power and turn life from bad to worse It is dangerous to help them tell their tales. Poetry in motion Claiming a salvific role for poetry is not asking too much it is misguided Poetry at its best brings clarity to what is seen or felt or thought obscurely It shows It does not tell And consequently different readers will take different sustenance from each poem they read Individuals differ For example some love risk Others hate it And that specific difference has huge implications for their approach to life politics and society It also has implications for what they will draw from a poem Constantine seems either not to know this fact or to be unwilling to accept it as a fact He wants everyone the same politically at least He wants his side to win And he thinks it is poetry s task to help him win On that last point he is wrong. Poetryko Constantine is not malicious He wants to think of poetry as being He sees things he doesn t like in his society and he wants them to change He wants to think poetry can change them It can t At its best poetry can enliven people What they then do depends on who they are Despite its oddities including a very peculiar discussion of women and poetry in the final section this is an interesting book Poetry runs through it Unfortunately there is also a steady flow of political anger that muddies the discussion of what poetry is and does and can do The resulting confusion is not helpful to politics or to poetry 0199698473 A short and punchy defence of poetry in the face of a world that is slipping back into a dehumanised de literacised society in which GDP and the bottom line determine value and price Constantine adds a unique slant on a well travelled round by his experience as a translator and so brings in Goethe and especially H lderlin to the argument A pithy howl of defiance with much to take away I liked Nietzsche s aphorism that any life should be able to be summed up in three anecdotes and R, Poetry notes pdf H Tawney s forlorn cry for the need for education to be spiritual and not commercial voiced a century ago and echoed faintly and ignored today 0199698473