Rereading Rafferty

This just in - and Eyewear is glad to hear it.

Seán Rafferty: A Revue
Edited by Alistair Noon

Ahead of Seán Rafferty's birth centenary in 2009, this symposium takes a rare and overdue look at a 20th Century British poet whose name and work, despite the efforts of some illustrious supporters and publishers, remains little known.

Beyond early magazine publications in the 1930s, and a small collection in 1973, Rafferty's work didn't resurface till much later, with chapbooks and collections from Poetical Histories, Babel Verlag and Carcanet in the early 90s, shortly before and after his death. The work is currently kept in print by Etruscan Books, with two volumes: Poems and Poems, Revue Sketches and Fragments, corresponding roughly to a Collected and Uncollected.

The contributions this week begin with an appraisal of Rafferty's writing life and impulses, continue with readings of individual poems, and round off with a comparison between Rafferty and a couple of contemporaries. Readers are invited to comment at length or in brief on what they find, maybe writing further pieces to extend the symposium onwards.

Monday - Peter Riley, 'Seán Rafferty's Echoes'
Tuesday - Kelvin Corcoran, 'Reading Seán Rafferty for the first time. . .' and Seán Rafferty's 'I would be Adam'
Wednesday - Catherine Hales, 'The Heron Rising: A moment of affirmation in Seán Rafferty's poetry'
Thursday - Edmund Hardy, 'Barefoot Ballads'
Friday - Alistair Noon, 'Implements in New Places: Rafferty, Graham and Bunting'

Comments

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

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