Sad news. The great English poet, R.F. Langley, has died. I wrote about his work here a few years ago. Here one can find him reading. One can purchase The Face of It here directly from Carcanet.
A poem for my mother, July 15 When she was dying And I was in a different country I dreamt I was there with her Flying over the ocean very quickly, And arriving in the room like a dream And I was a dream, but the meaning was more Than a dream has – it was a moving over time And land, over water, to get love across Fast enough, to be there, before she died, To lean over the small, huddled figure, In the dark, and without bothering her Even with apologies, and be a kiss in the air, A dream of a kiss, or even less, the thought of one, And when I woke, none of this had happened, She was still far distant, and we had not spoken.
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To be taught by him was to be taught to see the world with new eyes. He challenged the young mind, teaching – in a way that is simply impossible in the brave new educational world of today – As You Like It, Spenser, Carlos Williams and Beckett's Molloy in what is now called Year 9; Wuthering Heights, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, Hopkins' Journals/Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves, Donne, Herbert, Oppen, Ed Dorn and Olson’s “Kingfishers” in Year 10; with Wordsworth, Henry James, Pope, Shakespeare, Prynne in the Sixth, seasoned with Pevsner, Panofsky, the meaning of Michelangelo's Medici Tombs, F T Prince, Rakosi, Adrian Stokes, Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and a dash of Melanie Klein thrown in along the way as one entered the Sixth. He formed the sensibility of many of us. He taught us how to feel and how to think.
Like so many of his former pupils, I remember with much affection the devotion of at least a week's lessons to the first line of a Shakespeare play, whether Barnardo's "Who's there?" or Philo's "Nay, but this dotage of our general's, o'erflows the measure". For many of us, the implications of these lines formed our sensibilities, just as the discipline of intellectual rigour and meticulous attention to detail informed our analytical practices.
He has left school and nobody cares about his motives now. Some sort of dancer has been here, who perched and glowed and whizzed and picked the pepper out of the closing air.