Poetry Focus: Richard Scott

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome the British poet Richard Scott - pictured - this Ash Wednesday.

Richard Scott was born in London where he works as a musican and a teacher. Since graduating from Goldsmiths with an MA in Creative and Life Writing he won the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2011 and was selected as a Jerwood/ Arvon Poetry Mentee 2011/ 2012. His work has been published twice in Poetry Review and twice in Poetry London.

Matins

After singing at church he walks the mile to the bathhouse

and enters the fug of men.

Not the smaller cabins intended for twos and threes

but the steam room

for the hands, the lips

that emerge from interior clouds

to work him in warm silence, kissing the head, anointing the shaft

as he recalls the altar’s lavish cloth

pouring down onto the cool stone floor,

the polished, perhaps solid-gold, candlesticks holding their burdens of white

slow-burning wax

and the kneeling figures in their scarlet robes

washing the grey taken-down body.

A woman has placed her fingers into the red hinge of a chest wound.

Below the words read:

Save me O God for the waters are come in

even unto my soul.

poem published online with permission of the author; copyright Richard Scott 2013.

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. What do I mean by smart?

"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...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Search This Blog