THE MELITA HUME SHORTLIST 2014: BETHAN TICHBORNE (3 OF 11)

Bethan Tichborne (pictured) was born in London in 1984 and grew up in Tonbridge, where she attended Tonbridge Grammar School. She graduated from Exeter College, Oxford in 2008, where she studied Philosophy and Italian.

She is involved in social justice activism and has written for various political blogs including Bright Green, Liberal Conspiracy and New Internationalist. She works at a printing co-op in East Oxford that prints leaflets and zines for activists and community groups.

She was also shortlisted for the first Melita Hume Poetry Prize in 2012. Her poetry has appeared on nthposition.com, in Alan Morrison’s anthology Emergency Verse: Poetry in Defence of the Welfare State, and in a feature article in the Big Issue. She is related to the poet Chidiock Tichborne.

Sisyphus

The sun, the rain, the mud

the hooves, the sun, the dust
the archaeologist.

Silt shifts and unearths you

and the rivers will suck you up
and sort you, heavy bones here, light there.

In this river bend there are hundreds of teeth

and little else, pitted, spitting, twisted, bitten
into earth, chewing upwards, hungry for air.

poem COPYRIGHT THE POET 2014

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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