Words and Wonderings

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• Publisher: Wild Goose Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781849520713
• eBook ISBN: 9781849521895
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Misticismo

Through conversations and connections Joy Mead explores the true meaning of community - beyond the jargon of 'community cohesion' and the 'Big Society'. Includes conversations with Satish Kumar, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Lesley Saunders, Julia Ponsonby, Stephen Raw and others.

interlude

an orchestra larger than life

In 1999 Daniel Barenboim, conductor, pianist, writer, and his friend Edward Said, literary critic and campaigner for Palestinian rights, set about founding a youth orchestra to bring together Israeli and Palestinian musicians. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra gave its inaugural concert in August 1999, has kept going against all the odds and is now one of the most acclaimed youth orchestras in the world. It brings together young people from Palestine, Israel and other countries of the Middle East. Many of the orchestra members were raised in enmity but are united in their common love of music and the craft of music-making. The orchestra was founded, Daniel Barenboim says, ‘as an experiment for people who believe that politics should serve humanity and not vice versa’, and it brings hope to a region torn apart by war.

Since Edward Said’s death in 2003, Daniel Barenboim has been sole director of this amazing, larger-than-life orchestra.

The music of humanity

(a celebration of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra)

Listen. Listen each to each.
This is me. This is you.
Occupied and occupier –
this is us in a story
not yet our own.
We move with passion
towards perfect sound
and absolute commitment.
All voices equally responsible
for the beauty of the moment,
all equal before the music:
before Beethoven and Brahms
before Schubert and Elgar.

True and effortless spirit,
creativity and humanity,
is the logic of the world
of music making possible:
an Egyptian oboist’s solo
with Israelis in support;
an Israeli flute solo
with Arabs in support.

An image for justice.
A story of peace.

poetry, people and community

a conversation with Lesley Saunders

in a notebook

of handmade paper
I will save

the wide sky sounds
in my mother’s voice.

Alasdair’s wonder
at the downy newness
of beech leaves.

Apple trees that grow
amongst the trees
of the forest.

A pomegranate –
apple of seeds – that reminds me of sunlight
on the back step
of my childhood home.

The way light is
between islands,
the white sound of wind,
the willow colour of a whisper,
a small posy on a coffin,
the presence of angels.

poetry, people and community

a conversation with Lesley Saunders

Lesley Saunders is an award-winning poet who has appeared at the Voice Box, South Bank Centre, and has broadcast on BBC Radio 3. She has also had a lifelong career in education, and currently works with teachers and head teachers to encourage self-expression through poetry. The exploration of the uses of poetry in education is an important aspect of her work and thought.

Lesley and I enjoyed a pleasant lunch together and talked directly and indirectly about the role, or place, of poetry in a community, in education … and throughout our lives.

Joy: Perhaps I should begin by asking you to say a little about your early introduction to poetry and when you first realised that the particular arrangement of words on a page that we call poetry was highly significant to you.

Lesley: It goes back a very long time and for me it’s tied in with the whole purpose of education, of schooling, because it followed from a particular English teacher in the 6th form – so, quite late on in my schooling – who was teaching us T.S. Eliot and W. H.Auden for A level. The poetry that we’d studied up to that point had failed entirely to move me. I’m ashamed to say this, but Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Milton, Coleridge – they’d left me not exactly unmoved by their technical mastery but certainly untouched emotionally, spiritually and even intellectually.

Then I encountered these Modernist poets – Eliot, Auden – and realised that poetry could talk of real-life concerns and do it in a way that seemed to go immediately to the heart of the matter. I found Eliot an absolute joy. Obviously we needed help interpreting The Wasteland and so forth … but once we’d been given some clues I just thought it was the most amazing thing. At around the same time we were reading the novels of Virginia Woolf and there was this kind of whole opening up of human consciousness to the logos, if you like, to the power of human thought and creativity. It was truly life-changing for me.

And then, wouldn’t you know, the next year I met and fell in love with a poet.

Joy: Well, that was very convenient.

Lesley: What was interesting about that … well, lots of things were interesting about that relationship … but from a poetic point of view it was clear that he was the poet while I got to be the muse. When I tried to write very tentatively some of my own work, I can’t remember the reaction in detail but know it was negative. So it wasn’t until that relationship was finished that I felt I might dare to attempt something tiny, some four-line pieces …

Joy: It makes me think about people like Edwin and Willa Muir … and so many others … women always in the background …

So that was your beginning. You didn’t write poetry very much …

Lesley: When that relationship finished it was as if there were something just waiting to come out of me. Although I had very tentative beginnings and felt doubtful about what I was producing, I never had a moment’s doubt that I was put here to write poetry … although I have to say that that is not any kind of judgement about its quality!

Joy: Yes, I have the same feeling …… I’m here to write but … what … and why?

Lesley: So from 24 or 25, when I first started writing, I made it clear in a somewhat reckless way that that was what I was doing. A lot of people write in secret ……

Joy: Are there any sort of social implications to this? I’m thinking of that Elma Mitchell poem from People Etcetera: ‘This Poem …’ It begins: ‘This poem is dangerous’ … and the last two lines are ‘All poems must carry a Government warning. Words/Can seriously affect your heart.’

Do you see writing poetry as a sort of chorus, comment, background to what is going on around … challenging the supremacy of logic and reason over imagination … a different way of being and seeing maybe?

Lesley: That’s very interesting. I think at one time I would have said ‘Yes.’ Well, I’m 62. I’ve been writing for a dickens of a long time and I think now I have at least three different kinds of poetry … and one kind is poetry for occasions.

Joy: Poet Laureate sort of stuff?

Lesley: Yes, so the poems would be for celebrations. I’ve just been commissioned to write a poem for the opening of the new buildings of Kellogg College in Oxford. That’s a formal commission but occasionally I get informal commissions when someone wants something, for a birthday perhaps …

Joy: Yes, or the birth of a baby, or a christening … I’ve done that sort of thing.

Lesley: Yes, and I try to keep it accessible.

Then there’s the sort of poetry that I’ve written less of in the recent past but what I think of as political poetry. I wrote a lot of strongly feminist poetry in the 1980s and I guess that seeing the world through that sort of lens is still part of who I am, but I don’t write strongly propagandist things now, not at all.

The third kind of poetry is as the spirit moves me and that can be as dense or as simple or allusive or short or long as it needs to be because it’s not for an occasion but in response to something. But your original question is really interesting because I think that I haven’t seen the writing in terms of the chorus, as it were, commenting on things that are happening. I shall take that idea away because I think it’s such a good one.

Joy: Yes, I think perhaps it’s possible to be a chorus and hardly know it … there are quiet ways of doing it … like Seamus Heaney …… But in whatever way, we do need poets commenting on what is happening. It’s an important part of what poetry is about.

Lesley: Is that how you write – as a chorus?

Joy: I’ve done a lot of stuff on Bible stories so I’ll see that as commentary on both the story and the ways of the world then and now, from the women’s point of view. It’s about the ever- present women in headscarves – they’re in most news reports! – as the sometimes silent chorus.

Poetry is often about memory, about celebration of the undervalued (which is also chorus, comment), celebrating the small things.

Lesley: Definitely, and I think of it as meditation. You take a little object, you turn it and look at it from different angles. I feel strongly these days that for me the poem itself is an object. It exists as an object made in language, as Peter Abbs puts it.

Things could change any moment, as you know, but I suppose my current preoccupation is with crafting an object in words. I would say that the crafting has always been important to me but it moves in and out of focus over the decades.

Joy: And the crafting is part of the gift – your gift – and the gift that will be shared as part of a gift economy. Could you tell me a little about your understanding of how the gift economy works in community.

Lesley: There’s a lovely book by Lewis Hyde called The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, which resonates with me at this time of my life because I’m drawing my pension! So I’m in that privileged position of not having to earn a living. That puts a different perspective on work for me.

Joy: It puts a different perspective on life …

Lesley: Obviously at this stage all sorts of things pass through one’s mind about mortality and legacies and all of that but also things more specifically relating to the economy. Economic indicators are poor indicators of the quality of people’s lives because on some measures we, the UK, are quite high in the world’s league table, on others, like how happy our children are, we’re not so high.

So there’s something about the notion of a gift: something that you give without expectation of immediate payback of any kind. You give it into a space or maybe to another person but you don’t know what they’re going to do with it. They may pass it on, or you may be giving it into a more nebulous, a more abstract space and just letting it do whatever is its work. The accumulation of these small gifts into that nebulous space can profoundly alter the quality of life. I think of one small example: the voluntary group that goes around the river in Malmesbury, where we have a little cottage, picking up litter and looking after the river and its banks. It’s as simple as that. Part of the notion of a good deed done for its own sake without any expectation of anything coming back to you.

Joy: That was the way life was when we were young … certainly the way I remember because there wasn’t much money around but there were gifts to share. There’s also a quieter way: the gifting of thoughts, the gifting of writing and poetry. It’s important that these don’t become commodities but people must live … so it can’t be assumed that we will write or think for nothing. But I like the philosophy of gifting. We can’t hold communities together unless we have people willing to give something of themselves.

Lesley: That’s what distinguishes a community from a marketplace … the amount of gifting, the role of gifting, because there’s something about the process of giving and receiving that demands continuity over time, demands relationship.

Joy: But what I’m trying to work through is where the gifts of artists, poets, writers, musicians fit in. You can see that making music together works – I see it particularly, say, in Orkney. Music brings people together. Poetry will also bring people together as they broaden their thinking about what poetry is, because it’s more than the words on the page, isn’t it? It’s about the way we see life, perhaps also about recognition of local distinctiveness, our sense of place.

Lesley: Physically?

Joy: Could be physically, like knowing the distinctiveness of what matters to you in your area … the myths and stories around your place. Is this something you experience?

Lesley: Well, there’s no reason it shouldn’t be but this isn’t how I think of myself as a poet. I’m going to go away and think about it …

There’s another model of the poet as the wanderer and I’ve been in a lot of different places. One place I stayed in for a long time was motherhood. I wrote a lot of poems when my babies were small and then that tailed off as they grew older because I felt it was intrusive to write poems about them as they were discovering their own identity.

Now they are grown up, I wrote them all a poem at Christmas – so that theme or locus might be coming back.

The book that’s coming out in the summer is a collaboration between me and an artist, Geoff Carr, something that’s really important to me. I’d be interested to see how you see it linking on the one hand with community and on the other with free creativity, gifted creativity. I know I thrive when I’m working in close conjunction with other people. Christina the Astonishing was a wonderful experience because there were the three of us. The book that’s coming out, Her Leafy Eye, is based on the 18th- century landscape garden in Rousham, North Oxfordshire. Geoff, the artist, had recently finished a qualification as a garden landscapist. He studied the 18th-century landscape gardens and said that I must come and see them. He was wondering whether there was anything we might do together as a project. From there it just grew and grew and turned itself into a book.

Joy: Yes, like a garden.

Lesley: Also over the last few years I’ve worked with a dancer. We’ve put on performances of dance and poetry. I’ve worked with my husband, who is a photographer, doing a project on an outdoor sculpture exhibition. I wrote a poem for each of the sculptures, and then invited people to do a poetic tour of the exhibition with me. I’m currently creating a project as a visiting scholar at New Hall/Murray Edwards College in Cambridge on the gardens there, which i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Getting the bread right: a conversation with Andrew Whitley
• Earth pilgrim: a conversation with Satish Kumar
• Recognising the gift: a conversation with Julia Ponsonby
• Interlude: something as ordinary as an orchard
• People: who they are and what they do: a conversation with Colin Tudge
• Living the dream: a conversation with Maddy Harland
• Interlude: will you walk with me?
• Walk with me: a conversation with Jan Sutch Pickard
• Making music together: challenge and celebration: a conversation with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies
• A festival like no other: a conversation with Glenys Hughes
• Vision and wholeness: a conversation with Sophie Hacker
• Interlude: an orchestra larger than life