 
Good evening, and thank you for joining
us for this evening's
lecture given by the Professor of Poetry
here at the University of Oxford, Alice
Oswald.
My name is Philip Bullock and I'm
Director of TORCH, The Oxford Research
Center in
Humanities. We're delighted to host this
evening's event as part of our live
events series
itself part of the Humanities Cultural
Programme, one of the founding stones for
the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre
for the Humanities.
Alice has kindly agreed to take
questions from the audience so if you do
have any please pop them in the YouTube
chat
during the lecture and we'll do our very
best to answer as many as we can at the
end of the discussion.
TORCH is delighted to be collaborating
with the English faculty in hosting this
evening's lecture.
So it's my great pleasure and great
honor to welcome Professor Ros Ballaster to tell us more.
Ros Ballaster is Professor of 18th
Century Studies, Tutorial Fellow at
Mansfield College, and the chair of the
English faculty board.
She has published widely on the novel
and on women's writing in the 18th
Century
and is currently writing a book about
the role of theatre in the invention of
the novel.
Ros, thank you so much for sharing
Alice's lecture so without further ado,
I'd like to hand over to you now thank
you. Thank you
Phillip for the introduction, and to
TORCH for supporting our English faculty
live event this evening. Welcome again
to all our viewers watching at home.
The Professor of Poetry gives a public
lecture each term
the post has been in place at Oxford
since the lectures were first conceived
in 1708
in order that " the reading of the
ancient poets
should give keenness and polish to the
minds of young men
as well as to the advancement of more
serious literature
both sacred and human". Much
has changed since that conception; we've
questioned what counts as
serious literature and who decides that
we now make
keen the minds of students regardless of
their sex or gender.
We read and discuss the most modern
alongside the ancient
poets in some ways though the legacy
remains and is brought to life most
splendidly
in the figure of our current and 46th
Professor of Poetry, Alice Oswald
she's a keen classicist in conversation
with the voices of the ancient past
perhaps most memorably with Homer's
Iliad in her memorial of 2011
and with his Odyssey in her recent
collection 'Nobody',  2019.
Her poetry makes a mythic human and the
human
mythic poetry. Poetry, she commented in her
election statement,
'is an ancient memory system. It asks to
be heard out loud,
or at least read in the manner of a
musical score.'
Professor Oswald knows how to use her
voice to speak
for poetry and from poetry.I can't
think then of a better poet
to give the first ever online lecture by
a Professor of Poetry at Oxford.
For too many across the world this is a
time of grief and loss,
and Professor Oswald's lecture will
speak to that experience today too
her topic is the uncanny connection of
grief with water
water is the element that has
consistently flowed through her
imagination
she is in her element with water her
element is water
and I'm honored to invite her to deliver
her lecture for this term
her title is 'An Interview with Water' and
I'm pleased to hand over to Professor
Alice Oswald
for her lecture.
Hello can you see me?
We can.
You can okay. Hello and I'm grateful
as well to you Ros and to TORCH for
providing this
platform with the English faculty. It does
seem rather ironic that I should be
speaking to people through a computer
screen when live performance
has always been my personal manifesto it
is still my manifesto and it's what I
speak about
again today, in spite of being on YouTube.
I don't want to give up on the physical
performance of poetry even if it means
moving it
outdoors into the streets while we're
all under lockdown
anyway as a marker of where we are today
and because it fits the themes of my
lecture I'd like to start
just by reading a poem by Jericho Brown
called 'Riddle'
and this poem is about the murder of
Emmett
Till in 1955 in Mississippi.
We do not recognize the body/ Of Emmett
Till. We do not know/ The boy's name nor the sound/Of his mother's wailing. We have/
sound of his mother's wailing
Never heard a mother wailing. /
We do not know the history/
Of this nation in ourselves. We/
Do not know the history of our-/Selves on this planet because/
We do not have to know what/We believe we own. We believe/
We own your bodies but have no/Use for your tears. We destroy/
The body that refuses use. We use/
Maps we did not draw. We see/
A sea so cross it. We see a moon/
So land there. We love land so/
Long as we can take it. Shh. We/ Can't
take that sound. What is/
A mother wailing? We do not/
Recognize music until we can/
Sell it we sell what cannot
be/
Bought. We buy silence. Let us/
Help you. How much does it cost/ To hold
your breath
underwater?/ Wait. Wait. What are we?/
What? / What on Earth are we? What?/ [END OF POEM]    
It is a wonderful gift to be able to
swim in rivers
especially on bright clear days like
these
you step into an inverted version of the
world the water fits
around you like a velvet suit and you
float along seemingly
decapitated by reflections
of all the gifts offered to us by water
I'm going to speak today
about its gift of reflection. The liquid,
impermanent, unstable gift of similarity.
Similarity by the way, is not the same as
sameness.
If you want to hear sameness you can
ring certain public institutions
and you will be told "Your call is
important to us
you are held in a queue and will be
answered shortly.
Your call is important to us you are
held in a queue
and will be answered shortly your call
is important to us.
You are held in a queue and will be
answered shortly
your call is important to us. You are
held in a queue and will be answered
shortly."
The recorded message is a new kind of
poetry a machine spoken poetry
available on everyone's phone at any
time of day
and it communicates a machine's belief
in sameness
or stuckness which is a terrible thing
to carry in your pocket.
As an antidote to that message if you
want to witness similarity
you should look at water whose
reflections are
always being buried by currents in the
air.
I keep a bucket of rain water under my
window
and it delights me that green leaves
reflected in a bucket
are not quite green. I don't know what
color they are.
At certain moments early in the day they
might be called pre-green,
but then the clouds change or the wind
moves a surface mark
and all at once they seem bright dark
and blind silvery
then foggy emerald.
Samuel Johnson used this
idea of agitated reflection to evoke the
difference between spoken
and written language in the preface to
his dictionary.
He wrote about impossibility of defining
words
in their passing unrecorded forms
"While our language is yet living" he said
"and variable
at the caprice of everyone that speaks
it these words
are hourly shifting their relations and
can no more be ascertained
in a dictionary than a grove in the
agitation of a storm
can be accurately delineated from its
pictur
in the water".
I love to imagine that other kind of
dictionary:
a liquid shifting not yet written down
dictionary
is exactly what we should bring to
Homer's language to remind ourselves
that what looks like sameness on the
page will transform
into similarity in performance.
The pink finger dawn the dark proud ship
the winged word.
To repeat those phrases in print is to
drive the reader
mad with sameness. To repeat them
in performance with altered posture and
varying levels
of exhaustion or light or voice
is to offer the gift of similarity.
Agitated similarity is Homer's gift,
and it is his element. It behaves like
water
it throws everything into trembling
reflection.
Under its sway the journey of Odysseus
looks like,
but is not the same as, the journey of
Telemachus.
The rage of Agamemnon looks like, but is
not same as,
the rage of Achilles. Odysseus
wakes just as Penelope sleeps and then
sleeps
just as she wakes and his marriage
copies itself backwards
in the marriage of Agamemnon and then
forwards again
in the marriages of alcinois aeolus and
zeus
Penelope mourns like a nightingale
and a nightingale mourns like a human
Homer's adjectives which keep
reappearing in new colors
are rippled by the same agitation.
The earth is called 'life-giving' just as
a man's blood drains into it.
Achilles is 'swift footed' while he sits
idle.
And there is agitated or animated
similarity between Prion
and the father of Achilles, and also
between Hecuba
and the mother of Odysseus and between
Calypso
and Penelope, and between Athene and all
swallows.
But at heart of all this resemblance
as it were the pleat in the poem's cloth
there is the simile itself.
The extended simile is Homer's
particular
doubled over style of thinking. There are
about 215 extended similes in 'The Iliad'
almost another hallucinated poem
floating above the main one.
In 'The Odyssey' there are only half a
dozen and I'd like to read you
the eeriest of these.
"So the great singer sang, but Odysseus
liquefied. The tears ran out
under his eyelids onto his cheek.
As when a woman crumples over and mourns
her husband,
he has fallen in full view of his city
and his family
he was trying to delay the stroke of
grief for his children.
She sees him dying and gasping,
drapes herself on his body screaming a
shrill sound.
And the men behind are hitting her head
and shoulders with their spears,
and they lead her away to slavery, to
suffer hard work and sadness,
and her face is sucked in with pitiful
grief.
So Odysseus was pouring out pitiful
tears
from his eyelids."
I'll read it again because it's always
hard to take in poetry
"So the great singer sang, but Odysseus
liquefied. The tears ran out under his
eyelids
onto his cheek as when a woman crumples
over
and mourns her husband he has fallen in
full view of his city
and his family he was trying to delay
the stroke of grief for his children.
She sees him dying and gasping drapes
herself on his body,
screaming a shrill sound. And the men
behind
are hitting her head and shoulders with
their spears.
And they lead her away to slavery, to
suffer hard work, and sadness,
and her face is sucked in with pitiful
grief.
So Odysseus was pouring out pitiful tears
from his eyelids."
Oral poems keep moving and so should
oral critics
but there are two good reasons for
pausing to think about this passage.
First of all, it is a simile about
liquefaction,
which seems to emerge from the actuality
of water.
So you could say that it is a simile
about similarity.
But secondly, and more importantly,
this is a passage about tears-
tears as the messengers of similarity.
The way that widow interrupts the
narrative with her weeping,
not as a ghost, or a sign, or a memory,
but as a stranger in the language, with
her own vivid existence.
The way her scream goes on damaging the
mind,
that tells me something about grief
itself
and how poetry might rise to meet it.
"So the great singer sang but Odysseus
liquefied
the tears ran out under his eyelids onto
his cheek.
As when a woman crumples over and mourns
her husband
he has fallen in full view of his city
and his family, he was trying to delay
the stroke of grief for his children.
She sees him dying and gasping,
drapes herself on his body screaming a
sharp sound,
and the men behind are hitting her head
and shoulders with their spears.
And they lead her away to slavery, to
suffer hard work and sadness,
and her face is sucked in with pitiful
grief.
So Odysseus was pouring out pitiful
tears from his eyelids."
Just to give you some context this is
'Odyssey' book eight.
Odysseus on his way home from Troy
has lost his ship, his companions, his
raft,
and has swam inland to Phaeacia where he
is listening to a poetry recital.
He is in disguise and the poet
a blind man called Demodocus, is
telling a story about Odysseus
in battle and he, as you can hear, is
weeping.
And it is the second time this has
happened in the same book only 500 lines
earlier
the same poet Demodocus sang a different
song
about Odysseus. And Odysseus in disguise
started weeping, and the whole thing
happened with the same opening line
'So the great poet sang, but Odysseus'
'The great poet sang but Odysseus taking
his bluish gown
in his big hands threw it over his head
and hid his face, ashamed to let the
Phaeacians
see his tears'. This earlier version has
no simile
but the spirit of similarity is
radiantly present
especially when you imagine the piece in
performance.
According to Eustathius of Thessalonica
when rhapsodes performed 'the Odyssey'
they would always wear blue and when
reciting the
'Iliad' they wore red. Some of the energy
of this passage must derive from the
peripheral effects of its performance
watching a Rhapsode end under a blue gown,
to describe Odysseus
under a blue gown, listening to
Demodicus in a blue gown,
not far from the fictional sea in its
blue gown,
not far from the actual sea. It's as if a
whole
line of oral poets were suddenly
reflected, forming together
in that watery colour.
To go back to the bucket of water to
wave
a blue gown above it and ask 'what color?'
What is that color which Homer calls
porfurium
it is not blue exactly it gets
translated as purple
but purple is a settled color whereas
Homer's word is agitated
it derives from the sea verb porfurion
which means to roll without breaking
so it is already a fluid word a heaped
up word
a word with underswell not a pigment but
an emanation from the nature of water
to get a true sense of porphyrion you
need to see the sea in it
and for Homer the sea is unhuman full of
strange creatures
missed colored unplowable and this is my
favorite
word it is a peritone meaning unfenced
if you want to imagine the colour of Odysseus' gown
you will have to swim out into the
unfenced place the place
not of definitions but of affirmations
yes I'm afraid you will have to find
your way to the p volume
of Johnson's unwritten victory
there you will discover a dark light
word
an adjective for edgelessness a c
word used also of death
smoke cloth mist
blood between bluish purple
and cobalt move it appears
mid-ocean when the wind perhaps makes a
network of backblowing glitters that the
underswell moves sideways
as when a big sea swells with noiseless
waves
it is used of the heart meaning his
heart was a healing
not quite broken wave it indicates
a surface but suggests a depth
a mutation of flatness or noiseless
sheen
a sea creature a quality of caves any
inlet or iodine or shaded stone
a type of algae or rockfish anything
excessive
or out of focus or subliminal for
example
a swimmer seen from underneath a rotting
smell
a list of low sounds an evening shadow
or sea god
a whole catalogue of simmering grudges
storms
waves and solitudes or deep water
including everyone who has drowned in it
to be purpled is to lose one's way
or name to be nothing to grieve without
surfacing
to suffer the effects of sea light to be
either
sleepless or weightless and cut off by
dreams
find yourself in the silence underneath
an overhanging way
that or thereabouts is the color
of a bluish violet ultramarine
gown so the great poet fang
but Odysseus taking his bluish gown in
his big hands
drew it over his head and hid his face
ashamed to let the Phaeacians see his
tears
gown goes over the head like a wave the
human
sits under its sea color with salt water
pouring from his eyes
it is one of those places where the form
of the poem hurries us forward
the form of the language pulls us back
or furion is a word with water inside it
like a bucket down in the middle of a
line
already if you look hard at the word you
can see the widow's simile underneath it
but Homer is not yet ready to make that
gift
with magnificent theatricality he draws
a blue gown across the mind and we
like the Phaeacians are left looking at
it, waiting.
Homer is the foremost poet of the
visible
Homer delights in surfaces but the
surface of water
is complicated by transparency
and its transparency is complicated by
refraction
water is never the same as itself
rivers can only exist as similarities
licks reflect more than their own volume
and what's more when you look at water
it allows you to exist
twice but more darkly
when you look at it again it evaporates
as if
moving in and out of existence simply
required a bit of sunlight
then it reappears as frost perfectly
symmetrical
as if discovering pre-drawn diagrams in
thin air
then it reappears as tears so that any
attempt to describe the surface of water
tells you to hide your face and inspect
your immune thoughts
all these waverings are part of the word
porfurion
the physics or nature of water is
metaphysical
meaning that its surface expresses more
than itself
so I need to turn left here to
understand the tears of Odysseus
I need to make a detour into the very
different world of John Donne
a so-called metaphysical poet
Samuel Johnson invented the idea of
metaphorical poetry
and he complained that the men who wrote
it were too impassive
and leisurely and cannot be said to have
imitated anything
Johnson who spent eight years compiling
his victory
of the English language and forgot to
include the word 'sea'
might be said to have forgotten to sea
again when he made that remark.
Here is a poem by Donne called 'A
Valediction of Weeping'
which might be roughly described as an
imitation of the sea
it is a poem about salt water which is
also a love poem
a passionate poem which is also densely
involved
in working out what water is
A Valediction of Weeping
Let me powre forth/ My teares before thy face, whil'st I stay here,
For thy face coines them,
and thy stampe they beare,/   And by this Mintage
they are something worth, /For thus they bee/ Pregnant of thee;/
Fruits of much griefe they are, emblemes of more,/
When a teare falls, that thou falls which it bore,/
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore./
On a round ball/ A workeman that hath copies by, can lay/
An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,/
And quickly make that, which was nothing, All,/
So doth each teare,/Which thee doth weare,/
A globe, yea world by that impression grow,/Till thy teares mixt with mine doe overflow/
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so./
O more then Moone,/ Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare,/
Weepe me not dead, in thine armes, but forbeare/ To teach the sea, what it may doe too soone;/
Let not the winde/Example finde,/
To doe me more harme, then it purposeth;/
Since thou and I sigh one anothers breath,/
Who e'r sighes most, is cruellest,
and hasts the others death. [END OF POEM]
I'm going to read it again, I think
without the script up, because it's
always nice to
to hear a poem -Alice sorry it's Ros here
could I just interrupt very briefly-
Yes
Could you just move your camera a little
bit so that people can see the
bottom of your face? We've had some
people who are struggling
if they if they need to lip read.
That's better. Like that
Is that? That's perfect. I can't see
myself so I can't
but okay thank you Ros thank you so
much
I apologize about that
okay here's the poem again. 'A Valediction
of Weeping'.
Let me powre forth/ My teares before thy face, whil'st I stay here,
For thy face coines them, and thy stampe they beare,
And by this Mintage they are something worth,/For thus they bee/
Pregnant of thee; / Fruits of much griefe they are, emblemes of more,/
When a teare falls, that thou falls which it bore,/
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore./
On a round ball/A workeman that hath copies by, can lay/
An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,/And quickly make that
which was nothing, All,/
So doeth each
teare,/Which thee doth weare,
  A globe, yea world by that impression grow,
Till thy teares mixt with mine doe overflow/ This world,
by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so./
O more then Moone,/ Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare,/
Weepe me not dead, in thine armes, but forbeare/ To teach the sea,
what it may doe too soone;/ Let not the winde/Example finde,/ To doe me more harme, 
 
 
the wind example find to do me more harm
than it purposeth;/
Since thou and I sigh one anothers breath,/
Who e'r sighes most, is cruellest, and hasts
the other's death. [END OF POEM]
Donne was not an oral poet but nor was he
exactly a print poet
his work would have been circulated in
manuscript form
and it was normal for friends to adjust
a word here or there if that seemed
fitting
so you could say that during Donne's
lifetime
this poem was held in a fluid or at
least viscous state
and in keeping with this it achieves a
slippery balance between two modes of
thinking
the syntax sounds like a calculation a
discrimination
but the imagery is all watery
fencelessness
"Till thy teares mixt with mine doe overflow/This world, by waters sent
from thee, my heaven dissolved so./"
The dislocation between tone and form is
what makes the poem hard
to read people are sometimes unsure how
to match
its complexity with its urgency it is so
clearly
a premeditated performance of the here
and now.
"Let me powre forth"
"Weepe me not dead, in thine armes"
But before criticizing the poem's
doubleness one ought to glance down at
the bucket of water,
that is what tears are made of. Lament
at its most extreme will always have to
encounter water,
and we need someone like Donne to keep an eye on that absurdity.
so does each tear which lead us where
the globe gay world by that impression
groan
till thy tears mixed with mine you
overflow this world
by waters sent from thee my heaven
dissolved itself
inside a tear as if in a mirror Donne see
copies of copies of weepers
a bit like blue gown poets in Odyssey
8
and these weepers are reflecting each
other's tears and provoking more
until the sphere or sea of their weeping
is dissolving
and dissolved that is what you might
call
apeiron - an unfenced description of
water
and its language is close to Donne's 1597
account
of an actual sea voyage in which I
and the sun which should teach me had
forgot
east west day night all things
are one and that one none can be
since all forms uniform deformity that
cover
trust a boat on the high seas said
conrad a few hundred years later
trust a boat on the high seas to bring
out the irrational
that lurks at the bottom of every
thought sentiment
sensation emotion for all its cleverness
Donne's poem brings out that high sea
irrationality
it thinks its way to the bottom of
thought and reports on the confusion to
be found there
where the mind's world by means of tears
turns into the bodies
I am using water as a way of reading
Homer
and I'm using Donne as a way of reading
water
Donne has carried me into the heart of
weeping
I am under the purple wave now inside
the salt water
that condenses out of thought and comes
weeping from all humans
and here at its invisible starting point
I find water offering two
services of similarity it offers me
Homer's vision which is an extended
simile
and it offers me Donne's which you could
say is an extended metaphor
for serious metaphors
I think of metaphor as a kind of
nutrition whereby one idea gets eaten
and digested by another male
and female in Donne's poem dissolve and
transform
tears become fruits and emblems and
nothings
and spheres and seeds everything
transubstantiates into something else as
if
Donne, who was brought up a Catholic but
became Anglican in his twenties
had found a way to perform a communion
service in secret
all his love poems work obsessively at
this puzzle of change
substance that's unlike Homer
what Donne offers is not the gift of
similarity
but the gift of communion mark butler's
flee
and mark in this how little that without
a nice to me
is it sucked me first and now
and in this flea our two bloods mingles
me
but oh self-traitor I do bring the
spider love
which transubstantiates all
simile moves in the other direction
in instead of reducing one thing to
another
it proliferates it reverberates whether
wherever there is simile it is as if the
poem sprouts another whole poem
it is much more like pregnancy than
nutrition.
About 30 years ago I sent some poems to
the Oxford Professor of Poetry and the
answer came
'not enough metaphor'. I remember turning
for reassurance to that widow
in book eight noticing the way she
refuses to be absorbed into thought
he will not be digested she shares a
likeness with Odysseus
but keeps the difference she goes on
screaming
it seemed to me at the time that her
vitality was directly linked to the
spaciousness of simone
if she had been a metaphor her status
would have been closer to the woman in
Donne's poem
or to the women for example in Adrienne
Rich's poem
'Woman', about whom the poet writes this
i have a poem she says written in the
60s called woman
it begins my three sisters are sitting
on rocks
of black obsidian for the first time in
this light
i can see who they are and she goes on
to say
I have seen that poem glossed as a poem
about Rich's three sisters
on the simplest level such a reading is
factually incorrect
since Adrienne Rich has one sister not
three
but more than that even supposing that
Adrienne Rich the individual had three
sisters
the poem lives by metaphor
on one level this is still her speaking
on one level I can look at another woman
who is not my blood
and call her sister or on another level
all three sisters
are aspects of the poet's self
poetry is full of that kind of fiction
those various levels and aspects
by means of which metaphor tries to
detect something
immaterial but that is not
what Homer is doing
Homer is looking out beyond the self
he is taking the imagination seriously
as an
external and collaborative force
his mind his friends is not closed
in the skull but moving in and out of
the lungs
discovering someone actual in the air
Homer wants to express the clarity and
otherness of grief
and for that purpose he has need of
simile
metaphor transposes a noun similarly
real lines of uh
that is why Donne looks deeper and deeper
into the tear
whereas Homer moves his vision to and
fro examining the action
of weeping Homer has to step quickly
he has to get from one weeping to
another by means of a small crossing
word
the Greek word 'o̱s' I don't know how to
translate that word
it's unfortunate that the English word
as which is the correct way to introduce
a verb comparison
is a weak quiet old-fashioned word
it sounds dusty like something you would
find among Victorian door handles
in a junk shop. The word 'like'
which is designed for comparing mounds
is altogether more vigorous
but its edges are too sharp it sticks
out of the line
like a glinting knife i need something
softer
and swift. Homer's word
is a rough breathing followed by omega
the undulating last letter of the
alphabet
followed by s as if the wind had heaped
up water and then
broken it into sounds 'o̱s'
it is hard to pronounce unless you are
the wind
whenever I read it I think of waves
altering a stretch of water
and then altering it again posts
posts two ripples either side of a
likeness
it is as if the bluish wave the curve of
a bowed back
had unfolded and revealed it's
underneath
while it is breaking before we reach the
hiss
at the end of 'o̱s' I'd like to turn
left again to show you
a series of waves by the artist Sarah
Simblet
Sarah teaches anatomy at the Ruskin and
if you visit my room at Christ Church
you will find all kinds of dead objects
twisted pods
severed wings stuffed owls and a
kingfisher
finger bones open heels moths
seeds skulls stones and
three wasp-like human tortoise one with
scoliosis
which help her to understand the
structures of things
I suppose they comprise a kind of
material victory
but if Sarah wants to draw something
moving growing
living she makes use of water
20 years ago Sarah started studying the
Thames
at Iffley where it goes over the weir. 'I
listen acutely to water' she told me,
'I draw its sound as well as its smell.'
She describes how she developed an
ability to see water patterns because
design of the weir kept making the water
sorry the design of the
wheel made the water keep returning to
one shape
so for example she made these two
sketches
by waiting for the water to repeat
itself and then marking down another
line
and then another noticing as she went
along that the speed of the water
could only be caught if she drew quickly
that's another one of them
'My drawings are all made with fine liner
pen black or grey', she says, 'the wet pen
tip glides very fast over the smoothness
of the dismantled moleskin notebook
which I chose for the slippery speed of
its surface'
So she learned to draw water by looking
at patterns in a weir
and as a counter force to the bones and
stuffed birds Sarah carries these water
drawings wherever she goes
to remind her to look at things liquidly
last winter on a residency in Honolulu
she took out the drawings again and
decided to sketch some waves
here they are I hope
the first one this one I think it is
the first one is formalized made not in
the presence of water but later on
in a perfectionist mood back hotel Sarah
said this about it
'I think the hotel room reworking
collapsed into baroque patterns
because I could no longer hear or smell
or taste it or of course see the water'.
If reading is a kind of internal drawing
then this sketch
reminds me how easy it is to read over
enthusiastically turning poems and
pattern systems in your head
I prefer this next one obliterated by
rain
you can see the torn page and the ink
washed off
and if you hold its thickened paper you
can feel the whole
weather of the day first rate
performance by water
and I think it followed by some sketches
she made on the back
looking at the outlines of water on the
back of the paintings
Sarah is after something more elusive
the flourish of a falling wave
that is neither incoherent nor over
coherent
a paradox between movement and moment
here is a series of drawings made while
watching waves break over a rock
informed by the moment but not dissolved
in it
she says 'All of my drawings rely on all
of my senses
I touch or hold subjects especially
plants
whenever possible I hear really
important smell
and taste and this is all a kind of
seeing
any one of those sketches would make
good translation
greek word hosts a surge of change
provisional and mobile like a breaking
wave
so the great singer sang but odysseus
liquefied
the tears ran out under his eyelids on
his cheeks
posts as a woman crumples over and
mourned her husband
he has fallen in full view of his city
and his family he was trying to delay
the traumatic moment for his children
she sees him dying and gasping drapes
herself on his body
screaming a shrill sound and the men
behind
are hitting her head and shoulders with
their spears and lead her away
to slavery to suffer hard work and
sadness
and her face is sucked thin with pitiful
grief
so odysseus was pouring out pitiful
tears from his eyelids
what you miss in that translation are
the rolling hexameters
which are like the cylinders of a great
similarity machine
on which everything gets processed into
patterns
because of the hexameter there is a
structural alignment running down
through the poem
which matches one weeping to another
just as it matches one
rosy finger dawn or one winged word
or one dark proud ship to another there
is no stopping it
over those cylinders goes the shrillness
of lament and gets flattened into the
shrillness of grasshoppers
winds sea birds sirens and the
porphyrian of water
comes out comes out in the same color as
the heart
at least that is how it appears when you
are reading the odyssey
and the homeric formula keep coming at
you like
a recorded message
I think I have a recorded message. "The person
you are calling
knows you are waiting, please try later
the person you are calling
knows you are waiting please try later.
The person you are calling knows you are
waiting.
Please try later
please try again later. The person you
called knows you are
waiting please try again later.
The person you called knows you are
waiting please try again later."
And of course this poem was not in the
first place recorded
and in performance as Pina Bausch said
repetition is not repetition
but something more like varying
resemblances of ways
Homer speaks not in cylinders not as an
answer machine
but in undulations hosts as a woman
crumples over
hosts so Odysseus poured out tears
and who exactly is this woman I've seen
her in the dark space just behind my
eyes and sometimes in front of them
she's in shock so her knees have given
way she keeps crumpling over
she flashes past screaming enigmatically
alive
she has no name and nor does her city
which might be Troy
but it might just as well be Minneapolis
she is like Odysseus but in that
likeness
she could not be more different who is
she
if this were a film we would probably
find out
the scene would be presented as a
flashback host the image phase to the
city of Troy
here is Odysseus killing a man he has
his knee on the man's neck we see the
man dying
and gasping for breath and here is the
widow screaming a shrill sound
the scream fills up the cinema hosts the
image fades back to faiisha 
the scream keeps going in that film
version the widow has the status of a
memory
or a ghost she is a victim of Odysseus
lost to his psychology
their connection is causal and therefore
fixed
in Homer's version there is only
undulation
the wave of weeping moves through both
characters
but they keep status of their difference
odysseus in one world and the widow
in another as Samuel Johnson might have
put it
their connection is living and variable
and can no more be ascertained in a
dictionary
than a grove in the agitation of a storm
can be accurately delineated from its
picture
in the water
so thank you. I am now going to be happy
to answer some questions and go back to
Ros
and I think - Hello
thank you so much Alice that was
gripping
and moving in the fullest sense of the
world we have
um a lot of people asking questions um
and I will start um well let's start
with the
with one that starts with where you
started so how did you come to the
subject of water today
for your lecture? I think I seldom
leave the subject of water I'm very keen
on swimming and rivers
but I suppose as well as that I've
always been very interested
in that particular simile about the
woman
weeping and I've never really known how
to answer the question
of why at the highest pitch of our
emotion
uh we dissolve into water
so that kind of weird connection that
when you're swimming you know you're
swimming in the same
liquid as grief at its most intense has
bothered me for
for a long time I think that's really
interesting one of the questions we had
was can you speak to the role of tears
as a meeting of grief and water and i
suppose that's what you're describing
it's that moment
of encounter with water which is also an
encounter with
with grief yes and there's a
a Jewish legend connected to the
story of Adam and Eve that says
that humans were originally given tears
as a compensation for death
and I think that's I love that idea it's
a really
bad bargain you know to get these little
drops of water
in exchange for dying um but if you
think about it
 it's actually quite a lot as well to
be given
something physical and actual like tears
which either through distraction or as
an anesthetic
or simply through the sort of puzzle
that presents you with
of how the body connects with the mind
they sort of move you through grief I
suppose
and i'm just going to ask a little
question of my own because i was so
struck with that metaphor that you were
giving us and you're working it through
so similarly
from Homer, I wanted to ask a bit
about
time in that and how you perceive that
similarly working in time
you talked about hallucinatory poetry
floating above
other poetry is this an interruption
is it happening at the same time i was
thinking particularly about Denise
Riley's wonderful
time lived without its flow and this
idea that grief
suspends time but you are still living
in time
and whether there's something going on
in that. Denise talks a lot about
the struckness of grief doesn't she and
how how it is actually
occupies a different time from ordinary
everyday time
and I think it's it's a brilliant thing
to say
and it's exactly right and I've always
been fascinated by the way Homer's
similes occupy that time as well
so they always change into the present
tense from the main
narrative of the poem which is in a past
tense and i suppose it's perhaps a bit
like
the idea of the dream time it's it's as
if there is a continuous present
in which at our highest pitch of emotion
or understanding
we can we can sort of look down at
ordinary time
and get a different perspective on it.
Still on tears we have a question
that says why are tears symbolically
considered culturally pure
when other bodily emissions: saliva and
blood
are have an abject quality are viewed as
impure?
I'm probably not the right person to
answer that
but eyes are the windows of the soul so
it might seem that
here's other sort of liquid of the soul
uh
whereas urine, catarrh, earwax
saliva uh come from different windows of
the body which are not
necessarily connected with the soul um
but I don't think I
really have the right answer only my own
opinion for that
um eyes eyes are very fascinating things
so that's why perhaps tears get a kind
of status
from emerging through the eyes we have
two questions that I think are
connection
connected one's an extended way and
one's another short way of asking the
same thing so
um one of our listeners gives a quote
from 'Mrs Dalloway'
um from Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway' where
she says "this late age of the world's
experience had bred in them
all all men and women are well of tears
tears and sorrow courage and endurance a
perfect
upright and stoical bearing" what do you
make of Woolf's confluence of grief and
compassion
nurture and forbearance in this quote
and how do you think we might make our
own current collective well of tears
productive?
And then a more direct way I suppose
asking that question is has the current
global situation
influenced your work?
Well
in terms of the first part of the
question,
I suppose I still do think, I don't
want to stop at tears, I think the great
thing about
certainly about poetry is that it
doesn't get stuck
in lament I think it has this this kind
of rhythmical
aspect to it which moves it through
things
it's got kind of dance and song going on
alongside whatever grief it might
express
so I myself
wouldn't want to get stuck in that well
of tears I think that
one of the great things about certainly
about poetry I don't know about
the novelty, is that it does
present two things at the same time so
you can enter grief at the same time
as sort of just the joy of the music
of a poem
and probably with second part of the
question
I think that it's quite important to
wait and not know
too quickly how these extraordinary
times
are going to have affected people.
Perhaps one of the things
that poetry demands is that you kind of
you don't necessarily listen to the
surface of your mind, you
wait until the underneath has something
to say
and that can generally take a couple of
years I find
so who knows there are some who say
it won't have made any difference at all
I certainly think it's given enough kind
of solitude and quietness for people
at least to sort of churn things over
quite a lot.
A question here from Dan; rather
although we're still with rhythm, Alice
has such a strong sense of rhythm when
reading poetry
sometimes our natural rhythm and all the
more revealing for it
has she allowed her poetry to be set to
music and if so was she happy?
I love working with musicians I think
the
best of those collaborations has been
when I and the musician kind of taken
turns and listened to each other
I haven't so much enjoyed a kind of
formal relationship
I've occasionally written operas and
things like that
uh or words to offers and
I found that a bit less satisfactory
because,
perhaps it's vain of me, but the music is
really the serious thing
in that collaboration and it depends you
tend to be told when you start out on it
uh but only 10 of your words will be
heard or something
so I love working with musicians but in
a slightly more
jazzy way I think.
Okay,
many questions coming in, i'm just trying
to order them in my own head.
Sarah asked does the surface
of the water represent our sense
perceptions and imaginations which are
two uncertainties in our life so do you
think that agitation is about an a
state of uncertainty?
I think that what fascinates me about
the surface of water is that it isn't
just surface
you can see through it and it also looks
back at you with reflection
so it is the one surface and I and this
always this is why I get interested in
it whenever it crops up in Homer,
it's the surface that isn't the surface
so whereas Homer
always responds to the kind of the
actual invisible on the surface
when he's talking about water he can't
help sort of
reading somebody's mind or going into a
different
kind of world altogether um
and I think that
although I used the word agitation quite
a lot
in this lecture partly because of Samuel
Johnson using it
I think that the movement of water
doesn't have to be just an uncertainty
it can be a sort of energy and I think
that's really what I
love about the movement of water is
that it stops you getting stuck and
from the point of view of poetry that
means it kind of
it gives you all the vitality of live
performance rather than
the printed page. Quite a lot of people
are asking about similarities and
metaphors
I think this is a rather brutal question
and you may have already answered it
by selecting the message the simile you
selected.
If you had to pick one, simile or
metaphor, in a poem
which would it be?
Well obviously that one that I spoke about
has always haunted me,
but then I do also love the similes in
the Iliad because they just take you to such a very
different world. I always think the thing
about
Homer's similes is that they're not so
much similes as dissimiles they tend
to grow far enough that you are then
ending up in a very different place.
And the one that springs to mind is one
that never made it into my version of
the Iliad which is about
some men pulling an ox hide it's a
really strange
vision of people stretching a piece of
skin so
I'll throw that one in. Ariel, who has
a wonderful watery name for us,
asked can translations be written on water?
In other words where would you say
derivative works stand in relation to
the originals?
That's how she puts it. That is just such
an interesting question
because I think that poetry
in the 20th Century and the 21st Century
has completely changed its meaning
because of translation.
There have been so many good
translations of good poems
and that has changed what we think of as
a poem which was always
before defined as that which can't be
translated,
so we need translation desperately
because we need to sort of fertilize the
English language.
But I wonder whether
translations of poems don't include
silence because the silence is something
that
a poet deliberately places a particular
point in the language and if you
translate it
you're not going to have your silences
in the same places
so it does give a very different
experience,
and I think even writing translations on
water wouldn't
fill that in really.
Anna asked a very specific
question about-
she was wondering about Cordelia, and how
her tears come to represent compassion
and forgiveness that in a sense go
beyond grieving,
so do tears do work beyond grieving?
Well I think tears do work beyond
language
beyond thought which is that's why
they're valuable. Beyond grieving,
they certainly take you beyond grieving
but I think Cordelia,
what all strikes me with her, is is her
silence and the fact that
it's her body that speaks rather than
her mouth. We have a question as well
about
where's it um
someone says what Alice said about water
reminds me of the watercolors by W Tillyer
and their sense of randomness and
beautiful accidents
is that randomness something that you
try to include in your own poetry
I wonder what William Tillyer would
think of being called random because
he does very careful,
he sort of guides the water into its
blocks and smudges
very very carefully and
there's a huge amount of mastery and
artistry in what he does.
But yes he is interested in allowing
water
to express itself on the paper
and that's very much my way of working
too. I like to set things up with a strong
enough frame
that something other than myself is then
free to make its mark.
One tries to invite randomness in and
then one has to be careful that
perhaps like Sarah's smudged, rain-
smashed drawing
it doesn't go so far that you can't then
read it.
So I think that the question is always
getting a balance between
control and lack of control. I just
wanted to
share with you a message from Di,
she says 'I work with grieving children
and we use a lot of watery references
puddle jumping in and out of grief
wading through rivers getting stuck in
seas being knocked over by tsunamis of
grief'.
She says 'maybe water and grief always
flow together'.
And then another question for a specific
question from Mary
says 'How has your attitude to water
changed or developed
over the years that you've been writing
about water?'
I'm not sure that my attitude to
water has changed but I suppose I've
chosen different types of water
it was lovely to be able to write the
story of a river when I wrote 'Dart'
because that has
such a clear beginning middle and ending
so the poem was already structured for
me.
I have written quite a lot about rain
and that's always a treat because rain
is such a
beautiful sound, it's already a poem.
The great challenge for me
was writing about the sea which I tried
to do in my book
'Nobody', and I suppose
for me the sea is
is that which you can't write about so
so that was like kind of
trying to jump into something impossible.
Unfenced.
Unfenced, exactly.
A more scientific question 'Would you be
able to speak on water as gas
or solid, do these function as poetic
modes?'
I wish I were more of a scientist and i
understand
from my second son that water is very
remarkable when it's solid for example,
because it is lighter than its liquid
state if I've got that right.
And I think it behaved strangely whether
it's a gas or a solid or a liquid
And certainly, I suppose for me what I
love is the transitions I love
the way water turns into frost or turns into
steam but I don't think i'd be
qualified to write scientifically about
that.
This is one as we're moving sort of
further through our
questions, and close to the end. Jo says
that you're the most captivating
reader she's seen perform live,
and how did the experience of reading
alone to the lens differ from reading to
a room filled with rapt faces
responsive and reflecting back to you?
Yes, it's -I'm still going to be going
on about live performance because it's a
very different experience and that kind
of anxiety about the button on the
computer that would
scroll the script down and then the
terrible moment when you, Ros, had to
inform me that i wasn't actually visible.
I think that I have seen some quite
good performances actually online so I'm
sure there is-
and I love the fact that it can go all
around the world
and that it's very democratic so I
certainly think it's a good thing, but
there is something different about
the human body I suppose. And a human
conversation that happens when you
hear people sighing with boredom or
rustling
sweet papers you know you've got to pick
up speed.
So I think it's for me, very important to
have
the feeling that my words are landing
somewhere.
I think we should probably wrap up
we're almost out of time
One comment from an anonymous reader
listening who says 'I wrote a poem whilst
listening to your inspiring lecture'.
Good! I wish I could multitask that way.
Thank you very much, so shall I say
goodbye? No I'm going to have to
going to formally thank you, so you will
need to be with us for a little bit
longer.
So I want to thank
you, Alice, for your lecture this evening.
I'm a bit lost for a simile to capture it.
Thank you very much for agreeing to
offer your lecture in this way tonight
and for answering audience questions and
we've had people viewing from all over
the world:
Brazil, Japan, all over the UK, Denmark
Belgium, Croatia, Saudi Arabia,
Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Pakistan, South
Africa,
USA. All of us wherever we are
I'm sure, have been moved, probably also
agitated by the flow of your analysis
and it's reflecting turns from Marilyn
Nelson to Homer to Donne
to Adrienne Rich, and we're really grateful
to you, so Alice, many thanks to you
once again. Thank you, very much thank you,
Ros, and thank you all for listening. And
thank you also to all those involved in
making tonight possible,
including the teams at TORCH and the
English Faculty. And I want to thank all
you viewers at home for watching and
all your wonderful comments and
questions.
The audio of Alice's inaugural
lecture in November 2019 and
audio of lectures by the past two
incumbents of the post are freely
available to the public on the English
faculty website,
and this lecture will join them there
soon. TORCH continue their live event
series next week
on Thursday 2nd July at 5 p.m. They'll be
joined by Professor Homi K.
Bhaba from Harvard University, do tune
again
in again then if you can. In the meantime
thank you once again for watching,
and goodbye.
 
