Poetry and the wisdom of this world.

.A couple of weeks ago we took the Park and Ride bus at the Pear Tree, Oxford. Like the child I've never quite not been, I wanted top deck, front seat. And as so often in life, I was disappointed because some other height addicts with a love for seeing ahead before anyone else, had already usurped my rightful seat. So, content with 'near the front', I sat on the right side, and amongst the great sights of Oxford, saw again that red brick street of quite modern houses which I always take time to look for on the passing bus, 'Elizabeth Jennings Way'.

It's a kind of Baptist pilgrimage thing, allowing a place of significance to remind me of why it's important not to forget the person whose life made the place significant in the first place! Indeed I'm hoping to visit a number of such significant places later in the year as part of my Sabbatical, of which more in due course.

I'm currently working on a paper for the Baptists Doing Theology in Context Conference, which in the plenary sessions, will be on the general theme 'The Wisdom of This World?'. (August 26-29 at Luther King House, Manchester). My own effort is on the role of the poet in contemporary culture, and on the importance for christian witness of paying attention to 'the wisdom of this world' as expressed in the voices of those who are dissident, or dissonant, or interrogative, or disinterested - but never indifferent to life questions and cultural experience. It's a short paper, 30-35 minutes maximum speaky time with time for conversation and reflection. The poet whose voice I am listening to is Carol Ann Duffy. Don't know if there will ever be a Carol Ann Duffy Way in Manchester (where she now lives). Whether or no, her poems express Carol Ann Duffy's way of looking at the world, and seeing the comic and tragic, the trivial and crucial, ranging through wistfulness, realism, cynicism, to their deeper perhaps truer emotions of longing, acceptance and scepticism.

In her collection The World's Wife she distills much of what makes her an essential voice for those who want help in understanding the strange perspectives, unfamiliar emotions, named and nameless anxieties, and much else that makes up the tangled, fankled mess of human relationships in a post-modern culture. Stuart Blythe uses the word flux as a verb which describes what our culture is doing - it is fluxing. Duffy is an honest commentator and mostly compassionate observer of that fluxing which takes place in the emotional sub-structure of human relationships, and which is externalised in a culture that doesn't quite know what to want.

To anticipate a paragraph of my paper. Her poem on the myth of Icarus, who manufactured wax wings and was so pleased with his techonological brillince that he flew too high, the sun melted the wax and he fell to his doom, is a scathing comment on the myth of male mastery through technology.
Mrs Icarus witnessed the fall:

Mrs Icarus
I'm not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock,
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he's a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock

Comments

[Ruth Gouldbourne]

Thank you for this - she is one of my favourite modern poets, and I love this book in particular. I soooo wish I could get to the consultation!