I have a new soundfile up at the Poets on Poets website (which features a lot of modern poets, including experimental ones, reading poems from the Romantic era.)
I chose one of Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets. They’re late poems, and often, eg in biographies, taken as the lowest and worst of his work. Look for sentences like “Wordsworth scaled the heights of such poems as Tintern Abbey, and plunged as low as the Ecclesiastical Sonnets”.
But I love them. They do something fascinatingly visual and argumentative.
They find a vessel for a lot of contrary thoughts, but also a shape for a big narrative (the history of Christianity in England) he wanted to write - that gets so much more into that one poetic form than any other form could accommodate.
It was an ambitious project, and it allows me, a poet who also is Christian, to dream big - about what I would like to see in a poem about the history of Christianity in England - and feel like so much of my dream got captured in Wordsworth’s net.
I tried reading several of the sonnets, including those I loved and knew well, and thought were high points of concentrated focus.
But it was the two poems I read that I was not straining over that worked best. One is released now, one soon.
Thursday, 4 January 2007
