Kehinde Wiley at the National Gallery - 'Saying Yes to Us'

My latest review for Church Times is of Kehinde Wiley at the National Gallery The Prelude:

'Mountains have often been depicted as places for encounter with God, and the film, as also the paintings based on Friedrich’s images, frequently reference the Romantic wanderer figure in search of spirituality or self-discovery.

The title of the film refers to William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude, and his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” is quoted, together with Thoreau’s Walden and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature. Emerson’s line that “We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God” sums up much of a film whose character are, by turns, overwhelmed by snow, and subsumed by whiteness, so that they almost disappear in the landscape.

In this way, Wiley achieves a dual focus, reflecting the overwhelming reach of white supremacy, while also acknowledging humanity’s fragile relationship with nature, currently and most significantly regarding climate change.'

Other of my pieces for Church Times can be found here.

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The Staple Singers - The Gardener.

I wandered lonely as a cloud. Or not.

I wandered lonely as a cloud.
or not, as I was with my sister
when I first espied those dancing or golden daffodils.
I wandered lonely, therefore, in imagination
or in conflation of two separate occasions.
Whatever, in the retelling, the poeticising,
something changed and some things remained.
There was a trigger event I recalled
two years after, when re-reading my sister's journal.
The event was real but mediated through memory,
imagery, mastery of descriptive language,
becoming magnified with meaning
to live and breathe beyond the page
as re-enacted sacrament in which you now accompany me
on hills, no longer lonely,
for you are with me
as you imaginatively recreate
this speech-act-event, this poem.

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William Wordsworth - I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud.

Dove Cottage & St Oswald's Grasmere

Today I made the obligatory Lake District memorial visit to Dove Cottage in Grasmere and the grave of William Wordsworth at St Oswald's, although I'm really more of a Coleridge fan.

I particularly liked the inscription in the church to Wordsworth as Poet Laureate:

'To the memory of William Wordsworth, a true philosopher and poet, who, by the special gift and calling of almighty God, whether he discoursed on man or nature, failed not to lift up the heart to holy things, tired not of maintaining the cause of the poor and simple; and so, in perilous times, was raised up to be a chief minister, not only of noblest poesy, but of high and sacred truth.'

I also liked the fact that Wordsworth, not really wanting to become Poet Laureate, made it a condition that he only write as Laureate when inspired to do so and, as a result, became the only Poet Laureate not to write any verse in the role of Laureate.

It was particularly sad to see the grave of Hartley Coleridge. Martyn Hallsall writes that: "The child had proved to be the father of the man, his academic brilliance overshadowed by immorality and disorganisation ... Samuel Taylor Coleridge, separated from his family, lived latterly in Hampstead, thinking, writing and above all talking against a background of opium addiction; ‘an archangel, a little damaged’ as Lamb remarked. Hartley Coleridge remained to his father, Richard Holmes reminds us, ‘a reproachful ghost of his own lost youth’. He failed as a schoolmaster, abandoned journalism, and remained unmarried, living off a bequest. After many years of silence his father, the year before he died in 1834, received from Hartley a copy of his poems. It was dedicated to him, and the opening sonnet quoted half a line from ‘Frost at Midnight’."

St Oswald's church also has a fine 'Madonna and Child' by Ophelia Gordon Bell. I also saw the 'Virgin and Child' by Josefina de Vasconcellos at St Mary's Ambleside.

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William Wordsworth - To H C Six Years Old.

Celebration of Christian Poetry (2)

This year at St John's Seven Kings we have another engaging and interesting Patronal Festival programme at the beginning of October, which includes a Sixties Night (Saturday 2nd October, 7.30pm), Choral Evensong (Sunday 3rd October, 6.30pm), a Festival Communion with our guest preacher Revd. Alan Perry, Headteacher, St Edwards School (Sunday 3rd October, 10.00am), and a Celebration of Christian Poetry (Friday 1st October, 7.30pm) - this event is part of the London Borough of Redbridge's 'Word of Mouth' Festival.

Poetry is an aspect of the Arts where the influence of Christians has been felt particularly strongly. In thinking about why that might be and also why you might want to come to our Celebration of Christian Poetry event, the following thoughts from the US poet Gregory Orr may be of interest:

“The making of poems is the making of meanings. To write a lyric poem is to take the confusion and chaos inside you and translate it into words. Those words get organized onto a page; and if they’re being organised into a poem as opposed to a novel, they’re organized into an intense pattern, a concentrated coherence. When you suffer trauma, you mostly do that passively, as a victim. But when you translate that experience into words and shape it, you become active. You are no longer a passive endurer of experience, but an active shaper of it. You’ve redeemed something from that chaos.”

“We, as readers, most need poems, during our crises. We need poets when we’re deliriously happy, and the delirium threatens our stability, when we’re crazy with love. We need them when we’re crazed with grief and despair – then they’re a momentary stay against our confusion, a momentary clarification. Then they have the power to re-stabilize us. Wordsworth has a beautiful insight when he defines poetry twice in his “Preface to the Lyric Ballads”: first as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” – that would be a poem written in crisis – and than a few pages later as “emotion recollected in tranquillity” … “trauma revisited when it’s safe to remember it.”

For all these reasons “writing a poem can save your life, and reading a poem can show you that you are not alone. Someone else felt this. Someone else went through what you are going through and they survived, even triumphed. The poem is the proof of that survival and triumph.” Orr quotes a wonderful line about lyric poetry from Stanley Kunitz: “It’s the voice of the solitary that makes others less alone.”

If you are being drawn to poetry, as a reader or a writer, then he suggests finding out about your imaginative relatives – your poetic family – including “Great-great-grandfather Wordsworth, or mad Great-great-uncle William Blake, or strange and amazing Aunt Emily Dickinson.” Our Celebration of Christian Poetry event will be that kind of evening - an introduction to a poetic family tree offering the opportunity to “find your spiritual kin” and be “reborn into poetry” – through readings of poems from featured poets, favourite poems introduced and read by local clergy, and choral recitals of well known poems.

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Christina Rossetti - Love Came Down At Christmas.