The Dance, The Intellect and The Dream

This week I went to a master class with the Australian poet Les Murray. The class itself wasn’t as interesting as I had hoped but he is a lovely man as well as being an amazing writer and he did give us a few wise nuggets about the process of writing poetry.  One interesting thing that he said was that there are three parts to a poem – the dance, the intellect and the dream and the mystery is how much of each of these that you put in.  This rings really true for me and I know that some of my poems that don’t quite work have too much of one of these – normally intellect. It also reminded me of something our tutor said at the beginning of last term, which was that a good poem can be reduced to the steps of a dance. This is  an interesting idea – but I would say that it is not just any old dance – for instance you wouldn’t’ liken it to the skinhead moonstomp where you would just wade right in and trample all over your subject matter. But there is also a case for not being too delicate with your subject matter, pussyfooting around it and never quite getting to the point. I suppose if I had to liken it to a particular dance it would possibly be the tango...

Keeping the World Alive

"If, by accident, a moment were to occur when everyone was asleep, the world would disappear." writes Anne Michaels in her beautifully haunting novel Fugitive Pieces. I found in this statement a profound resonance and somehow I find that I want believe it more than science, astronomy and any other theory about the world and time and space. I find myself wondering if that is why the earth turns, why only half of the planet, at any given time, is in the light. Is it so that when we are sleeping, dreaming our dreams of the dead, the past and the not yet real - somewhere, on the other side of the world people are going about their daily business and, although they may not know it, keeping the planet alive?