“I sing the body electric”. Though no-one chose to read Whitman’s exhaustive tribute to the body, we did hear Neil Peart’s short song lyric ‘The body electric’ which derives from the Whitman via a Ray Bradbury screenplay about a robot.
Maxine Kumin’s ‘Song for seven parts of the body’ is a sequence of clever and funny riddles.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, while appearing uncomplimentary about his mistress, perhaps suggests that she surpasses conventional poetic comparisons. Sylvia Plath’s ‘The applicant’ and ‘Facelift’ typically abound in unsettling and even threatening images.
Geoffrey Chaucer vividly describes the miller’s body and character in the introduction to the miller’s tale from the Canterbury Tales. Another such portrait is of an old farmhand in RS Thomas’s ‘Lore’. ‘The hunchback in the park’ by Dylan Thomas is a far from straightforward description of the deformed tramp, who seems to have created a beautiful female companion or protector.
Michael Rosen’s ‘Going home’ tells of his near-fatal and permanently damaging encounter with Covid early in 2020. Michael Longley’s ‘The scissors ceremony’ is a sweet observation – with a gentle twist – of an elderly couple.
Seamus Heaney in ‘Punishment’ reads the story behind a Scandinavian bog-burial in the exhumed body, making connections to the Northern Ireland troubles.
In Thomas Hardy’s ‘I look into my glass’ the poet sees his fading body and wishes his romantic disappointments would also fade. Katha Pollitt in her ‘Mind-body problem’ seems never to have inhabited her body comfortably. Maya Angelou, in contrast, is very at home in hers; she’s a ‘Phenomenal woman’.
The protagonist of Sheena Pugh’s ‘The movement of bodies’ is clearly Isaac Newton, the ‘Philosopher giving that lecture’ in Joseph Wright’s painting of that name. Despite his understanding of heavenly bodies the poem imagines his discomfort when his own body is disturbed by desire.
‘The imperfect enjoyment’ by the celebrated libertine John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester was clearly intended for the Restoration equivalent of a locker-room. It was eyebrow-raising and jaw-dropping. We felt that he made his very clear and indeed innuendo-free point very adequately in the first half alone.
Adrian Mitchell’s comic ‘Ode to the skull’ celebrates its various parts, with a curious variation of the rhyme scheme in the fourth verse, while Patrick Anderson’s ‘The softness of the hair ‘ from his Parts of the body sequence uses high-flown poetic imagery and alliteration. Hair also features (obviously!) in the story in ‘Haircut’ by Ken Gambles which we heard previously in our session on ‘Work’. Roger McGough’s ‘Mouth’ is typically droll.
In ‘Out, out..’ by Robert Frost, a brief candle sputters and dies following a shocking accident.
Extracts from Edwin Morgan’s ‘A voyage’ whimsically depict the experiences of sperm and egg, reminding me of a section of the Woody Allen film ‘Everything you always wanted to know about sex’.
The evening ended with David Aldred reading from his recent pamphlet ‘a kettle of fish’ a poem which itself takes on the characteristics of a living body – ‘Poem alive’.
It must have been on this occasion that we were introduced to the term ‘ekphrastic’, in relation to the poem derived from Wright of Derby’s painting.