Poetry on the Lake

Highlights of the Festival:

Meeting so many lovely people and great poets.
Hearing so many great readings: Imtiaz Dharker, Carol Ann Duffy, Gillian Clark, Caroline Carver and Katrina Naomi among my favourites.
Meeting Michael Swan, author of Practical English in Use, every ESL teacher's bible!
Drinking Long Island iced tea and smoking cigarettes for the first time in 7 years.
Selling/giving away all copies of my home-made pamphlet (sorry about the typos).
Reading poems in front of an audience for the first time.
Having the National Poet of Wales say nice things about my reading.
Having anybody say nice things about my reading.

Wonderful! See you next year.

By way of explanation of the last post: the next stage of my journey to the dark side of trained teacherdom, as opposed to the blissful kingdom of "a bit of a chat for an hour and a half and some decent money", is DELTA module 2, where you take part in an identity parade of one and your classroom crimes and misdemeanours are pored over by People Who Are Much Better At This Than You ( that emphasis is real, not sarcasm). Part of this unenviable process is a teaching diary, which it will be your pleasure to read here whenever I update it.

For the uninitiated, in Cambridge there are no such things as students, only learners, or "Ls" to save time in the exam. L1 means your language, L2 means anyone else's. You could probably have figured that out yourselves, but I just can't help myself.

If you're one of my students, sorry, learners, don't worry - I wasn't talking about you.

About three weeks ago I decided to start recording my students telling stories. The reactions ranged from horror to outright refusal (they changed their minds after everyone else did it), but the interesting thing was that afterwards, when we analysed the recordings, they were all extremely positive about the whole process. I used two basic approaches.

1. I had found a radio programme where a woman talked about her first experience in the 1980s with the 'new generation' of Marks and Sparks sandwiches, talking about how they seemed extraordinary at the time. I decided to record my students talking about their first experiences of food or, failing that, an anecdote or powerful memory related to food. I gave them some time to prepare it (with use of dictionaries, without writing anything). We analysed the extract from the radio programme for typical features of storytelling and spoken discourse and then tried to apply some of these things to improve what we heard on the recording. We also went through the recordings looking for other improvements that weren't necessarily exemplified in the radio programme. Basically we deconstructed and reconstructed their stories as a group.

2. For lower levels, simple analysis of the story without reference to L1 model. I usually tended toward analysis of hesitation with these Ls.

Some of the typical problems that arose, even at higher levels, were:

a) no pronoun substitution and therefore unnatural repetition

b) unnatural hesitation

c) failure to 'close' the story so that the listener didn't know if the speaker was finished or not

d) failure to provide proper emphasis and intonation for key moments of the story

e) lack of 'vague' language

I decided not to ask them to retell the story after the analysis as I thought they would be too self-conscious and fluency would suffer. I don't know if that was the right decision.

I'm obsessed with hesitation at the moment. When we heard a particularly long and distracting 'errrr' in the recordings (and there were a great many), I asked them to tell me why. If their answers are to be believed, there are three main causes of unnatural hesitation:

1. They don't know the word and have to paraphrase

2. They do know the word but it's not immediately accessible

3. There are two or more words competing for use

The first problem is fairly easily remedied. The second shouldn't have been an issue since I asked them to tell themselves the story mentally in English before recording it. My guess is that very few people actually did this. On the other hand, in the heat of the moment, we tend to want to improvise, or something comes to mind that we hadn't thought of before ( as E.M. Forster once said, "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"). For many of them it may have been the first time they had told that story in any language. Maybe the next time I do this the only specification will be that it has to be a story they've told many times already.

Intonation and emphasis at key moments in the story came up only towards the final recordings and I realised only then how crucial it is to successful communication. Unfortunately, it also seems as if it's the most difficult thing to master. I really don't know how we can teach it without ending up with speakers who sound like bad actors. Intonation is a kind of emotional fingerprint and therefore is something that can only be absorbed where there is a 'whole person' relation, i.e. face to face contact with a great many different L1 speakers. Or maybe not. Then there is always the question of just how much a learner is willing to change to sound authentic.

I think particularly with storytelling, teachers find themselves dealing with issues that are not strictly connected to L2 competence. Some people are naturally better at it than others and some may be entirely incapable of coherent longer turns even in L1. Perhaps this makes a lesson of this kind doubly valuable for Ls - they get two skills for the price of one. On the other hand, perhaps the general strain of having to really think about what you say before you say it makes your overall production in L2 a little better in some respects.

Another problem was the unnatural setting. Recording yourself is stressful, but I told them that this simpy mimicked the pressure of speaking in L2 to people you don't know very well. The cause of stress in both cases is fear of judgement (it also occurred to me that it seems a little ironic that many people like talking but no-one wants to listen to themselves as they do it). The setting also made the listeners understandably reluctant to interrupt or ask for clarification or take part in some collaborative work with the speaker, something that is completely natural and essential in L1 storytelling, especially in 'rounding off' a story. The next time I do this, I think I'll try and make it a little more natural by inviting the other students to be a little more interactive.

I should say again now just how much the Ls liked this activity. There was usually always a feeling of "Wow, it's not actually that bad!" We all had a lot of fun.

Snooker. I can't get enough of it. They make it look so easy - I used to play for twenty minutes without ever getting a ball anywhere near a pocket. Positional play? Let's not be silly.

It's causality at its most fundamental or rather, the kind of causality most easily grasped by humans - you hit something, it hits something else which hits something else. You move, stuff happens. It's physics explained to children. And yet the variety of it, the jaw-dropping skill, the almost superhuman perception of angles and space all turn it into a long, soothing meditation on the relationship between mind and matter, creative intelligence and ironclad determinism. In many respects it resembles chess, but where chess favours pure intelligence, snooker gets to grips with the physicality of things. The chess player is a tyrant over his pieces; the snooker player is constantly negotiating with his world, never fully in control, always trying to make up for an inch too long here, an inch too short there.

It's snowing and bells are ringing in the church across from the school...a pack of hunting dogs chasing down a deer and I'll know that the border between this world and the other world has thinned almost to nothing.

Imagine my suprise on opening the New Yorker to discover that someone had written a poem about meeting William Burroughs in a dream, in a farmhouse - exactly what I dreamt a short time after he died. I'll have to write a response. Burroughs himself wrote often of being in the land of the dead, where he would meet with friends and acquaintances who were dead or dying; his trilogy, 'Cities of the Red Night', 'The Place of Dead Roads' and 'The Western Lands' is a great epic of death, partly set in the afterlife. As in a great many dreams, Burroughs 'just knew' that it was the land of the dead, even before he met someone long gone. I saw, as well as Burroughs, my grandfather in that same place some time before he died, with his dog, who died a long time before that. The poet in the New Yorker says that Burroughs told him something - the dead in my dreams never say anything at all.

Considering it's the one absolutely inevitable fact of life, isn't it strange that very, very few people try to write about the moment of death? The only writer I know who ever tried was Beckett in 'Malone Dies' and perhaps also in 'The Unnameable', which might be read as the instant of death stretched out or dilated so that it seems unending. Now that I think about it, there is the Ambrose Bierce short story about a man being hanged - we think he has escaped but it is in fact his final fantasy as he drops. And another by someone whose name I can't remember fading out on a life support machine. So fair enough, there have been a few. But you'd think there would be more.

Anorther strange dream coincidence - one night (when else?), I dreamt that a fire began in a church and quickly spread to the rest of the city. I tried to take shelter in a doorway and the next thing I knew I was standing with my family in front of a lake. Two days later, I got an email from a girl I hadn't (and haven't) seen for years who said "I just dreamt about you - there was a fire but you escaped and you seemed very happy in front of a lake with your family." That's just the kind of thing you don't want to hear, isn't it? Our abiding connection is that we share a birthday - astrologers, do your worst.

I had to abandon Burroughs at a certain point - to say he's unhealthy would be an understatement. But perhaps I've been harsh on him. When I visited him, or when he visited me, he was the very soul of kindness.

The Gathering Storm

So, here it is, weighing down and bulking up my rucksack, the latest monstrous installment of the monstrous fantasy cycle 'The Wheel of Time'. 'Eagerly awaited' does not even begin to describe it. This is book 12 and I've read all the others 3 times. This was supposed to be the last, but it's not just as simple as all that...

As literary tales go, this one is quite tragic. The author, Robert Jordan, began the books in the late 80s. He had wanted to write 12 about the journey towards the apocalypse in his fantasy world, undoubtedly the biggest and most painstakingly created I've ever come across. He finished 11, started 12 and died of a blood disease. Can you imagine? You would take it personally, wouldn't you? Not after 2, or 6, but 11. Just 1 to go. When I found out he was dead...

So when he knew he was dying, he told his wife the way he wanted it to go, wrote the final scene and then left it to another author to finish from his notes. But his notes, fully written up, were 3 books, not 1. So we have 3 final books waiting for us. This one, book 12, is the first of those.

So what's it like? By now, the characters and the cultures are so well-developed that the new author just has to pick up where Jordan left off. But the interesting thing is this - I had thought that Jordan didn't have much of a style: too many clichès, facile descriptions and excessive use of italics, to name but a few. Not personal, easily imitable. And yet this new writing is palpably inferior. On opening the book at random we have people 'cradled by blankets' and a character 'thick of neck and determined of attitude'. These are not happy sentences and Jordan would never have written them. The net result is that one feels a very definite nostalgia for a writer whose prose one never found particularly satisfying, which is a first in my reading experience.

With the best will in the world, and relatively simple as these characters are, it is clear now that they are 100% Jordan's and do not travel well. It is the confirmation of my feeling from the beginning with these books - that Jordan's love for his world animated the lifeless prose like a fish moving in stagnant water. It seems that passion, vision and earnestness in writing can occasionally substitute style; and these three things are so personal as to be inimitable, even when their expression is imperfect. I could mention Harry Potter here, another book where I had to willfully ignore the writing itself while acknowledging and enjoying the (occasional) genius of the characters and plot.

But am I going to stop reading it now? Absolutely not. After 11, would you?

I had the chance today to revisit some old ideas about language and mind, specifically the 'substance' of thought. The two main channels for thinking, as far as I can see, tend to be words and pictures - these can be manipulated, rearranged, broken down and put together in novel ways. They permit hypothetical imagination and reasoning and free us from the here and now. My question has always been this - sights are perceived by eyes, sounds by ears and smells by noses - and thoughts? What is the correct verb for a thought? I hear a thought? I see a thought? Most of my thinking takes the form of an aural hallucination, the ghost of speech. How does this come about? How does the trace of speech live on without employing the vocal apparatus or the ears? Is there a single part of the brain that deals with the auditory system? If it were damaged or removed, would we still be able to think in words? Or am I barking up the wrong tree altogether? Some theorists, such as Daniel Dennett, have described the phenomena of 'private' consciousness as a 'user illusion'. That may well be, the experience of thought is as real as any other and sometimes more so:

...wound in mind's wandering
as mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.

WB Yeats, All Souls' Night

or

O imaginativa, che ne rube
talvolta sì di fuor ch'om non s'accorge
perchè dintorno suonin mille tube,
chi move te, se 'l senso non ti porge?

Oh imagination, that steals us from the world
so totally that the cacophony of a thousand organs
is as naught, who moves you when nothing moves the senses?

Dante, Purgatorio, canto 17