National Poetry Day 2020

National Poetry Day is celebrated every year in October, encouraging people to discover, share and enjoy poetry in all its forms. To celebrate, we caught up with Dr William Wootten and Craig Savage of the Bristol Poetry Institute.

Why do you think observances such as National Poetry Day are important?

Craig: Poetry and public days of observance in England have been connected since John Dryden was appointed to the first poet laureateship. But long before that, from Demodocus in Ancient Greece, to the Courtly poets like Ben Jonson that preceded Dryden, poetry was aligned with moments of public ceremony, both momentous and solemn. National Poetry Day catches something of that, as well as what Bristol’s mayor, Marvin Rees, said recently about the Bristol City Poet, that ‘Journalists capture facts but poets have the ability to speak to a city’s soul’ – the sense being that poetry has a role in offering a deeper understanding, a concentrated parsing, if you will, of current affairs. Which is not to say that poetry can’t also be private or intimate but to acknowledge poetry’s public face.

What role does the Bristol Poetry Institute play within the University and in the wider Bristol community?

Craig: Put simply, the Bristol Poetry Institute exists to be a voice for poetry. This may be the research, practice (in its widest sense), or reading of poetry, or any other aspect of poetry that engages communities, introduces poetry to a wider constituency, or encourages thinking about poetry. It’s our goal to collaborate and engage with our university and city communities on matters of poetry.

Some people took to new creative endeavours during lockdown, from baking and crochet to song-writing or learning a musical instrument – what advice would you give someone wanting to give poetry a try?

William: You wouldn’t start song-writing without listening to and loving a host of songs first, so I’d suggest starting out by reading and listening to as much poetry as possible, maybe learning some of your favourites by heart. Then, I would approach it as you would all the other creative endeavours you mention – as a craft. Try writing in different forms and styles, especially, but not exclusively, those used by poets you particularly like, and give yourself technical challenges. See if you can write something someone else might enjoy, but don’t fret about getting published. Philip Larkin once advised: ‘Supposing no one played tennis because they wouldn’t make Wimbledon? First and foremost, writing poems should be a pleasure. So should reading them, by God.’

Who is your favourite poet and why?

William: Different poets suit different moods and different times in one’s life, and I’ve had crazes for all manner of poets over the years, so I won’t nominate an overall favourite. This year’s craze, though, is the early twentieth-century Italian poet Guido Gozzano. Gozzano’s best poems combine beauty and melancholy in a way that can be oddly reminiscent of Walter de la Mare, whose poems I happen to be editing. They also sound modern and intimate while employing traditional forms, a combination I often like to aim for when writing poems myself.

Craig: Controversially: Bob Dylan. Because, for me, poetry is meant to be performed, to have an audience, to be a popular art, to understand the demotic language, to be as much a thing of the body as the mind, and to draw through its breath the tradition in which it exists. To me, Dylan is our Homer, our Shakespeare; the figure of the 20th and 21st century that, like those great artists I mention, reaches across high and low culture to the widest possible audience, to tell, with great range and intensity, some of the truth.

What poem do you feel could help people find solace in these strange times?

William: There’s lots of poetry being written explicitly addressing lockdown and the corona virus, for instance the poetry at https://poetryandcovid.com/. But in poetry as in life, it is nature and love that tend to solace most:

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joy and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

That’s the close to William Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, a poem and a poet to turn to in a crisis.

This year marks the 250thanniversary of the death of Thomas Chatterton, a Bristol-born poet who died at just 17. What impact did Chatterton have on Bristol, and what’s the most intriguing fact you’ve learned about his short life?

Craig: Chatterton embodied for the Romantics that collision of prodigious talent and prodigious tragedy that has come to represent the Romantic Poet and the Romantic genre in general. I’m not a Romantic scholar but I would guess that Chatterton’s Bristol association must have added significance, for Wordsworth and Coleridge, to their publication of Lyrical Ballads in Bristol in 1798 – which is to say that Chatterton laid the groundwork for Bristol’s incredible Romantic heritage. It’s not a fact, but the most intriguing thing I’ve learned about Chatterton is his connection to St. Mary Redcliffe and the fantastic opportunities that site offers to engage with the history of Chatterton in Bristol. One great way to do this, especially around National Poetry Day, is to download the Romantic Bristol app from our website. The app, developed by our colleagues Professor Ralph Pite and Dr Rebecca Hutcheon, maps out, for example, a self-guided walking tour around Redcliffe of Bristol’s Chatterton heritage.

For anyone interested in finding out more, how can they get involved with the Institute?

Craig: We regularly offer poetry events. For National Poetry Day we have Poetry Karaoke and then, in November, we have our Annual Reading, which will feature American poet Claudia Rankine and Bristol’s former City Poet Vanessa Kisuule. Aside from our events, we’re keen to hear from those working with poetry – schools, community organisations, poets, poetry academics – and to engage in a dialogue with them about how we might collaborate.

 

Celebrating Pride Month

We’d like to wish all members of the LGBT+ community a very Happy Pride Month! We caught up with Dr Jamie Lawson, a queer anthropologist whose major research interest is in sex and sexuality, to find out more about his research, Pride, and the path to equality for all.

What was it that first drew you into the exciting world of anthropology?

It was a lucky accident really – I got very bored at school, so come university application time I felt a strong urge to study something new. Archaeology and Anthropology was the first thing in the UCAS course book that fit the bill. I fell in love with anthropology quite quickly, though – I enjoy the freedom of the discipline, and felt a strong pull towards an intellectual tradition that resists being pinned down. It’s a big, sprawling subject with as many definitions and angles as there are practitioners, which is what you might expect from a discipline that’s focussed on understanding people; we’re complicated things, after all. There’s a very thin line between anthropology and activism as well – I think I always found the political engagement of the discipline really exciting.

What was it about sexual minorities and human sexuality in particular that led you to pursue a research career in this area?

I developed an interest in sex and sexuality towards the end of my undergraduate degree, and followed it through to master’s and eventually PhD level. Initially I adopted an evolutionary perspective on the topic, but found that a little too heteronormative for my tastes, and have drifted over the years towards a more phenomenological position, focussed on queer identities and subcultures. This led me to my recent work on the puppy play community. It’s no coincidence that over the same time, I became properly politically engaged with my identity as a gay man, and got involved with activist work, including organising the first Pride up in Durham, and eventually writing my book. I think it’s important to challenge the dominant structures of society which act to marginalise and oppress anyone who doesn’t fit in with the trans- and homophobic, racist and patriarchal norms.

You were involved in the Art of Relationships project at the Open University, which was designed to explore the power of art to engage members of the public with social science research – can you tell us more about that?

That was a lot of fun. The project involved screening a set of short films that had been made to communicate research findings from a large, nationwide project on love and relationships called ‘Enduring Love’. In order to evaluate the impact those films had, I ran a reflexive group exercise called a visual matrix (based on a social dreaming matrix, for anyone who has encountered one of those). The method is designed to tap into group-level, collective ideas and feelings rather than individual, to see what the audience collectively had taken from the films. A visual matrix is a wonderfully egalitarian method which breaks down the distinction, to some extent, between researcher and informants. We used it to see what sorts of ideas had made their way from the films to the audience, to see if it was possible to communicate research findings through art (in this case, films).

June is Pride month here in the UK – what does Pride mean to you?

This is a favourite question to ask queer people around Pride time – I’m never really sure how to answer it. Pride is about visibility, community and celebration, sure, but we should never forget that it was born out of anger. The rights that the LGBTQ+ community has fought for and gained, the space it carved out for itself – that was all the result of anger, focussed against oppression. Pride this year comes at a scary time – the world is in the grip of a pandemic, and the hard right have risen in political power. The protests that are currently sweeping the world as a result of systemic racism and anti-Black violence in the United States are also an expression of anger, deeply and collectively felt. My hope is that we can all come together around that anger and push back against those who want to strip minorities of their rights and turn us against each other. I am a very angry queer, and very proud of that anger.

Last year you released your first book – Rainbow Revolutions: Power, Pride and Protest in the Fight for Queer Rights – which is aimed at children aged 12 and over. What inspired you to write specifically for this age group?

The opportunity landed squarely in my lap. I was approached by the publisher off the back of some consulting work I had done for them on another project, and they asked if I would like to write a book on queer history for children. I said yes almost immediately. The mainstream, cishet world does everything it can to stop queer people feeling connected with each other, including dismissing the idea of there being such a thing as queer history. Being disconnected from your own history makes growing up queer a very isolating thing – you feel lost, untethered in a society that only begrudgingly makes space for you. Knowing that you have ancestors, traditions, that you belong to a group of people who learned lessons collectively and had an impact on the world, that’s empowering and important. I wrote the book for young queers, hoping I might help them feel a little bit less lost.

What is the key message you hope young people will take away from your book, and what impact do you hope it will have?

I wanted the readers of Rainbow Revolutions to understand that queer rights were fought for and won – not given – and that the community has a history of its own , and perhaps most importantly that Black and trans voices inside the LGBTQ+ community have been some of the most important and most powerful we’ve had. As trans people are having their rights stripped away and their lives endangered around the world, and as the Black Lives Matter protests sweep the globe, it’s hugely important that the readers of my book understand how connected we all are, and that none of us are free until all of us are free. I tried to reinforce an idea that collective action that visibility en masse is key to liberation and safety. Most of all I wanted them to know that they are not alone.

What societal changes do you think are required to get to a point where we can ensure young members of the LGBT+ community are fully supported, included, and safe from discrimination?

That’s a big question, and there are a lot of moving parts, but if I could wave a magic wand and make one big change (and if I knew there were others out there with their own magic wands) I would disconnect the idea of sex from the idea of reproduction. The idea that “sex is for making babies” is at the absolute core of the oppression of queer people, and the oppression of women (queer or not), around the world. It’s dangerous most of all because it feels like such a self-evident fact, and is so deeply embedded in Western cultures. Alongside that, I’d make white people around the world turn to face the evils of colonialism, and engage with our collective responsibility to dismantle the structures that supported it, of which trans- and homophobia are important components. Big aims, both, but I have to believe they’re possible.

What more do you think could be done as a Faculty – and more widely across the University – to support the LGBT+ community and ensure equality for all?

I think the higher education sector is starting to shift in really interesting and quite radical directions, and that’s what we need here: radical change. If we don’t make active decisions to disrupt colonialist, oppressive structures then they persist. I think the pandemic has forced us to start to think properly about what universities could and should be and how they could and should work, and to confront difficult facts about access and inclusion. Finding new ways to imagine the University will be key to equality for staff and students alike.

Third Year History with Innovation student Jasmine Smellie on making the right choice studying an Arts degree

Third year History with Innovation student Jasmine Smellie talks to us about her degree, studying Innovation and why she made the right choice.

Before joining University, every time I mentioned I wanted to do an arts degree, the question that very quickly followed on was “what can you do with an arts degree?” In reply I would say “well what can you not do,” because I was confident in the skills I would acquire through university would set me with a range of understanding that could be moulded into any job position.

“I realise now how much I underestimated the true breadth of skills an arts degree could bring”

However, admittedly I remained secretly sceptical about what career it was, exactly, I was wishing to pursue. Since actually now studying History with Innovation, my perception has only got stronger. I realise now how much I underestimated the true breadth of skills an arts degree could bring, from analytical and comparative studies into textual information, to improved communication skills and learning how to work in teams.

“Some advice I would give to a new starter of an arts degree at University is to really have faith and belief in your own decisions and that you have chosen the right course for you”

Through Innovation, I have learnt skills that I have been able to apply during the summer whilst working at a cloud software based company, an internal communications design agency, and a variety of creative studios around Bristol. Which truly highlighted to me that when applied, the skills you acquire (sometimes unintentionally) through an arts based subject really can put you in good stead for any career area.

Some advice I would give to a new starter of an Arts degree at university is to really have faith and belief in your own decisions and that you have chosen the right course for you. Be confident to throw yourself into as many things you can, from drama and music, to working with the engineering and computer science based societies. The key is to explore all different areas, get to know what you like and dislike and where your strengths lie, but also see which areas you require people to work with you in order to create something.

Follow Jasmine’s blog on Linkedin for more information on studying Innovation and her internship experience at Home design studio in Bristol.