All
happened so normal. First I read by chance a poem of Jim Greenhalf
published at the London Magazine while being at the flat of a very
estimated and beloved Greek poet. I was so much excited by the writing
that later was looking online for more information so as to enrich the meta-feeling
– like metamorphosis- caused by the poem with some kind of knowledge. I
was lucky. I found the email of Jim Greenhalf and the e-mail
correspondence did start.
Days ago, it was a pleasure learning from Jim that my poem ‘‘Gardener’’ reminds him of the movie Being There, with the late Peter
Sellers playing the part of a gardener called ''Chance'', who came to be
thought of as a man of great wisdom. It was a pleasure because if poetry
is the spur for cross-thinking, a lot of good things can happen. Here
comes the poem ‘‘Socrates’’ by Jim Greenhalf as well as the interview I
had online with him.
Jim Greenhalf
SOCRATES
The struggle is to live with quiet gladness
in spite of weather, rent rises,
power bills, stock market fluctuations,
stupid or cowardly governance;
bad faith, cheap grace;
circumstances, time;
young blond barmaids
with plunging necklines.
Midwife of the questing mind,
professor of ignorance.
The way to wisdom is not
for those with secrets to hide.
The authorities got him
for immoral aiding and abetting,
as the English got Joan of Arc
for the heresy of cross-dressing.
More of a gargoyle even
than Paul Verlaine,
but purer than democrats and tyrants.
He had no possessions, no loot,
no off-shore investments in Persia.
What he had was shared with friends,
and when Athens was under military threat
he fought as a foot soldier.
He was sent to shine a light through posterity.
A thorny old bastard bare-heeled
among potsherds and
the broken amphora of history.
He accepted the state's poison ruefully.
The greatest discovery you can make in life
he said, as he wiped the hemlock from his mouth,
is yourself.
Jan/Feb 2008
Interview with Mr. Jim Greenhalf: About Wisdom and Poetry…
When did you write your first poem?its title?
J.G: At secondary school, when I was about 14, I wrote a comic poem called Fludd.
In later life I was astonished to find that Robert Fludd actually
existed; I think he was a minor English philosopher - I could be wrong.
Round about age 18 I wrote a poem called Lesley Mitchell Day, a disingenuously innocent lyric on the subject of unrequited love. Lesley, by the way, was a girl. In England there is a masculine first name variation - Leslie. This 12-line piece opens my collection The Dog's Not Laughing: Poems 1966-1998.
Poetry
doesn't have so many themes although the number of subjects may be
astronomical. In my experience, poetry that survives the time of its
creation, has the ability to cross national and cultural borders.
In which artistic movement would Socrates belong?
J.G:
Ah, Antigoni, what an inquiring mind you have my lovely Greek; if only I
had the scholarship to respond adequately to your question. Ignorant as
I am - no false humility intended - my conviction is that I don't
believe the old goat would have pastured on anyone else's hillside. He
left the grassy slopes of Parnassus to
egotists and fancy young men in love with their own reflection. Plato
too, I believe, took completely the opposite view of poets to the pose
affected by Shelley - that they are the unofficial legislators of the
world. Only a spoilt young man living on unearned income would even
think such a thing, let alone say it. Socrates was like the North Star, a
loner in the firmament, but a guide to all Mankind.
Have you been translated? Do you believe in poetry translation or you are an amateur of the original sound as well as rythm?
J.G: I believe there is a lady professor of French literature at Charles University
who has translated at least two of my poems into French. She saw and
heard me perform them at a concert with Jaroslav Hutka, at the Literary
Cafe in Prague, on May 11, 2007. The poems were: Frederick the Great and Voltaire Debate Truth and Beauty and The Difference Between Poetry and Everything Else.
Without
translations where would any of us be? What would English literature be
without the dramas, comedies and satires of the Greeks and Romans?
Where would French literature be without them? What would James Joyce
have done without The Odyssey on which to model the structure of Ulysses?
By the way, I think it's a pity he used so much artifice to do it;
contrivance can get in the way when it's over-done. Where would Boris
Pasternak have been without his beloved Shakespeare? If nation is to
talk into nation let them do it through their arts, not through the
artifice of technocratic idiocies such as the European Union - empire
building without the save grace either of a spiritual dimension as in
the Holy Roman Empire or the political vision of Napoleon. Hitler is
another matter.
Which question you hate to be asked? Was it included in the previous ones?
J.G: The question is most revile goes something like...What inspires me to write? Oh, you know, I would love
to write but I just don't seem to have the time. How do I do it? I go
away and die. Writing is not the ultimate purpose of Mankind, or
humankind if you prefer. Serving, healing, feeding, supplying,
repairing, defending, advancing, maintaining, loving, worshipping -
these are the great purposes of life on the blue planet. I write because I'm, I have no head for heights and I can't swim; I
write because no one taught me how to be a soldier or a missionary or
an engine driver; I write because I never made it as a footballer. I
write out of failure; but writing is no longer just therapy: I left that
behind when I turned 40. Beckett said: "Fail better". And that's what I
try to do: fail better next time.
What symbolises Socrates for you?
J.G:
A goat. A goat feeds on nettles and water. A goat has no fear of
heights and no fear of depths. A goat knows how to follow a difficult
path, or create one, and live at peace with its lot under the clouds.
Those born under the baleful sign of Capricorn are goats. I am a goat,
although it does not follow that I am Socrates. I wish I had played
football like Socrates, the great Brazilian star of the 1982 World Cup.
But my style was more, shall we say, sporadic than Socratic.
How a city could be poetic?
J.G:
'How a city could be poetic?' is like your 'early of September',
Antigoni: not quite correct gramatically, but all the better for being
innocently wrong. If you had asked: 'How can a city be poetic?' I would
have laughed. Europe is filled with
consultants advising city authorities how they can regenerate using
business and the arts (a little) to attract big bucks from the European
Union and other sources. Well, a city may gain all the glory of the
world and in the process lose its soul. If a city whores after the kind
of free-market liberalisation that has caused so much damage to the
United States, the United Kingdom
and to other parts of the world, it will certainly lose much more than
it gains in fast food franchises and apartments that few can afford.
Cities evolve through time. A street
or a square may be planned and constructed; but the soul of a place
cannot be designed on an architect's elephant board or computer screen. Berlin, Paris, London, Bradford each in its own way inspires poetry; but few would describe Bradford as 'poetic' the way they would Florence or the skyline of New York City.
A
poet usually lives in the shadow, behind celebrities as poetry refers
more to an existential identity rather than to a role playing game. Do
you agree?
J.G:
Yes. Poetry is about sinking wells into the oil fields of experience
and pumping up the crude. Writing is the art of refining the crude - but
not over-refining it.
Poetry can get benefit from information? You are also a journalist with a variety of awards.
J.G:
You have placed 'poetry' and 'journalism' together, perhaps in
juxtaposition to accentuate the difference between them. I would only
say that journalism, which the late Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski and
Anselm Hollo sometimes come close to - with great skill and panache is a
more public function than the writing of poetry. However, the act of
writing both requires common disciplines: writing to purpose and to
measure (not necessarily rhyming and scanning); using appropriate words
to deliver the meaning; editing out words that are either superfluous or
grandiloquent.
As to information, well, I could say 'Your eyes are brown' or 'Auschwitz
was a murder factory', or 'the EU is a political tyranny'. But if I
say, 'Your eyes are as brown as Amontillado', then I am imparting
something more to mere fact. The same applies to the other two examples.
Moral courage is subject to ethics (ethical action) instead of being applied on moral sense?
J.G:
By definition 'moral courage' is active, not merely an intellectual
category. 'Moral sense' may mean knowing the right thing to do; but
knowledge alone does not always result in right action. The conflict
between these two things - knowing and doing - is at the heart of almost
all of Shakespeare's tragedies. And then what about doing the morally
wrong thing - killing someone - for an ethically impeccable reason - to
rid the world of a terrible threat? For me, courage is active, whether
it means facing up to illness or distress or risking bodily injury by
going to another's rescue. It also means dealing with the idea of
mortality. The Socratic method, at least to this bear of alarmingly
little brain, rests upon an inner strength derived from coming to terms
with the fact of death. I believe Boethius took the same road, before
the Roman state killed him.
Under which circumstances you write?
J.G:
Usually the least propitious: in a noisy, germ-trap of an office; and
alone after work, at weekends and while on annual leave. Unlike Mahler, I
do not have three months of bliss every summer by a alpine lake; nor is
there a dacha waiting in a leafy Moravian glade. I think as I walk city
streets - me, my own private lyceum; I write as I work, letting
disparate ideas and images come and go while I concentrate on something
else; and when I am neither thinking nor writing, I wait for that little
hidden light to come on, like the light in a fridge, to set me humming.
These answers were first written out by hand this morning in the busy
Diner of Salts Mill, Saltaire (google it). I write less at work than I
used to because there is more work to do but fewer people to do it. Most
of my writing is done at home, a rented apartment in Ilkley.
Wisdom and self-consciousness: what's their relationship?
J.G:
Self-consciousness evolves through the natural processes of cognition. I
believe that we are born with innate propensities, for language, for
example. I have always felt antagonistic to the Behaviourist school of
psychology which attributes human development to personal background and
environment. Art usually defies the circumstances of its creation. How
else could Van Gogh, personally penniless for the ten years in which he
drew and painted until he killed himself at the age of 37, how could he
had painted all those sunflowers and sunsets and pictures of fruitful
nature? Behaviourists say that we only act in our own best interests.
But that simplistic explanation is contradicted by prison. If human
beings only acted in their best interests only prisoners of conscience
and the persecuted would be in jail. I do not believe we are born as
blank sheets of paper which life then encodes with a script we cannot
change. Were this the case, children would not surprise (and sometimes
alarm) adults by uttering words and phrases they have neither heard nor
been taught.
Wisdom,
however, can only come about as the result of lived experience.
Received wisdom, like epigrams - 'Cynicism is knowing the price of
everything and the value of nothing' (Oscar Wilde) is something
different. A child may make adults weep with a glance and a prodigy may
cause gasps of astonishment with amazing facility to play music or work
through complex mathematical formulae; but the genius at the keyboard or
log table is likely to be inexperienced and vulnerable in the way that
Socrates was not. Wisdom is a construct that evolves from experience
rather than a flash of intuitive insight. But intuition is NOT the polar
opposite of rationality; it is, instead, another way of reasoning -
with jump leads instead of deductive cause and effect and inductive
effect to cause (the difference is rarely clear to this bear). Intuition
is a flash of fire from the gods. Prometheus is another hero.
Dear Mr. Greenhalf , Thank you very much indeed.
Also visit:
http://www.euro-renaissance.co.uk/about_us/index.php
*first published here: http://lego4.blogspot.gr/2008/10/jim-greenhalf-britain-poem-and.html
A.D: Perhaps this poem is unusual for me. While I was writing my third collection, Bugs,
I promised myself that none of the poems in it would be about me. Some
of them are, of course – in indirect ways. This poem is one of the first
half-dozen I’ve written since Bugs, and I’m allowing
myself to write some more directly personal poems. It’s a romantic poem,
sure. And no, criticism is something I stopped being afraid of after
the first review of my first book made me burst into tears in a
bookshop...
