Last Saturday I went, along with some intrepid members of the Pre-Raphaelite Society, to hear poet Sarah Doyle, the PRS’s poet-in-residence, read her poems inspired by Pre-Raphaelite painters. As you will know if you have ever attended one, poetry readings can be quite intense events, and also very exciting. Even if you already know a poem, hearing it read aloud can be a very different experience (I mean this in a good way, although under some circumstances it can also be an excruciating experience!) This was, I’m pleased to say, a very good experience indeed. Sarah is an excellent and experienced reader of her poems, as is her husband Allen Ashley, who also read.
This was, for me at least, a very special event, as I spend so much time researching and writing that I find it very exciting to see that there are other, creative ways of responding to art and literature. Sarah’s poems respond in very different ways to Pre-Raphaelitism, not only to paintings but also to poetry and the lives of the artists. She began with ‘Reflections of Ophelia’, with which she won the inaugural PRS Poetry prize, and which I still find a remarkable poem (and you can read it at the bottom of this page). Sarah went on to read other poems, some of which had been commissioned by the PRS (you can read more of them here), and others which belong to a collection of poems inspired by the paintings of Waterhouse.
What I find so engaging about Sarah’s poetry is that what she is offering in these poems is a genuine reaction to the paintings, some which seem spontaneous and others which have probably developed after careful reflection. Sarah talked about the research that she does for her poetry, and also the way in which she looks for an ‘angle’ to write about. The result is a surprising range of poems, encompassing different poetic forms, styles, voices and concepts. Some are funny, such as ‘The Ballad of Echo and Narcissus’, a traditional rollicking ballad which retells the story of the myth with delightful rhyming humour; some are sadder, such as ‘John Ruskin: Body and Soul’. And some are shaped like pots, such as the concrete poem ‘Isabella: A Bitter Harvest’.
In response to the big Pre-Raphaelite exhibition last year, Sarah wrote ‘On Seeing Rossetti’s Self-Portrait, Tate Britain, October 2012’. This offers her personal reaction to the portraits, particularly of Rossetti, which appeared near the beginning of the exhibition. There is something very intimate about this poem, which communicates the spell that a painting can cast, and the connection that can be formed whilst one looks at an image, a concept familiar to all art lovers. The poem contains the line ‘the viewer and the viewed’, offering us the idea that, for once, we may look at Rossetti, just as he looked at his models. Poetry offers us the chance to see things differently, more clearly, then, even if sometimes that means back-to-front. The poems we heard on Saturday (not literally in the snow, by the way – we were in the Cathedral) encouraged me to look at very familiar works differently, and to think again about what I thought I knew.