Sitcom | Chapbook | Vol LII, Keyways: Unlocking Owen Sheers' Skirrid Hill by Phil Brown

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Vol LII, Keyways: Unlocking Owen Sheers' Skirrid Hill

Phil Brown (18.5.11)

A commentary on every poem in Owen Sheers’ Skirrid Hill written with revision for A-Level exams in mind and geared towards students of A-Level English Literature. This commentary is meant to enhance the reader’s understanding of some of the ideas in Sheers’ poetry. It is also entirely free.



APPENDICES TO THE COMMENTARY


Appendix I - Lyrics to Susan’s House by Eels

Going over to Susan's House, wandering south down Baxter Street
Nothing hiding behind this picket fence
There's a crazy old woman smashing bottles on the sidewalk where her house burned down two years ago
People say that back then, she really wasn't that crazy

Going over to Susan's House
Going over to Susan's House, I can't be alone tonight

Down by the Doughnut Prince, a 15-year-old boy lies on the sidewalk with a bullet in his forehead
In a final act of indignity, the paramedics take off all his clothes for the whole world to see while they put him in the bag
Meanwhile, an old couple argues inside the 'Queen Bee', the sick fluorescent light shimmering on their skin

Going over to Susan's House
Going over to Susan's House, she's gonna make it right

Take a left down Echo Park
A kid asks do I want some crack
TV sets are spewing Baywatch
Through the windows into black

Here comes a girl with long brown hair, who can't be more than seventeen
She sucks on a red popsicle as she pushes a baby girl in a pink carriage
And I'm thinking, 'That must be her sister. That must be her sister, right?'
They go into the seven-eleven and I keep walking, and I keep walking

Going over to Susan's House
Going over to Susan's House, I can't be alone tonight
Going over to Susan's House

Appendix II – To Speak of Woe That is Marriage by Robert Lowell

"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of
these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."

—Schopenhauer

"The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.

Our magnolia blossoms.  Life begins to happen.

My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,

and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,

free-lancing out along the razor's edge.

This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.

Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .

It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust—

whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.

My only thought is how to keep alive.

What makes him tick?  Each night now I tie

ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .

Gored by the climacteric of his want,

he stalls above me like an elephant."

Appendix III - Some Notes from AQA

Skirrid Hill by Owen Sheers

Skirrid Hill continues to attract an enthusiastic if still surprisingly small following with Sheers vigorous style clearly able to engage and challenge. His anthology presents a reflective, careful reader with many themes that align with the struggle for identity in ways that can be visceral as well as delicate, broad as well as extremely personal. It is important to a successful study of the anthology that centre’s do not pigeon-hole Sheers as simply a nationalistic poet who looks inwards to issues of Welsh identity but one is looking outwards too, taking in those moments in life which can seem paradoxical and bizarre, addressing moments where there is a complex interfacing of life, death and relationships.

Despite his growing published work across all the genres, Sheers remains a relatively enigmatic, restless poet clearly embarked upon a journey of discovery and about whom, significantly fewer biographical studies have yet been made. This works to candidates’ advantage because their focus more clearly rests on the language, form and structure of his verse rather than on the man himself. That said, candidates this time were keener to explore the question that invited a measured, argued response to a general theme rather than the one that began with a focus on a specific poem and invited validation and repudiation of its centrality. A little disappointingly, in response to either poem, some candidates offered little by the way of balanced debate and saw the question as a way of simply explaining the content of two or three poems, broadly linked to a theme.

Question 6

This was by far the more popular of the questions on Scarred Hill, offering candidates the opportunity to explore their own choice of poems from this broadly diverse collection. Whilst there were many strong responses, one examiner wrote that some candidates who had been offered ‘a gift of a question’ then ‘proceeded with ingratitude and uncertainty, attempting to explore different themes in a perfunctory, generalised counter-argument’ or they ‘wallowed in a morass of loss’ without ever really explaining what had been lost and with what consequences.

Perhaps these candidates were truly ‘spoilt for choice’ and could not arrive at satisfactory evaluative comments because of this. The poems that lent themselves most readily to the argument were Border Country, Mametz Wood, Y Gaer, The Hill Fort, Marking Time and Amazon although the poem that received most attention from candidates, interestingly, was Keyways. Counter-arguments usually cited examples of more celebratory poems such as The Equation, inheritance or Stitch in Time with better responses developing insightful comment or challenging the idea of loss at all.

Certain confident candidates were able to convince that Sheers depiction of loss really to revealed what was gained in terms of experience, understanding of self, others and the world. There was evidence that some candidates were trying to shape responses to past papers to fit the requirements of this year’s question with inevitable loss of focus. To this effect some candidates offered plenty of examples of Sheers’ treatment of separations suggesting either directly or by inference that separation equated to loss. Those who were able to suggest in their extension or counter-arguments that Sheers also dealt with moments of elision, repair and coming-together, were to be commended, especially where these moments were expertly pinpointed, analyzed and evaluated.

Successful candidates:

•         Chose highly appropriate poems for the exploration of Sheers’ treatment of loss and its effects or chose equally appropriate poems to validate their counter-argument

•         Analysed Sheers’ choices of form, structure and language

•         Explored a wealth of Sheers’ poetic techniques and articulated his intent in order to create interesting lines of argument and counter-argument

Less successful candidates:

•         Simply offered broad agreement with the statement and struggled to even illustrate loss effectively

•         Ignored the question’s key words

•         Made broad generalisations about the effects produced by Sheers’ choice of form, structure and language often asserting rather than illustrating their points

Question 7

This question had relatively few takers despite the comparatively comforting prospect of exploring a superficially straightforward poem. Interestingly too, there were some responses that neglected the punning title, missing an obvious way into Sheers’ musings on relationships between father and son and their relationship with their environment. Most problematic, however, was the interpretation of the phrase ‘key to this collection’.

The metaphor of the key should suggest an unlocking of something or a focus on some feature so fundamental as to be indispensible to a clear understanding of the anthology. Few such insightful readings were apparent with candidates, instead, suggesting typicality of theme, technique, intent or features. In some respects the named poem is a testament to the permanence of life despite its frailty and smallness, set against a backdrop of the awesome grandeur of natural world.

To validate the idea of ‘key’, links needed to be made to the rest of the collection and here it was obvious that some candidates had a very hazy knowledge of the structure and content of the collection as a whole. The named poems’ central themes of identity, contrasts, endurance, loss and the natural world should have been fundamental to a balanced argument and counter-argument, where the choice of at least one suitable substitute ‘key’ poem should have been possible.

Successful candidates:

•         Produced a balanced debate which considered, developed and agreed or refuted the idea that the named poem is the key to this collection in a thoughtful, engaged, incisive manner

•         Linked Farther to a range of other relevant poems and/or made an arresting case for another poem being the key

•         Explored Sheers’ form, structure and language choice with confidence always citing examples relevantly and with analytical significance.

Less successful candidates:

•         Simply dismissed the idea that Farther could be the key to the collection

•         Wrote basic accounts of the poem and/or others in the collection, with little relevant or developed reference to form, structure and language choice

•         Were unable to move beyond generalisations and assertions.

Appendix IV - Past Questions

Themes:

Separation between men and women

Striking and unusual imagery

Loss

Difficult Issues

Key Poems:

Y Gaer and The Hill

Border Country

Farther

Skirrid Fawr (fitting conclusion)

Appendix V - Possible Themes and Patterns:

Man against nature -Domestication

Masculinity

Death

Generation gaps

Modernisation and Americanisation

Playing roles (psychology?)

Spines?

Relationships

Everything is like writing

Magic

The use of titles to challenge or refute the content - sometimes as part of the poem

Titles often include puns; the duality of meaning at the heart of the ideas

Tercets - not sure really why. Long enough to develop a thread of thought without over-inflating it!

The rhythms of natural speech

Use of real people, places and his family

Natural imagery 

Enjambed lines that create a conversational and fluid movement. Ideas organically develop and weave together to form larger patterns.

Contrasts between beauty and cruelty - a necessary balance and stability, particularly in rural life

Demonstratives to guide the reader to see

Metaphors of theatricality

Images that have surfaces and depths - the darker elements of human life can not always be seen

Incise, probing language

Use of epigraphs or introductory notes

Archetypal characters and rural cast

Gentle rhyme and alliteration to add weight to ideas, moods and feelings

Imagery of cuts and breaks

Poems that begin en media res 

The repeated metaphor of marks to pinpoint moments of transition, growth or change

Poems in clusters or at periodic moments to develop an overarching idea

Use of the first person, though not always the poet speaking

Reclaiming of symbols for use in a different context e.g. the flags

Poetry in dialogue with other art forms e.g. sculpture, photography, song

 

Vincent Price | Poetry | Symbiosis

"There is a wonderful, simple conversation encoded in all poems worthy of the name: 'You've felt this, too, haven't you?'"

- Carol Rumens

"I don't want to read about some of these actresses who are around today. They sound like my niece in Scarsdale. I love my nice in Scarsdale, but I won't buy tickets to see her act."

- Vincent Price

Poetry and theatre have always endured an uneasy symbiotic relationship. Poets and philosophers are always returning to the ramifications of Shakespeare’s pivotal proclamation that ‘all the world’s a stage’, examining the extent to which we can ever cease to play roles as we flit around the elements of our fragmented psyches.

This principle has overshadowed the work of Hugo Williams, himself the son of an actor, throughout his work. From one of his earliest poems, The Actor,

‘Sent by his agency to this bright

Box, all his lines straight, knew

Where to die, but was not quite

Sure who he was…’ (1965)

to his most recent work, such as West End Twilight,

‘Reflections shimmer back and forth

as we watch Hugo Williams strolling through

the long twilight of upper-middle-class

light comedy, arm in arm with his son’ (2009).

A poet who goes one step further in interrogating the role of theatricality and persona in poetry is Owen Sheers, who preludes his second collection, Skirrid Hill, with a fascinating short piece called ‘Last Act’:

‘The previous scenes stacked in the wings

and at the centre, under the spotlight,

the actor, bowing as himself

for the first time all night’.

For me, this is an ingenious way to begin a collection, as it poses a manifesto of sorts as to what poetry, in Sheers’ eyes, is. Whilst he acknowledges the multitude of personae occupied by any person in a lifespan, he suggests that his collection is ‘the first time’ for us to catch a glimpse of the man without his stage makeup, costume and dramatic conceit.

Contrary to what we may expect, this is not an indication of Sheers’ poetry lacking theatricality. Lines such as

‘Cut to us, an overhead show, early morning.

Lying in bed, foetus curled,

back to naked back.’

(from Four Movements in the Scale of Two)

and

‘the way he offers the seat,

his practiced look of concern and the slow pace of his voice.’

(from Amazon)

show us that Sheers may have stepped before the audience as himself for the first time, but any ‘self’ is still unavoidably a performance.

This concept is further complicated when we bring in the notion of poetry performed by actors. Paul Scofield’s fine performance of Eliot’s Four Quartets is a beautiful medium for a poem founded on opacity and disjointed aspects of the soul, but does it move us farther from the poem’s honesty? We are not listening to Eliot as such, but rather an actor’s inference of Eliot’s intentions, with speculation on appropriate emphases and pace.

It is a sort of poetic refraction, if you can remember back to your days in the science lab, casting white light through a prism and seeing it broken into its composite spectrum as it is slowed down by the medium. And this ‘prismic effect’ is only in the case of sensitive, intelligent readers such as Scofield who allow the original light of the poem to emerge from the other side. It is far more common to see actors entirely mismanage the delivery of a piece through mis-reading which leaves the audience with something entirely unintended by the poet.

And so it is that the roles played by the poet and the roles played by the performer create an unavoidable background noise through which poems must fight before they arrive wearily at an audience’s ears.

An actor who illustrates the symbiosis perfectly is the great Vincent Price. It is difficult to speak of Price for any length of time without touching upon his relationship with the poet and novelist, Edgar Allen Poe. Price starred in several highly successful adaptations of Poe’s writing, including House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and The Masque of the Red Death (1964). Price’s finest performance in an adaptation of Poe’s work however, is in the 1972 television special An Evening with Edgar Allen Poe, in which he delivers four of the writer’s short stories as a series of dramatic monologues.

Along with his reading of the absurdly over-quoted (thanks in part to The Simpsons) The Raven, Price’s relationship with the work of Poe is entirely congruent with his public image and the nature of his oeuvre. Poe wrote doleful, gothic literature of lonely men turned cold and diabolical by the passing of lost loves. Price’s career thrived in such roles and so, when called upon to act out a dramatisation of Poe’s work, he often drifted further towards the self-parody that characterises his appearances on Alice Cooper’s Black Widow and Edward Scissorhands.

Like so many actors of such an idiosyncratic nature, Price knew that his audience were more concerned with his ongoing relationship with the role of ‘dastardly loner’ than witnessing any real widening of his dramatic boundaries. For this reason, I do not engage with his Edgar Allen Poe work as anything other than competent entertainment.

There is evidence to suggest however, that Price was both a sensitive and cerebral reader of poetry when he was freed from the constraints of being ‘Vincent the Villain’. This evidence exists in a recording made by Price in 1956 of him reading the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which can be listened to in its entirety here.

Shelley is just as steeped in gothic myth as Poe, but one gets the impression, when listening to Price’s reading of Shelley’s work, that he is not simply engaging with the poetry as ‘Vincent Price – Gothic Commodity’, but rather delivering the words as an earnest character actor.

Perhaps this is because Price is only beginning to become synonymous with horror at this point in the career, or perhaps he is simply aware that the audience for a Shelley-LP is going to want more than villainous hammery, but what we get when we listen to this recording is something far more vulnerable and honest than we get at almost any other point in his career.

This is best witnessed in Price’s reading of Shelley’s, Adonais. Over the thirty minutes of this memorial piece at the passing of John Keats, Price has all the issues of mortality, eroding faith and despair that he turned into such complacent ‘Price-ness’ in his readings of Poe. Yet here, in his engagement with Shelley, we see something far more delicate and nuanced.

We see Price’s exploration of all elements of the grieving process, never overplaying or working against Shelley’s original masterpiece, but rather treated with all the variations of a musical score, with its dramatic crescendos, ritardandos, legatos and cadences. As Price gasps the words ‘No more let Life divide that which Death can draw together’, his archetypal public perception is nowhere to be seen, but rather we hear a man at his most human, his most vulnerable, furthest from a detectable persona.

Poetry’s relationship with actors can often produce terrible, crass and unhelpful results, as the poet’s words are designed to contain enough innate drama to supersede any overzealous reading. Sometimes however, the symbiosis between page and stage hits an equilibrium that will stop you in the street and make you turn up your headphones, or close all the windows in your house so that there can be no disruption to the irreplaceable feeling of the best words in the best order played out upon the finest instrument.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor