It’s brill. If you missed the first episode, watch it here.
Happy Birthday Stephen
Stephen Fry is 50. I’m a bit belated with it.
Stephen on poetry:
It slows you down, so you can just enjoy the bounce and heft and glory of one word following another.
Also, thought I might add these excerts from an interview with Stephen Fry in The Times, on the eve of the publication of his new book, The Ode Less Travelled, a beginners’ guide to poetry writing. The article is by Catherine Shoard. I previously posted this on my other, rarely-ever-tended-to blog.
Fry: “The strength and confidence that we associate with the Victorians we also associate with things like empire, poverty, social injustice, sexual hypocrisy. We can’t seem to separate them. So if you’re white and privately educated and you start talking about the virtuosity of Western enlightenment then it sounds as if you’re basically grinding a boot into the face of Muslims and the Third World.”
But political correctness shouldn’t take all the blame. Far from it – the chief cause of bad verse, says Fry, is laziness.
“You cannot work too hard at poetry,” he says, tapping his saucer for extra emphasis. “People are bad at it not because they have tin ears, but because they simply don’t have the faintest idea how much work goes into it. It’s not as if you’re ordering a pizza or doing something that requires direct communication in a very banal way. But it seems these days the only people who spend time over things are retired people and prisoners. We bolt things, untasted.”
He puffs contemplatively on a full-strength Marlboro, and pours more tea.
“It’s so easy to say, ‘That’ll do.’ Everyone’s in a hurry. People are intellectually lazy, morally lazy, ethically lazy …”
Morally lazy?
“All the time. When people get angry with a traffic warden they don’t stop and think what it would be like to be a traffic warden or how annoying it would be if people could park wherever they liked. People talk lazily about how hypocritical politicians are. But everyone is. On the one hand we hate that petrol is expensive and on the other we go on about global warming. We abrogate the responsibility for thought and moral decisions onto others and then have the luxury of saying it’s not good enough.”
The solution? Poetry, thinks Fry. “At its best poetry engages with the realities of existence. That’s why it’s so grown up. It’s the absolute opposite of this Disney idea that if you dream hard enough you can get anything – that’s so manifestly not true. Good art has a skull showing. We just need to knuckle down and produce it.”‘
