Antonia Quirke on poetry

Last week in these virtual pages I wrote an open letter to the film critic Antonia Quirke, whose zany, madcap memoir Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers had filled me with such joy the week before.

One of the things I really liked about her book was the way poetry is a recurring, natural, just-part-of-the-soup element in her narrative - in terms of both her personal life and her approach ti film, to acting, to the way we make things. She frames things in terms of poetic practice; she quotes lines of all sorts of poems, just in passing, without feeling the need to identify them; she even refers to prosody! In short, she talks about poetry like someone who knows it and takes its presence for granted.

This is as it should be, and might well be if we had the reversed cultural experience Michael Donaghy hints at in his monograph Wallflowers (both wonderfully erudite and funny) - a world where poetry is simply enjoyed the way we enjoy music currently, without hush-voiced tuition, without separating it from everything else, without this fear of somehow getting it wrong. You know: poetry playing on the radio, in lifts, on hold.

Anyway, I have given my copy of Antonia Quirke's book to my best friend, Ms Rational Self-Determinism, and she is very excited about it. But before I parted with it, I typed out this couple of quotes from the book.

Quirke writes:

"Actors never seem to capture lawyers or teachers very well, possibly because they think they would make great lawyers or teachers. Great orators. But they're too musical, too fearful of monotony. That's why they can never read poetry. None of them. Why your toes are always curling throughout Radio 4's Poetry Week. No, there is one: the magnificent Stephen Dillane, whom I once saw play Hamlet as if he were a guy disappearing into the words, delivering the lines like he was reading a railway timetable, as Eliot recommends a poet should read poetry. The artlessness of Dillane's voice! You listen to Eliot or Auden or Larkin doing so little with their own stuff - or Bob Dylan singing, or even Tennyson captured on a wax cylinder in 1890 chanting The Charge of the Light Brigade - and you realise how the very purpose of the voice is to make the reciter disappear, to abolish everything but theear. Actors are never quite happy being all words."

(I totally agree with her there on reading style; I found this to my horror during my bad eye patch last autumn, when I tried to listen to several audio books of poetry, and ended up really understanding why so many people think they hate it. Unfortunately, it was far more painful than simply reading a book, even with my glaucoma. And the "poetry voice" adopted by so many poets when they read is just as galling.)

She also writes:

"Gérard Depardieu was a true poet, like Richard Burton had been. Because Gérard understood the endlessness of poetry he didn't overcook it, just as a great Shakespearean must be immersed in the whole ocean of Shakespeare in order not to be fazed by the smaller-scale brilliancies. You have to understand that poetry is being constantly transmitted in a casual voice to us by the universe 24/7, 24/7, in order to speak it properly. You have to understand this. You have to! But Gérard does."

She's very fresh, isn't she. And fun! I love that casual voice of the universe. I wish poetry cropped up more in things like this.