Introduction

Poetry: Antrobus, Femi, Shire and Berry

In this course, Professor Peter Howarth (Queen Mary, University of London) explores six poems that appear on the AQA and OCR GCSE English Literature anthologies: Raymond Antrobus’ ‘Happy Birthday Moon’, ‘The Perseverance’ and ‘With Birds You’re Never Lonely’; Caleb Femi’s ‘Thirteen’, Warsan Shire’s ‘Tea With Our Grandmothers’ and Liz Berry’s ‘Homing’. In each case, we think about what the poem is about, its structure, its language and style and its key preoccupations, from the idea of hearing and mishearing in Raymond Antrobus’ ‘Happy Birthday Moon’ to a sense of belonging in Liz Berry’s ‘Homing’.

Introduction

In this lecture we think about poetry not as the expression of a solid, basic idea, but a means of working something out, or of exploring the tension between two or more competing ideas – love and hate at the same time, for example, or conflicted feelings about home, or a terrible event in the past and the way you remember it now. As we move through the lecture, we consider: (i) the idea of poetry living ‘on the dangerous edge of things’, as Imtiaz Dharker put it; (ii) the various kinds of tension in poetry, e.g. between syntax and lineation, between meaning and form, between the rhythm of natural speech and the rhythm of the poem, etc.