Turn of phrase

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 13th May 2009

In his Point of View this week (Radio Four, Sunday), Clive James wove together a subtle threnody on the virtues of having a Poet Laureate.

In his Point of View this week (Radio Four, Sunday), Clive James wove together a subtle threnody on the virtues of having a Poet Laureate. He remarked on how good poets have the ability to conjure up ‘the phrase that makes your mind stand on end’, showing that it’s a quality shared by many prose writers too. The very existence of the Poet Laureate, argued James, is an acknowledgement by the state that there is something out there that the state cannot control — the national memory — and the national memory ‘travels’ in the language, which in turn is preserved, above all, by the poets. It was such a hope-inspiring thought amid the terrifying misuse of words, and ideas, by our current crop of state representatives.

Words are so much more powerful than images, as Orwell so cogently argued in his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’. That’s why radio’s survival prospects in the battle of technologies are always going to be higher than those of its suddenly poor relation, television. Words matter and radio’s USP is its vital relationship with language and the way it draws its listeners in, cutting through to the very essence.

In Jean (Radio Four, Thursday), Mary Stephenson recalled the months she spent with the writer Jean Rhys, arriving with her portable typewriter each afternoon at two o’clock to type up what turned out to be Rhys’s last book before she died, aged 87. Rhys had been asked to write an autobiography, especially of her years in Paris in the 1920s when she had been part of the creative circle that included Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. But she began with her childhood, growing up in the West Indies on the island of Dominica. She was ‘word perfect’ on her own life, Stephenson remembered, beginning in their first session with page one: ‘ “Smile please!”, the man said. “Not quite so serious.” ’

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