A Living Language: Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures

by David Constantine

In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. David Constantine's three lectures have to do with the chief end and means of a lively and effective language. In the first, Translation Is Good For You, drawing mainly on the life, letters and poems of Keats, he considers translation as a way to a poetic identity and a language of one's own. In the second, Use and Ornament, Constantine looks at the particular case of a poet, Brecht, who wanted his writing to be useful but who understood better than most what the peculiar resources and responsibilities of the lyric poem are Wilfred Owen and Keith Douglas are also considered in this context. The third lecture, Poetry of the Present, largely concerned with Walt Whitman and D.H. Lawrence, discusses the ambition of free verse to convey the abundance and quickness of life in the truest (liveliest) way. The sonnets and other fixed forms used by Rilke are offered as an alternative. In all three lectures there is a continual effort to define the good effects a poem may have when, by whatever means, it achieves its ends.

64 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2005

About the author

Born in 1944, David Constantine worked for thirty years as a university teacher of German language and literature. He has published several volumes of poetry, most recently, Nine Fathom Deep (2009). He is a translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet. In 2003 his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Lighter Than Air won the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His translation of Goethe's Faust, Part I was published by Penguin in 2005; Part II in April 2009. He is also author of one novel, Davies, and Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton. His four short story collections are Back at the Spike, the highly acclaimed Under the Dam (Comma, 2005), and The Shieling (Comma, 2009), which was shortlisted for the 2010 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Constantine's story 'Tea at the Midland' won the BBC National Short Story Award 2010, and won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award in 2013 for the collection (Comma Press, 2012). He lives in Oxford where, for ten years, he edited Modern Poetry in Translation with his wife Helen (until 2011). David's short story 'In Another Country' has been adapted into 45 Years - a major Film4-funded feature film, directed by Andrew Haigh and starring Tom Courtenay & Charlotte Rampling. This film won two silver bear awards at the Berlinale International Film festival in February 2015. David is also the author of the forthcoming novel, released by Comma Press, The Life-Writer.