Building the Tabernacle

This week on the Granta blog, Laura Barber reports on an evening of poetry hosted in London last week by Intelligence Squared.

It wasn’t until I was running late and frantically Googling directions to the Tabernacle that I gave any serious thought to the meaning of the word, beyond it being a venue in Notting Hill and ridiculously hard to find. But rather than a map reference, my search initially presented me with a definition:

Tabernacle: (Bibl.) a fixed or moveable habitation usually of slight construction, (fig.) human body.

The aptness of this description struck me as I finally took my seat in the auditorium, whose iron girders and wood-slatted walls form a dome that resembles nothing so much as an ark (albeit an ark with a giant disco ball dangling from on high). And so it was that the lights dimmed and four of Britain’s best-loved poets were introduced, two by two, and we embarked on an evening of poetry which would take us from the intimacy of a love’s first declaration to the inevitability of a life’s final reckoning.

Andrew Motion, Britain’s former Poet Laureate, struck the quivering chord that resonated through the rest of the readings with his first choice of poem. Edward Thomas’s ‘As the Team’s Head Brass’ captures a moment in British history when the old certainties had been desecrated by war and the world was stumbling its way towards an uncertain future. Motion pursued the theme through a series of elegies charting the painful No Man’s Land of grief, in which the imagination reels from the visceral shock of absence and clutches at escaping memories.

Don Paterson was also, briefly, grappling with the existential, as he considered Emergence Theory and reminded us of the fact that humanity is essentially just ‘chemical scum’. His poem ‘Air’ posed the question:

‘When will the air stop breathing? Will it all
come to nothing, if nothing came to this?’

Having forced us to peer over the ontological abyss, Paterson brought things swiftly back down to earth, with wry riffs on afternoon naps, American TV drama, Shakespeare’s love life, and the sly pleasure of countering a bad review with a spiked poetical riposte.

The sharp riposte, the pointed one-liner, and unerring comic timing were also features of Wendy Cope’s poems, which constantly punctured both her own and other people’s illusions – about themselves and about what poetry should be. She recalled having been teased as a child for using too many long words but, having learned a lesson at the hands of the bullies, her poetry has always been deliberately and deliciously unpoetical. The language is blunt, direct and conversational, but still retains a childlike sense of mischief and irreverent fun. In honour of the balmy, blossom-strewn weather, she read ‘Loveliest of trees the cherry now’ by A. E. Housman, a poet on whom she has admitted an ill-fated literary crush, in ‘Another Unfortunate Choice’:

‘I think I am in love with A.E. Housman,
Which puts me in a worse-than-usual-fix.
No woman ever stood a chance with Housman,
And he’s been dead since 1936.’

The final poet to take to the stage was Clive James, who declared his own life-long poetical passions – for Auden, MacNeice, Yeats, Stevens, and Charlotte Mew – and in ‘Literary Lunch’ described how the recitation of their words had, on occasion, been pressed into the service of seduction:

‘I trust my memory and watch your eyes
To see if you know I am wooing you
with all these stolen goods. Of course you do.’

If that attempt at literary enticement failed, his own poems succeeded in beguiling the audience at the Tabernacle. And it was James’s poems, of all those we heard during the evening, that occupied most fully and most poignantly that strange, unsettling space between: between past and present, between memory and reality, between life and death. In one of his recent poems, ‘Whitman and the Moth’, James pinpoints precisely this nebulous zone in the form of an encounter between the ageing poet and the newly-fluttering creature:

‘But they were joined by what each couldn’t do,
The meeting point where great art comes to pass –
Whitman, who danced and sang but never flew,
The moth, which had not written Leaves of Grass,

Composed a picture of the interchange
Between the mind and all that it transcends
Yet must stay near.’

As James descended from the podium and the disco ball sprinkled lights, blue, red and green over the scattering audience, I thought again of that definition. And of how poetry itself can act as a tabernacle: the words constructing a space within which the transience of life is for a moment held, still and graspable. And which allows us, in turn, to be moved. ■

Laura Barber is Editorial Director of Portobello Books, Granta’s sister publisher. She is also the editor of the best-selling anthologies Penguin’s Poems for Life and Penguin’s Poems for Love.

Previously on the Granta blog... Saskia Vogel recommends programmes for emerging writers, and Ollie Brock recounts a literary intrigue in the Galápagos Islands.