Last night, the School of English hosted a poetry reading by Sean Borodale, Visiting Writer Fellow for the Oscar Wilde Centre for Michaelmas Term. The intimate space of the Uí Chadain Lecture Theatre hosted an eclectic crowd of staff and students assembling together. This was a two-part event, beginning with the reading and followed by a wine reception and book sale.
Rosie Lavan, acting Literary Arts Officer, gave Borodale a warm welcome and thanked the School of English and the Oscar Wilde Centre for their support. She then acquainted the audience with the poet’s success in writing, visual arts and performance. Lavan detailed his fixation with topography and voices, exemplified in a project of his earlier this year where he transposed Joyce’s Ulysses onto the landscape of Liverpool, capturing the flux of the city. Lavan concluded by citing the praise bestowed onto Borodale following the publication of his first poetry collection, The Bee Journal, in 2012, which poet Simon Armitage described it as “Honey itself in poetic form”.
Following this momentous opening, Borodale spoke of the pleasure he has had teaching at Trinity, noting: “I came with very strong plans for the programme, and once I arrived I swerved unexpectedly into another programme of work.”
He went on to describe his creative processes in writing, emphasising the importance of the visual in performance. Early on in his poetic career, this creative process was in the form of walking and writing simultaneously. This spurred two works, Notes for an Atlas set in London in 2003 and Walking to Paradise set in the Lake District in the footsteps of Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1999. On this project he said: “For me, walking was a private act in a public space.” His poetry from Notes for an Atlas is like a camera lens, focusing on intricate details illustrating a larger framework of the city.
His later projects include lyrigraphs, a word coined by Borodale. He struggles to define it but places it as “like a seismograph but with lyrical energy”, they “help someone out who is lost in the act of reading”. These poems have a form that can be described as somewhere between maps and stage plans and are an ongoing process for the poet.
After laying the groundwork for his preoccupation with the visual and topography in writing, Borodale introduced his first poetry collection: The Bee Journal. This collection is based on his experience of beekeeping for two years, however – spoiler alert – his colony failed. Later on he admitted that he probably shouldn’t have spoiled it before beginning to read the collection. Borodale expressed his qualms with vocabulary: he finds that the problem with beekeeping lies in its language and throughout the process of writing, he found that he was uncomfortable with using the terms “queen” and “colony”. He cited Joseph Boyce who called for “the need to transform language before it can be transformative”.
His poems in this collection are distinguished by dates, and are very sensual in nature, evoking in particular taste and sound. There is an emphasis on the anxiety of beekeeping which Borodale expresses in amusing asides to the audience on the unexpected problems arising from bees. His main inspiration was the nocturnal hum of bees which he described as “a fifty million year old expression”.
His second poetry collection, Human Work published in 2015, shares the same sensuous imagery but is more animalistic and brutal in detail. He credits Ovid’s Metamorphoses as an influence for the work, with motifs of flux and greater forces that Borodale unconsciously writes “from the perspective of the Gods”. The collection stems from a creative process of cooking and writing simultaneously with food as his subjects. He outlined his aim is to escape poetic idioms and “put all weights of language aside to create a new context for words”. This was particularly difficult for the subject of the apple which features in his work. One distinctive poem is Eating of a Kipper, this poem describes the act of cooking and eating the fish with such sensuous intricacy evident in lines such as “I taste the ruined cartography of smoulder” and “Its loose stocking-silk sequins”.
Borodale concluded the reading by returning to his lyrigraphs, which were written underground in mines in post-industrial Southern England so that he could “place the voice into darkness”. These poems are highly intimate, focusing on buried objects and deeper themes such as oblivion and absence. His final lines express the burden that every poet carries: “Compressed under the great weight of everything’s substance.”
