Fan Fiction 1: Dante Alighieri

Abandon hope all ye who enter here

Et tu, Alighieri who held life dear

Yet dropped your bêtes noires without care or fear

Into black hell, with wrinkled lip and sneer.

Ravenna, a backwater and somewhere odd

To damn your enemies and play at God.

Imagine assuming you’d get the nod

A fast-track to heaven, though made of sod.

Flip it how you will, your unforgiveness

Threads the back weave of their lasting distress;

Betrayal begets betrayal – what a mess!

While you sail onward free of fault or blame

In perfect terza rima like a game,

Enraptured by daydreams of an old flame.

My attention has been drawn to fan fiction, which in Japanese is called dōjinshi. It’s an entire literary manifestation. It is “fictional writing written by fans, commonly of an existing work of fiction. The author uses copyrighted characters, settings, or other intellectual properties from the original creator(s) as a basis for their writing.” (Wikipedia) I have taken this modern practice to write ripostes to famous lines of poetry. The first one in the series, written today, is a response to Dante. The basic idea in this poem is the subject of a poem I wrote years ago in a 33-line canto of terza rima, which is in a folder somewhere. The idea is this: since when was Dante innocent and where would he have ended up in his own Comedy, if truth were known?

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Why did Dante write The Divine Comedy?

This is one of two short papers given by Philip Harvey at the first Spiritual Reading Group session for 2014 on Tuesday the 18 th of February in the Carmelite Library in Middle Park. He also gave a paper on that occasion, which can be found on the Library blog, entitled ‘A Rationale for Purgatory’ . Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls in one of her books how her husband, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, would say that when reading poetry we can spend a great deal of time discussing what it means, but the first and main question about a poem is not what does it mean, but why was it written. That is the place to start. Here are eleven reasons that I offer quietly to help us think about this poem: Why did Dante write The Divine Comedy? You may have other reasons and these are invited. We will spend most of our time today looking at meanings, but also at why. I wrote these out as they occurred to me, so there is no priority order. 1. He wrote the poem because ...

The Walk (Seamus Heaney)

This poem was read aloud at Janet Campbell’s funeral in Hamilton in Victoria in December 2006. Janet was a great lover of poetry all her life, a great reader of poetry, and she read everything of Seamus Heaney. Indeed, when she worked in Melbourne or London bookshops Janet would grab hold of Faber pre-publication copies of Heaney if they came into the backroom, and disappear for days, copying lines onto postcards for her friends, transferring lines into her lifetime of diaries. Diaries that were also a lifeline. Janet read everything, but Heaney was one of the regulars. Seamus Heaney keeps a tight line. He is rarely though completely opaque and the way into this poem is the word ‘longshot’. We only find in the second of the two poems that we are being asked to look at two photographs. Or, at least, poems that are like photographs. Or, better still, strong memories that have taken on in the mind the nature of longshots. The two poems in one are reminders of close relationships. ...

The Poetry of Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams delivers the twelfth John Rylands Poetry Reading last year This is a paper given by Philip Harvey in the Hughes Room at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne on Sunday the 6 th of December as one in an Advent series on religious poets. The original title of the paper was ‘The text that maps our losses and longings’. Everything Rowan Williams says and writes reveals a person with a highly developed sensitivity to language, its force, directness, instantaneousness, its subtlety, indirectness, longevity. A person though may speak three languages fluently and read at least nine languages with ease, as he does, and still not engage with language in the way we are looking at here. Because Rowan is unquestionably someone with a poetic gift. By that I don’t just mean he writes poetry, I mean he engages with the life of words, their meanings, ambiguities, colours, their playfulness, invention, sounds. We find this in those writings of his that delibe...

READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

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