What would Jill have said?
What would Jill have said?
This is what the members of our poetry group now ask during our monthly readings and discussions from the book edited by John Carey that I quote from above which Jill had chosen for us to read - over a year ago now.
The group formed after the pandemic, which had caused the closure of the WEA (Workers’ Educational Association) facility in Northampton, where around twelve of us, (although members came and went) had met to discuss a broad range of poetry and poets. The WEA courses, which I devised, included poets from the Renaissance like Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey; the Romantics, where students explored the well-knowns like Wordsworth and Shelley, and the rediscovered like Anna Seward and Felicia Hemans; The Poets of War, ranging from Ivor Gurney in 1914 to Adrian Mitchell in 1968; the Moderns like T. S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Wallace Stevens; also the Very Moderns like Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Alice Oswald and Wendy Cope. I even managed to include my Liverpool favourites, The Mersey Poets, with Roger McGough, a standout alongside Adrian Henri and Brian Patten, whose contributions were much admired by the students.
Throughout it all Jill was a stalwart member. The WEA is a very inclusive organisation in which I like to think that students play an equal role to that of the tutors, and in this way, Jill played an enormous part for the 12 Years during which I knew her. In the latter phases of her life she had come to live in Northampton in the vicinity of which many of the other students also lived and she got to the class in the main by using public transport. Jill had lost her husband several years before.
Jill had been a teacher and for a while she had lived and worked with her husband abroad. She had also worked as an advisory teacher for Early Years in and around London, and she shared with me a great liking for Tim Brighouse, an innovator for school improvement across Birmingham, Oxford and London. While Jill was dealing with Early Years provision in the London area, I had been an advisory teacher for Primary Science in Bedfordshire. Although we had not met before the WEA courses, Jill and I shared an enthusiasm for educational innovation, in pushing boundaries as far as we could.
There were many poetry sessions with the Northants group in which Jill played a memorable part. One of the most vivid for me is her recollection of a love of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, which she had received in her formative years and which I recall her giving a superb presentation of in one of the sessions. She was also a poet. I am now going to hand over to the other members of our group, to continue her story:
“I am so sorry to hear of the death of Jill. I learned so much from her. She had a rich knowledge of poetry and, being a poet herself, she was sensitive to the subtleties and nuances of the poems we studied. She was never afraid to speak out and be controversial. She didn’t hold back if she thought something was rubbish! I admired her honesty and self-confidence. But for all this she was always gracious and encouraging. I miss her very much. I hope that the three of us left in the WEA group are doing her justice as we continue to meet poetry and to share our thoughts.” Christine
“Recently going round the B.A. Degree show at Northampton University I thought this was Jill’s domain. And books. And literature. And poetry. And cricket. And more, and more. Jill, personable, lovely, always beautifully dressed. She was extremely knowledgeable about poetry, played Devil's Advocate with poems, so the bits nobody else noticed she brought to the discussion. I never thought of that I used to think, for she really extended our awareness of the poem. She was unafraid to go into the dark areas of poetry. In one of my favourite Paul Durcan’s poems, Martha’s Wall about love for his young daughter she mentioned that it could have an incestuous aspect. I too had thought of this, also I'd read about it online, but Jill was the one who brought it into the discussion. I didn't change my viewpoint and still regard the poem highly; still feel it is about a father’s love for his daughter. Having different contrasting views always livens up a discussion, and everybody respected different viewpoints. She too thought one of my favourite poets, John Burnside, was one of the greats. I look at every single poem now and say to myself what would Jill think and feel.” Pat
The following is a poem that Jill emailed to me, and Christine, and Pat at some time during our many meetings. I chose it because of its humour:
Unwanted
The Sunflowers were a pot of gold
Each petal a wild whirl of light
A thousand individual strokes of life
‘They won’t have it outside’, she says
‘The admin assistants think it’s naff’.
I think, ‘Bad luck Van Gogh.’
You’ll not get hung
Just like when you were young.
All that sweat
And blood
And paint
And madness
And the ear.
To be thought naff.
All those petals
And gold
And light
And life
All that work,
All that art, your art
And death.
To be thought naff
By the admin assistants.
by Jill Flanders
We had had to move away from being physical presences in Northampton after the pandemic, but our online Zoom meetings, set up by Christine where we read chosen poems aloud to each other from a variety of sources worked extremely well. We all benefited tremendously from our weekly, bi-weekly or even tri-weekly Zoom sessions, facilitated brilliantly by Christine from her new home on the south coast, where she had moved to be closer to her children.
The sources for our choice of poems were very varied. At first, we decided to read a poem from each of the English poets’ laureate, stretching from John Dryden to Simon Armitage; and then the Scottish and Welsh poets of the same order, beginning with Gwyneth Lewis, the first National Poet of Wales; and then Edwin Morgan, the first Makar of Scotland, appointed in 2004. At the end of this we agreed on two books from The Poetry Pharmacy series edited by William Sieghart, and each week we would read a chosen poem from one of them. Opening the first one at random, I immediately come across “The Trees” by Philip Larkin. I think maybe Jill read it, or me or Pat or Christine? Whoever it was, it reads like this:
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Jill chose our next book Contra-Flow, Lines of Englishness 1922-2022, an anthology selected by John Greening and Kevin Gardner, which took us over a year to read through but which gave us many enjoyable discussions. My favourite of her chosen books, and sadly her final one, is 100 Poets, A Little Anthology, edited by John Carey. This week we will be reading from it “The Cool Web” by Robert Graves, “Snake” by D.H. Lawrence, which I am looking at for the very first time, and “Disabled” by Wilfred Owen, which as John Carey mentions in his in his introduction deals with ‘the pity of War’, a theme of one of my WEA courses that Jill had attended.
We had known that Jill was becoming unwell and we heard from her son, Simon, in April that she had died in Northampton General. Returning to my title, we will continue to wonder what Jill would have made of the poems that we will continue to read as we travel through the book to its end.
References
Carey, J. (ed.) (2021) 100 Poets, A Little Anthology The quotation by Robert Graves above is from "The Cool Web".
Greening, J. and Gardner, K. (eds.) (2023) Contraflow: Lines of Englishness 1922-2022
Leyland, P. 'I had not thought…' in AuthorsElectric, July 2nd 2021, when I first posted about the online poetry group
Sieghart, W. (ed.) (2017) The Poetry Pharmacy, Tried and True Prescriptions for the Heart and Soul
Sieghart, W. (ed.) (2019) The Poetry Pharmacy, More Prescriptions for Courage, Healing and Hope
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