HKU Bulletin August 2010 (Vol. 11 No. 3)

36 The University of Hong Kong Bulletin The author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin spoke to a packed Convocation Room about his love of poetry and how it has influenced his writing. “I think one’s relationship with poetry is almost like a love affair,” he confessed. “It is a passion, and poetry has been a part of my life since I was very young.” As his father too is a poet, de Bernieres said he had the good fortune of being raised in a house where an ambition to be a poet or a writer was not frowned upon. “It was considered normal. Nobody told me that I should do something sensible. My mother, rather charmingly, advised me recently to get a PhD in case my career fails. I said ‘Ma, I’ve got four and I didn’t do any work for any of them.’” Speaking of his evolution as a poet he said, “If you think back to the way people wrote poetry in the 19th century it was often quite stilted and full of archaic speech, such as ‘thee’s’ and ‘thou’s’ and you could still say things like ‘Oh wild west wind’, which you can’t anymore.” “At around the turn of the 20th century a lot of the poets began to rebel against this old fashioned way of doing things and they started to write poetry in a much more natural English. I’m referring to people like Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon. “For a while these people became collectively known as the Georgian Poets because King George V had come to the throne. What’s interesting about them is that they were writing in recognizably natural English without strange word orders, but they were still writing poetry which was recognizably continuous of what had been before. This is the kind of poetry I was initially brought up in.” He was lucky, he said, to have been taught by a teacher who was passionately in love with language. “He made us learn proverbs. We had to write story a week and a letter a week and, most importantly, we had to memorize a poem a week. I doubt this is done anymore anywhere.” And he joked, “When I grew older I realized it was a really good move to learn love poetry by heart. It’s almost foolproof. But when I come across a poem that I really love I still, to this day, memorize it. The thing about the kind of poetry I was memorizing is that it was to do so because it was formal, it had rhyme schemes. It was also easy to recognize the distinction between prose and verse.” After the Georgians came the Modernists, amongst them, T.S. Eliot, who was literate at doing things in the old way “which made him that much better at doing it in a new way.” However, the drawback of abandoning the old way of doing things is a loss of confidence in the art of poetic writing. “You begin to wonder if you are really writing poetry at all. This happened to me. When T.S. Eliot took over form Walter de la Mare in my imagination I found myself trying to write like T.S. Eliot and failing completely, because I didn’t know what the rules were. “It was, as they say, prose cut up. And I found that this made me very uneasy about writing poetry at all. I had written a lot of poetry from about the age of 12 onwards but it was almost always about being in love with some unattainable girl. “Then, in my 20s most of my poetic work went into writing song lyrics. I was in a punk band called Irreparable Brain Damage. Then I was in a band named Isis, after the Egyptian goddess. Of course everybody thought we were called ‘Is is’. “But I grew up thinking poetry was my vocation. One reason I, to my own surprise, turned into a novelist is that I found that just about everything you can do in poetry you can do prose as long as you avoid overt rhymes.” ADVENTURES in poetry Best-selling author, Louis de Bernieres, spoke at the University recently as part of the Hong Kong Literary Festival. The University of Hong Kong Bulletin www.hku.hk/publications/bulletin.html Published by the University of Hong Kong The Bulletin is the University magazine that features our latest activities, events and plans. It aims to keep the local and international community informed of new breakthroughs in a wide range of disciplines initiated by members of the University. Editorial Team Chief Editor: Katherine Ma, Director of Communications Managing Editor: Shirley Yeung, Publications Manager Writers: Kelvin Au, Kathy Griffin, Allison Jones Design and production: The Graphis Company Ltd. 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