Oswald now serves as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, the first woman (incredibly) to hold that position in over 300 years. Her lectures have been made available online (another first for Oxford), and each offers rich and thrilling listening. And has a poet ever had a better education to become a poet? Living in curated gardens shaped by her landscape gardener mother, Lady Mary Keen, Oswald first studied horticulture, and then went on to study our mortal myths in the Classics Department at Oxford. If pressed to define her, Oswald might be called a visionary landscape poet. In equestrian terms, Oswald practices a controlled-but deeply imaginative-equitation, a kind of dressage with words-man and horse fused-though in this riding ring, the horses are of water, earth, air, and fire.
In Oswald’s hands, the pathetic fallacy is not really a fallacy as she sounds out the consciousness of our planet: flowers feel, the river speaks, and the ocean ruminates, struggles, converges, mutters, and murders. Such deep-diving is evident in all her poems, be they about stone walls, wildflowers, weeds, or as, in her latest book, Nobody, the ocean. This image of a swimmer can serve as a metaphor for Oswald’s spiritual and generative technique: as a body moves inside and through the liquid element water, the mind rides above the waterline, absorbing and projecting sensate-driven thoughts onto an empty landscape-the page. Like the seal in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “At the Fishhouses,” Alice Oswald is a believer in “total immersion.” Readers may know of her love of “wild swimming” (as the English call swimming in natural bodies of water-rivers, lakes, oceans, etc.), and how she charted the River Dart in a book-length poem of the same name. It’s like a tidiness summoning a messiness.” – Alice Oswald, from a dawn springtime walk by the River Dart with John Drever I am interested in the kind of poem that shivers when something from outside comes in that you are not in control of…. And to me, it works like that and you have this kind of rational, kindling dialogue and something that summons something that is not the poem but detects a poem. “My kind of model/structure, was always kind of the Japanese Noh play, …it’s really interesting, that thing where you have a conversation going on between people and then a god or something-from-the-other-world…appears. “I’ve always been very against flowing rhythms, like particularly against the iambic pentameter, the main rhythm English poetry has worked in.” It’s like listening really hard to silence.” “It feels like my working practice is a form of listening to the voices in my head and it’s as if I mishear it when a poem doesn’t work-I haven’t focused enough and heard it.
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