A classical education?

Sometimes you go to panels for the panel. And before anybody starts jumping up and down about me getting my sessions mixed up, with an image from one session (Lines for Birds) and a title from another. Well that's because Miriam's socialising kept us away from the Lines for Birds event and I wanted to make a point. And also to mention that this gorgeous book is the next planned purchase for her nibs. It's all she wants right now.  She's loved John Wolseley's work forever and is new to Barry Hill, so her coffee table will have one of these little beauties on it shortly!

Intrigued by the title of this chat about the classics, Miriam suggested we go. Okay by me - looked like an interesting panel of thinkers. It was interesting too, although the lovely chap in the salmon shirt three seats up from me had to be prodded by his wife when he started a gentle snoring in the middle of Barry Hill's segment of the afternoon. Lovely intro by Peter Rose. Though I should add that we all, including the people on stage, acknowledged that we hated that dreadful intro recording. Unease is building!  We should put a petition together! Peter did a much better job and we were off. Ian Morris from Stanford via various other places, Barry Hill of Lines for Birds and a great deal of other poetry thinking and word and Eliot Weinberger, policitical commentator and poetry person, who is spoken of in many conversations I've overheard recently as a hit of the festival. A real 'must hear'.

Miriam says she thinks the big idea she took away from this session is that the idea of classical texts or a classical education is bigger than just the texts or learnings of the Romans and the Greeks. The tracts of Confucious, the glyphs of the Mayans - the classics are different for each culture although some are shared by many.

Ian Morris started us off with a bit of a rundown of history's relationship with those Roman and Greek classics.  Barry Hill spoke of Songs of Central Australia by T.G.H. Strehlow as an Australian classic, whose essence he asserts we will find in other works from this country, which is what makes it a classic. Eliot Weinberger spoke about the classics in terms of culture rather than [the Morris approach] of history, and there was some discussion also of an essay from early this century where Weinberger bemoaned the lack of connection with the poetic tradition and the poets of the wider world, that he saw in young poets of the USA. He also said he feels there's been some improvement on that score. I guess I should say that in case all those young American poets reading this blog start sending him inappropriately castigating emails. As I'm sure they would have.