Two contemporary poets set off on a series of journeys – across Britain, America and Europe – to the death places of poets of the past for their new book exploring the price of poetry.
Deaths of the Poets by Michael Symmons Roberts, Professor of Poetry at the Manchester Writing School, and poet Paul Farley questions the post-Romantic myth that in order to be great, poets should be melancholic, doomed and self-destructive individuals who meet bitter and untimely ends.
Michael said: “There is an odd, skewed image of poets in our culture but this concept isn’t applied in the same way to novelists and playwrights. Other artists can be seen as stable, savvy and in control but not poets.
“We wanted to explore the roots of the melancholic, doomed image of the poet, and to question whether it is just a myth, or if there is some essential truth behind it – that great poems only come when the poet’s life is pushed right to the edge of acceptability, safety and security?

“By making pilgrimages to the places where great poets died, in some cases having taken their own lives, we wanted to honour those poets, but also hoped to learn something more about the relationship between their lives and deaths and their poetry.
“The manner of a poet’s death can affect, for better or worse, the popular understanding of their poems. For some poets, it becomes impossible to read a poem without looking through the lens of the poet’s demise. Their deaths can cast a backward shadow on their work.”
The two poets’ journeys took them to many places including Boston, Vienna and across Britain on the trail of around 30 poets –the most moving of which was John Berryman.
Michael said: “John Berryman was a poet very important to both Paul and me when we were starting to read and write poems in our teens. In 1972, he killed himself by jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis onto the frozen Mississippi River. On our trip to Minneapolis, we met with John’s widow and visited the home where he lived and wrote some of his best work in the last few years of his life. It was incredibly moving.”

On their pilgrimage, Michael and Paul honour their poetic heroes, but also investigate and interrogate the myth, sending themselves up in the process. The result is a book, published by Jonathan Cape, that is enlightening and provocative, eye-wateringly funny and powerfully moving.
The idea to co-write the Deaths of the Poets book stemmed from a previous collaboration between Michael and Paul in 2011, where they travelled to neglected corners of the English landscape for Edgelands, which explored the undervalued wilderness between the rural and urban, a terrain of tyre yards, disused mines, overgrown allotments and graffiti covered bridges.
Deaths of the Poets has been selected as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week this week (February 20-26). Every morning and evening on the show, Michael and Paul will discuss the book and alternate between reading sections from it. 

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