Think of a situation or time when you felt particularly misunderstood. Try to write a poem that alternates your point of view with the point of view of those around you. How do they perceive and misperceive your actions? Speaking of “serious,” “Not Waving but Drowning” is Smith’s most famous poem. This twelve-line punch to the gut is one of her most sober and plainly nihilistic pieces. Contributing to the deceptive quality of the poet’s work was her language, which a Times Literary Supplement reviewer described as “Smith’s most distinctive achievement.” The critic elaborated: “The cliches, the excesses, the crabbed formalities of this speech are given weight by the chillingly amusing or disquieting elements; by the sense of a refined, ironic unhappiness underlying the poems; and by the variety of topics embraced by the poet’s three or four basic and serious themes.” Although the writer found some of Smith’s work “indulgent, even trivial … it ought at last to be recognized that Miss Smith’s is a purposeful and substantial talent. From below the surface oddness, her personal voice comes out to us as something questing, discomfiting, compassionate.” Smith’s “highly individualistic poetic style [was] vulnerable to shifts in critical taste and to the charges of eccentricity, a charge which Smith risked, and in a sense even flirted with, throughout her career,” Hallett concluded. “However, the integrity with which she adhered to her own style earned Stevie Smith a considerable amount of respect, and, more than ten years after her death, her reputation with both readers and fellow poets is deservedly high.”

An album like this is hard to find. It is for those who like their Hip Hop to have soul, and their soul to have spirit. This is because it works on so many levels, but it is reflecting the personality of its creator. There are a host of collaborators here, Jorja Smith, Rebel Kleff, Kiko Bun, Kwes, Jordan Rakei, Sampha, Tom Misch and more, but none are overpowering. They blend righteously into place. Not Waving but Drowning’ is the best-known poem by Stevie Smith (1902-71). In 1995, it was voted Britain’s fourth favourite poem in a poll. First published in 1957, ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ fuses the comic and the tragic, moving between childlike simplicity and darker, more cynical touches. Civello, Catherine A., Patterns of Ambivalence: The Fiction and Poetry of Stevie Smith, Camden House, 1997.Calling Smith’s Not Waving but Drowning“the best collection of new poems to appear in 1957,” Poetry contributor David Wright observed that “as one of the most original women poets now writing. [Stevie Smith] seems to have missed most of the public accolades bestowed by critics and anthologists. One reason may be that not only does she belong to no ‘school’—whether real or invented as they usually are—but her work is so completely different from anyone else’s that it is all but impossible to discuss her poems in relation to those of her contemporaries.” Smith’s “seemingly light verse,” wrote Linda Rahm Hallett in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, contains a “sometimes disconcerting mixture of wit and seriousness …, making her at once one of the most consistent and most elusive of poets.” Smith’s writings frequently demonstrated a fascination with death and also explored “the mysterious, rather sinister reality which lurks behind appealing or innocent appearances,” wrote Hallett. As a result, Wright said, “the apparent geniality of many of her poems is in fact more frightening than the solemn keening and sentimental despair of other poets, for it is based on a clear-sighted acceptance, by a mind neither obtuse nor unimaginative, but sharp and serious, innocent but far from naive.”“Without identifying itself with any particular school of modern poetics,” Hallett wrote, “[Smith’s] voice is nevertheless very much that of what she once called the ‘age of unrest’ through which she lived.” Her first book, Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) examines religion and politics in the lead-up to the Second World War. De Britse rapper/dichter Loyle Carner maakt liedjes over familie, wereldzaken en het echte leven. Al het materialistische laat hij liever weg in zijn liedjes. Op zijn nieuwe album ‘Not Waving, But Drowning’ horen we day Loyle Carner nog steeds verhalen kan vertellen met de flow van een rapper en de gevoeligheid van een dichter. Het album is vernoemd naar een gedicht van zijn grootvader en beslaat onderwerpen zo

A Very Pleasant Evening with Stevie Smith: Selected Short Prose, New Directions (New York, NY), 1995.Novel on Yellow Paper; or, Work It out for Yourself, J. Cape, 1936, Morrow, 1937, New Directions (New York, NY), 1994. Before teaching, read the poem guide to “Not Waving but Drowning.” Have students think-pair-share a time when things went wrong because their words or gestures were misunderstood by others. I’m not that interested in the lives of poets. Lord Byron may have been “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” but as any product of an MFA program can tell you, a poet’s life is typically short on titillating details. Italian loafers. Yoga classes. Book signings. Yawn. Have students read the poem several times. Then have them rewrite the lines of the poem as a script, indicating the speaker of each of the lines. In their character descriptions, they should indicate the relationship to the victim that each speaker might have. For example, “stranger in the crowd,” acquaintance,” etc. Askwho says the lines, “I was much too far out all my life/And not waving but drowning.” Have students share their findings and discuss various readings of the poem. Askwhat does this startling image and the observers’ reactions challenge us to think about?