Signed Poetry Books - Douglas Dunn

It was decided over dinner at Oxford that Douglas Dunn would have been a bigger name if Tony Harrison had not been there in his way, and so would Michael Longley had it not been for Heaney.

It wasn't quite so much 'decided' as John Sears made the point and I had to agree. But there are worse things than not being the standard bearer of a generation and Douglas Dunn is a worthy and redoubtable poet and the world would benefit from having more poets like him rather than congratulating him for having a reputation that survived in the shadow of others who were considered somehow greater.

If his Elegies are to remain his best remembered work then Dante's Drum-kit, Northlight and The Year's Afternoon show that he was a genuine artist, one whose work continued to improve and not one who established a reputation with an early book and then tried to continue repeating its success. That is one way I've sometimes differentiated between a class act and a one-trick pony.

Aldeburgh

Gill reports from Latitude on the poets-
Luke Wright, Jackie Kay, Tim Turnbull, Rhian Edwards, Elvis McGonagall- all really good. We will have to take her word for that. The opinions expressed on this website are not necessarily those of David Green (Books).

But the best fish and chips ever were in Aldeburgh and so was Maggi Hambling's Scallop shell.

Matthew Welton

Matthew Welton, 'We needed coffee but...' (Carcanet)

It's tempting to say that Matthew Welton belongs in a category of his own but then, after you have made a list of related poets, composers and artists, it seems like a redundant thing to say.

I was partially but in those places hugely impressed with his first book, The Book of Matthew, having seen somewhere the fairly mainstream poem London sundays. The book proved to be more experimental, idiosyncratic and self-absorbed than that poem had led one to expect but it was an impressive if slightly dubious debut book. Thus the second book, coming along just when one realizes one hasn't thought about the author for quite some time, was ordered on sight with some anticipation.

As with the first book, it proves to divide opinion even among a group of one. Owing more of a debt to concrete poetry and other such avant-garde projects, the book is more 'retro' than 'cutting edge'. This sort of experimentalism has been around a long time now and, as Auden once sagely observed, everything changes but the avant-garde. Thus this book is redolent of the 1960's, kaftans, hashish and I found myself wishing that the Vietnam War could be brought to an end.

In his one-off status, Welton is a bit like Peter Reading but is nowhere near angry enough to emulate him, so it's Frank Kuppner that springs to mind, and John Cage and Philip Glass. In fact, all that the section Four-letter words establishes is that Welton is familiar with Yoko Ono's Grapefruit.

The sequence Virtual airport is ambient poetry evoking a grey, anonymous alienated world in a brave, underwhelming opening.

vier among the Four-letter word poems is an encyclopedic slew of words that look like but aren't swear words that is guaranteed to amuse any intelligent 13 year old boy.

South Korea and Japan 2002 follows the World Cup tournament, cleverly placing its best line,

The wind holds off like an overthoughtful southpaw.

on page 66 so that the reader will return again and again to page 66 like an England supporter still referring back to '66.

The best poem is I must say that at first it was difficult work which is a set of variations on that line in resourceful and ingenious ways. I have posted my own effort in this area One of Oscar's, written some months ago, to illustrate what sort of thing it is. My poem is only 14 lines and the friends I showed it to then were distinctly unimpressed by it so Welton's resourcefulness and ingenuity in this area is clearly much greater than mine.

Six poems by themselves are the most old-fashionedly avant garde in the book, although it is an interesting game to find poems that each of them share their form with. For example, The poem to itself is Larkin's This Be The Verse.

But in Dr. Suss saves it's hypnotic, mesmerising crescendo for the big finale. The book is well-organized enough to have built to a big finish. Its repetitive phrasing and occasionally amusing variations need to be read in full rather than skimmed and it makes for a soothing diversion. Welton comes across as a downbeat personality using his meticulous modernist sensibility to find illuminating, grey music in a dreary, largely soulless world. It is vaguely comforting and as fascinating and meaningless as a drug. On Health & Safety grounds, it should not be read while listening to any album by Moby.

There's no way you could recommend it to a mainstream poetry reader but anyone still enjoying the intoxicating, ground-breaking old 1960's will presumably love it. The mainstream has continued to move on, though.

One of Oscar's

One of Oscar’s

for Gill

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

A pot man arrives in time for a missed pint.
A pet cat’s nine lives are memories of a paw print.
A pope can arrive any time for an appointment.
Apple pie is sublime any time but at this point.
A prank satisfies many things for a miscreant.
A potter can’t abide such a thing as a missed pink.
A poseur isn’t wise when he sings the descant.
An IP’s advertised everywhere on a mouse mat.
A pilot can drive any kind of air transport.
A play can contrive many things from a mad prince.
A plant can thrive anywhere but a Hotpoint.
Ascot is a nice place for a horse race.
A priest can decide anything in a dispute.
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

Poetry in the Weekend Newspapers

Today's Guardian had a very generous collection of poems on the wars in Iraq and/or Afghanistan by poets invited by Carol Ann Duffy. It made me buy a different newspaper than the one I'd usually get on a Saturday morning. But to advertise Paul Muldoon on the front cover and then find he had only extended himself to two lines caused some disappointment even if we had no right to expect another Incantata.
And it is to be assumed that poets aren't generally in favour of wars these days. I'm not. There is very little reason for British soldiers to be in those faraway places about which our leaders appear to know hardly anything at all. But it doesn't make me want to write poems about the issue and perhaps some of these poems were written because the poets thought they ought to, having been asked. That said, Duffy herself and Ian Duhig made a good job of it and O'Brien turned out some typically O'Brien directives.
Last week, The Observer magazine featured an interview with the highly interviewable Seamus Heaney, at 70. I nearly jumped to it, thinking it was his birthday now, and nearly wrote my own little tribute. But his birthday was in April. However, I'd still like to share my favourite Heaney poem, A Brigid's Girdle, with you, because it is brilliant. And for no other reason.

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Museum/3655/heaney.html

Signed Poetry Books - Wendy Cope

As a bloke poet, faced with the history of Eng Lit in which the vast majority of canonical names are also blokes, one sometimes feels pressured to give special attention to female poets even if 8 out of one's favourite 10 poets, at the very least, are male. (The two are Duffy and Plath, if you really want to know).

The discussion goes on forever about the socio-political reasons why this might be so and I'd like not to involve myself too deeply in that discussion because it's the words I'm in it for, just the words.

So I don't include dear Wendy here as a token, to try to get my quota of lady poets up, it is because I admire her work. She has gained a massive reputation on the basis of a small body of work, much of which one might call 'light verse' and that is quite an achievement. This copy of If I Don't Know was bargainesque on e-Bay and it's a great book even if someone called Tim seems to have tired of it.

At the Barriers - On the Poetry of Thom Gunn

ed. Joshua Weiner, At the Barriers, On the Poetry of Thom Gunn (The University of Chicago Press)

It's always useful to find out that one's been missing the point for the last thirty-odd years. Neil Powell explains in his essay Coming Out Fighting that Thom Gunn's famous lines, 'I praised the overdogs from Alexander / To those who would not play with Stephen Spender' 'is not to attack Spender but to sympathize with him...who wanted to play with the rough boys every bit as much as Gunn did'. I'm still not quite convinced, though, since Gunn himself is quoted much later in the book as saying 'I was against a certain namby-pambiness' and in any case Gunn eventually disowned the poem so it's all over now.
This new collection of essays on Gunn, a few of which we have seen already, offers a number of new and valuable insights, as well as others that we could have managed without. They follow a chronological sequence through Gunn's ever-developing career but with a number of authors each contributing their own view of similar material, using the same reference points, there is a slightly repetitive echo effect going on within it.
Gunn's early career was all about a series of poses, and throughout his career he adopted a variety of attitudes like poetry's answer to David Bowie, superficially looking different but still the same underneath. But the poses were gradually shed as he developed and, if it means anything at all to say so, he was perhaps a Romantic poet working in a classical tradition.
He is a cerebral poet, particularly in his earlier work, and critics are regularly lured into over-intellectualizing. Just how Gunn's Anglo-American position is manifested or how Misanthropos
verbalizes a non-verbal experience are questions that we may never have needed to address but Weiner's essay does it anyway. Misanthropos is a seminal Gunn poem thematically as a man who thought he was the last on earth makes contact with some others, but it isn't a very good one and labouring its significance isn't helpful.
August Kleinzahler is better, highlighting striking comparisons with Baudelaire in Gunn's poems. Paul Muldoon astutely spots a lexical correspondance between Gunn's Blackie, the Electric Rembrandt about a tattoo artist and Ted Hughes' The Thought Fox about a poem being printed. David Gewanter follows a theme through from The Wound to Lament on 'the body's adventure', including a parallel between the openness to experience and the way 'the [AIDS] virus renders the body open and defenceless'. Tom Sleigh veers a little too far from the subject area by discussing how Gunn reconciled the hedonistic lifestyle with domestic stability and makes it a civic issue. But Brain Teare occupies sixty pages of our reading lives with a discussion of 'gay poetry' despite the fact that Gunn had said he didn't regard himself as such but as a 'poet of everything', which any poet worthy of the name ought to be. Gunn at least is far too good to be limited by such a label and it is only much poorer writers that need such epithets to give their work the appearance of some significance. In the same way that there isn't, or didn't ought to be, a need for such a thing as women's poetry, 'gay poetry' is a non-starter, too, but since Teare has won an award for it, he is unlikely to agree. Unfortunately critics and commentators often use their subject as a way of writing about themselves and that is what Teare, to the deteriment of this volume, has done here.
Poetry, above all, is concerned with the words, the words in the poems. The sub-title of this book, On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, suggests that it is going to discuss the poetry but far too much time is spent by academics developing their own avenues of thought away from the poems and such work is of limited use or interest. If it does nothing else, it makes one return gratefully to the poems themselves.

Thom Gunn, Poems selected by August Kleinzahler

While we are on the subject of Thom Gunn, it might be a good time to bring forward two previous items-

This review first appeared in Acumen.

Thom Gunn, Poems selected by August Kleinzahler
(Faber ISBN 978 0 571 23069 3, £3.99)

Faber’s ‘Poet to Poet’ series has recently been extended. In the original list, Thom Gunn introduced and selected Ezra Pound and now has August Kleinzahler doing the same for him. As a friend and admirer of Gunn, both urbane and urban poets and each having written essays on the other, Kleinzahler is well qualified for the job as a kindred spirit, in with the out crowd and with a similar post-Beat demeanour but Gunn’s poetry was always much more than a product of sixties culture.
Kleinzahler redresses a perceived imbalance in the widely expressed critical views of Gunn’s career in his selection and explains his choices persuasively in a brilliant introduction. Giving us only two poems from Gunn’s first volume, Fighting Terms, which he describes as ‘top-of-the-line juvenilia’ and not many more from The Sense of Movement, he leaves out many of the long standing anthology pieces that first made Gunn’s name. And where some critics perceived a loss of direction and stylistic uncertainty from the publication of My Sad Captains, in 1961, onwards, Kleinzahler argues that this mature Gunn is the real one whose achievement was ‘extraordinary’.
The selection of poems here is dominated by the pleasure-seeking poems from the 1971 volume Moly and the elegies from the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco from The Man with Night Sweats which appeared in 1992. Even Gunn himself once nominated Moly as his favourite among his own books as it seemed something of a neglected child. And while this re-evaluation of Gunn’s oeuvre is timely and might in time become a new orthodoxy, there are a number of poems missing that established Gunn’s name, maintained what was a more consistent level of achievement throughout his career than this selection suggests and would provide more contrast, demonstrating how far Gunn developed in theme and method from his highly metrical, sometimes bleakly philosophical first poems.
The inclusion of ‘Lofty in the Palais de Danse’, ‘Carnal Knowledge’ and ‘Elvis Presley’, at least, from the 1950’s would illustrate how Gunn’s poetry turned around from a view of human relations as a strategic enterprise, through the discovery of a more humane touch, towards a hedonistic inclusiveness. Kleinzahler bypasses a host of impressive poems from Jack Straw’s Castle, from the political engagement of ‘Iron Landscapes’ to the enduring empathy of ‘Thomas Bewick’, ‘The Cherry Tree’ and ‘Breaking Ground’, to name by no means all of them. And although he makes some good choices from the last volume, Boss Cupid, the omission of ‘The Butcher’s Son’ in which Gunn’s plain language achieves a disarming transcendence is as close to a mistake as a personal selection can make.
Gunn had all but disowned such poems as ‘Lines for a Book’ in which he purported to admire ‘the overdogs from Alexander to those who would not play with Stephen Spender’ and has expressed the view that his best known piece, ‘On the Move’, had come to look stilted and dated but Kleinzahler could hardly paint such a crucial piece out of the picture. However, for him, it is the opening lines of Moly that is the real seminal moment, an instance of transformation both as the theme of the poem and in Gunn’s career. It is one of several points in a gradual process where one can point to the increasing ‘personal abandon’ and relaxation both in form and content which had been noticed by such as Ted Hughes when commenting on the perceived parallels between his poetry and Gunn’s and saying that, for him, Gunn had always been a poet of gentleness.
Of course, we do get the three lyric masterpieces, ‘Tamer and Hawk’, a beautifully controlled love poem about control in the Elizabethan manner; ‘My Sad Captains’, a syllabic farewell to his more metronomic early style and ‘Touch’, a free verse reaching out for understanding of the other but we are then invited to concentrate on Gunn’s sensory adventures in poems like ‘Sunlight’ and ‘The Discovery of the Pacific’, fine poems in themselves but poems in which Gunn intellectualises his response to nature while we are not offered so much of the urban Gunn we would see in ‘Night Taxi’ from the under-represented The Passages of Joy. One is less inclined to argue about the number of poems from The Man with Night Sweats, probably Gunn’s most successful book but the selection, perhaps due to restrictions of space, still misrepresents the range of Gunn’s work.
But Kleinzahler’s close reading and deep appreciation is always evident in his essay, noting exactly why it was that Gunn was identified with other poets that emerged in the 1950’s but clear and instructive on the more important relationships he had with poets from previous centuries, like Donne, Ben Jonson and Fulke Greville. His examination of Gunn’s impersonality in the poems is exemplary, as is the explication of how he used strict metrical poetry to impose form on the elusive, fugitive experience of taking LSD. Kleinzahler admirably does this without using the word ‘objective’ which must have seemed tempting but wouldn’t be right.
He praises the lack of rhetoric, the honesty, the Plain Style so admired in Jonson (‘unembellished, clear’) that in Donald Davie’s words allowed him to recover ‘that phase of English …in which language could register without embarrassment on the one hand the sleazy and squalid , and the other hand the affirmative, the frankly heroic’ and which leads Kleinzahler to call The Man with Night Sweats ‘magisterial’.
Kleinzahler’s account of Gunn is a great tribute and an admirable close interpretation. It is significant for moving the focus within the body of work and thus argues against much of what Kleinzahler sees as a previous misreadings. Gunn’s poetry lends itself well to selection but mainly because each volume contained its quota of memorable poems alongside some that were more ephemeral or are now starting to look rather ‘of their time’ and another book selected on that basis would tell a different story. But Kleinzahler’s book is a cogent and sensitive contribution to the discussion of a poet whose reputation as one of the major poets of the twentieth century can only be enhanced by it.

Thom Gunn Obituary

This obituary first appeared on the website of The Reader in 2004,

Thom Gunn (1929-2004)

Thom Gunn died on Sunday 25 April in San Francisco.

One of the more obvious things to say would be that it’s impossible to imagine that a poet who celebrated the joy and thrills of being alive so eruditely is really dead. Even at 74, Gunn’s associations with youth and counter-culture made him seem unlike someone who was growing old. It is often an artist’s early work that defines them and the poems from the 1950’s about Elvis Presley and motor bikers seemed to define him as eternally young, turning ‘revolt into a style’. Certainly Gunn was interested in the superficiality of ‘cool’ but it was the formal, controlled and elegant (‘metaphysical’, apparently) way that he expressed his involvement with it that made him a genuinely ‘cool’ figure himself.
Along with Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, he was one of the three major English poets that emerged in the 50’s. At first his poems were compared with Hughes’ for their interest in energy and even violence and with Larkin’s for their formal structures which seemed to suggest he was a part of the much-discussed ‘Movement’. As is the case with many of these generalisations, very little of it proved to be lasting or relevant. Gunn moved to San Francisco and became a trans-Atlantic writer, teaching at Berkeley University and more interesting for his differences to Larkin and Hughes than his similarities.
The poet and critic Donald Davie, writing in Under Briggflatts, his book on the poetry of the second half of the twentieth century, wrote that

as I put it together I was surprised how insistently Thom Gunn shouldered to centre stage.

Not being exactly the household-name poet like Betjeman or Larkin, Thom Gunn was, in that stilted phrase, a poet’s poet.
The development of Gunn’s theme was in a way, one big process- from the inward-looking, philosophical edginess of Fighting Terms and The Sense of Movement finding separateness and the definition of limits everywhere to an opening out in Touch and beyond where he celebrates a shared humanity and escapes the ‘patina of self’. Having immersed himself in a network of human and natural relationships in poems The Geysers and The Discovery of the Pacific, it was tragically the AIDS virus that took away many of his friends in the early 90’s which he wrote of and received much acclaim for in The Man with Night Sweats.
At the same time, his poems moved from strictly-organized, formal rhyme schemes to syllabic and free verse. He was one of the few examples of C20th poets whose work you could confidently point to and show that poetry didn’t have to rhyme.
His last book, Boss Cupid (2000), was partly anecdotal and thus as uneven as some of his earlier books had been said to be. Nobody publishes perfect poems all the time. But it contained several memorable, humane and celebratory pieces, not least of which among them was The Butcher’s Son, a memory of his childhood in the 1939-45 war and The Gas Poker about his Mother's early suicide. They were among the best poems he wrote.

Poetry

Poetry

Some do it in pursuit of great repute,
attempting metaphor, symbol or trope,
supposing that their audience will be rapt
and beg them for an encore or repeat.

But poetry is also a trap
into which the unwary vainly troop
and their poems can seem somewhat de trop.
Thus poetry begins to fall apart.

Signed Poetry Books - August Kleinzahler

These hieroglyphs are inscribed upon Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow by August Kleinzahler and since I have another similar, I take it to be his signature.

Signed Poetry Books - Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon read at the Poetry International at the South Bank in 1999. I waited patiently to get his autograph during the interval. I had just sent a review of Hay to the Acumen Poetry Book Review competition.

I told him that he'd be able to read it when it won. He said he'd look forward to that so I hope he enjoyed reading it because, funnily enough, it did win.

Signed Poetry Books - Tony Harrison

Tony Harrison was good enough to sign this copy of The Trackers of Oxyrinchus at the National Theatre in 1990 but the thrill seems to have worn off eventually for Angela because it was for sale on e-Bay several years later.

Kathryn Simmonds

Kathryn Simmonds, Poetry for Beginners, Radio 4 Afternoon Play



Kathryn Simmonds' Sunday at the Skin Launderette was just about my favourite book of poems published last year, so when I happened to notice that the Afternoon Play had been a repeat of a play by her, I was keen to find it on Listen Again.

It is set on a residential poetry course and the rest of the action writes itself. One of the two tutors is indisposed and so traditional, 'conservative' Celia has to work with young, dyed-haired slam performer, Fran. Retired teacher William, fan of Wordsworth, makes a direct line for Celia but she prefers the attentions of Nick, who is younger and 'a painter'. The obvious opposition is set up of old, traditional poetic technique against young, innovative, quick fix improvisation. Conflict comes to a climax over dinner and then the final session breaks down as each participant wants to pursue their own personal project.

The denouement depends on Celia finding Fran's recording device on which she makes her notes. Needless to say, the recordings found on it have large repercussions.

It is a beautifully-made set piece of Radio 4 drama, not necessarily extending our ideas about poetry but using a number of stock elements to provide 45 minutes of fine entertainment. Poetry, being such a precious and personal thing, is an ideal vehicle for such a comedy of ambition, self-delusion, lust and catharsis and Poetry for Beginners observed both the poetry scene and human nature with an uncomplicated humour.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Groundlings Theatre Company, Portsmouth New Theatre Royal, Friday 3 July

MND was the first Shakespeare play we were introduced to at school and I hadn't knowingly returned to it since. It's possible that not everything that is by Shakespeare is bound to be wonderful- Love's Labour's Lost at The Globe a couple of years ago was little short of torture- but it can also be to do with the production. I have a feeling that any Hamlet, however badly done, is likely to be better than Shakespeare comedy not delivered convincingly.
But it might be a personal thing and only my problem. This performance was rapturously received, possibly because local AmDram like this is supported by friends and family of those that are in it. Most of the poetry readings I've appeared in have had an audience that consisted of the other poets that were reading and their friends and mine, so it's a bit like a mutual support group.
That is not to say that the Groundlings' performance was without merit. It was choreographed with imagination and sustained energy and the leading parts were properly realized. It sometimes suggested it might achieve the necessary magical feeling. But, on the other hand, if you don't personally know the bloke dressed up as a woman in a bad blonde wig, then his female impersonation can stop being hilarious quite quickly. And it began to apply to the whole production that it was a bit screechy and depended too much on dashing about.
I'm sure there were stars in the making among the cast should they choose to pursue acting as a discipline in the future but, there would be no point in reviewing anything if one simply delivered nice platitudes to everything one sees, and quite honestly, this was too ambitious for the talent available and no amount of costume, make up and movement was going to disguise something of a hole in the middle of it. I don't think it was entirely Shakespeare's fault.

Umbrella

I'm hoping that somebody will soon write to tell me that the vogue for these poems is over. As occasionally does happen, I was struck by a word while reading and it demanded to be a new poem. The word 'umbrella' was in a Donaghy poem- and if it's good enough for him, it's far too good for me.
It has associations for me, not only Rihanna's summertime hit but the downpour in London last year on the day we went to see The Magnetic Fields and they didn't play All the Umbrellas in London. And also, my early career as a retail jeweller. While it is certainly true that the search for rhyme extends a poem into places it wouldn't otherwise have gone, I'm not sure everyone will be able to follow me to all those places.
And just look at the fuzzy rhymes I threw away- ramble, bloomer, mob rule, ---l rumba, ---m rebel and it is a great shame not to have used creme brule.
Nevertheless.

Umbrella

The weather gods are above censure or blame.
The Earthquake Mass of Antoine Brumel
was playing on a stereo album,
the street was like a club’s chill out blue room.

Rain ran down the inlaid shop-front marble
where precious stones- quartz, corundum, beryl –
dozed in the windows like librium.
And then the thunder repeated its rumble.

My Favourite Poem - Geraint Thomas

Geraint Thomas mentions a few possibilities, like Pope, R.S. Thomas or The Prelude before nominating Y Mabinogion.

http://www.webmesh.co.uk/Mabinogionhomepage.htm

I hope you all enjoy it.

I promise you I haven't started making these things up. There really is a Geraint Thomas and he does tend to make patriotic selections.

Next week- Hamish McSporran nominates Robert Burns.

David Hockney

David Hockney is art's Jimmy Saville. Now then, now then, now then, 60's pop icon turned into ageing caricature of themselves as a sort of blunt Yorkshire idiot savant. Owzabout that, then, guys n gals. He is likeable and his paintings are usually quite cheerful and he talks a good game and he looks and notices things but he is probably Britain's most popular living painter because he is one that everyone's heard of and he is not very difficult to understand.
BBC's Imagine showed a film last night that followed him around for three years, returning to Yorkshire to paint the countryside with prolific application to his subject but apparently bringing Californian tones to brighten the summer pictures with. It updated the similar previous documentaries that television has been allowed to do, the theme of much of which has been what it's like to be David Hockney. He thinks and talks a lot about painting, seeing and looking but whether he is a great painter or not will remain a debatable point. One minute you see him applying the broad brush as if emulsioning the dining room and then you see him casually walk up to a canvas to add one line and you can see it is perfect. But he smokes apparently constantly, even indoors at the Royal Academy, so he must have a big reputation to be allowed to do that.
It goes without saying that there should be more such things on television but we are grateful for what we get. The film didn't enhance Hockney's standing much for me but it certainly didn't lessen it. He has always been superficially at the forefront of artistic innovation with his photographic collages, fax art and other publicity grabbing maneouvres. Now he is post-photographic, using a digital camera as an aid in the construction of vast paintings of woodland that he can't ever have been in a position to get the perspective. It is impressive. It will be nice to catch it at the Royal Academy if one can.
And Hockney will continue in his own sweet way, incorrigible and knowing, a spectacular colourist- popular, likeable and possibly forever with a reputation slightly in excess of his talent.