David Green

David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I publish booklets of my own poems, or did. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become. It keeps me out of more trouble than it gets me into. I hope you find at least some of it worthwhile.

Wednesday 28 January 2009

Lips & Bananas



Although there was a certain amount of material on the old website that didn't need to be there anymore, there were also some features that one doesn't want to lose. And although this new blog ought to be a fresh start, you might find the occasional item being carried forward.

One such thing is my painting Lips & Bananas (2007), gouache and marker pen on canvas. With its modernist echoes of Man Ray and Andy Warhol and a spilling energy all of its own, it adorns the wall of my front room while still being officially available for £10 000. But please buy it soon because the paint is beginning to peel off and I'm glad it was photographed before any restoration was required.

I never said I was a painter but, perhaps in the same way that it is said that we all have one novel in us, I apparently had one painting in me. I'm glad I got it out.

Monday 26 January 2009

Shakespeare's Life


For the first forty or so years of my life I was happy to accept that ‘very little is known’ about Shakespeare’s life and thought no more of it. However, over the last few years I’ve collected numerous books on the biography and even contributed myself in very minor ways. If more were known for certain about the life then there would have been much less written on the subject but the shadowy presence of the great man and the scraps of real evidence plus a large amount of speculation make it a rich area for thought and invention. Everybody wants to have a go at revealing the true Shakespeare from the clues available and they all want to make him their own.
My own interest was started with a late night television programme outlining some of the hidden clues allegedly left by Francis Bacon that caused a sizeable minority of sceptics to believe that Bacon was the author of the plays. Such coded hints are to be found in Love’s Labour’s Lost, in the longest word in Shakespeare’s work, ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’, which was found to be an anagram of ‘Hi Ludi, Tuiti Sibi, Fr Bacono Nato’, which is Latin for ‘These plays, produced by Francis Bacon, guarded for themselves’. So, you can see how much ingenuity went into some of the research. It is also thought that Shakespeare encoded a message of his own into the King James Bible, a work overseen by Bacon, in which Shakespeare puts the words ‘shake’ and ‘spear’ at the very centre of the work he did on the project to show that it was his work and not Bacon’s.
After I was given one Christmas the big, coffee table edition of Antony Holden’s biography which described how Hamlet was written in grief for the loss of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, which cast a shadow over all of the subsequent work and might have induced a loss of faith and a darker view of the world, I bought myself the full version of the book with all the words in it and it was an impressive book.
From there I found a book called Who Wrote Shakespeare by John Michell, which made the Stratford man an uneasy favourite in sizeable field of candidates for the authorship. At that stage, I was led to believe and write on the old website that the Shakespeare works were possibly written by a committee with Shakespeare as a nominal head or editor. But although that remains partially true in as far as there appears to be some collaboration with other writers, I’ve regained my senses enough to believe that the sequence of plays in some sort of chronological order is more or less the work of one man and there’s no sensible reason to doubt that it was the man whose name was printed on the front page of them.
I continued by reading a number of other accounts- Anthony Burgess takes all the myth and legend at face value and writes a beguiling life; Richard Dutton, whose book I had bought because he taught me at University, based his life on theatre studies; Stephen Greenblatt found Will in the World by cross-referencing passages from the plays with the life; James Shapiro concentrated on the seminal year of 1599 with all the political crises and the composition of Hamlet and Peter Ackroyd produced a beautifully written and insightful account.
It was about this time that I spent a winter writing an episodic website feature, eventually printed up as a very limited edition called Brief Candle, in which the major suggestions were that the ‘fair youth’ of the Sonnets was a composite of both Southampton and William Herbert, that Shakespeare and John Donne must have known each other and that although he seemed to keep signing off and retiring, he never really did.
Since then, some of the assumptions taken from the above established works have come to seem a bit glib and it has become clear that the shifting possibilities allowed by the few shreds of real evidence could still give more credence to some of the earliest biographers like Aubrey and Rowe. Great work found in Eric Sams’ book on the early life, Germaine Greer’s detailed research in Shakespeare’s Wife, Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger, Bill Bryson’s sensible, witty and brief best seller has done nothing to undermine confidence in a further re-adjustment of the known facts that makes me hope that one day there might be a further contribution to the slew of books on the subject with my name somewhere among the credits.
Most recently, the inestimable Samuel Schoenbaum has enhanced my collection on the subject with A Documentary Life which, as the title suggests, is based only on known material evidenced by extant documents and the book which, at the time, provided a survey of the whole industry, Shakespeare’s Lives, which is effectively a biography of the subject of Shakespeare biography. And without having read it all yet, it looks like a wildly exciting book.
So, because it is highly unlikely that there will ever be enough indisputable evidence to settle the matter, it does look as if the discussion will go on and on. The anti-Stratfordians, those who think that Bacon, Oxford or some other candidate, actually wrote the works, seem to be in retreat by now. It is left, perhaps for future writers, to continue to scrutinize the theories and worry the less credible of them into submission while there is never a shortage of writers willing to make gorgeous semi-fictions out of the glimpses of Shakespeare we are allowed. William Boyd’s A Waste of Shame was a highlight of the television year not long ago.
The Chandos portrait, pictured here, is thought to be Shakespeare because it could be the same man, at a younger age, as that pictured in the Droeshout engraving used on the first collected edition of the plays, the first folio, in 1623 by people that had known him and represented in the monument above the grave in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, as well as the fact that it was for a time owned by William Davenant, who was at the very least Shakespeare’s godson and some- including me- think might have been his actual son. But I’m afraid that once you get beyond the bare facts of a few legal documents, that’s how it works. It’s a mixture of dates, a variety of exhibits and then a moderate dash of sensible supposition.
Many of the major writers on the subject, including Auden and Greer, who you’d like to think better of, as well as A.L. Rowse, who never let the evidence spoil a good story, can’t help but let their imaginations run away with them. Some biographers are likely to find aspects of themselves in their subject. One would like to be among the few who could produce a coherent version of events that takes account of all that we know for sure and whose contribution has that bit of imagination that makes sense of it all.
I hope it keeps us going for a bit longer yet. 2009, being so significantly the 393rd anniversary of his death, the 445th of his birth and set to include my own 50th anniversary, it would be a monumental year to publish a ground-breaking essay on the subject. But, just in case we don’t, I think you can quote me on this-
Shakespeare died on 23 April, 1616. He was christened on 26 April, 1564. And thus it has been conveniently supposed that the National Bard must have been born on St. George’s Day but it’s about a 3/1 shot that he was born on 23/04/1564. And, as far as I know, I was the first to point out that although Shakespeare died on his birthday, he probably wasn’t born on it.

Friday 23 January 2009

Philip Larkin - The Sunday Sessions



Philip Larkin, The Sunday Sessions CD (Faber)

It might have seemed a few years ago that the Larkin legacy was being too deeply mined; the barrel scraped a bit too thoroughly. For a writer who was frugal in his lifetime in publishing his poetry and reluctant to read or reveal himself too much in public, it did seem that two biographies and the publication of work that might not have been given his approval was overly intrusive. On the other hand, when I did finally read Trouble at Willow Gables, the collection of very early attempts at fiction, and the Early Poems and Juvenilia appeared, it had to be admitted that there was plenty to enjoy in them.
The recordings on this CD appear now because they were only quite recently discovered, on a shelf in a garage. They double the number of available Larkin recordings and so are an important addition to the poet’s work. They are not private letters, they are genuine performances of many of his major poems, and so they are necessary and welcome and nobody can suggest that Faber are trading on the name by releasing sub-standard material after the fact.
In many ways it is only ever satisfactory to hear the poet themselves reading poems out loud. Actors are often too actorly and other readers might find inflections and stresses in the lines that the poet might not but, even if the poet isn’t a great reader, it is always much more interesting to hear their own account in their own voice and through their own personality.
Larkin probably isn’t in the same league as Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison or the inestimable live performer, Paul Durcan, as a reader. His poems are probably intended for the page but an intrinsic part of poetry must be its sound and so hearing Larkin perform them adds a great deal to these pieces. Certainly, there is a melancholy feeling to much of his delivery (as there obviously is in the poems) but he attempts more expression and liveliness than one might expect. He sounds quite posh by 2009 standards but he was at Oxford in the 1940’s and didn’t regard himself as posh at all. He is reserved and dignified, even aloof, but makes deliberate efforts to dramatize, and in For Sidney Bechet or Church Going for example, we appreciate the effort even if he can’t quite bring it off. Listening to the poems pass easily by without having to read them from the page, one is stuck by the jokiness and slightly awkward humour that informs the generally forlorn lyricism, the cartoon-style perception of a social world that he wasn’t entirely comfortable in and the dry wit with which he fended off a world that his best poetry successfully transcends.
So, he was by no means the worst reader of his own work among twentieth century poets, either, and one is better off with Larkin himself than Alan Bennet or Tom Courtenay standing in for him. Considering that the poems must have been written without public performance in mind, they are brought alive convincingly.
It has been reassuring to follow Larkin’s reputation since his death, through the accusations of misogyny, misanthropy, racism and miserabilism to a balanced and sensible rehabilitation. It is a credit to the reading public that they have been able to appreciate one of the finest writers of the twentieth century beneath the bad publicity of the politically correct and the piously fashionable left-wing criticism.
Frugality can be something to be admired, especially in comparison to the prodigious output of some other poets among which one is required to find the highlights in between all the other bits. Larkin’s editorial process seemed to occur at an earlier, pre-publication stage, or even a pre-composition stage, and so his Selected Poems would be almost the same as his originally published oeuvre, in The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows.
This could easily turn out to be the only CD I buy this year. I seem to have finally outgrown the need to rush out and buy pop records and I seem to have enough Bach keyboard music and Handel opera to last my meagre needs for a while yet. This isn’t a turntable hit that one would stay up all night dancing to with a glass of wine in one hand and the poems in the other but, for an admirer of fine verses of this circumspect and considered type, one can’t really be without it.
And if one last word of recommendation from this website were needed- it does seem incredibly unfashionable.

Wednesday 21 January 2009

New Acquisition- The Wound by Thom Gunn


Readers of the previous website will be familiar with the highlights of my library of poetry books which features a number of signed volumes by prominent poets of the twentieth century. And anybody in possession of unwanted signed books by T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden or Philip Larkin should get in touch.
A recent acquisition at what I think is a bargain price is this hand-written Thom Gunn poem, presumably written out and signed and dated by Gunn for an admirer. At £13.49, it seemed like a bargain to me. There is no doubt about its authenticity as I have a letter from Thom as well as a few signed books and this is what his handwriting is like.
The Wound was an early poem and not necessarily among my favourites of his but it really would have been too much to expect e-Bay to have the original manuscript of My Sad Captains gettable at such a price.
But it does give me a new marketing idea. Any and every David Green poem is now available in handwriting and signed on request. The going rate is £13.49 including p&p.

Monday 19 January 2009

This

I wrote this poem, or one a bit like it, several years ago after hearing on the wireless a news report about an emergency landing at an airport where plans were put in place to deal with any fire that might occur.

It seemed that news reports had not only gone beyond reporting things that had happened or which were going to happen but that they had started describing things that might have been going to happen but didn't.

Being as desperate for new poems as ever, I recently re-wrote it a bit and, needing something to begin a new website with, here it is...



This

This is the poem I might not have written,
These are the words you might not have read.
These are the things that might have been forgotten,
There must be something you could do instead.

That is a feeling that might have been passion,
That is a theory that might have been proved.
This is a style that might have been fashion,
Those are the movies that leave you unmoved.

This is the team that might have won the Cup.
That is a rule that might have been ignored.
These are the numbers that might have come up.
That is a luxury you can’t afford.

This is the fire that might have been started.
There is the man who might have been shot.
These are the lovers who might never be parted
And this could have been the News but it’s not.