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.

Monday 30 November 2009

Paul Muldoon, The End of the Poem


Paul Muldoon, The End of the Poem (Faber)

This isn't a new book by any means but it is worthy of some consideration after the fact nevertheless.
It is Paul Muldoon's lectures as the Oxford Professor of Poetry a few years ago. In some ways they make a companion set of 'close readings' to Tom Paulin's Secret Life of Poems (see elsewhere here), and just as Paulin will accept that he sometimes 'goes too far', Muldoon also in one place admits he's 'stretching' it a bit. But whereas Paulin concentrates for the most part on sounds and poetic effects, Muldoon's is a wider field of reference, like that of a crossword solver, finding relations and references to other poems and poets as well as in his characteristic play with words. Most readers won't find anywhere near as much in poems as these readers do, will be staggered how much there apparently is to find and then wonder how much of it is really there.
Muldoon begins by reading Yeats' All Souls' Night and in it finds Yeats echoing Keats, as his name does, but goes considerably further and among other discoveries shows that by describing glasses of wine he was thinking of the cork, and in fact, Cork, and associations with Irish history.
We may or may not think it instructive to be shown how Frost's poems involving woods have a hidden anagram, or an almost anagram, with his name in 'forest' but however many times we raise an eyebrow at such ostensibly forced coincidences, we probably accept the ingenuity and informed cross references that seem to imply that, yes, eventually all poems are made of previous poems and form a vast, integrated network rather than a diaspora of discrete works produced in isolation from each other.
Language, and English in particular, is made up of so relatively few vowel and consonant sounds that some linguistic patterning is going to occur whether a poet was trying to create an effect with them or not so all those essays one wrote at school praising the skill of the poet in creating such a masterful tapestry from words were half the time admiring things that any old language throws up on a regular basis. It would be difficult to write anything without some alliteration, assonance or unintended rhyme. Paulin's essays sometimes seemed to benefit from this inevitability but Muldoon's work is on a higher level of association, but one that requires a high level of familiarity with a wide range of poems in order to see them.
I had long thought it was only a happy accident that Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowning seemed to contain the unintended joke, 'he always loved larking' in the same way that Larkin himself used his own name in a personal in-joke with a girlfriend called Porter in the line 'porters larking with the mail' in The Whitsun Weddings. But as Muldoon points out (and I had never realized) Smith's poem came after the publication of The Less Deceived and the reference was more likely to be deliberate than accidental. Muldoon's reading of Smith shows her to be a far more terrifying poet than I had thought her poems ever suggested, the subliminal effects being much larger when made real and the desolation that Smith and Larkin share is highlighted by this reading. I must remember not to go back to Hull. And you'll be as surprised as I was that Stevie and Robert Lowell had an intimate occasion in a public place if you are prepared to believe everything suggested here.
The inter-relatedness of poetry is further emphasized by the way that Muldoon's lectures lead off from where the previous one finished in an impressive tour de force exploration of international C20th poetry. Lowell does not come out of it well, despite being acknowledged as a precursor of Heaney, but his translation of Montale's eel poem seems to get the lowest mark in a most instructive comaparison of the many versions of it made in English. The fairly obvious issues involved in translating poetry are made considerably more illuminating by the listing of alternative versions of a few passages where some poets are exposed as rather keener to write a whole new poem of their own compared to the more circumspect renderings of others.
This is a major, wonderful and exemplary set of essays. I don't know why I didn't get myself a copy earlier but I'm glad I did eventually. Muldoon is the paragon critic and reader of a poem, and if I'd already seen evidence of that I'm even surer of it now. The book is full of the best commentary, always entertaining if you like this sort of thing (possibly quite annoying if you don't), and once the brilliant detail has been assimilated the mundane conclusion must be that the effectiveness, the success of any poem depends more, if anything, on the capacity of its reader to elicit meaning or significance than it does on the poet to provide them.

Friday 27 November 2009

A Departure




It was about time we got away from the need to make lists of other stuff and about time for me to write a poem. You do realize that I usually only write four poems a year, do you. I've been working overtime this year trying to provide fresh material for this site. But it's been a great pleasure.

The social occasion marking the retirement of the much admired colleague was on Wednesday and apart from being the predictably great social occasion that ends up with the few hardcore drinkers still there when it's later than it should be, it might have been the last such that our now frighteningly Stalinist workplace ever sees. But I got a poem out of it, so I'm grateful. It's work in progress, but the work goes on. You're never happy with what you've done until you've completely lost it. The Still and West is a beautifully situated pub with fine views of Portsmouth Harbour which is why they probably have the nerve to charge three of the Queen's fine pounds as well as forty more of her sovereign pence for one pint of Guinness. I'm only glad I didn't pay for very many of those that I had.

But I promised you a poem, and here it is. It might look a bit different when it appears in print eventually but, happy retirement, Pete. Missing you already.




A Departure

That must be a cormorant,
sinister and clever,
riding the impatient tide
and diving from the surface
like a rattlesnake attacking
for somewhere in that murky
underworld he knows there’s fish.

He’s under water so long
that we think we must have missed him
but the rhythm is repeated
through the shifting afternoon
until I realize I don’t know
how many times I’ve seen
that ferry boat arrive and leave.

And the lights that sharpen
in the dusk across the nervous water
have no danger to warn of
but have nothing to symbolize
that we might hope for either.



Still and West, 25/11/09

Thursday 26 November 2009

Top 6 - Philip Larkin, selected by Colleen Hawkins



Choosing Philip Larkin’s six best poems represents a dream project for a naturally lazy person such as myself. His output was relatively small and all of his greatest poems are to be found in three slim volumes of poetry: The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. The juvenilia and uncollected poems are fascinating for the aficionados, but need not detain the more casual reader seeking out his best work. Larkin was his own best critic and only the cream of his output ever made it into his collections.

Going

The most economical and effective expression of Larkin’s notoriously extreme timor mortis.

Church Going

If there’s one Larkin poem that I’m absolutely certain will stand the test of time, it’s Church Going.

An Arundel Tomb


A powerful and – to a limited extent – consoling poem. Just don’t fall into the trap of getting too carried away by its famous final line. Lots of others have.

The Old Fools

There’s no phony consolation on offer here and much of this poem’s greatness stems from the fact that it’s so unflinching.

Broadcast

Romantic and full of yearning, but thankfully never sloppy or sentimental. Nobody likes a poet who slobbers over his beloved!

MCMXIV

I somehow doubt pre-WWI England was ever quite the quaint, trusting little Eden that Larkin imagines it was, but – whether it’s founded on a sentimental myth or not – MCMXIV is still immensely poignant.

Top 6 - David Green, selected by Dave Moxham


Dave Moxham undersells himself somewhat by claiming that he is not sufficiently widely read or knowledgeable enough to select from any other poet except this one, me. But it's a fine choice, in my view. He adds that his choices are based on non-academic and non-technical principles, just the poems he enjoys most or finds some emotional connection with. At least I think he said that, I'm afraid I reloaded Windows Vista on the computer and thus lost all my e-mails. Sorry about that.
Much more interesting to be selected by somebody other than oneself, I'd say. His nominations are, in no particular order Those Days, Later, The Graveyard Shift, Postcard, Kirstine and The Cathedrals of Liverpool.

Tuesday 24 November 2009

Top 6 - Martin Mooney




It beats me why Martin Mooney isn't a name seen more often in higher places in the strange little world of poetry. By all means, in recent decades, Northern Ireland has been over-crowding the place with major names but the fact that England might have been under performing is no reason for this fine poet to have been overlooked.

The fact that Blue Lamp Disco was published as long ago as 2003 gives rise to the hope that there might be a new book with us soon. Although that does remind me of the story of when one Oxbridge don asked another when he might hope to see his new book. And the answer was (something like) 'you can hope whenever you like'.

Dimitri Gregorievich Rasputin is a wonderful poem, full of working class spirit and fight, and daring to be longer than is required to fill a page or two. Not very far behind is Painting the Angel, moving and beautifully done. Much, much longer than the usual word quota expected these days is the early poem on Brecht .

I can't leave out the brilliant horse racing/bookies poem, The Cancellation of the Races. Two Pages from a Travel Diary catches the eye and it would be difficult to leave out Anna Akhmatova's Funeral but that is 6 already and I'm not saying I've done him justice at all.

The Big 50

I'm hoping to provide more than just lists here once again soon. I'm reading Paul Muldoon's Oxford lectures in The End of the Poem at the moment and it's a wonderful book and I'll write about it here eventually even though it isn't new.
In the meantime, in one of those attempts to define oneself I had intended to list the Big 100, my personal helicon of favourites across all genres of artistic endeavour. I soon realized that I'd need to include things that were great but not special to me if I was going to name 100 so I reduced it to 50. But, so far, I've only got 44.Andrew Marvell, David Bowie, Raymond Carver and William Byrd have been removed from the list which, in some sort of order, but not definitively in order, goes like this-

Thom Gunn, Maggi Hambling, The Magnetic Fields, Shakespeare, Philip Larkin, Handel, J.S.Bach, Vermeer, Gerard Depardieu, T.Rex, John Donne, Gregory Isaacs, Patrick Hamilton, Mozart, Mark Rothko, James Joyce, The Velvet Underground, Monteverdi, The Simpsons, Thomas Tallis, Al Green, Sean O'Brien, Emmanuelle Beart, Camus, Josquin Desprez, Ovid, Lindisfarne, Auden, Richard Yates, Edward Thomas, August Kleinzahler, James Macmillan, Peter Brueghel, Thomas Hardy, Sibelius, Buxtehude, Beethoven, J.D.Salinger, Marc Chagall, R.E.M., Vivaldi, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Haruki Murakami, Purcell, and possibly T.S. Eliot. Then maybe George Moore. And Sartre.

So, there it is. The anthology of a lifetime. I've almost certainly missed out something special, I don't know if Danny Baker belongs on such a list. Or Blackadder or Fawlty Towers. Neither can I explain how Sean O'Brien is rated one place ahead of Emmanuelle Beart or The Simpsons just in front of Thomas Tallis. But, while many will rightly question the list-making impulse, others will perhaps sympathize with the affliction and then decide not to attempt to try it themselves.

Saturday 21 November 2009

Top 6 - Andrew Marvell




Marvell was the subject of my third-year undergraduate dissertation and I haven't been back to him often in the last thirty years. He cropped up in Hull, of course, when I was really there for Larkin and I did go to St. Giles in the Fields in the summer but I haven't probably given him enough time and attention over the years.

If poets from bygone centuries had known how reluctant we generally are now to engage with long poems they might not have bothered but it has to be said that looking back through the Complete, one isn't tempted into anything over three pages long so, with apologies..

Marvell's poems, much likes Donne's are performances. You don't really believe in his cardboard characters or set piece scenarios. He was working at the dead end of a long tradition and remaking verse from cliches and hollow, familiar themes. To His Coy Mistress is knowingly and absurdly over exaggerated, and once we know that we can enjoy the ironic playfulness at work in the rest of the lyrics. Always in opposition but always in Parliament, Marvell seems like one of those clever survivors who knows a lot but doesn't hold deep convictions of his own. Or at least that's what he looks like. He apparently never uses the same poetic form twice. Always playing, experimenting, performing.

The Gallery is a nice conceit; The Garden a traditional symbol for paradise with its famous 'green thought in a green shade'; The Nymph Complaining on the Death of Her Fawn is a heartbreaking performance and The Coronet, to which my tutor John Mowat directed me to begin the thesis, is a humble hymn of unworthiness. The Unfortunate Lover is another typically 'metaphysical' study of love in which you just wonder if you notice the possibly ungenerous spirit of Marvell in sympathy with 'the malignant stars'. But somehow you still can't help admiring the lad.

Anti-Stratfordians Shoot Themselves in the Foot

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6923734.ece

Good stuff here from David Aaronovitch, attending a conference of all those who think Shakespeare might not have written the plays that bear his name. They might be united in wanting to remove the plays from the Stratford man but they 'cancel each other out' by all supporting different candidates for the authorship and having to refute the evidence required by their fellow conspirators who need those facts to support other candidates. They are Fred Karno's Army and laughable as far as that goes but the most depressing thing about them is their refusal to believe in genius and their apparent need to explain where the language came from. It just happens to be innate in some such rare people.
I wish I'd gone to this conference, it sounds like one big laugh after another.

Unfortunately The Times Books supplement today fails to maintain the high standard. On the back of this piece was their listing of the 100 Best Pop Albums of the Decade. Number 1 is Kid A by Radiohead and that dreary outfit occupy number 3 as well. The Magnetic Fields released two albums in the decade and neither are listed so there's simply no point discussing it. They had Is This It by The Strokes at no. 6 ( ! ). Swagger? No, stylized posturing.

Record of the Week

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_7Vv7RDUDg

...is Life by G Whizz.

Wednesday 18 November 2009

Top 6- Thom Gunn


You must be joking. Did you really think it was going to take me as long as this before I picked Thom Gunn's best 6 poems. Thom is picutured here in a tie-dye vest that didn't make into his top ten of them.
One day I might have to do Milton and there is every chance that Paradise Lost won't be in it but for the time being, it's easy. Without his example, I don't know if I would have tried quite so hard to make myself into any kind of poet in the first place so, yes, it is mainly his fault. Three early objects of sublime wonderment select themselves and they are Tamer and Hawk, My Sad Captains and Touch. Even I, the ardentest of admirers, might have begun to think that The Man with Night Sweats, however widely acclaimed it was as a return to form, didn't include anything quite so good. But it was never true that Gunn's career was patchy. There were plenty of good poems in every book. And there were several beautiful things in Boss Cupid, the last collection before he died, in among the anecdotal poems. The Butcher's Son is such an understated piece of genius that you have to check again if he really did do such a thing in such monosyllabic, simple language.
I can't afford any more choices from that last book but, quite honestly, I can't be sure, so I'm going for Rastignac at 45, which a lot of people wouldn't, and then I am going back to the last book for The Gas Poker.
It wasn't quite as easy I thought but sometimes one can know a bit too much.



Top 6 - Sylvia Plath



Now that some of the hysteria over Sylvia's death is diminishing, the demonisation of Ted perhaps not quite as shrill as it used to be, it's becoming more possible to see what was what.
Sylvia was an intense, intensely creative person and although the subsequent death of Assia Weevil do still make Ted look somewhat 'homme fatale', it does look to me as if her husband's early success upset Sylvia's competitive nature, top Fulbright scholar and all that she was. Her first book, The Colossus, is where I want to start in search of her best poems. The title poem, eponymously enough called The Colossus, and Spinster are enervated, controlled and powerful pieces that make her look potentially an even better poet than Ted, especially considering where Ted's went with Crow and subsequently. Both express neuroses but objectify them wonderfully and suggest that there was disturbance enough going on before Ted arrived to take all the blame.
All the Dead Dears and Hardcastle Crags make one wonder how much Ted was learning from her. Sinister and passionate, they have dimensions that his nature red in tooth and claw perhaps don't achieve.
The two posthumous volumes published after her death include the title poem Crossing the Water, which was a major teenage favourite of mine and I find it hasn't lost much of its power.
So I find that I don't have room for very many from the most famous book, Ariel, that gets the most attention but I can't in all conscience leave out Daddy.

Sunday 15 November 2009

A Chloris - Reynaldo Hahn

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNWKnXgrroA

It's not as baroque as it sounds when you look up Reynaldo Hahn's dates.

Cute, though.

Magnetic Fields Album and Tour in 2010



Good news from The Magnetic Fields website-

http://www.houseoftomorrow.com/

P.S. We'll be at The Barbican on March 22.

Saturday 14 November 2009

Top 6 - Thomas Hardy


I'm not going to pretend that I've read every Hardy poem but that's going to be the case with nearly every poet so the fact that The Complete Poems is a big thick book containing almost 1000 of them only makes it slightly more likely that there's a hidden masterpiece that one doesn't know about. One might, if one was feeling a little bit philistine, say that any poet who writes 1000 poems could probably have achieved a similar effect with 200.
The Darkling Thrush must be the Hardy masterpiece, its little glimmer of light and hope in a gloomy universe and the lyrical desolation done so well in such a strict metre. Not far behind is The Voice, equally representative of Hardy, remembering his first wife and haunted by her.
More depth of winter desolation in Neutral Tones, in which the scene is 'as though chidden of God', is an early piece before he returns to poetry much later in life after becoming a prolific and wonderful novelist. Its concern with the lack of God is echoed in The Impercipient which asks, 'O, doth a bird deprived of wings/ Go earthbound wilfully !' but then a teasing God turns up in Channel Firing, musing on whether he'll ever blow the trumpet for judgement day with the dead who have been so rudely awoken by the noisy war.
A Broken Appointment is a fine reconciliation with disappointment, consolatory in the typically Hardy way that finds some kind of seemingly slightly inadequate compensation.

Thursday 12 November 2009

Top 6 - David Green

I've been wondering about a new feature for this website for a while, with My Favourite Poem and Signed Poetry Books having run to a standstill. What we might try is Top 6, a selection of a poet's top six poems with brief notes about the selection process. And where better to begin than with me, myself, I. I'll put more poets on here as the weeks go by- for some reason I feel like doing Hardy next- but do feel free to contribute a piece if you feel like it. I'm always pleased to feature guest appearances.
In the meantime, anyone visiting here who wants to nominaste their favourite poem, please e-mail your choice, with some notes if you feel like it. And, of course, anyone with a signed book by T.S. Eliot, Auden or Larkin to add to my collection, please get in touch to arrange a convenient time to bring it round.

It's not possible that The Cathedrals of Liverpool could be as low as no.7 in any list of my best poems so we have to start with that prize-winning, iconic masterpiece ( ! ). It flowed from the biro onto the paper apparently unhindered by me and I was lucky to be holding the pen when it happened. Once in a blue moon things just happen to go so immacuately well. It wasn't even really my idea but I was grateful to be able to turn it into lines.
Piccadilly Dusk had a similarly beguiling effect on at least one kind reader and as a result these two poems were used in one of my more high profile magazine appearances, in the august pages of About Larkin.
From the latest book, TLOTGD, Everyday is surprisingly a springer in the market for me and currently exceeding my own expectations of it. But we need to consider the whole career and not just the latest pieces so Saturday Afternoon seems to me to still be doing all it ever wanted to do from all those years ago, certainly written in 1986 or before.
After that, it gets more difficult as several worthy poems with fine compositional ideas behind them queue up to occupy the remaining two places. I'm not going to try to fiddle it by mentioning the near misses but it might have been easier to have made it a top 7, or 10. I'll give it to Ovid's Waitress and Anagram.
But I am delighted that the poems since Re-read, the selected career retrospective published on my 45th birthday, have been an improvement on the poems in that book. Even if I say it myself.

Tuesday 10 November 2009

Censorship Horror Hits Workplace

The item below was submitted to our work's internal intranet to announce the retirement of a colleague. It was certainly intended to blow away the rather dull and plodding, same old jokes that generally adorn the retirements page. Quite understandably these pieces are checked for acceptability but quite alarmingly this was considered unacceptable, not only due to its mention of religious matters but also for fear it might upset animal lovers.
Of course, it's PC gone mad but the positive side to it is now having the chance to parade myself as a victim of censorship, a renegade artist and innocent dissident mistreated by tyranny. I'm Alexander Solzhentisyn, my work suppressed in my homeland. But here is the work, smuggled out to freedom from under the noses of the totalitarian state.
To be fair, I'm told that the ladies who banned it enjoyed it very much but they have their job to do and couldn't publish it.

Peter S....... is retiring on November 30th 2009.

Pete’s long career in Customs and VAT goes back to his early days working with a man he knew as Geoff who wrote poetry in his lunchtimes. Pete remembers the day when he was passing Geoff’s office in pursuit of a refreshing glass of ale and the fledgling poet invited him in. He explained that he was trying to think of an opening line to his new set of tales to be told by various characters on a pilgrimage to York. So Pete said, ‘Why don’t you begin with ‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote.’ Then he popped his head back round the door and said, ‘And not York, mate. That’ll never work. Why not make it St. Albans?’
You see, although Pete is officially well over retirement age, he has had so many parts replaced by now- eyes, knees, etc.- that the average age of most of him is estimated at about 55.
It was through a series of such lucky breaks that Pete rose through the civil service to a position in the court of Henry VIII where he had a pivotal role in the disestablishment of the English church. A little known fact behind Ann Boleyn’s failure to provide Henry with an heir is that she did not love the king and refused to share the marital bed and so for some time Henry had to be duped into thinking that a stand-in was really Ann and the best-looking courtier inevitably stood in to perform that noble role. Thus, the Church of England came about due to Pete S...... and it is the reason why we say ‘For Pete’s Sake’ rather than take the Lord’s name in vain.
Pete’s great reputation as a horse race tipster began on the day of the first Grand National. He had no interest in the turf then and regarded it a mug’s game and when asked who he thought would win this inaugural race said, ‘O, I don’t know, it’s just a Lottery.’ And since then, although he hasn’t tipped a winner since, he has been regarded as a sage and guru by horseracing folk.
Until last week, that was, when he was helping the vet in a stable in Ireland where the best racehorse for many years and priceless bloodstock prospect, Sea the Stars, was due to be shipped off to stud and a very moderate horse called Seize the Star was due to be operated upon in a very permanent way before embarking on a career over hurdles. Pete turned up with his secateurs and winning smile and cheerfully announced he was ‘here to do Seize the Star’ and the stable lad, who was very busy, thought he said ‘Sea the Stars’ and just said ‘third box on the left, mate’ without really looking. Following this quite expensive but perfectly understandable little mistake we are hoping that Seize the Star will exceed all expectations in his rather unforeseen stud career and Sea the Stars is red hot favourite for next year’s Champion Hurdle.

Sunday 8 November 2009

Devil's Advocate - Creative Writing

Creative writing was my favourite subject at school. There was nothing to learn, you just made stuff up so you couldn't get it wrong, it was almost as good as being on holiday. Similarly, in big school, English could be 'about' anything, there didn't seem to be anything to know and once I'd reached the limit of my interest in Maths in about the second year then it was ready to become my main subject hencefort and in perpetuity.
However, none of that means I wish I'd done Creative Writing at University. Having apparently imported this spurious non-subject from American campuses, it is now endemic in British Universities with whole courses of students becoming 'qualified' poets. As if the world needs more of them, producing further yardage of the precious poetry that they've have learned to make.
Michael Donaghy's book of essays attacks the industry in no uncertain terms but it has to be admitted that quite a number of my favourite poets earn their living, or a substantial part of it, by appearing on or administering creative writing programmes. J'accuse (amongst others) Sean O'Brien, Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, Roddy Lumsden but the list goes on for a very long time. It's not a bad way for poets to be given patronage, these meaningless sinecures dispensing pointless wisdom to hapless wannabes. But on the other hand it's an utter waste of time and makes no sense at all.
These qualified poets, emerging from University clutching their degree certificates, are too numerous to be accommodated in the same industry. Their graduate collection, in most cases, begins gathering dust there and then and employment outside of the Creative Writing industry is the likely option all too soon.
But that is assuming that Creative Writing can be taught anyway. The impulse to write comes from within and the way to do it needs to form itself naturally, certainly by learning from examples but not those provided by a Professor or Junior Published Poet in a classroom. The poet develops by finding their own models to imitate or avoid as the case may be and will learn from their own mistakes. Even if the mentor does impart some wisdom or influence that only makes it worse because subliminally or unintentionally they are going to make the apprentice poet more like them, closer to their own image, potentially subverting whatever talent there might have been in the novice.
But, of course, in the end there's no point failing the young bards in their early steps towards immortality. They'll pass, I'm sure. But it must occur to them that they can't all be due to be the voice of their generation.
Some of them (and I have heard this first hand from a tutor) even need to be prompted with ideas of what to write about. Imagine that, 'Right, then, Hughes. If you can't think of anything to write about then why not try a few animal poems. A Fox, a Hawk, a Jaguar. Maybe then do a whole book of them about a Crow.' You never know what might happen.
So I do rather wonder what the point of it all is, all these reams of verses, and all that hope and belief. There is enough poetry being written without actively encouraging more. It would, of course, be an untenable and awful thing to do but the world might benefit more from a severe critic in each English department taking a look at the work of young poets at an early stage and telling them not to waste any more of their valuable time.

Friday 6 November 2009

Kleinzahler's Music


August Kleinzahler, Music I-LXXIV (Pressed Wafer)

This is the heaven-sent sort of book that lends itself perfectly to bedtime or bath-time reading, being a generous collection of diverting essays on music that are just a few pages long, just the right length to entertain and amuse without demanding you have to concentrate for too long. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book from the beginning to the end as it is arranged if I didn’t have to, like if it’s a novel or a biography. With poetry books I pick out poems here and there, re-read favourites, find others and probably completely miss the point of any deliberate ordering until much later, if ever.
Kleinzahler’s pieces cover a range of musical interests not necessarily coincidental with my own but you can see where he’s coming from. In fact, out of his Desert Island 25 albums I’m not particularly ashamed to say that I’ve only heard of the artist or composers concerned on 8 of them. These are such people as Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Bartok, Bach, Dizzy Gillespie, Cole Porter. It is interesting to note that, having advertised his recent reading in London to my friend by saying that he might be poetry’s answer to Tom Waits he says he doesn’t care much for Tom Waits. Neither do I, although I’ve got nothing specific against the man. I only hope that my reservations are a bit like Kleinzahler’s in as much as I suspect Waits’ gambit of deep authenticity as being somewhat inauthentic. On the other hand, if the raw and real are things that Kleinzahler admires in music (John Lee Hooker mainly in the solo 1940’s recordings, or the dismissal of the vast majority of Johnny Cash’s albums, thank you very much), I’m afraid I don’t even care for ‘authenticity’ that much anyway and recently made the point that given the choice between seeing The Mothers of Invention or Buck’s Fizz, I’d go for Jay Ashton and The Land of Make Believe every time. And I won’t have a John Coltrane album in the house just in case it takes up space that anything with Marc Bolan on might occupy.
No music fan is a music fan at all if their music is limited to any particular genre. That’s not an interest in music, that’s a fetish. I look back in disbelief at the tribal attitudes of the 70’s when one’s identity was either ‘rock’ or ‘soul’ and it was regarded as hugely inclusive when Gloucester’s Cohesian Tentacle disco, obsessed with ZZ Top, Alright Now and Freebird, actually played Boogie Nights by Heatwave.
Kleinzahler’s taste, running from blues and Stax (rather than Motown’s cleaner commerciality) through jazz like Monk and Charlie Parker to Karajan, Glenn Gould, Beethoven, Bach and Bartok, is wide enough but not so wide that you have to admire him for it. But he’s always good, whether relating anecdotes about the stars or from his own life. You do need to know a bit about music to know what he’s talking about but you don’t have to know it all to enjoy reading his reflections on music and it’s always interesting to be offered such a detailed look into the mind of another music devotee.
I don’t remember The Beatles getting a mention but he’s interested in the Stones; he doesn’t appear to be interested in the Velvet Underground and you might have thought Aretha would be given more consideration but Monk is a genuine passion and, in this context, rightly so. He knows about Satie, Delius and the implications of Beethoven being made a Nazi icon, played by a Berlin Philharmonic with all the Jews removed from it and still brilliant.
This is a fine and wonderful book to which the epithet ‘idiosyncratic’ will have to apply until one thinks of a better one but it’s perfectly sane and reasonable, genuinely entertaining and it is the answer to the questioner who asked at the LRB reading if Kleinzahler was going to write a further book of memoirs to follow up Cutty, One Rock. Well, actually, sir, this is it. He’s done it already.
I don’t know how easy this book is going to be to get hold of in the UK but somebody will post it to you from America, I’m sure. It’s well worth having if you like the sounds of it. The only trouble with a book that you keep dipping into is that you are never really sure when you’ve read it all.

Eggheads


One wouldn’t want to admit to being an avid television viewer or else you might give the impression of being a low-brow and readers would never visit your website again. But I do watch a few editions of Eggheads each week, later on the iplayer or some such piece of technology. It is likeable, cosy, comforting viewing and I’ve gradually come to like all of the eggheads, from the pouting and preening C.J. to the immensely sensible Kevin Ashman but my favourite is probably posh Judith.
One quiz team I used to appear with were invited to represent a pub in Southsea for the first series before we knew what the quiz was like and I’m now quite glad that never happened.
However, last week during the sister programme, Are You an Egghead, it almost began to look as if I’d written the questions even though I had no memory of doing so. Firstly there was a question who wrote a Novel on Yellow Paper. Well, we all know it was Stevie Smith, of course, but given the options of Thom Gunn and Stephen Spender, the hapless contender went for Gunn. But I stared at the screen in disbelief. Thom Gunn was an option on a daytime TV quiz show. It said ‘Thom Gunn’ in writing on the screen. It wasn’t a dream either.
Later they were asked which poet’s letters were edited by Anthony Thwaite and had a biography written by Andrew Motion. Neither contestant knew but Barry thought it was Larkin. I stared at the screen more intently wondering which iconic figure from the pantheon of my literary heroes was going to crop up next.
No others did but a further question asked at which club some footballer had begun his career and although the answer was Tottenham, Fulham was an option.
I did once promise at one of Pete Custer’s Portsmouth pub quizzes that if Philip Larkin was ever an answer in one of his quizzes then I would pay the prize money. It never happened because most of the questions were about soap operas or Westlife but, it just goes to show, the poets of the 1950’s are on the fringe of quiz question material.
At this rate, I’m looking forward to when they ask who wrote The Last of the Great Dancers, was it Lionel Blair, Fred Astaire or David Green. They’ll never get that one either.