Top 6 - Seamus Heaney

If anybody knows the whereabouts of a spare ticket for Seamus Heaney's reading in London on Sept 14, please get in touch and name your price. It just goes to show that you really shouldn't leave the internet alone for more than a couple of days or else you might miss something important.

I'd also be interested if anyone has ever seen a bad review of Heaney since there might never have been such a thing.

I had been leaving his Top 6 for a guest to do if anybody fancied the job but since now seems a good time to be celebrating him, I've spent a glorious sunlit couple of hours sitting under a whitewashed gable to do the job myself.

I had no need to check on A Brigid's Girdle, one of my favourite poems by anybody ever and as lovely as a piece of harp music.

Soon after it comes Sunlight, a memory of his mother that a friend of mine once said made him get up and do a jig around the room after reading it and he wasn't wrong.

The early Personal Helicon is more self-consciously literary in intent but made a statement of purpose that he lived up to ever since.

Re-reading the pile of books I have here brought to light a few lesser known pieces that I'd like to highlight hear rather than nominate the established anthology pieces. Servant Boy is one that made an early impression and retains a place among highlights but The Outlaw was a tremendous find, an account of taking a cow to be serviced by an unlicensed bull at another farm, the bull described as,

Unhurried as an old steam engine shunting.

and Victorian Guitar, a relic of a girl's lost life as herself before marriage seems to have stolen her individual identity as a musician allowed to express herself while her guitar has a continuing life in other hands.

Of course, there's more to it than that and I choose the more lyrical, sympathetic Heaney over his meditations on primitive violence and archaeology but it's a personal choice and allcomers are welcome to pick an entirely different six should the urge take them.

Top 6 - Roger McGough

In the 70's we used to wonder what the Rolling Stones would do when they got old and having waited those 40 years to find out we know that they would keep on doing exactly the same thing. The same could be said of Roger McGough, a teenage hero of mine in the mid-70's but whose whimsical hippiedom hasn't aged quite as well as other claims on my affections. Now comfy and cosy on Poetry Please, some young gunslingers now might not believe you if you told them he was once really cool and state of the art.

Thus, this selection is a little bit of a nostalgia trip, but there's plenty still to like among the witty wordplay and cuteness. If he was partly e.e.cummings and partly Allen Ginsberg then the influence of cummings was always likely to be more beneficial.

Roger's biography, Said and Done, is worth a read for its anecdotes of zany sixties life on the road, particularly the story of the late night stops at motorway service stations, the homebound poets concocting the most outlandish dishes from the self-service, like coffees with celery sticks in them or steak and kidney pie and custard (but don't quote me exactly on that). The bored cashier would just take one look, key in the items and say,'one pound, eleven and six, please'. That is misquoted because I don't have the book here but I can vouch for his generosity in contributing a poem to our magazine at University and, at the end of the reading we arranged, just handing me a pile of books to sell, telling me the price and then not checking my takings once the crowds had dispersed.

40-love is an obvious selection, using McGough's visual effects of word arrangement to full effect, making the eyes move across the page as if watching tennis.

after the merrymaking, love? will always stay in the memory for its line, 'sleep./ In the onrush of its lava.'

The poem he let us have for the much unlamented Allusions magazine was Poem for a Dead Poet and it wasn't just any old outtake he had lying around because it made it into the New Volume follow up to the hugely popular Mersey Sound anthology,

St. Francis, he was

of the words. Words?

Why, he could almost make 'em talk.

Thank you, sir. The cheque might still be in the post.

.

But it's forlorn melancholy with the sad little joke that he did best, and still does.

In ofa sunday, it's

[i]... *

miss mass

and wonder

if mass

misses me

(*the typographical tricks on this occasion mine for editorial purposes);

.

in kinetic poem no.2, at his most cummingsonian, it's

without love

i'm just a

has been away

too long in the tooth

.

and although long poems are usually best avoided in this Top 6 feature, and so we haven't had Homer or Virgil yet, one probably can't avoid summer with monika, with such morose charm as 'your finger, sadly, has a familiar ring about it'.

He does rather lend himself to quotation because that is the whole point. Nobody apparently relished the job of 'poet' more and now that poets are more likely to be either po-faced creative writing tutors on university pay rolls or 'performance poets' few could have carried it off for quite so long.

Photo credit- Murdo Macleod.

Writing Utensils in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney

One can't help but notice the above-average occurence of references to writing implements in Seamus Heaney's new book, and noticing such things is how literary analysis can work and how theses come into being if you're not careful. Having noted a series of such linked features of a writer's work, all one has to do is note them down and explain what their significance is.
Having noted the nostalgic The Conway Stewart, perhaps a memory of his first fountain pen, its squelching, sucking repertoire of amusing noises and the feeling of style and maturity it confers, later in the book come Colum Cille Cecinit, Hermit Songs and 'Lick the pencil' in rapid succession.
The first is versions of three short 11th-12th century Gaelic pieces, the first reflecting on the cramp endured from the writing invested in the storing of wisdom; Hermit Songs relates memories of school and the stationery cupboard, again mixing the subject with the mere utensils of study,
...then Cuchulain

Entertained the embroidery women
By flinging needles in the air
So as they fell the point of one
Partnered with the eye of the next

...As in my dream a gross of nibs
Spills off the shelf, airlifts and links
Into a giddy gilt corona.

'Lick the pencil', another poem presumably in memory of his father, lists some habits that could be nicknames, most memorably a colouring pencil that marked the skin purple as the skin can letter become.
We might then remember that Heane's early 'manifesto poem, Digging, begins,

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests, snug as a gun,

and ends,

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests,
I'll dig with it.

Also, in that first book, Heaney names a poem about his investigation of the farm's earth and wells, his Personal Helicon. This consciously literary way of looking at the world was a part of Heaney's process right from the start, then, and the pen and writing implements more than the extended desk stationery fetishism and celebration of the paperclip to be found in Douglas Dunn's Dante's Drum-kit.
The writing and the world written about are merged by the pen and, on another level, too, with a consciousness of other past literary figures whose traditions he carries on. And, perhaps this awareness of old-fashioned writing paraphenalia, the ink-wells and variety of implements from fountain pen to pencil to crayon, is a way of identifying with the history of writing because he doesn't seem to mention any computer screen or keyboard.
But on the other hand, he's a writer, isn't he, so it's hardly surprising that he occasionally mentions the tool of his trade that he sees lying around every day. He just happens to have written a few poems with writing implements in.

Seamus Heaney - Human Chain

Seamus Heaney, Human Chain (Faber)

Over the years there has been a tendency in reviewers of Heaney to welcome each new volume as a 'return to form'. There was a similar habit in reviews of David Bowie albums after the 1970's but whereas many of us suspect that Bowie never really regained the greatness of his tremendous sequence of LP's up to, say, Heroes, I have never been able to identify where Heaney is supposed to have ever lost it. This is his twelfth volume of poems and they seem to be consistently fine to me.

There is a sort of blueprint trajectory to the career of many, but by no means all, poets, in which 'maturity' doesn't arrive until the age of 35-40 and then after 60 there is sometimes a decline or lapse into repeating themselves. Again, this isn't necessarily applicable to Heaney and the most noticeable sign of his senior status in these new poems is in the number of poems 'in memoriam' of friends or other artists.

The human chain theme of the book is comparable to Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats with both aware of a network of human relationships but whereas Heaney's is generational and often within the family, Gunn's was emotional, sexual and being torn apart by the AIDS epidemic. But both involve a rich sense of community and both are suffering loss.

Heaney is sure-footed and with a disarming facility, his rhythms natural and organically a part of his thought and we are all invited to be 'vulnerable to delight', his generosity of spirit is undimmed like a sort of good-natured optimism and belief in humanity. For once, I began the book at the beginning and immediately the first poems lead you in to his world rich in sympathy and alive to the nuances of experience that he seems to translate so easily into language.

We are always aware that he is enjoying language and the power of specific, sometimes unexpected, words - 'spatulate', 'snottery', 'flop-heavy'- and also his consciousness of the literary, aware of Dante, Virgil and his classical predecessors.

The 'unfreshness' of his father's suits in a wardrobe is made attractive in one of the most moving poems, but the best is quite probably 'The door was open and the house was dark', another 'in memoriam' in which the silence and the absence spreads out from the house down the street and into the wider world. It is impressively understated in a book where not everything is quite so memorable and it might not be his best collection but I'm not sure I could say which is. A career without peaks and troughs contains fine poems from beginning to end and so doesn't so easily offer up a stand-out set but there's no suggestion yet that he is going through the motions as other great poets might sometimes do after 70. The previous book, District and Circle seemed to revisit his early chthontic (yes, chthontic !) concerns and this is inevitably also a look backwards in many ways but not in a way that suggests the repeating of the same themes. He is entirely comfortable in his own poetry and hardly likely to change much now.

Far too comfortable, though, it has to be said, is Faber's continuing house style in cover design. Their plain style seems to have dispensed with design almost completely as if their position as 'establishment' arbitors of taste and authority make such considerations beneath them and the mere thought of illustration or promotion something they have transcended. Publishers like Carcanet and Salt make much more of an effort and their books look the better for it. But the words inside speak for themselves and they appear to think that if they have Seamus Heaney, Don Paterson and suchlike on their list then they don't need to try any harder.

Bag-boggling

I was pleased to see Paul Muldoon (interviewed in The Times last Saturday) nominating The Flea as a favourite among Donne poems. It doesn't mean I'm right but it does seem a neglected classic and I'm not averse to having Prof. Muldoon on my side.

Whereas one who is rarely on the same side as me, it regretably always seems, is Steven Waling, the Manchester post-avantiste poet who reports himself 'unaccountably sad' on his blog at the death of Edwin Morgan, the senior Scots makar. I don't think it is 'unaccountable', though, I think it's because Edwin Morgan died.

Anyway, I thought regular readers might be interested in the Bag Boggling Championships, held in Swindon recently, a sport played only in my family which should soon be on its way to Olympic recognition.

The sport has a disarmingly simplicity and is open to all, remarkably on this occasion by everyone present at my sister's house last week.

As will be seen from the picture with my sister, Pam Chadwick, fielding a boggle, the aim is to hit or preferably knock over with a tennis ball a target placed in between the two players. Two points are scored for knocking the target over (technically known as a 'boggle'), and on this occasion the target used was a small log, and one point for hitting it (for which the correct term is a 'bag'). First to 10 points wins and so far no match has needed a tie-break so no rule has been invented to cover that eventuality yet.

After some warming up, I decided on a darts-type throwing action similar to John Lowe's classic style. But a first round match between Ron Chadwick and my mother, Mary, saw two underarmers in opposition which was an intriguing strategy appreciated by the cognoscenti within the game. With eight players taking part, it was a straight knock-out format with Chris Chadwick, recently returned from cycling from Land's End to John O'Groats, among the most fancied but an early casualty with the obvious excuse of lactic acid deficit.

Always played in the most sporting spirit, Pam reluctantly found herself in the final and, at 9-8, had a shot to take the title but missed. She wasn't likely to get a second chance at that and, yes, Ladies & Gentlemen, I won. What else did you think was going to happen except that it very nearly didn't.

Last year's champion, Nicky Stephens then turned up and a Champion of Champions match went 10-5 to me, too. First thing I've won since the Portsmouth heat of the Ottakar's Poetry Competition quite some years ago, thank you very much.

But, of course, it's not the winning, but the taking part that counts and a fine family occasion with the youngest competitor 18 years old and the oldest 73. It is a part of the traditional English summer season, with Henley, Ascot, Wimbledon and the Chelsea Flower Show, or, for me, The Swindon Literature Festival, Portsmouth Festivities, Arundel cricket, The Proms and sometimes The Globe.

The game's origins can be traced back to Nottingham circa 1980 perhaps , invented by my father, Phil, on the patio outside my grandparents back door, a more concrete version of the game with a brick as target rather than the more rustic grass and wood edition played this year. With professional sport so increasingly dispiriting and unwholesome, it could be just the game we need to re-establish Corinthian values and something that everyone can happily take part in.

Aubrey and Sickert in Oxford

John Aubrey (1626-97, pictured) was best known to me as the early biographer of Shakespeare as part of his Brief Lives. His dating of Shakespeare's up and off from Stratford to London is early and I for one would like him to be right on that as it would help our little Shakespeare biography project quite nicely, thank you. The Bodleian Library have an exhibition of Aubrey's books this summer, showing him to be an innovative biographer of his time, introducing significant anecdote and telling detail to both enlighten and, in retrospect at least, amuse.

However, biography was only one of many polymathematical areas of study that Aubrey was involved in, in an age in which one could excel in a variety of disciplines without being suspected of dabbling. Aubrey was a 'scientist' before the word, an 'experimental philosopher' in fact, and interested in Astronomy, Mathematics, Earth Sciences and was ahead of his contemporaries in dating Stonehenge as pre-Roman.

However, the exhibition is of books and however in favour of books one is, looking at them in glass cases has a limited appeal. Much better to look at are paintings and the recently refurbished Ashmolean has some particularly fine ones, especially those by Walter Sickert. I've long been an admirer of his study of marriage gone past its crisis, Ennui, all modern desperation and quiet horror. But next to it is the even finer Brighton Pierrots, pictured. The bright splash of vaudevillean colour is backlit as the show struggles on, end of season, early evening, empty seats and only an echo of better days. What a tremendous painting. It made the trip to Oxford worth it on its own and any day would be worthwhile if one discovered such a thing, and any year in which one discovered 365 such things would be quite a year.

World Enough and Time

Nicholas Murray, World Enough and Time, The Life of Andrew Marvell (Little, Brown)

.

Even though much of the remaining documentary evidence of Shakespeare's life might suggest he was both parsimonious and litigious in his property dealings, most biographers insist on showing him as a sweet-natured, well-balanced paragon of charm. It is much more difficult for one writing Marvell's life to swerve the numerous reports of hot temper, scurrilous satire, 'haughty and insolent' manner and the rewriting of his own history because that is most of it but Nicholas Murray's highly readable book makes a fine attempt at achieving a fair and sensible balance.

By no means all of Marvell's life was literary and much of the detail here is taken from his years as M.P. for Hull and his ongoing pamphlet wars with Samuel Parker, Bishop of Oxford. He represents an odd but still faintly recognizable strain of English liberalism, a staunch defender of religious tolerance and yet deeply anti-Catholic, puritanical and sceptical of others in ethical questions but quite capable of quickly over-writing his support for Cromwell after the Restoration, referring to his 'usurped and irregular government'.

He landed a wonderful job in the Commonwealth in 1657, as assistant to Milton as Latin Secretary, translating, drafting and deputising for the blind senior man, but he was clever enough to see ahead with a survivor's instinct where his best opportunities lay and after Cromwell's death he shifted his ground quite radically but successfully.

In the best tradition, he was an amateur poet, and one is left to wonder how important his literary work would have seemed to him when he is now remembered almost exclusively for it even though his life is here rather more a slice through the politics of the English revolution. His poems seek after solitude while his life was spent in busy London at the centre of government. His use of gardens as a metaphor for art versus nature runs parallel to the juxtaposition of solitude and sophistication, the orderliness of his verses a further, cultivated irony on his celebration of innocence and the pastoral. As a writer, he is highly literary and stylised, with art always a consideration above sincerity.

His work involves sitting on any number of committees and he reports back to Hull, lobbying for a lighthouse at Spurn Head and apparently conscientious in his representative duties, which are admittedly more to the businessmen of Hull than to the people as a whole. But he becomes increasingly anti-Royal and critical of corruption in Parliament, too, as the glorious restoration went quickly to bad. His puritan conscience, or perhaps just his urge to express himself in his chosen forthright manner, led him to make many enemies and he might have worried for his own safety. Some of the more controversial pamphlets against popery were published anonymously and even though he died of a fever, theories about his possible murder were inevitable when the physician's remedies had the opposite of the intended effect.

But Nicholas Murray's Marvell is not without some redeeming features. Thanks to Parker, we see him drinking wine alone at home 'to refresh his spirits and exalt his Muse'; he enters a poetry competition for the newly completed Louvre but doesn't win; he might have turned down a lucrative position under the king on principle when rumoured to be living in relative poverty and he doesn't marry or leave any traceable emotional attachment to posterity. And it is to Murray's credit that this last factor isn't allowed to dominate his book.

There's much to admire in Marvell's difficult, self-contained, rigorous attitude and much to like about Murray's account of it, too.

Prom 35

Danish National Symphony Orchestra et al, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Langgaard, Ligeti, Royal Albert Hall, 11 August.

One can't help but like Denmark. I'd know. I've sat next to one of their expatriates at work for several years now and it's never been less than a privilege.
Not everybody in the DNSO is Danish but the award to best Dane on this particular evening went to the principal double bass, presumably from the programme, Michal Stadnicki, unanimously voted by me and my mate as the musician most likely . An enormous and expressive presence who thrilled us throughout Sibelius 5.
However, Henning Kraggerud, soloist in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, is Norwegian and had already set a standard of bravura expression than no mere collective performance like a symphony was ever going to reach. No more than a child, I thought, reading that he was born in 1973 and therefore after the heyday of T. Rex, until I realized that that makes him 37. Like a young Alex Higgins, he looked lingeringly into the eyes of the conductor with such doe-eyed insouciance that was so touching we thought there must be more to it than the concerto at hand.
The list of Romantic violin concerti is a thrill a minute schedule of delight that can be excruciated to any height of passion and intensity and whatever the Bruch, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Sibelius or anything else can do for you, the diminutive Henning wrung all that and more out of the Tchaikovsky. And without being overly demonstrative or flamboyant about it. It never looked like he was showing off, he was apparently playing the concerto in the way he wanted to play it. It was about time I had the thrill down the spine and the tears uninvited back in my eyes caused by just an artistic performance. O, how I missed them while they were away. They are the real judge of whether one is genuinely excited by something or not.
Short choral pieces by Ligeti led into both the Tchaikovsky and the second of the three halves without a break, which meant that the conductor, Thomas Dausgaard, marked the time of attentive silence expertly before we were led into the unexpected curio that turned out to be Rued Langgaard's Music of the Spheres. Don't be put off by the title. I mean, do be put of by the title. I'm not entirely sure even now. It occasionally seemed much longer than its billed 36 minutes but then in several moments of its ever changing textures, its resource-profligate attitude towards bringing musicians together with organist, sopranos, choirs, piano and harp not contributing all that often, it was blinding, with the four timpanists playing off each other in two magnificent passages as sublime highlights. In some vague way comparable to some of the more listenable 70's progressive rock, like my old favourites Faust and Focus, it had sublimely memorable moments and one was glad to have been introduced to Langgaard without necssaily having to rush out to get the boxed set first thing the next morning.
Most charmingly, the biographical note in the programme explains that Langgaard 'remained an outsider, an obscure figure on the fringes of modern Danish music, regarded at best as a gifted eccentric. But now he is recognised as one of the most important Danish composers of the first half of the 20th century.' I'm not sure how faint praise is allowed to be before it becomes actionable but luckily I was with a highly regarded lawyer who works in that field and I might be asking him to look it up.
We, or at least I, went mainly because it was Sibelius and we love Sibelius and are immediately suspicious of anybody who doesn't in the same way that I used to think it was a bit peculiar if a bloke didn't like football except now that has progressed from the perfectly understandable to the quite laudible and should soon be made law.
The chill passion of the Sibelius leitmotif and Led Zeppelin would have called them riffs is almost unfailingly a great thing but, here, having Henning's act to follow and a few fussy misgivings, it almost failed.
I did wonder at the time if the bassoon would be given the acclaim of their own ovation and I also wondered if some passages were a fraction faster than I liked because, of course, I'm one of the top 30 world experts on Sibelius tempi and expect to be able to get lost in the wilderness they create. My private suspicions were confirmed when my learned friend, whose experience of orchestral music has long since overtaken mine, expressed further doubts about the brass.
It might have been better. My reaction to the Tchaikovsky was that I had been wrong to choose to go to Proms featuring Tallis and Monteverdi previously because I could go and hear the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in Portsmouth every month in winter if I wanted and I usually don't. I felt silly and sorry for thinking that after Henning but after Sibelius, the virtuoso double bass apart, I went back to thinking I was right all along. But the end is good and the acoustics of the Albert Hall were shown off to great effect with the echoes of the final hammer blows and it was neither the first time nor will it be the last that the later part of a show was overshadowed by something that came before it.
--

It's All Too Much

It’s All Too Much

at least 822 creative writing programmes in the US
The Guardian 11/08/2010

My giddy Aunt, I would never have guessed.
The biggest growth industry in the West.
So many confessions to be confessed.
At first you almost have to be impressed
but then you think it’s no more than incest
to write all that at a tutor’s behest.
So many trying to feather their own nest,
each with their own zip, impetus or zest,
ready for Friday morning’s verse contest.
Whose new slim volume will be the coolest,
Whose new sequence of poems will be best,
Which of their lines will sound the profoundest.
O, come on, you lot, Please give it a rest.
I’m afraid I long ago lost interest.

Quiz

I was genuinely disappointed to see Pat Gibson win Mastermind Champion of Champions last week. This is the highest level of professional quizzing at its least pretty with no chance of that great thrill to us casual, slightly hopeless, quiz players who like it when we luckily guess something right, or, more likely, are absolutely certain of an answer that turns out to be wrong. My trusty team mates in the KGB quiz team will remember my certainty about Vauxhall cars but, there again, I did say we didn't ought to attempt golf questions and then we did.

What I didn't like so much about the machinery of Pat's encyclopedeic knowledge was the time saving tactic of just giving surnames rather than wasting time with first names. John Humphries could have stalled him and asked for further detail on 'which Attenborough' was Director General of the BBC because there was more than one famous Attenborough. And the more likeable Jesse, who had got three or four wrong, was arguably robbed of the title. I don't know and I don't care all that much. It is only a game.

So, here's a game, for Pat, for Kevin Ashman, and for Bobby Bushell, who beats me up at quizzes from his precious bloody quiz book every lunchtime in the office whether I feel like a quiz or not. Look, Bob, I don't know if I ever said I was good at quizzes or not but I've said I'm sorry and I'm sorry.

Let's play at my home ground to give me a chance.


1. Which poem begins, Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard ?
2. General Sir Charles James Napier once sent the simple message Peccavi. What pun was intended?
3. Why is it difficult to say whether Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day or not?
4. Which famous English poet’s father drowned crossing the river at Hull?
5. Which possibly anti-semitic clerihew is written in what might be 'iambic unimeter'?
6. Which poet ‘hated Spain’, according to their partner.
7. What was the side effect of the man putting the ‘ram’ in the ‘ram a lang a ding dong’?
8. Which English sonnet begins ‘Mondjam: tarsad, masod a nyari nap?’ And in which language? Admittedly with various additional marks over certain letters.
9. Which poet won the King George in 2007?
10. Which poet might otherwise be against memoir?

Strait is the Gate

The list of things I haven't read is getting longer not shorter.

I am shamed slightly visiting my busier friend who has a more time-consuming job than me and notice he has War and Peace on the arm of his settee with a bookmark in it. I'm never going to read that now and my knowledge of Tolstoy will remain at the film of Anna Karenina and the knowledge that all happy families are the same but unhappy families are unhappy in different ways.

Wide reading and breadth of knowledge of music and painting is desirable and admirable but I wonder if there comes a time, and if I've arrived at it, when one no longer sees the whole contents of the library or music shop as things to be explored. Eventually one learns that there are things you simply aren't going to like and one's system closes down in defence against them, often to one's detriment but sometimes necessarily.
Whereas I once had symphonies by Mahler, string quartets by Shostakovich, LP's of music by Schoenberg, an intention to carry on reading Proust, perhaps give Gogol a go or do Dostoyevsky, I'm no longer sure and Verklaerte Nacht hasn't been played for maybe thirty years.
This isn't because I'm essentially unadventurous. I was as avant garde as the rest of them in the 70's with my treasured Faust Tapes, my later taste for Schnittke and I trooped through the Royal Academy for Sensation with everybody else and enjoyed it very much, along with The Maybe and supporting artworks at The Serpentine Gallery. I have the Konkrete Kanticle LP and the New Formalist anthology. It's a wide church and I'm very glad it is.
But the more you like the more you need and my student days taste for reggae meant opening a new pile of records with Dennis Brown, The Mighty Diamonds and such adding to my 30-odd Gregory Isaacs albums and then extending to The Jolly Boys on their previous visit to these shores in the 90's and then the rest of World Music opened up with The Bhundu Boys, South America and then Indian ragas and the great Rajan and Sajan Misra, for examples. When does anybody get time to play all of these records and read all of those books.
So eventually a bit of editing out becomes necessary and it's easy to make do with what little jazz I ever liked- Fats Waller, Lester Young, Satchelmouth and my dad's old Humph records. I'm with Larkin in not needing the noise John Coltrane made encroaching onto my playlist. Not when one could satisfactorily spend the rest of one's life just listening to either Bach's keyboard music or Handel's operas. That is notwithstanding Sibelius, Monteverdi, Byrd and Tallis, the monumental Magnetic Fields, T. Rex, David Bowie, soul and reggae and discovering remarkable treasures like Reynaldo Hahn's A Cloris, findable elsewhere here on this site.
Will I ever read any more Gide, whose beautiful novels made him such a favourite once. And, for that matter, Turgenev, George Moore, Maupassant, Zola or Balzac. This autumn is already looking booked up with Stephen's Fry's second volume of memoirs, Larkin's Letters to Monica, poetry from Heaney, Muldoon and James Sheard following on from the Kierkegaard I'm just finishing, the biography of Marvell that's coming and half price PNR's that always seem to turn up on their impressive two monthly cycle a little ahead of when they are expected.
So, sadly, the door seems to narrow as one realizes that not everything is any longer part of a big exciting world waiting to be explored. No, I haven't read Dan Brown or Harry Potter or Frederick Forsyth and however many people think I ought to give them a go, there are always others who advise that it won't be worth my while. It isn't healthy to close the door on anything but, however enthusiastically John Peel used to explain that he was more interested in the music he hadn't yet heard than the music he had, I'm not going to gamble the Vespers of 1610, Spem in Alium, Al Green and Electric Warrior against a blind hand. I'm not going to pass up Hamlet, The Whitsun Weddings and Dubliners in the hope that I might find something better elsewhere. I just don't think I would.
One used to, once, go into a bookshop or record shop, when one went into such places regularly, thinking that anything was possible and everything that was available was worth consideration and no doubt there will be much I leave untouched that would have made a great impression. But I listened to the first weekend of the Proms- well, obviously only a few minutes of the Wagner- and I realized that I didn't personally need Mahler's symphonies any more, and I'm happy to stay mostly with the operas I know. The door is always slightly ajar as Radio 3 stays on and offers up a variety of possibilities from its endless stock, the book review pages of newspapers highlight novels and other books that might sound worth a look.
But, more or less, one might have found one's ground by the middle of middle age and, although it might be a bit of a shame in some ways and a terrible thing to say, one knows what one likes and can embark on some enjoyable later years of relative philistinism, buy a symbolic pipe and slippers and become safely entrenched in one's own comfortable opinions, prejudices and tastes.

Top 6 - Ted Hughes

I heave the burly tome of Collected Ted across to the computer safe in the knowledge that I'm not going to have to read most of it. It has long been my considered opinion that his success with a certain sequence of poems took him off in a wrong direction and that his ideas about writing poetry prevented him from writing poems that I, personally, might have admired more. But it was up to him and every writer must do exactly what they feel like doing. Unfortunately, the restraints of this 'Top 6' feature mean that I can only mention 6 poems and so cannot be specific about where the wrong turn occured.

Now that it is 2010, it is pertinent to notice how the posthumous reputations of Ted, and his contemporary but very different rival in reputation, Philip Larkin, have been through vilification by the massed ranks of politically correct, feminist and other such ideologues to eventual re-evaluations when readers went back to look at the poetry and saw through their scapegoat status as betes noires for all the perceived ills of the world that seemed to need attacking at the time.

Tribute is paid elsewhere on this website to our schoolteacher, Linden Huddlestone, who introduced us to Ted Hughes at a fairly early stage of our literary learning. The simple fact that a poet could be called Ted was interesting enough to us then.

Later, in our first year sixth, Mr. Huddlestone put into practice his belief in a wider, liberal arts education and we 'read around' the subject, which included each of us being allocated a contemporary poem which we had to read and then talk about. And such was his belief in me that he put me on first to give my account of The Thought-Fox, which is both more and less than a characteristic Hughes nature poem because it is also a poem about writing a poem. Nowadays, of course, we might need a few less of such things but it seemed like a good idea at the time and the 'sudden sharp hot stink of fox' is only as important to this poem as the beginning, 'I imagine..', and the end, 'The page is printed.' But, either way, you don't study a poem like that aged 16 without remaining impressed for several decades and counting.

But it's not my favourite Hughes poem. That would be October Dawn, moving through consistently made half rhymes from the delicate 'premonition of ice' dreamed across the glass of wine left out all night to the 'tons of chain and massive lock' that might hold rivers, the re-introduction of the Ice Age and mammoth and sabre-tooth to the world. That's our Ted, never knowingly undersold when asked to find primitive power underneath the fragility of human experience.

Like many an appointed laureate, Hughes might have found himself producing poems that he might not otherwise have written. Lady Carol Ann's already done that and Sir Andrew was lukewarm more than once on such occasions. But Ted was probably even worse because he partly meant it but his first effort, A Raincharm for the Duchy, allegedly written for the birth of Prince Harry (whose truly royal credentials might still require some confirmation by DNA tests), was a tremendous opener. But it was suggested at the time, 1984, and looks just as much so now, that it might have been a Hughes poem about a deluge that was almost ready at the time and was dragged into laureate usefulness quite conveniently. That hardly matters. It is a wonderful poem.

The Hawk in the Rain might now be regarded as a starting point, a title taken for granted, somehow reduced in power because it became an early signature poem but it says here,

His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,

It is otherwise a very violent thing and hardly surprising that Hughes made such an early impact with such primordial subjects. That he was ever considered suitable for categorization with Thom Gunn, whose threats of violence were mere posture and who Ted quite rightly recognized as a 'poet of gentleness', looks strange now and critics and readers must be wary of such early assumptions.

Wolfwatching was the title poem of a volume that returned to shorter poems, which, to be fair, Ted had never stopped writing, somehow sadder but also inconsistently crazier in its support of conservation of species like the white rhino when Ted had done his bit to hunt and fish more plentiful types of animals to premature deaths. The wolf trapped within earshot of the 'roar of London' is sympathetic, a sympathy that wasn't immediately obvious in earlier poems.

And if the almost death-bed confession of Birthday Letters might have been valued for more prurient reasons than those of pure poetry appreciation, I can hardly help but include You Hated Spain with its,

You saw right down to the Goya funeral grin

and other raw insights into not just Sylvia, but Spain and the more expected Hughes themes. Including that poem means leaving out others than ought to have been certainties for such a selection.

Whenever I look at Ted I am reminded that although he really wasn't exactly my sort of poet, he was a tremendous one by any other criteria. And, yet again, another brief look at him has been quite rewarding.