I'll be most disappointed if I can't make it to Cheltenham for the Thom Gunn Celebrration, to promote the new Selected Poems, which fits in nicely with Alan Hollinghurst. As such, I thought I'd look at Clive Wilmer, the latest to edit a selection of Gunn, and got his own New and Selected Poems from 2012. Thus it was that I was reminded of when Lindisfarne first split and I saw the off-shoot band, Jack the Lad, described as 'surrogate'. There's no shame in that but it does suggest that they found no distinct identity for themselves beyond being ex-Lindisfarne. In Wilmer's poems I was immediately struck by how much like Gunn's they were and then found, in a poem to Gunn on his sixtieth birthday, how he openly says that,
I tried to imitate your 'mighty line',
and he does it very well, like the second generation inheritor of Gunn's tribute to his mentor, Yvor Winters. When he is in that mode, he imitates the rigour and cadences like Gary Numan taking up the electronic-period Bowie or Shakin Stevens doing his karaoke Elvis, but when he isn't, he's different again, 'poetic' in a Keatsian way, perhaps.
But as when Eric Idle played the Rutles songs to George Harrison, there are moments like With a Girl Like You when 'it's a bit close, that one'. I've done it myself, unwittingly. Pleased with myself having finished a new poem, I'm admiring my own handiwork and then, oh no, all I've done is re-make a Larkin poem, it's not quite as much me as I thought. Because somewhere in the sub-conscious, there's plenty there and the longer it stays there fermenting, the more one assumes it's one's own.
Wilmer's Charon's Bark, from a book first published in 1992,
me stranded on this shore
and glimpsing you,
too far out, too baffled by the crowd
and
your set eyes blind to the same look
in these that reach out after you.
is very close to Gunn's A Waking Dream, from a book published in 1982,
but he looks through me and beyond me,
he cannot see who spoke
Imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery.
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But not always.
More than halfway thrrough the old Ben Pimlott Harold Wilson, one difficulty I have with it is whether it's appropriate to listen to something sublime and wonderful like Bach or Buxtehude when reading of such underhand horse-trading. It doesn't seem right.
But the parallels between Labour's two most electorally succesful leaders start to dawn on one as soon as the difficulties Wilson had with a number two called Brown are set out in quite such detail. One can hardly expect politicians to be honourable. It was to establish if Wilson was any better than the latest generation that I got the book. Well, maybe he was the blueprint, based on the way he was at first very impressive in putting away blase, patrician MacMillan and the old school.
This analysis must have been done before but it's not just a volatile sidekick called Brown that Wilson and Blairr have in common. If they ever had any socialist agenda in the first place, it is soon compromised by becoming Prime Minister and both find themselves subservient to the American president. They both ride their luck to come away with impressive win ratios at General Elections and then hand over to the next man, who has been waiting a long time, so that it's them that can inevitably lose the next election. One thing you can say for Margaret Thatcher is that she didn't go willingly and John Major did actually cling on. But Wilson and Blair both went from being dazzling, young, apparently progressive Prime Ministers to shifty, untrustworthy operators looking after themselves. And that is not particularly an indictment of them but the way politics is. I wish I didn't find it quite so morbidly captivating. It might be interesting to see the same period from a Roy Jenkins point of view next but I think Lord George Brown will one day be my next political biography.
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But, raising one's spirits beyond all that fiddle, was Friday night's late night Prom, mainly for the evening raga, played by Budhaditva Mukherjee (sitar) and, worthy of almost erqual billing, Soumen Nandy (tabla), to mark the 70th anniversary of the partition of India. So, presumably that means the great Rajan & Sajan Misra Prom that has lived in the memory ever since must have been for the 50th anniversary, twenty years ago. Good grief, there have been precious few radio concerts that have impressed quite as much as that did.
I know that it is almost jazz in a way but it's a far, far better thing that they do, in a vastly longer tradition and conjuring much more rarified thoughts of mountain ranges, mystery, meditation and passion than self-indulgent meanderings in self-consciously 'cool' clubs where your first thought is to look at your watch and wonder how much longer it's going to take to say nothing whatsoever. Indian ragas make forever seem perfectly acceptable but it is, paradoxically, all in the moment and I don't want just any record by Budhaditva and his mate Soumen, if he is his mate, I want that concert
And, while we are on the Proms. Tremendous recording of the Beethoven 5 concert with Mirga on telly this evening. You can't help but like her but it's unlikely I'll be learning her surname and she'll always be Mirga to me.
And, finally. Michael Craig-Martin was the guest on Private Passions today. It's all very well being highbrow and snooty and pleased with oneself for never having heard of Big Brother celebrities or Little Mix but perhaps I ought to have heard of him, some kind of godfather to the YBA's, who are by now much older British Artists, perhaps in the same way that Paul Weller was elevated to being the 'modfather' by Britpop. For someone of that pedigree who you might associate with marketing more than art for art's sake, he spoke a lot of sense, like there being no rules about art.
For forty years and more, wherever I've been there have always been people who want there to be 'rules', even to the extent, I suppose, of making lists of rules that say there are no rules.
A sonnet has 14 lines; counterpoint is this, coimposition in a painting is that. Virginia Plain and Up the Junction are two singles that didn't have a chorus. Well, good for them but so what. You can, if you want, abide by as many rules as you want- as it happens I usually choose to- but all you have to do is be any good.
Good lad, good music choices, too, immediately ruling out orchestral music in favour of smaller groups and opera. I'm not saying I'd go all the way with him on that but I know what he means.
P.S. During the following concert from the Cadogan Hall, with songs by Reynaldo Hahn, it was news to me that the composer of A Chloris was a boyfriend of Proust's.
You don't find things like that out on The One Show.
