Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

I declined the Guardsman's Gambit against Szezecyn over the weekend. Having analyzed his win ratio with white when attempting this high stakes but potentially lethal opening, I transposed into the Trieste Variation much favoured by Muller and Wobensteiner remembering the success that the latter had in the 1938 Tournament. A draw was agreed after 68 moves, the bishop and knight ending proving redundant.
And such would columnists have to write for their weekly offerings if their life was as routine as mine. Yes, I have my finest booklet of poems almost but not quite in the presses, but that's routine and would have happened anyway, the highlight of any week, the joy of it, is the Times crossword on Saturday which this week was finessed with 'tondi' - I had to make sure it was a word but it had to be and so that's fine. But unless I had something really scintillating to write about, like I'd got myself a whiteboard or, like Giles Coren, I'd been at the President's Club for their bachannalian orgy, I'd have to make up chess matches I'd not taken part in. It makes for better reading than saying although you'd produced an encouraging upward surge in the turf account the previous weekend, you got worried out of all that promising good start by one or two very upsetting reverses.
I'm nothing to do with gentlemen's parties or questions of who is exploiting who when alpha males are showing off with paid young ladies in attendance but Giles made a brave stand by admitting he was there and, inevitably, condemning it. It was a good effort but, obviously, nobody in their right mind would mix with such riff-raff in the first place, the carefully worded, appalled distancing of oneself from such parties is as formulaic as 'our thoughts are with' bereaved families after any newsworthy carnage and if that particular binge had not made the headline news, nobody would have been any the wiser and Giles could have written about his children, Julian Barnes or fat people like he usually does.
Lurid scandals are becoming, or have always been, commonplace but they are like supernovas that have already happened thousands of light years away. It's only that we don't know about them yet. There are plenty to come. It never happens that, okay, we've all learned from that, it won't happen again.
On Only Connect a few weeks ago, Vicky, also Coren, the smarter one, said she liked crosswords because while one is involved in one, a sense of order prevails (not her words exactly but that's what she meant) and the chaotic world is held at bay. Anybody would surely prefer to be doing the Times crossword than go to a President's Club do, wouldn't they.
But I saw a whiteboard in One Stop on Saturday morning, they had lots of them and they were only a pound. No, I have no use for a whiteboard. But it was strangely attractive with its two little magnets and pen that velcros itself to the surface. For one pound, I deserved such a treat even if it left me with the problem of what I could write on it.

Well, top left are my chess ratings at Chess24, where I am BorderIncident, named after a 1970's star horse that got injured and didn't win the Gold Cup he might have. I'm not playing classical 15 minute games anymore because I don't want to ruin my rating of 1903, which is sensational, for me. So I play 10 minute games and am sad to say this evening lost my grip on 1800, but I'll get it back in due course. And thus it is an index of well-being. It does make a difference to how I feel about myself in a tangible and meaningful way. I enjoy talking about it in support groups.
The number in the bottom left might be the finishing positions of the last five horses I backed, but isn't. That would have some 1's in it. Then there's a reminder of the next poetry club meeting I must make a point of attending, on Muriel Rukeyser, and there's a train I need to be on. But there's plenty of space left.
At a time when the Yesterday channel have been showing Ripping Yarns, with its cast of morbid obsessives, on Sunday nights, I clearly need to record such things as local precipitation, motor vehicle performance or football scores and need to find them interesting enough to know what they are. But it's a work in progress. I'll get there. I'm sure it is the first step to genuine fulfilment.
Poetry is such a fleeting thing. Numbers is what you need.    

A Night with the Jess Davies Band

O, Babe, What Would You Say

Confidence is an unreliable thing, isn't it.
(This is me Live at the Apollo, marching up and down the stage like Michael MacIntyre, making fairly mundane observations but the audience is ready to laugh their heads off anyway. Comedy was once Laurel & Hardy doing, Is that the money that I gave to you to give to her that she gave to him. But now it's just patently obvious things recounted as if they were hilarious. Get well soon, Doddy.)

After last weekend, with an all but unerring eye for a winner on the turf, I set myself up for a good time, thinking the 72-disc set of Complete Bach Cantatas was an absurd luxury on the verge of being ordered. And after today, it would have been, if it hadn't been for confidence. Because, 'not fluent at the last, beaten half a length' is a concise, if sorrowful, short story. One lives to fight another day and that day is one of the more interesting days in the racing calendar, Cheltenham Trials Day, where Wholestone is all but a tip. It would be a tip if I was still confident.
Confidence is good or bad in different situations. In horse racing it's bad because you persuade yourself you know when actually you don't really know. It is a short cut to the poor house. The same was true in cricket, whether batting or bowling. Feeling good, gonna score some runs today. This one can go. And then one hears the dreaded clunk of the stumps being re-arranged and that's that.
Football was different. There's no point in not feeling confident when a half chance presents itself. Back of the net, or if not, never mind, I was only Andy Cole ahead of his time if I missed.
But, at work. What about at work. You need some or you'd never turn up. You'd just get steamrollered time and again by the misplaced confidence of others, so, sadly, one does need to stand one's ground (and it helps if you're right). But what must it be like for them, chronically confident but lacking judgement, knowledge and foresight. Thus forever apologizing, back-tracking, looking daft or, more likely, making up some abstruse, convoluted, circumlocutory explanation to explain why they came up with their nutcase idea in the first place.
That's why I'm so excited about having you people on board, the nice lady said today, because you're not stupid.
It's nice of you to say that about me, I said, but I don't know how much further it can be applied.
--
But one thing I'm confident of is that the new Julian Barnes will be a masterpiece. I'm glad to see it published so early in the year, at a time when major highlights are fewer and further between.
Meanwhile, Muriel Rukeyser's Savage Coast, her semi-autobiographical novel on the Spanish Civil War looks like being worthwhile interim reading and at bedtime I take in a few more pages of A.N. Wilson's Jesus.
While it is enthralling and scholarly stuff, it is inevitably less forensic than one would have preferred but what can you do. Wilson is nothing if not urbane but his case is based on entirely plausible assertions that this or that wouldn't have been the case.
But that is the point. Virgin births, miracles and God are unlikely to have been the case. When you are up against faith, scepticism is all you have. But so far, it seems it is not so much Jesus Christ, whose name means 'Saviour Messiah', which seems very prescient of his parents, that we are up against but his main propagandist, his Alistair Campbell, Paul.
That lad, it seems, has a lot to answer for.
--
And the latest news on The Perfect Book is that it's unlikely to get to the printers in March.
This is not a delaying tactic to build up expectation in a poetry world agog for news of its publication, it is just that two more poems required haven't quite materialized yet and I doubt if I'll get to the printers in March. But I'm confident about it. Not confident that it will put me up alongside Seamus Heaney and Elizabeth Bishop as a wondrous poet but that I'm going to like it, be very happy to have written it and I don't expect any more than that of it.   

On Enjambment

Regular readers here (hello, Mum) will be aware of the recent upsurge in admiration expressed for Elizabeth Bishop's poems and everything about them and thus the reultant pressing need for her to be awarded a shelf of her own for books like those that Thom Gunn and Philip Larkin have.
The latest acquisition, Eleanor Cook's Elizabeth Bishop at Work, is among the best of them and as fine a critique of any poet's work one is likely to find. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: the Complete Correspondance is a further item not arrived two weeks after it was due. Now this makes it a t-shirt, a Christmas present and a book that have gone missing within a few months. Amazon have readily replaced items or compensated the account but I don't want it to be me that starts to look suspicious.
But idolatry has its limits, nothing's perfect and things can get taken too far.
Some poets habitually, necessarily, use enjambment, running sentences over line endings to, perhaps, create a natural tension between the prosody and form. It is often more pleasing than the traditional bang, bang, bang of ending each line on a rhyme and/or a full stop or comma as in, say,
There was an old man with a beard
Who said, 'it's just as I feared' 

I had thought that Gunn, in Vox Humana, was taking his syllabics plenty seriously enough when he split a word across a line end to fit his diligent 7 syllable count,
an indefinite haze, mere-
ly pricking the eyes, almost

Okay, Thom, you've made your point, that isn't free verse.
But, consummate artist though Elizabeth Bishop may be, blessed with any number of astute commentators of which Eleanor Cook is one of the most impressive, I begin to wonder if this devotion to the art of poetry hasn't gone one step more than really necessary when not only does Bishop split the indefinite article to achieve a rhyme but Cook holds it up as an example of supreme artistry.

In Pink Dog, 

solution is to wear a fantasia.
Tonight you simply can't afford to be a-
n eyesore. But no one will ever see a 

satisfies, tortuously, the aaa rhyme scheme of the poem's three-line stanzas but by performing this stunt, that Cook makes a contrived case for, the 'an' is rendered absurd, drawing far too much attention to itself.
Although it is not a syllabic poem but depends on beats to the line rather than syllables and it doesn't matter which line 'an' belongs to (it would be better off at the start of the next line rather than at the end of the line it begins on), this looks more like, (Write it) like disaster, than stylistic accomplishment and a poet of Bishop's talent could have found more unobtrusive ways to comply with her chosen form than draw attention to the contrivance that a poem is. It's a fail for me because the poet has allowed her art to show its workings, it's not a success because she has bent her usually natural-looking language into incongruity.
The beauty of enjambment (and I'm really not one for any kind of rules, maxims or diktats that must be applied across all poetry) is mostly how it blends natural-sounding sentences across an artificial form without the reader immediately noticing. But one can't help but notice this example in Pink Dog because it is foregrounded beyond reason and draws so much attention to itself that it distracts from everything else going on around it.
All poetry is artificial but much of the art involved is in hiding its artifice, the skill of the poet often to be admired in such legerdemain. Reading Bishop's sometime associate and corresdpondant, Muriel Rukeyser, one is struck by the difference between them - that Bishop is primarily of interest for how she makes a poem rather than what it 'says' whereas Rukeyser makes her socio-political point, no doubt very powerfully, but is not in anywhere near the same league as a poet because she doesn't have anything like the same music, subtlety or sophistication. I'm with Elizabeth all the time on that but let us not suppose than we don't all take it one step too far once in a while.

Double negative there, you see. I never made myself out to be the consummate prose stylist.
   

Windy Miller

I recently sent two recent poems to an august periodical ahead of The Perfect Book. I appear to be in a creative purple patch, producing well in excess of the four poems a year that I've long regarded as cruising speed.
You look at various poetry magazines, who they publish, what they do, their submission rules and wonder how long it will be before the poem sees print and, really, forget it. I'm not that interested. But maybe I can just e-mail so and so. And, yes, that's fine, one of the two will be in the next issue as long as there is space for it. So, even if it doesn't appear, at least I have one of the kindest rejection notes in literary history.
Except that they liked the other one best, not this one. You can never tell. But it means I can use it here.

Windy Miller

There was no sign of children

and his obituary

in the local paper would one day say

he never married. And so

he was the last of them

to be at home there in the creaking mill.

We’ll never know whether or not

one of those sails sliced him

in half or if it was the cider

that got him in the end.

Meanwhile it was his time there,

that once looked like forever,

when simple was as simple did

and nobody complained.

He’d have waved if he’d seen you

if you’d seen him in the hedgerows,

unaware he was idyllic,

on his day off from the corn.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

There is often less to write about at this time of year. Two years ago I began the series My Life in Sport, with memoirs of football, cricket and cycling. I did wonder whether to continue with running, pool, darts and chess but it hasn't got quite that desperate yet.

The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross lived up to all its much vaunting, mapping out one way through the bewildering shifts and fashions in C20th classical music. Some composers might be more significant for the theories behind what they wrote than what they wrote so some much-loved names, like Poulenc, seemed to get less coverage than I thought they deserved but, for those who know, music is apparently not important for what it sounds like.
The one CD I bought as a result of reading it was of Britten Cello Suites, which is still very kindly being rowed across the Atlantic from America for me. I had plenty of CD's of music mentioned already and although it would have been fitting to play them while reading about them, the urge was never that strong. Although I will have to give Morton Feldman another chance having read that,

 Feldman was a singular character- in Steve Reich’s words, ‘an absolutely unforgettable human being.’ As a conversationalist, he was verbose, egotistical, domineering, insulting, playful, flirtatious, and richly poetic...
and while one colleague at work agreed that is very much what they think of me, I'm not not everybody thinks that. Not 'richly poetic' anyway.
But Britten comes out of it very well, for me and I was only a bit put off the Humphrey Carpenter biography but its size and having to re-arrange delivery. I'll wait until I'm due to be home all week.
And the C20th, modernism, the avant garde. So many dead ends, many of them fascinating but ultimately period pieces now, dated by their tremendous vogue. But anything of worth feeds into the mainstream because the mainstream is all there is. Like any period, one can't imagine what happens next, surely it's now all been done and Ross does meditate on that.
It's unlikely that a new generation of composers are all going to go back to writing like Mozart. There is still a tendency towards shock and noise, as sadly documented in the BBC Music Magazine CD Best of British, youngest composer born 2000, which sounds very old hat. But Ross perhaps didn't highlight enough how Tavener's Protecting Veil, Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, James MacMillan's Seven Last Words from the Cross, amongst other things, and such composers as Michael Nyman made the end of the C20th not such a bad time. And, in Errollyn Wallen there is a composer who can do evocative modernism and produce a gorgeous Cello Concerto.
It isn't over yet.

The blurb on the back of Eleanor Cook's Elizabeth Bishop at Work is confident enough to quote at length a review that begins 'Do we need another book about Elizabeth Bishop', because if it's this one, yes we do.
It is a compelling and very useful survey of the oeuvre, well-organized and written no more academically than discussion of a poet's poet's poems needs to be. Heaven knows, it's hard to believe that a Bishop poem can have quite so much in it but it is the art that disguises art and whether the poems came readily or, as evidenced by some of the drafts in Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box, was hard won, this is how good poems need to be to be better than everybody else who ever tried.
One is almost tempted to say that the critique is as good an achievement as the poetry in such cases but it never is. Commentators are only ever on the sidelines, like autograph hunters, and getting in on the coat-tails of their subject.

And, only just begun, and I've meant to read it for years, A.N. Wilson's account of Jesus, the historical figure rather than the religious icon. It looks like he is diligently and exhastively forensic even if the preface does rely on assumptions like 'couldn't possibly have' and 'it is unimaginable that'. 
If we're going to nail this once and for all, it might need to be more forensic that than, my dear A.N., but we'll see.
It's a great thing about the CofE, you can hardly accuse them of being fanatical. They like their lovely churches, the hymns, the literature and the tradition but not so much the difficult bits, like God. 
That's liberalism. There's a lot to be said for it. 

Doctrines, Factions, Schools

Having taken time away from it to read a couple of Christmas books, I still haven't quite yet finished The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross, the doorstop survey of C20th 'classical' music but it has been a pleasure to return to it.
While art can be a welcome escape or withdrawal from the world that is too much with us, it is nevertheless very limited in scope and unforgivably 'up itself' if it takes no part in that world.
I'm getting the impression from Alex Ross that the two most influential figures in C20th music were Stalin and Hitler. That can't be right and probably what Ross says is that, during the C20th at least, an absolutely central figure was Schoenberg. But, be all of that what it may, his brilliantly lucid account, full of anecdote, character sketches and connections, does more than suggest that the story of C20th music immediately became more complicated than the whole history of music that came before it.

I have sketched out my own version that centres on Beethoven, goes back from Romanticism through Classical, Baroque and Renaissance to Hildegaard of Bingen and then forwards through Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, the overblown Late Romanticism of Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler, which then flounders in trying to explain what Alex Ross makes such a good job of here.

The difference seems to be that, suddenly, all the fault of Romanticism and the value accorded to the individual, it became all about the composer and not the music.
One reads the stories of the doctrines, factions and schools that developed post 1911 and never mind state control by totalitarians whose policies were so all-embracing that they had to include music, that they knew precious little about, it was the composers who were intent on denigrating each other.
I don't imagine for one minute that the host of heavenly baroque composers were all best friends but neither do I think that any of them took time out to denigrate their equivalent of Sibelius to the extent that the now quaint, outmoded 12-note, atonal theorists did.
Did they not realize that what seems so much the fashion one day will look very sad and misguided sooner than they thought. Sadly for them, Sigue Sigue Sputnik were not yet available to ask. 

I had my own run-ins on so-called avant-gardism on an internet forum with the editor of a magazine called Brando's Hat. Yes, mate, very cool, very New York but there needs to be more to you than trying to provoke the 'mainstream'. You don't have to admire Larkin, Simon Armitage or Carol Ann Duffy but you need to do more than define yourself as not being them. Is that all you've got.

And so, if Alex Ross has done anything for me apart from set out quite cogently one view of how it all happened, he has clarified some of my own prejudices. As with poetry, music is a broad church and I don't want to be falling out with anyone whose approach is different from my own, but I can see the attraction of the comfort blanket offered by siding with the like-minded.
I am very much with Philip Larkin and less with Ted Hughes, although I admire much of Hughes' work.
And I'm with Shostakovich, Sibelius, and Poulenc amongst others in the C20th, while only in possession of t-shirts with music by Mozart or a picture of Dietich Buxtehude on them but I've now got good reason to confirm the worst composer of all time. It certainly wasn't Wagner, it was never quite the schlerotically dull Bruckner and it's not even Korngold. It's Pierre Boulez.
Constantly deriding almost everything else as 'fascist' and boring us to witlessness with his gormless abstractions, he was an aberration that time will take care of. And thus passes the self-indulgence of the world.     

Prospects

The prospects for 2018 include a new title from Julian Barnes, which is always an occasion; there may be Julia Copus's biography of Charlotte Mew; there could be Sean O'Brien's short stories in Quartier Perdu and we will believe the long awaited re-issue of Patrick Hamilton's Monday Morning, currently set for August, when we see it. But that is a fair list to be going on with. In the meantime, I have some C20th American women lined-up with Muriel Rukeyser's memoir of the Spanish Civil War - her poems have their moments if they don't attempt the condition of music often enough; Mina Loy's surrealist novel, Insel, and plenty more Elizabeth Bishop commentary in the locker.

I'm often at a loss, though, to understand why some of these titles take quite so long from announcement to appearance. When you hear about a book you want to read, you want to read it, not recieve occasional e-mails from Amazon telling you how hard they're trying to provide it. Don't bother, it isn't in print yet.
This year should see The Perfect Book, a bit of a magnum opus for me at perhaps 25 poems, but once it is ready it will be e-mailed to the printers and a week or so later anyone who wants one can have one.

I'm more excited about it than a 58 year old should be because I like it a lot. I still look at The Perfect Murder once in a while and still like that and nowadays that is all that matters. I no longer understand why anybody needs the approval or endorsement of others. Of course, the young poet might have aspirations to greatness and need to know that their work captivates other readers so that they can hope for success and acclaim but, no, that's a bit gauche, isn't it. The starting point for any poem is that it is at least as good as you thought you could do and, hopefully, better. After that it is a superfluous bonus if friends, readers or reviewers say nice things about them.
And I doubt if I'll bother with reviewers this time. Vanity, vanity, all of it vanity.
I have sent a couple of new poems off to a carefully selected magazine having dismissed most titles on account of their fussy submission rules and the wait between composition and appearing in print. I can put a poem on here in a first version as soon as it's finished but would have to wait months to see it in print. So, with some regret, Move Over, Darling and Windy Miller are in the book but won't appear here for fear of stealing anybody else's thunder and we'll see if they appear anywhere else in due course.
But if nobody else wants to write quite the same sort of casually formal, gently ironic poems that I'd like to read, I'll write them myself. And I've gone to the portentous lengths of adding an epigraph to the collection,

Being laconic did not mean giving up on lyricism.

  which, when I read it in Alice Kaplan's book on L'Etranger, made me wonder if that's something like what I do. I couildn't say but I thought I'd treat myself to such a dubious decoration just this once.

News from the Jess Davies Band is that a second track towards the debut CD is a wrap. And so progress is being made on the way to becoming the merest footnote in the history of popular music with a songwriting credit on a recording. That's as exciting as could be but not currently quite as exciting as The Perfect Book. But in these matters, to travel is often better than to arrive. It's all about doing it, the potential, the forthcoming. Almost as soon as the book is done, distributed and has taken its modest place in the world, it's over, it's gone. And one is left with an empty storehouse, bereft of ammunition, with just more of a back catalogue. I'm not looking forward to that.