Julia Copus - Girlhood

Julia Copus, Girlhood (Faber)

The last book of poems by Julia Copus, and one poem in it in particular, was exceptionally well received at this address and so the next was awaited patiently but with expectations. It arrives ahead of her biography of Charlotte Mew and begins well by enhancing Faber's unimaginative house-style cover with rich shades of indigo and girl-referencing pink.
We are immediately back in the territory of Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden with The Greivers, the loss vividly captured, made shareable and finally made universal. But before that realization, grief seems very much one's own, assuming, we are

                                           among the crowds
of those who have not happened yet on grief.

And that interpretation of time recurs in subsequent poems,

                              Your final battle 
tucked in the future still,

or,

            in the unknowable meanwhile
the sunlit length of garden where we'd meet

Any Ordinary Morning is, as far as I can work out the genealogy, in memoriam the poet's husband's great grandfather, Adolf Buker, who was presumably not on our side, that builds back from the trenches to an epiphany of the everyday, not unlike Andrew Motion's poem on Ann Frank's house and a picture worthy of Vermeer.
Creation Myth could be Julia's re-make of Abba's The Day Before You Came because the book's title retrieves much family history in its various approaches to 'girlhood'. But not before the latest addition to the corpus of Copus poems, perhaps officially known as 'mirror poems' but properly acknowledged in places as belonging to their finest (and most fastidious) practitioner because for all that the first line mirrors the last and ever onwards into the same line being the middle two, over two whole pages, they need to be flexible enough to work syntactically and look natural as well as being very hard to do. The Great Unburned evokes witches, those sinister females that perhaps were invented as a place to put so much of what men fear about women.
If feminism were always so beautifully done it might persuade more of the many still unreconstructed among the male gender, or maybe not, and it's unlikely to be expressed like this anyway so progress will remain slow in the wider world while female poets currently provide much of the best poetry being written and men retreat to a defensive, curmudgeonly irony.

Acts of Anger and A Thing Once it has Happened are memoirs of types of violation, not as explicitly explained in the latter as it might be but we don't need to know all the details.
The first may or may not be haibun, incorporating passges of prose (I don't mind whether it is or not), which provide a long historical and literary context for the abusive behaviour. If there is a tendency towards 'case study' in it that we are to find again in the second half of the book, it remains powerful, only perhaps requiring the gentlest of reminders that not all such red mist bad temper is the province of the masculine and domestic tyranny can, and has, come from matriarchs as well as patriarchs.
In A Thing Once it has Happened, the understatement and reference to Propertius somehow distances and objectifies the #Me Too theme but one would expect no less from a graduate in Latin. But it remains uncomfortable reading, in direct contrast to the mild fetishism of Sunday Morning at Oscar's, where the most damnable sin appears to be a little bit of surely fictional shoplifting. The poem is as silkily seductive as the hosiery and accoutrements it relishes, which is how poems should work.

The second half of the book is taken up by Marguerite, which looks suspiciously like a 'sequence', that insidious invention of workshop-attenders and those who take it all too seriously. I have a pathological aversion to the idea that there even is such a thing, but I enjoy it. And I have no trouble classifying Marguerite as a long poem in parts, as is The Waste Land, rather than a collection of poems with concatenated themes, like Shakespeare's Sonnets. It depends on the coherence of the themes and any would-be sequence can be ushered politely into one division or the other should anybody be concerned to.
Marguerite Pantaine was examined by trainee psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, in 1931, 'after attempting to murder the actress Huguette Duflos', ostensibly blaming her, as a fellow female, for being a
       woman who gets
                            whatever she wants.

like not losing her first child, for instance.

Poetry that has to carry such a heavy freight of ideas can suffer as poetry as a result. There is necessarily some narrative involved here, too, but if anybody can make it happen it is going to be a 'natural' poet like Julia Copus, whose first instinct is that of an imaginative writer, rather than one who can't prevent the subject matter overwhelming the art.
There is a thematic parallel to be identified between,

                         a puddle in sunlight
drawn up into the air by degrees, or....
                                        a knot of wasps
pulled from the trees to a sticky pot of jam

and

He is assembling a theory
and I am the proof of it.

Lacan's search for a theory needs his case study to suck Marguerite in like the heat draws up the puddle, 'how the catalyst itself...has merely to make itself present' or the jam draws in the wasps.
If Marguerite might once have been regarded as an overly-sexualized hysteric, she has become, in the post-Freudian period, interesting raw material for study. And therapy, the 'dripping water hollows out stone', from Ovid, so that the Benediction where, after,
                                his brimful voice,
his sly and careful ways and the brawn of his
brown arms - that indeed was the undoing, then 
was the wretch of me

until achieving,
                              the calm
that is here and for the elsewhere of it
ever on me now

But Girlhood doesn't leave us with that harrowing ending, but saves Stories for last in the hope of not leaving us with nightmares. It is midsummer, gardens again and people joined together by some discovered continuity,

Their laughter was made of the same

air that moved as a breeze across you, & the dew likewise
was bits of sky, nestling where it could

One can worry for one's favourite poets, those with their careers still only halfway through, not all their work done yet. Not like those who have finished, done what they could and are now beyond mistake-making or loss of form. But I won't be worrying about Julia Copus any more. Girlhood did all it needed to, if not a little bit more, to confirm that.         
                          

Portsmouth Baroque Choir

Portsmouth Baroque Choir, All Saints Church, Portsmouth, March 23.

The last time I saw the Portsmouth Baroque Choir they sang music by Liechtenstein's most famous composer. With so much to choose from in the area tonight, it presumably being how long it takes to rehearse something since Christmas, it could have been Haydn and Mozart in the cathedral but All Saints is closer and it's interesting to give lesser-known composers a hearing.
But there is lesser-known and then there's lesser-known's even less known brother.
The Marcello of the Oboe Concerto here wasn't Benedetto Marcello whose opera, Arianna, waits patiently on the shelves for me to finish the latest batch of Handel discs, but Alessandro. On the map of baroque composers, who served the music ahead of expressing themselves in a personal style, this Marcello is not far from Vivaldi, especially in the quicker tempi, and anybody who says it's Bach might remember J.S. spent a lot of time with Vivaldi scores. Karla Powell was deft and nimble, especially as required in the presto, where the oboe almost slipped the surly bonds of oboe to imitate the high trumpet in the Brandenburg no.2, but the Dolce Quartet, superb throughout, contributed to gorgeous effect in the adagio.
That was by way of a hors d'oeuvres to the headline piece, Bononcini's Stabat Mater, but even if you know Bononcini you might not know the right one because this is attributed to Antonio, not Giovanni.
If all Stabat Maters have Pergolsei to contend with, they all at least have the poignant text to work on. Portsmouth Baroque Choir make a fine sound in unison but also here shared out the solo parts among who Pru Bell-Davies was first up, setting a high standard, best when moving into the higher range and proving impressive equal to any challenge and, not surprisingly since he got his own biographical note in the programme, Adrian Green, whose tenor is sure and accomplished.We had been given value for money by half-time and I was glad the attendance was all it might be in the face of the fixture congestion.
I don't think Jean-Joseph Cassanea de Mondonville is any more famous than Marcello's brother but his De Profundis Clamavi, having not really reached the heights of the first half in its early paces, came to life with the Recit de Haute-contre, sung by Jo Earney, and made a case for the depth of French baroque behind the first team of Couperin the Tenebres Man, Rameau, Lully, who are somewhere up there with those Italians who seem to have invented it. The choir filled the modest but admirable All Saints with the sweeping lines of the Requiem aeternam.
And Morten Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna had its moments. I'm not always convinced by C20th religious music, it sometimes seeming to incorporate the doubt that many of us, on the evidence, was born into and found in post-Darwinian literature. And lines like,
quemadmodum speravimus in te

(Let your mercy, Lord, be upon us)
inasmuch as we have trusted in you.

Inasmuch? Is it quite so contingent. And Lauridsen's music seemed to float between a comfort blanket and something almost Songs of Praise and lacked the intensity of European contemporaries like Arvo Part, John Tavener, James Mac Millan and Gorecki. Having had my first taste of the new Scala Radio station in the afternoon, I'm not going to say he quite belongs there but he might be fit for David Mellor and the Classic FM chart show. But, hold on, let's give him an even break. The choir put in a convincing performance and the string quartet part was the music that stayed with me on my way home. The organ had understatedly underscored passages, reminding us to be thoughtful and maybe the oboe, adding an edge to the strings, was what made it sweeter than some of us require because, frankly, in these difficult times, something darker like The Protecting Veil might be saying a similar thing but with more acknowledgement of how difficult it is.
But thank you very much to Portsmouth Baroque Choir, some tremendous work by all four of the Dolces, Karla, Peter the organist, the soloists and Malcolm the conductor, who I suspect of being the adventurous spirit who brings these composers to or attention.
Keep up the good work.  

More Oxford Lectures

Poetry in Translation. One of the more helpful definitions of 'poetry' is 'that which gets lost in translation' and so the whole industry is a little bit redundant. Being staunchly Remain and not nationalistic, I don't read poetry in English exclusively but recognize that I'm nowhere near fluent enough in any other language to appreciate the nuances available in one's native tongue, thus it is valuable to have some idea of what poets in other languages are saying and how they are saying it but accessing the 'poetry' isn't possible. Ovid, Symborska, Baudelaire and Catullus are favourite poets but not as a result of the work of their translators, grateful to them though I am for their versions and their help.

Shakespeare Sonnet 145 looks like an early work put into the book to fulfil the numbers. The only one of the 154 to be written in eight-syllable lines. But it makes use of a pun on the name Hathaway in,
'I hate', from hate away she threw,
   And saved my life, saying 'not you'.
which, for all the world, looks autobiographical, reflecting on the theme that was to recur in Thom Bell's Break Up to Make Up by the Stylistics. It is easy to extrapolate from that glimpse of evidence that it was not a happy marriage, from which one can lead back into the ready-made world of the TLS letter of April 2016, the possibility that the twins, Hamnet and Judith, were not Shakespeare's progeny and all that is outlined elsewhere at DG Books.  

Pop music and poetry. No, I wouldn't have given Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although I have awarded my own tiny prizes here for poetry, it was by way of reviewing the year (which is a lame excuse) and I'd prefer not to have prizes. But even if it was a prize for Best Pop Music Words, I wouldn't have given it to Dylan. He can be very good but he himself nominated Smokey Robinson as the 'poet' and nothing he did is as good as The Tracks of My Tears. But pop lyrics don't need to be as good as poetry because they are supported by, or even only support, other resources and the words aren't the only thing, often not even the main thing, in pop music whereas in poetry, it is only the words.

Poet is not a job. (This is such an old theme I'd almost forgotten it). It doesn't take all day to do, like the occupation of novelist, which is much more demanding. It is not only useful, but also necessary, to be engaged with the world in some other way rather than be a poet all the time. Tennyson's biography provides an example of what one becomes if that's all you are. That's all he was and he become too much absorbed in it, in being himself, and his work, if not his income, suffered as a consequence. When we speak of an 'occasional' poet, it means one who writes poems for occasions rather than one that writes occasionally but all poets would benefit from writing occasionally rather than habitually.

Ending the career with a long silence. Having begun the first lecture by saying there should be no rules, none of these are rules, but just suggestions. Not everybody has the opportunity to stop once they've finished and certainly Sylvia was pouring out great, if ostensibly highly personalized work, in her last days but her demise was untimely. David Bowie might have continued to produce worthwhile work after Station to Station, Low or sometime in the early 1980's but his average score would be much more stratospheric had it been based on the albums from Hunky Dory, maybe slightly before, to Station to Station, maybe slightly later. Artistically, it's best to quit while you're ahead, although you might not know when that is. Even St. Seamus Heaney possibly carried on too long, although he was still the best at it. The examples of Rimbaud, Rosemary Tonks and Sibelius, who for very different reasons all abandoned their creative careers, suggest that you don't have to keep on doing it if you don't feel like it.

I'll think of a few more to finish my tenure in abstracts, I'm sure.   

Lunchtime Live! at Portsmouth, Richard Dewland

Richard Dewland, Portsmouth Cathedral, Thurs 14 March.

Belatedly, but better belatedly than beneverly, and I do want to report back whenever I attend a concert even if the website is rallentando. I struck out bravely from the house last week to struggle the traditional seafront walk in wind and suggestions of rain to time my arrival in Old Portsmouth to coincide with the lunchtime recital.
Of course, it has to be admitted, the Portsmouth lunchtimes are not like Chichester's, on account of meagre attendannce and artists of international ptential, but I for one am grateful to have them to go to whenever available of a Thursday, to find that as nearby as Lee-on-Solent therre is an organist with repertoire like this and, in one of my usual catchphrases, if somebody is playing Buxtehude within travelling distance of my house, I want to be there.
Because, gladly, even if one might prefer a pianist or an ensemble, when it is an organist one hopes for Buxtehude and that's what Richard Dewland began with.
I'm not going to say BuxWV 137 is my favourite Dietrich. It didn't sound as cohesive and fully-formed as a composition as it might have been but even if he is mostly known as being John the Baptist to Bach's Christ, the one who was doing it very well before somebody else turned up and did it better, as an organist, the only picture we have attributed to being Buxtehude has him playing strings and the Complete Buxtehude, as with the Complete Bach, has far more cantatas in it than organ music. Thankfully.

Richard was mind enough to take time to explain his chronological programme, and how it moved from the opening to the 'classical' Couperin. And he knows more about it than me and no doubt has his reasons but, dead by 1733, if we need those labels (which we might not like but can be useful), I think Francois Couperin is baroque and the dearth of obvious 'classical' music for organ, by Mozart or Haydn, shouldn't be disguised by such legerdemain.
Because the next move was to a Mendelssohn sonata, definitely Romantic but still on the sensible side of the movement that, after the epitome of Romanticism of Berlioz, got out of hand. And it was the highlight of Richard's survey, thus proving that if the baroque doesn't put out its best team, it won't always win.
Now Thank We all Our God didn't seem to be the tune that I knew whereas the Frank Bridge Adagio provided the gentleness that is just as much of what organs are capable of as the ground-moving, thunderous pieces.
And Marcel Dupre's Toccata, Op. 38, no.16, which might be an opus number even Robin Ray would have struggled with, wasn't the most desolate C20th organ music one has ever heard.
All of which, I know, sounds more like scepticism than a rave review but thanks very much to Richard for doing it, for provoking such thought, and what a pleasure it is to have Portsmouth Lunchtime Live!, its stalwart dedicatees and all who sail in its ongoingness.
I will be there whenever I can 

Oxford Lectures

I can't remember how I stumbled upon it now but I have been reading James Fenton's collected lectures from his time as Professor of Poetry at Oxford in the late 1990's, The Strength of Poetry.
They are tremendous. Prof. Fenton having been an Auden man, Auden is allocated the most attention, and clear, insightful attention it is, as well as a strong cast of largely 'usual suspects', like Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia and some pertinent points which might shed some light on why we don't hear so much about D.H. Lawrence these days.
Previous incumbents of the Oxford chair, like Heaney and Paul Muldoon, have delivered books in the same league as this and I know Simon Armitage's are avaailable to listen to somewhere on the wires where he puts up a good performance, trying to live up to the rarified standard, with a very throuogh close reading of Tamer and Hawk.  
It might have seemed that Prof. Armitage succeeded to the post because there wasn't anybody else comparable to those august predessors but we will see. I have had him as odds-on to be the next Poet Laureate ever since Ms. Duffy was appointed and yet I saw a name mentioned in the paper recently that I had never even heard of which could mean it's a wide-open inclusive culture, could mean I'm not keeping up with what is trending or could mean their publicity machine is doing a good job.

I write only to draw attention to the Fenton book, could quote it and tell you but would rather you decide for yourself but, like other top, top books, like Julian Barnes' Nothing to be Frightened Of, his reflections on mortality written when he was only a couple of years older than I am now, it succedds by telling you what you knew already but puts it much better and with more telling quotes and examples than one knew.
But one also wonders what one might talk about if one took the job, one lecture a term for four years = 12. In that unlikely event.

There are no rules. Each poem succeeds or fails on its own terms. So it is perfectly reasonable to assume it's possible to have a morally didactic, virtue-signalling poem and read it out loud it in the precious, intense voice of someone like Ocean Vuong.

It becomes more difficult to appreciate the work of generations that come after you as much as you did the generations that came before you. Those that come after you seem to have stolen the game and decided to play it differently whereas those before, those that you admired, were those you learned from. And even if one does keep up with the latest fashions, one starts to look like John Peel, having previously championed Tyrannosaurus Rex, then Tangerine Dream and then The Fall, he contiuned to promote music by artists young enough to be his grandchildren. It's as if he had no point of view.

All poems come from other poems even if that is only the poet's idea of what a poem is and which they have read and so there is nothing wrong with being derivative. While it is possible that there might be potential genius in remote places, it isn't going to be realized if they don't know what a poem is. Art is recreational, which I still want to believe means it wants to recreate something a bit like something else it has seen and admired.

Yes, Larkin was politically incorrect. Even I, defending him as best I could whenever possible, had to give up when he said in a letter he didn't see why the anti-Apartheid campaign should ruin his cricket. Important though cricket, and poetry, sometimes is, it's not that important. But none of that detracts from his poetry because poetry is the words, not the person that wrote them.

And, even if it seems late in the day, it may not be too late to re-assert the credentials of Thom Gunn as the major English language poet of his generation. Maybe he suffered from becoming 'trans-Atlantic', still an English poet in San Francisco; maybe his work is 'uneven', but if not as consistent as Larkin, way ahead of the machismo and myth-making that Ted Hughes descended into, but for the sense, the parallel contemporary and long historical contexts of the poems and being virtuosic in moving from and between metred, syllabic and free verse which, it would be nice to think, any poet would do.

Etc, etc.

So, maybe I could do it. But I'd rather not.   

A Chichester Tuesday

An ordinary enough day, a Tuesday in early March, not Cheltenham until next week, bright eaely but a bit if rain by the time I got home. It is useful to have Chichester nearby.

Yenting Wang, Chichester Cathedral, Tues 5 March.

 It looked like a wide-ranging programme taking care to move through the C18th, C19th and C20th and presumably advertise the pianist's inclusive repertoire in the process. However, she changed the programme from chronological order to ostensibly alphabetical although that was obviously not the point.
If anybody's playing The Well-Tempered Klavier within range of here, I'll go. Yenting 's account of No.16 in G minor was luminous and especially worthwhile in the brilliant fugue. I nearly always praise Chichester's Yamaha and how now come to wonder if some woudn't find it too resonant sometimes but it lights up Bach for me, not least under these confident and authoritative fingers. I was wishing we could have had more and maybe another time we will. It wasn't until afterwards that it dawned on me that Bach might not be the whole point for Yenting Wang but perhaps more like something one needs must do, although not without great respect and due diligence.
The Bartok folk songs were moved up the order being miniatures, compelling though they were in this delicate account. The first, The Peacock, noticeably created one of those moments that happens at Chichester sometimes went one realizes the audience are concentrating more than ever, rapt and focussed entirely on the performance ahead of their more wordly concerns. This is gentle, folksong Bartok rather than anything more modernist and, although brief, the pieces distilled something pure and memorable.
But the point was surely the Schumann. Schumann is about 'flow' for me, the entirely acceptable face of Romanticism with its lyricism, rapture and movement. The first movement did that before ending suspended somehow in its own faraway world. If the second movement marched more rousingly and anthem-like, it demonstrated Yenting's capacity to do the more muscular passages as well as the thoughtful that may or may not be what she will be known for. The third could have been Chopin, in fact I kept thinking it was, but the bells were striking for two o'clock as she finished which witnessed a full value set. The Schumann was bigger, much, much more than the Bartok and, yes, the running order couldn't have ended with either of the other two pieces.
Stephen Kovacevich was there last year and received a partially standing ovation. Maybe they knew he was famous or maybe they knew he was even better than most of the fine musicians Chichester get for this tremendous series but I looked round to see if anybody was prompting a similar tribute this time because I was ready to join in. If I don't see a better concert this year I will have no complaint.
Of course, Bach will still be played here more than Schumann but I ordered a recording of the Fantasie before I even hurried to write this. Sadly, it's not by Yenting Wang but with Tasmin Little announcing her forthcoming retirement, it looks as if there won't be a vacancy on my list of favourite musicians, and it's great to have one happy to provide bi-lingual autographs.

Harold Gilman: Beyond Camden Town, Pallant House, Chichester, to 9 June.

It's a marvellous thing that the Cathedral's lunchtime concerts are on Tuesdays and Pallant House is half price on Tuesday. At least for the parsimonious amongst us.
The reason for including Harold Gilman in the itinerary was that if you like Walter Sickert, you'll like him. It's a bit like if you like Bach, you'll like Telemann. You almost certainly will but maybe not quite as much.
When two artists are similar they can seem more defined by their relatively minor differences than if they were completely different in the first place. For example, Gilman uses more colour than Sickert even if, on this evidence, it's mainly by insisting on detailed expositions of the wallpaper.
Being Camden Town, we are downbeat English post-Impressionist and Gilman's realism is often interior, domestic and with female subject matter. But if colour was something he was conscious of or cared about, Interior with Artist's Mother is surely playing games with the idea and quoting Whistler's Mother in predominantly grey and black.

One can see Degas in some of the painting, as well as Sickert, and in some later pictures, before his early death, something of Cezanne. It is admirable work for being unsentimental and understated. His subjects are modest and glorified, if at all, only to record their modesty. For all that most of them are interiors, it was the London Street Scene in Snow that I went back to, but although I'm aware of a space on my front room wall that could take another print, it won't be that.
In the end I thought either that wallpaper goes or I do.
And so I did.  

Cheltenham Festival Preview

Having spent most of last year behind and needs must playing a cagey game until the month mirabilis that turned it round, I'm back in the doghouse again having given them back the resulting plus from 2018.
So it's going to be a careful, considered Cheltenham, concentrating on what one hopes are the good thing or two.
There was nothing to be concerned about when Santini finished third at Kempton on Boxing Day. All perfectly understandable, doing his best work at the finish and if you can get 3/1 for shopping around in the RSA Chase on Weds, that's the best bet of the week. This will have been where Mr. Henderson intended him to be all season and we can trust him to have him right on the day.
We will know our fate without having to wait long. The double, which will put us back in the traditional black we like to be seen in, is completed by Champ in the Ballymore Novices Hurdle which is the race before.

It is unfortunate that Apple's Jade has been demolishing her races in Ireland so convincingly because she's now really got to go for the Champion Hurdle rather than the pushover win she was intended for in the Mares race where she formed an essential part of my long-term four-timer with the two above and Altior, which is still due to pay over 70/1 if she goes for the mares race but she isn't going to.
Champ won't have it quite as easy as he did, a  different species to the others when he strolled around in two summer hurdles last year but he's still not found anything good enough to worry him and I'm hopeful he won't here either. It's not always that owners save up the best names and give them to the right horses but J.P. and Mr. Henderson might have got it right this time, naming this one after A.P.
So although Tuesday is usually an exciting day, full of good races and expectation, I'm likely to be sitting it out and waiting for the second day. If we are back in business by Thursday then we could get involved with Min in the Ryanair and Epatante in the Mares Novices, and although Sir Erec ought to be opposed at the prices in the Triumph Hurdle on Friday, I doubt if I would because the form makes him look the best juvenile in the British Isles.
So all I can do is apologize for having nominated nothing that isn't favourite. It's the races you avoid that save you from losing.
And I'll see if the Prof's ready to declare his hand.

Hello, Prof, what have you got.

I will go Buveur D'air (nap) - champion hurdle. Let's keep it simple really. We have Verdana Blue defeating Buveur D'air in the Christmas Hurdle and Apple's Jade being rerouted to the champion hurdle to thank for the incredible price we are going to collect on. Buveur D'air is the best hurdler around and three champion hurdles will put him in the hall of fame.

Ok corral (next best)-  NH chase.
Derek O'Connor came over to Warwick to ride this the other Saturday. The planning here is clear to see and this strong traveller should collect.