Paul Muldoon - Frolic and Detour

Paul Muldoon, Frolic and Detour (Faber)

Twenty years ago
we lived, it had been said,
in the Age of Muldoon.
How was I to know
so many would try to get into bed
with him so soon.

But the height of fashion
can become as quickly jaded
or deflate like a balloon
or come crashing,
some might say unaided,
like an egg from its spoon.

No doubt some would barter
their whole career,
their whole raison d'être,
for an Incantata
or something within ear-
shot of Quoof or Hay, etc.

But a one-trick pony
might find a thousand ways
or more
to sustain his sophisticated, phoney
trick so be preapred to be amazed
at Frolic and Detour.

The maestro hasn't lost it.
It's still all there
on the elliptic.
Once more he's bossed it,
still debonair
not to say cryptic.
  

Michael Hofmann - One Lark, One Horse

Michael Hofmann, One Lark, One Horse (Faber)

Michael Hofmann's new book of poems might be so long-awaited by now that some might have forgotten they were waiting. He has translations and essays to do as well.
It begins promisingly with a Jewish story as epigraph, a prose piece ostensibly about something the culture has lost to technology, perhaps, and LV, a poem about being 55, which among other things is among 'the luncheon voucher years'. Much of it will be recognizable to any contemporary of Michael's and it is a fine poem until the last line,

...?       

(sic), which is not a good way of expressing the great beyond but that doesn't matter much.

Portrait d'une Femme makes reference to,
                                                Mary Elizabeth
Bott in the William books going
'I'll thcweam and thcweam and thcweam.' 

It was Violet Elizabeth Bott, wasn't it. And now I don't know what to do. I look for Mary Elizabeth on the internet but don't find her. I haven't got all the William books upstairs but I have plenty. I don't remember a sister.
It can't be a mistake, can it. If Michael had a blind spot then Matthew Hollis is editor of poetry at Faber and he would know. Is it ludic, a joke or intentionally wrong. It is in some ways a poem about things being wrong, but then I might be trying too hard. I never accepted the idea in John Fuller's Who is Ozymandias? that poems are puzzles set by the poet for the reader to solve- not all of them are and what if you can't. In a poem that is otherwise doing very well, I'm non-plussed when I didn't ought to be.
And for a while after that, reading the book almost in one sitting and almost from front to back, I've lost faith in it. Suddenly I'm critical and fault-finding but I still can't find my copy of  Corona, Corona to check if it was ever thus with far too much listing, that get-out-of-syntax-free card, and recurrent wordplay that sixth formers might be pleased with but are unserious, and not really clever enough, like,
I want to take my place as a nationally - make that
   notionally -
known professor,

which isn't an admirable goal, anyway, unless it's ironic. But I don't know.

The satire of Higher Learning, about how,
We monetize the university,

makes its point but isn't subtle. It must be one of those poems that the audience gladly laugh at at readings, delighted to be on the same side as the revered poet.
Or maybe it's my fault and I'm through with poetry. Not enough of it is good enough any more and I should stick to what I like. I thought I was doing that already.

So, I go back through to re-build a more positive opinion of a poet I was confident of.
Auden is surely in some imitation of the late Auden, discursive- some might say scruffier or loucher - style,
How careless, cheap and profligate we have become,
We have stopped shaving against the grain and in cold water,

and the good thing is, given the poems at the end of the book, On Forgetting, Cooking for One and Idyll, Michael isn't apologetic about this letting go.
There are hints of a personal bereavement but they are not emphasized or the grief flaunted.
The unfathomable pointlessness and ritual involved in certain days at the cricket is taken further than some of us have in Cricket although we might have to concede that occasionally when they do play and there is a point, it can be unbearably the other way. Even suspiciously so on T20 finals day.

I had made a note of an early theme of cheap sex, that isn't carried forward, and decay, which is more sustained in a standard-issue bemoaning of late middle age.
Well, it doesn't have to be like that. 'These days are ours' and 'we may not be the young ones very long', I often quote, ironically but not unenjoyably.

I will retrieve as much as I can from One Lark, One Horse. That story, from a biography of Primo Levi, is about how a shop does so well with its lark pâté. The proprietor explains he mixes some horse in with the lark. In the proportions of 'one lark, one horse'.
The title of a book sometimes indicates something thematic about it. I don't want to be left with the idea that it has worked on the monosodium glutamate principle of stretching a small amount of flavour across a large amount of food. I hope there's more lark to be found among the horse. In an age of taking offence, I won't be complaining that there's no need to eat either. If we can sort out the Mary Elizabeth Bott question, that will help.

Heck of a Chekov

40 years ago at University, somebody, not me, got 80% for an essay on Chekov. It was unheard of at Lancaster when a first began at 70. My effort on Larkin was in the right area but 2:1 was my station in life. Returning to my one book of Chekov stories last weekend I can see he might be easy enough to write about. We were advised not to attempt the Joyce of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake so I enjoyed myself hugely with Dubliners. The parallels between Chekhov and Dubliners are as obvious now as the essay I did when asked to compare a Shakespeare play with one by Marlowe. Okay, Richard II and Edward II. I bet nobody else thought of that. I took few chances with essays in those days.

Having reached the inexorable end of Doktor Faustus, something had suggested Chekhov so I had a very successful Sunday with The Kiss and other stories (Penguin Classics, 1982, £1.95) which very soon led to a trip to Amazon to find more.
Perhaps it's always ourselves we find in books, either prizing the bits we find ourselves reflected back in or taking as favourites those that show us what we knew already only better. I can't see literature as escapism or changing us much. The reason why there's not much Wagner, Bruckner or even Mahler in the house and no Tolkien, science fiction and only Mansfield Park of Jane Austen is that they're not me. And this was a stand-out line, among many, from Chekhov, from Concerning Love,
But I'd only be taking her away from an ordinary, pedestrian life into one that was just the same, just as prosaic, even more so, perhaps. etc. etc.

In his introduction, Ronald Wilks sees it is a critique of Aloykhin that 'his mistake was waiting for love and happiness to come to him of their own accord' but I'm not convinced we want literature to be as didactic as that, certainly not Chekhov. It was perceptive and an act of kindness and probably wisdom to let it pass.
He was, of course, the big name that the likes of Geoege Moore, Dubliners and, more lately, William Trevor owed so much to. He is a very important name I haven't read enough of and that will be remedied this Autumn.

Along with Mendelson's Early Auden once I've finished the temporarily suspended Later Auden and the new poetry by Michael Hofmann and Paul Muldoon will be on their way. So I'll tell you about them when the time comes.

 

Personality Disorder

Insanity, I explained, was an ambiguous conception, used quite arbitrarily by the average man, on the basis of criteria very much open to question.
Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus.

I'm not putting all that much faith in what 'the average man' thinks and I'm not saying that the Prime Minister is insane.
But it dawned on me recently in the same way that a poem might. There are a few personality disorders hiding in plain sight in the same way that Jimmy Savile wasn't noticed for all that time or the psychiatrist in Fawlty Towers said he was on holiday, but there was enough material in Basil for a whole conference.

It s not just the narcissism. It isn't only the compulsive lying. It isn't even that he might not have emotionally matured beyond the age of about 8. It is those but it is also psychosis, for which the most readily available internet dictionary definition has,
a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.

I thought it meant that you simply didn't care about anything but that's still him, isn't it. 



 

The Sixteen - Purcell Royal Welcome Songs

The Sixteen, Royal Welcome Songs for King Charles II, Vol II (Coro)

If you are going to get a track from your new album played on the wireless, let's hope they play the best one. I bought this album on the strength of O solitude, my sweetest choice, sung by Katy Hill with a lost soul wandering in the cello line for company. Gorgeous in its tender meditation on,
Places devoted to the night,
Remote from tumult and from noise.

If it sounds melancholy, the words aren't but that's perhaps irony, that some sadness is enjoyable.


If the rest is less impressive it is up against a high standard, not only in that track but against expectations of Purcell in general and what the Sixteen consistently produce. The local event of the year was their Monteverdi Vespers in Chichester Cathedral. I can't think now why I didn't make the effort.
The mood of O solitude continues through much of the record which makes it a bit one paced. That there is some fine singing we can take for granted but this is esoteric Purcell rather than Dido & Aeneas. It is to be hoped it has more to offer with more hearing but with the very different Weinberg and Bacewicz purchases to compete with for attention, it will need to take it chances.

The notes are of interest, though. Purcell owed much to the patronage of King Charles and the 'triumph' of the court and Tory party 'over an organized parliamentary opposition, the Whigs'.
The strong, stable, divinely legitimated image that Charles liked to project had no basis in reality; but the scale of the deception did not emerge until 19th century historians discovered secret treaty documents

that he was being subsidized by his cousin, Louis XIV.

Purcell wasn't to know that so the plaintive tone of Here the deities approve, a later highlight sung by alto Daniel Collins, is unwittingly double-edged, in tribute to that other great proroguer of parliament. History repeats itself in mysterious ways, repeating the motif of dodgy scoundrels incapable of honesty in pursuit of their narcissistic agendas. Thus, the Sixteen's project on Royal Welcome Songs tells a story, and this is inevitably well done without making me want to order Vol. 1 any more. There is plenty of other Purcell you might benefit from more.
   

Light and Shade

Nobody would accuse Thomas Mann of being lightweight. I knew Doktor Faustus would be no pushover and it will be finished at the weekend. It isn't even heavy-going but it is deep, its 507 pages are dense pages, and nothing if not thorough. Enjoyable, brilliant and major, providing plenty of things to note down, but one wants a break into something less demanding from time to time, which doesn't lead one back to finishing Edward Mendelson's Later Auden. Thus I've also been enjoying Enid Blyton's Five Go To Mystery Moor.
It reminds of when Public Image Limited's Metal Box was released. I saw it up on the shelf behind the counter and asked for it. It wasn't the same shop in which the assistant had complimented me on the purchase of a Patti Smith album but it was similar, in which they like to think they know a thing or two. (In another shop I had asked for the Cortina's Fascist Dictator and Chelsea's Right to Work, neither of which they stocked, so I then asked for The Logical Song by Supertramp at which the assistant sneered. Well, you don't have the ones I wanted, do you.) Anyway, having been provided with the PiL tin of 10'' records, I said, 'And have you got I Wanna Hold Your Hand by Dollar'.
He said, Do you listen to anything in between.
While Thomas Mann demands returning to, it won't be immediately.

It's the same in music, with the arrival of the Silesian Quartet's Bacewicz. I never got to the bottom of the String Quartets so why I need the Piano Quintets I don't know. Because it is quite clearly tremendous is why.
This is a good bit,

With the Weinberg Quartet no. 7 also due, needing to get in on the Weinberg vogue, it is as if I suddenly don't think Shostakovich is Shostakovich enough. These fragments I have shored against my ruin.
Tony Blackburn's joyful Sounds of the Sixties, Sat 6-8 a.m. is a fine thing to set off against such high seriousness but one can't stay awake for all of it of a weekend early morning. Early Sunday mornings are best spent with R3's breakfast show and once more this week, music heard in that floating, half awake condition was entirely convincing. I might have been only half awake but made sure I stayed awake, playing Guess the Composer, thinking I could almost hear Remember Me from Dido & Aeneas in it and so went for Purcell.
So I'm glad to be notified that The Sixteen's new release, Royal Welcome Songs Vol 2, should be here by Friday. After the intensity of the worthy, demanding Bacewicz, I'll deserve some of that and then, being unsatisfied by only having Vol. 2, I'll have to get Vol. 1.
I warmed up for its arrival with Come, Ye Sons of Art, with my favourite singer, James Bowman. Favourite, that is, alongside Al Green, Carolyn Sampson, Diana Ross, Nathalie Stutzmann, Gregory Issacs, Barbara Hannegan, Dusty Springfield, Hurricane Smith, etc.
One just can't help making lists but they never get anywhere near telling the whole story. Purcell is genuinely a compelling candidate for England, or Britain's Greatest Composer. Handel was German and wrote Italian music. There is Tallis, Elgar, Britten, Byrd and, lately John Tavener and James MacMillan but I might be siding with Purcell.

I see that the Bacewicz Quintets was released last year so it isn't new so I don't have to review it as if it is. I might have used up all my limited vocabulary to describe music but, as the Quartet for Four Cellos begins, I do need to mention this music because it needs mentioning. Words, or my words at least, can only detract from it. I recommend all the above if they sound like the sort of things you might like the sound of.

Catastrophe Averted

An item in yesterday's Times should have caused more alarm than it did. Had it been taken at its word there really would be no further point in music, poetry, future relations with the EU or bad horse racing advice.
Rhys Blakely, Science Correspondent, wrote,
The black hole at the centre of our solar system is swallowing up unprecedented volumes of interstellar gas and dust

A black hole at the centre of our solar system would be bad news. For about 400 years we have believed the Sun to be at the centre of the solar system. But, as Rhys goes on to explain, this one is 'about 26000 light years away' so he means 'galaxy', not 'solar system'.

One might have been tempted to send a droll riposte to Letters to the Editor but factual accuracy doesn't seem to matter anymore, neither on earth or on a vaster scale. It looks like it's not over yet and it is worth thinking about today's Irish Leger.

Racetrack Wiseguy

The Professor thinks it might be a 'fill your boots day' tomorrow and he might be right.

For me, I was ready to weigh in at long odds on on Mogul at Leopardstown but once I saw the 7/4 about Lancaster House (4.50), I could think of little else. Hopefully he is on the way up to bigger things still and should put these good but not-that-good horses away.

Quiet

Lasr night I didn't switch the telly on, not the wireless or CD player either. I read some more Thomas Mann in the quiet of the evening.
You're lucky if you can find any but it's worth having. Usually I'd have some music on to read by. Usually I'd have the news on but it's funny how you don't miss that blundering buffoon chuntering on, saying either the opposite of what he said last time or will say next time.
I'm not the first to discover quiet and I realize the point of John Cage's 4.33, or some of it, is the extraneous sound one can't get away from. I once punctured out in the countryside when I was a cyclist and was surprrisded how quiet it was without the tyres on the road, the whirr of the gears and the wind in my ears but, once accustomed to that, I heard the vast birdsong and the racket they made. Not a racket, of course - gorgeous.
Silence is potentially terrifying but quiet is as valuable as it is rare. The reason I have so little of it is that, looking up at the bank of CD's, I think I ought to listen to them; I'm with Pliny the Elder in wanting to make use of my time by hearing something, like Paul Sinha's excellent monologue that was on R4 at bathtime last night. O, yes, I must have had the wireless on then but not afterwards.
I don't necessarily want to become all mystical about it and escape into a state of meditative non-being but less can be more.
However, one returns to sound soon enough. My attempts at music reviews often fall back on saying how long it will be before a disc is filed on the shelves and thus isn't on the 'playlist' any more. Isata Kanneh-Mason's Clara Schumann has done well. I default back to the Buxtehude Complete Works on a regular basis and there are still Mozart operas to listen to that haven't had much of an outing but it is necessary to look at what other options there are.
I don't know what I said about the Veracini Complete Sonatas (for violin) when it came out but, goodness gracious, rediscovery must be at least as good as the first time around. A contemporary of Bach, there's not so much between them that Bach should be regarded as the all-time maestro and Veracini never heard of.
Following last week's Cadogan Hall Prom of Weinberg and Bacewicz chamber music - bleak chambers though there's might be- it is similar with them, how Shostakovich is a prime candidate for Greatest Composer of the C20th while these two, who sound much like him, are perhaps only just finding some wider recognition.

 

Aizhan Muhamedzhanova - Inspiration

Aizhan Muhamedzhanova, Inspiration

Having recently acquired a poetry book by going to Sandown races, my latest surprise came in the less surprising circumstances of a poetry club meeting.
Aizhan Muhamedzhanova is a Russian poet who has translated her own poems into English.
A translation is never the same as the poem. It can't be because the language it is translated into can't replicate the music of the original language. So, should the translator favour a literal approach and show the meaning of the poem or produce a new version of the poem based on the original.
It's difficult. Poetry only really exists in its first language.
Aizhan begins a number of these translations with rhymed lines but then gets as close as she can to her meaning. They are poems of great positivity and spirit.
A favourite is Rain,


I am not so sure why
Noise of beads from cloudy sky
Knocking on my window.
Melody of droplets' sound
Opening the door of heart:
All the memories of life
I can easily rewind.

There might be more fluent versions to be made in English but they might not say what the poem дождь says.
Rain ends in brightness and these poems in general are upbeat, overcoming their perceived difficulties by going beyond the 'disorder of prosaic day' or 'self-deception' into 'bliss and paradise' or 'the radiance of new today'.
Those of us usually more sceptical, downbeat or ironic might like to take a break from ourselves and spend a few minutes with a more refreshing point of view.

But the 'poetry' exists in the Russian and even if one knows only half a dozen words of Russian (pivo, glasnost, mir, etc.), one can appreciate the energy, passion and intensity of them in their music. Luckily, we can do that on You Tube,

  One doesn't need to understand everything about poetry to enjoy it. In fact, once you do understand everything about it, it's over.

Letter from Portsmouth

Apologies for yesterday. Hope nobody tuned in and took the advice. Dreadful rehearsal for the Racetrack Wiseguy feature. A John Gosden two-year-old that didn't win last week was a rare thing but I managed to find one. Luckily for me, the Professor pointed one out for today and put me right. We all ought to be reading him.

If the Prize for the Best Weather of the Year goes to Today, a strong candidate for Best Prom was the repeat of Monday's Cadogan Hall lunchtime concert, the Silesian String Quartet playing Weinberg and Bacewicz. It didn't take me long to resume Amazon activity after that. If Classic FM's If you like that, you will like this programme was a bit more adventurous it would lead to those two composers from Shostakovich. The Complete Weinberg String Quartets is 6 discs and £50 so I'll take it gently with just the no. 7 heard today.

Thomas Mann continues to serve it up in Doktor Faustus with my notes on useful quotes now onto the second side of the envelope. I take great encouragement, as an occasional contributor of words to pop songs, that,
a poem must not be too good to furnish a good lied,

that is, the words don't need to do it all, the lyricist must leave room for the musician to make the song. Which suits me fine. Here's the idea, a title, a chorus and a couple of verses - you do the rest.

And a fine day today was augmented by James Fenton's Oxford lecture on Auden's approach to Shakespeare's Sonnets. Further preparation for my session on Shakespeare biography due in November led me to see what is to be gained from that, and there's plenty. It is writing like that that makes it all worthwhile.

Racetrack Wiseguy

We are coming to the end of the dog days of the turf calendar. It's not always easy to find things to bet on in August, or the summer in general, but it will pick up soon.
There still isn't a great deal of interest today but we might try to set off in the right direction with Anastarsia, Ascot 2.10.
John Gosden's two-year-olds have come out and won all week and today's specimen is entered in the Group One Fillies Mile, which surely signifies more than the third in a Yarmouth Maiden achieved by Pocket Square.
I was dubious about the betting, seeing the latter made favourite, and left it until midnight by which time that had changed. The stable presumably expect some improvement from Pocket Square but without somebody else's confidence to bet against, one would never get a price worth having.
We'll give it a go.

Reclining Figure

Much weirder than any of those by Henry Moore, though.

Interesting piece of work. What is the body language trying to tell us in this studied pose.

Blasé disregard for that going on around him, I reckon. I admit I used to have some time for his style if not his content. But I always enjoy saying, 'I was wrong, you were right'. There is something sinister about the aloofness. But he is only, at best, the second most sinister person in the UK.
That's Dominic Cummings. Here are Cliff and Percy doing Boris and Dominic's song,

 

What a Waste

From the BBC,

M6 gin crash: HGV collision closes motorway

The M6 has been closed after a lorry carrying 32,000 litres of gin was involved in a crash and began leaking its cargo on to the carriageway.

One Portsmouth poet was reported to be 'unconsolable'.

September

Whan that Septembre with its ayre coole,
those hydeous kids due back in schoole,
the herte is gladde to welcom inne
Goddes fynest monthes that, wythout synne,
he did ynamen gentil Septembre
and noblest birthday monthe, Octobre.

It always seems like an achievement to arrive at September although, like a gin and tonic, you seem to no sooner have been glad of its arrival than it's gone again.
For those who still come here because it was once a poetry website, there are new books by Michael Hofmann and Paul Muldoon. It's not my fault, it turns out, that Hofmann had fallen below the radar - it's his. His first book of poems for twenty years is an admirable state of affairs but not sufficiently attention-seeking to remain where one can be seen. I suspect One Lark, One Horse will be highly worthwhile and I ought to be ordering it now rather than 'doing a Monday night'.
Having checked out the Cheltenham Literature Festival, I realize I will miss Paul Muldoon having arranged my visit to nearby for not quite when he's there. Never mind. I saw him last time and elsewhere before. Well worth it then but not to be regretted now. Frolic and Detour might be his last chance.
It was once justifiable to say, circa 1998, that we lived 'in the Age of Muldoon', as the eminent critic wrote, and I was a keen admirer of The Annals of Chile, Incantata, Hay and where the great man had got to by then but the worst thing about being the height of fashion is that you might live long enough to outlive the fashion you contributed so much to. Ask Sigue Sigue Sputnik. No, don't. Ask Shakespeare, whose reputation has been restored since but saw the theatre move into a vogue for plays other than his before he had quite finished. Perhaps that's why he stopped.
It might be an old joke and we know the TLS will publish letters from any old pranksters these days but following their big scoop of the huge American Standard earlier this year, someone was facetious enough to ask the following week 'when was he going to publish the answers' and now that someone's been brave enough to ask, it's either time for Prof. Muldoon to come halfway to meet us or disappear  into a parody of his own elusive method. We will see if we are prepared to keep the faith but there can come a time to stop being 'brand loyal' to those one once regarded as essential.
I understand that James Joyce might have gone back to something like Dubliners after Finnegans Wake had illness not deprived him of the chance to redeem his reputation so it isn't too late until it's too late.


But while I remain devoted to some poets, some poetry and certain things about poetry and unwilling to throw away the last 40-odd years of thinking about it, I'm not devout anymore. There is something Eastern, mystical or transcendent about not doing it any more. How much wiser do I seem in my assessments of cycling, cricket or football on account of the fact I haven't done any of them for twenty years or more. Or it might just be that I'm passed it, lazy, too ready with an opinion and there's nothing remotely Buddhist about it.

But the idea occurs in Japanese literature, and I'm sure in plenty of places elsewhere, about 'going beyond' and that is what all great art should surely be trying to do. To find some release from the shackles of itself, of us being ourselves, and resolve the difficulty that made it necessary.

I'm on page 220 out of 510 in Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus. It was recommended to me.
One has to size up any recommendation by assessing the recommendor, one's own pre-conceptions and make a decision. I've been eternally grateful for The Magnetic Fields, Patrick Hamilton and Richard Yates but not taken up computer games (when chess will do), science fiction or whisky.
I hoped Doktor Faustus would be a short book, like Death in Venice or any of those other European masterpieces by Gide, Turgenev, Camus or Hesse, but it's a monster.
It is a deep, hugely detailed thump of a novel that must have been C19th, when novels were like that, except it was published in 1947. There is no prospect of me embarking on another Mann novel once I've finished this because I'll need a rest but, heaven knows, there's enough to keep on mind.
During its account of 'the discord between genius and sanity', one can find one's own place among the many ideas on offer. There is Schildknapp, who 'wanted to be a poet, in his own estimation he was one', but complained 'if only I could work instead of drudging, I would show them!' but,
what he considered an obstacle was really a pretext with which he deceived himself over his lack of a genuine and telling creative impulse.

That might hurt anyone who hadn't realized it already but it falls refreshingly on those of us who knew.
So far, Doktor Faustus has mentioned Buxtehude twice which is double the number of times the only other novel I've read that did, which was The Glass Bead Game. That is a measure of how serious and clever it is. The title hints that one ought not to expect a happy ending but perhaps the thrill of what one finds out en route to the inevitable creates the illusion of it having been worthwhile.
But let's not hope to learn anything from literature or that it might make us better people. It can only be what it is for its own sake. Brilliant at its best but useless. Let's hope Paul Muldoon can sort it all out for us rather than provide something like the Listener crossword.