Heroics and otherwise

More heroics from St. Wystan were to be had as I make my inexorable way towards finishing Prof. Mendelson's Early Auden.
Poets are in fact "fairly ordinary men and women...some intelligent, others stupid", who happen to have "a particular interest and skill in handling words in a particular kind of way."
And that is all. Not shamen, no magic, no gift of insight into profound wisdom that is denied to tradespeople, entrepreneurs or sportsplayers.
I've long compared poets to carpenters in that one fashions an item from words, the other from wood. Some more elegantly than others in both cases but that's all there is to it.
--
Early Green, less heroically, it has occured to me, is covered by Re-read, Selected Poems (2004). It is 29 poems, only two of which were prior to Museum (1990) and appeared when I was 45, roughly halfway between Museum and The Perfect Book.
This week's Portsmouth Poetry Society meeting is on 'Transport' and I realized I had that old thing Re-reading Derrida on a Train and it was in this booklet of which I must have some copies remaining that I could try to give away to good homes. And I do. And Vasco da Gama is in it, too, which is about sailing.
I haven't looked at those poems for years. It's not for me to say if they stand up because they'll either be embarrassing or I'll love them from memory and blindness to their shortcomings.
Ferdinand is genuine juvenilia and Bonfire Night on the Moon at best sophomore before a few poems represent my old pre-occupation with Thom Gunn's My Sad Captains stanza which ideally you need to be as good as him to use to good effect. Otherwise it can be tortuous trying to fit fine-sounding, meaningful sentences into seven syllable lines that have a strict rhyme scheme. Heaven knows I tried.
The discipline loosens and gradually concedes that rhyme can be dispensed with, which I did know, the grandiose Tycho Brahe poems are followed by four from the Line Drawings limited edition (of 10) - the portraits of Gianni Versace, Emma Thompson, Stephen Hawking and Diana. Diana was about the funeral and written once I thought it was okay to do so because the Observer published poems by Carol Ann Duffy, Maya Angelou and was it Andrew Motion.
            flowers raining in on the hearse
like a soft explosion in reverse.

I can see I worked hard on some of those poems. I hope it doesn't show. I'd like to think the more 'take it or leave it' attitude of Later Green was an improvement but maybe not everyone would think so and it comes to something when you have to write a retrospective of oneself.
Copies of Re-read, Selected Poems are free for the asking while stocks last, which I'm sure they will.
--
But the one recognizable benefit of impetigo as I hope the antibiotics gain an advantage over it was, you'll never guess, my chess rating.
At the end of my tether, 'losing my religion' as Michael Stipe would say, at 3 a.m. with the raw, the sore, the itch and the scratch, I gave up on the forlorn hope of sleep and came down here and played chess.
I had been on a march recently after a couple of months since setting new personal best ratings. I don't feel any different when games just seem to go my way than when struggling among the average and haplessly blundering but I was back in the higher 1800's.
Playing largely on instinct in five minute games, sizing up the fianchettoed bishop against the chances of giving the opposition a bad pawn structure, one can get away with it sometimes because they think about it too much and their clock runs out (for example). So, glad to have something else to think about, I won in the depths of the night, lost a few points with a draw over breakfast but then was presented with an awful mistake and resignation to find myself on 1935.
So now I go back to 15 minute games which I had left at 1925.
Form is temporary so I enjoy it while I can.
Class is forever but I can't tell you much about that.
Impetigo, let's hope, is on its way out.