The Dead Heat and other stories

 I am indebted to the Professor for the photo finish of the last at Cheltenham yesterday on which it is possible to see that the near side horse won by a nose even though it was dark. The judges weren't prepared to call it, though, and it was officially a dead heat.

And that suits me as Elle Est Belle, on the far side, salvaged something from the wreckage of the weekend for me, even at half the odds, and we are still well-placed enough to finish the year ahead. Having to share the win is fine when one didn't really win at all.

This is very belated compensation for a day at Fontwell in the early 1980's when I was on the wrong end of such a decision. I backed a horse called Glamour Show that day which was a short-priced favourite. It hit the third fence from home which might have ruined his chances but he rallied and got up on the line to make a photo finish of it except the judges gave it to the other horse and bets were settled on that result before it became apparent that Glamour Show was in front on the line.

It must be part of the whimsical charm of sport, with its lbw and offside decisions, that the results aren't always right.

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Record Review yesterday played a piece from a new disc of sonatas by Vandini, who I'd not heard of either, but looking at You Tube, I thought this performance was hugely impressive by a musician who quite clearly entirely 'gets it'.

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Martin Stannard's biography of Muriel Spark is proving to be of great interest and has already lured me into ordering three of her novels. I hope I didn't do that too soon. It's early days yet and she's already abandoned trying to come to terms with rational thoughts and is going via Magic Realism towards Catholicism which is a downward spiral if ever there was one but it might not prevent her from being a fine writer. We will see.

I'm assuming that Martin Stannard is not a common enough name for there to be two of them and that he was the editor of Joe Soap's Canoe all those years ago. He will thus have been the reviewer of my booklet, Reptiles in Love, of which he liked the first line and said the second line wasn't bad but he was 'rigorous' about the rest of it. Which was fine. A review that 'has its doubts' is always better than unqualified enthusiasm and, at the time, I was most gratified that my poem in his magazine was apparently allocated an illustration. And now I've found it nestling in the undergrowth of the internet, here,

Joe Soap's Canoe 4

 

I'll have to see what else happened there later on.

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Meanwhile, not wanting to offend too much, I'll hide this negative Top 6 down here in the hope that nobody reads this far. It's really a summary of those things that, some 45 years down the line, make me want to put some distance between myself and 'poetry', such as it is these days, without despairing of all the wonderful things it can do for you as, most recently, August Kleinzahler's poem, Dance, Dance, Dance, most emphatically did.

It almost gives me some justification to quote the Sean O'Brien's novel, Afterlife, in which the most gifted poet of her generation, at Oxford, Jane Jarmain, was reported to be writing poetry 'as if she thought it was possible', although anybody who has tried knows it isn't.

 

Top 6 Worst Things about Poetry

Sequence - There was once something on a forum I read that said, 'when I'm writing a sequence' and struck me as preposterous. If you must write a 'sequence' then surely it will emerge from poems one is writing. One wouldn't sit down with the intention of writing a sequence. I formulated the dictum (which I didn't sit down to do) that all such things are either a long poem in sections or a collection of poems on a theme. Nobody needs the term 'sequence'.

I'm not saying I proved my point.

Voice - Reviewers find reason to praise poets who have 'found their voice'. Such preciousness about individuality would have mystified Elizabethan poets from that Golden Age when impersonality wasn't something one had to work at to avoid oneself but the idea of 'personality' had hardly occurred to them yet. In those days it was more of a discipline than a self-indulgence.

Poet - There needs to be a better word for it. If ever I fancied myself as such as a teenager, full of profound elsewheres, I'd rather be called 'writer' now, as it says on Larkin was on his grave. The distracted dreamer full of highly-charged, beautifully expressed thoughts is something that Wordsworth, Keats and their morbid fellow travellers established and is still inappropriately associated with the term.

Workshop - It's fine if poets want to meet up and discuss each other's work-in-progress. I'm sure the feedback is invaluable. But I don't want anybody else interfering with anything I might do and neither do I want an editing credit for suggesting alterations to anything they've done.

Prizes - It's not the point. It's not school Sports Day. Some poems are better than others but there is no stopwatch, scoring system or list of boxes to tick to prove which they are. So, wouldn't it be great if poetry could be one thing that was not run like a competitive sport but just enjoyed for its own sake.

Everybody's got some. There are so many to go round. I even used to award my own but I have tried to stop.

Sincerity - There is a place for sincerity and it can be powerful, I'm sure, but it's one-dimensional. One can only cringe at George the Poet, Kate Tempest and This is the Place by Tony Walsh. Poetry is a wide church but they are the lowest common denominators of something that can be infinitely more worthwhile. Irony works much better.