A Million Lies

Even though it was, I think, only yesterday that something provided the vague prompt that there might be a poem there, I can't remember what it was.

Not to worry. I've been more or less in a state of thinking I'd not write another poem for most of the time I've been writing them so I thought I'd try. It can easily be removed from here if, after its subsequent review, it is found not good enough. But I'm glad enough to have it for now.

It's about Marco Polo, the reports he took back to Venice from his trip into the East. For the most part, I believe him but I wouldn't blame those who didn't at the time because, if I'd been there then, I'd have suspected him of being a purveyor of fake news and, like it says, science fiction with which to astound the gullible masses. 

Maybe I'll get his book, read it and write a better poem later but there is this for now. I'm not unhappy with it. We will find out after a couple of weeks if it still looks okay but this having once been established as a website to 'promote' my poems, it's long overdue that it featured such a thing.

  
A Million Lies

He had been there and back, he said, 

Seen unicorns and behaviour
Beyond their quaint imagining.
Some bought it all and bought the book
While others would have none of it
And went back to their boring work
Or stared into the drab canal.
And even those carving the stone
On the ornate basilica,
Who had little faith in dragons
Or that it could be turtles
All the way down weren’t as tempted
As they might have been.

He might not have been anywhere,
No further than, say, Antioch,
Made most of the rest of it up
And then pretended to come back
With his crazy science fiction
To make such a name for himself.
He got that far, at least.

Lucas, Bach Piano, Scannell

There was always much to like about John Lucas, Many years ago I read his survey, Modern English Poetry: From Hardy to Larkin. Later his book on Notts cricket, The Trent Bridge Battery. Another time I'd ordered books from his Shoestring Press. And eventually I realized it was all the same bloke, also jazzman, Prof. of English and novelist. 

Recent obituaries mentioned his last novel, That Little Thread (Greenwich Exchange, 2023), thought it sounded worth a go and was proved right. Peter Simpson, Professor at a Midlands university, is approached by a 'wide boy' who had been the unlikely father of a child born to 'Paddy', a star student from twenty years earlier who left before graduating and reportedly died during childbirth. And thus we are on the trail of what really happened.

One might think a novel about middle class academic life written by one such could be a bit self-contained and there are larger concerns beyond its limited milieu but they have lives like anybody else and the fact that theirs is based around writing essays in pursuit of a certificate shouldn't detract from its potential too much.

It's a steady, good book done by one who had done it before and knows how to. It brought to mind Jane Jarmain who is the similarly brilliant, tragically early casualty in Sean O'Brien's Afterlife and perhaps there are comparisons to be made beginning with that motif. 

The future of thge novel is perenially in question but there's no shortage of them. The problem might be that Finnegans Wake seemed to have knocked the ball out of the ground once and for all but, like Theodore Adorno's dictum that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, there still was. 

Further novels by Lucas might well be on their way here soon. 

--

The disc Allusions and Beyond by Piano Dup Takahashi-Lehmann arrived with its 2.33 of the Bach/Kurtag Gottes Zeit from Cantata BWV 106. Two further such miniatures follow it without achieving the same stillness.

Before them, an arrangement for four hands of Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 is worth having although for once perhaps the very familiar orchestral original is difficult to improve on.

Although I can see how an album or programme can benefit from contrasts, I think I prefer discs that are 'more of the same'. The shift into Bernd Alois Zimmerman's 'Monologe' takes us immediately faraway when we might not be ready to go. If it's philistine not to find its modernist plink, plonk and crash intellectually invigorating then it must be the effect of time increasingly putting a cap on my sympathies for the avant garde. Having been there and done that, I don't feel much need to go back. And then the Brahms Haydn Variations come as some relief but it turns out to have been a disc mainly bought for 2.33 of outrageous charm.

--

Not dissimilar to the Lucas book is Vernon Scannell's Feminine Endings (Enitharmon, 2000), a set piece of the contemporary poetry world all about a residential poetry course. One of the tutor poets is older, male and traditional, the other is female and more challenging. The marital situation of the hosts is becoming fragile as are some of the paying guests, one of who is taking a lot of interest in news reports about the latest woman found murdered. And the premises where it all takes place with readings and writings of poems is haunted.

For all the ready-made humour to be found in the poetry world and the forseeable attitudes and opinions of those involved, it's a neat book encompassing more than might have been expected ot it and Scannell gets it right. It's fairly clear where he stands, that he is more or less Gordon Napier, brought in as a last-minute, stopgap replacement for the indisposed Brian MacDuff, who is presumably George MacBeth.

Some of the poets mentioned are fictitional but most of the poems are real. I don't think it's obvious who Gabriella Cornwell is which is a good thing because it might be actionable but at least she wins a major, international prize for her opaque efforts. It could be used as a text to introduce the poetry of its time and might yet be if I pursue the recently occuring idea to do something about the 1990's which, whether or not it did at the time, looks like a Golden Age by now. 

Next Prime Minister Betting

 Here's a wide-open market for those who think that Cheltenham, the Grand National, the ITV7 or the Lottery are too easy,

Next UK Prime Minister, a snapshot as of this moment because it could look very different by this time tomorrow.

This doesn't mean 'after the next General Election', it means next incumbent of 10 Downing Street and, given Ed's position in the market, I'd take that to mean including any so-called 'caretaker',

Angela Rayner	14/5
Wes Streeting	13/2
Ed Miliband	7/1
Shabana Mahmood	12/1
Nigel Farage	16/1,

so, you can have Kemi at 33's for looking around but 14/1 is the meanest offer. William Hill make Farage a 6/1 shot.

I'm told by Times Radio that, as a regular listener to Times Radio, I'm well informed about politics and it's true that without them I wouldn't have heard of Alistair Carns, 16/1, but even with their help, I'd never heard of Lee Pitcher, 25/1.

 

I lost more money than I imagined possible in 2016 when Trump beat Hillary Clinton and the referendum said Leave. That disastrous year was thus declared the last time I'd ever bet on politics because there is no way of assessing how it works any more.

How we'd love it if it was still possible for Robert Mckenzie and his swing-o-meter to detect a 2% swing and thus a change of MP for the likes of Swindon South. But it's not like that any more. Us olde worlde liberal/left are bereft and clinging to driftwood, trying to work out why Farage isn't a shorter price than he is to win the next General Election because nobody ever went poor by under-estimating the taste of the general public.

 

The Labour candidate for Prime Minister then is unlikely to be Keir Starmer, decent man though he is. So, if we did have to bet on Next UK PM, we are looking for a promotion from within. Angela would turn out to be rubbish, much as we love her. Andy Burnham is 16/1 even though not currently qualified to run. Wes Streeting might look like the class act but it's the sort of race that might not suit a front-runner. I well remember our own Penny Mordaunt being odds on, about 8/13, to be the next Prime Minister but not long after that she was most shamefully supporting Boris.

Not that it might matter too much because the next General Election already looks unwinnable, but I'd go for Shabana Mahmood, for preference and for the bet. Because she's so far the least tainted. Although it won't take long in 'power' for her to become so.

It's an impossible job but not quite as impossible as Boris, Liz Truss and then, sadly, Starmer, made it look.  

He hasn't resigned yet, has he. One last check. No, he hasn't.

 

The Lives of the Poets and other stories

 There was a time, a long time ago, when I didn't ever read biographies. It might have been part of a purist thing when I thought novels were proper writing. It was probably related to how I didn't write anything apart from poems. But the story of a life can often be how one changes from one thing to another, like Wittgenstein writing the Tractatus and then, later, another book that contradicts it. So now I write poems rarely but have tried, with less or even less success, most genres except libretti or a maintenance manual for the Triumph Herald.

Similarly with biographies. I read more of them than novels these days. Mostly poets, my shelves overflow with them. Any number relating to Shakespeare, 4 Auden, 3 Larkin, 3 Eliot, 3 Donne. I'm not sure there's anything one can generalize from them and sometimes wonder about the biography of an apparently more mundane tradesperson, like the proprietor of a local grocer's shop. Why would that not be more interesting.

The lives of Pushkin and Byron are the high lives of Romantic excess. Those of Larkin, Charlotte Mew and Elizabeth Jennings not quite so much. Poets in previous centuries were mostly men of some privilege until the C20th it became a bit more democratic. Poetry can be a self-indulgent thing. Do those who dedicate themselves to it do so heroically for the sake of their art and do they use it as an excuse to sacrifice consideration for others in the interests of their pre-occupation.

How much suffering is it worth to produce art of some value. Beethoven surely suffered but was rewarded with a body of work that precious few can compare with. But since it was his own suffering, it's mainly up to him. I'm more concerned with those who made others suffer.

We might think of Ted Hughes, Eliot and Hardy whose treatment of the women in their lives was selfish. And now Vernon Scannell.

Finishing Walking Wounded today, these questions arose. He dedicated himself to his art and his manifesto is to be admired but he was one among several names of his period and hardly one of the greatest names of his generation. But the cost it came at was immense. That he couldn't help his drinking and habitual violence is one thing and his own distress as a result of it is what he had to bear. But it's not a pleasant book to read and one tends to think that a life's work of well-made but not colossally brilliant poems does not balance out the way he treated a succession of partners.

I'd never like to say that any mere art work would be worth the real life pain inflicted on others. Poems, and art of any kind, is second-hand, not real and only words on a page - however much they are valued as such- whereas bruises and injuries are first-hand and not imaginary. We must never allow ourselves to become so precious about art that we forget its secondary status.

Scannell was a novelist, too, and this reading sequence continues into an order for Feminine Endings, a late book apprently very thinly based on Arvon Creative Writing course with tutors who may not be but probably are Scannell and Hughes. It sounds very much like an industry insider job but that might not prevent it being any good. It follows on from the TLS review on 'the state of poetry', Rory Waterman's essays and reviews and the Scannell biography, which each suggested the next. In between, and loosely related, begun today, is That Little Thread, the last novel by John Lucas, admirable man. That has begun most readably.

--

But, on the subject of 'bodies of work', the end of the Complete Works of Bach is sort of in sight. There's much organ music to go, the big oratorios and miscellaneous discs but the full picture is coming into sight.

It's never a chore but one only gets through 172 discs by applying oneself to them dutifully.

After 50+ discs of cantatas one can't help but think that his reputation would have been no less if he had written half as many and the same is passably true of the organ music. I'm naturally suspicious of anybody too prolific but there are some who, having provided so much, you can hardly throw any away and, anyway, it's not the complete Bach because a couple of further pieces have been discovered and accredited to him while I've been listening to them.

And we need not worry too much about 'authenticity'. Some of us - me, at least- have been tuned in to the keyboard music through the piano, not invented in Bach's time so clearly not how he heard them, but the accidental stumbling across transcriptions for four hands by Gyorgy Kurtág. The fact that Cantata 106 is sublime overrides any consideration of how Bach heard his own music and whether it was keyboard music or a cantata in the first place doesn't matter much. All Bach played on the piano is a transcription.

Perhaps the vastness of Bach's output is reduced slightly by realizing that he had his way of doing it. It's not 172 discs of brand new ideas. But if we reduce our assessment a little bit on account of that, it gets multiplied back up again by thinking that if he had only written the solo violin music or only the Cello Suites, or only some of the cantatas or only the keyboard music, as examples, he would be a great composer. One thinks of the Beatles and their reputation, how they gave away songs to Cilla and others, and I have this way of gauging pop artists by how good no. 30 in their Top 30 is. Bach is light years ahead of Lennon-McCartney, individually and collectively, on that score and he's most likely seeing off the whole of the Motown Hit Factory, too.

It was a blessed day I picked up that box in Chichester. Maybe I should have bought the Schubert, too. 

Baltimore

 For about 45 years, I've known Baltimore as a reggae classic by the Tamlins, inevitably with the riddim section of Sly'n'Robbie, 'one of the biggest hits in Jamaica in 1979'.

And then last week I heard it by Nina Simone in what I took to be a cover version because it was reggae. And now Bob Harris has just played Randy Newman doing it. I might have been vaguely aware that he wrote it but, heaven knows, that gives you no right to be credited with the best version. He trails in a non-descript, almost tailed-off third of three, being far too pedestrian and soul-less. It doesn't even sound like a good song when he does it.

It's not going to be easy to displace The Tamlins, so imprinted on one's later formative years, as the preferred version but if anybody can do that, Nina Simone is one of the most likely to do so. Not that one has to choose. Not everything needs to be competitive sport.

One can be glad to have both. Not all three. Credit to Randy Newman for having written it but I know what it's like. I wrote a few songs, too, but it's best for their sake if I don't sing them.

 

Racetrack Wiseguy- Cheltenham 2026

 Nicky Henderson has been robbed of his big Champion Hurdle hope and the Good Lord only knows what Constitution Hill will produce but the stable has quality if not the in-depth quantity to still be optimistic about these four days of crucible, red hot racing.

Of course, we don't want to dismiss Ireland's chances because it's become almost a home fixture for them but Mr. Henderson might be 2-0 up after the Supreme and the Arkle on

Tuesday. Old Park Star (nap) and Lulamba have looked impressive against UK opposition so far. Joseph O'Brien's Talk the Talk in the Supreme might be doing exactly that but only squeaked in at Leopardstown on heavy ground. There's more to worry about in the Arkle where Kopek des Bordes presumably won like a 2/9 should last time out and Romeo Coolio only beat Kargese a neck and I'm not 100% convinced about Kargese, having once backed her and lost. The  reasons why I'm not taking ante-post prices about this opening double is that it's still five weeks away, ante-post markets are strewn with disappointed chancers and Lulamba, despite being overwhelmingly on top by the end of his races, has taken the first half of them to find his feet, which might be a plus up the Prestbury Park finish but there's just half a chance he's not flawless over the bare two miles. 

Nevertheless, it looks like we go in all big and brash. The week could be all but over by 2.10pm on the Tuesday but that's sport for you. I know several people who pay good money to go and watch Portsmouth play football. They'd understand about disappointment and, hey, Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. The plan for the rest of the week entirely depends on how those first two races go. Some years ago, one of our local 'faces' went for the whole four days and backed 24 consecutive losers. I can't see the enjoyment in that. I was told, yes but you back the favourites, don't you. Quite often, yes, I do, but that's not cheating.

Jeriko du Reponet will be given the widest of berths in the handicap because it's not a natural jumper of fences and you need to be at least that to win a big Cheltenham handicap.

The Champion Hurdle market has had to be carved up and re-written several times already so I'm not committing to that yet, if at all. I was all over The New Lion before the two runs he's had this season; the race turned out to be Lossiemouth's for the taking last year had she been put in it; I'd be angling towards Betterdaysahead at present but not with money; I'd bloody luv it if Mr. Henderson could find the old Constitution Hill but that's a challenge that might be even beyond him. Golden Ace might yet pick up another top race and become a legend almost by default. It's a complete guessing game and a bookie's benefit.

On Wednesday, if body and soul are still intact, one might think that Majborough ought to be odds on to be Champion Chaser after Leopardstown but Marine Nationale wins at Cheltenham, so far. I'd be siding with Majborough because he's three years younger with maybe more ahead of him. There could be a bet in the first, the Novice Hurdle, and it might be Doctor Steinberg on a day where I'd have to ask for odds ungenerously about Ireland overall. I might come back here and edit this as a 'living document' ( !!! ) as things become clearer.

Thursday can almost be a rest day some years. At present the market that goes 10/11, 5/4, 7/4 for the Mares Hurdle means first of all guessing which of the ladies are sent to it rather than the Champion Hurdle. Except if they all chose the perceived 'easier option' it could make it the harder one. You'd need to be a wiser guy than me to be on who runs never mind who wins. 

I wish the Ryanair Chase could establish itself as a prize as much respected as the Champion Chase or the Gold Cup. Maybe it's at a disadvantage by being sponsored by an airline known for being cheap but not cheerful. There is no reason why middle distances should be less respected than shorter or longer. It's the other way round in flat racing. And in human racing the mile, or 1500m, is at least as much of a 'gold riband' as the 100m or marathon. They put £211k up for the Ryanair which ain't bad compared to £225k for the Champion and 351k for the Gold Cup, roughly in line with how much further you have to run and how many fences you have to jump. I can't be having anything at the prices at present, though.

The fact that 11yo Bob Olinger is 6/1, third fav, for the Stayers Hurdle says a lot about how bleak and starless things are in that division. And then you notice that Doddiethegreat is 10. These by all means classy races and would be riveting stuff at Sandown or Aintree but the argument against trying to fetch more cash out of the paying customer's pocket by making Cheltenham a five day meeting is that Thursday's already like it is. There are only so many good horses to go round.

Depending on which horses have taken their chance in the Champion Hurdle on Tuesday, there will probably be a bet in the Mares Hurdle but until nearer the time I'd not be taking those prices on them running, never mind winning. 

Whereas, if one has rested on the third day, Friday and the Gold Cup is worth having. If the race brings back memories of confident disasters such as Ten Plus, Silviniaco Conti or the ante post 5/2 I was stuck with when Burrough Hill Lad won, having been given away at much more than the SP of 7/2 as Mrs. Pitman insisted that there was nothing wrong with him, it might also remind one of some winners. But not as many as it should.

But Jango Baie is a bet, at 9/2, not going overboard but a go one could have. I'm a bit surprised it's favourite but in that blanket finish of 2025's race of the year in the King George, I reckon it was the one that wanted another furlong, or two and a half. That will be some sort of business on the day or else why do I still play this game. There was much to like about Haiti Couleurs keeping up the gallop at Newbury yesterday and at 8/1 isn't out of the question or even a reverse forecast. It's a long time since I did one of them.

There will probably be a bet in the Albert Bartlett, the long distance novice hurdle, and maybe if Doctor Steinberg and No Drama This End avoid each other, given that they are both entered in the first on Wednesday, it could work out alright to bet on both races.

That's not the most imaginative plan but the bookies' profits and the poor house are maintained by those who stride in all full of imaginative plans. I'd have landed the Coral place pot yesterday, and a few weeks ago, if I hadn't gone against a well-backed favourite. One wants to get by, not break the bank. 

So it's Old Park Star. Then it's Majborough and Lulamba. And then you mix in the others mentioned in bold type here and if you're lucky, three of them might land a treble. Because you do need to be lucky as well as a wiseguy. Or not unlucky, at least.

--

Why don't we have a little game here, if anybody wants to play. Send in your treble for the week, to be calculated as a Trixie- 3 doubles and the treble. I'll publish them here before it all gets underway. The prize could be something like a Thursday afternoon in The Dolphin, Old Portsmouth, date tba, but you'd have to get your round in.

First Four Questions

The TLS has its own Twenty Questions feature. It's a long time since I ended my subscription  but their e-mail still arrives each week, giving a tempting glimpse of what one could have if one went to the lengths of finding a shop that sold their paper.

Nevertheless, a questionnaire is hard to decline even if it's only the first four questions out of twenty that one can see. It's only the same as it ever was, not being able to watch a quiz on telly without taking part and not quite as much reading these questionnaires for an insight into the inner lives of the eminent person interviewed as thinking what one would have said oneself. So, as far as it goes, 

 “How can I know what I think, until I see what I say?” (E. M. Forster). How much of your writing surprises you?

Not all that much by now. I'm unlikely to suddenly find out in the process of writing anything that I believe in God, had misjudged Boris Johnson or should have been listening to Pink Floyd and Bruckner rather than Tamla Motown and Bach and Handel. 

On the other hand, if any piece of writing doesn't find something one hadn't been expecting to say then it was probably not worth writing.

What is the first thing you remember reading or having read to you?

Thomas the Tank Engine was certainly the first book I ever borrowed from a library, Nottingham, circa 1965. There were the heroic escapades of a collie dog called Black Bob. 

But, probably like most people of my age, Janet and John was the first set text at school.

Is there a particular sentence that has stayed with you throughout your life?

Not one, no. Plenty of good lines from great poems or novels. But, an almost throwaway line that Danny Baker used to use when encourgaing listeners to take part in his radio phone-ins,

All you've got to be is any good. Not throughout my life but for about the last twenty-five years.

What is the most interesting item on your bookshelf?

It's surely got to be a book signed by a poet who I thought of as a god at the time and for a long time afterwards. My copy of Touch by Thom Gunn. I was overawed in his presence in Cambridge in 1979 when he did so and he was kind enough to make a conversational gambit. But, no. I could think of nothing to say by way of reply.

Related to that is a magazine called Navis, no.6, Summer 1997, on the back of which my name appears in block capitals as a contributor to that issue, above Gunn's in ordinary type who had been in a previous issue. I got paid just about enough for that poem to spend it on a copy of the magazine with Gunn in. 

My copy of Larkin at Sixty, ed. Thwaite, was bought from one of his secretaries that he had given it to but I have no evidence ot its provenance.

Scannell and Discipline

James Andrew Taylor's biography hasn't made Vernon Scannell any more appealing to me as it progresses but in real life there were plenty ready to be charmed by him and I'd like to think that any friend of Anne Stevenson's might be a friend of mine. None of us can do very much about what we are like and the upbringing he had augmented by his army experiences can't have been of benefit.

I haven't really regarded his poems as much more than a C+ - in what would be a rigorous marking system- until Chapter 12 pointed out the rhyme scheme of Enemy Agents. If nominative determinism is at work in a poet called Scannell, he could equally have been called Rimell. In the first three lines, 

Expert in disguise and killing blows,

Fluent in all languages required,

They wrote me ardent letters but in code.   

 he establishes the subtlest of rhyme schemes in which the consonant sound in 'blows' and the 'd' and the end of 'required' come together in 'code'.

That's good form for you in more ways than one and entirely puts into practice his repeated criticism of 'pop' poetry, like that from Liverpool, and the wider idea of vers libre that Eliot is quoted here as saying, 

No 'vers' is 'libre' for the man who wants to do a good job'. 

 Having set off on this rescue mission, Chapter 12 goes on to describe how Scannell, in a mostly disastrous brief period on a fellowship near Oxford in 1974, found it difficult with students who weren't interested in close reading or technical improvement but wanted to hear fulsome approval of their efforts. Never having attempted such a job, I can't concur with him first hand but I can see how it would be, up and down the country, with thousands of such homemade talents all thinking it was them and not the other thousands that were the naturally gifted one.

Scannell fits the certain stereotype of the poet as penniless, wayward and itinerant all too well but his application to his art is admirable. And it was all too little appreciated during this posting. Not just unappreciated but targetted by local no-marks who made a point of abusing him in public and taking their animosity s far as a sustained campaign against him whether or not they knew of his pugilistic prowess and propensity to use it.

And so it's taken some time to find a lot of sympathy for him but a degree of it arrived in due course.   

Gioia on Kees and other stories

 Not for the first time, one is indebted to Anecdotal Evidence. This time for a link to a new film by Dana Gioia on Weldon Kees,

It's a good match. It sent me straight back to the Kees books - the poems, the stories and the biography and the best of them were vividly much better than I remembered them, possibly helped in no small way by Dana's seal of approval. It is such things that make one's continued interest and desultory participation in 'poetry' worthwhile.

The Pushkin biography was set aside to accommodate Rory Waterman's essays, then the John Lucas novel has to wait its turn in deference to the Vernon Scannell biography which itself had some time off while Kees was given an updating look. I'm not necessarily putting him in the very top echelon but there are poems and stories that belong alongside the best.

--

The upstairs room where the ceiling fell in is back together again, like Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway. Re-arranged, not exactly pristine but at least serviceable for my unfussy requirements. 

Putting back the books on the Novels, M to Z, shelves I felt some sorrow for 50 year old paperbacks showing their age. Most of them won't be read by me again and could hardly be given away to anybody who wanted them. So, why continue to give them houseroom. 

Firstly because it's not clear which of them won't be read again and one can't tell what's going to happen to make me want to look back at something. And, secondly, I never really recovered from the trauma of disposing of the pop vinyl that was ostensibly only taking up space and wouldn't be played again. And so I lost that essential archive of 'personal heritage', those sacred items that represented 'who I was' - the Yellowman albums, the first singles I bought, the PiL Metal Box. It's necessary to enjoy living in a library of one's own making while one can.

Vernon Scannell

One book leads to another, and it's good when they do. Rory Waterman's impressive sense and judgement in Endless Present were always good company. Apparently using Larkin as a reference point as much as some of us do, it was noticeable how when writing about books he had reservations about, he usually had the time or good grace to find something positive to say. But if you agree to review everything you agree to be sent then maybe that's the price one has to pay. One doesn't want to take someone else's work apart for the sake of it. I'd rather that their audiences were left to their own devices but Rory is kind enough, having made it clear that some work isn't much good, to try to see the point of it.

The book that he led me to is Walking Wounded, the Life & Poetry of Vernon Scannell by James Andrew Taylor. While still taking refuge from the heavy detail of the Pushkin biography at a suitable halfway point, this isn't an easy read, either, but for entirely different reasons. It's gripping but unpleasant.

Scannell was a prominent name in the 1970's even if it wasn't originally his own name. John Bain was a brutalized child at the hands of his abusive father and was further damaged by his army service in WW2. By that law that makes it necessary for such victims to re-distribute their suffering, he became less than the ideal husband more than once.

It's not easy to sympathize with him. It happens as often as not with poets. Byron, Hughes, Eliot, Yeats, Gunn, Shelley, Baudelaire- one comes out of their life stories thinking none the better of them. They don't always look as heroic in real life as they thought they were. But if Scannell's life is painful to read with its horrendous bullying, the boxing, the army and the later life, there are reasons to understand him to be found.

His time spent being mistreated by sadists who enjoyed their work, as a deserter in military prison, came at least partly from the horror he felt at seeing the dead being looted for wedding rings, watches and all by their surviving comrades. But, what were you going to do? Leave the gold to the enemy? 

He was a serial absconder, not only from the army but his early shotgun marriage. Violence almost inevitably became a default reaction, in due course against his father but also against the bloke in the pub with who his 'little town flirt' future wife had allegedly shared her attentions. But in the old nature v. nurture debate in which nobody's shortcomings are their own fault, I don't know in how much of this misery story he's the culprit or the victim.

I'm not convinced his poems justify such a deeply researched biography. He's a competent versifier without going much beyond his formats. His memoirs might have foreseen the fashion for unreliable narrators by claiming to have been at El Alamein when the evidence suggests he was not. A life in the military would have been bad enough without it being in time of war and I don't blame Scannell for 'cowardice'. He was brave enough to be a renegade within the army and take the consequences which in some ways were worse than gambling on one's chances of surviving the fighting.

If not ultimately memorable as a poet, it's still another lurid story of a poet's life, grim though it mainly is. Who would have thought that this contributor to 1970's poetry, whose name made him sound as mundane as a Larkin, Jennings, Davie or Thwaite, safe in their peacetime institutions, had such a back story. And there must have been thousands like him who never wrote poems and so whose lives never got written.    

Schubert and Melancholy

It's like being a 'face' at the racecourse. I'm regularly to be seen at various local music venues. Enough for many of those involved to know who I am by now even if I'm severely underqualified in the technicalities of music to write anything authoritative about it. But I'm indulged by the community, a bit like the Toby Jones character in Marvellous who is so keen to be involved at Stoke City that Lou Macari appoints him as kit man.

Much of the time I appear to get way with it but once in a while it becomes alarmingly apparent that I'm an impostor among the music professionals. Yes, yes, Mozart, Shostakovich. Op. 57, K.545. But, no, I've no idea what B flat minor is.

Thus, it was all going well after the Schubert Arpeggione Sonata and then I said I never found Schubert 'down-hearted' and the whole thing fell apart. He's the most approachable, kindly and helpful musician you could wish to meet but the look on his face was one of horror, disbelief, bewilderment or all three. I should have quit while I was ahead.

Hamlet is melancholy. Most artists, with the possible exception of Haydn, can express it but beyond the general premise that a certain sort of creative artist must be touched by some of it sometimes, I'm not sure how many are outright melancholics in their work.

It is a 'Romantic' trait, surely. It's Keats, Goethe and Baudelaire. Schubert, for me, is where Classical moves into Romantic, if we need to deal in these vague terms. The C20th organ music of Vierne is devastatingly dark - what I've heard of it- and Shostakovich can be bleak. Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman are melancholy personalities in their work but musicians rarely so thoroughgoingly so, it seems to me. I've been giving it plenty of thought. 

I don't know if there are right or wrong answers or if my melancholy threshold is higher than average. Neither Larkin or Sean O'Brien seem melancholy to me although Larkin at least has been called 'miserabilist'. What did we expect from this life ? So yesterday I played 3 discs of Schubert- sonatas, quartets and the Quintet, D. 956, to investigate. Not even the intensity and stillness at the centre of that was what I'd call 'melancholic', so do we use adjectives in slightly different ways in the same way that we can see colours differently.

D. 956 is where Schubert 'goes beyond', like Beethoven in the Grosse Fuge - is it- Bach in that particular Cello Suite and Shostakovich in the Viola Sonata. By then we have transcended the contingencies of transient feelings. 

But without writing whole essays or dissertations on an artist, one thinks of them summed up in more of a snapshot and Schubert remains for me more notable for his lightness of touch, a delicacy that maybe even Beethoven doesn't always have. Premier League among composers because the Premier League consists of twenty names.

I could still be wrong, of course, but as Prof. Bill Murray said of the dissertation I provided on Andrew Marvell in 1981, he didn't agree with a word of it but he had to admire the argument and give it a respectable mark.

A biography of Schubert has gone onto the 'to do' list. To read one, not to write one. It was said on the wireless yesterday that he was 4ft. 11. I know he contracted dubious diseases and was possibly disappointed in love as per Beethoven, Brahms and perhaps quite a few of us. Saturday's little chat might have been worth the trauma it put me through if a better understanding of him is the result of it. And I can survive to write about music another day, as Robbie Williams sang in Angels,

whether I'm right or wrong.

Mikhail Lezdkan & Béla Hartmann in Petersfield

 Mikhail Lezdkan & Béla Hartmann, St. Peter's, Petersfield, January 31 

One's shortlist of favourite local musicians is long but Mikhail Lezdkan and Béla Hartmann are high on it, both individually and together. The same might be said of favourite composers where Schubert and Mendelssohn make the top dozen. 

Schubert's 229th birthday was marked with a gorgeous performance of his Arpeggione Sonata, its blithe spirit exuding happy times with Mikhail's cavorting fingers making for something to watch as well as listen to. The rapid exchanges of phrases with Béla made for the most good natured of interaction.

Some anxiety in the piano part of the Adagio contrasted with a more serene cello part before the breezy Allegretto finale was full of good cheer. I rarely find Schubert downbeat although he quite clearly could be but art can be its own salvation.

To begin, Janáček had made a convincing case of his own with the gentle Pohádka, a fairy tale told more impressionistically than programmatically. Mikhail's pizzicato motif was mysterious until developing into something more passionate and in the second movement we were as if in half light into which the rich theme was introduced. Hints of dance in the Allegro led to its happy ending.

After an interval, Mendelssohn's Sonata, op. 58, opened in celebratory style with the duet making an abundant sound between them. Béla's quasi-classical part augmented by pizzicato cello in the Allegretto was followed by a continuing series of arpeggios and some homage to Bach in an Adagio which is the least Johann Sebastian owes to Felix without who he might still be lesser known and we'd have launched a piece by Telemann into space. In many ways the most complex piece on the programme, it here went from pensive to ardent before an effervescent, acrobatic Molto allegro e vivace brought to an end a gorgeous set by two musicians we are lucky to have round these parts.

But it was Schubert's birthday and Piers Burton-Page, the godfather of radio announcers, whose homework had been most useful throughout, wondered if there might be one more, short piece ready and prepared. And it turned out there was ! One from the song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin. Graceful and if here without words, regrets he surely had a few, but it's ever consolatory for me with a lightness of touch all of his own or at least comparable to Mozart's.

It was a three-way split today on where to go. I hope it all went well at the Menuhin Room. I probably did well to leave Sandown races alone and if Schubert's birthday doesn't justify such an exquisite memorial then I don't know whose would. 

Take a look at the lawman Beating up the wrong guy.

 It's in Life on Mars? that,

    Lennon's on sale again. 

 

And now, it would appear, so am I. Here, 

E-Bay, The Perfect Book 

 

It's remarkable what happens once books go out of print. Prices sky rocket to £4.38 plus p&p. There's always somebody ready to cash in.

Once in a while I google myself - vanity, vanity, all of it vanity- but it's not often there's anything new to be found about such a low profile poet.

It's just slightly saddening that I never took any money for those books and yet someone else would. They are cheap to get printed and I gladly gave them away to good homes. So the e-Bay seller never paid the £5 it says the book cost on the back. I have only the vaguest of ideas of how it might be in Guildford with a book by Maggie Sawkins, also of this parish.

But good luck to them. It might not be that the book was unappreciated. It could conceivably be that a genuine poetry lover has died and their family have less interest in this obscurest of titles.

But there is no need to pay £7.08 for it.

Yes, it is officially out of print but I could probably find you a copy if you wanted one.   

--

Much more dispiriting is what reaction 'twins theory', at Strange Fowl gets when it gets any.

For most it is unthinkable, 'bizarre' and almost, one might think, disloyal to the point of insurrectionist. But we're not like that at all. Mr. Curtis and I are entirely compos mentis and only ask if our modest proposal is disprovable.

Strange Fowl continues to add up, for me, and there are those Oxfordians, conspiracy theorists and much more of a host of those who don't believe in William Shakespeare that I ever imagined. And, distressingly, really, it is the likes of them from who we get some support.

They are welcome, of course. Few campaigns turn away any followers except we are exiled in mainstream, we are among the Stratfordian faithful and have nothing more dangerous to offer than some adjustment in Shakespeare's biography to the number of children he may or may not have been the biological father of.

And yet there is more in the news about the authorship question and The Real Shakespeare: Emilia Bassano Willoughby by Irene Coslet who,

comes to Shakespeare as an expert in feminism. She has studied feminism for 20 years and has been involved in the promotion of gender equality in multiple organisations and countries around the world. 

and I'm impressed that she does. But her reading of Shakespeare makes her a perfect fit for the tendency identified by Jonathan Bate that we all make Shakespeare into who we would like him to be, as per Virginia Woolf,

that all Shakespearean biography is veiled autobiography.

 

I'm not at all confident that modest proposals, carefully threaded together by gently thoughtful people, are loud enough to be heard any more. That is by no means a reason to give up on them but it might be a reason to put it in place once and for all and let the world go to bad if that's what it is intent on doing.  

Oh, Babe, What Would Poetry Say

When the opportunity to take a break from the biography of Pushkin presented itself, I took it up. It is more detailed than I require and the broad sweep of a story is in danger of being lost under a welter burden of contiuning affairs, flirtations, controversies and much of what was once expected of poets, 200 years ago, before they retreated into universities. Never wanting to waste a good joke, when Pushkin came to Shove-kin, I decided to give him a rest for a while. With him now married and having published Eugene Onegin, halfway through seemed like an appropriate juncture. But corny jokes can be recycled from e-mails to friends, too.

Julian Barnes was a very good reason to leave off a story that will be easily returned to, then a Christmas present cataloguing all those brands and memories from our shared, generic, 70's childhood was the harmless diversion it was meant to be.

But then, there having been that review in the TLS purporting to survey 'the state of British poetry', I wanted to see it. Only TG Jones, the inheritors of the WH Smith's shops, in Southsea, stock the TLS so I went to the Central Library first except it's a couple of years since they had newspapers and journals one can look at. It turns out they have plenty online but not the TLS. So, not very much like WH Davies, free-loading on public transport, I took the scenic route to Southsea and found the words I so wanted to read.

I doubt if I'm ever going to be a Tristram Fane Saunders admirer any more than one of Ed Sheeran. I'm sure they are both talented at what they do but to me they seem young, safe, anodyne types like those who did their homework, came top of the class and went on to successful careers without having been interesting- see also, Coldplay. But I'm glad I saw Tristram's essay and it's not his fault if what he finds to say about the current condition of British poetry could as equally be appropriate to Business Studies as the English Department.

However, I'm grateful to it for how it brought my attention to Rory Waterman's reviews in Endless Present. One has it confirmed once more that one is no longer middle aged when you are reading books by middle aged poet-academics whose father's poems one once bought, like Andrew Waterman's in Faber's Modern Poets Five, 1981, where he appeared alongside CH Sisson, Craig Raine, Robert Wells, Tom Paulin and Andrew Motion which wouldn't be the worst six-a-side team one ever played in.

But Rory is very soon a most amenable guide through some books one knows well and others one hasn't seen. It's not really a look at the 'state of the poetry nation' in 2026, it being Selected Articles, Reviews and Dispatches, 2010-23. That period included a number of Larkin-related books and they form the foundations of the book early doors and references back to Larkin continue afterwards which some might think is backward-looking, as Larkin himself was said to be in his time. But without helping to establish where poetry has arrived at by 2026, I'm with Rory entirely about what is entirely still worth obsessing over.

He is judicious and wise. As a professional critic, he sets himself a standard of honesty and stands by it. He is ready to find fault with those bits of Larkin that were never meant to see print but also, as sympathetically as he can with the likes of John Agard and Patience Agbabi but it's not a racial thing because his is more caustic when he simply doesn't reckon much, as with James Sutherland-Smith who,

Since the poet is here congratulating his perspicacity, the tired language is particularly unfortunate.

The more of him you read, the more it becomes desirable for Rory to award those poetry prizes we must have.

The big shock comes in the review of James Andrew Taylor's Walking Wounded: The Life & Poetry of Vernon Scannell. Scannell was a name that had always been there, the name at least redolent of a tweed-jacketed, bespectacled composer of careful verses only designed to make Larkin look more Byronic or Hughesian in comparison. I knew he'd done a bit of boxing but I didn't know much of that art was rehearsed on a conveyor belt of victim female partners. It's unfortunate to have to find out as late as this what some of those names in The Listener or those booklets left his sixth form room by Linden Huddlestone at school were really like.

In those days I vaguely imagined poets as the gods who sent down their words from a place beyond our finding, partly so that we could do 'A' level English. I never imagined them much less than saints and never thought I'd meet one. But it wasn't like that at all.

Rory's very good, ever alert to non-sequiturs, the emptiness of what he resorts to calling 'poesy' and one would only want one's best stuff to come before his diligent judgement and even then you'd not be sure until you got some sort of pass, if you did. But if you did, you'd have deserved it. 

It's true to say I've been losing faith in poetry - not to mention a number of other areas of human activity- in recent years. I wouldn't like to think I wasted so much of my life on something that proved to be no more than a charade. But I've been having another look at some of the books here for the purposes of the Anthology list and then I wondered what Rory Waterman had to say about it all and it's turned out that I do still care. 

The state of British poetry

 What is it, then? I'd be interested to know.

The weekly e-mail from the TLS is headlined by a review of five books that purports to enlighten us. Except if I can still fiddle my way into the whole article, I've forgotten how; the nearest shop that may or may not sell the TLS is some way from here and I simply don't know if Tristram Fane Saunders is who I'd like it all explained to me by. Maybe he is the new Messiah but he could equally be a new kid on the block who's done his homework and got good marks.

The 'state of British poetry' now, as elucidated by one come lately to it, is - much to my demerit- of as much interest to me as what a young person on the street thinks of the latest pop records. Entirely valid, I'm sure, but not guaranteed to be something I'd understand. But I'm not going to find out unless I try.

One of the five books in Tristram's survey is a collection of reviews by Rory Waterman. And that, being trustworthy, arrived today. It looks like a book worth having but in the same way that it's going to be good to see his particular form of words regarding books about Larkin published in the last fifteen years, it's not Larkin that I'm trying to catch up on.

So, what can you do?

One could, at a stretch, find the TLS or even read some poetry by younger writers and see what I think for myself. But I don't listen to Radio 1, I only listen to Tony Blackburn's 60's and Bob Harris's improving 70's shows.

There was a time when something aspiring to the canonical was essayed by Alvarez, then Motion/Morrison, Hulse/Kennedy/Morley, O'Brien and Lumsden but, convenient as it was to be informed about where we were, the wholesome diversity of British poetry meant that the Identity Parade looked more like an identity crisis.

One can't have it both ways. 

Julian Barnes, Departure(s)

Julian Barnes, Departure(s), (Jonathan Cape)

'Fiction Review' is a dubious label for the Julian Barnes swansong. He's a novelist and novels are fictional but he's also a writer of this 'hybrid' stuff - part fiction, part true- except there's not much imaginary material in the mix this time. And so we are already into the sort of discursion that he specializes in so elegantly himself. The book discusses itself, we discuss the book and find that although we might have covered a lot of ground most eruditely we've got no further than any other liberal, left, London elite dinner party.

IAM is involuntary autobigraphical memory, sometimes brought on by a stroke, and can be much more severe than that brought on by Proust's madeleine. It can get as bad as one girl who could remember every detail of every day of her life and turns out to be a terrible curse. It's far worse to be able to recall everything than to have a dubious, selective memory that has at least edited out a big proportion of raw material. But it's a great subject with which to open what is essentially a memoir by a writer who often used unreliable narrators.

The central, main part of the book relates the relationship between Jean and Stephen, two friends brought together by Barnes at Oxford and then again, forty years later, at Stephen's request. Barnes becomes confidant to both parties, with far too much involvement in the difficulties of the relationship which he candidly shares with his readers now that they are both dead. While at first this might seem pruriently fascinating, it is soon more than one wants to know especially for those of us who like the wording of the law about 'between consenting adults in private'. The stratifications of Barnes's many-layered writing have probably never gone as deep but there must be a limit to how much we want to know.

In summary, Stephen loves Jean more than she wants him to. She feels the need of more 'freedom'. It occurs to him that she might want more than him and while that doesn't seem to be the case in their later role as 're-kindlers', Barnes is aware at first hand that first time around she very nearly did.

All of which has to be unpacked at some length in the sort of coda that Barnes has gone into before, investigating all the implications not only of 'love' but age, dementia, loss and literature. It's a short book and is readily soon read because he's never less than a pleasure to read but one still wonders if such exhaustive analysis was necessary or if, over the three years it took him to write it, he was stretching it out to make it book length. One can lose sympathy for the perceived sufferings of the well-to-do intelligentsia if the intricacies of why two people find themselves to be incompatible twice over is the most they have to worry about.

And so it's farewell from Julian Barnes, still one of the finest writers of his generation even if by the end, almost inevitably, he was in danger of becoming a parody of himself. At least he was well-organized enough not to leave his last book unfinished.  

Annika Lindskog and Steve Copeland at Lunchtime Live !

 Annika Lindskog and Steve Copeland, Portsmouth Cathedral, Jan 22

One can still expect a sizeable audience for a Messiah, Vivaldi by Candlelight or Songs from the Shows but a programme of 'English and Nordic art songs on the theme of solitude, meetings and togetherness' of a damp January Thursday lunchtime is a bit more niche. Thus it was good to see a reasonable turnout (both in numbers and mindset) for Annika Lindskog and Steve Copeland.

Samuel Barber's Promiscuity was a brief, ethereal fragment to begin, followed by the almost as austere, lingering Desire for Hermitage. If Flickan kom ifrån sin älsklings möte by Sibelius next up was a degree or two more rhapsodic, it was almost so by default but by then one was tuned into the deeply meditative mood.

James MacMillan's Ballad was audibly Scottish and thus as much Nordic as English, with Steve's atmospheric, minimal accompaniment allowing Annika's voice to make full use of the acoustic in St. Thomas's chapel. Finzi's Come away, death completed a first section with more melancholy before Steve explained- for the benefit of the musically illiterate like me- that a shift from 'the misery of B minor to the uplands of E major' introduced a happier middle section. Except Bach's B minor Mass at least begins so rousingly. There is no point trying to explain key signatures to me. You'd be better off trying to teach chess to a cat.

So, pieces by Roger Quilter, Grieg and the plangent setting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Silent Noon by Vaughan Williams made for some mild sunlight before a final section of crepuscular, elegiac songs by Gunnar de Frumerie, another by Vaughan Williams and the restrained wonder of King David by Herbert Howells, in which he,

     rose; and in his garden
Walked by the moon alone
A nightingale hidden in a cypress tree
Jargoned on and on. 

Always glad to be introduced to a composer one hadn't known about, like de Frumiere, it's also exactly right to end on a piece that can't be followed, that incidentally makes one think that Walter de la Mare's currently unfashionable status as a poet is due some reconsideration. 

No big, noisy ending but ending on a high nonetheless. Thoughtful and classy. 

I've been hearing on the wireless about how a 'new world order' is set to carve up the world and it would certainly threaten much that we've always valued if it came about. Exquisite afternoons such as this afternoon, for example. I'm glad I was there, just in case. 

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig was not one of the later additions to the Anthology, still being remembered in the time after the first names went in. He was among the first names. Most timely it was, though, having been back through the Collected to decide which three of his go in, that BBC4 saw fit to show a couple of old programmes from the archives late last night. There might not be vast amounts of such material stored away and we might have seen much of it but it is good use made of minority air time.

The two programmes used a lot of the same pieces of film of him, there not being much. He came across as rather more pleased with himself than I remembered but those who are 'any good' have some right to do that. Perhaps his main achievement, that allowed the writing of his impressive body of work, was throwing away his first two books of inaccessible poems at the age of 37. It allowed him to become one of the names worth preserving from C20th poetry for the fine example he set.

He is an extreme instance of a poet whose later work was very different from where he began. It wasn't a matter of 'development', though. He started all over again. One can entertain oneself by thinking of different ways in which there can be said to be 'two kinds of poet'.

Those who change significantly and those who don't change much is one. Betting without MacCaig who disowned the poet he had been and successfully re-invented himself as a better one, my long-standing guru of all such things, Thom Gunn, turned around completely from the strictly metrical poems that often found the individual at odds or feeling separate from the world to free verse and the discovery of community with others- to put it mildly.  That he could do both and achieved some synthesis between those two polar opposite ways of working is what ultimately made him as great as he was.

There is a shift in Larkin, elsewhere identified as a 'hardening of the arteries', that does him no favours, but he hasn't changed beyond recognition. Yeats is re-made from Romantic to Modernist. Hughes moves from the capturing of the natural world into less successful mythical excursions. Sylvia gains in intensity but obviously finishes before we can see where her extraordinary talent might have led.

Whereas, I'm not sure that Hardy's poems are any different from first to last except that the return to poems, from novels, was in some ways a bigger move. 

 

Formal metre and rhyme v. free verse is perhaps the most obvious divide but surely, surely, it's better to do both as and when while it's not wrong to be one or the other. Although those never attempting some sort of formal discipline need, for me, to be convincing in their chosen relaxations or else we might think they can't do it.

Timothy Steele's metronomic metre was doctrinal, seemingly as important to him as anything he had to say while using it. At its worst, the far worse alternative is that described by Jane Greer, quoted here at Anecdotal Evidence , where in poetry terms the cart has been put before the horse, the art has been sacrificed for a course of unmitigated self-indulgence and stretches the definition of what poetry is. It can be poetry if it wants to be in the same way that I can be a snooker player if I want to say I am. But I'm no good at snooker and the poets to who Jane was referring are bad poets.

 

Some years ago I introduced a session at Portsmouth Poetry Society to try to see if there was a difference between poetry written by male and female poets. It wasn't envisaged that an outright answer would be arrived at but I hoped that the point was that 'poetry' was about the putting together of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. and that both genders did that. Since then, I've found that there are by now 72 other genders and so the question has become considerably more complicated but at least it will be simplified again once Donald Trump has established a right-wing hegemony across much more than the share of the world he was elected to manage and the number is reduced back to two, or maybe one and a half.

I hope it doesn't in any way associate me with him if I suggest that the art of writing is genderless and not to be weaponized by either misogynist Republicans or feminism.

 

There are possible divides between perceived Classical/Romantic; something purportedly impersonal and objective v. autobiographical and 'confessional'; light verse and its opposite; highbrow/lowbrow/middlebrow; poems to hear out loud or those for the page. Tragical, Historical, Pastoral.

I'm sure we would all love to see the Venn diagram that placed poets on the complex map, accurately categorized, and where we and everybody else was on it so that we could complain that it was wrong. But the art of a rambling item like this is to make it look as if one knew where one was going with it. Norman MacCaig openly admitted he didn't know where his poems were going while he was writing them and they didn't get titles until they were done and he could see where he had arrived.

I'd be glad to be somewhere near him on the Venn diagram once it's done.  

Retirement Diary

 It might sometimes seem as if not much is happening. I'm sure the ageing process is gathering pace and I couldn't claim to be 'middle-aged' any more even if I wanted to.

Some years ago I'd get home from work and the elderly man from three doors up the road would be talking to the lady opposite on her doorstep, I think on the pre-text of passing on the day before's Portsmouth News. Possibly the highlight of his, or both of theirs, day.

That is the future, or something like it. But when I've had such thoughts before I've realized that, no, the future is already here. But as August Kleinzahler asks in Snow in North Jersey, 

and what did you expect from this life 

 

It might not be a fair question as it came as a bit of a surprise to be born and it was a bit late for expectations by then.

But it would have been unreasonable to have hoped to be born into the family I was born into at the time I was in the country I was. That puts me into the top few per cent luckiest people ever, to begin with. Could one be disappointed at not having been Frank Sinatra, Princess Margaret, Stephen Fry, Elizabeth Taylor or... provide your own examples of lives thought to have been 'well-lived'. St. Cuthbert, perhaps.

What happened today?

I re-lived a few more of Pushkin's adventures, however vicariously from the page at third or fourth hand. I shared some old records with Bob Harris on Sounds of the 70's, none of which impressed as much as a first hearing of this, chosen by Peter Purves on Private Passions, 

and there's still Eartha Kitt from last night's The Good Old Days to come, from the mid-1970's though it may be. And maybe that's the least of it, having contacted a few friends vis a vis this and that of passing importance because 'the meaning of life', according to such authorities as Aristotle, Epicurus, Montaigne and maybe Terry Eagleton, is much to do with friendship. Although I might have to return to Derrida's The Politics of Friendship, once given to me by a friend, because it might de-construct the idea to the extent of making it more elusive than I'm sure the gift was meant to express.   

And so, as most days are, it wasn't bad. 

Perhaps it is essential to the overly-indulged, spoilt way some of us live that when we are busy we look forward to indolence and then when we get it we want to be busy again. 

All this in the context of a world order being re-set by the most overblown vanity projects so that the days of hearing the News in order to be concerned about a downturn in the balance of payments reported by Anthony Barber are like halcyon days become deja-vu. We should be so lucky.  

Anthology

 As far as the list-making fetish goes, for a poet or poetry reader the making of one's own anthology must be the ultimate project. Why I thought I'd begin mine I'm not sure but making a list is as compulsive as it is daft, especially if a numerical limit is not put on it. Most lists are themed or else one could please onself with Dadaist lists, like- The Moon, antibiotics, turbot, The War of Jenkins' Ear, Felicity Kendall, kumquat and Afternoon Delight by the Starland Vocal Band.

So it's only now, having got 121 lines on the Excel spreadsheet of my anthology, I begin to consider its parameters. I've limited it to three poems per poet, mainly arbitrarily but a few would get double figures straight off without such a quota. Would I stop at 500. Would I get to 500. There's always just one more. At least the Spotify playlist at DGBooks Radio has decided for itself what my favourite pop music is.  

Going back to basics, what is the etymology of 'anthology'. It's,

'mid 17th century: via French or medieval Latin from Greek anthologia, from anthos ‘flower’ + -logia ‘collection’ (from legein ‘gather’). In Greek, the word originally denoted a collection of the ‘flowers’ of verse, i.e. small choice poems or epigrams, by various authors.'

 

But why and how did 'small' creep in there. Collections of flowers can be extensive, as per the Chelsea Flower Show so we must be careful of definitions.

Certainly the contents of an anthology need to be regarded as worthy. So there must be a remit, like 'these are the best poems ever', 'these poems represent C19th French Poetry' or 'these are my personal favourite poems', etc.

I'm very much tending towards the lattermost of those even if several poets would get more than three at the expense of others getting any without that prescription. If, at present, it goes from Catullus to Julia Copus, it has to be said that poems from 1900 onwards begin at no. 29 out of the 121 so it's hardly a broad sweep of English Poetry and there are 10 translations - from Latin, French, Polish and Russian- so it's not 'English' poetry to begin with. I've tried to include as much as possible from pre-1900 but vast continents of Edmund Spenser, Paradise Lost and John Dryden are lost on me. 

So at whatever lengths it stops at, it will be all the poems I could think of, not including those from fourth place downwards by any given poet except there will be the one I forgot about and then the other one I forgot about.

Not to worry. No publisher is pressing me to do this. There are no 'permissions' to pay for. It's like any other compulsion- 'the four aways', the ITV 7 or not stepping on the cracks in the pavement- golf, for some- that has no end until maybe one day it has been left aside for so long that it's not worth going back to.

Would that it were, as Robert Robinson used to say. It's problem is not so much how it will end but how it was ever allowed to begin.

Meanwhile, I've allocated two poems each to Rosemary Tonks and Wisława Szymborska. I really ought to decide which to put in.