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.  

On Poetry

Glyn Maxwell is one of the diminishing number of poets whose new books I look out for. He can be relied on to be worthwhile. Like most such writers, absorbed in his art and craft, he has thought about it deeply and, like many, decided to share the results of what he thought.

On Poetry goes back further than most do, to the primordial savannah before there was poetry. Also to the white of the page before there was a poem or before the poem begins, where the lines end, in between stanzas or where the poem ends. The bit in between is the black, the poem or at least that part of the poem that is made up of its words and punctuation because the white silence is part of the poem, too. So it's profound and much is extrapolated from that beginning. Poets, especially perhaps professional ones, can have highly evolved ideas about what it is they do. Paul Muldoon and Tom Paulin's books of close reading found poems echoing with any number of other poems, Joseph Brodsky's analysis of Thomas Hardy engaged with every word, including the most basic conjunctions. John Fuller solved poetry like a cryptic crossword. Don Paterson was so exhaustive on the subject even he suggested at times that the reader could skip fifty pages in certain places without missing the point. For each poet, poetry is a different thing as I dare say God is for those who make that idea central to their lives. James Fenton's guide sets out the territory in more standard classroom fashion but while their adventures take us down some alleyways worth visiting it can all be a bit much.

I almost read these books out of a need to see what I don't need to know more than to find what I do need to know. Glyn is clever if not sometimes even a bit cute. There's not much I like better than finding my own belief (or maybe 'prejudice') confirmed by someone of higher standing or reputation, like a professor, and so was glad to see him not concerned about dactyls, spondees and trochees, agreeing that 'free verse' is not as free as it likes to think, that enjambment is not quite the skill that some think it to be when they do it and how he implies, I think, that poetry is formed by the language it's in and the fashion of the time it was written as much as its author who is also formed by them. His account of how at different times alliteration, rhyme and then not rhyme were the prevailing orthodoxies of poetry is useful for taking us out of our very specific time and place.

What is bad, and gloomily 'professional', about On Poetry, though, is Glyn's imaginary creative writing workshop. Inevitably it will be those who earned a living from teaching that are most likely to produce such books, those for who it is in their interests to go along with the idea that being a creative artist is something than can be taught. He has a way of using a pack of cards in which the suit and denomination of each card generates a situation and a number of people to use for a poem. For me, generating poems that didn't need to be written is a bad idea. While the world is exponentially over-populating itself with people, universities and the creative writing industry are also crowding the place out with more poems than are needed. A better exercise is suggested for poets under thirty to do what Gerard Manley Hopkins did and throw all their poems away.

Perhaps the art of poetry is better served by reading and study in order to see how not to do it, to avoid bad practice and write less. Nothing at all, if necessary. 

For Glyn, poetry is 'creaturely', a living thing in time and space, and perhaps good poems are but there's a danger that the reverence accorded to Edward Thomas, Auden, maybe Robert Frost but I'm glad Hopkins gets some coverage, might be unwittingly extended to bad poems. Like any subject, the philosophy of it becomes a self-regarding, endless thing enjoyed as a sport in itself. I'm not convinced it's a good thing although I'm too far down the line by now to ever escape from it. As happened with the Don Paterson book, The Poem, so much thinking about writing poems leaves me paralysed and unable to write any, so at least there's that to be grateful for. It's four months since I wrote one as it is but I can easily wait another four months as long as if and when I do produce something, at least I'll be satisfied with it. But one needs to clear one's mind of all these ideas before that's possible. It's a bit like cricket was - all the coaching telling you to move your feet, get in line, eye on the ball, play forward, play back, cover the spin. By the time you've remembered all that, the stumps are all over the place. No, if you're a natural, just do it but whether you are or not, enjoy it.

--

Meanwhile, Norman MacCaig that I keep for bedtimes. 

I thought Arkle and Foinaven were racehorses famous for quite different reasons. But they'd been mountains for a long time before they were that. It took me 50 years, poetry and Norman to find that out.

MacCaig - Between 

Tell It Like It T-I-S and other stories

Good performance by Dominic yesterday, I thought. I didn't watch all seven hours of it but I found it compelling to watch until about halfway. While one can see why there were so many headlines about 'revenge' this morning, that's how it surely was. We could see that from the outside. As has been said, there was only ever one way that the Johnson-Cummings axis of power would end, two very different narcissists very badly matched. One is a brilliant obsessive maniac and the other is an incompetent buffoon (and maniac).

I'm not inclined to join any Dominic Cummings Fan Club, though, because he will forever mostly be the sinister Svengali behind the horrendous referendum and General Election results but he's good at what he does and I like a maverick genius and so, apparently, does he. They are preferable to gormless oafs more suited to being in a play by Molière.

Precious little will come of it, I dare say. Oh, they'll have their own review, run by one of their stool pigeons. It's much the same at Prime Minister's Question Time. Whatever the question is, the answer is that the British people don't want to know about all that and the vaccine is working (because he's had nothing to do with it). 

And although the enemy of my enemy is not entirely a bad thing, two wrongs don't make a right. Conspicuously excused the torrential flak were Mssrs. Sunak and Gove who happen to be two of the current top three in the betting for next Prime Minister (Mr. Starmer being an honourable second favourite but not one I'd put money on), so I don't need to be Laura Kuennsberg to think he's got ideas about being the puppet master again.

I'd rather not be writing about all this. There must be other things more uplifting. But the more one sees this Prime Minister blundering on in his own special boorish way the more I want to use the only outlet to put on record my own same old song, which is Don't Say I Didn't Tell You, which will actually do for a song title.

So, to put in the more uplifting stuff- the postman's doing a fine job, bringing the latest batch of book purchases one by one each day. I'll be just as glad as he will when it's over. Although he has to carry them round, I have the great inconvenience - at my age- of having to be up and about quite early to answer the door for those thicker books that won't go through the letterbox. Maybe that's good for me. Otherwise I have to wait until something or somebody comes on the radio that makes me decide I could do something better. I think it's Mondays that Rod Liddle comes on Times Radio to say what he thinks. Right, that's enough of that. Time to get up. He might be something rather than somebody.

But last night, being in between books, I embarked on what I hope will be an ongoing programme of taking a poet from the shelves and reminding myself. I chose Norman MacCaig and was, of course, not disappointed. He's never less than a pleasure and it's a shame there aren't more that bear comparison with him but not much of his work makes me want to write like him. It's clear, it's fine, it's honest and admirable but it's not encrypted enough. Without wanting to do an Oxford Professor lecture on the subject, I'd ideally like at least the suggestion of other things shifting below the surface. In poetry, telling it only as it t-i-is only gets you 90% of the way there.

But the Second Balzac Festival will be along in due course with three more of La Comédie humaine lined up promisingly for later. That will make 6 or 7 of them I'll have read. I've seen mention that there are 96 of them altogether and they're not short novels. I don't understand how one can both have the time to write that much and have had enough time to witness enough of 'life' to write about.

They might not be top priority with a borrow of the recent Ishiguro due tomorrow and Claire Tomalin's Thomas Hardy, the Time-Torn Man, which I should have read years ago, ahead of such reliable stock books.

--

This picture was unresistable and I wish I could think of a poem to go with it. As it is, the poet I most associate with photographs of swans is me, as per The Perfect Book. Maybe I'll drag in Yeats and The Wild Swans at Coole at a stretch although these weren't at Coole, they were at Hilsea. Still gorgeous, though. Apologies if the pixels don't make it quite publishable. It is cut from a bigger picture but I couldn't get any closer because they were out in the middle of the water.

It's only words

 I did my short morning's 'work' on Wide Realm, the Thom Gunn book before meeting one friend for a completely legal afternoon's walk. He benefitted greatly, I'm sure, from hearing the product of my morning's endeavour. I'm making my workmanlike way through Moly, the 1971 volume in which Gunn found some sort of enlightenment through LSD.

It is ideal material for me with my chronic suspicion that poetry is never what it says it is. I suppose I'm forever in thrall to the ideas of irony and subtext. The point is, surely, that the heightened sensory experience provided by the hallucinogens is illusory. It is not a book about paradise or Eden being re-discovered. Once Eden had been ruined there was no getting back to it.

 

The dispiriting thing about any commentary, critique or analysis is that it is a poor substitute for the thing itself and only really of any use when finding fault. It is like Dylan's answer when asked what his songs were about, replying, 'about five minutes' or whoever it was, which might also have been him, who just played the song again. Academic discussion of anything worthwhile somehow takes the life out of it and I wish, in a way, that I didn't feel somehow compelled to 'get this job done'. Gunn doesn't always come out of it as much loved as I've always thought I loved him but it's too late to realize that now. He is a paragon example of one whose very best work is in that special 10/10 category that is reserved for the sublime but, with some 6/10 poems, he is not in the Norman MacCaig, Elizabeth Bishop, Derek Mahon category whose books one can't open without finding a good poem.

 

Gunn's career-long attempt to escape the 'self' is, for the most part, a forlorn one although it's a good try. Any effort to overcome the 'dissociation of sensibility' between thought and feeling identified by Eliot is undone by Gunn's powerful intellect which, one suspects, doesn't trust feeling.

And all poetry is, by definition, trapped in its own language which is always going to be its problem. Music and painting have the advantage over it by not being made from the raw material of words that have to 'mean' something, however shifting that meaning might be.

 

The problem with commentary is the need to identify or pin down some definitive interpretation. The 'magic', such as it is if and when it is achieved, in poetry is when it evades that. Whereas that is a grim indictment of reams and reams of vast swathes of poetry and shelf space taken up by it, it does mean that when it achieves the trick of appearing to have 'slipped the surly bonds' of its own medium, then we're excited.

That might be why I don't try very often any more. If I don't think I'm going to be able to fly I don't think it's wise to jump off the cliff.

 

Anne Stevenson - About Poems

Anne Stevenson, About Poems (Bloodaxe)

This is not a new book but is worth a slightly belated look. It is seven lectures or talks given in Newcastle, Durham and Ledbury before being brought together in this volume in 2017. Anne begins with a poem called How Poems Arrive that exemplifies much of what she goes on to say about the process of poetry, a brilliant poem the only problem with it being that it is a poem only about poetry whereas something like The Thought-Fox is also about the fox.
The recurring theme is how poems are sound, ahead of meaning - 'how poems are not about', and form and content somehow merge. She cites Elizabeth Bishop among others as an exemplar of how poems are best done. She is preaching to the converted when I read her saying so although I wouldn't sign up to any such manifesto and would prefer to stress that any poem can succeed on whatever terms it chooses. Or fail. Poets that write about poetry inevitably tend to make their way of doing it the prescribed way of doing it and tend to close off all areas of the endeavour that don't comply with theirs.
Anne's agenda, in as far as it can be called such, is very close to what I'd like to think is mine, though, and these pieces are as much of a pleasure to see expressed those things I'd like to say but are best left to those who are better qualified to say them, as in the interviews that Norman MacCaig gave elsewhere.
She is more of an admirer of Robert Frost than I am but one comes away more persuaded by someone who you recognize as wise counsel and I was grateful of her insights into Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens, which is a way into his poetry even if it is an early poem not typical of his later, more opaque style. She also explains how certain contemporary poetry, for her and others among us, lost its way,
To my old, bound-to-be-disapproving eyes it looks as if our youth culture, happy with its gunge-level clothes, punk music and junk food, has been pleased to spawn a kind of throwaway poetry that everyone is encouraged to enjoy (as at a poetry slam) but no one much cares to remember.

If, on the one hand, modernism took a high-church, difficult line, it is not to say that any counter-revolution should dispense with rigour completely.
American poets are the focus of much of her discussion, as well as Auden, both as paragon examples and those whose practice she doesn't always approve of. The final piece is a talk re-assessing her biography of Sylvia Plath, Bitter Fame, which is no less sympathetic to the role Ted Hughes played in her tragedy but shifts what blame can be allocated more towards the psychiatric treatments of the 1950's.
Anne was one of the first to publish commentary on Elizabeth Bishop's poems and although I have a fair collection of books on Ms. Bishop, I don't have hers. Writing as lucid and intelligent as hers is valuable and not to be missed so I'll soon be having a look at that and whatever else there is, including more of the poems that I don't have enough of.

The Year in Review

It was a wise decision to announce this time last year that after 10 years of making the most dubious and least-coveted awards in poetry and an extended set of categories that I would stop.
I haven't read very much new poetry at all this year. If I had any flimsy authority a few years ago to nominate what I considered the Best Poem or Best Collection of the year, I'd struggle to name even a few new books that were published this year.
I don't think I read any new novels in 2019 but Best Book would have to be Daisy Dunn's In the Shadow of Vesuvius, ahead of Julian Barnes.
Best Event was Wincanton races on 17th October as I marked my 60th successful orbit of the Sun with some choice company and the authoritative win by Sebastopol that was flagged up in these pages.
On a higher brow it was Isata Kanneh-Mason's recital at Turner Sims, Southampton, with her mostly Clara Schumann with the rest of the shortlist having been Chichester Cathedral concerts.
I was gratified to see the Anamorfosi album by Le Poeme Harmonique nominated as best disc of the year in Gramophone by Alexandra Coghlan on which the instability of the text was highlighted by a new Allegri Miserere but having had two Gramophone experts agree with my selection last year, I'm not going with that because it is too much altogether and I can't play it all in one go so Isata takes that as well because her debut album was as perfect as you can get without going to see her play it.

I read the best book I've ever read in Ian Bostridge's Winter Journey but the two I am reading at present, which won't take long, are excellent, too.
Rosemary Tonks's last novel, The Halt During the Chase, is not a disappointment. It could have been because expectations were high so the fact that it isn't makes it great, and a bargain at nearly £150 cheaper than the other available copy.
Marjorie MacNeill's Norman MacCaig, a Study of his Life and Work is as lucid and admirable as its subject and so looking like a huge success.
They should both be read, appreciated and carefully filed before Christmas, some of which will be spent looking at what I bought for others. Stanley Middleton's poems will be of interest, as will Laura Cummings's On Chapel Sands and the new Beryl Burton biography. I'll have to purloin them later if I can't finish them in the allotted time. Last Christmas I was inconsiderate enough to read the Alf Engers biography before its rightful owner.

So, that's it. I'm glad to see the number of 'postings' this year is well down on previous years so I must have been doing something more productive.
Happy Christmas, etc.

My Astute Swoop in the Book Market

From time to time I continue the optimistic search for the novels of Rosemary Tonks at affordable prices. I only have to be reminded of her to return to her poems and realize that I love her even more than I did before. It's an interesting exercise to find out exactly what price one will go to but finding Halt During the Chase, the last of the six novels, First Edition (as if there were any others), 1972, for £27.11 inc p+p and VAT because it's coming from France, helped define that.
The other copy available on Amazon New and Used is £174.74.
I can hardly wait for it to arrive and be its new owner because I want to be as much as I can one of that small but elite group of Rosemary admirers. Gathering the other five novels might never happen because they won't all be findable under £30 but, if I ever do, I hope I don't go through what I did with Richard Yates, putting together the complete works for myself, nearly all from America before they were all re-issued in paperback here. I don't think that will happen with Rosemary.

It led me to wonder if I could fit her into my Top 6 Poets.  Top 6 was a feature here once and still can be if anybody wants to contribute one. On any theme but literary, musical or art for preference. So,

Top 6 Poets

Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn go in automatically. I might not even be particularly interested in poetry if I wasn't interested in them. 
Elizabeth Bishop also has her own shelf here and perhaps only suffers in comparison for not having been regarded as essential for as long.
John Donne. Can't be left out.
Auden. Huge respect. I prefer to judge people on a significant amount of 'best' work rather than an average over an excessively prolix output.
And, so, the sixth place, which had gradually become a bit of a 'wild card', like a Top 5 plus 1. I can get Rosemary in there and that's where she might belong but I spent some time last night making a list of candidates and there's twenty-two others.
The serious contenders for the sixth place are Norman MacCaig, whose Collected can't be opened without something wonderful being found there; Shakespeare, Ovid, and then gradually the case to be made becomes more partial. So that's nine. The six is the five plus one from the repechage.

Bearing in mind that my Top 6 is an odd combination of 'best' in some objective way and 'favourite' in as much as I like them (which is where Rosemary's chance to get in ahead of Shakespeare and Ovid lies), the other 18, in some sort of order but not a definitive order, are Seamus Heaney, August Kleinzahler, Derek Mahon, Chaucer, Sean O'Brien, Sylvia Plath, Edward Thomas, Catullus, Tony Harrison, Louis MacNeice, Roddy Lumsden, Thomas Hardy, Keats, Horace, Paul Muldoon, Eliot, Marvell, Tennyson.
And that is about the 'canon according to me', plus things by Alun Lewis, Douglas Dunn, Julia Copus, maybe Fulke Greville ought to be in the canon, Baudelaire and the list goes on, as lists tend to do, with the proviso that one has overlooked somebody essential like the author of Wulf and Eadwacer.
So, since the point was to see if Rosemary Tonks makes it into the Top 6 or not, let's put her in.
--
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, in a purgatory of indecision worthy of Hamlet or Prufrock, I keep kicking the can down the road on when to pack in full-time paid work. I'm stuck between Larkin's Toads and Toads Revisited in a place that even he didn't envisage.
The concern is what fruitfully might fill the days rather than the further accumulation of cash that I probably won't ever need. 'Fruitfully' is the important word but the fruit doesn't have to be an end result, it can be mere enjoyment.
The other thing I sketched out on the back of an envelope last night was chapter 1 of my Thom Gunn book. How to write a book, as I discovered in writing a 'blizzard of errata' in the one draft of my bike racing novel, is to make a few notes on the back of envelopes, one envelope per chapter, and then sit in front of the bloody computer and bash it out. That is horrendous work if you have to make up a story but it might not be so bad just trying to organize 40-odd years worth of thinking, and assimilating other people's ideas, about a favourite poet. It might just be possible. It doesn't matter if it doesn't see print.
It is ten years, I notice, since August Kleinzahler's book on Music was published and I enquired of him at his appearance at the LRB Bookshop if there were any late, unpublished Gunn poems and he just about said 'no', and I asked if any biography was forthcoming and he said there might be. But it hasn't transpired. If you want a job doing, you sometimes have to do it yourself. It won't be a biography, it will bring together a shelf-full of books into a summary of what I made of them.
Publishers, by all means get in touch. Don't all rush at once.
 

A Survey of Contemporary Poetry

I'm not going to attempt such a thing. Good grief, no. I was led to thinking how difficult it would be to undertake, being so close to it, being a small part of a small part of it and not all of it being visible to any individual.
One might begin with the famous names from the big publishing houses, the 'mainstream' poets who we imagine might represent our age in a hundred years' time- Don Paterson, Paul Muldoon, Carol Ann Duffy, Sean O'Brien, we might think, although posterity sometimes sees things differently. And then there'd be the local groups and activity in London. Oxford and the provinces, as well as the dedicated schools of avant garde manifesto-makers beleaguered in their stolid doctrines, plus the magazines, competitions and, perhaps most important of all, the individual readers and writers doing their own thing to their own satisfaction without troubling anybody else with it.
I wouldn't know where to start but one of my own windows onto this disparate galaxy of far-flung stars and solar sysytems is Clarissa Aykroyd's The Stone and the Star, here, http://thestoneandthestar.blogspot.co.uk/  
and in particular her Blog List from which you can scan the latest posts by those she follows, which I'm gratified to be included in.
Today I followed up Anthony Wilson and his thoughts on his 'Go-to' poets. His list comprises Norman MacCaig, Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Tomas Transtromer as well as quoting Auden on Marianne Moore and it is so immaculate that I thought that any other poet he mentions must be worthwhile by association. I had never heard of Marie Howe but I was immediately off in search of her books. There is not apparently a Selected as yet and so I'll start with the most recent and let you know how it goes.
--
Otherwise, a new influx of books is due after a session of indulgent clicking away, irresponsibly just ahead of when I'm asked what I want for my birthday and I have to say I've just ordered a pile of records so I don't know.
I've begun George Gissing's The Nether World in preference to the breeze block that is Ben Pimlott's biography of Harold Wiilson. I can't believe I'll be ploughing through that line by line but it will be one to dip into although sadly the index leads us to not much on Jeremy Thorpe.
These follow the short anthology of memoirs about Joyce in The Joyce We Knew by Ulick O'Connor, which confirms at first hand much of what we thought we knew about the aloof, half-blind genius with a fine tenor voice, and the New Grove North European Baroque Masters for its brief biography and catalogue of works of Buxtehude.
Also on their way, alongside a selection of versions of Couperin's Lecons de Tenebres to compare with the latest new recording, are Elizabeth Foyster's The Trials of the King of Hampshire, Barney Curley's old autobiography finally found cheap enough and George's Ghosts, a biography of Yeats by Brenda Maddox. The Ellman account of Yeats was so unsatisfactory that I thought he deserved another chance. Brenda's book on Nora Barnacle was excellent and so if she can't make Yeats interesting, I'll have to assume it his fault after all.
So, with the Saturday Nap due to take us up to Boxing Day with horse racing advice of the most dubious provenance and the assessments of the Year's Best in all the usual categories, it is worth noting- should you be interested- that I only went away for a couple of weeks and I'm back here like a rearguard action, trying to show that the blog (although I'm old-fashioned and call this a website) is not a thing of the past.

Norman MacCaig

Last night's meeting of Portsmouth Poetry Society, on Norman MacCaig, provided an unparalleled level of approval, certainly ahead of anything I've ever seen, there or anywhere else.
That is a tribute not only to the man and his poems but also to those PPS members who were there last night. I have shared this programme with them.
In the unlikely event of anybody ever wanting to interview me, there would be no need. Look at this, I agree with everything he says, and the way he says it.

Top 6 - Norman MacCaig

Thanks to BBC4 for marking the centenary of Norman MacCaig on Friday night, a poet who might not always be given his due south of the border but is rightly regarded as a major poet in Scotland.

The interview first broadcast to mark his eightieth birthday showed a poet not quite as self-effacing and humble as the poems might have led me to expect. Although quiet and reflective, he was clearly a poet sure of his own worth and although by no means self-regarding or full of himself, he didn't look as if he'd be readily gainsaid or suffer fools gladly. Thus the nostrum still widely fashionable when I was being taught, that the text is the only object of literary study, was dismantled further as the poems look different after seeing the man in action.

Interestingly, and to his credit, MacCaig described his early efforts in poetry as personal and difficult in a way that experimental modernism would have been in his formative years but after a friend had queried the obcurity of his language, MacCaig determined on a more accessible style and benefitted from it for the rest of his life. Looking back through the Collected Poems, the clarity of each and every poem is immediately striking, the common sense of the man is carried over directly into the poems.

Summer Farm is the title I associate most memorably with MacCaig and I'm surprised how early in appears in the book, on page 7 out of 448, in fact. It is typical in many ways, adding brilliantly concise observation and description to a profound and well expressed idea,

A hen stares at nothing with one eye,

The picks it up.

The poet's mind is cleared of thought before,

Self under self, a pile of selves I stand

Threaded on time.

One way journey similarly celebrates a deceptively anti-intellectual attitude,

There was a time, where I take short holidays,

Before man came shooting his morals

At what created him. I can praise

What never was tortured between true and false.

This middle period of poems from the late 1960's and 70's is the strongest. Basking Shark is another encounter between the thinking MacCaig and the apparently unreflecting nature that he admires,

...I count as gain

That once I met, on sea tin-tacked with rain,

That room-sized monster with a matchbox brain.

The later poems become slightly more tangential or transcendental, less fixing their attention on the natural world. My volume here ends with an image of the poet's future growing 'smaller and smaller' but it's a wry observation still of a part with the earlier dry humour in, for example, Concerto, where

Miss pianist bows her lovely back

under the hail of notes

that she's returning, slightly damaged,

to Beethoven.

MacCaig is keen to debunk pretension and does so in a number of poems comparable perhaps to Larkin's Vers de Societe. But he is better in appreciation of the non-human, as in Culag Pier in which the gulls pick off herrings from the fishermen's catch.

You can pick six from almost anywhere in the book but I've found it more likely to find better poems towards the beginning where Night no more real reads like Baudelaire in a good mood, if that were possible.

Scottish poetry and English poetry are not necessarily the same thing, with many Scots poets using their own dialect and language to make the point. With MacCaig writing in English, he is the more accessible outside of Scotland and so it's not for me to be nominating the finest Scottish poets of the twentieth century but there aren't very many others I'd be putting alongside him on a shortlist.