Celebrity Mastermind

Hats off, chapeaux and congratulations to Stuart Maconie on his Celebrity Mastermind win. And thanks for giving me a chance to have a go at my own specialist subject. The result was Maconie 14 Green 10 as we battled it out on C20th British Poets and Poetry. Maybe I should have thought more before steaming in with Edward Thomas when it was Wilfred Owen and I couldn't quite call to mind the name of James Kirkup even though he's featured on these very pages but that's excuses, excuses and there was no way I was going to get 14.
However, it was good to get a set of questions in which the first two answers were Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn.
But now we know. I try to average 8 on a Mastermind General Knowledge round and often do (though several more on a celebrity edition) and having had a go at my specialist subject and scored 10, that makes 18 which wouldn't get you beyond third place at the very best in most heats. So I don't think I'll be applying for a place on there, thank you very much.

RSC Hamlet

Hamlet, RSC, BBC2 26 Dec

Shakespeare's plays are always ready to be re-made to suit the tastes of the period whether it be Bowdler taking out the bits that Victorians didn't like, surreal experimentation in the 60's with Midsummer Night's Dream on stilts or West Side Story retelling Romeo and Juliet in New York gangland. In the age of diversity and politically correct equality, this production offers us Voltimand and Cornelia rather than Cornelius.
But I'm only joking, such pointless and irrelevant tampering only makes any comment on it pointless and irrelevant. Every worthwhile production brings more to the play than that minor cosmetic amendment. Some of my favourites in the past have included Ophelia coming in dressed in Polonius' clothes after the murder of her father, Hamlet setting fire to paper boats on a pool of water (literally 'burning his boats') during 'To be or not to be' and the brilliant Fran Lewis as a female Hamlet in last year's Southsea Shakespeare Actor's renewal. In this one, amongst other things, we had an up-to-date setting that used closed circuit tv, camcorders and video diaries to sinister, forensic effect but eschewed the existing knife-crime theme and updated it to gun crime.
As is always possible in a dark play, and this was suitably dark when it needed to be, lighting was used brilliantly, both in the opening scenes and at the beginning of 'To be or not to be'. Some unorthodox camera angles made us aware than a film-maker was at work as well as actors and a playwright but usually to good effect and not quite enough to overdo it. Perhaps once too often the mirror that was shattered by the gunshot that killed Polonius was returned to for a character to presumably reflect upon their shattered nature, or the broken condition of Denmark, fitting visual metaphor though it certainly was. Perhaps the best cinematic effect was the reflection in glass of Polonius and Claudius eavesdropping on Hamlet and Ophelia.
The accumulating power of the play makes it difficult for any production to miss every opportunity it provides and even a bad Hamlet is usually good in parts. This was excellent, with especial highlights being the bedroom confrontation between Hamlet and Gertrude and the Gravedigger scene. Some productions seem to emphasize certain themes over others. Here, for me, it was the tactical game of wits, the espionage and counterplot, between Hamlet and Claudius that was foregrounded as the main premise of the many-layered text.
But not all of it was immediately convincing. While David Tennant did a fine madcap Prince, he was distraught and 'floored' by the occasion a little bit melodramatically from the outset and hardly needed an 'antic disposition' to be put on since he seemed disturbed enough already. As such it was not so easy to believe that he had the original nobility to have proved a great king if events had not gone so awry.
Laertes didn't look quite as hot-blooded and swash-buckling as he might need to be but there is always the difficult question of his attachment to Ophelia to deal with and so maybe we are not looking for the 100% action hero in him.
Oliver Ford Davies provided just about the best Polonius I've seen, giving the best comic part in Shakespeare a considered performance rather than the overdone battiness it sometimes lures actors into. He was stately, dignified and sporadically aware that he was in fact 'losing it' to incipient senility.
Penny Downie was a well-judged, excellent Gertrude and Mariah Gale another fine, distracted Ophelia. Patrick Stewart was never less than exemplary as the statesman cracking under pressure as Claudius realizes gradually that he's not going to be able to hold it all together.
If Hamlet isn't the greatest work in English Literature then something else has to be and I can't think of what that something else might be but even so, although it's hardly for me to find fault, one does sometimes wonder if the players and 'play within the play' doesn't take up more time than it needs to. During this time, we do see other themes develop, like Hamlet and Ophelia together, and it offers other insights, too, but there is just the suspicion that Shakespeare was indulging himself a little bit with a theatrical interlude.
So, Gregory Doran's film was a fine thing and the undoubted highlight of Christmas which doesn't these days involve too much television at all for me. David Tennant is a qualified success in it, brilliant in places but not establishing beyond all reasonable doubt that he would have 'proved most royally'.
Should any similar projects occur to the BBC in the future, don't hesitate -Go, bid the film-makers shoot.

Festive Fun

I posted this quiz on the Poets on Fire Forum but there's no reason why visitors here shouldn't suffer similarly. It's not supposed to be easy and the 5 claimed by one member of that forum is probably a very respectable score. As you will appreciate, it's partly festive and partly 'the year in poetry'.

1. Which book of poems this year was, anagrammatically, Shrewd Staid Whit by Solemn Dry Dud?
2. Which much respected poet wrote Reindeer sleigh, Come our way, Ho, ho, ho, Cherry nose, Cap on head, Suit that's red, Special night, Beard that's white ?
3. Which book ended with and none of this, none of this matters ?
4. Which book contained six poems in which every line was __________?
5. Where was Ruth Padel reading on the day that poetry hit the headlines with reports of her rival’s alleged indiscretions (see picture above)?
6. Which stove is lit again when the bells of waiting Advent ring, according to one past laureate?7. Whereas the latest one observed that, having paid the pipers, we dinnae call the tune. Which adjective, exactly, did she attach to the pipers?
8. When the Nation’s favourite poet wrote about Christmas, of what would the magi have finally been glad of another?
9. Which poet was Christmas number one in 1968?
10. Who wrote ,
Little tree
little silent Christmas tree
you are so little
you are more like a flower
who found you in the green forest
and were you very sorry to come away?

And a Happy Christmas to all my readers. I'll hope to be reviewing the RSC Hamlet, to be shown on telly on Boxing Day early evening, and then I'll see you next year.

Best, D.

Ho Ho Ho

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVs6X9yIM_k

Should it be the X Factor winner or Rage Against the Machine?

No.

London Chess Classic Round 6

London Chess Classic, Kensington Olympia, Mon 14 Dec

------

With Kramnik beating Nigel Short and Carlsen only scraping a draw with Michael Adams, the gap was narrowed at the top of the table for the London Classic with one round to go. Using three points for a win and one for a draw rather than the traditional one point and half a point, the emphasis is very much on winning games and a succession of draws will keep you in the bottom half of the table.

In the auditorium the games begin with a flurry of opening moves in quick time while press photographers are still allowed to be on stage and so it's difficult to see what's happening until it all settles down after ten minutes.

Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian prodigy who might become the youngest World Champion ever reminds one of Stephen Hendry, slightly cherubic in a moody way but he stands up, moves around, does a yawning stretch and suddenly looks like Morrissey instead. He is the centre of attention and seems to know as much, and being World number one at 19 must be a difficult thing to carry off. More impressive is the surprisingly large Vladimir Kramnik, a civilised, confident and apparently affable giant of the game.

Hukari 'H-Bomb' Nakamura, the American Champion, has only used a minute of his time while David Howells playing him is already a quarter of an hour down. Nigel Short hasn't been having a good week and already seems to be struggling against Kramnik. Ni Hua and Luke McShane are going slowly and will need to speed up to meet the first time control. After an hour and a bit I go to the Commentary room where Daniel King and Laurence Trent amongst others are analysing the afternoon away.

This analysis seems to me to be quite wide of the mark sometimes. What they actually do is explore a dizzying variety of variations in each position, more or less playing their own games with the positions and not always by any means having much bearing on what happens on the real-life boards. They think Michael Adams' Knight on a6 against Carlsen is bad and they don't like Nakamura's pawn on g5 or anything else much about his position but it turns out that Adams has the better of a fairly obvious draw and Nakamura and Howells agree a draw once Howells proves he can make forty moves in two hours.

Nigel creates some interesting possibilities counter-attacking Kramnik but it never looked good for him and he goes off to get himself a glass of something red at about 6 o'clock. Carlsen certainly isn't winning but he wasn't going to lose either and so McShane and Ni Hua are left in the auditorium while the big noises generously show up in the commentary room to run through their games for the benefit of those who want to know what happened and why. There were missed chances, even perhaps a chance for Short to win so if they couldn't spot the best moves at the time, how were the rest of us supposed to follow it.

Kramnik is big and expansive, Short self-deprecating and goofy in his likeable, studious way. Then Carlsen and Adams are slightly less forthcoming but it looks as if Adams was never really worried, not about losing but not about winning either. One has to be cognisant of the fact that Magnus is only 19 but even now one can't help but wonder if his demeanour and immense reputation foreshadow some later life Tiger Woods, Agassi or Bjorn Borg-style crisis. One hopes not, of course, but it does seem hard for stratospherically talented young stars to keep it normal.

While Luke, newly admired by me after his superb pawn avalanche win in the previous round, was eventually losing a complicated game to the three times Chinese Champion, Viktor Korchnoi (pictured) was playing 26 other people all at once, lapping the inside of a quadrangle of tables making the moves for white while the opponents waited for him to arrive before showing him their move with black. He didn't pause for more than a second or so at most of the boards.

So, another immensely absorbing chess event. The novelty of it all at this level is a big part of its attraction for me, though, I think. It's a great insight into a strange world of people who habitually talk in sentences like 'yes, b4, Knight takes Bishop, Rook takes Knight, a3, Bishop h4, castle long and then perhaps something like c3 and it looks okay for black' as if they were born speaking that language.

In the same way that two or three days at a poetry conference make me want to run screaming back to the more primitive excitements of football while other delegates are still earnestly discussing whether the sonnet can be a feminist issue, I'm not sure that chess is really more than an occasional interest for me. I don't think it's going to provide the competitive enterprise to replace my other sports in later life. I can't get my Blitz rating at Free Internet Chess Server up to 1300 and that isn't very clever at all. I can see from the analysis by these experts that every move offers vast opportunities for the mistakes one loses by and against anybody any good you only need to do it once.

And if I can't look after a Queen's Bishop's Pawn any better than I can defend a train ticket then my future in the game isn't promising. This was intended as one of my bargain London days out with megatrain kindly selling me train rides for four pounds each way. But it is understood that you've still got your print out for the return journey. Not having it makes it look like you're a rascally fare dodger and it turns out that a single back from Waterloo, is in fact 27 pounds and 70 pence. I can show you the ticket to prove it. But it's only money.

Christmas Records

Michael Jackson's inspirational performance of Little Drummer Boy and George Michael's Last Christmas had always seemed perfectly adequate favourite Christmas records to quote if and when asked for a choice until I found the genius that is Joseph Spence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk5ufApUArQ

London Chess Classic

http://www.londonchessclassic.com/live/live_games.htm

I'll be at this on Monday, trying to fathom that which I'm not really gifted enough to appreciate.

It's already provided considerable entertainment with live games available via interweb links.
Future World Champion, Magnus Carlsen, beat Kramnik in the first round and might have put the tournament beyond reasonable doubt there and then. In his next game, Luke McShane fought bravely against all odds but ran out of time in an eventually lost position. Then it looked awful for David Howells after not very many moves at all but Howells dug in somehow and hung in for a draw against the new wunderkind.
It is more thrilling than you might imagine. I, for one, can't see what's going to happen next at this level but I'm sadly not even good enough to learn much from what I'm seeing.

Viktor Korchnoi, 78 year old warhorse, will be playing simultaneous games against 30 players who will have paid handsomely for the privilege on Monday and so one or two might beat him or get a draw. If they do, I hope the old dissident finds it possible to lose with more dignity than he did here in a blitz game with Sofia Polgar.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9k5oBgaZGI

South Bank Show - Carol Ann Duffy

On an evening when Radio 3 had already broadcast a discussion about poetry and its audience featuring such luminaries as Michael Schmidt, it seemed as if we had reached a saturation point of media coverage when Carol Ann was the subject of the South Bank Show. If it continues like this, I'll have to find myself an alternative minority interest. Does anybody still watch football, I wonder. When is the next World Cup?

As much as anything, there was an opportunity to compare and contrast Carol Ann's life with that of our leading playwright for those who had also seen Being Alan Bennett the previous night. Both are admirable writers and among my favourites but I'd be with Bennett if I had to choose because he gets the option of pretending to be himself whereas Duffy seems to have to be genuinely herself, although she does it very well.

It must be awkward being filmed looking thoughtfully at picturesque rivers and then talking about oneself while pointing out that one is a private person. While 'poet' has always looked like the easiest job in the world, it has to be pointed out (as she did) that novelists get paid more and not all that poets find themselves having to do to earn a living wage are things that I'd want to do.

A residential writing course, run with Gillian Clarke, looked like excruciating business although some poets will have a more encouraging attitude towards students and a more genuine belief in poetry than I could drum up. Certainly, as we saw her talking a keen apprentice through a poem, he did seem to have a good line where the dusk was 'punctuated' by insects. But when she suggested that his description of the fall of dusk made it too sudden and not gradual enough she was overstepping the mark.

I once read a poem called Seafront to a group, over twenty years ago but it still rankles, and was told that the sea was a rough, unruly thing not to be described as I had done, as a calm thing. But it had been both as 'flat as a pancake' and 'calm as a millpond' on the occasion I was describing and I went away thinking that advice only re-directed one back to cliche when cliche was something that poetry ought to be avoiding. Avoid it or re-make it but surely don't just use it wholesale. This workshop ethic must be challenged at every opportunity. I hope not everybody left their educational retreat with all their poems re-made as Duffy poems.

But it's not entirely her fault. She has to make a living and if aspiring writers want to buy her advice it is entirely up to them. Duffy is a fine poet but a conglomerate one, bringing together a trustworthy, old-fashioned leftist ideology, an inheritance from Adrian Henri and the Liverpool Scene, the middle-brow, user-friendly accessibility of the Armitage style that has a vague relationship with 'performance poetry' without ever reducing itself to a slam performance and some respect for tradition. She is as good an advert for poetry as there is and so we should be grateful but they must all be careful about musing too much on the significance or meaning of 'poetry' or else we will drown under a welter of nice-sounding phrase making about what 'poetry' is. Just do it.

The best of these musings was when she offered the opinion that poets feel the world through language (and that is only my rough precis, not what she actually said). Yes, it is. It is more than anything else about the way the language is used. Not about gender politics, daffodils, scenery or words to be used at funerals. This programme was never going to be much better than it was. It might have been better without the vignettes of actors doing her poems for her and having more of her subdued but concentrated live readings in which one interesting but impossible game was to try to see who she was reading with. She is right that we should have a laureate and I'm glad she's been brave enough to take it on because she is the best person for it. It invites criticism from those in the media who need targets but I think she's up to the challenge.

All the best to her because she deserves it. But, given the choice, I'd rather have been Alan Bennett. It might even be preferable to become a National Treasure posthomously, but only eventually. And not just yet.

Top 6 - Pete Doherty, selected by Chris Chadwick

We're told that Can't Stand Me Now tells the story of Pete breaking into Carl's flat and their on-off relationship... "Have we enough to keep it together? or do we just keep on pretending (and hope our luck is never ending..)".

Death on The Stairs

She said: "I'll show you a picture

a picture of tomorrow

there's nothing changing it's all sorrow"

oh no please don't show me

I'm a swine you don't wanna know me

......perhaps a prophetic look into the future of The Libertines? He must have known it was going to end in tears, but is in denial.

The Delaney

Some people run from trouble

Some people meet it half way

Others are glad to pay

Their cab fare over

And superficially you enjoy the company that you loathe to bear

Enjoy the company

What exactly do you mean

The truth be known the drums they roll

I loop the loop on the old banjo

How's best to deal with problems or problem people? Ignore it, or meet it head-on?

Time For Heroes

there are fewer more distressing sights than that

of an englishman in a baseball cap

yeah we'll die in the class we were born

that's a class of our own my love

we're in a class of our own my love

... a social commentary of sorts. Maybe deriding the class system and the 'chav' culture "it's these ignorant faces that bring this town down".

Bollywood to Battersea

...It's a long, long way, oooh

From Bollywood to Battersea

Bollywood to Battersea

Bollywood to Battersea

I was a child of the pound and the crown

I lost myself in the haze

Of the new life that I found

On the silver screen

She was a child of the movies and the dollar

One fine day I was led astray

She took me by the collar

Said you must follow me

... discovery of cultural differences, new horizons.

France

The ideal girl

In London from France

Came over then left me

She left me entranced

Now I have to get by

Once again on my own

Nothing but memories

Beta Male

Robert Crampton provides some pleasant company on a Saturday in his Beta Male column in The Times magazine. Today he describes exactly what it's like, even getting close to naming one or two of the correct records.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/men/article6937491.ece

Sean O'Brien - Night Train

Sean O'Brien and Birtley Aris, Night Train (Flambard Press)

This collaboration between poet and illustrator has the appearance of a coffee table book with special consideration given to its presentation with hand-written poems as well as black and white drawings. It is an impression augmented by the feeling that the poems are heritage O'Brien, back on one of his favourite themes, the railways, a hardened nostalgia of attitude and the atmosphere of a disenfranchised afterwards that the drawings capture perfectly.

There might or might not be a story of lost love referred to among the lines but more or less it is more classic O'Brien, back to his Ghost Train signature style suggesting that life is somehow occuring elsewhere or in a bygone age. Always well-turned and immaculate in diction, it is retro in perspective and even, one could say, retro-O'Brien. For indeed,
why else
Would you be sitting looking out
And catching in the window the concern
Of those to whom you might be anyone
Or nobody at all

One minor complaint might be that the hand-written poems in a stylised italic hand did make me have to look harder at a word here or there which slowed the reading once or twice. It is a fragmentary 'sequence' and sequence isn't something I personally relish but I'd be the last to be churlish at the arrival of new poems by O'Brien, top practitioner and arbiter of contemporary poetry as he is. If it isn't his best work then it is at least yards ahead of most new poetry that will have been published this year.

As homage, and perhaps to suggest that once one is in the groove that O'Brien-ism is a style one can reel off quite effectively, my pastiche here is offered with respect and affection, hoping that I've not subliminally lifted any actual lines from real poems. Pastiche is imitation, not merely copying the stuff out.

Pastiche O'Brien

This is the kingdom of modern
disappointment. You came here
on a day's excursion once
and, for reasons you may now
have forgotten, never returned
to your native place.
You say that you don't know what to think,
imagining that thinking is the preserve
of those who can afford it
and so you stopped a long time ago.
The places that you went when you were younger
are overgrown with bracken
and rare lichens that camouflage
themselves in undistinguished colours.
And haberdashery is an excuse
for sex now, and happens
on Sunday afternoons
before the start of The Antiques Roadshow
where one day you expect to see
yourself undervalued. Wait patiently.

Top 6 - Elizabeth Bishop

One bad habit I must get out of soon is reviewing books before I've finished them or writing pieces before I know the whole story. If the second half of Muldoon's lectures are better than the first then the review below will have to be re-written but I might run out of the vocabulary of admiration if it is.

But it's not often that one is reading two such fine books in tandem, that and Elizabeth Bishop's Complete Poems and then, today, a Sean O'Brien book turns up as well.

I had always known, by the quality of her admirers, that Elizabeth Bishop was 'any good' but it hadn't quite clicked with me until I made the determined attempt to find out what it was about her. However, being parsimonious, I was going to make sure that buying her Complete wasn't going to be a waste of money.

She is well worth the effort, ticks all the right boxes and I'm sure that when I've read more of the book the Top 6 might be different to this selection. It's even possible that when the dust settles, she will find a place in my Top 10 poets and it is always useful to be genuinely able to include another woman at the top of one's charts because nominating 10 men makes one wonder if one does lack all the necessary cross gender empathy. It isn't an issue for me but one can hear the shrill accusations from some parts of the poetry world. But, don't worry. Good poetry is simply that for me, and LizBish will take her place in my pantheon on the merit of her poems.

A good villanelle is hard to find. There are several but One Art takes inevitably high order in any shortlist. Clever, emotional and playing with the difficult form, it is a tremendous poem. In fact the volume Geography III marks an obvious high point in her career, including as it does Crusoe in England, Poem ('About the size of an old dollar bill') and The End of March. The great thing about Bishop, and the job of the proper critic is to say, how her gentle, distanced, self-deprecating tone is so powerful. And yet she shows herself to be a great technician, too, in the villanelle and Sestina, which is very much the sort of poem that I, for one, would love to be able to achieve successfully. Insomnia is another I can't possibly leave out at this stage and I realize I have left out a few of her best known poems and might have to revise this selection later.

But I honestly didn't think she was going to be this good. We should trust in trusted authorities when they point us in the right direction and I have a feeling that, as with my other favourite poets, she is likely to get better the more I read her. This is beautifully made, subtle work likely to reward re-reading rather than fade after an initial impressive effect. She is certainly an example of the apprentice going on to outdo the mentor, in this case Marianne Moore. It's quite possible that she only wrote masterpieces and you can't say that about many poets. Derek Mahon might be one but we will see about that because he might be my next subject.

First impressions do count for a lot but sometimes the flash of early infatuation can wear off. On the other hand, you sometimes know it isn't going to. I think Elizabeth Bishop might not find it difficult to stay in the elite group of C20th poets .

Paul Muldoon, The End of the Poem

Paul Muldoon, The End of the Poem (Faber)

This isn't a new book by any means but it is worthy of some consideration after the fact nevertheless.
It is Paul Muldoon's lectures as the Oxford Professor of Poetry a few years ago. In some ways they make a companion set of 'close readings' to Tom Paulin's Secret Life of Poems (see elsewhere here), and just as Paulin will accept that he sometimes 'goes too far', Muldoon also in one place admits he's 'stretching' it a bit. But whereas Paulin concentrates for the most part on sounds and poetic effects, Muldoon's is a wider field of reference, like that of a crossword solver, finding relations and references to other poems and poets as well as in his characteristic play with words. Most readers won't find anywhere near as much in poems as these readers do, will be staggered how much there apparently is to find and then wonder how much of it is really there.
Muldoon begins by reading Yeats' All Souls' Night and in it finds Yeats echoing Keats, as his name does, but goes considerably further and among other discoveries shows that by describing glasses of wine he was thinking of the cork, and in fact, Cork, and associations with Irish history.
We may or may not think it instructive to be shown how Frost's poems involving woods have a hidden anagram, or an almost anagram, with his name in 'forest' but however many times we raise an eyebrow at such ostensibly forced coincidences, we probably accept the ingenuity and informed cross references that seem to imply that, yes, eventually all poems are made of previous poems and form a vast, integrated network rather than a diaspora of discrete works produced in isolation from each other.
Language, and English in particular, is made up of so relatively few vowel and consonant sounds that some linguistic patterning is going to occur whether a poet was trying to create an effect with them or not so all those essays one wrote at school praising the skill of the poet in creating such a masterful tapestry from words were half the time admiring things that any old language throws up on a regular basis. It would be difficult to write anything without some alliteration, assonance or unintended rhyme. Paulin's essays sometimes seemed to benefit from this inevitability but Muldoon's work is on a higher level of association, but one that requires a high level of familiarity with a wide range of poems in order to see them.
I had long thought it was only a happy accident that Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowning seemed to contain the unintended joke, 'he always loved larking' in the same way that Larkin himself used his own name in a personal in-joke with a girlfriend called Porter in the line 'porters larking with the mail' in The Whitsun Weddings. But as Muldoon points out (and I had never realized) Smith's poem came after the publication of The Less Deceived and the reference was more likely to be deliberate than accidental. Muldoon's reading of Smith shows her to be a far more terrifying poet than I had thought her poems ever suggested, the subliminal effects being much larger when made real and the desolation that Smith and Larkin share is highlighted by this reading. I must remember not to go back to Hull. And you'll be as surprised as I was that Stevie and Robert Lowell had an intimate occasion in a public place if you are prepared to believe everything suggested here.
The inter-relatedness of poetry is further emphasized by the way that Muldoon's lectures lead off from where the previous one finished in an impressive tour de force exploration of international C20th poetry. Lowell does not come out of it well, despite being acknowledged as a precursor of Heaney, but his translation of Montale's eel poem seems to get the lowest mark in a most instructive comaparison of the many versions of it made in English. The fairly obvious issues involved in translating poetry are made considerably more illuminating by the listing of alternative versions of a few passages where some poets are exposed as rather keener to write a whole new poem of their own compared to the more circumspect renderings of others.
This is a major, wonderful and exemplary set of essays. I don't know why I didn't get myself a copy earlier but I'm glad I did eventually. Muldoon is the paragon critic and reader of a poem, and if I'd already seen evidence of that I'm even surer of it now. The book is full of the best commentary, always entertaining if you like this sort of thing (possibly quite annoying if you don't), and once the brilliant detail has been assimilated the mundane conclusion must be that the effectiveness, the success of any poem depends more, if anything, on the capacity of its reader to elicit meaning or significance than it does on the poet to provide them.

A Departure

It was about time we got away from the need to make lists of other stuff and about time for me to write a poem. You do realize that I usually only write four poems a year, do you. I've been working overtime this year trying to provide fresh material for this site. But it's been a great pleasure.

The social occasion marking the retirement of the much admired colleague was on Wednesday and apart from being the predictably great social occasion that ends up with the few hardcore drinkers still there when it's later than it should be, it might have been the last such that our now frighteningly Stalinist workplace ever sees. But I got a poem out of it, so I'm grateful. It's work in progress, but the work goes on. You're never happy with what you've done until you've completely lost it. The Still and West is a beautifully situated pub with fine views of Portsmouth Harbour which is why they probably have the nerve to charge three of the Queen's fine pounds as well as forty more of her sovereign pence for one pint of Guinness. I'm only glad I didn't pay for very many of those that I had.

But I promised you a poem, and here it is. It might look a bit different when it appears in print eventually but, happy retirement, Pete. Missing you already.

A Departure

That must be a cormorant,
sinister and clever,
riding the impatient tide
and diving from the surface
like a rattlesnake attacking
for somewhere in that murky
underworld he knows there’s fish.

He’s under water so long
that we think we must have missed him
but the rhythm is repeated
through the shifting afternoon
until I realize I don’t know
how many times I’ve seen
that ferry boat arrive and leave.

And the lights that sharpen
in the dusk across the nervous water
have no danger to warn of
but have nothing to symbolize

that we might hope for either.

Still and West, 25/11/09

Top 6 - Philip Larkin, selected by Colleen Hawkins

Choosing Philip Larkin’s six best poems represents a dream project for a naturally lazy person such as myself. His output was relatively small and all of his greatest poems are to be found in three slim volumes of poetry: The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. The juvenilia and uncollected poems are fascinating for the aficionados, but need not detain the more casual reader seeking out his best work. Larkin was his own best critic and only the cream of his output ever made it into his collections.

Going

The most economical and effective expression of Larkin’s notoriously extreme timor mortis.

Church Going

If there’s one Larkin poem that I’m absolutely certain will stand the test of time, it’s Church Going.

An Arundel Tomb

A powerful and – to a limited extent – consoling poem. Just don’t fall into the trap of getting too carried away by its famous final line. Lots of others have.

The Old Fools

There’s no phony consolation on offer here and much of this poem’s greatness stems from the fact that it’s so unflinching.

Broadcast

Romantic and full of yearning, but thankfully never sloppy or sentimental. Nobody likes a poet who slobbers over his beloved!

MCMXIV

I somehow doubt pre-WWI England was ever quite the quaint, trusting little Eden that Larkin imagines it was, but – whether it’s founded on a sentimental myth or not – MCMXIV is still immensely poignant.

Top 6 - David Green, selected by Dave Moxham

Dave Moxham undersells himself somewhat by claiming that he is not sufficiently widely read or knowledgeable enough to select from any other poet except this one, me. But it's a fine choice, in my view. He adds that his choices are based on non-academic and non-technical principles, just the poems he enjoys most or finds some emotional connection with. At least I think he said that, I'm afraid I reloaded Windows Vista on the computer and thus lost all my e-mails. Sorry about that.
Much more interesting to be selected by somebody other than oneself, I'd say. His nominations are, in no particular order Those Days, Later, The Graveyard Shift, Postcard, Kirstine and The Cathedrals of Liverpool.

Top 6 - Martin Mooney

It beats me why Martin Mooney isn't a name seen more often in higher places in the strange little world of poetry. By all means, in recent decades, Northern Ireland has been over-crowding the place with major names but the fact that England might have been under performing is no reason for this fine poet to have been overlooked.

The fact that Blue Lamp Disco was published as long ago as 2003 gives rise to the hope that there might be a new book with us soon. Although that does remind me of the story of when one Oxbridge don asked another when he might hope to see his new book. And the answer was (something like) 'you can hope whenever you like'.

Dimitri Gregorievich Rasputin is a wonderful poem, full of working class spirit and fight, and daring to be longer than is required to fill a page or two. Not very far behind is Painting the Angel, moving and beautifully done. Much, much longer than the usual word quota expected these days is the early poem on Brecht .

I can't leave out the brilliant horse racing/bookies poem, The Cancellation of the Races. Two Pages from a Travel Diary catches the eye and it would be difficult to leave out Anna Akhmatova's Funeral but that is 6 already and I'm not saying I've done him justice at all.

The Big 50

I'm hoping to provide more than just lists here once again soon. I'm reading Paul Muldoon's Oxford lectures in The End of the Poem at the moment and it's a wonderful book and I'll write about it here eventually even though it isn't new.
In the meantime, in one of those attempts to define oneself I had intended to list the Big 100, my personal helicon of favourites across all genres of artistic endeavour. I soon realized that I'd need to include things that were great but not special to me if I was going to name 100 so I reduced it to 50. But, so far, I've only got 44.Andrew Marvell, David Bowie, Raymond Carver and William Byrd have been removed from the list which, in some sort of order, but not definitively in order, goes like this-

Thom Gunn, Maggi Hambling, The Magnetic Fields, Shakespeare, Philip Larkin, Handel, J.S.Bach, Vermeer, Gerard Depardieu, T.Rex, John Donne, Gregory Isaacs, Patrick Hamilton, Mozart, Mark Rothko, James Joyce, The Velvet Underground, Monteverdi, The Simpsons, Thomas Tallis, Al Green, Sean O'Brien, Emmanuelle Beart, Camus, Josquin Desprez, Ovid, Lindisfarne, Auden, Richard Yates, Edward Thomas, August Kleinzahler, James Macmillan, Peter Brueghel, Thomas Hardy, Sibelius, Buxtehude, Beethoven, J.D.Salinger, Marc Chagall, R.E.M., Vivaldi, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Haruki Murakami, Purcell, and possibly T.S. Eliot. Then maybe George Moore. And Sartre.

So, there it is. The anthology of a lifetime. I've almost certainly missed out something special, I don't know if Danny Baker belongs on such a list. Or Blackadder or Fawlty Towers. Neither can I explain how Sean O'Brien is rated one place ahead of Emmanuelle Beart or The Simpsons just in front of Thomas Tallis. But, while many will rightly question the list-making impulse, others will perhaps sympathize with the affliction and then decide not to attempt to try it themselves.

Top 6 - Andrew Marvell

Marvell was the subject of my third-year undergraduate dissertation and I haven't been back to him often in the last thirty years. He cropped up in Hull, of course, when I was really there for Larkin and I did go to St. Giles in the Fields in the summer but I haven't probably given him enough time and attention over the years.

If poets from bygone centuries had known how reluctant we generally are now to engage with long poems they might not have bothered but it has to be said that looking back through the Complete, one isn't tempted into anything over three pages long so, with apologies..

Marvell's poems, much likes Donne's are performances. You don't really believe in his cardboard characters or set piece scenarios. He was working at the dead end of a long tradition and remaking verse from cliches and hollow, familiar themes. To His Coy Mistress is knowingly and absurdly over exaggerated, and once we know that we can enjoy the ironic playfulness at work in the rest of the lyrics. Always in opposition but always in Parliament, Marvell seems like one of those clever survivors who knows a lot but doesn't hold deep convictions of his own. Or at least that's what he looks like. He apparently never uses the same poetic form twice. Always playing, experimenting, performing.

The Gallery is a nice conceit; The Garden a traditional symbol for paradise with its famous 'green thought in a green shade'; The Nymph Complaining on the Death of Her Fawn is a heartbreaking performance and The Coronet, to which my tutor John Mowat directed me to begin the thesis, is a humble hymn of unworthiness. The Unfortunate Lover is another typically 'metaphysical' study of love in which you just wonder if you notice the possibly ungenerous spirit of Marvell in sympathy with 'the malignant stars'. But somehow you still can't help admiring the lad.

Anti-Stratfordians Shoot Themselves in the Foot

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6923734.ece

Good stuff here from David Aaronovitch, attending a conference of all those who think Shakespeare might not have written the plays that bear his name. They might be united in wanting to remove the plays from the Stratford man but they 'cancel each other out' by all supporting different candidates for the authorship and having to refute the evidence required by their fellow conspirators who need those facts to support other candidates. They are Fred Karno's Army and laughable as far as that goes but the most depressing thing about them is their refusal to believe in genius and their apparent need to explain where the language came from. It just happens to be innate in some such rare people.
I wish I'd gone to this conference, it sounds like one big laugh after another.

Unfortunately The Times Books supplement today fails to maintain the high standard. On the back of this piece was their listing of the 100 Best Pop Albums of the Decade. Number 1 is Kid A by Radiohead and that dreary outfit occupy number 3 as well. The Magnetic Fields released two albums in the decade and neither are listed so there's simply no point discussing it. They had Is This It by The Strokes at no. 6 ( ! ). Swagger? No, stylized posturing.

Record of the Week

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_7Vv7RDUDg

...is Life by G Whizz.

Top 6- Thom Gunn

You must be joking. Did you really think it was going to take me as long as this before I picked Thom Gunn's best 6 poems. Thom is picutured here in a tie-dye vest that didn't make into his top ten of them.

One day I might have to do Milton and there is every chance that Paradise Lost won't be in it but for the time being, it's easy. Without his example, I don't know if I would have tried quite so hard to make myself into any kind of poet in the first place so, yes, it is mainly his fault. Three early objects of sublime wonderment select themselves and they are Tamer and Hawk, My Sad Captains and Touch. Even I, the ardentest of admirers, might have begun to think that The Man with Night Sweats, however widely acclaimed it was as a return to form, didn't include anything quite so good. But it was never true that Gunn's career was patchy. There were plenty of good poems in every book. And there were several beautiful things in Boss Cupid, the last collection before he died, in among the anecdotal poems. The Butcher's Son is such an understated piece of genius that you have to check again if he really did do such a thing in such monosyllabic, simple language.

I can't afford any more choices from that last book but, quite honestly, I can't be sure, so I'm going for Rastignac at 45, which a lot of people wouldn't, and then I am going back to the last book for The Gas Poker.

It wasn't quite as easy I thought but sometimes one can know a bit too much.

Top 6 - Sylvia Plath

Now that some of the hysteria over Sylvia's death is diminishing, the demonisation of Ted perhaps not quite as shrill as it used to be, it's becoming more possible to see what was what.

Sylvia was an intense, intensely creative person and although the subsequent death of Assia Weevil do still make Ted look somewhat 'homme fatale', it does look to me as if her husband's early success upset Sylvia's competitive nature, top Fulbright scholar and all that she was. Her first book, The Colossus, is where I want to start in search of her best poems. The title poem, eponymously enough called The Colossus, and Spinster are enervated, controlled and powerful pieces that make her look potentially an even better poet than Ted, especially considering where Ted's went with Crow and subsequently. Both express neuroses but objectify them wonderfully and suggest that there was disturbance enough going on before Ted arrived to take all the blame.

All the Dead Dears and Hardcastle Crags make one wonder how much Ted was learning from her. Sinister and passionate, they have dimensions that his nature red in tooth and claw perhaps don't achieve.

The two posthumous volumes published after her death include the title poem Crossing the Water, which was a major teenage favourite of mine and I find it hasn't lost much of its power.

So I find that I don't have room for very many from the most famous book, Ariel, that gets the most attention but I can't in all conscience leave out Daddy.

A Chloris - Reynaldo Hahn

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNWKnXgrroA

It's not as baroque as it sounds when you look up Reynaldo Hahn's dates.

Cute, though.

Magnetic Fields Album and Tour in 2010

Good news from The Magnetic Fields website-

http://www.houseoftomorrow.com/

P.S. We'll be at The Barbican on March 22.

Top 6 - Thomas Hardy

I'm not going to pretend that I've read every Hardy poem but that's going to be the case with nearly every poet so the fact that The Complete Poems is a big thick book containing almost 1000 of them only makes it slightly more likely that there's a hidden masterpiece that one doesn't know about. One might, if one was feeling a little bit philistine, say that any poet who writes 1000 poems could probably have achieved a similar effect with 200.
The Darkling Thrush must be the Hardy masterpiece, its little glimmer of light and hope in a gloomy universe and the lyrical desolation done so well in such a strict metre. Not far behind is The Voice, equally representative of Hardy, remembering his first wife and haunted by her.
More depth of winter desolation in Neutral Tones, in which the scene is 'as though chidden of God', is an early piece before he returns to poetry much later in life after becoming a prolific and wonderful novelist. Its concern with the lack of God is echoed in The Impercipient which asks, 'O, doth a bird deprived of wings/ Go earthbound wilfully !' but then a teasing God turns up in Channel Firing, musing on whether he'll ever blow the trumpet for judgement day with the dead who have been so rudely awoken by the noisy war.
A Broken Appointment is a fine reconciliation with disappointment, consolatory in the typically Hardy way that finds some kind of seemingly slightly inadequate compensation.

Top 6 - David Green

I've been wondering about a new feature for this website for a while, with My Favourite Poem and Signed Poetry Books having run to a standstill. What we might try is Top 6, a selection of a poet's top six poems with brief notes about the selection process. And where better to begin than with me, myself, I. I'll put more poets on here as the weeks go by- for some reason I feel like doing Hardy next- but do feel free to contribute a piece if you feel like it. I'm always pleased to feature guest appearances.
In the meantime, anyone visiting here who wants to nominaste their favourite poem, please e-mail your choice, with some notes if you feel like it. And, of course, anyone with a signed book by T.S. Eliot, Auden or Larkin to add to my collection, please get in touch to arrange a convenient time to bring it round.

It's not possible that The Cathedrals of Liverpool could be as low as no.7 in any list of my best poems so we have to start with that prize-winning, iconic masterpiece ( ! ). It flowed from the biro onto the paper apparently unhindered by me and I was lucky to be holding the pen when it happened. Once in a blue moon things just happen to go so immacuately well. It wasn't even really my idea but I was grateful to be able to turn it into lines.
Piccadilly Dusk had a similarly beguiling effect on at least one kind reader and as a result these two poems were used in one of my more high profile magazine appearances, in the august pages of About Larkin.
From the latest book, TLOTGD, Everyday is surprisingly a springer in the market for me and currently exceeding my own expectations of it. But we need to consider the whole career and not just the latest pieces so Saturday Afternoon seems to me to still be doing all it ever wanted to do from all those years ago, certainly written in 1986 or before.
After that, it gets more difficult as several worthy poems with fine compositional ideas behind them queue up to occupy the remaining two places. I'm not going to try to fiddle it by mentioning the near misses but it might have been easier to have made it a top 7, or 10. I'll give it to Ovid's Waitress and Anagram.
But I am delighted that the poems since Re-read, the selected career retrospective published on my 45th birthday, have been an improvement on the poems in that book. Even if I say it myself.

Censorship Horror Hits Workplace

The item below was submitted to our work's internal intranet to announce the retirement of a colleague. It was certainly intended to blow away the rather dull and plodding, same old jokes that generally adorn the retirements page. Quite understandably these pieces are checked for acceptability but quite alarmingly this was considered unacceptable, not only due to its mention of religious matters but also for fear it might upset animal lovers.
Of course, it's PC gone mad but the positive side to it is now having the chance to parade myself as a victim of censorship, a renegade artist and innocent dissident mistreated by tyranny. I'm Alexander Solzhentisyn, my work suppressed in my homeland. But here is the work, smuggled out to freedom from under the noses of the totalitarian state.
To be fair, I'm told that the ladies who banned it enjoyed it very much but they have their job to do and couldn't publish it.

Peter S....... is retiring on November 30th 2009.

Pete’s long career in Customs and VAT goes back to his early days working with a man he knew as Geoff who wrote poetry in his lunchtimes. Pete remembers the day when he was passing Geoff’s office in pursuit of a refreshing glass of ale and the fledgling poet invited him in. He explained that he was trying to think of an opening line to his new set of tales to be told by various characters on a pilgrimage to York. So Pete said, ‘Why don’t you begin with ‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote.’ Then he popped his head back round the door and said, ‘And not York, mate. That’ll never work. Why not make it St. Albans?’
You see, although Pete is officially well over retirement age, he has had so many parts replaced by now- eyes, knees, etc.- that the average age of most of him is estimated at about 55.
It was through a series of such lucky breaks that Pete rose through the civil service to a position in the court of Henry VIII where he had a pivotal role in the disestablishment of the English church. A little known fact behind Ann Boleyn’s failure to provide Henry with an heir is that she did not love the king and refused to share the marital bed and so for some time Henry had to be duped into thinking that a stand-in was really Ann and the best-looking courtier inevitably stood in to perform that noble role. Thus, the Church of England came about due to Pete S...... and it is the reason why we say ‘For Pete’s Sake’ rather than take the Lord’s name in vain.
Pete’s great reputation as a horse race tipster began on the day of the first Grand National. He had no interest in the turf then and regarded it a mug’s game and when asked who he thought would win this inaugural race said, ‘O, I don’t know, it’s just a Lottery.’ And since then, although he hasn’t tipped a winner since, he has been regarded as a sage and guru by horseracing folk.
Until last week, that was, when he was helping the vet in a stable in Ireland where the best racehorse for many years and priceless bloodstock prospect, Sea the Stars, was due to be shipped off to stud and a very moderate horse called Seize the Star was due to be operated upon in a very permanent way before embarking on a career over hurdles. Pete turned up with his secateurs and winning smile and cheerfully announced he was ‘here to do Seize the Star’ and the stable lad, who was very busy, thought he said ‘Sea the Stars’ and just said ‘third box on the left, mate’ without really looking. Following this quite expensive but perfectly understandable little mistake we are hoping that Seize the Star will exceed all expectations in his rather unforeseen stud career and Sea the Stars is red hot favourite for next year’s Champion Hurdle.

Devil's Advocate - Creative Writing

Creative writing was my favourite subject at school. There was nothing to learn, you just made stuff up so you couldn't get it wrong, it was almost as good as being on holiday. Similarly, in big school, English could be 'about' anything, there didn't seem to be anything to know and once I'd reached the limit of my interest in Maths in about the second year then it was ready to become my main subject hencefort and in perpetuity.
However, none of that means I wish I'd done Creative Writing at University. Having apparently imported this spurious non-subject from American campuses, it is now endemic in British Universities with whole courses of students becoming 'qualified' poets. As if the world needs more of them, producing further yardage of the precious poetry that they've have learned to make.
Michael Donaghy's book of essays attacks the industry in no uncertain terms but it has to be admitted that quite a number of my favourite poets earn their living, or a substantial part of it, by appearing on or administering creative writing programmes. J'accuse (amongst others) Sean O'Brien, Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, Roddy Lumsden but the list goes on for a very long time. It's not a bad way for poets to be given patronage, these meaningless sinecures dispensing pointless wisdom to hapless wannabes. But on the other hand it's an utter waste of time and makes no sense at all.
These qualified poets, emerging from University clutching their degree certificates, are too numerous to be accommodated in the same industry. Their graduate collection, in most cases, begins gathering dust there and then and employment outside of the Creative Writing industry is the likely option all too soon.
But that is assuming that Creative Writing can be taught anyway. The impulse to write comes from within and the way to do it needs to form itself naturally, certainly by learning from examples but not those provided by a Professor or Junior Published Poet in a classroom. The poet develops by finding their own models to imitate or avoid as the case may be and will learn from their own mistakes. Even if the mentor does impart some wisdom or influence that only makes it worse because subliminally or unintentionally they are going to make the apprentice poet more like them, closer to their own image, potentially subverting whatever talent there might have been in the novice.
But, of course, in the end there's no point failing the young bards in their early steps towards immortality. They'll pass, I'm sure. But it must occur to them that they can't all be due to be the voice of their generation.
Some of them (and I have heard this first hand from a tutor) even need to be prompted with ideas of what to write about. Imagine that, 'Right, then, Hughes. If you can't think of anything to write about then why not try a few animal poems. A Fox, a Hawk, a Jaguar. Maybe then do a whole book of them about a Crow.' You never know what might happen.
So I do rather wonder what the point of it all is, all these reams of verses, and all that hope and belief. There is enough poetry being written without actively encouraging more. It would, of course, be an untenable and awful thing to do but the world might benefit more from a severe critic in each English department taking a look at the work of young poets at an early stage and telling them not to waste any more of their valuable time.

Kleinzahler's Music

August Kleinzahler, Music I-LXXIV (Pressed Wafer)

This is the heaven-sent sort of book that lends itself perfectly to bedtime or bath-time reading, being a generous collection of diverting essays on music that are just a few pages long, just the right length to entertain and amuse without demanding you have to concentrate for too long. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book from the beginning to the end as it is arranged if I didn’t have to, like if it’s a novel or a biography. With poetry books I pick out poems here and there, re-read favourites, find others and probably completely miss the point of any deliberate ordering until much later, if ever.
Kleinzahler’s pieces cover a range of musical interests not necessarily coincidental with my own but you can see where he’s coming from. In fact, out of his Desert Island 25 albums I’m not particularly ashamed to say that I’ve only heard of the artist or composers concerned on 8 of them. These are such people as Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Bartok, Bach, Dizzy Gillespie, Cole Porter. It is interesting to note that, having advertised his recent reading in London to my friend by saying that he might be poetry’s answer to Tom Waits he says he doesn’t care much for Tom Waits. Neither do I, although I’ve got nothing specific against the man. I only hope that my reservations are a bit like Kleinzahler’s in as much as I suspect Waits’ gambit of deep authenticity as being somewhat inauthentic. On the other hand, if the raw and real are things that Kleinzahler admires in music (John Lee Hooker mainly in the solo 1940’s recordings, or the dismissal of the vast majority of Johnny Cash’s albums, thank you very much), I’m afraid I don’t even care for ‘authenticity’ that much anyway and recently made the point that given the choice between seeing The Mothers of Invention or Buck’s Fizz, I’d go for Jay Ashton and The Land of Make Believe every time. And I won’t have a John Coltrane album in the house just in case it takes up space that anything with Marc Bolan on might occupy.
No music fan is a music fan at all if their music is limited to any particular genre. That’s not an interest in music, that’s a fetish. I look back in disbelief at the tribal attitudes of the 70’s when one’s identity was either ‘rock’ or ‘soul’ and it was regarded as hugely inclusive when Gloucester’s Cohesian Tentacle disco, obsessed with ZZ Top, Alright Now and Freebird, actually played Boogie Nights by Heatwave.
Kleinzahler’s taste, running from blues and Stax (rather than Motown’s cleaner commerciality) through jazz like Monk and Charlie Parker to Karajan, Glenn Gould, Beethoven, Bach and Bartok, is wide enough but not so wide that you have to admire him for it. But he’s always good, whether relating anecdotes about the stars or from his own life. You do need to know a bit about music to know what he’s talking about but you don’t have to know it all to enjoy reading his reflections on music and it’s always interesting to be offered such a detailed look into the mind of another music devotee.
I don’t remember The Beatles getting a mention but he’s interested in the Stones; he doesn’t appear to be interested in the Velvet Underground and you might have thought Aretha would be given more consideration but Monk is a genuine passion and, in this context, rightly so. He knows about Satie, Delius and the implications of Beethoven being made a Nazi icon, played by a Berlin Philharmonic with all the Jews removed from it and still brilliant.
This is a fine and wonderful book to which the epithet ‘idiosyncratic’ will have to apply until one thinks of a better one but it’s perfectly sane and reasonable, genuinely entertaining and it is the answer to the questioner who asked at the LRB reading if Kleinzahler was going to write a further book of memoirs to follow up Cutty, One Rock. Well, actually, sir, this is it. He’s done it already.
I don’t know how easy this book is going to be to get hold of in the UK but somebody will post it to you from America, I’m sure. It’s well worth having if you like the sounds of it. The only trouble with a book that you keep dipping into is that you are never really sure when you’ve read it all.

Eggheads

One wouldn’t want to admit to being an avid television viewer or else you might give the impression of being a low-brow and readers would never visit your website again. But I do watch a few editions of Eggheads each week, later on the iplayer or some such piece of technology. It is likeable, cosy, comforting viewing and I’ve gradually come to like all of the eggheads, from the pouting and preening C.J. to the immensely sensible Kevin Ashman but my favourite is probably posh Judith.
One quiz team I used to appear with were invited to represent a pub in Southsea for the first series before we knew what the quiz was like and I’m now quite glad that never happened.
However, last week during the sister programme, Are You an Egghead, it almost began to look as if I’d written the questions even though I had no memory of doing so. Firstly there was a question who wrote a Novel on Yellow Paper. Well, we all know it was Stevie Smith, of course, but given the options of Thom Gunn and Stephen Spender, the hapless contender went for Gunn. But I stared at the screen in disbelief. Thom Gunn was an option on a daytime TV quiz show. It said ‘Thom Gunn’ in writing on the screen. It wasn’t a dream either.
Later they were asked which poet’s letters were edited by Anthony Thwaite and had a biography written by Andrew Motion. Neither contestant knew but Barry thought it was Larkin. I stared at the screen more intently wondering which iconic figure from the pantheon of my literary heroes was going to crop up next.
No others did but a further question asked at which club some footballer had begun his career and although the answer was Tottenham, Fulham was an option.
I did once promise at one of Pete Custer’s Portsmouth pub quizzes that if Philip Larkin was ever an answer in one of his quizzes then I would pay the prize money. It never happened because most of the questions were about soap operas or Westlife but, it just goes to show, the poets of the 1950’s are on the fringe of quiz question material.
At this rate, I’m looking forward to when they ask who wrote The Last of the Great Dancers, was it Lionel Blair, Fred Astaire or David Green. They’ll never get that one either.

FA Cup Report

FA Cup Fourth Qualifying Round

Gloucester City 1 Lowestoft Town 1

Two sublime highlights lifted this largely non-descript affair to a highly acceptable afternoon's entertainment.
Although Lowestoft, from some league lower than Gloucester, were the more attractive side playing with the wind behind them in the first half, Gloucester went ahead midway through the second half. Time dragged by and the impetus might have been draining from the game but successive attacks in the dying minutes by Lowestoft kept hope alive. When a free kick from just outside the box a couple of minutes from time came out from the underside of the bar it looked as if their last chance had gone.
But the final whistle remained resolutely unblown until another shot crashed off the underside of the bar and was somehow bundled over the line and the visitors got the replay they probably deserved.

The second highlight was this masterpiece from the Official Matchday Programme,

Sadly, the bingo evening that should have taken place last Saturday was scrubbed from the supporters' schedule, owing to a lack of numbers.

Lds & Gnlmn, I thank you.

I'll bring this to the attention of the Danny Baker Show (R5, Sat 9-11 a.m.) so listen out for it then.

Othello

Othello, Icarus Theatre Collective, New Theatre Royal, Portsmouth, October 22

http://www.icarustheatre.org/

I’m never quite convinced that Othello’s jealousy is quite justified. By all means, he is worked upon and deceived but he seems to descend into it with undue complicity. Perhaps he should have been more trusting but that’s easy for me to say and the play is perhaps a study of the green-eyed monster rather than the devious plot that causes it. In this production, again, the noble, confident and happy Moor is very quickly beset by doubts.
The talented cast here played their own string quintet soundtrack, an evocative set of themes and motifs, as well as acting the parts and the lighting, so often a forgotten part of any production was well done, too. Both contributed to the mood of shadows and sinister intent.
Vinta Morgan was impressive as Othello, powerful, passionate and then horribly undone. Like Vivian Richards at his most imperious, you can imagine that he’d been designed for the part. Christopher Dingli grew in malevolence as Iago and only perhaps Roderigo didn’t add up to much for me, the comic effects possibly played up too much. Despite so many of the constituent parts being so fine, the overall effect was fractionally short of something. While admiring this, that or the other aspect of it, I wasn’t as involved as I might have been but it will remain in the memory for the music incorporated into the scenes. Lush or lyrical and then suggestive of danger or mental disturbance or distress, it was a masterstroke.I can do no more than commend it to you if it’s coming to near you soon.

August Kleinzahler

August Kleinzahler, LRB Bookshop, London, Tuesday 20th October

Whoa, baby. Now that's what I call a poetry reading. Kleinzahler has been a bit of a favourite of mine for some years now and so it was never in doubt that I'd get the new cheap Greyhound bus service from Portsmouth to London for this appearance. And it was all that one might have hoped it was going to be. He starts with a disco spin and introduces himself as Archie Bell & the Drells and we are off into some extracts from his new book on Music, not least among them Liberace, with poems incorporated in among them and as the reading progresses it transposes into a poetry reading.
Laconic but lyrical, world weary but sympathetic, Kleinzahler's accent and delivery combine to make him one of the great voices. Perhaps the best I've seen (heard, to be epistemologically accurate there) with the exceptions of Ted Hughes (about which I remember precious little, to be honest- it was c.1977) and Paul Durcan, the utterly spell-binding Irishman who left his propeller in Bilbao.
The poems were from Sleeping it off in Rapid City, the recent new and selected, and included two parts of his History of Western Music as well as the title poem which was highly eponymous.
But he was engaging, serious and self-deprocating to an extent not to be expected in one quite so hip and gun-slinging in his debonair, stylish and knowing demotic. You couldn't mistake him for a bad guy. He was authentic and honest and not to be confused with the garbled concept of 'cool' which in any case must lie in the eye of the beholder and can't be achieved by practice or effort.
(Yes, Miles Davis and The Velvet Underground might well be the epitome of 'cool' but it still doesn't mean anything.)
The poems have an elegiac, Romantic music, as often as not, whether quoting popular songs or listing the contents of a missile silo. It would be difficult to think of a poet to put alongside him. Well, it is for me anyway.
Alongside last year's highlights, the Maggi Hambling exhibition and talk and The Magnetic Fields in the Cadogan Hall, this went straight onto the short list of 'best things I've ever been to', being a long-standing favourite and exceeding all expectations, which are the pre-requisites. Then I noticed a common denominator in that Fatty Rimmer came with me to all of them. In fact, I suppose with The Magnetic Fields I went with her. I should make her come more often. Imagine what a good time we'd have then.
But another parallel with the Maggi event was the handing out of complimentary wine. That is just the sort of optional extra that we like. Free booze, A-list creative artist, small but appreciative audience. Perfect.
They didn't need to do that to persuade me to buy one of the books August has brought over himself on the plane (although they'd have needed more than a few glasses of champagne to make me spend £15k on a Hambling canvas). It's not likely to be cheap on e-Bay for some time and it won't have his name written in the front by him either. I had taken a copy of TLOTGD to give to someone else but they weren't there so I gave it to August. He seemed delighted but I suppose it might have rattled the bottom of the trash can before I'd made it back to Victoria Coach Station, stepped happily from the sidewalk into the Greyhound bus and disappeared back into the night.

50

http://www.squidoo.com/poetry-by-philip-larkin-8

Philip Larkin, one of my big heroes in poetry, took a dim view of turning 50 when it happened to him. I can see his point but while I still can would prefer to keep on doing what I'm doing despite the inevitable. Although his poem (scroll down a bit on the link) contains some fine lines, I'd prefer to seize what days are left. There could still be quite a few of them for all we know.

So, because I'll be away to London early on Sat 17th, let's mark it here. Anyone who can find us at The Garden Gate pub in Hampstead at 12.45 then is welcome to come to Keats house and then to Highgate Cemetery and some other drink-related place after that.
On Tuesday I'll be back up to London to see Kleinzahler at the LRB Bookshop; Thursday is the Southsea Shakespeare Actors' Othello and then I'm in Swindon with family for the next weekend.
I have to go to these things or there would be nothing to review here and then where would we be.

Best, D.

NEW FROM DAVID GREEN (BOOKS)

The Last of the Great Dancers

David Green


14 new poems, £2.50 incl p&p in UK.

Ovid's Waitress/The Moon and Venus over Solway/The Sainsbury's Checkout Lady Asks about the Gin/Awkward Angel/I Don't Want to Talk About It/Tycho Dying/Summer/Umbrella/Intervals/Paradise/Later/The Last of the Great Dancers/Those Days/Everyday

E-MAIL dg217.888@ntlworld.com to order

Publication date 17/10/2009

Traditionally, there is a typographical error in all of my books which I don't find until it is back from the printers, or somebody else points it out eventually.
Does everybody think that The Sainsbury's Checkout Lady Asks about the Gin needs an apostrophe in it. I simply don't know anymore.

Eliot Regained

T. S. Eliot's remarkable win in the BBC poll provides an excuse for further rehabilitation of the old master.

There's no way I would ever have voted for Eliot as my 'favourite' poet but I'm not overly distressed that those who took part in the process preferred him to Donne, or any of the others that I would put ahead of him, who are (at least) Larkin, Gunn, Auden, Shakespeare, Donne and probably Edward Thomas. There is always that difficult difference between 'favourite' and 'best' and Eliot is definitely more likely to win 'best' than 'favourite' for me.
On the few occasions, long ago now, when I had anything to do with editing magazines, I certainly wouldn't have wanted to publish any poem that featured lines like,
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
Such heavy-handed philosophical exegesis looks like bad poetry to me and, if asked by its sixth-form author, what was wrong with it I'd have to suggest that long, portentous words are bad and the idea might be better expressed in shorter, less abstract phrases. Except, of course, Eliot was by the time of Burnt Norton an elder statesman of versification who surely knew all that, especially having had Ezra helping him. But I certainly have held up several passages in The Four Quartets as evidence against him in the past. Not anti-semitism. Even if he's guilty of that, moral concerns don't make the poetry bad. It's only the use of language that can do that.
Eliot had the great advantage of writing the critical essays that set the standard by which his own poems were to be judged so it's no great surprise that he was lionised up to and including the time in the 70's that I was discovering what it was all supposed to be about. The received view of him was as the cold fish intellectual, recycling old literature into big, important poems and his own readings of them confirmed the view of him as a dry old stick, never mind how glorious, exciting and danceable the opening lines of Prufrock were and still are. One wonders if the vogue for Eliot among students goes much beyond the Baudelairean ennui of half-deserted streets, coffee spoons and general fin de siecle malaise.
There is still every reason to count Prufrock as one of the very finest poems of the century, a tremendous, pivotal moment, etc. but the suspicion remains that he meandered a bit later on.
Lots of people, many of them much better read and wiser than I, are ready to admit that they didn't fully understand Eliot and that's part of his power. Something too quickly understood is soon regarded as lightweight but we all seem to agree that we somehow knew he was good. The addition of the notes to The Waste Land, padding it out for the American edition, don't seem to help much. But at the time, nobody told us that some of these notes were playfully spurious, mischief-making and fun.
As well as the esoteric references, and the de-bunking of them, it's easy to forget that Eliot can be quite funny and if The Waste Land had kept its work-in-progress title of They Do the Police in Different Voices then that might have been made more obvious. Most of the intrepid readers of Ulysses are so intent on looking at the notes on it that they miss the point that it is supposed to be a comic novel.
Hurry up, please, it's time. I do remember thinking that when my friend was quoting these words in a bar in Gloucester when we were schoolboys that he wanted to go and it was about time I finished the rest of my beer.
But there is great musicality in Eliot which, along with all the application of his avowed methodology, the bleak world view and mental breakdown ('On Margate Sands I can connect nothing with nothing.') leading to the need to transcend into 'shantih shantih shantih', he is an enormous poet, perhaps bigger than we are now able to conceive of. You can't imagine such a revolution in poetry happening again anytime soon but such revolutions do need somebody's example to lead them and it wouldn't have happened if Ezra Pound's poems, along with Yeats', had been the only paragon examples that the next generations had been required to admire.
So, yes. I have the gravest misgivings about allowing people to vote on things but this time, they seem to have got it right. I still wouldn't vote for him as 'favourite' but 'most important to us now' is an entirely different question and that might have been the question that people thought they were answering.
That, and the fact that he wrote Cats, obviously.

P.S. My other thought on Betjeman's slightly disappointing showing in the poll was that maybe now his time is coming to an end. Those of us who have any idea of the England he was writing about and wanted to preserve are getting older and some of them will have voted for the slightly harder-edged Larkin anyway. We might be arriving at the time when Betjeman is regarded as the anachronism that we all sort of knew he was but forgave him for it. It's a shame but it was bound to happen. Give it another 20 years and he might not feature at all unless Prime Minister Boris Johnson has made him central to the curriculum on some heritage Eng Lit reading list.

It's time for a present in time future

I probably won't get it but I might pursue this until it stops being a reasonable sort of price.

Obviously any investment portfolio would want a signed Eliot as a gilt-edged bulwark against deflation.

There's a cummings going

Wouldn't one just love to have this. Quite a rarity but my interest in it is likely to be limited to seeing how much it goes for.

The 'buy-it-now' price is £500 but it might not make that.

Amusing to note how lower-case, small writing e.e.cummings seems to go for a big signature.

Eliot voted the Nation's Favourite

There was dancing in the streets of East Coker today as T.S. Eliot won the BBC's vote to find the Nation's favourite poet. Over 18000 votes were cast and the American (pictured here with William Carlos Williams) beat my selection, John Donne, into second place with Benjamin Zephaniah in third. You might say that two out of three ain't bad and feel reassured by the public's choice but the result of any poll can only reflect the taste of those who voted in it so presumably the demographic of the audience who took an interest in the vote was predominantly Modernist or Metaphysical while, among the 30 names that voters were given to choose from, all of the rap/slam/performance poetry vote had to coalesce around Ben Zeph.
Wilfred Owen will be pleased with his fourth place, Larkin was a solid 5th. Ever popular William Blake came 6th, Yeats 7th. Betjeman and Keats might be disappointed with their 8th and 9th places while Dylan Thomas rolled in 10th. Wordsworth and Hardy were unplaced and Coleridge is likely to be dope tested.
So, well done, the public. In some ways quite a surprising result but if 18000 take part and provide a result like that then all is not yet lost.