Devil's Advocate- The Case Against Shakespeare

Shakespeare's reputation as the greatest writer in English, and even World, literature is one of those things that don't get questioned. It's simply accepted as true in the same way that The Beatles are unsurpassable as the greatest ever pop act although I notice that some critics have recently listened to Sgt. Pepper and suddenly it is not coming top of all the Greatest Album of All Time lists. In fact it's a bit of a mess of styles and ideas, it doesn't include many of their best songs and it's not actually in the Top 10 Beatles Albums in all honesty. So, perhaps it is time for further re-evaluation of long held critical certainties.

Shakesopeare's Sonnets- a sequence of 154 apparently semi-autobiographical poems- are held up as a paragon example of English poetry, the height of the Golden Age of great English writing. However, not every critic has admired these 'sugar'd sonnets' and on closer inspection one can find them a little bit sickly in their obsequiousness, the hyperbole of their devotion and their forlorn lovesickness. If it wasn't for the foregoing reputation of the author and a few memorable lines, we might have taken them for the adolescent indulgences of just another lovesick Elizabethan.

The outline of the career in the theatre isn't quite so impressive, either, if seen without the preconceived idea that these are the finest plays in the language or any other language. He begins with some appalling distortions of history, playing tricks with time, telling one-sided stories with warped sympathies to support whichever faction at court he wanted to please; he continues by writing some derivative comedies that nobody thinks are funny, mostly dependent on mistaken identity, identical twins and cross-dressing; he only ever once thinks up his own plot (in The Merry Wives of Windsor) and otherwise just adapts the work of others; his masterpiece Hamlet is 'melodramatic' as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, and ends in carnage more bloodthirsty than a modern horror film, while Lear is a statement in futility and Timon of misanthropy. The Taming of the Shrew is presumably sexist while The Merchant of Venice is racist and the last plays of reconciliation depend on the most unlikely workings of magic for their fantastical endings, the sudden return to optimism and happy endings possibly due to colloaboration with the younger writer, Beaumont.

But that just his work. His life didn't provide any more edifying a spectacle. Leaving his wife behind in Stratford with a young daughter and recently born twins, he goes to London in search of a theatrical career and builds up a lurid catalogue of romantic liaisons with a wide range of nobility, actresses, prostitutes and other people's wives without necessarily any peference for gender or cleanliness. Spending most of his adult life in the fleshpots of London, he never brings his family down from Stratford to ruin the good time he's having and those good times are only the ones that anecdotes have brought down to us and we thus think we know about.

So, that's Shakespeare for you, the beautifully tempered, soft-lipped humanist that bewitched the next 400 years with his lovely sonnets and the plays that looked into the depths of the human heart. But, still, nobody's perfect.

Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate

Because it's not been announced yet, let's be the first to congratulate Carol Ann Duffy on her appointment as Poet Laureate.

In as far as there are no parameters by which to appoint a laureate, she is the best choice. Accessible and popular without being trite or sentimental, she has built a reputation as a fine love poet and a feminist poet, although we all know that no such categories are necessary or useful if a poet already qualifies as simply a 'poet'.

In Warming Her Pearls, a widely anthologized piece, the volume Rapture, and poems like Words, Wide Night ('I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross/ to reach you. For I am in love with you/ and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.'), she has written some of the most memorable love poems of her generation and in The World's Wife, she created a series of deeply ironic and hilarious portraits of the women behind great men in history which only improve for hearing her read them aloud.

Although the big news story will be that she is the first female laureate, this will be of less significance to those of us who don't regard the difference between male and female as quite so crucial and it will be of more interest to us what she makes of the job, which is one in which the postholder really can write their own job description. Nobody could have made themselves more available or done more work behind the scenes than Andrew Motion did but his poems largely failed to excite much public interest. Carol Ann Duffy's harder edge and sometimes more forthright attitudes are likely to provoke more reaction and match up to our more challenging times in a way that could make her time in the role a livelier and more satisfactory tenure.

The Last of the Great Dancers

The Last of the Great Dancers

And this is where he danced.
Some say he might have danced
his last dance here,
each flawless step a decorous rebuke
to younger men more lately
the recipients of rapturous applause
but whose shapeless jigs
were no more than parody
of the last furious gavotte
witnessed and described
in the fashionable diaries
of those who were there
or those who at least
said that they were there.

The Poetry of Linden Huddlestone

One use of the internet is looking up people from one's past, finding out what they are doing now or what they have done. People from school or previous jobs. Sometimes you find them, sometimes you don't. It was a while ago that I first found reference to Linden Huddlestone, who taught English at our school, but only this week that I found a booklet entitled 'Cheltenham Poets' edited by him. For £8 or so, it was worth a gamble that he had included a piece or two of his own so I ordered it.
LCH would have been in his forties in 1971 when this booklet was published and when I started at Sir Thomas Rich's School, Gloucester. An austere figure to first formers with the scent of pipe smoke about him and ageing, boney appearance, prominent Adam's apple and slightly pedantic air, it wasn't until the sixth form that we appreciated a sense of humour and more bohemian spirit in him. He sang in the choir and played croquet with the music and history teachers, Rangeley and Thomas.
Google research reveals that LCH wrote a thesis on poet and novelist Charles Williams for his M.A. at London University in 1952. Williams is an unfamiliar name now but there is a society that meets to discuss and promote his work, http://www.charleswilliamssociety.org.uk/index.html. This thesis helped him provide a bibliography for a book on Williams by John Heath-Stubbs published in 1955.
The Arthurian legends are the subject of much of Williams' work. From the evidence of what he chose to teach us, LCH's interest in contemporary poetry included David Jones, the modernist second world war poet, and Ted Hughes. I saw him at the Hughes reading at the Cheltenham Festival in 1977.
So, finding a booklet of poetry by the Cheltenham Poetry Society, it was interesting to find which of these influenced his own writing.
The two Huddlestone poems in the book are 'from Taliessin on Snowdon' and With a Looking Glass. The first is an extended extract from a longer Arthurian work desribing the return of King Arthur's court poet to Wales. It is unrhymed and atmospheric and depends on a series of internal rhymes for an effect of surging forward motion,

Despair in the brow bent to ascent of the hill,

A note beneath the extract explains that it recalls a passage in Wordsworth's Prelude about a visit to Snowdon.
The second piece is a six-line prayer, neat and simple, possibly addressed to his wife,

With a Looking Glass

Many times you look here,
Questioning or neatening
Brown or greying strand of hair:
Beyond, over your shoulder,
In one room or another,
But at one, may he be there.

So, just two poems is a tantalising glimpse into the poetic output of the teacher who introduced us to Ted Hughes. Abebooks doesn't find any slim volume he left behind and the Cheltenham Poetry Society's website admits they don't know much about their own history so two Huddlestone poems might be all I ever find. But you never know.

C.J.Underwood and The Poets on Fire

The ‘Poetry Scene’ has always been a shifting thing, dependent on ephemeral projects that have come and gone, entirely dependent on the enthusiasms of those prepared to spend their time organizing them. In olden days, this mostly meant editing magazines or arranging readings but now that the internet is full of everybody, it has become the immediate way for communities of anyone who wants to be involved to involve themselves. As far as I can see, at the moment, one of the liveliest places to watch for poetry-related subjects is Jane Holland’s forum, ‘Poets on Fire’, here http://z11.invisionfree.com/Poets_On_Fire/index.php?showforum=15 . It’s this section on Contemporary British & Irish Poetry where most of it happens.
I’ve been looking at it for some time now and for a while it did seem like a place where a number of people met, each having a higher valuation of their own reputation than was really justified, but I’m glad to recommend this forum now to anyone with an interest in the frontline of contemporary English poetry as it has been going through a particularly good period and once you are familiar with the contributors, they are good fun.
Jane Holland is a poet, novelist, editor, translator and general poetry factotum who used to play snooker, who could be everybody’s favourite auntie, so committed to her art that she once spent a morning in bed writing poetry even though she was ill. Her coterie on this forum include Chris Hamilton-Emery, poet and publisher, editor of Salt and real insider of the poetry industry; Steven Waling is a prize-winning avant-garde poet, notable for not being limited by ‘mainstream’ ideas; other poets take part, like Rik Roots and Tom Chivers, but the estimable Roddy Lumsden appears regularly to ask an interesting question or add a dash of sanity. It is a fine mix of ideas and opinion, often more stimulating than you might think, which is illuminated by the considered musings of the poet, C.J. Underwood. And it has been Underwood more than any of the poets with more established credentials that has been bringing me back more and more to this forum in recent weeks.
Always succinct, and never allowing a moment of self doubt to cloud his aloof summary of any topic, his contributions to this forum have become one of the highlights of my internet week.
I was hoping to quote a wonderful exchange from a few weeks ago when C.J.
posted one of his dry dismissals of the topic under discussion at which Roddy finally lost his temper and asked which poets or poems C.J. actually liked because, as far as he remembered, C.J. had never said anything positive about anything on the forum. And Hats Off to Roddy, it needed to be said but since I can’t find it now I wonder if Jane has removed it. And if she has then it would be a polite and politically correct disgrace.
But, never mind, we are left with two recent worthwhile points. Tom Chivers said, in response to the question of what constitutes a ‘major’ poem, 'I'd make a case for Alice Oswald's Dart too', to which Roddy replied ‘go on, then’. And there was also the time when C.J. quite rightly disdained the idea of ‘schools, movements and manifestos’ but then immediately excepted ‘the surrealists and the futurists’. O, yes, those damnable futurists- they’ve been ruining our chances of classifying poetry, for whatever reasons we might have needed to, ever since they raised their weird futurist heads.
Poets on Fire is the place to go for anyone who wants to know whether Tim Turnbull is more significant than Daljit Nagra, but it’s better than that. The fact that I mostly go there now to read what C.J. Underwood thinks shouldn’t make you think any the less of it.

Juvenilia - Clear Sky in Anguish, Classification

Published in the school magazine, The Richian, and in a collection called Outraged Refugee in 1978, Clear Sky in Anguish was among my earliest, formative attempts to write in this syllabic and rhymed verse form that Thom Gunn used in his first three books.
It's a neurotic little poem for a 17 or 18 year old and it wasn't until a couple of years later, in the poem now called Ferdinand in Glib Remarks, that I think we can say I moved out of the 'juvenilia' stage, if at all. It's a bit portentous but I hope it's not the worst poem a sixth form boy ever wrote.

Clear Sky in Anguish

Tonight, everyone's sleeping
Under a clear sky and our
Anguish will ebb away, out
Towards the cold stars creeping
Home. But we sleep where we are,
Following a random route.

Tonight, minds embracing where
They meet in mid air diffused
Now dance the slow movement set
Against the oncoming cares
And the clouds emerging loose
From the horizon and yet

What doubts now linger in those
Sleeping minds, knowing the clear
Sky cannot last with the wish
Tomorrow was not so close,
And we know everyone here
sees the clear sky in anguish.

The previous year I had still been in my avant-garde, experimentalist mode, expressing a cry of repressed teenage individuality thus,

CLASSIFICATION

wehaveto

conformto

thenormbe

ordinaryb

ethesamed

onotmoveb

EBIGIFYOU

arebigbut

otherwise

dontbebig

followthe

paththati

sinfronto

fyouandke

epgoingun

tilyouare

stoppedso

metimesif

eellikeat

routinasa

rdinetina

ndiwantto break out and be me.

(on an old typewriter these lines made a straight line down the right hand side but on a computer they don't)

One Step Ahead - Aretha Franklin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cIWu5m8UmA

Too late for the Top 100 but it just goes to show you can't really put a lid on pop music forever. There's always something else waiting to be discovered.

I was looking for this a few years ago when Mos Def sampled it on Ms. Fat Booty but I never found it. I never realized it would be this good, though. Sublime.

The Poet Laureate

Andrew Motion’s shift as Poet Laureate is due to end shortly, after the agreed term of ten years, and the appointment of the next one is thus just as essential a topic for speculation as who will win the Boat Race (it was Oxford, last Saturday- just in case you missed it). Some might say that the Boat Race has as much to do with World Class Rowing as the Laureate job is to do with the best poetry and others could add that rowing holds the attention of a busy, busy British public about as often as poetry does, which is for no more than a shimmer above nothing on a seismic graph.

So, who cares? Well, I do. Mainly because it makes for a fascinating discussion, since there are no criteria to say who should be chosen, and because you can bet on it. I picked Andrew Motion at 4/1 ten years ago but was too embarrassed to go into a Portsmouth betting shop and try to explain what I wanted to bet on.

The last time I looked, William Hill Bookmakers had Duffy and Armitage locked at 5/4 joint favourites with good old Roger at 6/1. One can see Roger McGough stepping in as kindly old duffer in the Betjeman mode but my view was that Duffy would get the vote as the politically correct choice (female, lesbian, originally Scottish, etc) as long as she’d be prepared to accept it. Notwithstanding that she’s probably the best poet with a popular appeal anyway. Popular appeal as far as poetry goes these days is always likely to mean someone whose poems are set to be read in school. Armitage, likeable and equally on the syllabus, will probably do it if Duffy does turn it down, but I will ask him at Swindon next month if you really want to know.

The problem with the job is that it is so undefined. It isn’t necessarily given to the best poet in the country. Wordsworth, Tennyson and Hughes have done it but so has Colley Cibber. Motion reports that both the Queen and Tony Blair told him that ‘you don’t have to do anything’. He also reports that the job gave him a ‘writer’s block’ but he deserves some sympathy and I’ve always had a certain respect for the seriousness and commitment that he gave to the appointment. Following on from the telegenic, hugely popular and jovial John Betjeman and then the brooding machismo of Ted Hughes, the considered water-colour lyricism of Motion’s poems were always going to look pale in comparison. But somebody had to do the job and one reason for retaining the post of Poet Laureate was that the free-wheeling, radical reformism of the New Labour government under Tony Blair wanted to reform so much so quickly that a few old anachronisms needed to stay. Even if the only point in having a Poet Laureate was to be able to give a few bottles of port to a writer ‘on the house’ and have a quiz question that most people in the pub won’t know.
Motion was by no means as bad a poet as his detractors make out. His poems may not have been as memorable as Betjeman’s hymn to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn or Ted’s animal poems but in Anne Frank Huis and Salt Water, the extended account of the River Thames in memory of his friend who drowned on the Marchioness, he provided two excellent pieces worthy of places in any anthology.

Motion will, I think, be the first ever living ex-laureate because I believe everybody else did it for life. The pressure to appoint a woman seems overwhelming in an age when a better male candidate might be overlooked just to make sure the point was made but if Carol Ann Duffy is offered the job it will be because she is the best qualified poet for it. But if she doesn’t want it, they’ve got a choice between two user-friendly blokes. I’m sure Roger would love to do it but I’m not convinced he’ll be given the chance.