Poets in their other jobs

As expected, I have been inundated with pictures of poets doing their other jobs. Far too many to post here, I'm afraid. But I have chosen this one, sent in by Jason Craddock of Waterlooville, of T.S. Eliot in his other job of being Deryck Guyler, the stalwart comic actor of the 1970's in such shows as Sykes and Please, Sir.

Thanks, Jason.

Poet's Birthday Cakes

As expected, I've been inundated with pictures of birthday cakes made for poets. Far too many to post here, I'm afraid. Thanks to all those who sent them in. I have chosen this one to feature here, and I am indebted to Jason Craddock of Waterlooville who tells me that this cake was made to celebrate a birthday, he's not sure which one, of Lascelles Abercrombie.

Thanks, Jason.

William Boyd - Ordinary Thunderstorms

William Boyd, Ordinary Thunderstorms (Bloomsbury)


It has been said, although I daresay it’s unproven, that we are all only two mistakes away from walking the streets, sleeping rough, being reduced to begging. I’ve often wondered where I would go and how I’d try to survive if and when it happens to me. I doubt if it would be quite as eventful for me as it is for Adam Kindred in this tale.
Kindred doesn’t make mistakes but quite innocently suddenly finds himself a fugitive from the law and underworld goons with all the evidence suggesting he has committed murder in part of a complex pharmaceutical industrial espionage war.
After only a few days he is drinking water straight from the Thames by Chelsea Bridge and has to trap a gull for food. But if disbelief has to be slightly suspended for how he finds himself in such a position, it continues to be tested throughout as, in the interests of satisfying the thriller genre, a raft of both good and bad luck seeks him out.
What Boyd draws for us through this engaging device is a picture of a brutal underside not far below the surface of contemporary Britain. The body count, having begun so early, steadily accumulates as desperate people at various levels of society fight for their lives. The vastly rich powers that run the world and a very seamy low life are counterpointed as the prevailing influences while most of us are trying to pursue our mundane, domestic, unremarkable lives.
The naming of Ingram Fryzer, after the murderer of Christopher Marlowe, seems like a heavy-handed bit of literary referencing but the name Adam Kindred, the central character, seems to suggest that he is an Everyman figure and all this could happen to anyone. It is to be hoped not but the story is an uncomfortable reminder that, in the same way that we are always only a few feet away from the nearest rat, we are only avoiding the most perilous adventures by the skin of our teeth – for all we know.
Boyd is a fine writer, which we surely know already, and his use of the thriller is successful for me although it must be said that I haven’t read any Dick Francis for many years and my preferred fiction usually wouldn’t feature much action beyond someone looking out of a window and speculating on the prospects of afternoon rain.
However unlikely some of this might seem, Boyd has enough material from real life to keep it within a recognizable frame, not least when Kindred, improvising a new identity in a hospital porter’s job, claims to be a Manchester United supporter during the inevitable workplace football discussion. The Church of John Christ is also an interesting organization and counter-intuitively here ostensibly a force of genuine good. The joke told by Adam’s blackmailer just before his foreseeable demise near the end of the book is a suitably horrific commentary on another contemporary obsession but couldn’t be repeated on a respectable website like this.
But it would be better to stay within the fragile bounds of civilised, off the peg life, thank you very much, than encounter the range of thrills and scrapes described here. The picaresque journey allows a number of otherwise invisible places to be looked at, and it is probably distressingly a more accurate account of life in Britain today than one would like to think. And there, but for the grace of God, I’d prefer it to stay between the covers of this most diverting novel, one that I recommend quite highly.

Anne Hathaway and the Second Best Bed

Phil Adams, Anne Hathaway and the Second Best Bed, Havant Literary Festival, September 28

However many times one goes over the material, there still turns out to be more possibilities, more detail and more to it than one thought. As was often stressed by Phil Adams, what we ‘know’ about Shakespeare biography doesn’t amount to very much but there always seems to be further points to be made on the subject. Adams is robustly sceptical, a recommender of Schoenbaum’s rigorously forensic books, and takes nothing, or very little for granted. He is also entertaining, well-informed, less deceived and delivers an engaging summary of the Shakespeare-Hathaway marriage with gusto.
While basing his account, like Schoenbaum, on documentary evidence, he also, like Germaine Greer, elucidates it with contemporary facts and figures. For example, the £40 put up as security by Sandells and Richardson, the Hathaway’s friends or associates, before the wedding is ‘more money than they’ll ever see in their lives’; getting married when expecting a baby was no big deal, 30% of brides were pregnant on their wedding day and the 'right of dower' that might have meant that Ann automatically inherited a large percentage of Shakespeare’s estate only applied in London and York except Shakespeare made arrangements to exclude the Blackfriars Gatehouse -in London-that he had bought from such a legacy.
Adams is more thorough than all the popular biographers of Shakespeare in denying himself a bit of fanciful invention. Greer allows herself to imagine Will teaching Ann to read; Bate, Ackroyd and other recent contributors are all tempted to fill in the huge gaps between documentary facts with their own guesses and Anthony Burgess embraced every rumour, legend and myth in a wonderful if dubious fairy tale. To Adams it is ‘common sense’ to think Hamnet and Judith Sadler were Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare's godparents and he draws a brief sketch of the young Shakespeare unable to leave Stratford (being a minor) without his father’s permission until April 1585 and being ‘worked to death’ in the sweatshop of his father’s struggling business. So, you can see how easy it is for even the most circumspect and diligent of commentators to start making things up.
He doesn’t discount Aubrey’s assertion that Shakespeare went home ‘once a year’ to Stratford from London, on fairly tenuous grounds (and one has to start assuming things eventually) but he is very convincing on the point that Shakespeare couldn’t have been at Hamnet’s funeral in 1596. He stresses the sumptuousness of New Place, how the Queen stayed there in 1643 in preference to all other available accommodation, a detail which fits nicely with the ‘second best bed’ question because not only the Queen but other dignitaries arriving as guests would also have had the use of the best bed and suite and so Shakespeare’s bequest of their marital bed might have had romantic associations for them both.
Light is also shone into the shadowy character of Thomas Quiney who married Judith when Shakespeare was drawing up his will. Quiney’s excommunication could have been due to marrying Judith, who was somewhat older than average marrying age, only to avoid marrying the unfortunate Margaret Wheeler, who died giving birth to Quiney’s offspring on the day Shakespeare signed his will.
Without taking sides in the debate on the marriage, Adams points out that Shakespeare still returns to Stratford after his long and lucrative career in London and before summing up the for and against cases for the good marriage or the bad, he puts it a vote of the audience, which goes 10-7 to the ‘bad’ marriage with numerous ‘don’t knows’. The ‘bad’ marriage motion overstates the case by suggesting that Shakespeare hated Ann but I vote for it because I suspect it wasn’t a successful, complete and wholly faithful marriage.
So, in the questions afterwards, I ask if the numerous stories of Shakespeare’s extra-marital relationships, his long absences from Stratford and there being no record of Ann travelling to London don’t suggest that Ann might have had her own affairs in Stratford and that the marriage wasn’t based on great fidelity. The Dark Lady was explained as a traditional device in a sonnet sequence; William Davenant was ever likely to want to claim to be The Bard’s son and Ann was a good Puritan girl (in Phil Adams’ opinion, which he openly accepts is no more valuable than anybody else’s) and you tend to think that he sides just fractionally with the view that this marriage was a true one, based on love, and one that lasted throughout their lives.
But it was a hugely enjoyable hour and a bit, thoroughly well researched, profoundly well argued and a lively presentation. Not long before my 50th birthday I was probably the youngest among the gathering, which is always a bonus. The debate will go on, enhanced by the enthusiasm and intelligence of Phil Adams who is just the sort of non-partisan, common sense champion that the subject needs.

Poets in their Other Jobs

Obviously poetry is a very easy thing to do but not all poets are good enough at it to make a living at it so they have to have another job as well.

Here is a picture of me doing my other job. I'm a spy. Those people in the background think my name is Oleg Kalashnikov and they don't suspect a thing.

If anybody has pictures of poets doing their other jobs, do send them in. Or poets wearing hats. Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, John Betjeman, Tennyson et al, they used to like wearing hats. I've got a new hat, too, you see.

Poet's Birthday Cakes - David Green

To begin a new feature on the website, here is a picture of the birthday cake made by my sister and delivered today.

So, if anybody has pictures of birthday cakes made for T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Stevie Smith or any other poet, please e-mail them in. I expect there'll be hundreds posted here soon.

On my 40th birthday cake, or it might have been my 30th, there was a footballer nominally in Fulham kit so I'm thrilled by the thoughtfulness involved here that shows I have progressed to the immortal bard.

Obviously I can't eat any of it for a few weeks yet and unfortunately my next door neighbour, whose wife sometimes gives me home made apple pies, saw it being smuggled in, so I might have to share it when the time comes.

The Movement Reconsidered

ed. Zachary Leader, The Movement Reconsidered (Oxford University Press)

The Movement was the movement that never was. The anonymous, generic label was first applied to some emerging poets of the 1950’s in a review in The Spectator in October 1954 and although subsequently used to describe a characteristic type of poetry that was being written at the time, most of the principal names that were supposed to be a part of it made it clear that they didn’t consider themselves to be a part of any such thing.
What it represented concerned much more of what these poets didn’t do in common than what they did, being a reaction against Eliot’s elitist intellectualism, the ‘poetry of statement’ of the Auden group and the apocalyptic wordiness of some 1940’s poets. But as is pointed out, those 40’s poets have so disappeared from view now that it is less easy to see what particular excess was being thus corrected. But it was a plain style that tried to avoid undesirable habits rather than having a unifying agenda or manifesto and, as such, served as something like a cleansing process, based on common sense in a quite unfrightening way.
Larkin’s reputation hasn’t needed such a tag to bring attention to his poetry and Thom Gunn and Donald Davie quickly moved into new methods that made it clear they had more idiosyncrasies than likeness with the perceived hegemony. So, the publicity afforded by such a critical categorisation has benefitted the long term renown of lesser lights, keeping their names in view when they might have disappeared further from notice. Kingsley Amis, once the putative leader of the group, isn’t otherwise remembered primarily as a poet and John Wain’s legacy isn’t primarily based on his poems either.

This collection of essays by some of the most respected authorities on the subject is a wide-ranging and very welcome assessment of how it all looks now, almost as definitive as one would want it to be, and likely to be the last word required on the subject for some time, largely written by sympathizers, admirers and those who were there at the time, which doesn’t include the poets, most of who have died in recent years. And that in itself is a reminder of how rapidly such things pass into literary history. It is possible to believe that there was actually a ‘movement’ going on when reading about Amis and Wain in the 50’s but in terms of Gunn and any longer perspective, one can’t help but think it was any more than a minor footnote and a mention that briefly became a publicity gimmick.
Blake Morrison updates his book on the subject from the 80’s, showing how Larkin and Amis were more open to suggestion from America than they were prepared to admit. There was never much doubt that Larkin’s little Englandism was a pose because his reading of French poetry was referenced in some of his poems but Morrison points out that Robert Frost’s poem Directive has the ‘strikingly similar’ phrase ‘a house in earnest’ to Larkin’s Church Going visit to ‘a serious house on serious earth’. It’s always interesting to know but ever disappointing to find that a favourite poem might not have been quite as original as one thought. Morrison compares the social and political situation in Britain to the early C21st but not convincingly enough to make me believe it or to think that 1950’s poets are due to rush back into vogue.
Craig Raine’s brilliant reading of Dublinesque and his doubts cast in the direction of the technical excellence of the iconic An Arundel Tomb make an excellent conference piece. He is still appreciative of Larkin’s particular talent and if his exegesis of these and other poems doesn’t heighten one’s admiration for them any further, one does admire the clarity with which he understands the ways they work.
Nicholas Jenkins draws together the theme of skies in Auden and Larkin, a place from which danger emerged in the war, with great insight. Partly dependent on some Freudian psychology that looks a bit dubious to me, it is still an enlightening essay contrasting how skies in Larkin can reflect both mundane moods and another, more transcendent thing.
Three essays combine to put the Movement into contemporary perspective with Colin McGinn outlining the move in Philosophy towards ‘ordinary language’ and away from specialist phraseology in G.E. Moore, the later Wittgenstein and A. J. Ayer; Deborah Cameron’s socio-linguistic study refers us to Orwell’s dictum of good prose being like a pane of glass and Deborah Bowman examines the influence of Empson’s style. Along with James Fenton on Kingsley Amis: Against Fakery and a few parallels with the anti-phoney theme of Salinger’s 1951 classic The Catcher in the Rye, these illustrate a prevailing zeitgeisty attitude of downbeat, sceptical, post-war ordinariness.
Alan Jenkins demonstrates how Gunn’s Postures for Combat developed until, removing the first person and returning to Hardy, he could write the late masterpiece The Gas Poker.
William H. Pritchard surveys Donald Davie’s career as a critic, his ambivalent attitudes to both Movement and Modernism, but mainly his allegiance to Pound and antipathy to William Carlos Williams, his admiration for Gunn and ‘over valuation’ of Basil Bunting. Davie, at once austerely demanding but often generous, was the most illuminating commentator of his generation although always 'his own man'.
Rachel Buxton provides useful work on Elizabeth Jennings, another who didn’t see herself as part of the Movement but who we should be reminded of more often. The fact that she was the only woman and the only Catholic of the poets under consideration somehow has to be mentioned but it’s difficult to see how either factor made her any less a part of the group than she was already.
With other reportage from the time about the New Lines anthologies and Anthony Thwaite’s personal memoir, the only piece we don’t really need is on Larkin’s early, juvenile interest in lesbianism which on occasions seems to be given unwarranted attention however fascinating some seem to find it.

Fifty years and more after the fact, this illusory movement might look a bit pale and flat now that all kinds of post-modern playfulness and wonderment are upon us but some very major talents emerged in the 50’s- still highly worthy of our attentions- it’s just that they emerged at the same time individually and not as a group. Their efforts at a plainer style, ironies, less deceived knowingness and common language have been widely taken up by the mainstream poets who have made their reputations since, like Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, Andrew Motion and Glyn Maxwell.
This essential book is all that most students or readers interested in the period will need and it should send its readers back to whichever poems referred to in it grab the most of their attention.

CCADS - The History Boys

CCADS, The History Boys, Portsmouth New Theatre Royal, September 9th

Of Alan Bennett's long and impressive list of plays, I'd guess that The History Boys has been the most successful. Its long London stage run, then film and radio productions was added to by Portsmouth's consistently fine amateur company, Corpus Christi Amateur Dramatic Society.
While on the one hand it is an essay on the value of a traditional liberal arts education in the face of recent results-based approaches to proving education's worth, it also continues an established Bennett thread through such works as Me ! I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Laying on of Hands that use the theme of somewhat inappropriate homoerotic relationships between older men and younger boys.
There is much more to it than that, though, as Bennett incorporates any number of literary, historical and linguistic ideas into the classroom and poetry anoraks can tick off the references to major C20th English poets through Hardy, Housman, Owen, Eliot, Auden, Stevie Smith and Larkin. So it is a ready made compendium of curricular standards that would suffice for a highly respectable General Studies course on its own.
Portsmouth's finest character actor, Tony Dart, finds another well-befitting role in Hector, the maverick literature teacher, while John Paul McCrohon is as better than ever as Irwin, the supply teacher. Tony Doye and Sue McCrohon are excellent, too, but somehow they found eight talented teenage boys to fill the boys' roles thoroughly impressively, singing, playing the piano and acting their moody, truculent teenage socks off.
For me, to be painfully critical, the play took a long time to end and ten minutes could have been removed from it to greater effect but that is Bennett's fault, perhaps wringing more pathos and emotion out of the ending than is really needed but the production is a major triumph, possibly the best out of many years of CCADS performances. Not only due to the fact that it is one of Alan Bennett's most complete plays but the all-round relish and panache of this re-making of it.

Ends Saturday. Get there if you can.

http://ccads.musicdramastage.com/

Don Paterson - Rain

Don Paterson, Rain (Faber)

It doesn't seem like six years since Landing Light, Don Paterson's last book. Having thought his earlier books quite stylish and successful, I bought that expecting it to be the maturer, finished poet and a major book of poems. But whether it was my fault or that of the poems, I didn't find it so. Accomplished, sophisticated and all those things perhaps but not a book I returned to or thought about afterwards. So, in anticipation of the new book, I had another look and it still didn't do much for me.
The new book features a tribute in serveral parts to Michael Donaghy, to whose eminent position as critic's favourite Paterson might be regarded as a natural inheritor. It's allusive, personal, deep and meaningful but probably not worthy of its challeging remit. Some of the rhymed poems about his young sons are effective without being groundbreaking while other rhyming poems don't seem to suit him very well. It was beginning to look as if Paterson simply wasn't for me. Until I read the poem called The Day and then read it again to make sure. It is strange to find among a collection of poems that you don't particularly like one of the best new poems you've read for quite some time.
It 'plays with' the ideas of intimacy and the infinite, the one within the other, separateness within a relationship,
even in our own small galaxy
there is another town whose today-light
won't reach a night of ours till Kirriemuir
is nothing but a vein of hematite

is a beautiful and compact lesson in quantum physics. But then even though,

They talk...and decide
to set apart one minute of the day
to dream across the parsecs, the abyss,
a kind of cosmic solidarity.

it is still possible to feel that,
'You're saying that because
the bed's a light-year wide, or might as well be,
I'm even lonelier than I thought I was?'

And so the somewhat tragic miracle of love and finding each other, which might be a bit of a 'commonplace' but the poem's even self aware enough to know that, is profoundly expressed. In fact, for me, it makes the book worth buying on its own.
Once encouraged to take a more generous view of the poet, you notice that the title poem is a fine thing, too, and Why Do You Stay Up So Late? starts to look like a better poem.
However, there is a series of 35 renku, more gnomic utterances in faux-Japanese style that ideally would be forbidden in English poetry and a rather unhilarious blank page of transcendental zen poetry called Unfold i.m. Akira Yoshizawa. However apt a tribute it is to Yoshizawa, it is hardly a new idea. Len Shackleton, the 'clown prince' of football had a chapter in his biography entitled (something like) What the Average Chairman Knows About Football and I reckon that was four decades ago. The joke hasn't got any funnier since then.
So, with so much of this book so far short of the high standard required to be so, I can't see Paterson as the natural heir to Donaghy. It would be a better book if half of it had been left out but it provides a handful of perfectly fine poems and one that, for me, is exemplary.

Odyssey

I don't expect many readers that find themselves here to agree with this modest proposal. But don't you sometimes suddenly realize that this, that or the other was immensely better than they were ever credited with. Quite possibly, 80's disco music is as unfashionable now as the poetry of the 1950's, but even though I bought a few records by Odyssey, I'm not sure I realized what a great oeuvre they eventually put together.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtZEzWnsqA4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fameubts7I&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9M6gXIqlfI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AygsotQ8-so
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1zZm-UO2RI

5 records to offer up against the best.

Stop pretending.

Signed Poetry Books - James Fenton

James Fenton was all the rage in the 1980's. All the rage. War poet, hugely respected. He and Craig Raine, differently big noises. How different it looks now. I don't even know if a new book by Fenton is even eagerly awaited but it would be of interest if it appeared.
But it's always a shame, vis a vis Simon Armitage's story about finding a signed copy of his own book, for 10p in a box outside a second hand bookshop. Fenton made this book out to Jaquie but Jaquie didn't treasure it enough and I got it off e-Bay for very little. The title poem of this volume is a simple but sublime thing. I wouldn't say there should be more of such poems, only that when poems such as this are attempted that they should be as good. There is no need for any more poems at all, only that the ones that there are should be better.