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.

National Poetry Day- Heroes

Like General Elections, National Poetry Day is always on a Thursday. It's this Thursday, this year. And it's more or less a good thing, an artificially created publicity event for 'poetry' that draws attention to it for its own sake. And even if it often turns out to be a matter of wheeling out good old Roger McG or John Hegley to read some of their charming little jokes, it can sometimes be even better than that. I've been involved in and attended some very worthwhile events over the years. It's even easier to do so so from the comfort of one's own website, though.

This year's theme is heroes and I'm delighted to have a back catalogue that, however thin it might look for thirty-odd years of writing poems, has several 'heroes' in it. There's the Tycho Brahe poems, the Ovid, the fawning tribute to Thom Gunn (Rastignac at 45 at 35), a couple of Mozart poems, Buxtehude, and a set of poems called Line Drawings not all of which were necessarily tributes to heroes (Diana, Versace, Kasparov, Stephen Hawking, etc.). But there was also this poem in Museum, published in 1990, dedicated to Maggi Hambling, who certainly is a big hero of mine. It's based on her painting Broken Moon (pictured), which I'd love to own and is for sale and it's my 50th birthday shortly (I don't know if I've mentioned that elsewhere).

Maggi's Moons

(for Maggi Hambling)

Your moons are the still-burning
souls of heretics whose charred
bones have long since been dust. They
are the echoes of screaming,
frozen and splintered in hard
winter silence, torn ghostly.

They see the living woven
into troubled times. And your
moon is a witch's daughter
left hanging below heaven
whose passion is now shattered
light on midnight's blue water.