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 .