http://www.picador.com/Poetry/prize/picadorpoetryprize.aspx
This is interesting. Not because one might as well have a go at it. It's worth taking note if you stand to win one thousand pounds with no risk whatsoever and if they want to pay you it, it would be rude not to let them. The likelihood of me winning it won't be great and I won't be their ideal sort of winner but it's a shot to nothing.
What is more interesting comes in Don Paterson's tips to would-be entrants, If you don't actually read poetry, but fancy having a go anyway, don't.
This is undoubtedly good advice because if you're not the sort of poet they have in mind as a winner, you won't win and their sort of poet has read quite a lot of poetry. They don't want to be shown something new and out of the ordinary, the like of which the world has never seen before. They want to give the prize to someone who can join their club.
Ideally you will be formal in an informal way, you will be playful and post-modern, meaningful in ways that are not quite so easy to pin down. There is this paradox in contemporary poetry that although you need to be renewing the language, seeing the world anew and constantly refreshing it, you also need to be doing it within orthodox constraints, in their way, not too outlandish and don't scare the horses too much. It is a possible reason why the Identity Parade anthology offered a seemingly endless pageant of identikit, creative writing poets suffocating under their welter of directives and closely-observed principles.
Don's advice is good because it should save the judges a lot of time reading and throwing away hopeless entries and the entrants a lot of heartache when they don't win. There will be a lot of poets expecting to win because they inevitably see their own poems as special in the way that we all think our own blood is better than and not to be diluted with anyone else's. Many of the entrants are likely to be highly erudite young guns for who the prize has arrived at just the right time. They will have written their thousands of words on why they write the poems they write, their styles and influences (as I'm told MA Creative Writing students are asked to). It's unlikely to be some talented hick equivalent of Susan Boyle, they want the next Don Paterson, a replacement for Michael Donaghy and a name to add to their stable of poets. But ideally, if the winner isn't going to be a composite, designer poet for the age of this strange pluralist orthodoxy, Don's tips could also suggest that if you've read too much poetry and think you know all about it and want to give it a go, please don't.
Monday, 31 May 2010
Wednesday, 26 May 2010
Xavier
Franz Xavier was Mozart's son, born a few months before the death of his father. Inevitably overshadowed by Wolfgang's reputation, he left Austria and received patronage in Eastern Europe, teaching and giving concerts of his own and his father's music.
Xavier
These fools who think that lightning will strike twice
and will not release me from my name
demand one more cadenza from me then
I bow suspiciously to their applause.
For in this eastern outpost of empire
beneath their bright provincial chandeliers
I’m prized as replica but fugitive
in the orphaned sonatinas I play.
Winter is bleak inside me. I’m no more
than all these bums on seats expect of me.
Nothing I do is ever good enough.
I am both what I am and what I’m not,
out of and not out of the ordinary,
perhaps no better than I ought to be.
These fools who think that lightning will strike twice
and will not release me from my name
demand one more cadenza from me then
I bow suspiciously to their applause.
For in this eastern outpost of empire
beneath their bright provincial chandeliers
I’m prized as replica but fugitive
in the orphaned sonatinas I play.
Winter is bleak inside me. I’m no more
than all these bums on seats expect of me.
Nothing I do is ever good enough.
I am both what I am and what I’m not,
out of and not out of the ordinary,
perhaps no better than I ought to be.
Monday, 24 May 2010
Adoration of the Maggi
From the archives, from the previous website, my words on Maggi Hambling's blinding performance at Marlborough Fine Arts in 2008.
Maggi Hambling at Marlborough Fine Arts, Waves and Waterfalls, Jan 22, 2008
I saw poetry readings by Ted Hughes at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in about 1977 and Thom Gunn in Cambridge in 1979 but I don’t remember enough about them now to be able to nominate them as ‘the best thing I’ve ever been to’. A shortlist for such a prize would include The King’s Consort’s Monteverdi Vespers at the Proms of a few years back; James MacMillan conducting Evelyn Glennie in Veni, Veni, Immanuel in Portsmouth in the early 90’s; Paul Durcan’s spellbinding poetry reading in Portsmouth Library and possibly Rachel Hunter’s Richard III in The Globe.
However, Maggi Hambling talking about her waves and waterfalls at Marlborough Fine Arts was as good if not better than any of them. Praise indeed, you might say. Let me tell you about it.
With a fearsome reputation for her strongly-held beliefs and forthright expression of them, she was introduced with the caveat that the audience would have the chance to put questions to Maggi ‘at their peril’. The champagne flowed generously considering that there was no charge to reserve a place at the event and so either Maggi was in a benign mood or her ferocity is a misreading of what is really a lively, robust sense of irony and a quite charming manner that mixes a high seriousness with a more ambivalent sense of humour.
Introducing a set of drawings of the sea off the Suffolk coast as the earliest works in the show, she explained that drawing is the basis of everything she does rather than pickling things in glass cases. One of the main items of interest was how many figures and other images were to be found in the torrential water of the oil paintings because, as when one sees faces or shapes in the flames of a coal fire or in clouds, there did seem to be plenty of them. The answer was that they weren’t deliberately put there but unless they were too obvious and had to be obscured she didn’t deny that things emerge as part of the experiment of painting. Whereas a photograph is past and gone, a painting stays alive with its own energy and there would be no point in art if the artist knew how it was going to turn out and so the possible presence of Adam and Eve in the first waterfall we looked at was a good place to begin considering the recurrent theme of sexual imagery in the exhibition.
The power and energy of the turbulent North Sea became a regular parallel for Maggi’s treatment of her major themes of life, sex and death and while the paintings are predominantly dark tipped with white spray, there was the unforgettable detail of a glimpse of red sunrise on the horizon which suggested lips in a gloriously deep red among other variations on the surging and crashing.
While making regular reference to her preference for the paintings which had red dots on their labels signifying that they had been sold, she made wary reference to critics, time and motion people and interviewers while remembering her friend George Melly in anecdotes and referencing Titian and Courbet among others in her obviously profound grasp of the history of art.
Three waterfalls that we had already identified as the highlight of the exhibition were revealed as being the works that Maggi was most ‘excited’ about on an evening in which we did very well in having covered the main issues for ourselves before the talk revealed what it was really all about. Not only was I the bravest of the gathering who answered Maggi’s only question to us- ‘when do you know a painting is really finished?’ – when it is sold, but everything and slightly more than we had noticed emerged as the right answer on a day when the whole idea of right answers was a laughable idea. The biggest surprise to me was how little travelled Maggi has been in an age when the skies are clogged with flights to all corners of the planet.
She felt no need to go to India to paint amazing sunrises when Suffolk had enough of its own and ‘there’s nothing wrong with Suffolk’. So little wrong in fact, that Pembrokeshire seemed to be the only other place she’s ever been, now at the age of 62, and she perhaps overplayed her own naivety in claiming that it had to be explained to her that the sunsets were better in Wales because the sun sets in the West while Suffolk has the sunrises in the East.
The talk, which perhaps lasted nearly an hour as the group moved around the gallery, was a masterpiece and a masterclass both in aesthetics, the philosophy of art, and Maggi’s personal set of traditional but uncompromising attitudes. Her seriousness was obvious beneath a well-practiced but entirely natural dark wit. The value of art was beyond doubt and the passion and commitment was glaringly in evidence but so was the passion for life, the enjoyment and the bonhomie. The relevance, the approach and the manner of everything she said was disarmingly accurate and utterly convincing. She finished off the second half of one glass of champagne before being served another and for a while was carrying her own bottle with her but since we were served three glasses each without any sign of demur that we might be free-loading downbeats with a taste for the bohemian life but not enough money to buy a painting, we didn’t even need to envy her that.
Towards the end of an entirely entrancing wander round the gallery, it appeared to me that the one sculpture, a very roughly worked lump of plaster entitled Henrietta Eating a Meringue, was not going to be included in the talk. And so, full of the confidence I had from being top of the class by getting the first question right, I asked if Maggi might say a few words about it, which she did. At first they were the general, official introductory remarks about when it was done and where it was first exhibited but, nudged closer to a proper answer when I asked if it had anything in common with the imagery in this waterfall painting here, she said, ‘yes, everything in here is about sex’. ‘Thanks. I think you’ve confirmed our suspicions’.
The real, most genuine test case for me about any event or performance these days is whether it makes me want to cry or not. The very, very best things always do. It’s partly an overwhelming feeling that it is so sad that there’s so little generally as good as this in the world but it might also be that I have no other reaction left that is equal to the experience. I generally don’t actually cry but there are moments when it’s best not to speak to me because it might take me some time to collect myself to answer properly and that was how it was here for some time afterwards. I was prone to compare her art and her talking about it to the endless procession of over-rated, under-talented pop stars (and I mean Coldplay, Radiohead and U2 as prime examples) who are deluded into thinking that a few gloomy tunes that sell a few CD’s make everything they say or think into profound wisdom and give them the status of prophets, seers or sages. It simply isn’t possible for me to put any pop music performance I’ve seen on the short list for ‘the best thing I’ve ever been to’ even if I have seen several of my favourites. It simply isn’t in the same game.
It isn’t even proper for me to ruin such a review by mentioning those names but it’s necessary to emphasize the gap between the real, authentic, ‘lived’ experience in art of a special painter like Maggi Hambling and the posturing nonsense of those who pretend to be of any significance.
Gill, with her usual admirable sharpness, whispered to me to look at Maggi’s fingernails when she was close to us. Black, either charcoal or paint, was ingrained around the edge of each nail in a way that many women would regard as a make-up faux-pas. I might be tempted to say that it shows how closely Maggi is involved with her medium whereas others would see it as just a way of making their fortune. I could say that Maggi is a part of the paint and the paint becomes a part of Maggi but I won’t say that because, having heard her respond to a few pretentious questions, I think she’d laugh, give me a bit of an old-fashioned look and then find some kind words to mitigate the punishment for saying such a crass thing.
But that would be if she was still in such a kindly mood.
The best things in life might well be free but even better things come with three free glasses of champagne as well. Fantastic. Monteverdi will be wishing he’d tried a bit harder with his Vespers of 1610 because he’s in danger of losing his title.
Maggi Hambling at Marlborough Fine Arts, Waves and Waterfalls, Jan 22, 2008
I saw poetry readings by Ted Hughes at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in about 1977 and Thom Gunn in Cambridge in 1979 but I don’t remember enough about them now to be able to nominate them as ‘the best thing I’ve ever been to’. A shortlist for such a prize would include The King’s Consort’s Monteverdi Vespers at the Proms of a few years back; James MacMillan conducting Evelyn Glennie in Veni, Veni, Immanuel in Portsmouth in the early 90’s; Paul Durcan’s spellbinding poetry reading in Portsmouth Library and possibly Rachel Hunter’s Richard III in The Globe.
However, Maggi Hambling talking about her waves and waterfalls at Marlborough Fine Arts was as good if not better than any of them. Praise indeed, you might say. Let me tell you about it.
With a fearsome reputation for her strongly-held beliefs and forthright expression of them, she was introduced with the caveat that the audience would have the chance to put questions to Maggi ‘at their peril’. The champagne flowed generously considering that there was no charge to reserve a place at the event and so either Maggi was in a benign mood or her ferocity is a misreading of what is really a lively, robust sense of irony and a quite charming manner that mixes a high seriousness with a more ambivalent sense of humour.
Introducing a set of drawings of the sea off the Suffolk coast as the earliest works in the show, she explained that drawing is the basis of everything she does rather than pickling things in glass cases. One of the main items of interest was how many figures and other images were to be found in the torrential water of the oil paintings because, as when one sees faces or shapes in the flames of a coal fire or in clouds, there did seem to be plenty of them. The answer was that they weren’t deliberately put there but unless they were too obvious and had to be obscured she didn’t deny that things emerge as part of the experiment of painting. Whereas a photograph is past and gone, a painting stays alive with its own energy and there would be no point in art if the artist knew how it was going to turn out and so the possible presence of Adam and Eve in the first waterfall we looked at was a good place to begin considering the recurrent theme of sexual imagery in the exhibition.
The power and energy of the turbulent North Sea became a regular parallel for Maggi’s treatment of her major themes of life, sex and death and while the paintings are predominantly dark tipped with white spray, there was the unforgettable detail of a glimpse of red sunrise on the horizon which suggested lips in a gloriously deep red among other variations on the surging and crashing.
While making regular reference to her preference for the paintings which had red dots on their labels signifying that they had been sold, she made wary reference to critics, time and motion people and interviewers while remembering her friend George Melly in anecdotes and referencing Titian and Courbet among others in her obviously profound grasp of the history of art.
Three waterfalls that we had already identified as the highlight of the exhibition were revealed as being the works that Maggi was most ‘excited’ about on an evening in which we did very well in having covered the main issues for ourselves before the talk revealed what it was really all about. Not only was I the bravest of the gathering who answered Maggi’s only question to us- ‘when do you know a painting is really finished?’ – when it is sold, but everything and slightly more than we had noticed emerged as the right answer on a day when the whole idea of right answers was a laughable idea. The biggest surprise to me was how little travelled Maggi has been in an age when the skies are clogged with flights to all corners of the planet.
She felt no need to go to India to paint amazing sunrises when Suffolk had enough of its own and ‘there’s nothing wrong with Suffolk’. So little wrong in fact, that Pembrokeshire seemed to be the only other place she’s ever been, now at the age of 62, and she perhaps overplayed her own naivety in claiming that it had to be explained to her that the sunsets were better in Wales because the sun sets in the West while Suffolk has the sunrises in the East.
The talk, which perhaps lasted nearly an hour as the group moved around the gallery, was a masterpiece and a masterclass both in aesthetics, the philosophy of art, and Maggi’s personal set of traditional but uncompromising attitudes. Her seriousness was obvious beneath a well-practiced but entirely natural dark wit. The value of art was beyond doubt and the passion and commitment was glaringly in evidence but so was the passion for life, the enjoyment and the bonhomie. The relevance, the approach and the manner of everything she said was disarmingly accurate and utterly convincing. She finished off the second half of one glass of champagne before being served another and for a while was carrying her own bottle with her but since we were served three glasses each without any sign of demur that we might be free-loading downbeats with a taste for the bohemian life but not enough money to buy a painting, we didn’t even need to envy her that.
Towards the end of an entirely entrancing wander round the gallery, it appeared to me that the one sculpture, a very roughly worked lump of plaster entitled Henrietta Eating a Meringue, was not going to be included in the talk. And so, full of the confidence I had from being top of the class by getting the first question right, I asked if Maggi might say a few words about it, which she did. At first they were the general, official introductory remarks about when it was done and where it was first exhibited but, nudged closer to a proper answer when I asked if it had anything in common with the imagery in this waterfall painting here, she said, ‘yes, everything in here is about sex’. ‘Thanks. I think you’ve confirmed our suspicions’.
The real, most genuine test case for me about any event or performance these days is whether it makes me want to cry or not. The very, very best things always do. It’s partly an overwhelming feeling that it is so sad that there’s so little generally as good as this in the world but it might also be that I have no other reaction left that is equal to the experience. I generally don’t actually cry but there are moments when it’s best not to speak to me because it might take me some time to collect myself to answer properly and that was how it was here for some time afterwards. I was prone to compare her art and her talking about it to the endless procession of over-rated, under-talented pop stars (and I mean Coldplay, Radiohead and U2 as prime examples) who are deluded into thinking that a few gloomy tunes that sell a few CD’s make everything they say or think into profound wisdom and give them the status of prophets, seers or sages. It simply isn’t possible for me to put any pop music performance I’ve seen on the short list for ‘the best thing I’ve ever been to’ even if I have seen several of my favourites. It simply isn’t in the same game.
It isn’t even proper for me to ruin such a review by mentioning those names but it’s necessary to emphasize the gap between the real, authentic, ‘lived’ experience in art of a special painter like Maggi Hambling and the posturing nonsense of those who pretend to be of any significance.
Gill, with her usual admirable sharpness, whispered to me to look at Maggi’s fingernails when she was close to us. Black, either charcoal or paint, was ingrained around the edge of each nail in a way that many women would regard as a make-up faux-pas. I might be tempted to say that it shows how closely Maggi is involved with her medium whereas others would see it as just a way of making their fortune. I could say that Maggi is a part of the paint and the paint becomes a part of Maggi but I won’t say that because, having heard her respond to a few pretentious questions, I think she’d laugh, give me a bit of an old-fashioned look and then find some kind words to mitigate the punishment for saying such a crass thing.
But that would be if she was still in such a kindly mood.
The best things in life might well be free but even better things come with three free glasses of champagne as well. Fantastic. Monteverdi will be wishing he’d tried a bit harder with his Vespers of 1610 because he’s in danger of losing his title.
Friday, 21 May 2010
Poetry Magazine Review
http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/
Before going to see Maggi Hambling's exhibition, I spent an hour and a half in the Poetry Library in the Royal Festival Hall looking at the magazines. By no means enough time to read very many poems in them, you might say, but in all honesty, how long can one sit and read poems at a stretch. Not much more than an hour and a half, I'd say.
In the 1970's, there was a lively and flourishing 'little magazine' community of poets and editors that somehow bridged the gap between post-hippy and punk considerably more smoothly than pop music did. Productions values were not always high and magazines came and went, some with the life expectancy of a mayfly, but they came through the letterbox at our house at quite a rate and all of that glimpse of counter-culture, enthusiastic samizdat is still stored in drawers upstairs of this house now, thirty years or so later. There was Paul Lamprill's Sandwiches, Zack Samuel's Moth, Colin Webb's eventually very long-running Sepia. There were Bogg, Krax, Smoke, Slow Dancer and as many others as there were keen amateurs thinking they could make their mark. The best poet in them was the Isle of Man's finest, Michael Daugherty, but rarely did a magazine go by without a Steve Sneyd poem; blackie fortuna was a Rock Against Racism phenomenon of sorts and the late Tina Fulker and minor 60's icon, Tina Morris made sure it wasn't a boys only game. Fine times they seemed to be, somehow idealistic and devil may care. I read a review of something called Kestrel in the Suburbs by Kevin Osmond, which had won a prize, a poem I've still not seen, and wished I could win a prize.
Well, now I've won a few- very minor ones- and somehow it's thirty years later. Out of all the magazines so kindly made available in the Poetry Library, what's going on now. It's a few years since I let my subscriptions to Poetry Review and PNR lapse, so what am I missing.
Production values have gone to previously unthinkable perfect levels. It's no longer a late night on the roneo machine for editors knocking out 100 copies to their subscribers at two quid for three issues. Many of the titles are like books and priced accordingly but whereas you could spend your seven or eight pounds on a book by a poet you like, a magazine will often deliver only a small percentage of poems you want to read again and again. They are essentially samplers, they are Radio One playing singles, giving you a chance to decide which albums to buy. And although you might think that editors might give their magazines distinctive styles or attitudes, it isn't always so. It's the reviews that one more often finds interesting or informative and it comes as quite a find when one comes across a genuinely arresting poem.
Poetry London is good on reviews and must be really useful to Londoners with its listings of events but I didn't find a poem in it that looked like it was going to change my life. It didn't say it was going to, either, to be fair.
The Rialto was once advertised somewhere as being the place to be published but, no, not really. Same old, hanging in the air, musing sort of poems. Nothing tough or special or enterprising. Ordinary if you like that sort of thing.
South is almost determinedly domestic, safe and amateur and run and selected by committees and so although you get nice poems and a few good ones, it is beautifully produced but at another seven pounds simply unbuyable and presumably mainly subscribed to by the poets that are in it, and they try to include as many as they can so that they will. Although, to be fair, they do send out a contributor's copy.
Not all of the poems in Long Poem Magazine are all that long but Andy Brown's two-part poem, Home, took up nearly two pages and was satisfying.
It is good to see Tears in the Fence plodding dourly on after all these years but if you are going to spend the requisite amount then I'm afraid The Reader, coming from Liverpool University, with its crossword and quiz, provides much more entertainment. It's been through various stages of development from a worthy reading group magazine to its very professional status of now giving space to any celebrity writer you might have heard of, possibly at the expense of finding 'new voices'. But it's a well-produced magazine that probably deserves the wide readership it gets.
Poetry Review would, as ever, still seem to be the place to be seen if you want to be seen in the right places. It's best if you are somebody already, of course, but with the National Poetry Competition winners in it, including the latest darling, Ian Pindar, as well as octogenarian Anthony Thwaite reflecting that he no longer has time for genealogy, it's a classy enough effort and if one is going to subscribe to anything, it might be this establishment organ, or
Magma, to which I would like to award the prize for best magazine on the evidence available. Nice poems by good, old Dannie Abse and the apparently very industrious Martyn Crucefix who is still in every other magazine you pick up but also imaginative features, like asking poets for their favourite 'erotic' poems, in which we are reminded of Wyatt's They flee from me. It has concise, sensible reviews and the atmosphere of something that is good fun as well as serious.
That would do. It's impressive that so many magazines are continuing and that several of the titles are recognizable from a few decades ago. Under pressure from the challenge of internet publishing, one might have thought that magazines would be suffering but one can only imagine that the need for poets to see their poems in print is keeping this industry going. I've got to say that not all of them deserve to, although they are undoubtedly run with commitment, belief and dedication.
But it does look as if poetry has followed the rest of the world into corporate brands and safe options rather than a love of the game. Not just the magazines but the poets, too. The look of the thing, the style and presentation. There is no point in having nicely made books if there's not much in them.
Before going to see Maggi Hambling's exhibition, I spent an hour and a half in the Poetry Library in the Royal Festival Hall looking at the magazines. By no means enough time to read very many poems in them, you might say, but in all honesty, how long can one sit and read poems at a stretch. Not much more than an hour and a half, I'd say.
In the 1970's, there was a lively and flourishing 'little magazine' community of poets and editors that somehow bridged the gap between post-hippy and punk considerably more smoothly than pop music did. Productions values were not always high and magazines came and went, some with the life expectancy of a mayfly, but they came through the letterbox at our house at quite a rate and all of that glimpse of counter-culture, enthusiastic samizdat is still stored in drawers upstairs of this house now, thirty years or so later. There was Paul Lamprill's Sandwiches, Zack Samuel's Moth, Colin Webb's eventually very long-running Sepia. There were Bogg, Krax, Smoke, Slow Dancer and as many others as there were keen amateurs thinking they could make their mark. The best poet in them was the Isle of Man's finest, Michael Daugherty, but rarely did a magazine go by without a Steve Sneyd poem; blackie fortuna was a Rock Against Racism phenomenon of sorts and the late Tina Fulker and minor 60's icon, Tina Morris made sure it wasn't a boys only game. Fine times they seemed to be, somehow idealistic and devil may care. I read a review of something called Kestrel in the Suburbs by Kevin Osmond, which had won a prize, a poem I've still not seen, and wished I could win a prize.
Well, now I've won a few- very minor ones- and somehow it's thirty years later. Out of all the magazines so kindly made available in the Poetry Library, what's going on now. It's a few years since I let my subscriptions to Poetry Review and PNR lapse, so what am I missing.
Production values have gone to previously unthinkable perfect levels. It's no longer a late night on the roneo machine for editors knocking out 100 copies to their subscribers at two quid for three issues. Many of the titles are like books and priced accordingly but whereas you could spend your seven or eight pounds on a book by a poet you like, a magazine will often deliver only a small percentage of poems you want to read again and again. They are essentially samplers, they are Radio One playing singles, giving you a chance to decide which albums to buy. And although you might think that editors might give their magazines distinctive styles or attitudes, it isn't always so. It's the reviews that one more often finds interesting or informative and it comes as quite a find when one comes across a genuinely arresting poem.
Poetry London is good on reviews and must be really useful to Londoners with its listings of events but I didn't find a poem in it that looked like it was going to change my life. It didn't say it was going to, either, to be fair.
The Rialto was once advertised somewhere as being the place to be published but, no, not really. Same old, hanging in the air, musing sort of poems. Nothing tough or special or enterprising. Ordinary if you like that sort of thing.
South is almost determinedly domestic, safe and amateur and run and selected by committees and so although you get nice poems and a few good ones, it is beautifully produced but at another seven pounds simply unbuyable and presumably mainly subscribed to by the poets that are in it, and they try to include as many as they can so that they will. Although, to be fair, they do send out a contributor's copy.
Not all of the poems in Long Poem Magazine are all that long but Andy Brown's two-part poem, Home, took up nearly two pages and was satisfying.
It is good to see Tears in the Fence plodding dourly on after all these years but if you are going to spend the requisite amount then I'm afraid The Reader, coming from Liverpool University, with its crossword and quiz, provides much more entertainment. It's been through various stages of development from a worthy reading group magazine to its very professional status of now giving space to any celebrity writer you might have heard of, possibly at the expense of finding 'new voices'. But it's a well-produced magazine that probably deserves the wide readership it gets.
Poetry Review would, as ever, still seem to be the place to be seen if you want to be seen in the right places. It's best if you are somebody already, of course, but with the National Poetry Competition winners in it, including the latest darling, Ian Pindar, as well as octogenarian Anthony Thwaite reflecting that he no longer has time for genealogy, it's a classy enough effort and if one is going to subscribe to anything, it might be this establishment organ, or
Magma, to which I would like to award the prize for best magazine on the evidence available. Nice poems by good, old Dannie Abse and the apparently very industrious Martyn Crucefix who is still in every other magazine you pick up but also imaginative features, like asking poets for their favourite 'erotic' poems, in which we are reminded of Wyatt's They flee from me. It has concise, sensible reviews and the atmosphere of something that is good fun as well as serious.
That would do. It's impressive that so many magazines are continuing and that several of the titles are recognizable from a few decades ago. Under pressure from the challenge of internet publishing, one might have thought that magazines would be suffering but one can only imagine that the need for poets to see their poems in print is keeping this industry going. I've got to say that not all of them deserve to, although they are undoubtedly run with commitment, belief and dedication.
But it does look as if poetry has followed the rest of the world into corporate brands and safe options rather than a love of the game. Not just the magazines but the poets, too. The look of the thing, the style and presentation. There is no point in having nicely made books if there's not much in them.
Maggi Hambling - New Sea Sculpture Paintings and Etchings
Maggi Hambling, New Sea Sculpture Paintings and Etchings, Marlborough Fine Arts, until 5 June
Maggi Hambling's last major exhibition was a tribute to her friend and bohemian cohort, George Melly, but now she's returned to the theme of the one before that, the sea, and specifically the North Sea off the coast at Aldeburgh.
You might think that George Melly and the sea have little in common but the two shows are different parts of Maggi's ongoing obsession with the big themes of life and death, sex and sheer energy. The previous Waves and Waterfalls exhibition was dominated by oil paintings of those things- brilliant, powerful, mesmerising involvements with those forces of nature. Close up and increasingly they become almost abstract with faces, animals (and she says, birds) and ghosts appearing in the paint to such an extent that she said that when one such accidental suggestion became too apparent, it had to be painted out. They are there to find the longer one looks but they are genuinely sub-conscious and not part of the design.
The latest collection has fewer oils but Wave with reflected moon, 2010 (pictured) has a wonderful example of a ghostly face in the white paint just below the moon when seen in its full 48 x 35 inch glory. The detail below the breaking wave is done with understated panache. And although this night-time North Sea is very much a part of the waves of her current theme, one can't help but be reminded of Broken Moon, that I've used elsewhere on this website, from 20 years or more ago, which was similar except for the wave.
As the title indicates, this collection is dominated by sculpture, bronzes and bronze reliefs. The sculptures are small and although carrying such detail as seaweed or a breakwater, somehow reduced by their scale. The reliefs are unlikely to feature on a list of Maggi's finest work and, sceptical even of one's most favourite artists, professional as they need to be if they run big cars and smoke, one might see this exhibition more as a sale of buyable artefacts. That might seem an ungracious thing to say but the etchings are available in limited editions of twenty, numbered and signed, in a choice of colour. They presumably won't cost you the 20k that the picture above is available for but in order to avoid embarrassment, I didn't ask. The book is a tenner and it's a fine addition to my Hambling library.
So, it's more of the same elemental stuff but somehow less so. I wrote on the previous website about Waves and Waterfalls and rather than repeat myself but in muted fashion, it might be best if I retrieve the previous review from the archive and post it here for posterity, later.
But still, by some distance, she is the most magnetic and compelling artist at work in Britain, and probably anywhere else, today.
Friday, 14 May 2010
Top 6 - Patrick Kavanagh selected by Martin Mooney
The poems of Patrick Kavanagh demonstrated to Seamus Heaney that the matter and voice of his rural home life could be the stuff of art and books. For many of us growing up later in the 1970s, the urban/rural borders in Irish life had become vaguer and more permeable, as towns expanded into the country and new estates sprang up in pastureland. So it wasn’t Kavanagh as a poet of the fields – the ploughman poet, as he was caricatured, not least by himself – who spoke to me when I first encountered the work. It was Kavanagh the poet of frustration and longing and determination to take notice of the ordinary.
‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’ is a young man’s poem, and makes the best of the bad job of loneliness, and feeling at a tangent to one’s family and community. It’s ‘alienation’, the way a moody bookish teenager might use the word:
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.
Better poets than I have admired that ‘blooming’. I’ve always liked the opening line for its blunt annotation: ‘The bicycles go by in twos and threes’. Perfect.
‘The Great Hunger’ is anything but: rancourous, melodramatic, a kind of ‘Waste Land’ written by someone who I don’t think understood or sympathised with modernism. And yet… I sometimes think it’s the first Irish poem since the 17th century to deal head-on with real social and cultural problems without resorting to allegory. And it’s a characteristic Kavanagh move: don’t just describe a thing or comment on it – give it its proper name:
Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
Where the potato gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move
Along the side-fall of the hill - Maguire and his men.
Kavanagh disowned the long poem. ‘Shortly after it was published a couple of hefty lads came to my lonely shieling on Pembroke Road. One of them had a copy of the poem behind his back. He brought it to the front and he asked me, 'Did you write that?’ He was a policeman. It may seem shocking to the devotee of liberalism if I say that the police were right. For a poet in his true detachment is impervious to policemen. There is something wrong with a work of art, some kinetic vulgarity in it when it is visible to policemen.’ But ‘kinetic vulgarity’ is essential to poetry if it is engage with the world.
It has taken me a long time to learn how to value some of the plainer poems. Perhaps only in middle age does one appreciate understatement and sincere failure, or perhaps naively it takes certain experiences to open you to certain poems. There’s a streak of sentimentalism running through Kavanagh which makes me suspicious of poems like ‘Memory of my Father’; yet the more I try to dismiss it, the more it has stubbornly insisted on its honesty and urgency:
Every old man I see
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death
One time when sheaves were gathered.
That man I saw in Gardner Street
Stumbled on the kerb was one,
He stared at me half-eyed,
I might have been his son.
And on the other hand Kavanagh grew fonder of rhetorical flourish and complexity as he aged, prone to half-baked satire and daft rhymes, a pub wit who’s had one or two too many and has started to repeat himself, again. But this late style also produced some of his sharpest insights into his own nature and the nature of what poetry had come to mean for him:
Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal.
That’s from ‘Canal Bank Walk’, one of a series of sonnets from the 1950s when Kavanagh was poor, aging, ill, and had to a large extent alienated whatever audience he’d had in Ireland. The ‘redemption’ the sonnets celebrate is both spiritual, a matter of a reconnection with or rediscovery by the muse, and physical, his surviving lung cancer with a lung amputated. By all means read ‘The Hospital’ on its own terms:
A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward
Of a chest hospital: square cubicles in a row
Plain concrete, wash basins …
Naming these things is the love-act and its pledge.
But read any of the canal bank sonnets aloud and concentrate less on what they say, more on their syntax, punctuation, line-length, how much breath one needs to say them, and you understand the meaning of poems such as ‘Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin’:
Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully
Where by a lock niagarously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence
Of mid-July.
The man recovering from cancer demands of himself and his readers the very thing that keeps us going, the thing that will inevitably stop, the thing that makes poetry possible.
Martin Mooney's most recent book of poems was 'Blue Lamp Disco' (Lagan Press, 2003). His next, 'The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen', is due next year.
Saturday, 8 May 2010
Swindon Literature Festival - Stanley Wells
Stanley Wells, Swindon Arts Centre, Fri May 7, 2010
Doyen is the word for Prof. Stanley Wells. Approaching his eightieth birthday, he is still at it at the forefront of Shakespeare Studies.
His talk here explained the motivation behind, and methods involved, in the writing of his latest book, Shakespeare, Sex and Love. The main motivation was an irritation with studies that have gone 'over the top' in their readings of Shakespeare, finding references where none would have occured to the dramatist. He queried Jonathan Bate's assertion that the recent edition of the Complete Works, was the 'filthiest' yet, including all the most salacious readings of the texts, as if to advertise it as such. Wells is no prude, though. He just wants to get the balance right. In the same way, his Stratfordian crusades against the Oxfordian and other campaigns in the authorship debate, come from a deep vexation at the improbable proposals from those quarters. But Wells doesn't come across as particularly irascible in person. His lecturing style is comfortingly olde worlde and well-prepared and one can listen to him imagining oneself at Oxford, sometime perhaps in the 1950's, the boat chaps looking forward to a bit of a rah-rah with the rugger men and the frogging of some oiks after a few hearty pints in the pub, don't you know.
Wells' method involved scrutiny of the records of the Ecclesiastical Court, the 'bawdy' court, for details of sexual offences in Stratford in Shakespeare's time. Held in Holy Trinity Church, his findings there and elsewhere in the contemporary record came as a bit of a surprise to me, with Shakespeare's 'shotgun' marriage being a rarity and punishment for sexual 'incontience' quite common.
But most of the talk, and the book, concern love and sex in Shakespeare's plays rather than in his life. Wells considers the apparently homoerotic content of the Sonnets, the particular poems in question being dated 1593-5, in the context of similar poems by Barnfield, Marlowe and Drayton as if these professional writers were merely catering for a demand rather than writing from their lives. Well, possibly. So, although Wells is open to the possibility of extra-marital activity in London, and quoted the William the Conqueror came before Richard III story, he sensibly wasn't prepared to bet on specifics.
The book devotes a whole chapter to Romeo and Juliet, which is where Wells sees the most definitive exploration of the difference between love and lust and he illustrates how Shakespeare appreciates the 'transfiguring' effect that love can have on sex. And, so, sensibly not stretching credibility as some studies do but not being as dogmatic as some doyens might tend to become, this was a laudible and enjoyable performance with numerous references included to follow up for those with a will to do so.
Monday, 3 May 2010
Bank Holiday Monday
I had a late night last night but it wouldn't be what you're thinking. There was no booze involved whatsoever, it was just that having sat in front of the telly, one thing led to another. The snooker final was strangely uncompelling but the South Bank Show retrospective on David Hockney was good and it led into Hitchcock's The Birds. Me not being a film afficianado, I don't think I'd seen it in full before and Hitchcock is one of the few non-French film genres that I do think is worth one's attention, the non-bird early stages of the film led one in and Tippi Hedren is nice to look at.
So, having got to bed by 2, I wasn't expecting to be early to rise today, my old habit of cycling is proving hard to keep up with inclement weather and prevailing bad back conditions so I decided to go in search of the English Bank Holiday, having been told that, as part of St. Mary's Church May Fayre, one could go up the church tower.
Over breakfast, my chess rating goes down by about 20 points on FICS- Free Internet Chess Server- as I lose a couple of difficult endings to players rated below me but Radio 6 is in good form with a request show playing in succession, McAlmont & Butler's Yes, a track by The Pixies and The Liquidator. Then Radio 4 has a programme about changing your name by deed poll before I quickly tire of a sitcom about a rare record shop starring Lenny Henry.
Arriving at St. Mary's, I was afraid that the jamboree looked less my sort of thing with the usual tawdry set of stalls selling burgers and beer, t-shirts, face-painting and other people's worn-out old videos. So I continued to Southsea through Fratton. Where do all these people come from, the general public, with their terrible adidas underclass idea of fashion, their tattoos and appearance of having spent their lives sucking the air out of lorries' tyres. Of course, it's not for me to disdain the honest, blameless working class but I do feel outside of their demeanour, and feel as if they might at any minute uncover my effete, surburban literariness, my sense of non-belonging to their religion of football, lager and pizza. I feel like a spy whose cover is just about to be blown.
On Castle Field, Southsea, are some heavy horses parading with their drays and troikas with sideshows of more burgers, sundry tat and bouncy castles. I don't, for once, continue to Old Portsmouth, but turn back and find a way back towards Fratton, still wondering about a view from the church tower but go into a second hand bookshop on the way. The proprietor asks what I'm interested in and I say I doubt if he has any first editions of Patrick Hamilton's two rare early novels and if he did have, he'd know how much they are worth. Among the piles of reasonably well-sorted books, I find myself one of Ian Duhig's books of poems and that will do for me.
Back through Fratton, I donate a derisory amount to go and look at St. Mary's Fayre. The programme advertises organ music at 2.30 so I sit and wait while looking for signs of trips up the church tower. Although not everyone's attention is on the music- many being more concerned with how many of their children need to go to the toilet- Brian Moles plays us Bach's Toccata and Fugue and will play more but it's hardly concert conditions and you can hear it while looking at the other indoor attractions, like a big train set being played with by members of the Victory Train Club. I wish I'd been there earlier for the community singing of Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven, Love divine, all loves excelling, Morning Has Broken and Jerusalem. I don't trouble to seek out the Morris dancing.
But I feel I've found about as much high culture as was on offer in Portsmouth on such a cut-price, rough and ready day. In its modest way, it's an uplifting experience to see everyone doing their best to enjoy themselves among boarded-up pubs, endless takeaway food outlets and well-intentioned community activity. Call me patronising, by all means. What are they supposed to do, all these people. You can hardly expect Andreas Scholl or R.E.M. to be available to entertain in downtown Fratton on May Bank Holiday.
And so I'm back here. Tim usefully tells me I need to register if I intend to book my Proms tickets at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning so I'll do that next. Trips up St. Mary's church tower will be available in August so I must remember to go back then
So, having got to bed by 2, I wasn't expecting to be early to rise today, my old habit of cycling is proving hard to keep up with inclement weather and prevailing bad back conditions so I decided to go in search of the English Bank Holiday, having been told that, as part of St. Mary's Church May Fayre, one could go up the church tower.
Over breakfast, my chess rating goes down by about 20 points on FICS- Free Internet Chess Server- as I lose a couple of difficult endings to players rated below me but Radio 6 is in good form with a request show playing in succession, McAlmont & Butler's Yes, a track by The Pixies and The Liquidator. Then Radio 4 has a programme about changing your name by deed poll before I quickly tire of a sitcom about a rare record shop starring Lenny Henry.
Arriving at St. Mary's, I was afraid that the jamboree looked less my sort of thing with the usual tawdry set of stalls selling burgers and beer, t-shirts, face-painting and other people's worn-out old videos. So I continued to Southsea through Fratton. Where do all these people come from, the general public, with their terrible adidas underclass idea of fashion, their tattoos and appearance of having spent their lives sucking the air out of lorries' tyres. Of course, it's not for me to disdain the honest, blameless working class but I do feel outside of their demeanour, and feel as if they might at any minute uncover my effete, surburban literariness, my sense of non-belonging to their religion of football, lager and pizza. I feel like a spy whose cover is just about to be blown.
On Castle Field, Southsea, are some heavy horses parading with their drays and troikas with sideshows of more burgers, sundry tat and bouncy castles. I don't, for once, continue to Old Portsmouth, but turn back and find a way back towards Fratton, still wondering about a view from the church tower but go into a second hand bookshop on the way. The proprietor asks what I'm interested in and I say I doubt if he has any first editions of Patrick Hamilton's two rare early novels and if he did have, he'd know how much they are worth. Among the piles of reasonably well-sorted books, I find myself one of Ian Duhig's books of poems and that will do for me.
Back through Fratton, I donate a derisory amount to go and look at St. Mary's Fayre. The programme advertises organ music at 2.30 so I sit and wait while looking for signs of trips up the church tower. Although not everyone's attention is on the music- many being more concerned with how many of their children need to go to the toilet- Brian Moles plays us Bach's Toccata and Fugue and will play more but it's hardly concert conditions and you can hear it while looking at the other indoor attractions, like a big train set being played with by members of the Victory Train Club. I wish I'd been there earlier for the community singing of Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven, Love divine, all loves excelling, Morning Has Broken and Jerusalem. I don't trouble to seek out the Morris dancing.
But I feel I've found about as much high culture as was on offer in Portsmouth on such a cut-price, rough and ready day. In its modest way, it's an uplifting experience to see everyone doing their best to enjoy themselves among boarded-up pubs, endless takeaway food outlets and well-intentioned community activity. Call me patronising, by all means. What are they supposed to do, all these people. You can hardly expect Andreas Scholl or R.E.M. to be available to entertain in downtown Fratton on May Bank Holiday.
And so I'm back here. Tim usefully tells me I need to register if I intend to book my Proms tickets at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning so I'll do that next. Trips up St. Mary's church tower will be available in August so I must remember to go back then
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