Toads, jazz and a bad dance

The new issue of PNR has Neil Powell as its highlight, as he has been so often during my latest special offer subscription. The rest of the magazine is really beyond me in far too many places and I tire before reaching the end of many of the essays and reviews. It long ago seemed to cease to matter what erudite point was being made when one's mind has wandered.
In no. 196, Powell is considering some of the contributions to the Larkin25 anniversary, mainly the set of jazz CD's but, before then he manages to disapprove of the toads that Hull has been populated with. I'm glad that it's him and not me that goes into battle first even if it's only in passing and understatedly. There appears to be a sort of political correctness about this sort of celebration that means one shouldn't disapprove of them in the same way that one ought to sponsor charitable runs, walks or other ventures however feeble the project might be.
My preferred reason for not disapproving is that if something isn't to one's taste it isn't because it's no good but more likely because one is not in its target audience, not who it was designed for. If a record by Cheryl Cole or The Saturdays doesn't do anything for me and sounds manicured into meaninglessness as a product, it's not necessarily for me to say because there are plenty of pre-teen girls who love it and grisly 51 year old blokes are not supposed to like it and in fact might be in danger of getting put on some sort of list if they did.
But a world without bad reviews and some disapproval of stuff would be antiseptically clean and ultimately pointless. The cosy world in which everything was admissable and nothing was allowed to fail produced a miserable, truculent and spolit generation who were misled into thinking that everything was easy and hardly anyone failed whereas it might be closer to the truth to believe that most things are hard work and very few things succeed.
So I'm glad Neil Powell broke this taboo and suggested he didn't reckon much to the toads because from the pictures I've seen they look like the sort of unfunny, kitsch memorabilia you can buy at seaside emporia and their connection to Larkin is a bit tenuous.
Powell's consideration of the Larkin's Jazz compilation expresses reservations but is more or less in favour. I'm sure it's very listenable but the early days of trad jazz are not really my area. What it does do, though, is make me wonder if any previous poet has had their admirers try to recreate their record collection. Trevor Tolley made a list in the About Larkin magazine a few years ago and has now worked on this new release. It's harmless enough and in a way Larkin set himself up for this treatment by reviewing jazz in the newspapers for so many years. So it is only Larkin's jazz and not his favourite music, which as we all now know included a large helping of Handel, too. But, in future, could all poets please leave a list of 4 discs worth of music among their papers so that their record collections can be posthumously revisited by anybody not satisfied with only their poems, reviews, letters, life story and miscellaneous jottings.
So far, not so bad, until I am reminded of another release earlier this year, an album of Larkin poems set to music, most notably and badly by the Holy Orders who really did push the boundaries of decency with their 12 minute version of The Dance. I take it on trust that it lasts the advertised 12 minutes because I haven't managed to listen to it for anywhere near that length of time on my few attempts thus far.
Larkin abandoned the poem not only before he had reached an end but also ostensibly before he'd done much work on this rough draft which doesn't look anything like finished Larkin. Neither does this poem, and hardly any other by Larkin, lend itself to being set to music. Larkin's poems, in a technique learnt from Edward Thomas as much as anywhere, run lines across the rhyme scheme, adopt conversational rather than lyrical tones of voices in many places and are intended for the page or spoken recital in a way that makes them very difficult to set to music, which the Holy Orders demonstrate very well indeed.
It's a tortuous experience to hear the anguished performance and the horrors it perpetrates. One is not inclined to wonder what Larkin might have thought because there's nothing one can do about such atrocities but the greatest shame is that it is intended as a tribute, as a labour of love, 'inspired by' Larkin's poem when it adds nothing to the Larkin oeuvre at all and if anything, disrespects it.
All these add-ons, these sub-Larkin projects and enterprises ultimately suggest that the poems themselves aren't quite enough. Well, they are, and that's the point. Everything else added on around them, beginning with the biographies, the letters and juvenilia - which are more or less legitimate- down to the statue, the toads and the settings of the poems aren't the main point and at their worst they constitute an insult. It's a pity because they are clearly not meant to be.