Poetry Workshop Radio 4

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012wcln#synopsis

It might not hit the headlines with the same lurid intensity as some of the more graphic and gratuitous horror films have done in the past but Radio 4's new series, which seems to be occasional, and hidden away in the quiet 4.30 Sunday afternoon slot, Poetry Workshop, promises to provide shudders and shivers as harrowing as any of the more mainstream chillers.
Ruth Padel goes to a local poetry workshop and takes part in their discussion of each other's poems. It is one of the cruellest and most difficult things anyone can be put through. Not only for the poet, most of who think that their work is worthy of such scrutiny, but also for the other poets whose turn it isn't, who have to find kind words to say about the poem in question before guardedly and as politely as possible suggesting a minor improvement that might be made in order to transform the lines into a classic.
Cringe by cringe one listens to the poet adopt one of the default poetry reading settings- e.g. soft and caressing, carefully enunciated, deeply in thrall, etc.- and deliver lines they wouldn't dare use with friends and family but seem to think fellow poets will be impressed by. They have worked hard and they do think this is what poetry should be like and so you can hardly blame them but then the precious devices have to be picked over and considered until everyone's been done and they all go home with the happy glow of having been fulfilled.
It really can be quite horrific and for my part I'd rather my poems remained utterly without merit rather than be bandaged and re-made by others into something they thought they liked a bit better. If I like my own poem that is all I need. If anybody else likes it, that's fine but it can't make me feel any better if I don't.
In this first programme, Ruth went to Exeter. I've heard worse poems than all of them but none of them did much for me. It was mostly the usual agony of the process that distracted from any enjoyment. Until the last poem by Rachel McCarthy which sounded promising so I looked her up afterwards. She's only got her own Wikipedia entry, books published and an Arts show on the radio. It's not surprising she came across quite well. Her poem was a different class.
The programme has a gory allure and a grim fascination. It might even have the same effect as a horror film in making it impossible to sleep afterwards. One keeps thinking you heard someone say, 'I really liked the metaphor about the sycamore tree.' There's going to be another one in October. I hope I don't miss it.

Danny Baker Desert Island Discs

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012wcl4

Worth a look.

Forget What Read

Having noted a few weeks ago that I'd hardly read any books, I now realize that I can remember hardly any of those that I have read. Remind me, what happens at the end of Atonement; what are the names of the characters in Birdsong; what was the difference between A Wild Sheep Chase and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle? But, most of all, remind me never to do Contemporary Fiction as a specialist subject on Mastermind.

I do remember quite well some of the books we read at school and wrote essays about and I do retain a general impression of what books were about and what certain writers are like. I can do you an impromptu lecture on The Woodlanders whenever you're ready and I'll outline some main points about Patrick Hamilton if required. But reading Revolutionary Road again after only a few years, it came almost as fresh off the page as when I'd first read it.

I'm always impressed by academics who seem to be able to talk about, and certainly know about, almost any writer you care to mention. Perhaps there's a special trick to that. But it's a minefield getting engaged in any discussion with them because it's only a matter of time before they take you off piste and I'm floundering like a complete illiterate.

There's nothing to be done about this, of course. It's not as if I actually need to remember any of this and nowadays I'll abandon a book at an early stage if I'm not enjoying it. It's for enjoyment, not self improvement, that I read books. Amateur in the real sense of 'for the love of it', not professional. It really doesn't matter but it does come as a bit of a scare when one wants to talk about a book you know you've read and you try to find it in your memory and there's nothing there. This Side of Paradise? Sure, let me see, now. No, I'm sorry, I can remember almost nothing about it.

There is a big advantage to this, which is I have quite a large collection of books that I can return to at any time and they'll be as good as new. That might come in useful, and occasionally has, when one knows there must be thousands of titles one ought to read but one simply doesn't know which of them to try.

Opera in the Park

Opera in the Park, Victoria Park, Portsmouth, 30 July

When, next winter, the burghers of Portsmouth are complaining that the council haven't cleared their icy pavements for three weeks they will have to bear in mind that popular classics were provided for free in the park on a summer evening and that money can only be spent once.

Opera Interludes are available for corporate events to add a bit of class to companies who either see themselves as 'top end' or want others to think so. It would be uncharitable to point out that these singers are appearing in the park in Portsmouth at the height of the season and not in Covent Garden because they are making an honest bob and dishing out the Verdi and Bizet with some gusto, which is sometimes necessary when the train line runs right behind the stage and the Guild Hall bells chime the hour midway through an aria. I didn't think the train went past until Act 2 of La Traviata. A properly sumptuous One Fine Day benefits from the whole orchestral setting rather than piano accompaniment and the delicate textures of Voi Che Sapete are lost in this simplified, common denominator setting of picnics and bring-your-own cheap booze. But let's not be churlish and miss the point with snooty remarks when it was all put on for free and offered great tunes to the masses, just like ought to happen more often in any utopian civilisation. Baritone David Stephenson took the highest honours with the necessary power to impose himself on the situation, John Pierce did us a worthy Nessun Dorma and a particularly good Largo al Factotum by David had him in among the audience before timing his arrival back on stage to answer a call on his mobile phone with, 'Figaro...Figaro, Figaro, Figaro'. Well done.

Naomi Harvey and Charlotte Stephenson did such things as the Flower Duet before leading a miniature Last Night of the Proms with Rule Britannia, Jerusalem and Land of Hope and Glory. I realize that Jerusalem is probably the only one of these that one should join in with but by now I think the others must just be ironic while still providing a damned good opportunity to sing.

I was in two minds whether to go but it was a pleasant evening and with the favourites having won the two big races at Goodwood for me, thought I'd better make a day of it. Then I come home to find that two more winners at Lingfield had given me four out of five on the day and doubled my earnings so I could, if necessary, tolerate another day like today.

Top 6 - Easy Listening

Don‘t be concerned, it will not harm you.

Val Doonican, Elusive Butterfly http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FF0m-580B4

Max Bygraves, Fings Aint Wot They Used To Be, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg-Ycc-yKqY

Rolf Harris, The Court of King Caractacus, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3s0joFeajk

John Coltrane, Blue Train, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1GrP6thz-k
Just my sense of humour, 10 minutes of your life there is no need to waste.

The New Seekers, You Won’t Find Another Fool like Me, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lnO-517rEU

Darts, It’s Raining, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NhoXPT5tXY
Still perfect after all those years.

Last Draft

From the age of 50 onwards, as if following in the spirit of Larkin's The View, Green's poetry became increasingly morose and, although he kept on trying, it received even less critical acclaim than it had before.

-these lines taken from a future academic who resorted to me as his subject because all other poetry had been discussed to a standstill.

Last Draft

It’s no use. The past is now a spendthrift
friend, islands in a grey lagoon bereft
of such tricks as sorcery or witchcraft
or alchemy. It had promised a gift
of remembrance that, it said, you could lift
anything from, like that starburst festschrift
one very nearly wrote or Vermeer’s Delft
pictured after soft rain. But it was theft.

It never explained exactly how swift
it would be in making its move to shift
its ground and leave one derelict, adrift
upon a future that you were too daft
to see would leave you on a homespun raft
counting your good luck and whatever’s left.

Amy

I'm really sorry. I wasn't a fan. It wasn't my fault, I just didn't know enough about her.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfC6CCtZjxk&feature=related

Never mind the celebrity tributes. This is a fine thing.

Banana Yoshimoto - The Lake

Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake (Melville House)

A long time ago now, one of the Sunday papers published a supplement on 'cult fiction' with pieces on all kinds of books that they thought fitted that epithet. Against each book were symbols representing Horror, Sex, Drugs, etc. to signify which of those categories it belonged to. Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen was one of the few, perhaps the only one, to be awarded all six, I think it was, of these badges and so, inevitably, I thought I'd better read it. It was a nice book, strangely comforting and discomfiting in a dreamy world of ordinary unworldliness. I followed it up with the short story volume, Lizard, which remained a favourite and since then I've kept up with Banana as best I can although it has to be noted that this new translation into English was first published in Japanese in 2005.

After a while I came to wonder if the characters, often traumatized or locked into themselves, who find some transcendently close relationship with another lost soul, weren't becoming a little bit formulaic and when I found myself sitting next to a specialist in Japanese literature at dinner in Oxford, I asked if Banana Yoshimoto was taken seriously as literature or was really 'chick-lit'. I got no straight answer until the lady turned round to find me talking about the football results with the person sitting on my other side.

'Ah. One minute you want to know if she is chick lit and now you're talking about football.' So I'm afraid I still don't know.

This new book breaks precious little new ground. Chihiro's mother has died and she is haunted by her memory. She lives opposite the quiet reclusive Nakajima, but their relationship develops from a growing correspondance in their nearby but solitary lives. Chihiro is an artist, working on a mural. Nakajima has a deep attraction for her although neither of them are eager to repeat their first sexual enconter together.

Nakajima's trauma turns out to be due to an episode in his life when he was kidnapped and brainwashed by a cult. In the meantime, their relationship is on some special, zen-like level that we are led to understand is beyond anything that most people have ever felt.

I felt as though we had been walking like this forever. at the edge of this lake. Through scenery so gorgeous it seemed like another world. 'I'm sure I'll walk like this with lots of other people', I thought, but I'll probably never feel like this again.

There are many, many such magical passages in this short novel, as there are in all of her other books. They are contrasted with the terrible darkness that such love provides salvation from. Although apparently beautifully and simply expressed, there is no telling in translation how this reads in Japanese. Very attractively, one must assume. But there does seem an ongoing solipsism in this theme when one feels some identification with it and recognition of it and then reflect that the specialness of Banana's characters' feelings takes no account that we might all have felt it, too, and they might not be as special as they think they are so perhaps they are less illuminated and touched by a special grace but somewhat vain.

The Lake is no more or less than Banana's previous efforts, all of which outline this dualism of agony and ecstasy, a gentle and optimistic feelgood motif of young devotion and deep humanity.

It is a few years since I read my last Banana book. In the meantime I might have grown out of their mystical psychology and lifestyle statements.

I met Banana one last time, by the lake. I could see that she was as beautiful and perhaps still as special as when we had first met many years before. I knew that she would love others and others would love her just as I had but as I watched her disappearing into times of my life that had now passed, I could only think that the good times that we had were over and I already loved others more than I now loved her.

Hollinghurst - The Stranger's Child

Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child (Picador)

It is 1913, and handsome, effete young men are spending an endless English summer in the gardens of nice houses writing poetry, much of it to each other.

Stop me if you've heard it all before.

The idyll is brought to a shocking and abrupt halt by the war that didn't actually end all wars and many of these poets, athletes and charmers who were the cream of their generation are killed. Alan Hollinghurst's novel centres on Cecil Valance, not quite a first division war poet but one whose poem, Two Acres, becomes an anthology piece. And then the poem and the reputation of the poet are traced through the rest of the twentieth century.

By the end, Paul Bryant, has added a few more titles of controversial literary biography to the life of Valance that he began his career with.

In five chronological sections, the book threads together a number of themes which might be the nostalgia for the lost pre-war England, a history of homosexuality developing from furtive opportunism to civil ceremonies, a satire or examination of the curious shark tank of the literary biography industry and all along it is a beautifully observed comedy of manners, as when Paul is reviewing books for the TLS and searching through newly-arrived titles for potentially 'gay' material,

Paul saw a promising mauve cover deep down, gay books keeping generally to that end of the spectrum, but when he dug it out it was a survey of historic thimbles, which wasn't quite gay enough.

Hollinghurst's writing is as ever disciplined and understated but flawless and such prose is almost worth reading for its own sake. It might seem at first to be missing a climax, a big revelation, but, if anything, the big bang is near the start and the rest of the book is its echo. As such, making any interpretation of the title, one only ties up a phrase in the Valance poem with a much later detail that Bryant's father was 'unknown'. But, with Hollinghurst's method being both comic and at times satirical, one wonders if there are any characters one likes here, and then in any of his previous books either. Although his understanding of them is deep, his characters can be shallow as in self-regarding, hedonistic or envious.

It's 'cool' in the detached, studied sense of the word, a masterpiece at what it does but pitched one or two notches below the drama of The Line of Beauty or our expectations of any book or adaptation these days. It doesn't work against it for me but an occasion such as the 'new Hollinghurst' needs to be appreciated as a masterclass of prose style, a slow burn and perhaps even something anachronistic to many people by now. I didn't think the Booker Prize committee would need to meet when this book is up for consideration but perhaps now they had better just drop into the same pub to make sure and give it the nod. There is unlikely to be a better written book or a better conceived one but they might just want to make sure it wasn't just that bit too self-conscious and discreet.

Ian Pindar - Emporium

Ian Pindar, Emporium ( Carcanet)


Well, no, not really. My usually trustworthy eye for a good new poetry book might have left me down for once. It’s hardly for me to say that any book written at this level of erudition isn’t any good but I will have to accept that I wasn’t a part of its target audience even though I thought Ian’s prize-winning poem last year and his exemplary short biography of Joyce both suggested that his debut in ‘full-length’ poetry would be something I ought be buying.
I’m not ashamed to say if and when something is beyond me but if it seems to be orbiting beyond one’s remit, one shouldn’t be able to get the feeling that there are bits of it one simply doesn’t like and I’m afraid here I get a sense that when it isn’t trying too hard, then it is simply not my sort of thing. I hope it wins every prize that it qualifies for but unless I suddenly see the point, it isn’t going to make my shortlist.
There is one poem that demands attention- Chain Letter, a wonderful 'tour de force' that seems to take us through English language poetry from Langland to very recently (and thanks to the notes for showing some of us who didn’t know all the lines) in a wonderful, let’s say- for the sake of it- phantasmagoria of purloined fragments. Heaven only knows how well-read and clever you have to be to do that. It is a sensational thing but, somehow, disappointingly brilliant.
Disappointing when you have only just read The King’s Evil, an apparently not-ironic anti-Royalist poem that doesn’t seem to have realized that the monarchy might reign but doesn’t rule, that might appear to think that Prince Andrew is in charge and also seems to want to celebrate the democracy that in recent decades has given us Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the Coalition government successively shoring up the rich against the threat of the ever poor and taking us to war on behalf of another big fat country. Well, if that’s what Thomas Paine meant, it’s a shame he’s not here to defend himself. This poem can’t be as stupid as it seems to me because Ian Pindar is clearly several times cleverer and better read than me and so it must just be me missing the point - that has happened before- but I’m not sure I’d have written anything quite as gauche in the fourth form never mind 35 years later. I’m not particularly royalist but a better argument than this needs to be made if I’m going to be swayed from some admiration for the Queen and, say, Pippa Middleton. A colleague of mine went to a recent garden party at Buckingham Palace and met the Queen. My colleague is wheelchair-bound. When she met the Queen, and you always want to know what she said, Her Majesty said ‘I bet you can go quite fast in that.’ Brilliant.
We are told we have democracy already but unfortunately it’s run by gangsters, like the world always has been. What our country has that others seem to covet is a bit of class. I’m not saying we have. We invented Wayne Rooney and Jeremy Clarkson. All I’m saying is ‘be careful what you wish for’.
Armageddon is a nicely disturbed poem. Mrs Beltinska in the Bath is the prize winner I liked a lot. Birds, on a theme of totalitarianism, is a well-done piece. I could almost have liked this book as much as I thought was going to. Ian Pindar is beyond doubt a writer of immense talent and reading but I’m not going to say ‘depth’ because I suspect the politics and modernism on show here might be a bit shallow.
I could have spent seven quid on Amazon on something I liked better but it’s too late now.

From 'We cannot choose'

This came to light this week. Almost certainly my first poetry apperance in print, in The Richian, school magazine, of 1975, so I was 15.

Obviously from a longer work, and quite possibly a 'sequence' ( ! ). It is to be hoped that I made some progress in the following 36 years.

John the Baptist

Okay, then, hands up everyone who wants to see a new poem.

Well, hard luck, you're getting one anyway.

John the Baptist

Now I can see I never stood a chance.
From the moment I looked into his eyes
and they carried me like an avalanche,
I knew that it was him I’d idolize.
The water that I drenched him in ran off
him clear; he was already free of sin.
I saw that I could never do enough.
He would not follow me, I’d follow him.

My audience dispersed once they had heard
his charismatic speech; legerdemain
miracles that stilled their base discontent,
the frugal wonder in his every word.
And I do anything for him I can.
It is his word, not mine, I represent.

Signed Poetry Books - Martin Mooney

It was long overdue that the Signed Poetry Books collection welcomed new arrivals and so I was keen to make sure I got Martin Mooney at the Oxfam Bookshop in Marylebone last night. With apologies to his friend, Heather, I managed to end up with her pen, too.

It was a great evening with a varied international cast of poets genially introduced by Todd Swift but I'm going to give myself a day off and not actually review it here. Even I tire of contriving those considered sentences of judgement and evaluation sometimes. Instead, to preserve the occasion, here's the man himself caught in full flight.

Signed Poetry Books - Michael Symmons Roberts

A bonus for the signed poetry books collection was finding that the Oxfam Shop had a copy of Michael Symmons Roberts' latest book on its shelves and the poet only a few yards away to append his signature.

Today at Arundel

There were some old cricketers among the spectators at Arundel today.

In their interval exhibition they rolled back the years and showed that if you ever had it, you never completely lose it.