View from the Boundary

A propos of something else entirely, I was thinking recently how it is a hundred years since Modernism. Virginia Woolf dated its beginning at December 1910. And then I thought it might only be us in or time who regard that watershed as a great explosion in music, literature and painting in which every old orthodoxy was allegedly blown away.
People of my age naturally think that 1976/77 was the similar moment in pop music but it's less likely that younger people recognize it as such a seminal point and older people will identify it as Elvis Presley's first records.
So I wondered where others might have identified their own seismic shift, like did Bach think it was Monteverdi, did the Georgian poets think it was Keats, Wordsworth and Shelley, and, in fact does everybody think it occured 100 years before them. It seems difficult not to regard one's own time as the time that all history was aiming to arrive at and the future as a long aftermath that will follow it.
Those examples suggest that we might expect a revolution every hundred years and thus be on the brink of one now. I can't see one but I'm sure I'd be the last to notice. I'm not going to worry about it too much but I don't suppose history has finished yet and future generations will need to tidy it all up somehow even if we are all individuals in a our own minority of one resistant to being categorized alongside others. However individual we like to convince ourselves we are- which suggests we are really still in the Romantic Age- we are, however reluctantly, much more the victims and followers of fashion than the free-thinking inventions of our own devising that we would like to be.
--
Not consciously as a result of all that, but obviously connected to it, I thought it long overdue that I had another look at Ezra Pound to see if I could make any headway at all in understanding his poems.
I re-read Thom Gunn's introduction to his 'Poet to Poet' Faber selection, and it did make some sense, and glimmers of hope emerged as I followed up his references to some of the poems. So now I've embarked on Noel Stock's biography and, so far so good, it's an excellent book.
I had first rejected Pound out of hand as a fascist, needing no more than an old-fashioned doctrinaire ban on anything so abominable and that saved me for many years from the second objection that I simply 'didn't get it' anyway. But the ominous fact that both Gunn and Donald Davie held him in such high regard wouldn't go away. and surely anything admired by those two was worthy of my greatest efforts. And, so here we are, starting to appreciate Pound's pared-down principles, dry wit and cleansing English poetry of extraneous decoration. I'll hope to at least think a bit better of him. Whether or not it results in a big fat Collected Ezra becoming essential reading is another matter.  .

The End of Satire

I didn't watch the television series Twenty Twelve, of course, an imagining of what the London Olympics might be like.
But then the Olympics started and on day one, immediately outdid all the efforts of the wise guys and all their wicked humour.
It was beyond the weary limits of their writing.
Why did they ever bother.

Bradley Wiggins

Bradley Wiggins. Who would ever have thought that a few years ago.
As someone who tried their best to follow cycling in the early 70's via the small print of the classified sports results where you could check whether Barry Hoban was still in 47th place or not and by how far Eddy Merckx had won yesterday's stage in the Tour de France and then wait to see my dad's copy of Cycling Weekly, it is absurd that now one can hardly step foot in the office without hearing people talking about bike racing. I'm in favour of it, it's a fine and wonderful (and sometimes drug-addled) thing but I've said before what I see Simon Armitage has said recently, that if poetry was popular and everybody did it, perhaps he -and I -wouldn't.
I did my cycling when it was very much a minority sport and I'm hoping that poetry can remain a misunderstood secret.
If anybody fancies a game of quoits, let me know.

Ben Lerner - Leaving the Atocha Station

Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (Granta)

If you read this book having known what it was about and then didn't like it you would only have yourself to blame.
The flawed first person narrator is an American poet on a fellowship in Spain, knowingly feeling fraudulent, and somewhat of the school of John Ashbery, the difficult icon of contemporary American poetry. He tells lies, lives on a diet of pills, dope, booze and coffee and mooches about with two unconvincing relationships with women in progress.
He inevitably bares comparison with Mersault in Camus' L'Etranger while stopping short of shooting anyone for no reason.
I thought I'd risk it because two reviews I saw made this sound like an essential debut novel, something of a masterpiece, and I'm glad I did because I'm sure they were right. But it could have been a close decision. I can see why others would have a litany of reservations about it.
It is brilliantly realized and entirely convincing, Adam Gordon's blurred grasp of his own life is captured best in the several takes he has on each exchange in Spanish conversation - the dizzying effect of multiple possible meanings when he recognizes the words but not quite the significance of how they have been put together. It is also funny in a coolly laconic way, his detachment always adding to the feeling that he doesn't think he cares. He is apparently a brilliant poet but doubts if that is 'authentic'. For him, everything is bad faith and his poetry the most significant expression of it.
We don't have much sympathy for him, I think, and he doesn't endear himself but that worries me a lot because he seems to me to be right most of the time, for example in his reaction to Ashbery, whose
flowing sentences always felt as if they were making sense, but when you looked up from the page it was impossible to say what sense has been made.
He has confessed very early in the narrative that,
I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew.
Because I, when I was quite young, was the one who read Camus' La Chute and came away thinking that the narrator was a really good bloke.
Adam's apperance on a discussion panel towards the end reveals something of the fraud that he knows he is and it's a fear I've had attending academic conferences that my painfully thin knowledge or appreciation in many areas might be revealed and my very attendance at the event reduced to absurdity.
So in a book in which the main character admits that,
if I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted an acknowledgement of my own preposterousness,
and is later asked,
'When are you going to stop pretending that you are pretending to be a poet?' 
I feel quite at home but still unsure whether that is a good thing, a bad thing or if not knowing is the whole point.
So, although this is very much the sort of book that would annoy many sensible, right-thinking people for the self-absorption of its anti-hero, it takes those risks and is a brilliant discussion of this angst and torment. I'm going to take the chance on saying that it is a masterpiece but if you've taken the hint from the generous selection of quotes above you will already have a shrewd idea if it's very much a book that you should avoid.

Charpentier and Britten

Charpentier, Lecons de Tenenbres, Il Seminario Musicale (Virgin Veritas); Britten, String Quartets, Belcea Quartet (EMI)

One great advantage of buying books or music with one's disposable income rather than going to Fontwell Park to blow it on a series of hapless investments in races that one surely wouldn't give a second look if you'd stayed at home, is that it takes so much longer to appreciate them and you can also go back and appreciate them however many more times you want to. A couple of alternative results at Fontwell might have made that look like a profitable night out but the money that I came home with would only have eventually gone to my more regular bookmaker eventually.
And so, I will have these CD's for much longer than if I'd spent the cost of them on some other, less worthwhile, project. At least I don't throw all of my money away in the hope of instant gratification.
Both of these purchases were generated by the Brodsky Quartet's performance in Portsmouth Cathedral last month. Of course, with Britten, there is an admirable lost beauty that you can share with him, if you think you have any idea what he's on about. It is rarified and not immediately attractive. He wouldn't be among my favourite composers and yet I'm often impressed by his music. I recognized the first quartet here and I'm guessing that I probably have it on vinyl somewhere but it will have been twenty years since I played it. The third quartet is what I bought the set for, a 'swansong', and far better to listen to than write about.
Why would any musician ever have gone to the lengths of writing out a score if they could have expressed themselves in a few words. And so, why do I comment on it here. I don't know.
Whereas, the Golijov piece played by the Brodskys very quickly took me to the Couperin it was based on and that made me investigate any other French baroque settings of the Lecons de Tenebres and I thought Charpentier, roughly a contemporary of Francois Couperin, was worth a bet and I turned out to be right. It is bound to happen once in a while.
These two discs of two sets of Tenebres are apparently made up from smaller relevant pieces by Charpentier. Never mind, for once, whether the composer intended them to be heard like this or not together. It is deep, dark and ostensibly profound music and it's been skimming round in my CD player for a few weeks now.
I quite often end music reviews by saying, quite honestly, that I hope the disc in question will continue to be played here for quite some time. That doesn't always happen. In this case it already has.
Marc-Antoine Charpentier (c.1643- 1704) has a new admirer in his firmament. It's me.

James Fenton - Yellow Tulips

James Fenton, Yellow Tulips (Faber)

I'm not a great fan of the New & Selected idea of a book. I'm sure there are admirable artistic justifications for it but it can look as if it's about time we did a new book, there aren't enough new poems yet so let's do a Selected and include what else we have.
Nearly half of the poems here are from Out of Danger, a book that I already have. Most of that book is here, in fact, although I can't quite just this minute find my copy to do the counting.
Fenton is among our major poets and to his credit not quite as visible as some of the others. There's a lot to be said for not being laureate. And it is certainly a good time to be reminded of these poems.
The first section covers the early, reputation-making poems from his time as a war correspondent; the Out of Danger poems are predominantly well-made, often beautifully besotted love poems and the third section is the new poems that most of us will want the book for, including the fine title poem, an in memoriam Mick Imlah and the best thing, a poem called Cosmology.
In a time in which the poetry zeitgeist admires the allusive and elusive, Fenton remains almost unorthodoxly direct both in tenor and the use of full rhymes. In that way, I suppose, it might be termed muscular poetry, or masculine, but that is not to suggest any unrequired machismo or lack of consideration in the utterance. Because the poems are not consciously oblique doesn't mean they lack intelligence.
Of course, we will remember Fenton being 'in Paris with you', how he felt the beloved was 'out of danger from the heart/ Falling, falling out of love,' and several other of these deja vu pieces but  Cosmology is probably the poem we wanted from this book, a meditation on the very origins of our thoughts on the universe,
All the evidence was destined to be lost-
...
As these questions have waited for their tens of thousands of seasons,
Patient or indifferent to our expertise.

It's taken a little while this year for my shortlists for Best Poem and Best Collection to get underway but we do now have a genuine contender.       

Top 20 Poems

At the Portsmouth Poetry Society meting last week, I agreed to swap lists with another member.
Top 20 Favourite Poems since 1900 became the subject, and in English sort of goes without saying but wasn't said.
So, not being able to resist a list, here's mine, off the top of my head, and it could of course have been considerably different done at any other time,

Thom Gunn – Tamer and Hawk, My Sad Captains http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/my-sad-captains/ , Touch.

Philip Larkin – Church Going, At Grass.

Seamus Heaney – A Brigid’s Girdle.

Sean O’Brien –Latinists

W.H. Auden – Musee des Beaux Arts.

Paul Muldoon – Incantata, http://thepoeticquotidian.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/paul-muldoon-incantata.html (a vast thing- I can’t explain it much- but probably the greatest poem of the last few decades)

Sylvia Plath- Spinster

Derek Mahon- Courtyards in Delft

Roddy Lumsden- An Older Woman http://www.ninblak.demon.co.uk/vit-p/booklove/older.htm

Alun Lewis – Corfe Castle

Carol Ann Duffy – Mrs. Midas

Tony Harrison – Loving Memory (I did have to look up the title of that)

Richard Wilbur – Transit

T.S. Eliot – The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

August Kleinzahler – Snow in North Jersey

Ted Hughes – October Dawn

W. B. Yeats - Byzantium

Rotten on Question Time

Question Time, BBC 1

You might think that Question Time was a tiresome weekly squabble between party apparatchiks and as predictable as pop music these days. And you'd be right.
Then they add John Lydon in to make it exciting and he is even more predictably dull in his worn-out postures and well-practised manner. Good grief. If they want to liven the show up, they must do better than this.
I wasn't detained by the programme for long. I've got Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse to look at for bedtime reading and so I adjourned. But I'm sure I heard John say he had a Barclays account. Has it really come to this.
So,

I  Wanna Bank Account 

to the tune of Anarchy in the UK

I want a bank account

I’ve got a large amount

I know what a loan is

And know how to get it

But I don’t need one,

You can forget it

Cos I wanna b-----ank account 

Bank accounts for the UK

Cash machine availability

I enjoy all the facilities

for just some more of my money 

I pay my visa bill

And use it at the till

It’s so convenient

To keep control of what you’ve spent

Cos I wanna  b-----ank account 

Is this my interest rate

Indexed-linked, I think it’s great,

Or is this the APR,

Or is this my brand new car

Cos I’ve got a b-----ank account.