Bach - A Passionate Life

One can have too much of a good thing. Radio 3's recent Baroque Spring has left even me thinking once or twice that I might have heard enough glorious embellishment, clever patterning and decorous melancholy for the time being. Putting on good manners all the time will eventually make even the best of us want to be gratuitously rude.
But there was no such problem with John Eliot Gardiner's film on the life of Bach, last night BBC 2, http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01rrgg6/Bach_A_Passionate_Life/. It was well-organized, illustrated with performances by the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, and beautifully photographed with lots of German snow on the leafless trees near relevant churches.
Gardiner set out to discover the 'real' Bach beneath or inside the music, the personality we seem to know so little of within the music we know so well. It's been done before with Bach's great rival for the title of 'Greatest Artist of All Time', Shakespeare, and perhaps what happens is that we all find the hero we were looking for but that is not to cast any aspersions on Gardiner's ideas, his account of the life or the several insights he takes from documentary evidence.
An early fracas with a bassoon player has Bach deliberately giving the woodwind man a fiendishly difficult part and it resulted in the composer drawing his sword. I hadn't imagined Bach carrying a sword for a start. There is a manuscript with ink smeared on it where Kuhnau has corrected his mis-spelt Bacch, the ink allegedly providing forensic proof that Bach looked over the shoulder of his copyist, saw the error and cuffed him over the head. We saw letters in which Bach is chronically vexed and frustrated and everything is somebody else's fault. And, perhaps best of all, was the submission that The Art of Fugue doesn't end just as he has introduced the theme on B-A-C-H and then died, but that he left it like that deliberately (and then died).
For anyone totally devoted to the cause- and my own reaction was to start making a mental list of all the CD's I needed to order- they could use the red button to access five hours' worth of the complete performances of the pieces from which the extracts had been taken. I don't think anyone should criticize the BBC for anything when they can provide things like that.
I haven't been gripped by anything on television for quite some time, well, apart from the finishes of a few of the races I won on at Cheltenham the other week, and I can't immediately think of any other programme I have enjoyed quite so much in recent years. For many years. Perhaps ever.
What a tremendous programme. I vote we put the licence fee up by 50% if we can have more like it.

Paul Muldoon - The Word on the Street

Paul Muldoon, The Word on the Street (Faber)

Bookshops had their uses and still do. Rather than sit here and order anything with one flick of the wrist, you could scrutinize it before deciding on the purchase.
Although in retrospect, it might look clear enough that this is somewhat less than a new book of Muldoon poems, the blurb sounded as if they might be poems that could also, and do, serve as the words to 'rock' songs. It might have been Muldoon's new direction, perhaps having thought he had gone as far as he could with his poetry modus operandi.
I remember Bono praising the facility of Salman Rushdie who had written a few verses of lyrics at the time of the novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. But it can't be that difficult for someone who has written a number of monumental, exuberant novels to knock out a few lines to go with a big U2 riff.
Some of the songs here can be found at the website of the band, The Wayside Shrines, http://waysideshrines.org/ where they can be appreciated as they were surely intended to be. While Muldoon is at least as inventive and imaginative as most pop song writers and more so, the words on their own are only half of the piece, the other half of a karaoke backing track, and few if any pop songs can be expected to succeed as poems without the music they are set to. And as it stands I don't think they are satisfying on their own because Muldoon isn't quite in the same category as a songwriter as Stephin Merritt or Elvis Costello any more than you would expect those two masters of the craft to succeed as poets in the way that Muldoon does, which is good enough to almost give his name to the period he is writing in.
In Jersey Shores, we get,

I think of Botticelli
When he juxtaposes
In the Sistine Chapel
The foundling Moses
With Jesus in the creche

which, one accepts, is more sophisticated than, say,

Sugar,
Ah, Honey, Honey,
You are my candy girl
And you got me wanting you

but The Archies works very well for me, and no more sophistication is required, but unfortunately Jersey Shores is not one of the tracks available on the website so we can't judge how well it works as a song.
There is plenty to like about The Wayside Shrines but the feeling remains that this book is an opportunity for Muldoon adherents to buy a promo for the album. I am very much a fan of Paul Muldoon as a poet without being a devoted completist but this collection is not something, I think, to put alongside the likes of The Annals of Chile, Hay or Maggot and, nor, I dare say, was intended to be.
A lot of cricketers really want to be golfers; some footballers become racehorse owners, or even trainers; there are poets who want to be rock musicians. It must be accountants whose ambition it is to be poets.
And so, by all means, if you need everything by Muldoon in the same way that I need anything and everything by Thom Gunn, then it's a fine thing and you must have it. But if you are only an admirer of one of the finest poets in the English language of the present day, I wouldn't think you'd need it.

Suede - Bloodsports

Suede, Bloodsports (Suede Ltd.)

Word had it that Suede had reformed and had produced an album to compare with their best as if that had come as some surprise. I don't know why it would. Brett hadn't been idle in the meantime and The Tears, with Bernard Butler back on good, or at least workable, terms had been an excellent project.
Brett had done his solo albums, of which the received opinion was that they were morose, maudlin and below par, but that was surely only to add the requisite period of drug dependancy to his rock star CV and credentials.
But, yes, this uses the same template as Head Music, perhaps more so than the more angular Dog Man Star but it is a good thing rather than a criticism to say it is very much more of the same. A celebration of tawdry glamour with busy embellishments from Richard Oakes's guitar.
It would be reasonable to suggest that by track 8 the album has revealed its adherence to the track ordering system that comes with CDs rather than LPs in which you stack up your best ammunition from the top and hope that some residual long finish from the early tracks carries over to make the later ones seem better but it did last until track 8 before I noticed that. The last tracks are the slower ones. It wasn't that Suede couldn't do slow ones before but these do sound a bit self-indulgent and perhaps he's lost the feeling of Saturday Night by now. After that, I simply don't know if the four bonus i-tunes tracks form part of the work under consideration or not. Where does it all end.
So, of course, Barriers stands alongside the best of their output. At least the first half of the album is as if they had never been away. A classic English band and a proper songwriter, it would have been a shame if they hadn't come back and done it all at least one more time.

Singular and plurality, George

In today's budget speech, George Osborne announced that he was cutting the duty on beer 'by one pence'.

Oh, no, you're not, you Bullingdon oik.

'Pence' is the plural which you would use if there were more than one. When there is only one, you use the singular, which is 'penny'.

It's a shame your very expensive education didn't make sure you left university aware of that.

Fiction

Where do poems come from. Different places for different poets, I suspect.

I've never been a 'natural' poet. I once read something that John Tavener had said that his head was always full of music and he just had to get it down on paper. I would be the opposite of that. My head is certainly full of words and sometimes even the occasional idea but they rarely suggest themselves as a poem that needs writing. For two or three decades now, I've accepted that if I produce four poems a year that I consider are worth keeping then I am up to speed. And they said Larkin was 'perfectionist' and frugal. And some people also said that he was any good.
This poem came as several of mine have, very tangentially. In last night's (very good) BBC remake of The Lady Vanishes, one of the well-to-do was idly reading a book and, as happens in this kind of epiphany, I saw my poem. The best previous example of this was many years ago when watching a programme about some old art masterpiece in which the commentator said, 'and in the corner there is an astrolabe by Tycho Brahe'. I couldn't concentrate on any more of the programme. There was a poem in Tycho Brahe. I think there were six or seven in the end.
And so, here we are. The ache of that feeling that it is about time one wrote a poem is over for another couple of months or more. This is only a first go and so might not pass the test of reading it again a few days later but it does a few things I like. I hope. This is supposed to be my poetry website and so it ought to have a new poem by me on it more often than it does.
But then, once in a while, I think I ought to submit a few poems to a magazine or enter a competition. And one wouldn't want to offend such stipulations as 'submissions should not have been published or appeared on the internet before'. Fair enough. Except that it leaves me with very little ammunition to send anywhere else.
Well, that is too bad.
At poetry readings, I often much prefer the introductions to poems and the poet's comments in between them to the poems themselves. Even at readings by poets I really admire. More so, if anything. And at the last meeting of the Portsmouth Poetry Society, one forthright member more or less told me to 'get on with it', saying very kindly that she 'couldn't wait' to hear the poem but really meaning, 'shut up waffling'.
We will have to agree to differ on that, my dear.
But, yes. Eventually. The poem. Lds & Gnlmn, Fiction. And, I hope you'll agree, not a remake of Larkin's poem on a similar subject. Or maybe it is.

Fiction 

I read cheap novels for the whole two weeks.

The sun shone all the time. I went for walks.

I wondered whether to have an affair. 

I spent the evenings in a local bar,

drinking tequila slammers while I read,

until one night when I was just about 

to leave, a stunning blonde in a red frock

approached and asked if I would like a drink.

I put down my paperback while music 

by Burt Bacharach played gently somewhere-

I don’t know where it was- and said okay.

We talked while we sipped our drinks, mostly in  

French. She with a Russian accent, me still

with a trace of Nottingham in mine.

And, for some reason that I still can’t explain, 

when she said she thought I might be a spy,

I said I was but asked her not to tell

anyone. And she said that she had known 

because she was one, too. We danced a dance

or two to make it look as if we were two

lonely people who had met there and then. 

But, of course, it was all part of the plot,

and there I was again, passwords exchanged,

trapped in a story I had read before.

The Echo Chamber

The Echo Chamber has been occupying the Poetry Please slot on Radio 4, Sunday afternoons, 4.30, to good effect recently.
Paul Farley introduces a selection of poets reading their own work assembled approximately around one of those vague themes that such projects seem to like so much. But it's good. Leontia Flynn and Jacob Polley have impressed as much as any among the talent so far on view.
It makes one wonder if some sort of magazine like this couldn't be made a regular thing, on Radio 3, hidden away late one night, once a month. Twenty minutes would do. There were once such programmes but now it has to be all-inclusive, wide-ranging, eclectic and esoteric like the bloody Verb, with the enthusiasm of a nine year old, everything's fantastic and here's another performance poet from Hackney. There is a time and place for everything and a considered gathering of sensible mainstream, quality poets would not go amiss.
The last of this series of The Echo Chamber is this afternoon, I think. I hope it comes back soon.

The New One

Yes, I know. This is supposed to be a books and poetry website but, up to a point, one has to do what one is good at and tipping horses on here is proving more successful at present than writing poems or reviewing them.
The New One defied massive Irish confidence in Pont Alexandre as well as a recent malaise in his own stable to produce a hugely impressive finish to land the nap for my Cheltenham Festival Preview at a quite generous price this afternoon and if you didn't take advantage of my advice then I'm afraid you only have yourself to blame.
You make yourself what you want to be, don't you.
The example of George Best made me want to be a footballer and, aged about 10 or 11, I convinced myself that I had replicated one of his goals by side-stepping the goalie and passing it into the goal, playing for Dinglewell Junior School in about 1970.
I don't know if I had one model that made me want to play cricket but the feel of hitting boundaries off the middle of the bat- every so often- was a drug not quite equalled by knocking the stumps over as a bowler.
It would have been seeing the list of titles of Thom Gunn's books- Fighting Terms, The Sense of Movement, My Sad Captains, Touch, Moly, etc. that made me want to have a list of my own. And now I have- Museum, Mute, Reptiles in Love, Re-Reading Derrida on a Train, Walking on Water, The Last of the Great Dancers and, hopefully eventually, The Perfect Murder.
Apart from the fascination with the numbers that used to come up on black and white television screens before the mysterious horse races, it was also partly the influence of my grandfather that made horse racing seem like some esoteric enterprise that I felt I ought to know something about but the real moment of conversion was probably seeing a young Alex Higgins on A Question of Sport identifying races from their finish. It might only have been obvious things like the previous year's Champion Hurdle but I was impressed and immediately wanted to be able to do such a thing. And now, it looks as if I can.
The advice offered here on horse racing has, so far, been overall worth following. It seems to me a sort of magic that once had been unfathomable but has become possible. Heaven knows how much it cost me to learn.
But that is enough of the vainglorious self- congratulation. Good for me. In those various spheres, I became something like what I wanted to be. But the success of it might only be measurable by seeing how many people want to emulate that and become like me. I can't imagine there would be very many.

Simonsig

There have been certainties to bet on at better odds than 1/2 before. The last two American Presidential Elections were two of them but something sometimes holds you back and you just can't do it.
I've just been reading A.P. McCoy's autobiography in which he reveals that Martin Pipe legged him up on one at Cheltenham and then told him that it was the biggest certainty ever to set foot on a racecourse. And it won.
I don't have such inside knowledge but Simonsig looks as close to such a thing as I've ever seen before in tomorrow's Arkle Chase. 8/13 is a steal when he should surely be 1/4.
But there is no such thing as a certainty. Is all I'm saying.

What to Read

I don't know. I don't know what to read. I made a rare visit to the library recently and came out with McEwan's Amsterdam and A.P. McCoy's Autobiography.
The first is not McEwan's best but it was of its time and perfectly okay. The problem with sports memoirs is, of course, the ghost writer trying to sound like his subject but although a life of constantly riding winners is a bit repetitive, one can appreciate McCoy's story of being perennial champion by being a driven man impervious to pain and injury.
But with now a few days off, I will shortly need more books to read in between watching the cash roll in from Gloucestershire and so I spent a long time on Amazon looking for ideas. What were all those books I really ought to have read. How many of them are still high enough priority to give them the time of day. Balzac was selected and then passed over, then one of the biographies of Francis Walsingham that I thought about a few years ago. Richard Bradford, having done books on Larkin and Amis pere et fils has since filled in with one on Larkin and Kingsley Amis's relationship. And I thought I was recycling old material on here.
I came away with a book by a professional gambler and Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum. And so we will see. Paul Muldoon and Glyn Maxwell have books due soon and so we won't run out of ideas completely but I am starting to get a feeling of what it is like being a pointless celebrity.
I have some photos taken to update the website but I haven't written a poem for some months and don't have enough yet to make up a new booklet. The website hasn't reviewed a new book for a while and, although it is supposed to be about books and poetry, I don't have any new music to review and I won't return to horse racing journalism until October.
And so I have photos taken of me to put on the internet. And that, it seems, is what I do these days. It is a bit weird but at least I know what it's like being Victoria Beckham. Except I look more cheerful about it.

eec at PPS

The subject of the Portsmouth Poetry Society meeting on 20th March is e.e.cummings, a poetry hero of mine when I was a teenager and one whose appeal has lasted. And so, since it was one of my suggestions for the programme, I will introduce it. And I will introduce it thus-

e. e. cummings

e.e.cummings has been accorded the rare honour of conventionally having his name written in lower case in respect of his poetic practice.
Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Mass. in 1894 and died in 1962 and is one of the most instantly recognizable of poets by virtue of his distinctive style. He once explained that the small ‘i’ in his poems was perhaps less of an aberration than it looks as ‘did it never strike you as significant that, of all God’schildren, only English and American apotheosize their egos by capitalizing a pronoun’.
But his use of the lower case, with unorthodox capitalization elsewhere, was only one of many typographical effects that he used, including punctuation, elision and fragmentation of words and the arrangement of lines across the page. While the last of these might refer us back to a poet like George Herbert who wrote poems in which the lines made a shape, we can more accurately identify the influences if Ezra Pound’s Imagist economy with words and perhaps the lovestruck dreaminess of Keats in cummings’ poetry but the most striking kinship, it seems to me, would be with the maverick, sometimes eccentric, composer, Erik Satie.
Cummings takes the attitude of an innocent observer in a world that is in in Just-Spring, ‘mud-luscious’ and ‘puddle-wonderful’, who has a teenager’s propensity for and keenness in love, but it is surely a faux-naïve persona that he adopts because he is equally capable of social and political satire in a world of lost innocence, as we can see in next to of course god america in which the empty clichés of political rhetoric are parodied. Not all readers are enamoured with this approach and some find it, I think, a bit fey and whimsical, in the same way that The Catcher in the Rye can divide readers into those who idolize it and those who think it is an extended adolescent whinge. It seemed to me that among the Liverpool poets, Adrian Henri took the part of Allen Ginsberg in a ‘lite’ version whereas Roger McGough for the most part recycled the cummings whimsy.
Two poems that defy reading out loud are the ‘grasshopper’ poem in which we see the grasshopper arrange itself for flight and spring into being while the text in between reads,

who as we look up now gathering to leaps arriving to rearrangingly become

and l(a, which we might read aloud, but also diminish in the process, as ‘a leaf falls; loneliness’.
But one of my favourite of cummings’ expressions of precious innocence in a mad or wicked world is the greedy the people in which,

they flock and they flee
through a thunder of seem
though the stars in their silence
say Be

The conclusion arrived at in Bethany Dumas’s book A Remembrance of Miracles is that,

His description of himself as ‘an author of pictures, less a draughtsman of words’ re-inforces our own conviction that as a poet he was the most traditional of innovators and the most innovative of traditionalists.
The avant-garde is beset with dull theorists whose programme and ideology come before their poems but cummings remains fresh, for me at least, as a genuinely idiosyncratic original.

--

I won't read any poems but invite the meeting to look at two examples of cummings' work which defy being read out loud.

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r   

 

 

                             r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r

                      who

  a)s w(e loo)k

  upnowgath

                  PPEGORHRASS

                                        eringint(o-

  aThe):l

             eA

                 !p:

S                                                         a

                          (r

  rIvInG                         .gRrEaPsPhOs)

                                                         to

  rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly

  ,grasshopper; 

 

 

l(a

le
af
fa

ll

s)
one
l

iness

Photo shoot

You probably know what it's like being a major literary figure forever being required to sign books, turn up at places and be nice to people and have your photo taken for publicity purposes.
But I don't. I have to arrange my own photo shoot if I need some new pictures to put on the website. I have to buy my own Dimitar Berbatov t-shirt to express my statement of intent and I have to ask my mate to take the pictures.
But at least now I have some recent pictures to use. It wasn't a poetry reading, it was a short series of studio poses including this one based on one struck by Dusty Springfield singing You Don't Have to Say You Love Me. I can see that without the mascara and blonde wig it isn't quite the same but there don't seem to be any pictures of Larkin or Ted Hughes attempting anything so audacious. 
The early part of the year has always been a difficult time to find things to add to the website. I hope things will begin to start moving a bit quicker soon.