Acclaim

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7h0yYT8U3E

This was a genuinely moving moment for me on Friday night. My favourite band from 30 years ago, in those dark days at a not very good University that has risen to number 11 in the University charts since I left. But Chic are better than ever even if Odyssey might have made better, sadder records at the time.
But what strikes me most about it, watching it again, is not the minimal riff and lyrics from which Nile Rodgers garners so much, and it's not even the great communal feeling, the invitation to dance on stage with Chic, no matter if you are not as glamorous as them.
It's the rapturous reception it gets. It reminds me of what happens whenever I mumble my way through one of my poems.

The Stones at Glastonbury

From time to time, when the occasion allows, I am happy to point out the success rate of the horse racing tips that I put on here.
If I could just refer you to the posting of 15/4. I recommended investment with Paddy Power on the first and last songs to be played by the Rolling Stones at Glastonbury.
I studied the previous form, I thought about it, and would have landed the double of Jumping Jack Flash and Satisfaction had doubles been allowed by the wily bookmaker.
Opinion seems to be divided on the Stones' performance between the obvious observation that it is embarrassing to see old men still trying to cut it and those who were overwhelmed to be in the presence of such a legend. My own opinion was divided during the show but Satisfaction was tremendous. I wouldn't want to have been there but, let us not be churlish or ungracious, the Stones enhanced their reputation last night.

Signed Poetry Books - P.J. Kavanagh

Acquisitions have been few and far between recently but a return to e-Bay found me a bargain Selected Poems by the admirable P.J. Kavanagh and so I relieved the vendor of it for not very much at all.
I had to check my own website to see if I had a signed Kavanagh or not because one's memory is starting to lose track. The next time I order a book that I already have won't be the first.
An interesting feature of this volume, though, is a typographical correction on page 71 in the same hand as the signature. I must include a reference to it in any talk I give to visitors to the collection. Admittedly I am not taking as many bookings as the Lindisfarne Gospels are getting for their trip to the North East but once word gets around I'll probably have to stay open late two nights a week.

Isle of Wight Walk

Starting in Yarmouth with 12 miles ahead of us and the weather only having made a promise to be better later, I wasn't overly enthused that this was going to be the best way I could have spent a day off. We set off on the flat and took the North West corner of the island with views across to Dorset and it wasn't so bad. But this was a walk that reached its climax in the second half.

An early highlight was Totland, a well-hidden beach resort in miniature but with the genuinely redolent scent of childhood seaside and a perfect liitle shop selling windmills and lightweight footballs.

I am the least fitted of our group nowadays for uphill stretches and only a fraction of the three stone overweight I carry was shed in perspiration but Alum Bay and the excellent value ice-cream there were some reward for those struggling efforts.
Back over Tennyson Down with its imposing monument to the great laureate included the second lunch stop after which it was downhill all the way. That didn't necessarily mean easy because the last couple of miles on the flat were a delicately interwoven composition of aching feet and running on empty. Although not wishing to take any pleasure in the discomfort of others, I was at least consoled to hear of the specific aches and pains of others to realize that I was not alone. 12 miles must be the giddy limit for my walking capacity these days.
So, the rewards were roughly commensurate with the pain at the time and once it is all over, one appreciates it the more.

But the day had a further highlight in store. Not even capable of the challenge of a late evening bottle of Merlot, I settled horizontally to enjoy once more a couple of episodes of The Office which kept me up long enough to see Chic's performance at Glastonbury.
My favourite act from over 30 years ago delivered what a memorable set, as good as any live performance I've seen for a long time and, I imagine, the best thing I've ever seen from Glastonbury. On the other channel, and presumably on a different stage at the same time, the Arctic Monkeys were grinding through their dismaying routine of indie posturing. There was simply no comparison. Nile Rodgers is a blinding talent, continually renewing his minimal but glorious deadpan dance music. I had as much of a disco as I could while supine and clapped out. Quite glorious.

The Perfect Murder

This week I posted the form to register the ISBN for The Perfect Murder and set its publication date at 17th October in line with recent tradition.
It's best that a couple of the poems don't see the light of day before having had their initial outings elsewhere.
I hope the cover will look something like this but it will depend on whether the copy shop and can do that and if it makes it cost any more.
It is the 14 poems that finally suggest themselves as suitable on what is generally a 4 year cycle of me producing such a booklet.
But, by all means, advance orders are welcome. E-mail dg217.888@ntlworld.com .
What else can you buy for two pound fifty.

Huelgas Ensemble - The Eton Choirbook

The Eton Choirbook, Huelgas Ensemble/Paul Van Nevel (Harmonia Mundi)

Modesty forbids somehow that a disc like this plasters advertisements for itself all over its cover. Paintings from the relevant period, which are as far as I can see uncredited, are the only outward show. It is only when one is in possession of the thing and reading the booklet that one is advised to partake of its contents ‘in moderate doses’, and

 it is best to listen to no more than one a day. After all, no one would visit five cathedrals in the space of a single day.

If we are generally led to believe that Byrd and Tallis represent the Golden Age of English music then we are being offred more and more of this music, from the Eton Choirbook, that shows not only where it had come from but that it built on a tradition that was well in place already even if Wilkinson hasn’t been accorded quite such household name status.

This is the state of English music in the late C15th and early C16th, and thus the home side that these islands could offer up against the genius of Josquin Des Prez, the possibly Belgian superstar who had followed in a tradition Ockeghem, Binchois and Dufay.

That Wilkinson was the best of them is primarily evidenced by the ever astonishing Jesu Autem Transiens, which isn’t here but it is noticed that it is his Salve Regina that is given the prime spot of finishing this set. And it is also suggested in the booklet that after his departure, for whatever reason, in 1515, that Eton was never quite as good as it had been before.

It is regrettable that the size of CD’s and their accoutrements are by necessity small and the eyesight of the likely target audience for a disc like this are going to struggle to enjoy the replica page from the Eton Choirbook, which measures 12 centimetres square. Its detail is compact and would have been much more enjoyable in the age of the gatefold LP cover, but we are also old enough to know that we can’t have everything and we have had most of it.    

It is William Horewud’s Magnificat that impresses most at first, apparently making the most of the available endless acoustic, but if there was ever a record to explain what ‘melisma’ is then this must be it. The text is provided but progress goes so slowly through it that it is almost impossible to say, with the naked eye, in which direction the music is flowing. Very much like the River Arar in Caesar’s De Bello Gallico. And an appreciation of that is surely something that we have lost in an age when the sophistry of anyone who thinks they need to look business-like uses the phrase ‘going forward’ at least once in every paragraph of their dismal blurb. The artists of 500 years ago had a much better idea of forever than we have now. In our world, finding ourselves yet again at Friday afternoon seems like the same sort of miracle.

Browne’s Stabat Mater builds and builds as if threatening overload and you can appreciate how Tallis didn’t just one day sit down and write Spem in alium, but was standing on the shoulders of giants. But it was as much an English tradition by then, and it is all in the book, rather than anything owed to those cool low country masters.

Wilkinson wasn’t to know that Tallis was going to crown it all any more than The Velvet Underground didn’t know that they set up several future generations of pop musicians with a perfect template or that poets now owe so much to Eliot and Ezra Pound, but a lot of them do whether they like it or not.

The next time you are at a dinner party and the talk drifts towards the best English composers, by all means nod and agree when Purcell and Elgar are mentioned. And then Tallis and Byrd. Nobody is going to disagree with that. But, just as you are leaving, you could say you had thought of Robert Wilkinson, pronounce it Wylkynson if you want, but didn’t care to mention him.

You will be invited back, if you wanted to be.

Sue Hubbard - The Forgetting and Remembering of Air

Sue Hubbard, The Forgetting and Remembering of Air (Salt)

I liked Sue Hubbard's booklet Venetian Blue very much twenty years ago and have looked out for poems by her since but not with all that much success. I obviously haven't been looking in the right places, though, because this is her third full-length collection and, presumably, one of Salt's last books of poems by an individual.
It is in three parts. The first are mainly descriptive poems, accessible and open-ended and dependent on the adjectives that carry them for their effect. For me, it began to become the same effect each time. They are often sensual, placed somewhere that art and nature meet and are enjoyable poems if not particularly remarkable. There is quite a lot of other poetry available like these but that doesn't make it intrinsically bad. In Klein's Blue, we end with Yves Klein in the staged photograph in which he jumped off a building to appear suspended in air,

for at night he dreamt only
of alchemy, of gravity and grace,

of stepping from that high
window to float above the city street
in a void of endless blue.

The best of these poems is perhaps The Ice Ship describing the discovery of the ship Octavius in 1775, adrift 13 years after being trapped in pack ice off Greenland, its crew,

                                                  penitent
as glass angels, black lips welded to alabaster tongues,

untold tales frost-bitten in their throats. Alone
  at his log, the Captain holds patient vigil,
awaiting a huff of divine breath.

But the second section, Over the Rainbow, is a more specific set of poems based on equally real stories, but all of them on female suicides. Judy Garland, as you might have already guessed, as well as Marilyn Monroe, Eva Braun, Assia Weevil and others. The most immediate is perhaps Dora Carrington, the painter, saved from the gas by her husband but desolate after the death of her lover, Lytton Strachey,

For what use is painting now?

Since Sue is also a writer on art, it comes as no surprise that a number of her poems come from painting and she does it well. Artists and their female models was a theme in Venetian Red, most memorably Rembrandt's then. Whereas some might say this recurrent motif puts a limit on her work, it makes for a different poem each time and I haven't found a poet yet, I don't think, whose every poem is a brand new start.
The final section, The Idea of Islands, is in some ways the most ambitious, with its ready-made notions of separation and seeking for contact in the dark, whether by lighthouse or across the 'untranslatable hieroglyphs on the sea's surface'. There are enough references to visceral nature, the wildness of the elements but I don't think it is 'visceral' poetry, or meant to be. They are reflected upon and considered rather than engaged with and Sue Hubbard's art is at that one remove that her pre-occupation with painting would suggest. And I like it that way.
It's not all paint, though. An early poem is called riverrun and we end on one called ...yes and you can't fault her for not having the right reference points.
I'm glad to have found her very much the same poet that I first read so many years ago, sustaining her sympathetic ideas over the length of a book so effectively.
    .

Private Passions - Sean O'Brien

I’ve never quite become a ‘completist’ in any field, not one of those fanatics who has developed the unruly compulsion to collect everything by their favourite artist. I don’t leave a Thom Gunn item unbought if I can help it, I’ll buy anything by The Magnetic Fields and catalogues of Maggi Hambling’s work are snapped up from time to time but one can’t have everything and I can’t see why one would want to. There lies yet another doorway into madness.

Thus it is that it didn’t immediately occur to me to review Sean O’Brien’s appearance on Radio 3’s Private Passions programme, the highbrow Desert Island Discs. He’s been on the wireless before. But, why not. He is among those artists who haven’t done much that there isn’t a copy of in this house.

It is an interesting exercise to go through the anthology of Desert Island Discs and see whose selections are closest to your own taste. It isn’t always those that you might imagine. One of my biggest heroes, the cricketer, Derek Randall, took The Sun Has Got His Hat On to his island with seven other records that were not even as good as that. But music was obviously not one of Derek’s main interests. He was a maverick middle order batsman. Oh, yes, now I remember what it was we had in common.

So, of Sean’s choices on this programme, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that I have only one of them. Steve Reich’s Different Trains. The ones I don’t have were by Vaughan Williams, Prokofiev, Lowell George, Debussy, Johnny Mercer, Schubert and Joseph Kosma. A bit louder, slightly funkier and more addled than the music that I count as my favourite. It’s probably true to say that most men’s choice of music is more macho than mine. If you haven’t seen August Kleinzahler’s book on Music, it is worth a look and then I’ll rest my case.

It was an interview that exemplifies why Radio 3 is by far the most essential of the radio, and even television, channels, though. Sean’s explanation of his fascination with Debussy as being the musical equivalent of symbolist poetry was useful as well as his comments that followed. The insight into the glorious Damascean moment in an English lesson at school where Mr. Grayson introduced the poetry of Eliot that made Sean a poet was moving even if the conversion was more gradual for some of us others. It might not matter if you fall in love in a moment or over a long time but it is a blessing as well as a cross to bear to have the feeling is that ‘poet’ is what you must be, for better or worse. But Sean’s idea that he gave up being a drummer in a band to get ‘a proper job’ only made me wonder which job that was.

Danny Baker’s eight records on Desert Island Discs were nothing like what he would seriously want to be stuck with indefinitely but were chosen on a theme. When I pick such a selection for fun, I am relentlessly highbrow and only then allow myself a couple of pop masterpieces because that is genuinely what I think I would want. Sean’s remit here wasn’t quite that, though, and so it isn’t a question of whether this is the music he would want to live with. But it wouldn’t be so bad if it was. These weren’t choices chosen for effect. They are entirely credible. The Steve Reich piece is a great art piece. It’s just that, for me, it’s like the Rembrandt that is a great painting but you wouldn’t have it on your wall. Sean eschews the temptation of advertising an interest in Coltrane (if he even has one) and remains on the interesting left of centre, the challenging borders of the mainstream, without ever saying anything that makes you think he’s trying too hard or is actually a fruitcake. That is as much as one can ask.

View from the Boundary

The other night I did a rare thing and went and picked two CD's off the shelves to play rather than play one of the several more recent purchases or regular favourites that are piled by the computer. Some of those old discs have been there for a decade or more than that without being so much as looked at and some will probably never be played again and so the least they deserve is the random consideration of being given another chance.
The two that I picked (and it could have been almost anything) were The Mighty Diamonds and Hugh Mundell. There was nothing wrong with them at all but they did just slightly disappoint and certainly failed to live up to the opinions I had of them.
It isn't possible to keep listening to and re-reading everything and so there is a vast back catalogue of neglected things that might still be classic, or somehow got even better as they mature in the bottle, or might of course not be quite as good now as one remembers. I don't think you can guess which it will be until you've got them out and given them a try.
The Mighty Diamonds' fine harmonies seemed just less than gorgeous and Hugh Mundell, once a big favourite whose records I went to some lengths to find, just sounded a bit thin now. But perhaps I was expecting too much. The music hasn't changed and so it must be me that has.
On the other hand, the last meeting on the programme of the Portsmouth Poetry Society before the summer recess is on Tony Harrison. It certainly isn't ten years since I last looked at him but 'week collapses into week' and then months have gone by. I needed to choose a couple of things to read at the meeting and was immediately struck by the fact that they had lost nothing in that time. That might be because relatively little has appeared in recent years that was so instantaneously majesterial or it might be that some things are genuinely 'not of an age but for all time'.
What one is left with is only the opinion of work the last time you encountered it and there is no telling how many of those estimations have gone out of date. There isn't time to reconsider everything to revise them all either. So when one thinks that Bowie and Bolan were great, that is safe enough because one still hears them and time has only served to fortify their reputations. I'm waiting for discs of Heinrich Biber and The Eton Choirbook to arrive, relatively new to me in the long view but hundreds of years old and impregnable. But I wonder how well the stories and novels of William Trevor have lasted, who was a big hero of mine in the 1980's. Is that stylised, understated domestic loss and disappointment, the sense of the secrets of the past lurking behind a disconcerting present still as poignant and well done as it seemed then. I would hope that the best of it is but I'm not going to be able to find out just yet because today's deliveries are a fairly recent book of poems by Sue Hubbard and Susan Brigden's biography of Thomas Wyatt, which should keep me amused for a while.

James Salter - All That Is

James Salter, All That Is (Picador)

This book was so overwhelmingly well received by its reviewer in The Times that it ddn't seem like an option not to get a copy and read it. Some such recommendations are essential signposts and I will rarely be more grateful for a newspaper notice than the one in the same paper about a decade ago that directed me to Richard Yates before the revival of his reputation.
Philip Bowman survives the Battle of Okinawa and returns home with little experience of women but into a career in publishing. He marries his first proper girlfriend somewhat gratefully and finds intimacy with her to be of monumental significance. But, eventually, his wife has to suggest that they don't have much in common and they are divorced. Subsequently Bowman has further relationships and each time it is apparently dependent on the physical part of it rather than emotional.
Throughout the story, he meets any number of contacts in the industry and as the novel becomes episodic, their back stories are filled in and the men all seem to feel the same way and so one is tempted to deduce that this is not specific to Bowman but applies to Salter, possibly to all American men and, perhaps in Salter's view, to all men,
The great humger of the past was for food, there was never enough food and the majority of people were undernourished or starving, but the new hunger was for sex, there was the same specter of famine without it.
It is not that there is any fault with the writing but, at about halfway I was beginning to wonder if any more was going to happen than this ongoing catalogue of obsession with a transcendental new toy that so often lost its lustre before its adherents went their separate ways to new alliances. Perhaps it is an analysis of the mores of the post-war world, from 1945 to the 1980's. Since the book was so readily lauded and has blurbs by an impressive cast of John Banville, Edmund White and Julian Barnes, I can only assume that there was some truth contained in these accumulated episodes that linked together to tell of a higher truth about 'all that is' that passed me by because although it was not a hardship to sit and read it, it still seemed inconsequential by the time I reached the end.
The penultimate page sweeps up a summary of the life looked back on, like the life flashing back as it is said to do as one dies, but Bowman is not apparently dying, only planning a trip to Venice. It reads like an attempt to recreate the consummate ending to The Dead by Joyce but it is no more than a mildly lyrical synopsis of what we have just read.
And so, I was left at a loss to see what had made the book so great for several readers whose qualifications to appreciate it are all so much finer than mine. I knew from the start that it was going to need to be good because it followed on from my re-reading of McEwan's Sweet Tooth, which is a masterpiece if ever I read one, and so it had a job on but, with the sort of billing it had, it had seemed as if it might be up to the challenge.
You can't win them all. If it's me that has missed the point it is my loss entirely.

Sugar and Spice

This week's Portsmouth Poetry Society meeting was on Gender in Poetry.

One does have to tread carefully in these sensitive days and there might have been a danger at times of an assumption that girls are made of sugar and spice and all things nice and boys are horrid but it was noticeable that whenever a poem was read without the gender of its author being known, the vote usually got it wrong and I found that reassuring, especially as I voted for the wrong side every time.

I had introduced the subject thus,

Gender in Poetry – Is there a difference between poetry written by women and by men. 

Anthologies that bring together poems under titles such as Scottish poetry, C16th verse, Carribean poetry, Chinese Verse or on a theme of childhood suggest that such selections have common themes, issues or styles that make it significant or of interest to read them together. There are also such books as The Faber Book of Women’s Poetry. The question seen from that perspective seems to ask what is there that those poems share apart from not being written by men.

When I was at University, from 1978-81, the prevailing orthodoxy on the Stylistics and Criticism course was the primacy of the text based on the ‘intentional fallacy’ of Wimsatt and Beardsley, the ‘death of the author’ announced by Roland Barthes and the analytical methods of Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short, all of which concentrated on the text as the object of study to the exclusion of extraneous detail such as the biographical details of the author, or even who they were. I took this to mean that poetry was made of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. and the way they were assembled and the way they functioned was the same whether put together by male or female, and I thought that for at least a couple of decades.

However, the orthodoxy changed, as they usually do and, as they often do, it took a complete about turn. Literary biography became the new fashion and started to concentrate on how the poetry informed us of the life, although why a poet’s life was deemed to be so much more interesting and suitable for such investigation than that of a grocer was never made clear.

It didn’t really dawn on me that there might be a decisive difference between women’s poems and men’s until a reading by Deryn Rees-Jones at Oxford in 2007 after which I thought that those particular poems wouldn’t have been written by a man.

We have had our thunder stolen somewhat in discussing this issue by the winter edition of Poetry Review, which included a piece by Pascale Petit entitled, Do Women Poets Write Differently To Men? In it, she mentions women’s ‘closer relationship with the body, and its wonder, shock and messiness’. This is the sort of thing I thought I found in Deryn’s reading, with a closer engagement with personal feelings as well as physicality.

However, Pascale expresses the significant reservation that ‘it might be more useful to think in terms of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ poetry rather than the division of gender, and that some men write feminine poems and some women masculine poems.’

There are plenty of theories about the differences between the genders, including Virginia Woolf’s identification in To the Lighthouse of the ‘arid scimitar’ of the male and a female ‘rapture of successful creation’, or the perceived polarities of logic and intuition.

Some themes are likely to be of more interest to one gender than another. Kate Clanchy’s first three volumes- Slattern, Samarkand and Newborn - might be read as a progress through courtship, home-making and childbirth, for instance, but these are tendencies or generalizations that we might identify rather than inviolable laws.

Another possible difference suggested by Pascale Petit is that women’s poetry is that of ‘outsiders’ in a world where men are ‘central’. On a more radically feminist agenda I have heard it suggested that the ‘I’ in poetry stands for something male and stands thus for the suppression of the female. I’m sure there would be plenty of objections from male poets (me, at least) that we can also feel like outsiders and we have absolutely no designs on making the ‘I’ specifically male.

Pascale’s conclusion is that women do write differently to men but she acknowledges that ‘for many, gender is not relevant to their craft’.

As with most of the commonly identified divisions in the population- like ethnicity, religion, etc.- I prefer to consider us all as individuals, each in a minority of one, rather than in blocks that assume whole sections of the demographic can be bundled together.