Satire

Satire 

as if from the Latin 

Tell me, Satirist, about your satires.

Why is it necessary to malign

your rivals and ridicule those poets

whose efforts, you seem to think, are worthy

only of your disdain. Torment enough

for them it should be to live with their own

shortcomings and delusions of greatness.

Surely you are in error to believe

that these uncharitable jibes enhance

your own verses or, through them, your status. 

The well-dressed man moves easily through town

secure in the knowledge that nobody

will pity him on account of his poor

couture but he displays no tendency

to criticize the vagabond without

the means to disport with such elegance.

But neither is he a dandy, too keen

to parade flamboyantly in search of

the attention of others. Such poets,

one could construe, are hardly much better. 

Save your surliness for the coffee house

and your conceit for your lounge bar cohorts

where they can be enjoyed for what they are,

merely extemporized and short-lived wit,

before they disappear with the same haste

that they arrived. Your like-minded cronies

will slap your back but you’ll not be admired

as you make your way home. They don’t belong

in print for the author of sarcastic

verses is the lowest form of poet.

Holiday

A number of things pertaining to one's circumstances have made me think I ought to be going on some sort of holiday this year. One of them is that my passport runs out next year and perhaps I ought to use it and the other is that I suddenly feel well off.
Germany has been decided upon as the destination of choice, specifically Cologne and Berlin by train. Whether or not this actually happens remains to be seen. The initial enthusiasm is waning as it is tempered by doubts about travel, language, hotel etiquette, general anxiety and what on earth is one supposed to do all day. A small part of what I take from Philip Larkin as a poet, or try to, is his declaration that he wouldn't mind going to China if he could come back the same day.
And how can I expect to have a better time there than the last few days I have had going to Swindon. Here are just a few highlights.
I saw this remarkable construction in Cosham which I took to be a crane but am now informed was pumping concrete up and over the outside of the building to fill in the insides.
I took a ride on a one coach train, a wonderfully out of the way branch line from Westbury to Swindon which only had two other people in it until a few more got on at the next stop, including a mother and three children who sat right behind me and as soon as the train set off, one of the kids bawled out, 'WE'RE ON THE WRONG TRAIN', which they were. I commissioned a new portrait, provisionally entitled Fat Poet with His Mother's Dog. But the highlight was surely witnessing the bike racing debut of my neice, Laura, in the Swindon Road Club evening '10'. It was quite an emotional thing for me, really, seeing a new generation take to time trialling and what a stylish rider she looks.
It was all good, not least that her admirable effort of 32.42 was good enough to beat a handful of other competitors but not quite good enough to beat the sort of times I used to do when I was three stone lighter and about 20 years younger.

Happy 450th Birthday

Had Shakespeare not died on 23rd April, 1616, and then avoided any subsequent illness, he would have been 450 years old today or hereabouts.
Of course, tradition marks the birthday on April 23rd to fall in with St. George's Day and the date of his death but while he certainly died on his birthday, he probably wasn't born on it (an observation I never miss a chance of making). The documentary evidence we have is a record of his baptism on 26th and so you knock a few days off of that to arrive at whichever date of birth you prefer.

Discussion on the wireless yesterday evening asked if his reputation was deserved, if he is as good as is suggested. Surely nobody could be quite as good as this reputation. Some pertinent points were made.
As can be seen to happen in cases like this, we take our model from a paragon example and then should not be surprised to find that the paragon example fits our criteria of excellence the best. Bach and The Beatles seem almost unassailable in their genres in the same way that Shakespeare is 'the greatest writer ever'. Shakespeare represents something human, expressive and rambling compared to Classical models of discipline, order and convention and with Western culture showing no sign of recovering from its infatuation with Romanticism and individuality, his position looks safe for a long time yet. But such things can be surprisingly fluid and so you never can tell.
It was also suggested that Shakespeare has ceased to be a centre of light and creativity from which all things emerge and become a black hole into which everyone throws themselves. Each generation, each branch of thought, tries to claim Shakespeare as their own and Shakespeare swallows them up. But perhaps we no longer take the view that Shakespeare has something to teach. He seems to be astonishingly neutral on many issues and certainly should not, for example, be taken as a patriot just because some of his characters speak in patriotic terms. He was a poet and we don't necessarily expect poets, or the process of poetry, to have opinions these days.
He was accused of many things including being a capitalist. A number of eminent names who found fault can be lined up - Tolstoy, Shaw, Wittgenstein. But, heaven knows, give the man a break. It is very difficult to see his work as it would have been seen 400 years ago. See how absurd some popular music of the 1960's and 70's sounds to us already but I remember Tonto's Expanding Head Band being considered state of the art.
The answer to whether he was any good is surely implicit in the fact that 450 years after he was born, the subject is still worthy of discussion. It is not his fault that once the work has left his desk, been performed, published and gone into the world, there is no more the author can do to save it.
For me, anybody who wrote,
                       Light thickens; and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood: 

is a poet worthy of the name and the fact that he did equally good things time and again enhances his standing each time. But perhaps the most telling tribute is how he withstands generation after generation of academics coming to scrutinize every aspect yet again and he remains as fresh as ever.

Happy Birthday to him. By moving it to April 21st, his 450th can be marked on the same day as other great English icons like Charlotte Bronte (198) and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (88). What a coincidence.

The Answer to Question 9

This is an exam from a University in India, http://setexam.unipune.ac.in/QnPapers/17Feb13/FEB-03313.pdf. Just in case this link one day stops working I have captured the relevant bit.

It is a strange exam, with two and a half hours to do 75 multiple choice questions, several of which spell proper names wrongly, some of which appear absurdly easy and some of which look contentious to me.
But it came as some surprise to find myself the answer to question 9.

Troglodytes

There haven't been many new poems on here recently but nobody has complained about that.
Sometimes they just don't happen and sometimes if they do, I don't always put them here.

Two favourite targets of mine to make merry with in recent years are perhaps all the more so because of the high regard, or particular fascination, I held them in during the 1970's when I was an impressionable teenager. They are the avant garde and campus Marxists (but not necessarily Marx himself).
Then I regarded bookshops or libraries as places full of things worthy of my attention that it was up to me to find out about. It has taken a long time to realize that I'm not interested in a lot of it and some of it isn't much good, either.
The few poems I have toward any new booklet are beginning to look somewhat curmudgeonly with unflattering sketches of cavaliers and teenagers among them. It might soon begin to look like a book of Satires in the spirit of Juvenal or Horace. But I doubt it. There is a long time to go before any new title is to be considered and by then these few poems might not be very prominent in the selection.

Troglodytes

 

Campus Marxists 

They told themselves the time of day

and it was always half past four

on sun-drenched bourgeois afternoons. 

But it’s dark so far underground

where moles tunnel through acrid soil

disseminating furtive plots, 

where time stands still, strangely enough,

and what was inevitable

was indefinitely postponed. 

So old-fashioned and orthodox,

and some with Jesus Christ haircuts,

how odd their hard-won piety 

resembled most the religion

that they denied and ridiculed,

quoting chapter and verse to prove 

something they had known all along

while smoking their own opium.

Recent Reading

I ordered Kate Atkinson's Life After Life from Amazon as soon as it was published in paperback but it still hasn't arrived. It has been top of the paperback bestsellers for weeks after weeks but all Amazon can do is send e-mails apologizing for the delay and giving me the opportunity to cancel the order. Oh, no, you don't get out of it that easily. I wonder if they advertised it at such a competitive price that they find they can't now do it at that. I don't know. Let us let the order stand and see what happens. It's not as if there aren't other books to read.
Continuing a sustained period of immersion in long novels, I've begun Trollope's The Way We Live Now, which follows a winter of Donna Tartt and, most recently,

George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin) 

Having sat in front of these 900 pages in the summer of 1979 and thought it a worthy book and gaining a slight grasp of its central story lines, I came back to Middlemarch 35 years later to reflect what a waste of time that was and that such a marvellous book is much better appreciated by a more mature reader.
Of course, it takes its time but it is immaculately judged, meticulously worked out and its understated tone of worldly sense combines its themes in what has been praised in various ways as 'the closest thing to War and Peace in English literature' and a proper, grown-up novel.
It is important that it is provincial, and Coventry counted as provincial then as presumably everywhere outside of the M25 does now. There are the ways that the aspirations or proper places in the world for each character fit unsatisfactorily with the situations they find themselves in. Dorothea would appear to be a saintly figure, by the estimation of others as well as perhaps her own idealized view of her own well-meant hopes, but even she accepts less than she was perhaps due, or maybe that was her due and she is happy enough with it.
Lydgate's ambitions are diminished from high-minded research and achievement to merely earning a living serving those who can afford him while Casaubon's dessicated academic pursuits dry him out so much that he dies to release Dorothea into a codicil that means she can't be both rich and happily married. Eliot's writing in the passages with her and Will are tremendous.
Fred Vincy is reformed, Bulstrode is ruined, characters are given tellingly suitable names and, for the most part, it ends happily enough ever after with illusions dispelled and, with a finely-tuned moral compass, Eliot resolves the complex network of relationships and social structure in a sublimely well-made book.
My slip of paper forever to be left in my old copy has 11 page references to look back on where there were brilliant passages, either of thematic or almost 'poetic' value. I'm not going to bore you with all of them but I loved, when after 644 previous pages, Eliot can still write,
News is often dispersed as thoughtlessly and effectively as that pollen which the bees carry off (having no idea how powdery they are)

Brilliant. Rather against my expectation (because I wasn't sure how far I was going to go with it at first), it has to be one of the finest novels in the language.

And then I picked up a copy of this from a table of second hand books, which I will pay for when I get the opportunity,

John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells (Murray)

I suppose I thought I'd already read this but until seeing the whole poem together like this I probably hadn't realized that I'd only seen extracts.
For those of us of the right age to have become aware that there was a Poet Laureate when it was John Betjeman then there really can only be him. Although the subsequent laureates have all been fine poets, none fitted the title like he did.
While this account of growing up, from early childhood to being sent down from Oxford, includes several pieces of the typically rhymed and chiming verse that one associates with the old boy, it is for the most part in blank verse, almost prosaic by his standards but not by the standards of many other English C20th poets.
It is immediately evocative of the strange world he lived in, a world it is difficult for us to believe ever really happened apart from in films and the imagining of a Golden Age. But here is evidence enough in autobiography from one for who it was very real indeed.
It isn't quaint, rose-tinted England for him and he brings it alive so convincingly that we know that, for some quite pivileged sorts, it was so. Maurice Bowra and T.S. Eliot are fondly remembered, as are bullying, adolescent trauma, infatuation and there is evidence that once upon a time one could go to university because you were good enough, spend all your time enjoying yourself, get sent down and be told you were only going to get a third anyway and still become a best-loved poet.
Explain that to Michael Gove.
This is Betjeman's best work, bar just about everything apart from Indoor Games Near Newbury.
   

Poulenc - Stabat Mater

Poulenc, Stabat Mater, Sept Repons de Tenebres, Carolyn Sampson, Cappella Amsterdam, Estonian Philharmonic Chamberr Choir, Estonian National Symphony Orchestra/Daniel Reuss (Harmonia Mundi)

Poulenc is sumptuous, or can be when he chooses to be, let's give him that. But so much C20th music shifts in tone and tempo rather more than one of a sedate classical temper like me would like it to do.
I have been an admirer of Carolyn Sampson ever since her Monteverdi Vespers at the Proms some six years ago, was it. I found out too late sometime after that she was in an opera in which she took all her clothes off. Well, you win some and you lose some, I suppose. But here, in say the third of the sept repons, she gets a nice, sorrowful line of considerable elegance to explore and then the mood changes again. I have been worrying in recent weeks how much Western Music (especially, I think) depends on repetition and return for its effect as if we can't bear not to hear the same motif several times and can't incorporate it if we don't hear it a few times before moving on. But here, Poulenc offers some fine phrasing and powerfully moving music and I'm the first to complain that it doesn't linger long enough on an especially good bit.
Part 5, in which, 'Darkness covered the earth, whilst the Jews crucified Jesus' and Jesus cries out, 'My God, why hast thou forsaken me' is another, more sustained piece of abject suffering but where my indulgence in such profound grief would be indulged by Bach, Poulenc is always ready to move on.

This is a fine disc.It's my fault entirely if I come to it with some, but not extensive, knowledge of Poulenc, and expect his Tenebres to be like Couperin's or Charpentier's and his Stabat Mater to be like Pergolesi's. They are, though, in some ways, and are likely to sound more so when I've heard it more and become more accustomed to it.
The Stabat Mater is billed as 'for soprano, choir and orchestra' and, yes, those are the resources used. But I'm sorry if I seem to be in complaining mood but I think it should be 'choir, orchestra and soprano'. I had some joyous moments at the beginning when I suspected Poulenc had Pergolesi in mind but the choir is the main feature as it develops and Carolyn is less of a soloist than I expected and in more of a supporting role. It also put me in mind of the Durufle Requiem, which is a good thing and so I do intend to commend and celebrate, it is only that since the C18th composers had got there first and done things so well, those in the C20th had to find another way and that, at this stage at least, was more fragmentary. Stravinsky was still very much alive and the repercussions of modernism still very much being felt and so Poulenc did well to resist and maintain quite such a conservative approach. Perhaps it is only now that he might be given credit for that.
Carolyn gets one of her moments, perhaps somewhat operatically, in the 'Vidit suum',

Saw the Lord's anointed taken;
Saw her Christ in death forsaken,
Heard his last expiring cry.

The Latin somehow has the better line than the translation in 'Morientem desolatum' but if schools now have other curriculum priorities than language then there will be fewer of us in future who even have the opportunity to decide for ourselves.
We lost something somewhere. Poulenc has magnificent moments but at times can be lush, like Szymanowski, and it doesn't accord with the required desperation some times. I like it but I don't like it for long enough but I like it enough not to want my money back.

They're not laughing now - except they still are

I remember when 'comedy', by which was meant 'stand up', was billed as the new rock'n'roll. It must be twenty years ago now if not more. And I suppose it still is, if we mean by 'new rock'n'roll' a tired and clapped out format derived from something that several decades ago was regarded as fresh, dynamic and ground-breaking.
It is no longer a new generation of politically correct comedians at the Comedy Store being all vociferous and recalcitrant and the opposite of Jim Davidson, Bernard Manning and Jimmy Tarbuck.

I just accidentally heard something on Radio 4 called Susan Calman Is Convicted. She seems like a nice enough girl with her observations on not having children, having cats instead and- wait for it- being gay (now there's a radical idea), but one might not have realized it had humourous intent were it not for the riotous response of an audience bussed in for the occasion and under strict direction as to when to whoop and fall about in fits of laughter.
Much of the output in this slot on Radio 4 seems to be like that and the parallels with rock'n'roll have remained intact. The format is still there, it sounds as if it ought to be funny because someone is being self-deprecating and honest about their life and making observations about it. But the medium is the message and without the suggestion from the audience that it is hilarious one would just think, yes, I see, fair enough.
Perhaps an audience brought up in a culture where this has become a staple diet, with thousands of comedians populating Jongleurs clubs in towns across Britain, accept it, like it and genuinely enjoy it in the same way that children of the 70's liked Showaddywaddy (like I did) and didn't make any differentiation between them and Eddie Cochran. And why should they, it's the fact that they enjoy it that is important. But one day someone is going to turn up - well, I just have in fact- and point out that it is no good anymore. The proliferation of so many performers inevitably means that they can't all be good, some must be humdrum, and if Radio 4 are picking the best to satisfy their middle class, middle-aged listeners then this is an art form, a genre that has run itself into a redundant pastiche of what it thinks it still is.
One startling exception was a firther series of the Mitchell & Webb Sound at the back end of last year. Four programmes of good stuff, the highlight of which was the doorbell shop followed by the cash register shop. Not 'stand up', no, but masterpieces of the sketch form. That is the way to do it.