View from the Boundary

I have been searching to find exactly what Michael Gove himself said about the reforms to the syllabus for English Literature. The articles I find only attribute the idea to him and his department and they deny that any authors are banned. I'm always glad to be among the first to point out any shortcomings in the current government's stategies and books are of more interest to me than some of their more pressing concerns but I can't find Mr. Gove quoted on this and so it would be nice to hear from him what he does think. He studied English at Oxford University and so his opinion should be well worth hearing.
English Literature can just as easily mean literature written in the English language as literature written by English people in England. Most anthologies of English poetry are wise to include an introduction by the editor to say how they approached their project. One will usually find Eliot, Sylvia Plath and other Americans in a collection of C20th English poetry as well as Scottish, Irish and Welsh poets and from places beyond. We would be surprised by now if we didn't.
It is, of course, insular and myopic to not see any further than one's own shores and much good work has been done to show that even Philip Larkin, who affected a cartoon Little Englander attitude, was well-read in other poetry and used, for example, Theophile Gautier and Baudelaire as models. Those of us not fluent in many languages are inevitably limited in which books we can read in the original which is a particular problem with poetry and not solely poetry's problem but there is no need to exacerbate these issues and erect further barriers by restricting our world view to one that stops at the airports or ferry terminals.
In the 1970's there wasn't any ostensible wrong perceived in the fact we read To Kill a Mockingbird, Mister Johnson, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Juno and the Paycock, plays set in places like Denmark and Verona as well as French literature that didn't relate entirely to France. I wonder what it is that this new directive is issued in fear of.
I only really write now that it has been quickly followed up by the European elections in which many of our neighbours have, like us, returned results reflecting a new surge in funny little nationalism. It had seemed like we were getting over that and that progress was being made but history, as we probably should have known, goes in circles rather than being a linear thing and these are ever decreasing ones on the current evidence.
But I like to try to find the advantage in any new situation if I can. I don't know how many more times a friend, colleague or acquaintance will ask if I can help their offspring with their Eng Lit studies. I'm always flattered to be asked and glad to help. Most people of my age have now seen their children through school exams but in future that job is likely to be made easier. As long as I know about Rupert Brooke, I'll be fine.
---
I have always known that the job of the novelist was a much harder one than that of the poet. It's not just the time involved and the commitment required, it is simply the number of words you need to think of. Novelist is a full-time job and a proper one whereas poetry suits the dilettante very well and can easily be knocked off in one's spare time.
I don't need to be more than a few weeks into my most sustained effort yet to finally achieve my ambition of producing a 'novel' to have further evidence of how true that is. I come to it with a wealth of material, a very basic plot and three themes, as well as a reduced target of 40 thousand words, on the dubious pretext of just one website that defines a novel as less than the 50 thousand I thought it was that I had to aim for not to be a mere novella.
But my story goes from Monday to Friday, I've already finished Tuesday and I only have 12 thousand words. Where did Balzac get all his words from. Proust, George Eliot, Vikram Seth, any of them.
I could say that I've spent so long being so compact and lyrical that I have lost any facility for expansion but I remember introducing myself to a meeting of poets in Lancaster circa 1980 and saying that I wrote poems because I couldn't write novels.
It's not a big problem. Midtagspause will not be publishable in any form and nobody will ever want to read it even if I would let them. If it ends on 25 thousand words, it is only me that will be disappointed. But don't ever believe it when anybody tells you that it is poetry that is the highest literary art form. The highest art form is music in any case but the greatest achievement is in writing a good novel. All the publicity about the transcendence, the sublimity and the higher calling of poetry is put about by poets themselves. Only those poets who have also produced a novel worthy of the name know what having a proper job is like.
--
But let me excuse Seamus Heaney from that charge straight away. Having lauded his essay on Dylan Thomas (recently below) from his Oxford lectures in The Redress of Poetry, I turned to his insights into Elizabeth Bishop and his commentary on the poem, The Sandpiper. It is sensational work, reminding me of his mate, Joseph Brodsky's, word by word examination of Hardy's Convergence of the Twain.  
It restores one's faith in what one is doing, and my faith does need restoring from time to time. It sent me immediately back to my Elizabeth Bishop book and, not for the first time, I saw what sort of things can be achieved. And so it is by no means all a downer on poets. It becomes a reminder of why one is still at it.
And also a reminder of why whenever people like Michael Gove, if he did, get involved in administering the literature syllabus, then we need to know more about what he was thinking and why. It is far too important for people like him. Let us hope we hear from him soon. 

A nasty moment for Midtagspause

In one of those writer's calamities you hear about on the news once in a while when somewhat loses a laptop or deletes a major projects work from a computer, I had an anxious hour earlier today.
I thought I had corrupted the file of my 'novel' and didn't know if I could recover it. But by some stroke of geek technical good fortune, it looks like I have saved it. It was the first 8500 words but, honestly, if I had lost them, I wasn't going to write them again.
But there is no need to worry. When I say 'my novel', this is not something that is likely to be unleashed on the world. I know a fair number of people, many of them with much less literary presumption than me, who have written novels or novellas and the ones I've read haven't been bad at all. I have moved over the years from wishing I could produce one myself to a general feeling of resignation that I can't invest the time and effort in something that won't be any good. A number of unreasonably optimistic starts have been abandoned very quickly. I was like an adventurer setting out to cross the Atlantic on a plank of wood.
But all I want to do is be able to say I've got one and done it. It won't matter if it's no good and I won't have to revise it to make it coherent. Further encouragement came from a website that put the definition of 'novel' down to something consisting of 40 thousand words rather than the 50 I thought were required.
And so I am now already a quarter of the way there in not many weeks of adding 500 or 1000 when I feel I can. It is called Midtagspause, which is the German for 'lunchbreak' and centres on the office lives of two smartarses, a diatribe against the way large organisations are run, an unrequited love and the writing of the novel itself.
It is nowhere near as good as I'd like it to be, in fact it is rubbish, but I never let that stop me doing anything I wanted to do before.

Haydn Seven Last Words

Haydn Seven Last Words from the Cross, Cuarteto Casals (Harmonia Mundi)

I've been interested in Haydn's Seven Last Words ever since being aware that he had set them, with James MacMillan's account being such a big favourite. There are several arrangements by Haydn of this same music and one wouldn't think that the string quartet version would be the enduring one but it has been. My previous encounters with it have not been memorable but this new recording, as recommended by the BBC Music Magazine, is a revelation.
Haydn's classical temper and generally sunny disposition can't make this as austere an experience as MacMillan's late C20th choral setting. It has no words, of course, and doesn't sound as slow throughout as the list of tempi markings suggest it might be, which are all largo, grave, adagio or lento. You would hardly know, without the titles, that these pieces express the same text. And so, one reservation could be that there is not enough suffering in it but I've heard it said that only Haydn could write the Creation and not have the devil in it whereas Mozart certainly would have. He must have been a cheerful soul and a delight to know.
It is, however, a wonderful record and finds in great depth whatever was missing from other recordings I've heard of it, admittedly paying less attention on the radio. Something about the playing and recording- and I'm not qualified to say quite what it is- make this comparable to the Fitzwilliam Quartet's brilliant set of Shostakovich quartets and, there are passages when the plangent, painful last words are more directly suggested that glimpses of Shostakovich, due nearly 200 years later, are noticeable. But the Casals Quartet live up to their ambitious name with some blissful playing here, the limited range of the four strings never being an obstacle to beautifully realized phrasing and making a very expressive hour of some of what turns out to be the finest Haydn.
The rest of their catalogue needs to be investigated, I see they do the Arriaga, too, and what a good idea it was to take the BBC magazine's word on this one. In what is already becoming a competitive heat, this is a candidate for the best disc I buy all year.

Dylan Thomas - something intuited made manifest

I hope we all saw the drama on Dylan Thomas, A Poet in New York, on Sunday. I thought it was very good. I heard it said that Tom Hollander was too familiar from other recent television roles but that didn't worry me as I've never seen him before.
Another highlight of the BBC's marking of the centenary was Andrew Motion showing up on Radio 3 the previous Sunday morning to add some of his finely modulated thoughts on Dylan. I was particularly struck by his reference to Seamus Heaney's Oxford lecture in The Redress of Poetry which captured precisely what needs to be said.
Since the poets of the 1950's reverted to their common sense, empirical approach in reaction against Dylan's somewhat large gesturing rhetoric, his reputation has been somewhat reduced. Most poets have not done it quite like that since but some 'redress' is always required to balance the action and reaction. One of the better critiques of Thomas I have was the roughly contemporary essay by our old schoolteacher, Linden Huddlestone, but he wasn't in a position like Heaney to see the poems from our current perspective.
Heaney was a brilliant reader, critic and essayist. Such sensitive and nuanced reading and the facility to then explain it back again is a rare talent. Looking through the essay, I'm sure the line Motion drew our attention to was,
Imaginative force has moved a load of inchoate obsession into expressed language: something intuited and reached for has had its contours and location felt out and made manifest.
This is a propos some of the early poems like The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower. Heaney is not blind to the widely accepted shortcomings of the Thomas oeuvre but seems to put them in context with consummate consideration and doesn't try to defend the currently indefensible in the later poems but makes a special exception for the masterpiece, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. This is precisely an expression of where Dylan belongs in our appreciation now but it takes a critic of Heaney's power to put it how we need it to be put.
But it led me to wonder if he hasn't provided us with a further scale on which to set poets, another way to compare and contrast. We might have previously identified two polarities of Classical and Romantic and set poems or poets on a scale that ran between them but more specfic and meaningful labels for the ends of this spectrum might be to identify the balance between pure 'intuition' and to what degree it is 'made manifest'. The usual suspects might be Keats, Wordsworth and Blake on the intuitive side and Larkin, Gunn and hopefully John Donne among those that make it manifest.
It's possible that aspects of Modernism, with Dylan as a third generation Modernist, made the inchoate more fashionable, with poets like Geoffrey Hill finding it necessary to insist that poetry should be difficult. By all means it is an option but it isn't a rule, it's not a part of a definition of what poetry is. Although if a poem leaves nothing to wonder about then it is unlikely to remain of interest for long. But I'm not convinced that some of the latest contemporary poets aren't sliding deliberately back towards an over emphasis on intuition although they can remain nameless here.
Personally, I'd prefer the poet to have done the hard work by making their inchoate obsession manifest for us. That is why they are a poet. It seems a bit presumptuous of them if they think we are really so interested in them that we are going to do their job for them. If I want a puzzle, as John Fuller describes in his Who is Ozymandias, then I don't turn to a book of poems, I know there will be crosswords in the paper at the weekend. But I'm glad the centenary has provided the opportunity to get Dylan right. I didn't enjoy feeling that he was to be derided as a passing fashion, all bluster and overblown, empty wordplay. I always secretly wanted to say I quite liked him.
And thanks to Andrew Motion for pointing me to Heaney's lecture, I've had a job done for me that I probably wasn't capable of doing for myself.
Poetry is a broad church. It doesn't benefit from being divided into factions. The avant garde are welcome but must realize that they are nothing special, they are really just a part of a mainstream that is wider than they knew. Most of which I've offered as my opinion here more than once before.

BBC Music Magazine / Ivor Gurney

I'd rather buy Gramophone and feel like a genuine highbrow but it doesn't have a free disc with it, thus if the disc on the monthly BBC Music Magazine is one that looks worth having I buy that and get a free magazine along with a bargain-priced CD. The magazine seems to me a sort of placebo for people who like to think they are reading a serious music magazine but many of the reviews and articles don't say very much, however there are items of interest in the June edition.
Most notable is the interview with James MacMillan on his project of establishing a new festival in Cumnock, Ayrshire in October in the tradition of Britten's Aldeburgh and Maxwell-Davies' Orkney festivals. There is also great encouragement to buy new discs of Haydn's Seven Last Words and the String Quartets of Arriaga, who was born on what would have been Mozart's 50th birthday but who died aged 19.
Less convincing is Stewart Copeland's selection of 'music that changed him' where he includes Bob Marley's Natty Dread and recalls punk's relationship with reggae, claiming that it didn't work for The Clash on their Police and Thieves but it felt natural to him in The Police. Well, it didn't sound like it to me. The Clash was a fair effort but The Police don't sound like reggae at all any more and in retrospect it might have been better if white boys had left well alone.
But the disc is the main area of interest and a rare thing for me to buy anything that commemorates World War 1. I've recently put Ivor Gurney in my Top 100 Poets, admittedly as an act of sympathy with him and Gloucestershire rather than in admiration of his poetic achievement. He was more highly regarded as a composer and, generally, I believe it is his songs that are most remembered. But here is his War Elegy with the premiere recording of the recently put together edition of A Gloucesterhire Rhapsody. It is worth having as a rarity that describes the much-loved landscape of Gloucestershire in all its shifting, rolling beauty. It is easy to make comparisons with the better-known names who made similar music like Elgar, Vaughan-Williams and Delius and it is to be regretted that there isn't more Gurney orchestral music for those who would like this.
The Frank Bridge Oration is darker, and closer to, say, Shostakovich in its startker moments. Stephen Isserlis takes a striking cello part that explores some disturbed feelings, an introspective and discomfiting exploration of some restlessness. Without the focus on the cello, the orchestra surges less purposefully and I'm personally happy to be back with Gurney on track 3 which climaxes before receding to an elegiac rest.
Last month I found a loose CD from the previous month's magazine and pointed out to the customer service desk that they couldn't sell it without the magazine and so I would take it off their hands which they allowed me to do for a donation to their charity box. And my just desserts for such helpfulness was a fine slow movement in the Schumann Piano Quartet. So, well done, Sainsbury's.

Eloisa-Fleur Thom

Ciaconna, Eloisa-Fleur Thom (violin), Handel House Museum, Thurs 15th May 2014

With seating capacity of 28, the rehearsal room in Handel's House is about as intimate as a concert venue can be and ideal, if unusual, for solo and small ensemble recitals. I returned there after a few years' absence to take up the opportunity of hearing Biber's Passacaglia, not knowing how many chances I will ever get.
Eloisa-Fleur Thom began with it in this brief summary of the development of baroque solo violin, it is a majesterial piece, of course, and was delivered with nimble left hand fingering and great assurance. The Westhoff Suite no. 5, remarkable for its stylings in the opening Allemande, is something to be investigated immediately, with how ever many others there are of them, but the programme stepped up a notch or two for the Bach Partita no. 2, played (it seemed to me) with more verve and confidence suggesting either greater familiarity with the piece or possibly having to rise to the challenge of Bach. It built to the torrential Chaconne that is one of many places where Bach is shown to be nothing like a mere mathematical perfectionist but a vehicle for tremendous passion, leaving one blinding passage only to launch fluidly into the next. It can be exhilarating, should be and was and I for my part will always take the soloist against the world rather than the combined, shared responsibility of an orchestra.
I hope Eloisa-Fleur Thom has a great future and it is unlikely that she wouldn't have. And, as you can see, with so little competition from the rest of the audience for her attention, I was able to add her to my recent collection of signed programmes.
And then I found my way to Ealing and the best value accommodation in London. You take the wine but drink most of it yourself, are given the most considerate hospitality and leave with two complimentary books expertly chosen by your host with that special personal attention to detail, an autobiography by the posh spiv, racing correspondent, Julian Wilson, and a book of fine academic introductions to 50 Classical Authors.
It would be unreasonable to ask for more.   

Maggie, I think I got something to say to you

Congratulations to Portsmouth poet, Maggie Sawkins, on winning the Ted Hughes Award 2014 for her Zones of Avoidance, http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/competitions/tedhughes/

I'm glad to say that Portsmouth Poetry Society invited her to read as a friend at the reading we have planned for National Poetry Day, Oct 2nd, before this success and that she agreed. I only hope now that she will still be available and it is still on the originally agreed terms ( ! ).

So please put the date in your diary when PPS will be launching the new edition of Calliope, because now it is officially an even better event than it was going to be.

Well played, Portsmouth. You see, there really is something going on down here.

Jesus to a Child

She gave me so much. One thing that she gave me, probably not knowing how much it meant to me even then, was a disc of George Michael's Jesus to a Child. It was always a treasure.

Thanks for everything, Ingrid. You were a class act. You were tremendous.

Jesus To A Child

Kindness in your eyes
I guess you heard me cry
You smiled at me
Like Jesus to a child
I'm blessed I know
Heaven sent and heaven stole
You smiled at me like
Jesus to a child
And what have I learned
From all this pain
I thought I'd never feel the same
About anyone or anything again
But now I know

When you find a love
When you know that it exists
Then the lover that you miss
Will come to you on those cold, cold nights
When you've been loved
When you know it holds such bliss
Then the lover that you kissed
Will comfort you when there's no hope in sight

Sadness in my eyes
No one guessed, well no one tried
You smiled at me
Like Jesus to a child
Loveless and cold
With your last breath you saved my soul
You smiled at me
Like Jesus to a child
And what have I learned
From all these tears
I've waited for you all those years
Then just when it began
He took your love away
But I still say

[Repeat chorus]

So the words you could not say
I'll sing them for you
And the love we would have made
I'll make it for two
For every single memory
Has become a part of me

You will always be...my love

Well I've been loved
So I know just what love is
And the lover that I kissed is always by my side
Oh the lover I still miss...was Jesus to a child.

Cygnus

Cygnus 

i.m. I.K. 

One night I had explained to you the stars

of Cygnus the Swan, framed by a window

above where we lay. That’s Deneb, fifteen

hundred light years away.

 

And now I hear that you are gone further,

much further than that. Much further away

than where I thought you were now in London.

I am the more alone without you there.

Calliope, new poems from Portsmouth

It is intended that Portsmouth Poetry Society produce a booklet of new poems later this year. Work is underway to the extent that I have the first draft of the cover ready already and here it is.
A reading is planned on National Poetry Day, October 2nd, with PPS & Friends. More details later. I wouldn't want you to miss it.

Bank Holiday Special - Top 100 Poets

Top Favourite Poets of mine, quite obviously once you take a look.

They are the first 100 names I thought of and then the first 45 have been put in some sort of order and then the rest is in no particular order. I'm sure I have forgotten some quite important names but they can't be that important, or candidates for the Top 20 if I still hadn't thought of them once I'd put in Dante, who I have only read in the O'Brien version, for example. It started to become difficult. You don't know how hard it can be.
It just goes to show how futile list making can be but it was interesting for a while.

Thom Gunn

Philip Larkin

John Donne

W. H. Auden

William Shakespeare

Ovid

T.S. Eliot

Sylvia Plath

Sean O'Brien

Thomas Hardy

Seamus Heaney

Andrew Marvell

August Kleinzahler

Edward Thomas

Tony Harrison

John Keats

Fulke Greville

e.e. cummings

Thomas Wyatt

Geoffrey Chaucer

Paul Muldoon

Julia Copus

Elizabeth Bishop

Derek Mahon

Anon Wulf and Eadwacer

Ted Hughes

Horace

W.B. Yeats

Alfred Tennyson

Louis MacNeice

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Martin Mooney

David Harsent

Carol Ann Duffy

Andrew Motion

Alun Lewis

Roddy Lumsden

John Betjeman

Don Paterson

Catullus

Michael Daugherty

Douglas Dunn

Charles Baudelaire

Tibullus

John Burnside - Matthew Arnold Timothy Steele Wislawa Symborska Mina Loy Percy Shelley Adrienne Rich Glyn Maxwell Paul Durcan Christopher Marlowe Philip Sidney Richard Wilbur Kathleen Jamie Petrarch Dante Aligheri Craig Raine Stuart A. Paterson  Wilfred Owen Simon Armitage Colette Bryce John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester Juvenal James Fenton Michael Symmons Roberts Michael Donaghy Ian Duhig Robert Lowell Dylan Thomas R.S. Thomas A.E. Housman George Szirtes Ruth Padel John Cooper-Clarke Donald Davie Alexander Pope John Milton Ben Jonson Kathryn Simmonds Geoffrey Hill Marianne Moore William Wordsworth Francois Villon Ivor Gurney Stevie Smith Tom Paulin Sue Hubbard William Langland George Herbert Robert Frost Yevgeny Yevtushenko Wendy Cope Sinead Morrissey Weldon Kees Michael Longley Michael Drayton John Clare

From The Way We Live Now

The man's speculations had been so great and so wide that he did not really now what he owned, or what he owed.
Antyhony Trollope, 1875.