Crosswords just occasionally suggest poetry. And perhaps, poetry of a certain sort. In between big, proper books, I have been reading not only Don Paterson's book on Michael Donaghy (which I think I might have mentioned before) and Clair Wills' Reading Paul Muldoon. Brilliant though they are, it is offputting to a very ordinary poet like me who can only be daunted that such depth is to be discovered in major poetry. I am never going to write anything that requires such reading or can deliver such complex ideas. I might not even produce the usual 4 finished poems in the next twelve months, so overawed by such other work have I become. It shouldn't be like that. I've always been happy enough with the poems I've published before- although heaven knows how insufficient some of the rejects were- and so it should remain. It's only a matter of getting over any anxiety that one was never Donaghy or Muldoon and was never meant to be.
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I don't order books in December. If they won't go through the letterbox, I can't risk having to queue at the Amazon distribution point, otherwise known as the Post Office. And so I recently picked a book of stories and essays by Fitzgerald out of the upstairs library room, otherwise known as the chaotic detritus of my life. I was impressed enough by those to decide to read This Side of Paradise in any spare time that happens over Christmas. And I'm 100 pages in already.
My other project will be to write an introduction to Francois Villon for a February meeting of the Portsmouth Poetry Society, and then I'll order some titles to begin 2015 with, including the Clive James poetry essays and the new biography of Jeremy Thorpe.
The first few months of a new year are a quiet time for new titles and this website tends to get off to a slow start. The Saturday Nap feature finishes with the piece below and so my Friday night slot might be a new feature, perhaps a series of 10, under the title Why I Like...which could begin with Why I Like James Joyce, and continue with Vermeer and Handel and then we will see.
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But my favourite radio or TV programme these days is Bells on Sunday, Radio 4, 5.43 a.m., repeated 00.45 a.m. Except that those two times seem to be the only two times I am hardly ever awake. I can wake up at 5 a.m. on Sunday, think, it's not long until Bells on Sunday, stay awake for 20 minutes and then find myself having missed it by 5 minutes, and the same in the middle of the night.
The simple premise of the two or three minute show is that we are going to hear some church bells being rung. The introduction is a formulaic, Radio 4 set piece, a little more varied than the Shipping Forecast but equally arcane, like,
St. Jezebel of the Snows in Dancecraze-on -the-Wash has a peal of eight bells, the tenor tuned to B flat. The trumpet bell weighs 58 hundredweight and was cast by Wilfred Thorogood in Grantham in 1752. Here they are heard in the Leamington Centenary Triples Bob Major.
And then you get a couple of minutes of,
Di-da-di-da-di-dong
Di-da-di-da-di-dong
Di-da-di-da-di-dong
and you don't want it to stop but you know it's going to shortly so you concentrate quite hard but it fades out soon enough. And there is an arcane piece of England. I wondered if there might be a book that explains about Grandiose Morton Thrice Tripled Bob Major and went from the Bells on Sunday on Wikipedia to finding that, yes, someone has made it their work to have a website about it even if he hasn't managed to be awake for all of them. But what a great piece of work it is and I'm grateful that it will retrieve me at an early stage from any potential obsession because I wouldn't want to know quite that much about it.
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Otherwise, I'm very interested in how many prospective parliamentary candidates for the UK Independance Party are having to resign for saying the unsayable even when we know full well that they think the unthinkable. But they can't be trained not to say what they are thinking.
Most politicians are like that, I'm sure, but any that are going to be successful manage to get away with it somehow for a while at least.
The difference with UKIP is that they don't even get under orders before having to be withdrawn by the stable. And these were some of the best ones, selected to run in target constituencies, the best candidates they can find. Blimey, if they were the best they could find, what are the rest of them like.
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So, Christmas comes round a little too often these days to make it an occasion for seismic reflection or revelation. I'm sure it's only about six weeks since last Christmas. I'm glad I asked for a watch this year. I rarely wear one but thought a respectable one might be nice. And, just in time, I can't find the one I've been using for the last several years.
I will try to bear in mind in 2015 that this was intended to be a poetry website but it has necessarily expanded into other areas. There just isn't enough to do being a poet all the time. And one day, I suppose, I will suddenly decide that the world doesn't need to know what I think and then it will stop but, in the meantime, have a nice holiday and I'll see you next year.
Best, D.