But there is nothing like having landed the nap to make everything safe and then a double and a treble come to fruition with a well-backed favourite and the great Noel Fehily on board.
--
I don't know what time the postman came today, it's a Saturday, isn't it, but when I just had to slip out to the shop, there were two promising packages in the porch. The Staple Singers and The Sixteen's recent set of settings of the Stabat Mater.
One can hardly have enough music but it's hard to get around to playing all of them. Today, before the racing started, I gave a rare outing to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's Wintereisse, to see if I was interested enough in it to order Ian Bostridge's book on the subject.
No, I'm not. It is a fine thing but perhaps not quite the template for the archetypal poet that ought to be encouraged by now.
--
Whereas Clive James' recently arrived Poetry Notebook 2006-2014 is admirably stringent and forthright in providing an example of what a 'critic' could be like if we weren't all so nice and polite so much of the time.There might have been a time, in the 1960's and 70's, when a prototype of political correctness made it unthinkable to question modernism, the avant-garde, Beat poets and anything else that aspired to revolutionary intent. I can see why, then, in artistic terms if not all of them in politics, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, Pierre Boulez, concrete poetry and jazz might have been regarded as left-wing whereas Georgian poetry, Hardy, Larkin and any work that respected a tradition was seen as staid, right-wing and thus to be disrepected, Daddy-O.
It took a while for such assumptions to be revealed for the fashionable aberrations that they were but they were arguably right-wing aberrations and what had always been there was more genuinely leftist. Just because something is paraded as new doesn't make it 'progressive'. Clive re-assesses his reassessment of Pound only to find that the 19 year old Clive was in thrall to an empty appearance of grandeur and, yes, his loss of faith in him was perfectly in order.
He is also a resilient defender of Frost, whose perceived folksy wisdom was attacked by those who,
had a vested interest in the oblique and wanted poetry to be taught rather than remembered.
If I remain to be convinced about Clive James as a poet himself, there is no doubting his stout credentials as a commentator but mainly as someone who cares enough to find poetry 'electrifying' and the most important thing there is, which is gratifying to read when I so often doubt it myself.
But, of Pound's 'juxtapositions', he can say,
a fancy way of claiming weight for the practice of bringing incongruous objects together and waiting for a compound meaning to emerge: the hope and faith of every crackpot who creates elaborate wall charts with fragments of evidence joined together by string.
While he is in fine form throughout with such disdainful put downs (and let us remember what an admirer of Pound Thom Gunn was), Clive is best at letting others provide the comment when he feels he can't do any better, which is something he credits Michael Donaghy with.
Thus, it is no less pertinent for being fourth-hand when something I've quoted before only at third-hand, if I quote James quoting Donaghy quoting Auden saying that 'the only thing that doesn't change is the avant-garde'.
I'm not leaving much to say in a review of this book once I've read it, so I might as well go for broke.
The Cantos is,
or are- or perhaps was or were- a nut-job blog before the fact.
And, quoting Donaghy quoting Dana Gioia,
ideas in the poetry of Ashbery are 'like the melodies in some jazz improvisation where the musicians have left out the original tune to avoid paying royalties'.
And so it seems to go on, page after invigorating page, which I'm sure some beatniks, old-timers from the 1970's and playful post-modernists would be piously offended by because here, surely, is a cantankerous old bull having one last thrust at the tricksy matadors that have tormented him.
The finale is entitled Trumpets at Sunset, which I haven't read yet but anticipate being a grandstand farewell and celebration of all that Clive loved in poetry. I dare say there will be more to say after reading that.