Oh Babe, What Would You Say

About 20 years ago or more, it didn't cause much of a stir when I remarked to a few people that I didn't reckon much to Sgt. Pepper, which in those days used to be no.1 in many lists of Best Album of All Time.
My mate bought it to play in the car on the strength of that recommendation and I said something not quite as witty as,
This isn't the best album in the world. It isn't even the best album in the Beatles.

It has been considered newsworthy now that Keith Richards has said it is 'rubbish', however. That is going a bit far but he does augment this bare premise with the argument that it is a 'mish-mash', which it is although that doesn't necessarily mean it's no good.
Those lists of best albums are usually voted for by a panel of experts, like Charles Shaar Murray and Pete Waterman, who we are led to believe should know. They are the sort of people who think it's okay to say, 'the production on this album is amazing' and I did once hear someone say that before Gerald the gorilla said it on Not the Nine O'Clock News. Sgt. Pepper was a step forward in the use of the recording studio, then, but that led to much that was to be regretted as well as much to be grateful for.
But Keef's little jibe was only part of a bigger interview in Esquire rather than a direct insult to The Beatles. I personally agree with him, it's just a shame for me that his opinion catching up with mine after so long is regarded as interesting.
But we should all be careful of making any kind of derogatory remark for fear of upsetting anyone. Some consternation has been caused in poetry internet places (and thus not been noticed by most of the population) by Sean O'Brien's review of Jack Underwood's Happiness in The Guardian.
Among other things it says,
The cartoon detail, combined with a tone at once demonstrative and short of affect, mark a kind of indie house style that can be read (and perhaps more significantly, heard) almost anywhere at present. It’s not so much faux-naive as faux-urbane, emotion turning into attitude, defensive for all its apparent self-exposure.

(Does Sean mean 'effect' there, is it a Grauniad error or is it me presuming to anticipate the critic's intention.)
I don't know if it's true or not but I'm happy to take Sean's word for it until I can judge for myself. When I first saw Underwood's name I was afraid that C.J. Underwood, an odd little lad who used to turn up professing all kinds of inanity on the interweb, and so avoided it. Sean finds plenty of polite things to say about Underwood's debut book and so nobody should be getting too upset about what he is probably really expressing, which is a generation gap.

It's not that easy to be impressed by kids, the next generation or two below you or upstarts whose fashions and tastes have moved on from when your own were formed. I'm sure that much of the pop music being made in 2015 is fine for the audience it is meant for but it's not meant for me and I'm not all that interested in it.

This might well sound fogeyish, myopic and snooty but there is something in it. We, by which I can only be sure of meaning I, admire the things that were there when we first found poetry, music and anything else that is of importance in the world. That's not our fault but they were the things from which we took our cue. For me it became increasingly odd that John Peel held onto his godfather of indie status for so long because a man in late middle age still enthusing about records made by teenagers didn't quite seem right. Although, of course, as long as he was enjoying it, why shouldn't he.

The other thing that Sean's review reveals is the almost disabling knowingness about all aspects of poetry, and literature, now that every angle of it is discussed and deconstructed. It's not only in the reviewer but already in the poet and in the poems. There are so many things poetry needs to avoid doing, so many available lists of do's and don'ts. I mean, oh dear, it should be the last thing we need a rule book for. It makes it very hard to write a poem, harder to convince oneself you've done it properly and virtually impossible to send off to a magazine in case the editors and perhaps subsequently the readers fall about laughing at some inadvertent style faux pas. 

If only we could, we should just put on our red shoes and dance.

And so, this self-consciousness, this inertia is not leading to a wonderland of new and exciting literature, the vibrant, diverse renaissance in which we always dreamed we would be set free, it's locked into website point-scoring and holier than thou aesthetics, an esoteric correctness forever just beyond our grasp. Which might be why this year is beginning to look like one in which I won't read a new novel. There are still poets to admire, some of them a bit younger than me but not actually 'young', but no new novel has come to my notice that makes me feel anything like reading it. And that is why this week all the remaining George Eliot titles that I need are arriving by post but I won't read any of them until I've read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte's account of 'a charming young man's gradual degradation through drink and debauchery' based on the life of her brother, Branwell. What could be more suitable summer reading than that. I wish it would arrive soon.

Meanwhile, also impatiently awaited and to be reviewed here as soon as I possibly can, are new poems by Stuart A. Paterson and a disc of music by Loyset Compere.

You can't afford to stay away for long.