I was very taken with the thought, aged 16 or 17, not knowing any better than that literature was an almost divine thing, a gift from the gods that ordinary mortals weren't really capable of. That was possibly due to the way we wrote essays, always thinking that if something was by Shakespeare or Thomas Hardy it must be brilliant and it was thus our job to find reasons why. It seemed sacreligious when Mr. Bradford said that he thought Milton was something you cleaned your teeth with but Mr. Bradford was diabolical anyway.
But eventually I came to realize that I didn't think poetry necessarily came naturally and Oscar might have had more of a point when he said it was nearly all perspiration and not much inspiration. And so here's another scale on which to place poets, and then any other genre of creative artist. To what extent does the work pour out of them in a natural flow or how much is it a painstaking process. And when we say 'painstaking', does that mean 'taking pains' os 'staking pain'.
I'm sure it varies from poem to poem rather than from poet to poet. It's possibly best when a generous helping of a poem has arrived spontaneously but perhaps only the author can be sure how it happened. If you choose a rhyme scheme and a metre it's very unlikely that you think in iambic pentameter and an ABAB CDCD EFEFGG rhyming pattern and so some engineering is going to be necessary. But some poems looked too forced and if the syntax and prosody suffer for being mangled into a tight-fitting form, it may not look so clever.
My ongoing attempt to write The Perfect Book, a poem to give the title to my next booklet (provisionally due for publication on October 17, 2019), is coming not as naturally as getting blood out of a stone. When it finally becomes clear that nothing you can do will ever make these awkward lines look graceful, it is time to abandon it. But then, it struck me that two abandoned poems might be merged in some miraculous nuclear fusion to make a satisfactory one. No, it had to be admitted, they couldn't. But if you wait long enough, one day an idea comes along that looks as if it's in the right area. Oh, I see, perhaps I don't want to write about the perfect book but a much less than perfect book and then.... well, there's four years to go before it needs to be in print but there are few things more exciting than having a stanza and a bit to go with and see what happens. It might be a magnum opus or I might be back at square one before we know.
--
Although this year's Best Poem and Best Collection awards look like producing almost the most competitive shortlists since I began this most insignificant of prizes, the Best TV award must have been settled in favour of Cradle to Grave in its earliest stages. It is a treasure for anyone who was more or less formed by the 1970's. This week, though, stretched it a bit. Although hugely entertaining and beautifully done, I'm not sure I believed it verbatim in the same way that I had taken the rest of the series thus far as a precise re-enactment of the Baker teenage years.
Of course, others have lived more remarkable lives than I and Danny Baker would be one of them, who accepts in the book that things just happened to him, always for the best, and all he had to do was take advantage. Perhaps it would be like that for all of us if only we had the capacity to take every opportunity that is offered. I'm sure the majority are too dull to even notice an opportunity when it presents itself.
But Danny's school football team, of which he was captain, get to the final of the cup. In pouring rain, many are calling for the game to be called off but it continues, the referee gets injured, the anything-but-impartial coach of Dan's team takes over as substitute ref, knocks in an extra time header himself, then awards the goal and blows up for time.
But winning the cup is nothing compared to what happens to Danny next. Having been angling to get into the dark room with the somewhat nubile teacher who runs the photography club, he subsequently does. There might be legal reasons for wondering if such a story could be broadcast if it were true. I had at first thought the programme was misdescribed as 'sitcom' when it looked to me more like autobiographical drama, but perhaps we are safer with 'sitcom'.
--
Just the briefest word for pop-pickers on the new album by The Libertines, Anthem for Doomed Youth. It remains to be seen if this reunion album contains many things set to join the admirable top bracket of their repertoire but the gigs were tremendous, there are a couple of songs worth attention in You're My Waterloo and Gunga Din. Like Morrissey, the Kinks, Squeeze, Blur and I'm sure many other English pop acts, Doherty loves his retro English culture which includes the way that he assimilates so much of the classic elements of punk with the white boy's reggae references and delivers such laddish bonhomie, sometimes, it must be said, in memory of some of those who didn't last as long as he has managed to. It works on stage, it works on record and he is genuinely one who can be appreciated by an age group who might have thought such records were behind them by now. This is one act that would always have found an audience through talent alone, as could happen in the 70's. Just how much that still happens is another question.--
And the highlight of this week, and last, was luckily, accidentally but joyfully finding that SKY Arts are showing some Buster Keaton films. I know that 'luckily, accidentaly and joyfully' = serendipitously but having just written, above,Doherty loves his retro English culture which includes the way that he assimilates so much of the classic elements of punk with the white boy's reggae references,
I don't want to overstate my claim for a place in Pseud's Corner.
I don't know how much trick photography was available in Keaton's day but the choreography of the visual jokes in these films is sensational. I don't imagine I'm the first to have noticed that. But, isn't it remarkable how, as soon as something is invented, like moving film pictures, there just happens to be someone in place to realize more potential in it than could ever have been thought.
I don't know if my tiny but very choice collection of DVD's should be without Buster Keaton for much longer.
