Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

It is unlikely that future historians of England will look back on the last week and say it was 'our finest hour'.

Following the hapless performance by the electorate last week with their tactical naivety and misplaced crosses, the football team put in an even more deplorable effort on Monday.

I'd like to dissociate myself from both as far as possible, never having been sure whether to identify myself as English, British, European or, preferably, a 'citizen of the world'. English might be my subject but that means English Literature and Language, not separatism or tribal identity.

So, a fine antidote was reading Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot. It is a modern classic and so needs no reviewing or introduction from me. It is a book somewhat 'out of category', mainly literary biography but more tangential than that. There had been few like it before it appeared in 1984 but there have been a few more like it since. It is written in the voice of a persona, not Barnes' own, about Flaubert, and through this layered device, reflects upon writing, books, reading, art and thus arrives at an admirable aesthetic, a complete joy to be reading for its elegant erudition, its defining of the 'literary' and thus very much all those things that the Francophile, internationalist Barnes established as both his great idiosyncratic strengths and that attitude that some might find fault in.
But it was a welcome respite from some of the 'state of the nation' commentary of the last few days.
I don't entirely blame some of those that voted to leave for the reasons they had - some people I quite like voted to leave-  but I certainly do blame the undisguised ambition of Boris using it as his last stepping stone to becoming Prime Minister and I do blame the uncouth, lowest common denominator campaigning of Farage.
I see Martyn Crucefix reviewing Sean O'Brien's Hammersmith under the title 'The End of England'. Well, it's not quite that, is it, it's only the latest episode in an ongoing thousand-year-old story. But it is one of the more significant episodes to have happened in our lifetime, those of us who ever more fondly remember the 1970's not for the three-day week, the uncollected dustbins and the unburied dead, but for the liberal education, the belief that progress was being made and the likes of David Bowie. I would swap Now for Then in England unconditionally.

But a fine pile of deliveries was waiting for me this evening when I got home. Lee Perry's Arkology set is far too canonical to be reviewing now but I'm looking forward to Helen Mort's new poems, coming soon after her first collection, and Katy Evans-Bush's essays on poetry in Forgive the Language. Also on its way is Ben Lerner's discourse on The Hatred of Poetry where I will be hoping that his is the same as mine, a sort of dissatisfaction with having to think about the whole idea of poetry, the philosophy of poetry or theory. It is not natural to enjoy all poetry per se and so much of it is not to one's taste but we like it above all else, apart from music, when it is done well and so we should find those poets and poems and read them all the time.
Meanwhile, yes, in the same way that cricketers want to be golfers, footballers want to be racehorse owners and pop stars want to be philosophers, poets really want to be musicians. That is my 'hatred of poetry'. I'll wait and see what Ben Lerner's is.