Yanworth
The World's End
Gardefort
is not the beginning of the Contents page of my next booklet of poems. No, it's the honourable roll call of today's horses that obliged in a yankee to put the world back to rights after last weekend's debacle. Four out of four in a yankee is not unheard of and can happen from time to time. The first time it happened to me, circa 1983, I thought I'd been touched by a miracle whereas tonight I'll only be looking out for the blue moon.
Brenda Maddox's George's Ghosts is a fine account of W.B.Yeats but had to be put on hold when another book turned up. Her summation of Yeats as 'scatty and splendid' looks very fair, if not charitable. His regard for the 'Eliot-Auden camp' as one of 'bleak mundanity' is aloof and, like many poets, he doesn't come across as immediately attractive. 'Dubious' would be appropriate as he moves from one set of reasons to be doubtful about him to others. I think I'd have liked Larkin but in most cases readers are drawn in, like Shakespeare admirers, to assume the best about poets on account of their poetry. That is probably a bad idea.
Brenda's book was temporarily left to one side because of an enthusiatic recommendation from a colleague for Francis Wheen's Strange Days Indeed (2009), a riveting study of 1970's paranoia in high places from Richard Nixon, through Harold Wilson to Idi Amin and the proliferation of terroroist groups and Prada Meinhoff chic. Was it really like that as we lived through glam rock, Bowie and punk. Well, yes, it apparently was and maybe it is like that most of the time. It might be more unusual to find a decade in which mundanity was the prevailing atmosphere and see if we preferred it.
I can only pass on the recommendation and thank the person who lent it to me, having found it in an Oxfam shop.
And now for a game of Which One's Diderich?
Buxtehude mania didn't end with my Christmas acquisition of the Opera Omnia but has proved a springboard to even greater things, now in possession of the t-shirt that I wore for last week's poetry reading; the definitive volume by Kerala J. Snyder now on order and various options on the print here under close consideration.But whereas I had taken it that this group portrait only 'possibly' included Dietrich and he is the one draping himself over the keyboard in thoughtful repose, it now turns out he's playing the viol. If only the technology had been available to him, perhaps he could have played all the instruments, like Prince, but I doubt if he could have sung Klag Lied to his own satisfaction.
Meanwhile, I must press on with Time After Time, the novel written for the sake of writing a novel. My character, Des, needs to finish his epic 12 Hour ride by the end of chapter 9 and then I only have chapter 10 to do. Riding a twelve and writing a novel are similar enterprises, not to be undertaken lightly, and I'll be glad to be in a position to say I've done both, neither of them particularly well, and not have to do either of them again.
