Oh, Babe, What Would You Play

One wouldn't have thought that a mug punter's balance sheet would continue quite so consistently onwards and upwards so perhaps these days I'm not a mug punter any more. But pride comes before a fall so I must stick with the programme and be grateful while it keeps on working.
After another good weekend of which I had no great expectations but one thing led to another, I treated myself to the usual reward of searching Amazon for the next investment. The Complete Buxtehude was an outlandish luxury and a huge success but doesn't have to be the end of such self-indulgence.
The Complete Bach Cantatas goes to 72 discs, for £64. It remains a possibility but the unwelcome voice of restraint could just be heard saying, 72 discs, are you sure. It's not the shelf space, it's not the parsimoniousness, it's just the recognition of how long it would take to listen to them all once each. Although I would enjoy just looking at them.
So, maybe the alchemy that turns horse races into a music library is beginning to lose its charm. But not just yet. What, Simon Rattle's Beethoven cycle with the Vienna Philharmiker for a tenner. Okay, then. I'll be straight into the Pastoral when that arrives. And I had been aware that there is no Chopin on CD on those much-vaunted shelves, the cassettes and LP never get played and so 16 discs of the Complete Chopin, regrettably not by Martha Argerich, take me from no Chopin to all of it for the price of a fiver on a 3/1 winner.
Chopin's restraint in leaving us only 16 discs worth of music is admirable compared to Buxtehude's 29 and Bach something like 157. Thanks, Freddie, lad. I realize that all that Bach is the closest to perfection that any art is likely to achieve but surely it was just showing off to bequeath us quite so much of it.
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But, never one to be magnanimous when brash celebration is an alternative option, and never mind what a relatively minor honour it is in the wide and plural network of contemporary poetry, it has been announced that my poem below, the Portsmouth Acrostic, was adjudicated finest among the small number of poetry entries received for enhancement of the refurbishment of our office. So, all the usual caveats apply, like in any poetry competition, there would have been different winners if different judges had been invited to choose. And, quite possibly I was the only entrant that has received cash from a magazine for a poem that was published, so I won't be tempted into saying that it was like Nijinsky running against some much more honest, sincere and unambiguous colts and mares. It is very possible that many who read those poems, not all of who will be familiar with Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity or with deep reverence for the work of Elizabeth Bishop, will prefer the other poems and I'd be the first not to blame them for that. Most remarkably, though, the ratio of number of adjudicators to number of poems entered was almost 6:1 and I'd be surprised if there's ever been a poetry competition like that before.
But poems serve different purposes in different circumstances and literary worth might seem to a certain type of literati to be the overwhelming parameter by which to judge their value but it's not ultimately them that decide beyond the painfully limited precincts of campus, journal and elite cognoscenti.
I had thought the 'long fellow' meant Lester Piggott but I think I can see what Tony Walsh, performance poet, is doing by calling himself Longfella. Referring back to the Hiawatha poet, maybe, maybe not.
The poetry map is a difficult thing to hold one's own place on, this cosy middle-ground of understated, lyric poetry for the page that I identify with immediately feels the need to distance itself at first from the cerebral compositions of J.H. Prynne, the self-absorbed avant-garde and the precious creative writing industry but neither does it want anything at all to do with the one-dimensional crowd pleasing of 'performance'.
Walsh's This Is the Place, as a poem, set new standards for me with regards to what 'bad poetry' is like. Its 'defiance', its exploitatation of heightened emotion, its appeal to very basic, visceral feelings at the most vulnerable of times and its complete absence of any other way it could be read made Kate Tempest look like the most subtle of ironists in comparison. If ever I need to show anybody a bad poem from now on, I'll show them that.
But, if you're going to have a poem, perhaps it was going to have to be something like that. That is the problem with words, why poetry will never be as good as music, and we are stuck with them. Sometimes words aren't good enough but there were plenty of people who thought that Tony Walsh's words were exactly what was required and so I, and all those like me, ought really to abide by one of our other standbys, which we got from Wittgenstein, 'whereof one cannot speak, thereof we must be silent'.