The NME Poll

I thought, to belatedly mark the passing of the NME, I'd have one last go at doing their poll- but for all time.
A quick glance at some past results shows that winners in 1953 were Ted Heath for Best Dance Band and Dickie Valentine as Best Male Singer. I've taken my categories from 1971, which was the best year for pop music, but then amended a few. Then, cool or not now, Cliff was anointed as Best British Male Singer and Best DJ was Jimmy Savile.
I'm going,

• World Male Singer: Al Green
• World Female Singer: Diana Ross
• World Musical Personality: Gregory Isaacs
• Best Songwriter: Stephin Merritt
• British Male Singer: Marc Bolan
• British Female Singer: Dusty Springfield
• Best British Single: T. Rex, Get It On
• Best World Single: The Jackson Five, I Want You Back
• Best TV/ Radio Show: Top of the Pops
• Best Musician: Prince
• Top Genius: David Bowie
• Best World Group: The Velvet Underground
• Top British Group: T. Rex
• Turkey: Queen
• Top Disc Jockey: Tony Blackburn
• Best Album:  The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs 

Good Friday

Good Friday is perhaps the best day of the year, it dawned on me this morning. It's possibly the quietest day with its sense of decorum and seriousness that other religiose days have all but lost by now.
I marked it by playing all five versions of Francois Couperin's Lecons de Tenebres that I have on disc with an interval filled by Osvaldo Golijov's Tenebrae which re-makes it.
Some versions are more operatic than others, Alfred Deller inevitably a bit dated while all are sensual as is the French way but James Bowman and Michael Chance are surely still in a class of their own for their clean, concise performance with the viola da gamba sufficiently well up in the mix to take a prominent part. It's not quite a case of nothing ever equalling the first version one heard because that was Jordi Savall in the film Tous les Matins du Monde but Bowman/Chance was the version I bought for a complete account and it probably is still the best CD in the house.
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The ongoing story of the emergence of The Perfect Book has reached the stage of examining a sample copy. I'm re-doing it slightly to make the print a bit bigger, as bigger as space will allow without re-editing the whole thing.
The cover is great, quite possibly the highlight of the book but certainly the poems suddenly don't look quite as good when you realize they will appear in public like that so there has been further amendment in places while the opportunity to continue to edit remains.

But with a brief sample of Mama Told Me on the Jess Davies Band Facebook page sounding convincingly 'country' with slide guitar added, we can but anticipate May 4th with some hopes.

Portsmouth Poetry Society will be meeting at the Buckland Community Centre, Malins Raod from next Weds onwards and John Dean and I will have copies of our respective new books there on Weds 18th for anyone in the area who would like to come and see.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

How very remiss of me. Nothing added here for over a week. I'm disappointed it hasn't caused an inbox overflowing with complaints.
The hottest news, as we follow the progress of The Perfect Book, is that the sample copy is ready to collect so I must get down there so that I can scrutinize it all over for errata. There really shouldn't be any by now but it's likely I won't notice the last gremlin until three weeks after dishing out copies.
As soon as it's in print, the poems caan suddenly lose all the lustre one thought they had, knowing that now other people can see them and they are no longer your own private world. I'm sure some might look wooden or clumsy in places and I'm already fretting over use of the word 'lousy'. It is meant to refer to the fictional character rather than any real-life equivalent but that isn't made clear enough.
Or perhaps one can worry too much. Anyway, it will be a good job to involve myself in over Easter if the latest batch of old Barnesy novels don't staart to arrive. Needless to say, Talking It Over is another masterpiece.
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I'm a bit taken aback by the fuss caused about the ball-tampering in the cricket. It has gone far beyond the reaction to what Mike Atherton was seen doing and it is professional sport. It's not cricket in the spirit of the original maxim any more but, given England's performance in the first test against New Zealand, I didn't realize anybody still cared or tried. I thought it was just a matter of fulfilling fixtures.
I always polished one side of the ball when bowling. There were three reasons for that. In the vague hope it might make the ball swing, although I often tried to spin it as well; because it was what proper cricketers did on telly and much of what we were doing was pretending to be them and in order to leave an indelible mark on one's white trousers (which is still  there), as a badge of credibility as if one knew what one was doing. But why was that not ball-tampering. We only preserved the shine on one side, that was the point. It's like eating bananas or taking water on a long-distance bike race. They were performance-enhancing.
Professional sport has gone beyond my comprehension by now. Supporting a football team seems to require more of an interest in accountancy or high finance than any instinct for sticking it in the back of the onion bag, which is what I liked doing. 
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And I wonder why I keep getting special offers from the London Review of Books. Do you think they buy lists of subscribers from the TLS. That would surely be a retrograde move by the TLS because one day I might decide to change allegiance. Having both might be too much of a luxury. Does the LRB have a crossword, I wonder. It has Alan Bennett and, once in a while, August Kleinzahler but the TLS has Sean O'Brien as well as an occasionally irritating sense of its own erudition that sometimes makes it look silly.
We'll see.

Meanwhile, About Larkin, the magazine of the Philip Larkin Society, is due to appear next at the end of next month with Move Over, Darling, a poem from The Perfect Book, tucked away in a corner. It is a very timely single taken from the album and I'm grateful to them for finding space for it.   

We Could Have Been in Films,

It is customary for most books, and with most publishers, to promote new titles. By all means, this website has made no secret of The Perfect Book but that's because it's what I do and it's a story but any further marketing is beyond me. Those who want a copy badly enough will find out about it, or be given one anyway. It's a sort of reverse psychology but, mostly, it's just not a commercial venture.

A late alarm was caused by realizing that The Perfect Murder was set up in a slighly larger font but a loss of 12.5% of letter-size is something one can live with compared to 27 pages of fontage to re-edit having been thrown into disarray not long after I'd got it (I thought) right.

I might have had in mind, but didn't, how Marc Bolan always provided such good value for money on T. Rex singles by having two tracks on the b side and, since I had half a page of blank space, didn't want to fall back on the old expediency of 'giving the poems room to breathe' and thought I'd do a short one to fill the space. Not unlike Tony Hancock in The Rebel in which the painter categorizes his abstract daubs by size.
So, this will fill that half page, a bit of a reprise of some earlier themes late in the book (which is a convenient way of saying I made another poem out of bits of some of the others - never knowingly grandiose about the creative process) because what you should have in a poetry book is words, not empty space.

Nobody's looking forward to this book more than me and the editing process has become such a pleasure, I'll miss it but one has to let go eventually. I only hope that once the printer sees it he doesn't say, oh, no, mate, can't do that, you're using software that's over three weeks old.

We Could Have Been in Films,

the lunch dates shot on hand-held cameras

from adjacent tables,

                                   conversation

overheard in fragments.

                                       You were Bergman,

me without Niven’s demeanour but trapped

in storylines to come, fondly seeing

in them glamour nobody else could see.

Would that it were never, though, finalized

against further edits so that it can

shift and shimmer, so that whenever needs

be, when I care to, I can watch and play

the song, re-write and then roll the credits.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

I escaped Cheltenham week with cuts and bruises but intact. Many thanks to the Professor for pointing out one at Towcester that I would have missed, otherwise it would have been worse. But, no, Prof, you didn't tip the winner of the Gold Cup, I did. Scroll down and have a look at the preview we did.
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But, A.N. Wilson's scholarly and evocative Jesus proved an engrossing read with several imaginative explanations and much sense, if not light, shed on the weird permutations of the story as it has been passed down through Christian propaganda. I raced through the second half of it before taking Elizabeth Bishop Studies to the next level by looking at the correspondance with The New Yorker.

Quite how much detail we need as background to poems is difficult to say. In Philip Larkin Studies we have a museum with his spectacles to be gazed upon, letters, more letters, a reconstruction of what his record collection might have consisted of, his photographs, every conceivable line of doggerel he never could have imagined would see print and thank heavens the diaries were burned as he wished. All that to investigate a very 'private' man who meticulously published only his best poems and rarely gave readings.

 Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker, the Complete Correspondance is not as private as some letters so those who feel intrusive reading other people's post should worry less about these and they prove to be riveting.
One is struck by how painstaking the editors are in offering ideas for amendments to poems. What a nerve ! This is Elizabeth Bishop, don't they know. But she is accommodating and amenable most of the time and on good terms. It is even very civilized when she withdraws from her contract by which The New Yorker gets first refusal on her poems and stories.
The magazine has a house style, likes punctuation to conform to their standard and also writes back sometimes to say a poem was voted out but then they kindly forward it to the Partisan Review. The only reservation one has about the book is having to read repeated entreaties for more poems because, despite rejecting a percentage of them, they don't want to lose her. And she gets paid simply for letting them have first refusal.
But editing is an unlikely pleasure. Why, only today I realized that the word 'amaze', in different forms, turns up in three poems in The Perfect Book. That is much better than the same word, 'glorious', appearing three times in the same poem, In Pursuit of Autumn, and having to pretend to make a virtue out of lexical impoverishment. But one 'amazed' was changed to 'startled' and another to 'surprised' and I felt better for it.   
One can hardly wait to have the little bundle of joy to have and to hold. And then to stare aghast at the bare cupboard of having not one line of new poems on hand.
But I'm very comfortable, thank you, with the cosy intimacy of Elizabeth and her editor friends and only fear for myself as next I intrepidly attempt to scale the north face of The Salt Companion to Mina Loy. As difficult poets go, she is one but needs must. She is my dangerous, avant-garde mistress, the sort of girl I was warned about but didn't listen. I hope she's gentle with me.

Obits

I'm not ghoulish enough to have a file of obituaries ready and waiting for when elderly, deserving cases depart this life. The selection criteria that decides who gets one here is entirely arbitrary and down to me and Ken Dodd would have had one had I been here and I'd have invited my father to write it had it not been his incapacity that I was away doing my insubstantial best to attend to.
By Jove, Missus, By Jove, What a Beautiful Day it was to be stuck on a GWR train half the day while Shattered Love won at 4/1 without me home in time to back it.
I said to the railwayman, Can't you go any faster.
He said, Yes, sir, I can go faster but I've got to stay on the train.

I didn't have this Stephen Hawking poem prepared for his ultimate demise, it was in a very limited edition of poems I did in 2000, Line Drawings, on a variety of 'personalities', that included Gianni Versace, Emma Thompson. Lisa Simpson, Damien Hirst, Ian Wright and Shirley Bassey, but it comes in useful now.

Charming Weather

I was never sure if I had The Velvet Underground & Nico on CD but, not having seen it for years, bought it anyway. Sunday Morning never sounded quite so good so either it's re-mastered or I've never heard it on CD before. So one is drawn into looking at t-shirts, becoming more of a disciple and making a list of best albums purely in order to include it.
But taste is a fickle thing and today I've moved on. My favourite track is now by Miss M. Mayhew and Irving Gillette and a disc of The Arcadians is on its way.
Priceless.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

Julian Barnes's England, England is twenty years old now but still pertinent if not alarmingly prescient in some of its litany of satirical vignettes.
And, yes, I do sometimes write sentences like an Oxford undergraduate but only for a laugh.
It is a satire on theme park reproduction England in which the Isle of Wight is bought up and made into a tourist attraction of all the English things tourists come here for, except in replica, which doesn't matter, and it replaces the original, which subsequently declines into perceived backwardness. Barnes just piles up point after point in what is another variation on his theme of the 'played-out'.
There is a problem with the reproduction smugglers, which is that they start smuggling, but the most telling part is where England is foreseen as having left the EU, and in the end were so much trouble in negotiations that Europe paid us to go.
Perhaps we could pay Farage, Gove, Rees-Mogg and Boris to go and that would be the best way of making progress but Barnesy wasn't far off the mark twenty years back when Leave seemed unimaginable.
The culture is by now further down the line but fake news, the celebrity of celebrity itself and post-post-modernism of so much knowing fakery is implicit in England, England and no different from 1984 being written in 1948 and regarded as 'science fiction' only by those who didn't realize it had happened already.
 

Rather different but more impressive, if anything, was Mina Loy's novel, Insel, not published in her lifetime but available since 2014 from Melville House. I found it a few months ago and it has remained in the 'to do' pile for a while because although Loy is a big hero of mine, pin-up girl of the avant-garde in both Europe and New York, her poems are forbiddingly difficult. The novel proves to be anything but and is a glorious virtuoso performance of rich, evocative prose. The trepidation of attempting it was immediately rewarded with an impressive account of the art dealer's relationship with the dilinquent genius painter, Insel, who is the last word in being in the gutter but looking at the stars.
It is best read not only as a traditional examination of the divide between the bohemian and the bourgeoise but, giving it more credit, as a satire on surrealism as well.  Mina Loy's standing is enhanced by some yards by having read this. What one would really like next is a copy of her essays and stories in that half-hearted way that I'm never a completist but like to have most things that matter by anybody that's any good. However, £118 for one book. I have my limits and it would be cheaper to buy a kindle and download the kindle edition. But I'm afraid nothing is important enough to make me buy a kindle.  
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But one can be grateful for the far too many television channels there are when, having been created, they then have to trawl the archives for material to show. Not just Julie Christie, Alan Bates and the dastardly Terence Stamp in Far From the Mading Crowd that I happened upon last night - what can you do, you can't not watch it even if Julie Christie was a bit too perfectly manicured to suspend disbelief with any conviction- but New York Rock at the BBC on the Yesterday channel. I didn't see it all but John Cale, David Byrne and the gorgeous Antony Hegarty, as well as the entirely to-be-expected Lou and Patti, more than made up for the entirely unworthy Strokes that were less of a grand finale but a reason to flick over to see what else was elsewhere. Regrettably, though, I'm not adventurous enough. What I really wanted was a couple of John Cale albums but there were too many to choose from. So I ended up with another copy of the Velvet Underground banana CD in case I only have it on LP and Songs for Drella. The trouble is I never play such things and by the time they arrive I won't be feeling anywhere near as New York.