14 across.
Come on, how are we supposed to get that.
Saturday 31 August 2019
Monday 26 August 2019
'September 1, 1939'
Ian Sansom, September1, 1939 (4th Estate)
Described as 'a biography of a poem', Ian Sansom's contribution to Auden Studies should concentrate more on the poem and the poet. From the start, he is also writing about himself writing the book. That it took 25 years and was part of a personal Auden obsession is fine but, having told us in an introduction, that was all that was necessary.
The analysis of the poem begins with the first word, ' I ', and a routine discussion of to what extent the ' I ' in a poem refers to the author. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't but in a 'biography of a poem' the biography of the biographer is intrusive, especially when it is to this extent. Ian Sansom is relentlessly self-deprecating and insists that he is 'not W.H. Auden' but that only begs the question of who ever thought he might be.
That having been said, the book arrived on Saturday lunchtime and its 300 short pages had been read by Sunday evening which is always a good sign. It is very readable if outlining several fairly standard ideas about poetry along the way and, as he says, is more for a general reader than the Auden scholar.
Once it begins to make its way through the poem, stanza by stanza, each of them consisting of a nine-line sentence, he provides some worthwhile commentary.
There would be nothing wrong with taking the poem word by word. Brodsky does that with a Hardy poem to great effect. Having discussed the first word, he moves on to the second, 'sit', which signals a laudable thoroughness to come. Of course that level of detailed analysis can't be sustained but he takes useful detours into the likes of 'dive', Linz, Thucydides and skyscrapers before arriving at the memorable climax.
Sansom acknowledges the authoritative work by John Fuller and Edward Mendelson and his book will do its readers a service if it directs them to those. A significant percentage of the text is taken up with quotes from Auden himself, other commentators and a good selection from Sansom's wide, and adjacent, reading. A number of times he relates his point to the book he is currently reading. It seems he gets through a lot of reading, which he clearly does, but then one remembers the book was written over 25 years.
The central, famous point about the poem is how Auden changed the crucial line,
We must love one another or die.
then removed the whole stanza and then disowned the whole poem.
Sansom might have investigated the motives behind that decision in more detail, even if it were only speculation. Apparently he said it was 'dishonest' because we must die anyway but that has never seemed to me the import of the original line.
The specific dating of the poem in the title refers to something immediate. 'We must love one another or die' is a choice to be made in the moment, not over the rest of our lives. It can't be beyond our notice that Europe, and the world, has been moving disturbingly to the right in recent years. Whether that trend can be halted before history repeats itself remains to be seen. But Auden was a great reviser. It might have been better if he had been a painter and once a canvas had been sold he couldn't return to it because it was on somebody else's wall.
Sansom provides a credible summary of Auden's 'afterlife', from Four Weddings and a Funeral, the reaction to 9/11 and times when his lines have gone beyond the insular world of 'poetry' to illustrate one of the reasons why he is ahead of the more frugal and stringent Elizabeth Bishop in my own thoughts about the Greatest Poet of the C20th.
In one of those paradoxes that both sum up and beset one's thinking, sincerity is not essential to poetry, Auden wrote that The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning and yet he withdrew September 1, 1939 because he didn't like it anymore. And, this from a man who struggled with a sort of Christian belief as a framework for his admirable anti-fascist morality and yet lived, with a chronically dissipated Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee and others in a house that Peter Pears decsribed as 'sordid beyond belief', which may or may not have been what the gospels recommended. It is only natural to prefer the louche, liberal Auden to the dry, consistently high-minded Eliot.
Sansom ends by saying,
Maybe now I can begin.
He has led us through he own purging process and the book he should have written is the one he is in a position to write now, having thrown this one away. He has become more impressive as he has progressed towards a quick summary of those who have said they don't like poetry, including Marianne Moore's poem, I, too, dislike it.
He says he thoroughly dislikes it, in the first instance,
Because poetry embarrasses and humiliates us.
But he might have that the wrong way round. He must be thinking of 'great poetry' and feeling inadequate before it.
I don't like poetry because 90% or more of that which gets written is no good. The remaining 5% or so is tremendous but it's the words I like, not necessarily their authors. Most cricket is rubbish, too, but not Ben Stokes or Jofra Archer.
Ian Sansom does a good job on 'affirming flames' and finds some release in having finished his book. But the book is a disappointment, as befits Ian's beta-male mindset. It's as if he set out in craven, supplicant fashion to provide a superior fanzine. I might have been more sympathetic if he had left himself out and concentrated on the objective job he set himself.
It doesn't help that I recently read Ian Bostridge's book on Schubert's Winterreise, which is quite possibly the best book I've ever read. How far you get in the Cup depends on who you get drawn against in the early rounds.
Described as 'a biography of a poem', Ian Sansom's contribution to Auden Studies should concentrate more on the poem and the poet. From the start, he is also writing about himself writing the book. That it took 25 years and was part of a personal Auden obsession is fine but, having told us in an introduction, that was all that was necessary.The analysis of the poem begins with the first word, ' I ', and a routine discussion of to what extent the ' I ' in a poem refers to the author. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't but in a 'biography of a poem' the biography of the biographer is intrusive, especially when it is to this extent. Ian Sansom is relentlessly self-deprecating and insists that he is 'not W.H. Auden' but that only begs the question of who ever thought he might be.
That having been said, the book arrived on Saturday lunchtime and its 300 short pages had been read by Sunday evening which is always a good sign. It is very readable if outlining several fairly standard ideas about poetry along the way and, as he says, is more for a general reader than the Auden scholar.
Once it begins to make its way through the poem, stanza by stanza, each of them consisting of a nine-line sentence, he provides some worthwhile commentary.
There would be nothing wrong with taking the poem word by word. Brodsky does that with a Hardy poem to great effect. Having discussed the first word, he moves on to the second, 'sit', which signals a laudable thoroughness to come. Of course that level of detailed analysis can't be sustained but he takes useful detours into the likes of 'dive', Linz, Thucydides and skyscrapers before arriving at the memorable climax.
Sansom acknowledges the authoritative work by John Fuller and Edward Mendelson and his book will do its readers a service if it directs them to those. A significant percentage of the text is taken up with quotes from Auden himself, other commentators and a good selection from Sansom's wide, and adjacent, reading. A number of times he relates his point to the book he is currently reading. It seems he gets through a lot of reading, which he clearly does, but then one remembers the book was written over 25 years.
The central, famous point about the poem is how Auden changed the crucial line,
We must love one another or die.
then removed the whole stanza and then disowned the whole poem.
Sansom might have investigated the motives behind that decision in more detail, even if it were only speculation. Apparently he said it was 'dishonest' because we must die anyway but that has never seemed to me the import of the original line.
The specific dating of the poem in the title refers to something immediate. 'We must love one another or die' is a choice to be made in the moment, not over the rest of our lives. It can't be beyond our notice that Europe, and the world, has been moving disturbingly to the right in recent years. Whether that trend can be halted before history repeats itself remains to be seen. But Auden was a great reviser. It might have been better if he had been a painter and once a canvas had been sold he couldn't return to it because it was on somebody else's wall.
Sansom provides a credible summary of Auden's 'afterlife', from Four Weddings and a Funeral, the reaction to 9/11 and times when his lines have gone beyond the insular world of 'poetry' to illustrate one of the reasons why he is ahead of the more frugal and stringent Elizabeth Bishop in my own thoughts about the Greatest Poet of the C20th.
In one of those paradoxes that both sum up and beset one's thinking, sincerity is not essential to poetry, Auden wrote that The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning and yet he withdrew September 1, 1939 because he didn't like it anymore. And, this from a man who struggled with a sort of Christian belief as a framework for his admirable anti-fascist morality and yet lived, with a chronically dissipated Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee and others in a house that Peter Pears decsribed as 'sordid beyond belief', which may or may not have been what the gospels recommended. It is only natural to prefer the louche, liberal Auden to the dry, consistently high-minded Eliot.
Sansom ends by saying,
Maybe now I can begin.
He has led us through he own purging process and the book he should have written is the one he is in a position to write now, having thrown this one away. He has become more impressive as he has progressed towards a quick summary of those who have said they don't like poetry, including Marianne Moore's poem, I, too, dislike it.
He says he thoroughly dislikes it, in the first instance,
Because poetry embarrasses and humiliates us.
But he might have that the wrong way round. He must be thinking of 'great poetry' and feeling inadequate before it.
I don't like poetry because 90% or more of that which gets written is no good. The remaining 5% or so is tremendous but it's the words I like, not necessarily their authors. Most cricket is rubbish, too, but not Ben Stokes or Jofra Archer.
Ian Sansom does a good job on 'affirming flames' and finds some release in having finished his book. But the book is a disappointment, as befits Ian's beta-male mindset. It's as if he set out in craven, supplicant fashion to provide a superior fanzine. I might have been more sympathetic if he had left himself out and concentrated on the objective job he set himself.
It doesn't help that I recently read Ian Bostridge's book on Schubert's Winterreise, which is quite possibly the best book I've ever read. How far you get in the Cup depends on who you get drawn against in the early rounds.
Friday 23 August 2019
A Rare Double
I wonder how many people have had a letter published in a publication and been an answer in the crossword in the same issue. Not many, you would think. This rarest of honours goes to Tom Stoppard in this week's TLS.
Tuesday 20 August 2019
Audenfest
I've been having my own little Auden Festival in anticipation of Ian Sansom's new book which is due imminently.
After last week's casual chat about the Greatest Poet of the C20th, Wystan is installed as a slightly uneasy 9/4 fav in an open heat except I've no idea how the result would be decided. As we have recently seen, you can't trust people to vote sensibly on matters of importance.
Edward Mendelson's Later Auden can be heavy going at times, analysing in great detail the longer poems, their references to Jung or Kierkegaard and Wystan's unremitting search for liberal imperatives, Christian doctrine and literary properness. One has to admire his doggedness. Auden's as well as Mendelson's.
Alongside that, The English Auden is inappropriately the collected works of the Early Auden period, before the watershed moment of the emigration to America. I didn't necessarily need it, being in possession of other Selected and Collecteds, but it has long been one of those things one ought to have anyway and there's plenty in it I didn't have, not least the whole story of the poems he wrote in 1938/9, which represent a golden age. Who could be without both versions of Brussels in Winter so that one can see the revision from,
To warm the heartless city in his arms.
to,
To take the shuddering city in his arms.
I've lived with the 'shuddering' for so long it looks obviously right but the longer I look, the less sure I am. Being such a reviser leaves more than one version out there, which might be cheating, but when they are both that good, one can try to live with both and the poem benefits exponentially. The same is of course true of September 1, 1939, in which he changed his mind completely, from 'or' to 'and', but once you've read both versions you can't have one without the other.
Two facing pages in Later Auden quote lines that bring to mind later poets who owe Auden some debt, if not for these specific references. One Circumlocution is a poem I had not seen before but there it is,
Poems which make us cry direct us to
Ourselves least apt, least kind, least true
which looks like Wystan smuggling in more of his generalized wisdom under the beguiling magic of rhyme and vague truism but the 'kind' and 'true' set off alarms in a Larkin scholar for their echo found in Talking in Bed and,
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
On the opposite page, Mendelson quotes 'the end of a lecture on Don Quixote',
Art is not enough.
which brings to mind Sean O'Brien's Completists from the recent Europa.
As personalities, one might think Auden, Larkin and O'Brien as dissimilar but as poets I wouldn't put them too far apart. There is any amount of essay questions to be invented around that. Have them on me, they are yours.
But the case for Auden becomes more compelling with the disarmingly straightforward, Their Lonely Betters,
http://www.thebeckoning.com/poetry/auden/auden4.html
Goodness Gracious. He had retrieved English poetry from the excesses of high modernism to make it like Hardy only better to that extent, in 1950, by which time some commentators thought he had lost it in a deterioration into prolix inconsequentiality. The 9/4 is suddenly looking like value.
I was indebted to a schoolfriend's enthusiasm for Auden in the first place whose reading of Stephen Spender's memoirs and other anecdotes did as much as my own reading to put him where he is in my charts. The relationship to Eliot doesn't bear much comparison with my own maxim that one might admire David Bowie more but one loves Marc Bolan but some might see the point.
Somewhere upstairs there must still be the letter from Stephen Spender to my friend who had, ambitiously on my behalf, sent him some of my juvenilia. I was about 18, what else was there to send. He tried his best, Mr. Spender, who was by then all that was left of the Auden Group and so the closest we could get, and he really need not have been so gentle. I've done better since but still regret the few times I've bothered senior poets with my efforts on my own account.
As Larkin would have stamped it, why should he care.
After last week's casual chat about the Greatest Poet of the C20th, Wystan is installed as a slightly uneasy 9/4 fav in an open heat except I've no idea how the result would be decided. As we have recently seen, you can't trust people to vote sensibly on matters of importance.
Edward Mendelson's Later Auden can be heavy going at times, analysing in great detail the longer poems, their references to Jung or Kierkegaard and Wystan's unremitting search for liberal imperatives, Christian doctrine and literary properness. One has to admire his doggedness. Auden's as well as Mendelson's.
Alongside that, The English Auden is inappropriately the collected works of the Early Auden period, before the watershed moment of the emigration to America. I didn't necessarily need it, being in possession of other Selected and Collecteds, but it has long been one of those things one ought to have anyway and there's plenty in it I didn't have, not least the whole story of the poems he wrote in 1938/9, which represent a golden age. Who could be without both versions of Brussels in Winter so that one can see the revision from,
To warm the heartless city in his arms.
to,
To take the shuddering city in his arms.
I've lived with the 'shuddering' for so long it looks obviously right but the longer I look, the less sure I am. Being such a reviser leaves more than one version out there, which might be cheating, but when they are both that good, one can try to live with both and the poem benefits exponentially. The same is of course true of September 1, 1939, in which he changed his mind completely, from 'or' to 'and', but once you've read both versions you can't have one without the other.
Two facing pages in Later Auden quote lines that bring to mind later poets who owe Auden some debt, if not for these specific references. One Circumlocution is a poem I had not seen before but there it is,
Poems which make us cry direct us to
Ourselves least apt, least kind, least true
which looks like Wystan smuggling in more of his generalized wisdom under the beguiling magic of rhyme and vague truism but the 'kind' and 'true' set off alarms in a Larkin scholar for their echo found in Talking in Bed and,
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
On the opposite page, Mendelson quotes 'the end of a lecture on Don Quixote',
Art is not enough.
which brings to mind Sean O'Brien's Completists from the recent Europa.
As personalities, one might think Auden, Larkin and O'Brien as dissimilar but as poets I wouldn't put them too far apart. There is any amount of essay questions to be invented around that. Have them on me, they are yours.
But the case for Auden becomes more compelling with the disarmingly straightforward, Their Lonely Betters,
http://www.thebeckoning.com/poetry/auden/auden4.html
Goodness Gracious. He had retrieved English poetry from the excesses of high modernism to make it like Hardy only better to that extent, in 1950, by which time some commentators thought he had lost it in a deterioration into prolix inconsequentiality. The 9/4 is suddenly looking like value.
I was indebted to a schoolfriend's enthusiasm for Auden in the first place whose reading of Stephen Spender's memoirs and other anecdotes did as much as my own reading to put him where he is in my charts. The relationship to Eliot doesn't bear much comparison with my own maxim that one might admire David Bowie more but one loves Marc Bolan but some might see the point.
Somewhere upstairs there must still be the letter from Stephen Spender to my friend who had, ambitiously on my behalf, sent him some of my juvenilia. I was about 18, what else was there to send. He tried his best, Mr. Spender, who was by then all that was left of the Auden Group and so the closest we could get, and he really need not have been so gentle. I've done better since but still regret the few times I've bothered senior poets with my efforts on my own account.
As Larkin would have stamped it, why should he care.
Wednesday 14 August 2019
Caster Semenya
It's getting a bit weird in sport.
The other night I saw the last 15 balls of the final of the Canadian T20 from which Andre Russell scored most of the 50 runs to take it into a 'super over', in which he finally got out before having to bowl at the opposition. I am old enough to remember the early days of limited overs cricket and a commentary that said,
And with the required run rate now approaching 5 an over, I really can't see them getting these runs now.
A little while before I was born, Ray Booty was the first cyclist to do 100 miles in under 4 hours. And now Marcin Bialoblocki has done 3.13. Mr. Booty would have been surprised, if not a little crestfallen, to get caught by someone who had started 45 minutes after him.
Such things are progress but one eventually lives long enough for it not to be the same game.
Running is roughly the same game but the 4 minute mile is nothing special these days. But it has gone beyond other sports in expecting the oustanding athlete to take drugs to slow them down which is the opposite of what they usually want, which is to stop athletes taking drugs to make them go faster.
Caster Semenya is not a bloke. She benefits from a naturally occuring advantage, which is what all champions do. Something about them makes them better than the other competitors. I know because I've had other bike riders sail past me, faced bowling that either span too much or arrived too soon for me to hit and been out-thought by players who moved their pieces round the chess board better than I moved mine. None of them were champions but they were better than me. Nearly everybody reaches a level at which they are no longer competitive. You get used to it. Having gone to the Gloucestershire athletics trials for under-16's, having won the 800 metres in Gloucester, it was all I could do to stay in the race. 5th of 8, I think I was. That's that, then. Several could run faster than me, for whatever reason.
There are disgruntled complaints in the Paralympics when somebody wins by half the track that they should have been in the next category of disablement. In that case, why can't I have a gold medal for everything in the category of everybody who is exactly like me. I'm afraid we can't all be champions and the idea of it is that there is only one.
There is no suggestion, yet, that Caster Semenya is cheating. She is what she is and one of those things is female. Will they increase the dose until she can't win any more or ask her to carry extra weight, like a horse. It is hard luck for those who don't have her testosterone levels but it was just as hard luck for a horse called Excelebration, who ran up a long sequence of second places and must have the sight of Frankel's back end going further ahead of him etched forever on his memory. If he hadn't been born in the same year as Frankel, he'd have been best of his generation.
The other night I saw the last 15 balls of the final of the Canadian T20 from which Andre Russell scored most of the 50 runs to take it into a 'super over', in which he finally got out before having to bowl at the opposition. I am old enough to remember the early days of limited overs cricket and a commentary that said,
And with the required run rate now approaching 5 an over, I really can't see them getting these runs now.
A little while before I was born, Ray Booty was the first cyclist to do 100 miles in under 4 hours. And now Marcin Bialoblocki has done 3.13. Mr. Booty would have been surprised, if not a little crestfallen, to get caught by someone who had started 45 minutes after him.
Such things are progress but one eventually lives long enough for it not to be the same game.
Running is roughly the same game but the 4 minute mile is nothing special these days. But it has gone beyond other sports in expecting the oustanding athlete to take drugs to slow them down which is the opposite of what they usually want, which is to stop athletes taking drugs to make them go faster.
Caster Semenya is not a bloke. She benefits from a naturally occuring advantage, which is what all champions do. Something about them makes them better than the other competitors. I know because I've had other bike riders sail past me, faced bowling that either span too much or arrived too soon for me to hit and been out-thought by players who moved their pieces round the chess board better than I moved mine. None of them were champions but they were better than me. Nearly everybody reaches a level at which they are no longer competitive. You get used to it. Having gone to the Gloucestershire athletics trials for under-16's, having won the 800 metres in Gloucester, it was all I could do to stay in the race. 5th of 8, I think I was. That's that, then. Several could run faster than me, for whatever reason.
There are disgruntled complaints in the Paralympics when somebody wins by half the track that they should have been in the next category of disablement. In that case, why can't I have a gold medal for everything in the category of everybody who is exactly like me. I'm afraid we can't all be champions and the idea of it is that there is only one.
There is no suggestion, yet, that Caster Semenya is cheating. She is what she is and one of those things is female. Will they increase the dose until she can't win any more or ask her to carry extra weight, like a horse. It is hard luck for those who don't have her testosterone levels but it was just as hard luck for a horse called Excelebration, who ran up a long sequence of second places and must have the sight of Frankel's back end going further ahead of him etched forever on his memory. If he hadn't been born in the same year as Frankel, he'd have been best of his generation.
Monday 12 August 2019
Casual Chat about the Greatest Poet of the C20th
And we are talking 'English language' poet here. Unless one is fluent in every language that poetry has been written in, I don't know how one can say. Translations are interesting, useful, possibly even essential, but they aren't the 'poetry'.
I was alerted recently to some lines by Auden, including,
Time that tires of everyone.
And they were followed up in short order by the review in Saturday's Times of September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem by Ian Sansom which would be very much the sort of title to order notwithstanding anything in any circumstances. So, rather than embark upon Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann that has waited long enough and can wait a bit longer, I picked out Edward Mendelson's Later Auden that I bought many years ago but never read.
How many biographies of one's fourth (let's say) favourite poet does one need to read when there aren't any of one's favourite. Three seemed enough. Carpenter, Osborne, Davenport-Hines.
And yet Mendelson impressed so much in his first two chapters that Early Auden was ordered in a less salubrious edition straightaway. As James Marriott, the reviewer in The Times says,
I could read trivia about him all day.
Except Mendelson is no William Hickey and he's not trivial. If I was intending to be a leading authority on Auden, I might need the depth of detail he provides on New Year Letter but I'm not and so I don't. I rarely miss a word of any book I'm interested in and am surprised at those who skim or speed read any book but I have to admit I jumped a paragraph or two that I might never need there. I'll know where it is if I ever need it.
But reading Mendelson, with Collected Shorter Poems 1927-57 close by, I remembered how I thought Auden might be the Greatest Poet of the C20th many years ago. In the meantime one has failingly tried to avoid any such grandiose debates but if you decide there must be such a thing the next step is to identify them.
One thing that counts against him is his 'facility', just how much wisdom he manages to churn out, sometimes rhymed in C18th style, that makes it look too easy if not trite. On the other hand, his humanity, liberalism and anti-fascism is to be admired and he tried his best in the times he lived in, which, considering the circumstances in Europe circa 1939, are starting to look not dissimilar to those the failure of democracy and shift to the bone-headed right that are happening again now.
So much for learning from history. It only takes two generations for us to forget.
If we did need to appoint a Greatest Poet of the C20th, W. H. Auden is a candidate, if not the 'front-runner', that epithet that had seemed to have become pre-fixed to Boris Johnson's name in his virtually unopposed escorting to the job he always wanted. Most kids in the generation before him just wanted to be train drivers.
At least there are other choices available for those who don't like Auden enough.
Elizabeth Bishop might be too much the 'poet's poet', like an insider job who hasn't passed into the language via a Hugh Grant film and a poem like Stop all the clocks. The Greatest Poet might need to have broken through beyond poetry circles and written Night Mail even if many who know that poem don't know who wrote it.
Philip Larkin has passed into the language with a handful of memorable lines and been seriously suggested for the title in the twenty years since I heard Anthony Thwaite say, 'great, minor poet, like George Herbert'.
Eliot had been a 'good thing' a few decades ago when it looked as if he had changed everything, was the very touchstone of the 'modern' and there must be much we should still be grateful to him for. But I seem him friendless in the market after all he did, not only for racism but also for the unconsolably highbrow, which also rules out Geoffrey Hill, John Ashbery, Ezra Pound and, extending in other ways, those not highbrow enough and those who thought it was all about them. One might excuse Sylvia's 'confessionalism' because she was also a compellingly wonderful artist but none of the others can be considered because, of course,
Some might say dear old Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas are in the running.
The form is all in the books. If it's a question worth finding an answer to.
There might not yet be a consensus about who was the Greatest Poet of the C19th so it might be a bit soon to start dishing out prizes for that which was still being written only twenty years ago.
I was alerted recently to some lines by Auden, including,
Time that tires of everyone.
And they were followed up in short order by the review in Saturday's Times of September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem by Ian Sansom which would be very much the sort of title to order notwithstanding anything in any circumstances. So, rather than embark upon Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann that has waited long enough and can wait a bit longer, I picked out Edward Mendelson's Later Auden that I bought many years ago but never read.
How many biographies of one's fourth (let's say) favourite poet does one need to read when there aren't any of one's favourite. Three seemed enough. Carpenter, Osborne, Davenport-Hines.
And yet Mendelson impressed so much in his first two chapters that Early Auden was ordered in a less salubrious edition straightaway. As James Marriott, the reviewer in The Times says,
I could read trivia about him all day.
Except Mendelson is no William Hickey and he's not trivial. If I was intending to be a leading authority on Auden, I might need the depth of detail he provides on New Year Letter but I'm not and so I don't. I rarely miss a word of any book I'm interested in and am surprised at those who skim or speed read any book but I have to admit I jumped a paragraph or two that I might never need there. I'll know where it is if I ever need it.
But reading Mendelson, with Collected Shorter Poems 1927-57 close by, I remembered how I thought Auden might be the Greatest Poet of the C20th many years ago. In the meantime one has failingly tried to avoid any such grandiose debates but if you decide there must be such a thing the next step is to identify them.
One thing that counts against him is his 'facility', just how much wisdom he manages to churn out, sometimes rhymed in C18th style, that makes it look too easy if not trite. On the other hand, his humanity, liberalism and anti-fascism is to be admired and he tried his best in the times he lived in, which, considering the circumstances in Europe circa 1939, are starting to look not dissimilar to those the failure of democracy and shift to the bone-headed right that are happening again now.
So much for learning from history. It only takes two generations for us to forget.
If we did need to appoint a Greatest Poet of the C20th, W. H. Auden is a candidate, if not the 'front-runner', that epithet that had seemed to have become pre-fixed to Boris Johnson's name in his virtually unopposed escorting to the job he always wanted. Most kids in the generation before him just wanted to be train drivers.
At least there are other choices available for those who don't like Auden enough.
Elizabeth Bishop might be too much the 'poet's poet', like an insider job who hasn't passed into the language via a Hugh Grant film and a poem like Stop all the clocks. The Greatest Poet might need to have broken through beyond poetry circles and written Night Mail even if many who know that poem don't know who wrote it.
Philip Larkin has passed into the language with a handful of memorable lines and been seriously suggested for the title in the twenty years since I heard Anthony Thwaite say, 'great, minor poet, like George Herbert'.
Eliot had been a 'good thing' a few decades ago when it looked as if he had changed everything, was the very touchstone of the 'modern' and there must be much we should still be grateful to him for. But I seem him friendless in the market after all he did, not only for racism but also for the unconsolably highbrow, which also rules out Geoffrey Hill, John Ashbery, Ezra Pound and, extending in other ways, those not highbrow enough and those who thought it was all about them. One might excuse Sylvia's 'confessionalism' because she was also a compellingly wonderful artist but none of the others can be considered because, of course,
Some might say dear old Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas are in the running.
The form is all in the books. If it's a question worth finding an answer to.
There might not yet be a consensus about who was the Greatest Poet of the C19th so it might be a bit soon to start dishing out prizes for that which was still being written only twenty years ago.
Wednesday 7 August 2019
Rare David Green Poem Found in Oxfordshire Inn
She writes with news of the discovery, by her, of this poem by me in the Abingdon Inn. The Book Club Murder wasn't actually lost. I knew it was there in a 2013 edition of South and it was also in The Perfect Murder. All poems by me are 'rare' but it was somehow gratifying to think of it lying low there and, no doubt, in other places, adding a tiny fraction to the cultural fabric of the nation.
--
It must be 6 months or more since my sister asked, 'haven't you got enough CD's yet'.
No.
It simply isn't possible to leave Cilla, the Very Best of Cilla Black in a charity shop when it is 3 for a pound. The two to go with it, The Real Thing and Mozart's 'Prague' Symphony are fair enough but they could have gladly have had the whole pound just for the Cilla. It updates the LP I have upstairs.
Another thing that needs updating is my Top 100. It needs the SOS Band, it needs Dave & Ansel Collins and it needs this,
Monday 5 August 2019
Bill Cushing - A Former Life
Bill Cushing, A Former Life (Finishing Line Press)
It's not often one acquires a new poetry book from a day at the races. Our host from Corals at Eclipse Day said he had a book for me and would send it on. One doesn't expect too much from such a chance acquisition because there is far more bad poetry published than good but, what do you know, when it arrived a few days ago, we landed the odds. Bill Cushing's poems are entirely worthwhile.
The title poem with which the book begins is possibly the best although that might only be the effect of not knowing what one is going to find and being gently impressed. Obviously I usually choose what to read and expect to like it.
The 18 short lines of A Former Life are understated, with tangential musical effects - maybe a half-rhyme here or subtle enough alliteration elsewhere- and relates a disarmingly simple but vivid anecdote that stands a number of re-readings. And that is where the 'poetry' is, in the extra bit achieved beyond the sum of the constituent words.
The book is organized into three sections - People, Places and Things. If associations with the scent of honeysuckle are denied in the first poem, the sense of smell recurs in the first section, the 'acrid smoking steel' in Planking the Tango, the 'rich smell of dung' in Clarence and 'an aroma of mangoes' in Morning. The 'People' section moves from a childhood memory, through work to illness and death before ending with a restorative love poem.
But it's not all olfactory, pertaining to smell. Bill produces some effective visual metaphors in the new-born baby,
a twisted pretzel of
a person,
in Gabriel's Coming, and the mountains in Cusquenos,
curl like sleeping dragons,
but the poems in 'Places' are about people, too. Bill Cushing's places are inhabited by people, experienced by people or created by people and don't exist in the abstract beyond that. Dividing the book into such chapters is not a problem as such but might not have been necessary.
I had a good, long look at,
the finisher chips
discretely on the rough work
on page 30.
I was once told that you listen to the brass to find out if an orchestra are any good, presumably because that's the hardest thing to get right. I think one can look at poets using difficult words to see if they know what they are doing. There are 'discrete' and 'discreet' that are different things and can trip up the unwary writer. I should never have doubted Bill.
The things in 'Things' are nature, music and the environment before the poems move into religious themes. The music is Charlie Parker, a generous tribute to Miles Davis, a 'flagship for messages/ of the heart' and Modest Mussorgsky.
Some of these poems use 'the space on the page' and set the lines out for the eye, like Robert Duncan, or was it Gary Snyder, did in the 1970's. It was a fashion once and maybe still is in some circles in California but I'm never sure if it does the words any favours. There again, I'm English and by now think avant-garde is old-fashioned. And not everybody will relish the explicit Christianity expressed as the tone becomes more coruscating approaching its climax but, if the book began so beguilingly and quietly, it ends powerfully with Final Flight, 9/11 and the twin towers, and the decision to jump 'the quarter-mile journey back to earth' rather than burn alive.
That's not an easy subject to do justice to. Michael Stipe made a good job of it on Leaving New York, at a slight angle. Bill's poems don't flinch from taking any such subject head on. They are not 'literary', not ironic but are sincere and true and there's plenty worse things to be than that. He has produced a genuine and genuinely rewarding book.
The title poem with which the book begins is possibly the best although that might only be the effect of not knowing what one is going to find and being gently impressed. Obviously I usually choose what to read and expect to like it.
The 18 short lines of A Former Life are understated, with tangential musical effects - maybe a half-rhyme here or subtle enough alliteration elsewhere- and relates a disarmingly simple but vivid anecdote that stands a number of re-readings. And that is where the 'poetry' is, in the extra bit achieved beyond the sum of the constituent words.
The book is organized into three sections - People, Places and Things. If associations with the scent of honeysuckle are denied in the first poem, the sense of smell recurs in the first section, the 'acrid smoking steel' in Planking the Tango, the 'rich smell of dung' in Clarence and 'an aroma of mangoes' in Morning. The 'People' section moves from a childhood memory, through work to illness and death before ending with a restorative love poem.
But it's not all olfactory, pertaining to smell. Bill produces some effective visual metaphors in the new-born baby,
a twisted pretzel of
a person,
in Gabriel's Coming, and the mountains in Cusquenos,
curl like sleeping dragons,
but the poems in 'Places' are about people, too. Bill Cushing's places are inhabited by people, experienced by people or created by people and don't exist in the abstract beyond that. Dividing the book into such chapters is not a problem as such but might not have been necessary.
I had a good, long look at,
the finisher chips
discretely on the rough work
on page 30.
I was once told that you listen to the brass to find out if an orchestra are any good, presumably because that's the hardest thing to get right. I think one can look at poets using difficult words to see if they know what they are doing. There are 'discrete' and 'discreet' that are different things and can trip up the unwary writer. I should never have doubted Bill.
The things in 'Things' are nature, music and the environment before the poems move into religious themes. The music is Charlie Parker, a generous tribute to Miles Davis, a 'flagship for messages/ of the heart' and Modest Mussorgsky.
Some of these poems use 'the space on the page' and set the lines out for the eye, like Robert Duncan, or was it Gary Snyder, did in the 1970's. It was a fashion once and maybe still is in some circles in California but I'm never sure if it does the words any favours. There again, I'm English and by now think avant-garde is old-fashioned. And not everybody will relish the explicit Christianity expressed as the tone becomes more coruscating approaching its climax but, if the book began so beguilingly and quietly, it ends powerfully with Final Flight, 9/11 and the twin towers, and the decision to jump 'the quarter-mile journey back to earth' rather than burn alive.
That's not an easy subject to do justice to. Michael Stipe made a good job of it on Leaving New York, at a slight angle. Bill's poems don't flinch from taking any such subject head on. They are not 'literary', not ironic but are sincere and true and there's plenty worse things to be than that. He has produced a genuine and genuinely rewarding book.
Thursday 1 August 2019
Racetrack Wiseguy
It's not as clear as it once was what this DG Books website is for, especially if I continue to be someone who once wrote poems and buy fewer new poetry books than I used to.
But, never fear, if All Things Must Pass then some things metamorphose. I don't know whether to embark on an Autumn replacement for the old Saturday Nap feature with Racetrack Wiseguy, if only to indulge in the recreation of being the racing journalist I never was. But if I'm going to do that, I might also go and work voluntarily in the library once full-time paid employment is called to a halt because librarian (hilariously) is what I once thought I was going to be.
And, on current form, the last advice anybody ought to be reading on horse racing is mine. I do stupid things and can hardly live with myself when they inevitably go wrong but I remain ahead as a result of some judicious earler work and Oct-Jan is my time, so we will see.
I won't want to come across like Brough Scott who ITV wheel out on big occasions for his dewy-eyed memories of bygone days but that's what I felt like on Saturday when most of the spritely, young presenters had to admit they didn't remember Grundy-Bustino in the 1975 King George. But that is what Enable and Crystal Ocean served up.
The difference is that Grundy got weight from the year older Bustino in 1975 whereas Crystal Ocean was giving weight to Enable this year because he's a boy and she's a girl. The 2019 King George seved to establish the official ratings, that put Crystal Ocean 2lb ahead of Enable, as right.
Without wanting to suffer the slings and arrows of being John McCririck, one race is decided by ageism and another by sexism. I adored Grundy and was glad he won but now have reservations. I suppose I also wanted Enable's sequence to continue but perhaps not under the suspicion that Crystal Ocean is the better horse and won't go down in history, or memory, as such.
--
One of the several compensations of ageing is now being able to afford the things one wanted but couldn't when one was a kid. It's reassuring how many of them still apply although it is mostly pop records. I remember one acquaintaince, aged about 40, who drank lemonade from a pint glass, making up for all the times in childhood when he'd been offered fizzy pop and given only a small glass.
This week's case in point for me is the Double Barrel album by Dave and Ansel Collins. In 1971 it sounded very strange but has grown from that to acknowledged masterpiece and onwards to absolutely essential.
One thing my generation can't grow out of (or me, anyway) is having to own the record. We prized our records then in a way that generations since won't appreciate. Although I can't listen to Double Barrel on the internet whenever I want, that isn't good enough. I want to be someone who has the record, i.e. someone.
You Tube will suffice for further Lou Reed titles, though. Reading the 2017 biography by Anthony De Curtis, I am tempted by Coney Island Baby and other titles but I count up that I have 7 titles by Lou or The Velvet Underground and they don't get played very often in the face of such comptetion as there is on the shelves so I surely don't need any more.
Lou has long been some kind of idol as the founder of the Velvets, which is plenty, notwithstanding a very respectable subsequent career. Well, not exactly respectable. I have read a previous biography but must have forgotten, or it didn't make so much of, Lou's behaviour. While accepting that some creative artists can be self-regarding and ill-mannnered, Lou made a career out of it that meant his music needed to be good in order to justify it. It often was, but maybe not always, and then he slags it off himself. Being difficult or downright impossible might seem like fun but eventually, in such cases, sympathy begins to wane.
But, never fear, if All Things Must Pass then some things metamorphose. I don't know whether to embark on an Autumn replacement for the old Saturday Nap feature with Racetrack Wiseguy, if only to indulge in the recreation of being the racing journalist I never was. But if I'm going to do that, I might also go and work voluntarily in the library once full-time paid employment is called to a halt because librarian (hilariously) is what I once thought I was going to be.
And, on current form, the last advice anybody ought to be reading on horse racing is mine. I do stupid things and can hardly live with myself when they inevitably go wrong but I remain ahead as a result of some judicious earler work and Oct-Jan is my time, so we will see.
I won't want to come across like Brough Scott who ITV wheel out on big occasions for his dewy-eyed memories of bygone days but that's what I felt like on Saturday when most of the spritely, young presenters had to admit they didn't remember Grundy-Bustino in the 1975 King George. But that is what Enable and Crystal Ocean served up.
The difference is that Grundy got weight from the year older Bustino in 1975 whereas Crystal Ocean was giving weight to Enable this year because he's a boy and she's a girl. The 2019 King George seved to establish the official ratings, that put Crystal Ocean 2lb ahead of Enable, as right.
Without wanting to suffer the slings and arrows of being John McCririck, one race is decided by ageism and another by sexism. I adored Grundy and was glad he won but now have reservations. I suppose I also wanted Enable's sequence to continue but perhaps not under the suspicion that Crystal Ocean is the better horse and won't go down in history, or memory, as such.
--
One of the several compensations of ageing is now being able to afford the things one wanted but couldn't when one was a kid. It's reassuring how many of them still apply although it is mostly pop records. I remember one acquaintaince, aged about 40, who drank lemonade from a pint glass, making up for all the times in childhood when he'd been offered fizzy pop and given only a small glass.
One thing my generation can't grow out of (or me, anyway) is having to own the record. We prized our records then in a way that generations since won't appreciate. Although I can't listen to Double Barrel on the internet whenever I want, that isn't good enough. I want to be someone who has the record, i.e. someone.
You Tube will suffice for further Lou Reed titles, though. Reading the 2017 biography by Anthony De Curtis, I am tempted by Coney Island Baby and other titles but I count up that I have 7 titles by Lou or The Velvet Underground and they don't get played very often in the face of such comptetion as there is on the shelves so I surely don't need any more.
Lou has long been some kind of idol as the founder of the Velvets, which is plenty, notwithstanding a very respectable subsequent career. Well, not exactly respectable. I have read a previous biography but must have forgotten, or it didn't make so much of, Lou's behaviour. While accepting that some creative artists can be self-regarding and ill-mannnered, Lou made a career out of it that meant his music needed to be good in order to justify it. It often was, but maybe not always, and then he slags it off himself. Being difficult or downright impossible might seem like fun but eventually, in such cases, sympathy begins to wane.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
