Larkin Diary

It was a windy day, as it happened, that I devoted to reading Philip Larkin's Collected Poems. I had realized how little time I had spent reading my favourite writers and so the day after I finished Ulysses, I gave a day over to the Collected Poems. There is a choice of two. There is no need of Prof. Bradford's Complete unless you think everything he wrote on a birthday card counts as part of the oeuvre. Of course it doesn't. And so, out of Anthony Thwaite's two versions of the Collected, one can have the books with the poems in the order they were first published, with appendices of uncollected poems, or you can have the original edition that put them in chronological order of composition.

I chose the former option but, never mind what other questions it raises, the choice gives two different poems as where to start, either I, All catches alight, with its refrain of,

A drum taps, a wintry drum

or Going. Both are morbid. Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn, who were Larkin's rivals for poetry celebrity in the 1950's, begin Selecteds or Collecteds with somewhat more bravura. We might be in for a dreary day but one wouldn't be doing such a thing unless one knew we weren't. But, reading The North Ship first, in the 2003 Collected, promoted to a place alongside the three 'mature' collections, one can't help noticing how windy it is and not just because of the weather outside. It begins in VI and is mentioned specifically in thirteen of the XXXII poems and implied in a few more. We know already that this wind will blow through several poems in later collections, like Wedding Wind, Mr. Bleaney, Talking in Bed and gently in At Grass. I hadn't noticed quite how much its chilly restlessness defined the early work.

The introduction explains that Larkin agreed to a re-issue by Faber of The North Ship in 1966 'however reluctantly' and the decision might have been swayed by financial motives rather than artistic ones. As the appendices of uncollected poems will later show, he was an astute judge of his own work and best remembered for those poems he published in the three main volumes which does all the selecting needed to make a Selected Poems hardly necessary.

Larkin's reputation as a poet has firmed up since being identified twenty or thirty years ago in places as a 'great, minor' poet and compared with George Herbert to a high placing in the BBC's 2014 Nation's Favourite Poet poll and more consistent recognition alongside Eliot, Auden, Yeats, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney (please provide your own list) as one of the 'major' poets in English of the C20th with a number of his lines passing into the language. He may have been seen as 'minor' as a result of being more downbeat, everyday and apparently less inclined to grand gestures like,

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

or

April is the cruellest month

but while it might since have been realized that Literature doesn't have to be 'big', it might also have been noted that Larkin does deal with all such themes, often ironically rather than overgrandly and with reference to previous literature if that happens to be a requirement of serious work. Philip Sidney, Theophile Gautier and Thomas Hood, not to mention Shakespeare, are names we can cite if and when that essay needs writing.

It is often poetry about things that others might have found 'not worth stopping for', but reading through the Collected in one sweep it is such poems as Church Going, An Arundel Tomb and The Whitsun Weddings that one does stop at with the same satisfaction that a Ralph MacTell audience pay more attention to Streets of London. They are worth stopping for and there are good reasons why they are the best-known but there's an equal and opposite reaction in finding fine things in half-recalled poems, too.

For all of Larkin's complaints about the 'life reprehensibly perfect' spent and not getting 'the fame and the girl and the money/All at one sitting', he begins in The Less Deceived, and never really stops, comparing his lot with that of others and decides he's doing selfishly very nicely. There is no sense that he really wanted such things - and he ostensibly had them, anyway- but one might reflect that he would have been better off not comparing himself with Kingsley Amis. Perhaps the implication is that those who think they've achieved 'fulfilment' are the more deceived.
If he doesn't habitually begin with grandiose first lines, one soon starts to notice what little noise his endings make, too, in each poem that we stop at. If it is regularly pointed out that a Larkin poem broadens out from the specific to a wider perspective, they do also end on a diminuendo, like,

If only that so many dead lie round.

'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere'.

somewhere becoming rain.

With bridles in the evening come.  

or,

That vase.

and if we think that

What will survive of us is love.

is a momentous, optimistic thought to end on then we haven't noticed how the preceding lines, not just the last stanza but the whole poem, has hollowed them out from inside by explaining they are 'untruth', 'hardly meant' and only an 'almost-instinct' only 'almost true'.

These are quiet endings compared to

Shantih. Shantih. Shantih.

or

That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

If love is repeatedly the thing that Larkin suspects he might have missed out on, 'that much-mentioned brilliance' that they say should fall, 'like an enormous yes', he has been aware since page 48, in Reasons for Attendance, that 'what calls him',
                  is that lifted, rough-tongued bell
(Art, if you like)

and he wasn't the first artist and won't be the last who searched for transcendence only to find it in their own, or other, art.

Towards the end of The Whitsun Weddings, Send No Money, that the chronology identifies as one of the later poems in the book, from 1962, prefigures a hardening attitude expressed in more regular use of the vulgar or vernacular that is a noticeable difference between High Windows and the other two mature collections.
The Old Fools, The Card Players and an awareness of the corporate -we might even say Thatcherite- world in Going, Going and Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel are less inclined to gloss over dissatisfactions with compensations and Vers de Société only changes its mind at the last minute.
While remaining capable of a poem as gently moving as Dublinesque, High Windows is the least attractive of the three books due to a coarsening of view, and of language. Not necessarily by much but noticeably. They can look like poems done less carefully, less caringly, or less sensitively.

If the first appendix of poems, 1940-1972, show what a good editor of his own work he was, the second, 1974-1984, shows that he was nowhere near a further volume, notwithstanding the brilliant, brutally honest Aubade, which I thought I might have noticed forming as early as 1943/4 in Dawn, which is IV in The North Ship, with its,

How strange it is
for the heart to be loveless, and as cold as these.

If you want The Dance, you need the other edition, the 1988 version, but I didn't miss its unmade ramblings and if Larkin didn't see fit to finish it, polish it or publish it, I'm not convinced we need to read it. But what a day well spent it was, being reminded of the art of understatement, of clarity and poems being so well made. It didn't result in much reassessment and was never likely to. I never felt sorry for him and his complaints were mainly a strategy of disguise, pretending to be a curmudgeon in order to defend that which he wanted to defend.
But, perhaps like Hamlet, one can pretend to be mad and then not know whether one has become mad or not. One can put on a miserable disposition, almost for a joke, and find it suits you.

Ulysses Diary - Final Edition

 I finished Ulysses yesterday. It took three weeks in tandem with the commentary by Harry Blamires which is confirmation enough that one can give up the day job and spend time rewardingly.Like so many colossal masterpieces, it is mainly funny but a lot of other things besides. One note I made in Molly's soliloquy at the end was of,

I hate that confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool

It's an old joke, considering he's already done where was Moses when the lights went out by then but he does it so well. In The Times on Saturdays they get some well-known person to say that they wished they'd learnt the piano and that Fritz Lang is their favourite film-maker and they are also asked who they'd invite to dinner and they say Ghandi, David Attenborough, Dorothy Parker and Frida Kahlo but apart from not wanting anybody to dinner, I wouldn't want Joyce because I'd be so hugely out of my depth.

I was glad to see,

the infantile discharge of decomposed vegetable missiles, worth little or nothing or less than nothing

because someone once questioned whether there could be 'less than nothing' in a poem of mine (how dare they), Walking on Water,

And underneath, the grizzly, staring fish, 

suspended rigid in the glassy dark,

dreamed of nothing or even less than that. 

 

Well, if it's good enough for Joyce, it's good enough for me.

But above all else, the last section, which must be its best-known part, raised the whole thing to something better. To think there was still a fuss about D.H. Lawrence in 1963 when this had, eventually, been published in 1922 makes one wonder but it makes me wonder more about endings and how Joyce takes all he had before and goes beyond it. 

In Dubliners, he has built from slight beginnings to The Dead and then in its last pages provides the most sublime prose ever to be put on paper and, then, as Dubliners moves into the Portrait, to Ulysses and then Finnegans Wake, he keeps raising it to something more adventurous as if they were all part of an overall design. His grandstand endings only give him the starting place for what he does next.

But not everyone does that with endings. Beethoven signposts the endings of his symphonies from some way off and makes big performances out of them. Shakespeare's endings, in the plays, sometimes clear up quietly after the climax and we will see in Larkin Diary here soon, maybe tomorrow, how Larkin is adept at diminuendo finishes, having broadened out his theme not long before.

 

I can't nominate Ulysses as the greatest novel ever because I've only recently don't that for Proust and it's not even the best thing he wrote, which is The Dead, but three weeks of Ulysses did nothing to make me ever think about removing Joyce from the position of undisputed champion of prose fiction. And, much as I always feel bad about reading the letters of Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, Mozart, Ted Hughes and I think that's all I have to confess to (and you can see how all that Catholicism can drag you down), I think if there's no other Joyce to be had than his, then we'll have them.

I found the fragment, Giacomo Joyce, upstairs. I think another look at that will provide the necessary excuse to delay the Wake and one doesn't live by Joyce alone so Balzac might be next anyway.

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Much of today was spent reading Larkin, the Collected, and I dare say this evening I'll read the uncollected that were belatedly collected in the Collected, and in between I continued to find my slow way back from a minus position towards equity on the racehorsing enterprise. I missed Vocalised winning at Bangor because I was making notes on High Windows. Although I much prefer winning by 6 lengths like With Thanks did at Catterick to the short head that Vocalised won by, it still pays out and retrieving a large deficit a little bit at a time is a long job but we may get there yet. Racetrack Wiseguy is your man in form but there's nothing doing tomorrow.

 

Come back soon for some thoughts on Larkin. I hoped there would be days like this and there are.

 

Ulysses Diary

 I'll finish Ulysses this weekend once the crossword and the racing's over with. It hasn't taken long considering what a colossal thing I thought it was but it's like in bike racing, once you've ridden a few 12 Hour events, you don't think so much about 100 miles and having seen off Proust, not much seems like a big book anymore. I have read two books, though, previewing each of Joyce's sections with the very useful summary by Harry Blamires.

I don't think there's any shame in that. One gets far more out of it with a bit of clear and intrepretative summary and Blamires is exemplary at that. Ulysses is 'modern art', maybe cubist as much as anything with its various ways of showing, whereas Proust is still figurative, like the culmination of where the C19th novel was leading. It's more of an exercise in contrast than comparison, with their different ironic distances but their major themes of Jewishness and the self-deprecating characters of Bloom and Marcel give them some common ground. Whereas Marcel is the emerging, self-doubting writer in Proust, Stephen is the poet with an inflated idea of his own importance in Ulysses. If Proust explores the snobberies and finely-graded social rivalries of Parisian high society, Joyce's characters in Dublin are less aristocratic. Joyce is also more explicitly concerned with bodily functions of all kinds that Proust is more demure about. The pages of Ulysses sometimes seem redolent of the liver and kidneys and thus the fluid that passes from them.

Ulysses has both a Shakesperean thread and one of horse racing running through it. As well as its structure being loosely based on The Odyssey, it has a similarly associative set of parallels with Hamlet, the Modernist tendency to make a collage from previous literature, as in The Waste Land, never being far from Joyce's strategy. The Ascot Gold Cup theme provides more Joycean humour than one might expect with its series of misinterpretations and misreadings but the highly-informed, academic reader can find allusions in most things even where none might have been intended. Religion has already shamelessly co-opted symbolism and significance wherever it has been able as one religion, say Christianity, adopts anything and everything it can find use for from paganism to the old Jewish religion. Thus, while the Ascot Gold Cup is indeed a chalice, it's possibly only significant as such because Catholicism was such an integral part of the culture it made it seem so. It's difficult to keep thinking, reading Ulysses now, that in 1904, the king of England was the king of Ireland, too. Other Irishmen, Paul Muldoon and Tom Paulin, have published wonderful books of close readings of poems that find poetry echoing previous poetry in a seemingly endless way. The language, and an awareness of so much past literature, almost does that automatically. Once you set Seamus Heaney's Personal Helicon echoing, it's hard to stop it. 

And that is probably why it says somewhere that scholars have devoted their lives to Ulysses, because Joyce's genius is like a lottery win, which was 1 in 14 million before they added a few more numbers. And that's before one even thinks about Finnegans Wake, which I will have to think about because I don't like avoiding the issue.

Meanwhile, taking some time in calmer waters, the next little exercise will be to sit down and read Larkin, the poems, because one reads a lot of other things and then realizes that one hasn't read one's favourites for some years. It's tempting to think that one knows it so well, one doesn't need to but it's not always quite as you remembered it when you look again. Any poetry worth having will give you a bit more each time and even if it doesn't, like an old raincoat, it never lets you down.

While there's any amount of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and plenty more Dickens to fill the long days (which never turn out to be anywhere near as long as you thought they'd be), there is also more Zola and more Balzac. I loved what Balzac I read, once, and since I can't remember much about it, I might as well re-read Old Goriot and whatever else is upstairs rather than buy any more just yet. It's not as if I'm going to run out of things to do. It's what to write rather than what to read is the question. 

It looks like the genuine powers-that-be in Thom Gunn Studies are finally gathering their forces and that means I don't have to offer my lesser offering. I could still do it and still might but I could amuse myself with something else. The likes of David Hepworth and Stuart Maconie have occupied the ground in relation to mapping old pop music but each person's version of events, and their shifting prejudices, are different from everybody else's and nobody's told it how it really happened for me. My disadvantage is that I never met a Beatle, Bowie, Marc Bolan or anybody from Tamla Motown. I met Steel Pulse, Roger McGough (who got to number 1 in the Hit Parade) and Rod Clements from Lindisfarne. But I reckon I could make it intersting. We'll see.

The Thom Gunn Letters

 Earlier today I think I had the feeling that those first prospectors in the Yukon must have had when they spotted something bright and shiny in the river. I knew there were a few Autumn books that would need ordering soon and found that the new title by August Keinzahler isn't due until November. However, I also noticed him as one of the editors of a forthcoming Letters of Thom Gunn, along with Clive Wilmer and Michael Nott. While being well aware of who August K and Clive W are, I hadn't heard of Michael so looked up what I could find out and found him referred to in one place as Gunn's 'official biographer'.

Good Heavens.

With the letters due in March next year, those of us who care have the prospect of 800 pages to sustain us through a winter I was quite looking forward to but now it might as well rain until March, but it sounds for all the world like there will be a biography after all. Having ascertained several years ago that such a thing was in preparation, I had rather given up on ever seeing it and I'm not sure it's this, either, although who's to say.

With three volumes of letters, three full biographies and various memoirs about Philip Larkin and the biographies of Ted Hughes by Jonathan Bate and Elaine Feinstein, plus his letters being well behind us now, Gunn's reputation has not kept up with his 1950's contemporaries with who he made so many of the headlines in English poetry. But perhaps some balancing of the account is eventually to take place. Anybody who thought chess wasn't exciting should have seen the Carlsen-Nakamura match on Chess24 today. Those who think books aren't equally so need to know how excited I am about these far-off, long-awaited publications. The order for the letters is already in place.

I found the news, which is not the sort of story that makes the front page of the newspapers, at an opportune time. Today I also looked at the Word document of my very embryonic idea of a Gunn book that I found last saved 10 weeks ago on 1780 words. It had seemed to me that if you want a job doing, you sometimes have to do it yourself and although not very well qualified for the job, I might cobble together a survey of the poems with some biography from my not-quite-completist shelf of Gunn books. I do at least have one letter that the Faber volume won't have and, having typed 'letters of Thom Gunn' into Google, I see that others have them, too. So, whether my jejune effort at filling what I thought was a gap in the market remains worth pursuing, I don't know. It was a labour of love rather than a commercial project or contribution to scholarship anyway but it now seems a bit premature to spend the winter gradually bashing it out when so much previously unseen material is to become available as soon as the clocks go forward again.

But it's outrageously good news for those of us who have remained faithfully Gunn admirers in times of some dearth of material on the subject. It either saves me a pointless endeavour or it gives my chronic enthusiasm some coat-tails to catch hold of. But since others are showing off their letters from Thom, maybe I ought to share mine. I'm surprised I've not done it before. It now is transparently a polite reply to a fan letter that was implicitly imploring its hero to say something kind about one's own work and he was kind enough to do that at whatever cost to his integrity ( ! ).

And the winner is... not me

 One returns from the weekly 7 or 8 mile walk persuading oneself that surely now one deserves a tin of lager or two and while I'm not easily persuaded of many things, I'm easy to persuade of that. The racing results weren't good but will be better tomorrow. There were also some kind words from the people who call themselves Portsmouth Poetry, not Portsmouth Poetry Society, about the poem I had put into their Coronavirus-themed competition. It was Situation, which is somewhere below on here, which had already been written and, not being able to not be about lockdown, presented itself.

I was grateful for their words which at least showed they had completely 'got it', which is the main thing. Of course, I felt £100 the poorer for being short-listed but awarded 'no coconut' but, as a Fulham supporter, that is a familiar feeling.

Had I won, I'd be writing about how poetry competitions are such a bad thing. They give one poet an inflated idea of their own talent and significance and depress all the others who entered. The judges can only pick one winner, and other judges would have picked other winners, and so it doesn't really mean a great deal. It's a seaside resort knobbly knees competition or the Premium Bonds. But one look at an issue of Poetry News shows a quarterly litany of competition winners that make such honours less the gilt-edged  glamorous thrill the winners must surely feel but a small amount in a currency that is always being devalued. I know because I've won a couple but winning an end-of-the-pier talent show didn't make me David Bowie.

I would never enter a poetry competition that cost money to enter. Your money is better invested on a horse, like Mogul in the 2.45 at York tomorrow. It's no more than buying a lottery ticket and if the judges, who you probably have never heard of, don't like your sort of poem then you are a firm ground horse running on heavy going from the off.

As it happens, I'm most gratified by Portsmouth Poetry's comments. It would be great if poetry could make one last stand by being the last thing that refused to become a competitive sport, like cricket that didn't even have champions in the C19th or Rugby Union that had no league or professional status when I was a kid but was done for the sake of it. My percentage of wins, placings and short-listings in the few competitions I've entered in the last 40 years is probably quite respectable. But, like Jose Mourinho, it might be better if I keep that record intact rather than ruin it by trying any further in a sport I no longer have a good enough grasp of.  

Top marks to all involved. It was, at the very least, something to talk about.

Ulysses Diary

It is to the censors' great credit that they understood enough of Ulysses to ban it. They would probably have banned it a bit more if they had understood it better. I don't remember it being anywhere near as lewd when first I read it, or sat in front of it, over 40 years ago.

It is for the best if writers write for themselves, what they want to, rather than betray themselves by aiming at a readership. It is also for the best that we treat a writer and their work as separate things and not conflate them or I don't know what we'd make of James Joyce. Clogged up with Bloom's impotence, the ingrained rituals of the church, the paralysis brought forward from the Portrait, it is often not a gorgeous book but it is clever beyond most of our knowing and not all of us have the lifetime to spare to devote to it, Finnegans Wake notwithstanding. If this is a tour round the inner workings of Joyce's mindset we need either to retrospectively worry for him or, possibly instead, accept that, no, this is the squalour and seaminess that is somewhere in all of us brought to the surface with its high-flown writing only sometimes raising us above the depths of our actual strangenesses.

One thing, among any number, that I have enjoyed about his indulgence of himself has been his lists of names, e.g. 'the fashionable international world' at a society wedding, including  Miss Priscilla Elderflower, Miss  Rachel Cedarfrond and Mrs Helen Vinegadding. It's a stage further on from the lists of politicians in Bleak House in which Dickens compiled rhyming dictionary entries. It's an idiosyncracy I have become prone to while playing chess, making up ridiculous names while waiting for my opponent's move. I thought it meant I was mad but now that Joyce does it, I'm a genius, too, or only as mad as he was.

I don't think I'm ever going to be able to say I like Ulysses better than Proust. Too many pages go by where one doesn't want to have to check the guide to find out what's going on, whether it's currently real or something in Bloom's head or where a linguistic joke is taking its reference point from. But that's not to say it isn't tremendous or that Finnegans Wake won't be a winter project but since there is a book explaining just the first page of the Wake, I don't know if any guide will be enough to make a bit of sense of it.

-

While it might never seem the proper way to listen to music, I recorded Handel's oratorio, Susanna, from the wireless and heard it that way and have last night's repeat of Saul to look forward to but one would rather have the disc in hand and the reassurance that one isn't just hearing the music but have invested in it to the extent of having it on the shelf as part of one's 'collection'. That's not a problem younger generations will have but buying records was important to us. So, it was a great pleasure to pick these gamba sonatas played by Stephen Isserlis from that shelf and rediscover it once, twice and three times. Stephen Isserlis is on my short list of favourite musicians, not for musicianship because how would I know, but for being a great bloke. I won't be doing a Top 6 of those, though, because there are far more than six and I'd have to leave too many out. However, while the music on the album sells itself, its main selling point is that the sheer enjoyment of playing is brilliantly evident and that alone makes it a contender for the later stages of the Best Disc in the House event that I hope I'm never short enough of other things to do to do. 

-

And, before complaining, I'd like to pay tribute to two further things. The first is not only Ronnie O'Sullivan's miraculous steal of the semi-final in the last three frames v. Mark Selby that John Parrott described as 'like an out-of-body experience'. The final was a non-event due to either player being apparently unable to put it together at any given time but witnessing that semi-final (I understand the other was good, too) and John's words, that exceeded the drearily workmanlike football people's, was sport raised to the sublime.

Secondly, the horses have started to get it right with the weekend double being landed again with something in hand. It's almost tempting to start up the Racetrack Wiseguy feature again but we mustn't tempt fate with misplaced braggadoccio. It's a long way back, regaining big losses in small, unadventurous amounts.

-

But why, oh why, oh why do the pages of the telly guide always have to have pictures of people aiming guns at us. I wouldn't mind but it was Helen Mirren this week. Surely she's better than that. Films, it would seem (I don't know, I don't watch them) are either about people threatening to shoot, or shooting, other people or just staring grimly. Whatever happened to that charming boy, Freddie Batholomew.

Is it such an easy win for the film industry to put guns in films because the audience will be thrilled by the tension it creates. Surely, one gets used to it as a poetry reader who has been told that poetry will surprise them and 'make it new' can't still be expected to be surprised by page 60 when surprise has become 'the new normal'.

Oh, yes, and journalists have found a new phrase. One of them said something was 'a perfect storm' and so now they all say everything is. With Trump, Boris and so many other countries collapsing under right-wing governments, yes, I suppose it is but the minor inconvenience caused is that consumers of journalism have to wait for the perfect storm of reporters reporting everything as a 'perfect storm' to blow through.

- 

But, more positively, I was indebted to my nephew who also had a go at such an event, for the link to Joe Skipper's recent 12 Hour ride,

 

This is what I used to do, 25 years ago, but not quite to this extent. I did the same time as Joe but was over 100 miles behind him at the end. Much of it is familiar but not the technical detail, the choice equipment and the 28 mph.

British Poetry 2000-2020

 I have been noticing how we've already had twenty years of the C21st. It might not seem like it but a fifth of it's been done. Those of us who still think our subject is C20th Poetry had better give that further thought. I wonder if anybody's doing the 'definitive' anthology of the period to put alongside The New Poetry, the Motion/Morrison book, the other New Poetry and Identity Parade, if that counts, if any of them still count, if anybody is still permitted the idea of a canon. A little while back we were being told it was being abolished, that Shakespeare and Kate Tempest are both as worthy of our attention as each other. In some schools, in the generation after mine, school teams were picked on a rota basis rather than with a view to winning matches so they probably weren't as good as the teams I played in but with regard to poetry it does depend on somebody knowing which poems are better than others and, as a look through some old Poetry Review magazines showed a while back, that became more a matter of tribalism and old 'poetry wars' but maybe it was ever thus and at least each offered a point of view.

But, twenty years in, I have been comparing the first two decades of the C21st with those of the C20th. Without looking it all up, 1900-1920 seemed to be major in a major way with names like Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Edward Thomas, notwithstanding Wilfred Owen and reportage from WW1, and women like H.D. and Mina Loy at the forefront of Modernism, which was as big a revolution as any one cares to mention, but by all means provide your own names. Romanticism had made the individual and their preciousness a priority and after 200 years we don't seem to have recovered from that. The incoming French influence into English made Chaucer very different from Old English. The first Elizabethan Age is sold as a high point in English poetry. 

British. English meaning from England. English meaning 'in the English language'. Anybody needs to set their parameters but the barricades are largely down by now and it's Poetry and many of us aren't fluent enough in other languages to appreciate poetry in them sufficiently.

But 1900-1920 must have been an exciting time, with bad, old Ezra, the Dominic Cummings of English letters, showing everybody how it should be done henceforth. In retrospect, it looks like it, and then one looks to find what 2000-2020 have to offer.

Michael Donaghy was born in 1954 but died in 2004, much too soon, which already means that the 2000-2020 are like Argentina without Maradona. Paul Muldoon was perhaps at the height of his powers with Incantata in The Annals of Chile in 1994 and Hay in 1998 but subsequently proceeded to become more Muldonian than even he needed to be. Sean O'Brien has continued to provide powerful, highly accomplished commentary on what appear to be increasingly troubled times but despite an extensive list of highly talented poets writing in English - some of them in America and many in Ireland- he can't be expected to do it all on his own. There is much to be admired in the poetry of John Burnside, Carol Ann Duffy, Julia Copus, David Harsent, Don Paterson, the much-missed Roddy Lumsden -and I apologize to all the others I don't mention but this is a short essay rather than a directory - but it still doesn't feel like a period. It might be a good thing that it doesn't but the unfashionable idea of being 'great', like Bach or Mozart, meant taking the art to 'the next level' (for want of a better phrase).

If Roddy were still with us, he might defend his assertion that the current generation of new poets, a few years ago, were the best in the history of English poetry but it raised some eyebrows here if nowhere else, looking a bit like blurb for a generation he had done much to teach how to continue with ludic, Muldonian allusiveness. Nothing goes out of fashion quite as quickly as the avant-garde but all innovation contributes to the mainstream if it's worth taking in. (There we go. I haven't said it for a while so it was time I said it again).

I don't know if the Creative Writing industry has made poets so clever and self-aware that it has brought about some sort of ultra-plural paralysis, whether a liberal inclusiveness has not allowed anything to be regarded as 'elite' any more but, supposing there is an Eng Lit syllabus in unversities in 2100-2120, something is going to have to be on the reading list for the Poetry of the Early C21st. Or, isn't it. It won't all be Theory by then because even Terry Eagleton seems to have accepted that it isn't all Theory even now.

I was as dubious as any campus academic a few years ago when I heard it said of the Romantic Poets that 'there were six of them' and that's what happens when you have a syllabus or a canon but while contemporary poetry still has fine work in it, one can't help thinking that, like pop music, it doesn't have its Motown, Beatles, Prince, Bowie galaxy of impossibly great satars any more. On the other hand, one notices on University Challenge that when the music round consists of pieces of popular music to identify, a team with an average age of 20 listen to Roxy Music with blank looks. They know the festival artists of their generation well enough so perhaps those of us who thought poetry was about Eliot, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop and Larkin need to move over. It might have been our game once but it doesn't remain so forever.  

Do I Love It (indeed I do)

 News that a copy of Frank Wilson's Do I Love You (indeed I do) changed hands for £100k made me wonder who could afford that, as someone who was once glad to have 45p to spend on a pop single. It's okay, he's a multi-millionaire and I might well buy some such worthwhile rarities if I was, too. It's also okay that these dancers of a certain age are no better at it than me but are brave enough to be filmed in the joyful act. I think I heard on the wireless that there's only two copies of which the whereabouts are known from a pressing of 250 before Motown pulled it. But don't quote me on that. The heartache of Northern Soul is only enhanced for me by the fact that, at its height in the 70's, I was stuck with lesser musics but soon to move to Al Green, plus Beethoven and Shostakovich, but it's a treasure now.

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Reading Ulysses has an echoing effect in it for me, not because it echoes the Odyssey or other literature or Shakespeare biography and not because I've ever been to Dublin but because I read each section just after having read the guide to it by Harry Blamires, so it all seems to be coming back to me. I'm not going to say I like it better than Dubliners or Portrait, not yet anyway, but any time spent with Joyce's prose is time well spent with its seedy immediacy, art rising above the clammy, restrictive Catholicism and lines like,

It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.

which concentrates so many of its themes into so few words. And, by the way, could you lend me five shillings. I'll pay you back Tuesday after Southwell races, there were a couple at the Curragh I was depending on today that let me down.

I don't think it will be Finnegans Wake immediately after but having as much time as the world affords, it could be further down the list. Reflecting that one spends so little time with one's very favourite things, I think the next project might be a day or two reading Larkin - the poems- from start to finish. Having seen his reputation done over after the publication of the Selected Letters, the decades since have seen him recover through recognition as a great Minor Poet to something alongside all the major Major Poets of the C20th. It might yet fall away again as its context ebbs away in the memory of those reading him and how good it is is valued beneath what sort of bloke we think he was without having met him. Well, I never met him but I've met a few who did and I have more multi-cultural, liberal-left, diversity credentials than I care to remember and Larkin's place in the Top 6 Poets, per se, isn't in any danger.

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It doesn't matter about the five shillings. I was only duly giving back yesterday's winnings in the age-old rhythm of the money that comes in going out again and money that goes out coming back in. It's like the tide of the everpulsing sea or the field contracting and dispersing throughout the day on the cricketfield. O, lordjesussaveus, it is but another lifegiving throb that makes one know one is a living thing.

But those things won't leave us, the things we were taught as children about good luck, bad luck, a merciful redeemer and ghosts. I didn't believe it was luck for one moment when yesterday I finished the Times crossword in short order with no help from Andy's Word Finder, typed up a new poem of sorts (see below), and landed the sure-fire double at Uttoxeter at odds of 4/5 and 13/8, winning by 20 lengths and 12 respectively. Longhouse Sale is a very good horse to be running at this time of year and jumped impressively for a novice. It won't be any sort of price again but will surely keep winning on summer ground. However, today's couple of setbacks make me think the auspicious line up of planets had shifted out of my star sign.

The Deceived was, I thought, a great drama and a rare excursion into watching Channel 5. Of course, not believing in ghosts makes being scared by a thriller that much more difficult but it wasn't a ghost so that's fine. But never trust a charismatic academic, it seemed to tell us. There's a lot of baloney about.

I'll be particularly grateful of Times Radio tonight as Radio 5 devotes itself to that most soporific of sports, golf. Soporific might be useful in getting off to sleep but I'm tormented by commentators talking about it as if it mattered. Midnight and the hours straight after it are when I'm most likely to be awake and need the radio. 7-9 a.m. is when I'm most likely to be asleep, which is a shame when it means missing much of Tony Blackburn's litany of ready-made DJ chat on Sounds of the 60's on which his soul and pop sensibility makes a better case for the 60's than Johnnie Walker's more West Coast, Eagles and Jackson Brown sympathies make for the 70's which, by rights, I ought to prefer.

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Having left the day job, I am trying to be in at least semi-retirement in the ill-fitting role of 'poet' but one wants to try occasionally. The vague idea I was trying to concoct became Hammershøi, taking the trouble to take the title from the internet to get the Danish crossed out 'o'. It hardly resembles the original idea at all in the end but a poem that works not only needs to be vivid, not vague, before setting out on it, but needs two sources rather than one, by way of adding dimensions - I like to think. The second part came when I found the leaflet and postcards I bought at the exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2008, it says there.

It's not particularly this painting the poem is about because it hasn't got the keyboard instrument in it but it has got the open doors. I'm not yet convinced about the poem but it is in the three on the A list of the five I've written since The Perfect Book and not yet condemned to the scrapyard of the B list from which there is so rarely any return.

Hammershøi

This is all that’s left of us, 

the same air that we walked through once 

still hanging as it had done then

unchanged by being made to speak

and left with no more than itself,

occupied, you might have thought, 

by hours that leak or disperse so 

the white door that wasn’t closed 

as if it wasn’t meant to be

allows it thoughts of other rooms 

that, one might guess, are similar 

to this one if not quite the same

with their finished music gone 

but that would be an adventure 

these long moments won’t undertake.

Into the Mystic

Into the Mystic is, as I'm sure the sort of cognoscenti who would tune into a website like this would know, a track on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks album. I've never been a great admirer of his music but saw him once without having to pay, which was fine. He's always seemed to me the sort of figure that people who take pop music too seriously like, who value authenticity, or a facsimile of it, rather than admit they like David Cassidy. But as a teenager I had that track on a tape and was used to it. Its title came to mind as I thought about the years ahead, however many of them there may be, with Proust already behind me, Bleak House done, Ulysses begun and a first draft of the project in progress saved in two places for safe-keeping. At this rate, I should have time to achieve quite a lot but once the short list of obvious things is ticked off, it will be into the mystic.

Bleak House was Dickensian and as such was fine. He's a better prose writer than I ever thought and a great cartoonist but the progress made fom that masterpiece, published in 1853, to Ulysses in 1922 is about as astonishing as going from Rock Around the Clock in 1955 to The Faust Tapes in 1973. Neither of which comparison is meant to be to the detriment of the earlier work, but just look how far things moved on in such an apparently short time. I've never been less than thoroughly enamoured of James Joyce and even if his writing is drenched in the morbid, morose atmosphere of Catholicism as much as Dickens is in the dingy streets of London, it is by way of rising above the moribund catechism into art. Both Joyce and Proust make Jews central characters in their major works, too. We will see what we make of that later but, re-reading Ulysses, in the very early stages so far, looks like being another very rewarding part of the process of being retired which is exceeding all expectations so far and long may it continue.

This seeming paradise was only enhanced by the inclusion of a question in the Saturday quiz in The Times about the 1991 film Tous les Matins du Monde with Depardieu pere et fils, a long standing favourite in a genre I have not much to do with, which was crucial to achieving the modest target of 10/20. One of the many reasons why I'll never win a quiz on my own is that I don't know anything about films, or the United States of America, but I knew that one. I had watched the DVD only a couple of nights earlier, which is not a coincidence. Coincidences are mathematically inevitable, as was the 150/1 winner at Royal Ascot this year, if only we'd known. But the film was not as I remembered it. It was more straightforward, seeing it again all these years later after however many times. I had been trying too hard to find more in it that perhaps there's meant to be.

But, augmenting these glory, glory days of having one's life to do what one sees fit with, those who return here (in legions) in the hope of updates on my internet chess career will be thrilled to know the ratings achieved at Lichess reached 1917 for Blitz and 1926 at Rapid (top 10%) and so, not wanting to ruin those, I took to Classical with the 30 minute each time limit. Having W 10, D3, L4, I'm now at 1900 for that and don't want to ruin that, either. My big error was clicking on the wrong time limit and having to defend the 1926 rating at Rapid, failed to extend the winning sequence there to 9 and so I'm back on 1922, only 72 points ahead of the 1850 that I regarded as 'doing very nicely, thank you' only a few weeks ago. It must be something they're putting in the water down here.
But I watched some of Magnus v. Ian Nepomniachtchi in the final of the 15 minute tournament on Chess24 on Sunday. Before going down 4-2, Nepo produced an extraordinary last ditch blast in game 3 to equalize at 1.5 each, which is only possible in such time limits.
It's this game here,
Nepo-Carlsen Game 3 2/8/2020
This was on the same day that Joe Skipper set a new competition record for 12 hours on a bicycle of 326  miles and one realizes that whatever one did, or does, in whatever sport, it's not quite the same sport as they are involved in. But they are a different breed and it's us that's normal so as long as we enjoy it, we can carry on.