What is Poetry

There might not be much new in this that hasn't been co-opted by me before but the opportunity arises again from behind-the-scenes discussions and another of my several truisms is that poets repeat themselves more after the age of 60, so I'm allowed to.

Reduced to about 1500 words, it just about fits in here. I'd like to find a better title for it and will return to amend that if and when I do. The definition might be underwhelming to those who think 'poetry' is surely more than that but not all defintions are as good as the one I once found of 'kangaroo' that said it was an antipodean marsupial that proceeded in a series of flying bounds. 

I am increasingly persuaded by the implicit suggestion that poetry might be beyond us or a figment of our imagination by the aside in Sean O'Brien's novel, 'Afterlife', in which the tragic superstar poet of her generation, Jane Jarmain, is said to be writing poetry 'as if she thought it was possible' which I'm glad to be able to recycle again now.

So, to complete my full repertoire of poetry catchphrases, which is also lifted from elsewhere - All you have to be is any good.

--

My first meeting with the local poetry group here was in 1982. I’ve been a casual member with varying levels of attendance or excuses not to ever since. I’d seen it listed on their programme and the subject, What is Poetry?, was very much the sort of subject I’d have enjoyed at university where I’d finished the year before, the Aesthetics course with Colin Lyas having been a favourite.

The discussion was well-intentioned with dictionary definitions about ‘craft’, the idea of it being a ‘heightened form of language’, use of metaphor, alliteration and rhyme until eventually someone read some Byron and compared it with some T.S. Eliot, the implication being that Byron was poetry and Eliot wasn’t. I sat quietly and listened, not wanting to sound either too clever or say anything too opinionated among people I didn’t know, but, when the opportunity arose at the end, as a sort of summing up, I observed that much of what had been said related to the difference between good poetry and bad rather than what was poetry and what was not. 

It’s not a pejorative term that confers approval. Poetry can be bad as well as good and much of it is. Poetry can’t be assumed to be innately a good thing. 

At the time my own definition might have been that a poem was a ‘verbal construct’, which it usually is, but so is anything else made of words and so it doesn’t serve the function of delineating poetry from other writing. 

I can’t now remember how many of the pronouncements on the subject made by famous poets were quoted, if any.

Aristotle is a good place to start, whose digressions are a bit long for inclusion in a dictionary, 

Aristotle 

Certainly, poetry doesn’t have to deal with actual things but it can if it wants to. Had he known about photography, he might have compared it with painting and said that poetry is like painting in that it imbues its subject with something of the artist’s feelings about it.

In no particular order, Wordsworth’s verdict was that, 

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.

Shelley considered poets to be the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’; Coleridge has, ‘Poetry; the best words in the best order’, Auden offers ‘memorable speech’, Carl Sandburg says, 

Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance. 

Which is more like a poem than a definition of one.

I’m glad I’m checking these as I go because I’ve been labouring under the misapprehension that it was Ezra Pound that said ‘poetry is what gets lost in translation’, which is one of the more useful contributions, but it was Robert Frost. Pound’s ‘poetry is news that stays news’ isn’t quite so good.

Most of these are manifestos, agendas or aspirations, promoting each poet’s methods or sympathies rather than a definition that could be used to decide if any given specimen was poetry or not. A definition of a house will ensure we don’t confuse that which is a house with an apartment, an office block or a kangaroo. Poetry, or ‘a poem’, needs to be defined equally accurately.

Since many of those definitions were attempted, poetry and many other things have been through Modernism and the Avant Garde which the likes of Aristotle, in all fairness to him, couldn’t have been expected to foresee. One thing we have to be able to contain is the inevitability of the ever-readiness of an endless supply of self-styled mavericks to overturn whatever definition is put in place just because they can. Concrete poetry consisted of sound sometimes rather than words, like the Konkrete Kantikle that includes ‘number poems’ that is so rare that when I google it I’m referred back to my own website and every few months I still search the archives upstairs hoping to find the late 70’s magazine that had Michael Daugherty’s concrete poems that consisted entirely of punctuation.

It’s not going to be me that says any such thing isn’t poetry. I wasn’t quite 10 when Marcel Duchamp died but I was 32 when John Cage did. The likes of them, and Yoko Ono, were significant contributors to our perceptions of what was what in my formative years and so it’s not for me to say, as I heard said in meetings many years later, that poetry should rhyme. 

Homer doesn’t; Ovid doesn’t. They concern themselves much more with scansion, that poets blinder than Homer might have subsequently abandoned at their peril.

Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘poetry is the music of being human’ sounded a bit like what those dreamy Romantic giants of two hundred years previous had said and can’t be made to mean very much at all. Poetry would be something of a luxury for millions and being human doesn’t sound like that to them in the same way that it does to Poet Laureates and Professors of Creative Writing.

We have to allow poetry to be all and everything it wants to be or thinks it is and then dismiss it as bad poetry if need be. 

In one Philosophy seminar at university, 40 years ago now, Colin Lyas asked on what grounds we could believe what he was telling us and I suggested that he was a lecturer and we were students and so we should be able to believe him. This ‘argument from authority’, or argumentum ad verecundiam, was readily accepted, possibly because it was in the Philosophy Dept of a lowly-rated university (then) as part of a liberal humanities education that meant well but the argumentum ad verecundiam is clearly a fallacy post-Trump, during Boris Johnson and long after even worse travesties. But, at my own risk, I will use as a potentially treacherous stepping stone, a definition of poetry given by Terry Eagleton, the doyen of Literary Theory, who rose from the backstreets of Salford to become Professor at both Oxford and Cambridge before taking an Emeritus job at Lancaster.

In his book, How to Read a Poem, Prof. Eagleton, who has had a long time to arrive at his preferred form of words, delivers,

A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end.

It’s at the start of Chapter 2, here,

Eagleton, How to Read a Poem 

But in the same way that Aristotle didn’t need to make the point that poetry doesn’t have to be true, neither should Prof. Eagleton assert that it is ‘fictional’. It doesn’t seem right for me to be telling them they’re both wrong but it is ostensibly the fact that some poems are entirely true. And so we need to delete ‘fictional’ from the quotation above.

While it is surely desirable for a poem to be ‘verbally inventive’, not all of them are. Many are cliché-ridden and steadfastly refuse to do anything original. I wouldn’t want to name any names but I could find any number of poems, or even poets, in magazines that have never done anything verbally inventive even if they thought they had. They are bad poems but that doesn’t mean they’re not poems. So we can’t allow that. 

And why would a poem need to be ‘moral’ to qualify as a poem. It must be possible for a poem to be immoral. I have the Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, within arm’s reach here. It might be a matter of opinion but many ethical traditions would struggle to accept them as ‘moral’. 

I’m going to have to accept that a poem is a ‘statement’ in order to retain any sense in the sentence but, yes, it is stated and so it’s a statement. Donald Davie distinguished between poems as ‘considered utterance’ or ‘unconsidered utterance’ and only now does it occur to me to ask whether he meant it was the poet or the reader that did the considering but surely it is ‘considered’ by the author who has considered various options - one might hope - before deciding on their form of words and it is considered by any reader in the act of reading. It can become disarmingly straightforward to break down some of these questions. 

What we are left with, having removed the extraneous bits is,

A poem is a statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end.

And, thus, poetry is the language used in writing such a thing.   

There is still the ‘prose poem’, which is a thing whether it’s a tautology or not. The idea of what was ‘poetry’ or ‘a poem’ had taken off in all sorts of directions long before the prose poem came about which might have been in France in the C19th. All the ‘prose poem’ does is abnegate its claim to being a poem by admitting that it’s prose. It’s a very French, or possibly Belgian, idea like René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe. That is not a pipe, it’s a picture of a pipe. A prose poem is not a poem because it’s prose. But it’s also a poem because it says it is.

New Art from Oxfordshire

 Those of us who were around at the time will remember the Young British Artists, the YBA's, whose work came to our notice most noticeably in the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997, promoted with the same panache and daring as the Sex Pistols had been twenty years earlier. Gavin Turk's Pop was a waxwork figure of Sid Vicious that seemed to acknowledge their lineage. Tracey Emin has continued to parade her emotional torment from her tent and unmade bed to neon signs and Damien Hurst has moved from animals preserved in formaldehyde to diamond encrusted skulls to accumulate some monetary reward for his efforts. 

I suspect I might have seen the future and the next generation last week on a visit to Wiltshire and into Oxfordshire. Due to contractual reasons I am not in a position to reveal their names but I had time to contemplate their paintings at some length and found plenty in them. They are the VYOA's, the Very Young Oxfordshire Artists, already producing some very exciting work and likely to make big names for themselves if able to progress from this compelling first show.

As you can see from the highlights I have selected here, with special permission, they are notable for their vibrant and imaginative use of colour. I was grateful to be informed that this study in green and blue, so markedly different from Whistler's subdued palette, is a car driving into fog, a footnote that is very enlightening and transforms our appreciation of the energy with which the paint has been applied to the canvas. I did once find myself having to drive a van into a thick cloud of smoke and the painting evokes that same feeling of heightened anxiety.

More subdued but brilliantly done is this next one which suggests perhaps a Portugese Man o' War with its tendrils lit by submarine light. The subtlest hints of green in among shades taken from other areas of the spectrum ingeniously add to the harmony created by the predominant shifting yellow, burnt orange and cerise. Again, the brushwork is confident and almost flamboyant even though this is by the younger of the two painters, bringing to mind some of Maggi Hambling's uncompromising oeuvre.

The VYOA's are as yet unaffected by the potentially ruinous academic study of their discipline. I don't know if I ever recovered from the 'education' in Eng Lit I underwent sufficiently to write poems that escaped it. It certainly takes a long time to grow out of those things one has been taught and even if it's necessary to know some of the history of what one is doing, it's best not to regard it as any sort of law. The VYOA's arrive innocent of any knowledge of Fauvism, Modernism, Surrealism or any other -ism and yet here's one I'd pay good money for, and will ask for, in preference to owning anything by Jack the Dripper, Pollock.

As happened with the Hambling waterfalls, the artist can apply the paint freely, with some abandon, and see what happens. Unexpected things can, and do. It happens in poetry, too, when verbal effects emerge from what sounded right to make it even better whether or not it was part of the original intention. Nobody, surely, believes that the miles of shelf space taken up by books interpreting Shakespeare are full of things that Shakespeare was aware of having done. The audience contributes to the work, each in their own way.

It was possible to find birds, faces and anything else one's imagination could supply in Maggi's waterfalls and so it is here in this which may or may not be a confused octopus eating a grape.

I have taken a detail from the bottom left corner in which I found a portrait of Lowell George (1945-1979), the much revered singer-songwriter from Little Feat best known for his masterpiece Long Distance Love.

It was there to be found by anyone who had both long enough to look at the painting and knew who Lowell George was and what he looked like. I had the privilege of being the only person who could do that. While the artist is aware of the work of Marc Bolan, Little Feat are some way off his radar just yet.

The likes of Paul Muldoon and Tom Paulin took their close reading of poetry probably about as far as it could go in their respective books on the subject. At times they went so far that it seemed all poems re-echoed with all others which is an effect of the limits of language more than artistic achievement. Perhaps something similar is at work here but as a return to art, hopefully on the way out of lockdown and before some real, live music, I hadn't quite realized what I'd been missing.

When you put some effort into art you often get something back. I was very glad of these paintings by the VYOA's and I'm putting in my order for whatever I can get of their work next job.

More Gurney, Balzac, Hamnet et Al

I hope the review of Kate Kennedy's biography of Ivor Gurney, below, wasn't overly dismissive of the poet. It wasn't an easy read. Today I found time to listen to her R3 Sunday Feature, from 20/6, that benefitted from some music and Andrew Motion's sympathy and Ivor came out of it better. I'm never going to spearhead any movement to enhance his reputation beyond where it currently stands but some of the music persuades one of his talent more than some of the less elegant poetry does.

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With the chess rating back on the road to recovery after a disastrous run and the turf account now only showing half the profit for the year that it had been a couple of weeks ago, I took some comfort from a remarkable success in my game of 'guess the next word' in which regular readers might remember I try to anticipate the next word in a novel when turning a page. I think it is an indicator of how much one is involved in a book, or in tune with it, if one can anticipate the next word.

Turning from page 69 to 70 of the Penguin Classics paperback of Balzac's Ursule Mirouet, I was presented with,

To the left the wall is densely covered with creepers - virginia creeper and yellow....

 

So, whaddaya reckon. Place your bets. I'm no horticulturalist. It's as much of a horror to me when a crossword clue seems to want you to think of a plant as it is when a quiz expects you to think of a film. But I thought, 'jasmine', and got it right. I wouldn't have minded having a tenner on that but maybe all jasmine is yellow and it was obvious. But not all that is yellow is jasmine.

--

A copy of Maggie O'Farrell's best-selling re-working of our favourite bit of Shakespeare biography came unwontedly into my possession last week. I had had no intention of reading it but gift horses are better thanked than dismissed. I began to give it a go and was a third of the way through and then left it in Wiltshire.

It can wait. Maybe I'll review it in August.

It is fiction based on characters that certainly did exist and thus no worse than the Bible but 'historical fiction' brings with it its own difficulties. It is real people put into unreal situations. Maggie distorts those late C16th Stratford people into characters they were highly unlikely to have been but it was looking like being a better novel than I imagined it and I can see why readers would like it. As a contribution to Shakespeare biography, though, it scores about minus 3 out of 10. Why it even needs to pretend to be about Shakespeare isn't clear although it does save the author the trouble of inventing their own characters. 

I did it myself a couple of weeks ago in a short story I amused myself with that won't see print but at least I had the good grace to make my story the very opposite, the negative print, of the life widely attributed to Shakespeare.  

--

God only knows why anybody missed Glastonbury. Notwithstanding that its original counter-culture significance with Tyrannosauras Rex in 1970 has been commodified to make it look like a part of IKEA, with its product and resultant customers so bewilderingly normal, I can't see how any musical performance can be appreciated from a distance that even Ed Moses would have struggled to cover in less than a minute.

I'm halfway through Al Green's 1999 performance. I'm well aware of Aretha, Gladys, Otis, Sam Cooke and, just to show I'm not racist, Dusty and Rod but Al's records from the early 1970's made him the best singer. Except that Glastonbury somehow reduces every act to something similar and, some 25 years after the fact, he was still good but had reduced to certain mannerisms and had to replace some gorgeous tones with some new growling in places. 

Heritage pop might be all that's left, might have been even in 1999, but pop music exists in its own moment and nobody, not even those who first did it, can get it back.  

Ivor Gurney by Kate Kennedy

 Kate Kennedy, Dweller in Shadows, a Life of Ivor Gurney (Princeton)

I needed persuading about Ivor Gurney's poetry and for the most part I still do. Julia Copus provided plenty of evidence to upgrade the impression I've long held about Charlotte Mew but Kate Kennedy has more of a job on with Ivor who is less easy to like.

One can form one's own impressions of poets from biographies and letters. Elizabeth Bishop is easy to like, as are Auden, and maybe Keats. One has to accept the shortcomings of Hardy, Edward Thomas and Larkin while retaining some residual sympathy for them, especially in the light of what they achieved. My big hero, Thom Gunn, was done few favours by his letters. I don't regret having not met Shelley, Baudelaire, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell or Byron.

Gurney can't have been an easy job for Kate Kennedy because it is a grim story not alleviated much by his poems but she does him what justice she can in this admirable work of detailed research and objective sympathy.

While 'war poetry' is often one of the first genres of 'poetry' readers are likely to be introduced to, its message being clear and not hard to sympathize with, it is only subject matter and it is somehow inevitable that poetry isn't sufficient for the job. The horrors of war for those that were there are possibly more than poetry is equipped to deal with but the best poets, and poetry, might need something more nuanced to bring the best out of them. Not all the most talented poets went to war but Gurney wasn't one of them. My interest in him relates to most of my school having been done in Gloucester and the area to which he was so attached. Barnwood House Hospital, which proved not secure enough to prevent Ivor's repeated escape attempts, was close to where we lived but Kate's caption to the photograph of it that says it was 'burnt down' is not supported by any memories in my immediate family or anything to be found on the internet.

One reads things from time to time that one has reason to doubt which makes one wonder how much else one has taken on trust that wasn't true. One thing that this book does much to establish, though, from Kate's research and evidence she was provided with, is that Gurney's mental instability was not entirely due to the trauma of war and subsequent damage. He had every right to it, having been injured twice, but witnesses from pre-war Gloucester report him being known to be 'batchy' and known as 'Crazy'. Well done, that man.

It's a complicated psychiatric case to take on for anyone whose interests are mainly literary and musical but if we begin at the beginning, the difficult, unloving mother is hard to omit from any attempt. Having formed close attachments to older women, possibly as surrogate mother figures, a major disruption occurs with the ending of what might have been a more appropriate relationship with a nurse, Annie Drummond, that immediately precedes the first mention of his identification with Beethoven. He has already found some kinship with the Gloucester poet, F.W. Harvey, who described himself in lines that might equally apply to Gurney, as walking,

             behind himself, as if to catch

The motive: - An accessory to the fact

Faintly amused, it seems,

Behind his dreams.

 

Those lines are more coherent that many of Gurney's that arbitrarily leave out the definite or indefinite article or habitually put adjectives after their noun whether for laboured emphasis or to accommodate a rhyme but Gurney's poems often look unfinished as well as clinging unhealthily to his much beloved Gloucestershire background with its deep traditions of elvering, big, brown River Severn and the story of an ox so fat it got stuck in the street between what came and went as Debenhams and the shops opposite. Gloucester and its idyllic surroundings begin to look like another substitute mother that he can love. 

Without wanting to encourage comparisons with another self-obsessed poet, Walt Whitman, or giving any credence to ideas that Gurney's vague associations made him any sort of Modernist like Ezra Pound, there are things worth having in his poetry, such as,

The nurses move like music through the room;

 

and, from this account, it seemed to me the best poetry came post-Barnwood, which had been 'more like a genteel retirement home for deluded generals than an asylum', in the early days of the less salubrious time spent in Dartford, in poems like Cut Flowers.

Comparisons with the genuinely inventive poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins aren't useful. Strings are pulled to find Gurney a job in the tax office in Gloucester but despite his short-lived best efforts he proves unemployable. Any amount of Freudian analysis leads drearily to questions about 'sexuality' and gets us nowhere. The biography 'takes off', in the wrong direction, and eventually demands our sympathy as Gurney's condition deteriorates, with moments of lucidity and heroic support from his life-long friend, Marion Scott, and gestures from the likes of Vaughan Williams but the world can be a cruel place and only has so much time to try to help those so locked into themselves that they are capable of believing themselves to be Beethoven or Shakespeare. There's not much comfort to be had. Gurney as a poet is no more than a poor man's Edward Thomas. If we go anywhere in search of something to make a case for him it needs must be as a composer, possibly in the song settings of poems by his contemoparies but, I suspect, better in the sonatas and other chamber music that took Brahms as a model.

There must have been any amount of talent that went astray or was wasted having not been aligned with some organizing principle, some direction or less of an inclination in the artist to indulge themselves. The pieces need to be made to fit together. Lesser talents than Ivor Gurney's have made more of themselves by having been better directed. We might compare where Gary Lineker and Paul Gascoigne eventually found themselves with respect to what gifts they were born with.

It's a sad story and if you must read the biography of a suicidal writer there are better writers and less grim stories available but Kate Kennedy's been through it on our behalf and, if you feel any need to know, it is all here. You will be forgiven if afterwards you only feel like retreating into something less dispiriting, like Balzac or the recent best-seller, Hamnet. That's what I did.

Bill Cushing - ...this just in ...

 Bill Cushing, ...this just in... (cyberwit)

Poets sometimes explain themselves at readings when filling in between poems. It can be useful. Bill Cushing does so here in an introduction. His last collection, A Former Life, reviewed here 5/8/2019, had a foreword that was more biographical note and thanks but his introduction here goes further. One might think of some poets who would benefit from doing likewise but perhaps it would ruin the mystique.

By disciplining themselves to use language as efficiently, almost as miserly as possible, poets learn how to extract as much meaning from as few words as possible, Bill says and I like the 'miserly' in there. I'm less enamoured of the definition,

poems are “the history of the human soul,”

which reminds me of Carol Ann Duffy's 'poetry is the music of being human'. I'd say less than that, that poetry is the language poems are written in and a poem is a poem if its author says it is. I'd prefer not to claim too much for it.

 

In this new book Bill has war poems, several that sympathize with outsiders and a number that are ekphrastic - based on pictures that are provided alongside- and range from rhymed and metrical to unrhymed free verse and varying line lengths. For me the most successful is the 10 lines of Dispatches, with the double meaning of its title about the passing of his parents and, 

                             my 

mother’s saboteur 

steeped her in dementia 

making death more like a cure.

 

Without wanting to make it a definition of poetry, it's at its best when the language achieves more than its constituent parts.

Also, in The Nature of Snow,

it becomes difficult to tell 

whether it floats down 

or the world

rises.

Bill's enquiry into the phenomenon is slow-paced and mystical, using line-breaks to enhance its careful thought process.

The pictures chosen as source material are as various as the poems, most memorably Women in Black by Marianne von Werefkin, 1910, which for all the world could have been by Marc Chagall. Ekphrastic poems need to add to their picture rather than equate to them which Bill successfully does in Disappeared Dreams with,

Stealing people’s dreams along the blue avenue, 

these shadow babushkas 

grip full sacks in their left hand, 

holding our reveries like bales of cotton. 

 

War to End batters insistently on only two rhymes in its 13 lines, three of which are 'blood'; Hazardous Material wonders whether import restrictions include such dangerous books as Ovid, Vonnegut and Solzhenitsyn which, of course, at times, they have. Right on Time is possibly the most successful of the poems recognizing the disregarded classes as a subject for reportage. The theme that draws the collection together is this concern for humanity which arrives at an appropriate time as America recovers from the horrors of the Trump presidency and the damage has to be repaired. There wasn't much poetry to be had in his agenda but we can hope that it is being restored now.

Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax Beethoven

 Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma, Hope Amid Tears, Beethoven Cello Sonatas (Sony)

It's taken me all these years - about fifty - and this new album to realize that it's not Haydn and Mozart that are 'classical' and Beethoven moved into the 'romantic'. Haydn was born in 1732, Mozart in 1756 and Beethoven in 1770, Beethoven was turning 21 when Mozart died. Mozart's date of birth is nearer to Beethoven's than Haydn's.  

It is the first of these three discs where it dawns on me. I had just heard a concert of Mozart's Prague Symphony, no. 38, on the radio which sounded like Beethoven and then the two Cello Sonatas, op. 5, here could almost have been Mozart. Maybe I had known as much for a long time but never quite moved that instinct across into my own private map of music history.

Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma first recorded these sonatas together in 1984 as younger men and did so again as a 'lockdown' project, finding reason to believe that 'we can survive and do good' in Beethoven especially. It's not for me to compare the two sets except to say that what they have the benefit of here is time, not only in the years spent with this music but, particularly in the cello part, that sort of time that an exceptionally gifted footballer always seems to have compared to those around them.  While I have put Yo-Yo first in my title because they are cello sonatas, both the front page of the score - 'klavier und violoncello' - and the billing on the disc put Emanuel first. It might be purely alphabetical on the disc but in these sonatas more than any other, the two parts combine and should be given equal billing rather than regarding the cello as the main part and the piano as accompaniment.

 

The three discs are quite different. The most minor of faults in another great value release is that Emanuel writes a glowing introduction but if we want to know more detail about dates we have to look it up ourselves. Sonatas 1 and 2 are opus 5, the first most noticeably optimistic, feel good and with a lightness of touch that, not for the first time, belie the stormy, imperious impression with which portraits, anecdotes and the other half of his music tend to colour our idea of Beethoven. He was much more complete than that. It's not all Mozart cute and Beethoven less so. 

The second disc is Sonatas 3, op. 69, and 4 and 5, op. 102, and they are from distinctly different periods as the opus numbers suggest. Those on disc one are from 1796, op. 69 is from 1808 and op. 102 from 1815. With the confidence of having looked that up, one can tell. Sonata no. 3 is more muscular and, as such, less charming for me although Emanuel's note tells us it's the best known. The slow movement in no. 5 is the most solemn and desolate, inviting comparisons with the Grosse Fuge, for string quartet, from 1825, for its heart-stopping profundity, whether it be grief, age or wisdom.

The third disc is almost by way of a generous encore. Two sets of variations on themes from The Magic Flute are either side of Variations on a Theme from Handel's Oratorio 'Judas Maccabeus', which many of us might know better as 'Thine Be the Glory'. One can relax a bit more with these. It's a different kind of enjoyment. We have perhaps come through the darker moments of deep searching and philosophy and these are our reward.

It makes for a great album that can be taken a disc at a time or, conceivably, if the opportunity arises, do it all in two and a half hours which would be no hardship.

The William Byrd 1588 album spent more time being played than might have first been anticipated whereas the Ensemble Correspondances programme of Buxtehude and Schutz surprisingly did not, having inadvertently caused offence by its piousness. Perhaps one should not hold what they purport to mean against artworks that otherwise do it all so well but both those albums are plenty long enough, which I realize is an odd thing to complain about. Nobody's saying you have to play them all in one go.

But, with Yo-Yo and Emanuel on three discs, that would not seem forbidding. Something intuitive about generosity, empathy and understanding is always there to be had in the delicacy and the power, the sharing and the purpose. Beethoven takes you everywhere and then a bit further. Like the Piano Sonatas, the String Quartets and the Violin Sonatas, less is as much as the larger, often louder, resources of the Piano Concertos and Symphonies. 

It says huge amounts for Bach, Mozart and Handel that, in spite of all that, I still can't find room for him in my Top 3 composers but it says even more for music that I don't know where Shakespeare, James Joyce and Rembrandt would rate in an even wider list.

Yo-Yo was the guest on Desert Island Discs this morning, which I missed but will catch up with. If you can only have eight records, I don't see how one of them can be Leonard Cohen. I still have over a thousand having sold the pop vinyl off but there had never been any room for him. Still, each to their own. We all have our reasons. But never trust a 'classical' musician's taste in pop or what a 'pop' musician thinks about classical. It doesn't compute.

 

This record puts itself immediately on the very shortest of lists for any Record of the Year award one might feel like dispensing.

The Eclipse Eclipsed and other stories

The partial eclipse of the Sun scheduled for this morning was sadly obscured by clouds here. We must take it on trust that it occured as predicted. While it might seem that one thing obscuring another should be as interesting as some other thing obscuring yet another, it isn't. The Moon partially or entirely blocking out the Sun is not only a rarity but demonstrates to us the geometries involved in astronomy, that we live in a real-life astrolabe. While it stretches our comprehension to grasp the vastness of space and how everything in it is tilted, spinning and whizzing about, we can do it a little bit at a time and appreciate that the Moon has come between the Earth and the Sun. Most remarkably, the Moon is just the right size at the distance from us it is to fit exactly over the Sun. It arranged itself there with the same precision attributed to the designers of the mathematically ingenious pyramids.

But, there we are, in England at least we are accustomed to clouds and disappointment but the Cloud Appreciation Society must take a battering in the polls on such days.

--

Gogol wasn't quite what I expected. The Overcoat possibly was but not so much the early stories, going back to the beginning. They are adapted folk tales with elements of the supernatural. I will go back to those stories and Dead Souls but there are bigger attractions piled up.

I went to Balzac instead, La Peau de Chagrin, The Wild Ass's Skin. What a joy that was. Balzac is exuberant even when describing decay, dissolution and despair. The novel is half Faust and half, in a way, The Picture of Dorian Gray, with other fractions added in. The achievement of writing quite as much as the total Human Comedy, 96 novels plus more stories, in a 20 year career, and so ravishingly makes the most prolific of composers - like Telemann or Vivaldi - seem frugal. It must have been much harder to produce novels like this than the admittedly hundreds of concertos that mostly sound very much like each other. There will be reason to enthuse about baroque concertos another time but at the moment it's all about Honoré de Balzac who always looks as if he dined well on the proceeds of his efforts. 

Among any number of eye-catching sentences,

Here I was, far from strong, undernourished, plainly dressed, pale and gaunt like an artist recovering from a recent bout of creativity.

And he would surely know. I noted it down as a possible epigram for a poem but I wouldn't know. It might, however, serve for ironic use if ever a poem arrived to put with it.

Also worthy of special attention towards the end was,

He guided his master, who walked with robot-like tread, into the vast gallery,

which caused an eyebrow to be raised. The Wild Ass's Skin is dated 1830-31. My old edition of the OED dates 'robot' to 1923, from the Czech, robota, from a play by Karel Capek. Balzac wouldn't have known what it meant but perhaps it does convey his French word into English best for us now. Perhaps it is permissable but it seems to strike the wrong note for me, as if St. Paul had put his Letter to the Corinthians on the internet. While I'm used to not believing in translations of poetry which can only exist properly in its original language, I've never been quite so concerned about novels in translation before although the same doubts must apply.

I did get a copy of Gide's Les Faux Monnayeurs with the intention of comparing  the translation with the original. The time has long passed for that esoteric exercise and so I won't add La Peau de Chagrin en Francais to my shopping list but while the reading of literature from other languages is essential we remain hostages of the translator, brilliant though I'm sure they are.

I'll save the next two Balzacs for later and thrive on variety. I wasn't surprised the postman couldn't get Anna Karenina through the postbox. For some reason, I had thought it was about 450-500 pages. It's not, it's 849. That will be something to look forward to but I was keen to read Laura Cumming's The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez. She is a brilliant writer and I like being shown round paintings by someone who knows what they're talking about. Reading about poetry, I bring my own prejudices and long-nurtured grievances to hold against anything I don't imagine myself to agree with and uncritically nod with enthusiasm at everything I do. With painting, I'm grateful to have it explained to me. I know so little that, I now realize, I have been calling him Velasquez and I didn't even check. I must write out Velázquez 100 times so that I remember in future.

I began Laura's book outside in the early afternoon. The cloud cleared and the Sun came through, two or three hours too late. Wouldn't you just know it.

--

But Anna Karenina is said to be The Greatest Novel in places on the internet and, no doubt, in editions of itself. As was Middlemarch in the repeat of the life of George Eliot repeated on telly last night. Last year I thought it must be Proust. I'm sure some say it's Ulysses. There will be War and Peace to add to the long list, Don Quixote, Jane Austen fans will be outraged if she's not listed and so it goes on. But it seems as if being enormous adds weight to one's case in the same way as, somehow, louder meant better in heavy metal music. That surely shouldn't be one of the criteria. If The Dead qualified as a novel it could easily be that. We will see but there's no need to come back here for a decision any time soon. The older one gets the less easy it is to be definitive about such diaphonous decisions. 

I've seen the word diaphonous more than once today, in Balzac or Laura if not both. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me.

Ensemble Correspondances - Buxtehude and Schutz

 Ensemble Correspondances/Sébastien Daucé, Septem Verba & Membra Jesu Nostri  (Harmonia Mundi)

For a 2-disc set at such a budget price, coming in gatefold sleeve and with a good booklet, one can't have much to complain about but I tried in vain to find which of the singers were singing which parts, mainly so I could credit them here. That must surely be only a minor omission but it mattered to me.

Music of such import, on the subject of the passion of Christ, is never going to be anything less than serious but it is, for the most part restrained, rising from its melancholy to moments of celebration and, done with small resources, there is always space for the sound to expand into.

The first disc is Buxtehude's most often heard choral cantatas, Membra Jesi Nostri, contemplating the body of Christ on the cross from the feet upwards so that the unfolding layers of text in the different parts gradually lift the eyes though yearning and sorrow towards deliverance. Ad cor, to the heart, is the sixth part, with a mystical opening on 'vulnerasti' ('thou hast wounded my heart') that is repeated at the end either side of an entirely different middle section and then ad faciem, to the face asks for salvation in death, presumably as part of the deal in exchange for such pietism. Buxtehude's violin parts are lyrical and often desolate and, as ever, one of his best features, belying his reputation being based on his organ work but at least in line with the only surviving picture of him being playing a viol. Membra ends with the most extravagant, baroque Amen that such humility feels it can allow itself, which is more than one might have thought but makes one think that ultimately, the point of the suffering is the celebration it leads to.

Disc 2 begins with Buxtehude's greatest hit, the Klag-Lied, or Elegy, written for the fumeral of his musician father, Johannes, in 1674. This is surely sung by Paul-Antoine Bénos here, listed as 'alto' rather than the 'unnamed soprano' I found it attributed to elsewhere. I may be wrong. Whoever it is does it gorgeously, having been given such lingering, mournful material to work with. It reaches not quite breaking point at a couple of peaks after halfway as the arrangement subtly builds but does without the big finish and exercises all due restraint in finishing gently where it had begun.

Heinrich Schutz was born 52 years before Buxtehude. Here, the shifting string parts in his Erbaum dich mein could be by the same composer as Buxtehude's setting of Luther's Mit Fried und Freud, which had been a more muscular choral piece than the Klag-Lied but the Da Jesus an dem Kreuze stund is not an appropriate piece to use for any comparison. It is the 'Seven Last Words from the Cross' long before Haydn set them more famously, James MacMillan most memorably and Lauryn Hill's Forgive Them Father was a part of her hip-hop classic, The Miseducation of. With its several different voices, the Schutz account is almost more like an opera with it's narrative and recitative. It has its moments but as a composition is inevitably more fragmented than other settings. Either Schutz has more to offer elsewhere or this will repay more hearings, which it will certainly get. 

If Buxtehude and Schutz aren't heard quite as often as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven and not household names in every household, their names are almost as well known as The Beatles compared to Ludert Dijkman (1645-1717) who will be as grateful to be remembered here for the 7 minutes of his Lamentum eller En Sorge-Music as Arnulf de Louvain (ca 1200-1250) will be for writing the poem that provides the text for Membra. They've actually done well for themselves when you consider our own chances of being remembered that far into the future. It's bleak but expressive, addressing 'fleeting joy, whose name is but fiction!' and only asks that its prayer is heard.

Buxtehude returns to finish off the show with 18 minutes of Herzlich lieb hab ich dich, o Herr, (Most Dearly do I Love Thee, O Lord). One might wish they weren't quite so craven and supplicant but that's what life was like then. Art, for some of us, is less about what is said than how it says it. Otherwise it wouldn't be 'art'. As with the great cathedrals, we can take as much pleasure in the glories of this music for its achievement by appreciating how they did it rather than why. Herzlich moves from a stately chorus into choir parts as an ensemble piece bringing all the forces together for the finale. 

I don't know if I'll need any more recordings of Membra, with three now, and the Klag-Lied here is worth it on its own. I've surprised myself by returning to the William Byrd discs most out of those mentioned here on April 29th. I made the Buxtehude disc by Vox Luminis my Record of the Year only a couple of years ago so he's not due another one just yet. Two discs offering such value are gratefully received but sometimes less is more.

The amount of books and records I've bought recently was underlined by the Visa bill I paid this morning. I need to spend more time with them.

After the last Amen, I feel I'm due something a bit less respectful.