Nothing to do with reason or philosophy

I'm not halfway through it yet so it's nowhere near time to say anything too definite about John Burnside's The Music of Time. It's not new, anyway, it's 2019 so not necessarily up for review. It's heavyweight without being heavy going. John's broad, deep and international reading is hugely impressive, related as each chapter seems to be to some telling anecdote.

Underneath everything he says there is always the glimpse of the idea of something beyond, an elsewhere, that is transcendental, as there is in his poems, but that is a corollary of another recurrent theme which is the limits of what can be known and so it comes as no surprise that there is an unknown to contemplate. There is somewhat more to it than that, of course, in 450 pages that call up Wittgenstein, Hegel, Soctates, Aristotle and almost as many intellectual giants as one can think of as well as plenty I'd never heard of. Among the poets given close attention are Montale, Ungaretti and Hart Crane that I did know of, several, like Maria Zambrano that I hadn't and William Matthews that I had somehow missed out on so far and was convinced enough about to order the Collected Poems of. It is very much a case of the more you find out, the less it seems one knows about.

But I was gladdened to read that,

...this is where poetry seems to begin too - single words or phrases, or just a rhythm sliding from one train of thought to another, nothing to do with reason, or philosophy or the intensely meant moral or political ideas that, surely, poetry is supposed to 'be about'. 

That seems very much like it to me if I could take that highly selective quote out of the context of the rest of The Music of Time and cite it as wisdom of quasi-scriptural significance in the equivalent survey of poetry that I won't ever write.

It is just the words. That's where the 'poetry' is which is why it 'gets lost in translation' and although one admires John's international outlook, unless one is A.N. Wilson and capable of picking up Italian with so little trouble in order to read Dante properly, the nuances that make good poems good are likely to be lost on anybody not fluent in the poetry's original language. It is the translator that we read. But it would be some sort of crime against humanity, wouldn't it, to dismiss the likes of Yevtushenko, Anna Akhmatova and Mandelstam on account of them not being written in English. Even Larkin, who gets short shrift here, who liked to pretend to be a Little Englander betrayed himself with more knowledge of non-English poetry than his philistine pose who have had us believe. 

Already I'm much further into making a manifesto when the first point on my agenda is not to have manifestos. Poetry is the words, their associations and how those words can together become more than the sum of their parts. It makes a change for me to repeat that point week after week rather than argue forever that An Arundel Tomb does not say that,

What will survive of us is love. 

But of course words, and poetry, are laden with and possibly handicapped by meaning, however skilfully or inadvertently the poet makes use of the shifts in meaning that many of them can have. It's not something that music has to deal with. Some poets might want to divorce words from meaning while others give them a welter burden of associations and re-echoes.

Don Paterson's very different but at least as big book, The Poem, left one with the same feeling as this does - how on earth can I write a poem while bearing all this in mind. And, of course, you can't and don't have to. You need to forget all this and just do what comes naturally which is the sort of advice one can benefit from in a number of other disciplines, I'm sure. Cricket, for example.

It's a moot point how much theory one needs in any enterprise. At present I'm short of poems to read and hope that William Matthews turns out to be a find but enjoy reading about poetry, too. But poetry and things about poetry are two different things.

My song remains the same and you're likely to have heard it before unless it's the first time you've found yourself here - all you have to be is any good.

Lee 'Scratch' Perry was 85

 

 

He played the Wedgewood Rooms down here more than once in recent years. I didn't know about it before it was sold out or else that would have been a reason to go back to a gig, one last time.

Latest Reading - Dante, etc.

 It's unlikely I'll move from A.N. Wilson's life of Dante to the Comedy or any other of his verse. As Wilson catalogues in his last chapter, Dante's Afterlife, successive generations will make of such writers what they will and not all of them until relatively recently made much of Dante. No doubt the point of the poetry, which is the words and how they add up to more than the sum of their parts, might be appreciated in the Italian and Wilson assures us that it isn't difficult to acquire sufficient Italian to do so. Easy enough for one of his calibre perhaps but I can't see me doing it after my short-lived attempt to learn German for the sake of the Bach Cantatas.

What one comes away with, among many things, is the poet's position in relation to the warring factions and politics of his time and place. My understanding of the history of Christianity was based on the Reformation and the beginnings of the Protestant church but now the earlier schism between the Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic traditions looks equally as much of a power grab rather than the flimsy doctrinal disagreements it was predicated on and that should come as no surprise. The corruption, tyranny and self-interest that runs through the history of the popes makes the sagas surrounding the battle for the English monarchy seem like a little local difficulty and what God had to do with any of them, apart from as the most transparent pretext, is hard to fathom.

If one admires Wilson's detailed setting out of all the politics while largely choosing to let it pass by, one is very glad of his book for all the themes and ideas he picks out to explore along the way. Chapter XV, Medieval Autobiography, brings in Northrop Frye and,

'Most autobiographies are inspired by a creative, and therefore functional impulse to select only those events and experiences in the writer's life that go to build up an integrated pattern.'

 

In only a few hundred pages, a book has very limited capacity to cover much more than those parts of the early life that contribute to the story and how it builds to where it needs to get to. The life of a poet will highlight elements relevant to the development of the poetry at the expense of all the other things they might have been and, to some extent, might have been.

In a bit of a swerve away from C13th Florence, I'm enjoying some light relief with the autobiography of David Essex. I wouldn't usually but Yoko lent it to me and it seemed only polite. Slightly better written and engaging than many such ghost-written books can be, we at least get the same Rod Stewart story that David Cook could have been a footballer and that he was interested in blues and was a drummer before becoming the teen idol of Jackie pin-ups and 'it was only a Winter's Tale'. But I'm sure after these first chapters, which are often the most interesting in any life, it will be showbiz name-dropping and buying flash cars.

Gladly, not having had a life worth reporting to any audience willing to pay £20 for the hardback edition of it, I don't have to decide if my own story should aim at the low-grade sport, the very minor literary achievement, the work experience or anything else. It would peter out and find me in retirement on a Sunday afternoon explaining why I hadn't written it.  

A second, major good point in the Dante is how,

There are, Bruni averred, two types of poet. The First is someone possesssed by 'furor'. This sort of poet is inspired. The second has trained to write poetry by laborious study of theology, philosophy, astronomy, arithmetic and history. And Dante, says Bruni..., was of the second sort.

Of course, Wilson has to say that 'perhaps all truly great poets are, in fact, something of both' but he doesn't entirely dismiss the proposition. Without it having to be that particular litany of disciplines that the poet needs to have studied now that we are not, so we are told, in the Middle Ages, the distinction is not far from one I once tried to make on the old 'Poets on Fire' forum when in provocative mode several years ago and was all but shot down for it had it not been for the supportive intervention of Roddy Lumsden.

Very broadly, we might put Ted Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Kate Tempest and Dylan Thomas in the 'furor' half and Larkin, Gunn and Auden among those who 'trained to write poetry'. While I very much sympathize with the second lot and could only ever think of belonging with them, it's not quite so 'us and them' and we must recognize allies who are more at home on the other side, like Rosemary Tonks in poetry, and like Ken Clarke and how John Major turned out to be in politics when Brexit push came to a belated rearguard action and insufficient shove.

--

The David Essex book came with a couple of other 1970's-related items that provide hilarity and retrospective insight amid what is only really nostalgia. In the anthology of 70's memories, The Seventies- Good Times, Bad Taste by Alison Pressley, almost every page makes me want to tell an anecdote. An illustration of the 7-inch single, Fascist Dictator reminds me of the time, in 1977, when I went into Audiosonic, a record shop in Gloucester's precinct where two boys from our school worked, regarding themselves as 'in the know' and a part of the New Wave.

I went up to the counter and asked, 'Have you got Fascist Dictator by the Cortinas?'

No, they hadn't.

'Okay. Have you got Right to Work by Chelsea?'

No, they didn't have that, either. At which point I thought I'd better ask them an easier one.

'Have you got The Logical Song by Supertramp?'

The sniggering with which this third attempt to buy something from them was received seemed unbefitting, the conservative nature of Supertramp not being as raw and angry as my first two choices saw themselves but, gentlemen, it was you that worked in a shop that didn't have Fascist Dictator or Right to Work and where were you at the Anti-Nazi gigs in Brixton and Finsbury Park with The Clash, Misty in Roots, Steel Pulse, Elvis Costello and, I dare say, Sham 69.

The Jackie anthology has no such edgy concerns and would probably warn its readers off the sort of boy that concerned himself with fringe movements that may or may not have been monitored by the security services, innocent idealists dressed up as realpolitik activists as they were, especially if he wanted to kiss them, which enterprise Jackie seems to regard as a game of chess so strategic that even Anatoly Karpov would have struggled with it. But by far the biggest headline news from that book is the double page feature on 'Wanted Men', a set of pen portraits of fanciable singers, film stars and celebrities might have qualified them for inclusion in the Harmless Boys magazine that Lisa Simpson read. In hindsight, they might not have been as suitable as Donny Osmond and surely Rod wasn't even then but as well as him and The Fonz, John Travolta, it was always Leif Garrett then, and even Bob Geldof, none of who were likely to be at the local disco of a Saturday night in Gloucester, they feature the dishy, impossibly rich and aristocratic Prince Andrew.

'Wanted Men' indeed but no more wanted than some of those supported by the left once we arrived at university and took to reading Cosmopolitan instead of Jackie.

--

I stuck with the marvellous John Burnside for the next episode of ostensibly more highbrow reading and have begun his survey of, mostly, C20th poetry, The Music of Time. Having been so impressed with his poems for some years and then recently taking in some fiction and memoir, he does himself no harm right up at the top of my pecking order in the first couple of chapters as a commentator on what he's read, of which there seems to be plenty.

I had better save further thoughts about it until after I've read it, which isn't always how I plan reviews, but it strikes me immediately that Larkin only features in a very small way in the index, Gunn and O'Brien not at all and we all might have our own such survey in us, that they would all be different and at least interesting to do even if nobody would read them.

I'd love to have a book to write and it isn't going to be a novel. I know what would happen, though. I'd set off one morning, beginning with some seminal poem from which I'd intend to expand to cover all my 40-odd years of thinking about poems and then it would only be a matter of how long it would last until I abandoned it.

The short form, the miniature, the poem itself, might be all I have, would that any more worth writing might occur to me.

A Pecking Order

I'm not reading A.N. Wilson's book on Dante because I'm particularly interested in Dante. I was diverted to it after a review of the latest book on Dante and deciding that I'd rather read Wilson on anything, almost, except Seamus Heaney on who we don't seem to agree.

History is too much for me, there's so much of it. Wilson brings immense scholarship to all that he does (it seems to me) and even if the finer points of The Divine Comedy are likely to remain beyond me, the great thing about books like this is how they suggest as much as they can as best they can of such places as C13th Florence. Perhaps I first encountered such a thing in E.M.W. Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture which was on a reading list 40-odd years ago and is still remembered as amazing.

Good Grief, did they think that. But, then again, was the ongoing corruption of the Catholic Church, the schism with the Orthodox Christians further East or anything at all predicated on the existence of God, which always seemed to fit political expediency any different from those that concerned Tolstoy in C19th Russia or the hapless duplicity of how the world is being managed now. No, not at all. How could we have been so foolish, as teenagers, reading the NME or, preferably, Jackie, listening to David Bowie and T. Rex, to think that Clement Attlee, Roosevelt and even Harold Wilson had given us reason for optimism. My generation and those 10-15 years older than me benefitted enormously but it wasn't much use to anybody else.  And so I am left, apologetically really, with nothing better to do than read books as good as this.

I was most taken by a page or two (116-117) on which Wilson points out,

note the extraordinary sense of a pecking order.

My reticence in the face of objections in recent decades to any idea of a 'canon', of some writers being regarded as 'better' than others would not have allowed me to write 'pecking order' without inverted commas but Wilson finds no reason to use them.

 

The poets are being lined up in competition with one another.

 

Maybe all serious writers think like this to some extent.

 

In Dante, the streak of competitiveness is very, very strong...

 

So it looks as if poetry has always been a sport after all, however much we might like to think of it as a pleasure beyond the morbid league tables of three points for a win and let's hope to park the bus and get an away draw at Rotherham on a Tuesday night in November. 

We have all already liked one poem more than another. Such decisions have made us think we like this poet better than that and so we think they are 'better'. It remains entirely possible that there's something 'better' about the poetry of Ezra Pound or Geoffrey Hill that we don't quite 'get' compared to Wendy Cope that we think we do. But if there's been a 'pecking order' since 1260 and hundreds of years before, it is highly unlikely that an aberration of unduly zealous, inclusive liberalism can suddenly turn up and overturn all that in favour of some vague idea that every contribution is of equal value and that a good proportion of those who turn up to take 'A' levels deserve an A or A* grade. 

That would be like saying to an increasingly flawed succession of people who wanted to be Prime Minister (Blair, Gordon, Cameron, Thersea and the latest dreary dope we've have foisted upon us), that, okay, yes, you can be.

So, if you've folloed this circuitous ramble this far, we might like to wonder which poets in English have been top of the pecking order in living memory. It is going to be a shifting thing but for the time being and for my purposes, Auden, Larkin and Elizabeth Bishop look to have fairly secure places in it. After that, maybe the dust needs to settle a bit morte but I'll be damned if Seamus Heaney wasn't am,ong the best of his generation.

Having innovated himself to a prominent position by 20 years ago, Paul Muldoon has risked becoming a parody of himself. Sean O'Brien has bagged himself a large haul of the major prizes by staying mostly with tradition but doing it very impressively at his best and so is a sound and reliable pick in the same way that Hardy, Auden and Larkin are.

One isn't made Laureate without some relevant credentials and Ms. Duffy represents the period with some finely-made poems but, much to my surprise and not quite for the first time, I find an unlikely source of perceptive commentary in Private Eye, in their review of Simon Armitage's Oxford lectures,  A Vertical Art. I wonder who wrote it,

 

and yet over it there hangs the faint scent of elegy, the thought that chaos lurks just around the corner and that prescriptions (and proscriptions) of this kind will be completely anathema to the next generation of poets waiting to emerge from the nation's creative writing courses. Armitage's tenure as the UK's Mr. Poetry is set to last until 2029. It's a safe bet he will be the last proper poet to be appointed Laureate. 

 

They don't even put 'proper poet' in inverted commas. They really mean it. They have cited George the Poet and Kate Tempest ('zealously emoting') as examples of the way things are going. For a certain type of us, who may be of a certain age, such things only qualify as poetry by through our open-minded, inclusive definition of poetry that lets in all knids of bad poetry. If the poetry commentator at Private Eye is right then we are living on borrowed time and we are the dance band on the Titanic. But it is somehow a part of human nature to feel apocalyptic and it isn't over until it's over. It does seem like a generation of 'proper' poets are dying off and not being replaced by similar but who's to say.

It will be thin and unrewarding poetry that leaves future generations under nourished if they're right and poetry will be further diminished to a sub-category of stand-up performance and so one might expect some kind of renaissance, maybe like that of 1977 in pop music after the behemoths of old rock music had ground creativity to a standstill, bored us to paralysis and sent us gladly towards disco.

We will have to see what happens. There are more dangerous crises extending themselves exponentially across the planet. Those of us with time on our hands to concern ourselves with anxieties about pecking orders and the future of poetry are privileged and spoilt beyond our own knowing.

Under a Spell

In those brief, highly-charged moments when one finally puts down an unputdownable book, one can believe one has a new favourite writer. 

Thom Gunn's letters earlier this year did him no favours in my estimation. Last year I pronounced Proust as the greatest novelist, even if not ahead of James Joyce's Dubliners. A.N. Wilson contuines to be hugely impressive in whatever of his I pick up. Elizabeth Bishop and Rosemary Tonks head up a list of favourite poets with unforgettable bits of August Kleinzahler, Sean O'Brien, Larkin and Auden pressing their respective cases. It's hard to know how many tremendous writers there are that I haven't read although I wouldn't agree with John Peel that the music he hadn't heard was more interesting than what he had.

But the feeling that one has just read something entirely worthwhile and there was nothing one would rather have been doing is surely what one is in search of in a life spent, for better or worse, much of it with books.

I Put on Spell on You is possibly 'confessional' in a way that Burnside's less specifically personal poetry is not but, then again, any memoir is likely to be so except that not all of them escape the events they describe in search of something 'beyond' quite so insistently. The unprepossessing origins in Cowdenbeath and Corby are jettisoned as Burnside vividly broods upon a life of itinerant infatuation, 'glamour', madness and some danger seemingly, as in his poems, aware of something 'other', more and unattainable, glimpsed in moments in which he sees 'happiness' but knows that the hyperbole of popular music lyrics is nothing like the real thing.

It is in the isolation of sub-Arctic Norway that he thinks he might find release but his friend explains that there one is more dependent on the trust of others and community than anywhere else. As in the stories, there is a persistent awareness of violence and a need for protection from it. It might be the same pre-disposition that makes him a drug user and prone to amour fou that leads him to this edge of what 'the System' would regard as sane, that suburban, domestic 'sanity' represented more innocently by R4Extra's current series of repeats of Not in Front of the Children in which Wendy Craig developed her specialist line in crisis-stricken housewife.

Towards the end, Burnside refers in passing to Dante and Beatrice and how the poet there never mentions Mrs. Aligheri, which is the difference between the 'thrawn' of what might have been possible and the less poetic version of what really happened. There is something wild and uncontrollable beyond but Burnside, in finding himself unable to commit to Christina, turns away from it, which might have been for the best because otherwise she might have become 'real'.

I like it when one book links into the next and how Dante came into the story like that because it will be Wilson on Dante next and then we'll see. But, for however long it lasts - and it may have been a glimpse of impossible happiness - John Burnside seemed like my favourite writer. Maybe he still will be but, as becomes clear with any of them, it is only a form of words. It's not to be regarded as scripture or gospel as some aberrant believers would take texts to be. A talented writer is only someone who convinces through the illusion of the words they put together and conjures something wonderful from them but it's worth it while it's happening.

  What we talk about when we talk about books is usually good books, those we have enjoyed and are implicitly recommending. What I write about here, in my devil-may-care way, are the books I've been reading recently which are nearly always books I've chosen to read and bought and so, having chosen them in the expectation of enjoying them, it is to be hoped that I did and I usually do so I mostly have good things to say about them.

But one can't be right all the time. Occasionally something's not what one thought it would be. Having set Gogol's stories aside a while ago when more important material turned up, it was in due course time to try Dead Souls. It's been on some sort of long list for decades. But it wasn't worth the wait. Not for me.

I read it. It didn't do me any harm and it didn't even drag but it didn't do much for me. It's picaresque, which is an old-fasioned thing to be, perhaps, and allegedly funny but I didn't really laugh at all. I think I saw most of the point of it and Gogol is good at capturing characters, of which he creates many but, unlike Candide which is hilarious and still highly relevant with its take on human failings and the likes of our current Prime Minister to consider in its context, it was more and more of the same, it seemed to me, except to say that if and when I don't appreciate a book it is quite possibly me that's failing.

It finished mercifully 60 pages early with the notice that,

Here Gogol's text comes to an end.

The final version was completed by another author, Zacharchenko, and the editor/translator here, Isabel F. Hapgood couldn't find a Russian edition to translate from and so used a French translation, as if translation wasn't a dubious enough business in the first place.

I have no doubt that the [French] translation is very bad, it always is when filtered through the French

 

but she provides it for those who like their stories complete. Well, with Mozart's Requiem maybe I do but I was ready to move on from this and was past caring. But that seemed to me the most interesting thing about the book, being ever sceptical about how close to the original language a translation can get and seeing this further distorted and admittedly badly distorted. 

It was thus a great pleasure to move on to John Burnside's stories in Something Like Happy ahead of a volume of his memoirs, A.N. Wilson on Dante or the next Balzac. Much more like it, that slipped down like champagne and barely lasted a day. Burnside's facility with poetry is replicated in his fiction without necessarily being identifiably by the same author. I don't think you'd guess if you didn't know. 

It's a bad thing we do when we like to categorize people as one thing as opposed to another but we do, or we seem to in England at least. We seem to think of poets, novelists or dramatists and anything they did outside of their allocated field as somehow extra-curricula, like Sylvia Plath's, Douglas Dunn's or Sean O'Brien's fiction maybe. But surely they meant it just as much. Fiction writing can be time-consuming work. Larkin thought he was a novelist before finding more success with poems but had 'writer' put on his gravestone, wisely. Poetry has always seemed like the soft option to me and so unless one wants to emphasize the poetry or that's all one did, 'writer' is what we ought to want to be and what John Burnside surely is. There's a lot more available to be had. He will be challenging my chronic shelf space crisis as time goes by.

--

It's been a happy week on the turf regaining some lost ground after a summer hiatus, most gloriously with Mishriff in the big race at York. There is no better feeling than everything that you figured being played out in front of you and restoring some lost profit. That Mishriff is quite possibly the best horse in the world, over 10 furlongs, that there wasn't much of a case for the opposition, that he was very confidently ridden and won by 6 lengths at a generous SP of 9/4 were all the ingredients one needs to be reminded that sport can still be a satisfying thing.

We look forward to the Autumn and the return of the more involving game of jumping over obstacles on the way round.

--

But just how much of our lives is formulaic, set out for us to avoid the distress of anything unexpected and provide the required comfort. Nearrly all of it, I'd suggest.

Even the ever-inventive, garrulous wit of Danny Baker was fitted into a fixed radio show that was the same every week before his one last, big mistake. Tony Blackburn's 60's and Johnnie Walker's 70's shows on R2 are both eased into pre-set templates. Most of the records they play are cosily familiar and that's how we like it.

But interviews are made up of the same habitual set pieces, too. I'm much more Times Radio than R4 or 5 these days. Interviews have the interviewee beginning the first answer with, 'So,'; some of them don't realize they fill in with 'you know' throughout, which makes me start to bet on how many 'you knows' there'll be before the interviewer speaks again.

A recent innovation, that has caught on immediately and spread like a new virus, comparable only with the 'Look' and 'Listen' introduced by Australian cricketers some years ago, is the congratulatory, 'that's a very good question'.

Suddenly they all do it, beautifully, if vacuously, combining ingratiation with the interviewer with the suggestion that even though it's a good question, they can still answer it. 

The interview comes to a premature halt when they lose the line. Technology is never quite perfected and so we may no longer have 1970's R1 deejays struggling with 7 inch singles that stick or jump we now have digital phone lines that get tired, become intermittent, possibly make the voice sound like Victoria Beckham being put through a voice coder before we are robbed of the summing up.

Orr maybe they do it deliberately once they've heard enough.

I've had it installed here....

That's not what I call progress

 

John Burnside - Learning to Sleep

 John Burnside, Learning to Sleep (Cape)

John Burnside's new collection begins with the observation that,

Wooing is out of fashion,

like silence,

or manna 

 

no fervour any more, no

Tir na Nog.

 

and before the Postscript, it ends reflecting on David Hume and how, perhaps,

everything we know is what it seems.

In between those two empirical attitudes, though, that 'what we know' appears to suggest or contain a bit more. Postscript refers to the 'edge' and a 'brink',

as if a better world was still to come.

 

and elsewhere he has a 'cusp' and a 'horizon', or lack of one. Without wanting to sound too much like a poetry reviewer, it is that intersection between the actual and some potential beyond it that runs through the book. I don't imagine John Burnside to be a religious man or he would surely say so more explicitly but he needs quasi-religious ideas sometimes to express the idea. There must be more to it than meets the eye, he is trying to convince us, or convince himself, especially when, in A Brief Memo, for Valentine's Day, he senses,

            how sweet it is

to be alive.

 

That is the theme of the poetry and the poetry provides its own answer by being what it is. It is gorgeously done and entirely convincing despite the apparent ease with which such writing seems to come. There is no shortage of Burnside poetry and then there's the fiction and other prose but such facility doesn't seem to diminish the accomplishment. He hasn't wandered off into mythologies of his own making like some might say Ted Hughes did and he hasn't taken his method to the outer limits of arch-cleverness like Paul Muldoon, who continued from his pre-eminent position of sophistication twenty years ago into realms of his own making as if he were James Joyce.

Having posted the programme for the forthcoming year with Portsmouth Poetry Society only yesterday, I see I am down to introduce the subject of 'free verse' in February. I don't intend to either attack or defend the idea but to 'tell it how it is', for me at least, which may or may not gravitate towards a manifesto statement that there's no such thing. However, if one ever needed an example of a poet that writes 'free verse' than is undeniably 'poetry', I'm quite prepared to abandon Thom Gunn's Touch as my paragon example and replace it with almost anything from this book or elsewhere in John Burnside. Rhyme and metre, assumed by so many to be essential to 'poetry', would ruin the rhythms and progress of his language. It has an orderliness of its own. One couldn't call it verse but it isn't 'chopped-up prose'. As ever, all you have to be is any good.

 

Abundance, or at least the illusion of it, pours out of such regular experiences as loss, absence and isolation. From those first lines, from In Memoriam, in which 'there is a Meadow / - afterward', the world is charged with the likes of,

the murmur of stars in my blood

 

and the knowledge that,

so, now, there is no end

to what we know,

though what we know

is never quite enough

to set things right:        

and we recognize our unsafe place in the universe or at least have a good friend in John Burnside, or the words he threads together, to help soothe those agonies. And that is what he quotes from Thomas Carlyle ahead of Preparations for the True Apocalypse as,

 which all right writing is a kind of attempt to write down.

It can happen in the rare beauty of such lines as those from An Angel Passes, 

                                   the light

re-spinstering your face

by slow degrees, your fingers

tangled in a myth of needlecraft 

 

but it happens more properly not in selected quotes but in the cumulative effect of the book as a whole.

 

Poetry isn't actually up to much these days when the real threat of climate apocalypse has been obscured by a couple of years of pandemic difficulty. John Burnside's poems are unlikely to save us because hardly anybody outside the small, closed poetry world has heard of him but that doesn't mean a few of us aren't glad of knowing we are not alone. It's very unlikely I'll see a better book of new poems than this this year and, alongside the music and, let's hope, some great Autumn concerts, it's a highlight of 2021.

 

Sainthood

It said here, I think, years ago now that there were only two titles I'd like, professor and saint. Not any more, though. Professor's only a job and not one I'd like. Adorning one's name with epithets like titles before or letters after weighs one down like a royal wearing lots of medals at a ceremony. My name is a common enough one but it's all I need. The B.A. (Hons) need only appear on a CV if ever I had to provide one, which I won't.

Sainthood's odd, though. Plenty of people still think it's a good thing, like righteousness, but the language continues to move on and shift its meanings further. Sainthood is conferred by the Catholic church as a reward for work in its service like a Conservative party donor given a place in the House of Lords. While saints are usually credited with miracles, it is similarly a miracle that anybody would want to sponsor that ramshackle racket of self-interest except, of course, self-interest is why they do it.

I finished A.N. Wilson's weighty and impressive life of Tolstoy today. Wilson himself would possibly be deserving of some sort of honour were it not for his woeful dismissals of Seamus Heaney. It is a blind spot that makes him human and thus flawed. There are no saints, we are all who we are and we all think what we want to think. But Tolstoy was regarded as a saint in his lifetime, mostly for good reasons but, as ever, he couldn't provide the necessary unblemished record.

It took him some time to emerge from a ruinous gambling habit, a huge appetite for debauchery and a rich young man's lack of purpose. But Wilson quotes a number in the many millions of pages of writing he went on to produce that is industrial on a vast scale, with War and Peace and Anna Karenina being such achievements and only counting less than a thousand pages each. Put alongside his thirteen children and political and religious concerns, it is evidence of enormous energy. His mass popularity and the crowds he gathered were something far beyond literary significance and Wilson points out that his two big masterpiece novels weren't the cause of it. Like Saint Albert Camus later, it's hard to think that such a great novelist wasn't necessarily most importantly a novelist.

I took some satisfaction from the handful of times Wilson made comparisons with Alexander Solzhenitsyn who I spent some teenage years reading in the mid-1970's and now sometimes wonder if I should have been reading something else. Dickens, for instance, who was so admired by Tolstoy. But I was also pleased to see a few references to Larkin edging their way in, showing that Larkin is a part of the Wilson firmament even if one hardly thinks of him as Tolstoyan.

Tolstoyan comes to mean a Christian faith and devotion, despite the doubts anybody would have, that went beyond any church into the pursuit of a simple, rustic life, as he saw it, anti-war, valuing some impossible idyll of life, and revolutionary at a time in Tsarist Russia when revolution would have seemed to us the very least objective. But he was ex-communicated by the Orthodox Church and Lenin's 1917 revolution, being industrial and genocidal, was anything but Tolstoyan.

But as self-styled genius with all too much regard for itself can often be, Tolstoy's practice didn't follow all that it preached. As with many such men, his marriage was a catastrophe, he seems severly unhappy struggling with his malevolent demons and he is cruel to those close to him. In the closing chapters, anybody and everybody, knowing that they are living in such important times, is keeping diaries in order that their side of the story will be on record. It is madness and maybe it did drive Sofia mad.

In one telling vignette, Tolstoy asks a guest if he would empty his own chamber pot as he regards it as beneath the dignity of a servant to have to do so. Sofia has no such qualms and doesn't understand what they pay servants for if it's not to do that and informs the guest otherwise. But the guest is English and does what an Englishman, one might hope, would do at least in those days in those circumstances and makes no use of the chamber pot but uses the extensive garden instead.

But sainthood is beyond us, just another ludicrous invention of the imagination. The more one knows about a saint, the less they prove to be one.

--

So, tempted by the new, highly recommended (by A.N. Wilson in The Times) biography of Dante, I find I can wait until later for that because there's more Balzac and Gogol on the shelves, waiting. And, moving a few books about to accommodate Tolstoy upstairs, I found John Steinbeck. I must have had that for 40-odd years and not read it yet. But Dead Souls is up next.

Summertime

 I was surprised, somewhere below, to be reminded how many summer poems I had available to contribute from the back catalogue to the recent poetry club theme. Two of that very name, which briefly confused the compilation of the Collected, plus others. I think I see it as a passing aberration, or did. All bets are off as to how future generations will understand poems about the seasons written when Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter were known quantities. But as we lean back away from the Sun and make our way to more temperate weather we can look forward to something less jarring.

Not the least of which will be not having to try to understand the cricket season as the main strategy is by now how to monetize, and thereby reduce, the game. Today Trent Rockets are away in Cardiff and Notts are away in York while Trent Bridge hosts the test match. Well, that answers my question, then. I can hardly be expected to support a new-fangled Nottingham-based team if they take a handful of players from Notts, of who I am a lifelong 'follower' (at a distance) and diminish the real thing. It makes precious little difference to me what happens to Notts but following a sport seems to involve taking sides and so they are my side but the sport devalues itself if it expects me to be devoted to Trent Rockets, too, because I'm not going to be and it further undermines what interest I have in Notts when they have to field half a reserve team. I am just about a good enough supporter to know that I've never heard of half the side playing in Cardiff at the moment.

Whether it's the way of the world or just incipient old age, so much seems like Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

 

But at least here we might revive an old practice and review a new book of poems which is something that's not happened for some time. That's partly because there have been fewer, maybe, but also because I'm not finding, or even trying to find, new names to read. As happened with pop music a few decades ago, new poetry by generations that came after one's own seems to be about, or doing, something else. 

One lives in one's own moment as the Rolling Stones have always done and when David Bowie tried to move with the times he wasn't as good. Not even Shakespeare managed to do that.

And so the lights go out, one by one - Heaney, Lumsden, Mahon. All men, of course, but I was a great admirer of Anne Stevenson and Eavan Boland was significant to many. But John Burnside is still at it and never lets us down at the risk of being prolific. I'm promised delivery on Tuesday. That can often mean Monday. It should be just like the old days, reading new poems and wondering what I can possibly say about them to make it look like I 'got it'. 

 

Also, looking forward to the glory days of September and Autumn, although we still await the programme of Tuesday lunchtime concerts from Chichester Cathedral, we do have Portsmouth's list for Thursdays. Thank heaven, as it were, for cathedrals.

Pluperfect, Collected Poems

Setting this up as a kindle available on Amazon proved beyond me. Never mind. I had gone far enough with compiling the Word doument by the time I found that out that I wasn't going to abandon it at that late stage.

The next best alternative was to make a pdf out of it. That was easy in the end but not until I'd explored all the difficult options. Good Lord, I thought, if I'd wanted to battle with the computer all morning, making an easy job too hard, I need not have retired.

But now we have it, at least in version 1.0. One can't go on looking for errata and gremlins forever and so let's go with this.

In the end I decided to go without a foreword. The poems can manage without any more than the barest commentary, context and footnotes.

But the foreword I removed, if you really want to know, was thus,

 -- 

I had thought the Collected  might be pared down to only 20 or 30 poems but that would have been a new Selected. Thus the 123 poems here represent the career retrospective from, I think, 1979, to 2021. They are pluperfect by having looked back once, they are looked back on again.

Some poems were luckier than others on either side of the fine line between being kept in and being left out. In the unlikely event of a Complete Poems, there would be no such arbitrary line.

The process of writing was, for me, one of unlearning or of learning what not to do and, preferably, not consciously dwelling on such thoughts about what one was doing. The more successful pieces seemed to be those that came without trying too hard, that arrived almost fully-formed, and the three original manuscripts in the appendix show very little amendment.

123 poems is a slight Collected but it was never a full-time job. Four poems a year was the rate I maintained fairly steadily, much of that time not knowing where the next poem was coming from or if it would come at all.

While it is customary to thank people who helped or read such work along the way it became increasingly the case that if I was happy with a poem, that was all that mattered. Any reaction they generated by appearing in print or being read was of interest but a bonus. It was very soon not a commercial venture but something with which to please oneself. However, of course, by presenting those that might be more worth preserving, I’m glad of anyone who wants to share them and I hope they find something worthwhile among them.  

--

You are welcome to the pdf and can have it for the asking by e-mailing dg217.888@ntlworld.com.

Shakespeare and Tolstoy

 The film All is True will not be news to most people but, not being a film-watcher, it was to me when shown on TV the other night. I may not watch many films but I am a Shakespeare biography addict. One can put this film straight in at the top of Ben Elton's finest work with Branagh, Judi Dench and Ian McKellan enacting an insightful if ultimately far-fetched account of Shakespeare's retirement back in Stratford, 1613-16.

There are all the usual biographical motifs to include, like beds mentioned in wills, Shakespeare's concern for his social status and the death of the boy, Hamnet. I also realized that surely Shakespeare is by now surely a character in more works of historical fiction than he wrote himself.

Central to the film is Shakespeare's 'realization' that Hamnet didn't die of plague as he does in Maggie O'Farrell and as he is assumed to have in nearly every biography. Shakespeare notices that there were only five infant deaths in Stratford in 1596, three of which were newborn. In a line worthy of the man himself, Elton gives him, 'the plague is a scythe, not a dagger' that takes out swathes of lives and doesn't pick them out one by one. I wonder how verifiable that figure is because it shifts our understanding a little bit if it's true.

What is much less likely is the alternative explanation that Judith pushed him into the pond out of jealousy and he drowned. That Shakespeare had favoured Hamnet on account of his attempts at poetry but that they had really been written by Judith who, being a girl, helped in the kitchen is not going to be given much credence as a biographical possibility but it made for yet more fine fiction from the fertile material of the shadowy life.

It gives us the very outside possibility that it produced the lines,

There is a willow grows aslant a brook, 

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream

but I'm not buying that any more than I think Hamnet's death resulted in the lines from King John,

Grief fills the room up of my absent child, 

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, 

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

 

That ain't necessarily so.

---

We're dealing with big guns at present.

Moving from Anna Karenina to A.N. Wilson's biography of Tolstoy one is struck by how much of one is in the other. One can read the one without knowing about the other. It is, in fact, more of a distraction from either to open up a whole new area by comparing the two.

Wilson is scholarly and entertaining and sends one diligently to his back catalogue to see what else there is among his novels, Dickens and Victorian work having been so hugely impressed with his Jesus and his Betjeman.

I couldn't help but notice his passage on the C19th biographers of Jesus, including,

The most notorious and radical of their theologians, David Fiedrich Strauss, had brought to the study of the New Testament a whole package of scientific and philosophical presuppositions which enabled him to examine the Gospel stories in the same sceptical spirit which would have governed a scholar's reading of, say, Plutarch's 'Lives'. 

which is very much what Wilson himself does so he wasn't the first to do so but the latest in an honourable line.

Having also read Claire Tomalin's Thomas Hardy- The Time-Torn Man recently, the litany of great writers in difficult marriages insists on compiling itself before one's very eyes. Tolstoy, Hardy, Dickens, Shakespeare...it begins to look like a pattern. Do great writers become great writers as a result of unhappy marriages or are the unhappy marriages due to them being great writers.

That looks like an easy one to me.