Wild is the Commentator

 He was tackling truths that could not be represented directly, mapping a rapidly evolving set of new social spaces not yet classified, and creating a series of blueprints that the listener and viewer needed to complete through an application of the blueprint to their own reality.

Thus Paul Morley in 2016 on David Bowie in 1970. Maybe he was if you like that sort of thing but maybe all innovative art could be said to be doing that if it gets us anywhere to say so. Paul Morley provides a torrent of such paragraphs in his book, as below, enjoying himself far too much in his inexhaustible facility to do so. He is the critic in excelsis, engaging with the artist like an unnecessary adjunct less interested in helping his reader to see the light and apparently more intent on getting in on the act. The book could lose much of such self-indulgence, be half its length, more to the point and we wouldn't have lost anything. But even though it's not doing Morley, or Bowie, any favours I'll stick with it.

It was many years after Station to Station before I became aware that Wild is the Wind was not a Bowie composition. For all the world he makes it sound like one but not knowing it wasn't is the price one pays for enjoying the music ahead of doing a Ph. D. in it.

But now a Radio 3 trailer for a celebration of Nina Simone at 90 is playing her version,

  Having known the Bowie version since 1975 and this only now it's not possible for me to reset and not think he wrote it and think of this as a sultry cover version but Wikipedia says,

The album was compiled from several recordings that were left over from sessions (in 1964 and 1965) for previous Philips albums.

Good heavens.  That means to say there were Simone albums that this wasn't considered good enough to get on. One can't help wondering what they're like.

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I see we are due the Collected Anne Stevenson from Bloodaxe next week. I am tempted to try her as one that might revive my debilitating loss of faith in poetry. She was one of the good 'guys'. I very nearly got a book of hers signed when a friend went to a gathering she was due to be at except she wasn't and she died before we had another chance. Her books on Elizabeth Bishop were excellent and she was in on the Bishop Industry very early.

I'm not entirely convinced the Collected will be quite as reliable a resource for bedside dipping in as the Collected Morman MacCaig, though, and so might sample a couple of slim volumes at secondhand giveway prices before having the confidence to buy something so big and new that might not be quite as good as I hope it will be.

That's how bad it is these days and I'm not sure if I'll ever get poetry back.

FOR SALE. Maybe 1000 poetry books and related items.

No, only joking. I now regret taking so little for my pop vinyl and feel as if I sold off some important part of my life for not very much so I don't think the poetry books can be allowed to go or else I risk being left without the sort of map, spaces or blueprint that Paul Morley seems to think we need.