The First Poets and other stories

I was lead to believe, by the notes nearby, that a piece of stone with markings on it that I saw in a museum in Istanbul maybe 26 years ago was the earliest known poem. I'd imagine it's a subject it's hard to be definitive about. Michael Schmidt's The First Poets begins with Orpheus and for the most part talks about him as if he was real. I'm not sure how much credence should be given to his visit to the underworld and might suggest that he was about as real as Robin Hood.

Many of the poets discussed, which we take to be the 'major' names that are known about, are 'faded ghosts' known from what fragments of their poems remain and the mentions they get from other writers. Of Corinna's Seven Against Thebes 'only three words survive' and many poems are fragments so it is not only remarkable how much Michael Schmidt reconstructs of the poets and poetry from Orpheus to Theocritus but that he did so as well as having written the mammoth Lives of the Poets, The Story of Poetry: From Caedmon to Caxton; From Skelton to Dryden; From Pope to Burns (three volumes) and The Novel, a biography, among other things and it all looks objective, even-handed and sensible to me. It only remains for us to be suspicious that anybody could be so well read if we are sceptical types.

There have often been two of each of the major poets in order to explain things that don't quite add up. Two Homers, for example, is as much of a theory as there being no Homers at all.

Schmidt brings these characters alive, whether authentically or not. The whole project makes Shakespeare biography look very straightforward indeed. We might find some of the poets he conjures from these remnants of evidence but however diligent he is in filtering the evidence, it's been filtered plenty long before he got to it. One can't help but make a note of Hipponax, though, circa 540 BC, who makes Catullus look like John Betjeman.

Such scholarship resembles astronomy in its investigation of such distant, hard-to-see things. These poets are old stars that have imploded and left only debris or they are objects at the limits of our awareness the interpretation of which depends on the vestiges of clues. In astronomy, it is likely that technology will make things clearer but with the first poets they are mostly hidden behind time and who's to say they wouldn't, at least some of them, prefer it to stay that way.    

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The place from which I write, from which this whole website has been written for all these years, has been transformed into the Blue Room. Not before time, it could be said. I hadn't realized that interior design would be something I could do, with a little help from my friend next door who does the actual work.

How much did Boris Johnson get somebody else to pay Lulu Lytle to make a gaudy mess of the flat in 10 Downing Street. At least £112000, I see it says. He wasn't able to hold on to the flat despite an 80-seat majority and so either it all has to be re-done more tastefully or his successors have to live with the nightmare, not unlike what he did with the country.

Hidden in among the more modest costs of my refurbishment, I added a new artwork. I really, really don't believe in paintings matching the decor of the rooms they are in but, as it happens, my favourite painter, Vermeer, did a painting about music that used a lot of blue. In the end, the decision was clear cut. Maybe this, maybe that. No, of course not. 

Diego Velasquez can wait until we see if the horse named after him is worth the 2.4 million guineas that he cost. I was one of those that piled into him for his first run today but Aidan O'Brien decided against running him. If he wins the 2024 Derby, maybe you heard it here first.

Also tucked away in the expenses is a CD/Cassette player. It's got the wireless on it, too. Such things cost next to nothing these days. So I can have music here or in other rooms upstairs as yet not furnished with such olde worlde equipment. I am the beneficiary of a friend older than me who is making the grand gesture of off-loading his CDs. So, after about 60 years since it was my favourite record, I'll have She Loves You by the Beatles. It's a shame Doris Day isn't among them and quite how often I'll play Fleetwood Mac, Robert Palmer, later Roxy Music and Talking Heads it's hard to say but I'll give them a good home.

More significantly, there are some old cassettes I will look forward to hearing again. Radio broadcasts of poetry programmes like those featuring readings by August Kleinzahler, for example. Brumel's Earthquake Mass that was a birthday present once. I found so much treasure moving the books in and out of this room and then doing a bit of re-organization of the CDs that the Good Lord only knows what is waiting to be found on cassette upstairs.

The remorse I feel for having sold my pop vinyl for a paltry £120 only thickens and deepens. I was mugged, really. I will never let any such thing go again. I can think of nothing else to want, or worth having, than such treasure as one has already.