More Johnsonia

 A few books have piled up. I'd rather they did that than leave me wondering what to re-read.

Chichester's Oxfam Bookshop on Tuesday lured me in with F.W. Harvey, Soldier, Poet by Anthony Boden, not necessarily essential on account of the poetry itself but for its mentions of Chosen Hill, Over - pronounced 'oover', Framilode and such places, me having been partly adopted by Gloucester for formative year purposes. It's a characterful and picturesque part of England, as many are, and its people are often understandably attached to it, none more so than was Ivor Gurney although strictly speaking Edward Thomas who lived near here is the one to go to for poems.

Two copies of Erik Satie: Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman arrived today which is a sign of oncoming senility in me, or just carelessness, but I've an idea who might benefit from the surplus copy as a present to one who deserves it for their work. Ian Penman wrote for the NME in the late 70's when it still served as some kind of scripture for those hipsters who thought it mattered, and we did. And by now we can look back on who came out of that hot house school of pop music journalism. Ian MacDonald who went on to write so brilliantly about Shostakovich; Danny Baker, the radio broadcaster of choice for my generation. Not quite so much the tired rock iconographies of Charles Shaar Murray, the user-friendly novels of Tony Parsons or the increasingly predictable contrariness of Julie Burchill who I might have had a brief, equally contrary crush on for about two weeks then but among such a shark tank of thrusting talent, I'm guessing I'd have preferred to have been reviewing The New Seekers for Record Mirror.

Andrew Gant's The Making of Handel's Messiah adds to the Handel books as he goes head-to-head with Shostakovich in that department. I wonder how much information is duplicated on my shelves about Larkin, Thom Gunn, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop and especially Shakespeare but the more times one reads things the more chance one has of remembering it. Or maybe not at the age of 65.

But, bought from the Birthplace Museum in Lichfield, Dictionary Johnson by James L. Clifford is thorough and highly immersible. One needs to appreciate the financial hardship, at least until he was awarded the pension that his dictionary definition had so disdained, and the physical awkwardness and especially the anti-colonial sentiments that make him such a progressive C18th Tory. But what I think impresses me most about such a garrulous but also sympathetic man is how he sees,

'human experience [as] the empty recepticle which cannot tolerate its own emptiness',

an insight attributed to Arieh Sachs in a footnote and one of the most profound bits of commentary I've seen about anyone, anywhere, ever. Perhaps Arieh Sachs needs following up if he's findable.

When one is tired of Dr. Johnson, one might say, one is tired of life. It's possible I've used that before even if nobody else has but it comes with the rejoinder that maybe eventually he was. Auden said he felt as much; there's reason to think Shakespeare might have been. There will be other examples. There might be some consolation to be had in that enough is eventually enough, one has done what one could for better or worse and that will have to do.

Meanwhile, one keeps 'buggering on' if not quite so impossibly as Churchill did on the off chance that something truly worthwhile will yet transpire. Perhaps it will.

Thalia Holmes wins BBC Chess Masters

Not having been a devotee of Strictly Come Dancing, Bake Off, the ice-skating show or any other such thing, I wasn't expecting too much from Chess Masters but, as ever, I'm happy to be proved wrong.

The dense mixture of short time limit games, puzzles and simultaneous games against Grand Masters made for a rigorous challenge but one of the dozen of them had to win. Easily the most terrifying of those was the inevitability of being thrashed by 9yo Bodhana Sivanandan while she did the same to two others but one only had to last longer than one or other of those did.

I'd made Caitlin Reid favourite early doors, being the most impressive in the first group but soon put Thalia alongside her after she came through the second.

One can't help but notice the diversity of the chosen participants that covered male, female, ethnicity, age most diligently when, one can't help but notice, most of the best cherss players in the world are male and, now, aged 18-40. But it was by no means a championship. It was 'representative' in the same way that I represented the Civil Service without being demonstrably among its top 16 players.

They weren't all that good. I very much doubt if I'd have won it but I'd like to think I'd have been better than a few of them. What it showed, at least at such a level, is that chess games are lost by mistakes more than won by superior know-how. Even in the final, the resilient 63yo Richie had the opportunity to checkmate in, I think, three moves but he missed it, ended in deep time trouble and Thalia effectively got lucky.

It was all about 'pressure' and who didn't blow it. I didn't think Caitlin would, she looked like the cool, class act but she did. So it was a bit of an old-fashioned Grand National in which one needed to stay the distance and be lucky, a big part of which is dependent on others making crucial mistakes.

I don't know if it will go round again into another series. I'm not sure that chess can get by on such thin pretexts as the glitz, glamour and noisiness of Strictly but it was worth a go. Well played, the chess.

And I'm glad to report that I've got back to 1800 at the 2 mins+ 1 second discipline at Lichess, am safely above that at 'Classical' and those 2000+ ratings at the time limits in between are banked and not to be risked so, as far as chess goes, everything's right with the world.

Elena Toponogova in Chichester

 Elena Toponogova, Chichester Cathedral, April 29

One searches the Met Office forecast in vain in search of rain but Chopin's Prelude in D flat is all there is to be had. The Portsmouth-Chichester area benefits from a fine range of local musicians but also serviceable transport connections with London and so Elena Topogonova and others are welcome regular visitors. Soft fell the rain in her 'Raindrop' before modulating into a chillier mood. It's possible that Chopin, like Mozart, is sometimes too easy to like and so doesn't seem quite the equal of Bach or even more 'difficult' composers but his interesting, darker side is never too far away.

Lyadov, in his Prelude op. 57 at least, could almost be 'school of' Chopin with his thoughtful rapture and his Musical Snuffbox tinkled and twinkled in the upper register to charming effect.

More broodingly, the Rachmaninov Musical Moment, op. 5, no. 16, ruminated further and the gentle pace was maintained by Alla Reminiscenza by Nikolai Medtner whose music is a specialist interest of Elena's. Her great delicacy moved towards a moment of epiphany to shift us slightly elsewhere.

These tender pieces were by no means melancholic until Holst's O! I hae seen the roses blaw was distinctly Scottish, for a Cheltenham man, and one felt an awareness of time having passed. To finish, Elena played Three Sketches by Frank Bridge with April evocative - given the clue- of flowers in a meadow, perhaps bluebells or, for all we know, daffodils fluttering and dancing in the breeze. The Valse Capricieuse was more intricate with a touch of drama but this was a gorgeous programme to soothe and heal with no alarums. An encore of The Angel by Sergei Bortkiewicz fitted entirely with that mood and it would have been a pity to ruin it at that late stage. She returns to these parts soon, to the Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, with Anna Ziman (violin) on May 17th and there is every reason to want to hear that, too. Sumer is icumen in.

If we took a holiday

 ...we would have to travel to get anywhere. It's a long time since my poem Against Travel but I haven't revised my opinion of it. Train, aeroplane, coach, car - I honestly don't know which is beset by the least evils.

It's been quieter than usual here lately, partly due to the Easter hiatus in lunchtime concerts but also due to last week having myself a little excursion 'zipping up my boots and going back to my roots', to Nottingham where we left in early 1968 and where I haven't been back since the late 1980's.

It's said one shouldn't go back and I generally don't but once I'd had the idea it had to be done. There are only three people in Nottingham who even know who I am, assuming junior school contemporaries have by now forgotten me or moved away, and it wasn't appropriate to land myself on them and so inevitably one is in a place that, left to its own devices, has moved on and I'm a stranger in my own land.

A five hour walk tied together all the significant family-related sites. I sat outside the Trip to Jerusalem pub with Guinness rather than Nottingham beer, paid homage to Notts County, revitalised Forest and Notts cricket and that was Nottingham done. Some terrible irony struck me that while sat outside the Trip, as part of the historic scene, my view was of some tawdry business premises that had been built, used, abandoned and become derelict all in the time since we left which is, after all, 57 years. And they don't talk much proper Nottingham there any more, either. My sister, father and I sound more authentic than most of the people I heard.

But I added three more cathedrals to my list. St. Barnabas, the Catholic place in Nottingham, is very ordinary and I only went in because I was passing anyway but Lincoln lived up to its billing, easily Top 10 in the UK, maybe not quite up with Durham, Wells, Westminster Abbey and one or two other superstars but very good and essential, really. There's always some show-off know-all on a guided tour and on mine the guide asked if there were any Latin scholars that could translate the inscription Cantate hic.

Sing here, they said.

Yes, exactly, he said. It was me, of course, still even now unable to resist a chance to impress the teacher.

A great added bonus, though, was Lichfield with its impressive cathedral, too. Maybe not quite as grand as its magnificent frontage leads one to expect but very good. Even better, and possibly the unexpected highlight of the week was Dr. Johnson's house and Museum.

Spectacularly well done, all the better for being an 'extra', with its very well read and forthright lady presiding over it with to talk about not only Dr. Johnson but two Eliots - George and T.S.- Larkin and matters arising. Deeply impressed with that, I bought two books from her and so Tender is the Night is abandoned late on, Fitzgerald Studies can wait and I'm back with the great man all too gladly.

I'm sure he could have put it better than me but,

Travel, sir? It is an impediment to be suffered in pursuit of such places as might provide the satisfaction of fulfilment.

I must remember next time that while 'transport' is a good thing, when prefixed by 'public' it can often be a degraded pleasure. What normally happens is that I vow never to go anywhere ever again but that starts to wear off and then I think of somewhere to go. I'm not in any hurry yet, though. Dorchester for Thomas Hardy country might not be bad by train. London to go back to Westminster Abbey is easy enough but Hereford, Ely and York Minster aren't persuading me at the moment.

Simon Armitage in Southsea

A good number of the Portsmouth poetry community gathered by Southsea Castle this morning to see Simon Armitage, the unveiling of his new poem on the sea defences and hear it read, twice for those who stayed long enough.

The Theatre of the Sea is an impressive effort in response to an approach for such a thing. Simon was a student at Portsmouth Polytechnic in the early 1980's which provides a link to the Poet Laureate. As he read in his unperturbed way, just on cue when he reached the line about the hovercraft, it launched itself towards the Isle of Wight as if choreographed. Enter, stage right, hovercraft.

It was a fine performance by a poet who is making a good job of the strange title he's currently in possession of. 

It was good to see so many of the various Portsmouth poetry people in attendance, not all of who I see very often these days and, unlike some 'public' art, it's a poem worth having.

What Fresh Hell Is This?

Marion Meade's Dorothy Parker, What Fresh Hell Is This? returns me to the glorious wreckage of a story I've read before in slightly different versions. I don't know if she'd qualify for Matthew Parris's Great Lives but 'great' doesn't have to mean 'happy'. I'm sure many a thesis has been written about genius coming out of unhappiness rather than comfort.

More than elsewhere, this book traces the poems and stories back to very close biographical detail. The great shame that she never wrote a novel despite wanting to is explained by an understandable lack of commitment to the big project. On the third occasion that someone used her as the basis for their literary efforts she reflected that if she subsequently wrote her own autobiography the author would sue her for plagiarism but she had all but done it in her own short fiction.

I'll miss her once I've finished this last of the pile of books by or about her. It was thanks to the TLS still sending their e-mail that extended my interest in her when the recent Hollwood book appeared. But next up might be a look back at F. Scott Fitzgerald whose life crossed hers to continue in that shallow, writerly, self-destructive party atmosphere of America then.

After that, a tree trunk of a further volume on Shostakovich will bring me back to level and looking for the next excursion.

Bill Cushing, The Beast Inside

 Bill Cushing, The Beast Inside (Southern Arizona Press)

The poetry diaspora is a loose, often unconnected thing. While the superstar names for the most part know each other to some extent, the local writing groups, magazines and communities might have only tenuous links with each other if any at all. How I came to have any contact from the south coast of England with Bill Cushing who lives near Los Angeles is an unlikely story that was not through poetry. It's a story that will have to wait for another time but meanwhile it's a great thing to be able to keep up with his work.

The Beast Inside gets off to a sure-footed start with At Mrs. Gannett's, a portrait of an old lady,

In a tidy house cluttered with kindness,
surrounded by her late husband’s bric-a-brac, 

and not long after in the first section is the comparable, At the Stationer's, with the proprietor's somewhat less sympathetic attitude to children. There might not be a prohibitive language divide between American poetry and English but there might be one of idiom and attitude and I'd be interested to know if American readers find a certain swagger in such poems or if the tone sounds perfectly natural to them. It's more clear cut in August Kleinzahler's work who is more obviously putting on a laconic show.

In three parts, this first part of the book is entitled The Reminiscent Self. With a Foreword and an Introduction, the book comes with its own explanations or interpretation which, while useful, could also seem a bit limiting as if there is a right answer to poetry. Some might prefer less help and be allowed to find their own themes and sub texts because poems have different effects on different readers, occasionally with contrasting readings or even mis-readings, which can make them all the more interesting.

Crescendo was another that made an immediate impression in the first section, a powerful artist's impression of Beethoven on his death bed. I'm sure there will be poems where a better appreciation comes later. The thought that some of the pieces are heavier on ideas than the music of their words persists and lines such as,

Every moment in time

we need to see the moment in time
in which we exist and are present

and contextualize it to where we exist
in the history and the moment as it relates

not only to the past but to the future. 

look more to me like an idea for a poem than 'poetry' itself but Bill's not in such bad company there because that's what I think about some passages in Eliot's Four Quartets, too.

The second section is The Formal Self and is a wide-ranging collection of pieces in thirteen different formal disciplines. A sestina would have been impressive but we are given a successful villanelle, a form which is much more difficult to write than it looks, coming together in its four line final stanza here,

Spirit has died; there’s no more drive,
and true liberty lost all allies.
Welcome to the collective hive
where being numb means being alive. 

It's tempting to read the poem as commentary on a specific time and place but it's not obvious one should do that and it is applicable to any number of them and looks forward to recurrent themes in the the final section. 

The specific word count of 42 words proves enough to make poems whereas I've never thought that 17 syllables had the capacity to get anywhere in English in a haiku but trust that it does in Japanese.

'Concrete' poetry meant a few different things in the 1960's. Bill's The State of Florida goes back further to at least George Herbert in making the lines into the shape of its subject, the significance of it being called the 'state of' and not just 'Florida' being the point.

“If you ain’t from Dixie,
   You ain’t shit,” raising
  the question: If I am from
   Dixie, does that make me
   shit?

That being just above halfway on the map and Tampa being on the left side immediately below it. Bill's never far from being socio-political and I take it that Florida, once thought glamorous, is in decline.

The Dream-State Self  is the third section that maybe the book develops towards. It's a survey of a culture become dystopian now organized by AI and algorithms where human life has become degraded. It's 'protest' poetry in a way but has more in common with Larkin's Going, Going that fears a new, uglier world replacing one that had more to like about it,

Shopping malls are
caricatures of our way of life;
what one learns in these places about
our true nature will keep anthropologists
in stitches for hours. 

(in Let’s All Get Down and Do the Lowest Common
Denominator)

and,

The world is mannequin-clown scary. 

(When “Yes” Isn’t Enough).

As the book demonstrates, Bill Cushing is a few different poets in one, or a versatile one ready to take on a range of approaches but one personality comes through. The polemical work is easy to sympathize with but not always as accomplished as the lyricist or humourist. In nearly 90 pages of poems there are highlights to take with us, most notably in The Reminiscent Self, in poems like RE:Joyce, a gentle love poem, more solid and figurative than abstract, that preserves one of the things that makes it all worthwhile,

giving me the ability
to ignore life’s pallor
and bathed me,
if only for that year,
with nothing less than joy.