Bargain Bunting

Yesterday I bought a book in a bookshop. That wouldn't have sounded remarkable years ago but it's extremely rare now. For a long time I've been much more likely to buy a cup of tea in a bookshop than a book. It's my fault when bookshops close and I have no recourse to disappointment. The Letters of Basil Bunting were in among sundry sale items for £1 in Waterstones and I even had to think about it at that but it looked worth a try. The sticker underneath the one that said £1 said £8. Today I looked it up on Amazon and there it's £37.50.

It's possible the letters are a reverse way in to understanding Bunting. I derive about as much from the poems as I do from his mate, Ezra, and that's not much. But the likes of Donald Davie and Thom Gunn held him in high regard and he is a 'major' figure of C20th poetry, if in a tradition that has never done much for me.

Any friend of Ezra's comes with any amount of warning signs and to call Bunting a maverick might be an understatement. But his political imprisonment was not for the same reason's as Pound's. He was a Quaker, pacifist and conscientious objector. I still can't help being suspicious of him, his severity and acerbic attitudes bringing to mind Geoffrey Hill, who he looks a bit like in old age and shares some aesthetic principles with, I'd guess.

So maybe the book will be enlightening. Whether it will lead to a Damascean conversion to Modernism, 'high church' seriousness and the elitism of difficult poetry remains to be seen and seems unlikely but there's a limit to have far one can get reading more and more about a handful of favourites and time spent outside of a comfort zone must be at least occasionally necessary even if it turns out to be unproductive. 

For a long time I've thought of Bunting and his like as generally a bad thing for poetry while not in the least objecting to that minority who write, read and enjoy such esoteric work. I suppose I take an equal if opposite view of those whose writing is too obvious. So maybe I'll report back on any alteration that this bargain buy brings about, either that I've embarked on an in-depth study full of enthusiasm or that my prejudices were only confirmed.    

Casual Chat about the Greatest Poet of the C20th

And we are talking 'English language' poet here. Unless one is fluent in every language that poetry has been written in, I don't know how one can say. Translations are interesting, useful, possibly even essential, but they aren't the 'poetry'.

I was alerted recently to some lines by Auden, including,
Time that tires of everyone.

And they were followed up in short order by the review in Saturday's Times of September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem by Ian Sansom which would be very much the sort of title to order notwithstanding anything in any circumstances. So, rather than embark upon Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann that has waited long enough and can wait a bit longer, I picked out Edward Mendelson's Later Auden that I bought many years ago but never read.
How many biographies of one's fourth (let's say) favourite poet does one need to read when there aren't any of one's favourite. Three seemed enough. Carpenter, Osborne, Davenport-Hines. 
And yet Mendelson impressed so much in his first two chapters that Early Auden was ordered in a less salubrious edition straightaway. As James Marriott, the reviewer in The Times says,
I could read trivia about him all day.

Except Mendelson is no William Hickey and he's not trivial. If I was intending to be a leading authority on Auden, I might need the depth of detail he provides on New Year Letter but I'm not and so I don't. I rarely miss a word of any book I'm interested in and am surprised at those who skim or speed read any book but I have to admit I jumped a paragraph or two that I might never need there. I'll know where it is if I ever need it.
But reading Mendelson, with Collected Shorter Poems 1927-57 close by, I remembered how I thought Auden might be the Greatest Poet of the C20th many years ago. In the meantime one has failingly tried to avoid any such grandiose debates but if you decide there must be such a thing the next step is to identify them.
One thing that counts against him is his 'facility', just how much wisdom he manages to churn out, sometimes rhymed in C18th style, that makes it look too easy if not trite. On the other hand, his humanity, liberalism and anti-fascism is to be admired and he tried his best in the times he lived in, which, considering the circumstances in Europe circa 1939, are starting to look not dissimilar to those the failure of democracy and shift to the bone-headed right that are happening again now.
So much for learning from history. It only takes two generations for us to forget.

If we did need to appoint a Greatest Poet of the C20th, W. H. Auden is a candidate, if not the 'front-runner', that epithet that had seemed to have become pre-fixed to Boris Johnson's name in his virtually unopposed escorting to the job he always wanted. Most kids in the generation before him just wanted to be train drivers. 

At least there are other choices available for those who don't like Auden enough.
Elizabeth Bishop might be too much the 'poet's poet', like an insider job who hasn't passed into the language via a Hugh Grant film and a poem like Stop all the clocks. The Greatest Poet might need to have broken through beyond poetry circles and written Night Mail even if many who know that poem don't know who wrote it.
Philip Larkin has passed into the language with a handful of memorable lines and been seriously suggested for the title in the twenty years since I heard Anthony Thwaite say, 'great, minor poet, like George Herbert'.
Eliot had been a 'good thing' a few decades ago when it looked as if he had changed everything, was the very touchstone of the 'modern' and there must be much we should still be grateful to him for. But I seem him friendless in the market after all he did, not only for racism but also for the unconsolably highbrow, which also rules out Geoffrey Hill, John Ashbery, Ezra Pound and, extending in other ways, those not highbrow enough and those who thought it was all about them. One might excuse Sylvia's 'confessionalism' because she was also a compellingly wonderful artist but none of the others can be considered because, of course,
Some might say dear old Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas are in the running.

The form is all in the books. If it's a question worth finding an answer to.
There might not yet be a consensus about who was the Greatest Poet of the C19th so it might be a bit soon to start dishing out prizes for that which was still being written only twenty years ago. 
 

Poetry Readings

The excitement of coming home to a postal delivery doesn't always provide the best outcome.
A CD-sized package this evening certainly wasn't the re-scheduled delivery of Simon Bostridge's personal account of Schubert's Winterreise, so it could be that rare serendip of an order forgotten. But, sadly, it was no Candi Staton rarity, the Cliff album with Some People on it or that Racing Cars track from a Peel Session that I simply can't find anywhere. It was two refills for my Parker pen, the one that Helen Mort liked when she signed a book for me at Cheltenham after hosting the Gunn discussion. (Never miss an opportunity to drop a few classy names). But at least now I can do crosswords lying on my back again because that is one pen that's quite good at writing upwards. I  might be able to freeload another handful of Corals biros at Sandown on Saturday but those I picked up at Ascot last November underperform in that department.
--
I regret not being able to provide a review of the Poetry and Jazz gig at posh, old Edes House in Chichester last Tuesday but one can't review an event one left at half-time. The jazz was played by two virtuosi, the Dream Duo, Julian Stringle and Dominic Ashworth, but if jazz is not usually my area, their type, and a very appropriate rendering of bloody Summertime, of brilliantly done easy listening definitely isn't. I'd prefer an endless loop of that music Vision On used to play while they showed the pictures that viewers had sent in.
Some local eminences read a poem each and Sean was Sean, which is never a bad thing but I swelter readily and once my companion of choice for the evening had suggested we could go back to the pub I was helpless to his siren call.
And it was, after all, a poetry reading. I've long thought that the best poetry readings are short and the best bits are the talk in between the poems, which Simon Armitage is very good at. One reason, out of several, for not voting for Todd Swift for the Oxford Professor job, would be that at Marylebone High Street Oxfam bookshop he wanted Brian Turner, the Hurt Locker man, to read 'more poems'. No, let's have less (fewer) poems. Talk more, tell us about them, don't just bloody read them.
Of all the poet-curmudgeons, in a competitive field, Geoffrey Hill is a short-priced favourite to be the greatest. Having rattled on stage with his walking-stick, he gazed at his audience over his glasses from behind a desk and said,

Poetry readings? Why do you want to come to a poetry reading?

I would say that one does want to see and hear one's favourites. I was lucky to see Seamus Heaney when I did because he was usually sold out before I knew about his readings in London. Paul Durcan was electrifyingly tense but knew exactly what he was doing. And even if they're awful, it's worth knowing. And some are drunk.

But, yes, let's get it over with. I'm often surprised at the audience reaction, even when I've deigned to appear (or had the chance), that proves they are listening closely. Once I was impressed by someone who had picked up on my discreet rhyme scheme. But I either know the poem, might occasionally have the text in front of me, or I'm not really concentrating.

It's sometimes the case that the audience like the idea of being at a 'poetry reading'. It can also be the case at 'classical' music events, overhearing those at Wigmore Hall or Chichester Cathedral.

Oh, Buxtehude. I've never heard of him.

It can become preciousness for preciousness's sake.

I understand that Derek Mahon doesn't do readings anymore which is a shame because he is one name I would still have wanted to see. I don't either, which is a fact less lamented. Mahon will have his own reasons. My main reason is that I don't see why these people should devote five minutes of their lives to listening to me read my poems. And certainly they shouldn't have to pay for the privilege. 

Paul Muldoon was inevitably the 'top of the bill' star turn at Cheltenham a few years ago. The session seemed to be running late but he came on last and did one of his cryptic, long pieces in about 10 minutes and I saw him afterwards and he said he didn't want to do too much.

That's right. Top man. You've now seen and heard Paul Muldoon in the flesh, he's signed your book for you. What more do you want.

The last time I left anything at half-time was Murder in the Cathedral in Portsmouth Cathedral by some local amdrams. I should have stayed at home and read it. I can't remember leaving anything else at half-time. I turned up a day late for the Jesus & Mary Chain circa 1984 but that was my fault.

While my early departure did pass implicit comment on the play, it didn't last week disrespect the jazzmen, the local poets or Prof. O'Brien. I simply would rather be elsewhere.

There's a lot of poems that seem to say a similar thing.

 

 

The Alvarez Generation

William Wootten, The Alvarez Generation (Liverpool University)



Published in 2015, this is not a new book to be reviewing. It's been on a list all that time but I wasn't convinced I'd like it. But I've been wrong before and here we go again.
It concerns the generation of English language poets born between 1929 and 1932 and concentrates on 1962. Such detailed scrutiny is carried forward into discussion of poems not always highlighted by commentators and, as such, with this period not quite the height of fashion nowadays, it is a specialist book and something to be grateful for.
William Wootten takes Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter as representative of those poets who came after the 1950's 'Movement' and followed the encouragement to risk taking offered by Al Alvarez in his introduction to The New Poetry. My doubts came from my perception that Gunn was adventurous and 'risk-taking' in his life but his poems belonged more with Donald Davie's, and Larkin's, than those he is put with here.
If the litmus test of suicide as a way of validating poetry had always sounded a bit odd, I had tended simply to side with the Larkin poem about horses and not the Hughes one advocated by Alvarez but it took Sean O'Brien, in The Deregulated Muse nearly 40 years later, to point out that such pronouncements had become 'barely comprehensible'. That is where Wootten starts and so one would imagine him to be in sympathy with O'Brien but it takes some time for that to become apparent. He is giving them a fair hearing before common sense is allowed to increasingly prevail.
The use of a Jackson Pollock for the front cover highlights a parallel with 'extremist art'. Having arrived at a time of such 'extremism', poems like Daddy and Crow seem disarmingly normal to someone who was used to Bob Cobbing, concrete and the self-congratulation of any amount of avant garde. One of the first LP's I bought was The Faust Tapes so I've been making my way towards something like decorum ever since. One needed to have read Larkin first, in the tradition of Hardy, to realize what they were reacting against. It didn't take me long to catch up but some of the intended effect of extremism is lost on you if one regards it as the established school and thus takes up with sanity and the much-maligned 'mainstream' as an act of rebellion.
Not much satisfies as much as finding support for one's own prejudices. Wootten includes an impressive amount of circumstantial evidence, at an early stage quoting Gunn's reading of some Larkin poems in 1954 as 'an extraordinary revelation'. It has elsewhere been noted how inappropriate the coupling of Gunn and Hughes was in the joint Selected if it implied a shared celebration of violence. It was Hughes that described Gunn as a poet of 'gentleness'.
There are interesting implications in linking On the Move with The Thought Fox; how the figures in An Arundel Tomb are 'lying' in both senses of the word (which almost makes one wish for 'no types of ambiguity' to be possible occasionally); how Donne's 'off-hand manner' congratulates itself on writing badly and, eventually, how Sylvia's Ariel poem combines the virtues of the two poems that Alvarez had set in opposition.
I have made more notes than I can use, which is indicative of a book full of interest, but the central concern is 'seriousness', and sincerity to experience, that Gunn is later to question in subsequent poets in Expression and Peter Porter in The Cost of Seriousness. The attempt by Alvarez to merge art and life, as if poetry and life were equivalents, can't be made to work, as recently O'Brien has written that 'art is all there is and might not be enough'.
Crow, which I've long blamed for de-railing a good start to Hughes' career, is 'rivalrous' with Sylvia's poems but
The writing is now sometimes so extreme it is often impossible to tell if what is being written is parody or merely pushing a tendency to its furthest point.
The pity was, of course, that it was such a successful book that, like a pop group who have a number one hit, he thinks it's a winning formula.
Even if Alvarez took a step back from the 'rash chatter' of those heady times, he remains unabsolved.
but Wootten doesn't think that it directly caused the rising body count as the narrative of this damned generation progresses. If Gunn is differentiated from those he is bracketed with here by his lasting relationship with Mike Kitay, rather than the failure of so many marriages, his relationship allowed for extra-curricular casual encounters and Gunn's death, it seems, was due to his own more chemical risk-taking.
Not listed on the cover but given some significance is Veronica Forrest-Thompson, who died in 1975 at the age of 27, whose short career might be compared with that of Rosemary Tonks for its brevity if not for the sort of poems she wrote, being in one of them,
at the outset and on the surface all game playing and silly intertextual artifice for the Cambridge minded.
Peter Porter finds life in conflict with 'poetic vanity' with Wootten, whether intentionally or not, showing poetry's main theme becoming itself or other poetry. And Geoffrey Hill, who was knighted for being a highbrow curmudgeon, is all about 'disgust'. The book gathers itself to a grim, perceptive conclusion, via Gunn's implication,
less that confessionalism is too sincere than it is not sincere enough.
It is 'in fact an exhibitionist being-for-others'.
In mitigation of Birthday Letters, we are told that 'readability is not a fault' even if these low-voltage poems weren't very good, with the exception of You Hated Spain, despite the media frenzy, by poetry's standards, they caused. By now William Wootten is playing like Jocky Wilson when he can't stop hitting 180's.
He ends with a very recognizable survey of poetry, in Britain (maybe America, too), as it is now. Endless success in all kinds of prizes for almost everyone (including a couple of little ones for me) but not much of obvious greatness. That isn't traced back to Alvarez, it just happened. But where, indeed, are the Audens of yesteryear.
Sales figures for poetry are usually terrible, which is to be expected, but no single volume by a contemporary poet gets in the Top 20 poetry books. It almost seems to be over, despite the same old piece being trundled out in The Observer on quiet weekends every few years about the latest 'poetry boom'.  That only means some shouty virago having a go as if it's closing time already and she's cross.

The Alvarez Generation couldn't have been a commercial proposition - even I hardly know anybody for who it would have been of interest- but was well worth the effort. It is essential for anybody with an interest in the poetry of 1962 and, since I also very much enjoyed a book about the pop music of 1971, that includes me.    
   

Geoffrey Hill

Photograph from December 2011, taken with his customary curmudgeonly permission, 'if you must'.

Give a Poet a Bad Name

It might not always be wise to introduce oneself as a 'poet' when asked 'and what do you do?' Some little pieces of body language tell you all you need to know when people start glancing at their watch, looking across the room for some imaginary acquaintance they need to see or simply shuffling away uneasily.
While many poets are perfectly reasonable sorts, the epithet has dubious overtones that usually make me offer some other enterprise I'm involved in, even if I genuinely think of myself as a poet on that particular day or don't. Sometimes it might be preferable to say you are a tax inspector, an accountant or even an estate agent, shrug and airily make some observations about the state of the property market. It is a worthy occupation on the face of it, the equivalent of a carpenter, I sometimes like to think. It's just that the idea of 'poet' brings with it a number of connotations or overtones, or the unavoidable prejudices that others carry with them.
Most harmlessly, but not to be desired, would be the lingering stereotype of the Romantic dreamer somehow detached from the humdrum world, thinking of higher things and with a predilection for swooning. Long hair (on a bloke), some disarray or eccentricity of dress sense or a distracted manner might be identifying aspects of one of these. It's an old-fashioned idea in many ways but still, I imagine, with some currency.
One might be suspected of some self-regard, announcing one's poetic calling, as if you valued your own wit, insight and use of language above that of lesser, non-poetry writing mortals. This is based on the assumption that 'poet' is a good thing to be and that 'poetry' is intrinsically a good thing when clearly, and in vast reams, there is such a thing as 'bad poetry'. Thus, if admitting to being any sort of poet, I generally add that I'm not a very good one. The responsibility to be consistently profound, original or hilarious in conversation is far too much pressure to bear.
Among any other assumptions one might trigger would be that relatively modern curse of poetry which could be that you are 'difficult'. This would be the worst situation and, if poets do have a bad name that has only journalists, politicians and bankers as obvious types to put below it, then there is a certain faction among them who brought it upon the profession and it is they who really need to be identified and separated off from the otherwise less blameworthy majority of peaceable wordsmiths who, in Auden's phrase, are never going to make anything happen.
Ezra Pound, of course, must take his fair share of the rap. There possibly was difficult poetry before him but it became part of the agenda for a significant number of poets roughly 100 years ago. By no means all of Pound's manifesto was damaging and, as a sharpening up exercise, his legacy had arguably as many beneficial effects as bad ones. However, individuals will pick and choose for themselves which parts of a menu they will find to their taste and the tradition that remained high church modernist, translating into areas of the precious 'avant garde', are those that took to heart the maxim that poetry should be difficult.
Why anybody would want anything to be difficult when it doesn't have to be is as mystifying as their poems, especially in the light of Homer Simpson's wise advice that 'if something's hard to do then it isn't worth doing'. I had some trouble with Prof. John Fuller's argument in Who is Ozymandias, that poetry presents puzzles that the reader enjoys solving. I don't. I don't necessarily want one reading of a poem to reveal all I'm ever going to find to appreciate in it but neither do I want it to be unfathomable and, in the end, I'm often happy for my understanding to be incomplete if I've enjoyed the outing. In fact, I'm not sure one can ever be certain that something has ever been fully understood or if it is desirable for it to be reduced to that.
I can see that some readers will enjoy difficulty. Whether that needs to be a prerequisite of poetry when there is The Listener crossword to be done every week in The Observer to satisfy those savants, I would doubt, though. But if difficulty depends on a thorough grounding in classical references and etymology for interpretation then there are many of us who will make little progress however hard we study the lines. Geoffrey Hill tells us that poetry is not 'self expression' and I like the idea although it does rather torpedo anyone who feels like expressing themselves in verses. But certainly, a poem is often best regarded as a free-standing thng, succeeding or otherwise on its own terms.
The enemy within are those that deliberately set out to be difficult, even going to the trouble of attacking those for who some degree of clarity was regarded as a virtue, and then complaining that some of their potential audience are philistine for finding it difficult. These poets are affronted by the lack of gratitude they encounter from the dismal 'mainstream' (which means everybody except them). And, yes, as you can now see, I've arrived at my old sore point, the itch that I have to scratch once in a while.
Why should we be surprised that if someone deliberately sports what they consider strange attire that they are once in a while met with raised eyebrows or the non-committal gestures of a cartoon Frenchman by those who accept that, yes, okay, that is a bit strange, isn't it. We cling to whatever remains of our liberal culture and welcome all comers but if they take great pains to make themselves obtuse and then are recognized for their obtuseness then it is nobody's fault but theirs.
Of course, there is no stereotype with which to define the generic class of 'poets' and if some of the vestigial impressions of  poetry weren't the fault of the poets themselves in the first place, it's a shame that one of them is ostensibly actively encouraged. By those who then take great pleasure in complaining about it.
So, next time I'm asked, Oh, are you a poet, I'll probably shift uncomfortably from one foot to the other, glance down at my diminished glass of wine and remark how property prices in the area have been flat-lining for a long time now.
   

The Forward Book of Poetry 2013

The Forward Book of Poetry 2013 (Forward)

Questions of Good, Better and Best would be the ultimate aim of literary criticism if it were possible to decide. Thirty-odd years ago at Lancaster, the Stylistics and Criticism course stopped at 'Interpretation' and refused to go anywhere near the next step of 'Evaluation'. It seemed at the time that the English Department were withholding some precious secret from the undergraduates but now I can see that they probably didn't know either. Sometimes it would be preferable to simply enjoy poems but it's difficult not be quietly wondering 'if it's any good', trapped forever in a nightmare of critical judgement.
After that, it's only a short step to making comparisons between poems, poets and, in the end, anthologies.
I can't help but put this book in a different division to the Salt Best of British book. I'm sure that is a heinous, wicked and elitist thing to do but I'll have to compound the felony by adding that this might be seen as a collection of poems by poets whereas the Salt selection is a book of creative writing course graduates.
There are, of course, good and less good in both books and every reader will take different things from two surveys of the year in poetry in these islands. But once they start awarding prizes or using the word 'best' in their titles, with whatever caveats, then the idea of putting some things ahead of others is embedded in the process and we are stuck with it.
Glyn Maxwell in expansive and nostalgic mood and Geoffrey Hill as love poet are two that immediately stand out here, with a less ambitious but equally striking poem, Open, by Kate Bingham also a ready hit for me. A couple I've seen and admired already, like Julia Copus and James Fenton and a litany of mostly easily recognizable names like Marilyn Hacker, Paul Durcan, Jane Yeh and Michael Longley make this a credible attempt at what might be something like the 'best' of what had been published in the year to July 2012. There's no attempt to show how admirably diverse the range of poems are, they've just issued prizes, a short list and some commendations.
Once I've settled on my own short list for the year and nominated my favourite poem and collection I might look forward to not deciding what was more worthy than what else for a while. I'm sure that is not the purpose for which poems get written. Well, I'm not completely sure in all cases, actually, but for the most part it would be better if they weren't.

Geoffrey Hill - Clavics

Geoffrey Hill, Clavics (Enitharmon)

I wonder who frames the prices on poetry events for Paddy Power bookmakers. They made Clavics 13/8 favourite for the Forward Prize, ahead of Sean O'Brien who had an unbeaten record at the distance and some other very worthy collections. It could only have been done on the basis of career achievement and 'stature' or reputation. The prize could never have gone to Hill on this form. It was like making Corinthian Casuals favourites for the F.A. Cup.

In his wonderful performance last weekend, Prof. Hill explained his long held admiration for the cover illustration and all but said he wrote the book so that he could make use of it. The other element that has made him so prolific in old age is that the adherence to strict formal requirements help him to produce poems as a knid of midwife to bring forth the work from inside him.

It shows. The form here dictates a disjointed, unpretty poetry that is forced into highly demanding rhyme forms and lines that serve mainly to demonstrate how difficult it is to do. Hill refers us to Herbert's poem Easter Wings, a model of shape but also of diction and syntax, but Herbert's lines fit perfectly into the design whereas in several places Hill's are adjusted by spacing and typography to stretch or bend themselves to his chosen template. None of this seems to be justified, as it were; it is stricture and discipline entirely for its own sake. It is not so much unproductive as counter-productive.

As a tribute to William Lawes, the C17th composer who was killed at the Battle of Chester, 'clavics', it says here, is 'the science or alchemy of keys', so musical keys, then, we can assume is meant. It's not all about Lawes, but, as one would expect from one as expressly difficult as Hill, much more widely referential. If I can't buy the aesthetics of the project, I can take some pleasure in moments and lines, glimpses of Hill's gravely disconsolate view that the world, or more specifically, England, isn't quite what he would like it to be. I doubt if it ever would have been.

In 3, he plays on the name in fashionably Elizabethan-Jacobean ways,

As good epitaphs go Will Lawes is slain

Permit me, sire, is slain by such whose wills

                      Be laws

and, in 9, he ends on the memorable and ever true reflection that,

England rides rich on loss.

And in 26, as Lawes is killed in battle,

                  How your rutter-

        Kin dabbles in these tacky shows.

where a genuinely fine, edgy music transcends its meaning. If only more of the book had been like this. Hill's distemper might be better suited to a freer line but, presumably, that happened in his previous books more than in this one.

The reading last week was a great event and also included poems from other books than this but it was more exciting and satisfying to hear him talk about his work than read it. That wouldn't be said of, say, Bach or Mozart, however much one would love to hear them talk about their music.

Clavics was a false favourite for the Forward Prize and even in the summer I realized that sufficiently to oppose it in the betting. It's just that the judges preferred one of the other books to my choice.

Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill, The Purcell Room, South Bank, London, 11 December 2011

'It's not stand-up comedy,' Geoffrey Hill explained, 'but, there again, they're not paying me stand-up comedy money'.Professor Hill spent as much time talking about his poetry as reading it, which is always welcome, especially in a poet like him. His grasp and intellectual acuity in history and culture is apparently monumental and poets don't come any more high church than this. He explained that his work belongs with that of the painter Anselm Keifer and Paul Celan, so it is serious matter.

Poetry for him is not 'self expression' but 'a conjoining of shapes and harmonies' and I couldn't quite get down exactly what it went on to be to do with language. His poetry has been described as 'iron spikes sticking out of a blasted landscape' and I don't think he would have quoted it if he didn't like the description.While it is interesting to hear poets of this stature talk about their own work, the poet is ideally not their own best critic and it looked mildly alarming when he named his own three best books but it didn't turn out to be quite so self regarding from then on. Some self awareness is a good thing and his realization that his work is 'weird and unlovely' was reassuring.

Anybody with the slightest interest in poetry would be aware of George Herbert's Easter Wings. Well, yes and no. But that's the sort of level he works at even if I allow myself to dip below it occasionally. It is a fine and marvellous thing when the country's most doyen and eminent of poets can tell his assembled audience that 'nothing would drag him to a poetry reading', those most 'abysmal functions' and I can see that in a way but, on the other hand, one gets more from an hour in the presence of the poet than from several hours pouring over their books. Interestingly, after I have charted the general trajectory of most poets' careers as not reaching maturity until the age of 40, and then eventually fading or becoming repetitive sometime after 60, Prof. Hill's Collected Poems has grown exponentially in the last few years leading up to his 80th birthday. It is perhaps due to the rigour of form being able to impose itself on the chaos, where at least some of the chaos is dementia. But while apparently frail enough physically, there was little evidence of any dimming of acerbity, observance of the most difficult formal strictures and a non-curmudgeonly clarity of vision that can't help but pass as the driest of wit. This was not, as he pointed out, Poetry Please. Poetry plays oblique games with him.

But for all that, I haven't laughed as much or as satisfyingly at any other poetry reading. I've been equally thrilled and impressed and I've thought about several for a long time afterwards but none will have been so paradoxically 'laugh out loud' and the more impressive for it when the most serious and high-minded, one of the bleakest and spare, provides more genuine hilarity than those whose main object is to be comic and yet don't quite raise a laugh although you notice where the jokes were.

If young Hill were to attend a masterclass run by me I might even advise that his internal rhymes might in context look like affectation and if he wants to use rhyming forms then he could hide the rhymes more subtly as half rhymes so that the frugality and bareness of his 'vision' were not occluded by such simple effects. His music is that of deep and complex rhythms devoutly adhered to but it's a lot to ask. As he says, 'you try writing in these meters.'Fulfilling his hour with delightfully grumpy grace, he observed that we are run nowadays by a 'financial plutocracy' decorated by a small amount of aristocracy and democracy. Although one can't help but feel that he would be politically somewhere on the right, this is the preception that is beyond day to day politics and really ought to have wider currency and not need explanation from one of such austere dignity and dark, brooding solemnity.As if to provide some context or contrast, there was a reading afterwards by three young poets under the title Echoes of Geoffrey Hill in which the trace of any echo eluded me in three unprepossessing performances. Fine poets in their own milieu, I'm sure, but very forgettable. And then a half hour spent looking at the magazines in the Poetry Library made me reflect that the best thing that could happen to the poetry industry in this country would be a paper shortage. I don't think I saw a poem worthy of the shelf space. But the curmudgeonly spirit can only be properly exercised by those who have earned the right and my disdain is less worth having than Prof. Hill's. We will soon see how my credentials measure up in the next week or so if and when I review my signed copy of Clavics.

View from the Boundary

I'm looking forward to seeing Geoffrey Hill in London on Sunday. The high priest of English poetry has not always been quite to my taste but recently I've had the opportunity to at least appreciate some of his poems and if I'm never going to be a complete devotee I do at least want to take advantage of this rare chance to share in the spare austerity of his point of view. The price of a drink on the South Bank is alarming for a provincial thirsty man and so if you recognize me there by the hat (not the pink one), before I have to get back to Victoria, please feel free to buy me an after show glass of beer.

This December outing to London replaces what I've done for the last two years which has been a day at the London Chess Classic, which can be watched from the comfort of one's own terminal here right now, http://www.livestream.com/LondonChessClassic . The story so far is early dominance by young Magnus while it is being suggested that my personal favourite personality, Anand, is being careful to show nothing that he might have prepared for his forthcoming world title defence against Boris Gelfand. But I do recommend some time spent with the commentators live from the venue if their dubious suggestions and meanderings might be the sort of entertainment you prefer to Strictly Come Dancing or Celebrity Ratings Grabber on the telly. Chess players seem so nice these days, accessible and media-friendly as the age seems to demand - it's been Levon Aronian today, World number three on his day off. Has it gone the same way with poets, too. Do we miss the madmen and ladies, the off-beat, unapproachable genius, the Fischer or Ezra Pound, that never had to explain itself so often in interviews and as casually approachable human beings but could hide in a reclusive mist of unexplaining hero status.

Somewhat less cerebrally, I've been reading John Francome's Back Hander for cheaper thrills. I notice that although the Greatest Jockey of All Time has his name on the front of the book, the copyright is shared with another, and apart from the inside knowledge of particular racetracks and what it's like to ride a racehorse, I'm not sure how much is Francome and how much his helpmate. While we hear that Alan Hollinghurst delivers a typescript that needs virtually no editor whereas Jefferey Archer provides a story written in capital letters in pencil on the back of a Corn Flakes packet and someone else makes a blockbuster out of those thin beginnings, the Francome method must lie somewhere in between. Even so, this opus seems to have a high body count, a sensational rather than tense approach to plot and doesn't seem as well done as what I remember of Dick Francis. But as long as it has horse racing in it, I don't mind. You could tell me a story of a trainer called Jack who has a horse called Dobbin, he runs it in a novice hurdle at Uttoxeter and it comes third and I'd be gripped.

We have had such stories here every Saturday if anybody has cared to follow the Saturday Nap and I'm pleased to say that Sizing Europe was a confident tip last weekend and won like one. It means that we have had four winners out of eight selections and now, with three weeks to run before ending on Boxing Day, one more winner will put us into clear blue profit. I'd imagine that if Bobs Worth runs in the three mile novice chase at Kempton at Christmas, that will be where we'll go for a big finish.

That will conclude that little series and I wonder if we can replace it with a series on My Whole Life in poetry, tracing my own mundane career as a poet from its earliest genesis in Infant School in Nottingham in the mid 1960's up to now. I hope it might provide a diverting little excursion into poetry as well as revisiting for the first time in decades some esoteric examples of poetry. It will begin in January, all being well. Don't forget to tune in for that.