Jimp

Suddenly, eventually, the penny drops when reading a poet and one poem can help illuminate the rest of their work and, literally in this case, see it with the benefit of a better light.

The recently deceased Peter Scupham had for a long time been wrongly diagnosed by me as 'a bit difficult' but I hadn't been trying very hard. He was the friend of a friend and when I tried a bit harder I appreciated a good poet but still not one I was making a special case for.

Now, in receipt of a copy of his 1990 book, Watching the Perseids, something clicks and convinces me. The title poem is the best poem I've seen by him, in some ways a pre-echo of the masterpiece Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden By Julia Copus. And now that I know he could do that, it makes me think his other work is a bit more like it.

Of course it is but one needs to look to find a reason to believe and can't do so until one's found it.

Line 2 reads,

Glimmers of something on the jimp horizon,

 

Jimp? I've not seen that before but here it is,

jimp 

It maybe stops you once until you've looked it up but after that it's fine, onomatopaeic and works.

When you know a writer has done something that good once, you're more inclined to believe that some of their other work is better than you thought. 

Poetry as Therapy

Poetry as therapy is the sort of New Age, almost medieval treatment I'm not likely to believe in. Poetry might possibly cause more problems than it solves or maybe it's just the people that write it that make it seem so.

However, medieval is by no means always bad and I had thought I might sit down with some poems and see if it did me any good, with special reference to my loss of interest in the genre. I took the Firebox anthology with me to Chichester yesterday and in there, Sean points out Elizabeth Bishop's The Bight as a precursor to Craig Raine's 'Martianism'. 

The local library is closed on Wednesdays so I couldn't go and collect The Elizabethans by A.N. Wilson that they've got in for me. So, early this evening, I took books by Bishop, Sean, Julia Copus and Roddy Lumsden from the shelves and read a few poems, mainly reliable old favourites by those reliable, old favourites.

They were good, actually. Even if one's lost faith with the art in general, it takes more than that to dim the admiration for the best things.

It is always seeing other people do things well that makes one want to try it for oneself, or it always has been for me and before long, well, an idea of sorts. Poems, for some of us, come as much from other poems as they do from 'life'.

11 syllables per line with 10 in the last of each stanza, not making any claims to sonnet form, in some ways autobiographical, in others meta-textual or whatever it's called, but mostly ironic, downbeat, making no claims for itself, declaring itself a work-in-progress and so far, so good, I'm not displeased with it.

One Day Perhaps I Will Think of a Title

And poetry is like the sort of girlfriend

That leaves you on account of all your drinking 

Which you say isn’t half as bad as she says 

But still she won’t come back until you stop. 

I know the Köchel numbers of sonatas,

The name that Alpha Cyngi’s better known by, 

The scores from long-forgotten cricket matches 

And that is all the use I claim to be. 

We commit to no more than rainy Wednesdays

In suburbs where the library is still closed then 

And I perform repeats of all the stories 

She’s heard before in slightly different versions 

And then, if I’m polite enough to do so,

I ask her how she is but not to dance.

Charlotte Mew by Julia Copus

 Julia Copus, This Rare Spirit, A Life of Charlotte Mew  (Faber)

Charlotte Mew's work wasn't in danger of disappearing but it might having been fading from view. I hadn't been a great admirer, thinking of her as something like Stevie Smith, perhaps, but a look at the poems recently in preparation for the arrival of this book and now reading it, I entirely take the point. This detailed, evocative biography with its useful insights into the poems and fiction, has done both Lotti and me great favours.

The poverty and mental illness in her family caused great difficulties, each exacerbating the other, one might think, but Charlotte is remembered as being cheerful and good company while not pursuing celebrity. Her friendship with Thomas and Florence Hardy was a genuine thing and one can see why they would have admired each other but she disdained unwelcome attention and got on with the real job in unadvatageous circumstances.

Those circumstances, in the late Victorian and subsequent periods, with the old attitudes to the position of women only very gradually beginning to relent, the treatment of the physically or mentally infirm and finely calibrated indices of 'respectability' are clearly set out by Julia who also doesn't entertain any of the speculation about Charlotte's sexuality or private life beyond recording who speculated about what. In the same way that Charlotte attended to her work, cared for it and knew its place, such things, if there even were any, are not the story and are 'between consenting adults in private'. For once, we can be grateful for that.

Mew's stance was that literary renown had nothing to do with personal celebrity.

 

I'm not aware of any previous critical work by Julia Copus but she shows herself to have a great talent for it, beginning with how she demonstrates the themes of the first published story, Passed, provide so much of what was to follow in the poems. Like Hardy, Edward Thomas and Larkin later, Charlotte became  known as a poet having first been a writer of prose. The traffic seems to be mostly in the opposite direction a hundred years or so later now that poetry would be the very last way any writer would choose to make a living. 

In her day she was as successful as any female poet, gaining the attention of Ezra Pound and more Modernist figures as she lived through that date in 1910 identified by Virginia Woolf as when 'human character changed'. She belongs to that perceived change, apparently too similar to Hardy to be entirely C20th but certainly ahead of her time and not Victorian either.

But grief and chronic mental instability run through her life and all about her. They have a destructive effect on the slight, increasingly white-haired figure who is taken for being ten years older than her actual age although Edith Sitwell wouldn't have been the most sympathetic of witnesses to that.

In the poems Sea Love and I Have Been Through the Gates, 

we encounter a dispirited figure in an empty landscape, standing among the ruins of an idyll they once believed in.

Her suicide, by drinking undiluted disinfectant, at the age of 59 seems to have been planned for some time. 

It is as moving and tragic a story as any poet's, not least for the quiet dignity of its subject when not all poets or artists have quite such a powerful claim on our sympathy. And not least either for the thorough, well-organized and beautifully-written job Julia Copus makes of it. I've read biographies of plenty of poets whose work I admired more and might have been expected to have more interest in but I haven't read many, hardly any, that were more memorable and worthwhile. Julia has done Charlotte a great service.

---

Twice in the book, the adjective 'decent' is used to mean 'of an acceptable standard'. In about 1977, I used it in the same way in an 'A' level essay on Paradise Lost, explaining (as if I would know) how Milton created a 'decent picture of Hell'. I was told in the margin that this was not the right word, it then presumably still only properly being the opposite of 'indecent'. But times have changed and now it passes a Faber editor. Perhaps I was ahead of my time, too. 

Mew, Mew, Football's Askew and a sonnet I might scrub

Another overly cautious delivery date was applied to the biography of Charlotte Mew by Julia Copus.  Originally due on the same day as John Sutherland's Monica Jones last Thursday, it was no great hardship that it didn't come then but the revised date given was some six weeks or more ahead. Then it was due on Sunday. Then it arrived on Saturday. They certainly err on the safe side.

It is a fine thing indeed and I'll explain more next week. Seven years in the making, Julia says on Twitter. (Twitter !!! What have I become).  I have something of a collection of poet's biographies by now, from Chaucer to three Audens, from numerous Shakespeares, through Wyatt, Herbert, those indulgent Romantic types to Mina Loy and later C20th. As a piece of work in itself, irrespective of its subject, this is as good as any of them and a high quality read. But next week is when to say why.

Charlotte Mew wouldn't have been anywhere in a list of favourite poets for me but I read a selection from the Selected recently as a precursor to the arrival of this and I thought I found a bit more, certainly reasons for the perceived kinship with Hardy. With the help of this life, though, which includes some insightful approaches to the poems, too, she comes into better focus and claims a place among the worthy names of the early C20th as a poet, not as a 'woman poet'.

--

Slightly less high-mindedly, we don't spend much time on football here but I've been surprised at the coverage given to the plans for a new European Super League. I heard so much about it and what everybody thinks about it on the wireless that I searched for a station that wasn't doing current affairs and listened to Smooth FM for a couple of tracks until something unbearable by Chicago came on.

Surely such a league is what football has been edging towards for years, pitching teams of equal riches and capacity against each other rather than know the top three or four in the league before the season starts.

Fulham, Norwich, West Brom, Crystal Palace, Burnley and their like are middle-weights best matched against each other than having to play Manchester City or Liverpool into whose first XVI, none of their first XI would get.

Ideally, going entirely the other way, it would be preferable if aeroplanes weren't carrying extended squads and backroom boys across Europe each week for the sake of a kickabout. The Golden Age of Lawton, Finney and Lofthouse had them going to away matches by train. But, abandoning all hope of that, it is surprising how credulous the devoted supporters can be when they imagine it's 'their club'. It was made obvious when Manchester United were sold off and disgruntled purists went off to form FC United of Manchester that it was anything but their club. They are the customers in the same way that I am a customer of Tesco. I pay them for things I want just like those who want to watch certain people play football pay them for the privilege to do so. If that gives them some erroneous sense of ownership, belonging or tribal identity, they need to understand it is of their own making.

It doesn't matter to me whether the new league happens or not. I would have thought it stood every chance on the grounds that international football is a bit of an afterthought by now and I can't see many young players being put off by an international ban like Bobby Charlton might have been. It is an unashamedly commercial practice, rather than the art it might have once been on the playing fields of Gloucester circa 1970. But mainly, Boris Johnson has promised to do everything in his power to prevent it. I would be delighted to see him on the opposite side of a chess board or poker table. You only have to ask the Covid-19 virus how hard it is to outwit his best preventative efforts. I'm afraid it's too late to ask the 130000 victims it has so far claimed in the UK what they think.

Kerry Packer's rebel cricket circus didn't last long but cricket is now unrecognisable from the game it once was when a required run rate of six an over seemed out of the question. Things move on, mutate and can't be expected to stay the same. If the new league was UEFA's idea and there was relegation and promotion between it and the next level of European competition, rather than what seems to be a closed shop, I'm sure it would be fine. The Good Lord only knows what Arsenal and Tottenham are doing in it anyway.

Those upset about the selling off of their identity, if that's what it is, might want to consider how long any of the professionals stay at their beloved club once a better offer turns up. I could have been distraught at Arsenal's 97th minute equalizer against Fulham if I'd felt like it. But it makes no difference to my life whether my favourite team stay in the Premier League or not. Several managers have been in charge since I last saw them play and a few hundred players have played for them. I didn't make the effort to go and see them and none of them made the effort to read my poems, as far as I know. We have no relationship.

-

But if Scott Parker, Ademola Lookman or Bobby De Cordova-Reid happen to have tuned in, here's one for them.

There is a train line not far from my house and I've seen them passing, concatenations of unoccupied carriages, for a year or more now. It's a bit of an obvious subject but I like the echo with Rod Stewart's Downtown Train. I knew there was a poem in there somewhere but couldn't get a first line. Eventually I did and then the other words formed an orderly queue and slotted themselves in. I'm rarely immediately convinced about any poem and like to come back a few days, or even weeks, later, to see if it looks any good.

I seem to have lost any motive to see my own poems in print so it can wait in a file on a memory stick with the others. Any thrill is in the making and then, if one is lucky, in the finished article but I need not bother any wider public beyond those who find themselves here.

Lockdown Trains

The suburbs look away as they pass through

on their way to countryside and stations 

still deserted but that is what they do 

and continue to go through the motions.

 

Like actors who only ever rehearse

a play from the Theatre of the Absurd 

the government chronically reimburse, 

they’ve lost the plot but yet can still be heard

 

ahead of their arrival as the lines

twitch with the knowledge of them imminent. 

They shatter headlong through the air empty, 

unconscious that the role that they refine, 

seething because they think it is urgent, 

is a mime of what they were meant to be.

 

British Poetry 2000-2020

 I have been noticing how we've already had twenty years of the C21st. It might not seem like it but a fifth of it's been done. Those of us who still think our subject is C20th Poetry had better give that further thought. I wonder if anybody's doing the 'definitive' anthology of the period to put alongside The New Poetry, the Motion/Morrison book, the other New Poetry and Identity Parade, if that counts, if any of them still count, if anybody is still permitted the idea of a canon. A little while back we were being told it was being abolished, that Shakespeare and Kate Tempest are both as worthy of our attention as each other. In some schools, in the generation after mine, school teams were picked on a rota basis rather than with a view to winning matches so they probably weren't as good as the teams I played in but with regard to poetry it does depend on somebody knowing which poems are better than others and, as a look through some old Poetry Review magazines showed a while back, that became more a matter of tribalism and old 'poetry wars' but maybe it was ever thus and at least each offered a point of view.

But, twenty years in, I have been comparing the first two decades of the C21st with those of the C20th. Without looking it all up, 1900-1920 seemed to be major in a major way with names like Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Edward Thomas, notwithstanding Wilfred Owen and reportage from WW1, and women like H.D. and Mina Loy at the forefront of Modernism, which was as big a revolution as any one cares to mention, but by all means provide your own names. Romanticism had made the individual and their preciousness a priority and after 200 years we don't seem to have recovered from that. The incoming French influence into English made Chaucer very different from Old English. The first Elizabethan Age is sold as a high point in English poetry. 

British. English meaning from England. English meaning 'in the English language'. Anybody needs to set their parameters but the barricades are largely down by now and it's Poetry and many of us aren't fluent enough in other languages to appreciate poetry in them sufficiently.

But 1900-1920 must have been an exciting time, with bad, old Ezra, the Dominic Cummings of English letters, showing everybody how it should be done henceforth. In retrospect, it looks like it, and then one looks to find what 2000-2020 have to offer.

Michael Donaghy was born in 1954 but died in 2004, much too soon, which already means that the 2000-2020 are like Argentina without Maradona. Paul Muldoon was perhaps at the height of his powers with Incantata in The Annals of Chile in 1994 and Hay in 1998 but subsequently proceeded to become more Muldonian than even he needed to be. Sean O'Brien has continued to provide powerful, highly accomplished commentary on what appear to be increasingly troubled times but despite an extensive list of highly talented poets writing in English - some of them in America and many in Ireland- he can't be expected to do it all on his own. There is much to be admired in the poetry of John Burnside, Carol Ann Duffy, Julia Copus, David Harsent, Don Paterson, the much-missed Roddy Lumsden -and I apologize to all the others I don't mention but this is a short essay rather than a directory - but it still doesn't feel like a period. It might be a good thing that it doesn't but the unfashionable idea of being 'great', like Bach or Mozart, meant taking the art to 'the next level' (for want of a better phrase).

If Roddy were still with us, he might defend his assertion that the current generation of new poets, a few years ago, were the best in the history of English poetry but it raised some eyebrows here if nowhere else, looking a bit like blurb for a generation he had done much to teach how to continue with ludic, Muldonian allusiveness. Nothing goes out of fashion quite as quickly as the avant-garde but all innovation contributes to the mainstream if it's worth taking in. (There we go. I haven't said it for a while so it was time I said it again).

I don't know if the Creative Writing industry has made poets so clever and self-aware that it has brought about some sort of ultra-plural paralysis, whether a liberal inclusiveness has not allowed anything to be regarded as 'elite' any more but, supposing there is an Eng Lit syllabus in unversities in 2100-2120, something is going to have to be on the reading list for the Poetry of the Early C21st. Or, isn't it. It won't all be Theory by then because even Terry Eagleton seems to have accepted that it isn't all Theory even now.

I was as dubious as any campus academic a few years ago when I heard it said of the Romantic Poets that 'there were six of them' and that's what happens when you have a syllabus or a canon but while contemporary poetry still has fine work in it, one can't help thinking that, like pop music, it doesn't have its Motown, Beatles, Prince, Bowie galaxy of impossibly great satars any more. On the other hand, one notices on University Challenge that when the music round consists of pieces of popular music to identify, a team with an average age of 20 listen to Roxy Music with blank looks. They know the festival artists of their generation well enough so perhaps those of us who thought poetry was about Eliot, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop and Larkin need to move over. It might have been our game once but it doesn't remain so forever.