Help if help were needed

 I'm a bit disconcerted to find I need to add a tag on here for Louis MacNeice after all  these years but I suppose he hasn't had many new books out recently.

The other day I hid away, at the bottom of some other inconsequential thoughts, some curmudgeonly objections to 'poetry' in the hope that nobody would read them but I could at least have said it.

But, the funeral baked meats soon furnished the marriage tables, and I'm glad to see Martyn Crucefix citing MacNeice when he, in a roundabout way, arrives at the conclusion that,

Hence all poems …  are ironic.

Which is wonderful news except I'd be the last person to want to make any sort of rules or law about what poems should be or do. And so what happens is that far superior poets like MacNeice and poets who take their vocation far more seriously than me put their name to ideas that I wouldn't insist on. But I'm glad of any support I can muster from the likes of them. It's here,

 

Crucefix on MacNeice

 

My reservations were about sincerity in poetry being one-dimensional. There's nothing especially wrong with sincerity but it's not very interesting. Some years ago I received an e-mail entitled Whatever People Say I am That's What I'm Not, which I quite liked, being so far out of pop music by then that I had no idea it was the title of an Arctic Monkeys album. But, yes, that's right. As soon as anybody ever wanted to typecast me as poet, sportsperson, student, vaguely leftist, pop or classical music enthusiast, I'd shift into one of the other modes. And that's irony.

This morning I did a couple of hours on the first section of Thom Gunn's Jack Straw's Castle towards my gruellingly workmanlike plod through (which means exhilarating, insightful critique of) all his work. I'm finding very much a sinister downside to the self-indulgent liberation he found in the fashionable hippy culture of the late 60's. For all the Summer of Love they said they had, for all the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead and Tiny Tim, there was a nightmare waiting to happen, which subsequently did. That wasn't quite as ironic as bloody inevitable.

Luckily, it also works the other way round and some of the libertarian grip that the West seemed hostage to with Trump, Dominic Cummings and the UK having the most clueless Prime Minister it's ever had answering their every command like an obedient spaniel, might not be quite as tight as it was. Heaven knows what long-term damage they've done and they refuse to go gracefully but whatever things look like, they often don't stay looking like it for long.

It's always the other thing. Poetry can say what it means if it wants to but can be much better if it implies it by saying something slightly different.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

Perhaps not everybody knows where I took the title for these occasional miscellanies from. I'd rather you all did because Hurricane Smith was a genius.
Frankly, you can keep Van Morrison, Jim Morrison and all that moody attitude. In between the 'day job' of engineering such twaddle as Dark Side of the Moon, Norman 'Hurricane' Smith made use of Pink Floyd's tea-breaks by using the studio time to make some vaudeville masterpieces. I've continued to celebrate that he did by adopting one of his titles.
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Meanwhile, back with the reading list. An old Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, won't ever let you down. I should have gone straight for the 1344 pages of the complete essays rather than the mere sampler of the Selection because if you're going to have any of somebody you like you might as well have the lot. Any selection, or 'selected', is somebody else's choice and you might have chosen differently. I'd like to decide for myself.
It's not as if I didn't know about Montaigne, or you didn't either. Shakespeare did, too, we are told. It's not a tip. I've only just caught up with Rilke, through Martyn Crucefix's relaxed (I think) translations of the Duino Elegies. I've known 'about' him for decades without knowing much about him.
To get involved with these things needs a trigger, and luckily I've had them recently.
Montaigne is not the least bit forbidding to read, which being C16th and in translation, you might think he would be. At least in the Screech version, combining three available texts like a compact variorum edition, he is clear, eminently sensible and, like it says, like he's sat next to you on a quiet afternoon, maybe having a Guinness or two.
Every essay I've read so far makes me want to quote him. I'm not going to do that, of course. I only wish one could not only upbraid the Stoics for their ultimate absurdity - who had come out of Daisy Dunn's book on Pliny so well- and accept mortality so equably without any of that terrifying stuff from Larkin's Aubade. 
I wish such renowned classicists as Boris Johnson had read and understood a fraction as much of Roman literature as Montaigne had, like his unarguable objections to cruelty to animals invloved in the hunt.
Never mind persuading Workington, Bolsover and parts of the North East of England to vote for that vague, mumbling pack of lies that constituted a General Election campaign. Any party that thinks it's okay to charge around the countryside hoping to murder our fellow animals for fun is unelectable.
I was once sent a box of books by someone who was off-loading them and I was grateful for many of them, and they've been of much use but On Hunting by Roger Scruton, was, I'm sure, put in among them as a wind-up. It wasn't given house room here for long.
Montaigne would not have voted Conservative.

But I'll quote him On Drunkenness. It's good for you, once in a while. Don't worry about it.
But it's a mistake to refine the palate to appreciate only good quality wine because you will then only be disappointed by ordinary wine,
To be a good drinker you must not have too tender a palate. The Germans enjoy drinking virtually any wine. Their aim is to gulp it rather than to taste it. They get a better bargain. Their pleasure is more abundant and closer at hand.

Philosophy can be dull reading. In fact, it's bloody dreadful but Montaigne is bright and refreshing, more than 400 years on. Like a crisp Soave.
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So, actually, Montaigne and Rilke will keep me going for a while even if they seem like occasional reading. I'm subliminally looking for something else. The pile on top of the CD shelves only consists of the second half of the Northanger Abbey/Persuasion double-header and Jane's first book didn't do enough to make me weant to read her last; Les Monnayeurs in French so I can see what Camus really wrote except it's been so long since I read The Counterfeiters, I've forgotten where, and the long halted biography of Delmore Schwartz that got left behind when more important things arrived.
Please don't make me have to go back to Proust.

Perhaps the purer form of music, rather than books for the sake of books, is actually a higher form of detachment from the worldly world that only ever disappoints us.
The Beethoven Piano Sonatas by the completely brilliant Stephen Kovacevich arrived a few days ago. 9 CD's. Surely that's enough for a while.

  

Martyn Crucefix - The Lovely Disciplines

Martyn Crucefix, The Lovely Disciplines (Seren)

Martyn Crucefix has always been good at giving a collection a name. There was A Madder Ghost, An English Nazareth and now this, which isn't bad either.
He has dispensed with full stops and commas. Not being a Crucefix completist, I'm not sure when that happened but it was after Beneath Tremendous Rain and by the time of Hurt. The effect, one might expect, would be to create a seamlessness, dispensing with linguistic furniture to leave the words free of their moorings, and so it does although nowadays I enjoy a full stop.
What it does achieve is some dislocation of expectation, as in The girl who returned to Aix,
one I watched as snug and warm as Richard Dreyfuss
was driven crazy by shapes in his head

ah, you see, so not 'as snug and warm' after all.
The reader can take nothing for granted on first 'encounter', as it were, with the poems. The technique has a disconcerting but creative power to shift to the unexpected even if I'm almost alone in not demanding to be surprised by every poem I ever read. It means that re-reading is re-paid more in these poems than most others although any poem that doesn't warrant more than a second look is not likely to be a good one.
The book is in three parts and the poems towards the end might be the best, in some ways the least abstract, and an alternative strategy to piling all the best work in at the beginning to get off to a convincing start. It's not every time I begin a book of poems at the first page anyway and so such a ploy is less likely to fool me. But Street View, the final poem, is the pick, about the poet finding himself on the internet feature in a sequence of shots, becoming aware of what's happening. In a loose way, it is linked to theme of the 'poetry of modern technology' to a previous poem about a mobile phone in his parents' possession accidentally ringing him up so that he, not wanting to, can overhear their conversation without them knowing.
Things difficult to love and La Giaconda gone are also poems that make immediate appeal. Crucefix is thoughtful and measured and not one for the showy or grand gesture. It is not surprising that he has plenty of competition successes to list in the credits although the details of how many poems were entered and were also-rans in other competitions we never get told in such palmares. One suspects that his finest achievements are his translations of Rilke but you need to be a proper poet to do the translating job with any credibility and he never lets you down, being one of those who have kept contributing to English poetry steadily and conscientiously making it worth being a part of. 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

It is unlikely that future historians of England will look back on the last week and say it was 'our finest hour'.

Following the hapless performance by the electorate last week with their tactical naivety and misplaced crosses, the football team put in an even more deplorable effort on Monday.

I'd like to dissociate myself from both as far as possible, never having been sure whether to identify myself as English, British, European or, preferably, a 'citizen of the world'. English might be my subject but that means English Literature and Language, not separatism or tribal identity.

So, a fine antidote was reading Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot. It is a modern classic and so needs no reviewing or introduction from me. It is a book somewhat 'out of category', mainly literary biography but more tangential than that. There had been few like it before it appeared in 1984 but there have been a few more like it since. It is written in the voice of a persona, not Barnes' own, about Flaubert, and through this layered device, reflects upon writing, books, reading, art and thus arrives at an admirable aesthetic, a complete joy to be reading for its elegant erudition, its defining of the 'literary' and thus very much all those things that the Francophile, internationalist Barnes established as both his great idiosyncratic strengths and that attitude that some might find fault in.
But it was a welcome respite from some of the 'state of the nation' commentary of the last few days.
I don't entirely blame some of those that voted to leave for the reasons they had - some people I quite like voted to leave-  but I certainly do blame the undisguised ambition of Boris using it as his last stepping stone to becoming Prime Minister and I do blame the uncouth, lowest common denominator campaigning of Farage.
I see Martyn Crucefix reviewing Sean O'Brien's Hammersmith under the title 'The End of England'. Well, it's not quite that, is it, it's only the latest episode in an ongoing thousand-year-old story. But it is one of the more significant episodes to have happened in our lifetime, those of us who ever more fondly remember the 1970's not for the three-day week, the uncollected dustbins and the unburied dead, but for the liberal education, the belief that progress was being made and the likes of David Bowie. I would swap Now for Then in England unconditionally.

But a fine pile of deliveries was waiting for me this evening when I got home. Lee Perry's Arkology set is far too canonical to be reviewing now but I'm looking forward to Helen Mort's new poems, coming soon after her first collection, and Katy Evans-Bush's essays on poetry in Forgive the Language. Also on its way is Ben Lerner's discourse on The Hatred of Poetry where I will be hoping that his is the same as mine, a sort of dissatisfaction with having to think about the whole idea of poetry, the philosophy of poetry or theory. It is not natural to enjoy all poetry per se and so much of it is not to one's taste but we like it above all else, apart from music, when it is done well and so we should find those poets and poems and read them all the time.
Meanwhile, yes, in the same way that cricketers want to be golfers, footballers want to be racehorse owners and pop stars want to be philosophers, poets really want to be musicians. That is my 'hatred of poetry'. I'll wait and see what Ben Lerner's is.

Martyn Crucefix on blogging about poetry

Much of what Martyn Crucefix says here about writing (his own) poetry blog sounds familiar.

http://martyncrucefix.com/2015/07/20/how-to-write-a-poetry-blog/ 

However, the approach here has drifted somewhat from these fine intentions. It's not often you find much to read about poetry at DG Books these days. It's a bit like when Danny Baker was given radio phone-ins to talk about football but soon found that there were much more interesting things to fill the time with.

Martyn Crucefix - Hurt

Martyn Crucefix, Hurt (Enitharmon)

One of the first things I did having arrived at Lancaster University in 1979 was get in touch with the editor of the poetry magazine. I was eager to set about the literary world and be involved in what went on. What went on there wasn’t a great deal. Martyn Crucefix had been editing Continuum but now wanted to concentrate on his third year studies so he gave me the magazine on the spot and so I was already the boy in charge.
I might have made a good job of it on my own, or maybe not, but I felt I ought to invite anybody else who was interested to join in and so I ended up with a committee of four, but no unity of purpose. We changed the title to Allusions, opened up the campus magazine to allcomers, held a competition, speculatively solicited work from Betjeman, John Lennon and Naom Chomsky amongst others and got kindly replies and poems from Roger McGough, Iain Crichton-Smith, Brian Patten and others and had the nerve to turn down Gavin Ewart’s contribution. But when the first issue came out it wasn’t everything it might have been. We were down to a committee of three and,after issue 1, two more of us left the other one to get on with it.
It was a sorry episode. But ever since that meeting with Martyn I’ve seen his career go well, with prizes and translations of Rilke and, for some reason being aware that he was born in Trowbridge, think of him every time I go through there on the train.
His first book, Beneath Tremendous Rain, was one I liked a lot and anyone with a collection entitled A Madder Ghost is fine by me.
This new book is belatedly mentioned here because my radar missed it until recently. It appeared last autumn.
The opening poem Invocation repays a few readings but at first I found little to enthuse about, the poems sensitively observed and descriptive but not making a great impression as poetry. The sort of poems that make me wonder how they got written in the first place but some of these poems are more oblique than earlier Crucefix and might reward further looking. The last of the three sections does, however, contain some fine pieces.
Calling in the Dark works on a brilliant conceit, if conceit it is when the story is obviously and simply true. The poet's parents' mobile phone accidentally rings him when knocked in a bag of shopping. Martyn eavesdrops for longer than he might on their private conversation and feels some guilt and responsibility for doing so before terminating the call and one wonders at the double meaning of his title.
Scraps hopes for a better way of looking at cathedrals for his son than the poet had,

So this is what I hope for him:
a stronger belief than I knew,
that the solitary man
in his quietude need not
be scorned and ridiculed,
need not have plagued so bitterly

my boyhood –
The long poem Wilderness is a gentle meditation to end on. Martyn seems to have visited the Keats house in Hampstead during its renovation but his poem on the subject conflates the house now with Keats’ life there and abroad to great effect. But on a different poet, in Petrarch’s Head, the book provides it best moments,

Surely the answer lies with the beautiful Laura,
the girl like an idea you glimpsed one day-
Laura, who took your breath away,
greedy thief and snatched your heart as well,
allowing nothing of herself at all.
ending on the best lines of all,

the poet’s head happy in love’s dark place
and love’s tongue relieved in his embrace.
Yes, it’s another poem about poetry but when they are this good you really don’t mind.

So, perhaps this is a book of three halves but it builds towards some excellent successes and proves worth staying with. It’s good to see that one poet from Lancaster thirty years ago continues to thrive.

Why aren't they more famous

There are a number of poets whose reputations run ahead of their achievements, it sometimes might seem. It wouldn't be polite to name them here but it would be fun to give a few clues about who I think they are and then see who anybody else thinks I mean, but that would be a dangerous game to play.
However, there are a number of names who, it has long seemed to me, are inexplicably much less famous than they deserve to be. It is possible, of course, that they don't pursue celebrity and wider acknowledgement but, if that's the case, there's little point in publishing at all.
Some of the following names might be familiar to the afficiandos of contemporary poetry but you would need to have read a lot of poetry magazines over the last twenty years to know them all.
I've never understood why Martin Mooney isn't listed among the host of tremendous poets that came out of Northern Ireland in the last few decades. I first came across his limited edition booklet Bonfire Makers in 1995, and the poem on Rasputin and Painting the Angel. These two poems alone would be enough to make him a favourite but the rest of his work is very fine, too, from the early booklets Brecht & An Exquisite Corpse and Escaping with Cuts and Bruises through Grub, Rasputin and his Children to Blue Lamp Disco. I hope there's another book due soon.
Martin Crucefix was in his third year at Lancaster when I was in my first. I've followed what I've been able to find of his career since, much of it in Poetry London. His book Beneath Tremendous Rain is well worth a look and the poem Sugar in Banana Sandwiches is a stand out. I realize there's been much more work since then.
Sue Hubbard should be a division higher in the poetry world's rankings, her poem on Rembrandt's model being one of the better poems about painting that one is likely to find.
Michael Daugherty was a stalwart of the littlepress magazines when I read them all in the late 70's, a beautifully lyrical and romantic poet of the time who, one might have thought, could have broken into a more mainstream and more lucrative area than being listed here. I looked him up in the Poetry Library last year and the poems have stood the test of time in their post-hippy, user-friendly gloriousness.
And Paul Berry, another star for me of those magazines run on idealistic shoestrings, deserved better. I have his booklets here, Homages and Holiday Snaps and A Bequest of Fire, and wonder if he's still at it and, if so, where. I'm not saying he, or any of the above, are exactly Seamus Heaney but if I ruled the world then not only would every day be the first day of Spring but also they would inhabit more prominent positions in the poetry firmament.
Beyond the creative writing courses and the Universities, away from the slams and the local reputations and the cliques promoting each other, there has been something great going on. It's just that you do need to look quite hard, and discriminatingly, to find it.
Now, there's an opinion for you.