Browsing

 'Browsing' is an unpleasant word for an enjoyable thing to do. Perhaps it subliminally suggests eyebrows which bring to mind caterpillars. I'm not sure if that's how words work for everyone but they do it like that for me.

Browsing is non-committal, indolent and restful with all the benefits of Existential freedom  before the burden of choice brings the shame and nausea of having committed oneself. I browsed my own books for things to look at, which is what they are for. I haven't looked at much poetry on a regular basis for quite some time so I picked out-

Don Paterson, Landing Light, in which the accomplishment seems to be beyond my reckoning. Don's books on the Shakespeare Sonnets and Michael Donaghy are brilliant and there are poems I like a lot, too, but sometimes it's best to admit when one is not on the right wavelength.

Paul Muldoon, Maggot, which is from 2010 and thus a little after his finest hour. A little bit forced, still fine in places but maybe the strain of continuing to be Muldonian and then even more so was begiining to show.

Sylvia Plath, the original version of Ariel as introduced by Freida, is still devastating in its language and, like Rothko perhaps, finds a way of dealing with its extreme themes. It's far too difficult, especially in the light of Freida's honest introduction, to have an opinion about events one was not a part of but I've long been convinced that Sylvia was a far greater talent than Ted.

And Derek Mahon, whose prose pieces in Red Sails I had entirely forgotten about. On boozy writers, P.J. Kavanagh, The Gallery Press and advertising work in America, he is wide-ranging, somewhat austere and admirable. He gives pop music short shrift - The Beatles, Stones and Dylan - but has some time for Joni. I was heartened to see that one of the Kavanagh poems he cites is Blackbird in Fulham which was my PJK 'breakthrough' moment and he refers us to the memoir which is upstairs and unread so that will be coming off the shelf for an ideal read on forthcoming trains.

Not Single Spies

 Claudius observed how,

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.

And Wendy Cope noted how men are like buses in that having waited a long time for one, a few turn up at the same time. I might add that, not having written a poem for six months, I'm very suddenly surfeited with them and aware that 'surfeit' is an exception to 'i before e except after c' so there's another torpedo in the Bismarck of those who like rules.

One poem was earlier in the week, two were this morning, two more ideas have a few lines towards making a start and a sixth is only so far a title. The example below might be doggerel but such ephemera isn't going anywhere else and so the faults in the last stanza can stay like that.

The other one completed this morning is an old idea I never got round to but was I prompted to finally knock it out because it's in the same spirit of one poem suggesting others that link the three I'm yet to attempt which are related by all means but, oh no, not a dreaded 'sequence'. It is Derrida Re-Reading 'Re-Reading Derrida on a Train' on a Train, a very 'in' joke implying the infinite possibilities of 're-reading' had I somehow miraculously seen Jacques Derrida with a copy of my 2000 booklet, Re-Reading Derrida on a Train.

It's madness, I know, but if Paul Muldoon can get away with what he does these days we might as well all indulge ourselves howsoever we choose.  And 'light verse' did Wendy no harm at all.

The prompt came from thinking there could be a poem, called Reading a History of Writing, based on reading Steven Roger Fischer's The History of Writing. I thought of Writing The History of Reading but before doing that, surely one ought to have written The History of Reading, so that's the third idea. But, here's the kicker. That could be the history of Reading in Berkshire. I know it's a bit late to be so avant-garde and ludic but, like so many of them, it's only myself I have to please by now.

So exactly what comes of this boom in creative activity very much remains to be seen. It might not generate a 'personal best' but something satisfying there is in producing anything that isn't abandoned.

--

The wireless played this this morning,

 

and, had I been on Face the Music, I could easily have jumped in thinking it was Beethoven's Grosse Fuge. Tortelier, Casals, Stern et al is a superstar line-up to rival that brilliant Menuhin-Oistrakh Bach double concerto. Such things seem to work in collaborations like this whereas a football team including Pele, George Best, Cruyff, Gullit, Cantona and Maradona surely would not. Neither would a pop group with Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Dusty Springfield, Ronnie Spector, Gladys Knight and Candi Staton. But this works fine.

I can't see D.956 on the shelves whereas there are two Grosse Fuge's. Momox can send me a disc of this that, with some compensation Amazon insisted on awarding me, will arrive for 71p.

I know that Amazon are tax avoiding rascals that exploit their employees appallingly but they treat their customers will much ingratiation. A couple of shirts I ordered recently were made in Nepal, dispatched from Leipzig and promised for Saturday delivery having only been clicked on on Friday. And because they missed that ambitious promise and only got them here by Monday, I was compensated. It didn't matter. I've not had the occasion to wear one yet. I only hope the compensation doesn't come out of the poor courier's paltry pay but it would come as no surprise if that's how Amazon works.  

August Kleinzahler - Snow Approaching on the Hudson

August Kleinzahler, Snow Approaching on the Hudson (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux)

In Revenue Stream, August Kleinzahler tells of an 'interlocutor' he took a car ride with who takes an undue interest in him and his work,

                               he was determined, all right,

 

to find out what, I could not begin to surmise. About how

I went about stringing these words together, as I do,

 

and he might well have asked. I suspect there's a trick to it as there must be with other idiosyncratic poets with their inimitable styles. Paul Muldoon, John Ashbery, John Burnside, none of who Kleinzahler is particularly like but who have found their own way of doing it. And then Kleinzahler adds in a bit of Frank O'Hara's contrived, casual, non-poetry colloquial idiom.

It's been a little while since the last new Kleinzahler but as he hands in 80 pages of long lines dense with words, it has been worth the wait.

The title is Kleinzahlian with several of his previous volumes being threatening ominous weather but the slick wiseguy is 71 by now and even Archie Bell & the Drells grew old and it is to be expected that poets reach a time when their new work seems to be generated from what went before. It wasn't a problem with Heaney and it's not a problem here. Kleinzahler remains exhilarating.

The book could come with its own menu and gazeteer, never mind glossary. There is as much relish for the food as there is for the language, which is place names and anything that sounds exotic. But I've looked some of them up. Weehawken is in New Jersey and a dybbuk is '(in Jewish folklore) a malevolent wandering spirit that enters and possesses the body of a living person until exorcised'. It would appear that things worth writing poems about don't happen to him in places like Portland or Boston with more mundane names but Michael Longley has Carrigskeewaun and so Irish poets as well as American jews have a word hoard of place names that most English don't but I might spend more time in Ashby-de-la-Zouche or Kingston Bagpuize and hope for the best.

Kleinzahler has long been one for a sense of rootlessness and nostalgia for times and places remembered, hardwon like an old bluesman past his prime. Perhaps he's poetry's much better answer to the question that pop music provided the answer Tom Waits. I thought Tom Waits must be about 60 when he was only 30 but August is now going back to childhood and adolescence at times, bringing back characters from the past with vivid anecdote and affection. There's not much in his extravagantly laconic default mood that isn't vivid and there is a swagger even in his elegies. I even checked on some lines quoted to August much to his surprise by his 'unofficial guardian' at the age of 14, Murph, in Murph & Me, in his sedan in all its specified specification and they are from Hart Crane. Had to be, really. Kleinzahler is masculine and his poetry is so, too, which is not to say that the lady I went with to see him in the LRB bookshop didn't love him, too. It's hard not to like the swank and sashay of his performance, either on the page or in person even if he's glamourizing the downbeat in a sort of bluesy way.

It all makes the sensitive moments the more touching, when he not talking about broads, a spicy sauce or the leather upholstery of a choice automobile. In She,

She barely acknowledged that I was there, turning

her head ever so slightly in my direction as if she had picked out

in the breeze the faintest strains of an unfamiliar folk melody,

 

even though we had been lovers once, long ago  

 

For one who delivers poems with such panache and verbal largesse, he isn't half world-weary, describing,

        on the TV overhead the number one ladies' morning chat show

featuring the twin goddesses of our exhausted imagination,

Kathie Lee and Whoopi

 

but maybe it's only the drearier, commodified parts of the debased culture that he's weary of because there's no lack of enthusiasm, his own raw affections or wide-ranging reference points.

FSG might not have minded, but I always somehow will, lines just so long they need indentation. Editing a booklet some years ago now, one poet did that which was a pain in the ass. Sorry about that - neck. One can't help but adopt the vernacular argot. But the long lines are a sort of rapture, carrying the expansive sweep of the language onwards and I daresay it couldn't be otherwise.

It's possible Kleinzahler is one of those poets whose schtick you either buy or don't buy. I've not really bought Allen Ginsberg's since I was about 17. I have my doubts about O'Hara and any other contrivance of authenticity. A poem is a contrived thing and the more 'natural' and immediate it tries to sound, the more contrived it will look. One can hardly accuse poems with this level of erudition of trying to be bar-room speil or the off-hand jottings-down. It's sophisticated and the adopting of an informal tone is only a part of it.

It is, for me, as thrilling as contemorary poetry gets and, with the sad passing of the likes of Derek Mahon, Roddy Lumsden and Anne Stevenson this year, August doesn't have as much opposition as he did a few months ago for the position of my favourite living poet, a position he has in the past been not far off. 

This book won't be going on the shelf any time soon. In fact, some of the back catalogue at least will be coming back out of the top right hand corner of the bookcase where they live.                                   

 

 

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.  

Paul Muldoon - Frolic and Detour

Paul Muldoon, Frolic and Detour (Faber)

Twenty years ago
we lived, it had been said,
in the Age of Muldoon.
How was I to know
so many would try to get into bed
with him so soon.

But the height of fashion
can become as quickly jaded
or deflate like a balloon
or come crashing,
some might say unaided,
like an egg from its spoon.

No doubt some would barter
their whole career,
their whole raison d'être,
for an Incantata
or something within ear-
shot of Quoof or Hay, etc.

But a one-trick pony
might find a thousand ways
or more
to sustain his sophisticated, phoney
trick so be preapred to be amazed
at Frolic and Detour.

The maestro hasn't lost it.
It's still all there
on the elliptic.
Once more he's bossed it,
still debonair
not to say cryptic.
  

September

Whan that Septembre with its ayre coole,
those hydeous kids due back in schoole,
the herte is gladde to welcom inne
Goddes fynest monthes that, wythout synne,
he did ynamen gentil Septembre
and noblest birthday monthe, Octobre.

It always seems like an achievement to arrive at September although, like a gin and tonic, you seem to no sooner have been glad of its arrival than it's gone again.
For those who still come here because it was once a poetry website, there are new books by Michael Hofmann and Paul Muldoon. It's not my fault, it turns out, that Hofmann had fallen below the radar - it's his. His first book of poems for twenty years is an admirable state of affairs but not sufficiently attention-seeking to remain where one can be seen. I suspect One Lark, One Horse will be highly worthwhile and I ought to be ordering it now rather than 'doing a Monday night'.
Having checked out the Cheltenham Literature Festival, I realize I will miss Paul Muldoon having arranged my visit to nearby for not quite when he's there. Never mind. I saw him last time and elsewhere before. Well worth it then but not to be regretted now. Frolic and Detour might be his last chance.
It was once justifiable to say, circa 1998, that we lived 'in the Age of Muldoon', as the eminent critic wrote, and I was a keen admirer of The Annals of Chile, Incantata, Hay and where the great man had got to by then but the worst thing about being the height of fashion is that you might live long enough to outlive the fashion you contributed so much to. Ask Sigue Sigue Sputnik. No, don't. Ask Shakespeare, whose reputation has been restored since but saw the theatre move into a vogue for plays other than his before he had quite finished. Perhaps that's why he stopped.
It might be an old joke and we know the TLS will publish letters from any old pranksters these days but following their big scoop of the huge American Standard earlier this year, someone was facetious enough to ask the following week 'when was he going to publish the answers' and now that someone's been brave enough to ask, it's either time for Prof. Muldoon to come halfway to meet us or disappear  into a parody of his own elusive method. We will see if we are prepared to keep the faith but there can come a time to stop being 'brand loyal' to those one once regarded as essential.
I understand that James Joyce might have gone back to something like Dubliners after Finnegans Wake had illness not deprived him of the chance to redeem his reputation so it isn't too late until it's too late.


But while I remain devoted to some poets, some poetry and certain things about poetry and unwilling to throw away the last 40-odd years of thinking about it, I'm not devout anymore. There is something Eastern, mystical or transcendent about not doing it any more. How much wiser do I seem in my assessments of cycling, cricket or football on account of the fact I haven't done any of them for twenty years or more. Or it might just be that I'm passed it, lazy, too ready with an opinion and there's nothing remotely Buddhist about it.

But the idea occurs in Japanese literature, and I'm sure in plenty of places elsewhere, about 'going beyond' and that is what all great art should surely be trying to do. To find some release from the shackles of itself, of us being ourselves, and resolve the difficulty that made it necessary.

I'm on page 220 out of 510 in Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus. It was recommended to me.
One has to size up any recommendation by assessing the recommendor, one's own pre-conceptions and make a decision. I've been eternally grateful for The Magnetic Fields, Patrick Hamilton and Richard Yates but not taken up computer games (when chess will do), science fiction or whisky.
I hoped Doktor Faustus would be a short book, like Death in Venice or any of those other European masterpieces by Gide, Turgenev, Camus or Hesse, but it's a monster.
It is a deep, hugely detailed thump of a novel that must have been C19th, when novels were like that, except it was published in 1947. There is no prospect of me embarking on another Mann novel once I've finished this because I'll need a rest but, heaven knows, there's enough to keep on mind.
During its account of 'the discord between genius and sanity', one can find one's own place among the many ideas on offer. There is Schildknapp, who 'wanted to be a poet, in his own estimation he was one', but complained 'if only I could work instead of drudging, I would show them!' but,
what he considered an obstacle was really a pretext with which he deceived himself over his lack of a genuine and telling creative impulse.

That might hurt anyone who hadn't realized it already but it falls refreshingly on those of us who knew.
So far, Doktor Faustus has mentioned Buxtehude twice which is double the number of times the only other novel I've read that did, which was The Glass Bead Game. That is a measure of how serious and clever it is. The title hints that one ought not to expect a happy ending but perhaps the thrill of what one finds out en route to the inevitable creates the illusion of it having been worthwhile.
But let's not hope to learn anything from literature or that it might make us better people. It can only be what it is for its own sake. Brilliant at its best but useless. Let's hope Paul Muldoon can sort it all out for us rather than provide something like the Listener crossword.
   

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.

 

 

Oxford Lectures

I can't remember how I stumbled upon it now but I have been reading James Fenton's collected lectures from his time as Professor of Poetry at Oxford in the late 1990's, The Strength of Poetry.
They are tremendous. Prof. Fenton having been an Auden man, Auden is allocated the most attention, and clear, insightful attention it is, as well as a strong cast of largely 'usual suspects', like Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia and some pertinent points which might shed some light on why we don't hear so much about D.H. Lawrence these days.
Previous incumbents of the Oxford chair, like Heaney and Paul Muldoon, have delivered books in the same league as this and I know Simon Armitage's are avaailable to listen to somewhere on the wires where he puts up a good performance, trying to live up to the rarified standard, with a very throuogh close reading of Tamer and Hawk.  
It might have seemed that Prof. Armitage succeeded to the post because there wasn't anybody else comparable to those august predessors but we will see. I have had him as odds-on to be the next Poet Laureate ever since Ms. Duffy was appointed and yet I saw a name mentioned in the paper recently that I had never even heard of which could mean it's a wide-open inclusive culture, could mean I'm not keeping up with what is trending or could mean their publicity machine is doing a good job.

I write only to draw attention to the Fenton book, could quote it and tell you but would rather you decide for yourself but, like other top, top books, like Julian Barnes' Nothing to be Frightened Of, his reflections on mortality written when he was only a couple of years older than I am now, it succedds by telling you what you knew already but puts it much better and with more telling quotes and examples than one knew.
But one also wonders what one might talk about if one took the job, one lecture a term for four years = 12. In that unlikely event.

There are no rules. Each poem succeeds or fails on its own terms. So it is perfectly reasonable to assume it's possible to have a morally didactic, virtue-signalling poem and read it out loud it in the precious, intense voice of someone like Ocean Vuong.

It becomes more difficult to appreciate the work of generations that come after you as much as you did the generations that came before you. Those that come after you seem to have stolen the game and decided to play it differently whereas those before, those that you admired, were those you learned from. And even if one does keep up with the latest fashions, one starts to look like John Peel, having previously championed Tyrannosaurus Rex, then Tangerine Dream and then The Fall, he contiuned to promote music by artists young enough to be his grandchildren. It's as if he had no point of view.

All poems come from other poems even if that is only the poet's idea of what a poem is and which they have read and so there is nothing wrong with being derivative. While it is possible that there might be potential genius in remote places, it isn't going to be realized if they don't know what a poem is. Art is recreational, which I still want to believe means it wants to recreate something a bit like something else it has seen and admired.

Yes, Larkin was politically incorrect. Even I, defending him as best I could whenever possible, had to give up when he said in a letter he didn't see why the anti-Apartheid campaign should ruin his cricket. Important though cricket, and poetry, sometimes is, it's not that important. But none of that detracts from his poetry because poetry is the words, not the person that wrote them.

And, even if it seems late in the day, it may not be too late to re-assert the credentials of Thom Gunn as the major English language poet of his generation. Maybe he suffered from becoming 'trans-Atlantic', still an English poet in San Francisco; maybe his work is 'uneven', but if not as consistent as Larkin, way ahead of the machismo and myth-making that Ted Hughes descended into, but for the sense, the parallel contemporary and long historical contexts of the poems and being virtuosic in moving from and between metred, syllabic and free verse which, it would be nice to think, any poet would do.

Etc, etc.

So, maybe I could do it. But I'd rather not.   

Thom Gunn Selected Poems

Thom Gunn, Selected Poems, edited by Clive Wilmer (Faber)

It's been a long wait for this book since the news that it was in preparation. I've waited longer to see books in print, am still waiting for a couple more, but not often. Clive Wilmer's selection is most valuable for its authoritative introduction and notes, the poems being familiar to Gunn's admirers from plenty of previous editions but should provide a welcome opportunity to assess where Gunn's reputation now stands.
In the 1950's when his generation of poets emerged, he was immediately regarded as among its leading figures but whereas Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes have survived considerable vilification to become often quoted 'National Treasure' and iconic mythmaker respectively, Gunn has somewhat faded from view as the fashion has swung in some places towards a smartalec postmodernism in the Age of Muldoon. This is diagnosed by some commentators as being at least in part due to Gunn becoming transatlantic, if not American by adoption, and an accompanying  stylistic shift in his poetry. But previously Donald Davie, in a critique of the period, had written that he kept noticing "how insistently Thom Gunn shouldered to centre stage." Not that Gunn, despite his apparent swagger, seems the sort of person to 'shoulder' his way anywhere, it was the poems that did that. Those poems, though, have always been more urbane than those of Hughes and if there are some residual similarities in method to Larkin's, Gunn's came to express a much more generous personality than Larkin's cartoon curmudgeon.
As befits such a contrast, Larkin was more frugal and his three mature volumes constitute a 'selected poems' with the removal of only a handful of pieces whereas Gunn's output does benefit from some pruning. Not necessarily at the hands of his last editor, August Kleinzahler, or perhaps Clive Wilmer, though, despite the impressive credentials they bring to the job. I was ready to complain, in time honoured tradition, about the omission of a number of poems - A Waking Dream, Thomas Bewick, Monterey and The Butcher's Son - for which Wilmer includes sufficient candidates fit for substitution, but then checked Kleinzahler's volume and found he doesn't include any of them either. Whether this is down to their attempts to represent the range of Gunn's output rather than present his finest work or if we merely diverge in our tastes is a question I'm left with but I can't agree with the selection.
Wilmer puts in the whole of the long poems Misanthropos and Jack Straw's Castle while Kleinzahler leaves them out and certainly both decisions are preferable to using only excerpts from either but even if they are thematically significant, it would free up a lot of space for less dubious work if they were regarded as interesting, less successful experiments and didn't diminish the selection which might become the one that future readers first turn to. Poets deserve to be assessed by their best work rather than a representative sample that demonstrates acknowledged flaws and Gunn in his finest moments is a more accomplished poet than any of his generation.
Where Kleinzahler saw the first two collections, Fighting Terms and The Sense of Movement, as juvenilia, Wilmer spreads his selection more evenly throughout a career that moved through very different phases but produced masterpieces from the outset to the end, an end that Wilmer tells us was almost pre-conceived, but emphasizes, if anything, the poet that Gunn became ahead of the knowing coolness that first made his name and it would be difficult to omit any more than he has done from The Man with Night Sweats, which is regarded as a return to form even by many who ever thought Gunn had lost something. It is clear by now that he never had. If those of us that grew up with the David Bowie of the 1970's might now think that his shifts in genre eventually didn't do him any favours and ran into something less than genius, Thom Gunn never lost the capacity to provide each new collection with poems to compare with his best.
Wilmer tells us that Gunn 'came to dislike' The Sense of Movement for '(as he saw it) its excessive formality and over-deliberate manner'. And one well might, having moved on, but Gunn was a good enough judge of his own work to regard the poem My Sad Captains as 'one of his best poems'. It would have been a shame not to. But what he perhaps didn't realize, following his reservations about the 'confessional' poetry of Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, was that somewhere inside him was a confessional poet trying to get out from the model of impersonal detachment that he long maintained. If we can read into the trajectory of his oeuvre as a whole an emerging frankness about his homosexuality (which for me is neither here nor there in an appreciation of his talent or significance as a poet) as the zeitgeist modified itself as he wrote, we can also now see his devotion to his mother, who committed suicide at a crucial time in his life, and hostile attitude to his difficult father not only in the later poems where he finally recalled his teenage years but also in From an Asian Tent, left uncollected at the time of writing, in which, he
   each year look more like the man I least
Choose to resemble, bully, drunk, and beast.
Are you a warning, Father, or an example?

If that is a minor paradox, it is a more regular succession of paradoxes that Gunn makes his poems from, as if echoing Keats' idea of 'negative capability',
that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason

something like which is to be found in On the Move,
At worst, one is in motion; and at best,
Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,
One is always nearer by not keeping still.

and in other poems both in this selection and not in it.
We shouldn't make quite so much of the points that Gunn was poetry's most sophisticated contribution to the 1960's counter-culture of The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane et al while maintaining a much longer tradition that acknowledged John Donne and Elizabethan poets as models, or that he was equally adept at metrical, syllabic and free verse, each informing the other, if occasionally to his detriment when too enamoured with the Roberts Duncan and Creeley, which isn't to say that his interest in them didn't contribute something to his writing.
It is to be hoped that Clive Wilmer's work in making this selection offers a chance for Gunn to be re-assessed and his status in literary history established somewhere above where it could have been left to languish, as a poet's poet but not considered foremost among the generations of poets coming after those of us who took their initial impetus from the poetry of the 1950's. It was Thom Gunn that made me want to be a poet in the same way that George Best made me want to be a footballer although it's a moot point which influence was the most significant or useful. I had understood that a biography was in preparation but that was a few years ago now and there's no sign of it so maybe that project has been abandoned but let's hope it hasn't and its author hasn't long forgotten it and used their Eng Lit Masters to gain a position in marketing or advertising.
I am grateful to Clive Wilmer and August Kleinzahler who 'keep hope alive' even though I remain at some odds with their choices of what constitutes Gunn's best work. In the best way, it is an oeuvre that was at once contemporary and for all time but when his two nominated literary executors fail to include The Butcher's Son in their definitive selections, one wonders if they didn't quite appreciate,
   a light within the light
That he turned everywhere.
 

      

Neil Powell - Was and Is

Neil Powell, Was and Is (Carcanet) 

One needs the Collected Powell over and above the Selected to give him a fair hearing, some of the best poems come in the section that have been written since those in the selection. As well as the way any selection will omit poems that some readers prefer to those included and a Collected, rather than the sometimes overly complete Complete, is really the only way to see anybody's work.
Neil Powell's poetry is pared down to the most pared-down definition of poetry, much favoured by me, that poetry is writing where the author and not the printer decides where the lines end. It is largely free of extended metaphor, metaphysical argument, challenging allusiveness or any other difficulty that other poetry might be admired for. While never being culpable of the charge that it is 'chopped-up prose', it observes many of the principles attributed to 1950's Movement poetry, like the avoidance of grand gestures, a refusal to be flashy or unnecessarily literary and doing only what it needs to do. There's much to like about that and it can come as a welcome relief if one has been struggling with the likes of Craig Raine or Paul Muldoon. But then the thirty pages of The Journal of Lily Lloyd, presumably a memoir of his mother, can be read as prose. It defies any high-flown ideas of poetry as something sublime, intense or finely-wrought through its thoughgoing understatedness as poetry.
One wouldn't immediately think of calling Powell an extremist but he takes his undemonstrative method to an extreme. It's likeable, one appreciates the even temper but the Collected Poems lacks, as far as I can see, even the layers of qualifying irony of An Arundel Tomb, the sustained build of The Whitsun Weddings or the rigour of Thom Gunn's metrical verse. Larkin and Gunn are Powell's primary exemplars and yet he declines to be even as showy as them.
In The Picture of the Mind, as circumspect and well-made as any twelve lines, he says,
      half-disclosing is what poems do,

and, yes, I like those that do that but Powell discloses, explains and doesn't leave very much mystery to wonder about. It would - thankfully- be a difficult body of work to set questions about because there is precious little interpretation left to ask of the reader. That can be something to be grateful for and one can appreciate the thought, the clarity with which it has been set out and empathize entirely with the sentiment expressed but, appreciation apart, no much else is asked of the reader.
Thev Lunatics' Compartment is one of many poems of anecdote, friendship and sincerity and its ordinariness generates something gently extraordinary, or at least of value.
Shell is memorable for being quietly ahead of its time in the light of books now appearing on the subject of life in a certain type of school for boys of Powell's generation and, I'm sure, before and since. It implies considerably more than it says but we know now even if the culture of the time inhibited revelations then.
Powell likes his music but sometimes tells rather than shows. For Music looks a bit like an exercise in name-dropping that any record collector might indulge in.
Without checking the dates, I'm sure that Outing is a reply to an Anthony Thwaite poem about the abundance of contemporary poets, and lists the perceived preponderance of male homosexuals in C20th culture. So, what,
That wasn't too exciting, was it?

are Powell's words, not mine. They could, for many, sum up the whole book but I think Neil Powell can be credited with being better than that. There is a time and place for gentility and while a new generation of creative writing graduates strain to find their next stunning, imaginative way of stretching the language, he is comfortable in what might look like a bygone style that nevertheless is less likely to become quite so quickly completely unfashionable.
I once heard Anthony Thwaite, in his characteristic way, throwing out the remark that Larkin was a Great Minor Poet (and I apologize if that is not verbatim but it was twenty years ago) and that may or may not be true. I think he compared Larkin to George Herbert in terms of 'status'. I wonder where that leaves so many others.
Being 'minor' is no offence. There is plenty to enjoy and maybe not all of us ever thought for one moment we would be the poet of our generation. Neil Powell offers a Collected Poems that is entirely coherent, lucid and sustained, that happily doesn't aspire to be anything it isn't and is the better for it compared to many that do.  

          

A Survey of Contemporary Poetry

I'm not going to attempt such a thing. Good grief, no. I was led to thinking how difficult it would be to undertake, being so close to it, being a small part of a small part of it and not all of it being visible to any individual.
One might begin with the famous names from the big publishing houses, the 'mainstream' poets who we imagine might represent our age in a hundred years' time- Don Paterson, Paul Muldoon, Carol Ann Duffy, Sean O'Brien, we might think, although posterity sometimes sees things differently. And then there'd be the local groups and activity in London. Oxford and the provinces, as well as the dedicated schools of avant garde manifesto-makers beleaguered in their stolid doctrines, plus the magazines, competitions and, perhaps most important of all, the individual readers and writers doing their own thing to their own satisfaction without troubling anybody else with it.
I wouldn't know where to start but one of my own windows onto this disparate galaxy of far-flung stars and solar sysytems is Clarissa Aykroyd's The Stone and the Star, here, http://thestoneandthestar.blogspot.co.uk/  
and in particular her Blog List from which you can scan the latest posts by those she follows, which I'm gratified to be included in.
Today I followed up Anthony Wilson and his thoughts on his 'Go-to' poets. His list comprises Norman MacCaig, Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Tomas Transtromer as well as quoting Auden on Marianne Moore and it is so immaculate that I thought that any other poet he mentions must be worthwhile by association. I had never heard of Marie Howe but I was immediately off in search of her books. There is not apparently a Selected as yet and so I'll start with the most recent and let you know how it goes.
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Otherwise, a new influx of books is due after a session of indulgent clicking away, irresponsibly just ahead of when I'm asked what I want for my birthday and I have to say I've just ordered a pile of records so I don't know.
I've begun George Gissing's The Nether World in preference to the breeze block that is Ben Pimlott's biography of Harold Wiilson. I can't believe I'll be ploughing through that line by line but it will be one to dip into although sadly the index leads us to not much on Jeremy Thorpe.
These follow the short anthology of memoirs about Joyce in The Joyce We Knew by Ulick O'Connor, which confirms at first hand much of what we thought we knew about the aloof, half-blind genius with a fine tenor voice, and the New Grove North European Baroque Masters for its brief biography and catalogue of works of Buxtehude.
Also on their way, alongside a selection of versions of Couperin's Lecons de Tenebres to compare with the latest new recording, are Elizabeth Foyster's The Trials of the King of Hampshire, Barney Curley's old autobiography finally found cheap enough and George's Ghosts, a biography of Yeats by Brenda Maddox. The Ellman account of Yeats was so unsatisfactory that I thought he deserved another chance. Brenda's book on Nora Barnacle was excellent and so if she can't make Yeats interesting, I'll have to assume it his fault after all.
So, with the Saturday Nap due to take us up to Boxing Day with horse racing advice of the most dubious provenance and the assessments of the Year's Best in all the usual categories, it is worth noting- should you be interested- that I only went away for a couple of weeks and I'm back here like a rearguard action, trying to show that the blog (although I'm old-fashioned and call this a website) is not a thing of the past.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

There is a shop nearby the railway station not far from where I work that sells the TLS surprisingly among its otherwise barren fare. I saw Socialist Worker in there, too, today - one doesn't see that everywhere these days. I bought the sole copy TLS in order to justify them selling it but if I take up the trial offer of 12 copies for 12 quid then that could take the last trace of highbrow culture off Cosham High Street when that place finally stops selling it or closes down from that crucial loss of custom. It would be cruel.
But in among all sorts of Books of the Year recommendations from intellectuals so esoteric that not even their own families might have heard of them is the Cambridge University Press advert including mention of The Shakespeare Circle ed. Edmondson and Wells, adding or imagining yet more Shakespeare biography from the lives of his contemporatries and associates. Out since October and I didn't know. That's why perhaps these days only the TLS will do. The Beano is good but it doesn't have quite the same coverage of the publishing industry. So, Bang. That's that on order and Christmas reading sorted to go alongside my writing of the introduction to the Portsmouth Poetry Society's meeting on Rosemary Tonks and, by then, perhaps also being in a position to see if I have anything passable to write about George Eliot. I really ought to spend some time with my long-suffering family during Christmas, too, rather than use the holiday as a retreat, only appearing for meals or when there are presents to open, like possibly the book of Larkin's photography and a set of Buster Keaton DVD's.
But, among the welter of Books of the Year, Paul Muldoon says of Shapiro's 1606,
It's a work of genius.
But surely it's overstating the case to say it has 'at least one major revelation per page'. In a book of 406 pages of text, can 406 revelations all be 'major'.
But, of course, Muldoon is a poet and I remember a seminar in my first year at University that seemed to be teaching us that poetry was all hyperbole. I sat there for the hour with the growing suspicion that there must be more to it than that. And, of course, since then I have found out that there is metaphor and alliteration as well.
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I thought I'd be reviewing Morton Feldman's music for the Rothko Chapel tonight when I found a new arrival in the post. Always an exciting event., however often it happens. But it's Kate Miller's book The Observances, recently described as the more adventurous choice on the Costa Prize shortlist, so I thought I'll show 'em how front line and open I can be, I'll get one of them. But one can't review a poetry book while reading it for the first time, pouring Chardonnay down oneself on a Friday night, in the same way that one can (or I do) say what you knew you were going to say anyway about a new disc as you listen to it.
So, coming soon, reviews of music about Rothko and poetry by Kate Miller.
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Meanwhile, calamity upon calamity as Paddy Power remorselessly retrieves all the money he's lent me over the year. A 2/1 winner out of three selections is stalemate between punter and bookie at level stakes but today unfortunately the winner was the one that augmented the treble and the two best bets today fell when beaten and came second respectively. The bookmaker only ever lends money to the mug punter and he knows that. The mug punter secretly knows he will lose in the end but lives for those days when his horse looms up outside the leader coming to the last fence, outjumps him and canters off with the winnings. Suddenly those crazy days of summer, picking winners for fun, for small stakes but sauntering to an all-time high profit-level, seem a very long time ago.
The best recommendations for the favourites in tomorrow's Hennessy Gold Cup and Fighting Fifth Hurdle, Saphir du Rheu and Wicklow Brave, is that I don't fancy either of them at all. So there's a double for you that should pay 16/1. But, away from the crucible of high pressure tipstering that is the Saturday Nap, I might do the latest, last remaining few quid in my account on The Young Master in the Hennessy.
Paddy's website has introduced this crowing little reminder when one logs in that says, 'your account is running low, do you want to top it up' which is not as helpful as I'm sure they want to pretend it is.
No, Paddy, I don't. I'll decide when I want to do that. Did I accompany all the bets I placed in August with a message that said, 'ha, ha, you daft bookie, you are paying for my drinks these days. No, I didn't. So let's have a bit of decorum while you take me back to the cleaners.

Sport. I ask you. What was ever the point of it.