For One Night Only

Good Evening, Bedhampton. 

 

This evening I report from the joint reading of poets from the Chichester and Portsmouth groups that took place in the elegant surroundings of the Waterloo Room in the Elms.

Well organized and timed to perfection, there was as much rain in the poems indoors as there was in the weather outdoors and plenty of memorials to relations, some accomplished readings, music, cake, hot drinks and wine. 

No wine for me, of course- not while I'm on duty. There's enough can go awry trying to remember what to say to an audience without confusing the issue with Merlot.

Being on last either means one is the last hope, like a no. 11 batter, or top of the bill like Ken Dodd on The Good Old Days or Oasis at Glastonbury. It's hard to tell and it's even harder to tell if one was any good. The set list was - Piccadilly Dusk, Fiction, Windy Miller, Rainyday Woman. The audience were kind and not as fearsome and unreceptive as one's worst imaginings had anticipated. I got on, one or two of the attempted funny bits got a bit of reaction, Windy Miller made me feel emotional when really one objective of art is to make that happen to those listening and I got off in one piece. I didn't mess up and that was the height of my ambition and now the sense of relief is almost glorious.

I don't have to do it again. Any further performances can stay on the page.

Shadowy Lives

 It says at the top here, and has done for some time that,

The website is now what it has become, ... It will be about whatever suggests itself. 

I quite the way that from time to time a theme develops, rather than the mere repetition of old opinions and prejudices that have been set out several times before.

Coming to the end of Katherine Duncan-Jones's Ungentle Shakespeare, it is every bit as impressive as Jesus by A.N. Wilson and is doing a similar thing. Both are shedding highly informed and rational light on lives that have got out of hand in traditional re-tellings and idolatry. Germaine Greer was one who, in her life of Anne Hathaway, scorned the 'bardolaters' for who Shakespeare could do no wrong but even their devotion is paltry and half-hearted compared to that of Christians and their versions of Jesus. Wilson knows the scriptures and reads them with an alert scepticism and Duncan-Jones brings the same intelligence to her interpretation of Shakespeare. Implicit in both of their approaches is an understanding that their subjects are human. If they weren't then their work would have been less likely to be relevant. Wilson is Church of England and maybe his ex-wife was, too, but the C. of E. in recent decades has been quite liberal on belief in God and perhaps they have an inkling that gods are the product of man's imagination.

Where the tradition Sunday School Jesus was meek and mild and suffered little children to come unto him, we come away from Wilson with the impression of a firebrand preacher who wanted Jews to be better Jews, not establish his own church. He was a troublesome political figure crucified by the Roman rulers. Similarly, Shakespeare, on account of his sublime writing, was elevated to the sweet Swan of Avon who charmed everyone who met him and understood the human situation sympathetically. Such an account overlooks the litigious businessman building a portfolio of investments, a misogynist with an ongoing disgust towards women and an obsession with establishing his gentlemanly status. Both built up sizeable followings in their lifetimes while both would surely be astonished not only at their influence over 2000 and over 400 years later but also the myths and legends put about by their subsequent followers that have become so widely accepted.

--

One last aspect of the KDJ book is her setting out of the last part of Shakespeare's career before retirement circa 1613. Throughout her book she has very sceptical about the success of the marriage to Anne and she is consistent in explaining that the purchase of the Blackfriars gatehouse with three trustees was a move to prevent the property being left to her. 

She was writing before the discovery of the letter addressed to 'Good Mrs. Shakespaire' which has been dated to the 1600's. With William living as a 'lodger' in Silver Street from circa 1604, any credence given to that letter might need to be put nearer to 1610. The purchase of the gatehouse is not until March 1613. The incumbent there on Shakespeare's death, John Robinson, could plausibly have been in his service.

Anne being in London circa 1610 fits with the idea of some reconciliation that is reflected in the themes of the 'late plays' that were written from then onwards. But it doesn't look like such a complete reconciliation that such an asset was to be left to her. And the famous difficulties of interpreting what the bequest of the 'second best bed' in the will is meant to mean. None of which makes it impossible to form an idea of what was happening. There is no need to explain away every detail in a convoluted way and come up with a story that fits it all in for the sake of it. We don't know for sure and it's best to say as much.

--

But a third title of the seven shortlisted for Best Book in the House is on a comparable theme. KDJ is quick to correct the often-heard truism that 'not much is known about Shakespeare's life'. Not enough, certainly, but quite a bit. Not all of it reliable, as in the case of Jesus Christ. But much more guesswork and assuming are needed if one wants to imagine the life of Vermeer, another raised to quasi-saintly status on the back of the tremendous legacy left in his work. Due, possibly next up, as I re-read the best books I've ever read, is Benjamin Moser's The Upside-Down World, which isn't a life of Vermeer but alongside Carel Fabritius and Pieter de Hooch, he is one of the foremost in the greatest Golden Age anywhere in any genre, Dutch C17th Painting. Not everybody will agree. There is a time around 1720 when European music was doing especially well. There was 1971 when pop music was very wonderful for the most part.

--

On a slightly less elevated level, I'm most gratified that my mate, Kev, has chosen my poem, Romanticism, to read at an ongoing local event where readers recite poems from memory. I said I could thus attend in support and if one was required to perform I could do Rainyday Woman which I do know. Gladly, in what is a wise guideline, one isn't supposed to do one's own poems and one hardly wants to instigate a celebration of oneself.

What I do like, though, is how people choose poems of mine, when required, that are among the best of them. Over the years that has also included The Cathedrals of Liverpool, Windy Miller and Situation. There is something reassuring about others liking the one's I like best. It would be awful if none of my favourites ever got a mention and people chose titles that, in retrospect, might have been lucky to get into print. There are a few of those.

One thing KDJ says about Shakespeare's late plays is how they are 'backward-looking', partly at his own career, like The Tempest. He was only 52 when he died but he seemed to know he had done enough. Again, not imagining myself quite in the same league, I have been spending some time reviewing the oeuvre, aged 66. Poems rarely came in battalions but single spies and they come less often than ever. But I'd rather have one worth having per year- when it used to be four- than none at all. It isn't over til it's over.    

Orwell, Auden

One comes away from D.J. Taylor's Orwell biography well-informed but probably knowing less what to think of the man than before. To call someone a 'complex character' is often to cover a multitude of things one would rather not say but with Orwell, he's perhaps a complex character. I'm not entirely convinced by the socialism but these days I'm not entirely convinced by socialism anyway. And the idea of 'secular saint' would be overshadowed by the knowledge of what some saints were really like. Being austere might qualify him as such but it's not what the phrase is meant to imply.

But he got shot through the throat for his efforts and was apparently almost manically devoted to his writing so he deserves some sympathy. All but disowning his early novels, which are fine, the great success of Nineteen Eighty-Four might be some way ahead of what it deserves except for its brilliant insights into totalitarianism. I'd long thought of him as not a difficult writer but his life reveals quite a difficult man.

--

I'm never much of one for the poetry workshop. Any editing process is a private thing and unshareable, being personal to oneself, and I'd much rather wait for the poem to be ready to be written before trying to write it when it is then more likely to write itself.

But the Auden poem was presenting difficulties in lines 5-8. I sat outside for some time trying various options but it seemed never to be satisfactory until the bright idea of leaving them out. It's always an idea and I think it worked. I'm happy with this now. Best thing I've done since the last booklet- which isn't saying much- but possibly a candidate to go on the highly selective Collected list which now extends to 27 poems.

 
 

Auden 

The cigarette he sucks is surrogate
for something more than likely sexual,
the eyes can summarize a likely mate
like something due to be intertextual.

The lines that might look careworn are in fact
a rare affliction or a gift that came
to him as queerly as a lovers’ pact
that turned out, as can be the case, the same

as everyone else’s do – electric
at first but too soon too habitual
to seem more than the sort of magic trick
that might or might not happen to us all. 

 

Fifteen Poems

 So, having idly wondered about my own poems the other day, what better inconsequential thing to do of a Sunday afternoon, while Lulu plays her Sounds of the 70's, than pick over them. Not pick over them as much as see what there were. One can forget. What little time spent reading poems these days is not spent on my own.

I looked through the booklets and, with strictness aforethought, noted those certain for any short list onto a spreadsheet. I ended up with fifteen titles which is a frugal Selected, not the selective Collected I had in mind. Then, to put them in order, I played Devil Take the Hindmost and worked up from no. 15 as the game intensified.

It was in hindsight a game that was designed for Rainyday Woman to win because that is foremost in my thoughts. I'm the last person who ought to be picking such a list but I wouldn't expect anybody else to do it and there are precious few I could trust not to miss the point.

A further session would be needed to extend the list to the 30-40 that might constitute the selective Collected but it's a job that's never quite over, one's preferences in any such list varying almost from day to day. 

It was worth doing, not just the process of doing the list but the little look at what I ever produced in this esoteric endeavour. I'd be the first to allow I have much to be modest about but poems, in a mostly underachieving sort of life, were one of the few things I sometimes wasn't bad at. I'm glad that the list is dominated by later titles. A proper artist improves with time rather than begins well and proves unable to follow up. I'm not ashamed to be the author of,

Rainyday Woman

Fiction

Windy Miller

The Cathedrals of Liverpool

Piccadilly Dusk

Cygnus

Herbstregen

Starý židovský Hřbitov

Tycho Brahe at Uraniborg

Romanticism

Success

Situation

Summer

Kiss

Move Over, Darling

 

Auden, poem

 I'm not- at least yet- saying this is any good but it's only a few minutes since I said I might or might not sometime see about writing the poem about Auden that I dreamed about about ten hours ago. I just thought I'd see what happened during the Pinot Grigio.

I reckon I can still do it given an idea worth having. 

Auden 

The cigarette he sucks is surrogate
for something more than likely sexual,
the eyes can summarize a likely mate
like something due to be intertextual.
At a European outpost, someone
holds a nervous gun. At home his mother
wonders whether the shooting has begun
while preparing dinner for his brother.

The lines that might look careworn are in fact
a rare affliction or a gift that came
to him as queerly as a lovers’ pact
that turned out, as one might have thought, the same
as everyone else’s do – electric
at first but too soon too habitual
to seem more than the sort of magic trick
that might or might not happen to us all.

(revised 17/07)

Dreaming of Auden

 Nothing quite as boring as other people's dreams, is there. They are clearly the sub-conscious trying to sort out its baggage and anxieties, whether in obvious or symbolic ways, and while it's obvious that other people would dream about their obsessions, it's fascinating when we do so, so vividly, about our own.

This morning, in the last stages of R.E.M., I was back in Linden Huddlestone's sixth form class, circa 1977, and he had set us an exercise to write a poem that was a 'character study'. I immediately decided to write about Auden, sure that I could do it and knowing he had an interest in him. In the way that dreams mix up timescales, I probably wasn't aware that Mr. Huddlestone was an Auden admirer and I wouldn't have known enough about him to write the poem I might now, then. But that's neither here nor there.

I made a few notes of lines to put together to make my collage portrait and was confident I could make it work. But not necessarily before the end of the lesson when we might have to read it out or hand it in. But I was so sure I could do it that I thought I'd be fine saying, no, I haven't finished yet but I'll give it to you tomorrow and it'll be great. 

That was until I mislaid the notes I'd made and was desperately trying to reconstruct them. In real life, more than 30 years ago, I lost a poem, reconstructed it from memory, and then found the original and saw that they weren't very like each other. I was half re-making the fragments of the poem in a bit of a panic, knowing I'd miss the deadline and have to rely on my promise of a teenage masterpiece when I woke up.

The idea of the poem was still sharp enough for me to make approximations of a couple of lines once awake but I didn't write them down. They've all but gone now. I could go back to the start and undertake the exercise all over again. Or I could try to remember the idea for a poem I had the day before yesterday which seems to have gone completely. Either way, if anything came of them I'd put them here but don't come rushing back in expectation. It's rare for poems to realize the idea of how good they'll be. The best are those that somehow turn out to be something different in the process of making them and are better.

Ackroyd, Henry James, Four Poems, Next Prime Minister

Chichester's Oxfam bookshop served up Peter Ackroyd's essays in The Collection and Henry James, The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw this week. 

Ackroyd will be taken in bite-sized bits. Going straight to his Larkin, by way of the Motion biography, one finds him taking a dim view of Larkin's dim views without any compensating consideration of the consolations. He is firmly set against the man and his poems and unforgiving. Looking at his verdicts on other poets, that seems to be his way. Undoubtedly highly astute and discriminating, he is also sometimes a bit cheap in his put downs and one is tempted to put him and his book down, too, in the same way. Much of the journalism comes from The Spectator and there's an unattractive disdain in his tone until he gets to a poet like Prynne who is one whose poems are difficult enough for him. 

Maybe it's a good idea to read writers one doesn't like sometimes but after a while this is one volume that might find itself back on Oxfam's shelves in due course.

Whereas Henry James, who I've long thought I wouldn't like, is likely to be collected much further. His reputation for overly involved sentences and being heavy going was not corroborated by The Aspern Papers which I have just enjoyed enormously and seen off in short order. Atmospheric, beautifully done and Venetian, one wonders at the intensity of obsession with the great poet, Jeffrey Aspern, and the fact that Juliana Bordereau, his girlfriend, is now 150 years old when 100 would be plenty but that was captivating stuff and it might have turned out that James was the greatest writer I'd not read before and whatever else Oxfam have of his is likely to follow The Turn of the Screw. 

--

In case it transpires that I return to the sullen art of poetry readings in the near future, I rehearsed with the microphone on the laptop and have produced a recording entitled Four Poems. It fits perfectly into the five minutes I'm guessing would be the requirement, even including thirty seconds to get up and walk to the front. I wouldn't want to do more than five minutes, not least because I'm not sure many would want to listen for any longer, but it's hardly worth going to do less.

Not having heard myself do it much before, it's not as easy as one might think to get it as good as it sounds in one's head. I know the rhythms are there because I put them in but it's necessary to concentrate to get them right.

After four attempts it wasn't bad, without being flawless, but not to worry. It was intended to be made available here but it looks like incorporating audio files isn't possible, or at least far too difficult for me to do. So I guess it doesn't matter anymore.

The four poems are Piccadilly Dusk, Fiction, Windy Miller and Rainyday Woman. 

--

Meanwhile, surely even the political obsessives at Times Radio must eventually weary of reporting and speculating on the process of arriving at our seventh Prime Minister in ten years. To think we once looked down on Italy for their rapid turnover of governments.

Running the country must be a hard job and yet those doing it feel the need to continue with the internal machinations of what is only really a game of realizing their individual ambitions.

Keir Starmer is a good man hard done by, let down by his own party more than anybody else because, like most recent Labour Prime Ministers, he's not really Labour. It can't be wrong to lack charisma because Attlee was the best there ever was but he's not very good at it. The parallels with his direct opposite, Boris, pile up, most noticeably when he announces he's going to do ten years when he might not have ten more weeks.

I tipped Shabana Mahmood here a fewc weeks ago but that was about as good as the feeling I once had for Amber Rudd. So far unblemished, she'd no more carry her backbenchers with her than Keir or any other bluish type who might try to balance the books as a priority. But it's an impossible outcome to call. And whoever wins this time has three more years to survive and so will by no means be guaranteed to lead Labour into the next General Election. When was the last time the leader of the Conservative party could be backed at 50/1, and more, to be the Next Prime Minister.

These are unlikely days but it's likely they will get unlikelier yet.  

Marco Polo on Hormuz

 Towards the end of his vivid accounts of his travels, Marco Polo does what Lyse Doucet does so well and reports on a conflict. The malik of Kalhat 'had a powerful hold over' the sultan of Kerman due to his control over Hormuz and,

commands the gulf and the sea even more effectively. 

If only Donald Trump had read Marco Polo before getting himself embroiled out of his depth.

 

The Travels are full of good stories, whether they're right or wrong. It's very much the sort of thing that can bring me a poem and I've been in search of such a thimng for quite some time. A Million Lies, a couple of weeks ago, isn't really it but Witness is a better effort. It was to be in ten syllable lines and two eight-line stanzas but attemps at form like that can be discarded. Some rhythm can be maintained without them, having used it as a framework to begin with. It could be revised further yet but, grateful for it as I am, it might be allowed to stand as it is.

Witness 

this region is so far north that the Pole Star
is left behind towards the south.
                           Marco Polo, Travels

Except there is no such topography
in which anything is further north than north.
No wonder some weren’t having it
about him seeing unicorns
but not quite as advertised,
ugly brutes wallowing in slime.
Well, yes, that was preposterous
but not for one
who’d not previously come across
such a thing as a rhinoceros. He believed his eyes.

Hyperbole is all that one has left
when one can’t see a limit to such wealth
and strangeness so that it looks infinite
like the universe still does and might be yet.
He didn’t tell the half of it, he said,
recalcitrant and not giving an inch,
for we see what we think we see. It’s true
as far as we know and not for them to say. 

During the Late and Long Continuing Cold

During the Late and Long Continuing Cold, An Eightieth-Birthday tribute to Peter Didsbury, edited by Sean O'Brien and David Wheatley (Broken Sleep Books).

 Happy Birthday, Peter Didsbury. An expanded edition of his Scenes from a Long Sleep is published today and this festschrift, edited by Sean O'Brien and David Wheatley, is available for pre-order at Broken Sleep ahead of its imminent release date. It features poems by an impressively gathered cast of the great and good with such as Don Paterson, Ian Duhig, Carol Rumens, Rory Waterman, plenty more than that and some good wishes from Douglas Dunn. And me, actually. It's a bit like a non-league player finding themselves in the England squad for a friendly match. 

Peter Didsbury has long been a central figure in the story of how Hull became an unlikely-sounding epicentre of British poetry in recent decades, post-Larkin, post-Stevie Smith and a long time post-Andrew Marvell. If Larkin's provincial hideout in its university library began something there and attracted Andrew Motion, it is perhaps more properly Douglas Dunn who might be regarded as the godfather of its mafiosi although 'movement' might be a gentler term for what could be regarded as a more coherent grouping than The Movement ever was. 

It would surely be improper to submit the sort of poem one might place in the middle of a book to thicken it up, or for the editors to include such things, in a tribute to a respected writer and that hasn't happened. I must look further than I previously have into the work of Carol Rumens on the evidence of The Sense of Vision. If Paterson's Hedgehog appears to begin like Aesop, it becomes more like Einstein. If, as I sometimes suspect, we are not living in a Golden Age of British Poetry then the ongoing parade of talent now assembled here is evidence that it's not so bad after all. And there's little for poetry to fear from AI when O'Brien puts in a signature performance in The Lost Language of Trains that only he could have.

Didsbury is inimitable and I don't think anybody has dared to try. It would have been unwise. What has resulted is a profound tribute to one who has always done it his own way from a litany of admirers doing it theirs.   

 

Take Four Books - Romanticism

Radio 4 has a programme called Take Four Books. In it, an author talks about one of their books and then three others that were 'influences' on it. I can't help wanting to have a go at any questionnaire, desert island or suchlike and so, realizing that my level of celebrity is well below that required to get an invitation, do it anyway, here.

I can't think that my trio of such models for Romanticism will bring in any surprises. Least of all, Philip Larkin.

Some of the ways these 'influences'- terrible word redolent of the 60's, drug culture and being 'under the influence' but it's better than 'influencers'- are consciously adopted and some less so. I arrived at my own method of trying to 'avoid bad practice' before I found a very similar phrase used to describe Larkin and The Movement of the 1950's. For me, thus, not wanting to do the wrong thing, it means irony, understatement rather than anything overblown, trying to avoid sentimentality, being readily understandable and doing so within chosen forms and seeing the poem as, hopefully, a piece of music. Mostly that.

But Larkin is also an example for not writing too much, doing what he does carefully and finding something lyrical and worth having rising from his low expectations. Low expectations of this life, not of what might be written about it.

Situation is a bit like This Be The Verse - same number of lines, same rhyme scheme but I have 10 syllables in a line where he has 8. Finding a rhyme on 'the coastal shelf', I was well aware that it's a simile memorably used in the Larkin and wondered if it was too obviously a steal. But his use of it doesn't mean the phrase can't ever be used in poetry again and it stayed in, becoming an echo in a poem about 'going nowhere slowly' which is what the likes of Mr. Bleaney are doing.

Success implicitly acknowledges a debt to Posterity. One could find further, if vaguer, echoes of Larkin elsewhere but since I'm sometimes unsure whether I'm listening to Beethoven or Mozart, for example, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

 

Sean O'Brien has more than once been credited as a master of iambic pentameter. He undoubtedly makes good use of it and I've seen manuscripts with stresses on where he's been checking he's got it right. I'm less concerned with precise adherence to classical standards and count syllables more than metrical beats but, more than that, only really want the rhythm to flow and find that fitting the stresses over lines of defined length are a great help, not a hindrance.

The 'rainy Wednesdays/ In suburbs where the library's always closed then' could perhaps have come from O'Brien with its rain, library and the sense of ennui on long afternoons. It doesn't, though. It comes out of real life as part of an objective correlative for a kindly relationship that doesn't aspire to love. That's Larkinesque, too, in a way but I'd much prefer to define the gradations of acceptable equilibrium than aspire to some hyperbole of high passion and be found wanting. Which is what Romanticism, the poem, is about. Keats and his accomplices found themselves entranced by anything transcendent but, actually, were at least as much in love with the ruins of it.

 

So I needed a third influence. A poet who moves between rhyme, unrhymed lines, metrical lines and 'free verse' if need be. That would be Thom Gunn, for a very long time a great hero of mine, but this book isn't as Gunn as I've sometimes thought I've been before. And I'm never going to be as Rosemary Tonks as my liking for her might make me want to be because I'm not the world's most passionate guy and her trademark exclamation marks are dramatically intended whereas I'd never do such a thing unless, as in Escape Artist, as pastiche or with other second-hand inferences.

But her dissatisfaction with this life, or the world as she finds it, is somehow akin to mine, as it is in their own ways for Larkin and O'Brien and I wouldn't want to pass her over even if, as pastiche often remains, Escape Artist can't help being still more Green than Tonks.

So,

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems 

Sean O'Brien, Ghost Train 

Rosemary Tonks, Bedouin of the London Evening

 

but, having just done that, I'd no more go on Take Four Books than I'd take up any other quite so public exposure. Larkin was ambivalently equivocal about such exposure and Rosemary went to extraordinary lengths to try to extricate herself from it. Talking about oneself could be a stage further on towards madness from talking to oneself. One is better leaving such work as one sees fit for whatever attention readers want to apply to it. It's for commentators to do the commentating.   

Audio

The Studio Album.

Piece of cake with this simple, home use technology. I'll knock up some sort of document to go with it, whether or not it amounts to sleeve notes, see if I can think of a better title than Audio and a picture for the cover and there it will be.

It looks like it e-mails okay, the file size not being too big to go, so it could be made freely available. It remains to be seen if I'll re-record it before doing that. It comes in two parts because, as recording engineer, I accidentally began a new file before track 3.

George Martin put Cilla through numerous takes for Anyone Who Had a Heart and Burt Bacharach wanted even more for Alfie before they were happy. I maybe ought to be slightly fussier than using my first takes without being quite so perfectionist but I'm not trying to make a million-seller.

The track listing is,

Twilight
Piccadilly Dusk
The Cathedrals of Liverpool
Starý židovský Hřbitov
Fiction
Move Over, Darling
Herbstregen
Situation
Rainyday Woman
Windy Miller
Romanticism
Success 

 

Twelve poems approximating to the greatest hits without that being a suitable title because I'm not claiming greatness for them, or even that they were hits. There is always a borderline area where one or two look lucky to get in ahead of one or two others.

But it's an enjoyable thing to do while also making one feel as if one is attempting to be a 'heritage' artist, re-packaging the back catalogue or, as the Sex Pistols more forthrightly put it, Floggin' a Dead Horse. But it might have the effect of initiating some rekindling of the motivation to try to produce more of such things. If the right idea shows up, I'd be glad to. Whether it does anything to encourage 'live' performances is another matter.

However, with a few weeks without musical events to report on, at least DGBooks is back to talking about books and even that which the original idea was to do, my poems. 

The Studio Album

     The new laptop promises to be quite a success. Already I've taken it upstairs and looked at a book on it from the safety of my remote eyrie away from the possibility of kids playing outside. I then went on to watch some greyhound racing and landed a modest gamble on the fav in the long distance open race, which always seems the sensible option in dog racing. Thus, while there is still money in the account, I availed myself of 10/1 about Jagwar for the National although if I were you I'd wait until the day when the advertised prices might be better.

However, I found the microphone and sound recording features, too.  

I find this visual representation of my first go at reading a poem a thing of rare beauty. The title and each of the fourteen lines come in similar, but all different, shapes of sound suggesting variety within discipline which is what I like to think it is - like something by Haydn, perhaps. It has immediately given rise to ideas of recording a little album of poems. I've never doubted that poems are to be read aloud, it's just I don't like doing it in public for a number of reasons. But recorded in private without all the protocols of the 'live' reading, much of that is avoided.

So, something to think about. 8 poems, maybe 10, all done on one file hoping it would be of e-mailable size although I have my doubts.                        

A Million Lies

Even though it was, I think, only yesterday that something provided the vague prompt that there might be a poem there, I can't remember what it was.

Not to worry. I've been more or less in a state of thinking I'd not write another poem for most of the time I've been writing them so I thought I'd try. It can easily be removed from here if, after its subsequent review, it is found not good enough. But I'm glad enough to have it for now.

It's about Marco Polo, the reports he took back to Venice from his trip into the East. For the most part, I believe him but I wouldn't blame those who didn't at the time because, if I'd been there then, I'd have suspected him of being a purveyor of fake news and, like it says, science fiction with which to astound the gullible masses. 

Maybe I'll get his book, read it and write a better poem later but there is this for now. I'm not unhappy with it. We will find out after a couple of weeks if it still looks okay but this having once been established as a website to 'promote' my poems, it's long overdue that it featured such a thing.

  
A Million Lies

He had been there and back, he said, 

Seen unicorns and behaviour
Beyond their quaint imagining.
Some bought it all and bought the book
While others would have none of it
And went back to their boring work
Or stared into the drab canal.
And even those carving the stone
On the ornate basilica,
Who had little faith in dragons
Or that it could be turtles
All the way down weren’t as tempted
As they might have been.

He might not have been anywhere,
No further than, say, Antioch,
Made most of the rest of it up
And then pretended to come back
With his crazy science fiction
To make such a name for himself.
He got that far, at least.

Take a look at the lawman Beating up the wrong guy.

 It's in Life on Mars? that,

    Lennon's on sale again. 

 

And now, it would appear, so am I. Here, 

E-Bay, The Perfect Book 

 

It's remarkable what happens once books go out of print. Prices sky rocket to £4.38 plus p&p. There's always somebody ready to cash in.

Once in a while I google myself - vanity, vanity, all of it vanity- but it's not often there's anything new to be found about such a low profile poet.

It's just slightly saddening that I never took any money for those books and yet someone else would. They are cheap to get printed and I gladly gave them away to good homes. So the e-Bay seller never paid the £5 it says the book cost on the back. I have only the vaguest of ideas of how it might be in Guildford with a book by Maggie Sawkins, also of this parish.

But good luck to them. It might not be that the book was unappreciated. It could conceivably be that a genuine poetry lover has died and their family have less interest in this obscurest of titles.

But there is no need to pay £7.08 for it.

Yes, it is officially out of print but I could probably find you a copy if you wanted one.   

--

Much more dispiriting is what reaction 'twins theory', at Strange Fowl gets when it gets any.

For most it is unthinkable, 'bizarre' and almost, one might think, disloyal to the point of insurrectionist. But we're not like that at all. Mr. Curtis and I are entirely compos mentis and only ask if our modest proposal is disprovable.

Strange Fowl continues to add up, for me, and there are those Oxfordians, conspiracy theorists and much more of a host of those who don't believe in William Shakespeare that I ever imagined. And, distressingly, really, it is the likes of them from who we get some support.

They are welcome, of course. Few campaigns turn away any followers except we are exiled in mainstream, we are among the Stratfordian faithful and have nothing more dangerous to offer than some adjustment in Shakespeare's biography to the number of children he may or may not have been the biological father of.

And yet there is more in the news about the authorship question and The Real Shakespeare: Emilia Bassano Willoughby by Irene Coslet who,

comes to Shakespeare as an expert in feminism. She has studied feminism for 20 years and has been involved in the promotion of gender equality in multiple organisations and countries around the world. 

and I'm impressed that she does. But her reading of Shakespeare makes her a perfect fit for the tendency identified by Jonathan Bate that we all make Shakespeare into who we would like him to be, as per Virginia Woolf,

that all Shakespearean biography is veiled autobiography.

 

I'm not at all confident that modest proposals, carefully threaded together by gently thoughtful people, are loud enough to be heard any more. That is by no means a reason to give up on them but it might be a reason to put it in place once and for all and let the world go to bad if that's what it is intent on doing.  

AI

I'm sure that more worthwhile writers, musicians and maybe even painters than me look themselves up on the internet. I know they do because I've heard from some of them. It's a long time since I found anything about me I haven't known about and no news can't be bad news but you never know if somebody might have got hold of a copy of Romanticism, considered it quite glorious, and said so. Nobody has but AI summaries have been added to Google searches, and Bing and all and so it's interesting to see what it makes of Strange Fowl, the Shakespeare essay, and me as a 'poet'.

Google's AI thinks that,

David Green is a poet from Nottingham who currently resides in Portsmouth and is known for his book The Perfect Book (2018). His poetry, published under the imprint David Green (Books), covers a range of subjects, including the complexities of war, poverty, childhood memories, and the beauty of the natural world. He also maintains a blog where he discusses poetry, books, and music.

 

But, no, that is bordering on a 'fail'. While some of it is true, AI has conflated me with another 'poet' of the same name. I'm flattered to read that I'm 'known'. I'd never presume to write about war because I've not been in such a thing and wouldn't have anything to add anything to what Wilfred Owen and such writers wrote. Not on poverty, either. 

That must be the other bloke who is either a destitute ex-soldier or otherwise a victim of war, or he is prepared to attempt an empathy with the sufferings of others that I would not. King Canute and Ronnie Spector notwithstanding.

Childhood memories, yes, there are a few. The beauty of the natural world might not be a main feature in my poems. Of course it has plenty and I'm in favour of it but I suspect that 'art' is somehow more my environment. 

 

AI's got a long way to go yet. If it can't get beyond the simple facts of Green Studies and writes about entirely the wrong poems it's not going to get far in Eng Lit.

--

While I'm here. Excuse me. Can I try out a little test and see if this link works,

Strange Fowl

 

 

The Bad Boys of Portsmouth Poetry

 Kev and I aren't 'bad' at all, really- well, I'm not- but it amuses us in what we take to be 'later life' to imagine ourselves vaguely significant. Like The Movement, we are no kind of movement at all but at least we are mates, which they weren't. Kev's more Beat whereas I make Larkin look like a free-wheeling 60's troubadour in comparison. But it's a picture for the photo album if one still kept such a thing.

--

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the words above are by no means the whole story of today in Chichester. Poor Rokas was always up against it after I'd emerged from the Oxfam Bookshop with the Complete J.S. Bach by Helmuth Rilling.

172 discs is a week's worth of non-stop music by the greatest creative artist that ever lived, five star reviews throughout at Amazon where it is available for £191, secondhand for £134, and Oxfam were asking £49.99. As snap decisions go, it was quite snappy.

One needs to find time to play these things, and live long enough, so I left Complete Mozart, Schubert and Scarlatti Sonatas on the shelves there. I can't imagine they will still be there next time but I am at least safe in the knowledge that I got myself a bargain.

--

On the other hand, having got along okay for a while with The Whirlpool by George Gissing, it was abandoned because I didn't care enough. I went upstairs and found Thérèse Raquin instead which was even better than I remembered it with its hideous psychology and thriller plot. Zola is the real thing in a French team of the period that England would do well to match with Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant and onwards to Gide and Camus. The Masterpiece is on order from the library alongside a biography of Brahms and Madame Bovary is being given a further outing while I wait.

How did that happen

Meeting up with Jeff Turner yesterday, one never goes away without feeling the wiser for what he's said about poems. Thus it was very good to hear him saying positive things about Romanticism. It's one thing if I'm happy with what I've done- and enough- but a tremendous bonus if someone one respects thinks so, too.

This morning, then, I had another look. Line 6 of the book. How did that happen? How many times have I read that. But, of course, an author reading one's own work knows what it's supposed to say and so sometimes that's what they see. And not every proof reader would know the genitive case of the Latin for Swan, as per the constellation.

It says, 

The name that Alpha Cyngi's better known by,  

when it should say 'Alpha Cygni'. It's taken me six months to find that having thought missing the accent off 'cortege' once while remembering it another time was my only erratum. D'oh.

But, hold on, that poem first appeared in About Larkin. Did nobody notice it then. 

No, it was fine then in issue no. 53, three years ago. So when and how did it get amended from being correct into a typo. There's only me that could have done it and I wouldn't have typed it out again, I'd have cut and pasted the text into the book from the original typescript.

I don't know. But I'm aware of instances in books by much more respected and renowned authors than me that went into print with similar mistakes in them and maybe in the same way that one's not a proper cyclist until one's fallen off a few times, one isn't a proper writer -or editor, for that matter - until that's happened.

I did once do a book in which no errors have been found yet. I think, quite fittingly, it was The Perfect Book.

--

I was taken by surprise by the death of Sly Stone yesterday, 82. He was very much in the category of those I didn't think could have still been alive.

The hit parade in 1971/72 abounded with seemingly significant masterpieces, Family Affair being a paragon example, and somehow fittingly today's weekly match v. Heardle 90's, 80's, 70's, 60's was won 3-1, beginning with a tremendous opening goal on the opening bar of Everyday People by Arrested Development, a cover of Sly Stone from those far-off days when hip-hop was any good

 

'The Peacocks in the Arboretum' draft

 It's all music here these days, isn't it. It's not meant to be but that's the way it goes. Before we have yet more of that, finding this manuscript and finding it of interest, I'd like to indulge myself by including some words on it. Probably of very little interest to anyone except me and, on the wilder outskirts of possibility, some future professor who comes across my poems and decides that, after all, I was the defining voice of my generation of English poets.   !!!!

I included three manuscripts in the pdf Collected Poems by way of showing that when some of the best poems came they came fluently and naturally and needed very little later improvement. That is not to say that they were written immediately; the ideas had a few days if not weeks to take shape but the actual composition happened very quickly.

Not so with Peacocks in which the process was almost the other way round, the idea coming easily but the final version requiring some adjusting and fitting together. Still perhaps not as hard won as some poets who take months over such things but a more involved process for me than is usual. It is on the inside of an old envelope because the other side had a first version which at that stage was not made relevant to the occasion it was made relevant to. And that was reflected in how long it then took me to think it was worthwhile which it especially needed to be for the private, solemn occasion it was written for. As such, for the time being it remains unpublished but it has by now convinced me and so it could see print one day, somewhere.

Romanticism, Reaction Received

 I've gone to the highly self-regarding lengths of copying across all reaction received regarding Romanticism to make a miniature Casebook edition for my own purposes. I can hardly publish the comments here without permissions from their authors but it's an interesting exercise.

Some commentators are accomplished poets or poetry readers and others not quite so much and it's very kind of them to provide either in-depth analysis or less detailed thoughts but they are generous. In many ways, those that find places for suggested improvements are of the most interest but I don't always agree. Mainly it's a great privilege to have been read in such detail.

I'm still very pleased with the book. I think those last three titles were the best I did and if it goes no further it's good to end in such form.

I have to hang on to a few copies in case the copyright libraries take up their option but there are still a few available for want of an address of a good home to send one to.

Four Missing Lines

 This memory thing is getting worse. I thought that crosswords and chess and suchlike were supposed to keep one's faculties fit and alert so God Only Knows what I'd be like without them.

Since other people are reading Romanticism, I thought I'd better have another look. One's own work can suddenly look different with the knowledge that it's out there now and it's too late to change it.

But, what is this? In Escape Artist, a 'stanza' of four lines is missing after the bit about Kind of Blue. It is,

How fashionable ! In Paris 

it meant the world but now 

the sensitive needle 

is condemned to the groove. 

 

I can't remember taking that out. It fits thematically with the LP, Rosemary Tonks living in Paris when Miles Davis was very much a thing, the metaphor of being stuck in a groove and it has her trademark exclamation mark. I can't think why I would have taken it out but equally can't see how I could have done so by accident. It is intact in the version published in the anthology it was contributed to and so, for the benefit of future professors wondering about the revisions in the collected version, no, I'm sorry, I can't explain.

What's done is done. Perhaps, if I did it deliberately, I had my reasons at the time but the layout of the pages in the book would accommodate the out-take perfectly well. I stare at the lines and think I like them well enough. I try to think why I might have removed them and can't.

For the time being it's harmlessly mystifying but it contains sinister implications of what is to come. When she was younger than I am now, Elizabeth Bishop found the milk on her desk which meant her glasses must be in the fridge.