Simon Armitage Library Tour, Portsmouth BookFest

 Simon Armitage Library Tour, Portsmouth BookFest, Menuhin Room, March 4

It appeared to fall nicely that Simon Armitage's 10-year tour of libraries coincided, when it reached the right part of the alphabet, with Portsmouth's BookFest. Having been a student of Geography here and visited a couple of times recently, he knew his way.

As diplomatically as I am able, I need to explain that poetry is a broad church, as is music, as is painting, and if one 'likes poetry' one doesn't necessarily like it all. 

The host from BookFest displayed an overwhelming enthusiasm that made up in hyperbole for everything it lacked in irony. If her build-ups and reactions to the support acts, Maggie Sawkins, Portsmouth’s own Laureate Sam Cox, and Majid Dhana, went unquestioned, her next level left Simon with little option but to pause at the microphone and say, 'no pressure, then'.

The Menuhin Room fitted in 100 and tickets were much sought after. They could have given away- for it was free - plenty more. I dare say the majority took Sam and Majid's exuberantly affirmative performances at face value and felt enabled, inspired and uplifted by their messages of hope and deeply sincere belief in good in the face of all the evidence. But their poems have only one layer and while rhythm and rhyme are essential elements of the music that can make 'poetry' something other than 'ordinary language', not necessarily when that's all it has. When my friend discreetly got up and went out to having a coughing fit - luckily we were near a door- I thought the same as when another friend had done so in Portsmouth Cathedral during a sub-standard performance but, no, they were genuine coughing fits on both occasions.

And, no, we are polite people, happy to give anyone a hearing and well aware that what we are hearing might be brilliant to others, that it might even be us that are wrong. But for me the sincerity was overdone, the righteousness was comic and the poems were not my sort of thing.

Maggie Sawkins, opening the second half, provided the improvement that I was confident she would. She has a more guarded attitude and can do wry humour. I look back at her poem, A Sort of Bargaining, her reading copy of which she gave me after just snatching a competition ahead of me many years ago and by now can think, yes, that's fair enough. She's any good, knows what she's about and thus uses language in subtler ways than bashing it about like a Tonka toy.

And then came Simon, a class act who has done such things so many times and is entirely at ease working an audience with his self-effacing stories. There was nothing at all to find fault with at all in the delivery of the other poets, only the fact they were trying too hard while not having any but the standard poetry reading devices to do it with. Simon doesn't look like he's trying very hard. Probably because he isn't because he doesn't have to. He's had audiences spellbound by his methods time and again. It's a sort of anti-showmanship but, exuding a calm confidence, it entirely works.

Simon's not on my list of especially favourite poets and poetry readings generally are low on my agenda. If one doesn't know the poems already then it's not easy to assimilate them on one first hearing although all four of them did well to read poems mostly not so demanding that one needed much more.

Apparently there's a 'poetry boom' in progress. I can remember several such before. It doesn't mean that Simon is going to be as recognizable a figure as Tennyson was in his time. I happened to see him from a bus, approaching the railway station in Portsmouth City Centre the next day and he wasn't being mobbed or signing autographs. He had quite rightly answered a Q with his A that none of the more popular art forms needed to worry about poetry.

He is tremendous at what he does, however realtively few have the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, what that is. By all means it's a dubious undertaking and not an obvious one to get rich by. There are football players that not even football supporters have ever heard of earning much more money than the most eminent poets that every poetry reader has heard of.

So be it. Everybody had a good time. Even me. 

Sceptred Isle

Helen Carr, Sceptred Isle (Hutchinson-Heinemann) 

I shouldn't have done History at school. Certainly not for 'A' level. It was amorphous and didn't know when to stop. At least Hamlet finished with, Go, bid the soldiers shoot. The full story isn't available, we are taught from a certain point of view, reputations shift and what was once thought turns out not to be. Perhaps that's the beauty of it, though. I enjoy the fact that Hamlet is endlessly open to re-reading. Perhaps I tired of the succession of lords, dukes and princes maneouvring and for the most part getting murdered. History as we were taught it was an interminable game of chess about who ruled who and politics always has been such while the people have somewhere to get to and sail on as calmly as they are allowed.

Helen Carr does well to feature the Wheel of Fortune from the Holkham Bible, c. 1320-30, among her illustrations reflecting the recurrent motif of the kings who come to reighn and are subsequent beset with difficulties. Edwards I, II and III, and Richard II, set up a strong/weak, strong weak succession in which 'strong' means successful in war in other lands and 'weak' means unfitted for such a role and soon beleaguered. The away defeat at Bannockburn thus represents a low point in Englan's C14th adventures and Crecy a great triumph.

As reported by Marlowe and Shakespeare in their matching plays, Edward II and Richard II, are prone to favouritism, Edward to the extent that the two coats of arms displayed at his wedding are his own and those of Piers Gaveston rather than his wife, Isabella's. Helen Carr does her best to play down suggestions of carnal relations between Edward and Gaveston and blames that all on Marlowe but after rival aristocracy have dispatched Gaveston, Edward finds a replacement in Hugh Despenser the Younger. Isabella is a long way ahead of Diana Spencer in finding that there are three people in her marriage and for some time provides a formidable challenge with her own, chosen third party, Roger Mortimer. While there are few ostensible reasons to take sides in these unseemly campaigns for crowns, land and riches, I felt some sympathy and admiration for Isabella but later felt John of Gaunt always seemed like a baddie. Robert Bruce played well for Scotland and provided England with an unwelcome challenge to the north while it remains hard to believe that Aquitaine and some small part of North East France came under English rule. Many years ago now, I attended the opening of the refurbished Hampden Park to see world champions, France, put Scotland away 2-0 without breaking sweat, the famously devoted Scottish supports more concerned with singing Flower of Scotland and a less traditional composition, to the tune of Daydream Believer, about 'poor, old Kevin Keegan' while regularly inviting each other to stand up if they hated England. 1314 remained highly relevant news to them.

Of more pressing concern to ost of the population beyond the sport of the war lords was the Black Death, which is what Covid could have become if left to the laissez-faire bravado of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Piers Corbyn. One of the better arguments for the study of History is that we can learn from it but the fact that what goes round comes round suggests that that has a limited effect. What History mostly provides is wondrous tales of sinister plotting and gore with a bleak insight into the downside of human nature. It's easier to make heroes of the artists who reported from their times, like William Langland in Piers Plowman or perhaps the Pearl poet, not so long ago translated by Simon Armitage, which is where this book leads me next. 

I'm regularly disconcerted by journalists, on my choice of Times Radio, saying that it will be 'fascinating' to see what Trump or Putin does next or what happens in Ukraine, Gaza and all the other wars we hear less about. But it isn't chess or a computer game, it is horror of a kind not visited upon a radio sation's studio. We are 700 years on from the C14th's particular episode of ambition, gratuitous abuse and atrocity and they by no means invented it, they were just part of a long tradition.

I've long suspected that Economics wasn't a proper academic subject because its laws only amount to those that apply at a dog track and Portsmouth's rackety stadium closed some years ago now because it eventually proved unviable. It's tempting to apply the same verdict to History. It repeats itself. There can be few dafter pronouncements than that of Fukuyama when he said it was 'over', if that's what he meant. I'm with the poets, or at least the best of them, like Louis MacNeice,

The Sunlight on the Garden 

Simon Armitage in Southsea

A good number of the Portsmouth poetry community gathered by Southsea Castle this morning to see Simon Armitage, the unveiling of his new poem on the sea defences and hear it read, twice for those who stayed long enough.

The Theatre of the Sea is an impressive effort in response to an approach for such a thing. Simon was a student at Portsmouth Polytechnic in the early 1980's which provides a link to the Poet Laureate. As he read in his unperturbed way, just on cue when he reached the line about the hovercraft, it launched itself towards the Isle of Wight as if choreographed. Enter, stage right, hovercraft.

It was a fine performance by a poet who is making a good job of the strange title he's currently in possession of. 

It was good to see so many of the various Portsmouth poetry people in attendance, not all of who I see very often these days and, unlike some 'public' art, it's a poem worth having.

Westminster Abbey

 Some years ago here I had a go at deciding on some favourite architecture. It might be a better idea, if one hasn't really got a favourite, not to invent one. I decided on some of those flamboyant wavy lines, not really Gaudi and not really Frank Gehry, that are probably 'inspired by' orchids. But, no it's surely far too showy, garish and trying too hard. It's like selecting the dress sense of Leigh Bowery over Giorgio Armani.

Westminster Abbey put in a great performance today. I don't know why I didn't stick with English cathedrals in the first place. Of course they have to try quite hard, they are art, they need to impose themselves on their surroundings and the little country churches gain plenty of credit for their less assuming demeanour but one needs to be impressed.

Once you get into the splendours of Italy one can be put off by the Catholic showiness, the gold on St. Mark's Basilica. If I had to be Christian, I'd be Lutheran. For all its gloriousness, it does it in a measured way. St. Paul's is 'baroque' whereas the Abbey is 'gothic' with, I would have thought, some 'perpendicular' but whereas baroque is a good thing in music, not all these terms translate across genres.

There is a way of being stunning in art without going flat out to be so and Westminster Abbey achieves it by including the necessary sense of decorum in its magnificence. In their ways, Salisbury, Gloucester and

the litany of great English cathedrals all have their claims but I'm nowhere near ready to make any Top 6 out of them and would want to extend beyond religious buildings but whatever our reservations about religion might be, it can be credited with bringing about some of the most brilliant architecture and music.

It's hardly for me to find anything to add to the millions of words of tributes to Queen Elizabeth II. I was an admirer, of course. I saw her three times, always in cars. Once coming out of Dock Gate 4, Southampton; once coming out of Westminster, possibly having opened Parliament, and once while playing pool in the Dorchester Arms, Portsmouth, one lunchtime when we noticed some out-riders going by, in the direction of the dockyard, and waited a minute for the limousine to follow.

We saw the future King Charles III after a concert in Fairford Church, the big selling point of 'Music in Country Churches' being that he was a patron and attended some. Afterwards, some sleek Daimler or Jag was waiting by the side door and I said, 'we might hang round here for a minute' and then there he was, acknowledging the few that had cottoned on with a wave and a brief word.

Simon Armitage had an unenviable job finding an angle from which to say anything remotely original but that's the job he was glad enough to accept. I heard somebody finding fault with it on the wireless but that turned out to be Giles Coren so nobody need worry about that. Simon's Floral Tribute is possibly a B+ in the circumstances, 6 or perhaps 7 out of 10 as a poem but an 8 or more as a Laureate poem when compared with some of Ted's, so it would have been unrealistic to expect anything better.

I spent some time wondering at the minor roles, the vastness of the legions of those with roles to play and tried to spot my old mate, Princess Alexandra, who presented the degrees at Lancaster University in 1981. But the role played by Westminster Abbey was essential and for the most part taken for granted. 

Say what you will. I'm no fervent monarchist. I'm the equivalent of those who would say they believe in God if pushed to say whether they did or not (and I'm not that, either). But you've got to be impressed. Even if it's not the sort of thing you like, and my main objection would be the tendency towards guns, swords and the military, it was immaculate. The ritual, ceremony, fine-sounding words and music might be an elaborate brocade disguising the point that we just don't know anything, do we.

And that, Lds & Gnlmn, is what art does.    

Free Verse

 It was my star turn at Portsmouth Poetry Society this evening, some thoughts on free verse having been my theme for this year's programme. It went very well with a good turnout, not necessarily due to me being the advertised box office attraction.

I hadn't been entirely convinced about my introduction and so had circulated James Fenton on the subject, too, but it went well enough with the kindly people of PPS so here is another chapter towards some eventual Collected Essays.

--

 

Free Verse

Two of the best known remarks about ‘free verse’ are Robert Frost’s, regarding Carl Sandburg, that it is like ‘playing tennis without a net’ and that it is ‘cut-up prose’ which is less easy to attribute to anyone in particular. They both contain within them the idea that free verse isn’t quite the ‘real thing’ but it is for me because, after all these years, I’ve settled on a definition of a poem that says it is,

a statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end.

That might not be the most ambitious or Romantic idea of what poetry is and some will find it underwhelming but poetry is a wide church and ‘in my father’s house are many homes’.

In trying to find out where free verse all began I expected to find evidence of it before C19th France but I haven’t. Homer, Horace and Ovid didn’t see any reason to rhyme but they are devout in their adherence to their sometimes complex rhythmic patterns. In one of his most amusing excursions, Simon Armitage explained the structure of one of the medieval poems he has translated, possibly Gawain and The Green Knight, and for thousands of years, it seems, poetry was a very disciplined art.

‘Verse’ implies structure, the most easily found definition on the internet being, 

writing arranged with a metrical rhythm, typically having a rhyme.

‘Poetry’ doesn’t have to be that. The same source gives, 

literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm.

That might not be the whole story but a significant difference between the two definitions is ‘arranged’. Perhaps free verse likes to pretend that it hasn’t been quite so deliberately ‘arranged’ but I’d be disappointed if it hadn’t.

Wherever there’s an accepted rule there will always be somebody who sees fit to break it and claim for themselves some sort of revolutionary status. Artists, including poets, are often among the sort of people who enjoy being iconoclastic. That’s fine. Go ahead.France in the C19th might also have been where the other, equally apparently oxymoronic ‘prose poem’ emerged. They were busy, trying their damnedest to break rules. Neither those who think that poetry should rhyme or those who think that they’re part of a revolution need do any more than show us a good one.

Rhyme might also have come into English poetry from Italy or France in the Middle Ages, Italian and French being languages in which it can be difficult to avoid rhyme whereas in English one has to try a bit harder and, often to subtle effect, use ‘half-rhymes’. In English, with it being more difficult to achieve, it can be either richer if done carefully or look awkward if the rhyme has appeared to dictate the choice of words. And there are those who still think they don’t have anything to do with metre, syllable counts, rhymes or word patterning because their ‘voice’ is pure and natural.

Unfortunately for them, the language will have done it for them. Having accepted language, rather than, say, colour or music, as their medium, they have made themselves its prisoner. The late, great Roddy Lumsden once told of poets who showed him poems that they said contained none of the verbal effects traditionally associated with ‘poetry’ until he had a look and pointed out inadvertent assonance, rhythm and all such other linguistic ‘special effects’ taught in school as being those things to be identified and appreciated as ‘poetry’. The effect of such prescriptive teaching was to put many pupils off poetry for good, as if it was a homework exercise to be answered, an equation to be solved or some scripture that revealed wisdom rather than something to be enjoyed.

Perhaps language can’t help being poetry. Tony Harrison once reported over-hearing perfect iambic pentameter on a train in the sentence, 

He worked for British Gypsum outside Leek.

It happens whether you want it to or not. The point about poetry, or art of any kind, is that it is presented as such, as per the ‘found objects’ of Marcel Duchamp and the Modernist debt to France seems bottomless. We could spend less time worrying whether a poem is ‘poetry’ or not and concern ourselves more with whether it’s any good or not.

What ‘free verse’ needs to do is establish itself as something other than ‘chopped-up prose’ and it might do that by demonstrating that it has achieved cohesion and artistic effect however it sees fit. That might be deciding where the lines end, internal rhythms, semantic fields or even the failed attempt to avoid any such thing.

Perhaps there’s no such thing as ‘free verse’ and it lives a deluded life, like so many of us possibly do, believing itself to be free when it can’t be, a bit like Jean-Paul Sartre. 

--

What I decided in the end was that I don't first concern myself in music with time signatures or what key it's in. Neither do I worry whether, say, Billie Holliday is jazz, soul or blues. It's only a matter of whether it's any good or not and I found T.S. Eliot coming to a similar conclusion in his 1917 essay, Reflections on Vers Libre, that,
we conclude that the division between Conservative Verse and 'vers libre'  does not exist, there is only good verse, bad verse and chaos.

Great minds might think alike but also mine thought likke his did.

In Memoriam Barney Curley

 

Horse racing lost one of its livelier characters when Barney Curley died on Sunday at the age of 81. He knew what he was about even if it wasn't always appreciated by the bookmakers he took for all kinds of money and the hapless Luke Harvey and John McCririck whose job it was on the above occasion to politely enquire when he didn't.

He wasn't famous for Derby or Grand National winners but found his way to a few spectacular betting coups with less talented horses at the smaller tracks, his strongly held opinions being backed up with proper money when he was sure. One of my turf associates tells of working in a High St. betting office many years ago when the screens were flashing up warnings to staff to take no more bets on Barney's horse. They could see something was up and they were no longer interested in laying it at any price. They had been bitten more than once and by then were shy, which bookmakers usually aren't.

While always watchful for what he was up to, I can't remember benefitting from my interest in him. That was the point, really. The likes of me weren't to know.

I don't imagine him to be an easy man but it's an eclectic mix that qualify for an obituary here and it's often mavericks that are so honoured. It's not obvious that there'll be any more like him with racing and betting being more regulated than the old 'wild west' days which, well within my memory, had some unlikely stories, most of which were true. But he was certainly a serious man, having first thought about a career as a Jesuit priest before managing dance bands in Ireland and then taking on allcomers but mostly the authorities in horse racing and devoting much time, energy and money to his charitable work in Zambia.

More detail is available from more first hand sources than me, not least Graham Bradley's book, The Wayward Lad, which is a courageous defence against Barney's uncompromising criticism. Sic Transit Gloria Barney.

--

According to Simon Armitage's lectures, below, there is no need to be a 'maverick' poet because being any kind of poet is maverick enough. I don't know if he stretched that as far as to include Patience Strong but I take his point, having made it myself elsewhere once or twice.

While Simon's approach was exemplary for the most part, I've found it gloomy to think about since. As far as the poetry world goes, he's on the right side and he is well aware that these days the poetry world doesn't go very far into the rest of the world. Thus, it is absurd when the next sectarian clique announces its rejection of the 'mainstream' and their own, truer way, like Anabaptists, some more fundamentalist strain of Maoist but not really The Sex Pistols or punk rock. Apart from a few on its wilder shores, all they did was retrieve rock'n'roll from the overblown absudity it had become.

No, I'm sure Simon's right in suggesting that poetry is a minor enough branch line already without any need for further obscurantism. The mainstream is a wide and flexible thing and perfectly accommodating to all innovation - it hasn't stood still - with the general proviso, 'all you have to be is any good'. That's perhaps where 'experimental' work fails. Experiments that don't work in science are abandoned whereas some of them in poetry are published.

But my sorrow comes from the part of Simon's 'establishment' jobs that mean he has to say what poetry is, or isn't. He is very good at it, being roughly in the same region of the poetry map as I fondly imagine myself to be, but if he piles up a number of familiar ideas that's because they're familiar to me having been doing it for 45 years, they might not all be so familar to his students. One can also have a high ratio of agreement with his definitions and truisms but, with poetry being an elusive thing, being only as good as 95% true might not be true enough. To say something (which Simon doesn't, I'm just going to make something up) like,

Poetry happens at the intersection, on the cusp, where the pre-meditated marshalling of language engages in a chemical reaction with experience

is hopeless though I dare say there are creative writing tutors one could convince of its profundity.

It might think it is or its authors might think so but there's a lor of bad poetry, or poetry that doesn't work for oneself. Poetry is not a pejorative word carrying within it a sense of approval or quality. As in any other endeavour, one is likely to see bad poetry as much as one sees bad football, bad fashion, bad sandwiches or bad Prime Ministers.

With more of it being written than is ever read, or worth reading, an industry waylaid by not knowing why it's doing what it's doing and only serving itself, this is not the Golden Age it is from time to time promoted as being. Whether it is Paul Muldoon going further beyond the peak of his achievement twenty years ago, further than most can follow him into his allusive elsewheres so that a letter to the TLS asks of a long, opaque poem whhen he will publish the answers or whether it is at the bottom end of amateur work that delivers the same dreary worthiness, one can feel left as if the art form, or at least the art form as one knew it, has exhausted itself.

I know that isn't true and there's plenty to re-read and maybe things I haven't even read yet in the 500+ books on the shelves here. I hardly need to buy any more. In them there will be more than enough reminders of why I did it, why I tried and why for all that time it was their example that made the enterprise so rewarding and not my derivative efforts. I hope I haven't arrived here only to reflect it was all a waste of time.

--

Which leads, a bit tangentially, to the book I'll finish tomorrow that I was sent in error by a seller some years ago. It wasn't even cost effective to send it back or anywhere else, which I would have gladly done, and so I could keep it. I didn't want it then but thought I'd read it now as a further avalanche of a forthcoming second Balzac Festival pile in with Anna Karenina (no, I've not read Tolstoy), the Hardy biography and then that of Ivor Gurney.

It's The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, written in 1774 when he was 24, and thus very high-end Romanticism. So much so that, I find, he later did his best to disown it and regretted the early celebrity it brought him. I don't know so much. It's not a bad book at all and I'm glad to have read some Goethe. It is necessarily precious, it being of its time and not having the same distance and irony we imagine we've developed since. Or, does it not and, have we really.

Taken on its own terms, it's fine thing. I'm tempted to say that Germany invented Romanticism and look what that mutated into and Italy invented Classicism which comes out as slightly more respectable only by losing their race to the bottom.

But I was much taken by Heinrich, a very minor character, who looks back at the time,

he speaks so fondly of, when he was in the madhouse and totally unaware of a thing,

in the words of his mother. It compares well, I dare say,  with the agonies of Youing Werther, so very much in love, it seems unrequitedly and yet it might have been.

That's where your poetry is.

--

I am most gratified to have written a short story of about 4500 words. I don't know if I'll read it. It's better if I leave it as a first draft and allow myself to think it is what I think it's like rather than find it isn't. Prose is like that. Endlessly improvable and Heaven Knows how Graham Swift, Sarah Waters or Julian Barnes do it.

And I've been maintaining a chess rating of above 1900 at all disciplines for more than a week, glancing into the abyss that takes one back down to 1800 but avoiding it. I'm either riding a tightrope luckily or maybe I've learnt something. It's the same as poetry, though. one enjoys the good times enormously and when it's not so good one reflects on its meaninglessness. They both appear to keep one from the madhouse, temporarily at least, for better or worse.

Simon Armitage - A Vertical Art

 Simon Armitage, A Vertical Art (Faber)

The prompt arrival of this book was most welcome. I'd been waiting for it since long before it was even a forthcoming title having heard the podcast of the lecture on raptors with special reference to Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. But there's plenty of us want the book, to have the words on the page to look at and concentrate on rather than having to listen.

The lectures are the main part of the job of Oxford Professor of Poetry, three a year for the four-year term. Prof. Armitage was it from 2015 to 2019.

Previous incumbents include such names as Auden, Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon and James Fenton. If General Elections can return the most unsuitable of Prime Ministers sometimes, the democracy by which Oxford graduates elect their Poetry Professor seems to work with some vanity candidates and the equivalent of Monster Raving Loonies being summaarily passed over. With his Queen's Medal, CBE, FRSL, this Professorship and then the laureate job, Simon's now only missing the Nobel Prize from a Grand Slam. If that seems like over-achievement, to me if nobody else, it might be due to some squint in my perception that makes poets older than me look more important than those younger and maybe also that Simon adopts a modest demeanour and rather than being the grand old curmudgeonly highbrow that was Prof. Hill, he dupes us into thinking he's still that nice lad from Marsden, Mrs. Armitage's boy. Well, he knows what he's doing, as these lectures-made-into-essays amply demonstrate.

To start with the raptors, what I most wanted was the last word in commentary on Gunn's Tamer and Hawk, the masterpiece analysis of the masterpiece poem. Like any close reader (with books by Tom Paulin and Paul Muldoon some years ago now finding poems re-echoing more than a Prince Far I dub album), Simon finds things that are there to be found that the poet may or may not have consciously put there but most won't be unwise enough not to take credit for. The language sometimes does those things for you and are probably among those things that Sean O'Brien once called the 'earned surplus' which I took to mean if you get it right then even more things happen for you. In the first line, for instance,

I thought I was so tough,

he doesn't think it's,

stretching the point...to notice at a subtextual level the word 'thou' hiding

I don't know if he means once, in 'thought', or also in four out of the five letters in 'tough', re-arranged, but since it's Saturday, I have been doing The Times crossword. But I would certainly not have thought of that and I'm not convinced Gunn did, either, but it's one example of how, as he says elsewhere, it's in the reader rather than the poet that the poem takes place and, after thirty years of reading all sorts of poetry professionally, how alert he has become. It is symptomatic of the professional that he is tempted to read The Hawk in the Rain by Hughes as a 'poem about writing' in the same way that The Thought-Fox explicitly is,

This is a poem in which the serried furrows of ploughed land are lines; in which each clay-clogged step is a poetic 'foot', etc, etc.

Well, yes, no and maybe but as a later lecture discusses the 'state of the nation' of poetry and its place in universities and how it can lead to excesses of its own, and the horrors of inbreeding, it is difficult to say quite where the line should be drawn between that which is of genuine interest and entirely admissable and where it should stop. Some people in Oxford University have been inventing the Astro-Zeneca vaccine, others are involved in arcane thinking about words put decorously on a page while, at the bottom end of the evolutionary chain, blond yobbos commit vandalism for vandalism's sake in the name of the Bullingdon Club and are then let out into society to put into practice what they learnt there.

  

Not all poets are as deserving of our attentions. Well, not mine anyway, but as well as astute insights into a selection of those that surely are- Elizabeth Bishop, Hardy, Gunn - Prof. Armitage demonstrates the most catholic, with the smallest and most commendable 'c' possible, range of interests by talking about Walt Whitman, Edmund Spenser, some fairly postmodern Americans and Kae Tempest. It's possible I'll give Spenser a closer look one day but not one day soon but I'll manage without the rest of them. Not being quite up to date with the latest trends in political correctness and staying on the right side of 'cancel culture', it had escaped my notice that Kate Tempest is now Kae Tempest and should not be referenced with gender-specific pronouns. I was bemused by what looked at first like appalling proof-reading so I was glad of the internet and thus got myself updated.

I hope my ignorance of what goes on in other silos of the poetry community is no offence. My offence is having no time for Kae's work. It is to Simon's great credit that he has time for it. When he goes to heaven, his reward will be that he can hear more of it. When I go to hell, that's all there will be.

We wait a long time before the 'vertical art' of the title is explained. Poems usually start at the top and make their way down the page, when on paper, whereas music takes place in its own time and paintings don't tell you where to start. But, as Simon is ever circumspect in distancing himself from any ready-made assumption, I wasn't going to assume it was that. It might not be quite so simple for Prof Armitage who, uncharacteristically, abandons his immaculate common sense and, maybe having spent too much time on campus, eventually tells us that,

poetry is a vertical art, its verticality extending from orchestrated line endings and managed intervals. 

 

There really is no need for that when common or garden Danny Baker had the recipe for anything and everything in his phrase, 'all you have to be is any good'. Do whatever you like but let's see the benefit of it.

But Simon is making a case for the poetry that has been written since some of it saw fit to abandon the structures that it, whether that meant English, European or all poetry, thought it had to observe. Poetry, he says, has had to find other ways to differentiate itself from prose, and has, and although they might have been difficult to appreciate at first, the so-called New Generation that in 1994 he was co-opted into, did so without being Modernist, by being more Bishop and Larkin than Pound, Eliot or W.S. Graham, led, let us think and hope, into a world in which all and any types of poetry are possible and available. You make your choice just the same as you do between all the available flavours and combinations of them as you would in an ice-cream parlour.

He makes the point that such things matter to so very few people. But to those of us that it does matter, it matters very much. If anyone had so much time on their hands that they thought they might like to know what the poetry world was like by now, this is a snapshot that details all its grandeur and its failings. 

Prof. Armitage spoke, and then wrote, with the laconic wit that provided as many laugh out louds as Alexei Sayle did in his books except they came from different directions. Much of the Armitage humour is in-house, at the expense of other poets or the poetry industry but even Lexi would have been proud of,

in May 2015, nine people were killed when rival motorcycle gangs, including the Cossacks and the Bandidos, explored a difference of opinion in the car park of the Twin Peaks restaurant and sports bar.

 

Let's hope that there is a difference between poetry and stand-up 'comedy'. Or perhaps it doesn't matter any more. Some of the stories Simon tells in the in-between bits of his readings are as good as what Alexei does. All you have to be is 'any good'.

Days Like This

 One hopes for days like this and then one comes along.

The main reason for celebration is the second dose of vaccine which seemed so far off when first booked but came round in due course, having waited patiently. It is a heart-breaking and heart-warming experience with the helpful, cheerful volunteers and the kindly nurses. It is so well-run that it can't possibly be anything to do with our vainglorious Prime Minister and yet his otherwise inexplicable popularity is on the back of its great success as if he personally had invented it, arranged all the appointments and performed the injections himself.  But what really happened is that he underpaid the heroic NHS staff that saved his life among so many others. Incorrigible isn't the word, it's nowhere near damning enough.

So, one didn't at all mind walking home in drizzle. I like drizzle, I quite like rain in a number of circumstances. I have no conception of why people think that a holiday on a sun lounger in a resort that sells lager and cocktails in happy hours is essential to them but it looks like the same delusion that makes others, some of them the same people, think that the football results matter.

 

In the meantime, weeks can pass without anything getting written, with nothing that presents itself as worth writing. I had imagined that having all the time in the world would bring with it the chance to be a 'writer', whatever sort of writer I chose to be or of whatever ideas came to mind, but one needs something one believes in to write or else there is simply no point. 

It is more worthwhile to read good books than write bad ones and having torn through Alexei Sayle's percipient version of his early life, finished the Collected Hardy stories and gratefully completed my reading of the novels of Rosemary Tonks, I was waiting for Prof. Armitage's Oxford lectures. I had fetched from upstairs some of Oscar and a book by Goethe that I was once sent by mistake. I had ordered more Balzac and the Hardy biography I've been meaning to read for 15 years since it was published.

Those books will pile up as a bulwark against any early summer shortage because the Armitage book arrived today. I should be able to tell you about it next week, including why poetry is a 'vertical art'.  

But also, on days like this, when one gets the creative capability, or thinks one has, when it seems possible and suddenly anything seems possible, one must cash in. Out of thin air, an idea for a story arrived, I know not from where, and I added 700 words this morning to the 1800 I did yesterday and I haven't lost faith in it yet. Then, again in the way that 'inspiration' (as it were) comes not single spies but in battalions, a pop song was gifted to me and I knocked out two verses and the chorus, according to my Nile Rodgers-type formula. And then the Shakespeare biography work was miraculously woken from its coma. 

This time next year, then, I'm confidently expecting to be riding high in the hit parade as well as readily available in your nearest Waterstones in the fiction and biography sections if not the usually deserted corner they find for poetry, too. Or, on the other hand, the significance of a day like this might only have been the second dose of vaccine, which is thing I'm most grateful for.

The enjoyment to be had from the writing is in the doing of it. Unless it's prose fiction and then it's drudgery and almost certain to be as tortuous to read as it was to write. And, by the time any of it sees itself in print, it's long over and done with.

Good and Bad Timing and other stories

 The Letters of Thom Gunn is due on Mar 18th, right in the middle of Cheltenham races. That's bad timing but what can you do. Spring promises a major book each month with the biography of Charlotte Mew by Julia Copus due in April and the Oxford lectures of Prof. Armitage in May. So, before that jamboree, I have world enough and time, I think, to finish Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Benjamin Britten and read The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West and then, I think finally, become a Graham Swift completist by reading Out of This World. And that is good timing. Because it was planned by me. It almost reminds me of being in work. Whichever projects went well seemed to be the ones I was involved in. Only joking.

Carpenter's biography of Auden is a fine thing and so it's no surprise to find that he does a good job, so far at least, on Britten. Britten doesn't belong in my top echelon of favourite composers but I've long been aware of this heavy volume and fancied it. There is some sort of aesthetic similarity, it always seems to me, between Britten and the greatest composer of the C20th, Shostakovich. The trouble, or the main issue, with Britten's story is probably also the reason why one wants to read it, which is not a good reason.

Whereas the biography of Malcolm Sargent from 1970, currently with my parents, doesn't investigate at all the dapper party animal's extra curricular activity, that which is legally only the concern of consenting adults in private seems to be the big issue in who Britten really was. If it wasn't for discussion of that, the book would be much shorter. On the one hand, it is who he was; on the other hand, it's none of our business. But if W.H. Auden is involved, and he was when sharing accommodation in New York with a Bohemian coterie that included Gypsy Rose Lee described by Peter Pears as 'sordid beyond belief', one can be sure he'd make it his business and sort it all out. Matching the accompanying music to one's reading should mean that I become familiar with the Britten discs I have during 600+ pages. I might even make it to disc 2 of the War Requiem.

 

Good poem in The Times today by Prof. Armitage, an unrhymed 15-line sonnet in worthy tribute to Keats as part of that particular anniversary. I have slightly ambivalent attitudes to both of them but much prefer to credit people with their best work rather than hold the other stuff against them.

 

Maybe more later.  I'd put today's Times crossword solution here like I used to except I've recently taken to e-mailing it in on the off-chance of a £20 Waterstone's voucher. There's no percentage in telling everybody the answers so that they can reduce my chances of winning so I'm not doing that anymore.

The Marshes in Autumn and other stories

A few drops of rain are preferable to excessive heat for our weekly exercise afternoon. Remembering this week to go right-handed, like they do at Ascot, rather than left, like Cheltenham, it was more likely to be the cooler weather and fewer stops that produced a big improvement in our time rather than being more suited to a right-handed track.

It's not quite a different place going the other way round but one sees things slightly differently and the tide is never further out than it was today, which makes it mudflats more than an inlet from the sea. And there is much to enjoy about the deeper, darker colours notwithstanding that the birdwatchers, who have been there in numbers in recent weeks, presumably agog at the migrating season, have let us have the place back.  

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I heard this from Joni on a R4 tribute by Lynne Truss at the weekend and haven't been as moved by a pop record for a long time. I didn't know it. When Johnnie Walker then played In France They Kiss on Main Street on Sunday, I was concerned  that she might have died but, looking her up, it seems she's much better. That's great news. Without ever being one of my absolute elite list, she has always been great. All those 60's and 70's singer-songwriters seem to be predicated somehow on Dylan and I've got a lot of time for many of his things but it seems to me that Carole King and Joni are the preferred options. I'll be checking this posting with the words provided to see if she remains on the acceptable side of 'pop songs as poetry'. Sometimes they go a bit too far. Sometimes it's best just to catch a line or two and fill in the rest for yourself.

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More good news is finding Simon Armitage's Oxford lectures are due in print next Spring, which is very welcome. They are available on the internet as recordings but a book is something to have and hold, like ordering a couple more Joni albums on CD even though one can play them on You Tube whenever you like. Possession is nine tenths of expressing some allegiance to the work.

Simon's lectures included an exhaustive analysis of Thom Gunn's Tamer and Hawk and there's really no point in me doing a second rate job on the early masterpiece in my work-in-progress book when he's already put his first-rate account on record.

But, otherwise, Wide Realm, which is the current ante-post favourite to be my Gunn book's title, is emerging steadily. It doesn't matter how long it takes because it's enjoyable to do and there is no rush. It might be my own Key to All Mythologies and not really intended to be finished, not least because I know it will never be as good as it could have been.

But another 500 words or so a couple of times a week fit neatly into the routine that has built itself organically into the retirement days. The weeks bloody fly by and, for the most part, quite happily despite all the reasons why they might not.

Not having to be a professional writer and producing the thousand words a day as a job is a fine thing. Reading Sebastian Faulks's Human Traces is making me wonder if it's the same book I abandoned several years ago and then gave away, only buying it back in paperback to re-instate some sort of completism to my Faulks section. But I don't know how they do it, producing such quality writing out of the grind. I suppose talent has a lot to do with it.

Nobody could ever convince me that poetry is in any way a better thing than the novel. Try writing a poem and then a novel. Which of them is better and which was hardest to do. 

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I had heard about preposterous results that people had been getting out of a questionnaire on the National Careers Service so I did it myself. I dare say it works on algorithms, an algorithm being defined suddenly not as a clever bit of kit but a completely useless programme that gives out hilarious, or dangerously misleading, results.

Following the NCS feature as constructively as I could it told me I should have been an actor or an editor. I can't see me doing any more acting than that I use to get by in everyday life but editor is a good result. Maybe I could have been that. I have been it a few times. Fair enough.

Desert Island Armitage

Prof. Simon Armitage was shipwrecked on another island in R4's teeming archipelago yesterday and made a tremendous job of it. It began promisingly with not quite the track one might expect from Hunky Dory but one gradually becomes aware, over the years, that the choice of records isn't the main point - it's the interview. Simon is very good at an interview and has disarmingly self-deprecated his way to poetry eminence. He still tends to present himself as Mr. and Mrs. Armitage's lad from Marsden.
As well as music by John Tavener, a poem read by Ted Hughes and some homely Yorkshire , he took the whole shebang of the OED with him,
Armitage Desert Island Discs
He has enough good stories in his repertoire that he didn't repeat any of those I've heard before. Most notably, though, it's when a poet says things that you'd say yourself that one feels some kinship.
While making the usual claims for something special about 'poetry' and its unique power, I was more with him when he gladly declared himself 'mainstream' rather than claiming some ground-breaking poetics for himself, which seems to me a mature thing to do.
While I would prefer to direct anybody to an interview with Norman MacCaig that is on You Tube, rather than be interviewed myself, Simon presented something like a list of things I would say, too.
His influential example was Hughes, as opposed to my Gunn, but the point is you probably have to have one even if you don't write much like them in the end. He also feels comfortable with poetry's minority status and says if it wasn't thus, he would most likely not be doing it. And whereas he kept his first cheque as a 'professional writer' as evidence, I photocopied mine as a momento and still cashed it.
It's worth hearing and I think the link will last forever in the BBC archive there.

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.
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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.