There's a cummings going

Wouldn't one just love to have this. Quite a rarity but my interest in it is likely to be limited to seeing how much it goes for.

The 'buy-it-now' price is £500 but it might not make that.

Amusing to note how lower-case, small writing e.e.cummings seems to go for a big signature.

Eliot voted the Nation's Favourite

There was dancing in the streets of East Coker today as T.S. Eliot won the BBC's vote to find the Nation's favourite poet. Over 18000 votes were cast and the American (pictured here with William Carlos Williams) beat my selection, John Donne, into second place with Benjamin Zephaniah in third. You might say that two out of three ain't bad and feel reassured by the public's choice but the result of any poll can only reflect the taste of those who voted in it so presumably the demographic of the audience who took an interest in the vote was predominantly Modernist or Metaphysical while, among the 30 names that voters were given to choose from, all of the rap/slam/performance poetry vote had to coalesce around Ben Zeph.
Wilfred Owen will be pleased with his fourth place, Larkin was a solid 5th. Ever popular William Blake came 6th, Yeats 7th. Betjeman and Keats might be disappointed with their 8th and 9th places while Dylan Thomas rolled in 10th. Wordsworth and Hardy were unplaced and Coleridge is likely to be dope tested.
So, well done, the public. In some ways quite a surprising result but if 18000 take part and provide a result like that then all is not yet lost.

National Poetry Day- Heroes

Like General Elections, National Poetry Day is always on a Thursday. It's this Thursday, this year. And it's more or less a good thing, an artificially created publicity event for 'poetry' that draws attention to it for its own sake. And even if it often turns out to be a matter of wheeling out good old Roger McG or John Hegley to read some of their charming little jokes, it can sometimes be even better than that. I've been involved in and attended some very worthwhile events over the years. It's even easier to do so so from the comfort of one's own website, though.

This year's theme is heroes and I'm delighted to have a back catalogue that, however thin it might look for thirty-odd years of writing poems, has several 'heroes' in it. There's the Tycho Brahe poems, the Ovid, the fawning tribute to Thom Gunn (Rastignac at 45 at 35), a couple of Mozart poems, Buxtehude, and a set of poems called Line Drawings not all of which were necessarily tributes to heroes (Diana, Versace, Kasparov, Stephen Hawking, etc.). But there was also this poem in Museum, published in 1990, dedicated to Maggi Hambling, who certainly is a big hero of mine. It's based on her painting Broken Moon (pictured), which I'd love to own and is for sale and it's my 50th birthday shortly (I don't know if I've mentioned that elsewhere).

Maggi's Moons

(for Maggi Hambling)

Your moons are the still-burning
souls of heretics whose charred
bones have long since been dust. They
are the echoes of screaming,
frozen and splintered in hard
winter silence, torn ghostly.

They see the living woven
into troubled times. And your
moon is a witch's daughter
left hanging below heaven
whose passion is now shattered
light on midnight's blue water.

Poets in their other jobs

As expected, I have been inundated with pictures of poets doing their other jobs. Far too many to post here, I'm afraid. But I have chosen this one, sent in by Jason Craddock of Waterlooville, of T.S. Eliot in his other job of being Deryck Guyler, the stalwart comic actor of the 1970's in such shows as Sykes and Please, Sir.

Thanks, Jason.

Poet's Birthday Cakes

As expected, I've been inundated with pictures of birthday cakes made for poets. Far too many to post here, I'm afraid. Thanks to all those who sent them in. I have chosen this one to feature here, and I am indebted to Jason Craddock of Waterlooville who tells me that this cake was made to celebrate a birthday, he's not sure which one, of Lascelles Abercrombie.

Thanks, Jason.

William Boyd - Ordinary Thunderstorms

William Boyd, Ordinary Thunderstorms (Bloomsbury)


It has been said, although I daresay it’s unproven, that we are all only two mistakes away from walking the streets, sleeping rough, being reduced to begging. I’ve often wondered where I would go and how I’d try to survive if and when it happens to me. I doubt if it would be quite as eventful for me as it is for Adam Kindred in this tale.
Kindred doesn’t make mistakes but quite innocently suddenly finds himself a fugitive from the law and underworld goons with all the evidence suggesting he has committed murder in part of a complex pharmaceutical industrial espionage war.
After only a few days he is drinking water straight from the Thames by Chelsea Bridge and has to trap a gull for food. But if disbelief has to be slightly suspended for how he finds himself in such a position, it continues to be tested throughout as, in the interests of satisfying the thriller genre, a raft of both good and bad luck seeks him out.
What Boyd draws for us through this engaging device is a picture of a brutal underside not far below the surface of contemporary Britain. The body count, having begun so early, steadily accumulates as desperate people at various levels of society fight for their lives. The vastly rich powers that run the world and a very seamy low life are counterpointed as the prevailing influences while most of us are trying to pursue our mundane, domestic, unremarkable lives.
The naming of Ingram Fryzer, after the murderer of Christopher Marlowe, seems like a heavy-handed bit of literary referencing but the name Adam Kindred, the central character, seems to suggest that he is an Everyman figure and all this could happen to anyone. It is to be hoped not but the story is an uncomfortable reminder that, in the same way that we are always only a few feet away from the nearest rat, we are only avoiding the most perilous adventures by the skin of our teeth – for all we know.
Boyd is a fine writer, which we surely know already, and his use of the thriller is successful for me although it must be said that I haven’t read any Dick Francis for many years and my preferred fiction usually wouldn’t feature much action beyond someone looking out of a window and speculating on the prospects of afternoon rain.
However unlikely some of this might seem, Boyd has enough material from real life to keep it within a recognizable frame, not least when Kindred, improvising a new identity in a hospital porter’s job, claims to be a Manchester United supporter during the inevitable workplace football discussion. The Church of John Christ is also an interesting organization and counter-intuitively here ostensibly a force of genuine good. The joke told by Adam’s blackmailer just before his foreseeable demise near the end of the book is a suitably horrific commentary on another contemporary obsession but couldn’t be repeated on a respectable website like this.
But it would be better to stay within the fragile bounds of civilised, off the peg life, thank you very much, than encounter the range of thrills and scrapes described here. The picaresque journey allows a number of otherwise invisible places to be looked at, and it is probably distressingly a more accurate account of life in Britain today than one would like to think. And there, but for the grace of God, I’d prefer it to stay between the covers of this most diverting novel, one that I recommend quite highly.

Anne Hathaway and the Second Best Bed

Phil Adams, Anne Hathaway and the Second Best Bed, Havant Literary Festival, September 28

However many times one goes over the material, there still turns out to be more possibilities, more detail and more to it than one thought. As was often stressed by Phil Adams, what we ‘know’ about Shakespeare biography doesn’t amount to very much but there always seems to be further points to be made on the subject. Adams is robustly sceptical, a recommender of Schoenbaum’s rigorously forensic books, and takes nothing, or very little for granted. He is also entertaining, well-informed, less deceived and delivers an engaging summary of the Shakespeare-Hathaway marriage with gusto.
While basing his account, like Schoenbaum, on documentary evidence, he also, like Germaine Greer, elucidates it with contemporary facts and figures. For example, the £40 put up as security by Sandells and Richardson, the Hathaway’s friends or associates, before the wedding is ‘more money than they’ll ever see in their lives’; getting married when expecting a baby was no big deal, 30% of brides were pregnant on their wedding day and the 'right of dower' that might have meant that Ann automatically inherited a large percentage of Shakespeare’s estate only applied in London and York except Shakespeare made arrangements to exclude the Blackfriars Gatehouse -in London-that he had bought from such a legacy.
Adams is more thorough than all the popular biographers of Shakespeare in denying himself a bit of fanciful invention. Greer allows herself to imagine Will teaching Ann to read; Bate, Ackroyd and other recent contributors are all tempted to fill in the huge gaps between documentary facts with their own guesses and Anthony Burgess embraced every rumour, legend and myth in a wonderful if dubious fairy tale. To Adams it is ‘common sense’ to think Hamnet and Judith Sadler were Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare's godparents and he draws a brief sketch of the young Shakespeare unable to leave Stratford (being a minor) without his father’s permission until April 1585 and being ‘worked to death’ in the sweatshop of his father’s struggling business. So, you can see how easy it is for even the most circumspect and diligent of commentators to start making things up.
He doesn’t discount Aubrey’s assertion that Shakespeare went home ‘once a year’ to Stratford from London, on fairly tenuous grounds (and one has to start assuming things eventually) but he is very convincing on the point that Shakespeare couldn’t have been at Hamnet’s funeral in 1596. He stresses the sumptuousness of New Place, how the Queen stayed there in 1643 in preference to all other available accommodation, a detail which fits nicely with the ‘second best bed’ question because not only the Queen but other dignitaries arriving as guests would also have had the use of the best bed and suite and so Shakespeare’s bequest of their marital bed might have had romantic associations for them both.
Light is also shone into the shadowy character of Thomas Quiney who married Judith when Shakespeare was drawing up his will. Quiney’s excommunication could have been due to marrying Judith, who was somewhat older than average marrying age, only to avoid marrying the unfortunate Margaret Wheeler, who died giving birth to Quiney’s offspring on the day Shakespeare signed his will.
Without taking sides in the debate on the marriage, Adams points out that Shakespeare still returns to Stratford after his long and lucrative career in London and before summing up the for and against cases for the good marriage or the bad, he puts it a vote of the audience, which goes 10-7 to the ‘bad’ marriage with numerous ‘don’t knows’. The ‘bad’ marriage motion overstates the case by suggesting that Shakespeare hated Ann but I vote for it because I suspect it wasn’t a successful, complete and wholly faithful marriage.
So, in the questions afterwards, I ask if the numerous stories of Shakespeare’s extra-marital relationships, his long absences from Stratford and there being no record of Ann travelling to London don’t suggest that Ann might have had her own affairs in Stratford and that the marriage wasn’t based on great fidelity. The Dark Lady was explained as a traditional device in a sonnet sequence; William Davenant was ever likely to want to claim to be The Bard’s son and Ann was a good Puritan girl (in Phil Adams’ opinion, which he openly accepts is no more valuable than anybody else’s) and you tend to think that he sides just fractionally with the view that this marriage was a true one, based on love, and one that lasted throughout their lives.
But it was a hugely enjoyable hour and a bit, thoroughly well researched, profoundly well argued and a lively presentation. Not long before my 50th birthday I was probably the youngest among the gathering, which is always a bonus. The debate will go on, enhanced by the enthusiasm and intelligence of Phil Adams who is just the sort of non-partisan, common sense champion that the subject needs.