Windy Miller

I recently sent two recent poems to an august periodical ahead of The Perfect Book. I appear to be in a creative purple patch, producing well in excess of the four poems a year that I've long regarded as cruising speed.
You look at various poetry magazines, who they publish, what they do, their submission rules and wonder how long it will be before the poem sees print and, really, forget it. I'm not that interested. But maybe I can just e-mail so and so. And, yes, that's fine, one of the two will be in the next issue as long as there is space for it. So, even if it doesn't appear, at least I have one of the kindest rejection notes in literary history.
Except that they liked the other one best, not this one. You can never tell. But it means I can use it here.

Windy Miller

There was no sign of children

and his obituary

in the local paper would one day say

he never married. And so

he was the last of them

to be at home there in the creaking mill.

We’ll never know whether or not

one of those sails sliced him

in half or if it was the cider

that got him in the end.

Meanwhile it was his time there,

that once looked like forever,

when simple was as simple did

and nobody complained.

He’d have waved if he’d seen you

if you’d seen him in the hedgerows,

unaware he was idyllic,

on his day off from the corn.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

There is often less to write about at this time of year. Two years ago I began the series My Life in Sport, with memoirs of football, cricket and cycling. I did wonder whether to continue with running, pool, darts and chess but it hasn't got quite that desperate yet.

The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross lived up to all its much vaunting, mapping out one way through the bewildering shifts and fashions in C20th classical music. Some composers might be more significant for the theories behind what they wrote than what they wrote so some much-loved names, like Poulenc, seemed to get less coverage than I thought they deserved but, for those who know, music is apparently not important for what it sounds like.
The one CD I bought as a result of reading it was of Britten Cello Suites, which is still very kindly being rowed across the Atlantic from America for me. I had plenty of CD's of music mentioned already and although it would have been fitting to play them while reading about them, the urge was never that strong. Although I will have to give Morton Feldman another chance having read that,

 Feldman was a singular character- in Steve Reich’s words, ‘an absolutely unforgettable human being.’ As a conversationalist, he was verbose, egotistical, domineering, insulting, playful, flirtatious, and richly poetic...
and while one colleague at work agreed that is very much what they think of me, I'm not not everybody thinks that. Not 'richly poetic' anyway.
But Britten comes out of it very well, for me and I was only a bit put off the Humphrey Carpenter biography but its size and having to re-arrange delivery. I'll wait until I'm due to be home all week.
And the C20th, modernism, the avant garde. So many dead ends, many of them fascinating but ultimately period pieces now, dated by their tremendous vogue. But anything of worth feeds into the mainstream because the mainstream is all there is. Like any period, one can't imagine what happens next, surely it's now all been done and Ross does meditate on that.
It's unlikely that a new generation of composers are all going to go back to writing like Mozart. There is still a tendency towards shock and noise, as sadly documented in the BBC Music Magazine CD Best of British, youngest composer born 2000, which sounds very old hat. But Ross perhaps didn't highlight enough how Tavener's Protecting Veil, Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, James MacMillan's Seven Last Words from the Cross, amongst other things, and such composers as Michael Nyman made the end of the C20th not such a bad time. And, in Errollyn Wallen there is a composer who can do evocative modernism and produce a gorgeous Cello Concerto.
It isn't over yet.

The blurb on the back of Eleanor Cook's Elizabeth Bishop at Work is confident enough to quote at length a review that begins 'Do we need another book about Elizabeth Bishop', because if it's this one, yes we do.
It is a compelling and very useful survey of the oeuvre, well-organized and written no more academically than discussion of a poet's poet's poems needs to be. Heaven knows, it's hard to believe that a Bishop poem can have quite so much in it but it is the art that disguises art and whether the poems came readily or, as evidenced by some of the drafts in Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box, was hard won, this is how good poems need to be to be better than everybody else who ever tried.
One is almost tempted to say that the critique is as good an achievement as the poetry in such cases but it never is. Commentators are only ever on the sidelines, like autograph hunters, and getting in on the coat-tails of their subject.

And, only just begun, and I've meant to read it for years, A.N. Wilson's account of Jesus, the historical figure rather than the religious icon. It looks like he is diligently and exhastively forensic even if the preface does rely on assumptions like 'couldn't possibly have' and 'it is unimaginable that'. 
If we're going to nail this once and for all, it might need to be more forensic that than, my dear A.N., but we'll see.
It's a great thing about the CofE, you can hardly accuse them of being fanatical. They like their lovely churches, the hymns, the literature and the tradition but not so much the difficult bits, like God. 
That's liberalism. There's a lot to be said for it. 

Doctrines, Factions, Schools

Having taken time away from it to read a couple of Christmas books, I still haven't quite yet finished The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross, the doorstop survey of C20th 'classical' music but it has been a pleasure to return to it.
While art can be a welcome escape or withdrawal from the world that is too much with us, it is nevertheless very limited in scope and unforgivably 'up itself' if it takes no part in that world.
I'm getting the impression from Alex Ross that the two most influential figures in C20th music were Stalin and Hitler. That can't be right and probably what Ross says is that, during the C20th at least, an absolutely central figure was Schoenberg. But, be all of that what it may, his brilliantly lucid account, full of anecdote, character sketches and connections, does more than suggest that the story of C20th music immediately became more complicated than the whole history of music that came before it.

I have sketched out my own version that centres on Beethoven, goes back from Romanticism through Classical, Baroque and Renaissance to Hildegaard of Bingen and then forwards through Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, the overblown Late Romanticism of Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler, which then flounders in trying to explain what Alex Ross makes such a good job of here.

The difference seems to be that, suddenly, all the fault of Romanticism and the value accorded to the individual, it became all about the composer and not the music.
One reads the stories of the doctrines, factions and schools that developed post 1911 and never mind state control by totalitarians whose policies were so all-embracing that they had to include music, that they knew precious little about, it was the composers who were intent on denigrating each other.
I don't imagine for one minute that the host of heavenly baroque composers were all best friends but neither do I think that any of them took time out to denigrate their equivalent of Sibelius to the extent that the now quaint, outmoded 12-note, atonal theorists did.
Did they not realize that what seems so much the fashion one day will look very sad and misguided sooner than they thought. Sadly for them, Sigue Sigue Sputnik were not yet available to ask. 

I had my own run-ins on so-called avant-gardism on an internet forum with the editor of a magazine called Brando's Hat. Yes, mate, very cool, very New York but there needs to be more to you than trying to provoke the 'mainstream'. You don't have to admire Larkin, Simon Armitage or Carol Ann Duffy but you need to do more than define yourself as not being them. Is that all you've got.

And so, if Alex Ross has done anything for me apart from set out quite cogently one view of how it all happened, he has clarified some of my own prejudices. As with poetry, music is a broad church and I don't want to be falling out with anyone whose approach is different from my own, but I can see the attraction of the comfort blanket offered by siding with the like-minded.
I am very much with Philip Larkin and less with Ted Hughes, although I admire much of Hughes' work.
And I'm with Shostakovich, Sibelius, and Poulenc amongst others in the C20th, while only in possession of t-shirts with music by Mozart or a picture of Dietich Buxtehude on them but I've now got good reason to confirm the worst composer of all time. It certainly wasn't Wagner, it was never quite the schlerotically dull Bruckner and it's not even Korngold. It's Pierre Boulez.
Constantly deriding almost everything else as 'fascist' and boring us to witlessness with his gormless abstractions, he was an aberration that time will take care of. And thus passes the self-indulgence of the world.     

Prospects

The prospects for 2018 include a new title from Julian Barnes, which is always an occasion; there may be Julia Copus's biography of Charlotte Mew; there could be Sean O'Brien's short stories in Quartier Perdu and we will believe the long awaited re-issue of Patrick Hamilton's Monday Morning, currently set for August, when we see it. But that is a fair list to be going on with. In the meantime, I have some C20th American women lined-up with Muriel Rukeyser's memoir of the Spanish Civil War - her poems have their moments if they don't attempt the condition of music often enough; Mina Loy's surrealist novel, Insel, and plenty more Elizabeth Bishop commentary in the locker.

I'm often at a loss, though, to understand why some of these titles take quite so long from announcement to appearance. When you hear about a book you want to read, you want to read it, not recieve occasional e-mails from Amazon telling you how hard they're trying to provide it. Don't bother, it isn't in print yet.
This year should see The Perfect Book, a bit of a magnum opus for me at perhaps 25 poems, but once it is ready it will be e-mailed to the printers and a week or so later anyone who wants one can have one.

I'm more excited about it than a 58 year old should be because I like it a lot. I still look at The Perfect Murder once in a while and still like that and nowadays that is all that matters. I no longer understand why anybody needs the approval or endorsement of others. Of course, the young poet might have aspirations to greatness and need to know that their work captivates other readers so that they can hope for success and acclaim but, no, that's a bit gauche, isn't it. The starting point for any poem is that it is at least as good as you thought you could do and, hopefully, better. After that it is a superfluous bonus if friends, readers or reviewers say nice things about them.
And I doubt if I'll bother with reviewers this time. Vanity, vanity, all of it vanity.
I have sent a couple of new poems off to a carefully selected magazine having dismissed most titles on account of their fussy submission rules and the wait between composition and appearing in print. I can put a poem on here in a first version as soon as it's finished but would have to wait months to see it in print. So, with some regret, Move Over, Darling and Windy Miller are in the book but won't appear here for fear of stealing anybody else's thunder and we'll see if they appear anywhere else in due course.
But if nobody else wants to write quite the same sort of casually formal, gently ironic poems that I'd like to read, I'll write them myself. And I've gone to the portentous lengths of adding an epigraph to the collection,

Being laconic did not mean giving up on lyricism.

  which, when I read it in Alice Kaplan's book on L'Etranger, made me wonder if that's something like what I do. I couildn't say but I thought I'd treat myself to such a dubious decoration just this once.

News from the Jess Davies Band is that a second track towards the debut CD is a wrap. And so progress is being made on the way to becoming the merest footnote in the history of popular music with a songwriting credit on a recording. That's as exciting as could be but not currently quite as exciting as The Perfect Book. But in these matters, to travel is often better than to arrive. It's all about doing it, the potential, the forthcoming. Almost as soon as the book is done, distributed and has taken its modest place in the world, it's over, it's gone. And one is left with an empty storehouse, bereft of ammunition, with just more of a back catalogue. I'm not looking forward to that.