Pluperfect, Collected Poems

Setting this up as a kindle available on Amazon proved beyond me. Never mind. I had gone far enough with compiling the Word doument by the time I found that out that I wasn't going to abandon it at that late stage.

The next best alternative was to make a pdf out of it. That was easy in the end but not until I'd explored all the difficult options. Good Lord, I thought, if I'd wanted to battle with the computer all morning, making an easy job too hard, I need not have retired.

But now we have it, at least in version 1.0. One can't go on looking for errata and gremlins forever and so let's go with this.

In the end I decided to go without a foreword. The poems can manage without any more than the barest commentary, context and footnotes.

But the foreword I removed, if you really want to know, was thus,

 -- 

I had thought the Collected  might be pared down to only 20 or 30 poems but that would have been a new Selected. Thus the 123 poems here represent the career retrospective from, I think, 1979, to 2021. They are pluperfect by having looked back once, they are looked back on again.

Some poems were luckier than others on either side of the fine line between being kept in and being left out. In the unlikely event of a Complete Poems, there would be no such arbitrary line.

The process of writing was, for me, one of unlearning or of learning what not to do and, preferably, not consciously dwelling on such thoughts about what one was doing. The more successful pieces seemed to be those that came without trying too hard, that arrived almost fully-formed, and the three original manuscripts in the appendix show very little amendment.

123 poems is a slight Collected but it was never a full-time job. Four poems a year was the rate I maintained fairly steadily, much of that time not knowing where the next poem was coming from or if it would come at all.

While it is customary to thank people who helped or read such work along the way it became increasingly the case that if I was happy with a poem, that was all that mattered. Any reaction they generated by appearing in print or being read was of interest but a bonus. It was very soon not a commercial venture but something with which to please oneself. However, of course, by presenting those that might be more worth preserving, I’m glad of anyone who wants to share them and I hope they find something worthwhile among them.  

--

You are welcome to the pdf and can have it for the asking by e-mailing dg217.888@ntlworld.com.

Shakespeare and Tolstoy

 The film All is True will not be news to most people but, not being a film-watcher, it was to me when shown on TV the other night. I may not watch many films but I am a Shakespeare biography addict. One can put this film straight in at the top of Ben Elton's finest work with Branagh, Judi Dench and Ian McKellan enacting an insightful if ultimately far-fetched account of Shakespeare's retirement back in Stratford, 1613-16.

There are all the usual biographical motifs to include, like beds mentioned in wills, Shakespeare's concern for his social status and the death of the boy, Hamnet. I also realized that surely Shakespeare is by now surely a character in more works of historical fiction than he wrote himself.

Central to the film is Shakespeare's 'realization' that Hamnet didn't die of plague as he does in Maggie O'Farrell and as he is assumed to have in nearly every biography. Shakespeare notices that there were only five infant deaths in Stratford in 1596, three of which were newborn. In a line worthy of the man himself, Elton gives him, 'the plague is a scythe, not a dagger' that takes out swathes of lives and doesn't pick them out one by one. I wonder how verifiable that figure is because it shifts our understanding a little bit if it's true.

What is much less likely is the alternative explanation that Judith pushed him into the pond out of jealousy and he drowned. That Shakespeare had favoured Hamnet on account of his attempts at poetry but that they had really been written by Judith who, being a girl, helped in the kitchen is not going to be given much credence as a biographical possibility but it made for yet more fine fiction from the fertile material of the shadowy life.

It gives us the very outside possibility that it produced the lines,

There is a willow grows aslant a brook, 

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream

but I'm not buying that any more than I think Hamnet's death resulted in the lines from King John,

Grief fills the room up of my absent child, 

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, 

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

 

That ain't necessarily so.

---

We're dealing with big guns at present.

Moving from Anna Karenina to A.N. Wilson's biography of Tolstoy one is struck by how much of one is in the other. One can read the one without knowing about the other. It is, in fact, more of a distraction from either to open up a whole new area by comparing the two.

Wilson is scholarly and entertaining and sends one diligently to his back catalogue to see what else there is among his novels, Dickens and Victorian work having been so hugely impressed with his Jesus and his Betjeman.

I couldn't help but notice his passage on the C19th biographers of Jesus, including,

The most notorious and radical of their theologians, David Fiedrich Strauss, had brought to the study of the New Testament a whole package of scientific and philosophical presuppositions which enabled him to examine the Gospel stories in the same sceptical spirit which would have governed a scholar's reading of, say, Plutarch's 'Lives'. 

which is very much what Wilson himself does so he wasn't the first to do so but the latest in an honourable line.

Having also read Claire Tomalin's Thomas Hardy- The Time-Torn Man recently, the litany of great writers in difficult marriages insists on compiling itself before one's very eyes. Tolstoy, Hardy, Dickens, Shakespeare...it begins to look like a pattern. Do great writers become great writers as a result of unhappy marriages or are the unhappy marriages due to them being great writers.

That looks like an easy one to me.

This Is The Modern World

By now one needs to be 'of a certain age' to think that the 'modern world' was that represented by The Jam. Some of us have lived long enough to see 'modern' mean 'old-fashioned'. For me it was mainly represented by Concorde. Modernism as such, that art revolution that happened in 1911, was new enough when one first read T.S. Eliot or were aware of Picasso but poetry, philosophy and the world was already post-modern by then.

I'm not convinced that 'modern' sounds like a new thing to young people now. The New Look, La Nouvelle Vague, The New Wave that meant the Sex Pistols and certainly the New Seekers are definitely old now. It's a bad idea to brand oneself as 'new' because posterity will find the idea hilarious soon enough.

Modern is as old and tweedy as we used to think a Morris Minor was compared to, say, a Ford Capri.

 

Twice today it would have been of some use to have a mobile phone (and been conversant with how it worked) but I'm determined to hang out for as long as possible, e.g. forever, and be the last remaining person on the street, on a train or anywhere else, not transfixed by the tiny screen. I spend too much time in front of this quite big screen as it is.

The bank want my mobile number to text me a code to verify online purchases. We'll deal with that one day. More pressingly, making my way towards the final stages of the Collected Poems, I thought I'd investigate and maybe even set up the account to publish the book as a kindle with the facility of a hard copy. But, D'oh, the second level of verification required involves the same thing, a mobile number to send me a code. One can alternatively create such a code by downloading an app but after trying to follow several lists of instructions to do that, I can't waste a whole Friday night failing to achieve anything and I'd rather do this.

I am the new version of the Morris Minor driver, stuck somewhere in the past. I am a patient man, generally, and willing to try but sometimes maybe I'm unwilling to compromise and whereas I don't understand why people have objections to being vaccinated, I have my own precious objections to having to have a mobile phone.

So the Collected Poems might not be a kindle after all. It might just be a pdf document. So be it if the world won't come to meet its olde worlde intransigence.

The Intentional Fallacy Fallacy

At university, 40+ years ago, we were very much 'educated' that the study of literature was the study of texts. The 'Intentional Fallacy' by W.K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M.C. Beardsley was 'gospel' and, it seemed to me, propounded by the work of Lancaster's then highly fashionable tutors on the Stylistics and Criticism course, Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short. Their book was the set text for the course. Why wouldn't it be if that's what you were teaching and they could sell a copy to every student that signed up for it.

I tended to believe what teachers told me. Giving them back in essays the ideas that they had provided seemed the safest way of achieving passable marks. Having understood that a liberal, humanities education in the 1970's showed one 'how to think' and not 'what to think', we'd like to think, my doubts that it really did have accumulated ever since.

It wasn't only in The History Man, filmed at Lancaster on a suitably contemporary shopping precinct of a campus, that there was a given way of thinking, it existed in the predominantly Marxist Sociology Dept. there in the slightly less fictional world and in the Linguistics Dept., too.

I've not had much sight of what constitutes university education since then but it's possible that the education is delivered more than offered with concomitant 'correctness' advisable in exchange for a good grades.

I was taken aback ( ! ) at a conference in 1997 when presented with the proposition that the Intentional Fallacy, that the reader should not refer back to anything the author intended, was nonsense.

But, surely...the Death of the Author, Roland Barthes, the text.

No. I just went quiet.

 

Following up Anna Karenina with the great A. N. Wilson's biography of Tolstoy, of course you can't have the text without the life of the author it came from. Texts can't possibly be free-floating things that just happened. They came from a time and place and an author. That much has been apparent for quite some time but not often as clearly as it is in the case of Tolstoy. How far that should lead us into investigating the author and all their darkest corners is another matter because we are still reading the text rather than them but the idea that it exists in suspended isolation is absurd.

'Education' is a good thing, I'm sure, but for me carries the overtones that 're-education' in totalitarian states did and still does. In the same way that saying, 'I'm sure', implies some equivocation. All it can do is present you with what seems right at the time. One has to spend the rest of one's life unlearning what one was taught.

Collating the Collected Poems has shown me how I very gradually unlearnt what a poem ought to be like.

Universities have Theology Departments that train potential vicars, presumably predicated on the idea that there is a Christian God. Still. In this day and age. In some ways we are still medieval.

For all we know, in a phrase from Shirley Bassey, we congratulate ourselves on being wise by escaping one fallacy but only to potentially land ourselves in another. That might not be quite what Tolstoy meant but that's what I'm getting out of him. Maybe it's that condition that makes us 'human', for better or worse.

Maybe Carol Ann Duffy had more of a point than I thought she had in her 'poetry is the music of being human'. It first sounded to me like the most vacuous, self-congratulatory defintion one could provide in support of one's own position in a minor industry but, no. If and when poetry tries to come to terms with being human and succeeds in making music out of it, that's what it must be.

Tormented by this ignorance

I've added the 'fiction review' label to this well aware that it was first published in book form in 1878 and that what I have to say about Anna Karenina comes nowhere near to being a review.

But if one does a website that claims to be at least in part about books one can hardly let the day on which one finishes such a book pass without marking the occasion.

For much of the way I wasn't entirely convinced it belonged alongside Proust, Joyce, George Eliot and all. Tolstoy paints a very broad canvas and, like Julius Caesar in Shakespeare's play, Anna doesn't have as big a part in the work she gives her name to as one might imagine. There's plenty of essay mileage to be had cross referencing her with Emma Bovary and Dorothea Brooke but she's nothing like the whole point and nothing but the point.

I gave myself a bit of a rest by not taking notes and page references, or not until part 8 ( of 8). Tolstoy has been brilliant in documenting the Anna/Karenin/Vronsky triangle but is building towards a wider perspective and the politics of C19th Russia takes up as much space as the emotional struggles. While Levin isn't exactly Tolstoy in the same way that Stephen Daedalus isn't Joyce, Paul Morel isn't Lawrence and Marcel isn't Proust, we know they are to some considerable extent and, as will become more apparent in A.N. Wilson's biography, Tolstoy- like Hardy and, quite possibly, Shakespeare - wasn't happily married.

If Julius Caesar only makers it to about halfway through his own play, Anna at least makes it to the end of part 7 of her novel. That last chapter is a highlight of all writing, and translation, but that is the end of her story and she casts less of a shadow on part 8 than you might think if the book's really about her. Tolstoy, like Julian Barnes more recently, likes to ruminate at some lengths over the consequences and so part 8 is Levin, Tolstoy's representative in the story, coming to terms with himself.

The only page reference I had noted was at three-quarters of the way through where an infant boy dies of croup. My few encounters with croup had previously been Private Pike in Dad's Army explaining to Capt. Mainwaring that his mother insists on him wearing his scarf to prevent him from catching it and for years I had taken it to be not only a droll but a fictitious one, too. Many years after I was taken aback to find out it was real. And now Tolstoy is responsible for me finding out it could be fatal. Anna Karenina was thus nearly as much a humbling voyage of self-discovery for me as it is for Levin.

He starts echoing things one recognizes, reading 'non-materialist' philosophers like 'Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer before,

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any possibility of knowing what he was and why he was living in the world, tormented by this ignorance...

and we need not pursue the sentence any further without it getting out of hand. But he is finding 'inner peace'. A major theme and conflict for Anna, among others, has been between the sophisticated, often duplicitous city life in Moscow and Sr. Petersburg and the simpler, but less immediately stimulating, rural life.

Levin works his way towards an idea of 'good' that is outside of cause and effect, some sense of self that looks to me, as many such abiding within contradictions and difficulties do, like 'negative capability'. That would have been fine. Stop there. But Tolstoy can't stop writing and has to take it on a few more pages yet and allow him to rediscover his Christian 'faith'. 

D'oh. But it was the 1870's and Tolstoy was well ahead of his time.

 

Having sneaked a look at A.N. Wilson's foreword to the biography, he sets the scene and gives us some context, making a comparison between the flowering of C19th Russian literature with that of Elizabethan England and citing Pushkin as literature's equivalent of Mozart.

So, we'll get some Pushkin lined up for once the biography has been dispatched in what might be fairly short order. 500-odd pages. That's no time at all when something's any good.

From the Archives - two unvaluable manuscripts

Compiling the Collected Poems is proving to be a more painstaking but nonetheless enjoyable job than one might have thought. Deciding which poems should be included is the least of it. A Word document can do anything you want it to, one only has to find out how.

I have the more recent booklets saved already so they can be pasted in but the earlier ones need typing in ahead of them. Having to do that puts those poems through a more rigorous qualifying process when one wonders if they're really worth it. One notices phrases or idioms one used long ago, some of which are still okay but some make one pause. Some poems get in on account of lines I'd like to preserve while others now seem a bit too forced or mangled but then, one thinks, heaven knows how stilted some of, say, The Sense of Movement now looks and it didn't do him any harm.

It's good to do because it seems worthwhile and since it's long been my main intention to please myself rather than any other reader it still does seem worthwhile. But it is by no means a clear cut decision as to what stays in and what is thrown out. As when editing a magazine, there are some obvious choices that go in uncontested and some less impressive efforts that are eased gently towards oblivion but there's the area somewhere below halfway in the order of preference where it all hangs on a close call, at least one of which was made having typed out five lines of it before I thought, 'no'.

Once I've compiled this large document and been through it time and again (but probably once or twice not enough), it remains to be seen how hard it is to make it into a kindle. Otherwise it'll be a pdf.

But, what about appendices. What about the 'juvenilia', what about acknowledgements. And what about a couple of original manuscripts, like these. 

I don't know if I still have any examples of the more chaotic drafts of poems that came less easily but these two, of Windy Miller and

Starý židovský Hřbitov, show how neatly poems can sometimes write themselves for you. That's all it took with them.

I find myself, whenever given the slightest opportunity, explaining that the most successful poems arrive fully formed and all you have to do is write them down. It's possible that one has to wait until one's ready before doing that and it can't be done at will.

But the very last thing we want here is a masterclass.

It might be decided that such esoteric archive material is more than such a lowly collection needs so here they are now anyway as I labour the point Keats made against working too hard, that If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.

Compare and Contrast and other stories

 More great work from Saint Dominic last night. He's hardly flawless but he can be candid about many of his inconsistencies, some of which would have been admired by Machiavelli himself. But during the night I heard a Times Radio item about Michael Wolff, author of Landlside, the Final Days of the Trump Presidency, which provided an opportunity to compare the two chaotic, incompetent vanity projects.

Trump always seems the more terrifying, not least because he was 'in charge' of a more powerful country but at least perhaps he was in charge whereas it now turns out that Boris regards the Daily Telegraph as his 'real boss'.

While Laura Kuennsberg was her usual excellent self and pressed Dominic when she thought she had him in difficulties, her disbelief was taken quite lightly by Dom. What he said about Boris only filled in the first-hand witness detail of what we thought we knew all along and, while shocking, it no longer shocks. Yes, that's what he's like and always has been.

The difference between Trump and Boris is that one doesn't listen while the other listens but doesn't understand. The similarity is that they both suffer from a kind of maniac locked-in syndrome of being themselves. While Wolff said there is no other, hidden Trump, he only exists in the one-dimensional avatar that he presents, Boris is slightly different in that he can shift between convenient beliefs, ideas or policies almost by the hour if need be. There is nothing of any substance inside either of them but while Trump cannot be anything other than his awful, destructive, solipsistic self, Boris is malleable, forever shifting, very shifty and prepared to believe whatever suits the moment.

They both live in the moment.

While Trump is unchangeable and has to have facts, figures and history altered to suit him, Boris is like something that I noticed long ago in the fashionable left and capable of supporting whatever it looks worth his while to. The likes of Jeremy Corbyn seem generally well-intentioned but their righteous support of the Palestininan cause line them up with the anti-Semitic far right. 40 years ago, at University, the campus Marxists were in favour of the ayatollahs against the aristocratic Shah and supported Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

What we can do is follow Tyrone Mings, the footballer who someone pointed out is 'surely no Marxist', and monitor those things that politicians, or any of us, fail to condemn.

A highlight of Dominic's analysis was his daignosis of the broken system of 'democracy' that gives us a choice between Boris and Corbyn, as well as a system that puts the likes of him effectively in charge. One of his possible solutions was a 'new party'. We did try that before with the SDP which flattered to deceive and effectively went into the Liberal Party. I'd like to know more from Dom about this new party and whether it would be sensible, centrist and try its best to do the right thing or if it would be made up of the sort of sinister goons that he so expertly plotted the referendum and last General Election for.

He's a clever lad and his expertise is something you'd like on your side. The suspicion that he wins like Don Revie rather than like Brian Clough remains, though, and at present he's only admired for being the enemy of one's enemy. That doesn't make him one's friend.

--

Reading oneself over the last 40-odd years is more interesting than it might have been. Starting to put together the Collected Poems, I find I have 133 poems for it since the late 1970's, which is where it is likely to start. I'm surprised how much I like some of the old ones which I haven't looked at for years. It's not obvious quite where to draw the line but I've thrown out less than I thought I might so far. 133 poems from 40 or so years is not far off the rate of 4 a year I've long assumed is what I did.

I wonder if it might be called Pluperfect, contuining the theme of my titles and looking back twice, as it were. I might need to extend my computer expertise to make a kindle of it but there is time. I'll provisionally set myself a date of 17/10 to have it done by. One has to eventually accept that the bid for the rights to it from Faber or anybody else is looking unlikely and, no, I don't want to go out to try to sell copies by reading from it and being there to append my signature at festivals. It's not a commercial enterprise. It matters little to me whether anybody reads them or not. But the simple fact of having a 'project' to think about and do has immediately improved my quality of life.