The Reading Diary

For all the world it seems like this place has become a reading diary. There's worse things to be and I keep finding things I want to say and even I eventually tired of finding fault with the Prime Minister. Sisyphus himself would have had no complaint with his lot if he'd ben offered that job as an alternative.

It's not in all such places, though, that one would find the autobiography of David Essex followed by The Aeneid. There is variety to be had as well as idiosyncracy.

I know I didn't spend much time with Virgil in first year Classical Studies in 1978/79 but now it seems I didn't even look at it. I'm well aware I went through university without doing any more than necessary but that first year was particularly undemanding. Only now am I filling in some of the bits I missed out of what might have been called 'an education' but it is mostly very enjoyable and makes use of the library upstairs rather than making the postlady deliver more packages. It might also be thought that 'education, such as it was, was wasted on 18 year olds anyway and many of these books are better appreciated later.

It's not possible to enjoy Virgil as a poet in any meaningful way at this distance, not in the same way that we might connect with a contemporary poet in our own language, but I'm tempted to accept all the great claims made forr him by W.F. Jackson Knight in the introduction to my 1977 Penguin Classic (95p). One is not accustomed to quite so more war, heroism and divine intervention in downbeat suburban meditations these days but the glow of whatever Virgil's poetry was like is still evident through the veils of this translation and moe often than one thought was likely one is struck by some metaphor or verbal invention.,

he was like a man who, as he puts his weight to the ground, finds that he has trodden on a snake lying unseen amid wild branches, and recoils as it angily raises the swelling metal-blue of its neck.

Snakes and routine human barbarism are more familar in this poetry than we expect to find in the dailiness of our lives in provincial England now but poetry wouldn't be poetry if it didn't do hyperbole and the agonies of Dido as Aeneas leaves her in Carthage under the direction of even greater imperatives than mere love are as heartbreaking as you'd want them to be.

I hadn't known what to expect or how far I'd stick with The Aeneid but it's been a great pleasure so far and is inlikely to let me down now. I would have thought the Eclogues and Georgics will be on their way here in due course. Maybe The Iliad might be worth another go after the desultory efforts I made with it all those years ago but I suspect The Odyssey is the preferred option.

Poor old Balzac, whose Lost Illusions, has been waiting up there on the top shelf for a few months now but he's had a fair go in the past. There is another John Burnside up there with it. One is tempted by the new Bob Mortimer memoir but I don't want to be the victim of the blatant advertising of the interview with Caitlin Moran last week. And then I see, looking beyond the duteous acquisitions of more Listener-style crossword clues from Paul Muldoon in the Autumn, there is an Oxford novel due from Daisy Dunn next year, which is bound to be enormous fun.

At the end of the month, a fine-looking programme of Autumn concerts in Chichester and Portsmouth cathedrals might finally establish the rhythm of what retirement was imagined to be and so I'll go back to stretching my limited resources of music reviewing vocabulary to beyond breaking point in the effort to express how completely great it is when the whole point of one's life is to get up and make one's way to such an event and then come back and make some sense out of the notes one's made. Maybe I'd be better off just listening but, as with reading books or what Socrates said about the unconsidered life being not worth living, I wouldn't see the point of doing any such thing without having to think of what to say about it.

--

I didn't send The Times crossword in this week. While I'm not ashamed of using my OED, an internet word finder or even, at a push, Dan Word, I'm not going to try to get the book token prize when ACOEMETI was one of the answers. I would never have got that and, if they take the trouble, they might take the hint that the lack of an e-mail from me last week was a protest against that being too hard. 

 

Gently does it

This must be the gentlest album I've ever heard. The Castle of Fair Welcome by Gothic Voices all those years ago was calm but this is more so. It was bought for the four minutes and a bit of an arrangement of Josquin's Deploration, the gorgeous lament on the death of Ockeghem, for two voices and vihuelas, which makes for a slightly different impression but doesn't take any undue liberties.

The rest of the album is in much the same mood with counter-tenor, John Potter and soprano Anna Maria Friman augmented by vihuelas and viol. It might pass you by as harmless background music for relaxation purposes if not given full attention.

ECM are known for their often contemporary output of minimalist music but this is minimal in a different way. It's great to find something so apparently unobtrusive and yet not undemanding. It demands listening to.

--

John Burnside's The Music of Time found its way to a coherent conclusion that brought all John's thinking about poetry to a convincing denouement. Quite honestly, you can say almost anything you like about poetry and then back it up with your evidence and, as in school work, it will be the quality of your argument that counts more than the truism you try to justify. Although he seems to concede that 'poetry makes nothing happen', John brings immense knowledge and wide reading to lots of poems that probably don't and then, idealistically, one might think, argues for a 'world culture' of a liberal, woke kind that may or may not seem achieveable in English or Creative Writing Departments across the world but doesn't seem to be having much impact on the tyrannies that are more intent on achieving one sort of Armageddon or another.

But, with deeply thought-out reasons in favour of poetry in translation, a thorough-going examination of the pitfalls of marriage and always aware of the 'dailiness' of life in poetry, a phrase from Randell Jarrell, among many other wise chapters, one would expect no less of John Burnside and more of his books will be summoned to these premises after I made inroads into what remains of the pile I had waiting.

Nothing to do with reason or philosophy

I'm not halfway through it yet so it's nowhere near time to say anything too definite about John Burnside's The Music of Time. It's not new, anyway, it's 2019 so not necessarily up for review. It's heavyweight without being heavy going. John's broad, deep and international reading is hugely impressive, related as each chapter seems to be to some telling anecdote.

Underneath everything he says there is always the glimpse of the idea of something beyond, an elsewhere, that is transcendental, as there is in his poems, but that is a corollary of another recurrent theme which is the limits of what can be known and so it comes as no surprise that there is an unknown to contemplate. There is somewhat more to it than that, of course, in 450 pages that call up Wittgenstein, Hegel, Soctates, Aristotle and almost as many intellectual giants as one can think of as well as plenty I'd never heard of. Among the poets given close attention are Montale, Ungaretti and Hart Crane that I did know of, several, like Maria Zambrano that I hadn't and William Matthews that I had somehow missed out on so far and was convinced enough about to order the Collected Poems of. It is very much a case of the more you find out, the less it seems one knows about.

But I was gladdened to read that,

...this is where poetry seems to begin too - single words or phrases, or just a rhythm sliding from one train of thought to another, nothing to do with reason, or philosophy or the intensely meant moral or political ideas that, surely, poetry is supposed to 'be about'. 

That seems very much like it to me if I could take that highly selective quote out of the context of the rest of The Music of Time and cite it as wisdom of quasi-scriptural significance in the equivalent survey of poetry that I won't ever write.

It is just the words. That's where the 'poetry' is which is why it 'gets lost in translation' and although one admires John's international outlook, unless one is A.N. Wilson and capable of picking up Italian with so little trouble in order to read Dante properly, the nuances that make good poems good are likely to be lost on anybody not fluent in the poetry's original language. It is the translator that we read. But it would be some sort of crime against humanity, wouldn't it, to dismiss the likes of Yevtushenko, Anna Akhmatova and Mandelstam on account of them not being written in English. Even Larkin, who gets short shrift here, who liked to pretend to be a Little Englander betrayed himself with more knowledge of non-English poetry than his philistine pose who have had us believe. 

Already I'm much further into making a manifesto when the first point on my agenda is not to have manifestos. Poetry is the words, their associations and how those words can together become more than the sum of their parts. It makes a change for me to repeat that point week after week rather than argue forever that An Arundel Tomb does not say that,

What will survive of us is love. 

But of course words, and poetry, are laden with and possibly handicapped by meaning, however skilfully or inadvertently the poet makes use of the shifts in meaning that many of them can have. It's not something that music has to deal with. Some poets might want to divorce words from meaning while others give them a welter burden of associations and re-echoes.

Don Paterson's very different but at least as big book, The Poem, left one with the same feeling as this does - how on earth can I write a poem while bearing all this in mind. And, of course, you can't and don't have to. You need to forget all this and just do what comes naturally which is the sort of advice one can benefit from in a number of other disciplines, I'm sure. Cricket, for example.

It's a moot point how much theory one needs in any enterprise. At present I'm short of poems to read and hope that William Matthews turns out to be a find but enjoy reading about poetry, too. But poetry and things about poetry are two different things.

My song remains the same and you're likely to have heard it before unless it's the first time you've found yourself here - all you have to be is any good.

Lee 'Scratch' Perry was 85

 

 

He played the Wedgewood Rooms down here more than once in recent years. I didn't know about it before it was sold out or else that would have been a reason to go back to a gig, one last time.

Latest Reading - Dante, etc.

 It's unlikely I'll move from A.N. Wilson's life of Dante to the Comedy or any other of his verse. As Wilson catalogues in his last chapter, Dante's Afterlife, successive generations will make of such writers what they will and not all of them until relatively recently made much of Dante. No doubt the point of the poetry, which is the words and how they add up to more than the sum of their parts, might be appreciated in the Italian and Wilson assures us that it isn't difficult to acquire sufficient Italian to do so. Easy enough for one of his calibre perhaps but I can't see me doing it after my short-lived attempt to learn German for the sake of the Bach Cantatas.

What one comes away with, among many things, is the poet's position in relation to the warring factions and politics of his time and place. My understanding of the history of Christianity was based on the Reformation and the beginnings of the Protestant church but now the earlier schism between the Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic traditions looks equally as much of a power grab rather than the flimsy doctrinal disagreements it was predicated on and that should come as no surprise. The corruption, tyranny and self-interest that runs through the history of the popes makes the sagas surrounding the battle for the English monarchy seem like a little local difficulty and what God had to do with any of them, apart from as the most transparent pretext, is hard to fathom.

If one admires Wilson's detailed setting out of all the politics while largely choosing to let it pass by, one is very glad of his book for all the themes and ideas he picks out to explore along the way. Chapter XV, Medieval Autobiography, brings in Northrop Frye and,

'Most autobiographies are inspired by a creative, and therefore functional impulse to select only those events and experiences in the writer's life that go to build up an integrated pattern.'

 

In only a few hundred pages, a book has very limited capacity to cover much more than those parts of the early life that contribute to the story and how it builds to where it needs to get to. The life of a poet will highlight elements relevant to the development of the poetry at the expense of all the other things they might have been and, to some extent, might have been.

In a bit of a swerve away from C13th Florence, I'm enjoying some light relief with the autobiography of David Essex. I wouldn't usually but Yoko lent it to me and it seemed only polite. Slightly better written and engaging than many such ghost-written books can be, we at least get the same Rod Stewart story that David Cook could have been a footballer and that he was interested in blues and was a drummer before becoming the teen idol of Jackie pin-ups and 'it was only a Winter's Tale'. But I'm sure after these first chapters, which are often the most interesting in any life, it will be showbiz name-dropping and buying flash cars.

Gladly, not having had a life worth reporting to any audience willing to pay £20 for the hardback edition of it, I don't have to decide if my own story should aim at the low-grade sport, the very minor literary achievement, the work experience or anything else. It would peter out and find me in retirement on a Sunday afternoon explaining why I hadn't written it.  

A second, major good point in the Dante is how,

There are, Bruni averred, two types of poet. The First is someone possesssed by 'furor'. This sort of poet is inspired. The second has trained to write poetry by laborious study of theology, philosophy, astronomy, arithmetic and history. And Dante, says Bruni..., was of the second sort.

Of course, Wilson has to say that 'perhaps all truly great poets are, in fact, something of both' but he doesn't entirely dismiss the proposition. Without it having to be that particular litany of disciplines that the poet needs to have studied now that we are not, so we are told, in the Middle Ages, the distinction is not far from one I once tried to make on the old 'Poets on Fire' forum when in provocative mode several years ago and was all but shot down for it had it not been for the supportive intervention of Roddy Lumsden.

Very broadly, we might put Ted Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Kate Tempest and Dylan Thomas in the 'furor' half and Larkin, Gunn and Auden among those who 'trained to write poetry'. While I very much sympathize with the second lot and could only ever think of belonging with them, it's not quite so 'us and them' and we must recognize allies who are more at home on the other side, like Rosemary Tonks in poetry, and like Ken Clarke and how John Major turned out to be in politics when Brexit push came to a belated rearguard action and insufficient shove.

--

The David Essex book came with a couple of other 1970's-related items that provide hilarity and retrospective insight amid what is only really nostalgia. In the anthology of 70's memories, The Seventies- Good Times, Bad Taste by Alison Pressley, almost every page makes me want to tell an anecdote. An illustration of the 7-inch single, Fascist Dictator reminds me of the time, in 1977, when I went into Audiosonic, a record shop in Gloucester's precinct where two boys from our school worked, regarding themselves as 'in the know' and a part of the New Wave.

I went up to the counter and asked, 'Have you got Fascist Dictator by the Cortinas?'

No, they hadn't.

'Okay. Have you got Right to Work by Chelsea?'

No, they didn't have that, either. At which point I thought I'd better ask them an easier one.

'Have you got The Logical Song by Supertramp?'

The sniggering with which this third attempt to buy something from them was received seemed unbefitting, the conservative nature of Supertramp not being as raw and angry as my first two choices saw themselves but, gentlemen, it was you that worked in a shop that didn't have Fascist Dictator or Right to Work and where were you at the Anti-Nazi gigs in Brixton and Finsbury Park with The Clash, Misty in Roots, Steel Pulse, Elvis Costello and, I dare say, Sham 69.

The Jackie anthology has no such edgy concerns and would probably warn its readers off the sort of boy that concerned himself with fringe movements that may or may not have been monitored by the security services, innocent idealists dressed up as realpolitik activists as they were, especially if he wanted to kiss them, which enterprise Jackie seems to regard as a game of chess so strategic that even Anatoly Karpov would have struggled with it. But by far the biggest headline news from that book is the double page feature on 'Wanted Men', a set of pen portraits of fanciable singers, film stars and celebrities might have qualified them for inclusion in the Harmless Boys magazine that Lisa Simpson read. In hindsight, they might not have been as suitable as Donny Osmond and surely Rod wasn't even then but as well as him and The Fonz, John Travolta, it was always Leif Garrett then, and even Bob Geldof, none of who were likely to be at the local disco of a Saturday night in Gloucester, they feature the dishy, impossibly rich and aristocratic Prince Andrew.

'Wanted Men' indeed but no more wanted than some of those supported by the left once we arrived at university and took to reading Cosmopolitan instead of Jackie.

--

I stuck with the marvellous John Burnside for the next episode of ostensibly more highbrow reading and have begun his survey of, mostly, C20th poetry, The Music of Time. Having been so impressed with his poems for some years and then recently taking in some fiction and memoir, he does himself no harm right up at the top of my pecking order in the first couple of chapters as a commentator on what he's read, of which there seems to be plenty.

I had better save further thoughts about it until after I've read it, which isn't always how I plan reviews, but it strikes me immediately that Larkin only features in a very small way in the index, Gunn and O'Brien not at all and we all might have our own such survey in us, that they would all be different and at least interesting to do even if nobody would read them.

I'd love to have a book to write and it isn't going to be a novel. I know what would happen, though. I'd set off one morning, beginning with some seminal poem from which I'd intend to expand to cover all my 40-odd years of thinking about poems and then it would only be a matter of how long it would last until I abandoned it.

The short form, the miniature, the poem itself, might be all I have, would that any more worth writing might occur to me.

A Pecking Order

I'm not reading A.N. Wilson's book on Dante because I'm particularly interested in Dante. I was diverted to it after a review of the latest book on Dante and deciding that I'd rather read Wilson on anything, almost, except Seamus Heaney on who we don't seem to agree.

History is too much for me, there's so much of it. Wilson brings immense scholarship to all that he does (it seems to me) and even if the finer points of The Divine Comedy are likely to remain beyond me, the great thing about books like this is how they suggest as much as they can as best they can of such places as C13th Florence. Perhaps I first encountered such a thing in E.M.W. Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture which was on a reading list 40-odd years ago and is still remembered as amazing.

Good Grief, did they think that. But, then again, was the ongoing corruption of the Catholic Church, the schism with the Orthodox Christians further East or anything at all predicated on the existence of God, which always seemed to fit political expediency any different from those that concerned Tolstoy in C19th Russia or the hapless duplicity of how the world is being managed now. No, not at all. How could we have been so foolish, as teenagers, reading the NME or, preferably, Jackie, listening to David Bowie and T. Rex, to think that Clement Attlee, Roosevelt and even Harold Wilson had given us reason for optimism. My generation and those 10-15 years older than me benefitted enormously but it wasn't much use to anybody else.  And so I am left, apologetically really, with nothing better to do than read books as good as this.

I was most taken by a page or two (116-117) on which Wilson points out,

note the extraordinary sense of a pecking order.

My reticence in the face of objections in recent decades to any idea of a 'canon', of some writers being regarded as 'better' than others would not have allowed me to write 'pecking order' without inverted commas but Wilson finds no reason to use them.

 

The poets are being lined up in competition with one another.

 

Maybe all serious writers think like this to some extent.

 

In Dante, the streak of competitiveness is very, very strong...

 

So it looks as if poetry has always been a sport after all, however much we might like to think of it as a pleasure beyond the morbid league tables of three points for a win and let's hope to park the bus and get an away draw at Rotherham on a Tuesday night in November. 

We have all already liked one poem more than another. Such decisions have made us think we like this poet better than that and so we think they are 'better'. It remains entirely possible that there's something 'better' about the poetry of Ezra Pound or Geoffrey Hill that we don't quite 'get' compared to Wendy Cope that we think we do. But if there's been a 'pecking order' since 1260 and hundreds of years before, it is highly unlikely that an aberration of unduly zealous, inclusive liberalism can suddenly turn up and overturn all that in favour of some vague idea that every contribution is of equal value and that a good proportion of those who turn up to take 'A' levels deserve an A or A* grade. 

That would be like saying to an increasingly flawed succession of people who wanted to be Prime Minister (Blair, Gordon, Cameron, Thersea and the latest dreary dope we've have foisted upon us), that, okay, yes, you can be.

So, if you've folloed this circuitous ramble this far, we might like to wonder which poets in English have been top of the pecking order in living memory. It is going to be a shifting thing but for the time being and for my purposes, Auden, Larkin and Elizabeth Bishop look to have fairly secure places in it. After that, maybe the dust needs to settle a bit morte but I'll be damned if Seamus Heaney wasn't am,ong the best of his generation.

Having innovated himself to a prominent position by 20 years ago, Paul Muldoon has risked becoming a parody of himself. Sean O'Brien has bagged himself a large haul of the major prizes by staying mostly with tradition but doing it very impressively at his best and so is a sound and reliable pick in the same way that Hardy, Auden and Larkin are.

One isn't made Laureate without some relevant credentials and Ms. Duffy represents the period with some finely-made poems but, much to my surprise and not quite for the first time, I find an unlikely source of perceptive commentary in Private Eye, in their review of Simon Armitage's Oxford lectures,  A Vertical Art. I wonder who wrote it,

 

and yet over it there hangs the faint scent of elegy, the thought that chaos lurks just around the corner and that prescriptions (and proscriptions) of this kind will be completely anathema to the next generation of poets waiting to emerge from the nation's creative writing courses. Armitage's tenure as the UK's Mr. Poetry is set to last until 2029. It's a safe bet he will be the last proper poet to be appointed Laureate. 

 

They don't even put 'proper poet' in inverted commas. They really mean it. They have cited George the Poet and Kate Tempest ('zealously emoting') as examples of the way things are going. For a certain type of us, who may be of a certain age, such things only qualify as poetry by through our open-minded, inclusive definition of poetry that lets in all knids of bad poetry. If the poetry commentator at Private Eye is right then we are living on borrowed time and we are the dance band on the Titanic. But it is somehow a part of human nature to feel apocalyptic and it isn't over until it's over. It does seem like a generation of 'proper' poets are dying off and not being replaced by similar but who's to say.

It will be thin and unrewarding poetry that leaves future generations under nourished if they're right and poetry will be further diminished to a sub-category of stand-up performance and so one might expect some kind of renaissance, maybe like that of 1977 in pop music after the behemoths of old rock music had ground creativity to a standstill, bored us to paralysis and sent us gladly towards disco.

We will have to see what happens. There are more dangerous crises extending themselves exponentially across the planet. Those of us with time on our hands to concern ourselves with anxieties about pecking orders and the future of poetry are privileged and spoilt beyond our own knowing.

Under a Spell

In those brief, highly-charged moments when one finally puts down an unputdownable book, one can believe one has a new favourite writer. 

Thom Gunn's letters earlier this year did him no favours in my estimation. Last year I pronounced Proust as the greatest novelist, even if not ahead of James Joyce's Dubliners. A.N. Wilson contuines to be hugely impressive in whatever of his I pick up. Elizabeth Bishop and Rosemary Tonks head up a list of favourite poets with unforgettable bits of August Kleinzahler, Sean O'Brien, Larkin and Auden pressing their respective cases. It's hard to know how many tremendous writers there are that I haven't read although I wouldn't agree with John Peel that the music he hadn't heard was more interesting than what he had.

But the feeling that one has just read something entirely worthwhile and there was nothing one would rather have been doing is surely what one is in search of in a life spent, for better or worse, much of it with books.

I Put on Spell on You is possibly 'confessional' in a way that Burnside's less specifically personal poetry is not but, then again, any memoir is likely to be so except that not all of them escape the events they describe in search of something 'beyond' quite so insistently. The unprepossessing origins in Cowdenbeath and Corby are jettisoned as Burnside vividly broods upon a life of itinerant infatuation, 'glamour', madness and some danger seemingly, as in his poems, aware of something 'other', more and unattainable, glimpsed in moments in which he sees 'happiness' but knows that the hyperbole of popular music lyrics is nothing like the real thing.

It is in the isolation of sub-Arctic Norway that he thinks he might find release but his friend explains that there one is more dependent on the trust of others and community than anywhere else. As in the stories, there is a persistent awareness of violence and a need for protection from it. It might be the same pre-disposition that makes him a drug user and prone to amour fou that leads him to this edge of what 'the System' would regard as sane, that suburban, domestic 'sanity' represented more innocently by R4Extra's current series of repeats of Not in Front of the Children in which Wendy Craig developed her specialist line in crisis-stricken housewife.

Towards the end, Burnside refers in passing to Dante and Beatrice and how the poet there never mentions Mrs. Aligheri, which is the difference between the 'thrawn' of what might have been possible and the less poetic version of what really happened. There is something wild and uncontrollable beyond but Burnside, in finding himself unable to commit to Christina, turns away from it, which might have been for the best because otherwise she might have become 'real'.

I like it when one book links into the next and how Dante came into the story like that because it will be Wilson on Dante next and then we'll see. But, for however long it lasts - and it may have been a glimpse of impossible happiness - John Burnside seemed like my favourite writer. Maybe he still will be but, as becomes clear with any of them, it is only a form of words. It's not to be regarded as scripture or gospel as some aberrant believers would take texts to be. A talented writer is only someone who convinces through the illusion of the words they put together and conjures something wonderful from them but it's worth it while it's happening.