Elizabeth Bishop Exam Questions

It's been 'pop' music here recently, I can't help but notice. We can't have that all the time. It's a relatively quiet period for lunchtime concerts.

A few years ago I was doing what I could to help a friend with her Open University essays. Shostakovich, Ovid, Heaney and Hughes, that sort of thing. I was looking forward to the C20th Literature course and Elizabeth Bishop because I hoped the essay question might direct some attention to what it is about her poems that makes her quite the paragon example. But it wasn't to be. My friend chose to do Children's Literature and so I got some time off.

But it recently occurred to me that there would be exam questions on Elizabeth Bishop on the internet and there are,

Elizabeth Bishop Exam Questions

They don't help much, mostly only giving candidates the opportunity to write what they know, or think.

But maybe it was a bad idea and I was expecting too much. Maybe the reason why she is one of the poets whose work I haven't yet found any fault with is because one can't quite say. Maybe 'poetry' at its best is something that can remain elusive.

School and exams did their best to put us all off poetry by reducing it to the 'I-Spy' project of identifying alliteration, assonance, rhyme and even irony, ambiguity, synecdoche and zeugma. I'd much rather poetry didn't do such things, or at least make any effort to. It's much more impressive to 'be any good' without having shown how hard you've tried.

And that's why Elizabeth Bishop is 'any good' - because it's not easy to say why. Detachment, I reckon, has a lot to do with it. Putting some distance between what is being said and what it might, possibly, mean. But even that is straying a bit close to irony.

Now that we live in an age that allows biographical references back in and accepts that the text does not exist in isolation from the time and circumstances in which it was written, my main reasons for admiring her, as well as the poems, are that she was hospitalized for five days after a drinking session and that, at the age of about 59 or 60, she found her glasses in the fridge which meant the milk must be on her desk.

They don't make them like that anymore.

I've generally always thought that 'novelist' was a proper job and 'poet' almost something one did for pleasure, like some do gardening, and it didn't matter what sort of job one made of it. It's best not to worry because most poetry is terrible. Good poetry is almost impossible.

In trying to fend off the seven months since I've written a poem I liked much becoming eight, I have committed some lines to a Word doc on the subject of Ronnie Spector, see below, but it's not quite happening and so is likely to show tell-tale signs of having been 'worked on' and so it's likely to go with the failed companion piece on Agnetha Fältskog and await an idea for a third female pop icon to make a triptych of bad tributes.

But, you never know. In retrospect, I'm not sure what all the fuss was about with Blondie once we'd been treated to Denis but she eventually came back with Maria which was the best thing she ever did so one never quite gives up hope. And we are back on pop music again. Sorry about that.

They Lost That Lovin' Feeling

If the reason for reading Mick Brown's Tearing Down the Wall of Sound had been to investigate the relationship between madness and genius in this particular case, which it was, I'm not disappointed. I think it's always particular to each case, though. In this case, the insecurities of a small, geeky man who at least had the talent to develop his obsession with the pop music on the radio into a deep understanding of how it was made.

'Genius' is a big word but, like Thomas Edison might have meant, it's not necessarily all innate and requires some nurturing. Spector knew how to make a pop record, though.

Having read Ronnie's account in Be My Baby, though, there are differences to be found in perspectives to be had. Ronnie presents herself as a picture of innocence whereas Brown thinks she knew plenty, not least in marrying Spector for the benefit of her career. It effectively lasted four months although the wedding night was ominous enough.

Spector was most concerned that his girlfriend wasn't left with the Rolling Stones, especially, when touring the UK and would engage in long late night phone calls when she was away in a hotel to assure himself she was with nobody else. That contrasts with Yoko Ono's attitude to her marriage to John when she suggested he should have an affair with May Pang, much to both of their surprise, but they did as they were told. 

Maybe Lennon didn't have easy relationships with anybody, not unlike Spector, and so it is almost inevitable that they soon find difficulties of their own. I might take issue with Mick Brown that Lennon's Rock'n'Roll album, some of which was retrieved from sessions produced by Spector, was soon forgotten because Stand By Me is the best solo Lennon thing there ever but, yes, George was the most immediately successful Beatle with All Things Must Pass because he had all the songs The Beatles wouldn't do saved up for a triple album.

Books on pop music history aren't all as good as they could be, being written sometimes by devoted admirers or from a partisan point of view but it is usually of interest to find out what was going on behind those beguiling confections on the wireless. It would appear that the initial failure of You've Lost that Lovin' Feeling in America was a decisive fracture in Spector's run of success and resulted in a loss of self-belief, which is a big loss for someone who needed as much of it as he did. However, Mick Brown's job on Phil Spector is as compelling, and deeply researched, as any I can think of. It doesn't leave us thinking any better of Spector. We are surely all on Ronnie's side but even she in a way invited some of her troubles in. It is a book without an obvious hero. The story of pop music remains the story of what horrors went on beneath its surface while the disc jockeys played us so many wonderful records.

Steeleye Span – Rave On

 

I'm guessing it's Peter Knight doing most of the vocal gymastics, oh-wha-ah-a'who'a' whoopa, on this on the grounds that, some 40 and more years ago, I remember him saying, while introducing a song, that he was a great admirer of Prof. Stanley Unwin, whose quirkilarity in the usilarouousness of the Englistic lingusistocity was in those days by some thought to be the most hightilomonious achievementimum of erodicious although it might by now look as subversive as it did then.

Buddy Holly, we also understood in those days, was the Mozart of pop song writers. I'm not quite so sure about that as I once was but the point is that Steeleye Span were prepared to try to be 'quirky', for better or worse, of which this is an example, and it only represents them in The Rock Show because I'm very short on 'rock' records that I genuinely like to fill such a show and have shifted 'folk rock' into it and programmed this after one of Buddy's less sentimental efforts.

Rave On by Steeleye Span puts on a great show of folky vocals, as if some local yokels in a Thomas Hardy novel had done it ahead of their time.

There is plenty of more representative, more genuinely folky, Steeleye Span than this and not many bands came up with more evocative album titles than Hark! the Village Wait, Ten Man Mop, Please to See the King and Parcel of Rogues.

It almost seems as if the success of having an extraordinary hit with a Latin hymn in Gaudete and then completely 'selling out' by having an album produced by such an inauthentic purveyor of pop music as David Bowie should have done for them. Success ruined a lot of artists, possibly most of those that achieved any measure of it, but you might find that Steeleye, made up of whoever they can find, recovered from such glamour and stuck to what they did best.

As long as Maddy Prior is doing the front stage, top line part, they still can but, just looking at their website, she is the only one left from the 70's so it's really 'Maddy & Friends'.      

The Dark-Eyed Sailor

 

Steeleye Span are on the list for the Perfect Day of Pop Radio feature one day but they get in ahead of that for having been my unsuccessful suggestion for this morning's Radio 3 Playlist Challenge to follow up a somewhat less entrancing setting of The Dark-Eyed Sailor by Vaughan-Williams.

Steeleye were among my early 70's, early teenage favourites and, although it's maybe twenty years since I played the disc that has this on, originally from Hark ! the Village Wait, 1970, it has lasted the course. There is something about one's first enthusiasms that stays with you.

So, thank you to Georgia Mann and her producers for prompting the memory of this even if they didn't see fit to include it in their selections.

The Mamas & the Papas, Do You Wanna Dance

 

It's not necessarily the song, it's the way it's done. The Shadows put in one of their finest performances as Cliff's support band in 1962 but that was an entirely different thing to the Mamas & the Papas relaxed harmonies on their first album in 1966 and different again was a version by the T. Rex Disco Party on the B side of Dreamy Lady. The Beach Boys also had a go but they were all paying tribute, and royalties, to Bobby Freeman who wrote and recorded it in 1958.

Anybody who does better than a Cliff classic and, admittedly, not one of T. rex, most memorable outings, is doing well but the Mamas & the Papas must always be in with a chance, re-imagining what I had thought was a Cliff record. Gentle and sensitive before rising to something quite impassioned, it was a revelation when I first found it and it is some measure of their achievement that it was only filling out the album and never a single for them.

They had plenty of options but this hidden-away treasure was once quite a find, hasn't lost anything in the decades since and is possibly really their masterpiece.

Call My Bluff

 

The seasons call our bluff regularly these days often being out of kilter with traditional expectations. Eventually all the poems that described such things as Aprille's shoures sote, No This, No That, November or how October is marigold will need to be footnoted to explain way what have become incomprehensible  stereotypes of those times of year. But it's been Spring-like today and the plan is to attend the cricket on Friday for an absurdly early visit to the Bowl but that's when Nottinghamshire are due there. I hope Basharat Hassan, Derek Randall and Gamani Gooneseena are in good form. 

However, it's not all fun. One does have to do 'something useful' once in a while if only to assuage one's conscience. Practical jobs and I have never gone well together and any attempt at one runs a high risk of leaving the job looking worse than it did before I started. But painting is surely non-technical enough not to need somebody to do it for me. In nearly 25 years in this house I've maybe painted no more than 25% of its walls and very little of its ceilings and it begins to show. It's not until one takes a room apart that one finds how far short of an exhibition home it has fallen. So, today was the bedroom ceiling done in the homely company of Matt Chorley, Mariella Frostrup and finally Fi Glover and Jane Garvey on Times Radio. That might have been the hard part. I selected a shave of Duck Egg Blue for the walls which I'll apply tomorrow, whether with Times Radio or Radio 3 remains to be seen. But I already feel virtuous and I hope the ceiling is worth 7/10.

I deserve at least a 1997 Call My Bluff,something of a pop music special with Adam Faith, George Martin, Cliff and Bob Holness who so very famously didn't play the saxophone on Baker Street. But there's Vicky's dad, Alan, Suzanne Dando, who I'm glad to find wasn't murdered, or married to Sam Torrance, so I was thinking of someone else, and an early cersion of Sandi Toskvig that's not very different from the current one. One might say 'they don't make them like that anymore' but they do, they just do it with people you've never heard of.

Portsmouth Choral Union - St. Matthew Passion

 Music in Portsmouth

Some words regarding Saturday night's Matthew Passion by the Portsmouth Choral Union.