Anthology

 As far as the list-making fetish goes, for a poet or poetry reader the making of one's own anthology must be the ultimate project. Why I thought I'd begin mine I'm not sure but making a list is as compulsive as it is daft, especially if a numerical limit is not put on it. Most lists are themed or else one could please onself with Dadaist lists, like- The Moon, antibiotics, turbot, The War of Jenkins' Ear, Felicity Kendall, kumquat and Afternoon Delight by the Starland Vocal Band.

So it's only now, having got 121 lines on the Excel spreadsheet of my anthology, I begin to consider its parameters. I've limited it to three poems per poet, mainly arbitrarily but a few would get double figures straight off without such a quota. Would I stop at 500. Would I get to 500. There's always just one more. At least the Spotify playlist at DGBooks Radio has decided for itself what my favourite pop music is.  

Going back to basics, what is the etymology of 'anthology'. It's,

'mid 17th century: via French or medieval Latin from Greek anthologia, from anthos ‘flower’ + -logia ‘collection’ (from legein ‘gather’). In Greek, the word originally denoted a collection of the ‘flowers’ of verse, i.e. small choice poems or epigrams, by various authors.'

 

But why and how did 'small' creep in there. Collections of flowers can be extensive, as per the Chelsea Flower Show so we must be careful of definitions.

Certainly the contents of an anthology need to be regarded as worthy. So there must be a remit, like 'these are the best poems ever', 'these poems represent C19th French Poetry' or 'these are my personal favourite poems', etc.

I'm very much tending towards the lattermost of those even if several poets would get more than three at the expense of others getting any without that prescription. If, at present, it goes from Catullus to Julia Copus, it has to be said that poems from 1900 onwards begin at no. 29 out of the 121 so it's hardly a broad sweep of English Poetry and there are 10 translations - from Latin, French, Polish and Russian- so it's not 'English' poetry to begin with. I've tried to include as much as possible from pre-1900 but vast continents of Edmund Spenser, Paradise Lost and John Dryden are lost on me. 

So at whatever lengths it stops at, it will be all the poems I could think of, not including those from fourth place downwards by any given poet except there will be the one I forgot about and then the other one I forgot about.

Not to worry. No publisher is pressing me to do this. There are no 'permissions' to pay for. It's like any other compulsion- 'the four aways', the ITV 7 or not stepping on the cracks in the pavement- golf, for some- that has no end until maybe one day it has been left aside for so long that it's not worth going back to.

Would that it were, as Robert Robinson used to say. It's problem is not so much how it will end but how it was ever allowed to begin.

Meanwhile, I've allocated two poems each to Rosemary Tonks and Wisława Szymborska. I really ought to decide which to put in.

Pushkiniana

T.J. Binyon's Pushkin, a Biography, is a heavy book. Not heavy going but heavy on detail. One wonders if we need it all but the cumulative effect is probably the point. Byron is mentioned several times as a contemporary, a model and a comparable figure as that kind of Romantic poet that enjoys an adventure or two.

He's never knowingly not in love, whether it's with a teenager, somebody else's wife, a countess or all three, often an Ekaterina. The gambling debts, from being an apparently terrible card player, recur in increasing proprtions, his poems have to go through censors, he's suspected of being a Decembrist and did have revolutionary sympathies and he has a more crowded fixture list at duelling than I'd like. In due course, I understand, he comes second but I haven't officially got that far yet.

While I thought Eugene Onegin was impressive, many of the faults of Romanticism are present in other poems quoted, singing hymns of praise to beauty for its own sake without telling us much about it. And the book is generously illustrated by Pushkin's own drawings, done in the margins of manuscripts, of both male and female associates. All in profile, they must be caricatures of a sort because early C19th Russian noses only vary slightly in their sharpness.

Pushkin's not easy to like but he is coming out of it ahead of Baudelaire, for a start. And then one wonders how many poets - betting without all other vocations- do come across as attractive people. Auden, maybe Keats, in some ways Edward Thomas but they are valued for what they produced, not for their gorgeous personalities. In some cases we can sympathize with their perceived shortcomings but whereas our miseducation 45 years ago had told us there was only the text it now seems perverse, impractical or almost impossible to read a poet properly without the context of their life.   

Bores

Patrick Kurp, at the consistently worthwhile and ever estimable Anecdotal Evidence ,

the other day expatiated on the subject of bores, beginning,

One of the unexpected rewards of retirement has been a serious reduction in the number of bores in my life.  

And that sounded right to me. One can be more selective of one's company in retirement whereas you could get stuck with all kinds at school, university or in work.

But those of us who find it necessary to use the internet as an outlet for what a teacher at our school called 'verbal diarrohea' ought to be wary of calling others bores when we ply our trade in 'performing repeats of all the stories' our readers have 'heard in slightly different versions'. It is to be hoped that those who come here willingly do so for similar reasons to those I go to Anecdotal Evidence for and they don't include 'wanting to read a bore'.

Patrick ends with a reference to Bertrand Russell as an example. Perhaps these days one could suffer few more boring than Rod Liddle. Times Radio is good and has its least listenable presenters, him and Geoff Norcott, on at times when I'm not usually tuned in.

But, reflecting on the issue, I'm somehow haunted by various traumas from school, university and work as if this unforseen paradise with almost exclusively company I choose to keep was somehow lacking the antagonism life once had as a matter of routine.

And then I wonder if the people involved were 'bores' or uncongenial in other ways. I recently wrote myself a little memoir of 1981 - not for wider distribution, necessarily- which was a seminal year, moving from the lax, liberal campus life at a low-grade university to that of full-time work in a job unsuited to my limited personality and range of talents. More or less from a culture dominated by middle-class Marxists who enjoyed post-Trad jazz to one where money was a god and, as it turns out, Clarkson's Top Gear, the golf club and Dubai are objects of desire. 

I owe a fair amount to the three years I had at university and the four and a half I subsequently spent employed as a salesman. I don't know how I'd have got from the age of 18 to 25 without them. But whether the people there were 'bores' or only incompatible, it's hard to say. On balance, the Civil Service jobs were better because, despite the plentiful supply of odd characters, there were hundreds of people to find suitable friends among and the day I gained entry into that cosseted employment was the luckiest of my whole life. And, moving beyond that strange but relatively safe world, I've retained the best of them, soon lost the others and by now my inbox receives mainly messages from suitable poetry, music and amenable sorts of people.

I had realized that much but I hadn't got as far as Patrick Kurp in understanding, or putting it, quite so well. Which is why I read him.

--

But here's a test of boringness, or esoteric obsession. 

I've had to clear out much of the upstairs room that serves as archive, library and now the summer escape room if kids are playing their football outside in summer.

It is astonishing what one finds in the unclassified clutter. Like tickets to football matches from 1971. Vivid memories attach to Coventry-Forest on my 11th birthday, not many to West Brom-Man City and none at all to Swansea-Brighton. But looking up that game at Abertawe, I find that someone else has posted their ticket to it on the internet. They weren't sitting near me and my dad.

Whether posting such arcane material makes one a bore, though, I doubt. Mentioning something once, however mundane it might be, is okay. It's the very mundanity that can make it of interest. Surely the bore is the one who goes on about the same things all the time to make them eventually dreary.

The work of Karl Marx is of interest and one ought to hear the music of John Coltrane. The acquisition, maybe even modest accumulation, of some money, preferably by leagal means, is a necessary thing. But one is best trying to avoid becoming a parody of oneself. 

But, of course, it was all part of the plot,

and there I was again......

trapped in a story I had read before. 

  

Cuarteto Casals at Wigmore Hall

 Cuarteto Casals, Wigmore Hall, Jan 12

String Quartets are hard to come by locally, it's a long time since I occupied 'my' seat, A1, in Wigmore Hall and the very excellent Cuarteto Casals were playing the great favourite, Shos 3, so it was an obvious midwinter day out.

Those who think of Bach, especially in chamber works, as too mathematical have a point in the academic exercises of the Art of Fugue but kept to a minimum of four contrapuncti, it served as an hors d'oeuvre of manageable proportions, clarity and precision. With Abel Tomàs taking the lead impeccably, reduced to four parts of the four-part magnum opus it is entirely viable and maybe that's how it's best done, moving from a shadowy Renaissance viol consort to something much more involved.

Any prayer said before a bullfight would for me be offered for the bull so I came to Joaquín Turina's La oración del torero (The Bullfighter’s Prayer), Op. 34, somewhat set against it. Spanish machismo that feels the need of prayer seems even more cowardly than matadors usually are. However, the piece is warm, lyrical and atmospheric, neither too prayerful or suggesting gratuitous bravado and I came away from the encounter pleasantly impressed.

But if the supporting pieces outdid my expectations they counted for not quite so much once the Shostakovich was underway. A major favourite for fifty years since I first recorded it onto cassette from my transistor radio, it was the whole point of the straight up-and-back trip and came with the highest of expectations. Which it proceeded to exceed by a distance.

Vera Martinez-Mehner took the first violin part with tremendous relish and intensity from the austere dance of the first movement onwards. The sound that Cuarteto Casals make, from the delicacy of the subtle detail to the grim power required elsewhere, is stunning. 

The viola riff in the second movement has always for me evoked a shot-down Messerschmidt, or similar, spiralling down from the sky but the programmatic title provided by Shostakovich, whether as a diversion from his real meaning or not, is 'Rumblings of unrest and anticipation'. Music, being abstract, can be whatever you want it to be but the dark menace of Cristina Cordero Beltrán playing it in the flesh only a matter of yards away  is something that a recording can't replicate.

While it is clearly about war, as with a lot of Shostakovich it could be about a few other things, too. It is heroic and very personal music from a naturally, understandably, nervous man who stood his ground and if I can sometimes tire of poets and artists expressing themselves on the tragedies of war, I'll never tire of this beautiful, highly sophisticated bombshell so far ahead of the model string quartets of Haydn, Mozart and even, dare I say, Beethoven.

It was never less than devastating and entirely hypnotic the whole way through. Familiarity with a piece can help one appreciate an outstanding performance whereas unfamiliarity provides the equal and opposite shock of something new. It lasts until Radio 3 goes back to the studio at 2pm for an afternoon that must have struggled to follow it, after the long, lingering last note and the respectful silence allowed before the applause. Of which there was not enough. Good Lord, I realize that the Wigmore audience are served with the best there is but what do performers have to do to get them to their feet to applaud. 

It's a world tour - Paris on Wednesday then Liechtenstein, Spain and the Netherlands before Canada and the USA- and it's routine for them. But that makes the shortlist for Best Concert Ever for me, alongside 11 others I noted down on the train back. Not much more than £20 the ticket, £16.70 return with senior railcard to get there and back. London perfectly peaceable and enjoyable to walk through, unlike reports of it from Trump henchmen who haven't done so. What a bargain, not that cash comes into the equation with any significance.

Cuarteto have recently released vol. 2 of their Complete Shostakovich Quartets. It's possible I might have to have vol. 1 at the very least even though the seminal Fitzwilliam set ought to be enough, given that there are other composers to listen to and one doesn't have world enough, or time. I don't know. But today provided a reason to believe when such things can sometimes seem hard to come by.  

Sean O'Brien, The Bonfire Party

Sean O'Brien, The Bonfire Party (Picador) 

 

There was a time it seemed to me that once beyond the age of 60, poets either ground to a halt or began repeating themselves. If it's a rule at all it's one of the type that need exceptions to prove it. Exceptions like Sean O'Brien who continues to deliver with rigour and energy.

Some might facetiously suggest that he was always repeating himself but he arrived all but fully-formed with The Frighteners in 1987 and not in much need of 'development' to become the mature version of himself, complete with an armoury of objective correlatives for the perceived declining condition of England.

It's less repetition than resonance as summer is either imminent or on its way out. Afternoons are long and drawn out in an onomatopoeic way. Much needs to be ratified, certificated or established by a higher authority, maybe one of the 'gods' mentioned, and we are still haunted by vestiges of WW2. Otherwise not even language is to be trusted. There are sinister implications in how,

                  the clocks conspired to agree

rather than were synchronized. And the discourse is liberally sprinkled with sometimes esoteric literary references, several of which need looking up.

Early on, Sleepers takes as its text a line from George Orwell about 'the deep, deep sleep of England' which is at least as pertinent now as it was in the 1930's,

                         This couldn't be the end

 

for something we had never thought to lose.

It is deceptively restful while dense with a feeling of detachment and unbelonging. Similarly, in High Summer,

This used to be England

and now it is nowhere. 

This long, somnolent afternoon has dragged on since Somebody Else, in Ghost Train, in 1995. 

Ryan: Rainy Season is more autumnal and somewhat less resigned, longing to 'put off politesse and do some smiting' to the gory extent of putting insect larvae into ears but still,

the world is only ever scenery, a tale,

a line that evokes more than its surface complacency suggests when 'unpacked'. The world, it would appear, is a landscape, or some fiction, we pass through - perhaps as tourists or day-trippers do- without being a part of it.

And, as in The Past, we might look back on the past without finding ourselves there either.

But there might have been a shift in the O'Brien diagnosis of our personal, and communal, malaise. There was a time it was political, inflicted on us by the machinations of how things are run and all the time shown to be our own fault. Now, though,

                                    time's

the evil in the heart of things,

and we are victims of something more metaphysical.

It all remains contingent, precarious and unwinnable. But not necessarily as bleak as it sounds. If Sean's poetic genealogy has Auden as a grandfather and maybe Peter Porter and Douglas Dunn as parents, Larkin is an uncle. Dark with implications though much might be - and the future surely looks darker than Larkin could be expected to have imagined, the sordid sheds, the old crowd in the window seat of the pub and the

gasp of rust

with which the back door of the garage opens are real things offering something more tangible than literature, like the engagement with Jules Maigret in Impasse, and in To Cythera, Juniper and Fingerpost towards the end of the book, the reader is left more transfigured than they had any reason to expect. 

 

Having been one of those who decided the result of last year's Forward Prize, it's unlikely any such committee will be required this year to move O'Brien's tally of them up to four.  

Good Mrs. Shakspaire,

It's a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Like listening to Jane Garvey and Fi Glover on Times Radio yesterday afternoon. They interviewed Maggie O'Farrell ahead of the film of Hamnet. It's a brilliant book, might well make a good film but is imaginative historical fiction rather than scholarly literary history. Maggie is as welcome to her view of Shakespeare biography as anybody else is to theirs but she might have made her moving story from some traditional assumptions that don't stand up very well to further examination.

The Curtis-Green Strange Fowl essay offers a very different reading of events and the one piece of reaction to the interview that Jane and Fi read out was the first time we've heard the idea that Hamnet was really the son of Hamnet Sadler, and not Shakespeare, from anywhere else but ourselves. It would be very interesting to know where their contributor found the idea. But a little bit more of an airing and discussion of it was prompted at The Times online without it quite 'going viral'.

Since the first appearance of our 'twins theory' in the TLS in 2016 and posting it on the internet, the discovery of a letter to Mrs. Shakspaire in London, BBC News , has been presented as evidence that Anne was not left behind in Stratford, that it wasn't an unhappy, shotgun or make-do marriage. Maggie thought this was "thrilling" and "wonderful" and,

that proves of course that they did love each other and probably lived together for some time in London. 

 

But, not so fast. The letter might place Anne in London sometime after 1602 and before 1608 but it doesn't mean she was there for the twenty years before that, during which Shakespeare was making his name and a good living out of the theatre. While a reported sighting of Anne in London comes as some surprise, it fits with the Strange Fowl account as part of the reconciliation described there and that subsequent theme in the 'late plays', like The Winter's Tale. What first appeared to be a potential sticking point is readily assimilated and so the essay will be updated with it, gladly accepting the letter as a part of our account. 

 

If Anne wants to go to London then so she must. It's not for us to say she has to stay in Stratford. And neither do we think the worse of her if she did have children by two different fathers. Jane and Fi seemed somewhat offended that the 'twins theory' idea maligned her character and they compared it to Hollyoaks. It is true that Anne has had a 'bad press' for the most part but I'm not having that. It compares with how the prolific output of children by Boris Johnson and Bob Marley are respectively seen as profligate, irresponsible and incontinent but then an expression of love, creativity and fertility. 

 

Strange Fowl is looking good to me. Exactly what our motivation is in promoting the theory isn't entirely clear but I'd like to think it is a contribution to 'scholarship', a selfless project attempting some clarification of confused issues. And, with the job writing about local music events either in abeyance or even having reached its limit, here's a long-standing, labyrinthine subject that hasn't yet lost any of its appeal.  

The Captain's Daughter

The Captain's Daughter, according to the back cover of Pushkin's Novels, Tales, Journeys, 'has been called the most perfect book in Russian literature'. There will be time to wonder whether there are grades of perfection elsewhere. Not having read the whole of Russian literature, I couldn't say but it's a big claim up against Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev et al. James Joyce told his daughter, Lucia, that Tolstoy's How Much Land Does a Man Need? was 'the greatest story that the literature of the world knows' without saying it was perfect. 

Pyotr gets lucky more than once on his adventures before marrying Marya. The story is like an extended parable from the Bible with sharply delineated good and bad characters, virtue rewarded, the bad punished and thus a happy ending. For me, at least, a bit more ambiguity raising a few more questions might be required for anything to be 'great'. Hamlet is more convincing as a character because we can't be sure if he's a hero beleaguered by difficult circumstances or an indolent student mooching about.

Pushkin's characters often end up in duels, as does Hamlet, and as did Pushkin himself, which can't help but be dramatic but life was lived in primary colours in olden days. I don't hold that against him but in many ways a picture painted from a more subdued or limited palette can offer more subtlety. Coming at the beginning of Russian literature, it's remarkable how cultures like that find themselves such a major figure to follow, like Homer in Greek, Chaucer in English and maybe Dante in Italian. 

There's plenty more to be had in Novels, Tales, Journeys but the biography by T. J. Binyon, much lauded by A. N. Wilson - a fine biographer himself- arrived today so I'll soon be as well informed about early C19th Russia as I once was about the Soviet Union, courtesy of Solzhenitsyn. It might work to read the biography and stop off to read the fiction as and when it is mentioned. My trouble is that I'm not really a leisurely reader. Once I've started a book I like to finish it, as long as it's worthwhile.

--

Also upcoming, The Bonfire Party by Sean O'Brien, then Departures, said to be the 'schwanengesang' of Julian Barnes who I'm missing already and, later, Maggie O'Farrell.