Take a look at the lawman Beating up the wrong guy.

 It's in Life on Mars? that,

    Lennon's on sale again. 

 

And now, it would appear, so am I. Here, 

E-Bay, The Perfect Book 

 

It's remarkable what happens once books go out of print. Prices sky rocket to £4.38 plus p&p. There's always somebody ready to cash in.

Once in a while I google myself - vanity, vanity, all of it vanity- but it's not often there's anything new to be found about such a low profile poet.

It's just slightly saddening that I never took any money for those books and yet someone else would. They are cheap to get printed and I gladly gave them away to good homes. So the e-Bay seller never paid the £5 it says the book cost on the back. I have only the vaguest of ideas of how it might be in Guildford with a book by Maggie Sawkins, also of this parish.

But good luck to them. It might not be that the book was unappreciated. It could conceivably be that a genuine poetry lover has died and their family have less interest in this obscurest of titles.

But there is no need to pay £7.08 for it.

Yes, it is officially out of print but I could probably find you a copy if you wanted one.   

--

Much more dispiriting is what reaction 'twins theory', at Strange Fowl gets when it gets any.

For most it is unthinkable, 'bizarre' and almost, one might think, disloyal to the point of insurrectionist. But we're not like that at all. Mr. Curtis and I are entirely compos mentis and only ask if our modest proposal is disprovable.

Strange Fowl continues to add up, for me, and there are those Oxfordians, conspiracy theorists and much more of a host of those who don't believe in William Shakespeare that I ever imagined. And, distressingly, really, it is the likes of them from who we get some support.

They are welcome, of course. Few campaigns turn away any followers except we are exiled in mainstream, we are among the Stratfordian faithful and have nothing more dangerous to offer than some adjustment in Shakespeare's biography to the number of children he may or may not have been the biological father of.

And yet there is more in the news about the authorship question and The Real Shakespeare: Emilia Bassano Willoughby by Irene Coslet who,

comes to Shakespeare as an expert in feminism. She has studied feminism for 20 years and has been involved in the promotion of gender equality in multiple organisations and countries around the world. 

and I'm impressed that she does. But her reading of Shakespeare makes her a perfect fit for the tendency identified by Jonathan Bate that we all make Shakespeare into who we would like him to be, as per Virginia Woolf,

that all Shakespearean biography is veiled autobiography.

 

I'm not at all confident that modest proposals, carefully threaded together by gently thoughtful people, are loud enough to be heard any more. That is by no means a reason to give up on them but it might be a reason to put it in place once and for all and let the world go to bad if that's what it is intent on doing.  

Oh, Babe, What Would Poetry Say

When the opportunity to take a break from the biography of Pushkin presented itself, I took it up. It is more detailed than I require and the broad sweep of a story is in danger of being lost under a welter burden of contiuning affairs, flirtations, controversies and much of what was once expected of poets, 200 years ago, before they retreated into universities. Never wanting to waste a good joke, when Pushkin came to Shove-kin, I decided to give him a rest for a while. With him now married and having published Eugene Onegin, halfway through seemed like an appropriate juncture. But corny jokes can be recycled from e-mails to friends, too.

Julian Barnes was a very good reason to leave off a story that will be easily returned to, then a Christmas present cataloguing all those brands and memories from our shared, generic, 70's childhood was the harmless diversion it was meant to be.

But then, there having been that review in the TLS purporting to survey 'the state of British poetry', I wanted to see it. Only TG Jones, the inheritors of the WH Smith's shops, in Southsea, stock the TLS so I went to the Central Library first except it's a couple of years since they had newspapers and journals one can look at. It turns out they have plenty online but not the TLS. So, not very much like WH Davies, free-loading on public transport, I took the scenic route to Southsea and found the words I so wanted to read.

I doubt if I'm ever going to be a Tristram Fane Saunders admirer any more than one of Ed Sheeran. I'm sure they are both talented at what they do but to me they seem young, safe, anodyne types like those who did their homework, came top of the class and went on to successful careers without having been interesting- see also, Coldplay. But I'm glad I saw Tristram's essay and it's not his fault if what he finds to say about the current condition of British poetry could as equally be appropriate to Business Studies as the English Department.

However, I'm grateful to it for how it brought my attention to Rory Waterman's reviews in Endless Present. One has it confirmed once more that one is no longer middle aged when you are reading books by middle aged poet-academics whose father's poems one once bought, like Andrew Waterman's in Faber's Modern Poets Five, 1981, where he appeared alongside CH Sisson, Craig Raine, Robert Wells, Tom Paulin and Andrew Motion which wouldn't be the worst six-a-side team one ever played in.

But Rory is very soon a most amenable guide through some books one knows well and others one hasn't seen. It's not really a look at the 'state of the poetry nation' in 2026, it being Selected Articles, Reviews and Dispatches, 2010-23. That period included a number of Larkin-related books and they form the foundations of the book early doors and references back to Larkin continue afterwards which some might think is backward-looking, as Larkin himself was said to be in his time. But without helping to establish where poetry has arrived at by 2026, I'm with Rory entirely about what is entirely still worth obsessing over.

He is judicious and wise. As a professional critic, he sets himself a standard of honesty and stands by it. He is ready to find fault with those bits of Larkin that were never meant to see print but also, as sympathetically as he can with the likes of John Agard and Patience Agbabi but it's not a racial thing because his is more caustic when he simply doesn't reckon much, as with James Sutherland-Smith who,

Since the poet is here congratulating his perspicacity, the tired language is particularly unfortunate.

The more of him you read, the more it becomes desirable for Rory to award those poetry prizes we must have.

The big shock comes in the review of James Andrew Taylor's Walking Wounded: The Life & Poetry of Vernon Scannell. Scannell was a name that had always been there, the name at least redolent of a tweed-jacketed, bespectacled composer of careful verses only designed to make Larkin look more Byronic or Hughesian in comparison. I knew he'd done a bit of boxing but I didn't know much of that art was rehearsed on a conveyor belt of victim female partners. It's unfortunate to have to find out as late as this what some of those names in The Listener or those booklets left his sixth form room by Linden Huddlestone at school were really like.

In those days I vaguely imagined poets as the gods who sent down their words from a place beyond our finding, partly so that we could do 'A' level English. I never imagined them much less than saints and never thought I'd meet one. But it wasn't like that at all.

Rory's very good, ever alert to non-sequiturs, the emptiness of what he resorts to calling 'poesy' and one would only want one's best stuff to come before his diligent judgement and even then you'd not be sure until you got some sort of pass, if you did. But if you did, you'd have deserved it. 

It's true to say I've been losing faith in poetry - not to mention a number of other areas of human activity- in recent years. I wouldn't like to think I wasted so much of my life on something that proved to be no more than a charade. But I've been having another look at some of the books here for the purposes of the Anthology list and then I wondered what Rory Waterman had to say about it all and it's turned out that I do still care. 

The state of British poetry

 What is it, then? I'd be interested to know.

The weekly e-mail from the TLS is headlined by a review of five books that purports to enlighten us. Except if I can still fiddle my way into the whole article, I've forgotten how; the nearest shop that may or may not sell the TLS is some way from here and I simply don't know if Tristram Fane Saunders is who I'd like it all explained to me by. Maybe he is the new Messiah but he could equally be a new kid on the block who's done his homework and got good marks.

The 'state of British poetry' now, as elucidated by one come lately to it, is - much to my demerit- of as much interest to me as what a young person on the street thinks of the latest pop records. Entirely valid, I'm sure, but not guaranteed to be something I'd understand. But I'm not going to find out unless I try.

One of the five books in Tristram's survey is a collection of reviews by Rory Waterman. And that, being trustworthy, arrived today. It looks like a book worth having but in the same way that it's going to be good to see his particular form of words regarding books about Larkin published in the last fifteen years, it's not Larkin that I'm trying to catch up on.

So, what can you do?

One could, at a stretch, find the TLS or even read some poetry by younger writers and see what I think for myself. But I don't listen to Radio 1, I only listen to Tony Blackburn's 60's and Bob Harris's improving 70's shows.

There was a time when something aspiring to the canonical was essayed by Alvarez, then Motion/Morrison, Hulse/Kennedy/Morley, O'Brien and Lumsden but, convenient as it was to be informed about where we were, the wholesome diversity of British poetry meant that the Identity Parade looked more like an identity crisis.

One can't have it both ways. 

Julian Barnes, Departure(s)

Julian Barnes, Departure(s), (Jonathan Cape)

'Fiction Review' is a dubious label for the Julian Barnes swansong. He's a novelist and novels are fictional but he's also a writer of this 'hybrid' stuff - part fiction, part true- except there's not much imaginary material in the mix this time. And so we are already into the sort of discursion that he specializes in so elegantly himself. The book discusses itself, we discuss the book and find that although we might have covered a lot of ground most eruditely we've got no further than any other liberal, left, London elite dinner party.

IAM is involuntary autobigraphical memory, sometimes brought on by a stroke, and can be much more severe than that brought on by Proust's madeleine. It can get as bad as one girl who could remember every detail of every day of her life and turns out to be a terrible curse. It's far worse to be able to recall everything than to have a dubious, selective memory that has at least edited out a big proportion of raw material. But it's a great subject with which to open what is essentially a memoir by a writer who often used unreliable narrators.

The central, main part of the book relates the relationship between Jean and Stephen, two friends brought together by Barnes at Oxford and then again, forty years later, at Stephen's request. Barnes becomes confidant to both parties, with far too much involvement in the difficulties of the relationship which he candidly shares with his readers now that they are both dead. While at first this might seem pruriently fascinating, it is soon more than one wants to know especially for those of us who like the wording of the law about 'between consenting adults in private'. The stratifications of Barnes's many-layered writing have probably never gone as deep but there must be a limit to how much we want to know.

In summary, Stephen loves Jean more than she wants him to. She feels the need of more 'freedom'. It occurs to him that she might want more than him and while that doesn't seem to be the case in their later role as 're-kindlers', Barnes is aware at first hand that first time around she very nearly did.

All of which has to be unpacked at some length in the sort of coda that Barnes has gone into before, investigating all the implications not only of 'love' but age, dementia, loss and literature. It's a short book and is readily soon read because he's never less than a pleasure to read but one still wonders if such exhaustive analysis was necessary or if, over the three years it took him to write it, he was stretching it out to make it book length. One can lose sympathy for the perceived sufferings of the well-to-do intelligentsia if the intricacies of why two people find themselves to be incompatible twice over is the most they have to worry about.

And so it's farewell from Julian Barnes, still one of the finest writers of his generation even if by the end, almost inevitably, he was in danger of becoming a parody of himself. At least he was well-organized enough not to leave his last book unfinished.  

Annika Lindskog and Steve Copeland at Lunchtime Live !

 Annika Lindskog and Steve Copeland, Portsmouth Cathedral, Jan 22

One can still expect a sizeable audience for a Messiah, Vivaldi by Candlelight or Songs from the Shows but a programme of 'English and Nordic art songs on the theme of solitude, meetings and togetherness' of a damp January Thursday lunchtime is a bit more niche. Thus it was good to see a reasonable turnout (both in numbers and mindset) for Annika Lindskog and Steve Copeland.

Samuel Barber's Promiscuity was a brief, ethereal fragment to begin, followed by the almost as austere, lingering Desire for Hermitage. If Flickan kom ifrån sin älsklings möte by Sibelius next up was a degree or two more rhapsodic, it was almost so by default but by then one was tuned into the deeply meditative mood.

James MacMillan's Ballad was audibly Scottish and thus as much Nordic as English, with Steve's atmospheric, minimal accompaniment allowing Annika's voice to make full use of the acoustic in St. Thomas's chapel. Finzi's Come away, death completed a first section with more melancholy before Steve explained- for the benefit of the musically illiterate like me- that a shift from 'the misery of B minor to the uplands of E major' introduced a happier middle section. Except Bach's B minor Mass at least begins so rousingly. There is no point trying to explain key signatures to me. You'd be better off trying to teach chess to a cat.

So, pieces by Roger Quilter, Grieg and the plangent setting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Silent Noon by Vaughan Williams made for some mild sunlight before a final section of crepuscular, elegiac songs by Gunnar de Frumerie, another by Vaughan Williams and the restrained wonder of King David by Herbert Howells, in which he,

     rose; and in his garden
Walked by the moon alone
A nightingale hidden in a cypress tree
Jargoned on and on. 

Always glad to be introduced to a composer one hadn't known about, like de Frumiere, it's also exactly right to end on a piece that can't be followed, that incidentally makes one think that Walter de la Mare's currently unfashionable status as a poet is due some reconsideration. 

No big, noisy ending but ending on a high nonetheless. Thoughtful and classy. 

I've been hearing on the wireless about how a 'new world order' is set to carve up the world and it would certainly threaten much that we've always valued if it came about. Exquisite afternoons such as this afternoon, for example. I'm glad I was there, just in case. 

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig was not one of the later additions to the Anthology, still being remembered in the time after the first names went in. He was among the first names. Most timely it was, though, having been back through the Collected to decide which three of his go in, that BBC4 saw fit to show a couple of old programmes from the archives late last night. There might not be vast amounts of such material stored away and we might have seen much of it but it is good use made of minority air time.

The two programmes used a lot of the same pieces of film of him, there not being much. He came across as rather more pleased with himself than I remembered but those who are 'any good' have some right to do that. Perhaps his main achievement, that allowed the writing of his impressive body of work, was throwing away his first two books of inaccessible poems at the age of 37. It allowed him to become one of the names worth preserving from C20th poetry for the fine example he set.

He is an extreme instance of a poet whose later work was very different from where he began. It wasn't a matter of 'development', though. He started all over again. One can entertain oneself by thinking of different ways in which there can be said to be 'two kinds of poet'.

Those who change significantly and those who don't change much is one. Betting without MacCaig who disowned the poet he had been and successfully re-invented himself as a better one, my long-standing guru of all such things, Thom Gunn, turned around completely from the strictly metrical poems that often found the individual at odds or feeling separate from the world to free verse and the discovery of community with others- to put it mildly.  That he could do both and achieved some synthesis between those two polar opposite ways of working is what ultimately made him as great as he was.

There is a shift in Larkin, elsewhere identified as a 'hardening of the arteries', that does him no favours, but he hasn't changed beyond recognition. Yeats is re-made from Romantic to Modernist. Hughes moves from the capturing of the natural world into less successful mythical excursions. Sylvia gains in intensity but obviously finishes before we can see where her extraordinary talent might have led.

Whereas, I'm not sure that Hardy's poems are any different from first to last except that the return to poems, from novels, was in some ways a bigger move. 

 

Formal metre and rhyme v. free verse is perhaps the most obvious divide but surely, surely, it's better to do both as and when while it's not wrong to be one or the other. Although those never attempting some sort of formal discipline need, for me, to be convincing in their chosen relaxations or else we might think they can't do it.

Timothy Steele's metronomic metre was doctrinal, seemingly as important to him as anything he had to say while using it. At its worst, the far worse alternative is that described by Jane Greer, quoted here at Anecdotal Evidence , where in poetry terms the cart has been put before the horse, the art has been sacrificed for a course of unmitigated self-indulgence and stretches the definition of what poetry is. It can be poetry if it wants to be in the same way that I can be a snooker player if I want to say I am. But I'm no good at snooker and the poets to who Jane was referring are bad poets.

 

Some years ago I introduced a session at Portsmouth Poetry Society to try to see if there was a difference between poetry written by male and female poets. It wasn't envisaged that an outright answer would be arrived at but I hoped that the point was that 'poetry' was about the putting together of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. and that both genders did that. Since then, I've found that there are by now 72 other genders and so the question has become considerably more complicated but at least it will be simplified again once Donald Trump has established a right-wing hegemony across much more than the share of the world he was elected to manage and the number is reduced back to two, or maybe one and a half.

I hope it doesn't in any way associate me with him if I suggest that the art of writing is genderless and not to be weaponized by either misogynist Republicans or feminism.

 

There are possible divides between perceived Classical/Romantic; something purportedly impersonal and objective v. autobiographical and 'confessional'; light verse and its opposite; highbrow/lowbrow/middlebrow; poems to hear out loud or those for the page. Tragical, Historical, Pastoral.

I'm sure we would all love to see the Venn diagram that placed poets on the complex map, accurately categorized, and where we and everybody else was on it so that we could complain that it was wrong. But the art of a rambling item like this is to make it look as if one knew where one was going with it. Norman MacCaig openly admitted he didn't know where his poems were going while he was writing them and they didn't get titles until they were done and he could see where he had arrived.

I'd be glad to be somewhere near him on the Venn diagram once it's done.  

Retirement Diary

 It might sometimes seem as if not much is happening. I'm sure the ageing process is gathering pace and I couldn't claim to be 'middle-aged' any more even if I wanted to.

Some years ago I'd get home from work and the elderly man from three doors up the road would be talking to the lady opposite on her doorstep, I think on the pre-text of passing on the day before's Portsmouth News. Possibly the highlight of his, or both of theirs, day.

That is the future, or something like it. But when I've had such thoughts before I've realized that, no, the future is already here. But as August Kleinzahler asks in Snow in North Jersey, 

and what did you expect from this life 

 

It might not be a fair question as it came as a bit of a surprise to be born and it was a bit late for expectations by then.

But it would have been unreasonable to have hoped to be born into the family I was born into at the time I was in the country I was. That puts me into the top few per cent luckiest people ever, to begin with. Could one be disappointed at not having been Frank Sinatra, Princess Margaret, Stephen Fry, Elizabeth Taylor or... provide your own examples of lives thought to have been 'well-lived'. St. Cuthbert, perhaps.

What happened today?

I re-lived a few more of Pushkin's adventures, however vicariously from the page at third or fourth hand. I shared some old records with Bob Harris on Sounds of the 70's, none of which impressed as much as a first hearing of this, chosen by Peter Purves on Private Passions, 

and there's still Eartha Kitt from last night's The Good Old Days to come, from the mid-1970's though it may be. And maybe that's the least of it, having contacted a few friends vis a vis this and that of passing importance because 'the meaning of life', according to such authorities as Aristotle, Epicurus, Montaigne and maybe Terry Eagleton, is much to do with friendship. Although I might have to return to Derrida's The Politics of Friendship, once given to me by a friend, because it might de-construct the idea to the extent of making it more elusive than I'm sure the gift was meant to express.   

And so, as most days are, it wasn't bad. 

Perhaps it is essential to the overly-indulged, spoilt way some of us live that when we are busy we look forward to indolence and then when we get it we want to be busy again. 

All this in the context of a world order being re-set by the most overblown vanity projects so that the days of hearing the News in order to be concerned about a downturn in the balance of payments reported by Anthony Barber are like halcyon days become deja-vu. We should be so lucky.