Racetrack Wiseguy

Frankie got Falcon Eight up on the line in the marathon at Sandown yesterday to pay the expenses, everything else being provided by Corals without me having to bet them for it.
He then helicoptered off to Deauville to ride Too Darn Hot today about which I'm glad to have availed myself of 6/4 last night.
The passing of John McCririck mainly served to highlight the safe, formulaic nature of the coverage of racing on ITV now without him, John Francome or those of olden days who gave it some attitude. One can't imagine such a lively exchange as this being shown these days,

Poetry Readings

The excitement of coming home to a postal delivery doesn't always provide the best outcome.
A CD-sized package this evening certainly wasn't the re-scheduled delivery of Simon Bostridge's personal account of Schubert's Winterreise, so it could be that rare serendip of an order forgotten. But, sadly, it was no Candi Staton rarity, the Cliff album with Some People on it or that Racing Cars track from a Peel Session that I simply can't find anywhere. It was two refills for my Parker pen, the one that Helen Mort liked when she signed a book for me at Cheltenham after hosting the Gunn discussion. (Never miss an opportunity to drop a few classy names). But at least now I can do crosswords lying on my back again because that is one pen that's quite good at writing upwards. I  might be able to freeload another handful of Corals biros at Sandown on Saturday but those I picked up at Ascot last November underperform in that department.
--
I regret not being able to provide a review of the Poetry and Jazz gig at posh, old Edes House in Chichester last Tuesday but one can't review an event one left at half-time. The jazz was played by two virtuosi, the Dream Duo, Julian Stringle and Dominic Ashworth, but if jazz is not usually my area, their type, and a very appropriate rendering of bloody Summertime, of brilliantly done easy listening definitely isn't. I'd prefer an endless loop of that music Vision On used to play while they showed the pictures that viewers had sent in.
Some local eminences read a poem each and Sean was Sean, which is never a bad thing but I swelter readily and once my companion of choice for the evening had suggested we could go back to the pub I was helpless to his siren call.
And it was, after all, a poetry reading. I've long thought that the best poetry readings are short and the best bits are the talk in between the poems, which Simon Armitage is very good at. One reason, out of several, for not voting for Todd Swift for the Oxford Professor job, would be that at Marylebone High Street Oxfam bookshop he wanted Brian Turner, the Hurt Locker man, to read 'more poems'. No, let's have less (fewer) poems. Talk more, tell us about them, don't just bloody read them.
Of all the poet-curmudgeons, in a competitive field, Geoffrey Hill is a short-priced favourite to be the greatest. Having rattled on stage with his walking-stick, he gazed at his audience over his glasses from behind a desk and said,

Poetry readings? Why do you want to come to a poetry reading?

I would say that one does want to see and hear one's favourites. I was lucky to see Seamus Heaney when I did because he was usually sold out before I knew about his readings in London. Paul Durcan was electrifyingly tense but knew exactly what he was doing. And even if they're awful, it's worth knowing. And some are drunk.

But, yes, let's get it over with. I'm often surprised at the audience reaction, even when I've deigned to appear (or had the chance), that proves they are listening closely. Once I was impressed by someone who had picked up on my discreet rhyme scheme. But I either know the poem, might occasionally have the text in front of me, or I'm not really concentrating.

It's sometimes the case that the audience like the idea of being at a 'poetry reading'. It can also be the case at 'classical' music events, overhearing those at Wigmore Hall or Chichester Cathedral.

Oh, Buxtehude. I've never heard of him.

It can become preciousness for preciousness's sake.

I understand that Derek Mahon doesn't do readings anymore which is a shame because he is one name I would still have wanted to see. I don't either, which is a fact less lamented. Mahon will have his own reasons. My main reason is that I don't see why these people should devote five minutes of their lives to listening to me read my poems. And certainly they shouldn't have to pay for the privilege. 

Paul Muldoon was inevitably the 'top of the bill' star turn at Cheltenham a few years ago. The session seemed to be running late but he came on last and did one of his cryptic, long pieces in about 10 minutes and I saw him afterwards and he said he didn't want to do too much.

That's right. Top man. You've now seen and heard Paul Muldoon in the flesh, he's signed your book for you. What more do you want.

The last time I left anything at half-time was Murder in the Cathedral in Portsmouth Cathedral by some local amdrams. I should have stayed at home and read it. I can't remember leaving anything else at half-time. I turned up a day late for the Jesus & Mary Chain circa 1984 but that was my fault.

While my early departure did pass implicit comment on the play, it didn't last week disrespect the jazzmen, the local poets or Prof. O'Brien. I simply would rather be elsewhere.

There's a lot of poems that seem to say a similar thing.

 

 

After all that we've been through

Now that everybody else's old CD's are up for grabs for not much + p&p, it's hard to say how much of one's old vinyl will be belatedly upgraded.
A fair amount, it seems. Certainly this, which is likely to be me favourite ever record for at least a couple of weeks until I'm reminded of some other masterpiece.

The Alvarez Generation

William Wootten, The Alvarez Generation (Liverpool University)



Published in 2015, this is not a new book to be reviewing. It's been on a list all that time but I wasn't convinced I'd like it. But I've been wrong before and here we go again.
It concerns the generation of English language poets born between 1929 and 1932 and concentrates on 1962. Such detailed scrutiny is carried forward into discussion of poems not always highlighted by commentators and, as such, with this period not quite the height of fashion nowadays, it is a specialist book and something to be grateful for.
William Wootten takes Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter as representative of those poets who came after the 1950's 'Movement' and followed the encouragement to risk taking offered by Al Alvarez in his introduction to The New Poetry. My doubts came from my perception that Gunn was adventurous and 'risk-taking' in his life but his poems belonged more with Donald Davie's, and Larkin's, than those he is put with here.
If the litmus test of suicide as a way of validating poetry had always sounded a bit odd, I had tended simply to side with the Larkin poem about horses and not the Hughes one advocated by Alvarez but it took Sean O'Brien, in The Deregulated Muse nearly 40 years later, to point out that such pronouncements had become 'barely comprehensible'. That is where Wootten starts and so one would imagine him to be in sympathy with O'Brien but it takes some time for that to become apparent. He is giving them a fair hearing before common sense is allowed to increasingly prevail.
The use of a Jackson Pollock for the front cover highlights a parallel with 'extremist art'. Having arrived at a time of such 'extremism', poems like Daddy and Crow seem disarmingly normal to someone who was used to Bob Cobbing, concrete and the self-congratulation of any amount of avant garde. One of the first LP's I bought was The Faust Tapes so I've been making my way towards something like decorum ever since. One needed to have read Larkin first, in the tradition of Hardy, to realize what they were reacting against. It didn't take me long to catch up but some of the intended effect of extremism is lost on you if one regards it as the established school and thus takes up with sanity and the much-maligned 'mainstream' as an act of rebellion.
Not much satisfies as much as finding support for one's own prejudices. Wootten includes an impressive amount of circumstantial evidence, at an early stage quoting Gunn's reading of some Larkin poems in 1954 as 'an extraordinary revelation'. It has elsewhere been noted how inappropriate the coupling of Gunn and Hughes was in the joint Selected if it implied a shared celebration of violence. It was Hughes that described Gunn as a poet of 'gentleness'.
There are interesting implications in linking On the Move with The Thought Fox; how the figures in An Arundel Tomb are 'lying' in both senses of the word (which almost makes one wish for 'no types of ambiguity' to be possible occasionally); how Donne's 'off-hand manner' congratulates itself on writing badly and, eventually, how Sylvia's Ariel poem combines the virtues of the two poems that Alvarez had set in opposition.
I have made more notes than I can use, which is indicative of a book full of interest, but the central concern is 'seriousness', and sincerity to experience, that Gunn is later to question in subsequent poets in Expression and Peter Porter in The Cost of Seriousness. The attempt by Alvarez to merge art and life, as if poetry and life were equivalents, can't be made to work, as recently O'Brien has written that 'art is all there is and might not be enough'.
Crow, which I've long blamed for de-railing a good start to Hughes' career, is 'rivalrous' with Sylvia's poems but
The writing is now sometimes so extreme it is often impossible to tell if what is being written is parody or merely pushing a tendency to its furthest point.
The pity was, of course, that it was such a successful book that, like a pop group who have a number one hit, he thinks it's a winning formula.
Even if Alvarez took a step back from the 'rash chatter' of those heady times, he remains unabsolved.
but Wootten doesn't think that it directly caused the rising body count as the narrative of this damned generation progresses. If Gunn is differentiated from those he is bracketed with here by his lasting relationship with Mike Kitay, rather than the failure of so many marriages, his relationship allowed for extra-curricular casual encounters and Gunn's death, it seems, was due to his own more chemical risk-taking.
Not listed on the cover but given some significance is Veronica Forrest-Thompson, who died in 1975 at the age of 27, whose short career might be compared with that of Rosemary Tonks for its brevity if not for the sort of poems she wrote, being in one of them,
at the outset and on the surface all game playing and silly intertextual artifice for the Cambridge minded.
Peter Porter finds life in conflict with 'poetic vanity' with Wootten, whether intentionally or not, showing poetry's main theme becoming itself or other poetry. And Geoffrey Hill, who was knighted for being a highbrow curmudgeon, is all about 'disgust'. The book gathers itself to a grim, perceptive conclusion, via Gunn's implication,
less that confessionalism is too sincere than it is not sincere enough.
It is 'in fact an exhibitionist being-for-others'.
In mitigation of Birthday Letters, we are told that 'readability is not a fault' even if these low-voltage poems weren't very good, with the exception of You Hated Spain, despite the media frenzy, by poetry's standards, they caused. By now William Wootten is playing like Jocky Wilson when he can't stop hitting 180's.
He ends with a very recognizable survey of poetry, in Britain (maybe America, too), as it is now. Endless success in all kinds of prizes for almost everyone (including a couple of little ones for me) but not much of obvious greatness. That isn't traced back to Alvarez, it just happened. But where, indeed, are the Audens of yesteryear.
Sales figures for poetry are usually terrible, which is to be expected, but no single volume by a contemporary poet gets in the Top 20 poetry books. It almost seems to be over, despite the same old piece being trundled out in The Observer on quiet weekends every few years about the latest 'poetry boom'.  That only means some shouty virago having a go as if it's closing time already and she's cross.

The Alvarez Generation couldn't have been a commercial proposition - even I hardly know anybody for who it would have been of interest- but was well worth the effort. It is essential for anybody with an interest in the poetry of 1962 and, since I also very much enjoyed a book about the pop music of 1971, that includes me.    
   

Puta Madres

Peter Doherty & the Puta Madres

'Puta Madres' is presumably intended to be a bit shocking but I asked my Portuguese friend in the delicatessen who makes me a baguette once a week and he said it's pretty harmless these days. I hope Pete's not too disappointed to hear that. At most, it is no more than in an English tradition of thinking that swear words have shock value but the librarian of Hull University used to do it in his poems a long time ago and so it is looking a bit fogey by now.
It did occur to me to put Doherty at the end of another English tradition. In the same way that my dissertation on Andrew Marvell, 40 years ago, made use of a point that the poet came at the end of a tradition and re-cycled the pastoral, lyric and Metaphysical or Elizabethan conceits and hyperbole, Doherty is well versed in the punk, reggae and all the styles that came before but maybe that applies to lots of them. My knowledge of the NME is not what it was in 1973.

The Puta Madres might be more than T. Rex were without Marc Bolan, or Simply Red without Mick Hucknall, but whether it is them, Babyshambles or solo, it's always really a Doherty album. As were The Libertines except I suspect Carl Barat of being more than a session man.
And so, much more tuneful than the scratchy guitar sound affected by the Libertines Live, it is more insouciance, bleary-eyed vocals, exquisite guitar parts and world-weary poetry. I think it's meant to sound makeshift while being finely crafted, some of the songs emerge from murmurings that don't sound like Motown classics but, as well as his nifty guitar, his band have violin to make it sound a bit Country and Hammond organ to refer us back to the 60's.

Whether any of these songs turn out to be the masterpieces that Can't Stand Me Now, Don't Look Back into the Sun or Music When the Lights Go Out were is hard to say but after the epoch-making, there was plenty more to come, given that your average good idea for a band usually works out at two and a half albums.
If these songs sound like those that a Doherty songwriting machine would produce, with gorgeous moments but sudden changes, it could be worse. Anybody who is any more than a one-trick pony is any good and he's got at least two tricks. A more likely complaint is that the 11 tracks are short shrift these days, reminding those of us old enough of The Faces' lame excuse for an 'album', Ooh, La La, which was a very thin couple of singles augmented by a backing track and whatever else the boys hfound lying around. Not value for money, more putting out an album because an album needs to be put out.
But Pete remains the miracle of his generation to set against Keith Richard.

I could cite certain tracks, quote words (like I was working on the main line all my life long day) and comment more specifically but the message seems to be to make it look as if you're not trying that hard, so I won't either. Play people at their own game when you can. 
As far as I'm concerned, he's likely to be the last, the last of the English roses. Sometimes unintentionally, but not always, writers are writing about themselves.

Faber & Faber, The Untold Story

Toby Faber, Faber & Faber, the Untold Story (Faber & Faber)

A few decades ago, being published by Faber was for a poet like playing for Manchester United. Being added to their list now is not quite the same as signing for Manchester City.
To mark the 90th anniversary of the independent publisher, Toby, grandson of the original Geoffrey (of which there was only one), has collected letters and documents from the archive to tell its story up to the end of the 1980's.
The cover illustration might lead us to expect correspondance about poetry. Those of us who wonder why Philip Larkin doesn't warrant a place at the table will find him sneaking furtively away on the back cover. While we do hear from T.S. Eliot and about several other poetry names, it is a book that could be better categorized under Business Studies rather than Literature. The story of the publishing house is more about its crises and survival, internal politics and balance sheets but we should be grateful that Toby concentrates as much as he does on poets because their range was much wider than that. If it was the Nursing Mirror that underwrote the early years, the books were balanced by the rights to Cats while the poetry was, as is usual, more about cachet than cash.

Two of the more memorable stories involve poets' apparel. Eliot was a visitor to the Faber country retreat, Ty Glyn in Cardiganshire, but it's not a cardigan he's advised to bring,
Tell him clothes are of no importance. Flannels (gray) and a white pair if he plays tennis and a bathing suit, if hot.
Sadly, no photograph is included. Perhaps it wasn't hot.

In 1961, Charles Montieth has invited Thom Gunn to lunch at the Traveller's Club, who turns up in a fringed leather jacket and cowboy boots. He writes to the club,
I'm very sorry indeed that my guest's dress at luncheon yesterday should have caused complaints
...
I had no idea he would arrive so bizarrely attired. Since he was educated at Bedales and Trinity College, Cambridge, I took it for granted that he would be aware of the ordinary social conventions in matters such as this.
He had been living in California, you see.

The book report dated 1957 on A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond shows how easy it is to make a costly mistake by simply 'not getting it', not unlike the story of the fool who turned down The Beatles.
But Eliot makes a good point vis a vis Nightwood by Djuna Barnes,
There is someting an author does once (if at all) in his generation that he can't ever do again. We can go on writing stuff that nobody else would write, if you like, but 'The Waste Land' and 'Ulysses' remain historic points.

It was a shame for the business that an upturn in book buying during the war was no good to them because the Excess Profit Tax took anything over and above their previous profit level to pay for the war effort.
If we are short-changed on stories about Thom Gunn, we need to be grateful for slightly more from Larkin, most notably in support of Barbara Pym and 'ordinary sane novels about ordinary sane people doing ordinary sane things' as opposed to his litany of genres that he regards as 'rubbish'.

One can write about Faber without reference to their corporate cover design for poetry but one can also choose to mention it at every opportunity. It is intended, of course, to be an indicator of quality. It is what it is, I suppose, but perhaps they don't have the same genius capacity as Roddy Lumsden whose covers are worth five more great poems in every book.

So, while being grateful to Toby for collecting these documents together, which are worthwhile and of great interest if you like that sort of thing, there are better books of poets' letters to read if you want to read poets' letters.

All he's got to do is not blow it

...and he blows it.