David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf.
The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
Seek, and ye shall find. And if at first you don't succeed, try and try again. With a little help from a friend, I eventually found Rosemary Tonks. She wasn't really hidden in death any more than she had completely disappeared in life, she just wasn't easy to find.
The grave is first of all not really at the Church of St. Thomas a Beckett, Warblington, as given by Neil Astley in the introduction to Bedouin of the London Evening. It is in the much more extensive adjoining municipal cemetery. We know her inscription has her as Rosemary Lightband, the married name she lived under after she stopped being the writer, Rosemary Tonks, but if I missed her on previous visits it might be because I came from the wrong direction. She's on the reverse side of her mother's headstone, but I had been looking for her mother, Gwendoline, too.
In the end, suddenly, there she was and that was the accomplishment of this project and some kind of ambition achieved. I'm very glad I got there in the end. You go south from the main gate to section 2 before you reach the end and she's about 10 rows in from the path and maybe a dozen from the hedgerow, in between the great, weeping tree swaying in the summer breeze and a more prosaic one. I'm not saying they are a willow and an apple tree.
To be fair to her, she hadn't completely disappeared in life either. Some family knew where she was but they kept her whereabouts quiet so that she could evade the literary world that was wondering where she'd gone.
In the Jewish tradition, I left a stone on the grave in memory. They last longer than flowers. There will be more to say, perhaps, elsewhere in due course.
On the way back I tried what might have been a short cut back to Havant. Warblington is a bus ride and a walk from my house. It probably wasn't a short cut but it was a pleasant scenic route on a Sunday afternoon, joining the shoreline and the old Billy line where trains used to go from Havant to Hayling Island and I was able to add this photo to my very intermittent series of pictures that remind me of lines of poetry. I don't think we've had 'there is a willow grows aslant a brook' in which Gertrude reports the death of Ophelia in Hamlet and I know that this certainly isn't a willow but it could be a brook.
I'm only guessing, 'O' level Latin being now 46 years ago, that one can change 'salvator mundi', saviour of the world, to 'salvator mei', saviour of me. I once thought I had got 9 answers in The Times Latin crossword only to have at least three of them shot down so I don't try anymore. The usual cryptic completion was e-mailed in at lunchtime. They only have to give me the book token once and I'll stop entering.
But I was saved from the impending, enforced return to the Wake when, on returning the previous James Kirkup memoir, my friend abracadabra produced another volume. He is a great read, immediately and comprehensively dismissive of so many literary figures of his time but devoted to Ronald Firbank and Bertie Russell, amongst others.
I don't have much time for his poems but he got by. I do have a lot of time for his 'mis-fit' status, though, even if he connects with more than enough people in a contingent, fleeting way. I don't have much faith in the 'love' he summons for quite so many people when it happens quite so often but there's no point in anybody since thinking they lived in 'liberated' times after reading his stories. I thought the conditions were 'between consenting adults in private' but that doesn't include publishing so much of it aferwards.
But, yes, there might still be a way of getting by when you're not one of those the world has a place for but you do need some confidence in your own convictions, of which he had a few.
He might not have enjoyed it so much these days with so much righteousness on his side but still not making inroads into the supplicant attitude we all have to take towards money, pride and prejudice and the conflict they necessarily lead to. Maybe we could all live up to our radical ideals if we were allowed to but I'm not aware of anybody who does because we're not.
We like to think we get away with it as best we can.
Much of the discussion at an all boys grammar school in the mid-70's centred on 'best guitarist' which meant deciding whether Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton or anybody else was most competent or expressive on the instrument some actually thought was called 'lead guitar'. As time went on, the search for more convincingly researched, abstruse answers led to Robin Trower, Steve Hillage without many mentioning the raw but admirable work of Rory Gallagher, the fast fingers of Alvin Lee or such a more sensitive musician as Richard Thompson.
I found it difficult, being no musician myself whatsoever, and so sided with Jan Akkerman because I had an album by Focus, and Jimmy Page because Led Zeppelin were obviously very good in spite of, rather than because of, his dark fantasies. Eventually, I had to be honest and said that Marc Bolan was my favourite guitarist and was laughed out of court by one or two who knew better but, 45 years later, while we can accept that Jimi Hendrix was the right answer then, he was replaced by Prince in the 1980's. But none of that makes me want to alter my decision.
Genius isn't anything you can learn and it might not even be something you can be born with. It has to be self-taught, made up, something nobody else has done before or else it can't be 'genius'.
You will have to go a long way down into lists of 'greatest guitarists' to find anybody listing Marc but it was by no means anything like his main job. His main job was to be a pop star and it mattered little to him, after his teenage modelling career, whether that came about by being the new Chuck Berry, Cliff Richard, Bob Dylan or whatever it took.
And it took several years, through disastrous projects like John's Children, the underground years of sitting on the floor alongside a bongo player like an Indian musician he'd seen, with Tyrannosaurus Rex and doing an apprenticeship as long as but not much like that the Beatles did in Hamburg. In those days, there was time, and it was worth the wait.
In the same way that purist Bob Dylan fans disapproved of the move to electric guitars and the abandonment of the folksy poet idea in favour of something better, John Peel, who had nurtured Tyrannosuarus Rex and been devoted to them, decided he didn't approve of Get It On. And so, that was that and Marc dropped John in a reciprocal arrangement once he'd served his purpose.
It was not the first time or the last that a change of direction brought commercial success to an act that had been trying earnestly but not so profitably before hitting the jackpot by selling a lot more records. Hawkwind were never really Hawkwind any more after Silver Machine, Aswad weren't the same again after Don't Turn Around and Spandau Ballet, Simply Red and even Queen might have seemed interesting at first before realizing that 'professional' means earning money and that's the first priority.
In 1971, being interesting and being able to sell records weren't mutually exclusive. David Bowie was, by all means, the consummate artist that one had to admire but Marc was the one you could love, at least partly for his sheer nerve. It wasn't entirely obvious at the time if it was a joke or not whereas with chart rivals, Slade, with their mis-spelt titles and Nod, never mind Dave Hill, it clearly was. But with Marc, the words were spell-binding poetry, he was completely gorgeous to girls and he played music that might have been suspected of being novelty 'pop' at the time but is more respected now than it was at the time. Not the least of the credit for that should go to Tony Visconti, the producer who made the string of hits from Ride a White Swan to Metal Guru such masterpieces. That work only becomes obvious once Marc becomes so taken up with himself that he thinks he can do it all himself, sacks Visconti and he immediately stops being anywhere near as good as he had been.
None of that prevents Get It On being one of the monuments of 1971 which always seemed pop music's best year, possibly because it was a 'coming of age' year for me, being nearly 12, but it's a proposition supported by a sage like David Hepworth, who even though born in 1950, still puts 71 ahead of 1966. Pop music had learnt it all by then with its Hunky Dory, Electric Warrior, Motown in its last stage of majesty and, as we see in the Top 30 of September, could hardly put a foot wrong. There have certainly been brilliant things since but it's been very gradually downhill all the way since as, like most artists do, pop music itself eventually ran out of ideas, had to repeat itself or re-invent itself less convincingly. But, for those of us who were there, nobody can take 1971 away from us.
From time to time here I say that such and such a writer is one that will be worth returning to, and sometimes I do. Henry James was a pleasant if vague memory and The Turn of the Screw was helpfully only 132 pages long. It confirmed the impression I'd had of him before. He is famous for his prose style but it's a luxurious one. I wasn't clear what the ending of The Turn of the Screw 'meant' but it's a ghost story and ghosts needs must involve the unknown. And so Henry James continues on an upward trajectory.
I do sometimes wonder at the point of all this reading, though, when I can remember so little about the books not long after. I couldn't even remember which Henry James it was I read earlier this year - Portrait of a Lady. I can usually remember whether they were any good or not but with BBC4 showing the vintage dramatisation of the Raods to Freedom trilogy, which I read in January, I had to check back here to see what I thought about it. I thought Nausea was much better and read the trilogy more out of duty and diligence than with relish.
One remembers things more clearly from longer ago, they are solidified permanently like foundation stones. Especially set books for exams when, after all, one had only read a couple of dozen books and assumed that that was most of literature accounted for. Hamlet, The Woodlanders, probably The Catcher in the Rye and as much as you could want of Larkin, I could talk about until the cows come home or, more likely, the audience make their excuses and go to theirs but nowadays it seems books go in one eye and out of the other 'leaving just their picture behind'. While the poetry of Holland-Dozier-Holland and Smokey Robinson readily comes to mind and can be quoted at length, I couldn't give you much verbatim Rosemary Tonks even though her attitude and charisma are compelling, compulsive and glorious.
This post first appeared in 2009 but, having added the label, it has jumped forward to re-date itself as today. That's fine. I'm surprised, but glad, to see how many times the blogspot metrics say it's been viewed in the last 13 years.
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James Kirkup made headline news in the late 70's with a controversial poem which was by no means one of his better efforts. But there was more to him than that and this volume is an example of some of his more circumspect, controlled and thoughtful work.
He was, among other things, a great exponent of the haiku in English but the haiku in English in one of those subjects that I have to restrain myself from expressing a strong opinion on.
One thing Kirkup does best, though, is sign a book. This exquisite example is the neatest signature I have on a book of poems and it refers us back to an age where such style was valued.
'I'll give it you back next week when I see you,' I said. 'Oh, no, don't worry, keep it for the summer,' my friend said. She'll get it back on Thursday okay. Very readable and a couple of days well spent, was James Kirkup's memoir, I, of All People. I knew about Kirkup's poems without being an admirer but I didn't know about his other writing of which I am and am likely to seek out more.
Conscientious objector and mis-fit almost determinedly set against the conservative attitudes of the world he found himself in, he was promiscuous enough to take up prostitution as an income stream when necessary but whereas the easy access availability of 'trade' in the Thom Gunn letters was enough to diminish him, it is such an habitual thing for Kirkup, and is never held up as any solution to his isolation, that it caused no equivalent offence. But since I never held Kirkup's poems in anything like the sort of regard I did Gunn's, there was no such reputation for it to damage.
It is more reason to think of people who write as 'writers' rather than writers of a particular genre. As in Larkin's gravestone, which says 'writer', not 'poet', it matters less what form the writing took but that they were worthy of the name.
