Black Uhuru - Leaving to Zion

 The pop music book is now filed under 'Wake Up, Maggie'. I can't remember re-titling it as that, or why. It's still called 'Playlist', I think. But needs must we press on or else I'll forget I'm doing it.

There wasn't any question that I had to be at the Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea, on Sept 5th, 2022 to see Black Uhuru on their 50th Anniversary Tour having seen them in Brighton 42 years earlier. It was not to be, though, and only provided at least a hat-trick of reasons for not seeing gigs I should have. I went to Portsmouth Guildhall the night after the Jesus & Mary Chain were on and didn't think Gary Numan was any sort of compensation and I misguidedly turned down an invitation to see The Libertines in their early years, also at the Wedgewood Rooms, on the grounds that I thought Pete Doherty was 'a waste of space'. I've always been grateful to be proved wrong.

I was interested to see the lady on the poster and assumed it was Puma 42 years older but was devastasted to find she had died, aged 36, in 1990. I must try to keep up. But Black Uhuru had been an essential part of the reggae boom in the UK in the late 70's and into the 80's with their Red album and the Black Uhuru LP with Guess Who's Coming to Dinner that I suddenly had another bout of 'seller's remorse' when I realized it had gone, along with all the other pop vinyl, and that no amount of money really compensates for not having the badge of honour that comes with owning that and all the other things that went with it. 

Leaving to Zion was always the highlight, potentially thunderous, echoing with suffering and in the first place, at least, powered by Sly'n'Robbie, reggae's essential rhythm section and it's combative reply to disco's Chic Organisation. Pop music might have been an enormous industry but it can be narrowed down to a long short list of prolific musicians who were responsible for much of the best of it.

Romanticism

 For some odd reason I first thought I'd save this to send, along with any other suitable candidates, somewhere to see it in print. There was a time when that was quite exciting, imagining oneself the sort of 'poet' that some editor somewhere thinks worthy of publication and maybe a few readers will think worth reading.

I don't know what came over me. By now such things matter very little. I enjoyed doing it, like it and so it's over. It can be made public here for as many as know where to look immediately without the months of waiting to see if it gets in and then for the hard copy.

I almost miss the hard-won poem that takes a lot of thought and work. By now, it seems, as soon as the idea arrives, the poem can be done in short order. Being a poet takes me not very much time at all. The time it really takes is the long months in between ideas suggesting themselves during which it seems no more ever will.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Romanticism

The monks had done their homework and so knew
there was nothing left to say. Everything
expanded inwards, contemplating time
and space well beyond the giddy limit.
You’d never hear the last of it. 

Nineteenth-century Romantics, in love
with picturesque decay, resplendent at
the height of fashion, longing for whate’er
they longed for, postured here eloquently.
Such neat Regency graffiti engraved
into the masonry, like where it says
1811, is artwork by now.

Keats aboard his boat to Naples, restless
with tuberculosis, would have missed it
above where the sea continues sparkling
like a melancholy summer
trying to defy its end.

Netley Abbey 1/9/22

Getting over the Drina

 The Bridge over the Drina is an excellent book but what to call it is another matter. It's hardly a novel, being too episodic and the problem with historical fiction is differentiating between the history and the fiction. It is, of course, writing and that's all that matters.

The bridge itself might be many things. It endures, more than anything, a constant thing amid the coming and going of empires, rulers, conflict and the stories of individuals that gamble themselves away or jump off it. As such, maybe it is a stone symbol of something more stable and reliable than transient humanity but I'm sure the interpretation of the meaning of the bridge is a Ph. D. that's been done a few times.

First impressions of Ronald Firbank didn't do much to sell him to me so, with Banana Yoshimoto due any time I'll wait for her.

Looking forward to the Autumn season, mine is likely to be dominated by concerts in Chichester, Portsmouth and maybe Havant, Petersfield and Gosport which will be a most welcome return to that enjoyable routine.

Poetry might not be what it was but there is still Sean O'Brien whose Embark is due in November. Before that, though, Ian McEwan has Lessons,

Lessons is an intimate yet universal story of love, regret and a restless search for answers.
Roland's wife mysteriously vanishes, it says, which is a shame because a wife that mysteriously vanishes is what the novel I've tentatively made a new start on is all about. It shouldn't be a problem, though, because McEwan is likely to be excellent and mine will do well to get written beyond chapter 1, never mind get read, and so there should be no conflict of interest.

Meanwhile, as ever, poetry isn't over til it's over, as above.  

The Language Barrier

The Bridge over the Drina by Ivan "Ivo" Andrić (Cyrillic: Иво Андрић) is the reading filling in the time between getting up, going back to bed, the few chores and the time I'm allowed out into society in between. It comes from talking to a Serbian person whose enthusiasm for some of my enthusiasms led me to look up the Nobel Prize winner they mentioned. I'm not convinced Ivo Andrić is the one they meant, whether he counts as Serbian, Bosnian or Yugoslavian or which side one should properly be on but I was glad to get it right when I said President Tito did well in the circumstances.

The bridge is naturally the main character in The Bridge over the Drina in the long time span of the narrative with the many characters, empires, conflicts and ordinary lives that take place on or around it. It's easy to see it as the representative of that which remains, impassive and enduring, while humanity wars and flounders in between the intervals of peace and prosperity and that's what life's like, isn't it. There is much to like in the characters he captures, whether as portraits of unforgiving despotism, victims of it or those who somehow get by but they come and go and are minor compared to the bridge which is an obvious symbol for lots of things to do with connection.

But it's a translation and one is only ever being given one angle of what it's like in the original. It might seem much more so in poetry that is allegedly 'heightened' language but I don't see why prose should be accorded second class status only because poetry regards itself as something a class apart

It would be insular and unforgiveably narrow-minded to only read books in one's own language but it's not possible to appreciate work properly in translation however much the translator brings to it. I suspect The Bridge over the Drina is better than what I'm making of it but there's no way I can tell.

Still, next up will be Dead-End Memories by Banana Yoshimoto. It's hard to believe the title in Japanese is any better than it is in English. What I'm going to do is try to find the title in Japanese, send it to my friend there and see how they translate it.

The Institutionalized Poet

Seeing again the BBC's compilation programmes of Poets in Their Own Words, from Eliot and Ezra up to Seamus Heaney, one was encouraged to see the role of 'poet' as that of the commentator commentating on the state of the world from their detached position of profound other-worldiness. It didn't entirely convince me, especially when it spent so much time on such 'confessional' poets as John Berryman and Anne Sexton who were so wrapped up in themselves that suicide was their only ultimate option. Also, Allen Ginsberg and the Liverpool Poets, the mildly amusing English Beat surrogates, indulging themselves with their cul-de-sac of populism. At least Sylvia was a great poet.

It made me think how Poetry has so often regarded itself as 'beyond' the ordinary world of commerce, business and accountancy but even Poets in Their Own Words revealed the bardic, inspirational Dylan Thomas as one who worked hard at his great flourish of wordiness and also only put on the poet's disposition in public. Otherwise he was 'normal'.

Having inadvertently spent time among the crowds on their way to Southsea's Victorious festival on Friday, I was alarmed at how un-alternative they were. I was more tempted to engage with an older person I saw this morning going back into his respectable terraced house with his missus in a Sham 69 t-shirt. And Glastonbury has long been so commodified that it has no resemblance to the first 1970 show with T. Rex and Stackridge or this extra-ordinary line-up from 1971- Hawkwind, Traffic, Melanie, David Bowie, Fairport Convention and Quintessence. The mainstream is too powerful, one has to be very determined to stay 'alternative' if you don't have to. Lemmy joined Hawkwind shortly before they recorded Silver Machine and left not much longer after but they'd been at no.3 in the charts, seen what difference a bit of cash coming in made and suddenly were no longer the darlings of the free festivals. And later there were a few versions of Hawkwind trading on the name.

There isn't much money in poetry and so poets are less likely to be tempted, as Aswad were, out of their rootsy convictions by a Top 10 hit, but commercial success is the enemy of artistic invention. Poets generally don't like to think of themselves as beholden to anything less than their muse. Above musicians and painters, whose disciplines demand technique and talent, poets are encouraged to believe in themselves as prophets, seers and sages, the angels of the ages but they are more derivative and institutionalized than any. I saw a rapper called Dave on telly last night, the massed audience at Reading, or maybe Leeds, chanting his unsubtle verses along with him. Irony might not have been a strategy his work foregrounds at the expense of immediacy.

When Larkin wrote Toads, he might have still thought that being a writer was a better job than having a proper job but he corrected himself in Toads Revisited. He preferred to be institutionalized by the proper job of librarian rather than finding himself the more deceived by adopting the role of full-time writer, performing at festivals, unveiling the mystique like a fiarground sideshow and doing all that is required of any other professional.

It's a fine thing when musicians, novelists or even painters can earn a living from their work but poetry managed to shunt its way into a dead end that denied itself the necessary audience. Poets are every bit as much poets as accountants are accountants or grocers are grocers except that accountants and grocers will be found out if they're no good at their jobs whereas with poets it doesn't make any difference to anybody else. They express their difference but so do all the others, and everybody else.

Larkin didn't get everything right. I'm sure he would have seen through Boris Johnson but I don't know whether his latent Thatcherism would have blinded him to the triteness of Liz Truss. What he did know, though, was that he was 'institutionalized' and that you can't help it. His mainstream, accessible, common sense poetry was, in its way, against the grain of the fashions he inherited but English poetry would have been worse off without him.

Pavlos Carvalho - Bach Cello Suites

Pavlos Carvalho, Bach Cello Suites, Vol. 1, Suites 1-3 (Willowhayne) 

To add to all the other anniversaries, it is roughly 300 years since Bach wrote his Cello Suites. One is spolit for choice for recordings of them, since they are the cornerstone of the cello repertoire and every cellist has to have their say in the matter. One ought to have Pablo Casals since it is due to him that we have them. After him, Steven Isserlis comes out of the many critical surveys very well. I still have Paul Tortelier on LPs, have Rostropovich from the BBC Music magazine and would have more if there were shelf space and time to play them. However, after waiting patiently, I'm glad to now have local superstar, Pavlos, and the first half of the story.

Space and time are what he brings to them, giving a feeling of unhurried immersion in the music from the famous opening bars onwards even if he only takes a few seconds longer than Casals over the Prelude to Suite no. 1. There is calm and some restraint, the cello close-up and intimate in the recording and the final bars of the Prelude shimmer rather than fizz. The Courante skips before the drowsy Sarabande and the maze of ideas is set out with the clarity of a lucid explanation.

Suite no. 2 is a more inward-looking set, the melancholy of its Prelude and shadows of the Allemande richly realized in solo lines that bring to mind the laments of Jean de St. Colombe in the film, Tous les Matins du Monde. Before plague and lockdown delayed the release of these performances I had taken the opportunity of asking the generous and ever-approachable Pavlos how many times he had played these pieces for the benefit of the record and he said three but one could keep on doing them indefinitely and have to stop somewhere. You wouldn't know. It sounds like an entirely coherent performance.

The third Suite, in C major, is by contrast exuberant and full of expansive playing. The song and dance of the Allemande and Courante have Pavlos chasing himself playfully through the lively score before the Sarabande takes some time to reflect ahead of the panache and phrasing of the great Bourrées and the presto race of the Gigue towards the needless-to-say anticipation of Vol. 2.

Good things come to those who wait. We did and they have.

Pavlos will be playing selected parts of Suite no. 1 in Chichester on Tues, 20 Sept,

Pavlos Carvalho and Miriam Teppich in Chichester  

It would be most remiss not to be there if you can be.

Jimp

Suddenly, eventually, the penny drops when reading a poet and one poem can help illuminate the rest of their work and, literally in this case, see it with the benefit of a better light.

The recently deceased Peter Scupham had for a long time been wrongly diagnosed by me as 'a bit difficult' but I hadn't been trying very hard. He was the friend of a friend and when I tried a bit harder I appreciated a good poet but still not one I was making a special case for.

Now, in receipt of a copy of his 1990 book, Watching the Perseids, something clicks and convinces me. The title poem is the best poem I've seen by him, in some ways a pre-echo of the masterpiece Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden By Julia Copus. And now that I know he could do that, it makes me think his other work is a bit more like it.

Of course it is but one needs to look to find a reason to believe and can't do so until one's found it.

Line 2 reads,

Glimmers of something on the jimp horizon,

 

Jimp? I've not seen that before but here it is,

jimp 

It maybe stops you once until you've looked it up but after that it's fine, onomatopaeic and works.

When you know a writer has done something that good once, you're more inclined to believe that some of their other work is better than you thought.