Do you like to Kipple?

Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight,
Or he would call it a sin;
But - we have been out in the woods all night,
A-conjuring summer in!
And we bring you news by word of mouth -
Good news for cattle and corn -
Now is the Sun come up from the South,
With Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

The nights are starting to draw in.

Deji

What would you do if you were a political refugee and discovered that the country you thought was safe was anything but - in fact habitually refused asylum to people from your country then rounded up the unsuccessful applicants into camps before shipping them off back home as fast as it could? Would you trust them to deal with your case fairly, or would you weigh your chances and keep your head down, hoping to get by with help from friends, hoping even for an amnesty?

I know what I would do. And that's what Deji did too. I first came across Deji as a participant in the Exiled Writers project at Oxford Brookes University. He was a popular member of the group. The anthology we all contributed to is due to be published later this year, and there will be a reading from it tomorrow night in Oxford, as part of Refugee Week. Someone else will have to read Deji's poem though, because he was arrested in April and has been held in Oakington since.

In the Looking-glass Home Office world, failing to claim asylum on entry is evidence not of fear of the certainty of being sent back, but of lack of good cause to be here in the first place. He's from Nigeria. The Home Office almost always sends back Nigerian refugees whether they're fleeing political or religious persecution, gangsters, or FGM, even if they can prove those threats are real. You can read the Home Office briefing note on Nigeria here (pdf file). Deji's fear of persecution is real. For failing to toe the party line he has narrowly avoided an assassination attempt; his mother and small son have been kidnapped in an attempt to coerce him. A brother who tried to help him had his flat ransacked. Deji has been vocally critical of the ruling PDP, and they have agents everywhere, determined to stamp out opposition, utterly ruthless.

He is due to be deported tomorrow evening. Campaigners are trying to arrange a Judicial Review; meanwhile you can help by appealing to the Home Secretary to halt the deportation, and to the CEO of Virgin Atlantic appealing to them not to participate in the forcible removal. It will only take a moment. The National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns features Deji's case on its homepage today, with links to model letters specific to Deji's case, and the addresses to send them. Do it now.

Update
Sad to report that Deji was deported on Thursday. Right until the last minute his solicitor was prepared to go to the High Court with an application for JR, but the critical proof didn't arrive in time from the Nigerian solicitor. It appears that pressure had been put on him not to expedite Deji's claim. Now who could have done that?

At least Deji managed to get away from the airport. There is a lot more to say about all this.

peony moon

Peony mooon has a poem from The Men from Praga.
It's Britannia, not elsewhere online. Britannia, who she?



Just one reason why nationalism gives me the heebiejeebies.

Thank you, Michelle.

An Anthology of Modern Verse

chosen by A. Methuen, with an Introduction by Robert Lynd

This is a curiosity I picked up from my local Oxfam a while back. Unfortunately the online text is totally scannered, so there are idiocies like "rliythm" for "rhythm" - you just have to use your wits.

This "fine and catholic collection of modern verse" was first published May 12th 1921. It's dedicated to Thomas Hardy, O.M. Greatest of the Moderns. It went through seven editions in that first year. My copy is the thirtieth edition, published in 1940. I don't know how much longer it continued in publication.*

The poets are all from the British Isles. (Well, OK, Eliot's La Figlia Che Piange sneaks under the wire of date and residence.) Of the 92 names represented, more than half would be recognised today. How much of this familiarity was because of the persistence of the anthology, and how much did the anthology persist because of the popularity of the poets? The two must have fed off each other. At any rate, people were buying it.

I enjoy old anthologies not just for seeing reputations in the making, but for the snapshot - or rather, flickr stream - of history. There's a glimpse of people hardly read these days - eg Alice Meynell, JC Squire (I'm including them in the category "recognised") - consigned to a label "Catholic/Suffragette", "Georgian/fascist", but who had a way with words that merits a glance even if you don't share their politics or religion. And right next to Squire is James Stephens, and after him RL Stevenson.

The poets are presented in alphabetical order. No dates are given. It's rather touching to consider the publishers of each (Mr. John Lane, Mr. Wm. Heinemann, Sir Henry Newbolt, Mr. Basil Blackwell, Lord Desborough, Messrs Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd and so on). The compiler, Methuen, says nothing about his criteria for selection. His 1921 note remarks that "considerations of copyright have prevented the inclusion of one or two eminent writers", that "roughly, the pieces chosen are either the work of living poets, or with rare exceptions, poets who have died within the last fifteen years. It is hoped in any case that the spirit of the new poetry inspires this little book."

It was rather a shock to discover that Methuen's first name was Algernon, and that his surname was really Stedman. I'd love to know the story behind that. He didn't write the introduction though. Robert Lynd, who did, was a name new to me, but felt familiar:

Every child is a poet from the age at which he learns to beat a silver spoon on the table in numbers. He likes to make not only a noise, but a noise with something of the regularity of an echo. He coos with delight when he is taken on an elder's knee and is trotted up and down to the measure of "This is the way the ladies ride," with its steady advance of pace till the ultimate fury of the country clown's gallop. Later on, he himself trots gloriously in reins with bells that jingle in rhyme as he runs. His pleasure in swings, in sitting behind a horse, in travelling in a train, with its puff as regular as an uncle's watch and its wheels thudding out endless hexameters on the line, arise from the same delight in rhythm.

Well, that's a cosy middle class childhood, from back in the days when the middle class weren't forever pretending not to be, before they grew ashamed of themselves.

After suggesting that poetry can be distinguished from verse by its exercise of imagination, and from prose by its music, he makes the case for popular poetry:

Whichever may be the sense in which we use the word, there is a good defence of poetry as, not the possession of a select few, but as part of the general human inheritance. Poetry is natural to man: it is not a mere cult of abnormal or intellectual persons.

Hear, hear!

*Perhaps not for many years longer, as Lynd himself edited an anthology for Methuen's firm in 1939. It had considerable overlap with Methuen's own but as well as including Housman (curiously omitted from Methuen's), it edged into the modern with Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender, Dylan Thomas and others - and the fifteenth woman, Ruth Pitter.

What's a heaven for?

In last week's TLS, Peter McDonald has a column urging the case for Geoffrey Hill as candidate for the recently vacated Poetry Chair. Hill's learning and wit would make him a splendid academic choice.

McDonald insists that the holders of the Poetry Chair

are not there to proselytize (sic) for poetry, or indeed for themselves as poets, but to try to say things that matter about the art itself.

"Reaching out" is not required; but reaching within certainly is.

Nice turn of phrase there. Reaching within: a leading poet telling us how poems are made, where they come from in the tradition, how they make new myths, how they form neural networks of the imagination. Paul Muldoon's The End of the Poem was a tour de force. That's the sort of energy and erudition we require from our professors.

The duties of the Professor are to give one public lecture each term; to give the Creweian Oration at Encaenia every other year (since 1972 in English); each year to be one of the judges for the Newdigate Prize, the Lord Alfred Douglas Prize and the Chancellor's English Essay Prize; every third year to help judge the Prize for the English Poem on a Sacred Subject, and generally to encourage the art of poetry in the University.

Generally to encourage the art of poetry in the University. That seems pretty wide open to interpretation. It could mean encouraging the best to write better, or encouraging neophytes to start reading and writing.

Let's say it was the Chair of Tennis. There would be those saying the job would be to encourage the future Wimbledon champions. Others might suggest it could entail encouraging those who'd never done so much as pick up a racquet to start enjoying the challenge and exercise, the company of like-minded people. Isn't it possible to do both? He is quite right to dismiss self-promotion as a role of the Chair, but in rejecting proselytising for poetry itself Mcdonald assumes that the audience for poetry is rightly self-selecting. I'd like to hear more from him about how he sees that sensibility developing in young people.

Eh, forget all that and read Christopher Reid's review of Ian Hamilton's Collected Poems.

Brutish National Party

I hate them with a deep and abiding passion.
I hate that they arrogate to themselves the word "British", which refers to a politically troubled archipelago off Northwestern Europe.
I hate that they arrogate to themselves the word "national" and purport to define it. [...]

I wish I knew what to do. When there are enough sad gits to vote in a BNP MEP, it feels as if liberal democracy has failed. Or rather, that it has finally delivered the inevitable outcome of tolerance.

More anon. Meanwhile, let's just remind ourselves of the sort of people they are. Ordinary, ignorant.

[Edited to make me seem a nicer person than I am.]

Update
Andrew Brons, the new MEP for Yorkshire and Humberside, is a former Chairman of the National Front. He has a conviction for using insulting words and behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace (directed at a black police officer). He was ambivalent about the value of firebombing synagogues, which might do the cause more harm than good. He led the chant: if they're black, send them back. And so on. None of this is a great secret.

In a facebook discussion last night I was foolish enough to refer to him as "a sh**" and to complain of the "ignorance, prejudice, hostility, self-righteousness of the BNP voters". I got flamed for my "mass generalisations and angry tone." Apparently some of them are "little old ladies" who are terrified by smooth-talking canvassers into believing that they will be murdered in their beds by illegal immigrants, and we should be reaching out and educating the poor dears.

Quite how a "little old lady" (and isn't that term demeaning!) could live so long and remain so ignorant escapes me. Surely it's simple racism of the sort that so often runs like a sewer under a veneer of decency? There was a time when racism was open and unashamed of itself, busy controlling jobs and tenancies, promotions and awards, and generally inscribing itself on the culture. And some people seem to regret its passing.

I refuse to make excuses for BNP voters. They may be disaffected, they may have much to feel disaffected about, but there are plenty of other parties to vote for who aren't racist. All the BNP offers that other parties don't is a particularly noxious line on race. And possibly - and possibly we aren't paying enough attention to this - the BNP knocks on doors and talks to people. Few mainstream parties have had the courage to do that this time, now the whole of British politics is being played out as a TV reality show. The voter wants to feel important too. The voter wants someone to care what he thinks. It doesn't seem to matter to some voters who that someone is.

An Evening of Magnanimity

My old friend and Joy of Six colleague Andrea Porter launched A Season of Small Insanities last night at the Maypole in Cambridge, and a very jolly event it was too. While I've been to several launches where the author invited support acts from a few friends, this is the first I can recall where the host's generosity extended to quite so many readers: Ian Cartland, Emily Dening, Fraser Grace, Wayne Hill, Peter Howard, André Mangeot, Helen Mort, and me. Andrea wanted the evening to be "a celebration of poetry" and urged guests to approach readers to buy their books as well as her own.

Guests came from Dublin, London, Bath, Chatteris... The place was packed; people had to keep going out to find more chairs, then face the even bigger challenge of finding somewhere to put them. With Andrea opening and closing each half, the rest of us made an eclectic mix of voices. It's unfair to single anyone out, though several people had the courage to do a hands-free reading, including Helen Mort with work from her forthcoming A Pint for the Ghost, and Wayne Hill who with Deep Frontiers reminded us why he was such a powerful member of Joy of Six, and how we miss him now he's down in the west country. Fraser Grace's Mr Evans illustrated the argument that "performance poetry" is more than an energetic reading. Grace is an actor and playwright (who adapted Andrea's Bubble for Radio 4). Beware actors bearing props. His performance will remain with us even longer than it takes to wash the great smell of Brut out of our togs.

As for Andrea, her book is wonderful. She took us from the absurd and insane, through real tragedy, into celebration of life, finishing with the hilarious and risqué DIY, which she delivers with panache. The poem is in the downloadable sample on Salt's website here (pdf). I like Fraser's comment: "The forensic eye and the killer detail, Porter's poems take you to worlds you deliberately forgot, you emerge feeling stronger, almost heroic - humanity reinforced, always laughing, always hungry for life."

Thank you, Andrea, for a great and generous evening.