squared

More arboricide

2011-08-15T21:46:00.003+01:00

My brother had to fell the cypress that was fouling the gutter of the gite and threatening to dislodge tiles from the roof. It rattled and scraped alarmingly in the least wind. No one remembers why it was growing so close in the first place. But we were all shocked and ashamed to discover a hoopoe's nest in the felled tree.

The Glorious Twelfth

2011-08-12T18:52:00.003+01:00

I have said nothing about the reasons for my silence, painful family reasons. And nothing about seismic world events and local difficulties. Sometimes we just end up, for no particular reason, resounding from the last loud noise. To my loyal follower, I can only apologise.

With regard to recent events, Prévert had the sense of it, years ago. He was writing about an escape from what we then called Borstal in the UK (forerunner of Young Offenders Institution):

Hunting the kid

Mugger! burglar! layabout! scum!

They can see birds on the island
all round the island is water

Mugger! burglar! layabout! scum!

What's all this baying for blood?

Mugger! burglar! layabout! scum!

It's a pack of the silent majority
out hunting the kid

who's had a bellyful of Borstal
So the screws used their keys on his teeth
and left him out cold on the concrete

Mugger! burglar! layabout! scum!

Now he's broken out
on the run in the night
like a hunted beast
and everyone's galloping after -
policemen tourists shareholders artists

Mugger! burglar! layabout! scum!

A pack of the silent majority
out hunting the kid
You don't need a permit
all real men do it
What is it swimming out there in the night
What are all these noises and lights
A kid on the run
They're firing their guns

Mugger! burglar! layabout! scum!

All these chaps on the beach
empty-handed – they're gagging with rage

Mugger! burglar! layabout! scum!
Come back to shore come back to shore!

They can see birds on the island
and all round the island is water.

Jacques Prévert (trans AB)

book meme

2011-03-13T11:15:00.010Z

The book I am reading: Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Penguin). Subtitle: Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street. Gripping and trashy, seems headed for Hollywood. There's a sly wit, too. It fleshes out the personalities in that excellent documentary, Inside Job. Sample extract:

Ben Shalom Bernanke was born in 1953 and grew up in Dillon, South Carolina, a small town permeated by the stench of tobacco warehouses. As an eleven-year-old, he traveled to Washington to compete in the national spelling championship in 1965, falling in the second round when he misspelled "Edelweiss."

Wait, no, here's a better example:

John Mack and Colm Kelleher, Morgan Stanley's chief financial officer, were sitting in the backseat of Mack's Audi, having hurried to the car just ten minutes earlier after Mack's secretary had instructed them to get down to the Fed as soon as possible. "This must be Lehman," Kelleher had said as they rushed out.
Not only was the rain pelting the roof furiously, but they were sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the West Side Highway, still miles away from their destination.
"We're not fucking moving," said Mack, repeatedly checking his watch.
"We're never going to get there," Kelleher agreed.
Mack's driver, John, a former police officer, noticed the bicycle lane running alongside the highway -- a project of the Bloomberg administration to encourage walking and cycling.
"Boss, that bike lane on the right, where does it go?"John asked, craning his neck back at them.
Mack's face lit up. "It goes all the way down to the Battery."
"Fuck it!" the driver said, as he found a break in the street divider and inched the car onto the bike lane, speeding down it.

Delightful people.
The book I am writing: Some short stories. Don't know if this counts as a book.
The book I love most: At the moment, Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes.
The last book I received as a gift: A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor, based on the outstanding radio series.
The last book I gave as a gift: Hisham Matar's Anatomy of a Disappearance, purchased at the launch last week. It opens:

There are times when my father's absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest. Other times I can barely recall the exact features of his face and must bring out the photographs I keep in an old envelope in the drawer of my bedside table. There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy.

I do not see him in the mirror but feel him adjusting, as if he were twisting within a shirt that nearly fits. My father has always been intimately mysterious even when he was present. I can almost imagine how it might have been coming to him as an equal, as a friend, but not quite.

Like de Waal, Matar is also a poet.
The nearest book on my desk: I don't have a desk as such at the moment, but the nearest book to where I'm typing this is the catalogue of the John Stezaker exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery. I've been meaning to post about the Stezaker exhibition but am still mulling over what it means. The critics in the Guardian, The Independent, The Times, and The Evening Standard have a lot to say that is thoughtful and well worth reading. I liked the exhibition a lot more than I thought I was going to, hence the purchase of the catalogue. Reading about it beforehand, I'd assumed it was facile and gimmicky, but it touches and disturbs on a deep level, and I'm not sure how. Is it simply the assault on integrity? My infant son was upset by a broken biscuit and the eclipse of the moon. He crawled away in horror when he saw me with wet hair. Another small child I know was terrified by the Mother and Toddlers Santa Claus, who was really her own father. It is disturbing when something is different from what we expect. Stezaker's interventions are witty and profound, sometimes utterly mysterious, but they are technically adept. He has a fantastic visual memory, that enables him to match up totally disparate images (eg, the distance between two lovers and a wild ravine) so the disjunction is thematic rather than simply linear.

Arboricide II

2011-03-06T01:26:00.006Z

So there are heaps of chippings where we used to have trees. When the bus goes past, the top deck gets an unedited view of (what we laughingly call) our garden. To look on it is like looking on a surgical scar. It will never be healed, I think - but of course it can: we can plant new trees, just not the same ones. Not fast-growing non-native conifers, obviously. Nor chestnut, oak or beech - all of them challenged by climate or disease. Someone suggests larch, unarguably native - but when doesn't it look weedy, except in the first flush of spring? And given the proximity to houses, we can't have anything that grows very high.

I bottled out of felling the blue pine. It is such a splendid tree. If high winds in autumn cause an accident, I shall never forgive myself. Meanwhile, I'm persuaded that all that anxiety is Health and Safety gorn mad.

library users: consumers or citizens?

2011-02-05T22:25:00.008Z

More than 400 public libraries in the UK are threatened with closure.

"If you think about it, public libraries are all about recycling. Books are lent out to an individual, then recycled through the system to someone else. Public libraries also act as laboratories, allowing individuals to experiment with, and ‘test out’ items before they decide to make any kind of consumer decision itself, such as buying a new book or CD or DVD or indeed, any other type of creative work. Not only this, they function as a democratic access point to information: when you enter a library you are not judged on your background, your status, or your wealth (or lack of it). You have the exact same rights of access to the information as everybody else there too. Do you realise how empowering that is? Such access to information is unbelievably powerful: and why I see public libraries as the bedrock of world citizenship. They are, without a doubt, one of the most important ideas of the 19th century (the UK’s first Public Libraries Act was in 1850 by the way) and inherently stem from concepts of The Enlightenment and The Republic of Letters, that is, universal access to knowledge. The juxtaposition that I am exploring is that although my belief system is founded upon these concepts, I’m actually living in a world and a time where we’ve been shifted from our previous state of individual citizens to individual consumers. This is a crucial distinction: issues of access are now going to be determined by your levels of engagement as a consumer not as a citizen. What might that mean? It might mean that if you don’t have the required level of wealth, you’re not going to have the same level of access to certain types of information, and information can become knowledge… and we all know where knowledge can lead… yes, to power: the power to make informed decisions about your life, your community, your health, your educational and lifelong learning needs, and much, much more.

From The Itinerant Poetry Librarian's interview in Seam 30 (2009) [my bold].
Follow the intrepid and utterly wonderful Itinerant Poetry Librarian on Twitter, Facebook, and see her post today on Baroque in Hackney.

2011-01-22T19:21:00.004Z

Racketeering, illegal gambling, extortion, obstructing the enforecement of justice

The indictments are here
Albert Cernadas a/k/a "The Bull"
Anthony Alfano a/k/a "Brooklyn"

20. VINCENT AULISI, also known as “The Vet”
19. GIOVANNI VELLA, also known as “John Vella,” “Mousey” and “Little John”

18. STEPHEN DEPIRO, also known as “Beach”

17. ANTHONY CAVEZZA, also known as “Tony Bagels”
16. JOHN BRANCACCIO, also known as”Johnny Bandana”

15. ANTHINO RUSSO, also known as “Hootie”

14. FRANK BELLANTONI, also known as “Meatball”

13. CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS, also known as “Burger”

12. VINCENZO FROGIERO, also known as “Vinny Carwash”

11. JOSEPH CARNA, also known as “Junior Lollipops”

10. DENNIS DELUCIA, also known as “Fat Dennis,” “Little Dennis” and “the Beard”

9. LUIGI MANOCCHIO, also known as “Baby Shacks,” “The Old Man,” and “the Professor”

8. ANTHONY DURSO, also known as “Baby Fat Larry” and “BFL”

7. GIUSEPPE DESTEFANO, also known as “Pooch”

6. JOHN AZZARELLI, also known as “Johnny Cash”

5. ANDREW RUSSO, also known as “Mush”

4. VINCENT FEBBRARO, also known as “Jimmy Gooch”

3. BENJAMIN CASTELLAZZO, also known as “Benji,” “The Claw” and “the Fang”

2. ANTHONY LICATA, also known as “Cheeks,” “Anthony Firehawk,” “Anthony Nighthawk,” “Nighthawk” and “Firehawk”

1. JOHN HARTMANN, also known as “Lumpy,” “Fatty” and “Fats”

Arboricide

2011-01-19T01:20:00.007Z

I've been putting it off.

They are tall, strong trees, probably native to the west coast of North America. I don't know the species, but one is what we call The Blue Pine, a particularly handsome and vigorous plant that has doubled its height in the twelve years we've been here, to about 30 metres. And it's about ten metres from the house. If it were to fall in various other directions it would flatten one of three neighbouring houses. And it might fall, because our topsoil is about nine inches, and below that is chalk.

The other conifers are a different sort with softer needles, nearly as tall but much nearer to the house. Their tops foul the telephone wires and the roots foul the drains. One blocks the light to J's study. If they toppled, they would flatten our house or next door. We used to have a goldcrest nesting in one of them, but I haven't seen it for about ten years. We have quite a large garden, so it is a mystery why a previous owner put these tall trees so close to the house, and to next door properties. It must be that they simply had no idea how big they would grow. And neither do we. We have watched as they soar. And we love them.

I have been putting it off. We keep hearing warnings that extreme weather will be more frequent. High winds kept us awake in our last house, and in October 1987 a neighbouring ash tree crashed into the garden, smashing a window. That has probably made me more risk-averse, and I'm rather ashamed of that. I'm even more exercised by the idea that one of these trees might kill someone because I'd failed to do something about it. We live in a conservation area, where you have to get permission to prune anything thicker than your finger. And even the Council thinks the trees ought to come down.

When the tree surgeons rang today because the weather forecast was good for tomorrow, I didn't say yes straight away. I dithered and maundered for an hour before giving the go-ahead.

I feel like a criminal. I can already see our impoverished skyline and the bare ground. We have used these tree surgeons several times before, so know they will leave no mess. That's worse, somehow, like editing it out.

We will plant some new trees. What, though?

Six Flags

2010-12-12T22:55:00.006Z

This amusement park in New Orleans was abandoned after Katrina and is due to be demolished next month.

What is the fascination of ruins? Partly that they show us what will happen. In one version, we look back from the future and see a morality tale of which perhaps the inhabitants were unaware. In another version, we can see there our own future undoing. And in this case, any easy romanticism is blown away by the horror of that storm, and the cruel ineptitude of a government that allowed people to drown and a way of life to perish.
Via

ooh-ahh

2010-12-06T21:28:00.005Z

It was snowing the other day, but not so much here, so I paid little attention to the radio news stories of panic-buying of petrol. When I went to fill my three-quarters-empty tank at the local all the pumps were closed so I gave up, figuring I probably wouldn't need to go anywhere for the couple of days till it got back to normal. I gave DH a lift to Cambridge and on the offchance made a detour via Sainsbury's - they were out of petrol too. I took this as a sign not to bother. I don't tweet; I don't even do Facebook much, so I didn't pick up on any of the panic. But if it had been cash...

Eric Cantona was a brilliant footballer. I don't know so much about his grasp of economics. He wants to bring the banking system to its knees. He wants people to draw money out of the banks tomorrow to prove - gasp - that there isn't enough cash to pay everyone should they all demand it at once. Apparently, this makes banks teh evil. There are plenty of reasons to imagine (some) banks are teh evil, but this isn't one of them. Taking your money and using it to do something else, making a profit on that and giving you a bit of the profit for the opportunity to use your money - that's what banks do. It helps build roads and factories; it helps generate power and pay wages.

But hey, what do I know? If you were the elderly blind person over the road who can't get to the bank, maybe you wouldn't be so keen on this stunt. If your mortgage payment was due at the end of the month maybe you wouldn't be so keen either. Or a shopkeeper wanting to bank your takings and pay wages. Hey, you're capitalist scum, who cares about you?

So far, there are only a few thousand people signed up for Cantona's grand gesture. It would take a lot more than them to destabilise anything - until you think about the turbo-charging effect of social networking. How many tweeted queues does it take to make a crisis?

Uh-oh, maybe I should have kept quiet. All I know is that a bunch of sovereigns in a sock is jolly handy if a burglar smashes in your bedroom window.

Desert Highland Discs*

2010-12-02T12:31:00.013Z

Six years ago I went on a writing retreat to Hawthornden. Somewhat daunted by its reputation for monkish austerity, I took a Walkman and a wallet of discs. In the event, I scarcely used it, and for various reasons the wallet remained largely unpacked until now. So here is a time capsule:
Philip Glass: Glassworks
Philip Glass: Songs from Liquid Days
Jan Garbarek: I Took up the Runes
Jan Garbarek: Works
Jan Garbarek/ Ustad Fateh Aki Khan: Ragas and Sagas
Miracles of Sant'Iago (Music from the Codex Cadixtinus)
Charpentier: Neuf Leçons de Ténèbres
Ali Farka Toure: Niafunké
Couperin: Quatrième Livre de Pièces
Meredith Monk: Book of Days
Meredith Monk: Volcano Songs
John Harle: Terror and Magnificence
The Sunday Times Music Collection: Gregorian Chant (I must have bought that edition specially)
Van Morrison: Enlightenment
Ewan McColl: Chorus from the Gallows
Zebda: Essence Ordinaire. Must be something my sister gave me.

I had a good time at Hawthornden. The wind howled, the snow hurled, and I was quite disciplined. Although I didn't think at the time I was making enough progress I went home with a stash of new work, revised work, and some drafts I have yet to grapple with - along with the twentyfirst century.

*Oh, and that's an unforgivable pun. Hawthornden is in the Lowlands.

The Hare with Amber Eyes

2010-09-05T10:14:00.007+01:00

This extraordinary book by Edmund de Waal operates on many levels. The Hare of the title is a netsuke, an intricately carved ivory toggle from Japan, from a large collection put together by one of De Waal's forebears, a man who knocked around with the likes of Renoir and Proust. De Waal is a potter, and his tactile appreciation of these objets de vertu is eloquently expressed. He writes about form and function, the wit and punning of the carvers, the feel of these puzzles designed for the hand, and how such things came to be collected and displayed. By a circuitous route, the collection comes into his possession, and the book is a detective story - the account of how he tracked down the collection's previous owners. He devotes a year to the task, and in the process of reading letters, essays, newspapers, accounts, is able to reimagine them with their passions and foibles. It's a family history told against the backdrop of enormous wealth and privilege, and the growing horrors of anti-Semitism.

The subtitle, "A Hidden History" puzzled and annoyed me - it seemed both fey and extravagant - until, unexpectedly, the meaning was revealed. I won't spoil it for you. The waiting is worth it, and prepare to shed tears.

Last words

2010-08-10T18:31:00.010+01:00

If you value words, this is worth your attention.

Vowel sounds and sibilant consonants slide out of my mouth, shapeless and inchoate even to my close collaborator. The vocal muscle, for sixty years my reliable alter ego, is failing. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.

Even while dying, Tony Judt's passion for words and scrupulousness remained undimmed. What a beautiful writer.

Obituary here.

Random book titles for cold weather

2010-08-09T22:03:00.008+01:00

Tramp in Flames
Windmills in Flames
Great Fires
The Burning Perch
Dad, the Donkey's on Fire
A Furnace
Hot Like Fire
Pale Fire
Fire to Fire

Blurb

2010-08-09T21:41:00.002+01:00

The poems have no purpose, though their author is happy should others find them interesting to read. This book collects some early works missing from the Collected Poems (2003). The rest were written since then. They will help the reader lose weight, have an attractive smile, be at ease with members of the opposite (or their own) sex, have relief from constipation, speak in tongues, fillet herrings and ultimately boost the Nation's economy.

I might have to buy this book.

Seamus Heaney Centre

2010-07-30T18:26:00.005+01:00

The shortlist has been announced for the inaugural Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for the best first collection published in UK and Ireland during 2009:

(In alphabetical order)

Anne Berkeley, The Men from Praga (Salt)
Siân Hughes, The Missing (Salt)
Lorraine Mariner, Furniture (Picador)
Tom Mathews, The Owl and the Pussycat (Dedalus)
Andrew Philip, The Ambulance Box (Salt)

I am honoured and delighted to be on the list.

Siân Hughes reads from The Missing

Lorraine Mariner reads from Furniture

Tom Mathews reads from The Owl and the Pussycat:

Andrew Philip reads from The Ambulance Box (and explains the title)

I interviewed Andy last year, and his book was one of my choices for the year on Peony Moon.

Hmm, seems I'm the only one without a Youtube presence (except for this one as part of Joy of Six). Maybe I should do something about that.

Oriole

2010-07-18T19:25:00.006+01:00

Down in the woods he sings: oriole, oriole. It's haunting, alluring, maddening. I've seen pictures of the bird but never the actual thing. I wonder if he is Edward Thomas's Unknown Bird. Thomas was a keen naturalist, and if the poem was prompted by a real bird (and why not? All the proof is-- I told men/ What I had heard) it's inconceivable it could have been any regular visitor to the UK, at least in his part of it, at his time. I write this from deepest France, where the oriole is regular but not exactly common. The oriole has been a rare East Anglian visitor for best part of a hundred years. It's not a bird of Thomas country.

A lot depends on how you hear "La-la-la". Whenever I have heard anyone read this poem they place equal weight on all three syllables. But give it a bit of song, la-la-la, and it starts to become possible.

The Unknown Bird

Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang
In the great beech-wood all that May and June.
No one saw him: I alone could hear him
Though many listened. Was it but four years
Ago? or five? He never came again.

Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off--
As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
As if the bird or I were in a dream.
Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes
Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
He sounded. All the proof is--I told men
What I had heard.

I never knew a voice,
Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told
The naturalists; but neither had they heard
Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,
I had them clear by heart and have them still.
Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then
As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:
Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say
That it was one or other, but if sad
'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
For me to taste it. But I cannot tell
If truly never anything but fair
The days were when he sang, as now they seem.
This surely I know, that I who listened then,
Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering
A heavy body and a heavy heart,
Now straightway, if I think of it, become
Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.

Just One (more) Book

2010-07-14T12:49:00.010+01:00

Does contemporary poetry make a difference to you? Do you relish fiction that makes you think? Do you value truly independent publishers? Then you can help. Despite heroic efforts last year, my publisher, Salt, has been having a hard time in the recession and desperately needs to sell more books to stay afloat until the new grant kicks in. Word is that they have less than one week's cash left in the kitty. Chris Hamilton-Emery writes:

I hoped I'd never have to write this note. The recession has continued to have a very negative impact on sales at Salt and we're finally having to go public to ask you to help support us.

Our sales are now 60% down on last year and have wiped out our grant and our cash reserves as we continue to market and publish what we can from what we believe is a great list. We've plans in place to help secure the business from November 2010 — though the books we'll be publishing won't deliver any real revenue until 2011. We're sorry to ask, embarrassed to ask, but we need your help to survive until then and if you were considering purchasing a Salt book, we'd dearly love you to do it right now. We've less than one week's cash left.

If you can help us, please do two things:

1. Buy one book from us — we don't mind from where, it can be from your local bookstore (they need your support, too), it can be from Amazon or the BookDepository. It can even be directly from us. But please buy that book now.

2. Please tell everyone you know to do the same. Buy just one book and pass it on.

If money is tight for you, too, you can simply write a review of any Salt book you love on Amazon. Or recommend a book to a friend.

You can visit our Web site right now, simply go to
http://www.saltpublishing.com/
and buy JustOneBook.

Remember too, that every book you buy directly from us gets a raffle ticket in our Big Summer Raffle — and you could win one copy each of the next 20 books we publish from 1 September.

Thanks for continuing to support us.

Chris

I bought two more Salt books just now: Wena Poon's novel Alex y Robert and Tom Chivers's Crashaw Prize-winning debut How to Build a City. Oh, and my book's still available if you're interested - just click on the image on the sidebar.

Ledbury

2010-07-12T19:36:00.017+01:00

Just back from Ledbury Poetry Festival. I was there for the second weekend, reading on Saturday with Mick Wood, managing to grab a few other events en route. The first was Meirion Jordan, reading with Ruth Bidgood - quite a contrast of voices. He's good, this is a very accomplished first collection. Sarah Crown called it "a startling, lubricious debut". He reads well, too.

That night, I heard Aoife Mannix at last, accompanied by Janie Armour with great wit and intelligence. Very accomplished, thoughtful and all with such a light, sassy touch. Deserved a much bigger audience.

As for my reading with Mick Wood on the Saturday morning, it was a blast. A lovely, responsive audience. And Mick was wonderful, a real star. A seasoned thesp, he had the audience in his hand. His poems have a keen dramatic intelligence, and the audience respond to that. His delivery values the reading as a dramatic encounter, not just voiced words on a page. Couldn't be much further from the grey armchair school of poetry reading - one I've never subscribed to anyway. When poets profess to eschew a dramatic reading and "let the words speak for themselves" they are too often copping out. A performance that prefers one interpretation over another doesn't preclude those other interpretations for all time; it's questionable whether it erases the possibility of other readings even during the performance itself. The performer's first duty is to the audience, and the Ledbury audience hugely appreciated that.

An honour to be reading with him.

I took the rest of the afternoon off, going with friends up the Malverns, to sit in sunshine and the western wind surveying Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Wales, while eating strawberries and consuming lashings of ginger beer, while far below we could hear strains of tuning up for the Jools Holland concert. (Thanks, Gary!)

Rather than Jools Holland, I chose to hear Martin Figura debut Whistle, the show he is taking to Edinburgh. Based on the collection published earlier this year by Arrowhead, the poems, delivered with Mart's inimitable confidence, nous and warmth, layered and textured with slide show and recordings, earned a standing ovation. You don't get that so often at poetry readings. The story the poems tell is heartbreaking, but Mart tackles it with courage and humour. It was an intimate, generous experience. As a fellow Sixer, I've known Mart for quite a while, and enormously value his emotional intelligence vis à vis audience.

As I said, the performer's first duty is to the audience. He's a fabulous reader. I wish him every success in Edinburgh, and if Ledbury is anything to go by they will be crowding it out before he's through.

As for Ledbury, I was torn between going to lots of events and preserving my sanity. There is just too much to do.

The last event I managed to get to was Roz Goddard and Penny Shuttle (standing in for Dan Chiasson, who was indiposed). Roz's Soprano sonnets were witty and astute, and I know I missed a lot from being a TV-phobe. She's a good reader, with a lovely rapport with the audience. As for Penny Shuttle, I have heard her read loads of times, but don't tire, even of poems like "Filth", which I've heard so often I probably know by heart.

xkcd

2010-06-24T10:38:00.002+01:00

Here.

A hard chair

2010-06-09T17:13:00.013+01:00

And there was I thinking it was going to be nem con.

There are ten remaining candidates for the Oxford Poetry Professorship. Paula Claire withdrew on 7 June, in protest over "serious flaws" in the election process, and favouritism shown to Hill.

We are used to arguments about what does or does not constitute poetry, but Roger Lewis doesn't draw a distinction between the patterned words and the metaphor. Like Geoffrey Hill (for whom Professor Dame Averil Cameron, Warden of Keble, has posted an encomium), Lewis hasn't written a manifesto. His case is extravagantly pleaded by Rebecca Nicolson (St Hugh's 1985). Tantalisingly,

If elected to the Chair of Poetry, Lewis' subjects may well include - Ezra Pound: Poetry and / or Politics; The Ramification of Richard Ellmann's 1,500 Factual Errors in his Biography of Oscar Wilde; The Nineteenth Century View of Shakespeare and Jesus and Great Cryptograms; Sullivan Without Gilbert; Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes: Sex, Violence and Difficulties with Girls; Poets of the Appetites: M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David; The End of England: Eric Ravilious, Barbara Jones and Edward Bawden; and Dick & Liz at Oxford: The Burtons and Doctor Faustus.

But he won't be.

Michael Horovitz stands much more of a chance. It doesn't signify, but his facebook group has more supporters than Hill's. I just don't get his allegation that his religion is against him because it seems irrelevant to me - but maybe it's true that Christians are voting for Hill because he's a Christian... Have literature, and Oxford, come to this? I applaud Horovitz's manifesto:

Let the Oxford professorship's authority be revived as a platform for authentic poetry ticket-bookings, scheduling ever newer departures and in-depth arrivals way beyond mere careerist arrivism. Anyone voting for me is assured that I will continue striving to emulate Chaucer's Clerk of Oxenford: "Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche, / And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche."

Ruth Padel supports both Hill (with a damning qualification about his stamina) and Horovitz. (Snarky article in Camden New Journal at the link.)

Other candidates include poetry ~~fundamentalist~~ traditionalist Michael George Gibson

The literary and verbal things now presented and published as 'poems' are so varied that a fresh and fundamental examination of what was and is 'poetry' is well worth making.

[Edit: amended following a complaint from Mr Gibson's agent - see comments]

Seán Haldane if elected wants

to talk about the neuropsychology of poetry, poetry and verse, poetry and 'more-than-coincidence', poetry in different languages, and what Hardy called its 'sustaining power'.

Chris Mann, a former Newdigate prizewinner, offers samples of his work, including

Dragonfly

Rafting the Zambezi River,
I saw your filigree shimmer
on a boulder's bulky sphinx…

Maybe that wasn't such a good idea.

Stephen Moss is the Monster Raving Looney whose candidacy has been well documented in the Guardian.

So why I am standing? It's a good question. The idea came to me over a curry at the Hay Literary Festival last year.... What will I do if I win? Well, I will give the stipend away to needy poets and writers, and to good literary causes. I will set up an annual two-week poetry festival in Oxford. I will fight against the marginalisation of poetry, literature's perennial poor relation. I will buy anyone who votes for me a drink. I will, if necessary, go into coalition with Geoffrey Hill. I will back proportional representation in future elections. I will lecture on the role of poetry in society, starting with the Greeks and ending about a week last Tuesday. And I faithfully promise not to publish too many of my execrable poems. Can we win it? YES WE SCAN!

Sanskrit scholar Vaughan Pilikian's ambitions are as wide ranging as Lewis's, if harder to visualise.

I intend a lecture series to range across some, if not all, of the following topics: the poetics of science in the atrocity exhibition; antiaesthetics, esoterrorism and metempsychosis; the rhythm of the dig in the Negro spiritual; Japanese death poetry; rhymed trajectories to heaven in the Iliad and the Mahabharata. My aim in this august office will be to pull poetry from the drawing rooms and the garrets and the palaces, and send it forth. For poetry is a weapon, bloodsoaked and glinting. It is a gnostic heresy, a counterattack on all that holds us captive, a challenge to the cruel symmetries and stifled laughter of the Demiurge. It is only through poetry that we might revenge ourselves on time.

It is only through poetry that we might revenge ourselves on time. I could almost be persuaded of that.

Full Candidate statements here

I haven't voted yet.

A soft chair

2010-06-08T00:38:00.013+01:00

So I read to a private group of students in Cambridge tonight. Nice audience, fit but few.

I didn't do a lot of gab, but did once utter those terrible words "this next poem". It was because we were très intime and it would have been wrong to be too polished, somehow. I read from a chair because everyone else had done so - and if I'd stood up to read it would have looked a) precious and b) like an implicit criticism of everyone else who'd read sitting down. I could have stood on the chair, I suppose, to make a comic point - but they didn't look as if they were expecting comedy, and indeed, it would have been practically the only comedic moment in the performance so everything would have been downhill thereafter. Besides, it was a soft chair. At times like this I wish I had more comic poems in my repertoire.

As for the seated position, I can't say I favour it. I recall once seeing Carol Ann Duffy reading from a chair, and she was much criticised for it. I hadn't been to many readings at the time so couldn't see what was wrong. And now, I have a lot of sympathy for anyone who wants to read seated. Who is to know what unspeakable ailment they might be suffering?

No question, it makes a difference. I felt underpowered. It's true about not being able to breathe so deeply, but there's more to it than that. I also felt a certain loss of status. It's an impression that doesn't withstand close scrutiny, but is nevertheless mildly disconcerting. It's something to do with delivery. One feels obliged to curb the slightest tendency to perform rather than read. There is an equality about the situation, particularly with tiny numbers. The audience is seated too: how easily the roles could be reversed. And they were, because to begin with we had poems from people who'd attended the workshop prior to the reading. I'm totally OK with that - but the last thing you want to do in that situation is come on as the Big I Am. So there was a chair, from which the readers read, and other chairs seated around in a horseshoe and we took turns, me last and longest as the guest.

Do I have a poetry voice? Probably, though the thought appals me. Nobody likes to admit they've got one. Most people do, even if it's understated. Duffy does. Robin Robertson does. A poetry voice can be at the other extreme: just think of Thomas Lux.

It reminded me of the time when I went to look round an old merchant's house in Ledbury. No one else had turned up for the guided tour, but the guide nevertheless treated me as if I were an audience of many. She pitched her voice high to reach the back of the crowd, and went into spiel mode, never catching my eye. I think she was too shy to do it any differently, though she seemed embarrassed too. But when I asked questions she answered quite normally.

A poem isn't a normal thing, though. It's not something you've just thought of that you're telling someone, though some poets - eg John Hegley, Michael Rosen - tell theirs so seamlessly you can't tell the join between poem and gab. And there were some of my poems that wouldn't have felt right in front of a tiny audience, at least while I was sitting down, because they are too rhythmical and not at all like ordinary speech.

And yet and yet. This still doesn't explain it. Sometimes I go and read to groups of blind (and invariably old) people; I read them favourites like The Listeners, Cargoes - anything they request that I happen to have in my bag. And I read sitting down, and they will join in if they know it. These are almost invariably rhythmical poems unlike ordinary speech, and I'm expected to ham it up a bit. Is it easier to do a cover version, because the voice is not one's own?

John Rety, RIP

2010-03-07T01:29:00.012Z

Poet, publisher, impresario, chess fiend, émigré, anarchist.

Rumpled, principled, opinionated, informed, generous, challenging, uncompromising. Occasionally bloody rude.

And much loved. Having been away for a while, I only learned of John Rety's death today, when I read Harry Eyres's tribute in the FT. Rety was part of the poetry landscape, always there.

A quick search revealed a couple of good obits in The Camden New Journal and The Daily Telegraph. (Don't laugh - the torygraph has well informed poetry obits.) I wonder what Rety, an anarchist since the ("rather late") age of 13, would have thought about his coverage in the right wing capitalist broadsheets. If the Guardian has published an obituary, it hasn't hit Google yet. There are one or two generous appreciations on blogs, but I'm surprised that there hasn't been more coverage.

His press, Hearing Eye, and the readings at the (tiny) Torriano Meeting House seemed to punch way above their weight in terms of influence. The Torriano readings commanded top readers, such as Dannie Abse, John Hegley, Adrian Mitchell, while the famously inclusive "readings from the floor" were a template for many other venues.

Even as I write a Torriano session seems to be in full swing. All but one of the chairs are occupied, and latecomers lean against the walls, listening intently. I recognise at least half the audience. John has made some preliminary announcements, and has berated poets in general for their lack of response to the political situation. Several have already leapt up onto the wooden stage and unfolded a scrap of paper from a pocket. There have been sonnets and doggerel, rants and lullabys. It's been a mixed experience, shall we say, with some gemstones on the beach. Most of us are waiting for the featured poets. Heavily laden and swathed in many layers against the cold, an elderly woman comes in late, excusing herself past knees and folded overcoats to the least accessible seat in the house, by the wall. The singing man carries on singing, oblivious. She settles herself dramatically (but wordlessly so as not to draw attention). Surreptitiously, she rummages in her crackling carrier bags throughout the rest of the session. What does she have in there? Poems? Knitting? Fish?

Although I read for him a couple of times I didn't know him well, or visit Torriano that often - regular engineering works make London a nightmare Sunday destination by rail. Now I wish I had. And I wish I'd taken seriously his offer to publish one of my pamphlet-length pieces.

I heartily recommend Marius Kociejowski's lively and astonishing minibiography in PN Review 187, last May. Among many fabulous anecdotes, that story about the writing desk is going to come around again and again.

More gab about gab

2010-03-02T09:51:00.003Z

In a comment on the last post I casually remarked that actors and musicians rely solely on their art to communicate with the audience. Poets, on the other hand, tend to gab.

Even as I clicked Publish, I realised I was wrong about musicians. How could I have forgotten? When I was a kid way back, folk song was popular and every little town had its folk club with regulars and itinerant performers. Ours was in The Bull on Friday nights, and in its heyday there would have been well over 100 people there. And musicians did links. They might tell something of the background to the song (fishing, canal-digging, mining, political struggle) or its origins (trad, Ewan MacColl), where they first heard it, or what they might have done to adapt it to the voices and instruments at hand.

It's not just folk singers, it's other popular forms like country and western, crooners and, sometimes, jazz. Even rockers might pause in the middle of a gig to ask the audience "Are you having a good time?" if they could be sure the answer would be a resounding "Yes!" (OK, maybe that was just to distract the audience from the retuning of guitars.)

I'd thought the habit was a feature of popular music, but in a recent Independent, there's a letter from Judy Vero, correcting an earlier article I'd missed:

David Lister asks why conductors do not address their audiences more often (6 February). Here in Birmingham it happens regularly.

Sir Simon Rattle began the trend many years ago, and it has now become an established feature of concerts by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Our dynamic and highly talented young Latvian conductor, Andris Nelsons, has clearly set out to build a rapport with his audience. We look forward to the moment when he turns to face us and addresses us as "Dear ladies and gentlemen..." The music become far more personal when he explains what it means to him and how he interprets it.

So I looked up the David Lister article:

...Before conducting the Schoenberg piece, Barenboim gave what was described as an "illustrated talk" from the podium, introduced the various themes from sections of the orchestra, explained how they fitted together and how the motifs were subtly altered and repeated. This prelude to a 21-minute piece lasted nearly half an hour. The audience was rapt, partly because this was a master showman at work, with a sense of comedy and timing to be envied by many a stand-up comedian. By the end of the talk he had the audience, not quite whistling Schoenberg as he had promised, but at least learning to love him, which is quite an achievement.

But Barenboim's charisma was only part of the reason that the audience was rapt. I also think it was because it was a treat to be addressed at all by a conductor at a classical music concert...

It's worth reading the whole article. It's instructive that Lister cites charisma and entertainment, but the main purpose of Barenboim's address was instruction. The talk lasted half an hour. That's not gab, that's a lecture. Clearly a lot of thought and preparation had gone into it. It was billed as an "illustrated talk", so they were expecting it. Even the most devoted Barenboim fan would have started to get a bit restless if they'd gone there expecting only music.

Music, like poetry and theatre, is a temporal art. The curatorial notes* in art galleries are often written precisely because (most) visual art outstays the moment and context of its creation. For the same reason, they're easier to ignore: they occupy visual space, not temporal space.

But note how the curatorial can shift into the personality:
The music becomes far more personal when he explains what it means to him and how he interprets it. (Vero)
... Barenboim's charisma was only part of the reason that the audience was rapt... (Lister)
Conductors are some of the greatest personalities in the world of music, and by virtue of what they have to do with an orchestra, some of the greatest communicators, yet we never hear them speak or even see their faces. (Lister)
... would it be so terrible to have a screen above the orchestra so that one could see the facial expressions of the conductor, his or her glances at various sections of the orchestra, rather than just staring at a back all evening? (Lister)
(My bold. And yes, it would be so terrible.)

It was a treat to be addressed at all by a conductor at a classical music concert. One can imagine a few aficionados being disdainful of anything that mediated between them and the music, but perhaps they would stay at home anyway, just reading the score. More profess resentment of the curatorial notes at art exhibitions (and a fortiori those recorded Walkman tours), which they regard as patronising and limiting. I haven't hired one for years: surely they have improved. But I always read the notes. They are always informative. Sometimes they have a wonderful lightness and wit. For some brilliant curatorship, where the talk virtually takes the place of the object (cf poem, symphony, song), listen to Neil MacGregor on Radio 4: A History of the World in A Hundred Objects. MacGregor is the Director of the British Museum, and in each programme chooses one of its exhibits to cast light on the society from which it emerged. When he places the Olduvai artefact into the hands of someone like David Attenborough to respond to and interpret, it's beautiful radio.

Some poets' gab tends more to the curatorial than the charismatic. I suspect the poetry audience tolerates more of the latter than the former. And not much of that. They particularly resent being instructed how to interpret the poem. The Author is Dead, remember?

I'm straying from the point. I started looking at gab as an overlooked part of the performance, and it's led to the point where the gab is the performance, with the referent playing a supporting role - offstage, in the case of A History of the World.

I'm still developing my theory of gab. Meanwhile here are a few more thoughts.

Our receptivity to gab relies on
• the relevance of the gab
• the authority of the gabber
• the skill of the gabber
• the personality of the gabber
• our expectation that there will be gab

* I'm interested in the idea of museum object by way of contrast to performed art: immutable but open to interpretation the way a music score or a poem is - or at least the idea that the interpretation of it can be artistic as well as scholarly. How far can the museum artefact be distinguished from a contemporary work of art, like a painting or a poem? Of course it has a historic provenance and purpose which, however disputable, are in theory knowable. Or in another theory, perhaps not. I don't know the first thing about curatorship theory, but it must be as rife with different factions and revisions as any other area of intellectual effort.

Gab

2010-02-03T01:26:00.007Z

Bernard O'Donoghue, to whom I owe the title of this post, self-deprecatingly dismisses his entertaining interstitial chat as "just gab". I’ve never heard him use those killer words "This next poem..." His intros are tangential. They may illuminate the poem from a distant place, but make no attempt to explain it, let alone render a prose version. The prose version gab is a betrayal of the poem.

Gab between poems. Like it/don't like it? How much? What sort?

These questions are prompted by a recent reading where some readers gabbed and others took the piano recital approach of reverential silence. (Knowing chuckles from the audience, coughing, shifting and recrossing legs permitted.) Odd, really, because some of their poems are so dense they need recovery time. And sometimes I'd appreciate it if they gave the occasional poem a leg-up, given that this was a rare chance to hear the poet in person, rather than just the tape running in my head when I hold the book.

One non-gabber even prefaced his reading with a brief gab-denouncing gab. I thought I detected a certain froideur between the two camps.

Although I’ve been thinking about it for a while, it’s not easy to formulate a critique of gab. While there is a lot of commentary on reading the poem itself, I haven't found much about the bits in between. Here are some fairly inchoate initial thoughts on a large and divisive subject.

What is gab?
Anything which isn’t a poem - whether a few introductory remarks, or a long chat between poems. It includes modes of speech known by more polite terms, such as conversation, talk, chat, anecdote, aside, reminiscence, yarn, joke, ad lib, etc. Proponents of gab will say that it’s a perfectly natural interaction between performer and audience. You might wonder why on earth I’m angsting about it, but bear with me. It also gets called more derogatory names, such as patter, spiel, waffle. By using this term I’m trying to be dispassionate about it for a bit.

We’ve come to hear the poems, so why gab?
Gab has complex and overlapping functions, both informative and phatic, not always consciously employed (and not always successful):
• To acknowledge courtesies.
• To get the audience used to the sound of the poet’s voice.
• To establish goodwill.
• To establish or adjust status – eg I may have a reputation for being difficult to understand but I’m just an ordinary person like you really. To democratise.
• To provide context for something arcane, to explain an unfamiliar reference.
• To release tension, eg after poems about highly emotive subjects. Done badly, it can drain energy from the performance.
• To provide breathing space between poems. This is the most commonly cited. There is a perception – which may be wrong – that some audiences cannot bear too much non-stop poetry, that they need to pause and consider what they’ve just heard. Gab requires a much lower level of attention, but it may undermine the period of reflection it’s intended to provide. A short period of silence may work better.
• To avoid monotony.
• To entertain.
• To deal with interruptions.
• To establish or re-establish control.

Critics of gab might add further categories such as:
• To disarm or befriend. Those who favour a conversational style of reading will slip more naturally into chat with the audience.
• To control interpretation of the poem.
• To let the poet off the hook. To evade commitment to the poem.
• Habit
• Fear
• Vanity

I wonder too if the prevalence of gab is something to do with the growing requirement of the market. Like other writers, poets are expected by publishers these days to market themselves as personalities. This doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but when audiences start looking for personalities and newspapers can publish two-page interviews with a poet without quoting a single line of poetry, gab is hardly a surprising by-product.

Some audiences ask for gab. On occasion, when invited to read I’ve been specifically asked to give background to the poems. (Younger listeners know very little about the Cold War, and no one knows much about V bombers.)

How prevalent is gab?
It's so widespread it’s almost taken for granted in some quarters and doesn't get the attention it deserves. Less experienced readers are inclined to absorb the performance style of people they admire. When I first started reading to an audience the perceived requirement to say something non-fatuous between poems was far more anxiety-inducing than speaking the poems themselves. I’d have saved myself some agony early on if I’d realised that saying nothing at all was an option.

About ten years ago we formed Joy of Six. I’ll blog about that one day, but for now the relevant thing is that we read our poems without any gab in between, often without even giving a title. We choose poems that can withstand a quickfire delivery. It doesn’t matter if the audience doesn’t get everything as it wings past, so long as the poem delivers something: a promise, a mystery, a teasing sound. The next poem will aim for another effect, intensifying or contrasting. We often read to audiences who aren’t used to hearing much poetry. Our enthusiastic comments book suggests that the “breathing space” theory doesn’t necessarily apply to multi-voice performances.

Gab is not always appropriate
The TS Eliot readings allow only 8 minutes a poet, so there's no time for it. Anyway, that occasion seems to require solemnity. Nevertheless, a creeping gabbiness can be detected. It was clear a few years back that performers had been warned off any gab whatsoever, because nobody said a word but their poems. It was oddly formal, but not displeasing. I can understand the injunction against gab, because poets famously have no idea how long it takes. But this year, almost everyone had something to say that wasn't a poem. Even the rigorously non-gabby Alice Oswald felt constrained to comment on how Weeds and Wildflowers had come about as a collaboration.

The gabless performance
Foregrounds the poem.
Foregrounds the language.
Foregrounds the voice as performance.
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets favour it.
Poets with a sculptural sensibility, such as Elizabeth James, favour it.
Poets with a dramatic sensibility, such as Paul Durcan and Alice Oswald, favour it.
It takes courage.

Gab as performance
Poet, wit and raconteur: Michael Donaghy was an exemplar of gab. Simon Armitage*, when he's on form, can give Ian McMillan a good run for his money. John Cooper Clarke blends poetry with standup. John Hegley adds a mandolin. Michael Rosen has it down to such a fine art you can't tell where the gab ends and the poem begins. That's not actually a criticism, since the whole thing is about giving a performance. At a very basic level it's about holding the tribe’s attention, whether with stories, jokes, political rhetoric, music or the language of the poems themselves.

We are talking about many different sorts of performance and venue here: the concert hall, the SCR, the pub. It would have been weird and alienating, I think, if John Burnside hadn’t chatted to the audience at the intimate reading at Toppings.

Gab or pure poetry?
I was talking to a couple of poet friends about this last night. S said he had no time for gab. It's self-indulgent and boring. He hates it when poets give the background to a poem, and he hates it when they tell tangential stories. Or else it shows lack of confidence in the work: above all, he hates it when the poet tries to give the impression he's an ordinary bloke like them, and tries to be their friend. He doesn't need to like the poet. He doesn't need to know anything about him. He has come to hear the poems. He cited a reading recently where each of the readers had chatted away between poems: it virtually sent him to sleep. When he gives a reading, he doesn’t feel the need to address the audience other than through the poem, because everything he wants to say is in the poem.**

J completely disagreed. She thought the poet could seem arrogant and rude if she didn't address the audience. She cited the example of a well known poet years ago at the Troubadour, when the performance space was half the size it is now. In refusing to engage with the audience he came across as contemptuous of them. The audience are people, individual human beings, not disembodied intellects. Some are listening with their heads, some with their heads and their hearts. Some audiences are not just randomly collected, but bonded communities.
She thinks too, that people need downtime between poems, otherwise it all gets too intense.

Bad gabbers?
This is a public space.
Oh, all right then:
A few years ago at Aldeburgh a distinguished foreign poet felt obliged to introduce each poem. Although it’s very common, gab is not a universal expectation there. Unable to trust herself to ad lib, she read from a script. It drained all the energy from her performance.
Archie Markham. His gab was fascinating, and the only reason he is here on the bench where he can't defend himself is that when I heard him I found myself wondering when he was going to read an actual poem. However interesting the gab (and it was), people had come to hear his poems.

People have very different reactions to gab. It can be seen as an integral part of performance, or an aesthetic insult. Surrounding the poems with silence like piano études can be seen as either professional or arrogant. Some people insist they go to hear the poems; they don't want the poems explained or undermined, and they certainly don't want the poet trying to ingratiate himself. If the poem is baffling in places, the language should carry it through, and in any case there will be another one along in a minute. In fact, this is the theory behind our Joy of Six performances - to keep the energy level high. Yet when we perform individually, we all gab. Appropriateness of gab depends on the audience and venue.

There is a lot more to say about all of this, and if anyone can recommend some studies, please let me know.

There are some things that everyone agrees on:
• People have come to hear poems.
• It's a mistake to assume that anyone will be interested in your domestic arrangements. (Well, they probably will if you are someone famous.)
• It’s a mistake to explain the poem. This next poem is my attempt to show the transience of beauty, and the irony that... (Sorry, I already nodded off.)
• The prose version gab is a betrayal of the poem.
• It’s fatal to apologise for the poem.
• It is better to be silent than to gab badly.

*"Simon began to read and immediately had the audience in the palm of his hand. The first two poems he picked were hilarious; the first on the surreal musings of a sperm whale and the second on the quasi biblical crossing of a causeway before the tide was properly out. He had his rather staid audience rolling with laughter. His ad libbed comments between the poems were also funny, and his timing when reading was like watching the best of comic actors. Having got us totally onside he moved on to a range of poetry covering a great mix of styles and emotions. His preambles before each poem made everything quickly accessible even if you had not heard that poem before, or if the poem proved difficult."(Juxtabook)

**Which, come to think of it, sounds just like the attitude some men have to sex

The real thing and the bar room manoeuvre

2010-01-31T14:00:00.001Z

I went to hear John Burnside read in Ely the other night. We were upstairs at Toppings, a real bookshop. I've been meaning to go there for ages: they have an excellent programme of readers. Twenty chairs just about packed the place. It's a welcoming den to idle away a few hours, in case you haven't already got enough books in the house. I was racking my brains to recall what the shop had been when I lived there back in the 80s. A bakers, a gentlemen's outfitters perhaps? There's no trace; Toppings have made it completely their own, and it feels as if they have been there forever. Fabulous! I shall be back.

I wish them every success, and they seem to have both the curatorial sense and the critical mass for it. A much smaller bookshop opened in our village in the 90s and flourished until Amazon and Tesco killed it off. The proprietor was keen on poetry, and knew someone at OUP (remember when they published poetry?), so we had a succession of readings: Michael Donaghy, Peter Porter, Anne Stevenson, Stephen Romer - and others who weren't on the Oxford list, like Katrina Porteous and Kevin Crossley-Holland. There was even wild talk of getting Anthony Hecht over. What days! It could seat about a dozen people on various chairs, tables and bar stools. Much wine was consumed (and Michael played the whistle). It closed last year, the poetry-loving proprietor having long since retired.

It's the first time I'd heard Burnside in person, and found him engaging, thoughtful and unpompous. It was interesting to hear him talk about his work as well as read from it. His publicist won't want to know that he read from his latest poetry collection, The Hunt in the Forest, as well as from the second volume of memoir he is really supposed to be promoting, Waking Up in Toytown. But if she's reading this, she should know he was worth travelling for. I'm reading The Hunt in the Forest right now. It's good to have heard his voice so I can put the poems to it.

At the reading I found myself sitting next to G, whom I hadn't seen in twenty years. We went for a swift half to a pub I'd never set foot in during all the years I lived there, as back then it was a bit too spit & sawdust even for me. It's under new ownership, so G wanted to check it out. He stepped through the lobby to the glazed inner door, and couldn't open it. Push, push, this side and that. Standing behind him, I could see what he couldn't: below his eye level, a sign that said Pull. Who ever heard of anyone pulling open the door to a bar room? That's no way to start a brawl.

It's elf and safety, you see. If there's a fire (even less likely now smoking is forbidden) then the panicking customers must be able to get out quickly. But that oddly placed handle should have been a warning.

Everything had been ripped out, every surface levelled and sanitised. There were some low armchairs and there may even have been a potted plant. Perhaps the imagination supplies that, because it resembled nothing so much as the foyer of a modern mid-market commercial hotel. While we stood at the immaculate bar supping our Adnams, reminiscing about the livestock market and trying to ignore the smell of paint, several other punters batted at the door, finding it as baffling as G had. What sort of pub was it? It was near enough. It served decent beer. It was smoke free and there were places to sit down. There was no canned music, no slot machine (but neither, as far as I could tell, dartboard, pool table or jukebox). No ugly behaviour brewing. But all the while, I felt there was something I was not getting about it. I enjoyed my beer, and was in good company, but what was this pub for? It was almost empty. There was a group of young women talking quietly in the corner, one of whom G knew slightly and nodded to. They were subdued and respectable. It didn't seem to be the sort of place where you should raise your voice.

Like a poem that evinces all superficial properties of a poem apart from actual motive, this called itself a pub, and it sold beer. It certainly provided somewhere out of the rain to yarn away with an old acquaintance. But it didn't feel like a pub. The men confounded by the door finally entered, trailing tobacco smoke, and looked round bewildered. You could tell they wouldn't be stopping long.

Salt Cellar Reading: The Punter

2010-01-19T22:59:00.005Z

Salt begins its tenth anniversary celebrations with an evening of poetry, prose and conversation at The Punter on Thursday 28 January.

Readers: Anne Berkeley, André Mangeot, Leo Mellor, Rod Mengham, Drew Milne, Ian Patterson, Simon Perril, Andrea Porter, John Saul and Padrika Tarrant.

Come and find out what Salt has planned for 2010 and where you might fit in…

The Punter
3 Pound Hill,
Cambridge,
CB3 0AE

Personation

2010-01-18T00:11:00.003Z

Just back from the TS Eliot readings. This isn't a post about that, though. It would be boring if I opined on who read well and who less well, and anyway no one would agree with me. Some fine poets didn't read their best poems, or read them well... But it was a vintage evening. Last year was a strong one: if anything this was even stronger. People can argue about whether it was really as diverse as Armitage claims, but it's an impressive sampling of the mainstream (whatever that means).

Not for the first time Sharon Olds was an anomalous American on the list. Not for the first time the work of an absent poet was read by someone else. There were mutterings that it should have been an American voice reading the poems, the English cadences were all wrong.

I don't agree. Jo Shapcott read with controlled passion. It was very English, yes, but she was engaged with the poems. She really cared about them. It surprised me. Although I admire Olds for her skill in shaping experience and sense of drama, I've long had misgivings: about portentousness inclining to bathos (eg Connoisseuse of Slugs, Animal Crackers - and if that's wit I don't get it), about incongruities of vocabulary (eg, how she slips that "gold endorphin light" into The Ride as she shifts gear) - oh, and other things but this isn't a post about Sharon Olds either - and above all her personal involvement with the material. Even as artifices, the poems insist on their fidelity to experience. I'd almost started to think of her as the Tracey Emin of poetry: that what mattered most about her work was that it (sc. the raw material) had happened to her. I ran a thought experiment where the poems were written under a nom de plume by one Shaun O'Leary, a former English major at Iowa, now a lawyer forced by unexpected literary success to perpetuate his fraudulent identity. Nonsense, but I was trying to explore how much a reading might depend on assumed biographical knowledge, even though we know the poems are fictionalised if not complete fiction. (I'm not going to pursue this line of argument into Ern Malley territory tonight.)

What Shapcott's voice did wonderfully for me was to distance the work from the Olds persona. It distanced it (riskily) even from North America - and the poems survived. At last I can hear the words separated from the voice that first spoke them. The poems are released. From whatever cage I've been locking them in.

Another thing: if it had been an American reading the poems, would it have seemed like an impersonation?

And a couple of observations:
It's fantastic to see such a large audience for serious poetry. It gets larger every year, and they'll have to move to the Festival Hall soon at this rate.

And kudos to the sound engineers. We were in the back row, and the sound was fabulous. Music venues don't always work well for spoken word, but this was delicate and crystal clear.

London and the Provinces

2010-01-09T00:42:00.013Z

NASA: Snow across Great Britain 7 January

This picture was on the front page of at least four daily papers this morning. They are full of how difficult it is to get to the office, and occasional complaints that compared with last February the London snow is frankly a bit disappointing.

Back in the seventies I was an articled clerk in Lincolnshire and set out after work one Friday to catch the train from Grantham, 30 miles away, to join my boyfriend visiting his big sister in London. The roads were thick with snow and I was dubious about making the journey. Oh don't be silly, Rosamund said on the telephone, there's no snow here. We're expecting you and it's roast lamb. From my small market town office window I looked at the tyre tracks neatly laid out in the street below and realised she thought I was a wimp. Snow is evanescent. There was no snow in London so the snow in Lincolnshire didn't really count. I drove carefully, staying in the tracks. Twenty miles out from home, coming downhill near Ancaster, I collided with a road sign warning of the bend.

The front end of the car crumpled.

It wouldn't start.

I was rescued by a policeman who took me to his house where his wife cleared the toys from the carpet and made me tea. The snow walloped down outside. When he'd finished his paperwork, the policeman gave me a lift to the station.* Rosamund was annoyed that I was late for supper, but amused that I'd pranged my car.

Lesley is a Devon farmer. Read her account of working through snow, if you think this latest lot is frankly a bit disappointing.

Seriously.

As I write the farmer is trying to dig the milk tanker lorry out of the lane a mile away so he can get to their tank and take milk to the processors. It’s currently 19.30 and that lorry has been on the road since 6am. Apparently only 40 out of 400 hundred dairy farms in the region have had collections in the last few days. There has been no lorry taking animals to the abattoir. Beef and sheep are not going to market either. Three people including us have not had a requested visit from our vet – also without a 4 wheel drive car. Fortunately my sick goat is stable but I need a blood test on her to assess what is going on. Others with animals needing immediate caesarians for example will have to watch them die.

Let's hear it for the farmers.

*Crikey, that policeman and his wife were wonderful. Would that happen now? Do village policemen live in police houses any more? Is there even such a person as a village policeman?

Othermes

2009-12-10T12:22:00.005Z

Anne Berkeley is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at Utah State University
anne berkeley is a program assistant in colorado's child support enforcement program
anneberkeleyx3 on twitter: he is the same as me!! xD i dont like that -_-

It's disconcerting to find that there are other people out there with the same name. Perhaps if you are John Smith or Jane Brown it feels a bit different from how it feels for me. But still. There is this aural space you feel entitled to occupy, this signifier which since you were a child you expected to own uniquely.

You grow up. You learn you aren't unique, nothing about you is unique. You even get round to finding this exit from solipsism oddly consoling. Then along comes the internet. Google. Twitter.

There is someone with the same name as me who tweets @ someone called Andrew. How dare she so casually assume my name? And who is Andrew? A late adopter of blogs, a reluctant participant in facebook, and with no desire to tweet, I suddenly feel like the woman who returns from holiday to find someone else living in her house, only it isn't her house after all. It never was.

Is she like me? Are we perhaps related? And does she feel annoyed that there's this Limey using her name?

I work for your credit card company, you can trust me

2009-12-10T11:30:00.006Z

I'm in town with OH when his cellphone rings. It's for you, he says, puzzled, handing me the contraption.

I do not know anyone who would contact me on that number.

When I've figured out which way round to hold it, there's a voice from the depths of southern Asia telling me that this is my credit card company calling and they must check a few security details with me before they can tell me what it's about. They won't tell me anything until I answer their questions, as they want to be sure they are talking to the right person.

Huh? Someone rings me out of the blue about my credit card, on someone else's telephone, and wants to check my security details?

- How do I know you are who you say you are? I don't want to give any information over the telephone to a stranger. Can you tell me what this is about?

- I am sorry madam, I am not permitted to discuss anything about the account with you without first clearing your security details.

(Things like the colour of my grandmother's eyes, and the check digits on the back of the card. Things that would be jolly useful to someone wanting to use my card.) This really isn't a good time to call. OH and I in the middle of trying to buy a car. She is insistent. She suggests I call their customer service department, and starts to dictate a number.

- Sorry, I don't know who you are. I will ring the number on the back of my card.

It's a joint account, that's why they rang on OH's telephone. It transpires that someone had been trying to use my card to buy goods online "in the Pacific area" and the credit card company wanted to check it wasn't me. No, it wasn't. (Where in the Pacific area, I'm dying to know. Anchorage? Honolulu? Shanghai?) My card is now cancelled, a new card is on its way and I must let them know if it doesn't arrive within ten days. Lucky I have another credit card, what with Christmas coming up and everything.

Honestly, I'm grateful that they checked, rather than just paying out and not telling me my credit limit was up until I tried to check out the latest bit of black goods for the offspring's pressie. But what is the mentality of these institutions? They are forever asking us to be vigilant against fraud, yet they act as if they didn't know what it was like to be a customer. Imagine that you'd just paid for a meal in a restaurant where there happened to be a dodgy employee. I know I know, but it does happen. The employee has your name and credit card number, he has the telephone number from the booking; all he needs now are the answers to the security questions to be able to exhaust your unasked-for credit limit.

How to Write Badly Well

2009-11-15T15:14:00.007Z

Joel Stickley makes me weep with laughter. Frex:

When writing radio drama, use dialogue to set the scene

Present your research in the form of dialogue

Always use a thesaurus

Joel is one of the poetry boyband Aisle 16.

Beauty in numbers

2009-11-15T09:44:00.002Z

300,000 starlings in Denmark

Via

Writer's Choice

2009-11-10T15:35:00.005Z

My Writer's Choice is on normblog! Don't go there* expecting something highbrow or poetic. Although I wrestled with the idea of doing justice to various books that might make me look intelligent and cultured, I settled for what first came to mind: some of the first books I remember.

*Edit: I should add that of course you will frequently find things highbrow and poetic elsewhere in Norm's Writer's Choice series, and indeed on his blog in general.

The Workforce from Praga

2009-11-05T09:15:00.013Z

Oh good, I thought, when this came up on Google alerts, a review at last. But "workforce"? Were they going to be accusing me of lucubrations?

So I wandered over and found myself in an alternative universe. As Gary Larson says of another malfunction entirely, the results are disquieting but inexplicably hilarious:

Anne writes:

"Besides as on recent 50p coins, Britannia employed to look on the old British pennies. The influence of society 's, and the province 's, demands on single individuality is something that holds upseted me for many geezerhood."

I love "geezerhood"! I'm having that. I don't care really, so long as they've spelt my name correctly. And below that, they've printed the poem. They shouldn't really do that without permission, should they? I can tell it's my poem from the shape of it. But hang on, this isn't right. Not right at all:

Britannia
Anne Berkeley

Careful not to bemire her delicacy Ferragamos,
the grand locomotes discreetly through the herbaceous borderline,
a bundle of cuttings in her bag:
a cardinal, the Queen 's gynecologist, a twelve QCs.

She holds come for the music, course,
but the ambience 's lovely, such elegant lampshades.
There is e'er some Authorities in the garden
where the sheep are maintained in their rightful spot
safely cropping beyond the haha.

There are twenty-two transactions before pall upwards.
The wind is cold, there Holds a whine of rainfall
but the outing must locomote along and be such merriment:
an unfastened window functions coloratura with rap de pate de foie gras.
Everyone holds a carpeting for their genus, and she reminds us
again of her dark at the Albert Hallway,
the swallowing blueness of a million delphiniums.
We can nighly believe in her cloak-pin and shield.

It Holds not what it was, she states: the coarse new edifice,
annually the way to the lily pond more overgrown -
a dialolog of green blackberries and birtwistle.
Hemlines are uprise; already comptrollers rinse au fait the lawn.

Even today, out mazed with Rebel Alien,
I hear her jubilant arpeggios over the waves,
the Broadwood 's V policing round the fiddles.

Britannica ' is printed in The Manpower from Praga

( Salt Publication, 2009 ).

Read more about Anne and The Hands from Praga

[That link above is a pukka link handcoded by me to take you directly to Salt.]

I love the way there is a different translation of "Men" each time, not all of them politically correct. I shall never again see the words "Albert Hall" without thinking of a humble corridor, and the neglected vaudeville entertainer, Albert Hallway. And when the going gets tough, I might well consider getting out mazed with Rebel Alien.

As for jamesmarshallko, the name behind this odd tribute, he seems to be a bot who has crawled over Peony Moon, extracted my poem and run it twice through a translation tool. In case there's any malware floating around, I'm not linking. It is hosted by livejournal, a place I normally associate with keen-eyed ficcers. I didn't click on any of the links over there, which probably take you to Canadian pharmacies or worse. I'm keeping this poem, though.

2009-10-25T23:21:00.024Z

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.

Charles Bukowski - so you want to be a writer?

I was at a reading tonight where a friend read this poem, one of his favourites. The audience cheered. Part of me cheers too, finding congruence with Keats writing to his publisher: if Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all. I certainly feel like cheering when I get to this bit:

don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.

But he is wrong. Seductive, but wrong. The poem ends like this:

and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

A dictum that would have condemned Elizabeth Bishop, who spent years looking for the right word, to silence. And think of Plath, whom Hughes described working with a thesaurus on her lap.

The thing that most riles me - for a moment - is the prescriptivism. One of the chosen defines who else is chosen. It would be tempting to discuss the soteriology underlying that word "chosen" if one could have more confidence that the word itself had been chosen rather than simply occurred as, say, leaves to a tree.

Romantics. Men channelling the collective unconscious. Duende. Let them talk for themselves. But they are not simply talking about themselves, they are also talking about the way they would like to write. Or at least, the way they'd like to be seen to write. The skill is in making it look natural. Poetry favours the prepared mind. Those poems that come quickly and seem to need little revision - don't they arouse suspicion? It shouldn't be that easy. That way lets in cliché, lazy thinking, push-button emotions, rhymes that are there for no other reason than the sound.

Keats was one of my first loves. Bukowski bores me. I'm irritated at the dismissal of work. Keats took dictation from his prepared mind. Bukowski, not so much. Bishop took the protestant work ethic to an extreme. Hey, even the sainted Don Paterson claims to write dozens of drafts. There's room for everyone.

Poetry can come from the head, the heart, the toil or the soil - what matters is where it lodges. It doesn't matter how long it took to fashion the arrow, if it finds its mark.

Andrew Philip

2009-10-09T18:37:00.008+01:00

Congratulations to Andrew Philip for making the Aldeburgh shortlist against stiff competition from 92 other first collections.

I highly recommend The Ambulance Box. The Squared interview with Andy is here.

The final winner will be announced at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival on 7 November.

Boys

2009-10-09T18:31:00.001+01:00

"We didn't see a big splashy plume like we wanted to see," said Michael Bicay, director of science at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center.

Hundreds of space enthusiasts in parkas and sleeping bags gathered in the early morning to watch the impact on a big outdoor screen at the Ames Research Center, housed on an old dirigible field in Silicon Valley.

"You're going into a place where the sun hasn't shined for a billion years," Morrison said.

(Paragraphs reordered)

See How I Land

2009-10-01T18:43:00.007+01:00

"Come, talk, laugh and break isolation"

- Vahni Capildeo ("Filda's Workshop")

This book collects new writing arising from the Oxford Poets & Refugees project - an initiative of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre and the Oxford-based charity Asylum Welcome.

In See How I Land the intersection of arts and human rights is vividly demonstrated… It asks us to think again about what it is that we, as humans, value, what it is that we share, and what it is that we desire to protect and to celebrate: freedom, safety, family, and love.

– Shami Chakrabarti

Asylum seekers and poets are both searching. Refugees are trying to find a haven for themselves and their families, writers a home for stories, dreams and ideas… When Oxford Brookes brings these two worlds together they give us ‘outsiders’ a place where all our words, and all our lives, are valued.

– Benjamin Zephaniah

I'll be writing about it soon.

Misunderstood

2009-10-01T17:07:00.008+01:00

I don't often do quizzes, but this one appealed.

Your recommended philosophy-guru is EPICURUS.

Key fact: Epicurus, founder of Epicureanism, is probably the most misunderstood philosopher of antiquity.

Must have: A delight in the countryside and gardens.

Key promise: Peace and tranquillity.

Key peril: Boredom.

Most likely to say: "The true hedonist can find as much pleasure in a glass of chilled water as in a feast for a king."

Least likely to say: "He who tires of the city, tires of life."

Via.

Ars longa, vita brevis

2009-10-01T12:58:00.012+01:00

Petition for Roman Polanski

We have learned the astonishing news of Roman Polanski’s arrest by the Swiss police on September 26th, upon arrival in Zurich (Switzerland) while on his way to a film festival where he was due to receive an award for his career in filmmaking.

He's a great film maker.

His arrest follows an American arrest warrant dating from 1978

an awfully long time ago. Don't you think we can just let bygones be bygones?

against the filmmaker, in a case of morals.

We don't judge other people by standards of bourgeois morality.

Filmmakers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision. It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by the police to apprehend him.

He's a great film maker. We all think so. You can't go around arresting great guys like that. Film festivals are sacrosanct. This is tantamount to arresting a priest in church.

By their extraterritorial nature, film festivals the world over have always permitted works to be shown and for filmmakers to present them freely and safely, even when certain States opposed this.

We claim diplomatic immunity for our event. Otherwise, what next? They will be arresting people for showing films that someone doesn't like. This is like McCarthysism.

The arrest of Roman Polanski in a neutral country,

Switzerland was neutral in WWII, and is not a member of NATO or the EU and it's um we think it's probably therefore neutral in the enforcement of cases of morals

where he assumed he could travel without hindrance,

He's been able to get away with it for so long he thought he could get away with it this time.

undermines this tradition: it opens the way for actions of which no one can know the effects.

What next? They will be arresting people for showing films that someone doesn't like. This is like McCarthysism.

Roman Polanski is a French citizen, a renowned and international artist now facing extradition.

He should be immune from your bourgeois American moral judgements.

This extradition, if it takes place, will be heavy in consequences and will take away his freedom.

And he should be free, because he's a great film maker.

Filmmakers, actors, producers and technicians—everyone involved in international filmmaking — want him to know that he has their support and friendship.

He is one of us. He is our friend.

On September 16th, 2009, Mr. Charles Rivkin, the US Ambassador to France, received French artists and intellectuals at the embassy. He presented to them the new Minister Counselor for Public Affairs at the embassy, Ms Judith Baroody. In perfect French she lauded the Franco-American friendship and recommended the development of cultural relations between our two countries.

We appeal to all enlightened French-speaking people

If only in the name of this friendship between our two countries, we demand the immediate release of Roman Polanski.

* * *

If a friend of mine were threatened with jail I'd go to some lengths to help keep them out, and if they went to jail I'd go and visit. (Assuming they hadn't done something so gross I didn't want to stay friends.) I'm not going to boycott anyone for signing this petition. There are many people I like and admire who support it. I just think their arguments are woolly.

It's a long time ago.
OK, so you want a statute of limitations for rape. Some jurisdictions have that. No doubt some elderly clergymen wish they had the benefit of a statute of limitations. But you will have to make a better argument than this. He's hardly Jean Valjean is he.

Hollywood, rock stars, the golden days - everyone was messing around with kids back then.
There have been powerful people indulging their urges since time immoral, and society sometimes lets them get away with it. Then people start thinking you can get away with it if you're rich and influential enough. There is never a shortage of victims. There should have been a lot more prosecutions. Why should an auteur be treated differently from a priest, or someone who lives in a trailer?

Her mother knew all about it.
The victim was thirteen. I don't know what her mother has to do with it. (It's a pity she didn't stay around during the shoot.) The sexuality of children isn't - in western society at least - the property of their parents. How many times did that kid say No? I've lost count, but it was a lot.

The victim wants it dropped.
And some offences are so difficult or humiliating that the victim may not want to talk about them. But unless the offence is really trivial, the victim shouldn't have a say in the matter. Otherwise the perp would be able to intimidate the victim into dropping charges, or if they were rich enough, buy the victim off.

But he's Roman Polanski! He makes great films! What about Chaucer, Villon, Marlowe, Byron, Wilde, Eric Gill &c, &c?
Let's separate the man from his work.

And why focus on him when there are all these other guys running around evading prosection?
Because of the petition. People like me are sounding off because we don't think the petition should be unchallenged. We may speculate on why it's taken the US so long to catch him, and why now. They need to catch the other guys as well.

Feelings are running high. There's wild talk of witch hunts, of pitchforks and torches, of lynch mobs. This isn't Salem, it isn't McCarthyism, and it trivialises what the Ku Klux Klan did. It's not even as if Polanski can be claimed an innocent man. It's not totally unreasonable, is it, to call these celebs out on their assumption of entitlement to immunity?

[Edited to remove link to victim's testimony.]

Weblog

2009-09-29T14:34:00.009+01:00

As any fule no, a blog is a weblog, and it started out by being a list of sites visited. As an antidote to Blytonia, here are some of the more interesting items I've come across in the past few days.

Jim Murdoch ponders the dearth of modern nursery rhymes.

Lorna Watts is refused the loan of scissors by a north London librarian: They are sharp, you might stab me.

Anton Vowl suggests what Gordon Brown should have answered to that question from Andrew Marr.

Belle Waring has an impassioned post on Crooked Timber about sexual harassment in the academy, with a sideswipe at "look but don't touch" Kealey from Buckingham. Mary Beard isn't so bothered. Is Terence Kealey as misunderstood as Juvenal? (Or as contemporary? I'm inclined to add.) Yes, it may have been satire, but it's pretty lame satire.

In a post entitled Because Men are Stupid and Shallow, That's Why, Jeff Fecke demonstrates that some men are capable of seeing the person beyond the breasts. He challenges the Canadian Rethink Breast Cancer campaign (aimed at raising men's awareness by concentrating on breasts):

the thing about breasts that I generally like the most is that they’re usually attached to living, breathing women, and I like women, because, you know, they’re people. Many of them are people I like, and consider friends. All of them are worth far more than the breasts attached to them; that should go without saying.

Ben Goldacre considers the AIDS-denialist film House of Numbers, which was shown at Cambridge Film Festival and (temporarily) hoodwinked rationalist sceptic Caspar Melville. Goldacre starts a lively discussion about how to deal with moonbats - exposure, ridicule, debate? Or by ignoring them? (There's no widely accepted noun for that, but ignoral might suit.) This comment in particular struck me:

The best advice my late Dad ever gave me was; “Never argue with an idiot, because people watching lose track of which is which”. The older I get, the more I appreciate his words. Several times a week, I’m given cause to think of them.

Teach the debate is what creationists say.

Jack of Kent argues why English libel law is a danger and makes a proposal for reform.

Shuggy has a go at performative theists aiming for the class prize.

no man ever forsook his father, mother, brother, sister, son or daughter and took up his cross in order to support the nuclear family, preserve the work ethic, reduce crime in the neighbourhood or foster charitable giving as an important ingredient in civil society.

Terry Glavin doesn't know how to handle the human tide, except that the handling should be humane. Who could disagree?

Right, I'm off to Oxford now for the launch of See How I Land.

Antidote

2009-09-27T11:50:00.026+01:00

[Emily asks: Did you enjoy the Blytons? Yes, like a drug. When I wasn’t reading them I’d be trying to work out how I could get away in secret for my next fix. It was the summer holiday, and my mother thought I should be out of doors. Normally I needed no encouragement, so she must have worked out that something was amiss. Inevitably, she discovered me in the act.]

- Said, said, said, said, said! My mother jabs her finger down the page. It’s so boring! She looks exasperated.
- But it’s not boring! It’s very exciting! I want to know what happens next.
- Said Julian, said Dick, said George. Didn't you notice? Proper reading is when you read the words.
She’s right. Why hadn’t I noticed?
- Look at this. She produces another red-covered book, the same size as Five Go to Smuggler's Top. My spirits lift for a moment, then I see the title: Just William. Richmal? Why do these writers all have funny names? The pictures aren’t as good as Eileen Soper’s. The boy doesn't look much older than me. He’s very scruffy. There isn’t anyone who looks as sensible as Julian. At least there’s a dog, but he’s not powerful like Timmy. I don’t think these children will be able to deal with grownup situations like smugglers and spies. But the print is small, which suggests it's for older children. It is confusing. I look again at the boy with his cap askew and his socks around his ankles. His face is grinning and dirty.
- That boy doesn’t look very reliable.
- He's got more life in his little finger than all this lot together.
I stare at his little finger, which is just a blur.
- I think you'll enjoy his company. But you can’t have it yet. Finish that Famous Five and come and tell me all about it. Then we’ll see.

* * *

My mother is right of course. She is always right. There is an art to writing that doesn’t draw attention to itself. But now she’s pointed it out, I can’t help noticing the saids, and that’s done for it.

William hardly ever just “says” anything. He’s forever exclaiming, proclaiming, conjecturing, expostulating, reasoning, arguing, protesting and even ejaculating. (Ah that will get me some Google traffic. But those were the days when social intercourse was polite.) I get the impression of a boy with a very mobile face.

Sometimes I need to ask the meaning of a word, and the tubby, child-sized COD has become a dear friend. But that's another story.

Issues

2009-09-24T15:53:00.016+01:00

Gmail is temporarily unable to access your Contacts. You may experience issues while this persists.

Issues? The mind boggles.

Of course I know what they mean, but it's the first time I've seen this used formally and it piqued my interest.

Here's dictionary.com:

1. the act of sending out or putting forth; promulgation; distribution: the issue of food and blankets to flood victims.
2. something that is printed or published and distributed, esp. a given number of a periodical: Have you seen the latest issue of the magazine?
3. something that is sent out or put forth in any form.
4. a quantity of something that is officially offered for sale or put into circulation at one time: a new issue of commemorative stamps; a new bond issue.
5. a point in question or a matter that is in dispute, as between contending parties in an action at law.
6. a point, matter, or dispute, the decision of which is of special or public importance: the political issues.
7. a point the decision of which determines a matter: The real issue in the strike was the right to bargain collectively.
8. a point at which a matter is ready for decision: to bring a case to an issue.
9. something proceeding from any source, as a product, effect, result, or consequence: His words were the issue of an intelligent man.
10. the ultimate result, event, or outcome of a proceeding, affair, etc.: the issue of a contest.
11. a distribution of food rations, clothing, equipment, or ammunition to a number of officers or enlisted soldiers, or to a military unit.
12. offspring; progeny: to die without issue.
13. a going, coming, passing, or flowing out: free issue and entry.
14. a place or means of egress; outlet or exit.
15. something that comes out, as an outflowing stream.
16. Pathology. a. a discharge of blood, pus, or the like.
b. an incision, ulcer, or the like, emitting such a discharge.
17. issues, English Law. the profits from land or other property.
18. the printing of copies of a work from the original setting of type with some slight changes: the third issue of the poem.
19. Obsolete. a proceeding or action.
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.

Nope, None of those. On the contrary.

Then some similar definitions from another source including additionally:

Informal A personal problem or emotional disorder: The teacher discussed the child's issues with his parents.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Not that either. I try to keep sane when the computer plays up.

Further down the page:

Slang dictionary

n.
problem. (In colloquial use, issue has virtually replaced the word problem. It is even heard in a few idioms such as Do you have an issue with that?) : I had an issue with my car this morning. It wouldn't start. , You are late again! Do you have an issue with our office hours?
Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions by Richard A. Spears.Fourth Edition.
Copyright 2007. Published by McGraw Hill

The car thing.
What's the problem with problem? Anway, why didn't Gmail just stop after the first sentence? I get the impression that "problem" isn't a sufficiently empathetic word for their purposes as they want to convey the nuance that We know that when things go wrong people get upset. I hope I'm wrong. It's infantilising. Not everyone gets upset, and it's something we all try to grow out of. If they wanted to convey a warm fuzzy Googly feeling, an apology might have done the trick.

Torch under bedclothes

2009-09-23T20:42:00.009+01:00

By balancing the stool on the chair, I can just reach the top of the wardrobe. I know it’s silly and dangerous, but I’m sensible and a good climber. I’ll get into trouble if anyone catches me.

It’ll be worth it.

Up there under the ceiling is a cardboard box full of books the new vet carried into our kitchen when he arrived for supper yesterday, announcing: Anne would like these. Out of politeness he’s allowed to show what’s in there: a glimpse of maroon, occasionally light blue bare boards, dust jackets long gone: a dozen fat volumes – twenty perhaps. All the same size, the same but different. A collection! On the bottom right hand corner is impressed an almost illegible signature, which seems to say Cuid Blyton. Cuid is a funny name, I think, but the titles are irresistible: Five on a Treasure Island, Five Go to Smugglers’ Top. For me! All night, and all the next day, unread adventures torment me: Five Go to Mystery Moor, Five Go Off to Camp, Five Go to Billycock Hill.

My mother deems them “unsuitable”. You can read them when you’re old enough, she says.

It’s not fair. She knows I am a good reader. The headmaster calls us in for reading tests. He says, I don’t know why I bother with you and Christine Simpson, I only call you in to cheer myself up. He puts his arm round me in a fatherly way. I have a reading age of fourteen.

It is only years later that I realise my mother meant when you’re old enough to recognise them for the trash they are.

Meanwhile, here I am, tiptoe on the stool balanced on the chair, stretching for the forbidden books in the cardboard box just too high for me to reach. I try jumping. The stool rocks alarmingly. Only by tugging and tearing a corner of the cardboard can I get a hold on one. It’s alright, no one will look on top of the wardrobe until Christmas time, by when I’ll be old enough to say I was much younger when I committed the crime. They might even think the box was torn already. So I dip in and grab a book.

Five On a Treasure Island. The vet is a methodical man. It’s the first in the series.

How different from the home life of an ordinary person

2009-09-17T18:36:00.008+01:00

For reasons we won't go into, this morning I found myself listening to William Shawcross being interviewed by Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour about his new biography of the late Queen Mother. What an extraordinary piece of radio. The Royal Family is an anachronism, useful as trade ambassadors and tourist attraction. And - in principle anyway - it is a good thing for the Prime Minister to have someone to defer to. (Imagine Blair as head of state. Or Cameron for that matter.) But, while Murray has no time for this gilded, profligate life and sense of entitlement, Shawcross adores his subject. I'm on Murray's side in this. Yet through Shawcross's passion one can also glimpse Murray from his point of view: shrewish, petty, practically philistine. But she keeps her cool.

After the abdication, the war, Diana, the alleged colostomy - the fun starts at around 11 minutes in:

JM: One of the other things she was criticised for was her profligate lifestyle, and she seems to have almost gaily announced that she might go bankrupt. Why did she live in such splendour?
WS: Because she enjoyed it. Because she grew up to that. She was one of the last of generations of people, of aristocrats, who weren't ashamed of their birth and the concept of noblesse oblige, she wasn't ashamed of giving employment to lots of people and having a jolly good life. And she enjoyed it, she could afford it, and she certainly lived better than you and I do. And why not?
JM: Could she afford it?
WS: She gave a huge amount of pleasure -
JM: She did have an overdraft
WS: Of course. Have you never had an overdraft?
JM: (Pause) I'm not the Queen Mum.
WS: I've had overdrafts. I couldn't live without an overdraft. (laughs) Always begging the bank manager not to come down too heavy on me
JM: But she had thirty three staff and she had -
WS: (interrupting) Why do you go on about this?
JM: - she had - Because it's fascinating -
WS: It's so silly, Jenni, this is an incredibly important woman, who epitomised this country through the whole of the second world war. She held the country together after the abdication, she created - she enabled her husband who was a hesitant, but adorable man, whom she was devoted to, she enabled him to take over the throne in very difficult circumstances, when a lot of people thought the monarchy was finished in 1936. She personified and symbolised this country. Churchill won the war for us but she and the King sustained the British people through six years of terror and horror, and that's what matters, and you go on about her staff. It's pathetic actually,
JM: - it -
WS: that doesn't really matter, I'm really surprised at you.
JM: - if she -
WS: You're one of the, you're the Queen Mother of Broadcasting and all you can think about is her staff and her illnesses. (fiercely) It's very very funny -
JM: I think people would be fascinated if they thought I had my menus hand-written in French every night, don't you?
WS: No - I well, they might well be fascinated if you do but why shouldn't she?
JM: You met her didn't you -
WS: Yes
JM: - on a couple of occasions and you clearly adored her.
WS: Yes I do adore her! And everyone adored her! Her staff stayed with her for thirty years. Nobody wanted to leave her. One of her pages who'd been with her for twenty five, twenty six years, um, on her hundredth birthday, he was very very ill, he stayed with her till her hundredth birthday so he could take her her morning coffee but went into hospital and died two days later. He kept himself going for her, just to be there for her hundredth birthday. And I hope this is what this book puts over, that she was a woman who was much loved, not just by the millions of people who didn't know her, but even more importantly by the people who worked for her, who knew her well, and I think that's - well, I mean - that's a celebration, something to be celebrated, and I was jolly lucky to be able to have this treasure trove of all her letters of a hundred years.

(Etc.)

...an incredibly important woman... What?
Do listen again before it disappears.

That story of the servant disturbs me. What was his name? Was his loyalty, sense of duty, misplaced? You'd think a sensitive employer would have had him off to the doctor sharpish, but people are not easily or kindly separated from their objects of veneration. He might have been cruelly disappointed if denied the opportunity to serve. Perhaps HMQM was working on that assumption.

By the way, Shawcross and Pan MacMillan are getting a lot of mileage on the BBC today. Nice publicity if you can get it.

William Shawcross is 63.

Councillors pointing at things

2009-09-01T15:13:00.014+01:00

Cllr Neil Williams draws attention to a road defect

Glum Councillors:

This blog will doggedly collate images of councillors looking glum whilst pointing at holes in the road, wearing hard hats or presenting oversized cheques. Lets celebrate the work of our local elected representatives! Tweet suggestions to @glumcouncillors

Via.

It's easy to mock. I blame the photographers. Or perhaps the editors. The posed photograph of someone looking glum while pointing at a pothole is a staple of local newspapers. Which come to think of it are under threat not just from the internet, but allegedly from what Roy Greenslade calls the "local Pravdas" produced by, erm, councils. The councils' glossy, clourful, fun-packed magazines are a fast breeding species, full of jolly news of filled potholes, pie-charts, bin collection dates, keep-fit classes and tips on healthy eating. Greenslade may have a point, though it reminds me uncomfortably of the point James Murdoch was making about the BBC. You know, where he was saying that free content on the BBC website was unfair competition for newspapers.

I admit it. It's partly my fault. I rarely buy a local paper.

I didn't go to the pub much either, and look what's happening to them.

[Crap Photo Editions: No Smoking]

Abducted. Abused. Raped. Survived

2009-08-30T17:19:00.015+01:00

The header is a quote from The Observer. It should make headlines when a girl minding her own business going to school is snatched away to spend her life with a stranger, and forced to bear him children. But it's not the story everyone's talking about, and it's more common than you might think.

Each year there may be as many as 4000 cases of forced marriage involving British residents.

At least there's a law against it here now, though some claim it doesn't go far enough.

The problem is far wider than forced marriage - as if that weren't bad enough - and it's global.

Violence against women and girls is a human rights scandal; from the bedroom to the battlefield, from the schoolyard to the work place, women and girls are at risk from rape and other forms of sexual violence.

The response of governments to rape and other forms of sexual violence is still inadequate.
Amnesty International

And a better than average CiF, from Victoria Brittain, here.

Amnesty International. Here's the link.

Look like if the words are bleeding

2009-08-22T17:08:00.011+01:00

Photo and artwork: Theodore Diran Lyons III

A US college art teacher makes an art installation of his students' abandoned essays - which he marked but they never bothered to pick up - to illustrate his thesis that too many people are admitted to higher education without adequate literacy skills. For the purposes of the display he anonymises and red-pens the uncollected essays to highlight the errors.

Commenters are outraged that he has appropriated students' work, that he is not showing proper respect to his students, that he is not teaching writing in an effective way, that he is misdefining "mistakes" as illiteracy, and that in concentrating on the medium rather than the message he is focusing on an irrelevant skill. He engages his critics with surprising stamina.

The USA is not alone in having a problem with poor language skills. According to The National Literacy Trust, "one in six people in the UK struggle to read and write." Hmm. They don't give a source for that figure. "Dismal", says the chair of the Public Accounts Committee. Here in the UK Lyons would be similarly criticised for using students' work like this. But it doesn't make the problem go away.

Via.

At home with the box

2009-08-05T01:32:00.025+01:00

Hebridean Thumbnail 1

fo cheò

islands buried in the sky’s white sands

Andrew Philip

(fo cheò: 'mist-covered')

Today I'm delighted to welcome my first ever virtual guest, Andrew Philip. I bought his collection The Ambulance Box back in May when Salt launched their Just One Book Campaign. It's an impressive first collection, assured and purposeful. Nothing idles; the language sings, as alive as his curiosity about the world. His training as a linguist shines through in the precision of his words and his scrupulous awareness of the contingency of everything. This is a book full of questioning, with no easy answers. The salves in the Ambulance Box are astringent.

Note: Andrew Philip was born in Aberdeen in 1975 and grew up near Falkirk. He lived in Berlin for a short spell in the 1990s before studying linguistics at Edinburgh University. He has published two poetry pamphlets with HappenStance Press —Tonguefire (2005, sold out) and Andrew Philip: A Sampler (2008) — and was chosen as a Scottish Poetry Library “New Voice” in 2006.

The Ambulance Box is his first book of poems. It is dedicated to Aidan Michael Philip, the poet's son and first-born child, who died shortly after birth in 2005.

Andrew blogs at Tonguefire. You will find links there to many of his poems and essays, and a Scots glossary.

Since June, Andrew has been on a demanding virtual tour explaining himself to other bloggers. I add to their number with some nerdy questions of my own.

Welcome, Andy, and congratulations to you and Judith on the arrival of Cerys Ilona!

Q When I read the first poem in The Ambulance Box, I thought "here's a man who knows what he's doing!" and was immediately hooked. But as a writer myself, I know it probably took some courage to open with a one-liner. Is there a story behind that?

AP The first poem in a book is obviously an important one, and I spent ages agonising over which was the right piece to place first. I wasn’t happy that any of the poems of more normal length worked as openers and I wanted to thread the Hebridean Thumbnails — the one-line poems in the book — through the collection, using them to link what felt like different sections, so I bit the bullet and put one of them first. I was pleased with the way it worked so I’m delighted it hooked you. I suspect some people will love that approach and others not, but I think it invites readers into the more contemplative aspects of the book from the word go.

Q You have mentioned working with Rob Mackenzie to hone each other's collection before submission. You have quite different styles, and have each produced sharp and distinctive collections. Would your collection have been very different without these exchanges? How do you rate mentoring, workshops and colleagues in your development?

AP It wouldn’t have been so tight at the submission stage, that’s for sure. Rob’s comments were particularly useful in helping me to decide what poems to leave out. There were also a couple he gave me the confidence to include. For example, I felt that “Berlin/Berlin/Berlin” was a strong piece but was uncertain about how well it would come across to most readers. Slightly to my surprise and much to my delight, Rob rated it as one of the best, so I kept it in.

Creative friendships and relationships like that are surely important to all artists. I’m not a member of any formal, regular writing workshop or writer’s group, so such relationships are particularly important to me. I send poems for comment to people I trust and I’ve learnt a lot that way. In the end, you have to trust your own judgment, but a good critical reading by a fellow poet can help to identify strengths or problems you knew were there but couldn’t quite see. In fact, that person needn’t necessarily be a poet; my wife is generally my first reader and often makes astute comments even though she reads very little poetry. You need people around you who will tell you when they think you’re writing rubbish, even if you don’t always agree!

Although I’ve not been in any formal mentoring scheme for my writing, I’ve benefitted enormously from the advice and encouragement of the poet Michael Symmons Roberts. The fact that someone of his stature would take my work seriously was an enormous boost, especially in the early days of constant magazine rejections. But I might never have come across him had it not been for Roddy Lumsden, who encouraged me when I was a student. I happened to be at Edinburgh University at a good time: Matthew Hollis, Sinéad Wilson and Andrew Neilson were active in student poetry at that point, and Roddy took an active interest in our work.

Q You use a lot of formal devices in your work. Is constraint an ignition, or is it a brake?

AP A good constraint is probably both. Even if it isn’t part of the initial impetus for a poem, it can ignite further lines and images at the same time as helping to shape the material. After all, constraint is an integral part of all art, no matter how free. Even aleatoric art involves constraints of some kind.

Q So how does a poem start?

AP Generally with a word, a phrase or an image. Sometimes a formal device suggests itself and then sparks the words and images, but I can’t get down to work without a linguistic hook of some kind.

Q And how do you finish? How do you know when you've finished?

AP That is a trickier question altogether! There’s no easy answer. It’s intuition as much as anything, and one you have to develop. I suppose that, at some point, the impetus leaves the poem and you have to give it up. I sometimes change my mind about whether certain poems are finished, but I’m unlikely to do an Auden and make significant revisions to poems that have already been collected.

Q Some of your poems are in Scots and some in English. Are you a different person in each case, and are you addressing a different audience?

AP It may be that slightly different aspects of me come out in Scots and in English, as is the case in speaking any two languages, but I think I’m largely the same person. I don’t think of myself as addressing a different audience so much as addressing parts of my audience differently. For instance, what really determines how much readers enjoy “The Meisure o a Nation” is how much they get the references that make up the poem’s equations, not the density of the Scots.

Q As a non-Scot, I don't feel shut out from these, though I do feel a guest in foreign territory, without recourse to my usual conventions. So they are disarming in a way that an English poem wouldn't be. Is that a conscious strategy?

AP That’s interesting. I wouldn’t say it was a conscious strategy, but it’s a useful effect. It’s more that I’m inviting non-Scots readers into the language and all my reasons for using it, which I’ve discussed to some extent in previous stops on this tour. In using Scots, English and Gaelic, I aim to be linguistically inclusive and I hope that the reader feels that spirit of inclusion.

Q Salt produce beautiful books. (I would say that wouldn't I, but even on an objective test they are outstanding.) How do you see poetry publishing developing, and are new media a threat, or a promise of a much wider audience?

AP The ease with which writers can now make their work available globally, including through video and audio, is surely a great boost to their efforts to build an audience. Blogging has certainly helped me to widen my audience geographically, but I’m not sure whether it’s had an effect demographically.

If there’s a threat from the new media, it’s the expectation of free content that is associated with their use. How writers manage that without it destroying the meagre income from their work, I’m not sure.

I’m not convinced that e-books will ever replace the hard copy entirely, but they could open up interesting new avenues for enriching the audience’s experience of the poetry. If poetry e-books with embedded or linked audio and/or video became commonplace, that might be very healthy for the art. Perhaps Bloodaxe are already on the way there by bundling DVDs in with their In Person anthology and the new edition of Bunting’s Briggflatts.

Q Well, the free content on the Salt site certainly persuaded me to get this book! So what are you working on right now?

AP I’m always reticent about talking too much about unfinished work in case it robs me of the drive to carry out the ideas. However, I feel like I’ve begun to hit my stride again with a sequence after a rocky patch for new work and am getting excited about what might come of it.

Q What are you reading right now?

AP Mainly Yang Lian’s Concentric Circles and Ray Givans’s Tolstoy in Love. Ray is a long-standing friend and I read with Lian in London at the end of June.

In prose, I’m reading Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love, which is a translation of Julian’s writings by John Skinner. It’s one of those books that have sat on my shelf for ages until what seemed the right time.

Andrew, thank you very much for answering so generously. It's been a privilege having you here. Good luck with your new work - I am very keen to see what you do next.

* * * * * * *

Catch up with Andrew's Cyclone tour - highly recommended.

The Ambulance Box: available from Salt at a 33% discount during August - see below. (Sample poems and podcasts downloadable free.)

A message from Chris at Salt Publishing:

The Just One Book campaign continues with a further sensational August deal.

In order to keep Salt on track through the wet British summer, we're offering you another special deal throughout August. All Salt books are available from us at 33% discount yet again. That's a third off all Salt titles, and free shipping on orders with a cover price of over £30 or $30. Offer ends 31 August 2009.

Simply enter the coupon code HU693FB2 when in the store to benefit.

As before, all we ask is two things—

1. Buy one book. Or perhaps another one ... go on.
2. Pass it on. Share this offer with everyone who loves gorgeous books and likes a bargain (whilst saving independent literature).

http://www.saltpublishing.com

You are everything you feel beside the river

2009-08-04T22:21:00.015+01:00

Diamond Geezer ponders fishing:

I was out walking beside a particularly long lake at the weekend [...] and I noticed a heck of a lot of people out fishing. Every few yards another chair, another rod and another sprawled-out display of angling paraphernalia. And I thought two things. Why do people fish? And why are they all male?

I can't speak generally for anyone, but here's one woman's take.

I used to muck about in rivers and streams when I was a pre-teen, back in the days when children were out unsupervised all day (and no doubt some of them drowned, though I never heard of any). I learned to catch fish with bare hands, which for child's play is an amazingly satisfying skill. First you have to find your fish - camouflaged, shy, alert - wait for it, your hands already underwater so there is no splash. To lose yourself knee-deep in a stream pitting your wits against a wild creature in its own element is worth all the aching hands, wet wellingtons, muddy coat and the scolding when you get home. You learn to watch the fish very carefully, and learn patience and disappointment. And you distinguish species, "which are easiest and valueless to catch." Some people go into Big Chief I-Spy twitcher mode, but I knew we didn't have all those fish in our streams, so I didn't.

When I started getting pocket money and an even greater sense of self-importance I could do some proper fishing - bought a second-hand rod and a rubbishy reel. That's where the trouble starts. If you are going to be serious about fishing, you need fishing tackle. It gets expensive, nerdy and competitive, and I couldn't be bothered with all that. And you do it in proper places like the Brick Pits, where you have to stand on the bank because it's far too deep to wade in. There are rules for grown-up fishing - things like pitches and licences, which spoil the Rousseauian fun. And there seemed something faintly cheating about bait, and cruel about hooks. I was never persuaded that fish don't feel pain.

Anyway, I needed money to raid the junk shop every Saturday for second hand books.

Much later I had a boyfriend who was a keen fly fisherman. So I tried my hand too, and seemed to have a beginner's knack for casting. We fished chalk streams in Hampshire and Wales, Highland rivers, wildernesses. There's a fair bit of skill to it, and you can eat some at least of what you catch. Hot-smoking a trout you've just caught by the side of the loch where you just caught it satisfies something pretty primitive. But fly fishing is expensive, and some of the people who do it can be snobbish. (I wouldn't have minded going fishing with Ted Hughes though.)

I married someone opposed to blood sports.

Incidentally, I picked up a book on freshwater fish the other day and was shocked to see how many fish I guddled thoughtlessly out of the Waring and the Bain are now rare or endangered.

But to go back to DG's question: Why do people fish?

O, Sir, doubt not but that Angling is an art; is it not an art to deceive a Trout with an artificial Fly ? a Trout ! that is more sharp-sighted than any Hawk you have named, and more watchful and timorous than your high-mettled Merlin is bold ? and yet, I doubt not to catch a brace or two to-morrow, for a friend's breakfast: doubt not therefore, Sir, but that angling is an art, and an worth your learning. The question is rather, whether you be capable of learning it? Angling is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so: I mean, with inclinations to it, though both may be heightened by discourse and practice: but he that hopes to be a good angler, must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit, but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the art itself; but having once got and practiced it, then doubt not but angling will prove to be so pleasant, that it will prove to be, like virtue, a reward to itself.
Izaak Walton

And why are they all male?
I don't know. It sounds as if DG was witnessing a fishing match. That never appealed to me. The regimentation and competitiveness seems more about the technical side of things, rather as motor racing is more about the cars and driving them than about getting to a destination or even the journey. (You will find more women rally-driving than on the racing circuits.)

Angling may be said to be so like the Mathematicks, that it can never be fully learnt; at least not so fully, but that there will still be more new experiments left for the trial of other men that succeed us.
Izaak Walton

What I liked about fishing was being out of doors, hunting, that sense of being wild.

But the men with all their state-of-the-art tackle and half-dozen rods side by side on their rod rests (and what is it about rod rests? and bite buzzers? How disconnected is that?) do care about fish, in their own way. Here is (or was) Benson.

Biographical fog

2009-07-31T10:00:00.015+01:00

At a poetry workshop recently someone brought in a powerful piece of work I wish I could post here. It's not linear let alone narrative, mixing apparently random snatches of sharply sensory observation while it plays with voice and register, including a couple of innocent-seeming lines of tabloid-speak. For any smell or texture it evokes, each reader will have different personal associations. The cumulative effect is disturbing, suggestive of abuse, and I'd say among other things it explores the perspective of time and how that can transfer power from abuser to victim. The effect on the reader is to feel voyeur, complicit, accused.

Then our paid-up member of the awkward squad asked a taboo question: What made you write this? The poem made her feel very uncomfortable, manipulated, she said. She felt as though she were being exploited through sympathy to read something she would rather not. But if she knew that the poem came from personal experience rather than a gratuitous attempt to be sensational, she said, she'd feel less antagonised.

It was an uncomfortable moment. The general rule in our workshop is that the writer doesn't say anything until the crit is over, and anyway this sort of question is off-limits, but the questioner felt that this was an important factor in the analysis. The writer said with dignity that they'd rather just talk about the poem. The questioner wasn't very happy about this, or about the direction our discussion took.

Some of us spoke up for the poem to be taken on its own terms. If the poem were in a magazine, the reader could choose to stop reading as soon as she felt uncomfortable. (Anyway, since when has it been the job of poetry to let people feel comfortable?) In the workshop, she could excuse herself at any time. While it's perfectly OK, helpful even, for a workshop member to explain why they find a particular poem in bad taste, or even offensive, or why for them it misses its mark - it's not on to complain that the poem shouldn't have been written. It's one thing to suggest that a poem strikes the reader as second hand, or manipulative, or any other sort of fault, but quite another to question the bona fides of the poet. That's too personal.

So we got that sorted. In the end.
Sort of.

It leaves me with the perennial puzzle of biographical fog. Time and again I've come across poems in workshops and elsewhere read and misread and excused in the light of biographical knowledge: Oh, this must be about his divorce, or, it can't mean that because he's never had children/been to China. No, it's all about the words. Just read the words.

Well, one learns to be disciplined in reading. Je est un autre. We all know that. We aren't misled by the first person. Poets are fiction writers. To go to a poem in search of biographical truth is to make a category error. Poets will write what they are interested in. Notoriously, they adapt reality to their own ends. The poem has rights of its own, irrespective of any mere biographical happenstance. Yet poetry gets stuck with this authenticity rap more than any other genre. Readers don't quiz PD James about how many murders she's committed.

My introduction to formal criticism at school, years ago now, was I A Richards's Practical Criticism. Aeons ago, and it was ancient even then. His aim was to get students to read closely, just the words on the page, without knowing who'd written them or when. So much can be learned from the text alone. My teachers were disdainful of the baggage of biography, which was only so much tittle-tattle. But there's no escaping it, is there? Close reading is the beginning of reading, not the end. Borges had fun with the idea in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Menard rewrote Don Quixote word for word, in the same words, and the critic finds his version "much richer in allusion than Cervantes's 'original' work because Menard's must be considered in light of world events since 1602."

Quite so. Il n'y a pas de hors-texte. Or, consider these thought experiments:

Brian Turner (real name Briony) has never been in the Army, but writes copy for mail order catalogues.
Sharon Olds is the nom de plume of Shaun O'Leary, a former English major at Iowa, now a lawyer forced by unexpected literary success to perpetuate his fraudulent identity.
Wilfred Owen stayed at home, pruning his roses. He died in obscurity in a retirement home in 1984.

(Heck, if people can believe they faked the moon landing, they can believe anything.) The power of the writing makes the suggestions bizarre, but can we separate it from what we know of these poets' lives? Would we read the poems differently? Can we avoid asking why someone would write such poems? I've seen a reviewer describe those who write in the first person about second-hand tragedy as "the cockroaches of poetry". He didn't mean to liken them to archy but was suggesting that they hitch a ride on undeserved sympathy.

Heaney has an essay in Preoccupations (which I can't lay my hands on for the moment) where he describes urging his students to overcome their feelings of delicacy to crit Dulce Et Decorum Est. His students are reading the witness and, he suggests, prepared to let poetry off the hook. Does Owen overplay his hand? Is "coughing like hags", or "His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin" over-writing? Pressing buttons of sentimentality?

(It's tempting to sidetrack into the huge territory of war poetry and whether the poetry lies in the pity as Owen contentiously claimed, or whether it's more accurately the reader's sympathy that lies there. But this post, which is only a knee-jerk stab in the fog, would never get written.)

There is a suggestion that we tend to cut a bit of slack for the witness. A reader who finds she's been cutting slack for an impostor can feel cheated. On the one hand, if the poetry really is in the pity, the work has borne false witness. People who have been relying on whatever truth it purports to deliver feel cheated to discover it's just been pandering to the usual prejudices. Hence the common rage at debunked misery memoirs, marketed as autobiography. On the other is the argument that this can't apply to poetry; if the writing holds us, why should we mind that it isn't true?

Which brings me back to the workshop. The flip side of the coin is the workshop session that ignores, through professional detachment, the person who wrote the poem. If someone writes about despair, or dying, or a sick partner, is this something we should follow up on a personal level after the workshop? I recall reading a letter in The Rialto a while back where a poet complained of what she called insensitivity - her fellow workshoppers gave her a crit on the poem, but ignored the suffering human being who'd written it. I'm not so sure. It depends on the workshop, and the poet, their relationship with fellow members, and their general powers of ordinary communication. Workshops aren't therapy sessions. The poet who expects that is making a category error similar to the reader who expects biographical accuracy. Shouldn't we treat poems as separate entities, and poets as grown-ups who can ask us directly in conversation outside the workshop if they need to offload grief? In fact, isn't the poem sometimes precisely such a formal distancing mechanism for the poet?

And if so, where does that leave poems? Adrian Mitchell once said that he wrote poems because there were some things he could not say directly to the people he cared about.

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest - that I loved the best -
Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below - above, the vaulted sky.

John Clare

Palin Shatnerized

2009-07-28T14:25:00.004+01:00

(Yes, that's a zee because they are both American.)

Hat tip to the ever-resourceful AKMuckraker.

Andrew Philip

2009-07-18T13:18:00.007+01:00

I'll be interviewing fellow Salt poet Andrew Philip here on 5 August, as a coda to the Cyclone tour for his new collection The Ambulance Box.

The Ambulance Box is a timely reminder of the range and power of the lyric – from philosophical exploration to tender and intimate elegies. This is a powerful debut, and Andrew Philip's is a significant new voice.

Michael Symmons Roberts

Purity patrol update

2009-07-16T13:41:00.008+01:00

I was so incensed by the behaviour of security guards aired on last Sunday's Broadcasting House that I went onto the BH website and filled in a comments form with some intemperate language, demanding to know the exact location of the petty tyranny that seeks to suppress midriffs and buttcracks, so I could deny the proprietors the dubious benefit of my custom.

I forgot about my outburst. Several people had pretty well convinced me that I'd been a victim of a classic BH wind-up, but I still nursed a sense of grievance that these public places are being privatised by prudes and worse.

But this morning, lo! There was a message in my intray from the great Paddy O'Connell himself. After thanking me for writing, he tells me

the pathway in question was on the South Bank of the Thames, leading from the London Eye to the road to Waterloo Station. It runs perpendicular to the river.

I wonder if I should go back there and see what happens.

Fantastic! (My original message was attached. I'm rather ashamed of it. The word "Taliban" was used. Dear me.) I'm impressed and very pleased that Paddy O'Connell replied. It is a serious issue.

Meanwhile, I've been doing a bit of research, and arguing with friends. I have had difficulty in convincing some people that there is any real difference between a nightclub and the South Bank when it comes to the legitimacy of enforcing standards of dress and behaviour from visitors.

I've have been meaning to post a measured analysis of the issues of public space/private ownership, taking in reviews of books and articles that cover the issue. That will take some time. The privately owned public space concept is complex and evolving. The law can't keep up with the models, let alone how people's behaviour adapts. I haven't even read Anna Minton's book yet.

[edit...] Here are some links to get you thinking.

Liberty discusses private ownership of "public space" in relation to the right to protest, in a submission to JCHR (see esp p 5 et seq)

Cities for sale
The enclosure of urban space (extract from Paul Kingsnorth's Real England: The Battle Against the Bland) from The Guardian

Urban public space is at the heart of city and town life. It is the essence of public freedom: a place to rally, to protest, to sit and contemplate, to smoke or talk or watch the stars. No matter what happens in the shops and cafes, the offices and houses, the existence of public space means there is always somewhere to go to express yourself or simply to escape.

Chris Webster: Property rights, public space and urban design (pdf)

Policing the retail public - keeping out the "less well-heeled"? Guardian article

Shopping Malls: The New Village Green by Robin Fox

Private Policing: A View from the Mall
Abstract of an article by Alison Wakefield that sounds interesting but is v expensive to download. If anyone has more information about it, I'd be most grateful.

Police Partnership at Cribbs Causeway (pdf)

Ecotowns given the go-ahead

Update

And no, I have been assured that the Broadcasting House recording was most certainly not a wind-up:

If you could have seen the look on the face of the female security guard you would know that she was very serious indeed.

She looked as if she had been suddenly struck by a very old kipper, just above the top lip, and she kept summoning assistance on her lapel radio.

Can't have people telling the truth about things like this, can we?

Set list

2009-07-15T17:13:00.014+01:00

Toddington Poetry Society are a lovely bunch of people to read to, engaged and responsive. Thank you for asking me.

There's a vogue for recording set lists, so this is what I read last night:

To Paint a Bird (Jacques Prévert, trans AB) - on account of its being 14 July
Holdall (Aircrew)
Yellow Sun, Green Grass
Revesby
The Boasts of Jim McKay
Small Arms
Russkis
Downstairs
Nav Rad
Co-ordinates
The Men from Praga
Britannia
Chamber of Horrors £2 Extra
Chattel

All but the Prévert come from The Men from Praga. The Prévert translation is available on Frank Parker's site here, and the first five TMFP poems are downloadable from the Salt site (pdf file). Nav Rad was featured on small change, and Britannia on peony moon. The title poem is on poetry pf. That still leaves plenty of other poems to read in the book.

At the organisers' prior request for "background" to poems I interspersed plenty of what Bernard O'Donoghue deprecatingly calls "gab". The audience needs a breather between poems, they said, anxiously. Well, of course - and I wondered whose poetry blitzing they'd suffered in the past before it dawned on me that they were probably worried I'd try a one-woman Joy of Six blast. What J6 are doing is something different altogether: the philosophy behind that merits a separate post some time. In the more conventional poetry reading, it's important to give the poem a bit of aural space, but without betraying it. When Bernard does it, it's an artform in itself. It was while listening to him, years ago now, that it dawned on me how good it was not to keep hearing that phrase "this next poem". I've never heard it on his lips, and resolved forthwith to try to banish it from my own.

At the other extreme was a nervous poet I heard at Aldeburgh a few years ago. Much praised and garlanded, she'd flown half way round the world to read at the festival, but some freak of nerves had caused her to write out all her intros and ad libs and read from them as if they were poems themselves. It was horribly embarrassing.

Purity patrol

2009-07-12T18:18:00.017+01:00

If you're down on the South Bank showing flesh, a man in a uniform can tell you to pull your jeans up, and if you don't like it he can summon up reinforcements to run you off the premises. Did you know they were "premises"? Neither did I.

I don't normally listen to Broadcasting House, but caught the tail end this morning. The fascists are out in force.

Listen again (for seven days only):
The bit I'm interested in concerns the discussion of public space at the end of the programme. It segues from discussion of the 4th plinth, which starts at around 52.30. Anna Minton (who's just written Ground Control) discusses public space and private ownership, starting at 54.30 minutes, and the clip ends with security guards hassling the interviewer away from the "private" area on the South Bank, after a guard has just asked a girl to pull her jeans up as she was showing a gap... The girl was sitting with her family - it's not as if she was cavorting around drunk with her trousers round her ankles. The goons want the interviewer to stop recording.

We've had it already with hoodies banned from Bluewater, which I thought was was just a weird fascistic aberration, all of a piece with that dystopia. But when you start getting blokes in uniform telling girls to cover themselves on the South Bank, for heaven's sake, I feel a sense of indignation. Who is making these rules, and with what authority? Should people with no mandate other than someone else's money dictate how we conduct ourselves in public?

The Royal enclosure at Ascot, Glyndebourne, the Ritz - most people wouldn't even dream of going there in the first place, so any who choose to can take the dress code deal. This is on an altogether different scale, so the principle is different too. The South Bank looks like a public space. We all feel as if we're entitled to be there. We may not all care to see a butt crack when someone sits down wearing hipsters (I'm assuming that's what the little hitler was complaining about) but I certainly don't want to see people stopped from showing it, especially when they're sitting down with their parents minding their own business.

This is only a symptom of a deeper malaise. As the Guardian headline has it, they sold our streets and nobody noticed.

Don't bury your bras

2009-07-11T18:49:00.020+01:00

Textiles have become the fastest-growing waste product in the UK. About 74 per cent of the two million tonnes of clothes we buy each year end up in landfills, rotting slowly (or not at all) in a mass of polyester, viscose and acrylic blends. Where is Steptoe when you need him?

Another charity bag flopped through our letterbox this week. Unless they are collecting stuff to sell in their charity shops, it's best regarded merely as a way of clearing out clutter if you can't be bothered to go down to Oxfam with your old duds. Or preferably as a binliner. If you read the small print you may spot that the collector for the Lithuanian breast screening project with its pink ribbon isn't a charity at all, although their website seeks to reassure people "that their clothing donations will only be used to fund worthwhile, bona fide charities" - in Lithuania. Even if this week's bag is supporting a pukka UK registered charity, you may find that they get very little out of it.

This one, for example, is in aid of Childline, an organisation that has helped thousands of children with no-one else to turn to. The bag gives details of the charity, with their helpline prominently displayed and the charity registration numbers as required, and the details of the company which actually operates the collection on their behalf. Childline will get £50 per tonne. A tonne is an awful lot of "clean, good quality clothing... and bric a brac". Cambridge Oxfam might well charge £10-£15 for a dress, more for a designer label. See also the Salvation Army value guide. Unsorted mixed used clothing is being sought by a merchant in Bedfordshire this week at 50p/kilo (ie, £500 per tonne). And old bras can fetch up to £2,500 a tonne.*

As far as I know, Childline doesn't operate any charity shops, so this kerbside collection partnership with a commercial organisation is a low-admin method of raising funds that wouldn't otherwise come their way. But you'd be making better use of your resources to give the clothes direct to a charity shop and make a donation to Childline. You can afford to be generous. 50p would be twice what your 5kg bag of castoffs would earn in this particular charity bag scheme with its promised rate of £50 per tonne.

Charitybags campaigns for greater transparency in the field. Their website is a trove of information.

We estimate that around £20 million income is lost by genuine charities each year because of misleading, bogus and poor-value "charitable" house-to-house collections of clothing etc in the UK. Many of these collections are illegal.

You need a local authority licence to collect door to door for charity, even just clothes and bric a brac. Some charities (eg Age Concern, Oxfam, Red Cross, RNLI etc.) have a national exemption, but they are supposed to inform the local authority when they are collecting in their area. Some may have a local exemption granted by the police. If you want to hold a jumble sale for your scout troop and collect door to door for it, this is the route you'd take.

Of course, jumble sales and charity shops fulfil a social need for the purchaser as well as providing income for the charity in question. And a low-guilt solution to the overloaded wardrobe.

But where there's muck there's brass. Second hand clothes from Britain end up on markets in Lithuania and Belarus, and much further afield. According to UN Chronicle,

An estimated 40 to 75 per cent of used clothing donated to charitable organizations end up not in the hands of the needy in the West but in busy markets across the developing regions, such as in sub-Saharan Africa.

It's not the end purchasers I have a problem with (and they are probably being ripped off) but the dodgy operators.

At least with Steptoe, you knew who was going to benefit.

Whatever you do, don't let it go to landfill. (A very old paper, but the principles still apply.)

*On African markets. Apparently Africa lacks an inexpensive, good-quality bra manufacturing industry. (Check the link - it's a fascinating insight into what happens to old clothes.)

Norwich North

2009-07-09T15:27:00.021+01:00

I don't know what to make of this. Craig Murray claims he's being gagged. He's standing in the Norwich North by-election, due in two weeks' time. There are eleven other candidates, with the Tories favourite to win. Last I heard, Ladbrokes were quoting him at 25/1, ahead of the Lib Dems (33/1) and the BNP (200/1), UKIP and sundry others.

He's had grief (which he blames on the Ministry of Justice) from the Post Office over getting his electoral address out; the BBC is refusing to give him any coverage; "and, despite numerous representations from within their own union, the Universities and Colleges Union have still banned me from this evenings candidates' education debate, despite the fact that I am the Rector of a Univeristy and a great deal more interesting on the subject than the rest of the candidates put together."

Craig Murray, one of the Indy's Alternative National Treasures*, is the ex-ambassador to Uzbekistan, the man who blew the whistle on the UK's complicity in obtaining "evidence" through torture. In this respect he is on the side of the angels. He was hounded out of office for his pains. All sorts of mud was chucked at him, and then he was ignored, except by the (occasionally rather strange) people that haunt his comments box. By his own admission he's clearly not the most compliant of employees, and his behaviour in - ah - certain matters has been less than saintly. That sets him apart from other pols then, eh?

He is standing on an anti-sleaze platform.** Whatever mud's actually stuck to him from the past, none of it's sleaze-coloured.

Minority candidates usually get a bum deal from the media, unless they are deemed to be newsworthy in their own right. Think how the media have salivated over BNP - and I wonder how many votes BNP would get if they didn't. I'd have thought Murray's colourful past and ability to insert himself in the governmental nasal orifice would make good copy, but the BBC doesn't see it that way:

[in]response to the many complaints about their decision to exclude me from all election coverage. They have started to send out standard replies saying:
one of the key factors they look for is "evidence of past and/or current electoral support" in that electoral area.
Note the BBC's own quotation marks within that quote. They have tacked on "In that area" to their formal criterion.

When the BBC banned me from all coverage at the last General Election when I stood in Blackburn against Jack Straw, who is blocking my electoral address now, the BBC explained it was because I had no "evidence of past and/or current electoral support".

I gained 5% in that election - which is a lot better than the 3% the Greens got in the same election in Norwich North. That 5% may have been modest, but it does meet the BBC's criterion. So the BBC have now moved the goalposts to exclude me, by adding a brand new stipulation "in that area" to their criterion, so the electoral support in Blackburn does not count - despite the fact I might reasonably expect to do a lot better in my own county.

As for the bureaucracy, the whole system is geared up to deal with major parties. So the apparent gagging of Dr Murray isn't necessarily evidence of bad faith conspiring to put the kibosh on his campaign, more likely a convergence of inertia, incuriosity and incompetence. Nevertheless, it is all a bit odd.

I don't know if I'd be voting for him myself if I were in Norwich North. You have to question the common sense of someone who imagines that voters will bother to look at an election address on DVD. But whatever your political stripe, if his allegations here have any real substance it's a cause for concern. The three major parties have an entrenched right to airtime whatever their chances of success, while BNP is becoming a creature of the media, interviewed and analysed wherever they go.

*The Independent says:

Craig Murray Former ambassador

Britain is a better place now that Craig Murray has returned. As ambassador to Uzbekistan, Murray witnessed the UK's changing attitude to torture, and rather than keep it under his hat, came back and revealed all. He had his own problems, what with the drinking and leaving his wife for a dancer. But after a breakdown, he has bounced back to become a fully fledged member of the awkward squad. The Foreign Office may have disowned him, but we welcome him with open arms.

**The Put an Honest Man in Parliament party isn't quite as sexist as it sounds. He had to form it urgently as it was the only way he could get the slogan on the ballot paper.

Do you like to Kipple?

2009-06-22T17:36:00.002+01:00

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

2009-06-17T12:58:00.032+01:00

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

2009-06-13T12:36:00.009+01:00

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

2009-06-12T12:27:00.006+01:00

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?

2009-06-12T10:59:00.007+01:00

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

2009-06-08T00:30:00.022+01:00

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

2009-06-05T11:59:00.020+01:00

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.

Dooms

2009-05-29T22:30:00.016+01:00

"Very, very dangerous" giant underwater volcano found off Indonesia, 4,600m high and 50 km at its base.

Resistance to malaria drug growing, experts warn.

Road accidents have overtaken malaria as the leading cause of preventable deaths in developing countries. In five years time, if nothing is done, traffic accidents will be the biggest single cause of premature deaths for children aged 5 to 14.

Climate change "kills 300,000 every year"

Update
But there is hope yet:

Gay penguins rear adopted chick. Perhaps I should be depressed that this is even regarded as news, depressed that the zoo and the BBC put inverted commas round "gay" but in view of the torrent of hatred and oppression that usually flows unchecked, this is mildly cheering - cheering that the zoo for all their scare quotes (which might just be bet-hedging for less tolerant customers) seem fairly enlightened, and cheering that it seems to be reported in like vein. Roll on the day when this sort of thing isn't news because it's unremarkable, and when humans no longer have to refer to animals to seek legitimacy for human behaviour because humans are finally accepted for themselves.

Chair

2009-05-25T15:15:00.008+01:00

Martin Ejector seat

Useful.

But look, it's a museum piece. It's bolted to the floor.

Chestnuts

2009-05-23T11:05:00.004+01:00

Let's go back to happier, more innocent times - oh, about a fortnight ago:

Each year I think it's going to be the last time they flower. Right now, they are magnificent along the approaches to Cambridge, in the allées on Jesus Green, and in parks and avenues up and down the country. The leaves have shaken themselves out to their full extent. While some buds are still opening, other flowers are on the point of fading, and fruits begin to set.

By June, the leaves will be covered in mottles, by July they will be shrivelled and it will look like autumn. When autumn comes, there may be a few small conkers. Not that children bother much these days to be first out after a big wind, scuffling for a gleam of treasure in the grass.

In October last year among the blasted trees in Richmond Park, one or two branches were sporting spring candles, a desperate measure against the ravages of the leaf miner moth. However devastating it looks, apparently it's not fatal. But another rapidly spreading blight of chestnuts can be.

I had thought of ending this post with some links. But let them just be chestnuts for now.

Save our Salts

2009-05-22T09:28:00.004+01:00

Chris Hamilton-Emery says "Anyone looking after kids at home will be familiar with the WWF Adopt a Polar Bear ad being piped in with every commercial break on children's daytime television. Enjoy this spoof."

Salt

2009-05-21T10:29:00.021+01:00

Salt is one of the leading poetry publishers in the country. They also publish fiction, criticism and drama, and their authors come from all over the world - over 200 titles this past year. But the recession is hitting them too. Chris Hamilton-Emery has just posted this plea:

Here's how you can help us to save Salt.

JUST ONE BOOK

1. Please buy just one book, right now. We don't mind from where, you can buy it from us or from Amazon, your local shop or megastore, online or offline. If you buy just one book now, you'll help to save Salt. Timing is absolutely everything here. We need cash now to stay afloat. If you love literature, help keep it alive. All it takes is just one book sale. Go to our online store and help us keep going.

UK and International

USA

2. Share this note on your Facebook and MySpace profile. Tell your friends. If we can spread the word about our cash crisis, we can hopefully find more sales and save our literary publishing. Remember it's just one book, that's all it takes to save us. Please do it now.

Go on. Buy one. You know you want to. Just look at their website - you can listen before you buy, watch videos, download a pdf of the first few pages to sample a book.

Salt books I have purchased in the last twelve months:

Josephine Balmer - The Word for Sorrow
Simon Barraclough - Los Alamos Mon Amour
Isobel Dixon - A Fold in the Map
Katy Evans-Bush - Me and the Dead
Jane Holland - Camper Van Blues
Charles Lambert - The Scent of Cinnamon
Tony Lopez - Meaning Performance
Rob MacKenzie - The Opposite of Cabbage
André Mangeot - A Little Javanese
Andrew Philip - The Ambulance Box
Andrea Porter - A Season of Small Insanities
Fiona Sampson - On Listening
John Siddique - Recital
John Wilkinson - Down to Earth
John Wilkinson - The Lyric Touch

and my own The Men from Praga

Some I have just ordered:
Julia Bird - Hannah and the Monk
Diana Pooley - Like This

Walcott Lectures

2009-05-16T10:13:00.005+01:00

Walcott's Nobel lecture. Text and audio.

Michigan State University Audio.

Whitman College Lecture Audio.

University of Alberta (Scroll down to the bottom of the page.) Audio.

OxPo redux

2009-05-14T17:37:00.026+01:00

Admittedly I was angry when I wrote that last somewhat incoherent post. I've calmed down a bit now.

There are several issues here, which need untangling.

1. The archaic post of Professor of Poetry. The job needs reform.

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.

For this s/he will receive a stipend of £6,901 pa (pay award pending) and a princely £40 per Creweian Oration. A mercy they don't still have to give it in Latin.

2. The method of election. This needs reform too. While the overwhelming number of beneficiaries of the lectures are undergraduates, they have no vote. The candidate is chosen by secret ballot of senior members of the University. Not just the dons, but any old geezer, who may have no interest in poetry whatsoever, who sports an MA (Oxon). (Not suggesting that votes can be bought, of course.) There are no postal votes or electronic votes. Voting is in person, and the wearing of gowns optional. Well, of course you can't let young people choose their own professor; they are too young to know anything, let alone what's good for them. It has always been this way, and therefore it must continue. It is a tradition, and that's the sort of thing England, and above all Oxford, does exceedingly well.

3. The candidates. One would think that a poetry professor whose ~~job consists~~ light duties consist mainly of giving lectures on poetry should be chosen on the basis of their skills in lecturing on poetry. They don't have to be poets; indeed, the present Professor, Christopher Ricks, is not known for his poetry but was elected because he is an inspiring critic.

4. The campaign. One would think that candidates would campaign on their ability to deliver the lectures, and if they have any, their skill as poets. As far as I can tell, they have. No-one but an idiot would engage in negative campaigning, let alone by anonymous proxy. I'm frankly amazed that anyone could have such a low opinion of any of the candidates that they should think differently.

5. Sexual harassment. Look, I loathe sexual harassment. It has no place in the university. It's not flattering. It's not a joke. It is corrupting and demeaning, and sometimes frightening. A tutor who offers or withholds good grades on the basis of the giving or withholding of sexual favours is no better than one who would do the same for money. In fact, probably worse.

There were two anti-Walcott campaigns. One was started by a woman using her own name (there's a bit of a muddle even there) asking a group of her contacts whether someone with a reputation for harassment should be appointed to the post. This email was forwarded on, as can be the way of emails, and became a campaign. It would be a legitimate question where the appointee is to come into personal contact with students. But this job doesn't. Perhaps they were afraid that it might involve such contact under the rubric "and generally to encourage the art of poetry in the University." In that case, perhaps it can be excused as legitimate debate. Or it could be, if there were evidence that any of this were true, apart from the allegations by the alleged victims themselves. At any rate, were the appointee to be in a position to sexually harass students here, then the allegations should have been put to him properly, and he should have been required to answer them before his candidacy could proceed. He shouldn't be tried in the court of public opinion. (We are pig sick of that forum.)

There was a second, and utterly disgraceful, campaign conducted anonymously in which pages from a book accusing Walcott of harassment were mailed to prominent female academics. That is smear. There is no excuse for the anonymity and it's not possible to debate with or counter anonymous allegations.

5. The suggestion that appointing someone with sexual harassment allegations hanging over him would bring the Professorship, and Oxford itself, into disrepute. Has it brought the Nobel laureateship into disrepute? Well, has it?

6. If you are against X you must be in favour of Y. Wrong. Walcott's supporters ask themselves cui bono? and conclude that Padel's supporters must be behind the smears. While one of her supporters hasn't been above repeating them publicly, it doesn't follow that this is the reason for either of the campaigns. It is quite possible that feminist anti-harasser animus is sufficient motive. My god, haven't these people ever met an angry feminist?

The election is on Saturday. It had promised to be exciting: poetry giant vs poetry populist vs poetry heavyweight largely unknown in Oxford. There were real issues involved. As it is, the whole business feels sullied. I feel sullied. I don't want to go and vote. I want to protest at the world for being different from how I'd like it to be.

OxPo Foes

2009-05-13T19:51:00.018+01:00

Sickening. Vandals.

I am disappointed that such low tactics have been used in this election and I do not want to get into a race for a post where it causes embarrassment to those who have chosen to support me for the role, or to myself.

I already have a great many work commitments and, while I was happy to be put forward for the post, if it has degenerated into a low and degrading attempt at character assassination, I do not want to be part of it.

Derek Walcott has withdrawn from the race for Oxford Professor of Poetry - not for any poetic reasons, but because certain idiots have sent over 100 anonymous letters to voters repeating personal allegations at least 20 years old. (It's only from the Oxford Mail that I learn the recipients were all female.) Who could have sent them, and why? And why anonymous? Are they seeking to smear Walcott, or is it some Machiavellian swipe against Padel? There was nothing particularly secret about these allegations: as someone who is hardly at the centre of poetry gossip I first heard of them years ago. They were published and ignored. Even if they were true, they have nothing to do with his ability to deliver the lectures. They didn't stop him getting tenure at Boston.

Ah, but.

I don't really understand why he didn't face them down as he's always done in the past. He might have been elected; he might not. Either way, he would have come out of it looking as if he didn't give a stuff about the person who made the allegations. Whoever is elected now won't have the satisfaction of knowing they won in a fair fight.

Hermione Lee has called on Padel to dissociate herself from it, which she has done. She has just been on PM saying it's absolutely terrible. She deplores that it's been all over the press this way. She feels tainted. She has no idea who sent the letters or why. She's wondered whether to withdraw, but supporters have persuaded her she shouldn't be deflected.

Other dons are claiming that there would certainly have been other candidates if Walcott hadn't been standing. That's true, and the animosity against Padel is palpable and suggests that even if elected she would have to endure continual sniping from some quarters. Perhaps she should withdraw after all, leaving Mehrotra as a shoo-in.

The best solution would be to postpone the election, but that's been ruled out. Why in the name of all that's rational can't someone rush through an amending statute? This election should be about poetry. If art were judged only on the moral virtue of artists, there wouldn't be a lot left. And it's hardly as if the Professor of Poetry does one-to-one tutes, or exercises any power over grades.

Oxford has been deprived of a fair choice of candidates. It's a moot point whether the smear campaign did this, or whether it was Walcott himself in choosing to stand down. It is a huge shame he's removed himself from the race.

I bet John Walsh is feeling pretty sick too. (I wish I'd never mentioned his wretched article.) A snarky leader in today's Independent (the paper Walsh writes for) is almost actionable in its innuendo.

I don't really know Padel, I've never even had a drink with her - but I cannot for one moment credit that she would have had anything to do with this crapfest. I'd guess she was pretty embarrassed even by the Indy's totally un-anonymous Walshing. With friends like that, who needs enemies?

We are all tainted. We are humans, appetitive and fallible. Without those qualities, no-one could write poetry. And we are all the poorer for this sort of non-poetic battle about poetry jobs.

The row on Harriet continues here.

Let the Right One In

2009-05-04T20:40:00.002+01:00

Image: Momentum Pictures

The producers call it

a story about emancipation. Of how love and trust build the foundation for personal growth and liberation.

The film is based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who wrote the screenplay. On the film's website he says:

Above all it's a love story. Of how Eli's love releases Oskar, how she makes him look upon himself in a different light. Not as the scared one, not as the victim. How she gives him courage to stand up for himself. But Eli is a vampire. A real one...

I still don’t really know what to make of it. It is an unforgettable film, poetic and complex, and for the most part never looks like a horror movie at all. For me, the worst horror is not what appears onscreen. It's been praised for its restraint but in fact I could have done with even less gore, and less sniggering at the back.

Horror is a genre I have never understood. Why do people laugh at horror films? How did horror become camp? And why do they laugh even when the horror isn’t camp? Why do they laugh at the most gruesome things? They can laugh because it’s unconvincing, or excessive. Perhaps they laugh when it’s too frightening, or out of relief, or simply to show their companions that they're not scared. Sometimes of course there is deliberate wit, a compact between director and knowing audience, and there was an element of that here.

As a student I went with a friend to see The Exorcist, which at the time was getting rave reviews in the grown up press. Despite the sniggering at the back, I was impressed by the night-dressed child’s passive-aggressive urination on the carpet at the cocktail party, rather shocked by the creative abuse of a crucifix, repulsed by the 360 degree head rotation (this was a generation before CGI) - but I’m afraid that by the time we got to the projectile vomiting I laughed too. It was just over the top. It didn’t make us popular with the Very Old townspeople in the audience. I had a feeling that I'd spoiled something, that they wanted to continue to be convinced by something that had now lost its spell over me. And in turn I had the feeling of having been spoilsported at times while watching this film. I wonder what the effect would have been if I'd seen it at home on DVD.

I still don’t really get horror. Violence revolts me, and I have so far resisted all blandishments to see Tarantino as I lack the sense of humour that finds severed limbs funny. (No, sorry, not even in that German fork-lift truck safety film.)

But I was persuaded to see this by the five-star reviews, one of those rare occasions when Anthony Quinn (The Independent) agrees with Nigel Andrews (the FT). They insisted this was more than a vampire movie.

It could hardly be more different from the image conjured up by the tag "teenage vampire movie". There's no sex, no glamour, very little melodrama. It’s set in a bland suburb of Stockholm in the early 1980s, tensions with Russia on the radio in the background. It is winter, bitter outside and fetid indoors. The camera is patient, allowing appreciation of composition, the almost abstract qualities of the blocks of flats. The pace is restrained, and there is a rich palette of sound. The focus is on Oskar, a twelve year old boy who is being bullied at school and fantasises about revenge.

There is a murder scene very early on, where a young man is waylaid at night in the park. There is some verismo business with scuffed plastic containers and the sound of blood knocking into them. It's all very matter of fact. But the butchery is interrupted by a dog. There is undeniably something uncomfortably funny about the way the dog is so riveted by the scene – as anyone might be – and continues to ignore its owner’s calls. Instead it sits down to watch. It’s funny not least because it’s one of those fancy manicured poodles, sitting politely, not a wild-looking mutt who'd have been getting stuck in. The streetlights are on in the background, and passing traffic. The murderer gets more and more frantic, and it’s funny too because such an effete looking creature can thwart someone so murderous. And because it’s a movie, part of you wants the man to get away with it so we can have more of the story. The scene epitomises the delicate area the film explores: the park, liminal between civilisation and the elemental, banality and evil. The horror is that it can happen within earshot of everything ordinary.

For the first twenty minutes or so, I was in the world of the movie: the housing estate, the cold, the mundanities of the kid’s life, the bullying he suffers, his halting attempts at friendship with the mysterious girl. This is what the film does best: ordinariness, alienation, suggestion. It's never exactly clear how much is going on in real life and how much in Oskar's head. The leads – Kåre Hedebrant as Oskar and Lina Leandersson as Eli – are terrific. Natural, sensitive, believable. The film is psychologically very astute. It lingers but never bores. The tension is fantastic.

The film makes beautiful pictures, whether of the suburbs, the snow, or the outback, where the boy’s father drinks vodka with a man who appears out of nowhere and may be his lover. Or maybe just a drinking buddy, and the lover is really the vodka, but at any rate the boy knows his idyll with his father is ruined.

Then a man's face is half destroyed by acid, and the students giggle. They are so grown up, students these days, and so knowledgeable.

Some of the special effects seemed unnecessary. But perhaps their ability to disrupt underlines the moral ambiguity. Eli herself is not above a bit of passive-aggressive manipulation in her bid to be accepted across the threshold.

And there are puzzles, some of which might be resolved by the book, which I haven't read. This is a film: it doesn't need a book to explain it. There are hints of a massive back story for Eli. Why, if she is so “old”, is her Pa so incompetent at bloodletting? He wears a homely plastic overcoat, has an idea of disposing of a body, but really is extraordinarily hamfisted, not reading the culture: he chooses a park with streetlights; he doesn’t realise that kids will wait for their pals to go home together after basketball practice. He is new to the city, but acts as if he is new to the century – which is the last one, not ours.

And why has Eli got that scar we glimpse for a moment? What does it mean? (Oskar is wounded twice: once by violence, and once by his own bravado.) And the jigsaw egg, which she claims is worth enough to buy a nuclear power plant, an odd measure of value?

There is a shockingly ambiguous scene in which the father goes back home to the vampire daughter and asks her to do one thing for him, not to see “that boy”. Although the narrative is skewed to suggest that he is always her gofer, here is a glimpse of an alternative abusive relationship. He is clearly jealous. She touches his cheek as if to confer a blessing; he closes his eyes as if receiving it. In his submission, we glimpse a sense of his desire.

It seems commonly agreed that in this movie vampirism is a metaphor for other sorts of difference. Both Oskar and Eli are outsiders. Neither has a normal family life. Oskar lives with a mother who seems to pay him no attention, let alone notice that he's being bullied, and a father who indulges him with a sentimental fondness until the bottle appears. Eli’s parent/guardian makes it his business to go about getting her haemoglobin rations, and doesn’t appear to have any job.

None of the adults in the film is particularly sympathetic.* The parents don’t seem to engage properly with the boy; the others are boozers, except for the teacher who can’t wait to get home when the bell rings - even though Oskar is staying behind, copying something out of an encyclopaedia. You’d think she’d want to see what he’s up to, but she leaves him to it, and he rather touchingly switches off the classroom light when he leaves. In one scene where his mother berates him, the sound wonderfully enacts how Oskar switches off.

Eli’s true nature eventually dawns on Oskar: she appears only after dark, doesn’t seem to feel the cold, and when Oskar cuts his hand in a gesture of kinship, falls to the floor to lap it up with those curious animal gutturals that come with her affliction. He accepts this, yet when later she offers him money he is scandalised. You stole it! You stole it from those people you killed!

What is going on here? He nods at murder but baulks at theft? Is vampirism so bizarre that both Oskar and we the audience can gloss over it as beyond morality, a theatrical device, a mere stroke of fate that has to be endured despite its victims (for the most part not the toothsome youngsters of tradition, but boozers and losers – the implication perhaps that none of them will be missed)? Perhaps I’m being too literalist, but it’s one thing to accept someone from an alien culture, or with an alienating label or even an antisocial addiction, but quite another to be OK around a vampire.

Critics have focused on how it is a beautiful metaphor, probably because the darker side is bleedin' obvious. And there is a deeply disturbing cultural aspect to it. Eli’s way of life is shown as different but sufficiently similar that she can live in the flat next door. She may sleep in the bath under a light-proof cover, but when the cover is lifted, she is an ordinary girl asleep. In one sense, Eli provides the kinship that Oskar, if he weren't a loner, would find in a gang. At that level, the violence isn't so remarkable. Although friendship and acceptance can redeem us, if we befriend the wrong person, one possible outcome of unconditional acceptance is corruption.

*Correction: one of the unglamorous middle aged boozers is a heroine. She makes the supreme sacrifice in one of those scenes with baffling comedic overtones, but she has been dogged (or should that be catted) by comedy all along.

A Grand Day Out

2009-05-04T18:08:00.003+01:00

Now that the Poet Laureate's been named, attention might turn to the next Oxford Professor of Poetry. Will another male bastion fall? The election is on 16 May.

It's an archaic institution, requiring the holder to give three lectures a year, and little else. Andrew Motion rejected the idea of applying, declaring that the whole thing has been overtaken by creative writing courses, and needs radical overhaul.

For some time, poetry evangelist Ruth Padel and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott were the only candidates. Roughly speaking, their declared supporters can be characterised as poetry readers and poetry writers respectively. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is a latecomer to the fray, and brings endorsement from Tariq Ali, Amit Chaudhuri, Toby Litt, Tom Paulin. He sounds impressive too.

I'm almost sorry that Michael George Gibson didn't garner enough support. He would have ensured some frantic media coverage. He's the man who allegedly asked for his money back at Ledbury because he didn't like the poems, and attempted to report The Poetry Society to Trading Standards because they weren't dealing in what he calls poetry. But they are arguments we've heard before.

Fascinating to see who's nominated whom. Walcott is getting the poets and critics: Al Alvarez, Alan Brownjohn, Carmen Bugan, David Constantine, the sadly late UA Fanthorpe, Alan Hollinghurst, PJ Kavanagh, Grevel Lindop, Patrick McGuinness, Lucy Newlyn, Bernard & Heather O'Donoghue, Michael Schmidt, Jon Stallworthy, Oliver Taplin, DM Thomas, Anthony Thwaite, Geza Vermes, Marina Warner...

Padel appeals to everyone else, astronomers, broadcasters, classicists, journalists, musicians, philosophers: Melvyn Bragg, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Valentine Cunningham, Victoria Glendinning, AC Grayling, Jeremy Isaacs, Emma Kirkby, Libby Purves, George Steiner, John Walsh, Geoffrey Wheatcroft - and at least one real poet: Alice Oswald. (Probably others I should have recognised.)

I incline slightly to Padel: sparky, generous, less conservative, and I like her. I understand some people don't, but not their reasons. I applaud what she does with her proselytising. It's not aimed at poets but at non-poet readers who are wary of the stuff. I don't see what's such a sell-out, or so patronising, about that. She did a fantastic job sorting out the Poetry Society a few years back - not a reason for her to have this post, but it speaks of character. It was impressive how she was prepared to listen, learn, and get up to speed overnight. She never seemed to begrudge the time spent.

Her old pal John Walsh did a hatchet job the other day on Walcott's reputation. Though it touched on professorship, it had nothing to do with poetry. I haven't read any of Walcott's criticism. Maybe it's not surfaced on my radar simply because I've been asleep.

Last time I voted for Carson. She didn't get it, but it was a grand day out.

Updated to account for more names.

Update and correction
Mr Michael George Gibson's agent has contacted me:

...we were very amused to read your comment about him in Squared. Where did you get your information from? Michael never asked for his money back at Ledbury and he has never attempted to report The Poetry Society to Trading Standards. We suggest you have a look at www.michaelgeorgegibson.org to find out what he is really saying.

My apologies to Mr Gibson.
25 August 2009

A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.

2009-04-27T21:09:00.030+01:00

Katy Evans-Bush thinks much can be learned from an unsuccessful poem about what makes poems fail. She shows us the other Ozymandias, written by Shelley's friend Horace Smith in that famous competition. One can only hope that Smith himself saw instantly how outclassed he was. Do go there and read it - it's most instructive.

I've long had a fantasy of editing an anthology of bad poems, with a commentary, as a tool of instruction, but Nicholas Parsons got there first with his Joy of bad Verse. Lack of imagination, failure of nerve, and above all a lack of sensitivity to language are the commonest failings. McGonagall is treasured for his tin ear and his heroic mastery of bathos. Smith isn't in this sort of class either. He's just not terribly good.

But perhaps it's not so much what makes Smith's poem fail, as noticing, as Katy does, that it has a couple of good bits. And it's a question of what makes Shelley's poem so good. Where Shelley makes things up, and visualises them for us, Smith's poem is for the most part literal, unimaginative. He doesn't recognise the potential in the data. Starting with the same material as Shelley, almost every decision he makes is conventional:

Here's the fragment of statue, all alone; the Leg is all that's left of the civilisation; it could be the same for London one day. Civilisations pass. Smith takes Ozymandias for granted, is uninquisitive about the nature of power, save for its transience.

The first good bit - and I concur with her judgement - is the image of the Hunter "[thro' the wilderness/ where London stood,] holding the Wolf in chace". I don't know why Katy likes this bit, but I like it because it gives us an identifiable agent in the poem in contrast to the undefined and almost abstract "We"), and a new perspective of time, a sense of the altered state of London now a forest; that lovely period diction "holding the Wolf in chace" manages to suggest a relationship between the Hunter and hunted, some kind of controlled distance, like a dog on a lead. The Hunter is skilled. There is something intimate about it.

And how distracting that Hunter would find "some fragment huge", so ill-defined and unexpected, on his purposeful quest. It distracts us too: I wondered how a bit of statue had got from Egypt to London - via the British Museum perhaps? - before I pulled myself together. Oh, and I have a weakness for post-apocalyptic scenarios.

The second good bit she identifies is the closing couplet, and I must admit it raised a smile to my lips too. The polysyllabic adjectives cling to monosyllabic, simplistic rhymes. The second adjective, in the last line, is even longer than the first, so when the second shoe drops there is a fitting sense of build-up and bathos. It's interesting that Smith felt the need to relate the desert statue back to the situation of the assumed reader. He couldn't trust the statue itself, or the reader, to do the work, but had to draw an explicit moral: "some Hunter may express/ Wonder like ours..." The switched focus leaches energy from the original image. Not that the original image is very clear; it's treated as a given. There is something almost comic about the "gigantic Leg" because it could be anything. Actually there is one other almost good bit, which is the "[gigantic Leg], which far off throws/ The only shadow that the Desart knows".

Shelley lets the statue be the focus. His Ozymandias is a story, "I met a traveller... who said..." and it is the traveller who describes the statue. By putting the words into his mouth, he manages to give it an oral immediacy, both an authority (literally) and mythic status, a distance and a reason for being told.

And thereafter the focus is on the statue. Well, not exactly - because in piecing the statue together, Shelley conjures the subject of the statue himself, zooming in on the "frown,/ And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command" and even the hapless sculptor. We are right there with the antique traveller, seeing a tyrant's statue. And its empty boast. The poem is filmic in its attention. One could use Shelley's poem as a shooting script for a short. And the genius of the ending, which leaves the poem at the point where Horace Smith started his: the bare and level sands stretch far away.

Street art

2009-04-26T22:56:00.039+01:00

Photo: Bailout by Slaminsky

Annie at Slaminsky has come back from New York with a fab slide show of street art.

Here are a few more sites for your delectation:

Brooklyn Street Art

c-monster: Eclectic, informed and witty art blog

El Celso: colourful, unpredictable, and not worksafe

wooster collective: A celebration of street art from all round the world

Bombing Science: Graffiti Pictures and Graffiti Supplies
Interesting forums. One thread on How to cook wheatpaste is enlightening about the consequences of not using the product quickly enough:

well, i'm sitting on my floor in my room watching Comedy Central when out of nowhere, i hear my backpack start to make this weird fizzing noise, it almost sounded like a zipper. anyways, i looked through my backpack for the source as it was increasing in sound, when i realized it was coming from my bottle of wheatpaste. well me being the idiot that i am i decied it would be best to pop up that littl cap thingy to give it some air.
THAT WAS THE WRONG THING TO DO!
the very second i opened it, BLAM! wheatpaste all over my room. i was left there watching the wheat paste LITERALLY spray out of the tube, as i franticly try to figure out what to do (so just seal the cap again right? well it wasn't til after the whole ordeal that i realized i should have.)

Lucky

2009-04-22T12:09:00.056+01:00

I am a member of The Poetry Society. The confession seems in need of some justification. Years ago, it was a way of keeping in touch when I didn't have any other contacts. These days, as well as Poetry Review, a members' newsletter, a local Stanza group and the right to use club premises on certain terms, membership can have unexpected benefits. Unannounced, there arrived in my letterbox a 200+ page poetry collection, lavishly illustrated (as they say) and larded with endorsements:

X is the real thing. I love reading his verse and you will too.
Stephen Fry

This is marvellous stuff... a 21st century Kipling. He rollicks and rolls with rhyme, meter, and melody.
Tom Wolfe

Annoyingly good.
Hugh Grant

I enjoy his poetry immensely.
Mick Jagger

You feel he lived it so richly, so dangerously, that he could be wise for our delight.
Dr Robert Woof, Director of The Wordsworth Trust

A fantastic collection! Rich, sumptuous and beautifully threaded.
Jon Snow

If Waugh were still alive, he would fall on X's verse with a glad cry of recognition and approval.
John Walsh

That would be Auberon Waugh, then. I love John Walsh. He can be a devil at times.

Here's an extract from On Entering My New 'Writer's Cottage' on Mustique For The First Time:

Here in a fastness, filled with light
In view of a turquoise sea,
A fool has banished himself to write,
And, oh, that fool is me.

A fellow member of The Poetry Society came up to me the other day, apopleptic that someone could have bought the right to a PoSoc mailshot when there are so many more talented poets around crying out to be heard.

While I don't have a lot of time for the Mustique musings, such as I have read, I don't quite share her sense of outrage. Poetry isn't a zero sum game. No other poets were denied a purchase by this publicity stunt.* The mailout wrapper makes it quite clear that the gift is not from The Poetry Society, but from the generous donor. No doubt he paid handsomely for the privilege. Are they supposed to turn down such a gift on behalf of their members, and if so, who would make that decision and on what grounds? Should they turn it down if it were (just supposing any were rich enough and so inclined) from Simon Armitage, The Wordsworth Trust, Jeremy Prynne? Should they turn it down if it were a consignment of fresh coconuts? Yes to this last, presumably, on the grounds that fresh coconuts are outside the remit of The Poetry Society and the delivery of unsolicited fresh coconuts to members might amount to a nuisance. (Though personally I wouldn't mind them sending me a voucher for a free coconut, courtesy of the Mustique Development Agency, so that I could take advantage of the generous offer if I chose.)

She was almost incoherent with rage, but I think what my acquaintance was objecting to was the fact that Mr Felix Dennis (for it is he) is rich, and the further fact that publicity can be bought. And the fact that it can be bought, apparently, by anyone rich enough. Or at least by a rich poet she disapproves of. She is also exercised by the idea that the very use of The Poetry Society's mailing machine might give his publication some kind of imprimatur. (I am not sure what value should be attached to The Poetry Society's imprimatur. The Poetry Society arrogates to itself the definite article.) And not least, she is exercised by the perception that good poets can find it very hard to get published, let alone get publicity.

I haven't put it to her, but I wonder if she isn't also slightly bothered by the suspicion that innocent members of The Poetry Society might pick it up and actually like it. Dennis has made his fortune by an astute reading of popular taste.

*P.S. In fact, Dennis sponsors the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, under the auspices of the Forward Arts Foundation. This puts £5000 into the hands of a new poet, along with a fair bit of publicity.

The State of Play

2009-04-21T16:24:00.005+01:00

Was there ever a movie about investigative journalism where the future of the paper isn't on the line?

Having missed the BBC series I could watch this with an open mind. It pushes paranoia buttons about NorthCom, corrupt defence procurement, jumbo corporations and privatised homeland security. It's a pacy political thriller, with some very familiar tropes: the maverick boozy journo, the editor anxious about the bottom line, the dodgy pols, the love interest/conflict of interest, the abrasive police, the dangerous assignation, the sleazy bar, the deadline, and so on. There is even an underground carpark sequence, so it's a lot of fun.

Russell Crowe is terrific as the slobby maverick journo. Helen Mirren as the editor is a sort of cross between Tina Brown and Anna Wintour. Ben Affleck, though well-groomed as a Congressman, lacks gravitas and steel.

The film could have ended many minutes earlier, and been a different, simpler, and perhaps more satisfying piece. There are too many improbable plot twists, and so many loose ends I gave up counting, so many circling black helicopters that never land. I wondered whether room was being made for a sequel.

At a time when print journalism is under greater threat than ever, it makes a traditional plea for inky hands. It's worth seeing the movie - which is never boring - simply for the beautiful credit sequence, following the paper to the press and on to distribution: this coda is a soaring hymn to newsprint.

La Vie Moderne

2009-04-20T17:45:00.028+01:00

When I first visited rural southern France in the early 70s, some farmers were still ploughing with oxen. Even now, you can find old ox-ploughs rusting under a hedge – where there are still hedges. My parents have lived there nearly 30 years, and during that time we have seen farmers retire, their children move away, cattle sold, vineyards grubbed up, fields amalgamated, and the growth of tourism.

In La Vie Moderne photojournalist Raymond Depardon records the life of farmers in the Cévennes. It is part of an ongoing project dear to his heart. As a farmer's son, he has a great sympathy for them, and they open up to him as best they can, though it’s clear some of them are not completely at ease with the camera. The interiors are so familiar: the solemn pendule in the background, the open fire, the long kitchen table with the oilcloth, the plate of vanilla flavoured biscuits, the scuffed tin of sugarcubes pushed towards the visitor for the bitter coffee. You have to keep them in a tin because of mice.

The landscape is achingly beautiful. To strains of Fauré, the camera tracks up and down narrow country lanes, dives into valleys, past snowbound forests and shuttered houses, halts at a barbed wire gate. The people who scrape a living from the mountainside are dying out. Villages are ghosts of themselves. It’s heartbreaking to hear the stories, to contemplate the passing of a whole way of life, something which for generations had seemed so permanent. The way of life was backbreaking and brought little reward. Young people these days demand more. It is the loss of a culture. The loss of the language (Occitan) began even earlier.

Even here they now use tractors. Little of the old soundscape remains now but the bells on the brebis as they scramble down over the rocks to their barn for the night.

The film makes no argument beyond presenting a few farmers and their families to talk about the hardships of their existence, their hopes and fears for the future. The first family consisted of two elderly bachelor brothers and their nephew, who had got himself a wife from up North via a lonely hearts ad. He seemed well pleased with life, apparently oblivious to the jealousy and pain occasioned by the introduction of his new family - a wife and her daughter, people from elsewhere, who didn't understand the district, or farming, and showed insufficient deference to their elders.

One of the most poignant was a man who lived alone in a state of some neglect. His hair was long and matted, and he chainsmoked. For the entire session, he was glued to his ancient television watching the funeral mass for Abbé Pierre (founder of Emmaus). Without taking his eyes off the screen, he answered the questions almost monosyllabically:
- Are you a Catholic?
- No.
- Were you baptised a Catholic?
- No. I’m Protestant.
- Do you go to church?
- No.
And so on. I found all this disconcerting. The television was clearly his constant companion, and on this occasion enabled him to share in a national day of mourning. It seemed rather rude to persist in questioning when the interviewer had dropped in unannounced on this particular day. For all his sensitivity elsewhere, Depardon seemed curiously unalert in this instance - except that it made a telling piece of film, albeit partly at his own expense.

Although the film has received rave notices, it is not an obvious hit. There is little pacing, no polemic. There are odd flashes of wit but nothing to stop the viewer from nodding off for a minute or two. The voice of the interviewer slows things down, keeping a sense of distance between audience and subject.

I never saw any of those programmes about Hannah Hauxwell, but suspect that focusing on one family in the Cévennes might have made more engaging viewing than La Vie Moderne in its dutiful progress round the valleys. But Depardon’s aim is to be more faithfully representative of the different types of farmer and family set-ups. He is more of a collector than a specialist. Nor is this a visual Akenfield. We are so used to documentaries which edit out the questions, giving the impression that the participants are speaking freely for themselves, that the questioning, with all the rephrasings, repetitions – one of the participants was pretty deaf – and awkward silences, feels rough-hewn. Perhaps the documentary maker who is also a photojournalist wishes to display more regard for the “truth” of the present moment, even if that includes the non-answer and considerable longueurs. Why not say what happened? Yet he doesn't hesitate to stage a shot, to position the camera in the best place - the far side of a cow who is crumpled on the floor with mastitis, her grieving owner beyond... And heaven knows what went on the cutting room floor. As a photographer, he'd be used to culling the one image out of a thousand. Perhaps it's a category error to want something more rigorous from a documentary too.

However, that's a personal gripe that no-one else seems to share. And this is without question a valuable record of the remnants of a community that will have disappeared the way of the ox-plough within a generation.

WoT

2009-04-15T00:30:00.005+01:00

Robbie G1, who created the slogan, credits
jamesholden.net/billboard/, who created the app. Go there to make your own billboards.

Via Hatherley.

Gun control

2009-04-13T22:50:00.023+01:00

Dr Omed got a gun

Jesus got a gun

True facts of the Tulsa Gun Show

Janie's Got a Gun
[Video not available in your country]

Oh shit wrong chord

South West Airlines have the rhymes

2009-04-11T17:54:00.003+01:00

London's lease hath all too short a date

2009-04-11T12:06:00.041+01:00

Diamond Geezer draws our attention to

The Golf Sale. The legendary never-ending Golf Sale. The sports shop down a Mayfair sidestreet near Oxford Circus. The iconic Golf Sale advertised along Oxford Street by men with sandwich boards since time immemorial. Much imitated, never beaten. The Golf Sale. Closing down. Nip down to Maddox Street fast if you want to snap up a cut-price putter...

The lease is up.

Three landowners control most of the West End:
The Portman Estate

The Portman Estate is principally located within Marylebone, central London.

It encompasses Oxford Street from Marble Arch to Orchard Street, from Edgware Road in the west to beyond Baker Street in the east, and stretches north almost to Crawford Street. The Estate includes Portman Square, Manchester Square and the residential squares of Bryanston and Montague.

The Duke of Westminster (Grosvenor Estate)

Key locations in Mayfair are: Mount Street, Grosvenor Street, North Audley Street, Duke Street, Park Street
Key locations in Belgravia are: Grosvenor Gardens, Motcomb Street, Elizabeth Street, Eaton Square, Pimlico Road, Ebury Street

and HM the Queen. Details of Crown London holdings here.

(Not forgetting Cadogan Estates' massive - though diminishing - holdings in Chelsea.)

Between them, they own enough to make the market.

The Portman website advertises retail premises to let:

Shops are available on new Full Repairing and Insuring leases for 5 years, without rent review and outside the Security of tenure provisions of the Landlord & Tenant Act 1954.

Are we just starting to see the effects of the 2004 amendments to the Landlord & Tenant Act 1954? And we've just passed Lady Day, when rents are due... I'd love to know more, but alas do not have a subscription to Estates Gazette. What sort of business is prepared to take on a five year full repairing lease without right of renewal? Someone selling Olympic tschotskes, maybe? You'd have to be reckless, unless there were no choice.

The erosion of tenants' rights that began under the Tories has continued apace under New Labour. Under the guise of market liberalisation, most new residential lets are unprotected; new agricultural and business lettings suffer the same sort of insecurity. It doesn't allow a business to put down roots. It doesn't make for cohesive communities. It can cause dreadful hardship. It took generations to build up security of tenure but it seems to have been pissed away in under twenty years.

On their website (which doesn't let me link to a specific page) the Cadogan Estate exonerates itself from blame for the homogenisation of the High Street:

Today, Cadogan's holding in Chelsea is substantial in value, but is nevertheless still patchy. The assumption, for instance, that Cadogan owns everything on the King's Road is wrong. And the associated assumption that Cadogan is therefore responsible for the influx of High Street brands is profoundly inaccurate.

Not their fault, then. No-one's fault.

Not a day longer

2009-04-05T02:13:00.011+01:00

from 10 Downing Street
to e-petition signatories

date 3 April 2009 15:44
subject Government response to petition 'notadaylonger'
mailed-bypetitions.pm.gov.uk

hide details 3 Apr (2 days ago) Reply

You signed a petition asking the Prime Minister to "Stop seeking to further extend pre-charge detention."

The Prime Minister's Office has responded to that petition and you can view it here:

http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page18895

Prime Minister's Office

Petition information - http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/notadaylonger/

Bastards.

Cambridge poets

2009-04-03T22:12:00.028+01:00

I thought Plane Debris was terrific, in the top Heliogabalus class. Sweat ran out of my ears, and still does, a sheer delirium.

J H Prynne

Back in the early nineties I joined a workshop run by Stephen Rodefer, who was then Judith E Wilson Fellow at Magdalene. (At the time, he'd only published in the States, but recently Carcanet has brought out a Selected, Call it Thought.) At our first seminar, he wrote on the board the names of some English poets with whom we should all be familiar. I've still got the notes somewhere, but from memory they included John Wilkinson, Denise Riley, John Riley, Tom Raworth, Veronica Forrest-Thompson, Rod Mengham... there were about a dozen names, and I hadn't heard of any of them - though I was familiar with names in the PBS catalogue, Poetry Review and so on. I can't for the life of me remember whether Prynne's name was on the list or whether he was taken as a given - certainly he was a presiding spirit, and Rodefer was glad to be breathing the Cambridge air. Most of my fellow students were familiar with many of these poets (a couple were Prynne's students), and with Americans like Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley etc, whom I'd never heard of. [Shamed.] My reading in those days was random, and I had a sense it was a bit restricted which is one of the reasons I joined this course.

(It was another 6-7 years before I got online, and people tend to forget what it was like back in those days.)

It was an enriching experience. It was there that I first encountered a personification of OuLiPo, the legendary Harry Mathews, who featured in the terrific series of readings that Rodefer organised for us. We also heard Rod Mengham, John Wilkinson, Denise Riley, Christopher Middleton, Wendy Mulford and others. It was wider than L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, though all his guests had that passion for words as words first, rather than simply as means to an end. For the first time since student magazines, I was brought face to face with poetry that didn't make sense in any obvious way. Some of it was non-linear, some was syntactically disrupted, some played with the sounds words made:

An error is mirror to the truth
than any statement claiming to be true.

Rodefer, Plane Debris (Four Lectures)

At one seminar Rodefer produced for especial scorn a recent TLS with a poem by (let's call him) JG. Although it was quite vivid it wasn't, to be honest, a remarkable poem, particularly in retrospect now I have read so many other poems a bit like it - about dealing with the effects of an elderly relative as a consequence of their going into a nursing home. It began with an image of the narrator and his siblings picking over the household effects like gulls. "See!" said Rodefer, "that's what I really hate about this sort of poem: it gets a little movie camera going in your head" [here he makes cranking motions with his hand near his ear] - "poets should leave that kind of thing to the movies. Movies do it much better. We can't be satisfied with the visual now. Poets have to move on. It's our duty to foreground language."

(Of course he was a real film buff, and fascinated by the interaction between poem and film - but that's another story.)

So while we have our mainstream workshops urging things like Show don't Tell and all the other orthodox mantra, LangPo is doing something rather different. I read quite a lot of stuff around then, and went to a lot of readings, but on the whole it didn't excite me enough. I could never work out how to tell whether it was being done well or badly, because I never really "got" the point of much of it. At the same time, I was keen to pick up anything that might be useful, but heaven knows whether it shows. I doubt it. (I try to remember his advice: "Be bolder along the axis of selection.")

What I couldn't bear was the animosity that so often went with LangPo - that the Mainstream had sold out to Mammon, that the Mainstream pandered to the lowest common denominator, that the Mainstream was capitalist and anti-socialist, that the Mainstream perpetuated archaic values, that Mainstream writers were beneath contempt. At the same time, I was going to mainstream poetry readings and it was interesting in Q & A sessions to drop my bit of sodium into the water by asking them what they thought of Prynne.

The loathing was mutual, and it still baffles me. It may well be a testosterone thing, as it's not simply political. Now Bloodaxe has published Prynne's Collected (a book whose purchase-to-reading ratio must be close to A Brief History of Time) perhaps the barriers have come down a bit. While they remain, it's sad and an impoverishment of poetry. There are poets who earn respect from both sides, such as Geoffrey Hill, Roy Fisher, WS Graham, John Kinsella, Christopher Middleton, Denise Riley....

Hell, this is worth more than a cursory anecdote. I'll return to the subject when I've collected my thoughts more intelligently.

Village life

2009-04-02T13:35:00.009+01:00

The Party Planner's shop has closed. I only patronised it once (for Hallowe'en, and not for me, and it's a long story), because it didn't sell anything I wanted. It appears it didn't sell enough of what other villagers wanted either. Not for them the party poppers, bouncy castle, personalised helium balloons. Not for them the dream wedding limo hire. Perhaps the reality was just too cruel.

Il Divo

2009-04-02T00:23:00.022+01:00

Quite a contrast with last week's movie, this stylish piece from Sorrentino foregrounds cinematographic technique with clever background music to make a drama which never pretends to the documentary. It deals with the top end of society, its manners, masks and gross corruptions. The children in Entre les Murs are saints by comparison. Knowing little of Italian politics - though I remember the perennial Andreotti, the whiff of corruption that hung about him, the tragedies of Aldo Moro and Falcone, and the endlessly interrogated mystery of Calvi (and how can any of these be called "politics"? Oh, and I recall learning back in school that Italy's system of proportional representation led to inherently unstable government and unpalatable dealmaking) - even knowing so little, I found it compelling. A huge amount must have been over my head. I don't know enough to know what percentage that might be but guess it's well north of 50: I don't speak Italian; I know precious little about their political structures; I don't know the names of the politicians, nor remember them from one scene to the next so was frequently lost. But I'd gladly go again, and not just to pick up a few of the threads I missed first time round. For the most part, it's fascinating viewing. The very few longueurs are places where too much explanation is being given, and are defined only by the drive of the rest of the film.

Jumpcuts, flashbacks, flashforwards and leitmotifs create depth and texture. The fizzing glass of migraine cure marks the end of an Act. The focus on his curious hands has its own strange language once his secretary explains it to his inexplicable visitor.

Let's take her as an example of the ambiguity the film revels in. A woman appears at his office, sur commande. She is attractive, very nervous - frightened even. Her blouse is undone by one too many buttons for her to be respectable. Yet she has crows' feet - she must be fortyfive if she's a day, far too old to be a prostitute. What other explanation can there be? She seeks advice from the loyal secretary as if an ingénue from a madam. When she meets Andreotti she is shy, but embraces him. They talk of intimacy, she says she explores herself... The camera focuses on his hair, his physicality. The next time we see her she is on the arm of an Ambassador, and when someone asks her about her painting dismisses it: "I just dabble." Can we believe that Andreotti, whose power could command whomsoever he could choose, would choose a woman d'un certain age to be his companion of the night, or a "dabbler" to paint his portait?

This is a drama, so we can take it only as a means to the construction of a character - one who is undemonstrative, enigmatic.

And yes, so much comes down to the physical presence. Much as there's a hint of The West Wing in that encounter on the diplomat's arm at the ball, even though it's taking the trope of embarrassed recognition to put a different spin on it, so there is an inescapable comparison with Richard III. At least for the English. Er, well, there's the intelligence, the dead bodies strewn on the path to power. And the hunchback. I am ashamed to mention it. Yet it's undeniably there. If we're going to be politically incorrect here, let's go the whole hog and suggest that the Italians, in common with their French neighbours, are much less bothered by political correctness than the Anglo-Saxons.

But like Entre les Murs, it is an intelligent film, treats its audience like adults. And engaged. Whereas Entre les Murs listens to children for once, and shows teachers to be fallible - and neither of them perfect - this film ironises Andreotti's claims to innocence. He is never seen to mandate anything. Enemies die right and left; he prays. The only hint of guilt is circumstantial: the kiss. Later, he jokes that a politician must take care whom he associates with: think of Jesus and Judas. Later still, there is a parody of Leonardo's Last Supper where associates meet to anoint him presidential candidate. No-one kisses and betrays him. They all toast him with wine, white and red, even the cardinal, while he toasts with migraine remedy, his cup of bitterness and guilt.

And his physicality is amazing. Toni Servillo as Andreotti manages to make his neck disappear. He wears a hunchback. His curious hands have a role of their own: praying, or marking pleasure or displeasure. He holds his body still as if nothing could move him. His stillness exemplifies his power - and occasionally his vulnerability.

It's overdone in places, no question. The ears are too much. The abject senator whose name I forget (the ugly, stupid one who complains that A never showed him any affection) is a caricature. No-one would vote for him. The kingmaker whose name I forget wouldn't have tested the slide of the marble floor IRL even if he fancied himself as a funky dancer. The scene after Andreotti is indicted, where he is sitting with his wife who is channel-hopping to avoid the appalling news - very stagey, but effective. After many channel-hops she finds a station playing a torch song and as the two of them sit there and she reaches out a hand to him and tears up, you can't be sure whether she is weeping for her husband, or the man she thought he was.

Along with the swooping and savvy camera work, an extraordinarily eclectic range of incidental music, sometimes so brief it was over before I noticed it.

The credits played to this:

Update
Why I walked out of my own biopic: an interview with Andreotti about the film here.

Entre les Murs

2009-03-27T21:52:00.012Z

Compelling movie. I knew nothing about it when I went. I loved the documentary feel of it, the absence of music (save the poignant offstage Schubert during the parents' evening, a telling counterpoint to the dialogue). I loved the ambiguity of the teacher's role. He is idealistic but an insensitive loudmouth. He fucks up. He compromises himself with the disciplinary board, and even before that he is faking good in his account of the run-up to Suleiman's disastrous outburst. The earlier grading meeting is similarly compromised by the vested interests of the student representatives: a lovely piece of symmetry. I loved the vitality of the kids, all the more so thinking that this was largely improvised.

And I loved the subtitles. Someone had thought about them. At one point, a pupil has to conjugate "croire", so the subtitler went for an equivalent irregular verb rather than a straight translation, and had a lot of fun with "swim". It kept all the fun of the mistakes, and wouldn't have mattered a bit to anyone who doesn't know French, but flattered anyone who does.

I despaired of the bureaucracy. Of the low expectations. Of the student representatives on the grading committee, even though they are bright girls. Of the slovenliness. Should it matter that a teacher goes to school in t-shirt, jeans and trainers? Hmf, in my young day teachers wore suits, or at least sports jackets and flannels or cavalry twills. They certainly wore a tie. And Mr Brown wore a linen jacket in the summer term, and a panama hat. The past is another country.

Danger

2009-03-06T15:39:00.006Z

The book is due out in April.

O'Ryan's Belt

2009-02-25T15:07:00.009Z

That's four pubs down, three to go. We lost one in the last credit crunch in the early nineties, and three in the past six months. We have also lost in the past six months: two freesheets, an estate agent, a shop selling nursery goods, a shop selling dresses sizes 16+, a shop selling sports gear, and our independent bookshop. This last was an amazing place in its heyday - they would order anything for you, often going to a great deal of trouble to track it down, with most things being available the next day. And we had poetry readings. It was tiny, and there were only about 3 stools available, so it was très intime. The owner had some kind of direct line to OUP in the good old days when they published poetry. So we had visits from Anne Stevenson, Michael Donaghy, Peter Porter, Stephen Romer, Katherine Porteous (who had only just had her first collection out) and, anomalously, Kevin Crossley-Holland.

The reading I remember best - it must have been at least 15 years ago now - was Michael Donaghy's. It was the first time I'd heard him, and he was witty and wild. Anyone who's ever heard him will know how privileged we were. He is the measure of performance.

And after many draughts of white wine from a plastic cup, he took out his tin whistle. That is what it should be like - conviviality, poetry and music.

Beheaded

2009-02-22T13:06:00.013Z

I return to the village after a few days' absence to find another pub boarded up. I say "boarded up" but like the other pub in the village that went dry overnight, this one has perforated metal sheets nailed to window- and door-frame. Everything bears the signs of hasty departure: a pile of beer kegs in the yard, picnic tables stacked at the far end of the carpark. Hefty concrete blocks dumped inside the security fencing deter any ramraider or passing caravans. They boast the legend "BLOCK AID". Does anyone in this business have a gram of compassion?

It's one of the village's signature buildings: half-timbered with a jetty storey at head-bashing height. In fact, one corner has been bashed by something more substantial than a head, and has remained unrepaired since the tenant before last, along with various scabs of plaster, which have fallen off over the years. The Queen's Head sign looks rather better for her veil of green lichen.

So who is the queen? Anne Boleyn? Lady Jane Grey? Or Mary I? I waste time trying to find out. An entry in Wikipedia asserts (citation needed) that all pubs in the village are owned and run by drug dealers. I wouldn't know, I never go to village pubs.

Update
Of course, if I'd bothered to look up, I'd have seen that whoever secured the pub with its grilles and fencing had also taken a Kärcher to the sign and jetted off the accumulation of moss to reveal the necklace and the wobbly legend Lady Jane Grey.

Update 2 And on the other side of the sign is Mary I. The sign fixed to the gable end is of yet another queen. OH says it should be "Queens' Head" and there ensues an unseemly battle about grammar. I win, but the pub is still shut.

Baffleboard

2009-02-08T21:55:00.017Z

A present from my sister, acquired in Bordeaux market. This is her photograph. She understands me very well.

Made in China of course. Just look at the size of that car! (Click image to enlarge.) I imagine the manufacturer had overstocks as he had so few orders from the catalogue. Alas, no instructions were included, but I'm just being greedy.

Morph

2008-12-04T23:56:00.002Z

Why Bolero of all things?

Using lists

2008-11-19T14:41:00.018Z

Perusing the list of BNP members induced a mixture of emotions. Schadenfreude, because I detest them and all they stand for, and it was an odd sort of poetic justice to see them exposed like that. Ridicule that they'd let it happen. Shame, because however awful they are, ordinary members deserve their privacy. Anxiety that I might find someone I know there, or someone from my own village. Revulsion at the large numbers of people from the same family, again and again, with teenagers signed up to the youth group. A grudging respect for all the volunteering that it represented: every one of those thousands of entries had been compiled by someone knocking on a door, filling in a form, and someone else collating it.

I wasn't looking at the original file, but one that someone else had copied and posted up, so there was minimal formatting, no tablulation. But it was clear that there were fields for title, first name, surname, qualifications, address, and comments. These last were pathetically illuminating:

Accountancy skills
Activist (discretion requested)
Activist. Ex-Independent candidate (General Election May 05). Good networker
Activist. Former Lib Dem agent. Change of address 21/3/07
Activist. Letter sent re. temporary activity ban (Southampton area) of six months
Activist. Previously listed as Alfred
Activist. Upgrade from Standard to Gold m/ship 3/4/07
Aged 17 (06). Change of address 18/6/07
Body piercer/retailer (self-employed). BA (Hons) Business Enterprise. City & Guilds Adult Teaching Cert. Diplomas in Aromatherapy/Reflexology. Former nurse. Hobbies: dancing, swimming, walking, caravanning
Borough councillor.
Bounced cheque: membership cancelled 4/11/05.
Business owner
Candidate
Candidate willing
Candidate willing Has meeting venue available
Carpenter/builder
Cert Ed. (Law/Accounting). Hobbies: researcher/writer modern philosophy & pre-historic mysteries. Poetry. Yoga, martial arts, body-building (former competitor). Occasional martial arts/fitness instructor
Chartered town planner
Civil servant
Commercial artist.
Company director
Composer/musician/lecurer. Doctor of Philosophy (Composition) PhD. Cert. ED:FE, BA (Hons), BTEC computer software. Soundtrack writer, ethnomusicologist. Hobbies: music (performance), rambling/hiking, ornithology, history, poetry
Computer skills (web design)
Computer skills (web design)
Director (small company). ANZIQS, NZATC, NZCQS, NZCB. Hobbies: lay-reading (C of E)
Director a tatoo [sic] & body piercing studio. Qualified mountaineering instructor (AMI). Hobbies: DIY
Donation £35 (07). Original birth cert returned 29/3/07
Donation £5 (07)
Engineer. City & Guilds (motor engineering).
Ex-serviceman (Army). Hobbies DIY, dogs
Experience of legal, constitutional & european law. Publishing skills
Ex-serviceman (MoD Police). Abex
Ex-serviceman. Hobbies: woodwork/metalwork. Proof-reader
Ex-serviceman. Retired docker
Ex-serviceman. Retired lecturer. Abex
Factory manager
Family: (name). Comps slip: gold/family membership
Film maker (amateur) with own recording studio
Fluent French/Dutch
Fluent German
Former Conservative councillor (13 years).
Former police/prison officer
Former policeman (international security/counter terrorism)
Gold badge not received - replacement sent 12/2/07
Graphic design/desktop publishing
Housewife. Hobbies: walking, water colour painting
Illustrator/graphic designer (professional)
IT experience
Jobbing builder, cabinet maker, boat builder, restorer. Hobbies: boating, fishing
Joiner (placards/boards etc.). Security
Joiner. Slater. Tiler (self-employed). Hobbies: fishing, darts, pool
Law graduate. Teacher (English literature)
Locksmith/carpenter
Manager (building site). City & Guilds (plastering, floor laying). Hobbies: karate (2nd Dan instructor), clay pidgeon[sic] shooting. Lead singer/drummer with band
Manager (senior)
Manufacturing company owner
Marketing skills
Mechanic/manufacturing engineer (self-employed)
Military/social historian
Mobile DJ with singing partner, snakes & spiders
Musician (professional)
Nick's double
Office manager
Parish councillor
Party chairman
Pilot (helicopter/aeroplane)
Plumber/gas engineer
Printing company owner
Refrigeration and air conditioning engineer
Resigned 02/06/04. Will not be renewing 07 (unhappy with his reception within the Party - reports not published, etc.) Journalist
Retired clerical worker/fireman on British Railways. Hobbies: railways
Retired fitter
Retired Head of Mathematics
Retired male nurse
Retired martial arts instructor. Plasterer
Retired primary teacher. Cert. Ed/Teaching. Hobbies: knitting, walking
Retired R & D engineer. Former chief engineer &; consultant (engineering/environmental). BSc Mechanical Engineering. Hobbies: archaeology, English history/literature
Sales/marketing
Security officer
Self-employed
Senior citizen: paid full rate
Serviceman
Serviceman (Army)
Singer/musician (English Folk)
Site manager (construction)
Teacher (secondary school) (discretion requested)
Teacher. Cert. Ed. Hobbies: astronomy, wildlife, ancient history, handwriting
Video editing equipment
Will not be renewing 07 (took offence to newspaper reports about the Party)
Will not be renewing. Now supporting UKIP
Will not be renewing 07 (court case pending)
Will not be renewing 07 (emigrating)

By contrast, I learn from Huffington Post that Obama's team emailed everyone on their campaign list on Monday:

The campaign was letting me know that barackobama.com was directing visitors to volunteer for -- or donate to -- relief efforts to aid the victims of the Southern California fires.

Huffington adds:

There are, of course, some on the political fringes already mounting their pushback, as Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia did, comparing Obama's call for national service to "what Hitler did in Nazi Germany" and "what the Soviet Union did." Jonah Goldberg likened it to "slavery" (of course, Goldberg's latest advice on dealing with the financial meltdown is for Obama to do nothing).

Perhaps one good thing that will come out of the hard times will be a collective willingness to ignore such bleating -- and to do what so clearly needs to be done to ameliorate the human suffering those hard times have brought.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Galveston

2008-09-17T10:56:00.008+01:00

This song has been on my mind. I last heard it in the 60s, and didn't know then that it was more than a love song. And all I could remember of it lately was the refrain, that half sob in the voice. It was a shock to hear it now, with all that cheesy backing that the memory had edited out.

The media over here has gone a bit quiet on what's happening over there. I haven't seen any appeals for help, but there must be people out there who have lost everything. I hope other people are around to pick them up.

And the first shall be last

2008-08-07T23:59:00.005+01:00

Just one of the brief essays on underside of Vulcan fuselage.

Methuen's Anthology of Modern Verse

2008-06-16T23:14:00.003+01:00

I've just been indulging myself with An Anthology of Modern Verse (Methuen, 1921). My Oxfam copy is from 1940, the 30th edition. Staggering to think of how popular it must have been. It's full of the famous: Chesterton and Belloc, Kipling, Hardy, Thomas. And people I've never heard of - and on this meagre evidence, rightly so: Fyleman, Hopewood, Turner. This anthology, obviously enormously popular, has one striking omission: Housman. It is curious but oddly satisfying to see Eliot, Hopkins, Graves, Lawrence, Hardy, Owen, Thomas, Yeats rubbing shoulders with Kipling, Masefield, Stevenson. But why no Housman? His work was current, hugely popular.

92 poets, of whom there are 14 women, most of whom are justly neglected - as indeed, are most of the men.

Chapeau

2008-06-04T14:26:00.006+01:00

Was in Ribérac, down a back street. The shop was shut, with its grille down - you can see it in the photograph, along with the reflection of the wall opposite. The model is in a dream within a dream: she's not real; she's in a shop; the shop is closed. She is beyond reach, and from another time.

Tuscan whole milk

2008-06-03T16:03:00.006+01:00

It's good milk if you drink it right away, but I'm only giving it one star because it spoiled when I left it [on] the counter when I went away for the weekend. They really should put this in the description. I've bought a lot of products from Amazon (books, CD's, etc.) and I've never had this problem with anything else.

Human creativity knows no bounds. Any new technology will quickly attract populations to exploit it beyond its original purpose, whether they use it to sell things, to rob people blind, to perform new acts of vandalism, or simply to have fun. While facebook attracts its share of spammers, spivs and satirists, it's heartening to know that the wilder reaches of amazon.com have their own colony of creative writers squatting in Gourmet Food.

I was in two minds blogging about it - it's like a small microclimate one hesitates to disturb by sending tourists trampling over it. I've hardly begun to explore its wilder reaches myself yet, but I love the way people adapt creatively to hostile environments. A quick google reveals that I'm late to the party as usual: Boing Boing blogged about it nearly two years ago.