Lady Godiva and Me

Once more round "The Wanderer".

2012-01-18T20:12:00.000-08:00

Firstly, let’s get rid of the idea of the poem as an autobiography. Yes there is an I.

Oft ic sceolde āna ūhtna gehwylce
mīne ceare cwīþan. Nis nū cwicra nān
þe ic him mōdsefan mīnne durre
sweotule āsecgan.

But the speaker is a fictional construct: the “I” an empty space into which the performer of the poem steps. The Exeter book is a book to read from, placed on a lectern. The reader steps into the role, becomes the anhaga, who thus magically appears in the place where the performance occurs.

Imagine, urges this text, imagine a man in this situation. Speaking to you.

He has lost everything external that gives his life meaning: his kin, the bonds of fealty that tied him to his lord, the social and legal definitions and protection those afforded, the obligations which shaped his behaviour and gave him finite purpose; he has lost his country, he is adrift in a hostile world looking for context. He cannot even expect to land where his language is spoken and he may be given the chance to explain himself before they kill him.

Who is he?

Take away all those external markers of identification, those makers of social identity, and who is he?

And the poem says that you are all in this situation:, you, sitting there listening, safe in your assumption that the I speaking is not the I listening. Who are you?

What do you ground your answer in? A name (with its assumptions of family: x son of A or Y daughter of B?) A relationship? A history? The name of your village, your kingdom, your Lord? The accumulation of experience that passes as your biography? The world? Heroic actions? Acquisitions: fame, possessions, knowledge, the beauty of made things? The language you speak with its colouring of status and education and regional provenance?

Friends, lords, family, companions: they all die, says the poem. One the wolf took off, another the bird bore away, another was buried in a ditch by his kinsmen. It all rots, rusts fades, crumbles: Even the walls stand ruined, and soon it’s all gone.

And when it’s all gone...and then something odd happens. The poem wants to say; you will find meaning and context in god. That is the lesson and this is what it says. If you do not know God then your life is simply an exile lived in a hostile space. Search for him and find him and you will no longer be alone.

But lurking in the background is a different question. Not a “pagan” answer. (This is a Christian poem. Not a pagan poem topped and tailed with Christian sentiment to make it fit for the cloister, but a very obviously Christian poem.)

Ongietan sceal glēaw hæle hū gǣstlic bið,
þonne ealre þisse worulde wela wēste stondeð,
swā nū missenlīce geond þisne middangeard
winde biwāune weallas stondaþ,
hrīme bihrorene, hrȳðge þā ederas.

gǣstlic :a lot depends on how you translate that one word

The first clause could easily be translated :

A wise man knows how ghastly it is when all this world’s wealth stands waste.

Ghastly: in early use: causing terror in modern use: suggestive of the kind of horror evoked by the sight of death of carnage; horrible, frightful, shocking. (OED)

But you could also translate gǣstlic as ghostly, in the sense of “not of the body”. Peter Baker’s suggestion, by extension, is spiritual. But since I’m not doing an academic translation, how about: liberating.
A wise man knows how liberating it is to stand alone in front of the ruins of whatever he thought made him who he was.

The poem rephrases the question, cutting through the post modern waffle about identity as performative, as self as fractured an unknowable, as constructed by nationality or language and culture.

The last human on the planet, utterly alone, would still be an “I”.

So not what roles do you play, not what labels do you wear, but who or what is this irreducible, unique “I” who stands looking at the ruins?

Antidotes to sludge: Geoffrey Hill's Oxford Lectures.

2012-01-14T01:45:00.000-08:00

So as antidote to sludge, I recommend Geoffrey Hill’s lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry which are available here:

http://www.keble.ox.ac.uk/about/keble-podcasts/all-podcasts

It says something unpleasant about poetry world that some of the people in it can be so outraged by the fact that the man dares to have opinions that don’t match theirs. In a cultural field where “transgression” and “oppositional criticism” and “subversion” are catch cries of an unreflective orthodoxy, it’s just not acceptable to criticise.

And he has a sense of humor. Which is there in the poems.

His lectures, like his prose criticism, are not easy going. If you’re expecting a single argument driven logically through a series of supporting points, you’re going to be confused. Some years ago, we set out from Laytown to drive to the Hill of Tara. It took me far too long to realize that following the road signs was the least useful way of finding the place. But of all the journeys, that one sticks in my head.

Hill’s critical work reminds me of that journey: words are so untrustworthy they have to be forced and bent: the destination may be visible but the route to it is not always obvious. The work glitters with fascinating insight but the overall direction is not necessarily obvious.

And he has a sense of humor.

Whether you agree with him or not, the world of poems needs people like this who stand their ground and talk with passionate conviction and vast knowledge about poems: about their value, and about the value of approaching them as worthy of deep consideration without marching forth behind some trendy banner daubed with slogans.

There’s something obdurate there to push against. An argument worth sifting and considering. SOmething that might be worth disagreeing with.

This following quote comes from:
Geoffrey Hill's First Lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry
By Jeffrey Wainwright from PN Review 198, Volume 37 Number 4, February - March 2011.

His [Hill’s] message is that contemporary poetry is only ever what it is by virtue of its past and that its history cannot be elbowed aside by the self-important contemporary.

What will students new to the voice of their new professor have learned? First and foremost, aside from any of the arguments advanced, I believe that as Hill read they will have heard poetry's visceral power and in his analyses its immediate intellectual substance. They will have recognized that the 'English studies' they may be engaged upon is no light matter or pastime. Poetry, and by extension literature, has a 'technic' and a history to be absorbed, and through that unfinishable labour its passion and importance can be known and felt.

the evils of academic writing and the instantly forgettable poem Part 3

2012-01-13T16:57:00.000-08:00

The Evils of Academic writing.

Smith, H. (2005). The Writing Experiment: Strategies of Innovative Creative Writing. Crows Nest, Australia, Allen and Unwin.

So there is writing, which is not creative (we knew that though we might have worried about what “creative” means) but there is apparently “creative writing” which is not “innovative”. The book never explains “innovative” or "experimental” in terms of “to whom?”: For the individual doing something he or she hasn’t tried before, or the writer trying to do something that genuinely hasn’t been tried before. The fudging of that issue haunts the book.

The “How to write a poem” genre is massive: 1300 plus results on an Amazon search on “how to write a poem” in books alone. I’m not sure where I read it but I think books on “How to write poems” outsell books of poems.

There’s a subgenre of this which "The Writing Experiment” is an example. It window dresses word games with a coating of “literary theory”. They name check Saussure and Lacan and Freud or other randomly chosen names, and they are characterised by their own predictable buzz words:
transgressive, subversive, innovative, experimental, ideological, race, gender sexuality, theory.

I forgot "postmodern".

In these books Knowledge is not a buzz word. Skill, Understanding, Craft, Ability , Talent are not buzz words.

According to this book:

The main special qualities writers must have are perseverance, motivation, the willingness to search for methods which suit them, energy to push themselves out of their own comfort zones and avid reading habits. Failure to produce creative work is often due more to a lack of stamina or insufficient commitment to the process than a paucity of talent.

Which reminds me of the bad old days when I went to school and boys who failed to achieve acceptable results were caned because failure was simply a lack of effort on their part.

Why writing should be almost the only field of activity where you can tell someone, presumably with a straight face, that talent is not an issue is an interesting question. Whatever “IT” is, some people do “IT” better than others.

(Note to self: work at "commitment to the process" if you want to write better…stay up longer…Is a Briggflatts possible if you don’t sleep for six months?).

(Note to self 2: What could creative work mean in that previous quote and would it be "Innovative creative" work?)

Books like this, supposedly about writing, discuss “fundamental issues’ which tend to be defined as sexuality, ideology and ethnicity, roll out names of “literary theorists” and are characterised by an almost complete absence of any historical sense of poetry as a thing people have been producing and discussing, in a form of English accessible to a modern English speaker, for at least five centuries.

Whether this absence of an historical perspective is due to ignorance or is a deliberate strategic manouver to protect the flimsy nature of the writer’s assertions and make what they are promoting seems “innovative” when it isn’t; is a judgment call for the reader to make.

But the implied reader of this book is actually the problem because the implied or model reader is not capable of making that judgment.
On the one hand he or she has to be ignorant enough about poetry to accept:

“..many writers probably do not really know about their writing methods. Many writers probably do not really know how they arrive at their texts and mental events which occur during the creative process may be difficult to remember or describe.”

The vagueness of “many writers” is probably deliberate. Who they are, or why their ignorance is important, is not stated.

However, our model reader obviously doesn’t know about Shelley, or Emerson, or Keats’ letters, or Pound’s writing about poetry, or Eliot’s, or Graves’ or Auden’s or Davie's or Heaney’s or Hill’s or Atwood’s or Boland’s or Susan Howe's ( the list extends and is admittedly a bit random), or anyone of numerous manifestos from Sidney onward, and has not got even a nodding acquaintance with any decent twentieth century poet with a long career, many of whom were/are provocative critics, because if they did have that knowledge and acquaintance, which I would think is essential for anyone who wants to take writing poems seriously, our model reader would stop reading and ask: what about the “many writers” who have spent their lives thinking and arguing and writing about writing?

To be fair, if the target audience of this book are undergraduates on a creative writing program, or high school students, they probably don’t know any of this.

However this same gullibly ignorant reader is later told that:

experimental texts usually work against and beyond familiar literary codes and conventions. To write experimentally is to adopt a subversive and transgressive stance to the literary, and to break up generic and linguistic norms. This formal transgression is significant because it can be a means to rethink cultural mores; to shake up ideas about sexual identity race or class

So given the implied reader’s ignorance of the history of poetry and poetics, how is he or she going to know what “familiar literary codes and conventions’ or “generic and linguistic norms” are? Or be able to know what is or isn’t "Innovative"?

Which brings us back to that crucial question: who is using this “experimental” writing to rethink SI,R,C? Individual readers in the comfort of their own homes?c But if we’re talking about “writing” as a public activity then surely the next question is what ideas of sexual identity, race or class or “linguistic norms” have not been shaken, stirred and decanted over the past five hundred years.
And are books like this, and the approaches to poetry they promote, the reason why so much poetry is instantly forgettable?

The instantly forgettable poem #2

2012-01-11T19:49:00.000-08:00

Back in 1975 or 76 I memorized MacNeice’s Cradle song for Eleanor. It was in an anthology of poems we were abusing in class, along with Bagpipe Music and Prayer before Birth, and MacNeice was not one of the poets we were studying. (R.S. Thomas, Sir John Betjeman, and Robert Graves were also in the anthology and they weren’t on the syllabus either. An all boys school, we were DOING “War Poets”. )
Someone should write a thesis on the reasons why English teachers will keep on pushing those "War Poets".

Cradle Song was one of the first poems that cut through the classroom dullness and turned me towards poetry. Far too many years later I have a head full of poems and bits of poems, lines, phrases, images, from Robert Service and Rudyard Kipling to Bunting and William Carlos William, via Old English and God alone knows where else. But Cradle Song, like Kipling’s Three Part Song and Kavanagh’s Kerr’s Ass is special and it's still there.

I am not suggesting that “memorability” is the only test of a good poem. That would be silly. Learning Briggflatts would be a party piece and nothing else, trying to learn the better cantos would just be silly.

I’m not even sure that memorability, in itself, is any sign of excellence. About the same time I learnt Cradle Song I learnt:
Cohen’s
I never knew/ until you walked away/ you had the perfect arse/forgive me/ for not falling in love/with your face or your conversation. (I didn’t learn where the line breaks are.)

The old Cadbury Drinking Chocolate ad’ which consisted entirely of:
‘Hot chocolate drinking chocolate, hot chocolate, drinking chocolate”

And a song with the irritating chorus “Coeey chirpy chirpy cheap cheap” and lyrics that began:
Where’s your mama gone
Little Baby now
Where’s your mama gone

And I’m not advancing any claims for any of these as poetry. In fact I would give a fair bit to have two of them surgically removed from my memory. (The Cadbury’s ad can stay.)

However,

What intrigues is how much of the poetry I read and have read is instantly forgettable. It is published which should mean something, politically correct, technically excellent, approved, lauded, prize winning, beblurbed to the heavens, but instantly and utterly forgettable. Sometimes even before I've finished the poem itself.

There are whole collections of poems I have bought, read and remember nothing about.

In one case all I remember is the cover of the book: I don’t even remember its title.

So what is the point of all this instantly forgettable poetry? Why is there so much of it? What purpose does it serve? Why do people write it and publish it? Does anyone read it? Why do I keep buying it?
Answers on a postcard please……

The forgettable poem #1

2012-01-11T19:44:00.000-08:00

Is an interesting phenomena.
But first a different, less explicable type of forgetting.

Having spent twelve months reading poetry I have to read, I’ve been having a holiday and reading Louise MacNeice’s “Collected Poems.”

In his introduction to the Faber poets on poets edition Michael Longley claims MacNeice wrote some of the finest love poems in the language. For what it’s worth, I agree with him. I’m not convinced by ‘Mayfly’ (one of Longley’s candidates) , but I’d back him on ‘Cradle song’, ‘Meeting point’ and ‘The introduction’.

MacNeice tends to be forgotten. The Thirties are Auden, Or young Dylan Thomas. “Modernism” is on its way to being an established ism and perhaps a university subject. In “The Sinking Island” Hugh Kenner, blasting the thirties as “A dishonest decade”, is too busy assaulting Auden to even mention MacNeice. In the companion volume, “A Colder Eye: the modern Irish writers’ Austin Clarke gets five or six pages. MacNeice, as far as I can tell, doesn’t even make the footnotes.
Why someone this good is so forgotten is an interesting question.

His poems sing. The line is essentially melodic, whether the poem is a short “lyric” like “The Introduction”, or an extended demonstration of Terza Rima like the second “Autumn Journal”. There’s enough technical virtuosity to keep anyone happy. There’s an obvious intelligence working behind the line so that it’s not just a vacuous melody. The poems move in a reconisable urban landscape where most people live, have friends, jobs, go on holiday, fall in and out of love.

Not a critic’s poet, certainly. But a reader’s poet? Surely?

If you can be this good, and mostly forgotten, what does that say about the field of cultural production that is poetry? How can anyone keep a straight face and argue that quality will win through?

Teaching

2011-12-18T16:02:00.000-08:00

I do not teach truth as such; I do not transform myself in a diaphanous mouthpiece of eternal pedagogy: I settle accounts , however I can, on a certain number of problems; with you and with me or me, and through you, me and me, with a certain number of authorities represented here. I understand that the place I am now occupying will not be left out of the exhibit or withdrawn form the scene. Nor do I intend to withhold even that which I shall call, to save time, an autobiographical demonstration, although I must ask you to shift its sense a little and to listen to it with another ear. I wish to take a certain pleasure in this, so that you may learn this pleasure from me.
Derrida

Attitudes to poetry part three: The Prime Minister's award for poetry

2011-12-03T01:11:00.000-08:00

This from Australian Poetry:

The annual Prime Minister's Literary Awards will now include a poetry category. Collections of poems first published in book form between 1 January 2011 and 31 December 2011 are eligible for entry. The winning entry will receive $80 000 tax-free and the shortlisted entries will receive $5000 tax-free. This major award is a great step forward in recognising and promoting poetry's contribution to Australia’s literary landscape.

So firstly, honestly, without irony, best of luck to whoever wins it.

But I think it's obscene.

Many (most?) working Australians don't earn 80,000 after tax. And don't start on about "Writing is work and should be paid". That sum bears no relation to sales of poetry books in Australia. It's unlikely that any poet is going to earn that in royalties from one book in a year. (Most won't see that in a life time). The government might as well give a lottery ticket to every poet who publishes a book. (And given the way literary prizes are handed out, it'd be more fair as a comment on the quality of the book.)

WIll it encourage more people to read or buy more poetry books? No. WIll it help struggling independent publishers keep their heads above water? No. (They could split the prize. three quarters to the publisher on the condition they use it to publish new books and the rest to the poet.) WIll it help provide new paying markets for poets? No.

it will give someone the right to put a sticker on a book.

Apparently what it will do is allow Australian Poetry to continue to keep making bizarre statements like: This major award is a great step forward in recognising and promoting poetry's contribution to Australia’s literary landscape..

How does it do that by throwing an obscene amount of money at a single book? It only highlights the fact that in the Australian literary landscape no poet can make this kind of money?

The truth about writing

2011-11-05T18:00:00.000-07:00

...and always the cutting out and the buggering about and the buggering about and the rewriting and so on...

Basil Bunting

what I learnt etc part three

2011-11-01T16:04:00.000-07:00

Flying Crooked

The butterfly, the cabbage white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has — who knows so well as I? —
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.

(Robert graves)

what I learnt as a writer in residence part two

2011-10-26T03:41:00.000-07:00

We talk about poetry in ways that are not only different to other arts, but which are detrimental to poems. I’ve never heard anyone say “Music sucks.” Or “Music is sooooo boring” or “I don’t like Music.’

I’ve heard people say “Folk music sucks” or “Wagner is boring” or “I love Bing Crosby and not Frank Sinatra”. But people talk about “Poetry” as if it were a homogenous thing: “I hate poetry”, ”Poetry is soooo boring/difficult/incomprehensible”.

We have a “peak industry body for “Poetry” in Australia.

And inside the academic discourse, teachers talk about “the power of poetry”. Poetry does this or that.

But it doesn’t.

If there is any “power” in poetry lies in the way individual poems mean something to readers. “Poetry” is a meaningless abstraction which cures warts, stops wars or infects readers with unwanted ideological viruses. And which doesn’t exist in the real world.

Oh, I also learnt I can still talk the hind legs off a donkey.

Steve said: "Bert Jansch Is dead".

2011-10-22T03:12:00.000-07:00

We were tuning up, and I said, don't be stupid, that's not remotely funny....

But he is.

Dead.

So I never met the man but I've been listening to him since I found "Rosemary Lane" in the city record library in 75 or 76. And I haven't been able to think of anything to say. Then I remembered Hopkins:

Glory be to God for dappled things
For All things counter, original, spare, strange;

and that about sums it up really. So thank you Mr. Jansch. And safe travelin'

Bit late but it needed saying all the same.
Thank you.

What I learnt as a writer in residence part one

2011-10-18T03:32:00.000-07:00

I was standing in a classroom, looking at the unfamiliar faces.
Nothing new there, I’ve been doing this for twenty five years. I know the drill. I know I’ll get out of here alive. I’m a total stranger, so there’s enough curiosity and generous courtesy to get me through the first five minutes. That’s all I need. I know that I’ve got a better than good chance of making the next eighty minutes work. The deviants up the back will have something to laugh at, the brightest in the class will have something to think about and I’ll pitch it in a way that keeps them all interested and entertained and informed.
I’m going to speak to five classes, and I know that if this school is like every other one on the planet I can guarantee that by the time I get to class number three I wilI have already have a vague reputation to live up to and I can use that to bank on.
I feel sick, but there’s nothing new there either: fear is a performance enhancing drug and I feel like throwing up everytime I walk into a class room, no matter how sure I am of the class or the material.
So what’s weird is that I’m not here as the expert English teacher, or the curriculum expert, I’m not even here as someone who knows a great deal about the history of poetry: I’m here as someone who writes poems and reads them. And I’m here to talk about poetry from that perspective to a group of kids who are five or six weeks away from the end of school and that means that statistically in the five classes I speak to there will be only one or two students who will ever buy a poetry book. The others might for a wedding or a funeral, but poetry is something they do at school and as far as they are concerned the sooner they can get away from both the better.
I don’t blame my profession. English teachers do what they do because it’s what they have to do. The people who write syllabi might not know their arse from their elbow but they have the power to impose their ignorance on all of us.
English teachers are not there to make poets, make students love poetry or train fledging literary critics.
But ……
I’m standing in a space that is utterly antithetical to everything I’m about to say…

What is a poem?

2011-09-03T17:20:00.000-07:00

‘Poetry is a verdict not an occupation’ or in the words of Pierre Bourdieu (1993. P.35): ‘The work of art is an object which exists as such only by virtue of the (collective) belief which knows and acknowledges it as a work of art’.

This is true of all arts, but poetry is unusual in that in the 21st century, not only does the writer have to negotiate critical judgements imposed by others who may not share his or her poetics, but writing a poem does not necessarily allow him or her to claim the title of Poet, and writing a poem does not necessarily mean he or she is producing Poetry.

The writing is nothing more than raw material, an offering to be ignored or taken up by the machinery of legitimization, whose patronage is based on numerous factors, none of them the value of the writing because it has no intrinsic value to anyone other than its writer, neither commercial nor cultural, outside the process.

It is simply scribble until it has been recognized by those with the authority to recognize it as a poem and then transformed into ‘poetry’ by the process of publication, review, critical reception, academic commentary and consecration: the process of institutionalization that characterizes the discourse of Poetry.

The value of the writing depends entirely on its acceptance into this discourse, and the fact that it is recognized or accepted first as a poem and then treated accordingly. The limitations of its stand alone value are easily seen from the reader or critic’s perspective in Fish’s ‘How to Recognize a poem when you see one’ (Fish 1980), and Richards’ discussion of his “Protocols” (Richards 1929). From the writer’s perspective in the often incomprehensible process where a poem, rejected by one journal is published by another and in the practice of some editors who accept the submission and then feel free to change the words on the page before publication without consulting the writer or even as a condition of publication.

The field exerts its own gravitational force, bending the trajectory of self-editing towards a finished product that will be more likely to have a chance of being accepted. The writer is constantly being told to study the market, read the journal before submitting etc. But even then there is no guarantee; most writers have looked at journals that have rejected their work and wondered why the pieces in the journal were accepted. However, as a writer there is little one can do about this process except accept it as a fact of life or become an editor or publisher.

"Words Alone: Yeats and His Inheritances" by R.F.Foster.

2011-08-15T03:12:00.000-07:00

I think one could fairly describe R.F. Foster's output as prodigious. The amount of reading that must have gone into his two volume biography of Yeats alone is almost frightening to contemplate. He somehow managed not to be buried by the details and he is consistently enjoyable to read. Neither of which can be said for Gordon Bowker's new biography of Joyce.

Two examples from Foster's new book: "Words Alone".

The first nails The Boys Own quality of Dracula while simultaneously taking to task some of the more outrageous readings of the book:

In many ways Dracula reads more like John Buchan on mescaline than anything Irish. Its primary identity is as English (or British) shocker rather than Anglo-Irish meditation-however wittily the count and his earth boxes may be interpreted as a metaphor for declining Irish landlords. 105

We could argue whether Uncle Silas is Le Fanu's "masterpiece". Foster's topic in chapter three, "Lost in the Big House: Anglo-Irishry and the Uses of the Supernatural" predisposes him towards the novel as it is always going to be more useful to his analysis than "In a glass darkly". But I like this:

Thus the Styrian lesbian Vampire Carmilla allegedly turns into an 'autochthonous manifestation of the female nation, reaching out from portraits and ruined castles to fascinate and destroy the expatriate English, confined, as Laura is in the novella by a sterile world of patriarchal rationality where no young men are permitted because no continuation is possible.' Perhaps the connection between nation and narration can be taken a step too far.

The reproof is in the juxtaposition of controlled syntax with what precedes it more than in the diplomatically phrased comment.

The Australian National Poetry symposium: Free advice on how to be a poetry evangelist.

2011-08-04T18:37:00.000-07:00

How to be a poetry evangelist, or an evangelist for Poetry

General Rules
1) Discuss Poetry, or Contemporary poetry: an idealized abstraction which is never the sum of all the poems ever written. Personify it, use a single verb and talk as though it had needs and desires.
2) Make extravagant claims for “Poets”: idealized characters who are never people who produce poems.
3) In both one and two follow the strategy instigated by Sir Phillip Sidney, and followed by Shelley, Emerson, Eliot, Pound, Gioia, et al: do not discuss specific examples. Do not attempt to support your claims for #1 with reference to actual poems or to #2 with the life/career/reality of any poet.
4) Above all know that millions of people aren’t listening, and anyone who bothers to probably believes whatever you’re going to say before you say it so relax and don’t worry about how daft most of what you say really is.
5) It helps if:
You either don’t know much about the history of poems, or you prefer the repetition of myths. Good myths for Poetry evangelists include:
a) Somewhere in the past Poetry had cultural, moral and political significance. If you are Polish, Russian or Irish this may not be such a myth but for the rest of the English-speaking world it helps if you just pretend it’s true.
b) Somewhere in an ill-defined past everyone read poetry and cared about it. (Be vague. The repetition of this myth even by people who should know better has almost turned it into a fact so it’s unlikely anyone will call you out on it).
c) Poetry is important. Vital. Crucial.
d) Poetry is important because it sustains the health or purity of a language. Without Poetry and Poets a language will decay and we all know what that will lead to!

In General:
1) You should avoid not only history but also linguistics, philosophy most modern literary theories and plain common sense.
2) You should lament the small size of poetry’s modern audience (make reference to 5b above), but as a good Poetry evangelist you should always suggest that that people who don’t read poetry are somehow in need of the salvation only Poetry can bring.
3) Make silly claims for poets. (Take Shelley’s Defense as your model. Study his final paragraph. Read Emerson). But keep main rule number two above in mind at all times. Never stop to consider why craftsmanship in arranging vowels and consonants makes anyone an expert in anything other than arranging vowels and consonants.
4) At some stage you should contribute to the debate about how best to turn kids on to poetry so “we” can save civilization as you know it. This allows you to make disparaging references to schools and over-worked English teachers. Any solution you offer should be as idealized and impractical as possible: this guarantees that trained professional educators will dismiss your suggestions as wildly impractical, which then allows you to denigrate them as “lacking vision” and confirm your feelings of superiority without ever having to take the risk of doing anything practical.
5) Use familiar terms vaguely. Blame “modernism” for Contemporary Poetry’s apparent lack of popularity. Be as rude as you like about academic criticism. Talk glowingly about a “truly popular poetry”.
6) Pretend that Poetry is something everyone should enjoy.
7) Never be embarrassed by either the silliness of your claims or the arrogance they imply.
Above all, keep in mind Peacock’s statement: continue to talk as though poetry is the be all and end all of intellectual life as it was in Homer’s time. Do not stop to consider that Peacock’s full statement frames this as a criticism. (Most editors seem to think Peacock was joking. Read him as if he were being serious. Use him as a good example of how not to be a poetry evangelist.)
And finally, do not, under any circumstance start from a realistic appraisal of the contemporary situation of poems as competing in a cluttered market where so much of what people used to use poems for has been taken over by other, more effective forms.
It’s easier if you stick with wishful thinking, historical amnesia and bad linguistics. Your audience, no matter how small, is sure to applaud.

This advice created after reading:
Sir Phillip Sidney’s 'An Apology for Poetry/The Defence of Poetry', Peacock’s 'Four Ages of poetry', Shelley’s 'Defence of Poetry', Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘The Poet’, Ezra Pound’s 'ABC of Reading', T.S Eliot’s ‘The Social function of Poetry’, Dana Gioia’s ‘Can Poetry Matter’, Les Murray’s 'Blocks and Tackles', Paul Dawson’s 'Creative Writing And The New Humanities' essays in 'The Politics Of Poetic Form' edited by Charles Bernstein and the Australian Poetry web site.

Bunting, Persian, and Davis' 'Shahnameh'.

2011-08-02T03:48:00.000-07:00

I’m reading Dick Davis’ translation of the Shahnameh. Partly because it is the subject of one of my favorite Bunting stories, partly to find out what impressed him so much about Ferdowsi, the author.

And it rolls. I had meant to dip into it and just read about Iraj and his death, the subject of one of Bunting’s poems. and then leave it for a later time when there weren’t piles of ‘things’ that have to be read.

The pile can wait. I haven’t had this much fun since I first read Malory in Vinaver’s edition of the Winchester Mss.

In “Descant on Rawthey’s Madrigal” Bunting relates how he was looking for second hand books along the quay at Genoa where he had previously found the Italian source for his poem “Chomei at Toyama” :

“I found a book-tattered, incomplete-with a newspaper cover on it marked ‘Oriental tales”. I bought it, in French. It turned out to be part of the early 19th century prose translation of Firdausi and it was absolutely fascinating. I got into the middle of the story of the education of Zal and the birth of Rustam-and the story came to an end. It was quite impossible to leave it there, I was desperate to know what happened next. I read it, as far it went, to Pound and to Dorothy Pound, and they were in the same condition. We were yearning to find out, but we could think of no other way. The title page was missing. There seemed to be nothing to do but learn Persian and read Firdausi, so, I undertook that. Pound bought me the three volumes of Vullers and somebody, I forgot who, bought me Steinglass’s dictionary, and I set to work.”

It's British understatement at its best. "There seemed to be nothing to do but learn Persian..." As though it were just a matter of making up one's mind and getting on with it with a minimum of fuss.

There’s a coda to the story. Bunting’s Persian translations didn’t impress Pound, and he doesn’t say if they read the end of the story of Rustam together. But his classical Persian took him to Persia. During the second world war he applied for a posting there:

“I didn’t hear a word of it spoken until I arrived in Persia and was called upon to interpret for a court martial. You can imagine how difficult that was. I hope they put the right man in Jail. Very fortunately it wasn’t one of those case [sic] where it would require shooting or hanging.”

Yeats, Pound and Bram Stoker (!)

2011-07-31T02:58:00.001-07:00

According to Roy Foster's life of Yeats, in the winter of 1915 WBY and Pound were at Stone Cottage reading, amongst other things, Dracula.

it's in a list containing Norse sagas and Doughty's 'Arabia Deserta'. Yeats I understand..Stoker came from Dublin, was significant in the london theatre..and there's Le Fanu, the occult, folklore.

But Pound?

What did he think of it?

Geoffrey Hill, 'Clavics' (part four).

2011-07-26T15:22:00.000-07:00

Peter at Enitharmon Press, the publishers of Clavics, drew my attention to this:

http://www.enitharmon.co.uk/pages/store/products/ec_view.asp?PID=434

He wrote:

"As you will be able to see on the Enitharmon website, I've tried my best to write a proper blurb for Clavics, but it wasn't done in time to go on the back of the book. And I can say it's pretty scary to try and nail his recent work. Only by nailing my colours to the mast have I been able to say something which avoids being completely bland, and I've no doubt that many people will take pretty major issue with it." (See his comment on "Geoffrey Hill, Clavics, (part one)" for the full quote.)

But if you go and see what he wrote, I think he's done a fine job. It contains statements like:

"Clavics is a celebration of seventeenth-century music and poetry, yet is confrontational and sometimes shockingly modern. From one line to the next you may be pulled out of a potently evoked moment of history, thrust up against the wall of sexual politics and strained meaning in contemporary language, and then dropped back onto a battlefield."

Which gives you some idea of what to expect

And

"Geoffrey Hill’s work is at the centre of a debate about how poetry should develop to find its place in contemporary society. Should it embrace the superficial potency of much of modern culture or turn back in upon itself with ever more complex layers of meaning? Should poetry attempt to gain a broader audience and engage ‘the market’ or consolidate its role as an increasingly obscure bastion of the intellect? Since his election to the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry, Geoffrey Hill has not shied away from these questions in his addresses. Now in his first book since he took his place amongst the highest of poetry academics, he has provided his provocative answer."

Which puts the book in a context to suggest its larger significance. It also means someone who's never heard of Hill would know why they might find the book interesting, have some idea of what to expect and be alerted to the fact the man's work is seen as contentious.

(And I thought the copy of Clavics I had was a fine looking book, but I see there is a hand bound and slip cased edition. Books as beautiful objects containing beautiful things.)

The First English Dictionary of Slang, 1699

2011-07-09T03:21:00.000-07:00

In 1699, what would you do if someone offered you “A Willing-Tit”?

The Bodleian Library, which previously published Cawdrey’s “First English Dictionary,” has now published an equally welcome edition of “The First English Dictionary of Slang, 1699” with an introduction by John Simpson.

It’s a great read, though not as sleazy as the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, and while claiming to offer explanations of Cant, it also includes phrases and other terms, some of which seem out of place.

For example: “Batter”: “The ingredients for a pudding or pancake, when they are all mixed and stirred together”. The OED gives examples of this from the fifteenth century. But Batter as a verb meant to beat against or bombard, and to call the stuff you beat “a batter” is an extension of meaning equal to Nooz’d: for “married”. The impression of words as static, solid objects independent of usage is a fantasy conveyed by dictionaries. Historical Slang dictionaries dispel the illusion. Not only do you get to see “standard usage” emerging from slang: “To box” is explained as “to fight with the fists” and “Bitter-Cold” is given what now seems an obvious explanation. The difference between “slang” and “standard usage” is one of convention.

The surreal effect of the dictionary is to create a context where the plainest of definitions start to seem suspect. “Rangle; when gravel is given to a Hawk, to bring her to Stomack”. Suddenly the nouns seem to be trying to hide. A hawk? It can’t be the bird? Rangle must have a hidden meaning that only an initiate, fully cognizant of the secret meanings of Gravel and Hawk can unravel. Which is off putting at first and then fun once you give in to it. (The OED explains Rangle; the gravel given to hawks to aid their digestion”). Meaning recedes down an endless chain of lexical paranoia?

If puns are the adulterers of semantics, then slang is often seen as the refuge for the demented escapees of the dictionary’s straight jacket, proof that Un Petit D’un Petit was right and you can make words mean what you want them to mean if you pay them enough. Proof too of the linguistic inventiveness of human beings and perhaps a counter argument to the idea that we are passive victims of the language we enter.

But Cant or Peddler’s French thought to be the secret language of initiate thieves, beggars, tramps and prostitutes, collectively called the canting crew. To modern ears, or mine at least, it has an odd mixture of menace, humour and daftness which I have been plundering for purposes of the current project.

Acoustically phrase and sense don’t always tally. It’s not just lexical meaning that changes but the feel of the shape and sound of the words. Something that may have once sounded downright nasty might sound silly to modern ears.
Darkman’s is the night, and the sinister Darkman’s Budge is a house creeper. That sounds rightly ominous.

The highest title in the twenty-five orders of rogues was a “Ruffler”, one step above an “Upright Man” who has a right to “Dells”. This just sounds suitably opaque to anyone who doesn’t know.

At times the words seem to have been deliberately forced in the wrong direction. “Well, you’re a dim-mort” sounds like an insult but is actually a compliment since a dim mort is a “pretty wench”.

But while I suspect the rogues and thieves of the 17th century would have been a scary bunch, the top man in the Canting Crew was called “The Dimber-Damber”.

“Right you, the Olli-Compoli says we’re taking you to the Dimber-Damber” just doesn’t sound like scary 17th Century Criminal talk. It sounds like something Sir Derek Jacoby would say during a visit to Makka Pakka and the Tombli boos in The Night Garden.

And a “Willing-Tit’? “A little horse, that travels cheerfully”. (and quickly to the OED in case “ a willing horse” means something other than a four legged animal.)

An ideal reader?

2011-06-27T01:24:00.000-07:00

I would go fifty miles on foot, for I have no horse worth riding on, to kiss the hand of that man whose generous heart will give up the reins of the imagination into his author's hands-be pleased he knows not why, and cares not wherefore.
Tristram Shandy or Laurence Sterne or maybe both of them.

The truth about literary studies?

2011-06-22T00:30:00.000-07:00

One of the main items of business would appear to be A's objections to B's critique of C's hypothesis about what might happen if D's methodology were applied to E's analysis of F's theory of interpretation, this being the "current state of the question". Some of the participants could no doubt be found talking about poems and novels in familiar way but mostly after hours, in quiet corners, with a slightly furtive air.
John Harwood, Eliot to Derrida p18

Geoffrey Hill, 'Clavics' (part three).

2011-06-08T16:10:00.000-07:00

I'd forgotten the quote. I thought it was speak then of me...

Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear
your favours not your hate.

Still,it seems appropriate.

it's a bold stance. It seems guaranteed to win more critics than admirers.

Look what happened to the guy who said it.

Geoffrey Hill, 'Clavics' (part two).

2011-06-08T03:03:00.000-07:00

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/clavics-by-geoffrey-hill-2292235.html
The review was titled Clavics by Geoffrey Hill: discords and distractions. Written by Lachlan Mackinnon (June 3rd 2011).
I hadn’t read it when I wrote the last post.

It ends:

This book, all as easy on ear and mind as its opening, is really the sheerest twaddle. Hill has the courtesy to tell us at the outset that if "Distressed attire", his uneven style, "Be mere affect of clef", showing off in a strange key (I paraphrase), we should "Dump my clavic books in the mire/ And yes bid me strut myself off a cliff." The archly modified cliché feels stilted and invites our accord. Writing this bad cannot earn the kind of attention Hill demands; he is wasting his time and trying to waste ours.

It sounds more like a bad tempered report card from the days when teachers were allowed to vent their spleen about an annoying pupil than a considered review.

Joyce said that all he required from a reader was a lifetime’s attention. Hill’s poetry demands the same. It’s not easy, not comforting, you can’t sit there and smugly tick off all the familiar tricks of the published poet knowing you’re supposed to applaud and feel good about your ability to identify.

There is the feeling of a glowering moral and ultimately religious intelligence at work, helped along by a succession of almost comically dour author photographs, which I suspect some readers and critics find off putting because moral and religious seriousness is supposed to have vanished with post-modernism into the world of mindless religious fanaticism of whatever kind you don’t like.

So Hill is awkward.

But why shouldn’t a man have a conscience and a religious faith and why shouldn’t he use poetry to explore it. Especially when it’s a man who doesn’t trust the surface of words and explores what it means to speak that faith using them? I don’t share his faith, I'm fairly certain I'm immoral by his standards, I'm absolutely certain he'd find what I write pitiful, but that doesn’t mean I can’t give him space to speak his faith, or engage with the questions he raises. Or enjoy the way he does it.

His refusal to engage in what he once called “the frustrated mating dance” of autobiographical confession also means there’s none of that comfortable consoling, ah yes, he’s silly, just like us, nonsense.

I would put him in the same bracket as Joyce because comparing either to another writer is pointless. They do what they do. Comparing Hill to Yeats or Eliot or Milton or Pound or anyone else diminishes him and them. Like them, there’s a substantial body of work that is worth returning to. There is, like any body of work, parts that feel lesser than the rest. Trying to discuss what works and what doesn’t is probably the highest attention a reader can pay a writer.

But unthinking reverence is just as bad as automatic denigration. Once the conversation gets polarized the work gets lost.

I am not reverent, but speaking as a reader, I’d rather read a poet like Hill being ambitious and perhaps failing once in a while, than someone trotting out the usual safe “poems’ which blur into one another and are easily forgotten. An artist without ambition, or making a big thing of not trying too hard, makes me nervous. Why “pretentious’ came to be regarded as such a damning slur is an interesting question.

As a reader, I’d also argue that some poets are worthy of constant renewed attention because the work they have done feels, for all its familiarity, always slightly beyond of my reach.

There are those who don’t like this feeling.
Says more about their egos than the poems.

Blurb wars; Geoffrey Hill, 'Clavics'.(part one)

2011-05-30T05:10:00.000-07:00

For reasons unknown I own a copy of every book of poems Geoffrey Hill has published since the Penguin collected of 1985. Which I also have.

(Reasons unknown is not a cliché but a good catholic confession of guilt. I own a copy of every studio album and solo live album Bert Jansch has made (over twenty hours worth if my computer is to be believed) and if you have a bottle of Bushmills handy and a few spare hours I will bore you silly by explaining exactly why I admire the man and his music. I’m not sure I could do that with Hill’s poetry and no, for the record, I don’t like 'Mercian Hymns'.)

Still, this is about blurbs.

Clavics, his new book, has six quotes by way of Blurb.

There are quotes from A.N.Wilson, Peter McDonald, Eric Orsmby and Michael Dirda on the inside of the dust jacket and quotes from Peter Levi and William Logan given pride of place on the back. All six tell the reader how great Geoffrey Hill is. Peter McDonald is quoted as saying: ”The most important and original body of poetry since Yeats”. Michael Dirda simply states: ”Geoffrey Hill is the greatest living English poet”.

Not one quote or comment is about the poems in Clavics itself. This has been a characteristic of Hill’s books (at least of the editions I own) since The Orchards of Syon in 2002. Apparently his publishers think it is enough to state that Geoffrey Hill is great and His work important. I’m not denying either.

But of the six quotes on the back of Clavics only one, by Michael Dirda, doesn’t turn up on another book of Hill’s in my possession. The Wilson, McDonald and Ormsby can each be found on three of the last four books. The Logan quote was first used way back in 1998 on The Triumph of Love. The Peter Levi in Canaan in 1996.

Without Title (2006) raised the recycling to a new level. A different quote is attributed to Peter McDonald. Ormsby’s quote appears again. The other quotes are referenced not to individual writers but to publications. One of them had been used before on Hill's previous book and another;”The most important and original body of poetry since Yeats” is actually by Mr. P McDonald who is thus quoted twice on the same book cover.

Now, I would hazard the opinion that those last four books; Clavics, A Treatise of Civil Power, Without Title and Scenes from Comus) reflect a falling off in the power of the poetry found in the magical sequence of four books that began with Canaan and ran through to The Orchards of Syon. It may be indicative that Orchards of Syon is the last book of Hill’s that I have which has a comment from a critic about the poems in the book. (It’s from George Steiner who offers a useful way of thinking about what is not an easy poem to come to terms with.) And I think it’s reflected in the fact that none of the blurbs of these recent books have anything to say about the content of them. They simply keep telling the potential reader these same people think he’s really good and his work is really important.

But

After The Orchards of Syon did the actual content of the books become irrelevant? Was there nothing new to say about the poems? No one new to say it? Were the pomes somehow beyond scrutiny? Are lines like ”meritocrats are crap meteorites” and “No intercept from zero frisky dawn” clues from a cryptic cross word or lines from “The Greatest Living English Poet” writing in Clavics? Could you even imagine Yeats writing something like that?

Does it matter that Clavics is said to be an “Elegy for the musician William Lawes”? when I deny that anyone given the book without that information could ever work it out? (And I do know who William Lawes was and I even have some of his music…). Does it matter that Clavics is metrically very clever in an obvious way which may well nod towards George Herbert, if it produces lines like the above?

Or can a poet reach a point of eminence where what they write is no longer important because there are enough people ready to find value in whatever they write?

?

The uses of poetry: David Whyte: Preservation of the Soul (excerpt)

2011-05-27T18:52:00.000-07:00

David Whyte

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO0OjtThqyI&feature=related

Never Explain-your reader is as smart as you are

2011-05-26T18:17:00.000-07:00

Bunting again. Good advice, although one might observe, perhaps unfairly, that if your small circle of readers are called Louis Zukofsky, Ezra Pound, and W.B Yeats and later Hugh Kenner, Daniel Jones and Hugh McDairmid, it would be easier to believe this.

How many critics and editors believe the corollary; that the writer is at least as smart as they are? When Hugh Kenner first encountered Pound's poetry, he knew something worthwhile was happening but his highly developed critical skills didn't allow him to "appreciate" it. He didn't chuck Pound's poems in the bin and dismiss them: he accepted the challenge and revised his critical skills until they allowed him to deal with what was strange and new.

Unless the critic, the reviewer, the reader, are willing to do that, any talk of "originality", is meaningless.

I like that said Offa, sing it again.

2011-05-19T03:16:00.000-07:00

The poet as makar. Not as sage or seer, or recorder of the human condition or shaper of texts suitable for the educational system, or cultural analyst or popular entertainer, or even as spy. These, and many other activities are all valid but peripheral.

The poet as someone who makes or composes poems. Poems as constructions , as patterns of words which when heard (or in our culture, predominantly read, but nevertheless finally heard in what might be called ‘the Inner ear’) give us the experience of something we label as poetry. And which other sorts of verbal expression do not.

Gael Turnbull, 'The Poet as Makar' from The Star you Steer By.

The evils of academic writing: AMITAVA KUMAR: DENIS DUTTON IS DEAD http://www.bookslut.com/denis_dutton_is_dead/2011_05_017627.php

2011-05-14T02:28:00.000-07:00

AMITAVA KUMAR: DENIS DUTTON IS DEAD
http://www.bookslut.com/denis_dutton_is_dead/2011_05_017627.php
Subtitled “Theory vs. Academic writing”

A blog entry about good and bad writing. It begins by making the usual criticisms of writing from the field of literary criticism. It quotes some good examples of bad writing. But jargon is not the only academic sin. Every discipline has its own vocabulary. The idea that writers operating in say, Narrative theory, writing for their peers, should make immediate sense to casual readers unfamiliar with the discourse and lexicon of the field is baffling. The relevant question is not; “Is the passage difficult to understand?” but “Does it make sense to the intended audience?”

There are I think worse sins. And it’s interesting that in a discussion of good and bad writing so many of these sins are treated with approval.

There’s a good example in this piece. This paragraph is taken from a long quotation so it's not by the writer of the blogg:

Now the best academic writing knows what many different disciplines converged on around the beginning of the 20th century: the observer is an inseparable part of the system under observation. The yardstick and its wielder are part of the measurement; the speaker and what can be spoken are reciprocally joined. Great academic stylists embrace that fact, and they use it to turn the prison house of language into something more like a beachside cottage. They know that any rich attempt to represent the world “out there” participates in those same world processes, and their style reflects that rich reflexivity. Without forgoing their search for external or even objective facts, these writers foreground their own voice and the ways that their words strive to take the curse of inescapable linguistic mediation and make a blessing of it. As Bakhtin so beautifully puts it: Every act of depicting is itself a depiction. What we say speaks us, and we are part of the truths we can formulate.

Where to start? There is so much wrong with this elegant paragraph. “We are part of the truths we can formulate”. Does that mean anything more than we believe what we think is the truth? Does it mean that all “truths” are automatically equally invalid, or suspect?

Now the best academic writing knows what many different disciplines converged on around the beginning of the 20th century: the observer is an inseparable part of the system under observation.

There are three things happening here. A dogmatic value judgment “the best academic writing”, which blandly asserts what then becomes the defining quality of “the best”. The unnecessary personification which denies the human agency of writers, making conscious choices. And finally the casual assertion which avoids any kind of qualification “part of the system under observation”. All systems? With equal consequences?

This was the defining discovery of Quantum physics at the beginning of the twentieth century: measurement and observation affect the behavior of the sub atomic particles being observed and measured and therefore the measurement of a particular photon is unrepeatable Socio-linguistics and European Anthropologists realised much the same: enter the village to observe, interview the speaker, and you will affect their behaviors and speech. But the quantum rule doesn’t apply to macroscopic objects and academic disciplines like the latter two developed strategies to deal with the problem.

It is obviously not true of all systems. There are numerous things one can measure and observe without affecting the thing observed and being measured.

When academics in the field of literature went cherry picking in other disciplines to offset the fear of their own irrelevance and lack of “scientific rigor” they often failed to observe the qualifications, methodologies and contextual limitations of the disciplines they raided. Bad linguistics, bad history and sloppy philosophy suddenly became acceptable parts of literary discourse and the fact the historian, linguist and philosopher might object became irrelevant.

But a poem isn’t changed by the act of reading. Counting the words on the page doesn’t change them. I can read the book and pass it on to another reader and unless I vandalize the page the words remain the same. Being human, I may disagree with another reader over value and meaning, but that doesn’t change the words. Years ago Stanley Fish was claiming that because different critics disagreed about a poem’s meaning and used the same evidence to support their reading: there was something fundamentally flawed with literary criticism. But as his critics pointed out, what he willfully ignored was that readings of the same poem can be compared, because the words on the page don’t change and part of the task of criticism is to establish the criteria by which those different readings can be assessed. (Donald Davie picking Micheal Schmidt for thinking the Bull in Briggflatts is called ‘Rawthey’ is a small but interesting example that answers the question "can you misread a poem?")

The yardstick and its wielder are part of the measurement; the speaker and what can be spoken are reciprocally joined.

The beautifully balanced phrase uses the semi colon to conflate two separate issues and elevate the second clause to the status of scientific fact. The first part continues to slur the quantum physics argument to make it sound as though measuring anything is always going to be subjective, unrepeatable and unverifiable. The second clause is demonstrably wrong. What “can be spoken” does not rely on the individual speaker. What the individual speaker is capable of speaking relies on the individual speaker, but “what can be spoken” relies on the limits of a language at any given historical moment operating in a social and cultural context.

This academic characteristic, the habitual use of the fine sounding but empty phrase reaches its height:

Great academic stylists embrace that fact, and they use it to turn the prison house of language into something more like a beachside cottage.

Which “fact”? The 2 previous separate statements have become one “fact”. And while it’s a fine sounding sentence which the mind and eye glide over, what does the metaphor mean? Is it a good thing if you turn your prison into a beachside cottage? Are you still under house arrest; still limited and peripheral? And why a beachside cottage? Is that the kind of place most people live their daily lives? Or do these unnamed “great academic writers” use language as a comfy refuge on their weekends and holidays?

Exam question 1:

Is language a “prison house”? (Note to student: do not fall into the obvious trap of quoting either Wittengenstein or Benjamin Lee Whorf in your answer). If you could break out of "the prison house of language" where would you escape to?

Depending on how one counts “words” there are anything between a quarter of a million and three quarters of a million words in the OED. This doesn’t include “words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary. (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/page/howmanywords). So the rich dialect and slang vocabularies of your own local world should be added to that number.

Exam question #2
What exactly is it you can’t say with that many words?

If it’s a prison, and I think the metaphor is inappropriate, it’s a bloody huge one.

And so on. There are worse things in the world than bad syntax and an overuse of technical vocabulary.

Blurb Wars revisited: Tom Pickard, 'Tiepin Errors', BB and BS.

2011-05-12T03:08:00.000-07:00

I recently read the blurb for a collection of poems which was so tangled in its own imitation of ”critical jargon” that the writer could claim, apparently without irony or humor, that the poet creates metaphors from syntax. I spent so much time wondering how I could create a metaphor without syntax that I forgot everything else about the book.

So it was refreshing to pick up Tom Pickard’s Tiepin Errors, and read this quote on the back. The fact that the quote is attributed to one Basil Bunting means it’s also functioning as an endorsement: “approval and envy” means a great deal coming from who it does.

I’ve just been reading his poems with approval and envy. His ear for rhythm is exceedingly delicate, his syntax strong and terse, and his vocabulary free of any fancy work. He seems to able to select at will the detail which creates a whole scene or action, He has made several unusual forms his own.

This is my ideal blurb. It clearly states why a reader might find the poems of interest as poems. You do need to be tuned into those key terms; rhythm, syntax, vocabulary and why they might be crucial and appreciate the kind of poem it endorses. But read the poems, and it is a fair description. Examples could be given from the collection to support each of those claims.

However, the publisher obviously thought more was necessary and the page slides away from Bunting’s precise compliment into a different register altogether: the register of the anonymous blurb writer:

Tom Pickard’s poems of love, sex, politics and war are searing in their directness and emotional power. His political poetry is unflinchingly honest…

It’s hard to believe that this is targeting the same potential reader. It’s an almost parodic example of a use of language directly opposite to the one the Bunting quote admires or performs.

Leaving aside the problem of distinguishing between love and sex or politics and war, what is ‘searing’ doing in that first sentence? It’s the kind of vapid qualifier you hear on the news or in celebrity interviews….how does a poem sear? What does it sear? If it’s the reader, why would you want to read something that did that to you unless you were a paid up member of the masochists union. Why does ‘Honest’ need an adjective and why “unflinchingly”. How do you tell if a poem flinches or it's honest?

We’re in the world where the nouns go hobbling round in need of crutches because no one is really listening anymore. The kind of person who is solicited by this slush is not used to paying attention to words So why is it on the back of a collection of poetry that demands and rewards attention?

PS; Great title, great tie, and for what it’s worth, Bunting was right about the poems.

Tom Pickard's "More Pricks Than Prizes'

2011-04-19T03:03:00.000-07:00

I feel bad that I bought a second hand copy, but the press‘s website wouldn’t take my money for a new one and, frustrated, I went to bookfinder.com and they threw this at me.

Having apologized, it’s unusual to find a book, especially such a short one, which explicitly contains the criteria that should be used to evaluate it.

Both are quotes from Basil Bunting who has a staring support role in the story of Pickard’s arrest and trial. The first is from an essay Bunting wrote which criticised Malcolm Muggeridge: “It is agreeable to fancy that some day it may not pay a man who has material for an essay to swell it to the length of a half guinea book by verbose repetition and argument round and round…”

So perhaps the best thing I can say about “More Pricks than prizes” is that there is probably enough material here for a thick autobiography of Pickard and a biography of BB, and it has been compressed into 68 pages.

In a letter sent to Pickard while he was awaiting trial, Bunting wrote: “Keep objective; your own unhappiness is not capital stock but what your eyes see and your ears hear is...” The unhappiness is certainly recorded but there’s no wallowing in it. Pickard has “kept objective”.

In “Moab Is my Washpot”, Stephen Fry records a similar series of events. But in Fry’s version, being arrested for fraud and going on remand is all a merry jape, and while he calls attention to what a scallywag he was, there’s a sense of unreality about it all. I can’t be the only person who keeps thinking the title is really “Moaning, I’m a tosspot” (to the tune of tell them you're a womble). (And no, I don't know why I bought it or read it)

Pickard tells his story and still manages to step aside. Bunting’s admonition put into prose; emotions first-but nothing in the poem except facts or things. Which given this is autobiographical is no mean feat.

But it’s not a case of dumping the facts on the page and leaving them to the reader. (‘Nennius’ did this in the ninth century and it wasn’t even a good idea then). The facts and things have to be selected and manipulated. There’s a sequence which describes Pickard and his friends’ attempts to find enough second hand books to refill crates that had held “a ton” of Ugandan cannabis. It could have been a scene from “softly softly”: dodgy dialect lads, with flat caps, in a dark London alleyway filling a battered transit: it could be an episode from Black books: with Bernard perversely trying to stop them from buying his useless stock. Instead it sparks an alliterative riff, which threatens to run through the whole alphabet, about books and their writers. It manages to be funny; it manages to show off; it conveys the enormous amount of books they had to buy, and it puts the boot into types of books and types of writers and the publishing industry. It evokes “Sittin' in a sleazy snack-bar/ Snuckin' sickly sausage rolls”. But it never loses sight of the reality of what’s going on.

Art, in fact. Technique.

I think his description of crossing the iron curtain in a train is going to stick in my head for a long time.

Nuff said.

What the Chairman told Tom-the value of poetry

2011-04-18T01:59:00.000-07:00

You can read the poem here

Finally a copy of Tom Pickard’s “More Pricks than Prizes” of which more later. And a very enjoyable rainy afternoon reading it. I assume, probably incorrectly, that he is the Tom in Bunting’s “What the Chairman told Tom”.

Anyone who is interested in poetry has met the Chairman at some stage. Part of the fun of the poem is the sense of revenge. His ignorant dismissal of the art and its practitioners, his self appointed status as judge of the merits of not only Tom’s work but of his person, is justly ridiculed. But lurking in the joke is an unanswered question: Why should the Chairman care for Poetry?

As far as I know Bunting never answered that explicitly. He offered possible, partial statements at different stages of his life about “the value of poetry” but he seems to have avoided the temptation (if he ever saw it as such) to be as emphatic as either Pound or Eliot on the subject. (if anyone can correct me on this please do).

There’s a paradox in the writing of the latter two on the subject. It’s partly an inability to reconcile two contradictory ideas about poetry and poets: the inheritance of Shelley’s over inflated waffle which elevated THE POET to a position of supreme human preeminence, and their own rigorously argued belief that the duty of the poet, as a poet, is to the poem. From the latter it might logically follow that the purpose of writing poetry is to write a good poem and as Pound said the public can (and will) do what it wants with the end product. There is the art, and there is its value in the market place, and Pound’s insistence was that one does not define the other. Discussing the function of poetry, Eliot takes it for granted that the primary function of poetry is to give the reader the pleasure that only poetry can give.

But to leave it there meant stepping down from the silly Post Shelley idea of the poet as someone of crucial importance and neither Eliot nor Pound seemed to lack a sense of their own cultural and historical significance. Rather than make claims for “The Poet”, they both made claims for the social, cultural, historical and linguistic importance of “Poetry” which implicitly elevates the poet and affirms his [sic] value. That their claims were untenable hasn’t stopped successive generations from repeating them, and acting as though they were empirical facts. They have fortified the Evangelists ever since.

Poetry is an art, and there are numerous art forms. It gives pleasure and it entertains. It offers a pleasure and a form of entertainment that are all its own. Not stand up comedy, nor song nor drama. But if you’re not entertained, and it doesn’t give you pleasure, that doesn’t mean you’re unrefined or in need of remedial help.

The chairman’s mistake, in the poem, is to assume knowledge and expertise where he has none. He sounds like those “experts” on education who are experts because they once went to school. And his arrogance, and his fault, is to bolster his self-importance by denigrating something he doesn’t understand. ANd he is justifiably ridiculed.

On the other hand the Poetry evangelicals behave as though they need to convert the benighted masses, if the world is to be saved. Like Eliot and Pound, they make claims for the importance of an abstracted “Poetry” that is far beyond the reality and capabilities of poems and their producers. Because they like “Poetry”, they feel they are an elect, and that everyone else should like it (and preferably the poems and poets they like as well. The evangelicals are nothing if not clubby). But if the Chairman is arrogant in his dismissal of poetry, it seems equally arrogant to act from the belief that there is something fundamentally wrong or ill educated with someone who doesn’t like your favorite art form.

Entertainment and pleasure have negative connotations; they can sound selfish and trivial. But ‘entertainment’ doesn’t have to be mindless and pleasure doesn’t have to be selfish, or self centred or trivial . If you’ve ever used an art to entertain anyone, ever created something which has given a stranger pleasure, you know there’s nothing trivial in the process. It’s hard work.

The final paradox of the poem is the last line. “Go and find work”. Poetry doesn’t pay. It won’t feed the family. It’s not work in the form of paid labor. However, as Bunting knew, and as Pound kept insisting, Poetry is not a hobby, but work. It requires “sharp study and long toil”.
But that doesn’t mean anyone owes you a living while you’re doing it.

Q: Why should the Chairman like poetry?
A: There’s no reason.
Q: Why should he care for poetry.
A: No reason.

He said what?

2011-04-07T16:43:00.000-07:00

'I want to come to a concluded view about the issues that I've raised, before I'm drawn on that particular point,' Mr Smith told reporters in Melbourne on Thursday.

Poetry in High schools: a parable.

2011-04-06T21:47:00.000-07:00

You are an unwilling visitor to a country whose language you do not speak. You know very little about the place and don’t know if the part you are stuck in is characteristic of the country as a whole. You might be on an island the size of Bali or in a country the size of Siberia. Via and interpreter you are told that the only way out is to hire a car, but before you can do that, you have to pass a written test which shows you know the local road rules.

The test procedure is explained to you as follows:

Step outside the test centre and flag down any passing vehicle. You will see some disreputable types lurking near the exit. They will try to get your attention before you get into a car. You will ignore them; everyone else does.
The driver will accept you as his or her passenger, and take you on a circular route of his or her choosing and deposit you back where you started. During the drive, which may last up to one hour but no more, and which may go anywhere the driver pleases, you will not be able to ask any questions. Your task is to infer the whole country’s road rules from the little you observe.

When you return, ignore the scruffy people at the door. You will be given a written test. When you have finished your paper will be placed in a device which sends it randomly to one of three rooms. Depending on your results you are taken to one of three doors. Behind one of them your hire car is waiting.

What they do not tell you is that the test consists of one of two papers chosen at random. One is a blank sheet with the words “What are the road rules?” written at the top in your own language. The other asks: “You have two hours to explain why scrungeblobs are not allowed within fifty zorthopeks of the disfustilator. Give at least seven reasons why this is fair.”

There is no way out of the room unless you write on the paper. You will notice that the “random” device sends most papers to the room on the left. Through the frosted glass you can see it is has the most markers. What else they don’t tell you is that it is staffed by people who know as much about the road rules as you do. This is actually a good thing: if you sound like you know what you’re talking about, they will be too scared to call your bluff. Otherwise whether they tick pass or fail depends on the time of the day, what they had for lunch, how bad their night was, or how bored they are. Behind the other doors lurk those markers who think they know the road rules, and those who think the ones who think they know the road rules have got it wrong. They will both fail you.

Whether you pass or fail is also irrelevant. The first door, through which most people exit, leads to an airport departure lounge where you are flown home, never to return. Why would you want to? The middle door leads to a long tunnel which eventually leads back into the largest of the three rooms where you will find a desk with your name on it and you will be paid to mark papers. You will not have learnt what a scrunglebob is, nor will you have seen anymore of the country. The third door, through which very few pass, leads to the hire care.

And the last thing they don’t tell you is that it will only take you on exactly the same route you went on earlier. Endlessly.

Faber's promised new edition of Bunting goes missing, yet again.

2011-04-05T03:12:00.000-07:00

It seems that yet again Faber have put off, or put back the publication date for Don Share's new edition of Bunting's Collected Poems. Given that two thirds of whatever they publish will be forgotten in twelve months it seems bizarre that they keep shunting the publication date of this one.
As the blurb on the amazon page says:
An important work of literary scholarship which highlights, for the first time, the achievement of a neglected modernist master
And for once it's not hyperbole. Anyone want to argue Bunting is not "A Master"? That his reputation may rest of one great long poem and a fistful of smaller ones, doesn't invalidate the claim. The Blood axe collected is nice, and does the job, but the new Faber one promises to have a scholarly apparatus. I don't need notes on the Northumbrian History in Briggflats, but I know zip about Persian literature and I would love to know what's going on in parts of The Spoils and in many of the Overdrafts.

It is revealing about the way the field works. Here we have a writer who is regarded (by some) as one of Britain's best poets in the twentieth century and twenty five years after his death there's still no thorough scholarly Collected. Or rather there may be one, but it looks as though Faber ain't publishing it any time soon.

Hug a medievalist day, with thanks

2011-03-31T17:56:00.000-07:00

This form the New Yorker.

HUG A MEDIEVALIST
by Macy Halford

Today is International Hug a Medievalist Day. Do I really want to hug a medievalist?, you wonder. Yes! you do. Medievalists are the best kind of historian, in my opinion (which is why I majored in medieval history in college): they are always very interested in the body, the bawdy, and the beautiful, by which I mean they have a profound interest in the nitty-gritty of Western culture—in its material composition and the spiritual and intellectual urges that give rise to it. Perhaps because they delight in details and see worlds within them, medievalists are uniformly possessed of an excellent if slightly juvenile sense of humor, which becomes more pronounced when they drink and their inherent social awkwardness wears off. They drink most nights, usually at dimly lit pubs or sitting in tight clusters on the floors of grad-student apartments, and they prefer to drink red wine or ale. The caveat to this is that at least once a year, in every medievalist cluster, someone has the idea of hosting a medieval-themed party, at which they serve a) mulled wine b) mincemeat pies and c) some multi-animal mishmash like turducken. If you are very unfortunate, someone will attempt rabbit stew with cinnamon and mace, which no one will eat. But such comical failures are part and parcel of the medievalist lifestyle.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/03/hug-a-medievalist-day.html#ixzz1IEEbKGDR
(I have never had the idea of hosting a medieval themed party, though I did once participate in an all night reading of Beowulf which was lubricated by some devastating ale brewed, we were told, to an Old Icelandic recipe.

So here's thanks to all the saints and scholars, the gentle lunatics and social misfits, the straight geniuses, the professional teachers and the ones who didn't mean to but did, to all those who preserved the field, the antiquarians, archivists, librarians, the amateurs when there was no profession, who have , one way or another, helped and hindered along the way.
Many thanks.

"I'm so happy now Saint Patrick's day is over".

2011-03-17T15:56:00.000-07:00

All together now:

I'm so Happy now Saint Patrick's day is over
And all the silly hats are thrown away
And all the plastic paddies have gone back into the clover
But I know they'll return another day.

(Saint Patrick's Dance in San Fernandao)

Although, we did have a good time. For once we played all night and weren't swamped by the noise of drunks telling irish jokes in fake accents.
But I can't connect it to the people I grew up with.

Stew

For Brendan, who told it this way:
There’s these two fellas, see
they’d come across after the war
he and his misses, and the friend.
They worked on the production line.
You know the kind of character
who drinks his tea and has his breakfast
while the misses cut him sandwiches.
When he came home from work,
his tea was always on the table,
he never knew or cared where it was coming from.

And then of course, she ups and dies.
That left him and his mate.
The two of them, without a clue!
But there’s this neighbour, down the road,
came across from Galway, in the fifties,
He put them straight.
Gave them tips for making stew.
And then the factory shut down.

I went there, once, After his misses died.
He said: You know, I’d like to top myself.
But if I did, they’d send me down below
and she’d be up above,. We’d never meet again.
I couldn’t stand that. I told him about tins.
There’s good stuff in them cans these days

Australian Poetry

2011-02-21T00:49:00.000-08:00

I've been studying the defences of poetry In English from Sir Philip Sidney to the present day, wading through the remarkable sludge of silliness that characterises them: bad history, wish fulfillment, ludicrous claims, a willful refusal to deal with poetry as the sum total of poems, poets as the people who produce them or the world as it is. Why this nonsense has ever been given credence is a fascinating question in itself.

So it's great to see we have a national body to support poetry in Australia, but why does it have to open with a claim like this:

Australian Poetry’s vision is to excite all Australians about Australian poetry and poets

ALL Australians?.....name anything that excites All Australians.

The Cantos again

2011-01-29T03:51:00.001-08:00

Revisiting The Cantos, having discovered the version I had read doesn't have all of them. Enjoying them a lot more the second time round.

And i find this, lost in the back:

M'amour, m'amour
what do I love and
where are you?
That I lost my center
fighting the world
The Dreams clash
and are shattered-
and that I tried to make a paradiso
terrestre.

I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise
Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.

that I lost my centre/fighting the world seems an apt epitaph for Pound's career. But what published writer wouldn't ask let the gods forgive what I/have made/Let those I love try to forgive/what I have made. No matter how good it seems at the time, it is never good enough in retrospect..

Battle Abbey and Baker Street (Folks go on pilgrimage and sometimes get lost)

2011-01-11T03:24:00.000-08:00

My parents never owned a car. When I was little my gran did, so once, when she visited, I talked her into taking me to see a local battle field. We got suitably lost in green Midland lanes. I had a Lady Bird book with garish pictures of archers in leather jerkins straining their long bows against a very blue sky, and pictures of mounted knights, lances levelled, plumes fluttering, all the usual romanticised medieval nonsense that attracted young boys.

We arrived at the field. It was empty except for a tractor. No thundering cavalry, no sky darkening shower of arrows.
Just a field and a parked tractor.

I’ve done a lot of travelling since then to see historical sites and objects. I’ve often wondered if the experience you have is due to the place itself or to what you take with you. Would you know if it were the wrong field? The wrong couch? Would you know if the Book of Kells was the real object or the facsimile if they didn’t tell you?

This trip home we managed to get to Battle Abbey. It’s one of my favourite places on the planet, partly because the curators have left the battle field as a field. You walk around it. There are stations, each with a board, a picture, and some information that gives a version of the battle which is as good as any version. There’s no twit dressed as William the bastard to annoy you. You can stand where the Norman’s must have jostled and mustered before setting off up the slope towards the waiting English. Unless you’re spectacularly unimaginative you can see the dark line of the English army stretched along the ridge waiting for them. The imagination is given space.

The question remains though: does my reaction to this place depend on the fact that I have read the accounts of the battle. I’ve read the historians’ discussions of the accounts. I’ve written about Battle and about the battle. My maternal grandfather’s family comes from here and some of his family worked as gardeners in the abbey. My great uncle Ivor claimed to be the last person to be born inside the abbey walls.
Or it is that the place resonates with what happened here. The history of a country changed. Would you know if they’d put the abbey on the wrong ridge?

As a counterpoint, we went to the Sherlock Holmes Museum in Baker street. This is at the other end of “how to deal with the past”..It’s the shonky end: the “you have to go all the way through the souvenir shop to buy your ticket and then walk back out past all the tat just to get to the museum’ end.

There was no historical character called Sherlock Holmes, and 221 Baker street may have been a lodging house in the 19th century but neither Holmes nor Conan Doyle lived there. SO what you get is something like a film set, or a reconstruction of a 19th century lodging house. But this is not the fireplace where Holmes sat working his way though a two pipe problem, and this is not the sitting room of Dr Watson, just a room filled with things that are named in the stories.

I like some of the Holmes stories. I also think Jeremy Brett did for the film version what Suchet did for Poirot. I can watch him even when the story is silly or so familiar I know what the next character is going to say.

But 221 Baker street is dead and cold: a set of rooms in a draughty house unredeemed by the waxworks in the top storey or the man dressed as no Sherlock Holmes you've ever imagined or seen saying"Hello, my name is Sherlock Holmes. This is my bedroom. Please feel free to take a photograph if you have a camera." The fictional Holmes would have despised the redundancy of that last clause.

Perhaps there is a difference.

11/01/2011
9.34 pm

The Exeter book. (Folks go on pilgrimage)

2011-01-07T23:19:00.001-08:00

At a rough reckoning, a version of what we describe as Old English was spoken in England for at least five centuries. For at least four of those, some of the English were literate.

From that four hundred years only four manuscript “books’ of Old English poetry have survived, one of which is known as the “Exeter Book” ; the micel englisc boc given to the cathedral library by Leofric, the first Bishop of Exeter, who died in 1072.

The book’s survival is an accident and it’s not reassuring to dwell on how small its chances must have been. It has been damaged (the poem the ruin is ruined by fire) and traditionally it has been claimed that the book has been used as a chopping board and a beer mat. From the twelfth century onwards, until the book was studied in the early modern period, it is unlikely that anyone could have known what it contained, since the reading of Old English was a lost skill.

So the fact that you can see the thing in the Exeter Cathedral library meant a visit was compulsory. Last time I was there the Library was shut. This time we were luckier: two days after we saw it, the library was closing for twelve months.

We were welcomed by a volunteer assistant who clearly enjoyed the opportunity we provided for her enthusiasm and the librarian who, though trying to work while we prattled, gave up his time to our questions.

Until it moves to its new home, this irreplaceable national treasure is kept locked in a thing that looks remarkably like a portable spit roast, kept company by a unique document from the Domesday survey.

Think medieval manuscript and one tends to think of illumination and elaborate art. The Exeter book is unadorned apart from the large letter that signals each new poem. This is simply a large book, with large lettering, ideally suited to be read while placed on a lectern. A functional book.

But affecting as an object. You’d have to be unimaginative to fail to wonder about the hand that wrote it out. (Krapp and Dobie argued that the “poetical parts’ of the MS are the work of one scribe.)

Cold hands in winter, carefully copying by candle light, watching the letters marching evenly to fill each page. Sore eyes, a sore back and the damp smell of scratchy woollen clothes. Writing as a form of devotion or meditation, an act in the service of a God who to judge by some of the riddles, had a ribald sense of humour. I used to envy Pete his archaeology, his ability to touch things that had been owned and used by people; words seemed evasive. But here was something tangible.

And I hoped the man who wrote it wasn’t in a monastery where there were vows of silence; I could imagine him hurrying to some communal space eager to pass on the latest riddle he’d copied out: and his satisfaction of knowing that when the book was used, it was his hands that had made it possible.

Most old English poems survive in only one version. And the “Exeter Book” contains most of the poems a student of Old English Poetry or anyone browsing a book of translations is most likely to encounter other than Beowulf . No Exeter Book and no “Elegies”: no Seafarer, Wanderer, Wife’s lament, no Deor, Widsith, fewer riddles and the disappearance of my favourite Old English poem: Wulf and Eadwacer.

So here’s to him, the nameless scribe who copied the anonymous poems. Literature is the work of people: not theoretical abstractions.

And my thanks to librarian and his assistant for making us welcome, not only for allowing us to see the book but for sharing their knowledge and enthusiasm with two strangers.

blurb wars revisited:Annie Freud

2011-01-03T12:31:00.000-08:00

Nice to return home and find the world still providing free humour. This is from the back of Annie Freud's new book, a PBS choice no less:
"Freud has invented almost a new kind of writing; neither "found" nor "made" in the conventional sense, these poems are profoundly moving, and startling in their boldy unfashionable lack of irony."

Apart from the usual cliches: "profoundly moving", that 'almost' is a work of twisted genius.
Either she has invented a new kind of writing, or if it's not a new kind of writing and therefore she hasn't invented anything.

If it's "almost a new kind of writing" then it isn't new and there is no invention to celebrate.

The blurb burbles to a finish with this sentence:
"In the end, this is a book about reality and its representations, and the truth and lies we tell ourselves."

Homework; think of all the books you've ever read to which that statement could be applied. Then ask yourself what exactly it means.

The staffordshire hoard

2011-01-02T15:11:00.000-08:00

And so, briefly in Birmingham, and the opportunity to see pieces from the Staffordshire Hoard. There’s a beautiful set of pictures on Flikr but what they don’t prepare you for is the size of some of the items

http://www.flickr.com/photos/finds/3944486130/in/set-72157622378376316/lightbox

Now cleaned and on display, these pieces are about the size of your thumb nail, yet adorned with intricate patterns and shaped to hold minute pieces of fitted garnet.

History is usually the story of the sword wielders, not the sword makers, but these pieces were made by consummate craftsmen, working without the benefit of magnifying glasses or strong artificial lighting, on a scale that is so small as to be breath taking. A small toast to those nameless masters of the intricate.

And then The SHOp arrives ... it must be Christmas

2010-11-17T23:47:00.000-08:00

In the last issue of The SHOp the editors pointed out a frightening statistic. Each year they receive about 6,000 poems for consideration. They print sixty an issue and there's only three issues a year. 180 chosen from 6,000.
And that includes writers like Mahon, Heaney, Longley, Les Murray and others of such ilk.

I have a poem in this issue.
It's the second time they've published one by me.

Once is a fluke, twice ...
Thursday 18/11/2010

The Stinging Fly arrives

2010-11-16T21:52:00.000-08:00

Just as the temperature here starts cranking its way to summer, and the air tightens with the promise of afternoon storms, the Winter issue of the Dublin based The Stinging Fly arrives.
It's always nice to be published, but getting poems into Journals I pay to read anyway, always feels special.
The Stinging Fly itself seems to be getting bigger and this issue adds graphic fiction to the usual excellent mix of poetry, short stories, reviews and articles.
16.16 17/11/2010

Pound, Eliot and the untold true story of 1066

2010-10-26T18:31:00.000-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, the Highly Esteemed Goon show brings you:
(sound of wet kipper hitting custard…)
1066: the Untold but TRUE story…Starring Russel Maximus Hood as Hereward the Sleepy and any number of beautiful actresses
as his historically irrelevant love interest…

sound of heavy thump followed by body falling to the floor.

Announcer; Mr Eliot and Mr Pound, thank you for joining us on critics forum.

Eliot: well, unless they go on producing great authors, and especially great poets, their language will deteriorate, their culture will deteriorate and perhaps become absorbed in a stronger one.

Pound: I agree: If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays

Sounds of scuffle, chairs falling. Eliot saying: really! This is most undignified. Pound saying; get me a phone, I want to talk to the president…

Spike: clears his throat…yes, due to budget problems there has been a change of cast…Wallace my good man…

Announcer: It was a dark and windy night

Spike; the Naafi had been serving beans again…

Announcer; stop it with these naughty post war jokes. No one will understand. It was a dark and windy night somewhere in not so merrie England. William the secretly reviled was feeling philosophical.

Spike: I didn’t know he had an Irish lover?

Announcer: Our regular listener will recognise that William the horrible is actually Count Moriarity in disguise; And we’d just like to say, Jim, on behalf of us all, thank you for listening. The cheque is in the post..

William: Bloodnock, you English are so revolting. You were revolting last year and the year before. I am going to kill you, but before I do, I am going to let you into ze secret. You might think I conquered England because my army was stronger than an English host weakened by two long and bloody battles…

Bloodnock looks surprised but says nothing…which is very difficult to do on radio.

William: The truth however….Minstrel, play appropriate flash back music:

Announcer: Scene: the white cliffs of Dover (you have to take my word for it) water, gulls, traffic. A gale is blowing
King Harold Seagoon the first and soon to be the last, is despondent. The Normans are massing across the channel. His time is running out. Where it’s running to nobody knows…

Spike: enough of these terrible punes…

Bluebottle: My captain, I heard my capitane call. Makes grand entrance. Waits for applause. Not a sausage. Sulks.

Ned; Ah suitably dark age greetings my grubby little alliterative half line. How goes the great work?

Bluebottle; it is finished my Captain. I read it to that Dorrisberga and ..giggles…goes bright red, stands on one legs and tries to wink. Falls over.

Ned; you naughty little nerk. That bag of jelly babies is yours. Read it to me, so that our language might be rejuvenated and fortified against the evils of Norman French.

Bluebottle: strikes impressive Nelson on His Column pose. Puts hand on chest under shirt. (giggles) Stands on one leg again. Is blown over the cliff clutching piece of parchment.

Sounds of falling object followed by distant splash.

Bluebotle(far off): I’ve fallen in the water (audience cheer) shut up you swine!

Neddy; Eccles, quick, jump in and save the poem

Sound of footsteps going away, then coming back…sound of falling body and distant splash.

Neddy: Eccles you idiot, what are you doing?

Eccles: (far off) Drowning.

Neddy; Here, use this box of holy relics I got from William the obnoxious. Use it as a float until I get help. I’m off to find a kipper for this sketch

Blue bottle; Don’t you mean a skipper for the ketch my Captain?

Neddy; needle nardle noo. it’s started already. (mutters as he exits)

Announcer; and now our scene shifts to the other side of the channel.

(frantic sound of packing, grunts groans, door slams shut, car racing away. Screeches to halt. sound of frantic breathless rowing. waves, gulls, boat scrunching ashore. Feet on sand)

Spike; (gasping) there has to be a better way…

Announcer; Count Gryppe type thin, pretending to be Blondel, insinuates himself in a suitably furtive Gallic manner into the throne room of William the bastard. Who is watching a ballet and eating pain au chocolate.

WTB: Wearily: is it finished?

GP: it is my chocolate-coated munificence.

W: is it a work of the highest quality, which only a few of the current intelligentsia will appreciate?

GP: it is so difficult that it will baffle critics, who will study it at the university of opaque theoretical waffle in Paris nine hundred years from now.

W: will it immediately invigorate our language and make us victors over those alliterating long haired fops?

GP; My lord, I have used the pluperfect, the passe compose and the past historic

W: you vile evil charmer. Your misspent youth in the public urinals of Calais has finally paid off.

GP: (gasps) The doctor, he told you everyzing?

W; He told me nathing…but on with ze story I don’t want you to die horribly before you have finished….the passé compose is passé, zey will respond with the simple past, zey even have an answer to our subjunctive ze filthy rotten swines

GP: evil manic genius type laughter. My lord, not only have I insinuated a few examples of the future tense…formed without auxiliary verbs…

W: gasps…victory is ours…

GP: but …Pauses for fanfare….(sound of wet kipper hitting custard) I have managed to use …..dah dah dah dah: the future pluperfect

W; sapristy nuckoes. ze war is won. Let us celebrate with the suitable gallic extravagance: Have another pain au chocolate. Do you like my tutu? (fades)

Announcer: and so on that fateful day in 1066, Harold Seagoon the Last was fatally wounded by a verb in a tense he was unable to recognise. The thriving culture of Anglo-Saxon England ..(voice fades out in dreary lecture style..)

Fade up Sounds of waves, sea gulls.

Bluebottle: Eccles my good man, do you think we are forgotted?

Eccles; We have been in the water for a long time

Blue bottle; yes, I think that Irish coast guard was a filthy rotten nerk…where are your papers he says says he and then splosh back in the whale’s bath without so much as a keel to row.

Eccles; that was days ago. Hey Bluebottle: I see land. Ooh, look, dem peoples are in the nuddy. All their bits are showing

Bluebottle: er Eccles my good man, it appears I have lost my national health service specs, do you see girls…
Eccles; Yup. Yup.

Bluebottle: oooooh, dieded we dided and wented to heaven…

Announcer: Ladies and gentleman and representatives of all other categories ; that concludes this episode of the highly esteemed goon show.

William: Hey, wait ze minute. Why fore are you all not ze French speeeking?

Gun shot. Gallic groan. Body hits floor.

Spike: has he gone?

Neddy: yes.

Peter: fancy a pint

Eliot and Pound: please!

Gun shots. Bodies hitting floor.

Spike: (warily) have they gone?

Neddy: yes, but I fear we haven’t heard the last of those two….

(11.37 27th of October)

bad pun of the day

2010-10-09T04:58:00.001-07:00

there were two birds sitting on a perch. One asks: can you smell fish?

(Courtesy of Trevor the Banjo).

Billy Collins': The Guest. Puzzling over value

2010-10-09T04:29:00.000-07:00

The poem is published in the current review of the London Review of Books. I don't know how much of it I can quote legally: the first verse reads:

I know the reason you placed nine white tulips
in a glass vase with water
here in the room a few days ago
was not in order to mark the passage of time
as a fish would if nailed by the tail
to the wall above the bed of a house guest.

There are another 8 lines.

So what do we know about our speaker and his or her situation. He or she is a guest: knowing he or she is welcome: “I know the reason wasn’t…” The flowers are a reminder that time is passing, but s/he hasn’t yet “made themselves at home”.

So let us assume that there is a relationship where one person feels as though he/she is not really at home and doesn’t really understand why not: she/he notices details, but these details don’t tell the reader anything specific about the relationship or about either the speaker or the person who is being addressed. We learn ‘you’ puts tulips in a vase full of water…hardly strange behaviour: a vase without water or full of beer might be worthy of notice; the host doesn’t nail a fish above the guest’s bed (how strange they don’t do that…) and owns a glass topped table that is by the window of the room. That’s all we know about “you.”

It could be argued that the fact that “I know the reason” which begins the poem and the “was not’ which qualifies it, is separated by four lines creating some kind of tension other than grammatical, perhaps performing the speaker’s doubt? ”I know you’d didn’t do it for this reason” suggests at least the thought that maybe he or she did. Later the same syntactic suspension occurs between “I did notice” and “my suitcase’? So the guest is not sure of his welcome, and he’s just realised he doesn’t feel at home enough to have unpacked the suitcase, but instead has it “by the door” ready for a quick exit?

Because it’s vague, I could come up with things that this is a metaphor for: early stages of a romantic relationship; a marriage, an aging poet addressing the reader, feeling that time is running out and the “suitcase’ (trans; word hoard) is still not totally unlocked……but we’re back with Teenage Cavemen. It’s almost a ready made metaphor you could use for any number of relationship situations without being specifically about anything. Ahaaa, I hear someone cry, this is so obviously a poem about……because white tulips are traditionally a symbol or …and Nine is a ….number and the fact that only two of them are dropping means….

It seems to me an example of a writer “being poetic” without actually offering anything to the reader than what must pass as a “poetic’ poem in some circles. The most arresting image in the whole thing, to which the only rhyme in the poem calls attention, the nailed fish, is not something that is really relevant; it’s something that is not.

Nagging at “content”, “meaning” and “trying to understand the situation” is obviously not the only way to read a poem. It’s usually a fairly limited one. But the writing here forces attention on content not only because it’s so vague (call it allusive if you want to be polite) but because nothing much is happening in terms of poetry. /I/ knows what’s going on. I don’t. And since I don’t care, what I’d like is something in the poem as a poem for me to enjoy.

In such a short piece I’d expect (Would you?) the writer to have chosen each word carefully. In such an old-fashioned first person lyric I’d expect syntax, diction and rhythm to be working together in ways they wouldn’t in prose. Heaney does informal syntax, but his poems at their best are held together with patterned sound and while the impression is a voice speaking to the reader the artifice itself is enjoyable.

But written out as prose The Guest doesn’t lose much.

Lines like “In a glass vase with water/here in this room a few days ago” are not interesting in themselves in terms of diction, syntax, rhythm or sound. Rhythmically the lack of any type of end stopping in the first verse paragraph keeps the eye moving, but it makes line endings redundant. How much difference is there between the printed version and this:

I know the reason why you placed
Nine white tulips
Here in this room a few days ago
Was not in order to mark the passage of time.

If poetry is about making words work then the diction here is consciously informal and uninteresting. The “grey light” of early morning, “the passage of time”, (both in the second stanza), if not clichés are too vague when placed beside “glass top table by the window” Why does it matter where the table is or that its top is made of glass? (On the other hand, the fact the suitcase in the last line of the poem is “by the door’ does seem relevant.)

Why “nine white tulips” (do we need to know there are nine and then two droop..is this important?) Or is “white” important. Why “even touching’ and not just ‘touching’? Why is the suitcase “only half unpacked“ and not just “unpacked”?

What does ‘as they lose their grip on themselves” mean in terms of flowers withering? What could it mean? Since the phrase is usually used about people, then are being invited to see the two wilting tulips as the guest and host but what could it mean that they are “losing their grip”? On what? Why?

Someone must have loved this poem; it’s published in the current edition of the London Review of Books. Which must be a prestige market. But for the life of me I can’t see the value of it. If this is "accessible poetry" (Collins sells well in the States. He's been American Poet Laureate.) ) when you push it the meaning isn't accessible at all: it evaporates, leaving nothing.

Seamus Heaney's "Human Chain": coming home via three quotations

2010-10-02T17:51:00.000-07:00

1)
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(Eliot: Little Giddings)

not “to Know”, if to know means the “real truth” of something will be revealed to us, but to see the once familiar differently, to react in a new way based on new knowledge or experience. Or to discover that what we thought before we left has been confirmed.

So in the past year, as part of the new project, I have worked my way though the major sequences/long poems of the twentieth century. (There are a more of them than I thought) . It reminds me of traveling home on the Trans Siberian: large swathes of time and landscape I don’t remember, punctuated by intense moments: seeing Lake Baikal, the grey water steaming in the sub zero temperature, surf coming in to smack into snowdrifts, the Narnian beauty of sunsets, small villages all but buried under snow, like illustrations for European Fairy tales, the Chinese family who spoke neither Russian nor French or English but who managed to talk me into sharing their breakfast of boiled chicken feet and home made vodka…

But somewhere east of the beginning of Zukofsky’s “A’, about “A 9” perhaps, the images changed. I was back on the trans Kazak express, staring at an unchanging landscape, imagining trying to walk across the steppe, a tottering survivor of a massacre plodding onwards because he’d forgotten how to stop.

A long long way from Kerr’s Ass. Time to go home

And there was Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain waiting to be read.
But I had also been reading aggressive poetics:

Quote #2
…Establishment poetry is approaching the condition of journalism—"a form of writing as harmless as it is ephemeral": A generic "sensitive" lyric speaker contemplates a facet of his or her world and makes observations about it, compares present to past, divulges some hidden emotion, or comes to a new understanding of the situation. The language is usually concrete and colloquial, the ironies and metaphors multiple, the syntax straightforward, the rhythms muted and low-key. Generic and media boundaries are rigorously observed: no readymades or word sculptures here, no zaum explorations of etymologies, no Steinian syntactic permutations. As for Eliot's objective correlative, it emerges, in the mainstream poetry before us, as little more than a faint echo, an ironic tic.

Having read enough of this type of criticism I opened Human Chain and the first poem begins:

Had I not been awake I would have missed it

And I shut the book.

It took a while to see beyond the criticism of the quotation. Reciting Kerr’s Ass helps. Perloff may be a great critic, but it’s not the paradigm of the lyric speaker itself that is the problem but the way it is so easily abused. In the wrong hands it’s too easy, requires no great art or thought to churn out the formulaic “poem”. But open any journal or book and you’ll find poems ticking boxes that prove the writer is “having a poetic experience”. (The PE may be aggressively modernist, avant garde or lyric depending on which poetic the writer hangs his or her hat: Sooner or later everything becomes formulaic).

Heaney has never seemed a box ticker. It’s true that Human Chain has an air of familiarity about it; some of the poems feel as though they’ve been here before. The “Heaney topics” of rural boyhood, school, family and religion are ever present. At times his habit of using an unattributed pronoun as the subject of a poem becomes irritating. The poet knows who “he’ or ”she” is or was but the reader has no chance and the overworked pronoun collapses the poem into vagueness. One of the great defining characteristics of the man’s work, the sense that a voice is speaking directly to the reader, at times lapses into a syntax that produces lines and a stanza like ”flattened back/ against themselves/ a bit stand-offish’. Or the whole of “Canopy” with its opening stanza:

It was the month of may
Trees in Harvard yard
Were turning a young green
There was whispering everywhere.

Which never rises above a literate diary entry.

But having said that:
Quote 3#

The sight quenches, like water
After too much birthday cake.
(Thom Gunn: “Expression”)

In The Wanderer, wisdom is understood as intelligence looking back on experience in age. It’s not a popular ideal these days in cultures driven by the cult of eternal youth, so in one sense to say that these are an old man’s poems may not convey the intended compliment. And to stick 'wise' in front of old would only sound even more anachronistic.

At seventy, having survived a stroke, you shouldn’t be too surprised if the poet is in retrospective mode. The collection is ghosted by a sense of summing up and coming to terms. Each recent Heaney collection has contained at least one poem in memory of dead friends. Some of them are very good poems. Like the Old English poet, he can produce memorable poetry out of the specifics of a common sense of loss. He does elegy well. In this collection: ‘The door was open and the house was dark” with its lift towards its final memorable image is a fine example in this collection.

There is also that familiar ability of his to see things awry as in “Miracle’ with its arresting opening:
“Not the one who takes up his bed and walks/But the ones who have known him all along/And carry him in-“

After all the theory, after the poetics, the gabble of disaffected voices, the struck pose and the learnt strut, it feels good to come back to poems sturdy enough to walk in the day time, that celebrate rather than whine or denigrate or disappear into their own self serving ideological smugness.

Human Chain my be uneven. But that says something about the poetry. Its successes and failures aren’t hidden behind a hedge of conceptualized waffle. As verbal artifacts they succeed or fail. I suspect the success comes from the sense of recognition, of a shared experience spoken aloud.

Bunting said he had tried to make poems that would give pleasure but stand on their own without prop of theory or the support of party. He succeeded. So does Heaney. If nothing else there are poems in this collection that challenge the generalsied condemnation of Perloff's statement.

i.m Jerry Dixon part two

2010-09-19T17:41:00.000-07:00

The Ballad of Tappen Falls.
(to the tune of any generic slow sleazy blues)

Jerry Dixon ran the South fork
With an English friend
He ran some evil rapids
He cheated death again
Then they paddled down the Middle Fork
And were not impressed at all
So the river quietly rumbled
Wait till Tappen Falls.

The river waited patiently
for the best part of a week
Jerry said: “there’s nothing on this river
Half as Bad as Devil Crik
And these things that you call rapids
They are really rather small"
And the river quietly rumbled
Just wait till Tappen falls.

A bozo in his Duckie
He was out to have some fun
He took his cigar stub from his fat lip
Asked “Can I make that middle run”
Jerry tried hard to dissuade him
Said he’d stand no chance at all
If he stuck his rubber duckie
In the hole at Tappen Falls

The right had line looked obvious
Scouted from the bank
But poised above the rapid
Our Jerry’s mind went blank
He did the main drop sideways
To the wonder of us all
And that’s how he got stuffed
In the drop at Tappen Falls.

He was trashed, chewed up, spat out
Rock spotting upside down
He saw God at the bottom
As the boat bounced round and round
And lined along the river
All the bozos said, with awe:
Oh so dat’s de way you do it
When you kayak Tappen falls.

So the South fork of the Salmon
Is white water at its best
You got Rooster Creek and devil creek
To put skills to the test
But underestimate the middle fork
You’ll hear the river call
For a dose of True Religion
Stuff up on Tappen Falls.

Nuannaarpoq: a verb meaning to take extravagant pleasure in being alive.

I wrote this at camp the night it happened. And have resisted the urge to edit it. Even doggerel has its place.

blurb wars revisited

2010-09-17T16:43:00.001-07:00

A statement about Bunting's Collected, quoted on the back of Makin's book:

"Bunting is a great master... anyone with an ear or an eye will immediately appreciate his extraordinary lyric gift and his acute visual sense." Craig Raine, New Statesman (ellipsis in the original)

I.m Jerry Dixon

2010-09-11T04:08:00.001-07:00

Some men should have mountains named after them, except in Jerry’s case it would have to be a restless mountain, with ice and snow sheeting off its face in winter and water cascading in spring, and at its base there would have to be a huge, roaring river raging though a spectacular gorge. It would be the kind of place that attracted people like him.

So one story though there are so many:

That summer, he and I paddled the Main and then the South and Middle forks of Idaho’s salmon river system. Coming off the South Fork, which he and I had run with no permits, no back up, and after that first night at George’s place, there had been just the two of us and the bears and the rattle snakes and the river, we met up with friends to run the Middle fork.

We had been comparing the Middle Fork's rapids to the South fork and were unimpressed. It’s always a good recipe for a disaster. Arriving at Tappen Falls we only got out to scout because there was a group of tourists with their bright inflatable rubber duckies looking at the falls.

A fat man with a cigar in his mouth asked Jerry if he could run his rubber duckie through the main hole.
Jerry spent some time dissuading him.

We scouted what seemed the obvious line for kayaks and I took off: hit an eddy line we hadn’t seen, and in my four metre kayak was faced with "water fall sideways" or "water fall backwards". Much to everyone’s amusement I choose backwards, demonstrated the rock splat/pivot below the drop and tried to look like it was all planned.

Dixon, following, did it sideways, flipped, bounced his helmeted head along the rocks, and finally rolled up.

Watters was laughing so hard at our disasters he wrapped the raft on Little Tappen, so we pulled over to have lunch. A very fat man with a thick cigar in his mouth, wallowed past us in a bright yellow duckie.

Hey, he bellowed to Jerry, are you the guy who kayaked Tappen upside down.

No said jerry, waving his hand down river, he’s gone on down stream. Heluvva boater though, helluva boater.

He was. And it was my privilege to have known him.

So: Go light, Go fast, Go far.

And remember: If you need to ask how hard it is; you shouldn’t be there.

drawdown#2

2010-09-05T17:00:00.000-07:00

Mr. Graves, who read his own obituary, knew about such things:

The Persian Version
Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
As for the Greek theatrical tradition
Which represents that summer's expedition
Not as a mere reconnaisance in force
By three brigades of foot and one of horse
(Their left flank covered by some obsolete
Light craft detached from the main Persian fleet)
But as a grandiose, ill-starred attempt
To conquer Greece - they treat it with contempt;
And only incidentally refute
Major Greek claims, by stressing what repute
The Persian monarch and the Persian nation
Won by this salutary demonstration:
Despite a strong defence and adverse weather
All arms combined magnificently together.

Robert Graves

Drawdown?????

2010-09-02T01:44:00.000-07:00

Reported in today's paper:

"and because of our drawdown from Iraq we are now able to apply the resources necessary to go on offence" said President Obama.

Presumably a continued offensive against the English language.

Did some highly paid speech writer sit there thinking, Oh god, if we say withdrawal someone might think we're withdrawing, so if we say Drawdown no one will know what the F&&& we're talking about and it'll be smooth sailing at the polls?

In future will we see it conjugated. When we drewdown in Iraq, while we were drawdowning.

What's even more depressing is the journalist who reported on this speech used the word outside of reported speech as though it were a normal phrase and the Australian editor who published this nonsense didn't stop and challenge it.

There again, this is the nation that once said its marines were advancing towards the rear.

Sometimes it's funny...Only sometimes....

Word games

2010-08-16T03:24:00.001-07:00

She said: "I hate my car." A little while later she declared: "I hate my body."
So she donated her car to a friend and walked everywhere.
When she tried to donate her body to science they pointed out she'd have to die first.

When she said "I'm going out in five minutes. Are you coming with me or not" I pointed out it was raining outside.
When he told her "I'm going out of my mind" she said she had to resist the urge to ask"Where to?"

attitudes to poetry part two:The Stinging fly and Bunting.

2010-07-17T18:29:00.000-07:00

From Dave Lordan’s review of “identity Parade: New British and Irish poets” in the Stinging Fly issue 16/volume two summer 2010-07-18

The poems here are nearly all beautiful in the sense that they are very well-sculpted and clearly and sonorously expressed. Sometimes, however when confronted with such apparent technical faultlessness I am put in mind of Ron Silliman’s question of ‘what is more deadly than a poem that seeks to be told it’s beautiful?’ What I find lacking are formal and thematic reflections of our commonly experienced fragmentation , confusion, disturbance, upset, instability and insecurity. By and large the senses of all prevailing danger, irredeemable human failure and imminent total disaster that characterise the zeitgeist are not well communicated here…” (p123)

“Our commonly experienced….”
[resist the urge to list all the things that are more deadly than a poem….]

The eerie near total absence of political poetry in our era of neo-imperialism, neo-liberalism and climate change is also deeply troubling, but not suprising. The cultural and intellectual scene overall is far less radical and interesting than it was even twenty years ago and it apt that the general retreat from commitment and strong ideas and concurrently from passion, risk and invention, should be reflected in poetry. (p123)

“The general retreat from commitment and strong ideas…..”

Compare with Bunting, replying to this request (Poetry 1972):

Dear
I wish to publish a special issue of Poetry protesting the acceleration of the undeclared Indo-Chinese War and shall be grateful to consider any poem on this terrible and topical subject that you might wish to contribute as soon as possible. I am not an American citizen , but this is not an American issue. IT is of global importance.
Poetry is a matter of life and death.
Sincerely,
Daryl Hine
Editor.

Bunting replied:
Poetry does not seem to me to have any business with politics. Whatever thoughts the war in Vietnam puts into my head, they are not as could be well expressed in verse. …
There’s not a soul who cares twopence what I or any other poet thinks about the war, Nixon, Wallace, marijuana, pills, oil spills, detergent advertisements or the fog from Gary. We are experts on nothing but the arrangements and patterns of vowels and consonants, and every time we shout about something else we increase the contempt the public has for us. We are entitled to the same voice as anybody else with the vote, no more. To claim more is arrogant.
So I won’t be contributing to your special issue.

in a short talk that prefaced the reading he gave at Keats' House in 1979 Bunting said:

Poetry hampers itself when it undertakes advocacy, however indirectly… Poetry that advocates obscurantism, or on the other hand naïve slogans of liberalism is a nuisance to everybody who can read. What I have tried to do is to make something that can stand by itself and last a little while without having to be propped up by metaphysics or ideology or anything from outside itself; something that might give people pleasure without nagging them to pay their dues to the party or say their prayers.
It’s brought me just what I expected from the first: nothing….and after sixty years of fairly good work without pay I haven’t even a house of my own to die in.

Attitudes to poetry part one:salt

2010-07-16T23:59:00.000-07:00

I have been researching the attitudes and assumptions that underwrite the production, publication reception and consumption of modern poetry. And the history of their development. It’s a lot more interesting than it sounds.

I was thinking that Salt’s 2009 “just one book” campaign would be a good example and so went to their website to see if I there were details I could reference.

So I was feeling guilty, not because I didn’t buy a book, but because I can’t help but wonder what the reaction would have been if any other business had tried the same line. Imagine the car producers in Coventry in the sixties and seventies: Humber, Roots, Triumph, Chrysler, Rover going public: ”We are going broke because no one wants the cars we make. SO if everyone would just buy one car we can stay in business and continue to make the cars you don’t want.”

Their disappearance was devastating: not just on the families coping with unemployment, but in the broader sense where schools stuttered, trying to sell the future to kids who knew there wasn’t one: the precinct with its shut and empty shops, even Woolies, shrinking and then finally going.

So feeling guilty for the cynicism, I went to the website, read this and gagged.

“Support the good work here. Don’t let Salt fall. If the recession is going to take things down, let it be motor manufacturers, let it be bad banks, let it be chains of fast food restaurants. We can lose a few of them, but we don't have enough small independent and daring publishers like Salt. I think I can be a little more forthright than Chris and say ‘Just six books’. Buy dozens why don’t you? It’s a great list. And apparently you will help the economy in many subtle ways too complicated for studious folk like us.” — GRYFF RHYS JONES

“We can lose a few of them”!!! Who does he speak for? Who are these “Studious folks like us”? Obviously not people who have jobs. Or intelligence despite their study if the last sentence is anything to go by

Then I thought maybe it was a joke. Someone poking fun at the whole thing. Irony.

But I’ve never been good at being “Outraged from Anywhere”.

I cut it and pasted it and put it in the file as a prime of example of what I’m studying.

Another review

2010-06-07T22:59:00.000-07:00

Lady G rides to Canada:

http://www.poetryreviews.ca

Graves on Pound

2010-04-21T02:41:00.000-07:00

So they were both equally dedicated to the craft of writing poetry, both professionally obsessed with other languages and both equally daffy in their own ways.
I prefer Graves' version of nuts which is a gentler old fashioned kind of lunacy.
There's a story he told about meeting Pound in T.E Lawrence's "rooms" at University. Pound was visiting Lawrence who was an expert on things provencal...
Lawrence; Pound, Graves: Graves Pound. You won't like each other.

This is Mr. Graves on the Cantos
It is an extraordinary paradox that Pound's sprawling, ignorant, indecent, unmelodious, seldom metrical cantos, embellished with esoteric chinese idiographs-for all I know they may have been traced from the nearest tea chest-and with illiterate Greek, Latin, Spanish and Provencal snippets (the Italian and French read all right to me but I may be mistaken) are now compulsory reading in many ancient seats of learning. If ever one comes across a relatively simple Blake-like passage in the cantos, sandwiched between direct quotations from history textbooks and snarling polyglot parenthesis , this is how it sounds. Forgive me but we are all adults here...

Quotes from cantos

even Whitman's barbaric Yawp was hardly as barbaric as that. But remove the layers and layers of cloacinal ranting, snook-cocking, pseudo-professional jargon and double talk from Pound's verse, and what remains? Only Longfellow's plump, soft ill-at-ease grandnephew remains!

Maybe Lawrence was right.

Pound's Cantos

2010-04-19T05:28:00.000-07:00

There are the alps said Basil B. You can go the long way round to avoid them, or you can sit and wait for them to crumble.
Not me I said, I'll go straight through.
so I did.
1-95 without much pause. five days. The pain killers helped.
With no footnotes or translations or other critical waffle.
and there was much bad history and poor economics and some rancid ideology and vast swathes of boredom and once in a very long while a bit of jaw dropping poetry.
Compare/contrast Pound's editing of The Waste Land, which I have also been mulling over. Available in facsimile. How removing chunks of it turned a good but rather uninteresting poem into a piece that still unsettles with its strangeness.
Pity he lost that crayon.

Peter Makin and the art of good criticism

2010-04-03T02:34:00.001-07:00

So I looked up Peter Makin, or his work, having been annoyed by the footnotes to Bunting on Poetry.(see Bunting On Wyatt several posts ago) I still don't appreciate Makin's editing of that book, but his book about the shaping of Bunting's verse is fascinating reading.

Here is a fine reader, nagging away at the simple question: how good was this man's poetry. And if it was good could it possibly be great and if it were great how can that be verbalised. Like the illuminations of the gospels he discusses, it's slightly obsessive, and bordering the fringes of a gentle lunacy, but like the illuminator, the final product is clear sighted and impressive.

He begins with the poems; not the theory or the poetics, and reads carefully. And he takes on the objections to his method.

And you begin to realise, if you had been living on the moon had had never stopped to think about it before, how difficult is that question: is this a good poem? How hard it is to answer it. But he performs the fact that it can be answered: not neatly in a five second sound grab or some kind of trendy slogan that could be assimilated intot he next best sellign "how to write a poem". He swerves, backtracks, takes Bunting to task, stops to marvel, finds faults, but all the while heading, if not inexorably, more like Graves flying crooked Butterfly, towards an answer.

Observing what he calls “ ‘the seduction scene in Briggflatts’ he states “This scene does without a great deal of what we might expect to find in such a description.”…
Comparing it to a scene from The Rainbow he writes; But the addition of detail would add nothing if the centre , the essence, were poorly conceived. With a mass of denotation-like the venetian painters with all their skill in modelling-a writer may only make clearer his weakness. Bunting’s scene is cut down to a few flat planes. They undress; he runs his fingers though his pubic hair; they talk through the night; she washes him. From these sections, we infer the solidity that is needed”

(Peter Makin (Bunting: the shaping of his verse. 1992 p 225/6))

(I’d have thought that "thatch of my manhood’s home” was hers, not his? but the freedom to dissent here is part of the effect of the style. The fact we might see it differently doesn't detract from the success of the suggestion. It may even be a criteria that measures the skill of it.)

How much detail is too much: how much too little? What is admirably terse; what is too private?

Good criticism illuminates the text it discusses and for the would be writer, forces an encounter with hard practical questions.

And Makin does a good job of showing why so much of the Stanley Fish ("is there a text in this class/How to recognise a poem when you see one") style of approach to poetry, for all its sometimes enjoyable pyrotechnics, is a facile dead end. Both for the reader and the writer.

To criticize the critic

2010-04-01T22:20:00.000-07:00

Not the done thing apparently.

But if I'm going to consider "who is speaking" and the sincerity typos sooner or later I run up against the idea that what is really at stake is the indvidual's response to the poem. And the dangers of taking a subjective reaction and passing it off as an objective, measured response.

So i've been domesticating the argument and thinking about the reviewer who described parts of Lady G as “embarrassingly unconvincing.”

What does that mean? Does it tell the reader of the review about the poem or the critic? And what as writer could I learn from this? How do I make my poem more "convincing".

The story of Lady Godiva’s ride though the city as told by twelfth century latin chroniclers is historically unconvincing because it claims to be truth and there are too many reasons why it couldn’t be.

If you claim to have kayaked the Herbert river from its upper reaches to where it becomes tidal and don’t mention or remember that below the main falls there is a series of falls which must either be paddled at great risk or portaged at some risk, then I will be unconvinced.

In both cases I can measure the claims against an objective knowledge. ANd the claims are undermined by their own inaccuracies.

So our critic is saying he’s met a First century Roman Legionnaire and knows they don’t speak like this? I don't think so.

let us give the critic the benefit of the doubt, a courtesy he doesn't extend in his review: surely he doesn’t think I’m stupid enough to pretend this is what a real Roman legionnaire said in the first century standing on the ramparts of the Lunt?

So given that it’s not a truth statement, and given the fact that this is not a warped attempt at mimesis which can be measured against the real thing, what does it mean to say it’s unconvincing?

our critic apparently find this embarrassing because? The only real evidence is:

“A green hill “does Dumb Insolence” (more schoolboy attitude than war)”

Sitting there at his computer, wouldn’t you think he'd check his own understanding? How long would it take to type “dumb Insolence” definition into Google? If he had, the first thing he’d have read on the search results page, without even bothering to open the link would be:

Dumb insolence is an offence against military discipline in which a subordinate displays an attitude of defiance towards a superior without open disagreement. It is also found in settings such as education in which obedience and deference to a teacher is expected but may be refused by unruly pupils

Had he bothered to check further he would have found out that in the British military, it was a court martial offence and in time of war punishable by firing squad.

Why did he think his understanding of the term was the only one? Or assume that I wouldn't have checked it before using it?

Instead he declares of number 5: in tones that remind me of my English teacher (which is not a compliment) : “it should have been left out of the sequence”.

Why?

Did he take the time to consider how this piece fits into the sequence, because after all this is a sequence, not a series of randomly collated bits, with its own architecture: those veterans sipping tea in part two had just come out of the British military and it might have been a part of the vocabulary passed on to the /I/ growing up in the migrant city. His teachers, many of whom were ex-military might have carried that vocabulary into the school grounds and Adrian Mitchell's poem did a lot of the carrying (and mutating: the sullen ten year old says "They don't like it/but they can't do you for it") .

He might have considered what those twelve lines were doing there, what that speaker might be there to represent and how his statement might be seen to qualify or at least challenge, or be qualified or challenged by the hopes of the later migrants who wait for the city to be made familiar in their children’s stories.

But given that he didn't check "dumb Insolence" I have reasons to doubt that he considered any of these things.

I am unconvinced.

Varney The Vampyre

2010-03-25T21:32:00.000-07:00

The good news; it's far better than I expected.
the bad news: 1166 pages...
It's literally bigger than War and Peace
(But much more readable.)

When in doubt

2010-03-23T21:07:00.000-07:00

read T.S Eliot.
Open the book and start the conversation: Three voices of poetry, in the second one the poet is speaking in his proper person...invite others, here's Bunting in support (he isn't too keen on ELiot but they can be polite to each other) claiming that Wyat rocks because he is writing about personal events and real people, Graves (what are these two doing together?) agrees: the poet is the poem and the sick poet writes a sick poem. But Northrop Frye is arguing that you should never confuse the appearance of sincerity in literature with the thing itself, and since the boy is a medievalist by training and preference we'd better hear from A.C.Spearing arguing that the sincerity typos is a creation of the middle ages, though while the poets may have realised it was a literary game their audiences, or their readers after they were dead, certainly did believe in it.

Which means, that realistically is there a difference for the reader between a first person poem or narrative and a dramatic monologue. If I read Mr Last Duchess I know that it's not the duke speaking but Browning putting words in his mouth. But If I read Heaney's Digging...I'm reading the words of a speaking character called Seamus Heaney who is the creation of a poet called Seamus Heaney. And the fact that x number of poets could be imagined saying the content of those lines undermines the whole autobiographical nature of the poem.

Back to TSE. I'd forgotten how much fun this is.

Bunting, Wyatt, editors.

2010-03-02T01:22:00.000-08:00

Bunting on Wyat (sic) .
(In Basil Bunting on Poetry ed. Peter Makin

It’s interesting when poets I admire admire the poets I admire. And I think Bunting nails some of the things I like about Wyatt‘s verse. He also suggests something that has always intrigued me. Wyatt is regarded as one of the first English poets to go to Italy for his models, and to bring back not only the sonnet but Petrach. But Wyatt Englished Petrach, or Wyatted him, in way some of his successors failed to do. To put it in Bunting’s Northern voice:
“The cruel mistress of Wyat’s poems is not someone to despair over. He is quite ready to give her the chuck if she goes on refusing him.”
To giver her the chuck...You can hear the poet saying "bugger this " in "whoso list to hunt" and then compare it to the Petrach piece it's supposed to be "translating".

The other difference is that, despite the forests of Tudor pine in the collected, Wyat’s women seem far more real than Petrach's. As Bunting says, Laura was an excuse for poetry.
“There is hardly ever any reason to remember where Wyat found his material; and indeed for the most part , he found it in his own head (the translations are not so many); or he found it in the eyes of Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth Darrell, and the other ladies who felt the force of his love and his poetry.”
Those naked arms, long and small, in They flee from me, seem to belong to a real woman.

Or to put it another way, in Wyatt’s poetry an individual voice wrestles with conventions and refuses to be stilled by them.

What I really don’t like about “Bunting on Poetry” is the editorial apparatus. Peter Makin may be a renowned Bunting scholar (I’m guessing he is) but be fusses round the text like a child worried about the impression a beloved but wayward parent is going to make at the Sunday school party. Extended end notes refute, challenge support and explain Bunting’s comments as though Makin wants whatever is said to be RIGHT. It’s a very odd way of presenting material. I’d have preferred the book of lectures without the intro and footnotes which could have been published as “What Bunting Should Have Said”. And that would be a book I wouldn’t pay for.
Though you could imagine someone doing it to Pound's ABC of Reading, or of Graves' lectures. “There is no evidence to support Graves’ suggestion that Anglo- Saxon poetry is based on the rhythm of oars, so what follows is really rather silly and you should go read Professor Bosti Fidget’s unreadable but seminal disquisition on the influence of post colonial feminist economics in the post roman provinces on the development of alliterative metres.”

Shearsman’s new version of Tottel’s Miscellany

2010-02-20T01:09:00.000-08:00

The miscellany (1557) was the first printed anthology of English poetry in English, one of the first examples of possibly dodgy editing practice and a wonderful book. Although it named Surrey on the title page, it also published Wyatt beyond his immediate circle of friends.

This edition, published on my birthday no less, is wonderful in the literal sense of that much overused word. Unlike the usual meaningless blurb the back cover is used to provide most of the necessary background information. This in itself deserves praise. My only real quibble with the whole book is that the afterword isn’t signed and we can’t thank who ever edited this version.
Tottle began with “The printer to the reader”:

That to haue wel written in verse, yea & in small parcelles, deserueth great praise, the works of diuers Latines, Italians, and others, do proue sufficiently.

The lyric was coming of age. Although there are beautiful anonymous pieces from the middle ages, with Tottel the short poem steps up, sometimes with the writer’s name attached, to be considered as “deserving great praise”. This new edition makes it possible to see the moment as it was.

As the quotation makes obvious, the spelling hasn’t been modernised. This isn’t a problem. I’m also grateful to the anonymous editor for deciding not to reproduce the heavy black type of the original. My second hand copy of the Scolar press facsimile is now almost unreadable.

In “The Modern Poet” Robert Crawford, discussing how the presentation of poetry has become subsumed into the academic process, points to the way modern editions of poetry from the past are likely to be edited by scholars who are academic experts in their field. This produces a familiar book where the poems, squashed between the critical apparatus, are presented as objects for study. The penguin Complete Wyatt has 262 pages of poems in very small font on grainy paper, squashed between 66 pages of introduction and 178 pages of notes.

I confess to being a compulsive reader of footnotes, endnotes, introductions glossaries forewords, afterwords and all the familiar paraphernalia of the critical modern edition. So there’s a delightful sense of unfamiliarity to open the Shearsman edition and find nothing but the poems on the page. Set out in a readable font on good paper, the book is slightly bigger than the usual paperback and that makes for a decent sized page.

At first sight it’s actually odd. The poems aren’t jostling for space or competing for attention. Stripped back to what it was, the book invites the reader to pay attention to the poems. This is what I imagine Graves meant when he said poets and readers need “clean reading copies” of poetry. And I like it. It’s pleasant to read. Rochester please?

It’s hard not to start by looking up favourite poems. Doing so misses some of the odder little pieces scattered about.
But being a fan of Sir Thomas, to page 48 to read the tottled version of “They flee from me”. What Tottel did to Wyatt has been well known since the mss versions of the poems were discovered in the 20th century and has been discussed at great length.

This means that modern editions of Wyatt usually include the almost obligatory discussion of “How to read Wyatt” with attendant attempts to show the editor’s favourite version of the metre or method Wyatt may have been using. Fortunately this edition does not do so and resists the urge to correct Tottel.

Reading the Totteled version not as a foot note or as extracts in a long essay is a strange experience. Tottel added titles. I haven’t read them all but he seems to have used third person titles to introduce first person poems. So the piece I know as “They flee from me”..is ”The louer sheweth how he is forsaken of such as he sometimes enjoyed”. (Which is an advance on the penguin complete’s LXXX)

I can see why people may prefer this version of the poem although the stanza break makes little sense. The poem lacks that familiar jaggedness (highly technical term!) I like in Wyatt. Instead of being forced to think about how to speak the lines, they just toddle along.

But the Tottel version not only adds words but changes them. The sarcasm of the ms “kindly”, which is in keeping with “I have leave to go of her goodness’ has been replaced by the more obvious “unkindly” and the understatement goes out the window. The last line in Tottel’s version is almost bland compared to the bitter whine of “I would fain know what she hath deserved.”

There’s nothing new to say about Tottel or Wyatt and if there is I’m not going to be the person saying it. So all this to say having a good reader’s edition of Tottel presents poems as things to read and enjoy not to study. Anyone interested in English poetry, or in the short lyric poem, should buy this book.

Leofric's family...the events of 1065

2010-02-09T17:44:00.000-08:00

With so little evidence the Historian is forced to fit what is available into which ever grand narrative he or she prefers. It’s the only way to make what is a scattered mess into a tidy story. The generally accepted master narrative of the 11th century is that the families of Godwin and Leofric vied for power, possibly at the expense of the Anglo-Saxon state and the unity and strength of the kingdom.

Richard Fletcher, who was after all writing a book about Blood Feuds, could write about the events of 1065: “ For Edwine and Morcar it was an opportunity not to be missed. Here at last was a chance to hit out at the hated sons of Godwin” (Bloodfeud. p161). Victor Head in his “biography” of Hereward wrote: “it is tempting to see in this [the exile of Hereward] evidence of the political intrigues that marked the years leading up to the Norman Conquest and to a large extent contributed to its success.”
Reading backwards family politics becomes a reason for the Norman success and for Edwine and Morcar’s recalcitrance in 1066 and later. That backward reading is supported, consciously or otherwise, by later medieval history where great families did split the kingdom all ends up and by earlier Anglo-Saxon history where Mercia and Wessex and Northumbria were kingdoms vying for political dominance. And by the assumption that two families, both alike in dignity, must have been each other’s throats.

Baxter suggests that the earls were in fact both powerful and vulnerable, hard working administrators who may not have been quite so geographically focussed as we would suspect and that the continued strength and prosperity and peace of the kingdom under the anointed king was in their best interests.

But not being an historian, I can indulge in some whatiffery. Is there any reason to suppose that the Godwinsons and Leofwinsons did hate each other? Or saw each other as rivals? If so for what?

But first a quick recap on what is known about the Northumbrian uprising in 1065.

After ten years or so, the people of Northumbria had had enough of Tostig. While he was away at the southern court they rose against him. The uprising was well-planned. The rebels entered York on 3rd October and killed Tostig’s retainers. Having declared Tostig an outlaw, they offered the “Vacant Earldom” to Morcar, the youngest brother of Eadwine and son of Aeflgar. Morcar accepted, and marched south with his new people, joined by his brother, the fighting men of Mercia and their Welsh allies. Harold Godwinson acted as an intermediary between the king and the rebels. Rather than bring them to heal by fighting, as Edward may have wanted, an agreement was reached which legalised what had happened. Morcar was confirmed as Earl of Northumbria, Edward agreed to follow the Laws of Cnut, and Tostig was isolated. Outraged, he claimed his brother had manufactured the uprising and Harold had to clear himself on oath. The rebels did a bit of Harrying around Northhampton where Tostig had estates, and then went home. The had entered York on the 3rd, the council finished its deliberations on the 28th and Tostig was offered a choice: accept or be exiled. He chose exile. Before speculating about skulduggery.

Edwine and Morcar's father was dead. So was their grandfather Leofric. But Godgifu wasn't. I wonder what Grandma G thought of all this.

1) The rebellion, which is usally simply narrated and explained, was outrageous. The Earl was the King’s appointed deputy in his earldom. To throw him out was an act of gross disobedience. In a top down society, no matter how interdependent the parts of the hierarchy, to overthrow your king’s appointed officer was novel. King’s had exiled earls, but not at the request of the people they were supposed to keep in line.

2) There’s nothing odd about the rebels' choice of Morcar. They obviously needed a candidate to replace Tostig. You don’t just rock up to Morcar’s front door in the aftermath of your rebellion and ask “how’d you fancy being earl of Northumbria’ to which he replies : ”Cor, I’d like that. Hey Edwin, bro, I’m marching south against the King, wanna get some homeys together in a posse and ride with me?”

Choosing a local replacement for Tostig was not a good idea for several reasons. Firstly it would isolate the northumbrians between the Mercians and the Scots; secondly, if Fletcher is correct, while there were candidates from old families in the area, they tended to have enemies who were candidates from other old familes; at least they could all regard an outlander with mutual suspicion and hostility. Morcar was the ideal choice: While planning the uprising they were hardly going to approach one of Tostig’s brothers; as a son of Leofric he had had what passed as training for Earling: secondly, his elder brother had an army.

3) Tostig’s actions after his exile suggest he was following a well known script without quite realising that the world had changed. He probably remembered his father’s banishment and had heard enough stories about it. The pattern, which Aeflgar had worked twice with minor variations, meant you went away, gathered an army, found an ally, roughed up the locals, then gathered enough supporters to make the King take you back. King Harald’s Saga is not a reliable historical source, but it’s interesting that in the dramatic confrontation between the two brothers before Stamford Bridge, Harold offers Tostig a third of England, including Northumbria. Tostig says it’s a pity he didn’t say this last year, and then asks what English Harold will give Viking Harald. The reply ”seven feet of ground” sums up the bind Tostig put himself in.

4) If Tostig was playing a well known script the context had changed in subtle but important ways. Godwin had been exiled for refusing to harry Dover. He had good will in the bank when he came back. Tostig had been evicted by his own people and they didn’t want him back. When he raided along the coast he was seen off by Edwin and Morcar. There was no popular rising in his favour. Godwin had faced Edward. Tostig now had to face his brother. And while Aelfgar had made treaties with the Welsh, Tostig went and made his with a man even the Vikings thought was a hard case, who wouldn’t be happy to see Tostig reinstated in York and then sail home. He wanted the crown of England. And that changed everything.
But the question that intrigues me, is did Harold “do his bother good and proper” in 1065? And does the concept of family feud obscure something else.

Leofric's family...a digression

2010-02-08T03:26:00.000-08:00

Before the dirty deeds and misdeeds of 1065…
One of the problems of 11th century history (or one of its delights) is the dearth of available records.

Within a hundred and fifty years of the conquest the number of people who could read an Anglo-Saxon manuscript may have been less than the number who can do so today. Add to that the problems caused by the monastic habit of “Creative Copying” of older charters and documents, outright forgery, destruction and loss of manuscripts over time and then accelerated by the dissolution of the monasteries and what we can know of whole decades is pitifully small.

As the earliest story of Lady G attests, the problem is compounded because the Normans of the 12th century and those who came after weren’t that well informed about the Anglo-Saxons of the Eleventh.

We know Earl Aelfgar was exiled twice. The first time is mentioned in three of the versions of the chronicle although each gives a slightly different version of the story and none gives much of an explanation.

But almost all that is known about the second time is contained only in the Worcester version of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle for 1058.
Here Earl Alefgar was expelled, but he soon came back again, with violence, though the help of Gruffydd. And here came a raiding ship-army from Norway. It is tedious to tell how it all happened. [the entry continues with the actions of Bishop Aldred and other ecclesiastical figures.)

It is tedious to tell how it all happened. It was cold, he was bored, hungry, his fingers hurt and his back and eyes ached. How was he to know anyone would care in a thousand years time?

Hereward the Wake is a hero of Romance, the epitome of English resistance to the Norman invaders, a subject of ballads (he was?) but all the Chronicle says about him is in the entry for 1071 which begins…Here Earl Edwin and Morcar ran off and travelled variously in woods and in open country…Edwin is killed by his own men and the surviving rebels, holed up in Ely, surrender…”except Hereward alone, and all who wanted to be with him; and he courageously lead them out.”

Now, the gaps are so huge you are free to fill them any way you wish.

If you want to argue that he must have been a three toed Nergle from the planet ZIpthith who landed in Ely by mistake, thinking the monastery was a rest and recreation area and the monks were organic orgasmatrons (mark 4 ambulant) you are welcome to do so. It’s about as sensible as arguing that he must have been a son of Earl Leofric. Summarised and possibly supported by Heard in his biography of Hereward, the arguments, based on the novel by Charles Kingsley and a "history" written by a Lieut-General Thomas Netherton Harward in 1896, who thought he was his descendant. make my Nergel thesis seem a model of rational argument.

Earl Leofric's family #2

2010-02-06T01:00:00.000-08:00

Eadwine and Morcar, the two surviving sons of Aelfgar, (lady G's grandsons (she was still alive) had their army destroyed at Fulford Gate and then disappear from the evidence until their submission to William after Hastings. If they fought at either Stamford bridge or Hastings there is no evidence, but if they fought at Hastings then they must have “slipped away”.

Their careers after the conquest are depressing: held as virtual hostages, they seem to have tried to operate within the new regime the way their Grandfather and Great grandfather had adapted but failed. There is even a story that William promised Eadwine his daughter.

They rebel, apologise, are pardoned, rebel again. Eadwine is killed by his own men and Morcar, having submitted yet again, plays out his life as a prisoner. Though pardoned by William on his death bed, he was re-imprisoned by William 2 and probably died in the same prison as Harold’s last surviving brother. He’s last heard of as a prisoner around 1086.

As Baxter writes is an ironic end to what is often seen as the great family feud of the 11th century.

Baxter shows how the sorry post conquest career of the boys may not have been simply the result of their character. As he explains, the conditions that allowed the earls of pre-conquest England to be powerful were gradually disappearing. The Earls were no longer able to protect their people; their powerbase was being eroded as their influence at the local level was being steadily diminished. A lord who could neither punish nor protect, reward nor promote, (to put it in terms Baxter doesn’t use) wasn’t worth fighting for.

One other major factor had changed: The King. The great magnates of pre-conquest England seemed to simultaneously muster armies and try to avoid civil war. When Godwine and Aelfgar returned after exile they did so with an army behind them, but in all three cases they were able to negotiate their return with limited bloodshed. When the Northumbrians threw Tostig out, they marched south in force with Eadwine's Mercians and some Welsh supporters, but Harold negotiated rather than raise the army and fight. There was no suggestion that Edward’s status as King was under treat. Perhaps his authority and his ability to force his subjects to do his will was under pressure but there was no attempt by any of these to actually topple the King. Heroic poetry might obscure the fact that most of the time men didn't like fighting unless they had to.

(There may have been some very underhand goings on In the immediate aftermath of Tostig's expulsion...but even so it would have exploited a general reluctance to fight a civil war... see next post).

However, William knew his position was tenuous. Any challenge to his authority implied a threat to his position. The evidence also suggests he and his men were more than happy to fight.
Next post, Revealed, scandalous political dealings in the 11th Century!

Earl Leofric's family #1

2010-02-06T00:52:00.000-08:00

The Earls of Mercia
By Stephen Baxter.(OUP 2007)

Having sacrificed an arm and a leg to buy a copy, I have to say it’s been worth the pain. Although you’d think they'd get a decent proof reader to check a book like this. Grumble aside, this is history as careful consideration of evidence, written by someone who knows the limitations of the available evidence and keeps his arguments firmly grounded in it.
It avoids the kind of half informed wishful thinking that characterises some books about the 11th century.
This strict focus on the evidence leads to two paradoxical results.
The first is to show how very little survives from a century. The second, despite the scarcity, or even because of it, the players still emerge.
And in some cases, the evidence is incriminating in ways that speculation cannot be.

So firstly the cleaning up. I wish I’d had this when writing Lady G.
The family tree in two posts and then the more juicy stuff.

Earl Leofric’s father was Leofwine, and as Baxter says this means the Leofwinsons were the great survivors of the 11th century, holding almost continuous (though varying) office from 994 to 1070(ish). For four generations the family served nine kings representing four different royal dynasties. The Godwinsons are sexier, a family of delinquent power hungry nutters makes much better subjects for a story, but it may be better, sometimes, to serve in heaven than rule in hell?

Leofric’s grandfather is shadowy though it’s possible he is named in ‘The Battle of Maldon’ which is ironic given his grandsons’ action.

Leofric had at least three bothers, two of whom came to violent ends. Northman was executed in Cnut’s purge of 1017 although his father wasn’t. Eadwine died in battle against the Welsh in 1039. Confusingly there was also a brother called Godwine who lived til the 1050s. He’s the one who launched an attack while his son, Aelfwine, was a hostage of the Danes. Aelfwine, Leofric’s nephew, having lost both his hands, “lived out his life in the hut of an oxherd”.

Leofric and Godgifu had one son, Aelfgar. There seems to be no evidence of a daughter or any other children.

Aelfgar , who doesn’t seem to have inherited his father’s…. tact, pinballed around the 1050s in a series of banishments and returns. He is known to have had three sons and one daughter.: Ealdgyth, Eadwine, Morcar and Burgheard. The idea that Hereward the wake is a member of the family is a romantic fiction and Baxter advances the case that it is more likely that he was one of Morcar’s men.

Although at this distance it’s impossible to “know” much about Ealdgyth, the bare facts of her life provide an insight into the reality of being a member of such a powerful family. Her uncle had died fighting against Gruffudd but she married him. Dealing with the Welsh was an English problem but the border made it particularly a Mercian one. The fact that her brothers were known to have welsh allies suggests they weren’t always at each others throats. She may have been part of the price her father paid for Welsh support in his two “returns” to power. (The facts open up into speculation. Did she speak Welsh? Or did Gruffudd speak English, or did they require a Latimer? In such a marriage was conversation even necessary? )

Gruffudd was killed in 1063 after Tostig and harold raided deep into Wales. (His own men sent his head to the English). In early 1066 she married the man responsible for his death; Harold which makes her the last queen of Anglo-Saxon England. If you subscribe to the family enmity and feud version, then in theory at least it should have stopped here, not in the bathetic end of Morcar (see next post).
She had a daughter by Gruffudd, and a son by Harold, though the latter didn’t live to see him. It’s possible that if William hadn’t already been married he might have been her third husband.

" A meme about books"

2010-01-21T02:12:00.000-08:00

I stole this from Barbara Smith. But it's about books. How could I not?

1. Which book has been on your shelves the longest?  
An oxford pocket dictionary bought in 1971 to start high school. If dictionaries don’t count then a now very tatty paperback copy of Michael Alexander’s translation of Beowulf.
2. What is your current read, your last read and the book you'll read next?  
Currently reading ‘Hereward the Wake” It's awful so i blame Linda davis. Just finished The Pen Friend by Ciaran Cason and The monk. (who reads one book at a time?) Next non work read is Varney the Vampire though I think I have to read Butler’s Gender Trouble First..  
3. What book did everyone like and you hated?  
Don’t often hate books. I hated Eagleton’s “How to read a Poem” with the kind of hatred that is dangerously close to irrational loathing but I don’t know if anyone else liked it.
4. Which book do you keep telling yourself you'll read, but you probably won't? 
The fairy Queen. I get about half way through and crash.
5. Which book are you saving for "retirement?"  
why save a book?
6. Last page: read it first or wait till the end?  
Depends. Most often or not I read the last page first.
7. Acknowledgments: waste of ink and paper or interesting aside?  I always read them. When I was kayaking it used to be a way of finding what some of my friends were up to…All the poetry I’ve published has been read by friends before it ever saw the light of day and some of their comments have been invaluable. Especially with the longer sequences it’s a big ask getting someone to read and comment. So I always try and say thank you.
8. Which book character would you switch places with? 
I can think of three characters I’d like to swop with and three books I’d like to be in: I want Thursday Next’s job please. (what reader doesn’t). or to be the River Rat in Wind in the Willows or Lucas Corso in The Dumas club. Then I’d like to be in The House at Pooh Corner; At Swim Two Birds , and Ulysses. (Actually, I’d like to be Ulysses. The whole book.)
  9. Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time)?  Too many
10. Name a book you acquired in some interesting way.  
All the Russias by Henry Norman..it’s an old old book. I did a slide show at bill’s Adventure bookshop in Maleny and instead of paying me he gave me that and a couple more beautiful books. Best payment I’ve ever had for shooting my mouth off in public. (He also had a first edition of the Ascent of Rum Doodle which he didn’t give me.)
11. Have you ever given away a book for a special reason to a special person?  
I tend to buy specific books for those kind of people.
12. Which book has been with you to the most places?   Probably that Pocket dictionary and Beowulf if we’re talking houses. Copies of Ulysses (I’ve killed a few) have probably clocked the most air miles. Mandeville and Basho did the trans Siberian. My paperback of Byron’s Don Juan did the whole Russian/Central Asian trip so I think it has done the most land and river miles and probably been read in the weirdest of places.
13. Any "required reading" you hated in high school that wasn’t so bad ten years later?   I hated it all and still can’t read a lot of it. I don’t remember liking anything we had to read except for Othello. My teacher put me off Keats and it wasn’t til I was at uni that I reread bits of it and saw it might have some value. Going the other way i loved Lawrence's Pansies when i first found them (we "did" some of his poems for O level. Didn't read them for years. Recently i found a cheap copies of his collected poems. It still sparks.(and no i don't like his prose or his attitudes)
14. What is the strangest item you’ve ever found in a book?  
Creepiest was a lipstick smudge on a copy of Shadowland that I swear wasn’t there when I started reading that page. I buy a lot of second hand books so I’ve found everything from letters to flowers, ferry tickets, plane tickets, postcards blank or otherwise. None of them seem strange really
15. Used or brand new?  
Both. I don’t’ care. . I like the second handedness of second hand books. I like the marginal scribbles and the underlining. I like the idea of an ongoing conversation with people I’ll never meet. I also love the smell of second hand books. James and I were actually sniffing a set in a book shop when we realised the owner was watching. Expecting to be embarrassed, he said: if you like that, try this..and gave us some first edition Arabian nights to savour…Book sniffers of the world unite!
16. Stephen King: Literary genius or opiate of the masses?  
Neither. Damn good at what he does if you like what he does. I prefer early Straub.
17. Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book? 
Yes. Lair of the White Worm. The film is bad but it’s a vast improvement on the book.
18. Conversely, which book should NEVER have been introduced to celluloid. Ulysses. Stoker’s Dracula. (Polanski’s version of the Dumas club is so bad it’s really a different story.)
19. Have you ever read a book that's made you hungry, cookbooks being excluded from this question?  
Can’t say so.

20. Who is the person whose book advice you'll always take?  
I’ll take anybodies.

The monk

2010-01-14T23:35:00.000-08:00

Found shamelessly reading The Monk.

It’s awful. The editor’s introduction (reprinted from the 1906 edition) gets it right:
“There is food for thought in the case of a man of mere average ability who, on the strength of one crude production written in his teens, was able to find publishers and a market for a miscellaneous series of works that would daunt the hardihood of the most indefatigable researcher to read now …but was regarded as among the leading men of letters of his day.”

Mathew Gregory Lewis was so famous for his book that he was known as “Monk Lewis”. He knew Byron and Moore.
Written in 1795 before the author was twenty, (like Vathek, except Beckford could write) the book attracted such praise and blame that the second edition was “expurgated” by the author.

The writing is awful. Not “awful by modern standards” but just “awful”. It’s hard to believe that Byron admired the book; though possibly it was the idea of openly admiring such a shocking story that was attractive to his lordship. (Actually given B’s biography there may have a been a bit of self identification at work).

There’s a certain sour attraction to the main plot line. And it’s obviously a very English assault on the perceived uglyness of the Catholic church and some of its institutions. (Which links it to Melmoth but Maturin could write) )
Ambrosio the monk begins life as a paragon of religious virtue and the story traces his slippery descent from fornication with another monk..( a woman disguised as a monk, or a devil disguised as a woman disguised as a monk) to destruction by the devil himself. On the way he becomes an obvious candidate for the Group W Bench with mother killing, sister raping and sister stabbing along the way, before being caught and mangled by the Inquisition and then signing a pact with Satan who admits he’s been after him all along, sinks his claws into his skull, flies him up to a great height and drops him.

There’s lots more: sub plots on sub plots…a Bleeding Nun, villains in way side inns, a pregnant nun, who is killed then found alive, brothers losing sisters and finding them, a lover who after losing his lover and finding her raped and stabbed takes up with a conveniently good looking nun who isn’t a nun …You could troop the colour through the plot holes..(Rosario the monk who is actually Matilda who is actually a devil is examined by the convent doctor who doesn’t seem to notice his patient is a woman and this doesn’t surprise Ambrosio.)

So, Le Fanu is still leading hands down. There is only Varney the Vampyre left to consider.

(According to Brewer's "to win hands down" comes from racing where a jockey who is taking it easy has his hands down and one who is trying hard has his hands up).

Coventry June 1604 (The early joys of dictionaries)

2010-01-13T01:38:00.000-08:00

27th to be precise
Robert Cawdrey (who?) signs the epistle to his book:

A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing, and vnderstanding of hard vsual English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, latine or French.

Which will be published in London.

The first monolingual English dictionary, with "hard usual words" set out in alphebetical order. Hard to imagine how revolutionary the idea was. The attempt was not to explain all words, just the hard ones. As simon Winchester pointed out when Shakespeare was writing, he could consult books on history. There were atlases, prayer books, missals, biographies, romances and pamphlets. There were guides to rhetoric. There was even a book he could use to check his classical allusions. But he had no way to find out if his use of the word Consanguineous meant what he thought it did. Nor could his audience, on hearing the word, go home and find out what it meant by consulting a dictionary.

No dictionary. No coffee. He do it the hard way.

Consanguinity is in Cawdrey. Not that his little book was always so useful.

Crocodile. beast.

However Cawdrey's book was so novel that he had to explain why he'd written it. He also had to explain to the reader how it was set out:

If thou be desirous (gentle Reader) rightly and readily to vnderstand and to profit by this table, and such like, then thou must learne the Alphabet, to wit, the order of Letters as they stand, perfectly without booke, and where every Letter standeth: as (b) neere the beginning, (n) about the middest, and (t) toward the end. Nowe if the word which thou art desirous to finde, begin with (a) then looke in the beginning of this Table, but if with (v) looke towards the end. Againe, if thy word beginne with (Ca) looke in the beginning of the letter (c) but if with (cu) then looke toward the end of the letter (c).

(yes he does spell beginning two different ways.)

The book has only recently (2007) been given a modern printing. It's the beginning of the great tradition of English Dictionaries (what little that's known of Cawdrey suggests he was as awkward and odd as you'd expect which is another part of the tradition) ) ; but what a beginning, and in Coventry too.

Anti Blurb wars part three

2010-01-13T01:23:00.000-08:00

Leonard Cohen; Hallelujah-A new Biography

The blurb claims this is “Authoritative but often wryly amusing…” but more importantly: “featuring numerous new and exclusive interviews with some of Cohen’s key Associates and including brand new research which reveals previously unreported details Leonard Cohen; Hallelujah-A new Biography will remain the standard work on the man for years to come.”

So let’s see: “Authoritative” could mean any number of things.
the author does have a tendency to lay down the law about what is and isn't good about the songs or individual records. But unless you're the kind of person who wants to be told what to like, it's a bit tedious.
Authoritative
There’s already a very good biography of Cohen, by Ira Nadel called Various Positions. It’s more a literary biography than a piece of glib rock journalism but the list of people Nadel interviewed and consulted is a long one. The only real criticism you can level against it is that it’s almost hagiographical.

So wouldn’t you expect a book which is claiming to be “the standard work on the man” to be driven by its own agenda which would necessitate the writer moving away from what is readily available? Wouldn’t you expect it to include some interviews with the man himself, conducted by the writer? How do you write an authoritative biography of a living subject if you don’t ask him or her the questions that are driving your biography.

"So Wordsworth, what does it feel like to have been instrumental in killing off one of the greatest talents in English poetry?"
or
"Harold, what the hell were you thinking?"

If you simply cobble together your work from the answers to other people’s questions aren’t you just retracing the well known tracks? Wouldn’t you think that maybe interviewing the ex wife, or some of the women who figure so prominently in the songs might be a good idea? (it would be the one way to improve on Nadal’s biography). Footman did neither.
So the blurb says:
“numerous new and exclusive interviews with some of Cohen’s key Associates”
There are 200 endnotes to the biography section of the biography. Of these 5 are credited as “interview with the author[Footman]”. Is five numerous? It’s easily outnumbered by references or quotes taken from either Nadal’s Biography or Harry Rasky’s book.
"Exclusive" perhaps but “Some of Cohen’s key associates”…so if you know Cohen’s story think of “key associates“ ..Sharon Robertson, Jennifer Warnes, Rosco Beck.. or Marianne, the ex wife, the “real Suzanne”, Anjani Thomas, Dominique Isserman…? People he knew on Hydra/Nashville/Montreal?
As far as I can make out the “original interviews’ were carried out in May or June 2009 and the book was published in November 2009. Which suggests a lot. The subjects of the "numerous and exclusive" interviews were John Simon John Lissauer, and Stephen Scobie. (Scobie’s work on Cohen has been a long term academic project which actually treats the man’s work with the attention it deserves but nothing he’s quoted as saying here is of that standard.)
I’m not sure what the “previously unreported details” can be since most of the information in this book is taken from previously published and often readily available material.

I think there's a point where blurbs move from being overblown and funny towards being dishonest.

Cows

2010-01-06T17:15:00.000-08:00

One of the first Kayaking courses I ran. A week long residential course for adults. In Cornwall. Great place but not for a kayaking course. Anyway.
We're in the pub on the last night going round the table: "What's your best moment?" (leading up to "What do you suggest we change?")
She was twenty three, and had come on the course with her husband on a "let's do something weird and different" impulse.
Her answer: "Being In a field". She paused and thought about it."The one that had the real cows in it. I'm gonna remember that for a long time."

The point of all this slang…apart from the pleasure of it.

2010-01-05T17:31:00.000-08:00

(In the canting tongue to open the door is “to dup the gigger”. “To mill the ken” is to rob the house…I will find a way to use these phrases!)
I started out looking for the source of a phrase and was surprised to find that its origins were mid 20th American, not English as I thought.
There’s an undoubted attraction to language that is indigenous to place and time. Barry Lopez went so far as to suggest that genuine mental health is tied into the usage of a language that is organic to the place where it is being used. And certainly Seamus Heaney et al have made their localised dialect a cornerstone of their practice.
In England, language spoken under a cloth cap with ferrets down its trousers always seemed “authentic” in a way that FSE never did.
But when I came to write Lady G I thought about making it specifically west midlands and realised I couldn’t. It’s true that you can argue that the man from Stratford wrote the plays of Shakespeare because so many purely Warwickshire words and expression turn up in them.
But Coventry was a migrant’s city. In some ways it always had been.
According to the VCH, after the war the percentage of incomers to the city was disproportionately high. The people I went to (RC) school with had parents who were Irish, Polish, Yugoslavian, Lithuanian, and 'Slovakian. Neither of mine were born there. There must have been some English but the swirl of voices was anything but indigenous.
This was compounded by our English teachers who laboured under the now unfashionable idea that teaching the children of NESB migrants Formal Standard English was a door opening activity. (“Sir, may we use contractions in our stories?” ”Only in Dialogue, and only if it is essential!”)
So apart from the fact that the way I say Bus and Road betray my place of origin, I have no local dialect to fall back on, no “thole” to make a fuss about. Damn. But then it occurs to me the attraction of the local in a world of mass movements is a kind of romantic nostalgia. I'd love to know how many people live and die in the place they are born. I'm betting it's not the majority. How many of Heaney’s readers have stuck their hands up a cow’s arse?

Even More joys of Slang

2010-01-01T01:11:00.001-08:00

The excitement of discovering that what you thought the phrase meant is exactly what it meant...in 1811

Slang dictionaries remind me that whatever the rules are, the words will always escape. They don’t remain tied to their classifications as parts of speech, and they certainly don’t rest in the comfort of a neat dictionary definition. Nor will they be tied down to the ball and chain of etymology.

It’s reassuring though to find phrases I thought I’d misheard, misremembered or which had simply been misused. I’d come to the conclusion that Cupboard Love must have been a mistake (perhaps for covert love) but no, it’s there and it meant what I thought it meant. As does/did Mumchancing.

It’s even more reassuring to find out how much hasn’t changed. Phrases that needed explaining in 1811: Kick the bucket, out of kilter, a lazy man’s load, lop-sided, queer street, toddle etc etc meant the same thing 150 years later and were still colouring the speech of adults and children alike.

And then there are the phrases used today which needed explaining then and which, if you stop and think about them, don’t make any more literal sense now. A shop lifter. To sit bolt upright. To be taken in.

More joys of dictionaries of slang

2009-12-30T21:11:00.000-08:00

The arguments justifying dictionaries are almost as entertaining as the dictionaries themselves.
The first is from the introduction to the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.

We need not descant on the dangerous impressions that are made on the female mind , by the remarks that fall incidentally from the lips of the brothers or servants of family; and we have before observed that improper topics can with our assistance be discussed, even before ladies, without raising a blush on the cheek of modesty. It is impossible that a female should understand the meaning of ‘twiddle diddles’ or rise from the table at the mention of ‘Buckinger’s boot’.

Unless of course she got fed up with her smarmy bothers, stole their book and looked up the words they were using. Then she might wonder why they were discussing such things in her presence. But I suspect the intro is not meant to be taken entirely seriously.

On the other hand: The first English Dictionary, Cawdrey’s: A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words published in1604 contained no more than 3,000 words and spelt words two ways on the title page. It was published:

For the benefit and help of ladies, gentlewomen or any other unskilled persons. Whereby they may more easilie and better understand many hard English wordes, such as they shall heare or read in the scriptures, Sermons or elsewhere and also be made to use the same aptly themselues.

According to Simon Winchester “…fantastic linguistic creations like abequitate, bulbulcitate and sullevation appeared in these books alongside Archgrammarian, …there were words like necessitude, commotrix, and Parentate…”
The latter apparently means to celebrate ones parent’s funeral.

However, none of my slang dictionaries have “To go round the Wrekin” or any variation on this phrase.

I am disappointed.

The joys of (West-Midlands) Slang (dictionaries)

2009-12-30T03:33:00.000-08:00

Slang dictionaries have a seductive subversive irresponsibility. Some, especially Australian ones, are dangerously funny and achieve a ribald poetry; others like the canting dictionaries of the renaissance are relics of an alternative universe peopled by rufflers and upright men, jarkmen, bawdy baskets, doxies and kinching morts .
So I have been wallowing in Chambers new Dictionary of Slang; the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue and some Tudor and early Stuart “Rogues Literature” surfacing occasionally to cross check words in the OED or Brewer’s. It’s far too enjoyable to call research.
I’ve come to the unexceptional conclusion that at some stage in the history of English almost every common word has been press ganged from its standard usage to do service as a term for something completely different. In fact, in the wrong place and time, the most innocuous sounding phrase would probably be interpreted as obscene or as evidence of membership of some kind of illegal or secret society.
But while I enjoy slang dictionaries, I remain sceptical. Even the huge Chambers leaves out terms I grew up with. How is standard usage of a slang term established? How many people have to use it and for how long before it gets recorded?

Soon after I came to Australia I read an article in the travel section of a national newspaper which purported to be the results of the journalist’s interest in West Midlands slang. I thought I’d grown up speaking it fairly fluently, or at least playing rugby with people who were experts. So it came as some surprise to learn that in the west midlands a “shag” is a type of bread roll.

The young lady journalist told her readers that if they went into a bakery in the region and asked for a “hot buttered shag” they would be offered a warm bread roll with toasted cheese on top.

So here’s my dilemma about slang dictionaries. Where I grew up, in the west midlands, and where I went to uni, still in the west midlands, if you went into a bakery and asked for a hot buttered shag they would have assumed a) you were nuts, b) into some really weird kind of perversion or c) taking the mickey. But does that mean that nowhere in the wide west midlands this term wasn’t used? Does this mean that somewhere some poor guy was wondering why his girl friend had stopped talking to him after he’d innocently offered her a bread roll?

If you lived in Coventry you knew that people in Wolverhampton spoke a strange and mysterious language. Even the move to Birmingham was fraught with incomprehension. (ok, not so bad as being English and arriving in Australia and hearing the phrase “shag on a rock” or “look at that hunk of spunk over there”..but still enough to make you wary.)

I imagine two codgers in a pub, reluctantly accepting free drinks and earnestly answering the young lady Journalist’s questions. Everyone knows the English are serious unimaginative literal minded people (unlike the Irish) and so they can be trusted to tell the God’s honest. I can also imagine two said codgers pissing themselves when she left having told her to go ask for a hot buttered shag in the local bakers. Maybe things have changed. Maybe there is such a thing, (after all you can go into a shop in Qld and ask for a Gaytime) but in the world I grew up in I’d love to have been there to see the baker’s face, and his customers’, if she did….

Bright Star

2009-12-29T15:27:00.000-08:00

Bright star

So instead of the usual grumbling, something positive.

I wasn’t going to go.
1) I don’t like films that claim to be about “historical characters’ . Usually the writers take liberties with the truth in the name of entertainment. It really doesn’t matter if you give Beowulf and African father, he’s fictional. But a film that pretends to be about about William Wallace, the real human being, might as well be about a character called Jock McJockstrap.
2) There's a trend to write biographies of the partners of famous people. Who'd remember Gilbert Imlay if he hadn't been involved with Mary Wollstonecraft? Isabel Burton was the subject of a huge biography which couldn't avoid the fact that if she hadn't married Sir Richard no one would have remembered her outside her family and friends. All the evidence suggests Fanny Brawne is only memorable because her boyfriend was one John Keats.
3) I’d read a review of Bright Star that discussed Campion’s career in terms of making films about strong women struggling with patriarchal oppression. There’s no way, given the evidence , you can interpret Fanny Brawne in those terms.

However, who wouldn’t want to meet the Keats of the letters, or the hero of Gitting’s biography? Or see the settings made real.

So orf I went.

And bloody good it is too. For once I don't have to worry about possible fall out in the class room. (No dotty, there were no Female actors in Shakespeare's time, yes, i know you saw a film with one in but it wasn't true....)

It looks beautiful. The script is good (Keats’s lines are often taken from his letters) and although after an hour I was wondering how it was going to end (Please god don’t let him make a miraculous recovery, please god do not let them go to bed) she pulls it off beautifully.
So she exonerates Fanny a little. Brown and Keats accuse of her flirting but you don’t see her doing this. She does catch the lighter side of Keats’s character; this was no brooding tortured Romantic parody but Junkets, the man who delighted in company and playing silly game. The acting is very good. From the two main leads all through the cast, especially the moppet who plays toots.
And if it makes people pick up the letters or the poems to find out more, it can only be good.

with all due respects your Honour

2009-12-10T16:32:00.000-08:00

I’ve been reading “The Mad Woman in the Attic”. I feel guilty because it’s taken me so long to get round to reading it, and I’m impressed by the readings of the Brontes. (and a little embarrassed to have missed some of the things they point out.)

But the general sections are getting harder to read. It’s not that I doubt the truth of their argument, I’m just getting put off by the way they are making it.

The real problem seems to be their use of “women”. As if “women’ in 19th century England had the same experience regardless of race, rank and personality. When they write about women being encouraged to be passive, to adopt a role of almost willing invalidism, and how anorexia and agoraphobia were almost de rigueur, they seem to have forgotten that to be the pallid angel in the house you had to have robust servants to do all the hard work. They seem to have forgotten that the majority of the population (regardless of Gender) would quite happily have swapped the problems of economic survival for the conditions that allowed writers (male for female) to agonise about their role in the literary tradition.

While Anne Finch, countess, was writing sonnets (and fine sonnets they are too) about the problems of being a woman who wrote, men and women denied her education and her leisure were living a life one step up from slavery to keep her household running and allow her the time to worry about such things. Virginia Woolf had leisure to ponder the problems of having a room of ones own because people bought up in houses where the whole family lived in one room were running around doing the housework for one.

My other problem is that they buy into Bloom’s fantastic version of literary history and then use it as a touchstone. What they don’t so is show how the spectre of Milton, for example, which in the 19th century cast a long shadow over a certain type of poet, was different for men and women. They quote Woolf’s response at length, but I don’t see how that response is particularly “a woman’s”: it reads like an intelligent response to the complicated work of art that is Paradise Lost and there is nothing in it to gender that response. Present it clean, without the author’s name, and I defy you to identify the gender of the writer.

I suspect they don’t try to differentiate because since all women are the same, and would obviously share Woolf’s response, then all men must be the same and any male poet would simply acquiesce in Milton’s rank misogyny while girding up his loins to kill Milton’s ghost in the boxing ring of Bloom’s Freudian mishmash. Woolf’s contemporary, Robert Graves, who last time I checked was male, hated Milton. Personally.

Given the serious problems facing women in the 19th century: an invidious legal situation, lack of access to formal education, exclusion from careers and the vote, the fact that a small group of leisured ladies worried about their literary role doesn’t seem that important. And I’m not sure that the Brontes, or Emily Dickenson, are any more representative of their gender than Coleridge Robert Graves or Tiger Woods.

I don’t doubt their case your honour, and I know this was a brilliant pioneering work that's been argued over and developed in subsequent years, but with all due respects, I think they are calling the wrong witnesses and spoiling the argument by asking some wrong questions.

The truth about them Anglo-Saxons

2009-12-09T15:03:00.001-08:00

This is from "Young Folks' History of England" published in 1873.
Its the final paragraph in the chapter about the Normans.

In the end, the coming of the Normans did the English much good,
by brightening them up and making them less dull and heavy; but
they did not like having a king and court who talked French, and
cared more for Normandy than for England.

The Book depository is offering over 11,000 titles as free ebooks. They download as small PDF files. Which I where I found this, as well as several 19th century deportment manuals I'd been looking for. Of which much more later.

Lady Godiva and Me gets an Australian Review

2009-12-02T20:01:00.000-08:00

And it's a good one.

Text review

stupidity and the cliche generator

2009-12-01T03:32:00.000-08:00

New Moon star Ashley Greene thinks vampire sex is 100 times better than human sex.
The 22-year-old actress plays vampire Alice Cullen in the hit movie series The Twilight Saga. Asked what vampire sex is like, she said: "Take the best sex you've ever had in your life and multiply is by 100, and that's vampire sex.
End of quotes.
Ok, so it was a stupid question. It would be like asking Harrison Ford what it was like to dine with Ewoks or Sean Connery to reveal what Robin Hood was really like. And if either actor had started talking as though either meeting had really happened the men in white coats would be on standby.
So let us assume that the young lady was talking in character, and/or not expecting to be taken seriously. There is also the possibility that this may be a quote from the book.
Irrespective of this how can something with no numerical value be 100 times less than a similar experience also with no numerical value? Even if there was such a thing as “vampire Sex’ (and the bad puns and ugly jokes queue up) what could it possibly mean to say it is one hundred times better than anything else? And why did a journalist think repeating such a dumb statement was a career move?
It’s about as sensible as some of the vomit inducing political statements being made today after far too many people hit the cliché generator and left it running. Spewing out endless tides of nothing.
Why isn’t there a prevention of cruelty to language movement?

Vampyr (1932)

2009-12-01T03:29:00.000-08:00

Vampyr (1932)

Unlike Nosferatu, which tried hard to pretend it wasn’t based on Stoker’s book and failed because it obviously was, Vampyr claims to be based on Le Fanu’s “In a Glass Darkly”. The beautiful Criterion Collection DVD version even comes with a print copy of ‘Carmilla’. But even if Le Fanu’s descendants were as finickity as Joyce’s they’d be hard pushed to prove any breach of copyright.
Dreyser’s film ghosts the stories: an image here, a piece of plot. There’s a vampire, and she’s female (though old and ?blind?), and there’s a young female victim, but that’s about it. You could track other allusions. But even the obvious reference to the Dragon Volant, or the mysterious stranger in the bed room from …which story was that…. are not exclusive to those particular stories and all the allusions remain like occasional snatches of familiar music in an unfamiliar soundtrack.
The fact the story is not tied to any sources is an obvious advantage. There’s no primary text to provide easy answers to the obvious puzzles. So, a recognisable version of Carmilla this is not, although Laura’s habitual ”it appeared to be’ “it seemed” has been taken to the limit. A conventional horror story this is not and even the vampire element, which is explained by the old book, is muted.
Shadows move, some separate from their bodies, some return to them. Scene and time shift abruptly without causal linkage. Characterisation is missing. Narrative discontinuity starts to seem perfectly sensible. Images seem weighted with significance that is never explored or explained. Light becomes a character just as the old book does. In a fog bound, physically realistic landscape (Dreyser shot the whole film on location) which it would be impossible to map. All this and the editing and camera work create a beautiful film which explains very little. It’s what surrealist poetry could have been. A tribute to the time when film was still regarded as an experimental art form.
What we do get is the subjective experience of the inexplicable. If such things happened, and you were caught up in them,remembering them would, I suspect, feel a lot more like this than most modern “horror films”.

Why Le Fanu was a genius.part two

2009-11-19T03:03:00.000-08:00

Stoker pretends his heroes have altered nothing in their journals.
“there is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them.”

There is to be no retrospective rearrangement. This is one of the ways he ‘guarantees’ the “authenticity” of the story. Laura, however, is writing eight years after the facts she relates. The game allows her to tell us what she knew at the time as she unfolds the story, but it also allows her to have the benefits of hindsight.

And that’s exactly what she avoids. ‘Carmilla’ is in many ways much more opaque than ‘Dracula’. Exactly what her relationship to Carmilla was remains vague. It’s vague because Laura keeps it vague, but why she does so is what leaves the text open. The vagueness gives the story its slightly dream like or out of focus quality.
After eight years, what are her final words on the subject?

The following Spring my father took me on a tour through Italy. We remained away for more than a year. It was long before the terror of recent events subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations-sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door.

“The light step of Carmilla” is suggestive; not only of familiarity, but of someone who listened eagerly and cared enough to distinguish footsteps so she could identify the ones she wanted to hear. ‘Ambiguous alterations’ are an apt description of her portrayal of Carmilla’s behaviour and her reactions to it. Throughout the story she alternates between fascination and repulsion. And then there’s “reverie” and ‘fancy’. A reverie is a waking dream but without negative overtones. What does she dream that leads to the sound of those familiar footsteps. And is she frightened or hopeful? It’s impossible to tell.

Something very strange happens towards the end of the story. For most readers it’s become obvious that Carmilla is a vampire, and she is the same young woman who destroyed the general’s ward. The general tells Laura what is obvious to everyone else:

"She called herself Carmilla?" asked the General, still agitated.
"Carmilla, yes," I answered.
"Aye," he said; "that is Millarca. That is the same person who long ago was called Mircalla, Countess Karnstein.

However, that night Laura can still record:
and I was glad, being unspeakably fatigued when we reached home. But my satisfaction was changed to dismay, on discovering that there were no tidings of Carmilla.

The story wraps itself up in a sudden orgy of explanations which might signal that Le Fanu had lost control of his material. But there’s enough evidence to suggest that Le Fanu knew he could play his narrator off against what she was narrating. When the Countess Karnstein’s tomb is found and opened and the body destroyed, Laura’s language becomes uncharacteristically factual. What she doesn’t say is louder than what she does.

The next day the formal proceedings took place in the Chapel of Karnstein. The grave of the Countess Mircalla was opened; and the General and my father recognised each his perfidious and beautiful guest, in the face now disclosed to view.

What follows is a series of declarative sentences with subjects like, the face, the body, her eyes, the flesh, the head. But who is this happening to? “The vampire”. A “guest” perfidious and beautiful. Nowhere in the description is Carmilla’s name mentioned. Either the thought of her friend being hacked , burnt and scattered is too much, or she is simply refusing to accept that the body in the box was Carmilla’s. It’s no wonder she’s still waiting for her step at the door.

In The Conclusion that follows Laura reverts to being vague.

I cannot think of it without agitation. Nothing but your earnest desire so repeatedly expressed, could have induced me to sit down to a task that has unstrung my nerves for months to come, and reinduced a shadow of the unspeakable horror which years after my deliverance continued to make my days and nights dreadful, and solitude insupportably terrific.

That “It” floats. What is the unspeakable horror? What happened when Carmilla stayed with her, or what was done to the Vampire’s body? ‘My Deliverance’ suggests she is saved, but from what? From Carmilla the vampire, or Carmilla the devoted friend? From being vampirised or from being in love with a vampire?
Before the reader can stop to ask, she breathlessly rushes on piling up bits of vampire lore and quaint antiquarian details. Hidden in the pile:
The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons. In pursuit of these it will exercise inexhaustible patience and stratagem, for access to a particular object may be obstructed in a hundred ways. It will never desist until it has satiated its passion, and drained the very life of its coveted victim. But it will, in these cases, husband and protract its murderous enjoyment with the refinement of an epicure, and heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship. In these cases it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. In ordinary ones it goes direct to its object, overpowers with violence, and strangles and exhausts often at a single feast.

Is that the unspeakable horror? That what she took as genuine was something “resembling love”, “an artful courtship”; that the predator wanted sympathy and consent. Is Laura appalled at how close she was to being consumed or appalled that she was seduced by something that saw her as a meal? OR did she offer sympathy, consent, love even and regrets that Carmilla was taken from her?

She babbles on and “tidies up”, explaining the already obvious, but the narrative suspends the real questions and leaves them unanswered.
Would the sound of Carmilla’s “light footsteps” at her door terrify her or make her happy?

The story lives in an artful refusal to close.

Why Le Fanu was a genius.part one

2009-11-16T21:16:00.000-08:00

In writing Dracula as a series of journal entries Stoker set himself two problems.
The first is that in a journal which has not been retrospectively tampered with, you can’t have prolepsis. Stoker handles this impressively and I think there’s only one place in the book where he slips up.

His other challenge is that he has focalised his story though the limited perspectives of the participants. Along with the problems of creating separate voices with differing attitudes and characters, he still has to find a way to give the reader essential information so the story can move forwards. When Harker records that Mina is growing languid and pale, and Mina records bad dreams and bad sleep, the reader knows Drac’s got to her, but since this is ‘revealed’ in a dramatic sequence later, the heroes seem slow in noticing the obvious significance of what they are recording. Stoker's clumsiness makes his heroes seem dim witted.

Le Fanu, on the other hand, exploits the problems a first person narrator creates for the writer, to create a character, Laura, not only in what she does in her story, but in the way she tells it.

We play the game: Laura, the narrator of Carmilla, is a real person, telling us about events that happened to her eight years ago when she was nineteen.

We know nothing about Laura except what she tells us. The paratext sets up expectations which the story seems to frustrate. All we are told about Laura is that she was: “a person so clever and careful ….. Much to my regret, however, I found that she had died in the interval.” Her narrative of events is described as being told with such conscientious particularity.

The Laura of the story does not seem clever. She goes out of her way to show she isn’t. I’d argue she is ‘careful’ in what she reveals. If the story exhibits “conscientious particularity” it does so in what the narrator hides and fudges. 8 years have passed since the story ends. We are explicitly told this is being narrated retrospectively at someone else’s request. But from the start of the story Laura exonerates herself and muddles the issues. She does it surreptitiously but consistently. She has two strategies that can be described as characteristics and once established are then exploited by Le Fanu at the very end of the story.

The first, used to exonerate herself and excuse her lack of comprehension, is her insistence on how isolated she and her father were. The isolation of the schloss is partly the trappings of the gothic story and serves its own function in the narrative but the geographical isolation bleeds into racial isolation, (her father is English) which exonerates her from not knowing the local stories about vampires, which would have rung the alarm bells much earlier. (Not that Laura has much to do with alarm bells). The geographical distance from “society” allows her to repeatedly tell her addressee that she has to accept Laura’s naivety as the result of her upbringing in such an isolated spot. Carmilla’s behaviour, beliefs, etc would be judged differently by a more worldly wise person. Though how such a person might have judged her is never clarified.

Her second habit is that when reporting what happens she relies heavily on phrases like “It appeared” or “apparently” or ‘what looked like” where straight description would be justified. For Laura, things aren’t simply what they are; they are always potentially something else. However, she never seems to want to cut through “appears to be” and reach “was”. Her description of Carmilla’s behaviour is therefore nebulous. Laura insists on its ambiguous nature. And given the fact that she has had eight years to think about it, she’s either very confused, or out to obfuscate.
Part two later.

Free advice for anyone wanting to film Bram Stoker's Dracula

2009-11-11T01:15:00.000-08:00

Dracula
(2002: “starring” Patrick Bergin. Here after “Dracula the Dumb version”)
This film is awful. Moved to Budapest and translated into the twentieth century, it dribbles along, trying to be some kind of fable about moral choices and moral strength and blah blah blah. The dialogue is awful, the special effects are comic and the acting stilted. The central characters are unlikeable and the ending is just naff. Whoever wrote it must have known it didn’t work. They must have looked at it and thought, gawd, what a mess.
You know something is wrong when one of the selling points for the film, the triumphant climax of the blurb on the box, is that in this version Dracula is played by an Irish actor, and according to the blurb this is significant because Stoker was Irish. (The fact that Stoker lived most of his life in London, and Bergin is done up to look like Billy Connolly doesn’t help their case.)
Actually the fact that the music was co-written by one Thomas Wanker doesn’t help either.
So, for all those people out there who are thinking of making yet another film of Stoker’s Dracula, here’s what you need to know before you start. If you want to film the book, there are some problems. They should be obvious, however, here, in protest, on behalf of all those people who keep thinking that someday someone (other than Herzog) will do the story justice, and who keep forking out good money for dross, is a list. It’s yours for free.
If you can’t solve them yourself watch Herzog’s version. Following Murnau, he sidestepped them.
Thesis statement:
Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ is “unfilmable”. There are problems of narrative logic, there are nineteenth century assumptions driving the plot, and while bits of the story are memorable and dramatic, lonnnnnnnnng stretches of it aren’t. Most people who try to read the book don’t finish it. It has to be adapted, and adapting it requires solutions to these problems:

1) If Dracula is a threat to the world as we know it, why is he beaten so easily by such a bunch of hearty dim wits? Drac in his castle at the beginning of the book is frightening. Drac in London is just out of place. What “powers” does the dead Lucy have? She nibbles children and is easily staked. Drac only preys on women and runs away at the first resistance from the boys own heroes. So first choice. Is Dracula a genuine threat to the world? Or just a deluded anachronism. You could write him either way. You could even see his anachronism as a reason why he’s a threat. But you need to decide.

2) Exactly what is evil about Stoker’s Drac apart from his dietary habits and the fact he’s “undead’? Stoker’s version of evil is based on a comfortable binary resting on a Christian framework. Since he wrote his book the binary has been dissolved. We’ve had the ugliness of the twentieth century: the first world war, the holocaust, the atomic bomb “ethnic cleansing”. Compared to this, sucking someone’s blood doesn’t seem that bad. If your Drac is evil then he has to be based on a modern understandings of “bad”. Read American Psycho first. Then imagine an undead Bateman with a political agenda.

3) There’s a lot of nineteenth century stuff in the book you should ignore unless you’re going to set it in the nineteenth century; the misogyny that runs through it, the way Stoker uses his female characters to denigrate women etc etc. but in ignoring it you need to alter the story. Mina is the most intelligent person in the book, but she stays at home while her dim witted husband and his band of brothers race around doing the heroic stuff and leaving her in danger. In a modern film this just makes the band of brothers look even more dim witted. If you haven’t woken up to the fact that there your average intelligent, resourceful modern women would be far more useful than Stoker’s male heroes, then you might want to leave your crypt and walk around in the daylight a bit.

4) It’s really about time the vampire brides were liberated and got to do something other than simper and hiss. Equating female beauty with stupidity and female sexuality with evil is a ……limiting….. view point and the fact that Drac seems to want to spend eternity with the lead characters in a blonde joke is another strike against him. I vote they eat Van Helsing, who should die screaming: Stop it I like it!

5) Van Helsing is another problem, but you can work that one out yourself. Also, in a twenty first century film, there is something deeply incongruous if not actually risible about characters who are obviously not in any way religious defending themselves with religious symbols. If you don't believe in a Christian soul, being a vampire wouldn’t be that bad either.

6) What you cannot ignore is that at the heart of the novel is a perverted eroticism. Bram stoker was pushing his own buttons. What ever that first note book recorded dream of the vampire brides meant to him, it drove the best part of the novel: a darker, disturbed and disturbing version of sexuality. You can ignore it. Or you can run with it. But you must choose and stick with your choice. If you ignore it you may as well not make your film. If you run with it, then for god’s sake, having actresses in night dresses pulling faces while some aging actor gums their throat is funny, not disturbing. In Dracula the Dumb Film I just watched Harker says, ”he seduced me”. Mina replies “in what way?” A sexual seduction it wasn’t; but it should have been.

7) This is a supernatural story. Please carefully consider any special effects. Tod Browning’s film demonstrated that a sparing use could be…effective. The first few minutes of Suspiria which are so unsettling don't use any. For an audience bought up on Star Wars and beyond, cheap special effects, or ones that don’t work, are embarrassing. Relying on them instead of good acting and a good script makes for a silly film.

8) You need good actors. Not famous names (see the Keanu Reeves as Harker disaster for proof) but competent actors who can play characters the audience can care about and believe in.

9) Casting Drac is your main problem. No matter how you envisage him (see point one) the actor has to carry the film. Even if you follow the novell and leave him off stage Drac has to be WRONG: terrifying, mysterious, powerful, sexy, attractive, repulsive, and disturbing. Above all he has to be convincing in all these roles. Playing Hamlet is probably easier, I’d go for one actor to play old Drac in his castle…and then a cast of several Dracs: Lucy’s lover is not Mina’s seducer, nor Jonathon’s, nor Van Helsing’s nemesis.

10) You have to scare and disturb us. (And we have seen so much faked blood and dismemberment that it really doesn't shock anymore). That means you need a good script. Characters in horror films, especially the characters we’re supposed to relate to, should not be more stupid than real people would be in that situation. Would you really go exploring the spooky castle after dark? On your own? Without a torch? When someone tells you “it’s not safe, stay in your room” would you go for a wander to find out why it’s not safe? “Threats to the world as we know it” should not make statements that would cause embarrassed giggles at a dinner party and twentieth century heroes should not be expected to say “Vampires. They are just a myth” in a vampire film. On the other hand, being ignorant of vampire lore in a film set in the twentieth century is also unbelievable.

11) It would be both terrifying and disturbing if the heroes did what seemed absolutely logical, having intelligently considered their course of action, so the audience thinks, I wouldn’t have thought of that but what a good idea, and THEN bad things happened to them.

12) For the length of your film the audience has to believe that this is the real world. What makes Harker’s Journal so effective is that he’s a drab, unimaginative clerk, and his flat factual account of what happens at Drac’s castle is, while you’re reading it, credible. That’s what makes it scary. One of Stoker’s successful choices was to situate the rest of the story in the world his readers knew.

Unless you can solve these problems please leave the book alone. Should you be thinking of filming it, I volunteer to read your script, for free, and will comment on it to prevent yet another waste of time from making it to the screen and into my DVD collection.

Under the Radar ))

2009-10-27T03:48:00.000-07:00

There's multiple levels of irony in that title, but I have two pieces in issue four. Grandmother's Story and Presentment of Englishry
Both are 'English pieces'. The latter a record of the irritation I feel every time someone asks me if I'm English, the former a favourite ghost story. I'm not sure Gran ever revealed what was under the floorboards.

What the poem tries to catch is the absolute conviction of her delivery. She wasn't trying to entertain us, she was reporting something she really believed had happened. The poem is an 'Outtake' from Lady G, as i couldn't cut it back to the necessary twelve lines.

There's other fine things (finer things) in Issue four: poems and reviews,and Jane and Matt are developing a good looking and content rich magazine that rewards rereading.

Beowulf: Prince of the Geats.

2009-10-20T17:58:00.000-07:00

This film was made for no cost to raise money for the American and Norwegian cancer societies and it feels cruel to be looking at it critically. On the other hand Herzog with a camera and a group of volunteers would create Aquirre. A herzog film it ain't. But neither is it Plan Nine from Outer space

It does claim to be a version of Beowulf.

And Yes, Beowulf is played by an “African –American” and if you can’t deal with that then don’t buy the film, otherwise for less than twenty dollars it’s a donation to a good cause and the outtakes are hilarious.

The director said his model was “high school movie on steroids” and the film does feel like a grade ten production. Though most grade ten art classes I know would have done a much better job of the graphics, some of which are simply bad. It’s a pity they didn’t go the Todd browning route. When his budget for Dracula was slashed the extravagant outdoor sets and props were cut out and the story focussed on the human interactions at the heart of the story. (Ok, so there are some bad flying bats and drac’s death off stage “urgh” isn’t good, but the scene with Dracula on the stairs with the cobwebs is spooky even now.) In Beowulf Prince of the Geats the three fight scenes, especially the one in the mere, are embarrassing. However, there are moments in between, when the actors act, and the film works as a watchable film.

As a version of Beowulf?

The questions with any adaptation are: better than, less than, equal to? Does the version send me back to the original to look at it in a new light?

The second of those questions might be irrelevant here as the I’m not sure how well the writer knew the poem. In the documentary on the Dvd he keeps referring to Vikings, and the story itself begins in “Southern Denmark AD 866”. There are lots of minor changes, some of which are driven by the logic of earlier changes, some of which simply seem random.
There are two significant changes to the story. The first is the frame that explains why Beowulf is African We’ve had Beowulf with a Scots accent and Beowulf with a cockney accent, and neither is “authentic” so why worry about the actor’s “colour”. A few racists will jump up and down but so what?

Instead we get the story of how his father travels from Africa to Denmark (in his outrigger canoe?) The map suggests he came down the Nile. There’s nothing impossible about this. To celebrate the five hundreth anniversary of Columbus’ landing a lone sea kayaker paddled from Spain to America. It’s just unnecessary, and it forces the film into places, like the “African Village”, which are the more cringe inducing parts of the film. The film begins with Unferth finding his way back to the village. Somehow he knows their language well enough to tell the whole story. This all seems to be a mistake. We could have done without it.

The other major change is to Beowulf’s character. We have an older Beowulf who has “pacifist” stamped on his forehead. When the obvious usurpation attempt occurs (itself a logical consequence of the way the character is written) he isn’t strong enough to defend himself and has to be rescued. What’s worse is he doesn’t seem that interested in defending himself. He’s too nice. In fact he’s downright cuddly. This is hardly the admired war hero who batters his enemies into submission and goes off boldly to take on the dragon “most eager for fame”.

But the biggest change is that we have yet another self-doubting Beowulf. Here the self doubt is expressed in Beowulf’s slightly puzzling mantra “not a risk to the tribe’ and the fact he seems to be attempting suicide at one point… In the story world of the poem when the monsters are beating down your door and winding up to rip off a few heads and feast on a half dozen freshly Killed family and friends the last thing you’d want is a hero who wants to analyse his motives, question his self worth and speculate about the ethics of his actions. (or get suicidal after every victory).

Why this insistence on the flawed and or self doubting hero ? A modern distrust of heroism? We’ve been conned by the metaphor of the enemy at the gate so that we can’t see that in Beowulf’s story world its not a metaphor. There really were bad things in the darkness. For us there was either no enemy at the gate or if there was, we were left with the nasty suspicion that our own actions brought him there. In the world we live in now, unthinking military heroism makes us profoundly suspicious (until the enemy really is at the gate and then I think we’d prefer our military not to need counselling before they can operate).

But in the story world of Beowulf, a hero who went in for endless self analysis and doubt wouldn’t be a hero for very long and would be worse than useless. Ironically that means the hero of the thirteenth warrior is probably the closest of all the versions to the Beowulf of the poem.

Anglo Saxon poetry has several examples of reflective speakers who analyse themselves and their actions, but you don’t find these in “heroic verse”.

So go to the web site and buy the film. You’ll laugh you’ll cry and it might save a life.

The Staffordshire Hoard.

2009-09-24T16:41:00.003-07:00

"You're not going out trudging fields with that machine of yours are you?"
"One day I'll find something really impressive"
"Fat chance"

The "staffordshire hoard" was found this year by a man with a metal detector. The Anglo-Saxons come to life again.
The slide show on flickr is stunning:

The staffordshire Hoard

And the excitement round the traps is palpable.

medieval films continued:An African Beowulf

2009-09-22T03:17:00.000-07:00

An African Beowulf:

There's a trailer

here

and a discussion of the sadly predictable response in some circles

here

With any adaptation there is little point in leaping up and down because something has been changed..whether it’s an African Beowulf or the “president’s big push” and “holocaust’ in Jane Holland’s “Lament of the Wanderer”. The interesting question is what do these things do with the original? Do they invite us to go back and rethink our assumptions? Or do they diminish the poem by making it something lesser?
So I have shelled out pennies for a copy, knowing that the money is going to American and Norwegian Cancer research (or so the story goes). And I will report back… It cannot be any worse than the animated version.

set questions for "For all We Know" and "Quiver"

2009-09-21T04:44:00.000-07:00

Questions for Quiver as a way of answering why I think it doesn't work.
(WHich I will try and answer later)

1) what is the narrator’s name
2) who is Mara and what is/was Mara’s exact relationship to Will and Nate?
3) Why has Mara been killed? In fact is it Mara or her twin who has been killed?
4) Who is the woman who looks like Mara (Twin or clone)?
5) How did Mara or the woman who looks like her have access to the narrator’s poems? What is the point of her having access to them?
6) What is the point of the long mythological piece?
7) Why was Mara/clone/Twin killed?
8) Who tries to Kill the narrator?
9) Why does mara/twin/clone kill Nate?
10) What is the point of all of this?

Why does my inability to answer these questions in any satisfactory way affect my response to the poem adversely when my inability to answer equally many questions raised by “For all we Know” is part of the pleasure of (re) reading that text?

lunatics, critics and beautiful music

2009-09-01T01:20:00.000-07:00

One of the criticisms levelled against Lady G was that sections of the sequence were "unconvincing". Recently I read a review of a novel which used the same strange criticism.

Here’s a true story. Decide for yourself if it’s “convincing”….

Carlo Geusaldo 1560 -1613 is remembered today, if at all, as composer of music that seems far ahead of its time. It’s beautiful, or at least I think so. He has also been suggested as one of the prototypes of Browning’s Duke in “My Last duchess”…

His life however….

Made Duke on the death of his older brother he was already a respected musician and composer. His marriage was a grand affair; two thousand oysters and 120 roasted goats in a banquet of 120 something courses. His new wife was one of the leading beauties of her day, possibly Leonardo’s model for the Moaning Lisa. Married at fifteen her first husband had died “of an excess of Connubial bliss’. Her second hubby went the same way.

Soon after her marriage to Guesaldo one of his relatives makes a pass at her and learns he has been beaten to it in the extra-connubial bliss stakes. Rebuffed, he tells Guesaldo about her affair. Guesaldo now plans the murder and catching the lovers together kills the man (who is dressed, rather oddly, in a woman’s night dress) and stabs his wife. Running out the house he is said to have stopped and said..she can’t really be dead..so ran back inside and stabbed her over twenty times. He then dumped, or had dumped, the dead bodies on the steps to his palace…where they were randomly “molested” by a passing monk.

G flees the scene of the crime for the family home, where he spends the next couple of months cutting down all the trees.

Convinced his second son isn’t his, he decides to get rid of it. He does this, so the story goes, by sitting him on a swing dangling from a balcony and having his attendants keeping the swing going for three days and nights. Being a noted musician and lover of music of course, he hires a choir to sing while the swinging is going on: they sing madrigals about the beauty of death.

It seems he was not prosecuted for the murder of his wife and her lover.

He remarries but treats his new wife so badly so runs away. He spends the last dozen plus years of his life in seclusion, making sure his servants beat him regularly. HE also employs one of them to sleep with him to keep his back warm.
He dies..doesn’t everybody…and apparently you can choose your version of his death. He dies of asthma...or he dies of infections caused by the severe and repeated floggings administered by his servants.

I didn’t make any of this up. But how convincing would it be if I did?

Abelard

2009-08-30T18:54:00.000-07:00

Abelard.

As a kind of side track to the FIlm conversation.
( I should confess I find him fascinating. The relationship with Heloise I always thought was a minor issue that wasn't that interesting. Oh well.)

If he has any role in History it’s as “the invincible arguer” (the phrase is Kenneth Clark’s). At a time when faith and a willingness to bow to authority were all that was required, no matter how daft they seemed, along comes Abelard and argues that reason must be used to support faith. (Come to think of it, the Bernard’s still rule the world.Or at least the educiational one).

The one thing he couldn’t do was avoid an argument. Castrated, publically humiliated at the council of Soisson, and in no position to do anything but keep his mouth shut and attempt invisibility, he still managed to offend almost everyone, including those looking after him, by worrying away at the truth.

There’s a debate about when our idea of “individuality” first appears in European art and literature. The 11/12th century being one candidate. Abelard appears as an individual, not because of the letters, but because of the Historia Calamitatum and only because the genre cracks under the pressure of the story the writer is telling.

He claims that:

“Since therefore I was wholly enslaved to pride and lechery, God’s grace provided a remedy for both these evils, though not one of my choosing; first for my lechery by depriving me of those organs with which I practised it, and then for the pride which had grown in my through my learning-for in the words of the Apostle “Knowledge breeds conceit’-when I was humiliated by the burning of the book of which I was so proud.”

So there are to be two stories: the story a relationship (lechery) and the story of a scholar’s pride in his own reason.

His version of their relationship can be read then not as a honest confession of the facts but as his conscription of the events to fit his stated moral and narrative design. When he decides to seduce someone (and the decision is presented in those terms) he first describes Heloise as ;” In looks she did not rank lowest, while in the extent of her learning she stood supreme.” He then writes:

“I considered all the usual attractions for a lover and decided she was the one to bring to my bed, confident that I should have an easy success; for at the time I had youth and exceptional good looks as well as my great reputation to recommend me and feared no rebuff from any woman I might choose to honour with my love”. Which I think puts the mockers on the idea that this is a great love story. It’s either painfully honest in its arrogance…if you have decided it’s time to seduce someone, why settle for less than the most intelligent best looking woman available ?…or it could be read it as simply the topos of pride coming before the fall?

His castration and separation from Heloise are his first punishment (for the sin of lechery) and he accepts it in keeping with the overall aim of the Historia.

It’s the second castration that breaks the plan and gives us a sense of Abelard as a man. He can tell the story of his affair with Heloise to fit the pattern; he is proud and vain; he seduces her; he is punished. But he cannot subdue his outrage at his treatment at the council of Soissons to his stated purpose. Accused of Heresy he attended the council ready to argue his case. And the stacked “jury’ knew that no one was going to win an argument with Abelard. So they basically castrated him again: his book was burnt and to prove he was a good Christian he was forced to read the creed. He wasn’t allowed to state his case in his own words; he was forced to read a formula. For a man whose career had been based on the essential role of individual reason in support of faith, and on his ability to verbalise that reasoning in public, it must have been terrible.

He was outraged. You can still hear it. He may have set out to write about his punishment for pride, but you don’t show that by proving the Judge was theologically unsound, or comment after the council:

“all the grief and indignation , the blushes for shame, the agony of despair I suffered then I cannot put into words. I compared my present plight with my physical suffering in the past and judged myself the unhappiest of men. My former betrayal seemed small in comparison with the wrongs I now had to endure and I wept much more for the injury done to my reputation than for the damage to my body, for that I had bought upon myself though my own fault, but this open violence [the burning of his book] had come upon me only because of the purity of my intentions and love of our Faith which had compelled me to write”.

That last, long sentence, doesn’t sound like someone accepting a justifiable punishment to me?

(I can’t read Latin so quotes are taken from Betty Radice’s translation. I also know that it’s quite possible that both the Historia and the letters are forgeries…)

Medieval films continued

2009-08-28T02:59:00.000-07:00

My thanks to Linda M. Davies for pointing out that both the story of Abelard and Heloise and "The Song of Roland" have been filmed.

The first is called "Stealing Heaven" and stars someone called Derek de Lint as Abelard.

The second is called "The Song of Roland" and stars Klaus Kinski as Roland. It would be Kinski without Herzog pushing his many buttons, but still, it would be Kinski.

Dr. Johnson on Milton... thoughts on obscurities

2009-08-27T02:35:00.000-07:00

This is from Johnson's "Lives of the Most Eminent English poets with Observations on their Poetry". Like Hazlitt's "Lectures on the English Poets" it is still thought provoking (and enjoyable) reading. (Though my copy has no notes and Johnson's habit of throwing out Latin tags which are meaningless to me is a good reminder of how definitions of literate and educated have changed. )

"Paradise lost' is one of those books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look else where for recreation; we desert our master and seek for companions.

There are so many poets alive and dead you could replace Milton with in that paragraph if it stopped at the final semi colon.

The index to the "Lives' is an interesting lesson in the realities of fame and reputation. The "Most Eminent English Poets" include Milton, Dryden, Pope, and Rochester, but also Wentworth Dillon, John Phillips, George Stepney, John Pomfret, and the marvelously named Thomas Sprat amongst many other names I'd never even heard of before, let alone read.

William Walsh is another name I'd never heard before, but the index does say of him "known more by his familiarty with greater men than by anything done or written by himself".

You could probably replace his name in that sentence with many others others as well.

Name a good film made from a medieval story

2009-08-21T00:10:00.000-07:00

other than Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The Arthurian cycle has taken a miserable hammering, from the banal idiocy of “First Knight’ to the pretentious silliness of “Excalibur”. (It’s true, Uther manages to rape Ygraene without taking off his full body armour….which may explain the lady’s facial expressions). There’s a twee film of Gawain and the Green Knight which conflates it with some of Chretien’s tales and misses the point of the story. I saw it on tv in the 1970s. The reviewer said: the author of the medieval poem is anonymous. If it’s anything like the film that’s totally understandable.

Beowulf has recently been butchered by two very different films (see previous posts.) neither of which seem to have a firm grasp on what’s happening in the poem.
Robin hood has become a smiling bandit leaping around in tights, (and we can discount any film where they describe King John as a Norman.)

Has the Tain ever been filmed? That would be a superb subject for a three part epic.. Deirdre first, then the youth of Cuchulain to lift the mood a little before the The Tain proper. Except it wouldn’t have the furry loveliness of that other pseudo medieval three part epic. It’d be a bitter story about jealousy and greed and all those other adult things that don’t happen much in fantasy world. With the hero doing what medieval heroes do ..dying..at the end.

I’m sure I once saw a very low budget but weirdly excellent Gaelic film of the story of Finn, but this was on late night tv back in the early eighties… there’s also an excellent stop animation series of the Canterbury tales that was doing the rounds recently…but that’s hardly mainstream cinema. El Cid with Charlton Heston is ok though painfully long…and not as good as The War Lord which I don’t think is a medieval story but a story set in the middle ages?

Has the song of Roland ever been filmed?

So…any takers?

maldon 991:the Anglo-Saxon art of defiance #2

2009-08-10T00:56:00.000-07:00

Hiġe sceal þē heardra, heorte þē cēnre,
mōd sceal þē māre þē ūre mæġen lȳtlað.

Says it all really.

Rebuffed by the English(see part one) the vikings try to force the causeway but are stopped. The messenger returns. No flowery speeches this time. Let us across and we’ll settle this. Byrthnoth agrees. Then,

Wōdon þā wælwulfas (for wætere ne murnon),
wīċinga werod west ofer Pantan,
ofer scīr wæter scyldas wēgon,
lidmen tō lande linde bǣron.

I know it’s a fantasy of mine, but I can hear the “hateful strangers” wading silently, purposefully, across the bright water. You can feel the rustle and clatter running through the East Saxon lines as the “sailors come to land, bearing shields”

The battle goes wrong for the English. Byrthnoth, who is old enough for a free bus pass, is killed, and our poet says, with characteristic economy:

Hī bugon þā fram beaduwe þe þǣr bēon noldon.
(They turned then from the battle, who did not wish to be there)

Seeing someone riding off on Byrthnoth’s distinctive horse, many think he has fled and run after him. But not all the army flees. Byrthnoth’s closest friends and retainers decide to stay. They have boasted they will not leave their lord, their ring giver, dead on the field, and now they keep their promise. Making good your boast, is a theme that runs through Anglo-Saxon poetry. When Beowulf arrives in heorot he makes his boast that he will kill Grendle, without weapons, knowing the consequences of failure.

The poem orders and tidies. We’re reading about a group of men hacking away like lunatics in an abattoir; but their resolution is shaped by the poem’s formal movement. The narrative breaks down into a series of individual vignettes as each man speaks, then steps forward.

But the old retainer's words are still the most succinct definition of resolution that you could hope for:

"Hiġe sceal þē heardra, heorte þē cēnre,
mōd sceal þē māre þē ūre mæġen lȳtlað.
(Thought shall be sterner, heart harder, courage greater, as our might lessens)
Peter Baker suggests; ...because our might lessens)

Kipling states something similar in a very different poem:

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

which may have lead to Pink Floyd’s,

“Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way”

But there is nothing quiet or desperate about the retainers at Maldon. They are at the point where, as Peter Baker points out, physical ability is now largely irrelevant: they know they are not leaving. They are not “hanging on” because there is nothing to hang on for, what matters to them and to the poet, is the will-power to make good a promise.

In the win win world of negotiate and counsel, I’m sure someone would tell those who fled that it was ok really, they were expressing themselves. The value system that might condemn them is merely historically contingent and culturally defined and therefore not necessarily objective and worth worrying about. In fact the ones at fault are the blind fools who weren't critical enough of the dominant hegemonic discourse to see through the way in which ideology had conditioned and manipulated them to behave like obedient puppies serving the self interest of the ruling elites.

But I think there may be something to be said for holding to a considered line, if you’re willing to accept the consequences.

The problem being to find a line which, after long and serious consideration, might be worth holding.

Maldon 991:the Anglo-Saxon art of defiance #1

2009-08-03T03:29:00.000-07:00

Ok, so it's August, any excuse to trot this one out. In August 991 an English army under Ealdorman Byrthnoth was defeated by a Viking army at Maldon in modern Essex. The poem, or what's left of it, describes the defeat. It begins as the English army arrive on the banks of the Pant and line up facing the Vikings who are on an island in the estuary.

The vikings send a messenger over who basically says: we don't need to fight, you just give us treasure and we'll trot back to our ships. Under Aethelred the English had been buying them off. Byrthnoth's reply, or a scrambled version of it, has been in my head since I first read it way back in 1980.

A translation won't catch the bitter humour or the absolute resolution of the reply but anyway. What he says is:

"Gehȳrst þū, sǣlida, hwæt þis folc seġeð?
Hī willað ēow tō gafole gāras syllan
ǣttrynne ord and ealde swurd,
þā hereġeatu þe ēow æt hilde ne dēah.
Brimmanna boda, ābēod eft onġēan:
seġe þīnum lēodum miċċle lāþre spell,
þæt hēr stynt unforcūð eorl mid his werode
þe wile ġealgean ēþel þysne,
Æþelrēdes eard ealdres mīnes
folc and foldan. Feallan sceolon
hǣþene æt hilde! Tō hēanliċ mē þinċeð
þæt ġē mid ūrum sceattum tō scype gangon
unbefohtene, nū ġē þus feor hider
on ūrne eard in becōmon.
Ne sceole ġē swā sōfte sinc ġegangan;
ūs sceal ord and ecg ǣr ġesēman
grim gūðplega ǣr wē gofol syllon."

Roughly:
D’you hear, seafarer, what this folk say? As tribute they will give you spears, poisoned points, old swords, war gear that will avail you little in the battle.
Messenger of the seamen, go back and tell your people a far more hateful message: here stands, undaunted, an earl with his troop, who will defend this homeland, the land of Aethelred and my elders, both folk and fold. Heathens shall fall in battle! It would be shameful if you should go back to your ships with our treasures or come any further into our homeland without a fight. Not so softly will you win our treasure. First point and edge in grim battle play will reconcile us before we will give tribute.

There are some grim jokes that don't translate, but there's something magnificent in the defiance. The OE works aloud (he confesses to trying it on a river bank) alternating between tub thumbing heroism and sly humour.

The viking messenger offers him the easy option and he flatly rejects it. At this stage there is no suggestion that if it does come to a battle he can't win or won't win.

There are times such attitudes need evoking...if merely in private situations that are intolerable; a kind of this far; no further and to hell with the consequences.

Later in the poem, in what is usually described as one of the most succinct expressions of the "heroic ethos' in OE poetry, the choice will be much more limited; the consequences far more obviously grim.

But that for later.

what a difference a word makes?

2009-07-29T03:59:00.000-07:00

I thought he said:

give you guitar lessons?

but what he really said was:

Do you give guitar lessons?