George Szirtes

Canzone: Animal

2009-11-07T10:07:00.012Z

GEORGE STUBBS (1724-1806): A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl: Human Skeleton, Lateral View, in Crawling Posture, 1795-1806.

There is a new poem up in the front, titled Canzone: Animal.

As I said in the last post I shift between work, thinking and, curiously, not thinking. As far as poetry goes I am still in the Canzone room, working out its spaces and angles, trying to figure what it demands of me, what odd corner of emotion I will come across. I am pretty well convinved that thought and emotion are broad categories. One feels intensely but in so complex a way that to name any of the emotions or thoughts seems almost a profanity. It is one of the reasons I hate the emotional telegraphese of news bulletins, all that shrink-wrapped, opaque pabulum, the wheeling out of one tragic cliché after another. It is, if anything, the instinctive shudder at such opportunistic, and essentially lying, shorthand that made me a poet in the first place.

But writing is a slightly horrifying occupation. Part of me says I ought to be an emotional wreck, incapable of thinking, let alone working at these obsessive intricate demanding patterns, objectifying whatever it is I ought to feel. And why even write these words? You, goes the accusation, are turning your father and his sickness into an aesthetic object. You should not be writing but feeling, the accuser continues. There is, surely, something missing in you.

The simple answer is that I am a writer: that is what I am and do. But simple answers are not really answers, the accuser retorts. They are merely road blocks on the way to some city of truth that we cannot know.

So my next road block is to claim that I don't know what I feel until it passes through the filter of language. But why should it have to do so? demands the accuser. Isn't the poem a superfluous gesture, a refusal?

I go on to claim that gestures are what we have, for how are we to know the body and its depths without gestures? But these poems bear a signature, your signature, they are about you, a you that has subsumed the objective, out-there, real and equal, in fact greater realm of experience that is properly your father's, the accuser insists.

Listen, I reply. After my mother died in 1975, a good ten years later, I wrote my longest poem, 'Metro' which is entirely posited on her and her experience as I received it, and when I showed it, eventually, to my father - my father not being a literary man - he said that it was like 'walking about inside her'. He did not intend that as criticism, he simply recognised her in some sense. Isn't that a good thing? Isn't that what art is?

Talking of art, replies the accuser, didn't you also write in a poem called 'Hand Colouring' about how unlifelike, how unreal, how almost mortuary, it felt to be looking at photographs of yourself taken by your mother and hand coloured by her. 'Almost like embalment', you wrote then. And aren't you doing the same, and him alive? Embalming him alive?

Now we are at the borders of religion. 'Stranger, beware the false beguiling arts' says the Puritan motto in Stranger's Hall, Norwich, and didn't someone once say to me, that all this poetry was vanity? Yes, vanity of vanities, all is vanity, saith the preacher.

I come to my last visible answer, which is much like Russell Hoban's 'last visible dog' in his marvellous The Mouse and His Child. The answer goes like this and it is in the form of a question:

Who can tell how much vanity, how much deficit of feeling, how much embalment, how much gesture, how much preoccupation, how much self-delusion, how much aesthetic nit-picking, how much temptation to assume control of everything is involved in being who we are? Who knows where an instinct is bred, or indeed a sense of voice, balance, manners..

...and the question remains unfinished because I am now beyond the last visible dog, though I do not think it impossible that there might be another dog, and maybe another behind that one and that beyond all these dogs along the way, beyond my own road blocks, there is something we can yearn for and hope for, and could it not be that the thing one writes is a kind of offering to it?

But the dog's not there. That's what makes it an invisible dog.

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So, now on the front is a new canzone titled Animal. It has been through six or seven major redraftings, the most abiding problem being the question of the pronouns: the I, the you, the we of it. It started with I and has finally returned to I. The I that writes this is perfectly aware of the difficulties involved. On the other hand that I is an optimist who thinks art can and should address life as best it can, not be an alternative closed monastic system (and believe me, I respect the integrity of monks.) In other words, 'I' means something in a poem. It means that something is at stake.

The word animal is so close to the word anima, meaning soul, that the one rings through the other for me. It is derived from the concepts of soul, mind and breath. All of these then.

The levels

2009-11-06T20:09:00.004Z

My father is back in hospital after difficulties breathing. Hospital is about 120 miles from here and our car isn't working because the starter motor seems to have packed up but we can always hire a car tomorrow if it comes to that. I did speak to him on the phone while he was still in A & E a couple of hours ago and he sounded quite good, but this is the third dash to hospital in a month.

There is little sense of reality to any of this at one level - the mundane or daily level - and yet it is a reality we are, I think, familiar with at the level of the imagination. It is hard wired into us but so deep we are hardly aware of it except as a faint haunting sensation. Michael Hofmann once wrote a poem in which he said, 'We are fascinated by our own anaesthesia'. Well of course we are, just as we are fascinated by our own adrenalin. It is our fate to be fascinated by our own being, and by being I mean everything: our bodies, our moods, our consciousness, our presence among others. The out-of-body experience is perfectly normal in one sense.

In other words, this critical condition of my father is a strange, almost unwelcome, poetic experience. How terrible it should be so, I myself half think. I am peculiarly alive in one way and almost in a state of somnambulism in another. Meaning? I don't know what any of this means. I don't even understand the concept of meaning. All I know is that words keep putting themselves into a series of obsessive orders, the kind of order I am very familiar with when I write. Breath seeps into language. So I do write, in concentrated flickers. Or translate. And then I snap out of it and consider practicalities. But the practicalities are imponderable. There are hours and then more hours. Maybe weeks. Maybe months. Perhaps even a year. Or two years. Maybe just minutes.

It was the same when C was seriously ill thirty one years ago, Anxiety? Yes. Hope, yes indeed. Desperate hope. But also this odd alien medium, life, that overwhelms, is staggering and miraculous, and through which we move trailing clouds of anaesthesia much as Wordsworth's child trailed clouds of glory.

The poetry of Dennis Bergkamp / poetry and winning

2009-11-05T22:28:00.012Z

All day with poetry mentee, Nick, up from London. These are long intense sessions and quite tiring by the end for both. We talk about detail but also about ideas, about distinctions between performance and private reading, about range, about poetics and grace. Nick is an Arsenal supporter. He was asked recently what he would be if he weren't a poet? A poet was what he wanted to be, he insisted.

But let's put it another way, I say. If you were forbidden to be a poet but had to choose between being Cesc Fabregas, Thierry Henri, Emanuel Adebayor or Martin Keown which would you be? And this makes sense because there are certain qualities associated with these individuals that can be identified with aesthetic values.

Could we throw in Dennis Bergkamp? he asks.

Certainly, I say. So he could aspire to be the Dennis Bergkamp of poetry.

We could just as easily play the party game where we try to guess which person someone is thinking of by asking questions like: If X were a car which car would X be? Or a city? Or a tree? Or anything. There are qualities in all things we quickly learn to associate with whatever we desire, need, or aspire to.

Good friend Ed, the philosopher, was writing a paper on beauty and goalkeepers. He was talking about beauty in the moment of the great save. I doubted - partly out of mischief - whether one could build a case about beauty entirely predicated on given moments of a competitive sport where the main idea was not to perform acts of beauty but to win. Isn't winning the point of the game?

No, he replied, not necessarily. I go to Arsenal to see beauty, he said.

The question is not so much whether I believe him, though I am tempted to, but whether he would say the same of a QPR match. Ed has been a QPR supporter for many years. I wouldn't, I say to myself, accept the answer that QPR should win by playing beautifully. He would have to maintain that it wouldn't matter if they lost - and kept losing - providing they played beautifully.

But then I am hoping he would stick to his guns and say it didn't matter. In fact I am hoping I myself would say it. Of whatever I cared deeply about.

Márai on smiling

2009-11-04T18:54:00.004Z

Judit thinks about her husband and his smile

Pass me that photo, let me have another look at him. Yes, that’s what he was like fifteen years ago.

Have I said I wore this picture round my neck a long time? In a small locket, on a lilac ribbon? Do you know why?... Because I had paid for it. I was just a servant then and bought it out of my wages: that was why I looked after it. My husband never knew what a great thing it was when someone like me paid money for something for which there is no pressing need, I mean real money, like the change from my wages or a tip. Later I spent his money as if there were no tomorrow, threw thousands around the way I sent dust flying with my feather duster on mornings when I was still a servant. That was not money to me. But when I bought this photograph my heart was beating fast because I was poor and felt it a sin to spend money on things that were not absolutely essential. That photograph was a sin for me then, mere vanity… I bought it all the same, sneaking a visit to the famous, highly fashionable photographer in the city center, ready to paying the full price without bargaining. The photographer laughed and sold it to me cut price. This was the only sacrifice I ever made for that man.

He was reasonably tall, a couple of inches taller than me. His weight was steady. He controlled his body the way he controlled his words and manners. He put on a few pounds in winter, but he lost them again in May and remained at that weight till Christmas. Don’t think for a moment that he dieted. Forget diets. It was just that he treated his body the way he might one of his employees. It was required to work for him.

He treated his eyes and his mouth the same way. His eyes and mouth laughed separately, as and when they were required. They never laughed at the same time… Not the way you did, my precious, so freely, so sweetly, with both eyes and mouth smiling, especially when you truly excelled yourself and sold that ring and came home to me with the good news.

That was something he could never do. I lived with him, I was his wife and, before that, his servant. Needless to say I felt much closer to him as a servant than when I was merely his wife. Even so, I never saw him give a full-hearted laugh the way you do.

He was far more likely to smile. When I met that hunk of a Greek in London, the man who taught me a great many things… don’t go bothering me with what he taught me, I couldn’t tell you everything, we’d be here till dawn… well, the Greek warned me never to laugh in company when in England because that is considered vulgar. I should just smile and keep smiling. I tell you this because I want you to know everything you might find useful sometime.

My husband could smile like nobody’s business. I was so jealous of it sometimes I felt quite sick just thinking about his smile. It was as if he had learned a high art at some mysterious university where the rich go to get their education and smiling is a compulsory subject. He even smiled when he was being cheated. I tried it on with him sometimes. I cheated him and watched… I cheated him in bed and watched to see what he’d do. There were moments when that was dangerous. You never know how someone will react when they're cheated in bed.

The danger was a deathly thrill to me. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one day he grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stabbed me in the stomach - like a pig at slaughter time. It was only a dream of course: wish-fulfillment. I learned the term from a doctor I consulted for a while because I wanted to be fashionable like the others, because I was rich and could indulge myself with a few psychological problems. The doctor got 50 pengő for an hour’s work. This fee entitled me to lie on a sofa in his surgery and to regale him with my dreams as well as all the rude talk I could muster. There are people who pay to have a woman lie on a sofa and talk filth. But it was I who did the paying, learning terms like repression and wish-fulfillment. I certainly learned a great deal. It wasn’t easy living with the gentry.

But smiling was something I never learned. It seems you need something else for that. Maybe you have to have a history of ancestors smiling before you. I hated it as much as I did the fuss about the nightshirt… I hated their smiles. I cheated my husband in bed by pretending to enjoy it when I didn’t really. I'm sure he knew it, but did he draw a knife and stab me? No, he smiled. He sat in the huge French bed, his hair tousled, his muscles well toned, a man in top condition, smelling faintly of hay. He fixed me with a glassy look and smiled. I wanted to cry at such moments. I was helpless with grief and fury. I am sure that later - when he saw his bombed-out house, or still later when they kicked him out of the factory and expropriated him - he was smiling the same smile in exactly the same way.

It is one of the foulest of human sins, that serene, superior smile. It is the true crime of the rich. It is the one thing that can never be forgiven… Because I can understand people beating or killing each other when they have been hurt. But if they merely smile and say nothing I have no idea what to do with them. Sometimes I felt no punishment was enough for it. There was nothing I, a woman who had clambered out of the ditch to find myself in his life, could do against him. The world could not harm him whatever it did to him, to his wealth, his lands, or to anything that mattered to him…. It was the smile that had to be wiped out. Don’t those famous revolutionaries know this?...

Etta's Week 3: Some poem links and true empowerment

2009-11-04T11:36:00.005Z

Security... the appearance of too much of which is bad for you...

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New GS on web:

In today's Poetry Daily, the 'Palladio' poem;

Poetry Daily also carries this article about the New and Collected by John Taylor, originally in the new Antioch Review;

As also at Poetry Daily a substantial biog note, though much of that is scattered here and there on this site anyway.

Elsewhere, at Poetry magazine of the Poetry Foundation, this prose piece about walking...

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Etta's Week 2: Verbing rain

2009-11-03T20:46:00.003Z

I just want make sure you're well fed / I just wanna make love to you.

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First serious daytime rain for a while. On Facebook I started with a pittance of rain. Someone in a heavier shower came out with a nice largesse. The rain having grown heavier here but not yet a downpour I returned with sniggering .

There is something comforting about transferring context. We may well have blustering rain, a drivel of rain, a blather of rain, sharp gusts of rain that is rain on tenterhooks. Rain barrages. Dints of rain, blurts of rain. Alternatively, we could have rain on points, rain that pirouettes in a whirlwind, rain that chirrups like sparrows, rain that shuffles, a boiling of rain, indeed a thorough bollocking of rain.

You name it, we have it.

Etta's Week 1

2009-11-02T21:05:00.005Z

Stormy Weather all over again. Something more up tempo tomorrow

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Reconsidering the scientific adviser versus minister affair, surely the best, most proper defence of the government position is to argue that alcohol and tobacco are indeed likely to have worse effects - and sooner - than cannabis or Ecstasy, but that is no reason to let two more potentially harmful, potentially addictive drugs on the market, however minor. Just because we've got rats it doesn't mean we want mice too. The unstated defence that 'the press will skin us alive if we sound soft on drugs' is not good enough. Nor is it good enough for Channel 4 TV News to bring on the mother of a girl who died from drug abuse to tell us that cannabis is definitely more dangerous than alcohol or tobacco when it is clearly not. Certainly not on the day after a man who tried to take back his girl friend's witch's hat from the drunk group who stole it was murdered by them.

The general device of bringing on weeping mothers tends to conclude any case on TV. See? There is a weeping mother. Case dismissed. You must be wrong. Feel that emotion. What more proof do you need?

On the other hand the professor's comparison of the dangers of cannabis as opposed to the dangers of horse riding is equally nonsense. The most dangerous place for accidents is, apparently, the home. Would scientists therefore advise us to spend our lives outside trotting on horses along some country lane because that is safer than sitting in a chair from which we might possibly rise, trip and break our necks?

*

In the meantime, back in Márai...

Here in Rome there are all these wonderful statues and paintings and grand tapestries, like the cast-offs of a lost world, the kind we get in junk shops back home. But maybe all the masterworks of Rome offer just one view of culture. It might be that culture is also what happens when people cook for themselves in their own kitchens exactly the way they cooked for the rich, with butter or oil, with complicated recipes prescribed by the doctor – as if it were not only their teeth and guts that required nourishment but they had to have a special soup for the liver, a different cut of meat for the heart, a particular blend of salads for the gall bladder, and a rare form of pastry with raisins for the pancreas. And having eaten all this they withdraw into solitude so that their mysterious organs of digestion can get on with digesting… That was culture too! I understood it all, full-heartedly approved of it, admired it. It was just their way with nightshirts and pyjamas I failed to understand. I could never reconcile myself to it. Damn the God that invented such things!...

Have patience, I’m about to tell you. After making the bed I had to lay the nightshirt on top of it face down, folding the bottom end of it back and over, spreading the sleeves… See what I mean?... Looked at this way the nightshirt or pyjamas looked faintly Arabic, like some Eastern pilgrim at prayer, stomach to the ground, his arms spread over the sand… Why did they insist on this? I have no idea. Maybe because it’s more convenient that way, because it involves one movement less, because you just need to pull it on from the back and there you are, ready for bed, without having to struggle into it and tire yourself out before going to sleep. But I hated this kind of strategic thinking, absolutely loathed it. I simply couldn’t tolerate this affectation of theirs. My whole nervous system rebelled against it. My hands shook with fury whenever I made their beds, folding and adjusting their nightgowns, pyjama jackets and trousers the way the manservant taught me. Why?...

People are peculiar, you see. They are born that way even when they are not rich. Everyone is annoyed or driven mad by something. Even the poor who tolerate everything for a while, who resign themselves to everything and support the weight of the world with a certain awe and helplessness, accepting whatever comes their way… but there comes a moment, one that came for me each evening when I was making the bed and putting out their nightwear in the required manner. That was the moment I understood that there would come a day when people were no longer willing to put up with the world as it was… I mean individuals as well as nations… someone would scream out loud that they had had enough, that things had to change. And that when this happened people would take to the streets and go on the rampage, smashing and braking things… Though that’s only a form of circus. Revolution, I mean real revolution, is that which has already happened inside people. Don’t stare at me like an idiot, gorgeous.

I might be talking rubbish but not everything runs according to the laws of logic, not everything people say or do has to make sense. Do you think it is rational or logical that I should be lying with you in this bed? Don’t you get it, sweetheart?... Never mind. Just keep your mouth shut and carry on loving me. Our logic makes no sense but here we are.

So that’s the nightshirt business. I loathed this habit of theirs. But eventually I resigned myself to that too. They were so much stronger after all. It is possible to hate superior forms of life just as it is possible to admire them, but you cannot deny them. I grew to hate them. I hated them to the extent that I joined them and became rich myself, wore their clothes, lay down in their beds, started to watch my figure and, eventually, got to taking laxatives before I went to bed, just like the rich. I didn’t hate them because they were rich and I was poor, no, please don’t misunderstand me. It would be nice if someone finally understood the true state of affairs.

Newspapers and parliaments are constantly on about this now. Even the movies are full of it, or so I understood watching the newsreel the other day. Everyone is talking about it. I wonder what has got into people?...I can’t imagine it’s good for people to be talking so broadly, so generally, so much, about rich and poor, about Russians and Americans. I don’t understand that. They even say there is bound to be a great revolution and the Russians will come out on top, as well as the poor, by and large. But a very refined man once told me in a bar – a South American I think, a drug dealer, went the whisper, whose very false teeth contained a stash of heroin – that that was not how it was, that it would be the Americans who win out in the end because they had more money.

I thought a good deal about this. The saxophonist said the same thing. He said the Americans would drill a great hole in the ground and pack it with atom bombs, and then this little guy in glasses, the man who was currently the president over the ocean, would get down on his hands and knees carrying a burning match, crawl over to the hole, light the fuse of the atom bomb and then whoosh, the whole caboodle goes up. It seems a load of nonsense at first. But I can’t bring myself to laugh any more at such nonsense. I have seen a great deal that seemed just as ridiculous but soon became reality. Yes, my experience is that, generally, the more stupid the idea the surer you can be that one day it will be realized.

I’ll never forget the gossip in Budapest at the latter end of the war… One day, for example, the Germans ranged cannon along the embankment on the Buda side of the city… Enormous cannons they were, properly dug in by bridgeheads. They broke up the pavements and placed machine gun nests all the way along the lovely chestnut-lined shore. People looked at them anxiously but there were a few wise guys who declared there would not be a siege of Budapest because all those terrifying weapons, the heavy artillery by the bridges, the bundles of explosives on the bridges themselves, were all a confidence trick. It was a trick to pull the wool over the Russians’ eyes. They didn’t really want a battle… that’s what they were saying. But it was no trick, at least it did not fool the Russians. The Russians arrived at the river one day and shot everything to pieces, including the cannons. That’s why I don’t know whether what the South American said will come true, but I have a certain feeling that in the end it will be exactly as he said if only because it sounded so ridiculous at first hearing.

I also thought a lot about what the very refined man said about how the Americans would take the decisive step because they were rich. The rich – now there is something I do understand. My experience was that you had to be very careful with the rich because they are extraordinarily crafty. They possess enormous resilience… though heaven alone knows where the resilience comes from. One thing is certain – they are subtle and it is never easy dealing with them. What I said about their nightshirts is evidence of that. People you prepare nightshirts for the way I was told to prepare them are not ordinary people. Such people know exactly what they want, day and night, and it is as well for a poor man to cross himself when coming into their presence. I can’t emphasize enough that I mean only the genuinely rich, not those who just happen to have money. Those are less dangerous. They flash their money around the way a child blows bubbles. And it all ends as it does with soap bubbles: the money just pops in their hands.

Sunday Night is... Early November

2009-11-01T21:57:00.003Z

Doesn't get any earlier than the 1st. Miranda Lee Richards. Sounds and looks sixties, the hair, the fur coat, the dress, the skirt the black and white, the op-art here and there, the cheapness of the video. The song itself. Nice straight song oddly dropping out of the sky.

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Meanwhile back in government world, scientists resign because having been told to form an informed scientific opinion they have been told it's the wrong opinion. What was it Cecil B. De Mille is supposed to have asked people: "Tell me, how did you love my picture?"

In case anyone should ask I can remember the sixties perfectly clearly so I can't have been there. Nor indeed was I. Not properly. I think my experiences with cannabis were extremely restricted. I wasn't really interested. I very much like whisky (and whiskey) but have no difficulty believing that alcohol is more harmful than cannabis, never mind tobacco. And yes, I smoked cigarettes too but never in any great quantity. I suppose I neglected cannabis principally because it seemed the thing to do. I have always hated doing the things it is the thing to do.

Alan Johnson looks like the manager of a League 1 football team. It could have been worse. It could have been League 2.

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And since it was this day in 1611 that the great Shake-scene's The Tempest was first performed, and because there isn't a decent version of excerpts from the play on YouTube, (the BBC production in 1980 was worse than pedestrian), and because the wind was blowing and the rain driving all this morning, and because I have already had the magnificent Lena Horne version of 'Stormy Weather', and because the elderly Elizabeth Welch sang the song in Derek Jarman's hit-and-miss camp film version of the play, I hereby end this brief commemoration with Welch doing her stuff.

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And Stormy Weather also puts me in mind of the great Etta James. Next week is Etta James week, one for each day.

Lost languages

2009-10-31T21:04:00.004Z

The following excerpt from this article by John McWhorter, via the always fascinating A & L

At the end of the day, language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together. Globalization means hitherto isolated peoples migrating and sharing space. For them to do so and still maintain distinct languages across generations happens only amidst unusually tenacious self-isolation—such as that of the Amish—or brutal segregation....

...The alternative, it would seem, is indigenous groups left to live in isolation—complete with the maltreatment of women and lack of access to modern medicine and technology typical of such societies. Few could countenance this as morally justified, and attempts to find some happy medium in such cases are frustrated by the simple fact that such peoples, upon exposure to the West, tend to seek membership in it.

As we assess our linguistic future as a species, a basic question remains. Would it be inherently evil if there were not 6,000 spoken languages but one? We must consider the question in its pure, logical essence, apart from particular associations with English and its history. Notice, for example, how the discomfort with the prospect in itself eases when you imagine the world’s language being, say, Eyak.*

I love the argument that small languages naturally go with the maltreatment of women. Safe ground there, professor. Reading this reminded me strongly of an open letter written in 1930 by the great early 20C Hungarian writer, Dezső Kosztolányi to Monsieur Antoine Meillet, professor of the Collège de France, in which the latter suggested that the world may be better off without its troublesome small languages, such, for example Hungarian. Kosztolanyi defends the Hungarian language with great passion and wit, noting in passing that:

There are some tiny European languages that are spoken by so few that only linguistics know of them and collect them. For example, Livonian is spoken by 1,255 people, Nakh by 799, Archi by 797, and Ludic by a total of only 494 people. Linguistic communities of this size would fit comfortably into a large tenement house or in a steamboat. If the tenement house were to burn to the ground and its tenants all to perish in the fire.... then these languages would be irrevocably lost.

Irrevocably lost. The current Wiki entry for Livonian talks of it as a moribund language "until recently spoken by some 35 people, of whom only 10 were fluent". (Ludic however has comparatively prospered with some 3,000 speakers on a recent count.) But what is lost?

For a writer who loves language because he knows both its emptiness and its extraordinary depth of association, a language is far more than a dictionary, a grammar and a body of writing. It is a particular sense of the world. For a writer, the argument of convenience that assumes language is simply there to conduct transactions of one sort or another, seems utterly banal. The connection between language and experience is the point. The peculiarity, density and communality of any particular language is, in effect, an aspect of the world.

But let's throw away the mask of 'writer' - let's just talk about people, the way they feel their way into the world through word, syntax, turn of phrase, register, rhythm, timbre, manners. To wish a language out of the way is to wish a people out of the way because, well, they are in the way.

The argument for universality is rarely pushed by those speaking a minority language, of course. It is pressed, most of the time, by those seeking not universality but ubiquity, the ubiquity of the language they themselves speak, a language that, by one or other historical turn, has become a language of power.

At the end of his letter Kosztolányi finds himself "overwhelmed by humility, and love and admiration for every language. It is," he says, "as impossible to give a rational answer to what the point is of a people speaking their own language, of our speaking Hungarian, as it is to determine what the point is in living at all."

We talk perhaps too easily of humility and love and admiration, if only because such feelings are befitting. But that's not to say we don't mean them.

Regarding the Eyak language McWhorter says:

...the going idea among linguists and anthropologists is that we must keep as many languages alive as possible, and that the death of each one is another step on a treadmill toward humankind’s cultural oblivion. This accounted for the melancholy tone, for example, of the obituaries for the Eyak language of southern Alaska last year when its last speaker died.

That death did mean, to be sure, that no one will again use the word demexch, which refers to a soft spot in the ice where it is good to fish. Never again will we hear the word 'ał for an evergreen branch, a word whose final sound is a whistling past the sides of the tongue that sounds like wind passing through just such a branch. And behind this small death is a larger context. Linguistic death is proceeding more rapidly even than species attrition. According to one estimate, a hundred years from now the 6,000 languages in use today will likely dwindle to 600. The question, though, is whether this is a problem.

A problem? To whom? Not to speakers of English, I suppose. But the problem is not about a problem. It is about something more; about a substantial unique understanding of the world that once constituted life, that was itself an element of human life. And the point of living is?...

Header and Footer / Bookends

2009-10-30T12:14:00.003Z

Launch of UEA anthologies last week. A selection at UEA, the other selection in London. Andrew Cowan introduces at UEA...

In between, readings by Gavin McCrea, Seonaid MacKay, Marisa Silva-Dunbar, Philip Langeskov, Priscilla Morris, Jenny Pagdin, Claire Girffiths, Ruth Selwyn Crome in two parts.

..... I end

The ubiquity of YouTube. I hope you enjoy the readings. Me? Stuffed up with cold for now.

Now with Cold...

2009-10-29T22:13:00.003Z

...Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante
Had a bad cold nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe...

As with Madame Sosostris so with Monsieur Szirtes who does not claim to be the wisest man in Europe and has an, on the whole, well-behaved pack of cards. Still made it to a reading of Arc poets-in-translation where the languages were French, German and Russian. Suffocated sneezes by popping handfuls of Tictacs...

Shantih, shantih, shantih
It's only a shantih in old shantih town...

....as has been pointed out by another, elsewhere.

At my Father's: cutting a figure

2009-10-28T20:20:00.003Z

He is ill, small and frail in his armchair. He is in pain, a pain that has taken him by surprise. We are visiting him, having driven up to London on my first free day for a good while. He himself remarks how small he is. He has lost weight. We talk an hour and a half or so. He tells us what he has been through and how things seem to stand. It is not a complete or fully orderly account. I watch his hands. I am shocked to find myself thinking, 'Nosferatu hands. When did he get those?'

In the picture above he is newly married. He is a survivor, as is she. What they have survived has cast a permanent shadow on them but in the photograph they are happy, relieved, in love. They possess a certain vigour and voluptuousness. And yet now, when I look at them as they were, I feel younger than they were then. But that is because I now know him to be old - ninety-two to be exact - and because I don't feel old. Like him, I think of myself as someone young. He thinks of himself as someone young to whom age has happened out of the blue, much as pain has happened: I think of myself as someone young to whom age is waiting to happen. What will happen is a little like what I see in front of me. But that won't happen to me, not exactly.

We ought to see life as a shape that comprehends the entirety of our years, as if what we were contemplating were some perfect median, as if time were not linear but a three dimensional package, its three-dimensions forming a body: our body. Our body-mind-spirit. Our passage. The young always see the old as having been old from the start. The very fact of them having been young so long ago means that they have always been old.

There are moments when I think I can see the shape of my life as a shape, I don't mean progress, I don't mean career. I mean a shape. An incomplete shape, maybe no more than the ghost of a shape. It is, nevertheless, oddly cheering and miraculous to perceive a shape. One ought, after all, to be able to perceive shapes. Poets perceive shapes, don't they? That is what they are supposed to be good at.

Well, I will carry on trying to be good at it. My father will carry on sitting in the armchair. Then he will lie down in his bed and try to keep his food down. And he will get up in the morning and sit in the chair again. I wonder if it is harder for him at his age to see the shape of his life? Everything seems hard for him at the moment. Maybe it is the writer's responsibility to read and render that shape in language, a shape that isn't entirely a story but a kind of median that contains all the hard things yet cuts a figure in space as much as in time.

Arbus: Paragons

2009-10-27T22:32:00.002Z

Paragons

Those with two heads know something you don't - Diane Arbus

Distrust everything - especially the happy face,
the successful face, the face with something solid
stacked behind the eyes. Locate instead the scapegrace,
the lost and the squalid,

those who have nothing to say with the eyes but the eyes
are open and inward or are lost down a well
where you look down the shaft to find them and their faces rise
like your own in the circle

of water, with lips large as dinner-plates: the man with a tail,
the man who smoked cigars with his eyes, the Siamese twins
in Hubert's or Huber's where there is neither male nor female
but paradigms and paragons

that tickle your guilt and your pity. You say: I don't want
to make you cry, but when the button's there you press it.
And it's true that those with two heads know something you don't,
only you guess it.

(from Blind Field, 1994)

The characters are all from Arbus's own experiences. She was a frequenter of freak shows at a place called Hubert's or Huber's. She also said: 'I don't want to make you cry, but when the button's there you press it'. What Mark Granier says in the comment to the previous post is absolutely true and justified. It is only that "their faces rise / like your own in the circle // of water".

I suspect it is our faces we see as if from the other side. The 'freaks' are not out there: they are within. Those in the photographs retain dignity and integrity, are in possession of themselves. We do not retain it. We, whose eyes have something solid stacked behind them, in that alternative moment become the scapegrace, the lost and the squalid. It is not appearance at stake, but condition.

Lartigue: Bichonnade

2009-10-26T20:45:00.005Z

Bichonnade
- that we may wonder all over again what is veritable and inevitable and possible and what is to become whoever we may be - Diane Arbus

The Mystic Barber teleports himself to Mars. Another carries
a noose and a rose wherever he goes. A third collects string
for twenty years. A fourth is a disinherited king,
the Emperor of Byzantium. A fifth ferries
the soul of the dead across the Acheron. There's a certain abandon
in asking, Can I come home with you?

like a girl who is well brought up, as she was, in a fashion,
who seems to trust everyone and is just a little crazy,
just enough to be charming, who walks between fantasy
and betrayal and makes of this a kind of profession.
It takes courage to destroy the ledge you stand on,
to sit on the branch you saw through

or to fly down the stairs like Lartigue's Bichonnade
while the balustrade marches sturdily upward, and laughter
bubbles through the mouth like air through water,
and the light whistles by, unstoppable, hard
and joyful, though there is nothing to land on
but the flying itself, the flying perfect and new.

(from Blind Field, OUP 1994)

That is Bichonnade in the photograph, that is the balustrade marching sturdily upward, there's the laughter, the light that whistles by, unstoppable, hard and joyful, and there is the flying itself, perfect and new. I wrote this as a set of four Diane Arbus poems, after I had read a biography of Arbus. So the Mystic Barber who teleports himself to Mars, the man who carries a noose and a rose and the man who collects string are all in Arbus's real life: they are some of the outsiders she followed and gathered in. As for the disinherited King of Byzantium and the character who thinks he is Charon, I made them up, thinking, why not? It is however Arbus who politely asked the outsiders if she could come home with them, who was well brought up and charming and, surely, a little mad; Arbus who destroyed the ledge she stood on in killing herself.

Each of the four poems carried an epigraph from Arbus, who could certainly think and write and said some wonderful things about photography that are just as true of poetry. I sometimes imagined Arbus as my own photographer mother, with the same penchant for standing on edges and destroying them.

The photograph above is not by Arbus but by Jacques-Henri Lartigue, whose life was as different from Arbus's as it was from mine, or, I dare say, yours, reader. It was not wealth that separated Lartigue from Arbus since Arbus (maiden name Diane Nemerov) also came from a rich family - a family of furriers - and was the sister of the excellent and underrated American poet, Howard Nemerov. The difference between Lartigue and Arbus is the differencce between light and dark, both of which are true states. Lartigue offers an overflow of delight. His family does crazy, playful things. They play straight in funny clothes, in new fangled, not quite domesticated machines, all the time killing themselves laughing. We could play it stern with them. We could disapprove of the Lartigue tendency to frou-frou and high spirits, but we know the sternness would turn us into killjoys. Exhilaration has something of innocence about it, and Bichonnade leaping down all those stairs for a dare is simply an object moving through space, a laughing respectable human object weighing as much as any other human being. And it is such a simple thing leaping down stairs, you don't have to be rich to do it. You can wear anything you like and the stairs can be any size, shape or colour. Classical balustrades are not obligatory.

So she flies down the stairs in the same way as Arbus asks to follow home the man with the tattooed face or the nightclub performer who could smoke cigars through his eyes (he existed, he's documented in the Arbus biography). They both take a leap.

I like the leap. At least I like to imagine the leap and land among words. Some time after Bichonnade appeared in the TLS, Anthony Thwaite said to me: I have just noticed that the last two lines of each verse rhyme with each other: abandon / stand on land on, you / through / new etc. Well, yes. The rhymes are, I suppose, a kind of leap between stanzas.

Both Arbus and Lartigue fill me with the welcome strangeness of being alive and moving through the world. One moves through both dark and light. It is inevitable.

Sunday Night is... Torquay in the 1920s and 1960s

2009-10-25T21:05:00.002Z

The 1920s

The 1960s

*

The second reminds me a little of the work of Lartigue... of whom more perhaps another time.

Torquay in October Sunlight

2009-10-25T18:42:00.003Z

Not my photographs, just plucked off the web, but there is something peculiarly truthful about the bottom one. Torquay was early British Seaside to my family, the learning of the seaside code of fun. We started in Kent and, over the years, worked our way across the south coast, venturing at last into Devon and Cornwall.

This time it was the invitation to do the pre-dinner reading on Saturday night for the Torbay Poetry Festival. The train journey involved a change at Newton Abbott, from intercity express to a very-much-local train that looked like trains looked a good thirty years ago, all benches and facing seats, combining the best of Edward Ardizzone and with the best of Soviet Pioneer Railways.

Torquay was bleached in late afternoon sunlight. Something about the shape, the space, the light, the colours, the form of the station itself suggested joy in aspic, the fantastical married to the very plain indeed. Walking down past the public gardens, past the crazy golf, seeing nothing but sea and bay and grand hotels d'un certain age everywhere, each grander yet slightly more uncertain of itself than the last, induces a sweetish pain in the soul that I'd identify as nostalgia, but nostalgia, so to speak, without an object. It is not a case of missing something that was once there but of touching the heart of something that has become a slightly lesser version of itself, something which, in that descent, had become more humane. You get this feeling in Cromer too. Not in poor old Yarmouth, nor, at the other end of the scale, in smart, knowing, Southwold. Torquay, of course, is considerably grander than Cromer ever intended to be.

The poetry festival was at the Grosvenor Hotel, as in the second picture above. Two Regency buildings are joined by a sixties (I imagine it is sixties) extension housing the reception desk. It is the extension rather than the Regency that moves me now, or rather the combination of the two. The extension seems to have aged more than the two buildings possibly could. The extension is from the age of optimism and cheap modernism. Hotels everywhere from Switzerland to Romania were presenting this functional holiday face to the world. Here is that face awaiting its period sunglasses.

The morning after the reading C and I took a pre-breakfast walk. It was a beautiful October day, the sun warm but a cold draft nipping round corners in the shadows. The light was chalky and fragile. Torquay hotels move to a certain dance, the truly old fabric, and the more recent extension that somehow feels even older, shifting or wafting like a curious couple across the ballroom floor. And it is a very crowded ballroom. Every house in every side street in the bay is a hotel or boarding house: menus, terraces, dining rooms, signs indicating Vacancies or, occasionally, No Vacancies in widows or by gates. The customers are not the rich, not even the well-to-do middle class, but something a little lower than that and descending. It was all descent, nothing too precipitous, quite a gentle descent, but distinctly descent. There was a tiny chaotic Polish shop on one corner with a Greek Orthodox church nearby next to the broken hulk of a building that was little but facade. The news agent was gruff. He looked as though he hated being opposite the Polish shop.

And the sails drift in the bay. A few people are playing crazy golf. The prom is generously wide. The tide is in.

I loved the touches of the fantastical. The mad faintly oriental gates into the park. The sprightly, convoluted ironwork on mansard roofs, the red spirals round the columns along the platform, the bridge across platforms that feels a little like some corridor in an old lido. The joyful things.

These are very quick impressions. I would like to say more about the redemptive yet haunting quality of the English seaside. It is as if the whole country had found itself at a lost resort, a reminder that everything here is really island, all edge and unknown interior.

*

The festival is itself is remarkably well attended and full of enthusiasm thanks to Patricia and William Oxley and their team of helpers. Aldeburgh is very professional now, as indeed it has to be. Torbay is simpler, more a marvellous lark or flight of fancy. It is not a university or an institution or a place of pilgrimage. It's a soul binge in a partially-grand hotel by the sea. It is the seaside. I don't know that I have ever read to a keener, more uplifting audience. And I left the envelope with my cheque in it somewhere in the hall during the book signing.

Griffin via Beeston

2009-10-23T18:22:00.003+01:00

The reading at Nottingham University with two talented younger poets, Polly Atkin and Neele Dellschaft, was very well attended chiefly thanks to the remarkable energy of the organiser Eireann Lorsung, herself a poet. She and her phalanx of bright and charming fellow PhD students spoke volumes for the place. Afterwards we went for a meal and only at the end of that did I see the last twenty minutes of Question Time in my perfectly respectable and clean B&B on the oldest TV set I have watched in years.

It is a little worrying to see the comments on the BBC websites, mostly sympathetic to Griffin, mostly complaining about a lynch-mob atmosphere. It didn't look or sound like a lynch-mob to me: he was not being constantly interrupted as some claim, nor was he booed throughout despite the fact that he didn't look or sound anything like a decent human being. He prevaricated on Holocaust denial and on the Ku Klux Klan, and kept hammering away at the idea of the indigenous English or British, sometimes one, sometimes the other, as a downtrodden group deprived of rights by immigrants and government. As if! It does not seem to me that poor Asians or Africans or Caribbeans are running the country, let alone migrant Polish workers. Ostensibly, his greatest concern was immigration and indeed it is immigration that touches the nerve in poor white areas, but the rest was little more than a plea for racial purity, classic fascist territory, presented weasel-fashion. That, at least, is my twenty-minutes viewing.

I think the BBC handled this badly. It would have been far better to have him politely but very firmly interviewed in a face-to-face situation by someone prominent. Then possibly let him on Question Time with the full range of BNP ideas established. But this is a dangerous time - a deepening recession - to bring him on QT first. However hopeless and repulsive he is, he only gains by this form of appearance. A door has been opened through which he will walk again and again. Vile people bring out whatever is vile in perfectly ordinary people. They stop thinking of it as vile. Furies and frustrations concentrate on specific targets. The programme had both fury and frustration in plenty.

In the morning I walked up to Beeston town centre just to get a sense of the place. It has the sweet, hamfisted look of much of post-industrial Britain. Miscellaneous shambolic buildings where small businesses try to make a living either by providing cheap handy services or by appealing to the imagination: the three part barber-ladies hairdresser-children's 'jungle cut' building with the Martial Arts shack tacked on to it. Dancing lessons behind a shop. The vacant site. The large shed-like building housing Amore, the Italian restaurant . The small, front-room sized Balti take-away. The ancient cobbler's shop, established in 1947, in a tin shed with a facade of miscellaneous crooked signs. The bike shop. Young mothers with prams. The roads too big, sweeping through to other places. The friendliness in shops. It is latter day George Orwell territory at heart.

Hard to think of hatred simmering in such places. The odd resentment, the odd fight, the odd curse probably fuelled by drink, but not the steady downloading of hate accumulated over long years the way I sensed it in parts of Northern Ireland. I don't think the country is primed for Griffin and his yobs. I think people are better than that.

Stop Press: Burning of the Books on Eliot Prize Shortlist

2009-10-22T12:25:00.003+01:00

I have known about The Burning of the Books and Other Poems being on the shortlist for a few days but it has gone to the press now. I am, of course, delighted. The press release goes:

Judges Simon Armitage (Chair), Colette Bryce and Penelope Shuttle have chosen the following 10 collections from the 98 new books published in 2009:

Eiléan Ní Chuilleánain - The Sun-fish Gallery
Fred D'Aguiar - Continental Shelf Carcanet
Jane Draycott - Over Carcanet
Philip Gross - The Water Table Bloodaxe
Sinéad Morrissey - Through the Square Window Carcanet
Sharon Olds - One Secret Thing Cape
Alice Oswald - Weeds & Wild Flowers Faber
Christopher Reid - A Scattering Areté
George Szirtes - The Burning of the Books and Other Poems Bloodaxe
Hugo Williams - West End Final Faber

Simon Armitage said:

“We believe this to be the most wide-ranging shortlist for a poetry prize for a good number of years, one which reflects the scope, breadth and vitality of contemporary poetry. From the extraordinary number of poetry titles to be published this year we have been most impressed and persuaded by poets who have pushed their level of craft to the next level, or, in some cases, have re-thought their entire approach to writing to produce uniquely invigorated work. The books on this list are by poets who have dreamed and who have dared.”

THE AWARD CEREMONY:

The winner will be announced on the evening of Monday 18 January 2010 at the T S Eliot Prize award ceremony, which will be held in the Courtyard at the Wallace Collection. Mrs Valerie Eliot will present the winner with a cheque for £15,000 and each of the shortlisted poets with a cheque for £1,000 in recognition of their achievement.

THE T S ELIOT PRIZE READINGS:

On the eve of the judges’ decision all ten shortlisted poets will be invited to take part in the year’s most thrilling poetry reading. On Sunday 17 January 2010 the T S Eliot Prize Readings will once again be staged at the Southbank’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. Expect an electric atmosphere as the poets read from their collections on the eve of the judges’ decision. This event is a unique opportunity to hear the best contemporary poets reading their own work.

Tickets are on sale now from the Southbank box office 0871 663 2500 or go to www.southbankcentre.co.uk. For press tickets please contact Hilary Davidson 020 7833 9247 or email hilary@poetrybooks.co.uk

In the second year of a three-year sponsorship the John S Cohen Foundation will be sponsoring the T S Eliot Prize for Poetry. The Foundation includes the David Cohen Prize for Literature amongst its portfolio, which covers the arts, education, culture, environment, conservation and heritage.

The T S Eliot Prize is supported by the T S Eliot Foundation.

Pleased observation by my publisher::

So the publishers have the following numbers of poets:

Carcanet 3
Bloodaxe 2
Faber 2
Cape 1
Gallery 1
Areté 1

(with Faber and Carcanet both having 2 of their poets automatically shortlisted as PBS Choices)
....

50:50 M:F

I am particularly pleased to see the names of Jane Draycott, Philip Gross and Christopher Reid included. I would be so happy to see one of them win. (Me too, of course, but then I am delighted just to be there.)

Miscellany: Frostrup, Griffin, Bankers

2009-10-22T10:13:00.005+01:00

Before I buzz off to Nottingham in a couple of hours.

1. The lovely Mariella Frostrup on the radio this morning trails her programme saying 'This begs the question that...', meaning that some issue demands that the question be asked. But the phrase actually means the opposite, meaning 'it avoids the question'. This inversion still rubs me up the wrong way in much the same way as the misappropriation of King Canute and his non-problematic relationship to waves does, though Frostrup's use is now pretty general. Which then raises the question of usage and the miraculous, and sometimes cheering, English habit of accepting any usage providing a lot of people employ it for long enough. Which then raises the further question of which latest misuse is likely to stick and which to swirl away down the sewers of history. Canute is a lost cause. Begging questions is a lost cause, I suspect. There they sit in the pockets of language like the strange coinage they are, perfectly legal currency. Small change. Pedant and poet wipe away a passing tear, a tear that, like all tears, runs away down the sewers of history.

2. Griffin on Question Time. Fine, let him be on Question Time but let there be a loud picket and as many tomatoes as are deemed appropriate to the occasion. Let verbal and conceptual tomatoes fly in the hall. His attack on the war crimes of the military should be put in a large locket the weight of several bricks and hung around his neck. May it be the perfect complement to that hideous greasy face. There is surely, is there not, a faint resemblance to David Irving? I wonder if the two are related? Those of a nervous disposition look away now.

Go, Bonnie Greer! It's your stage.

3. Bankers: Without our vast bonuses you will die. Old news, I know, and not unexpected. They warn us that they will scurry abroad where the world is waiting to receive them with the grateful deference that is their due: bigger bonuses, more millions. That's the way it has to be. They will save us, they always save us. They save our jobs, our pensions, our mortgages, our savings. Without them the financial system would collapse.

I say for every £100k of bonus the public should be entitled to one kick up the arse each time they pass. That could be our bonus.

Midnight in Wymondham

2009-10-22T00:12:00.002+01:00

Back from LSE where I give a reading, followed by three plays, one by Beckett, one by Havel and one by Stoppard (or rather excerpts from it). Whisked off to dinner before Stoppard, which is just as well as I only just make my train back anyway. Going on the plays (Beckett's Catastrophe and Havel's Largo...) the full time score is Beckettt 5, Havel 0.

My reading a mix of talk about 1989 and some appropriate poems. Tomorrow will be quite different.

I'll write more in the morning.

Noir Note

2009-10-19T20:54:00.002+01:00

It is a big subject with big literature, the general lines of which are established to the point of cliché, particularly the role of the femme fatale, but also its themes of transgression, fatalism, lack of character certainty, violence and moral ambiguity. I don't want to discuss these things all over again in either a political or historical context. I am however interested in why film noir still thrills.

What fascinates me is the sheer poetry of it. In what way?

Story
The narrative to begin with. The narrative is nearly always complex, often unclear. Some evil has been done, is being done, or is about to be done. The precise mechanism of the action is of secondary importance. It is our apprehension of events that is being courted, not our reason. Film noir is never really a whodunnit. Detectives appear in the films, are often the central characters in films, but it is not detective work, not deductive reasoning that is the point. Film noir pits image against syntax, or, to put it another way, the point of syntax is image, the apparitional image. It is the figure looking in a lit doorway, at the end of the drive, throwing his or shadow on the wall behind the desk. It is the femme fatale's sexual presence not her agency. She is undoubtedly up to something but it hardly matters what. It is simply not the story. The story is secondary. It can be as minimal as narrative in a lyric poem, which does have a narrative but not one of the what-happens-next variety. It is the sensation of possibility, the apprehension of something pending that matters.

Figure
So the narrative is poetry narrative rather than novel narrative. Thats what the stock characters are about. They are the genius loci of the backyard and the mean street. The weight they carry is beyond rational or instrumental. The femme fatale is not merely a device to embody the struggle of (and with) female independence or sexuality, though it could be that as well, but, more importantly, a figure that has always been there in both male and female imagination as a dream power, a latency. A shape that is the precise dimensions of desire but never quite still, entering, looming, disappearing. Never quite to be focused.

Form
The language of film noir is pretty formal. Its devices are rhythmical and expected, like metre and rhyme: staircase, wall, lamppost, hand, drifting light, vertigo, swing of hair, great pool of shadow, glimpse, a look away, the broad shoulder with the jacket thrown over it, swing of hip, the half-open door, desk, back of chair, desklight, cigarette, a hulking back, a craggy face, car fin and car door. These images and others like them form the stanza, the rhyme scheme, the chorus.

The lyric I as a loner
Everyone in a film noir is on the outside. If there is an insider view, the insider is already isolated. There is no real communal life. It is the world of the poet as melancholiac, as romantic outcast, as voyeur. However the central characters resolve their situations their natural state is helplessness. They are being drugged or slugged or imprisoned or puzzled. They are troubled partly because there is only ever an outside. The inside, should there be such a place, is already corrupt. 'I wouldn't join any club that would have me as its member,' quipped Groucho Marx. And that is precisely the point.

The spectral
The characters are ghostlike or are in the process of becoming ghosts. Ghosts, wrote Peter Scupham, a good poet friend, are a poet's working capital. That's as true as it gets. Ghosts don't do things, they are just there, drifting about. Everyone in film noir is either being shot or about to get shot. They may not be shot finally but being on the edge of being shot is their very essence. They are all, in their way, uncanny, unheimlich. That, I think, is often the poet's sense of his own being in his or her own skin. It's all just a bit uncanny. What an odd place for consciousness to have lodged in, this Plato's cave of shadows!

*

Form, apprehension, sense of story rather than story, unfixed desire, isolation, haunting. Art is a house that tries to be haunted said Emily Dickinson. Yes, but the haunting takes place in a real world, a hard, mean, dollar-down kind of world, not in a ghost story.

If I like film noir It is for reasons like this.

Sunday night is... Film Noir

2009-10-18T21:17:00.002+01:00

Very nice list of the films from which scenes were taken here. Myself? Back from day at the Hungarian School in Highgate where C and I learn the basic steps of the csárdás, eat gulyás and almás pite, listen to AL on Hungarian poetry and her own, and I do an impromptu talk on translation before returning to visit my father, thence home.

On the subject of film noir there will be something to think about at another time.

Hearing verse / hearing metre

2009-10-17T23:42:00.004+01:00

The difference between rhythm and metre has been on my mind recently arising out of a discussion with a doctorate student who talked of rhythm as something superior to and quite other than metre. I can't quite see how this might be since rhythm presupposes some kind of regularity against which it plays.

The reason it comes to mind today is that I have been working on a commission to produce a verse play for radio. Something very short, of only some seven minutes length.

I had heard of a Hollywood film whose screenplay was in blank verse and had long wanted to find it. Mentioning this to a film studies colleague at university, she first said she hadn't heard of it, then, to my great delight, an hour or so later knocked at my door and held out a DVD of it.

The film is Force of Evil (1948), a version of film noir starring John Garfield. The director and co-screenwriter was Abraham Polonsky whose first film it was. It turned out to be his last for twenty years. Polonsky was a Marxist in the McCarthy era and the film was a study of financial corruption. It has some excellent performances and the verse script. Can't embed but I can link to some dialogue. The blank verse is in there, beautifully naturalised. 'Look it up for yourself while you are at it...' says the femme fatale. 'What do you want? What are you waiting to see?' he shouts.

I have a draft. We'll see how it goes.

Cheltenham and back

2009-10-16T22:12:00.004+01:00

I'm not sure when I first went to Cheltenham as a writer. It might have been 1989, when Lawrence Sail was director and there were a good number of poets on the programme. I think I did a reading with Stephen Romer. The next time was with Christopher Reid, or it might have been in reverse order. I also, that first time, chaired a discussion on translation with Ewald Osers, Adam Czerniawski and Danny Weissbort. If it was 1989 than I would have been thirty-nine and certainly a good deal younger than the other translators. On the other hand it might have been 1988. Or even 1987. I can't remember very much about it except that Adam C insisted that the true measure of a translation was how few words it had. The more it had the worse it was. But I might be imagining this or it wasn't exactly what he said. The session wasn't very grandly attended - some thirty people perhaps on a sunny morning. Later I saw Jeremy Reed perform, green fingernails and tiny scraps of paper bookmarks that he discarded with an imperious gesture after each poem.

Since then, as at most general literary festivals, the poets are a much diminished presence, and celebrity events (of a respectable kind) much expanded. This is not a complaint as such, it is simply the world, to which it behoves one occasionally to say hello. On this occasion I read with Roddy Lumsden to a good sized audience that was in complete darkness from my position on the podium. They were very nice, and bought books and said very nice things. Kapka Kassabova is writer in residence and she and I being old friends she joined Roddy and I for a writers' dinner. Kapka is splendid and beautiful and her memoir, Street Without a Name, is really a very good and very enviable memoir, she having packed a great deal into a life that is twenty-five years short of mine.

Then Roddy and I hunt for a pub in which to have a drink but either we go in the wrong direction or Cheltenham has very few pubs. We see The Slug and Lettuce, and, opposite that another less crowded pub so I have my Jamesons and Roddy his pint and we talk poetry and poets.

Back in my hotel room (one day I shall write a book called The Last Hotel) there is a large television, a marvellous shower, a beaut of a basin but no shaving plug by the bathroom mirror. This is no disaster, certainly not last thing at night, and in any case my electric shaver has batteries, but it still puzzles me why, having set up an all mod-cons relatively elegant room, the hotel should have decided - and it must have been a decision not an oversight - that 'they shall not have shaving plugs'. Wondering how the design meeting might have gone kept me awake a while. Then I was just awake, like on many recent nights. Not a good thing.

And today I stop off in London to meet another good friend, the magnificent Alison Croggon, whose intelligence is worth its weight in something better than gold and who has recently been named Australia's best critic, a prize that comes with cash, as a result of which she insists on buying me the meal rather than vice versa. By way of thanks I load her down with a hundredweight of books. She is currently on a tour that takes her to Ireland next, then the Lake District, then Edinburgh and Glasgow. We walk down past St Martin's-in-the-Fields and I tell her it reminds me of the time one night in the mid 80s when I walked down the same street with the Romanian poet, Grete Tartler, then in leather jacket and equipped with small vodka bottle, later, after the revolution, in smart suit and proper diplomat hair as Ambassador in Vienna. I am not sure how much this interests Alison but I recall it all being very interesting at the time. But then that is generally the way with things.

This is so much like a social diary I feel I should be signing off with a toodle-pip. But I am home now and tend not to use the expression while seated at my desk.

Brief from Cheltenham

2009-10-15T16:52:00.003+01:00

About to walk down to the writers' room. Drizzly, spritzy. Reminds me of numerous channell crossings. Hotel full of writers I don't recognize. Driven down from station with Rageh Omar. Face smooth as glass the way mine never was. Friendly, glowing smile.