SO, WITH THE HANDING OVER of the T.S.Eliot Prize to John Burnside, all the fuss and pother is over. The winner immediately endeared himself to the teeming poetry public by stating 1) that his own animus was rather directed against financial institutions that don't support the arts than those that do, and 2) that he could do with the money to replace the roof on his studio, which a gale had run off with. John Kinsella would probably have bought a vegan hot dog van for the St Paul's protestors. Did they have a point, the squeamish pair of flouncer-outers? Who can tell? An unusual aspect of their protest was that they could adduce no reason for it. Alice Oswald first tried "Hedge funds are not obliged to be transparent, so there is little one can find out about their practices". She must have recognized this was a bit feeble, so she had another go: "It [Aurum] doesn't, according to its website, have an ethical policy." Of course, Aurum's website says nothing of the kind. It just lacks a pious mission statement. So does this one. Kinsella at least came up with the memorable "Hedge-funds are at the very pointy end of capitalism", which got one wondering exactly what-shaped instrument capitalism might be, in the Kinsella world view. My own world view is that poets, unless themselves of the cloth, should keep off preaching. Do poets as a species have a superior 'ethical profile' to hedge-fund managers? All those condom-shy Romantic inseminators, Dylan the shirt-stealer, Freddie Prokosch's rather endearing faking of his own Butterfly Books, any amount of day-to-day cliquey log-rolling, some quite recent events. . .? Hush.    23.01.2012

SOME MALIGN GREMLIN, or maybe a thief in the English or Italian postal service earning a fat black market living recycling poetry magazines, is thwarting me of my copies (one as contributor, one as subscriber) of New Walk 3. Of course I am interested in seeing what contemporary poetic gems the editors, Rory Waterman & Nick Everett, mistakenly believe superior to whatever it was of mine they last rejected, but what I am really anxious to peruse is my own extensive interview with Patrick McGuinness. Why? If I want to reread it, I can open my computer at any hour of the day or night. But there is something specifically satisfying in seeing your own words in print, there's no denying it. Perhaps this is what makes folk write to the newspapers, however inadvisedly (see below). I can even trawl quite a distinct pleasure from (occasionally) rereading the glossy articles I used to write, in another life, for The British Racehorse - the typescripts, had I kept them, would not be at all the same thing. It has always seemed to me that 'Why do I publish?' is an altogether different question from 'Why do I write?' though they are often confused. Some poets are, or appear to be, serenely indifferent to publication - John Ashbery, in the introduction to his recent translation of Illuminations notes Rimbaud's 'casual attitude' towards that now acknowledged masterpiece seeing the illumination of day. I have put the former question to fellow scribblers on occasion, but have never really had a satisfactory answer. One rather stuffily, even huffily, replied, "Well, actually, I feel I have something to say". Surely not. Or rather, if so, poetry would be an extraordinarily inefficient way of disseminating it (alas). Is it that the (illusory? - at best chancy) permanence of print is our tiny fingerhold on the cliff of immortality, our feet swinging out over the bottomless pit of merited oblivion, in this faithless age? As long as there's a mouldering bound volume of The British Racehorse from the 1970s still not 'de-accessioned' from some library somewhere, I'm not, not quite, dead and gone? Perhaps I can get Rory and Nick to do a survey . . . (Subscriptions to New Walk from www.newwalkmagazine.bigcartel.com ) 8.11.2011

NOT FAMILIAR ENOUGH with the corridors of power at Caesura House to have a view on the bust-up at the Poetry Society, but isn't it curious how governing organisations, composed of non-participants, sooner or later go to the bad? - football associations, Olympic committees, Fédération Internationale des Echecs (though to be fair to that KGB office-boy Florencio Campomanes, he was no mean player himself, honourably defeated by many famous names, before waking to the higher attractions of graft). . . And you can see how irksome it must be to have to deal with the little people who actually do the stuff, those pesky ivory-pushers and poets with their tiny needs and gripes. 'I control a budget,' you can hear being muttered into expensive office equipment, 'many times what you'll earn in all your born days. I can't spend my time listening to your whining on about travel expenses and who pays for the brandies after dinner'. 'If they can get computers to play world-class chess, surely they can get them to write poems. It can't be that hard - look at the people who do it'. 'And at the end of it all, what? A brass clock and, well, all right, quite sensible pension arrangements (predisposed by myself: no one else would have thought of muggins) while some ghastly little unwash edalcoholic gets a full-page obituary in the Times. . .' 14.09.2011

Deskmouse

ONE OF THE MINOR pleasures of my life is rereading the TLS two years or so down the line. I keep back numbers in a box by my desk and every now and then fish a few out from the bottom of the pile to relive old debates or see how many of the books reviewed in the language of the Second Coming have finished in the interim on the remainder tables. I am now at November 2008, which saw a notably ill-judged attack on W.H.Auden and John Ashbery by Jascha Kessler. Mr Kessler's grudge, honed over the decades, is that he (or another of the original shortlist) was cheated of winning the Yale Younger Poets competition by Auden's helping Ashbery to 'run on the inside track'. Ashbery's contained reply in the next issue begins 'Jascha Kessler's letter about W.H.Auden and the Yale Younger Poets Series is seriously delusional'. Ashbery is referring to matters of fact, misrepresented in Kessler's original letter, but of course Kessler is seriously deluded in another sense: he thinks that BUT FOR this malign blow HE WOULD BE ASHBERY, garlanded with fame and prizes, and presumably that Ashbery would be relegated as he is to the shadows of poesy, without so much as a Wikipedia page to his name. Funnily enough, I have come across the same butforist delusion once before, and again involving Auden. Back in the seventies in Florence I bumped into one Joseph Macleod, whose beef (at fate rather than the presumed manoeuvres of the homintern) was that his The Ecliptic was published by Faber and Faber in 1930 at much the same time as Auden's Poems, incidentally in the identical red-ruled pale blue covers. He too believed that BUT FOR this cruel coincidence towering fame would have been his. As it happens, faithful accolytes have provided Mr Macleod (who died in 1984) with a fulsome Wikipedia page, on which the following evidence of his prowess is proudly displayed:

Moonpoison, mullock of sacrifice,

Suffuses the veins of the eyes

Till the retina, mooncoloured,

Sees the sideways motion of the cretin crab

Hued thus like a tortoise askew in the glaucous moonscape

A flat hot boulder it

Lividly in the midst of the Doldrums

Sidles

The lunatic unable to bear the silent course of constellations

Mad and stark naked

Sidles

The obol on an eyeball of a man dead from elephantiasis

Sidles

All three across heaven with a rocking motion.

Joseph Macleod, from 'The Ecliptic' Faber & Faber 1930.

Auden's 'Poems' kicks off with 'Paid on Both Sides: A Charade' which is followed by 30 untitled roman-numbered poems, including 'It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens', & 'This lunar beauty Has no history' & 'Taller today, we remember similar evenings, & 'Consider this and in our time'. . .

Mr Kessler is more than welcome to send me some examples of his own skill to set alongside 'Some Trees'. 15.06.2011

I AM CURRENTLY engaged in a project to get poems into the advertising spaces on the vaporetti here in the watery city, along the lines of the hugely successful 'Poems on the Underground' in London and elsewhere. Why does one want to do this sort of thing? We are inclined, if asked, to say something about trying to 'make poetry more a part of daily life' and it's true that poets do tend to hanker after some imagined Golden Age when wooers slipped their intendeds a sonnet rather than a date rape cocktail, and the king's men conversed naturally in courtly couplets. It is, I suppose, depressing how large a part of the poetry public are producers as well as consumers, or consumers only because producers - an obligatory quid pro quo. One doesn't expect biographies to be read chiefly by biographers, still less novels by novelists, but you can be pretty sure that half or more of the audience at any poetry event will have something tenderly inept in a lined notebook back home, or, worse, in that shoulder-bag . . . So: 'Poesie sul vaporetto'. Will it 'make poetry more part of daily life'? Well, yes, in an absolutely literal sense. Increase poetry sales? Possibly. Be a showcase for my own huge talent? No - if only because I don't appear ever to have written anything as short as eight lines long, our limit for legibility in the spaces available. Some of these and similar weighty questions will be answered in due course on the website www.vapoesia.com which right now contains little more than a picture of a vaporetto, but I'm working on that too.

24.5.2011

I GET THE FEELING that the waves of trend are rolling in the Formalists' direction. I've no strong views on the matter myself, other than that pendulums will swing and this one had perhaps swung far enough the other way. Jarrell had it right, as far as I'm concerned: 'It can rhyme if it wants to'. At school, as it happens, I had a great facility for tum-ti-tum-ti-tum-tum, could practically converse in rhyming couplets, and even now could write my emails in alcaics if need be - DEAR GEORGE a LONG TIME / LONG beyond ALL exCUSE JANE HOPES the NEW YEAR / BRING AnatOLE and BRUCE BACK HOME and TALL TREE DRIVE be ONCE MORE FAmily HOLiday ZONE (and NO DOGS!) - which goes to show that Latin metres should be applied sparingly. But here in front of me I have the Able Muse Anthology, which declares itself 'The best of the first decade' of the online metrical mag, with a foreword by Timothy Steele, the 'captain, my captain' of New Form. It also contains an interview with the well-tempered Steele, conducted in then-what-didst-thou-o-great-one style by Kevin Durkin. Re the Master's 'Fae', the fawning Kevin opines in his intro 'Re-reading this poem at home . . . I realized with pleasure that Steele had captured quite a lot about life in Los Angeles in just twenty-one flawless lines of verse'. Here are all flawless 21 of them:

Fae

I bring Fae flowers. When I cross the street,

She meets and gives me lemons from her tree.

As if competitors in a Grand Prix,

The cars that speed past threaten to defeat

The sharing of our gardens and our labors.

Their automotive moral seems to be

That hell-for-leather traffic makes good neighbours.

Ten years a widow, standing at her gate,

She speaks of friends, her cat's trip to the vet,

A grandchild's struggle with the alphabet.

I conversationally reciprocate

With talk of work at school, not deep, not meaty.

Before I leave we study and regret

Her alley's newest samples of graffiti.

Then back across with caution: to enjoy

Fae's lemons, it's essential I survive

Lemons that fellow Angelenos drive.

She's eighty-two; at forty, I'm a boy.

She waves goodbye to me with her bouquet.

This place was beanfields back in '35

When she moved with her husband to L.A.

I'm happy to acknowledge this is a pretty good poem, but 'flawless', Kevin? There are two very bad lines (3 & 11, the latter particularly hideous and clearly dragged in solely for the metrical scheme: 'I talk of work at school . . ,' would be more natural), and one clunking Redundant Second Adjective (the bane of formal verse) in l.12. The nod to Frost in line 7 is harmless but hardly warrants 'The allusion certainly wasn't hard to detect, but how cleverly it had been deployed' - all it does is say 'I've read Frost'; nothing in 'Mending Wall' is of relevance here. 'She meets and gives me lemons' is an inelegant solecism. Finally (and this, I confess, is nitpicky) the comma at the end of line 8 lets in the ludicrous possibility that poor Fae has been standing ten years at her gate. As I say, by no means a bad poem, which closes well, but if this is the pinnacle of New Formality, the O'Harans won't be running scared. 30.3.2011

DO YOU REMEMBER how 'Three Dimensional Chess', during its brief vogue, was not on the whole played by great eggheads who had exhausted the possibilities of the regular game? Those who can, do; those who can't, experiment. 18.10.2010

THE LATEST ISSUE of the online poetry magazine The Bow-Wow Shop (no.6: www.bowwowshop.org.uk ), hosts a debate, or the rudiments of a shouting match, on the merits of competitions. The fellow who has done best by them, James Sutherland-Smith, thinks they are quite a good thing. Others, less prized, prize them less. One contributor thinks a straightjacket of 42 lines or fewer an infringement of the Rights of Man, another is worried that not enough lolly is thrown at very short poems. Judith Palmer, representing the Poetry Society, which runs the National Poetry Competition, comes on at the close like Graham Chapman winding up a Monty Python sketch, the only sober woman at drinking-up time, a glass of clear Malvern Water after some pretty muddy ales. Notwithstanding my own lamentable record (from relatively few attempts), it seems to me churlish to deny that competitions are Ladders and not Snakes, and therefore to be welcomed. Needless to say there are beardy-weirdies of both sexes ready to opine that 'experimental' work goes too generally ungarlanded and that more, or all, contests ought to be judged by J.H.Prynne. Prynne's own efforts read to me like relatively standard stuff with half the nouns and adjectives replaced, following some arcane numerical grid, by others chosen by a pin from the dictionary, but for all I know he reads Keats at home. Revolutionaries, if such he be, often have quite homely tastes at twilight. None the less I would guess that sooner or later some Saatchi of vers libre will modestly, or more probably immodestly, fund a Turner Prize of poetry and wondrous things will be illumined by it. In the meantime, that most judges are inclined to reward what most readers find rewarding, is hardly cause to cry scandal.

9.10.10

COMING UP FOR A MONTH since I wrote the last lyric I was happy with. The fear of drying up I know to be widely shared by poets - though not by all: I have a friend who (like Auden) goes to his desk every morning come what may, and stays there until lunchtime. What emerges of course may not be verse, or publishable, but the effort has been made. Others of us, more of the standing-around-waiting-for-lightning-to-strike tendency, have honed various strategies for nudging Fulgora's beefy arm. 

Hugo Williams in one of his Freelance columns described having recourse to rewriting in different words the last decent thing he'd done, which led to a whole suite of 'variations on a theme by HW'. Free translation can take you after repeated revision to something unrecognisably far from the original: Robert Lowell claimed in a letter 'I began 'Skunk Hour' as a loose rendering of Holderin's 'Brot', and heaping on the Maine scenery', not a connection that leaps to mind on reading his poem, or Holderin's. You can see both John Tranter and I taking considerable liberties with one of Callimachus's Epigrams on the Translation page. In a like vein Hugh Tolhurst has done things with Catullus, and Dan Chiasson with Horace, which would have startled the Romans. Tranter has also written pieces with line endings or beginnings lifted from others' poems; his riff on Dover Beach, 'Grover Leach', being a particularly choice example. Another trick quite widely employed (including, once, by me) is 'Poem Beginning with a Line by..'. Here is the aforementioned Dan Chiasson's Poem Beginning with a Line from Frost as if regret were in it and were sacred as if regret itself were a river and want that was the source of the river flowed through the river, more and more the more the river thickened towards the boring lake where what stirred once went terribly quiet. This is indistinguishable from happiness. This standing water was a mindful current once. Once was a mindful current: now leaden, still; it is ourselves we most resemble, now. Now the maples that had been nowhere gather. When we look down what we look down on is our own. 21.8.10

TO WHICH I MIGHT ADD this bracing thought from Jim Behrle: Ultimately, you are responsible for your own obscurity as an artist, and you have only yourself to blame if no one knows who you are. 3.8.2010

ALL DAY OUTSIDE MY WINDOW I hear the sandolista hawking his rides: 'Nice gondola tour! Only way to see the small canals!' And I like to imagine a world where the poets too go about touting their product with half-truths (half-truths because his boat is, in fact, a sandolo, and if it is true that some things can be seen only, or at least best, from the water, it's also the case that small canals have a habit of being traversed by small bridges, with obligatory artist and easel). 'Sad and angry consolations!' (GH), 'Hotline to the emotions!' (AM), 'Rubbish bins and rawl-plugs!' (AB), 'Easier than the Times crossword, and more melodic!' - not so much a half-truth that, as a whole truth in (possibly) half the cases. Never has it been easier (or cheaper) to produce a physical book(let) - I could do a fair job, with a nice bit of hand-stitching, without leaving this room - and the presses are legion. But getting folk to buy the stuff? Or read it even... Joseph Rykwert told me a nice story about Sacha Guitry taking to a dinner an inscribed copy of his latest play as a present for his hosts, only to find it a few weeks later at a bouquiniste along the Seine. Invited back to the same house, he took it again, adding 'J'insiste' to the inscription. Insistons.    2.8.2010

'this room'

MORE OF SAME. It didn't really require the silly antics of Paula Claire to reduce the Oxford shoo-in to a bathetic farce, but we got them anyway. This soi-disant poetess objected to being described on some candidates' list as a 'performer and artist', for all that her own website - www.paulaclaire.com - offers no support for the supposition that she can write poems. There seem to be exhibitionists beyond numbering out there who think that standing on their heads and chanting the Bible backwards is 'pushing back the boundaries of poetry', or some such guff. But calling all colours red is not brave and adventurous, it just means the rest of us have to think up new words for redness. It may well be of course that flouncing out of the contest was no more than a cynical manoeuvre to extract more flattering publicity from a débacle than could be milked from coming seventh of six. Either way, it's a pity for those of us who would have liked to have cheered, say (at random), Sharon Olds or Marilyn Hacker up the finishing straight, to have had to watch the Sisters disgrace themselves twice in a twelvemonth, in the same race.   14.7.2010

HELLFIRE FOGY bags Oxford chair! Why? Well the short answer is that none of the other candidates was plausible, but where was, say, John Fuller? Michael Schmidt? Any number of Americans?

Hellfire Fogy in the wild Posted @ 21:14:35 on 12 July 2010