The Englishness of English Poetry 1

Dr Johnson (observed by Hogarth) - see below...


This will be the first of a set of intermittent posts on a particular subject I am determined to think about, and, if possible to make some sense of. I think I'll have to begin on an uncertain autobiographical note then see where it leads.

At a certain - or uncertain - point in my early poetic career - is 'career' the word? do poets have careers? - well, let's say career anyway, I came to the realisation, or what I thought was a realisation (you can see how uncertain this is), that the reason my poems often sounded wrong was because the English language wanted to say 'English' things and I was trying to write like a translation of something else, possibly French.

This was not an easy realisation because it meant I had to change.

From 'realisation' to resolution is a short but heavy step, so I set out, in rather a conscious way, to write in English as it was written and mostly heard, that is to say in a kind of classless (or what I took to be classless) standard English. That is, as such a thing might have looked in about 1974.

In truth, I doubt whether it was quite standard English or standard anything, but there was enough of 'English' in it to push it through some barrier. It was perhaps a belated attempt at socialisation, a moving out of myself, whatever that was, into something in which language rather than self, was to be the main actor. In any case, it made a lot of difference. It was from that point on the poems began to appear in magazines and, eventually, books.

There has been a great deal written about the nature of Englishness, mostly since Britain started to break up, and I don't want to go over that ground again. Enough to say that, to me, the term 'English' implied a certain kind of relationship between the sensible world and the words that conjured or referred to it. This was not the logical conclusion of a painstaking investigation: it was an apprehension.

What I want really to think about now is what it was I thought I was hearing, how and where it was embodied, how far it was simply a product of its time, and how far it was imaginable as 'English'. I don't suppose I would have thought about it at all if I had been born English. It would have been the air I breathed, and chances are it would have been more specific, more localised, less standard. But I was without locality, without class. I had partly to imagine the air.

*

Nikolaus Pevsner's The Englishness of English Art was first given as a set of Reith Lectures in 1955. It was expanded and annotated for publication by the Architectural Press in 1956, and appeared in the Peregrine edition I have in 1964. Pevsner's chapter divisions, apart from introductions and conclusions, are as follows:

1. Hogarth and Observed Life
2. Reynolds and Detachment
3. Perpendicular England
4. Blake and the Flaming Line
5. Constable and the Pursuit of Nature
6. Picturesque England

I don't necessarily assume that Pevsner had got English art tabbed, but there is something in the above list, even if it isn't enough. Maybe it will help me a little with the poetry too. No doubt, I shall find out.

NEW WRITING IN 'NOTES' 2: Katy Evans-Bush

Delighted to have a new poem from Katy Evans-Bush, whose first book, Me and the Dead, is just out with Salt, and who writes one of the best literary blogs as Ms Baroque at Baroque in Hackney. (See also sidebar).

Sunday night is...

A bunch of doctors. Avoid them. Keep your bones in order.





This is, of course, one the great sequences from the best television drama serial by the best writer for television, Dennis Potter. The Singing Detective, with Michael Gambon as Philip Marlowe (not that one.) It's over the top, but not by much, not by much at all. Any thoughts in the brainbox, old chap?

Howard Hodgkin

Howard Hodgkin, Realism


I have always wondered why people paint if they don't like the stuff. True, there is an element of mere luxuriance in oil paint that goes against some grains and it may be that Howard Hogkins verges on what certain branches of society regard as de trop. Too bad. Can't be helped.

I like a bit of askesis myself, share some of the instinct for it, but Hodgkin gets to me. I can't be bothered to resist him. Not even tempted to. I welcome those gorgeous splodges of his. Not that he is a great epic artist like, say, Kiefer. He is not a whole desolate land soaked through with history. There is little outside world for him. He is an exotic plant in the corner of the room. A voluptuary.

He comes to mind now because I have been writing, or trying to write, a series of short poems about his work, partly as a result of the welcome prompting of a magazine. I have four poems now, all written very fast, including one about, or out of, the painting above. I still regard it as a draft. I don't quite know what I'm doing in fact. But that, of course, can be a good thing.

So what is it about this particular painting?

There's the spillover for a start, the rich bourgeois frame invaded by a heady colour that billows over it. The application is soft-handed, the paint pressed, almost pushed on. The turquoise verges on aquamarine. In the middle it blurs and muddies, then sharpens to a vivid streak of orange that suggests both flame and leaf. The whole is autumnal. The hint of sky and horizon behind the orange has a heroic feel as if Emil Nolde had been looking over Hodgkin's shoulder. Echoes of Nolde run through Hodgkin's work. He is a more pervasive presence there than those Indian miniatures people compare Hogkin's work to. The miniatures are delicate and spiky. Hodgkin is blunt. More Nolde. Nolde, of course, is more bitter, darker, more about premonition. Hodgkin is about memory, or rather nostalgia.

Nostalgia at its least sentimental is the sense of having been somewhere we had to leave for one reason or another. You get it in Elgar, in the Cello Concerto. You get it, much more poignantly and tragically in Schubert. Even in Verdi.

OK, let's not get too swoony, to twerpish about this. Hodgkin is a sensualist, that's all. HH in melancholy afterglow in a prospect of flowers. But the senses are what we work through and denying them does no one any good. They are something to hold on to, to celebrate. You don't get them for ever, not even for that long.

The Enormous Face

What part of the psyche does it rise from? A cast of thousands all doing exactly the same thing. It is disturbing, oddly moving in its symbolism, but military, military down to every crossed t and dotted i.

The dead who made a wrong move are already rotting in mass graves at the edges of the city, in plots that will be sealed off for a thousand years - or however long the Reich lasts.

Well, Riefenstahl of course. All Olympiads are her Olympiad. As for the display it is just as Cole Porter wrote:

Hitlers do it,
Stalins do it,
Even Kim-il-Jongs and Maos do it,
Let's do it,
Let us form an enormous polyhedron made out of six hundred people wearing folk costumes with neon buttons!

But at the same time it does catch you somewhere at the base of your belly. It can even bring tears to your eyes. Because it represents a yearning for the great collective that is the combination of all our efforts. Look: we! we microbes! we atoms! we mere specks in the dust of the universe! what extraordinary constructions we can produce when we move as one!

Now, if you would only be nice to each other, says mother, we could all build a model of the Eiffel Tower out of rice crispies! Think what you could do if you stopped squabbling for a moment, or, worse still, sulking and going off into a corner on your own.

Yes, but it is never the Eiffel Tower. It is nearly always one enormous face, like the face of Stalin, or of Mao, or of Dick Powell or Gene Kelly. It is a single vast head we have made.

And so nightmare and reverie merge. The fireworks go off and blaze over the entire city. The firestorm is entirely under control.

The Olympic Games open

Very spectacular. This leaves us with a problem in 2012. How do you follow this paean to the collective? Here is my suggestion.




Busby Berkeley of course and, at ten minutes, it's much shorter than Beijing - and no expense on fireworks.

Small despairs, odd lacunae

What governs human mood? C says it shifts for her. Sometimes a dark week will fall across her path with no specific reason. Body chemicals? Hormones? The slow build-up of anxieties that mount under the skin and rise to the surface like a blemish that seems to blight the whole body? Keats's influx of nightshade, ruby-grape of Prosperpine?



Let's try Robert Burton, the first page of whose Anatomy of Melancholy begins with a paean to humankind, to man, who is:

...a little world, a modell of the World, Soveraigne Lord of the Earth, Viceroy of the World, sole Commander and Governour of all the creatures in it...

Well, there's only one way from there and it is down. In any case, we think we know better now, we sole commanders and governours of all creatures, we viceroys.

I am not much subject to depression, probably because I am one of life's fidgety doers, mentally at any rate. Oh, the thoughts that rush through this head and chase each other round like demented children! I land myself with several tasks at once and so skip on. Skip and chase. Skip and chase. When poems arrive they gather out of a seeming nothing, the mysterious pulp of what one never really sees or knows, but that, once given a promising exit, runs out and begins to gnaw language into shape. Maybe it is that that saves me. That, and those odd lacunae, little spaces, missing links that leave one puzzled enough to explore them. Tiny toothaches of the mind one can't help fiddling with.

They are accompanied by big plans. I land myself with commitments to big plans. So, for example, in November I am invited to give the Kenneth Allott lecture at Liverpool University and I am thinking of something like 'The Englishness of English Poetry', much like Pevsner with his The Englishness of English Art. It's a bit crazy really, particularly because I have no real scholarship to speak of, but the subject is, I think, one of those odd personal lacunae if only because I am not English by birth. I sometimes think I inhabit English like a lodger in an old fashioned B & B. What? Ain't you got no 'ome to go to? Not really. Home is another country, a notional place, a unscored music at the back of the mind. Besides, like Kinglsey Amis once said, 'I like it here.' Go for the odd walk down the prom, and that.

But back to melancholy - see, I have almost driven away the faint shadow that had settled over me only half an hour ago, or was it a deep dissatisfaction from having worked through the proofs of my Collected? - to melancholy that has never yet incapacitated me. Never have I, like GL, been unable to get out of bed for the sheer weight of it. My despairs, those I know about, are relatively small. They fall into those odd lacunae. Into language.

Speak then fool, no commander of creation, merely of a few words now and then. Emperor of lexicon and marginal. Ghost empire. Brief light.