Intervention and Corruption - Bring back the Taliban

Waking early at a time when Radio Four is out on the farm and when Radio Five is not as frenetically keen to be matey as it is at some other times, in other words listening to Radio Five, I think I hear an interview with the Afghanistan correspondent in which he asserts the whole place is a mess because of war and because of corruption. So (he asserts) Afghans want the Taliban back, because, after all, yes, they did execute people in stadiums, they did burn down schools, they did prevent women getting any education, in fact, yes, they prevented them from being seen, from moving around at all, and they murdered and smashed and terrorised, and I won't even mention the gays, yes, all of that, but, you see, they weren't corrupt. People could get on with their lives.

I lie there and wonder which people got on with what lives, then realise of course, that I don't really understand these things, because, of course, it is their country (ie the Taliban's) and their culture (ie the Taliban's) so it's really nothing to do with me, I just don't understand their inherently noble value system, which, you must understand, is not corrupt, whereas the non-Talibans, especially of course we listeners, we are corrupt, and all the more corrupt for wishing our corrupt value-system on the straight-as-a-die-and-off-with-your-head Talibans.

Am I corrupt? Honest, guv, me, I'm straight as a bent pin. Next door, you see, I have this bunch who have murdered a few, burned a few, terrorised a few, have in fact eaten a few of their children, like that bloke in Austria who kept his daughter in that cellar thing and fathered kids with her. That was his value system. It was in his house. It is nothing to do with me or the cops. Value system trumps ideas about common humanity, which is just, like, so just your opinion, man.

Poems on the Underground

Last night I was part of the reading for the publication of The Best Poems on the London Underground at the LRB Bookshop near the British Museum. This meant a scurry down and an even hastier scurry back but it was eminently worth it.

It is, I think, one of the great privileges of poetry to be included in this scheme, which has given birth to many others throughout the world since it was first set up in 1986 by Judith Chernaik, Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert (and even more of a privilege to be in this Best of... volume). On this occasion, as the link says, I was reading with Wendy Cope and Jo Shapcott, but also with Gerard and Cicely. The place was crammed. We each read for about 10 minutes, roughly half from our own work and half from the anthology. Since there was no pre-planning it was something of a miracle that none of us chose a poem that had been chosen by another. It is also a tribute to the range of poems in the book. Many of the poems are familiar of course, as they would be given the premise of the selection, but they sit next to others that are new, or only faintly familiar.

I tried to say something about why I thought the scheme so good. I want to try to say it again now, perhaps a little more clearly, with a little more consideration, at a little greater length.

The phrase, 'Go, little book...' tells us of the power, value and vulnerability of the book. It is impossible to speak too highly of the value of books, of the human thought, feeling and endeavour contained and invested in them: the words of the dead and dying in the hearts of the living, the words alive, as if spoken now, as if touching the nerve now, at this very moment.

In bookshops there is usually the poetry corner about which Kingsley Amis once wrote a funny poem. 'A Bookshop Idyll', before turning his attention to fiction. There is, for all kinds of reasons, something coyly cornerish about Poets' Corner. Sensitives retire there in varying states of tremulousness: the robustly healthy avoid it as if it were a source of potential weakening or embarrassment. The common-sense disciples of straight-speaking and simple man-ness avoid it because it is for clever intellectual types who'll only make them feel inferior and dumb. Fancy talk for the fancy minded.

People, on the whole, only go there if it is what they already want: the corner offers a specialism, like turnip growing or vintage trains.

The corner is a minor, short-term disaster for poetry. It's not a disaster in the great eternal scheme of things because poetry survives wherever it is put because it is hard-wired into our central nervous system. It is as plain as day to me that under all the Pavlovian reactions and aversions there is a deep understanding of what the stuff is and what it's for and that that understanding extends to everyone, in every culture. It's not going to vanish. As long as language persists, poetry will radiate from its very centre, if only because the experience of living demands it. Being alive is a poetic experience. The simple consciousness of our capacity to breathe can take our breath away.

What is marvellous about Poems on the Underground is that it takes poetry out of the corner (I know, I live in the corner, am of it, and love it because how can you not love being with what you love?) and floats it into the very air. It is there among crowds, among advertisements, among newspapers, public notices, maps, graffiti, above the issues of London Lite and the Evening Standard. It is not in a corner. People glance up and there it is. Just a few lines of it. And those lines are doing something that nothing around them does. They hold the air. They engage an unprepared part of them (of me, of us, of you) just as the poem itself must enter the world a little unprepared, always a little surprised at itself. They engage the place we know exists within us, that rises out of all we are to meet them.

If I had my way I would print short poems on napkins in restaurants, on the backs of tickets, on ordinary things we never think about because we are about some other business. I would leave them on leaflets on park benches. Let them blow away. They'll eventually blow away in any case.

And as for the bookshops, I would have certain special, slightly unfamiliar arrangements. I would have some bookshops without a poetry corner. I would arrange all the books alphabetically and let the authors sit next to each other: the gardeners with the historians with the scientists with the poets. Or do it by subject if you like, the subjects suggested by their titles: The Death of a Naturalist with The Natural History of Selborne and The Nature Boy. Or keep the broad areas of interest but mix in the fiction and the poetry, so that, say Masefield and Homer and Anon and Walcott are with books about ships and the sea, or at least with travel, and industry, and colonialism and whatever. Let's introduce people at the party. Let's not stand on too much ceremony there. There will be ceremony enough elsewhere, and sections and corners and embarrassment.

It's lovely to get prizes (hey! I might even get one tonight, though I doubt it). It's lovely to stand in the prize corner. But it's just as good, even better, to be out of any corner, with all the other stuff of the world. On the Underground. Why not?

Commemorating U.A. Fanthorpe

When I think of poets who have been generally loved, that is to say loved by those who are not normally readers of poetry - and I think here primarily of Betjeman and Larkin and, in a different way, Wendy Cope and, again in a slightly different way, our current Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy - I naturally think of UA, as she liked to be known. The commemoration service at St Mary's, Wootton-under-Edge was packed mostly by local people to whom UA and Rosie Bailey clearly stood for something admirable and lovable that extended beyond books of poetry.

Wotton-under-Edge is heart of England, and UA wrote a great deal about England. It was a reciprocal love which means it tells us about both UA and England. Betjeman and Larkin were both eccentrics after a fashion, oddities who stood for a certain caricature of what the English found attractive and, in some ways, aspired to, meaning individuality as manageable, recognisable difference. Betjeman with his churches, teddy-bears, underground stations, self-mocking humour and fear of death was the loveable uncle; Larkin with his curmudgeonliness, his post-war, dry, matter-of-factness and lyricism about residual nature, was the stern unliterary librarian, the wry remark at the bar, the solitary, the man in the distance removing his cycle clips in awkward reverence, Mr Bleaney, the loner at the boarding house who'd never take a garden properly in hand. The toad that squatted on Larkin perfectly represented the toad that squatted on everyone. (How did you come upon the image of the toad for work? asked the Paris Review. Sheer, genius, Larkin replied.) Both Betjeman and Larkin spoke for everyone from a position tolerably outside everyone. They were the eccentrics that sounded the norm.

UA was clearly gay and dressed it. Her double act with Rosie was a mixture of the joyful, the wise, and the jolly, almost boy-scout, camp. The act was loved somewhat in the way music hall was. It was dressing up for the party, safe, and yet a blow for liberation, in the sense that whatever is camp in us - and there is a considerable amount in the English persona - could find an echo there. It was warm, generous, affectionate, comfortably outrageous. At the same time, her poems were born out of deep, common feelings, precisely and plainly articulated, that could never be described as camp. The life of the emotions was set to wisdom. It was a kind of secular charitable anglicanism. I would have had no difficulty in seeing UA play the role of Trollope's Warden. Members of the same parish. All three, Betjeman, Larkin and UA can be read in the light of class without diminishing any of them. All three are members of the same unruly congregation.

The loved English poets are loved in the way people love their follies: as romances, as extensions of latencies that spring out of themselves. These English - and they do not represent all England, which is distinctly a various place - are realists with a tolerance for caricature and a sense of the mystical perceived in unlikely places. The persona is music hall but the feeling is solid and reassuring as the landscape it is set in.

New audio recording of poems from Rotterdam

The marvellous Rotterdam festival and site is packed with material. There is a new set with audio poems by Mourid Barghouti, Valzhyna Mort, Vera Pavlova, Jacques Roubaud, Piot Sommer, Matthew Sweeney and myself. Mine are here. There is a sidebar link to it too.

Sunday night is... Katalin Karády

'Mindig az a perc' - Ever that moment. Here is Wiki on Karády. To summarise: born very poor, started acting in 1936, became the leading glamorous film star through the war. She was arrested in 1944. Having been charged with spying for the Allies, she was imprisoned, tortured and almost beaten to death by the fascists. Nevertheless because she had been popular in the Horthy era her life became very difficult under communism. Her films were banned and her acting career forced to the very margins. In 1951 she left the country. She lived in Brazil and the USA and never returned. Died in 1990. She was given a posthumous medal by Yad Vashem in 2004 as a righteous gentile.

The first verse of the song translates (translated pretty impromptu by me) as:

The loveliest moment is ever the one
that life will never grant you;
The most wonderful kiss is the one
that we will never enjoy;
The most marvellous dream is the one
that most quickly comes to nothing,
it is the dream we never dream again.

It is, of course, a sentimental song, but then many of the songs of the time were, partly because times were hard and dangerous and the words were likely to be proved true. But the sentiment is often accompanied by irony, acidic wit or playful lightness of heart.

Pearl and Lily: two recovering cats

A very long time since I mentioned the cats, our war-time, music hall double act. Both rescue cats, slowly working their way back to security.

Security takes a long time. It has taken over a year for Lily, the silver and black, smaller part of the duo, to lose her resident terrors. She arrived from the cat home frightened by the car journey, frothing at the mouth in fear. Pearl had arrived a few weeks earlier. The first meeting of Pearl and Lily was not compounded of mutual delight. Territory and intrusion. More terror. Lily crept and slithered and scrambled out of the way, avoiding Pearl, avoiding us, even avoiding her food for a while. But food was necessary. Even we were necessary. But it was minimal contact. She ducked under our hands, would not be stroked and certainly never thought of leaping into our laps. It was all she could do just to get by in the house. And when visitors came she scampered off to find the most secure hiding place, squeezing into impossible corners, behind books on shelves. She desperately desired to be elsewhere. Or, perhaps, to be nowhere at all.

We had no idea what was making her behave like this. It continued for months on end and looked unlikely to change. But then a step forward. One day she leapt onto C's lap and settled there. Briefly. When touched, she leapt off again. She began to play wild games, involving Pearl in them. Pearl's notion of play was rather more violent. It would start quite tenderly. She would even groom Lily, but then something would get hold of her and she would start biting. Pearl had set herself up to be Alpha ex-female and was not going to be patient with a strange little upstart.

More recently Lily has entered another stage. She sprawls and lopes and gets under the covers of our bed in the morning and gives our hands a good lick. And yesterday, for the first time, a visitor came and she did not seek refuge. She showed a certain curiosity before sidling off.

She is a feral child who has learned to relax a bit. A war orphan.

Pearl is constantly hungry. She starts eating cardboard boxes as a hint. She eats fast and makes herself sick. She is bold and examines every visitor. Her fear is hunger. She can be stroked but not always. Like Lily she hates being picked up. With her half-Hitler moustache there is a touch of the comic about her but now she seems the more troubled of the two. She is quite a handsome thing but a touch lumpen compared to Lily. She waddles slightly. If we allowed it she would would eat herself senseless and sick it all up again.

Both these cats are more problematic than any we have had before. Both are in recovery from something. Pearl was found hurt on a road as a kitten. Lily was born at the catwoman's luxury apartment but the shadow of something dreadful had already lodged in her.

She is bright now, frisky. Still ducks from a stroke but likes a good firm scratch. She purrs a lot. Pearl has brief storms of purring than something else switches on. You can see it in her eyes. Sudden tension. Intelligent though. She understands certain words and acts on them without us initiating.

If my life were starting again I might be tempted to make a study of animal consciousness. Why they do this or that? Why leave a chair to move to another chair? Why walk or run or sit or lie? Why that direct look? What do their ears and noses tell them?

Sun and Sun

Natural disaster. Earthquake, tsunami. Here the warm autumn is beginning to develop a sharper edge as the wind picks up. The sun still slanting over the road in that hesitant end-of-sunny days manner. The Chinese take-away over the road is quiet. Our neighbour's daughter has returned to Australia. My Australian cousin rings in the evening, tells me my elderly Australian second-cousin is frailer than she was, but that her 87 year old husband, a Steinerian, has written a book about soil that could save the world. And my father is out of hospital. He wants no operations. Fair enough at 92.

As for me, I work, answering letters, sending books, reading people's PhD drafts, meeting people, writing blurbs. I see The Sun has decided to back the Tories. I shall not vote Tory but will register my hopeless Labour vote when the time comes. Hopeless because I cannot really stand the sound of Gordon Brown any more, that I have saved the world and had nothing to do with putting it in danger guff. Dead man walking and talking.

It is not personalities, not even precisely where the party stands now or in the next five years on this or that policy that keeps me voting as I do. It's very simple and I'm keeping it that way. Who needs more support? The weak or the strong? End of story.

To Ursula Fanthorpe's memorial service on Saturday. Long drive coming.