Late again - points mean prizes

Back from Cafewriters in Norwich at Jurnet's Bar, where I was handing out cheques to the winning poets in a national - nay international - competition, and some applause to the shortlisted ones. The best were very good indeed. Here are three of the young ones to keep an eye on: Helen Mort, Thomas Warner and Richard Lambert - all outstandingly talented. I have a feeling that the next generation is going to be quite something.

Here is part of the judge's report which may be of some use to people entering poems for competitions.

A very high number of entries - c. 1600 – meant it was bigger than most regionally offered prizes. It is, in many ways, encouraging to have so many poems since it indicates that poetry is a natural recourse for far more people than we would think.

However, if you want to write good poems it is essential to read some of the best poets, both historical and contemporary, and to form some notion – conscious or unconscious – of what makes the good ones good.

It is also good to be aware that poems are not statements about life, they are explorations, and the best poems don’t simply tell us what the poet thinks in verse but explore what might be thought and felt while listening as keenly as possible to language. No listening: no poem. The apparent simplicity of the best poems is in fact a distillation of different, sometimes even contrary feelings. And that, after all is true to life because, as people, we can feel several ways at once in trying to understand the world.

I say ‘verse’ but must add that the great majority of the poems were in free verse. Free verse is not free for those who write it well. It is as difficult as formal verse if you do it properly. You think you are let off the leash, that there are all those unimportant elements you need not worry about, but poetry itself is a leash, as is language as a whole. Poetry doesn’t run everywhere: it still has line and length and development, and you have to attend to those all the time. Cadence, rhythm, phrasing and development are all part of it, as they are of music, from which these terms are taken. Nowadays people tend to go in mortal fear of writing doggerel. Doggerel does at least impose shape. Where and how do you break a line? Why there? Push harder. Think harder, feel harder. In any case some of the more competent formal poems held their shape better than most of the relatively competent free verse poems.

Or so it seemed to me. The rest of the report - and it was quite long, discussing everything commended - was about specific poems. Quite splendid poems too, the best of them. And very well read on the night.

Tomorrow, I am at home, doing the necessary things.

Sunday Night is... The Four Seasons

Last night I finally finished the redraft of the Márai. Off it goes to Knopf with my blessings - just as soon as I've finished this post. The very last part of the book had been redrafted two or three times already so I felt I could pre-celebrate with some music while checking through. I just picked something out of one of the CD drawers and it happened to be The Four Seasons. I was typing and wanting to dance at the same time, so I did stop and dance a little, then sat down again. Then got up again and sat back down again. The harmonies are like the Beach Boys but it's the sheer bursting simplicity of the music that's such fun. I felt I needed some fun. Then I finished the redraft of the redraft of the redraft and sent it to myself by email lest some dreadful accident befall the computer before it gets to the USA across the troubled waters of the Atlantic. I slept well and deeply and didn't wake as early as usual.

Sunday morning is the time my father used to ring for a chat. I woke remembering that, as did C beside me. The sun was brilliant. I sat down to write a poem, one of the series based on postcards front and back that I am writing as part of the art-writing collaborative project with Caroline Wright, Helen Rousseau and Phyllida Barlow. I have three poems so far, of two parts each. I have found both the earlier ones exciting to write, then everything stopped. Now it started up again. The new one too excites me. Having produced a draft I had the urge to go to the sea and asked C if she wanted to go. But it was lunchtime and clouding.

A sudden wave of depression washed over us both. I sat down to watch the football on TV and slowly cheered. The match ended. The sun was out again, so we went for a walk. The light was unearthly beautiful - to call it golden is to insult it. It was clear and long and dazzling, everything extraordinarily luminous. Goldfinches again, maybe a greenfinch. And a tiny flittering, zipping bird across the river we couldn't follow. Perhaps a kingfisher? There are kingfishers there. And back by the abbey, the towers pure Samuel Palmer, visionary period.

I have not done a single practical thing today in respect of my father's accounts and savings. One day off. Tomorrow it's university then, in the evening, I give away some prizes and read a few poems. More work in store - plenty of it to come, of all sorts. I read in Cambridge on Thursday night - at Trinity College.

And I see Wayne Bridge did not break his leg but played very well. Not that his team won - no, they play again against friend Stephen's heroes. I rather fancy the Stokies to win.

The YouTube here isn't particularly good - lipsynch- but it's OK. It will do.

Love rats

I hear Fi Glover this morning talking about the John Terry affair. She begins by saying something about the hurt and pain for the women (plural) involved.

There are four people as far as I know. Let's call them John, Toni, Vanessa and Wayne. According to the Glover doctrine the scene in the confession booth would go as follows.:


John: Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. Despite being married to Toni, I caused her hurt and pain by having an affair with Vanessa, who has also suffered hurt and pain because I had an affair with her and now she is in the public eye and this is liable to do immense damage to her career as a lingerie model. I feel no hurt and pain because I am the cause of hurt and pain for them both.

Toni: Forgive them, if you must, father, for they have sinned. I feel the hurt and pain that is caused by John on account of his affair with Vanessa, who, poor thing, is also feeling hurt and pain because she had an affair with John. If only Wayne had not given Vanessa hurt and pain to start with she would not have become the innocent instrument of the hurt and pain caused by John. Wayne, therefore, deserved all that was coming to him

Vanessa: Forgive neither of them, father, for they have sinned most grievously. I feel hurt and pain because I am in the public eye because of my affair with John, but also because Wayne thinks he owns me thereby causing me more hurt and pain by preventing me having affairs with people like John who made me have an affair with him, thereby causing me yet more hurt and pain. I myself have caused no hurt and pain.

Wayne: Forgive me, father, for I am the worst of sinners. I caused Toni hurt and pain because my girlfriend, Vanessa, who is, naturally enough, associated with me, had an affair with John. I must have caused hurt and pain to Vanessa too otherwise she wouldn't have had an affair with John. I myself feel no hurt and pain because it's what I deserve, and who, after all feels any sympathy for a cuckold?


Yes. That's how it would be. It's the women that get all the hurt and pain. Let's hope that swine, Wayne Bridge, breaks his leg in the next match.

So now it's over...

The funeral was yesterday. The crematorium is like a doctor's surgery: one in, one out; next in, next out. It's a brisk business. Timing is important. The clock faces you as you enter the small chapel. There are about five rows of pews, a lectern with a microphone and a button to push to draw the curtains. The coffin lies on a table on a dais projecting into the hall. It is up to the convenor (is that what it is?) - in this case, me - when to push the button. Frankly, the coffin means nothing much, though the drawing of the curtains can't help but have a heavy symbolic effect. Everything about the chapel is new, polished, non-committed and efficient. It's like entering a lift in a three-star hotel or a conference centre, travelling a few floors, then getting out again. Perfectly horrible in other words.

I have a memory of my mother's cremation in 1975 that still chills me. There was nothing in the least personal about it. There was a religious figure who mouthed generalities and a few quick facts mugged up from my father, and the coffin disappeared behind steel doors as into an oven. Not a good pun for my mother. And there was Martin Bell's funeral where a clergyman kept referring to him as John, presumably the first name on his birth certificate.

So we made our own as many do today. We arranged the furniture in the lift: we pushed our own buttons. The music - my brother's choice - was being administered by a man called Gary, in another room. You hand him the CD's. Brother Andrew was to play the violin with a CD orchestral background so he needed the volume turned to full so he could hear it while playing. To Gary this is routine and this was slightly out of routine, possibly mildly annoying. So unprofessional.

But the service was good, moving but disciplined, and better attended than we had anticipated. I thought there would be, at most twenty-five people including us, secretly anticipating about fifteen; but it was thirty, the elderly and frail rousing themselves, making a considerable effort to get here. Andrew and three of the next generation did a fine job of reading the brief extracts from dad's recorded memoirs. Andrew played the Meditation from Massenet's Thaïs, beautifully. It was after that I pushed the button to draw the curtains. Then I read my address - just five and a half minutes - and, finally, Clarissa read the poem below, the last of 'My Fathers' series. Her voice broke near the end and I took over. Exeunt to Beethoven's No 6, the Pastoral.

Brisk file past the flowers ten back to the house where he lived with K, to sandwiches and bits of cake served by Erzsi, the Transylvanian woman who had been some cleaning for them. The youngest generation, elegant and handsome in their suits and dresses; the elderly, smiling and milling and leaving. Six of my own generation. And then away.

But the service was a proper shape. It was about him. It said some of the things that mattered. Now come many more practical affairs with the pulses of memory kicking in, fading, then kicking in again, as must happen.


Like a black bird

Like a black bird against snow, he flapped
Over the path, his overcoat billowing
In the cold wind, as if he had trapped

The whole sky in it. We watched trees swing
Behind him, lurching drunkenly, blurred
Bare twigs and branches, scrawny bits of string,

And as we gazed ahead the snowflakes purred
In our ears, whispering the afternoon
Which grew steadily darker and more furred.

His face was in shadow, but we’d see it soon,
As he approached it slowly gathered shape:
His nose, in profile, was a broken moon,

His hat a soft black hill bound round with tape,
His raised lapels held his enormous eyes
Between them. The winter seemed to drape

Itself about him as if to apologise
For its own fierceness, hoping to grow warm
Through physical contact, and we, likewise,

Ran towards him, against a grainy storm
Of light and damp. It was so long ago
And life was then in quite another form,

When there were blacker days and thicker snow.

*

From here on I will post the occasional excerpt from his own reminiscences. Not straight away. Tonight I read in a Norwich bookshop along with some of the youngest and best for St Valentine's Day. Back in the weave of life.

Two more poems from the 'My Fathers' set in Reel

My father, crawling across the floor


He crawls across the floor. His dangling tie
Distracts the child. He hauls the child in the air
And swings it round, once, twice. He holds it high

Above his head. In the forest, a bear
Lurches towards the cabin. Almost night.
Goldilocks sits in the deepest chair

By the table working up an appetite.
Time starts up, judders and stops again
Its flooded engine refusing to ignite.

We’re conked out here, stuck in the slow lane
Of history, where my father comes home late
From work as always and will not complain.

Seventy-two hours he labours for the state
Weekdays, Saturdays, doing what, why, how,
We do not ask him, but accept his fate.

Time is forever in an endless Now
Except in dreams, anxieties, and school,
Though time ticks over far behind his brow

According to a superimposed rule
We touch when we touch him. We hear him roar
In distant forests where his masters drool

And lumber playfully across the floor.




My father carries me across a field


My father carries me across a field.
It’s night and there are trenches filled with snow.
Thick mud. We’re careful to remain concealed

From something frightening I don’t yet know.
And then I walk and there is space between
The four of us. We go where we have to go.

Did I dream it all, this ghostly scene,
The hundred-acre wood where the owl blinked
And the ass spoke? Where I am cosy and clean

In bed, but we are floating, our arms linked
Over the landscape? My father moves ahead
Of me, like some strange, almost extinct

Species, and I follow him in dread
Across the field towards my own extinction.
Spirits everywhere are drifting over blasted

Terrain. The winter cold makes no distinction
Between them and us. My father looks round
And smiles then turns away. We have no function

In this place but keep moving, without sound,
Lost figures who leave only a blank page
Behind them, and the dark and frozen ground

They pass across as they might cross a stage.

*

Before setting off for London. Just one poem for the funeral itself - the one from the same set that I'll put up tomorrow. C will read it, not me.

An early UK shot and two poems

Part of the day completing and printing the order of service; arranging / negotiating who is doing what; writing the brief five minute address. The rest of the time, working our way through the jungle of his savings and pensions. It's not that it adds up to a lot, because it doesn't - it's the constant alertness, the struggles and leaps of prudence, the prudence of someone who has never in his life felt safe. The balance between the god of good cheer and the god of anxiety is delicate.

I try to follow the windings of his mind. Even to begin to consider the extraordinary phenomenon of human consciousness is dizzying and humbling. In between the microcosms of dust and atoms and the macrocosms of the immensities of space whose silences frightened Pascal there is our realm that seems equally immense and silent, yet full of noise - mostly noise incapable of being interpreted.

The photograph above is from our first years in London, in a small terraced house. Those spiky sub-Picasso shelves and trifles! Tiny pots with minimal spiky plants. A doily.

Two poems from the 'My Fathers' section of Reel. An early start tomorrow. I'll put up another before we go.



My Fathers

My fathers, coming and going

Moustaches and grey homburgs: our fathers were
Defined by properties acquired by chance -
Or by divine decree. Standing behind her

In rooms, on stairs, figures of elegance,
They came and went in a murmur of soft voices,
Objects of bewilderment and romance.

How many of them on the premises?
Some worked twelve hours a day in an office
In the city, some placed bristly kisses

On our brows, some would simply embarrass
Us for no particular reason. Their age
Was indeterminate. They would promise

Anything befitting their patronage.
Were all these fathers one? And was it you,
My father, who pushed me in that carriage

I can’t remember now before time flew
And took her away as it will take us all?
I feel myself flying. It’s like passing through

Clouds in an aeroplane in its own bubble
Of air, a slightly bumpy ride down
Towards a runway as we rise and fall

Above the brilliant lights of a big town.




Their histories and fabled occupations

The histories and fabled occupations
Of their fathers lay somewhere off the map
In provinces lost to their imaginations.

The knowledge they had was fed to them scrap by scrap
And was all they ever needed. The fathers’ presence
Was sufficient. They watched them through a gap

In their mother’s eyes, beyond the fence
Of reason, arriving wreathed in smells of their own,
Some reassuring, others wild and tense

With dangers they had carried home from town.
Their fathers were the seas they read about
But never saw, in which a child could drown

However he might wave his arms and shout
For help. A singular compound figure stood
On the threshold of their bodies and looked out.

Mysterious rodents emerged from the wood
And scurried up the stairs at night to nibble
At their faces. They woke covered in blood.

Their father’s moustache was a scary scribble
Above a friendly voice. His kindness shook
The world out of its endless incomprehensible

Rigor mortis like the closing of a book.

Prequel

The first parts of the transcripts of my father's autobiography are ready and I have worked four small excerpts from it into the order of service for Thursday. There will be music for entering and leaving; brother Andrew will play the violin; there'll be a reading of Kosztolányi's wonderful Halotti beszéd (Funeral Oration); the four autobiographical excerpts read by four parts of the family,in two different spots, two excerpts in each; my address (draft written); and C reading one of the shorter poems that I wrote for my father from Reel. We go out to music.

The transcripts are polished up from the verbatim, which is always a complex matter, because once this is done, although there is a voice saying 'I', it is not the voice as spoken, not the person's voice, full of hesitations, revisions, and things in the wrong order: it is literature or, as some would have it, litterachewer. It is not voice but the birth of a possible style. In other words, you lose voice but you gain story. I remember feeling awkward about this when I first started transcribing about twenty years ago (on an old Amstrad, the sheets joined together and perforated), telling myself: if it's facts you want then the edited version is better.

Maybe one could alternate between the two and let the voice just stick its head through the door sometimes. The danger is that we could get Beckett without the genius on the one hand, and Dickens as retold by Jeffrey Archer on the other.

*

Quite exhausted. Late back last night, long time to get to sleep, wake early. To UEA for three meetings, rush home, then start phoning the world -Argentina, Australia, USA, Hungary, as well as various numbers in England. Type up transcript (I no longer have the Amstrad.) Compose address. Ring and talk, ring and talk. Keep modifying order of service.

It keeps you busy, and being busy you don't dwell on anything - except during the writing of the address when dwelling is precisely what is required.

I'll start the obituary / biography once the service is over. In the meantime it looks as though my selected poems in Italian and in German may be back on the menu. But let us not count chickens before etc, or, as one joke's punch line had it, (you can make up the joke that leads to it): The moral is: don't hatchet your counts before they've chickened.