New poem on front / Sunday night is / Oxford

I have put the poem I wrote at Arvon up at the front and am still thinking about the male / female figure at the end. I am tempted to turn it into a man for the sheer sake of it. Because it isn't of course - no poem is - a report on something that "happened" like that, but a scene that seems to open some element of understanding, through a combination of, rhythmic, melodic, lexical and narrative actions whose purpose is hidden from the writer in the act of writing, except as a certain compulsion.

Very well. It will be 'he' and we shall see how he crawls into the world like that, phantasmal and croaky and half not there.

*

Meanwhile, The Ronettes:



*

I have returned sneezing, stuffy headed and with a runny nose. I have had a chance to catch up with the Walcott-Padel affair. I would say that I would love to have read what the writer of Midsummer, The Schooner Flight (decent sized excerpts here) and Omeros (description here) would have said in his series of lectures. Failing that I would have been less interested, but still interested, in what Ruth Padel had to say (she wrote all those columns about poems at The Independent). Failing them both, I would have loved to hear Arvind Mehrotra on any subject he chose to speak about, because he is an outstanding poet, a remarkable, intelligent and wise man, and as honourable as they come. They have lost him too.

Idiots.

As it is, failing all those, I find I intensely don't care who they appoint. One poet speaks, so I hear, of Walcott as "a sleazebag". That will do me, thank you. Let the whole post be set on fire and be pissed on. It is a repulsive affair. Some establishment figure will be appointed - whether male or female is a matter of complete indifference to me. Let whoever it is make that particular career move. I shall look forward to ignoring the whole bag of shite. Forgive the mixed bloody metaphor.

Totleigh 5: Last night

As ever, it ends with a party. Everyone reads - a very good set this year - and after a few shots of Jamesons I go to the piano and do my "Play it again, Sam" act (true lines: Play it, Sam. Play it. You played it for her, you can play it for me or so I remember). I improvise a bit, then it is Ellington, Berlin, and Rogers & Hart, and eventually..

...I have a quartet of lady singers crooning along asking "can you play...?" and, after a fashion, I can, until the whole performance becomes so ragged there is no continuing. Meanwhile proper piano players come and render Satie and Philip Glass and Chopin and Gershwin. I suppose if I had some sheet music I might be able to oblige in classical mode, in somewhat lumbering fashion.

Soon it is 1 am and here I am. Odd how the outside world suddenly looms up like a giant admonitory figure across one's path.

Got one good poem written here. Might put it on the front page once I get back.

Totleigh 4

The fourth day - the day when a certain spiritual and intellectual tiredness normally sets in. I talk in high energy mode and am continually attentive, furthermore my mind is alert, but inside I am sleepy. I am easily moved by things people say or write, then I yank myself back into proper critical mode.

And yet it is unavoidable. People are normally the epidermis of an occasional meeting. Here several layers of skin are suddenly shed - not in the 'confessional' sense, but in that you find out what concerns people. Their dimensions deepen suddenly. Their lives seem at least as substantial as your own. They are not people with a romantic idea about being poets, they want to write because language is what they have and they want shape and meaning, much as you yourself do - and, as it inevitably turns out, there is much to give shape and meaning to.

This is anthology night when students choose two or three poems from books to read. The poems vary and range from the grand to the little, from the funny to the profound. One student, who was a doctor, reads John Berryman's XIVth Dream Song. It runs right through me. "Literature bores me, especially great literature bores me". And the truth of that, the necessary and salutary truth of it, goes deep down without ever making great literature less great. On the contrary it makes it tragic and the slightly crazy, sprawling, yet perfectly cut poem that finds it boring becomes tragic in its turn.

Part of me doesn't give a tinker's cuss about Oxford and its professors of poetry. It bores me. It is, as Blake would have put it, something else besides life. And what's that Marianne Moore line about poetry?

I too dislike it.

And yet, by showing a perfect contempt for it, as she does in the poem, you find it does after all have value. It can even be great literature.

Totleigh 3

Rain all day, the same changeless grey sky so you don't even know what time of day it is. Helen's session this morning so I sit in for half of it then read student work for the other hour. The course directors, Claire and Ollie, are back. In and out of the office with an umbrella. Tutorials in the afternoon with an hour in between and a wave of heavy sleep overtakes me. My head is down for five minutes (or so it turns out) when there is a knock on the door. One student has come for her scheduled tutorial. I wake and open the door. My watch says 3.30 and she is scheduled for 4.30. We do the tutorial realising half-way through that her watch is still on continental time. She is an hour early. Farewell sleep. I wake up.

Kapka has arrived by lunch. We talk in her room. She looks very slender but sharp. I know she has had a difficult time. She is an extraordinary polymathic writer. Now novels, now poems, now travel guides, now memoirs, and she is only thirty-odd.

It is her evening. Reading followed by talk and more Jamesons. I must think seriously about getting Jamesons to sponsor this site. I will keep mentioning them providing they keep sending me bottles. Is it a deal. guys?

And United lose, which, to be truthful, I was expecting, since I don't think the team is good enough to win everything twice over. Won't do them any harm in the long run. 'Remember you are mortal, Caesar'. I have never forgotten that. Though I also remember what Keynes said about "the long run"*. Still, some pain, but at least I was prevented from watching and fretting.

And that Oxford Chair. It seems there is some enthusiastic backing. What to do? Nothing from here, certainly.

What's the matter with you, Szirtes? No ambition?

Oh, high ambition, higher than you could dream of, but not in this respect. Offices are another thing entirely. Still, it might be interesting. This from quarantine in Devon. Perhaps I shall be the Anti-Pope. Or Hadrian VII. In the equivalent of Avignon. Or just nothing. Just a poet. In the world where poems are the only judges.

Which is where the ambition comes in.


*In the long run we are all dead.

Totleigh 2

Half past midnight. Helen and I have done our readings and chatted and drunk with those in the sitting room. We have invested in a bottle of Jamesons between us and now it is all gone. One gentleman student generously offered me a top up from my own bottle. It was a moving moment.

It is always a weight off my mind to get the tutors' reading done. I generally enjoy reading - reading anything, not just my own work - but the Arvon circumstances are ambiguous in that you are supposed chiefly to be a tutor so you come in wearing a different kind of mask. But I am getting to the stage where I care less about this and just go ahead and do my stuff.

This must be a brief post as I am pretty tired. I took the morning session on imagery, then did almost four hours straight of tutorials (as did Helen). Tomorrow Kapka Kasabova comes as guest. Good. And Helen takes tomorrow morning's session.

Outside moths flap threateningly against the window. Slugs gather on the grass in menacing gangs. It's dangerous in the country. And that's not to mention the cattle wandering around fully armed with horns. Where is a policeman when you need him? Officer, I am making a citizen's arrest of that spider. Deal with him as you must.

Thank you for the kind support re: my brief outsider's flash as Professor of Poetry in Oxford. Let me know if the campaign gathers momentum. I would not want to be swept away by an avalanche. I shall look out for men in bowler hats bearing encomia. That's if they make it over the cattle-grid.

Totleigh 1: a shout for Mehrotra.

Arrived from London yesterday, meeting fellow tutor, Helen, at Paddington, then down on the usual crowded train, but finding seats. The train stuffy smelling faintly - as H said - of chips. Picked up at Exeter by taxi and brought down into the valley, over the cattle grids - one of them shiningly new. Many students already here, and there are cars in plenty - mostly younger than average.

The big news is the resignation of Ruth Padel as Oxford Professor of Poetry, on which no special comment from me, except that it is a comedy-tragedy for all involved, and that the forgotten third nominee, Arvind Mehrotra, whom I met in Delhi, is a marvellous poet and one of nature's deeply good people, so I hope he is offered it and accepts it. The fact that few have heard of him here reflects deeply on us, and not in the least - let us contemplate this fact for a minute in silence - on him. And why not an Indian poet in the job? He'd be very good - a revelation, I think - and what he would have to say would be new and to the benefit of all. Bring on Arvind Mehrotra!

As regards Walcott I don't know the full facts - if there are full facts to know - but his generation, which in this country was the generation of heavy boozers, les grands buveurs, as Peter Redgrove had it, was in the USA - and indeed sometimes here - the generation of campus affairs. The guillotine fell heavily on that malarky in the eighties. My generation preferred to teach in rooms with glass doors or windows or open doors. I still do. Sensible paranoia.

Back then, in the 60s and 70s, it was, as the TV show I have never watched has it, Life on Mars, so there would have been nothing peculiarly heinous in such advances when Walcott was a younger man. Autre temps, autre moeurs (French day today). I don't suppose Byron or Shelley or Donne would be offered the Professorship now. And as for Rimbaud or Verlaine, perish the thought. Not even Betjeman, with his love of strong young tennis girls.

Lewis Carroll...? Don't ask.

These are the menfolk, of course, but I am sure a few of the lyrical womenfolk might disqualify themselves.

Quiz and on

Last night recording of The Book Quiz for BBC4 TV. Four teams of two. One semi-final knockout, then the final. My partner is the stand-up comic and journalist Natalie Haynes who is splendid. Other teams involve Brian Patten, John Sutherland, Bonnie Greer and Andrew Motion and if I can't remember the names of the two other sweet and lively women it is because it's all a bit of a blur. We guess quotations, we try to guess poems from picture clues, we guess poems from garbled Japanese translations translated back into English, we do quick buzzer questions.

It all goes swimmingly. But I suppose I can't say what happened until it is broadcast, and I don't know when that will be yet.

Afterwards I sit around the green room for a while with Andrew and Natalie and Kirsty Wark, then am driven back to this rather smart hotel where after an initial confusion they have given me a suite, so I have slep in two double beds at once, watching two televisions and having twice the usual number of dreams, that I am now twice as incapable of remembering.

I watch the sad face of Alan Shearer being twice as gutted. I see Newcastle lose 2-0 not 1-0. It is double disaster time for Toon. My heart does go out to the city, that I really took to when giving those lectures. But from what I saw and read it was a gutless surrender. Alas.

It reminds me a little of Leeds - terribile dictu. Here's to better time to come for both.