Occasional verse

My father's 85th, almost seven years ago. My brother, his wife, our daughter (pink haired at that time), my father and our son.


My father will be ninety-two Saturday after next but we - that is to say C and I, as well as my brother and his partner, and my stepmother's daughter and her husband - are going down this Sunday to celebrate it in an Italian restaurant nearby. The grandchildren will come a fortnight later.

My father finds it hard to walk any distance now. He wants to show me photographs, many, if not necessarily all of which, I will already have seen. Like many people of his age he wants to know that things are where they belong.

As for me, I do what I always do on occasions like this - on birthdays, anniversaries - I write something. My father is not up to complex verse in complex language. For that reason most years I have written him a humorous rhyme with just enough seriousness in it to give it substance, and just enough in it for me too, so that I feel I am discovering something, however small, in the writing. I forbid myself doggerel. I am, after all, a writer, a poet, and what I write must be well written. It must be a kind of serious, proper light verse, with some pride in the making of it.

This year I have stayed with the rhyme and the simple song structure but have written something that is not funny but as true as I can get a simple song to be. In other words it had to carry me along. The truth of it had to take me by surprise. I had to believe in it as I was writing because any loss of belief in the process and the poem would just stop. So I think I have written him a good poem. Of a type, no doubt, a certain kind of good poem, but still a poem. Not a cliché. I will not allow myself to write clichés. I won't put the poem up now, but later, only once he himself has read it.

Two thoughts on this.

First, that it seems to me right, one of the proper uses of poetry, addressing each other in such a way on such occasions. Some poets feel it must be the worst kind of verse. Death of Princess Di stuff. The sentimental garbage of sentimental minds. Poetry is not for this, they declare. It is for itself. It is for a harder, drier, cleaner, more remote, more disinterested, more abstruse kind of purpose that is, in its own way, more real and more true. And, to some degree, I agree with them. I love Wallace Stevens. I appreciate John Ashbery. I love much of Pound and adore Beckett. I like experimental verse and all kinds of Oulipan games. I spring out of Modernist roots. But I have a certain idea of what it is to be human, and an important part of that is the belief that in most important aspects I am no different from other human beings. That part of humanity is a certain courtesy: that it is not patronising or degrading to address those you are talking to as they might want to be addressed. I am not an Olympian.

Secondly, that there are - that there must be- ways of keeping the human fresh. There must be registers, notes, verbal gestures, that are wholly new yet strike one as if they might always have been there, only hiding. Beauty is a strange, all but intangible term. By beauty I don't mean a superior form of prettiness. I mean exactly what Stevens and Ashbery and Beckett, and all that lot were aiming it. Some clean, unsmudged, pure verbal monument through which life seems to pass, leaving us breathless. Something that doesn't lie. So I want to make something beautiful in that sense.

Just this. A beauty that is only seen on Olympus doesn't move me. Mountain scenery is fine but I like the peopled valleys. I don't think Beckett and Pound and Stevens are up there. I think they are here, on the same ground I am trying to cultivate. I don't want to avoid getting my hands dirty. Almost all my best late work has been occasional. The hands dirty but still finding things.

Meanwhile, a new wrestling poem on the front.

Márai on sex

The all-night cafe in Márai'sThe Intended. It is still the husband in the eternal triangle talking, trying to get to the bottom of things. It is well past midnight now, and he is reflecting on life with Judit, the beautiful maid for whom he left his wife, his career and his place in society. For whom, in essence, he both found and lost himself.



Judit and I lay down in bed and loved each other. We loved each other passionately, expectantly, heartily, in wonder and hope. We were probably hoping that what the world and mankind had ruined might be put right by the two of us eye-to-eye in this other, purer, more ancient realm, in the eternal country without, and beyond, borders: bed. Any love preceded by an extended period of waiting – though maybe it’s not exactly love when not all the cinders have been consumed by the purgatory fires of waiting – hopes for a miracle from both the other and itself.

At a certain age – and while neither Judit nor I were exactly youngsters by then we were not old, just man and woman, in the complete, most basic sense of those words – it is not sexual satisfaction that people desire of each other, not happiness, not release but the simple and solemn truth that vanity and falsehood had previously hidden from them even in love, the truth that we are human beings, we men and women, and that we share common enterprise or responsibility on earth, a responsibility that may not be quite as personal as we think. It’s not a responsibility we can avoid but we can tell an awful lot of lies in pursuit of it. Once people are old enough it is the truth they want and they want it in bed too, in the underworld of sheer physical bulk.

It isn’t beauty you want most– after a while you stop noticing the beauty anyway - it’s not that the other should be wonderful, exciting, wise, experienced, curious, lusty and responsive. What matters?.... The truth. In other words exactly the same thing as matters in literature and in all human affairs: spontaneity, readiness, the willingness to be surprised by the miraculous gift of joy that comes unplanned, unintentionally, and, at the same time, when we are selfish and wanting only to receive, the ability to give in an almost distracted, vaguely conscious way as it were, without planning, without mad ambition… That is bed truth. No, old man there is no Soviet-style pyatiletka, no Five Year Plan, nor Four Year Plans either. The feeling that drives two people together can have no plan.

Bed is jungle, wilderness, a place full of surprises, teeming with the unexpected; there is the same unbearable dank heat, the same extraordinary flowers and lianas with their deathly scent and ability to twine around you, the same glowing eyes of the same beasts of prey watching you in the half-light, the heraldic beasts of desire and obsession ever ready to pounce. In some ways that too is bed. Jungle. Half-light. Strange cries in the distance – you can’t tell whether it is a man screaming by a well, his throat ripped open by some predator or nature itself screaming, nature that is human, animal and inhuman at once…

This woman possessed the secret knowledge that was life: she knew the body; she knew self-control and loss of self-control. Love for her was not a series of occasional meetings but a constant return to a familiar childhood, a blend of hometown and festival, the dark brown light over a field at dusk, the intimate taste of certain foods, excitement and anticipation, and, under it all, the confidence that once evening came there would be nothing to fear in the flight of the bat, just the road home at dusk because she was tired of playing and because the light in the window was calling her back to a hot dinner and a clean bed. That was love as far as Judit was concerned.

As I said, I was hopeful.

*

Meanwhile...

I am reading through the entries for this year's Stephen Spender poetry translation comptition. It's the fourteen year olds for now. As I read them I know I am reading the assured leaders of tomorrow. Huxley's eloi. They are almost all privately educated, highly articulate, occasionally a little precious, but well-supplied with knowledge and thirst for knowledge. I think they are extraordinarily fortunate and somewhat removed from life as most of us know it. I wonder how far removed they will be in ten or twenty years time? They are invited to write a page or so about the poem they are translating and about the process. They do so in adult voices, in adult manner, in adult clothes. I have to remind myself how young they are. I keep thinking of Spender's own lines: My parents kept me from children who were rough / and who threw words like stones and who wore torn clothes....

In which I discover my head is too big.....

Physically, of course. Ever since I was knee-high to a pedal I have cycled, albeit in patches. Not long distances. Not like a proper cyclist with proper cycling outfit. Not even cycle clips. Not setting out with a route planned on a map as I once dreamed of doing in my early teens, all gleaming thigh, handsome jaw and plastic drink bottle. My cycling is just getting on the bike and doing fairly small circles. I am, after all, a busy man and don't have time to be doing big circles, unless, that is, a magazine or publisher is paying me to do so.

Besides, the thigh is no longer gleaming, nor are the lungs or heart in any kind of long-distance shape. But then they never were. I was, in my youth, rather fast on the flat. I ran a good 100 yards, even for Middlesex schools on one occasion. I could fly reasonably fast down the straight. So I was played on the wing in football, and, a few times, on the rugby field too. I was - still am - of fairly broad chest and good drive. Nothing above 440 yards though. A series of 100 yard sprints was fine, but not the long jog, nor the long pedal.

Out of this I developed my theory of why I was a poet rather than a novelist or scholar. Poetry was a series of sprints, and even my longer poems, the sequences, were essentially sprints. I composed, and still do compose, in sprints, headlong, light on the feet, driving forwards over the relatively dark terrain of language and feeling. I am productive by sprints because I have stamina - sprint stamina. I prefer running up stairs two at a time practically on my toes. I dance light. My hair and nails grow fast. Everything is metabolically calibrated to high-energy intensity: think fast, feel fast. When I hand write I tend to begin my second word before I have finished my first.

The thing is I haven't done much cycling in the last year or so. Too much the busy desk-bound man. But I have to do some exercise, so a regime of cycling and table tennis might be the best I can manage.

Which takes me to the issue of the big head. It doesn't look that big until I try buying a hat. Somehow the circumference is always too wide or the wrong shape, a freak of nature. Last time I was teaching at Oxford someone was telling me she cycled an hour to work each day. She also told me that a friend had had a cycling accident and was now brain-damaged as a result. She beseeched me to buy a cycling helmet. I smiled and broke the sink that evening when my glass slipped from my hand.

Today, at last, C and I went to buy cycling helmets. C has a fairly large head too it seems, but she soon found one that fitted. But nothing, not a single helmet in the shop, fitted me. I felt faintly monstrous. Faintly Boris Karloff. I asked the boy serving to order me a bigger one from the supplier then left and carried on the cycle ride in my usual unhelmeted fashion. The air was lovely, a light warm southerly breeze, under the railway bridge, over the highway bridge, out past fields full of poppies, a weasel darting in front. It was as if the First World War had never happened. But then that is Norfolk for you.

Er... a dialogue with a non-existent interlocutor

We are talking about children's books, and he, the author, tells me about a book written specifically for boys - because boys don't read much as we know - which is about some boys who play games of knight errant but are then rescued by girls who "display feminine qualities of courage, persistence, responsibility for others, ingenuity and protectiveness". And what qualities do the boys display?

Er..

So there is a drive to get boys to read. What can there possibly be that boys are interested in?

I know! Football!

Nothing else?

Er...

No violence though. The authors - male and female - go to their editors who are inevitably female and are told: "That's not appropriate."

Appropriate for who? I ask.

Er...

So the girls do the clever caring daredevil stuff and the inventive stuff. Do you ever get children's books where a girl character is, like, stupid? Just a bit stupid?

Er...

So everyone is happy and everyone conforms and behaves as they should, especially the stupid boys who only rebel and break rules and can't be trusted to do anything. And still the boys refuse to read? How could that be?!!?!

Er...

It is strange, I think, that the sex that seems to have invented most of the things I see about me, things I use everyday, that wrote that Shakespeare and Donne and Dante stuff, that seem to have thought considerably about life, the universe and other things, are always shown so irredeemably brutal, infantile and er, stupid.

Well, that's how it is, you know. That's just how it is.

That's how it is.

Sunday night is... Eine kleine camp wrestling

The referee, Sándor Kovács, is a Hungarian. Ricky Starr did the ballet act. In some respects the performance resembles that of any comedian-clown in any ring - Charlie Chaplin and Norman Wisdom immediately come to mind. What is fascinating is the way wrestling accommodated outrageous camp for an essentially macho audience.

Pro-wrestling, I mean. Amateur wrestling is just a sport. Pro-wrestling has always been carnival and theatre. The commentary too understands that.

British pro-wrestling had its own camp acts like miner's son, Adrian Street and Bobby Barnes (here fighting the legendary Les Kellett). The very programmes included camp pictures.

I put this up not because of a particular interest in camp, but to show the sheer comprehensiveness of wrestling, a working theatre of life.

But maybe some music too. This gorgeous thing:





Back to an essay on / review of poetry and visual art.

Show Trials of Gilded Youth

So now the Tehran show trials begin with the usual 'confessions', the usual smears and the usual lack of a defence. The people charged here are representatives of those referred to by people like Seumas Milne in The Guardian, as 'gilded youth'. You know, people like Neda Ahgha-Soltan. Far too gilded.

That is also reflected in the western media, whose cameras focus so lovingly on Tehran's gilded youth and for whom Ahmadinejad is nothing but a Holocaust-denying fanatic. The other Ahmadinejad, who is seen to stand up for the country's independence, expose elite corruption on TV and use Iran's oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority, is largely invisible abroad.

That's what the man said.

There have always been apologists for show trials. Stalin had his apologists here. But then people like Milne would have approved of the trials, or lack of trials, of people like Mandelstam and Isaac Babel. There isn't much difference. The people and causes you don't like are represented by those charged; the people and causes you do like are represented by.... well, it doesn't matter who, as long as you can go on believing that those charged represent what you think they represent.

It's a kind of spiritual toadyism. By his logic so far Milne should defend these trials. He must do if he is to be at all consistent. We shall see whether he does. (Mandelstam and Babel mutter in the background.)

Easter Wings

Easter Wings
George Herbert

Lord, Who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poore:
With Thee
O let me rise,
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day Thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne;
And still with sicknesses and shame
Thou didst so punish sinne,
That I became
Most thinne.
With Thee
Let me combine,
And feel this day Thy victorie;
For, if I imp my wing on Thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Thinking again about my earlier entry on the ICA's show I want to look at Herbert's Easter Wings, a poem often claimed as an early example of concrete poetry.

What to call such poems technically? Sometimes they are known as shaped verse or visual verse (Lewis Caroll's The Mouse's Tail is another well-known example). The term 'carmen figuration' has also been used.

I don't think it matters much about the name or who claims it as what. It is certainly a precursor of other poems such as Dylan Thomas's 'Vision and Prayer', or indeed my own 'Winter Wings', the half-wing that was the last poem in Reel. Concrete Poetry has a perfect right to it. I would however want to reserve a reading of Herbert's poem that does not sit comfortably with one of the central notions of concrete poetry: the reorientation, or disorientation, or at least questioning, of language as word and - more specifically, and much more crucially - as syntax.

There is no syntax-breaking project in Herbert. On the contrary, the poem's entire drive, or mission, is to confirm syntax through breath. Let's be very simple here and read the poem aloud. It demands reading aloud.

Each line is a unit of sense as well as a unit of breath, The long first line sets out the figure addressed by the poem; the second posits an event (the Fall) as the problem; the third explores the consequences of the event and enacts the process by shortening the line and hence the breath. At the point man becomes 'most poore': he is out of breath, exhausted, worn away to a mere skeleton by his sins. Now God comes to the rescue and, as the lungs were emptied, so now they begin to fill out with God's breath. Kingsley Amis once asked in a poem "Should poets bicycle pump the human heart / Or squash it flat?" Well, here comes God with his mighty afflatus pump to fill the heart again. The units of sense expand, as does the breath. It is as if we had dived to the bottom of a pool and were now ascending. Those f sounds in 'Then shall the fall further the flight in me' is the sound of the divine pump at its inflating / afflating work. I hear an athlete puffing then finally relaxing on the flat eee of me.

Then down we go again, this time not man in general, but the speaker in particular. The lines shorten once more as he heads for exhaustion and - glorious metaphysical pun - waste away, like the speaker, until he (and the line) is thinnest on 'most thinne'. Then it's revival time again, revival as work, step by step raised towards God, each time taking longer swoops in the air, rising and rising, beating the wings then relaxing, almost hovering. Then one final effort, with three great grunts: imp, affliction, advance. The ff's in affliction remind us that there is till some puffing to be done, but at least we are on some plateau of air.

The poem is an enactment of the process of salvation. The visual shape, a rough pun on the shape of a wing, seems to me secondary to the aural and syntactical drive. Herbert does not question language. He demands a great deal of it. He thinks it can do the job of conveying God's power in words. To put it simply and crudely: Herbert believes in the God that ordained syntax. The shape of the poem is auxiliary in that project, more than a pretty toy of course, since the shape of wings has meaning too, but still auxiliary. What matters is that language should be an aspect of faith. You don't pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again. God picks you up, unworthy as you are: he crams your mouth with language and breath and says: now live.

If I could be persuaded to be of a God's party, it would certainly be of Herbert's God. Aldous Huxley called Herbert "the poet of inner weather". In Herbert God is almost human. He inhabits syntax in much the same way as he inhabits weather.