Goodbye to classes

Richard Strauss : Metamorphosen, Studie für 23 Solostreicher. Berliner Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan, direction.


Next week we are going to China. I don't know whether I will be able to blog from there. We shall see. But in the last two days I have finished two classes at university before passing them on to colleagues who will complete the term with them.

I feel quite sad at leaving them. In general I enjoy teaching very much - it's a way of talking about what I love anyway and spending time with people who are learning to love it in their own ways.

Can people be taught to write poetry? Not without hearing and reading it first, or at least being aware of it as a quality in perception, so that is where I usually start. And I don't even think of teaching it, not as the passing down of certain precepts. I think good teaching is intelligent conversation with a growing understanding of what might be said and how.

And of course there is the relationship with the people that constitute a class. You cannot get to know them thoroughly. Class isn't that kind of place. But you can like seeing them, talking to them and grow to miss them if they are not there.

People can sense if you like what you are talking about and thinking about. They can sense that the subject matters, that it is about something important, that something gets sorted through in this way of writing, saying or singing, and in talking about it. That in itself it isn't something anyone has to be taught: people know it, but they rarely speak about it. Talking about it can be taught. In poetry, the importance arises out of the speaking. It is like speaking a whale into being. Poetry is the act of speaking things into being, even, at times, becoming the thing that is coming into being.

Poetry is not like political rhetoric or advertising: it isn't there to get you to do things. It isn't even there to get you to be things. It is about how being is possible, in language if nothing else: it is about the kind of being that language can give life to.

So you toss this around the class, with this or that example, often - with luck - with some laughter. Laughter at the sheer ingenuity and cheek of the thing. I don't think poetry is a product of solemnity, but it is serious, deadly serious if you like. It is a properly serious form of laughter. Even the saddest and most tragic of songs is better for that unheard laughter.

Shall we be incongruous with the music. Why not?

After Durham

First home for lunch and packing and then to London by car to take part in Passing Bells at Jerwood Hall, LSO St Luke's, which is quite a place, and supposedly the best acoustics in London.

The occasion was put together by Judith Chernaik of Poems on the Underground. The programme: the Apollo Chamber Orchestra, conducted by David Chernaik playing Barber's Adagio, then Cicely Herbert, Carole Satyamurti and myself reading poems, followed by Bartók's Divertimento for String Orchestra before the interval, and after. Gerard Benson, Tony Harrison reading poems, ending with Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen. It's quite a mix. The Barber is well known, the Bartók is spiky and capering and thundery and lyrical and joky, and the Strauss is labyrinthine, ever more labyrinthine, lyrical and heartbreaking.

The poetry is generally pitched towards suffering and loss but in a lively fashion. Tony Harrison in the second half is making a rare appearance, granite-like, monumental.

This note is briefly composed as we are still in London, back later tonight after dinner with friends. I'll add some music or visual later.

Peterborough, the other way - not cool, and yet...

 


Not the 'third way', just the way back. Brilliant sunshine much of the way, the kind of light that transforms everything it touches, serving up a world that is practically Samuel Palmer-Edenic.

I read a while, then do some codewords, sudoku and crossword for half an hour. There are six ways of travelling: social, working, playing, daydreaming, reading and looking. One moves between these depending on circustances. I do five out of the six.

Having picked up an Indy & a Times I scan the glossy mag. Aaronovitch in hospital etc and get to Hannah Betts. She writes a small envelope sized column in which she declares that couples who think they are cool are not cool. Being single is cool.

My general view on cool is that anything referred to as cool cannot be cool. In short cool is not cool. Not-cool can be cool but as soon as it becomes cool it is not cool. Cool is possibly the least cool thing on earth.

As for Peterborough it is cool in a simple temperature sense. Sunshine gone. No Palmer. Just Peterborough. Cool.

But then at Darlington before, the man in front of me in the shop queue was Steve McClaren. Who is that? asked the girl at the till after he had gone. Steve McClaren, I answered. Her eyes widened just a little. Does it ever get cooler than that?

From Peterborough station

Trying out iPhone Blogger. Grey, misty and cold. No- No-November, the proper service. On way to read at Colpitts in Durham. More later.

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Reading very well attended and Many books sold which lightens my load on the way home. Gillian Allnutt there too. 20 min - break - 20 min. Afterwards an Italian meal.

Streets full of the young, the girls in tiny dresses out on the pull or just rehearsing. Boys dressed as for day, haughty or hapless. They run, they loiter, they laugh or frown.

Then it pours down.

From a forthcoming broadcast on W G Sebald

Three hours in studios today recording a fifteen minute essay on the poetry of W G Sebald, known informally as Max. Three hours because we recorded it three times and because we - meaning Martin, the producer, and I - had to change studios because the first studio at the BBC's Norwich HQ was not only very like a cupboard, about the width of an old fashioned telephone box and full of packing cases, but was noisy with people outside and feet on the floor above. So we gathered up the recording equipment Martin had brought with him and someone kindly showed us to another studio, where we unpacked, Martin set up, and we began again. In the meantime some conversation, some corrections and an initial delay. But I enjoy recordings. I enjoy reading and catch my left hand conducting the script as though it were a lecture or a concert.

The essay is one of a series to mark the tenth anniversary of Max's death. I know Chris Bigsby and Amanda Hopkinson are two of the other essayists. The broadcasts will go out in early December when I will be away in China so I won't hear them but I hope Martin makes a disc of them for me. What I hadn't had a chance to read was what Jo at university showed me yesterday, Iain Galbraith's new translations of Max's selected poems under the title Across the Land and the Water, which comes out this month. The title rather reminds me of Patrick Leigh Fermor's marvellous Between the Woods and the Water, but that's just by the way.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the talk I recorded today:

...This double nature - the poetic shifting between fact and fiction - seemed to hang about him and about everything he wrote. He was a scholar of German literature, but he was also an author of essayistic fictions based on history and coincidence. In what I had read of him there was always a sense that the floor would fall away and that his complicated, old fashioned, melancholy yet droll voice would fall through with it and we would find ourselves altogether elsewhere in history and geography. History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake, said Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses. The dreams and nightmares Max was conducting us through were historical, but the history was perceived in terms of accident, coincidence, anecdote and ghosts. History was a way of feeling the world as much as knowing about it.

I sometimes think of Max’s books as haunted magical encyclopedias. It isn’t the story that holds them together, the books are not exactly working towards a climax: it is more that they present us, particularly in his last work, Austerlitz, with intensely seen and felt phenomena that come upon us without warning. Nothing is stable, not even the narrative voice, which is likely to melt into other voices in the course of a sentence. One first becomes conscious of this in The Rings of Saturn where the voices of Michael Hamburger and Sebald wind in and out of each other, with a simple, ‘he said’. Even as I write the words ‘he said’ I note how I have placed the inverted commas around them, rather than, as in normal speech, before or after, around what is actually being said. I think that is appropriate for a voice so insistent yet so evanescent, and one so likely to return to the reader as the reported speech of an encounter behind glass, that intervening glass becoming the very nature of perception...

...Max’s history, the history of the world as he presents it, is the history of suffering. The suffering happens in the real world but is immediately mediated through memory, historical record, art and narrative drift. The suffering is often at second hand but is everywhere, the very air through which we move. Remorseless power and cruelty are the animating factors in his history, leaving behind a trail of vanishings and cries.

The ghost world is, however, lodged in a material one whose physical substance is an object of wonder. The sheer welter of phenomena, the orderings of the natural system as well as the orderings of the museums and palaces of art, are constantly brought before us. The whole place shimmers with it. Reading him made it shimmer.

All summings-up are unsatisfactory. The best you can do is hit a phrase or two that seems to be right and try to knit them together as best you can. Having said that, I do like the radio essay as a voice turning things over. I hope this series goes well.

The music vanishes

Constantin Cavafy

The god forsakes Antony

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

- Constantine P. Cavafy (1911) tr Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

The university is to close down its music department. The students staged a touching demonstration today in front of the council chamber. They had three brass, a violin and a lot of drums. At one point they broke into Miles Davis. I was watching them from my window, as it isn't my normal day in, and was about to attend the meeting which was the reason for my presence. Even from the window it was loud and poignant and sweet.

The ant said to the grasshopper: now dance! But there was no music, so the ant turned over into a dreamless sleep from which there was no waking.

Mouse Dreaming

I will be doing a collection for children next year. In gathering together poems I came across some oddities that are not necessarily children's poems but are not quite something else either. This is one such:

Mouse Dreaming

Small as I am
I have such dreams
under the stairs,
the grey mouse screams.

In the dark hall
coats wave
empty sleeves,
enormous and grave.

But mouse just twitches
the end of his nose.
Well, dreams are for fulfilment,
I suppose.

There is a memory there of Edith Sitwell's piece from Facade:

Madam Mouse trots,
Gray in the black night!
Madam Mouse trots:
Furred is the light.
The elephant-trunks
Trumpet from the sea....
Gray in the black night
The mouse trots free.
Hoarse as a dog's bark
The heavy leaves are furled....
The cat's in his cradle,
All's well with the World!

And a very early poem of my own about silver fruit falling from branches with a soft sound

that stifles the screaming of mice

That comes from 'News for Signor Mouse', my first ever poem to appear in The Times Literary Supplement, in 1973.

But then sometimes it is people (Ladeees!!!) who scream at mice, certainly in cartoons, so screaming and mice may go together like sugar and spice.

For children? What are children? Are they those small things that run around in playground? Ah, those! There's one running around in the playground inside me. He must have written the poem. Perhaps it will please him.

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A lot of radio work at the moment. Yesterday recorded an interview for Radio 4, a programme about poetry at time of war and other stress. Very nice producer came from Brighton. We recorded in my university office. On Thursday I record a Radio 3 essay about the poetry of W G Sebald.