Sunday night is.... The Inkspots

Ivory 'Deek' Watson, Charles Fuqua, Orville "Hoppy" Jones (singing bass) and Bill Kenny (singing high tenor) who, in 1932, made up The Inkspots: perfect enunciation, the respectability, the suits, the tie, the slight raffishness when the pretty girl passes, the touch of humour and self send-up. This is 1939 and the record sells 19 million copies. The sound is as dated as Al Bowlly and as sweet. But the context is quite other.

Writing for occasion

Titian, Flaying of Marsyas, c.1570s


The wind may blow where it listeth but there are times when it is actually drawn or desired to list here or there: these are what we might call the occasions of verse, and what such occasions may well occasion is occasional verse.

*

One view of poetry posits a world that is mysterious and possesses independent will, or indeed a number of separate, discrete wills. These are the individual, often contrary, wills of spirits that may be addressed, appeased, aroused or summoned. The wind is under their control and bloweth where they listeth. Robert Graves referred to those who were in thrall to them as Muse poets, and pointed to Keats's La Belle Dame sans Merci as the true figure of the Muse. Like the lady of the poem, the Muse was capricious: she rode the poets, possessed them, then left them. The best the poet could do was pray to the moon, to enter the appropriate trance under her influence, and prepare to be discarded. In this version of poetry it is not exactly an engagement with the irrational, but whatever reason there is in it lies beyond mortal wits. The Muse poets line up with Dionysos.

And you can see why they, and any poet, might do so. You cannot, they would rightly argue, reason your way to a poem. There is about the act something instinctive and capricious: now it works and now it doesn't for no known reason, and even when it does work you can't tell exactly what it does. And since the cult of Dionysos is an ecstatic, drunken cult, the best thing you can do is to go out of your head then stick your head into the wind and hope the wind listeth your way. You do, don't you, want a total disordering of all the senses, along with Rimbaud? The rest is nothing.

Flaws? Getting drunk or stoned or out of your head in any way you choose does not make you a poet. Nor does lying by the road hoping for La Belle Dame to come along. Excuse me, lady, you look very like La Belle Dame... but then so do you, madam... You do understand your serious calling to be a Muse, don't you? You do understand it is a privilege to feel my inspired hand on your inspiring etcetera? Won't wash. A bad poet isn't a better poet for being drunk or for imitating Nature grown wild.

*

In the opposite camp is the poet of parallelograms, Apollo's boy or girl (more often boy traditionally) to whom poetry is a kind of gradus ad parnassum, the steps of which include intellect, learning, the social graces, irony, the form, structure. To him, a poem is a rational task in a reasonable, albeit highly complex world. Poems embody ideas, preferably interesting ideas. Poems behave in orderly, almost courtly fashion. They follow rules, however complex, because beyond rules there is only chaos. It is up to him, the Apollonian poet, to preserve the essential order of things, to deride that which departs from such order, to create reasonable orchards and magnificent glass orangeries with the wholly reasonable figure of Apollo at the centre of the fountain, preferably shown in the process of flaying Marsyas. And if Apollo happens to look like Alexander Pope flaying Lord Hervey that just goes to show what intellect may aspire too. Pope lisped in numbers, he says, 'for the numbers came'. The shape comes from the numbers or meters.The energy required to fill the shape comes from somewhere else, a rage against chaos: which too is a kind of ferocity.

Graves, naturally, had no time for Pope, or for Dryden, or for Johnson, or for Auden. But then he had no time for Eliot or Dylan Thomas either. Graves was following other orders. The Apollonian poet sits in his Palace of Art and constructs parallelograms and crystals against danger. The Gravesian ducks through the intoxicating forest seeking Diana and her nymphs, seeking danger.

Both models have certain attractive, not to mention entertaining, features. Without contraries is no progression, wrote Blake, and wanted them to remain contraries. They should not, he believed, be reconciled.

*

We do have doubts about occasional poems. They seem foredoomed to be duds. Who would wish to be the laureate of birthday cakes, or worse still, of royal encomia? Only a sell-out. The best you can do in the situation, so goes the argument, is manners, and manners are a form of toadying.

But there are and always have been good, sometimes great poems, written for specific occasions, or out of specific occasions. I call Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, Byron on his own thirty-sixth birthday, Dylan Thomas on his thirtieth or on the funeral of Ann Jones. Rites, celebrations and ceremonies are part of the job. There are, of course, private occasions and public occasions for poetry. The private are expected to be sentimental: the public to be sententious.

The problem is expectation. The occasion can determine too much: that the poem should be constrained to say worthy things; that it should mind its manners; that it should avoid offence; that it should say in verse what might be better said in prose, or take the place of a vow or a gift. Yet even if writing such a poem were a problematic act, it might still be possible to argue for the poem as an example of humane art, as a fitting structure for what is properly felt to be important.

*

There is something in poetry of the offering in any case: as speech offered to commemorate a birth, a wedding or a funeral. The poem might be song, the part song-part speech of the event, an event that naturally invites reflection. It might look to be the fitting structure. Poetry is, after all, a shape in language, whether raw or cooked, whether drunk or sober. Poetry without shape is not poetry.

But energy and opposition are also required.

There is bound to be an element of both the Dionysiac and the Apollonian in art. The two elements cannot be reconciled but they cannot be entirely without each other. Those who on honeydew have fed and drunk the milk of paradise, are quite capable of composing poems about poetic meter for their children, as Coleridge did.

I have loved writing poems for occasions: they were excuses to write. Sometimes they had a spinning headiness that was set to spin right off but just held in. Those I think were the best poems, language setting off, getting lost, landing eventually in the world of the living. Others were simply as well made as I could make them, looking for a door to get lost through, but staying where they were. Sometimes the pattern in them compensated. If I hadn't started the best ones they wouldn't have existed.

In the end, poems make their own occasions, their own necessary ferocity. But they need occasions. It is their ferocity that saves them. Apollo flaying Marsyas.

Being professional

I can't quite remember when this highest form of praise was introduced. I do remember it was around some time in the late eighties when, as schoolteachers, we were exhorted to be professional at all times. And then, when I moved into higher education, some senior member of the college came in to welcome us as professionals and academics, people with proper professional pride. 'So and so is a true professional' was the equivalent of five gold stars. We were doing things properly, by the book. We were 'of the professions'. We were truly, as Márai might have said, not just, 'respectable citizens' of the republic of something but, most importantly, professional respectable citizens.

To act professionally was not necessarily to act kindly, to act with understanding, to act according to conscience or to act with devotion to the underlying cause, but to be proper, to act by the book according to the current conception of the book. Professional conduct had been defined by leaders and committees and might be redefined next year, but for this year it was such and such a procedure, and following it was professionalism. The army were 'the professionals'. There was a television series called The Professionals. Highest praise. The worst thing you could be was 'amateur'. To be amateur was to be hopeless. No standards. A mess.

But I have never felt professional in my life. I have felt conscientious, occasionally to the point of agony and sleeplessness; I have felt devoted at times and indifferent at other times; I have tried to understand those in my care as best I could; I tried to be interesting and friendly and interested: but I never regarded these things as professionalism. Professionalism was getting my reports in at the right time, phrasing them in the correct way, taking my part in the career structure, making constructive criticisms and looking for ever greater efficiency, or rather, ways of registering ever greater efficiency even when the result of registering was less efficiency.

This process has come a long way. First, students were invited to evaluate classes on forms, which is fine and even useful. Then students were instructed to anonymise their work so that we shouldn't be able to discriminate against them, and to put their evaluations of the class into an envelope that we might deliver their sealed evaluations to the appropriate place. Then it was further determined that only students should carry the envelope to the appropriate place. Why? Because we were not to be trusted, of course.

Not trusting us, or anyone, is truly professional. Distrust is the one true mark of the professional.

At one place we were invited to sit in on each other's classes and observe, and then, together with the observed colleague, put together an A4 sheet noting the general condition of the class. But that A4 sheet was far too simple and amateurish. Soon it was broken down into sections and micro-questions. This was then fed through the system. It was very professional. On one occasion I simply wrote '[Colleague] X is a privilege to work with' and fed it into the system. No one complained. No one even noted the fact. That too was professional. Everyone is so busy being professional they rush to file things away and don't have the time to read them. Filing is professional. Reading is amateur. Unless you are a lawyer, of course.

After all these years I have grown pretty well certain that my deepest instincts are deeply unprofessional. When I see a group or an individual in front of me at some institution of learning I don't think: there is a professional procedure to go through, I think: they are people, let's talk. I actually trust them. Do they trust me? God knows. I know the institution doesn't. That's because it's professional.

People are in free fall. Professionals move steadily, ever upward. What was professionalism in the eighties is sheer amateurism now.

I continue to genuflect to professionalism because that is what I have to do when I am on duty. But my knees are getting very tired. And so are the knees of the other people in institutions. Or so I suspect. Can we trust each other to say as much? Oh no. Not professional.

Edward Thomas 'Lights Out'

Lights Out

I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.

Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink.

Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends,
All pleasure and all trouble,
Although most sweet or bitter,
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.

There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter and leave alone
I know not how.

The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.

'Beneath it all desire for oblivion runs', wrote Larkin in 'Wants', repeating that line as frame for his second verse. And it does, nor do we resist it, least of all when falling asleep, or at times when we are just exhausted or out of hope.

The great trick is not to sound self-pitying. Then the just as great trick of dramatising that desire without the poem itself sounding lethargic. There is a remarkable stroke in this poem by Thomas, probably greatest writer of melancholy in England in the twentieth century. We think we are getting an even-paced Georgian poem with a few necessary graces but line three drops away from us, vanishes from under our feet, through the simple device of an enjambment. So 'deep' appears at the end of one line, and its partner 'forest' at the beginning of the next. It is the forest floor that gives way. After this our sleep will never be untroubled. The next enjambment of lose / Their is gentler by comparison: it is a shock to fall through but the landing appears relatively soft. For now.

And now that we are at this level we seem to go on, moving on relatively firm ground (though we can never forget how far, how deep, we have fallen and might fall again) so we move, even then, with some trepidation through the next verse until the last line - And in they sink - where we imagine we have two simple iambs, as in And in they sink, which is slightly disconcerting because of the implied internal rhyme, that slight grunt of in, sink, but then there is the odd sense that it isn't two iambs after all, but the triple thump of spondees: And in they sink.

We are stumbling again, tumbling down a little Lethean slope. And the next verse is no more reassuring. We have got used to the first two lines of each verse rhyming with each other. Here, instead of a rhyme, we get the same word ends. Love, despair and ambition all end. The insistence of ending takes precedence over rhyme. This ending is too insistent, too urgent. The slight Georgianism of Then tasks most noble, a conventional phrase with a nagging archaic inversion, is a period grace, a potential weakness that the poem can afford, because whatever reassurance such a phrase might offer has long been undermined.

The forest is dark. The desire in the fourth verse is plain enough. The voice wants sleep, oblivion, more than it wants what it most loves. There, beside us, is our lover, our partner, the dearest presence, but that's not what we want here. It is sleep, but sleep of the fallen through, oblivious kind, a self-vanishing. And we don't need to spell that out, do we?

Now the forest is huge, merging with clouds and that simple towers / lowers rhyme is again tripped up by a strong enjambment : lowers / ahead, the sound of ahead another grunt, a double grunt. Then comes a double hush, shelf upon shelf.

The end of this sleep is the losing of oneself. I don't think this feeling is unfamiliar to us. Larkin's sense of the same moment is blunter, less subtle, but of unmistakeably of our time:

Wants

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff—
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death—
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.

We know about Edward Thomas's oblivion in the First World War, so his poem strikes us as foreknowledge, the nerves creeping under the stream of time and language, letting Lethe or Acheron, whichever dark river runs through that forest, chill it most. He lets his hand trail in it, the hand turning colder the longer he trails it.

Caring: welcome to UK / Girl on a Motorcycle

Friend of ours in London, about our age, maybe a little younger, a very beautiful, highly intelligent, lively, kindly woman, who has been painted by many artists. Her foreign mother has dementia and is entirely incapable of looking after herself. Friend brought her over from abroad so she could care for her. She herself was born here, is a British citizen (since what else would she be?) Mother had lived here for years.

Our friend was an art historian, lecturing here and there. She sometimes wrote articles. Her flat is full of books, piled in columns on the floor. The flat actually belongs to her son now. Her ex-husband is elsewhere.

Our friend receives £60 a week as pension. She also gets £50 a week as carer for her mother. The local private nursing home charges £600-750 a week. The unenticing council home charges £400 a week. Mother being foreign she can't get a place there. Friend can't get out of the flat because mother can't be alone. The ceiling of the bedroom collapsed and the flat flooded a little while ago.

You wonder what the council does for £400 a week that she is expected to do for one-eighth the amount?

*


picture: Cleanup workers (Liquidators) going to the Chornobyl Plant. Photo by Lu Taskey.*



Another friend, The Plump, has a marvellous post about a Ukrainian girl on a motorbike. ""Good girls go to heaven. Bad ones go to hell. And girls on fast bikes go anywhere they want," she says, and where she wants to go is the ghost town of Chernobyl. Originally this is Will Popinjay's discovery. But you'll find it over at The Plump's, here. Go, as he advises, right through the photographs and texts.


*The motorcyclist's own text. These liquidators are going to their deaths.

1989: Going for a Walk

Back very late last night from London where Arthur Phillips, Tibor Fischer and I talked about our memories of the year. Arthur wasn't in fact there that year though he was the next, out of which he wrote his novel, Prague. Tibor was there from 1988-1990 and made a film for Channel Four's Dispatches, of which we saw about eight minutes, mostly Victor Orbán, in one shot artfully poised by the statue of the poet Attila József with whom he seems to me to have little in common.

We, meaning C and I and the family, spent most of 1989 in Budapest. I wrote a book of poems, or rather the title sequence of it, Bridge Passages (shortlisted for The Whitbread Poetry Prize in 1991) while I was there as well as translating Madách and Kosztolányi and writing two broadcasts for the BBC.

The unspoken (or not much spoken) theme of the evening was 'Let's not be too gloomy', though, to tell the truth, considering the prospect of a right-wing Fidesz landslide with only the fascist Jobbik for opposition I can think of very little that is more gloomy. As Tibor pointed out - and he is a supporter of Fidesz - once they get in, and if the majority is big enough, Fidesz will be entitled to change the constitution. Hungary could revive the old 40s vaudeville act of an authoritarian 'Regent Horthy' with a fascist 'Szálasi' snapping at his heels. There are, it seems, plenty of people there who consider that an attractive prospect. The uniforms are in place. My parents who told me that Hungary was, at heart, a fascist country, and against whom I argued because I didn't believe them, might - especially my mother - have been right.

But let's not be too gloomy. That description doesn't fit those I know and have met and loved, nor does it, I think, describe the youngest adults, who are a more international generation than any before them, and who could bring the Hungarian virtues of energy, intelligence, humour, ingenuity, and passion out into the fresh air. Little Hungary (Greater Hungary in its dreams) is like a particularly small house in a row of terraces in a decaying slum. It's stuffy. The great vehicles of global commerce drive by outside so exhaust fumes waft through it. The brilliant child, the abusive father, the neurotic mother all live there. 'This house used to be so nice,' weeps mother. 'The neighbourhood has gone down,' growls father. ''I am going for a walk, but I'll be back,' mumbles the child.

If Hungary does move overwhelmingly to the right, I will not be back. I don't claim to be a brilliant child. I'm out already and I am no longer a child. Nor was I ever brilliant.

*

As to the evening, Arthur is New York, funny, self-deprecating. I haven't read his book but I will. Sounds good. Tibor is droll and dry as ever. I have read his books, most of them. Me? I am a poet and this audience hasn't come to hear poetry, they want jokes and argument - so I feel I am boring them. Too bad, if so, I reflect in melancholy mood on my long way home. To Hungarians I will never be anything but a translator who can do the state some service. But I have done that for twenty-five years and once this new anthology is out I think I will have done enough. I think it's time I went for a walk myself.

Ends and breaks: young poets

Today I said goodbye to a group of young undergraduate poets from America. They were such a bright bunch from top universities, bristling with reading - particularly modern but all the general greats as well as Dickinson and Whitman. I liked them a good deal and parting with them after three months or so, with a day a week, was, for me, an oddly sentimental occasion. We have fun in class, at least I always try to make it fun, but fun with passion and intelligence, so we laugh while we concentrate. And that makes for warmth of feeling.

I think one of the hopes of the humanities is to bring the best out of people by bringing out their humanity. The arts can do this particularly well. They can, but don't always, since the arts, especially the making of them, involves vanities and vulnerabilities. Artists cannot be insensible nor can they lack a sense of self: all they can do is to affect insensibility at times, as much for protection as anything else, and they can try to look cool. But sensibility is not enough. Nor is cool. Humanity is a matter of dimensions.

Writing, at best, is a wrought set of dimensions within which it is possible to live. The young poet moves from self to language, makes a self inside language. That language provides its dimensions, the dimensions within which a written self can live. And through those dimensions it begins to explore the world, which is out there and not the self alone, but the wind and the cold and the cry of animals and the whistling of the planets and the voices of others.

It has been a very long day and tomorrow is no shorter. I am down in London at the Hungarian Cultural Centre in Maiden Lane with the US author Arthur Phillips and with Tibor Fischer, discussing 1989. University in the morning, train in the afternoon, event in the evening, train at night.