Received by email notification of a new online journal, Rattle, which is part-edited by an ex-MA student, Jon K. Shaw. I'll put in the link on the right, under Literary Magazines, though its interest is not primarily in literary matters, as such. It looks very interesting and, properly, demanding. Jon was a poet and an artist with a strong interest in theory. Very fleet-footed and light on his impressively shod intellectual feet.
Great to see ex-students being active in their fields. There are a lot of them out there. One is probably standing no more than a stone's throw from you. Stay that stone!
In the Old Town, in Tynska, the sun blazing and threatening flames. It's a lovely quiet apartment on the ground floor with two cafés in the courtyards in front of it. Here for a few days.
First impression of great beauty: Venice without the canals. Alleyways, vaulted passages, old trees, cobbles, murals, relief scultpture, fantastica and phantasmagoria. A place for writers, readers, idlers, beggars and smart business-folk selling semi-surreal antiques clearly angled at the western eye...
Walked into two nearby grand churches, the first, in a quiet street behind us, being the Bazilika sc. Jakuba. The full Baroque splurge, screaming like a mad government official dripping with medals and frogging.
Here's what the website says about it:
The basilica was founded in the reign of Wenceslas I in 1232 in the close vicinity of the Old Town Square during the establishment of the Old Town of Prague. The original Gothic Minorite convent with the Church of St James the Great burnt out in 17th century. Following a reconstruction led by Jan Šimon Pánek Panecyus it is one of the most attractive Baroque buildings in Prague. The painters and sculptors involved in the decoration of the church were notable artists of the Czech Baroque and Classical period: Peter Brandl, Václav Vavřinec Reiner, Jan Kryštof Liška, Ignatius František Platzer and Ignatius Michal Platzer. The church, significant from the point of view of decorative art, the church has always been a place for concerts. What now remains from the original organ built around 1720 by Abraham Starck from Loket is only the richly ornamented case. The current organ is from 1970s and was designed as a universal concert organ. Probably two best known members of the Minorite Order worked here in the beginning of 18th century: the organist and composer Bernard Artophaeus (1651-1721) and his student Bohuslav Matěj Černohorský (1684-1742), prominent composer and teacher. The basilica has never ceased to be much-frequented concert venue.
Now to don my gilded wings, twist my body into a particularly expressive form of contrapposto, and head for lunch. I think I'm going to like it here.
This seemed appropriate as we are about to celebrate our fortieth anniversary. After this, at opportune moments, I will record a group of Middle Love Poems, and then, Late Love Poems. Here is the set:
Six Early Love Poems
The earliest of these goes back to about 1970 or so when I am just twenty-one. They are all short and surprisingly enough - I had forgotten this - three of them are in terza rima. They are:
Sleeping written about 1974 or so. In terza rima, as a companion piece to three others in the same form and of the same length (12 lines each), of which it was the third and the next poem, Bones - the second poem here - the fourth.
The third poem in the recording, Snow, is the one written about 1970, the year we got married. It was printed as a postcard poem by either Roger Burford Mason's Dodman Press, or Peter Scupham's Mandeville Press, I'm not sure which. I must have it somewhere. All these three poems were in my first book, The Slant Door (Secker, 1979 / New and Collected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2008). The book was awarded the Faber Prize, sharing it with Hugo Williams's Love-Life.
The fourth, fifth and sixth of the poems come from the second book, November and May (Secker, 1981 / New and Collected Poems, Bloodaxe 2008). The Object of Desire is a return to the pattern of Sleeping and Bones. I'm not sure why I returned to it - maybe because it seemed part of the same extended experience.
Nightsong was written for Shakespeare's birthday. There used to be a small annual chapbook anthology edited by a different poet each year, in which poets were invited to write something in honour of WS. The one in which this appeared was edited by Anne Stevenson. The epigraph is from Romeo and Juliet.
May Wind, the last of the six, refers to Chambers' lovely Book of Days (I recommend this, I so recommend this, and the linked version is online!) that I would leaf through now and then. The girls in the flower-niche are taken from the book. They are the 'poor Mayers'.
Of course one cannot but observe, as a judicious critic might remark, that they are all set in bed. I cannot say I have quite forgotten the reason that they should have been set there. The sun, that busy old fool, as Donne had it, was either setting or rising. It hasn't stopped doing that.
And there is generally a danger of some sort gently purring in the background of these poems. Love without fear is too pure for lovers. Love without fear does not exist for them, only for saints.
Nostalgie de la boue: '...a desire for degradation and depravity. The French phrase, meaning literally ‘mud nostalgia’, was coined by the French poet and dramatist Émile Augier (1820–89), in Le Mariage d'Olympe (1855). In response to the comment that a duck placed on a lake with swans will miss his pond and eventually return to it, the character Montrichard replies, ‘La nostalgie de la boue! [Longing to be back in the mud!’]
Yes, afflicted with it to a degree. A certain distaste for the utterly pristine. Dislike of clipped borders and tidy gardens (unless with fantastical topiary and toads). Shudder at acres of marble. Distrust of the cut and dried. Preference for the marred rather than the umarked. Liking for books with turned down corners and jottings in the margin. Fascination with old yellowed postcards with tea stains on them.
"Nostalgie de la boue" means ascribing higher spiritual values to people and cultures considered "lower" than oneself, the romanticization of the faraway primitive which is also the equivalent of the lower class close to home. I have been submerged in such ideas since I was born and am just getting my head out of the waters.
Do I then consider the people in the Bill Brandt photograph above to be lower than myself?
Not exactly. They are possible selves that move through some hinterland between dream and waking. In fact we know the desire for both, don't we? And in any case, let's look at the photograph again. If it isn't a set-up, some kind of tableau, then it is a scene in which the symbolic content is perfectly poised and posed in what is decidedly not one of Cartier-Bresson's decisive moments.
These are handsome artistic derelicts in a scenic bar, the scenery possibly from an early silent film, or maybe a stage set from Brecht & Weill. Might it be The Threepenny Opera? The nicely crude little drawing on the wall on the left, the military photo next to it, and the crooked picture of two figures underneath are all supporting cast to to the star of the complementary subplot: the image of the magnificent sailing boat riding in brilliant light across the waves.
So the mud (boue) from which these characters and stage properties have emerged has already been through the filter of art. The damp patch spreading like a continent across the wall has acquired a formality that longs for a suitable text to interpret it.
This nostalgie is the one I mean between dreaming and waking. It is no longer quite the primal mud: it is composition, texture, light, mise-en-scène, echo. Not so much the decisive moment as the dramatic eternity then, an existential condition to which the gut responds.
I too would be sitting in that bar. I too would feel the melancholy and the desire. It is a portrait of the soul, of the way the soul regards the body, or perhaps simply lives through the body. And it is nostalgic. And, in its own staged way, true to life, or so I think. The romanticization of the faraway primitive. Romanticization? Maybe. The primitive? Not entirely. Faraway? Not in the least. In easy reach. Within the body doing the reaching.
Still playing with audio. I recorded these four sonnets together because they follow each other in my 2001 book, An English Apocalypse.
Four Sonnets from' An English Apocalypse'
Three of the sonnets have names referring to colour. I wrote several colour sonnets, some of them sonnet sequences. There are eleven such in the book.There are seven more in Reel (2004), but the series began back in Portrait of My Father in an English Landscape (1998) that contains another seven, and continued in The Budapest File (2000) where there are four more.
Strange I had never counted them. It seems there are twenty-nine of them, but since half of them are sequences the actual number of sonnets is much higher.
The colour sonnets began one day in London when C was visiting Cornelissen's, the famous old colour merchants to buy paint and inks. While she was ordering I was gazing at the jars of pure pigment and one particular one fascinated me. It was called Monastral Blue and it reminded me of something I couldn't place. That was what did it. I wrote a poem that turned out to be a sonnet, but unfortunately turned out not to be very good. Others followed. I bought colour charts and contemplated individual colours. I suppose the series must have continued through some three or so years.
The sonnets here are all single and all deal with experiences of England.
The Ropes referred to my first days in England where I went along to cub scouts in Westgate, Kent, and tried to learn to tie knots. The idea of learning the ropes came later, once I was more conversant with idioms.
Payne's Grey simply reminded me of sea and clouds and foggy evenings attending football matches
Sepia: The Light Brigade was based on memories of slightly muddy walks in the fields in Hertfordshire and how we would meet other people as we went. I was also thinking of fields as palimpsest - the fields under the field - and of the soldiers moving into open view in the Great War, the war that was so much at the heart, or so it seemed to me, of the English imagination.The Light Brigade refers to light but also to the well known charge.
Copper Brown is just an old coin dug up in the garden. The terrible importance of money when you have little. The annals of the poor. 'Pounding' is of course a pun that happened along.
From 1998 onwards I was preoccupied with the subject of England - what it was, what made it, what part it had become of me. I am still preoccupied.
This set is going into the Links on the right too, as an archive.
There are two more Link categories on the right of this post if you read down it:
1. George Szirtes Reading, where I will store recordings I make (The Courtyards is there);
2. Other GS Texts Online, where I will put anything I find of mine that seems to have crept online without me knowing, not including poems. I do this because I have found that most of my translation of Gyula Krúdy's The Adventures of Sindbad is available on Google Books. I think the Introduction (scroll down) to it is one of the best introductions I have written: maybe because it is to one of the books I have best loved. You can click through the book, which is an absolute classic, to get the stories.
It is also the basis of a fascinating film, itself a classic of its genre, Szindbad, directed by Zoltán Huszárik in 1971. Here is an excerpt from it.
Sindbad (as it appeared in the English translation) is over three hundred years old, a lover of women and fine food. Played here by Zoltán Latinovits, the most popular male actor of his day, he is in a country inn, indulging himself.
The dialogue is in Hungarian, of course and it is too long to translate here, but the essence is this: Sindbad keeps asking for more and more food, constantly declaring his preference for this or that way of making it, for this or that cut of meat or poultry, for this or that way of dressing or spicing it. He goes through his preference for the various kinds of mustard firmly declaring for English mustard (you see a jar of it on the table).
In the meantime he has asked the waiter whether he was married. The waiter sadly replies that he was but that his wife has left him. He tells how he met her at the casino where he was on good terms with the jockeys and how someone there decided to make a fortunate man of him by introducing him to the her.
And then what happened? asks Sindbad between ordering yet more platters and discoursing on food. The waiter answers that his marriage was the ruin of him. She ran away to a village and there she married some foolish member of the local gentry.
Sindbad frowns and takes another bite. I was that man, he tells the waiter.
And has she left you too? the waiter asks.
Yes, Sindbad replied. But no matter.
And carries on eating.
The food in the meanwhile serves as metaphor for the delights of sensuality, in silent close up, bubbling and dripping, swimming in its own juices.
If interested, do read the Introduction mentioned above.
The Krúdy book I have just reviewed for the TLS, Life is a Dream (review to appear soon) is full of meals and food and sensuality. I doubt whether there exists another book of stories so lovingly descriptive of food.
*
Also there is Tibor Déry's collection of stories Love, to which I also wrote an Introduction (again, scroll down).
