Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, though I have been far from the news (at least, after lying in bed listening to a special feature between 7.30 and 8am, the result of forgetting to turn off my alarm - and very fascinating it was too); I never even bought a paper. But here is Linda Grant with a wonderful remembrance.
And here is Antony Hecht:
The Book of Yolek
And here is Roger Mitchell, with magic effects by Michael Donaghy:
The Story of the White Cup
The excitement!
Ms Baroque has a lot of friends, as many regular readers must realise. Some of these friends are doing wonderful things all over the place, and achieving great recognition, and many of these have been rhapsodised about on this blog in various degrees of shameless puffery. You know I'm never embarrassed to shamelessly puff (as the actress said to the bishop...) my friends. However, even within that context I have just received an email that made me excited.
Because this one is about Liane Strauss, my very dear friend and one of the most exceptionally talented poets I know of. Her work itself is exciting, thrilling in the same way as riding a roller-coaster is. Its sheer verbal and logical momentum - or, as Clive James says, its "particle-beam velocity" - sweeps you along almost centrifugally. (How's that!?) I have my own personal reasons for being happy to see Liane's work getting the exposure it deserves (not least the fact that she takes her inspiration for titles from Radiohead, and that I was sitting next to her when she first workshopped a lot of these poems);* but my reasons for posting it here are that you should read it.
Her poetry is always, first and foremost, poetry - this is a good thing. The momentum builds out of the words themselves, heady and hyptnotic - not out of some complicated structure of information she's trying to hit you with, as so often happens... As Mallarmé said, "you don't write a poem with ideas, but with words." Liane's poems bear out this truth both implicitly and explicitly.
And they're often funny.
Check her out here:
"One of the pleasures of building this section of the website," (writes Clive James) "is to have been plunged into the poetic world of the late Michael Donaghy, whose alumni are disproportionately represented on my guest list. If he gave them water to drink during seminars, there must have been something in it. Among the leaders of a pack that seems to consist almost entirely of leaders, Liane Strauss has got something going in her poetry that it took Donaghy himself adequately to describe.... Her work is helping to provide the dazzling evidence that there is a new school of poets in London for whom the Atlantic has simply disappeared" (etc).**
Clivejames.com also features Isobel Dixon, Olivia Cole and Simon Barraclough, as well as other poets,*** and many examples of James' writing (there are several articles I want to bookmark) - altogether a site worth a visit; see my sidebar.
* I will confess here in public that, when it got workshopped, Lady Suwō made me cry.
** I am getting quite a bit of feedback lately to indicate that I too am a member of this "school", though my work is nothing like Liane's. How exciting!
*** I say "other" - the list includes the great Les Murray...
Poetry readings again. George Szirtes writes, on his blog:
"There is the history of reading aloud as entertainment for a small circle, an act of intimacy, as it might be to children or to a lover or as a couple reading passages to each other in bed or over the table, or maybe a small group of friends. I hesitate to call this entertainment simply because entertainment suggests amusements and distractions and this is the opposite. It involves trust and close attention, because the material read might be of the sort that starts thoughts, memories, feelings and ideas, and the level of communication is such that one might say to the other: Wait a minute! Read that bit again! The noise is quiet and low, capable of being broken, the whole moving like a fugue in chamber music, returning, reiterating, nothing detachable."
I think he's got something here. And as far as the intimacy analogy goes, I can say I long ago became aware that my style, in reading to an audience, owes more to my years of reading aloud The Runaway Bunny or My Naughty Little Sister than anything else. This is probably a good thing: if you think about it, you realise that in reading to a child you are more than anything trying to get, and keep, the child's attention, and make the child happy.
George talks about three traditions that feed into poetry readings; the above is only the first. The experience he describes might be an ideal: I've certainly been to enough readings where nothing of the kind ever happened - but that may be partly the reader's fault, in not addressing the audience properly - not being intimate enough, not allowing the spaces to open up where the listener can sit.
Now, I must have missed something in the Guardian while I was in America in September. In the letters page on the 22nd, when I was back and landed enough to read the paper, Laurence Inman wrote a letter about a reading Auden had given in 1971:
"He explained at the beginning that he would be taking breaks to get his breath back. 'I have been a heavy smoker all my life.' He took four such breaks, sitting on a chair at the side of the stage, staring at his feet, which were shod in carpet slippers."
It's not exactly Anything Goes, is it.
Maddy Paxman, in the next letter, describes her late husband Michael Donaghy's famous readings very, if you'll excuse me, tellingly - saying he managed "both to convey the shape of formal structures within which he wrote and to give the poems meaning and sense. His performances were often described as though the poems were being told into your ear."
Michael had a beautifully modulated voice, never mumbling and never shouting, and with no pretentious poetic pauses. He could read blank verse for both line and sense. And he memorised everything. I'm not sure I ever even saw him hold a book on stage.
Maddy continues: "This must have been especially so when, one night in America, the lights in the auditorium failed and he continued with the 'reading'."
I think Michael's model for reading - if mine is bedtime stories - was the pub raconteur, or someone more urgent than that but certainly no more removed from the context of daily life: poetically his model may have been an ancient mariner but in terms of delivery, he was far more low-key: the intimacy George Szirtes is talking about. Donaghy's poems are certainly often narrated by people with a story they have to tell you. Any poem can, of course, be that story.
Certainly, if the reader gets this aspect right, and the reading is working, even poetry that might not be up to all that much on the page is forgiven, because the connection that's been made - the space created by the reader in which the listener can situate himself, as if in a bubble - creates another space, which is for the words, which become hyper-effective.
On another note: if you're going to go check out George's place, do make sure you catch the video of WC Fields playing ping pong. I feel able to face even a grey November Monday morning after that... God I love WC Fields.*
thanks to Tom Gauld for my utterly unauthorised scanning of his wonderful picture - one of my favourite things ever
* Scrap that: make it "a grey, soaking wet, rainy November Monday morning." I think I'd need to rewatch It's a Gift from start to finish. But I'll settle for the ping pong. (And I do have some extremely nice new tights on.) Thanks, George.
Well, I'm hungover for a good reason: we have launched Isobel Dixon's fine new poetry collection, A Fold in the Map (Salt), and we have floated it out to voyage on a river of free South African wine. The people at Foyles, which hosted the party, were absolutely delightful - until probably just after 9pm, when the several-floored shop was suddenly and repeatedly plunged into darkness, and the merry horde of literary revelers was unceremoniously ushered to street level and dumped on the pavement! (Cue fond reminiscences of my own young days, working at Penguin and having to coax drunken writers out after parties so as to tidy the shop up for work the next morning.)
The room was abuzz with poets, and literary agents, and novelists, and interestingly there was quite the little blog presence. (Of course novelists write blogs!) Various other blogs were discussed, too ("Who is Madame Arcati?" we cried). Bonding was bonded and friendships, old and new, were unbounded, speeches were made. Isobel made several pairs of eyes well and redden with a reminder that her "poetic family" was born in Michael Donaghy's famous workshop, which of course made everyone think how very happy and proud Michael would have been to be there last night. (Mental note: don't do this at Baroque launch! But it was lovely, of course, and for just a moment he was there.) She read only two poems from the book, one about her mother and one about her father: both I'd never heard before, and they were tantalising. How often are you left at a poetry reading wanting more?
Isobel's poetry is quiet and economical, but very warm with it. (She beat me in a competition three years ago, Oxfam Poems for a Better Future, where she came first and I came third: hers was short, clean and direct; mine was written in the voice of Henry James. Hmm...) Her poems are often like this, and come at some clear truth often from a surprise angle. The book is largely about her childhood in South Africa and her family, with pictures of her father on the jacket and a section about his illness and death and life in the family since then. It's very moving, and yet life-affirming (sorry for the word), power-packed stuff. Worth having a look.
Anyway, in our little gang we are now waiting for Simon Barraclough's first collection, Los Alamos Mon Amour, out from Salt next spring; after that it'll be my turn. For now, I might just have a little lie-down. And I've got something to read.
Which are you? And how clever is not clever enough?
A few days ago a fascinating email landed in my inbox at work, linking to two websites for determining the readability of a text. Readability is expressed in terms of "grade level," meaning what grade in American school a person would have to be in to understand the text easily. There are different tests, using different criteria and giving the reader (or the US education system!) varying degrees of the benefit of the doubt: what comes up at a 10th grade reading level in one test might be 12th or even college (university) level in another.
But seriously, how do the scientists rate the pratfalls of our prose? The SMOG test - acronymically-enhanced "Simple Measure of Gobbledigook" - uses an equation thus:
The Flesch-Kincaid grade level formula looks like this:
It is confusing, to this simple mind, that linguists and educationalists are using such crude measuring tools - as if word/sentence length were the only issue. I personally think you could do just as well with an inverse rating based on the number of prepositions. But maybe there is a wonderfully indicative simplicity at work here which is almost poetic in its very conception.
Critically, however, there doesn't seem to be any indication of how readable is "good" and how readable is "bad." I can see that each person, and even each text, will have its own needs and aims, so there can be no ideal target level. Readability is generally agreed to be a Good Thing, but the value attached to it is merely implicit in the fact that one is testing for it - a detail which leaves the famous barn door wide open for interpretation, and then neurosis, as follows.
After the rather salutary processing of several randomly selected work-generated text samples (score: a gratifying grade 13+, meaning we have something to aspire to), I couldn't resist trying out some selections of my own prose. I put in a section of a close reading of a poem by Joseph Brodsky. 9th grade. Yay! This is good news: even when talking about complex things I am clear, understandable by children! I put in a section of a review of Dorothy Molloy: 10th grade. Later I put in a whole load of samples from Baroque: they averaged 8th or 9th grade. I began, as I tested sample after sample, to feel piqued: what am I, stupid? What! Any child could understand my most interesting thoughts? What is this?
So then I put in a sample of my recent review of the geo-kinetic poet Frances Presley (soon to come out in Poetry London). It got a 14. Hurrah! You have to be in university to understand that one! See, if I put my mind to it I can be hard. I put in a sample of essay on Donaghy: 14. Wrong again, the master of clarity unclarified. Cope? 14! Oh NO! How could I not have written readably about Wendy Cope? I'm letting the side down badly. Duhig: 13. MacNeice: a high 13. All these years of saying I was a lowbrow - well, galling as it was to begin to suspect I might actually be one, imagine the disappointment of turning out finally to be no such of a thing.
With not much left to care about, I put in a sample from an essay on New Formalism, written as if its author thought Big Words sound more intelligent. I was mocking the essay slightly, earlier in the month. Well - it got a 16. Bits of it are only a 14.
I'm a wreck.
Elizabeth Bowen: always impeccable
I know this is primarily a poetry blog - and indeed this is an EDW post - but Chip Dale's very successful guest post not long ago, where he talked about his tips & tricks for writing novels, reminded me of something. I've been meaning to write about it ever since.
Back in the mists of time, your own correspondent - yes, that's me - was still too embarrassed to walk into a room and announce to all and sundry that she liked writing poems. (This phenomenon, called 15-year-old-girl syndrome, has been corroborated verbally by other poets, including big strapping guys.) So to that end, when her decade-long writers block cleared up, she started writing stories, and even a novel. It was a bloody good novel, except for one thing: it never got finished.
Of course if I'd had Chip to guide me with his common sense about not getting bogged down, or being too perfectionist, I might have finished it. But possibly not, because, as it turns out, my mental structures seem to be more those of poems than of stories - though oddly enough I do write narrative poems. Because I still love, I guess, character and incident. But I was unable to move a plot along through a whole, long, bewildering novel. I read and read and thought and thought and wrote and wrote, and I am about to share with you something that did help me a lot.* It still helps me a lot.
There is a wonderful little book, edited by Walter Allen, called Writers on Writing (Phoenix House, 1948),** which has both long and short quotes from almost every writer you can think of, pre-forties. Proust is in there, Henry James of course, Chekhov, Fielding, Coleridge, Maupassant, Ford Madox Ford, Dickens... the quotes are taken from letters, notebooks, prefaces, essays, and from novels themselves.
My favourite thing in the whole book is a little gem I've never seen anywhere else, before or since, headed Miss Bowen Sums It Up (originally published in Orion II as "Notes on Writing a Novel"). It's fifteen pages long so I can't give you the whole thing. In it Elizabeth Bowen spells out the moral, imaginative, structural, technical and other issues which must be addressed by a writer. Not, I stress, just a novelist, though this is what she was overtly writing about. Many things are interchangeable, and many issues are universal to the creation of written art, whether you call it "plot" or "the trajectory," "character" or "the narrator."
She begins:
"PLOT: (Essential. The Pre-essential.) Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot for the particular novel is something the novelist is driven to. It is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives. The novelist is confronted, at a moment (or at what appears to be the moment: actually its extension may be indefinite) by the impossibility of saying what is to be said in any other way.
He is forced towards his plot. By what? By 'what is to be said'. What is 'what is to be said'? A mass of subjective matter that has accumulated - impressions received, feelings about experience, distorted results of ordinary observation, and something else - x. This matter is extra matter. It is superfluous to the non-writing life of the writer. It is luggage left in the hall between two journeys, as opposed to the perpetual furniture of rooms. It is destined to be elsewhere. It cannot move until its destination is known. Plot is the knowing of destination.
Plot is diction. Action of language, language of action."
(KEB here: Michael Donaghy would leap up right now and say: "Notice that chiasmus? That's how Elizabeth Bowen is getting you to remember this point!")
"Plot is story. It is also 'a story' in the nursery sense - lie. The novel lies, in saying that something happened that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie."
(KEB again:) There's so much in here that can be taken apart and really examined - within oneself, of course - all this has to happen in oneself: the whittling away of alternatives, for a start. The emotional truth that makes it all worthwhile. The nature of one's material. What is it that is of no use in one's writing life?
Further down Bowen writes something that made a huge impression on me: that is, I kept looking at myself in light of it for years, until it had become part of me in the same way that Bootstrap Bill Turner is part of the Flying Dutchman.
Bowen continues:
"Plot, story, is itself un-poetic. At best it can only be not anti-poetic. It cannot claim a single poetic licence. It must be reasoned - only from the moment when its non-otherness, its only-possibleness has become apparent. Novelist must always have one foot, sheer circumstantiality, to stand on, whatever the other foot may be doing. (N.B. Much to be learned from storytelling to children. Much to be learned from detective story - especially non-irrelevance.) (See Relevance.)
Flaubert's 'Il faut interesser'. Stress on manner of telling: keep in mind, 'I will a tale unfold'. Inerest of watching a dress that has been well-packed unpacked from a dress-box. Interest of watching silk handkerchiefs drawn from a conjurer's watch."
(KEB again:) Can you see Donaghy here too? (A connection I'd never made until typing this out.) This image of the dress being unpacked stayed with me for years, and the handkerchiefs drawn from the watch are right there in his poems, like (for example, obviously) Upon a Claude Glass, or Caliban's Books. All good poetry has this quality of something magical, something transforming itself before your eyes, and transforming you a little with it.
Now, here is something really interesting. There is so much more in here that it's hard to choose, but I'll end with this, as a structural note. Chippy wrote about structure, and I am intensely interested in it myself. I think structure is a form of truth - the form of truth: a scaffold, without which no building can be built.
Bowen writes:
"Plot must not cease to move forward. (See Advance.) The actual speed of movement must be even. Apparent variations in speed are good, necessary, but there must be no actual variations in speed. To obtain these paparent variatons is part of the illusion - task of the novel. Variations in texture can give the effect of variations in speed. Why are apparent variations necessary? (a) for emphasis. (b) for non-resistance, or 'give', to the nervous time-variations of the reader. Why is actual evenness, non-variation of speed, necessary? For the sake of internal evenness for its own sake. Perfection of evenness = perfection of control. The tautness of the taut string is equal (or even) all along and at any part of the string's length."
(KEB) This principle is the reason why reviewers talk of something being "flabby in the middle" or movie-goers say it's "slow." Those are the places where the actual speed slowed down, and the momentum was lost. It is wonderful to think of this speed/tautness thing in conjunction with the dress thing. And it is crucially, critically important in poetry. In fact, it is the essence of elegance.
* Not so much that I actually finished the novel, mind.
** There are other books called Writers on Writing: popular title! I own a couple more. Also good, if you're into this kind of thing, are the Paris Review Interviews, published as books and now available online; Henry James' Notebooks and prefaces; Keats' wonderful letters; Don't Ask Me What I Mean (ed. Paterson & Brown); and a funny thing I have, A Piece of Work: Five Writers Discuss Their Revisions (U. of Iowa Press).
Last week in these virtual pages I wrote an open letter to the film critic Antonia Quirke, whose zany, madcap memoir Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers had filled me with such joy the week before.
One of the things I really liked about her book was the way poetry is a recurring, natural, just-part-of-the-soup element in her narrative - in terms of both her personal life and her approach ti film, to acting, to the way we make things. She frames things in terms of poetic practice; she quotes lines of all sorts of poems, just in passing, without feeling the need to identify them; she even refers to prosody! In short, she talks about poetry like someone who knows it and takes its presence for granted.
This is as it should be, and might well be if we had the reversed cultural experience Michael Donaghy hints at in his monograph Wallflowers (both wonderfully erudite and funny) - a world where poetry is simply enjoyed the way we enjoy music currently, without hush-voiced tuition, without separating it from everything else, without this fear of somehow getting it wrong. You know: poetry playing on the radio, in lifts, on hold.
Anyway, I have given my copy of Antonia Quirke's book to my best friend, Ms Rational Self-Determinism, and she is very excited about it. But before I parted with it, I typed out this couple of quotes from the book.
Quirke writes:
"Actors never seem to capture lawyers or teachers very well, possibly because they think they would make great lawyers or teachers. Great orators. But they're too musical, too fearful of monotony. That's why they can never read poetry. None of them. Why your toes are always curling throughout Radio 4's Poetry Week. No, there is one: the magnificent Stephen Dillane, whom I once saw play Hamlet as if he were a guy disappearing into the words, delivering the lines like he was reading a railway timetable, as Eliot recommends a poet should read poetry. The artlessness of Dillane's voice! You listen to Eliot or Auden or Larkin doing so little with their own stuff - or Bob Dylan singing, or even Tennyson captured on a wax cylinder in 1890 chanting The Charge of the Light Brigade - and you realise how the very purpose of the voice is to make the reciter disappear, to abolish everything but theear. Actors are never quite happy being all words."
(I totally agree with her there on reading style; I found this to my horror during my bad eye patch last autumn, when I tried to listen to several audio books of poetry, and ended up really understanding why so many people think they hate it. Unfortunately, it was far more painful than simply reading a book, even with my glaucoma. And the "poetry voice" adopted by so many poets when they read is just as galling.)
She also writes:
"Gérard Depardieu was a true poet, like Richard Burton had been. Because Gérard understood the endlessness of poetry he didn't overcook it, just as a great Shakespearean must be immersed in the whole ocean of Shakespeare in order not to be fazed by the smaller-scale brilliancies. You have to understand that poetry is being constantly transmitted in a casual voice to us by the universe 24/7, 24/7, in order to speak it properly. You have to understand this. You have to! But Gérard does."
She's very fresh, isn't she. And fun! I love that casual voice of the universe. I wish poetry cropped up more in things like this.
The reading I took part in last night was fun. Roddy Lumsden always runs a good night, good readers, good audiences. I'm not going to give a description of every reader: there's no point, anyway I can't, really, because even after you've read your stuff you're still sitting there thinking about how you think you did.
Well: I was! I had a new poem which I had still been beating into shape at 5pm, which I was determined to do because it was so perfect for the theme Roddy had set for the night: America.
(This theme is so broad it was interesting to see what other people did with it. A few had poems written when they were in New York, or poems about the influence of America on UK culture, and one girl read a poem in which she wishes she was American! One was a paean to American poets - Berryman, O'Hara, etc; two were about September 11th. Several people spoke axiomatically about the "ambivalence" "we all" feel towards America. I was the only American reader, which was kind of nice actually.)
My poem is a narrative about a critical moment on the Fourth of July when I was seven, one of those split seconds when you suddenly jam up against yourself. (I have another poem like that, called "Dissection of a Split Second." It's quite a long poem, which is of course part of the joke. Yes, of course it's funny. And poignant. Getting jammed up against yourself can only be inherently bathetic.) In my new poem, my brother took off his nappy and went running down the street - he was a year old - and my parents asked me to go get him. And I couldn't bring myself to do it - so my sister went and got him, and that was that.
Funny, right?
Well, reading something that new at a reading inevitably becomes an important part of its birth - what works in the mouth, what doesn't work, is it too long, were they interested, did they laugh at the end? I'm pleased to say I think this one did work, but it does kind of mean you sit there half-mulling it over afterwards, trying to gauge remembered reactions to particular bits.
Certainly more interesting than lying on the sofa analysing how your incisions are healing up!
I also read a little bagatelle I have made up entirely of the names of towns in the Hudson River Valley. This is also based on my childhood, when we constantly drove across the Hudson River going upstate and back:
Woodstock, Red Hook,
Hudson, Hurley,
Shokan, Millerton,
Bearsville, Rhinebeck...
Well, really all I had in America was childhood - so I triple-themed my choices: America, summer, childhood. In keeping with Roddy's practice, I read two poems by other poets, & chose two I thought no one else would know (indeed, they didn't). I had first thought of reading an all-time fave of mine by Frank O'Hara, "Ave Maria," which begins: "Mothers of America, let your children go to the movies!" but it was too easy. I just knew someone else would read something by O'Hara, and they did. ("Lana Turner has collapsed!") I tried Lowell, with his amazing rootedness in American history - and presence - but he just doesn't fit my rhythms. I couldn't accommodate him in the shape of my mouth. I wanted an American poet, a poem about America, and something that would fit with my own experience & feelings.
Easy peasy. First, a small delightful poem by Donald Justice about a family saying grace in a house with a plaster flamingo outside, a section of his "Memories of the Depression Years," called "Miami, Florida, c.1936." I love Donald Justice. I love his line, the way he uses caesura to create an amazing insouciance of tone, but one which also carries emotional freight. Unlike Lowell's, his rhythms are natural and effortless to me. Several of his poems are among my all-time faves: "On the Death of Friends in Childhood," "Ode to a Dressmaker's Dummy," "Men at Forty" (reprised in "The Swear Box" by Michael Donaghy), "The Telephone Number of the Muse."
And I finished with a very beautiful, unusual synaesthetic poem called "Vermont," by Frederick Seidel:
The attitude of green to blue is love.
And so the day just floats itself away.
The stench of green, the drench of green, above
The ripples of sweet swimming in a bay
Of just-mowed green, intoxicates the house...
Unusual for him, as nothing nasty or cynical or creepy happens at all! And more lush and beautiful, I feared afterwards as I sat on the couch listening to the other readers, than either of mine.
Eleanor of Aquitaine - just resting for a bit
The Grumpy Old Bookman writes: "Madame Arcati has two stunning interviews with Molly Parkin, part 1 on 13 April and part 2 on 18 April. Surely, few writers can have lived life with such energy and commitment."
That'll be me, then. Since my return to The World I have managed to achieve not one thing in my writing life. I read Joan Wyndham's teenage wartime diary, Love Lessons, which is not very long and is about as taxing as - well - as lying in bed reading something light for a little while. I've written half a blog post about it.
I've written, in instalments, half of a post about Life on Mars, now about two weeks out of date. In the intervening time I have watched two episodes of Doctor Who and thought I might cleverly incorporate the Doctor into my Life on Mars time-travel post. But it's half done and I don't mean the half where it makes sense.
I bought Poetry London and flipped through it thinking, "what kind of poems does Maurice Riordan want for this journal? I mean, that I write? Oh, I'd have to write some new ones. He wants different ones. Oh, and maybe not by me." Which was just silly, except for the part about having to write some new poems.
I went to the launch of the new Poetry Review issue: an exclusive little do in Borders, Charing Cross Rd. I had to sit down a lot and went home at 8pm when they all went to the pub (I say "they all" - I mean about five of the fun people of course, ring-led by my friend Jane "Are you two sisters?" Holland, ex-snooker pro, poet, jobbing writer and hard-as-nuts mother of five, count-'em, five kids)... It was great to get out in the world, & I had some lovely chats with people, including someone who was at the last thing I went to, the night before I got sick. I was shaking when I got home.
Met another delightful poet and editor, Raul Peschiera, chez my friend Clare. Raul's international poetry magazine, The Review, is currently being revamped: watch this space. I borrowed an old issue containing an early interview with my friend Michael Donaghy, interesting because it predated his 2000 collection Conjure: he was just talking as a poet who'd had an amazingly successful first book, and had published a second, and to whom the next collection was always moot. And Conjure was going to be definitively great. He sounded a bit stressed about it at the time but of course he needn't have been. Oh, dear me... Incidentally, Michael was the last person I knew who had gallstones. He was dead six months later, though it is not connected.
I ascertained that Baroque was not quoted in this week's Guardian Review.
Got a couple of rejections. Am waiting for others.
Didn't work on any articles. I read a bit of poetry by one subject. I talked a little about another.
Had a dream about a large blue china jug I have - from a Victorian commode set - in which it had been given to me by my dad, and through him by MacNeice. This is because Jonathan Wonham had written on his blog about a crystal vase which is the only extant "personal" effect of the 12th century queen and overachiever Eleanor of Aquitaine, who acquired it through her grandfather William IX of France, who had got it in the Crusades. (Wm IX was, incidentally, the first troubadour poet, and the court of Eleanor was the first flowering of the cult of Courtly Love, until Henry II arrived and put a stop to all that nonsense. I think he didn't quite get the measure of what he was marrying. And you can't even say it was because he was English.) The crystal vase is in the Louvre, saved by the fact that Eleanor's first husband, Louis, presented it to the powerful and visionary Abbe Suger. In my dream the blue jug was floating in the air, very prominently, and an indistinct voiceover suddenly became very clear and loud when it said: MacNeice.
It's a message.
But interesting as that is, I didn't work on my articles.
I drafted, one evening, for a little while, a bad poem, which will need a lot more work (preferably at a time of day when my brain works) to be any good at all. It's about listening to the recordings of Ezra Pound, which are now available on the web.
Just the one, mind.
And I spent what very little time I could just - about two hours, I think - being a bit of a vegetable - which reminds me, I am so sick of chicken I could scream, and I've gone off fish completely. I don't care if I never see another mussel.
Yesterday, exhausted to the point of emotional desperation by my few little social sojourns (all copiously backed up by minicab support, and involving little alcohol and even less food),* I had no choice but to take Mlle B into the West End, so great is her need for school clothes. I know: at this time of year! But shoes give out, shirts go grey, and they always clamp down on uniform in the summer. It was awful, hours and hours of it, and when we finally staggered into the flat Mamma was good for nothing except the bunging of a chicken (organic, M&S, which we were fortunate to have at all - I had grabbed it one day just because M&S is right in Victoria Station; and lo, the supermarket itself proved beyond me this weekend) into the oven, in between lying on the sofa.
And now it's Monday. I could weep. I've done nothing and I haven't even had a chance to rest.
Maybe Molly Parkin's had times like this too. Maybe this is what "energy and commitment" are really about.
So much for easing myself back in, eh. Now I have to finish this, have a bath, do some "working from home," wake up the Tall Blond Rock God and go to the doctor. No, not that Doctor. I wish. And then to work.
* And I thought I better had: you never know, you might meet someone. Otherwise I really will spend the rest of my baroque life sitting here all alone in an empty flat. But no: only one cute guy and he was married.
I went to a friend's birthday party on Saturday night, in Stoke Newington - this was where the whole thing fell down. I was delirious before I even arrived. And there was no one there I'd never met before, all couples from years back & school parents. Everyone was telling me how extraordinarily well I look! This despite my eyes spinning round in opposite directions like those psychedelic toys I had when I was a kid. I think they meant, variously: "You're not dead," "you've lost weight," or "I like your earrings."
a leaf-covered boulder by Andy Goldsworthy
It's nearly five o'clock of a mostly dull February day. The light's beginning to fade a little, and the house is empty. Lord knows where the Rock God and the Urban Warrior have got to, and Mlle B is at the cinema in the Angel with all her friends, watching that thing with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore in it. The food is in, because when I went out to get the cash for the movie I forced myself into Morrisons where I bought - among other things - a beautiful chicken, mushrooms, two lemons and a Savoy cabbage. I'll cook it all up in some form or another with some garlic and white wine, I think. And cream.
I'm sitting here on the couch with the laptop, because the iMac has a strange cord going into it, with a digital dictaphone at the other end - it has identical earphone plugs at both ends. I didn't even know you could get these! Up till the other day I had no idea you could even get a tapeless dictaphone. Durrr. But it has no instructions or anything for transferring data, and the sheet even said if you wanted to back it up, you had to record it onto another external device! What, like another tape player??? Lord no. The Urban Warrior says, get one of these cables. And he's downloaded me some freeware audio recording kit that works off the sound card, so it can read whatever the strange data type is that my recording is. I feel very high-tech.*
But not that high-tech! I'm so paranoid about backing this up that I've been carrying the dictaphone around with me since Thursday as if it were an egg.
I'm turning my fabulous interview with Ruth Fainlight into a sound file, back-up-able, before seriously buckling down to the job of transcribing it. (It took me about 35 minutes yesterday to type out 12 minutes of conversation. I have about two and a half hours of recorded conversation.) All I can say is, dear readers, watch this space! In several months (probably; I am turning into molasses in January) I will have written up a sparkling, funny, affecting, erudite, affectionate and witty account of our conversation, which ranged over a whole landscape of poetic and general-interest topics.
I can't give you any previews yet, of course, because it all exists in my head and (I hope, shortly) in my other computer. And who knows how it'll all play out when it's edited. So fun!
And the fun doesn't end there. On Monday morning before work I finally got my act together to send some poems out to a magazine for the first time since May. I emailed them to the Poetry Salzburg Review, which takes email submissions - hurrah! (They all should.) It wasn't too scary because they had published a poem of mine before. I sent eight files and forgot about it because it always takes months. So, imagine my joy this morning when the post came and in plopped a letter containing proofs - yes, proofs, after five days! - of three poems, to go in their Spring issue!
I'm very happy because these are poems I love. One of them (Imitating Life) is about looking at a book about the installation artist Andy Goldsworthy. The other two (The Brass Doorknob and A Crack in the Feeling) were written for my friend Michael in the months after he died in 2004. A Crack in the Feeling is one of my favourite poems I think I've ever written. It's all about eggs, and I didn't realise for ages that it was about Michael. I hadn't even realised that eggs were a metaphor for grief. But it is - and it seems they are. The poem even has a rubber chicken in it. Michael would've loved that.
Anyway, this is great news. It's a great little magazine, and it's only £10 a year to subscribe. It's clearly time for me to wake up and stop hibernating. And go check the other computer and see how that monster file's going. And see about the dinner...
* edited in months later: it never worked. Low-tech after all.
