poetry in church, but not church poetry

Last night's reading was part of a series Oxfam have been running to celebrate the launch of the Life Lines 2 CD. Which you can buy in any Oxfam shop or here. We were picked up at St Albans station and taken to the church where the reading was being hosted, by a 35-year-old local poetry group called Ver Poets, and as the car approached the place our jaws dropped slightly.

What a shame it was pitch black out - but the stained glass windows gleamed very effectively in the dark. The church, St Michael's, is guarded by giant yews, and dates from 948, when they built it with bricks and flint taken from the ruins of the old Roman town. Verulamium.

It's a trip outside London! Nothing in London is that old, the Great Fire took care of all that. But in this little building, even many of the "later" changes happened in the 12th century. The lovely round arches, so early there was no trace yet of a gothic point. It has a gorgeous 15th-century timber roof, and in the choir the ceiling, behind the black beams, is painted red. The walls are white, the pulpit is oak and Elizabethan.

We felt like we'd just wandered into an Agatha Christie story. Outside, behind floating clouds above the yews, there was even a full moon. Definitely a step up from that sweaty little room under the Poetry Cafe! (Sorry guys. You can work hard but you can't make it better.)

The church is built on top of where the Roman forum was, where they tried and condemned the first English martyr, Alban (now of course St Alban). Layers on layers of people, of our doings, and it is hard, even for me, now to realise that Alban and the Romans stood there on that spot just like us, no more "lost in the mists of time" or exotic or even just dead than we are now. They were just like us, only (to borrow two lines from MacNeice) "it was all so unimaginably different/ and all so long ago."

In the kitchen there was a very tiny arched doorway; I filled it, all 5'4" of me. I wished the circumstances were better for wandering around and having a proper look. It must be the most amazing place to go to a Christmas Eve midnight mass - but don't even get me started about Christmas.

The place was very full, by poetry reading (and indeed probably, these days, church) standards, full of people who had paid money and were keen to hear some poetry. We were to be reading with a Bishop. Walking in, looking around, taking the measure of it, and seeing printed in the programme the rather random set list I'd provided weeks ago, I quickly realised something had to be done. Out must go the poem about the guy who shacked up with his nanny. Also out, the satirical one about Adam and Even and the nature of "meaning" as fractured through Wittgenstein. "Dinosaur Opera" just felt too silly. And I think there was something else. The sonnet called Our Passion I had to read, as it's the one on the CD. It's full of bitches and crones and geezers, all kissing. In church! Ew! But I changed what I could, sitting there while the Bishop chatted to me before the reading. (I liked him tremendously. His poems were also funny and accomplished, and he read them, of course, beautifully.)

Even as it was, I read a rather sweet thing I thought would go down well, and it did go down well. It's beautiful: The Bog of Despair. Three people told me later they had loved it. But the line about the used condom hanging on a tree branch on Hampstead Heath kind of escaped my memory till I was right up on it... it did get a little laugh, though... you just can't win.

(Todd Swift, after the reading, talking about the audience and the august surroundings: "well, you read about a rubber full of come, didn't you Katy?"

His wife Sara says, "But the audience liked it, they laughed!"

Todd says: "Yes, nervously!" But no.)

Todd read well, his Houdini poem which I love - like an Oedipal version of Roethke's My Papa's Waltz. And I think he wins the prize for Title of the Evening, for his poem Auden in Snow, a description of a photograph I've never seen, but would love to, of Auden walking through a blizzard in NYC.*

I'd spent most of the day in bed, as it happens, feeling ill, drinking tea, watching The Singing Detective. The baroque throat held out until after my bit, thank God; I sounded a bit like Lauren Bacall (and they had a great microphone). A woman who'd been sitting at the back even came up to me in the break and said what a beautiful reading voice I had, such lovely intonations and shadings! It was lovely of her, but I thought mournfully to myself: "alas..." and indeed, after the break I could feel my vocal chords packing their bags and leaving.

The other readers were nice, and the audience definitely receptive, and the evening had a wonderful friendly atmosphere to it. As Su Lycett from Oxfam pointed out, the first Life Lines CD has raised £50,000 for Oxfam. And as she pointed out, that may be about enough to build a garage in St Albans, but it'll do a lot more in the places where Oxfam is using the money. So buy it - but don't listen to my bit, I've tried and it was horrible.

* We had to choose and read a poem by someone not ourselves, and were asked to make it a "classic" or something recognisable. For some strange reason, all those long weeks ago, I had chosen Part 1 of Auden's In Memory of WB Yeats:

...But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers...

a formal distinction

I like this, from Auden, in The Dyer's Hand:

"The difference between formal and free verse may be likened to the difference between carving and modelling; the formal poet, that is to say, thinks of the poem he is writing as something already latent in the language whcih he has to reveal, while the free verse poet thnks of language as a plastic passive medium upon which he imposes his conception."

Of course the sad truth is that both are true, maybe almost in equal measure; or more and less so at different times (sometimes separated only by a split second! No wonder it's hard).

a rag-bag of delight

fellow-Hackney-blogger That's so Pants, proving that it wasn't all pants in 1989 - click picture for more

It's a little while since I did one of my Saturday round-ups, so here are some of the things I have found interesting, touching or funny over the past week or so - you can decide which was which.

Politics is to the fore, of course. The Spine had me in exquisite tears with its pictures of Tony Blair last week (a long time ago, I know) when he resigned and we all briefly imagined that the past ten years had had some distinguishing feature worth preserving.

And Sweary Girl - who for those of you who don't know her lives in the Arse End of Ireland (she's just moved, but it seems it's still the arse end) - is hard at work describing what she wants to get out of the Irish general election on May 24th:

Manifest this! (writes Sweary)

"It being election week (are you excited? I’m frothing at the gnashers!), and with my being distracted from the issues by the whole moving-around-the-country-for-jobs thing, I thought I’d do my duty by knuckling down and outlining clearly what it is I’m looking for in a public representative. Ideally, he (for it will be a he) will be tall, lean like a nice piece of turkey, with a few tattoos and an earring and a shaved head. Failing that, he/she/Mary Harney must also agree with me on the following issues.

Health: I’m for it. Paradoxes, though, I’m against them. Y’know, like going into hospital to get sick. Or being offered that life-saving treatment just after you’ve died. That kind of thing.

Education: I’m also for this. More paradoxes, though; it’s like Marty McFly ripped a hole in the space-time continuum right over Navan or something. We’re getting better results in the Leaving, yet were also getin mo thickr. You leave your child in school to be taught in a safe environment, yet by half-past one in the afternoon the teacher has lost said child in the sea of little faces and is cowering in the corner, drinking gin from a crude papier mache bowl, muttering, “They just keep multiplying. And not in a good way. 8 by 8 is 64.” Incidentally, the space-time hole over Navan may account for Hector O’Huckleberryfinn.

Immigration: Tis fucking emigration we need, for Jaysus sake… "

Wales' top stripper, meanwhile, is living the literary life. 'Club Gabby' is the new poetry group of Chip Dale's Romanian popstar girlfriend, and this is not the sort of gathering you'd want to see when you emerge from your bedroom at nearly lunchtime, wearing only your sleeping thong... even if it is Auden's centenary year:

"She held up the book. ‘Oh, I took it from your poetry shelf,’ she replied. ‘We play poem game.’

‘A poem game?’

‘Like drinking game but it involves poems.’ She looked at my face and must have recognised the look of mild curiosity. ‘We take turns,’ she began to explain.’ We each pick a poem at random and then we read it. Then we rip it out and eat it.’

‘You do what?’

‘It’s poetry, Chippy! You wouldn’t understand.’

‘You know,’ said a voice from the crowd. ‘We internalise the mystery… It's ruminatio of the word...’

‘You’ve been eating my English Auden?’ I sobbed, snatching the book from her crocus scented fingers. ‘Do you know how much this cost? It’s a Faber & Faber…’

‘And very tasty it was too,’ said a man sitting on the window seat. He was picking his teeth with his little finger. ‘I’ve just eaten the Night Mail and it went down lovely,’ he said..."

Read the rest.

Regular readers will be aware of my fondness for the Emotional Blackmailer's Handbook. They will also be aware of my fondness for London itself, in all its squalid splendour. They will also be aware of my penchant for experiencing, sometimes, even the most ordinary event as if it were some strange otherworldly sign, which I suppose accounts for the poetry. To combine all these wonderful things, check out Tristan's recent posts on the Albert Memorial: 'like the pearly gates without the pearls'. My favourite pictures are the ones of the sculptures against the grey sky.

Erin O'Brien, who is guesting over at Edward Champion's place this week, believes like me in the power of objects. Somewhere in the trail of links that goes with a post about her brother's suicide and subsequent demonisation in the press - he was the author of the original novel of Leaving Las Vegas (and that is not something you'd wish on any family) - she reveals that no one quite knows what to do with the gun with which he shot himself. Well - no.

Music to my eyes, of course, is Dave Hill's post in his excellent new Hackey-centric blog, Claptonian, which links directly to my Lucille Ball post (which, if I do say so, makes even me laugh, though it didn't at the time). It's like being Lucille Ball all over again!

scapegoat and saviour: auden again

Louis MacNeice: he couldn't do that now

The centenary continues: here in Baroque Mansions we still blow the candles out every night. Faber's new Auden Collected is finally out,* and Ian Sansom has had a bet each way after reading it.

It is interesting how the centenary this year has been like an opportunity to rake open all the old festering resentment towards him for defecting to America in 1939. I've always taken Auden's greatness so much for granted (more on this later in the year, as MacNeice's centenary gets nearer) that I wasn;t even aware of how much anti feeling there is. (And of course some people's only reason for ever saying something nice is so they can pause meaningfully and then say, "but...")

Sansom's review in Saturday's Guardian begins grippingly:

"WH Auden is to blame for everything that went wrong with English poetry. Absurdly overpraised when young, he remained naive and immature both as a person and as a poet, his preciosities and youthful good looks becoming vile and monstrous. He was dictatorial in his approach and his opinions, imprisoned by his own intelligence, intellectually dishonest, atrociously showy in diction and lexical range, technically ingenious rather than profound, pathetically at the mercy of contemporary fashions and ideas, facetious, self-praising, vulgar and ultimately merely quaint."

Well! I don't know about you but I was rather shocked. Great paragraph, though. Maybe I'm just a bit delicate, what with the gall bladder and everything. Sansom continues, reviewing the book in a responsible and conscientious manner, until the end: "if Auden is the scapegoat of English poetry, and he is and deserves to be, then he is also its saviour." Still a bit harsh, you might feel, though I know people who utterly deride Auden. I don't understand it (just as I never understand people who deride James Merrill for being arch, of all things: you might as well write poems about dinner parties as anything else), but this review brings me closer to understanding that it might have to do with leaving the second half off the quoted sentence. Then again, the conundrum is troublingly encapsulated in a stanza claimed by Sansom to be "Auden's most perfect stanza":**

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

This stanza is not what I was expecting to see after that sentence. It is one I have always enjoyed, and it is utter Auden in its cadences and tone. Yes. But is it most perfect Auden? Isn't there something bathetic about those reindeer? They are very much reindeer viewed through the window of a very English imagination. I have never once read it without somehow, somewhere, feeling a naughty urge to giggle. Is this stanza, in its perfected Auden-ness, telling us that we must learn to expect irony with every meal? Can we never do without it?

After all, we know Auden could write movingly about love, death and hopelessness. It may be that claiming this as the perfect auden stanza is another way of shrinking him down to size - rather like those reindeer, who always seem to me very small, for all that the herds are vast.The Auden tone is usually at least a little bit complicated. At his best, including in the above stanza, he is also strangely (even if very fast-) moving.***

So after all, do I really want this book? Sansom hasn't really told me if I should. He has told me I should read Auden, which I can do anyway in my Collected Shorter Poems, Collected Longer Poems, Letters From Iceland, The Shield of Achilles, or The English Auden. (To be honest, I sometimes wonder if the reason I found Auden so daunting for so many years was because he came spread out through so many books.) I might be afraid of collecting him up all in one place: would it make him appear somehow smaller, more easily comprehended? Would that be a good thing? But the edition itself gets a rather short treatment. What is it about this Collected, aside from the fact that somebody thought they ought to do it as it was the centenary, that should make me want to have it? I mean, have to have it?

I didn't think all of this through instantaneously. But after I read the review I did a curious thing. I went onto amazon.co.uk, and dawdled through a few book searches and things, as you do. And then I bought the magisterial new MacNeice Collected. (But anyway that's understandable: I bought it for the picture.)

(Disclaimer: this whole post needs editing and if I get a chance I will do it. Words cannot describe how tired I was when I wrote it. Though it does approximately get at what I think.)

* a watched pot that boiled.

** I was sort of expecting to see this, which even now always somehow surprises with its final rhyme:

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

*** Would I be happy if I'd written it? Yes.

... and the prize for best comment goes to...

Ladies and gentlemen, can I please direct your attention back to February 21st, 2007? It was the day WH Auden would have turned 100. Here at Baroque Mansions we hung out the bunting and celebrated with a new poem, made largely - not entirely - of lines from Uncle Wiz himself (though Madame here forgot to keep notes of where the pertinent lines came from! I know I have the book around somewhere...).

I think it is time to address attention to this post again, if only to address attention to the comment it received today. I've never made a post out of someone's comment before, much less the comment of an unknown poetaster. However, there is such a thing as progress, and just as Marie Antoinette might have put the world's first feather pompoms on her pink satin mules, I intend to break with tradition right now and post it.

Heiranonymous Bosh, Poetaster De Luxe, writes:

"Madame B., thank you for your delightful poem, which I like very much in all its alleged rough-hewness. I shall be sharing it with sympatico friends. It is a graceful & generous hommage to such a rare one as Auden, who did indeed (though certainly no angel himself) commit some of the 20th century's "sanest, most liberal, & chaste poetry in English", successfully interpenetrating the sacred & the profane in a "user-friendly" poetic fashion.

Incidentally, I have just chanced upon this interesting site of yours via a bewildering cascade of chance search-engine turns & twists whilst researching-- of all things-- the celebrated (or, more mischievously put, "the sainted") Maya Angelou as viewed speculatively in the light of both Vladimir Nabakov's provocatively iconoclastic ideas regarding the poshlost & its viral inroads into the heart of man in these days of the global exploitation of Admass, & Paul Fussell's conception of the ultimately barbaric jingoist-consumerist faux-Culture swindle of BAD. (Whew! Try saying that a few times!)

Just pour lagniappe, a few perhaps germane things I've also just chanced upon:

One Patrick Kurp, of Houston, Texas, usefully referencing The Prolific and the Devourer in a caustic protest against the misuse of poetry in the forlorn-hopery of misconceived Good Causing:
http://www.evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/2007/02/poets-against-war.html

"It would be a hard heart and a dull head that could condemn, except with a sacred awe, such poets for anything that they have done-- or rather, for anything that has been done to them: for they have never _made_ anything, they have suffered their poetry as helplessly as they have anything else; so that it is neither the imitation of life nor a slice of life but life itself-- beyond good, beyond evil, and certainly beyond reviewing."

I'm sure most will be familiar with this sharp-edged but humane piece by Randall Jarrell, but it is evergreen & bears another look:
http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/gunner/bad-poets.html

The Pakistani-American writer Maliha Masood spotlighting (against the current deep-darkness of the geopolitical background) a past master of what is arguably the most radical poetry conceivable who, though long dead, is currently holding his spirited, lively, & unyieldingly Sufic own against the rigours of attempted feel-good co-option by out-&-out frauds and even well-meaning but ignorant acolytes of the current terror-drenched dispensation of global provincialism & fuzzy-thinking/feeling (Whew! Try... O skip it):
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FJ06Aa01.html

Roger Downey's "In-sufi-cient: Translating Rumi's verse into the stuff of self-help books"--Traduttore, tradittore:
http://www.seattleweekly.com/arts/0141/arts-downey.php

Recently-read joke which I stared at, mind-nulled, for several seconds, like an emu contemplating a chrome lug-nut, before reaching Epiphany:
"Don't you know the King's English?"
"No, sir, is he?"

I am looking forward to perusing your site at greater length. Cheers!"

Ms B says cheers to you too, Mr Bosh.

Oh, and by the way - by following the links I came to a home page that seems to belong to Mr Bosh, and bless me if I didn't find a description of myself there!

"Button-cute, rapier-keen, cucumber-cool, and gall-bitter..." -- S.J. Perelman.

twang my thog

Okay, I have a little confession to make. This is a blogging confession - as you know, bloggers are honour-bound to blog about blogging sometimes - it's in the Blogger's Code, and I like to nod in the direction of the guidelines sometimes, just to be on the safe side.

(Sometime I'll tell you about the little thing I have for Geoffrey Rush.)

Well, the thing I did is, I acted like a 2nd-grader in the playground. The other day I discovered - so late in life, and I don't even remember how - Chip Dale's wonderful Diary, and I read his post all about how he had been nominated as a "thogger" - that is, a thinking blogger, a blogger who makes someone think. He had, as it's a meme, nominated five more bloggers, ones who make him think. But by the time I got to the end of his post* and into the comments box** I was so gutted that I wasn't one of Chip Dale's fave bloggers of all, and why should I be? you ask. Not everyone can be stalking the halls of Baroque Mansions all the time (capacious dwelling though it is), and even 15 minutes earlier I had never heard of Chip Dale himself! - As I say, I was so overcome with the ignominy of my position of being unthogged by Chippy of the Dales that I left him a comment saying it was all so unfair and too late for happiness and how I wished he could have nominated meeee.

And guess what happened next. He did.

I'm 5b on his list. I love Chip Dale.

But it just feels so cheap! Did I really make him think? Or did I just make him point, and laugh?

Be that as it may, I am honoured as well as chuffed, and will assume I made Chippy think. Maybe, as he says below, it is best not to ask about what. And now, tagged as I am, I am going to nominate five bloggers who make me think. Or maybe 2 and a half.

1. No, it's no good. Everything makes me think. Let me think about this.



* (as the actress said to the bishop.) ...part of which reads as follows:

"Anyway, the reason I’m working so late" (writes Chippy) "is that I’ve been nominated for a Thogger.

You might want to read that again.

When I got the call, I mistakenly thought it was a ‘Thonger’, which, as you probably know, is the highest accolade in world stripping. No UK stripper has yet won a Thonger, let along a chap from Wales. I thought my life was about to change for the better and I’d become the world ambassador to the world’s exhibitionists, gyrators, lap dancers, and thonglateers. You can imagine my disappointment when Gabby pointed out that it said Thogger, not Thonger.

That’s the problem with these Romanians. They’re so perceptive.

After I’d finished crying, I reread the citation and discovered that Trixy considers that I’m a blogger who makes her think. Think about what, you probably wonder? Well I think it’s probably not a good idea to ask. I try my best, of course, but I never seem to become anything more than a man in thong. I sometimes wonder if an education will come to nothing unless I mention my private parts every hundred words. If I gave you a choice between lots of observations about my wang or something insightful about Auden, I suspect the wang would win every time. Which is typical of the British mentality. I’m also sure Auden wrote a poem about it as he had a similar problem."

** (as the actress said to the bishop)

auden again - the centenary's only just started

Sorry: more Auden. He's everywhere. Ian Sansom says, in the Telegraph: "...it can be truly shocking, the work of a great artist, in its magnitude and in scope."

Of course he's stolen his syntax there from the old master.

And isn't it true! How often have you felt shocked, reading something, that someone could be so fruitful, so abundant - know so much, have so many ideas, be so big. I'm so glad he put it like this.

It's a wonderful vivid article. Beginning with a disarming story about how Sansom left his job at Foyles (where Ms B never bought a book from him, alas: I never shopped there, so put off was I by a) the fact that Christina Foyle wouldn't let the shop be unionised - my horror outlasted Christina Foyle & indeed persists to this day as a prejudice - and b) the queues) to start a PhD on Auden, it finishes like this:

"He is everywhere, if you look, in early Philip Larkin, in James Fenton, John Ashbery, Derek Walcott, Paul Muldoon, and particularly memorably in Gavin Ewart's ribald "The Short Blake-Style Gnomic Epigram", which reads simply, "A voice was heard from a bottle of hock, saying:/ I am the ghost of W H Auden's cock!" Isn't the character Hilary in Alan Bennett's play The Old Country a little bit like Auden? And that's him, for certain, as the detective Nigel Strangeways in Day-Lewis's novel A Question of Proof . I've slipped him into my own books, too, in quotation and disguised as minor characters. Like God, or a first love, he's gone, but not forgotten."

elegantly dressed Auden

WH Auden was born 100 years ago this very day. I think I need say nothing about his elegance: just look at the picture.

February 21, 2007: Based on Lines from Auden
(a very fresh and rough draft, unfortunately)

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after:
no one, not even Cambridge was to blame.
He knew human folly like the back of his hand
and forgave us our folly in his own name.

Therefore we love him because his judgements are so
apposite to the dilemma in which we find ourselves;
he who from these lands of terrifying mottoes
emerged into the blinking light of 52nd St's little hells,

where he saw and dispensed to us a homeopathic faith
in his marvellous long letters but kept none, not one word:
but no. He kept his own faith, that's correct.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd.

All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
what was it your shadow unwittingly said?
From life to Art, it's a painstaking adaption.
Pray for me and all writers, living or dead.


As James Fenton said: Happy birthday, Uncle Wiz!

photograph: Jane Bown

how DO we do it

Well, it's easy to keep up print appearances if you're home all day, no matter how ill! Back out in the world for two days, all the energy one can muster goes into making it through the day without a lie-down.*

Of course, this is the same old bugbear as always; for many years people have been saying to Ms B: "How do you do it?" And for many years the answer has always been: "I don't know." But of course it's a simple combination of focus, energy, determination, etc. Every working mother knows this. And paradoxically many people do find that the more you have going on the more you can do.

Two days into being back at work, therefore, and feeling like I've "done nothing" - meaning what exactly, I don't know, except that I have stacks of bills and papers and have to go see the bank about something but have been too tired to run around in my lunch hour, and still don't have a good list of magazines to send poems off to, which needs doing badly - two days in, as say, I've almost edited an entire document; I've had some big fat dynamic ideas and started to sell them around the organisation; I've written a good start on a fun (yes!) new poem, which I think will come out quite ambitious but is falling off my pen; I've finally found my Primo Levi quote (I had to buy the book, again, & strangely it was not easy to find) and put it into the article, which I can finally send off final edits to the editor; I've read this great article, about a police force in Mexico turning the tide on crime by teaching their officers to read; and this one, which confirms me in my hatred of Starbucks; I've been in yet another of those arguments about poetry sales versus "what readers want" etc; I've read some Auden (this reader wants Auden); I've read a pile of poems a friend sent me; I've texted the 15-year-old Rock God in France (no reply; he's back Saturday night), and kept up with the others at their father's house; and I've been for an after-work drink (my first glass of wine in 10 days!) in Thistle Hotel bar at Victoria Station, which is a fab place to meet for drinks, actually. You get that big old-fashioned hotel feeling, which is always a tonic; I could have been Miss Marple, sitting there. Next time I'll take some knitting.

Oh, but the trip home: I just wished I had a room.

* nb this turns out to have been the stones of gall.

lightening up

...and I don't mean my roots! Or maybe it is my roots. Yesterday's haul is anything but light, and weighs in at:

1. The long-coveted Letters of Robert Lowell. I love being a regular, I walk into the Church Street Bookshop and Tim says, "Oh, I think I have something you want!" Lovely pink Faber spine with a beautiful b&w picture of mad Lowell, in a wonderful sixties jacket, writing a letter. I had to leave behind two hb Farrar Strauss Giroux collections (not firsts, no dw) to make way for this, and I'm a bit under-resourced in the Lowell department. But anyway I'm way into Charles Lamb at the moment, and he is the sort of antithesis of Lowell, bless them both.

2. Further Requirements by Philip Larkin, whose reviews combine breezy readability with acerbic remarks. Not a man to try and put one over on. It'll be great bedside reading.

3. Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled: I got into an argument about this, having never cracked a copy, based purely on the reviews I'd read plus my own prejudices. (Baroque I may well be - and it wasn't my decision {it seems the little gold angels are a bit of a giveaway, which is odd as I don't even have any} - but fogeyism is just tiresome, don't we think? There's no excuse for it.) Fry's famous "arse-dribble" remark went down spectacularly badly in Baroque Private Conveniences. Why, some of my best friends are contemporary poets. For under a fiver, though, I thought I'd inform myself - if only to hone the argument. Also, people I love and admire have raved about the book's examples of metre and form, etc. I still expect to come out on the Fenton side of the fence. (Yes, I'm building the fence as we speak.)

4. Auden's Table Talk: someone called Alan Ansen apparently used to go home from Auden's lectures/dinner parties/readings and scribble down in a notebook everything he could remember that Auden had said! It's hard to imagine doing that (I mean the talk of people other than Auden; clearly I never went to dinner with Auden, I was maybe 10 when he died), but there are occasions when I wish I had. So here's the great man holding forth effervescently and camply on his opinions, never imagining OUR ghostly presence... and I was going to leave that in the shop? I don't think so! Here's a review from Peter Forbes; the book came out in 1991. I love this: "The great paradox about Auden is this: how can the writer of the sanest, most liberal and chaste poetry in English of the twentieth century also be the crotchety opinionated old fossicker of the Table Talk?" He goes on to say that Auden's pronouncements "flatly contradict" his poetry, which is what I've, frankly, always found in Auden's essays anyway. Maybe I'm wrong.

But who doesn't love opinionated, crotchety old fossickers? One day they'll be saying that about me, and when they do, I'll say: "Be quiet! Fetch me that lap shawl!"

5. Eliot, Collected Prose, replaces my motheaten illegible old marginless Pelican.

6. The KGB's Literary Archives. This is such a momentously interesting volume that I'm almost scared to read it. Contains the files in Bulgakov, Gorky, Pasternak, Mandelstam and others. Many pictures. God, Bulgakov was handsome. But I already knew that.