stop press! Elvis has arrived.

"Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today in the sight of God (see photo)..."

Arthur Clewley is right. I was wrong. Read his post. And listen to the song.

a few bits and pieces

1. I hope you haven't all forgotten my fantastic first-ever competition! There will be prizes, however modest; and please don't be put off by the sight of Chase Twitchell glowering all over the cover (what is that about!). Deadline Monday. Do join: it's a pilot, there will be more.

2. Thirty years since Elvis died. Today. I remember it well, that sense of shock you have as a kid that the world has somehow changed, and you can't imagine it changing in that way - but it does, and you soon do... I don't actually think he's still alive.

3. I thought I wrote an exceptional elegantly dressed post for Non-Working Monkey's blog yesterday. Did you even go read it?? Where are the comments? She's going to come back from her hols and think no one cares! To say nothing of me, spreading the EDW joy around the blogosphere like a complete trouper. Go on...

4. You should check out this blog called Georgiasam. I'm trying to work out who it is: any poets with kids called Georgia and Sam? Anyone from the former USSR called Samuel? Or could it even be a carefully coded EastEnders reference...? Whatever: this is a person who's clearly not afraid to mention - oh, wait, but I am. You'll have to go read it.

5. LRB Bookshop last night, the launch of the new Salt Essays series: Fiona Sampson, Tony Lopez and John Wilkinson. I had to literally drag myself out of bed to go, and show up with a large coffee* instead of the usual lashings of free wine, and I'm glad I did. Fun, nice evening. Wilkinson however (this is on georgiasam, by the way) has some funny ideas about the tired, moribund English (sic) poets (eg MacNeice) of the mid-century as against the fresh, vibrant, "egalitarian" ones of the NY school. He describes LM's poem Death of an Actress as a "slightly mocking and superior treatment of popular culture and its ephemera" - apparently this would be a bad thing - and its first line, "I see from the paper that Florrie Forde is dead" as holding "the unmistakeable tone of the old bore at breakfast dismissively shaking the Times..."

He compares this with "Frank O'Hara's genuinely democratic spirit" in relation to The Day Lady Died - * admittedly, this is a great poem. I love Frank O'Hara.**

Well, bu does it even make sense to try to place these two poets comparatively in relation to pop culture? They're so different, with such different projects, with such different mackgrounds and legacies and agendas and hopes and dreams - and, you know, such a world of difference between London (or Carrickfergus) and New York, I don't see how this is even a valid comparison. It's an incredibly reductionist reading, though I say so wot am no academic and so can't fight fire with fire - and it is so like a boy to think you have to choose. All this claim-staking, all these soap-boxes - as an elderly friend of mine said last night, "as if they were politicians!"

How we larfed.

I did get a copy of Wilkinson's book, though. Not only was he charming and interesting in person, he also reminded me hugely of a boyfriend I went out with for ages, in and after high school - who later went on to get his PhD on one particular kind of irregular verb in Homer.

* The proof that I needed it is in the fact that I had no trouble sleeping.

** He's very dangerous to copy, though: I've almost had to turn him off in me like a spigot, because that insouciance of his is so infectious - but the genius is a thing apart. London is full of people writing just a bit too much like Frank.

elegantly dressed thom gunn

Thom Gunn!

The elegant, rock-&-roll poster boy for poetry. I've had a little thing for him ever since I was a kid - I remember seeing his books in the houses of my parents' friends, like the Golds, who were photographers and had an Anglophile book collection, in the senventies. I was fascinated by his name, which seemed to inhabit its own spelling system with its rogue "h" and the double "n", and (admittedly) I think by the beautiful typographical covers of the English Faber editions. "Thom Gunn" seemed an infinitely authoritative representative of something I had yet to discover.

And because of this I missed the particular discovery of Thom Gunn that was formative for so many poets of a certain generation. I've read accounts where poets recall their first reading of Gunn with something like awe, saying thyey felt he gave them permission to be themselves on paper. He wrote graceful poetry with both rhyme and metre - something that, as has been said, never really went out, and with which in any case the mass of English poets have always been far more comfortable than the Americans among whom he played out most of his career - but he did it differently, he was sexy, he wrote about Elvis, and after he moved to San Francisco he lived (and wrote) a wild (yet intellectual) life full of homosexual excess. He and Ted Hughes (paired by Faber and both at their peak in the sixties and seventies) were the sexiest poets to come along in a while, I guess.

By the time I read him I was just saying, "so this is what it's all about..." I've always found it interesting that the New Formalists don't showmore interest in him.

Anyway, there I was, and I've always loved him for his warmth, his lack of vanity, his poetic immediacy and of course the beautiful sounds and technical bedazzlement of his poems. When he died three years ago today, it didn't seem possible that he was 74 - technically, "old enough" - so "not-old" did he seem, for all that he'd been around - well - forever! My forever, anyway.

Love 'im.

Here are the obituaries from the Telegraph and the Guardian (with a wonderful picture).

And here's a poem that seems apt, from his last collection, Boss Cupid:

To Donald Davie in Heaven

I was reading Auden - But I thought
you didn't like Auden, I said.
Well, I've been reading him again,
and I like him better now, you said.
That was what I admired about you
your ability to regroup
without cynicism, your love of poetry
greater
than your love of consistency.

As in an unruffled fishpond
the fish draw to whatever comes
thinking it something to feed on

there was always something to feed on
your appetite unslaked
for the fortifying and tasty
events of reading.

I try to think of you now
nestling in your own light,
as in Dante, singing to God
the poet and literary critic.

As you enter among them,
the other thousand surfaced glories
- those who sought honour
by bestowing it -
sing at your approach
Lo, one who shall increase our loves.

But maybe less druggy,
a bit plainer,
more Protestant.

I spy, with my 85-year-old eye

Over at the National Library for Health, this week is National Knowledge Week on Glaucoma (it seems the National Health Librarians are as puzzled by prespositions as everyone else is) in which new research on glaucoma is made easily vailable to health care professionals, at great benefit to the community at large. This is not to be confused with Glaucoma Awareness Week, which was in June.

The first thing to know is that there is more than one kind of glaucoma. "Angle closure" - acute, as opposed to chronic - glaucoma is not covered by the National Library for Health's Knowledge Week. I suppose, because it is less common and more specific - that is, less of a 'public health' issue in the way that chronic, common, open angle glaucoma is.

Well, I'm a bit hurt. A bit miffed. I'm sure that making some up-to-date research more available to health care practitioners might help some young angle-closure glaucoma patient who otherwise runs the risk of being told she has migraine; but maybe they'll be doing that another time.

Come to that, I could have done with knowing a few things before I did (e.g., "acute angle-closure can become asymptomatic as it progresses over years"; "in fact, it can become sub-acute, as the angles narrow and the eyes become less able to maintain a healthy pressure in between 'acute attacks'"; and "nerve damage isn't the only kind of damage to the eye, so don't imagine, just because they say the nerve looks fine, that your eye has sustained no damage").

Other things I have learned, presented here as a public service:
1. If you are young, present with episodic pain in one eye, and that pain includes halos around lights & darkness of vision, and they diagnose migraines - ask to be tested for glaucoma just in case!

2. Classic acute glaucoma comes on at night, when the pupils are dilated in the poor light. If you have an attack and have no eye drops, or can't get to a hospital, go to bed. The eyes go into a resting position when you sleep which should allow them to normalise.

3. If you have glaucoma, read a lot and suffer from eyestrain, it is important - get reading glasses! Apparently it can raise the pressure (I've been asking doctors about eyestrain since - get this - 1987, and only just got a consultant to engage on the subject)

4. If you do yoga, headstands are out if you have glaucoma

5. If you have glaucoma and you are young, you will be an anomaly, possibly even being asked to sign autographs for trainee doctors, and you will have to ask for every scrap of information. Moat of the care is based on patients upwards of age fifty. Never stop asking.

6. Decongestant flu remedies, like DayNurse, NightNurse, etc, can raise the pressure in the eyes - who knew? Read the info in over-the-counter drugs.

7. Over-the-counter eye drops like Optrex are also out of the question

8. Acute, angle-closure glaucoma is more common in women than men - so where are all the women on the list below??

famous sufferers include:
Elvis Presley
Gore Vidal
James Joyce
Wild Bill Hickock
Claude Monet
Woody Harrelson
Alec Guinness
Astronaut John Glenn
Bill Cosby
Jilly Cooper
apparently, Galileo
Ray Charles
Jose Feliciano

See this week's Elegantly Dressed Wednesday post (coming up in, ahem, two days) for yet more on the glittering carousel that is Glaucoma Knowledge.

29 years today

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