nature

Well, yesterday we did precisely nothing here on the mountainside. At about 5pm, when it had clouded over, I finally got my act together to hobble up to the pool. By that time my muscles and joints had all seized up & I needed the swim just to stay alive.

See, here in the sticks, there are no shops or cafes to go to, no interesting people-watching spots in the immediate vicinity - and, more importantly, there are no sidewalks on which to walk to them if there were. If I went out on the road I'd most likely be killed.

Of course, there are the woods, acres and acres of 'em, all connected to this property - but they are, if reports are to be believed, absolutely teeming with ticks. If you go there you have to wear sturdy shoes, and socks, and definitely not flip flops (my footwear on this trip, as you will guess, consists of two pairs of flip flops), and preferably fill your pockets with crumbs before setting out.

It's worth remembering that Lyme, after which the fearsome Lyme Disease is named, is actually a town in Connecticut.

But I'm not immune to the joys of nature! No, no. I spent an hour or so yesterday afternoon trying to take a picture of a cricket, but they were all singing their little guts out, or rubbing their little legs together, from under the shrubbery. Two years ago when I was here it must have been a bumper year for crickets; they were spilling out everywhere, by the roadside, walking in single file, just sitting there, lying dead in the pool poor things... Now they seem to have got the hang of it. Heard but not seen. It's a shame, because they are beautiful: light brown, and they look as if they are wearing little jerkins and breeches. It's hard not to warm to them. (I did, yesterday, get some other pictures which if I can ever be arsed to transfer them to the laptop I might share. It is very verdant here.)

The other night there was a big green grasshopper sitting on the side of the house, next to the door. I was out here on the deck with no camera, so there is no picture of him - but he was about three inches long and very calm, but happy.

There is a hummingbird feeder out front, visible from the living room window, shaped like a hot air balloon in red-&-white plastic. Apparently "the hummingbirds absolutely love it," says Mama Baroque - but your correspondent has yet to see a hummingbird. If I do I will try to take a picture of it as it hovers around its hot air balloon like something out of Jules Verne.

They also get Cardinals and Blue Jays here. I have seen lots of little birds, but nothing I recognise.

This sojourn among nature has got to be good for me. The other day in Borders we were sitting in the coffee shop looking at our piles of books, and Mama B suddenly says to me: "What will the poets do when the farms disappear?"

On the other hand, we gave the dog, Truman, a giant bone last night when we ate dinner and he was much better about jumping up on the table. Tonight: lamb.

thoughts from a master, part one

Selected from Wallace Stevens' "Adagia," published in his Opus Posthumous, pulled down from Mama Baroque's bookshelf yesterday. I'm typing them in here - there are an awful lot of them, and this is only selections - partly because I want to keep them and it's not my book, and partly because I'm thinking about a rarified thing: how we think about poetry. How we think about it as readers, yes, and also how we think about making it.

I'm writing quite a lot, and finding that I don't really feel like thinking about that too close to the surface. I could never, for example, do what Jane Holland did and describe the process of "fixing" a poem. To be honest I could barely even read the description! Too scary: once you've analysed how you do it it might never come back. I can remember doing my first-ever revisions in my early teens, and thinking: I have no idea if this is how writers do it! My methods have not changed in any real way since then.

I guess that's why good old Baroque in Hackney is so different from other so-called "poetry blogs" (so-called in my case, not theirs; they are much more brass tacks!). I just circle around the "how-to" part, but am passionately interested in the techincal part, and also in the more general ideas that might, if recognised within oneself, help to create an atmosphere in which falseness - of thought, feeling, observation, tone, even subject matter - cannot easily thrive.

Stevens writes:

Progress in any aspect is a movement through changes of terminology.

Each age is a pigeon-hole.

It is not that one purpose is as justifiable as another but that some purposes are pure, others impure. Seek those purposes that are purely the purposes of the poet.

Merit in poets is as boring as merit in people.

Definitions are relative. The notion of absolutes is relative.

Wisdom asks nothing more.

Parfait Martinique: coffee mousse, rum on top, a little cream on top of that.

It is life that we are trying to get at in poetry.

After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

Art, broadly speaking, is the form of life or the sound or colour of life. Considered as form (in the abstract) it is often indistinguishable from life itself.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.

Art involves vastly more than the sense of beauty.

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

Poetry is not personal.

The romantic cannot be seen through: it is for the moment willingly not seen through.

The real is only the base. But it is the base.

Abstraction is a part of idealism. It is in that sense that it is ugly.

Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognise this.

All poetry is experimental poetry.

One has a sensibility range beyond which nothing really exists for one. And in each this is different.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

There is nothing beautiful in life except life.

The poet is the intermediary between people and the world in which they live and also, between people and themselves; but not between people and some other world.

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

Poetry is not the same thing as the imagination taken alone. Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelations or interactions.

All of our ideas come from the natural world. Trees=umbrellas.

The ideal is the actual become anaemic. The romantic is often pretty much the same thing.

A poet must have something by nature and he must know more about the world by reason thereof.

The poet feels abundantly the poetry of everything.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

Money is a kind of poetry.

Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words, occasionally of the dissatisfied thinker to find satisfaction through his emotions.

The thing said must be the poem not the language used in saying it. At its best the poem consists of both elements.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as to have something to say.

The aesthetic order contains all other orders but is not limited to them.

Religion is dependent on faith. But aesthetics is independent of faith. The relative positions of the two might be reversed. It is possible to establish aesthetics in the individual mind as immeasurably a greater thing than religion. Its present state is the result of the difficulty of establishing it except in the individual mind.

The ultimate value is reality.

Realism is a corruption of reality.

Poetry is the sum of its attributes.

three baroques in the woods

Today, blissfully, I have relaxed at my mother's house on the side of a little mountain in the midst of Connecticut, surrounded by woods and trees and absolutely deafening crickets and cicadas. I swam in her little pool earlier - the first exercise I have taken in months and months - with the blue sky above and green all around. It is one of my favourite places in the world, that pool. It's my inner vision of happiness.* I must rejoin the gym when I get back to normal, and go swimming again.

Of course I could only manage a fifth of my usual swim, but it was great, and then I had to do loads of stretches - which made me think of my poor father le duc de Baroque, who is having to do stretches on his leg, because in his months of wheelchair-sitting the muscles have shortened to the point where they're hurting him more than the torn tendon that put him there. He's well known for his screaming and whining and begging, when a physiotherapist gets going on him: "please stop, please stop, it really huuurts, please stop, owwwww," he says. I'm sitting there going, "Dad, you won't get the gain if you don't feel the pain" - exhorting him to think of Jane Fonda - we're saying, "you know, Marty, everybody has to do stretches" - but of course, le duc has never done an actual exercise in his life. He's far too baroque for anything like that. His idea of exercising was, in his heyday, to bend over and get some more ice out. He just hasn't got the memories, see.

Poor thing. So picture me there up by the pool, doing my stretches, thinking, "I'm building a bank of memories for when I get old and past it and they want to stretch my leg!" I just hope when I get there I can remember it.

In other news: dogs. The picture doesn't really capture how overwhelming they are. Dogs everywhere. And the big one, Tai, has eaten my John Ash book from the Poetry Library. He liked it. He told me afterwards that he found the bleakness of Ash's dystopian worldview quite unsettling, but the wordplay and the underlying humanity of vision soothed his nerves. He's a nervy little thing: Japanese Chins always are.

* Don't get too excited. There's no such thing as a free lunch - with the brief proviso that I am about to be taken out for dinner. But it's so unfair, my mother's making me proof-read a densely-written 16-page newsletter about near death experiences. If you or someone close to you have or has had a Near Death Experience, and would like information, support, or a newsletter, please contact Mama Baroque care of the email address on my sidebar. There. Now the whole world knows.

Alexander Calder and the Puritans...

...co-existing peacefully in Hartford, CT...





















I remember this sculpture in a tactile, physical way, from childhood: it fascinated me. Of course, I was about the same size as the little girl depicted, with her little lamb; I would have been very concerned with whether or not she got to keep her lamb, and relieved that she had. The plinth reads: "He who brought us here sustains us still."





















Center Church, in Main Street, was founded in the 1630s or thereabouts and has a churchyard full of early sandstone gravestones in good repair. More on them later; they are intensely beautiful. Even their lettering is beautiful. For the purposes of poetry, alas, I think the old New England graveyard's sort of already been done, but I suppose one could have a go at this one...
















Hartford, however little is going on now, is extremely proud of its vibrant history in the visual arts. Back in the day, when the creation of a Museum of Modern Art was being discussed, there was talk of putting it in Hartford. As late as the seventies the city was buying public art from the likes of Carl André, best-known in the UK for the famous 'Tate bricks'. (Hartford's 'Stone Field', right alongside the old church above, which cost I think $26,000 and divided the community right down the middle. One morning the police discovered it had been vandalised in the night : one of the boulders had been moved 18 inches or so out of place! The vandals had been unable to shift it further.)

The city's relationship with Alexander Calder is much less troubled. Everybody loves his Stegosaurus, which stands in a friendly, sunny garden beside the Wadsworth Atheneum, the city's small - but serious and once big-hitting - art museum.

Ms Baroque is still in America.

elegantly dressed death and taxes

I was seventy-seven, come August,
I shall shortly be losing my bloom;
I've experienced zephyr and raw gust
and (symbolical) flood and simoom.

When you come to this time of abatement,
To this passing from summer to fall,
It is manners to issue a statement
As to what you got out of it all.

So I'll say, though reflection unnerves me,
And pronouncements I dodge as I can,
That I thiunk (if my memory serves me)
There was nothing more fun than a man!

- the immortal Dorothy Parker, of course. There's more, but I don't have time to type it. I have rescued a first edition, rather marked, of her collection Death and Taxes from the ducal estates.

in the sombre season

Everything is topsy-turvy. I suddenly find myself a person pushing an old man in a wheelchair through a thoughtfully-planted ring of acacia trees, to a bench, wheeling him gently over the bumps between paving stones. I nod and smile and say hello to Lilian, raffishly elegant with jewels and smudged orange lipstick, who likes to sit in a seat by the front door of the nursing home. Daddy is sort of hunched over in his wheelchair, with all sorts of problems going on in his legs; apparently emphysema fucks your circulation, as it would.

Strangely, my first impression of him - after all the preparation from family members worrying that I might not realise how bad things are - is how good he looks. His hair is finally going a bit grey. He still has less grey than me: when I arrived on Saturday for the first time I said to him, "My God, Dad, you're going grey!" That made him laugh... & tactfully I didn't mention the combover.

When I was little I always thought he looked like Clark Gable; now, happily, I find he looks like TS Eliot: handsome and distinguished. It's an academic stoop he's developed. But when he gets tired, which he does, his colour isn't so good. Sallow.

We sit under the acacia trees and talk about opera singers. Too late I realise we're only talking about opera singers who've died: Sills, Schwartzkopf - such a nursing home cliché! So I mention Angelica Kirschschlager, but although he has heard about her she has never heard her, so that peters out. I must remember the iPod connection cable, and then I can play him some on the laptop... he might not remember the previous conversation and he might not care, but he will like it. When I bring up Emma Kirkby, he tells me: "Now, she died young." (Note to readers: no she didn't! She's being made a Dame, in the new honours list...)

The other day, sitting in the utterly grim "TV room" talking about how I'd been writing something for MacNeice's centenary, he suddenly pronounced - in something like his own voice - "Of course, Auden is the greater poet!" I took issue slightly, and he asked me to clarify my position, and he sat nodding approvingly while I talked about Modernism and jazz and MacNeice's sort of colloquial use of metre, & how he was so influenced by jazz. Of course ten years ago he'd have defended his position more vigorously, but it felt great to be talking about that stuff, and I could see it did to him, too. I don't think anybody else does.

I said, clarifying still further, "Of course, MacNeice's work is uneven..." & he said, sharp as a tack: "Like jazz!" Too late to put that into my essay so I'm putting it here.

There is an element, which we've all admitted to, of wanting to make sure the nurses know how interesting, intelligent, distinguished he in fact is. We talk about how he taught us this and that; I give a nurse called Susan a recipe for chicken breasts and tell her he taught me how to cook; a friend of his comes in to see him, a Connecticut State Representative. We want them to know that Dad is, in fact, le duc de Baroque, with a strong resemblance to TS Eliot!*

The other day I hear there was a session of some kind, the rabbi came and gave a talk on some issue to do with education and equal opportunities, and Dad thought he had been interesting but hadn't gone far enough in his analysis... later when the rabbi came down the hallway talking pastorally with the little old ladies, Dad pulled him aside and said, "I want to talk to you!" and gave him the whole lowdown.

The rabbi went up to Dad's partner later and said, "He's really bright!"

"You don't say," came the reply.

We're talking about bringing him some food he might like to eat. It's a little difficult, because the place he's in is the Hebrew Home and they keep kosher. Which is fine, of course, but means you have to think through what you bring. There's a nice picnic table outside where we can have a picnic.

I'm thinking about the food he used to make. I ask him if he'd like some meatballs - he has been, in his day, the Meatball King - and he says: "If they're good meatballs."

I go hands on hips, "Are you saying I make bad meatballs?!?"

But he just looks at me. "No."

So I'll make some meatballs. Little ones... And when I leave I have to park him in the hallway among all the old ladies who can't sit up, the people dribbling, the people who never get any visitors: it's a gauntlet, they all want you to stop and say hello to them. The nurses say Dad is really lucky. Outside there's a little apple tree: see, the Hebrew Home is a really nice place. There are landfalls all underneath it on the grass, so I go over and find three nice ones. I'll bake them and bring him one.

* Going through the house is another post entirely, but one thing I have salvaged is his Complete Poems and Plays. I already have his Waste Land facsimile ms, with Pound's edits. He did his MA on Eliot & it seems right to keep both the books, I will just get rid of my old Faber hardback.

the ragged rock in the restless waters

... so in the end we must return to Eliot. Who knew! Here's Part II of "The Dry Salvages," from Four Quartets.

Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable—
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

There is the final addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind's tail, where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.

We have to think of them as forever bailing,
Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;
Not as making a trip that will be unpayable
For a haul that will not bear examination.

There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone's prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable
Prayer of the one Annunciation.

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:
The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.
Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony
(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
Is not in question) are likewise permanent
With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better
In the agony of others, nearly experienced,
Involving ourselves, than in our own.
For our own past is covered by the currents of action,
But the torment of others remains an experience
Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.
People change, and smile: but the agony abides.
Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple.
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.

what I did on my holidays

Something is very wrong. Most people who are actively engaged with contemporary poetry either feel that, or refute it, and endless arguments flare up about the state of poetry-buying, or -reading, or -writing, or -teaching. The debate goes in circles and never goes away entirely, no matter whether you're talking about Nielsen's BookData or other more informal information.

Well, I have had a revelation. I wouldn't say it was a road-to-Damascus conversion, but I was writing a review the other day of the "innovative" poet Frances Presley and I suddenly had a thought of such clarity (my first in months) that it might have knocked me off my chair if I hadn't been wedged into the smallest airplane seat in the universe, typing with my nose.

Thinking about it it isn't the most revolutionary revelation, but it did strike me forcibly. I was describing a passage of poetry based on some standing stones on Exmoor - "geo-kinetic" poetry which takes its shape on the page from the poet's experience of the shape of the stone formations, which is non-linear ("non-heirarchical") and which explores the ways in which meaning occupies words. That is, how does it? The poet splits words open (like stones) and uses pieces of them to make word formations.

Now, as I was writing about this I compared the experience of reading it to the experience of looking at paintings. I was in fact thinking of some paintings I saw at Tate St Ives this spring, by a young Cornish painter called Luke Frost. They blew me away, I was really excited by them. I went back and looked at them three times.

You could as easily say reading these poems is like looking at any "pure painting," though - any colour field painting, abstract expressionism, etc. (In the review, which by the way will be published in Poetry London, I cited Barnett Newman as the comparitor.) The aesthetic experience is essentially the same as in looking at a painting. The feeling is the same, and yes: I did find Presley's poems exciting.

Once I thought all this, I looked Luke Frost up on the Tate website. Here, in the notes for the exhibition I saw, is how they describe Frost's work: "Up to ten layers of paint – dependent upon Luke Frost’s selection of colour or tone – result in a surface that recedes into sometimes deep, sometimes shallow, recessive space. These abstract paintings imply space rather than define it through their mass and surface. The juxtaposition of contrasting colour hints at a relationship with nature. Working within the legacy of the St Ives School of Modernists, Frost is attempting to relate colour and form to create a space sensation that conveys a representational experience devoid of gesture and authorship."

Now here are some excerpts from Presley's Statement of Poetics:

"The image also permitted a movement away from the individual subject, the lyric ‘I’: the first person pronoun in this stanza is deceptively omnipresent."

"I, that is ‘she’, have taken compression as far as I can, becoming elliptical and oval (elle), who can’t see the words when she means the woods. It is a compressed line which, I hope, is simultaneously many other compressed lines, of which I can barely hear the echo without special equipment."

"The identity of words constantly shifts and changes within the language and the landscape. Like Harriet Tarlo I am interested in the ‘gaps’ in the landscape, in our lives and in our language and the influence they have on our writing."

"The non-linguistic dimension has to be given space to appear on the page."

So, my revelation is this:

Why the fuck, if the educated and/or pretentious middle classes can flock to galleries to look at paintings and have the aesthetic experience of colour fields and kinetic painting, are they incapable of experiencing the same thing when it's about geo-kinetic language fields?

Even more so, since in my experience as a writer and an editor and working in the public sector, it has come to my attention that everyone seems to think they can write. So language is apparently not arcane, doesn't feel offputting to people in the same way "Art" might. It should be more accessible!

Am I missing something? Of course, not all people are open to visual art, and many people go to galleries without ever knowing what they're looking at: they go, "that's pretty," and leave it at that. But I seems to me that there is more resistance to verbal art than to visual. People are more perplexed, more intimidated.

Is it partly because of all the manifestos and the skinny blokes going on about how alienated they are from the mainstream? (Duh. But FP is not a skinny bloke. And a lot of her poems are very anecdotal, funny, and even heartwarming, if not quite in a way Garrison Keillor might appreciate.)

I'm sure I'm just saying the same thing everyone's been saying for decades; I even have a shadowy feeling of having said similar things myself. But this realisation of having the same kind of response has made me really, really wonder exactly why it is that language-based art is so devalued, when people are clearly - clearly - open to the concept of the same kind of aesthetic experience in other media?!

I include myself in this, of course. I have become very lazy of late, even intellectually moribund. Well, that's over now.

my new found land!

I am in America! I did it! I flew the plane with the sheer effort of will, and while I was doing that I also wrote the last 1,800 words of my 3,000-word book review. Picture me, in the smallest plane seat ever, hunched 0ver my 12" iBook (which usually seems quite small, in fact) - which is perched on top of the two large paperbacks I am also trying to use for reference and which, when I am actually typing out passages from poems, I must commit lines to memory and then hold the books to me with my chin - hunched over, as I say, typing with my nose... talk about a sense of achievement!

And now I am in America. Speeding down the Massachusetts Turnpike in the car of my sister I was flabbergasted to hear my little phone ring. Amazing. We were in a large, air-conditioned car on a large motorway with gigantic trees and outcroppings of large rock on either side and I answered the phone saying, "hello? I'm in America!"

It constantly amazes me that I grew up here and it seems so strange now whenever I come back. Only yesterday I was riding in a cab through Regents Park, and now I'm in Hartford, CT, with its flat brick buildings and Mexican guys sitting on benches out front. I did grow up in this city but I've never missed it: in fact, every time I come back I'm more depressed by how dead the city is. beautiful old department stores on Main Street went, long ago, and now the green Sage Allen clock stands on its lamppost forlornly as a lady who has lost her way...

But now for the first time in 25 years I'm actually staying right in town, and a walk around this morning reveals some great regeneration work going on; the atmosphere is much more alive than it has been for years. Something is stirring. And my sister's neighbourhood is great.

It's as if every time I come here I have to work something out again. Renegotiate.

And it's muggy as all get-out here and hot. Yesterday was hotter: once, in a car park, I thought my jeans were on fire.

Baroque news, pictures, and reflections both poetic and otherwise will be forthcoming. There is some actual poetry which I know you will love. Right now, however, I have to do some things and then go and visit Papa, the Duc de Baroque, the reason I flew the plane at all in my present enervated condition, in his nursing home.

And I know it doesn't really matter because everyone else is away now anyway.

masochism*

Why do we do it to ourselves? In school we used to call it "term papers" or "research papers" and they were part of why we all thought the teachers were torturing us.

Somewhere along the line I developed Stockholm syndrome, bought some little plastic index-card boxes in different colours, and started to use strategic term paper topics as a way of deepening the dialectic with my teachers (eg, for the ex-Marine who never taught us a single work by a woman in a whole year of advanced-placement English, 20 pages on "the theme of androgyny in Virginia Woolf's Orlando").

But now, years later, here we are, arrived at a point in one's life where the to-do list goes like this:**

1. 3,000-word (I nearly wrote page, there - tells you something) review by Saturday, 500 words already written, ne of the two books not thoroughly read yet - basically, 12 hours to master something completely new, which looks hard yet interesting, personally challenging but, you know. Do-able.

2. MacNeice article (8,000 words) is back with edits I have to go through. Plus I read something last week I really want to work into my argument, so I'll do that too, I think (realistically) by photocopying the relevant pages of the source book and bringing them with me. Mysteriously, there is a bit where the editor has written "Fragment - please finish" and it doesn't look overly familiar. So I guess I must finish that.

3. interview with Ruth Fainlight, much still to do in terms of editing the conversation and adding quotes from poems etc, and maybe asking a few more questions to flesh out specific bits. It'll be great when it's done!

There are little piles of books and papers, like spontaneous eruptions from the coffee table, sideboard, window ledge, everywhere. One pile for this review; another for MacNeice; another for Ruth Fainlight; a pile of papers for the ms; a pile of magazines I have to read; another of books I want to read (poetry); and, under the coffee table, too much to mention but it incudes the pile of nonpoetry books I want to read. There's a novel I can't find, too.

Not only do I not have a study, I don't even have my own desk - and the living room is also my bedroom! There is simply nowhere to put things to get them out of the way or even keep bits of work together nicely. Tell that to the people on the Saturday Guardian magazine.

4. Small matter of sprucing up my manuscript for Salt... speaking of which I must make sure I have the up-to-date version of that file on my laptop before I leave.

Then when I get back to work it's going to be all scheduling and editing and words and liaising with the authors and deadlines and rabbits out of hats and basically my life will go back to being like one big holiday in Newcastle carrying coals with coalmen and busmen.

This little rant is just procrastination. You know it is. I'm about to go back to bed, I mean the sofabed,*** to read a "statement of poetics" and some other things (as well as the book, of course; I bought a very satisfying little notebook the other day for taking notes in).

Do I love it, really?


* there, that'll bring the punters in.

** Actually, it also goes: go to Post Office & post prizes to winners, change up money; pick things up at cleaners; do three loads of laundry; print off insurance policy papers; pack; get new black printer cartridge while out; go to the coffee shop because Skippy, who works there, is going back to Australia forever while I'm away so I must say goodbye to her today!; try and ring my brother; teach Urban Warror's girlfriend to knit; oh and the Tall Blond Rock God is coming over later, possibly with his friend the Boy Who Writes, who will want feedback on the two poems he left with me last time, which I have not yet developed any feedback on. Book a cab for the morning. Watch a DVD of "Swing Time," which finally arrived from LoveFilm; see if I can put LoveFilm membership on hold while I'm away; make list of useful phone numbers (eg, the caretaker) for the babymummy, who is staying here while I'm away (long story). Keys. And dinner. The only thing I think I don't have to do today is mind the baby.

*** Not as luxurious as it sounds. I'm too tired to fold it up.

a coffee hommage

"One of the finest things in life is the sight of a lovely cup of coffee, preferably with a biscuit or something by the side of it to nibble on between sips of its molten goodness. Non-Working Monkey knows that...."

...and that is why I have posted an hommage on her blog. She is still holidaying in France, lucky thing.

and the winner is...

Background Artist, for the best evocation of the elemental importance of poetry in real life, and for the way in which it is meaningful to the family, not just one person. Also, this entry is about both the application of poetry to, and the creation of poetry out of, one event, which is interesting. We are also grateful for the happy ending!

LIAM

You will always live
buried in a deep beyond
and beckoning to me
from lambent thoughts
eternal path, through
conduits of melancholy.

Your spirit flames alive
there, fused within our
heart of sorrow's
weathered love, and shapes
its thread upon the shadow
where our souls are hung
and bound as one.

~

This was written in 2005, two years after my youngest of four sisters - three elder one younger - still birthed her second child, and first son, three days after her due date.

She knew something was wrong a day after the baby was due, as he had stopped moving, and she had a three day nightmare ordeal in the hospital, having to be induced to give birth to a dead baby, that took 18 hours to deliver.

Her first child, a daughter was born deaf, something she didn't discover until a couple of years after, and so the still birth was a terrible blow, as much for my parents as my sister, as Geraldine is the youngest and one who is a pillar of the local community. A local girl made good, who never sought to make a life outside of my home town in Lancashire, and my parents are rightly very proud of her, and she is naturally the one closest to them now.

She knew the sex beforehand, and both she and my folks were very excited, as up till that point my sisters had produced seven girls and one boy between them, and as the two with six kids - five girls one boy - live outside the UK, my pensioner parents in particular where looking forward to having a lad about the place in their dotage.

I was in my second year at Edge Hill university studying writing and drama - also in my home town - and tried to write something, but it was only two years later this came out.

Feeling hopeless in this situation, i set about trying to find a poem to read at the funeral, and by sheer random chance - which, being Irish, i prefer to believe as fate - i chose the exact same one as Geraldine. Mary Frye's "inspirational bereavement poem"

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glint on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you wake in the morning hush,
I am the swift, uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft starlight at night.

Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there, I do not sleep.
(Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there, I did not die!

(1932)

But she recovered and gave birth to Joseph - 18 months now, the apple of my parents eye now, who dote on him, and Scarlet her daughter has had a successful cochlear implant and is now at primary school, hearing and talking pretty much the same as any hearing kid.


Congratulations Desmond! Just email me your postal addie and what kind of sweets you like.

runners-up and honourable mentions

That's as opposed to the horrible unmentionables, which no one has really chosen to write about here. No Bukowski, no Ginsberg (did he ever write about underpants?), not even any Frederick Seidel.

It was hard to choose a winner. Sometimes it's hard to be a woman.

There were two entries I'd have liked to give the magazine to, but couldn't in the end because of the winner. They are:

Ms Robinson!

The idea of an affair between an older woman and younger man became real to me when we came to study TS Eliot in English Lit. I was 16, the poem was 'Portrait of a Lady.' As a lesson in creating atmosphere alone this poem should be read. But it is much more than that.

'Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon,' the affair has run its course, the young man is off on his travels and the lady is desperately trying to pretend it's all ok by playing the 'I expected this and you must run off and do what I have done' card. But she's not happy. Here you will find some of the most elegant, cruel and poignant exchanges between a man and a woman, but the one that has stuck with me forever is when she says

"But youth is cruel and has no remorse
And smiles at situations which it cannot see"

And he tells us

"I smile of course

This woman is valiantly trying to hold on to some dignity and so she talks about things she's done and what she will do when he's gone - 'serving tea to friends' and you feel like the walls are closing in not just on them but on you. The smell of decay is so potent I actually found it quite claustrophobic. And so does the boy who is leaving.

"Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins
Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own"

Some years later I experienced something similar when I lived with an older man and he turned to me one day and said, "One day you will have to leave and do what I have already done."

I felt like the youth who had no remorse. I protested that it would never happen. But it did.

“Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall
My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,
I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world
To be wonderful and youthful, after all.”

...and...

Lara Pawson!

I am not funny, I'm afraid, but a poem that always makes me laugh is Wendy Cope's Bloody Men!

Bloody men are like bloody buses
You wait for about a year
And as soon as one approaches your stop
Two or three others appear.

You look at them flashing their indicators,
Offering you a ride.
You're trying to read the destinations,
You haven't much time to decide.

If you make a mistake, there is no turning back.
Jump off, and you'll stand there and gaze
While the cars and the taxis and lorries go by
And the minutes, the hours, the days.

I wanted it read at my wedding, but the woman asked to read it (a friend) refused, saying as a single woman it would ridicule her. I no longer particularly like this person.

Of course it's not so apt anymore, because thanks to Livingstone there are hundreds of buses; and thanks to materialism, most women no longer seem to be prepared to engage with a partner - they just want the Mr Perfect Who Does Not Exist. Bloody men, in their case, are more like Bloody Porsches.

Are there runners-up prizes?

Ms R's entry could almost have been written by me, which is a sure way of finagling one's way into Baroque Mansions. I think she has displayed a fine application of the principle of poetry seeping into one's life in an indistinguishable and symbiotic (and, er, tragic) way.

Lara wins endless brownie points for choosing a poem by Wendy Cope, one of my favourite poets; and by b) not really liking that friend any more. This shows how poetry was not just an empty gesture but represented something fundamental (even a short, funny poem) - not just lip service.

However, the sad answer to that last question is: either the bus comes or it doesn't. Love it! Just look at me, though: living proof.

Both Lara and Ms R will receive some sweets if they send me a postal addie.

The honourable mentions go to:

1. Ben Wilkinson: in a surprisingly candid confession of being turned on to poetry by Philip Larkin, he writes: Life is slow dying… the ideas and thoughts of the poem resonated within me… it's a small wonder, looking back, that I didn't listen to Morrissey and The Smiths or something equally terrible during those years."

And, because it is Larkin he's talking about, he finishes: "...the new edition I purchased ... lacks something that its predecessor possessed (quite a few poems, now I come to think about it). But since the best of those is about wanking in bed, the loss, it must be said, isn't as terrible as one might imagine."

2. That's So Pants: "Eliot was interested in the same things we were: Michelangelo, coffee, novels, walking on the beach and questions, all sorts of questions... Sixteen year olds are very interested in unrequited love and being able to hear mermaids singing but being overlooked as the recipient was something with which we could easily identify.
Prufrock is undercut with carnal imagery mixed in among the turgid and mundane minutiae of the narrator's life, which he so memorably measured out with coffee spoons ...We were also reading Sons and Lovers and listening to The Doors at the time, mind."

Doesn't that bring it all back? At that age I had a copy of Ash Wednesday cut out of a book and pinned over my headboard. (Yes: I did used to get bad dreams.)

3. Edmond Clay: watching a meteor shower, "Having reached a point of emotional resignation, resolve, a sense of wonder at it all comes over me, and the poem "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" suddenly can be recited with deep feeling, meaning, and it proves to be not just a poem for children."

4. Kris from Stoke Newington: on a poem by Maya Angelou, "It was quoted in a criminology text book I was reading."

5. R.H., for his suggestion of filming Robert Browning's great dramatic monologue My Last Duchess.

N.b., This list has been the hardest formatting I have ever practically done. What IS it with &$@!!§%$!! Blogger. God damn them for a bunch of imbeciles.

the computation of the competition

Choosing a winner is hard. As Robert has pointed, out, the mere fact of a winner is often enough to make everyone else feel like a failure, and no one wants to contribute to that. In setting this little comp I aimed to achieve several quite disparate things:

1. Get rid of my spare copy of Poetry London
2. inspire people to write entertainingly about something in a small vein
3. spark off a train of thought about how people do engage with poetry, and maybe learn something about the role it plays in our lives and imaginations
4. pilot the whole competition idea, as it's something I've thought of doing before, and I have another one lined up for October.

So here's how we've succeeded:

1. Yes, there is a winner! There could have been three or so winners, but I've winnowed it down to one.
2. Not as many entries as I would have liked, and some of them a bit short on the old context, revelation & sharing front, but there is always next time. Quink's entry was much missed but here in Baroque Mansions we do understand the imperatives of paintwork.
3. Well, I was interested but not really surprised, yet... however, the signs are very good! Clearly poems are playing a formative role in our imaginations, our life choices and in how we experience our experiences. (Mind you, thinking about the poems people have made this claim of, I'm not so sure that's a good thing!)
4. Definitely. There will be a theme, and I'm not sure how hard I should make it. Tell me: how hard should I make it?

weekend roundup

1. rain. Greyness, and rain.

2. babies. That feeling of having a baby in the bed with you in the small hours. I'd almost forgotten it, but not really. It really is an all's-well-with-the-world feeling.

3. Shakespeare really loved his wife, although she had a face like the back of a bus, had they had buses then, "and was the 'town bike'." She's definitely all about transport, anyhow, one way or the other. The sonnets were a commission for some third party, duh, and she put up the money for the Folios to be published because she HAD to just to prove the whole darn sacrifice had been worth it in the first place and that the sonnets had been just a commission. See? The whole thing IS, that every great man has a great, unsung woman behind him, and we need to make this case for the great writers of England. So why not start at the top? Germaine Greer (Dr). I love her, really I do.

4. chocolate cake. To be precise, the squidgy chocolate log from Delia Smith c1990 (recipe that is, the cake was fresh today). It's gone now.

5. Cat Power. We were listening to her this morning, the baby and I, and then Chet Baker. Because on iTunes, Chet comes after Cat. It was all pretty mellow. For a while.

6. crying children. There did come a point when I had the baby crying her eyes out without cease in one room and a big girl crying her eyes out in the bathroom, but that wasn't without cease; she showed great good humour when I appealed to her on the grounds of the baby; & we did end up havig a lovely chat. But for a few minutes it was touch & go; and/or it was all go; except I didn't. Go. Mlle B said of the baby, in the tones usually reserved for incredulous insult: "how can you be so patient!" ("practice, my dear, practice...")

7. bottles. I have scooped many scoops of formula today.

8. teenagers.

9. dishes. I have cooked in them, made cups of tea for other people in them, washed them up, eaten off them (not so much), washed more of them, washed more of them. I have been down to the new Tea Rooms in Church St (N16), from whom I bought a most charming sugar bowl the other week that I'm in love with, because they said they had other dishes to match; pre-baby I had agreed to come in this afternoon. Well. Two small boxes full, 48pc in total. A pound a piece, or £20 the lot. Bargain! It seemed worth £20 not to have to decide which ones I wanted. And the nice lady brought them to my flat, where I let her in with a copiously weeping baby on one shoulder.

10. dampness. Come to think of it, that is a theme. Rain, crying, peeing babies, dishwashing, laundry-washing (see "peeing" previous), handwashing; my bath, with the baby in her buggy in the bathroom doorway, terrified that my aunt would arrive any second with her dog (which she didn't, thank God, because of the rain - there it is again); water boiled for the bottle, water cold to cool down the bottle; dribble. Dampness. The need for a dry little top.

11. words. Not the best ones. And often not in the best order.

prizes galore! deadline tomorrow

Dear readers,

The Baroque in Hackney summer write-about-a-poem competition is still open. You have until 5pm tomorrow to write something aobut a poem that has meant something to you in your life.

As I said earlier, it can be a poem you loved, a poem you hated, a poem you wrote; a nursery rhyme; a poem a teacher wrecked for you, one you learned by heart, one a teacher gave you and didn't wreck; you could have seen it in a movie (even Four Weddings and a Funeral, if you must). Did somebody recite it to you as you hitchhiked across Asia? Did they read it at your wedding?

All you have to do is talk a little (in writing, of course) about this poem, and you could win a prize! You can write something funny, learned, knowledgeable, autobiographical, even sad. It only needs to be a few lines.

The winner will be the one I love the best, and I may well put others up on the blog. The advertised prize is a copy of the summer issue of Poetry London - an excellent magazine - and if you have that already there are other alternatives. Plus I might throw in some sweeties, because that's just the kind of person I am.

Come on! I'm curious: what does poetry mean to people? You know you want to help me out...

minding the baby

Okay, get this. The Urban Warrior, my eldest kid, is a strapping drum-&-bass prodigy and dab hand with the spray paint. He has a friend, met somewhere along the network of raves and squats and music co-operatives, who had a baby five months ago, aged 17. Or maybe 19. (According to Mlle B, who's met her because they sometimes stay over at their dad's house, the baby's "really cute!" and the friend is "a really good mother, you know!") I was a bit dubious but, really: what can you do. And they're all great kids.

So I'm trying to organise Sunday lunch tomorrow with my elderly aunt from Chiswick (who wants to bring the little dog she got a few months ago, who also happens now to be pregnant with her first litter of puppies; she's apparently much less yappy now, and her fur is growing back). I'm off to the States on Friday (barring surprise results from last week's blood tests), the Urban Warrior is turning 18 on Wednesday, and I've just spent £41.83 on a joint of beef & all the rest, including the makings of a death-by-chocolate cake (small portion for moi) with low-fat whipped cream (which I for one will be washing down with the foul-tasting potion I got from the herbalist). I haven't even seen the boy in weeks, he was at somwe festival and then in Cornwall and then working, for the builder who's (still) working on his dad's house. So I'm determined to make this meal happen.

Well, the Urban Warrior is wishing, as I wander through the frozen foods, that we could have Sunday supper instead of lunch, because well he's been working all week, and there's this party tonight which is gonna go on like ridiculously late, and it's in Brixton, and he wants to not show up tomorrow in some kind of a state or somfin. I say I'll call my aunt when I get home with the food.

Needless to say, just as my groceries start coming through the checkout my phone rings again: it is the Urban one again, saying: "how would you like to babysit for a really cute five-month-old baby tonight? She's really good, she's really happy - she likes everything, she really likes children's TV, no trouble..."

Why hadn't I seen it coming. The babymummy wants to go raving in Brixton.

I bark at him: "Tonight!? Overnight?? The baby doesn't even know me! What does this baby eat? Does she eat solids? Does she have baby food with her? Does she sleep through the night? Well you better get your butts over to my place pretty damn pronto so I can check the baby out and then we'll see."

Like as if I'm going to let an infant watch telly.*

The check-out girl goes: "Brixton?! I went there one time, I couldn't wait to get back to Hackney! It's scary down there! My boyfriend, he's down with the street,** you know, he won't even go there."

"Hey listen, my kid went to a party in Peckham once," I tell her. "You can't even get back from there."

"Boy! He sure likes South London!" she says.

Now I'm back in Baroque Mansions. I carried two bags of groceries through the rain. I called my aunt back. She can't come at dinner time. I called the Urban Warrior back and said I wouldn't be having that baby till dinner time anyway, so they can jolly well come at lunch time. He and la petite famille are on their way over now. The thing is, I'm stitched up. I'm giving it all this, you know - but the Urban Warrior knows what I'm like.***

I might just grab a kip till they get here. It was hard enough to get up today.

* But I might read her some WS Merwin; I do still have this review to write!

** Okay, I can't remember the exact phrase she used, but it ended with "street." I got the gist. I was busy packing groceries.

*** In case of the possibility of anyone reading this not knowing what I'm like, let's put it this way: I'm in some danger of spontaneous lactation. And the washing machine and bath tub will turn themselves on, and the child will know Meg & Mog by heart by the morning. And there's no way a child is eating canned babyfood in this house... have you any idea how easy it is to purée a broad bean??

tantalus comes to baroque mansions

Things you can do with yourself in the summer Part 47:


Brodsky talks about Akhmatova

Learn Russian. (Get started now and you'll be up to speed when Natalia comes back in September!) I have often been sorely tempted but I just don't know how I'd fit it in with everything else... there are human limits, after all.

But even if you don't learn Russian - and God knows I have given it the old college try, but I think it might be easier if you have someone to practice it on - do watch this video anyway. First of all, Brodsky sounds beautiful. Russian is a beautiful, musical language, with all its complicated vowels, and it is so densely meaningful that the meaning comes over even if you haven't a clue what's going on. I once cried listening to someone read Eugene Onegin in the original. In a bookshop.

Secondly, this interview contains both video and audio of Akhmatova herself and it is absolutely amazing. There's a picture of her with the (very young, smiling, adorable) Brodsky that is heartbreaking.

I set out, by the way, to write about WS Merwin, whose new Selected Poems (Bloodaxe) I'm reading (and in fact reviewing). But there were only two videos of Merwin, and in the one where he's reading his own work you can barely see or hear him, so that wasn't much use. Nothing ever being in vain, however, I found this other treasure - a rather Merwinian approach if I do say so. So all's not lost, & I'm sure there'll be some Merwin to follow. I'm really enjoying him (oddly, he's sort of like the antithesis of Russian).

me me me

Isn'ty it funny how the word "meme" is like the first two-thirds of my title here? Odd, that... anyway, I've been tagged; had it been by anyone of a lesser standing than the time-travelling Political Umpire himself I might not do it - but I know that if I don't, I'll get some sort of comeuppance about two years ago.

So, gee, eight things about me... me me me... hmm...

1. Descended from John Milton. Via his daughter Mary, one of the long-suffering reader-to-ers. Oh, I'm waiting for the day I develop as supple a line.. and I don't mean a chat-up line, though that might be fun too. If it worked. Meanwhile I practice my blank-verse skills.

2. Summer squash - they're sort of like yellow zucchini, but fleshier, with big flat seeds. Love 'em. Very hard to find in London, but they seem to be selling them in Fresh & Wild at the moment, for well under a tenner each! Right now I'm eating one cooked with asparagus, and an egg, and sourdough toast.

3. On that note, my pepper mill is a beautiful wooden sphere that I bought in Copenhagen for quite a lot of money when I was about 25. It has a Nissan grinding mechanism and I never tire of its beauty.

4. I have finally finished my Louis MacNeice essay, and I am assured by two separate people that not only is it really real (I wasn't quite sure, as long as I was the only person who had seen it), it is enjoyable! As one of these two people is the editor, I am very happy indeed. (In fact, his words were, "you've done it again." Thank Christ for that.) It came to 8,012 words including my name.

5. The flat is disgusting. I need to hoover but don't have the energy. My hair, on the other hand, is pretty good at the moment.

6. My idea of disgusting will not be the same as some other people's, but it is still driving me nuts.

7. I have a gorgeous new silver pendant, long and sinuous and twisty, with leaves and vines and little nobs on the ends of them (hard to describe) that was a present from Ms Rational Self-Determinism today. We went into our favourite jewel shop - Metal Crumble, in Church Street - where we are friends with the Polish guy who works there, and it's the sale! Hurrah! All of a sudden she held up this thing of intense beauty, said it would look beautiful on my chain with my other little baubles that I always wear (though in truth it is three times their size) and that she was buying it for me. And lo, it is lovely! It was half price. The excitement.

8. I'm currently reading, thinking about reading or about to be reading, the following books, all of which are in my home:

The Lyric Touch, John Wilkinson (essays; Salt)
Gods Behaving Badly, Marie Phillips (v funny; summery novel)
poetry collections by John Ash, Oliver Reynolds and Andrew Waterhouse
Peeling the Onion, Günter Grass' memoir
Selected poems of WS Merwin
Selected poems of Frances Presley
How to Shoot a Movie Story (I'm thinking about general imagistic structural technique here, not making a movie)


(P-Ump: you happy now?)

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.

poetry for all?

Yesterday, as stated, I went to see a very eminent herbalist - of the Miss Marple kind, not a crystal-waving hippie - who has kindly laughed in the face of my worst fears and given me a magic potion to drink. He says it is like watching flowers grow: if I look for changes in how I feel every day I won't see them, but if I look every week, I probably will. It's hard to describe how cheered I was by his predictions.

To celebrate - and hoping to do some research to back up a book review I have to write this week - I got on a bus to Waterloo, to check out the newly-reopened Poetry Library in the Royal Festival Hall. Now, I love the Poetry Library. I don't think I can overstate the part it played in bedding me down into the poetry publishing world: many's the whole day I've spent looking at magazines there (back when I didn't know where to send to) and borrowing books and books and reading more books, and copying things down, and just being happy and in my element. It's been closed for something like two years for refurbishment, during which time it has been a sad gap, and even its much-enhanced website hasn't been able to fill its place.

So I went, excitedly; I excitedly rejoined (yay!); I ran into my friend Dean, who works there, who worried me by saying he has pictures taken of me at my friend Annie's wedding ( but he says they don't make me look fat); and I began to look around. I did find lovely things to do and to read, but my hopes of research were a bit cruelly dashed - not helped by a severe energy failure shortly after I arrived, which made me decide to take the path of least resistance, meaning I didn't engage a librarian in a huge long search on my behalf. But anyway that's not my style; I prefer to poke around and find things organically. And I do know roughly the sort of thing I'm looking for.

In the end I copied some things out, and found some books to borrow (not by any means the first ones I looked for), and went downstairs to fortify myself with coffee for the trip home. Prompted by a comment on my last post, I've listed my thoughts on the new poetry library. Because it doesn't seem as much the new-&-improved flagship establishment as I was hoping. Not so much revamped as rearranged. None of this means I don't love it, and I will certainly be going there as usual. But:

1. Why are (some - not all) books of criticism mixed in with the poetry collections?? Jesus! What's that about?!?

2. The loan collection seems not much added to - it is looking, in fact, sadly tatty. And several books I was hoping to borrow simply weren't there; can it be that so many people have been there since the reopening that everything you'd want is on loan? Paul Farley's new collection, for example, was nowhere to be seen in the whole library, unless I was missing something arcane.

The lovely spandy books at the back - acquired in the past two years - are all for reference only. I just think the loan collection is looking distinctly tired and a bit depressing... I realise this isn't the library's fault, and the space is ridiculously small, and the website looks great, but it would be so wonderful to see it looking a bit more - you know - vibrant...

3. The loan collection up to, I think, M, is in the rolly-shelf bits in the middle. It makes browsing almost impossible.

4. I wanted to look at some Rosemary Tonks - well, I really want to own some, but it's so expensive. Why will no one republish her! Her books are hard to find and, okay, there were none for loan. But there were none for reference either! Only on mentioning it later at the desk did I discover that they are in the Rare Books Section. I hadn''t even thought about there being a Rare Books Section.

On the other hand, the selected poems of Harry Fainlight - just as rare as Tonks, certainly it fetches the same price online - was right there in reference, fine in original Steadman d/w, waiting to be stolen! The librarian didn't seem to see anything in this, as I implored him to put Harry in the Rare Books Section too.

5. There do seem to be far fewer magazines on display. I was consoled by one of them being the current Poetry Salzburg Review, which has some of mine in it. Hurrah!

6. The tables are both smaller & fewer. And closer together. The reading cubicles at the back are ridiculously claustrophobic, tiny and too close - you're practically rubbing shoulders with the next person, and with your back to the room! I will never use them.

7. To be honest, I came away thinking that my lit crit section here at home is as useful, and that there are some books - some quite expensive - that I will still need to buy, unless I were to take my laptop there and spend a whole day typing out, say, a whole book. Unless a wealthy benefactor can be found.

On the plus side: the audio section looks spacious, there are some lovely typographical artworks in the front, and it was busy - lots of people were in there. Clearly it is being used, which is a great thing.

elegant narcolepsy

I think this is the one I love the most. This is like a fairy tale. Sorry about the heavy border.
















It's quite fitting, I was thinking of writing something about these pictures today anyway, but as it happens I've been unable to because I've been in bed, exhausted, wiped out all day long. Talk about tapping into the Zeitgeist! This picture and the ones below are from a series by the Chinese photographer Wang Ningde, called Some Days. Each one is called Some Days with a number. (Many thanks to 3 Quarks Daily for reproducing this one and alerting me to the existence of this artist! It's a new love affair but I've seen a lot of pictures. Go to the Goedhuis Gallery for more.)















I don't want to get into that thing where you start saying what I think the pictures mean, or what they're "about." I find them very haunting and evocative and I'm sure people have written much about them. For now, let's just look and think. (...funny that you have to be awake to do that, yet in order to be with the pictures you have to be very receptive to a dreamlike state! Eh!)














They seem to be specifically Chinese on one level and also universal. The EDW angle is here: first of all, the clothes are clearly extremely important here, and the artist is using them in a way that is not about fashion. He is recognising the real power clothes have over us. Secondly, these pictures are intensely elegant in their composition, in their painstaking execution and the amazing stillness at the core of each one. Thirdly, the artist has not seen a need to go for colour, which would have ruined them, I feel.

I love them as much as I love Jeff Wall. And that's saying something. Very exciting.

elegant extra!

The more observant among you will have noticed that I have not yet put up an elegantly Dressed Wednesday post today. Ths is partly because I have been in bed all morning, completely wrung out by the exertions of my very first trip into town in oh, two months! (Yes: armed with the common sense and potion of my newly favourite-ever herbalist, I went to the Poetry Library yesterday to sit among some books I don't own, for a change. More on that later, if I have the strength.)

The other reason is that the only thing I have done today was to write an Elegantly Dressed Wednesday post over on Non-Working Monkey! Yes!

In a development almost too exciting, NWM asked me last week if I'd be willing to help out on her blog while she's away, cycling around France with a pathologist who cuts his own hair. I could hardly believe it. At first I thought I knew what I would write, but then I couldn't think of anything. Then I had annother idea but it was rubbish. So the other day I made my first outing on her blog, disgracefully using a whole post just to tell a very silly joke. (It is the funniest joke in the world, though, so I'm hoping she won't mind.)

Today, thinking always of her high standards as well as personal happiness, etc, I have passed on my style advice for her as she ventures into her new life in a giant fruit-basket in Canada. It is the first-ever EDW post on Non-Working Monkey. (nb. Some of you may recognise the dress; I featured it last year. I just can't stay away from it.)

I will try to do another EDW here too, making it a double-scoop-extra day, but do be patient.

love in black and white

I just watched The Girl on the Bridge. Can I tell you how much I loved it? I know it's really adolescent and probably tells the reader far too much about the state of mind of Ms Baroque, but this is a movie that makes me want to get up in the morning and watch it again.

The last time I did that it was The Godfather.

The time before that it was Romeo + Juliet.

And I'll tell you what, all of a sudden I really love Daniel Auteuil. I've never done that before - I've admired him, fancied him, even found him vaguely repugnant. I've never loved him before. It's the luck, you see. Or maybe it's because the film is about love. And Vanessa Paradis - phew! I love the spaces between her teeth.

It's also a film about magic - luck - chance - and fate - "an erotic fairy-tale," as someone-or-other called it. In one scene someone asks Auteuil's character, the knife-thrower Gabor, "who are you?" "I'm a fairy," he answers.

It's all shot in this amazing black-&-white that looks very rich and saturated. It looks like colour, even just on a DVD. It happens that I told someone today that feeling as if you're living your life in a black-&-white film is no bad thing; that black and white is a timeless classic and will never date. In fact, black-&-white is the repository of possibility. Right after I made that comment I saw the most beautiful photograph of a gelatin silver print (admittedly only on the internet, not in some wonderful gallery) by the Chinese photographer Wang Ningde. Now, look at that! You could just weep. And then I saw this movie. The whole black-&-white thing, it's true.

Or maybe it's the director, Patrice Leconte, I'm in love with. (But I knew that. He made Ridicule.) (And The Hairdresser's Husband.) (And L'Homme du Train. I could have written rapturously about any of those.)

This movie has a big thirties thing going on, it's an hommage. It reminds me in a few different ways of another favourite film of mine with a very different take on the thirties: Paper Moon (starring Ryan & Tatum O'Neal), another unconventional love story between an older man and a younger, vulnerable girl. At times Vanessa Paradis actually looks startlingly like Tatum O'Neal. I wonder am I the only person who thinks that? (The rest of the time she just looks like Johnny Depp.)

And the music! Big, fat and heart-swelling, with Benny Goodman thrown in. Yum.

Well, I must go to bed. I have a movie to watch in the morning.

summer competition! win a prize!

To celebrate the month of August - as well as the duplicate copy of the summer issue of Poetry London, retail price £5, that plopped through the baroque letter box the other day - I am holding the first-ever Baroque in Hackney competition.

Don't get excited! It's exactly the kind of competition you'd expect of me, I'm just setting everybody some homework. But it's a great issue of the magazine, with new poems by Ciaran Carson and Jamie McKendrick, as well as many others, plus some fab reviews - both by, and of, very interesting poets - and of course the usual impressively comprehensive Poetry London event & course listings.

I want you to think of a poem - any poem at all - that you have ever loved, or liked, and write something about it. Just something short, engaging, not too serious unless you want to be. Be funny if you like, I love funny things.

Why did you like it? Who showed it to you? Did a teacher ruin it for you? Did you write it when you were 7? Did you give it to a girl, pretending it was your own work? Was it Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall? Do you know it by heart?

The deadline is 5pm, next Monday, August 20th.

Please email entries to the email address in my sidebar. Please enter!

I will publish the ones I think are interesting and fun (which they all will be), and the one I love the most will win, and I will send the winner this copy of Poetry London. In the event that the winner already has a copy of Poetry London, I will send something else, which will be commensurate. Don't you worry.

And I might throw some sweets in too.

salt magazine and the healing balm of beauty

Salt Magazine has just been relaunched as an online literary journal; Issue One is online now. I've read only a few poems so far, but John Burnside's poem As Essay Concerning Religion has inspired me to print it out - all four pages of it - and take it with me to the GP surgery, which is where I'm going right now.

The magazine was started by John Kinsella as an Australian print journal, and here's what he has to say about the name (which I've always really liked, and wondered about):

"The name Salt comes out of the salt wastes of the Western Australian wheatbelt, and the intimate connection Kinsella had with them. Yet the magazine’s title is not simply a mnemonic for ecological devastation but also one of renewal. 'My cousins and uncle and I planted many thousands of trees in the wheatbelt in an effort to heal the damaged land. This is the salt that intrigued me. The grotesque and the beautiful, and the question of what — if anything — really separates them.'"

Now, that is something to think about. Lately I've been intrigued - well, in fact, plunged into ennui - by the question of what - if anything - really separates the boring and the less boring, and whether there is in fact anything at all that is not boring.

So far, John Burnside's poem is doing it for me. I also bought a bar of 70% dark chocolate, we'll see if that's as good as the poem.

"make yer point"

Practically the last novelists whose use of the language I have found exhilarating - aside from Colm Toibin, whose use of it is beautiful - were Roddy Doyle and James "Fucking" Kelman. The Snapper and How Late It Was, How Late both reduced me at the time to tears of happiness, fear, breathlessness - and hope.

Almost as gripped as that, I sat yesterday reading James Kelman's account of his early years as a writer. I know I'm middle class. Whatever that means. I think (unless you're Martin Amis, say, born with a little silver baby-pen in your fist) if you're a writer, being middle class doesn't help much. It certainly doesn't help you make yer point.

Here he is, in his glory (and with a photo that makes him look surprisingly like Tom Paulin, whatever he might think of that):

"Shifting the narrative back and forward, from first-person to third-, from third- back to first-, helped the process. This can resolve dramatic problems writers experience in "I-voice" yarns. I wanted the central character active in a present adventure, not recounting the one about a mysterious stranger he once chanced to meet aboard a cargo ship to Borneo. I tried and rejected the present tense; locked into one dimension, behaviourist, static, lacking mystery, deterministic, non-existential. Just fucking philosophically naive, like science fiction or world-weary detectives trudging the mean streets humming a piece of Mozart, to a backdrop of the theme from Johnny Staccato: the mental masturbation of the bourgeoisie, that was how I felt about the "I-voice" present tense. Avoid it at all costs. Go for richness, sophistication, infinite possibility: use the past tense properly, discover its subtlety. Learn yer fucking grammar! Do not be lazy!"

Here he is again, letting me back into the fold, sharing, if you like, my imaginative house with me:

"I still found difficulty in connecting with writers who had no reason to worry about money and job security. I was prejudiced against Turgenev for years, until it dawned on me how influenced I had been by Dostoevsky's judgment, arrived at through a suicidal gambling habit. I would have sat down for a game of poker with Dostoevsky but knew I would not have enjoyed it. I aye imagined him jumping up from the table and flinging a cape round his shoulders, This is too slow, too slow! and marching out into the night."

And maybe this is where I am now. Certainly I'm increasingly aware that, not only does the world not care whether you do your work or succeed, it actually doesn't want you to. Entropy. I learned about that from a book, too, in this case a children's novel: Meet the Austins, by Madeleine L'Engle. Anything you do, you do by wrestling the bull to the ground with your own strength, every single day afresh.

Here's Kelman again:

"I saw it as the fundamental and shaping struggle in each, the need to do your work in the face of the socio-economic reality. There was no place in society for your work, as with Cézanne, van Gogh and the rest. Your only requirement was to do their work. Who the fuck were they? These bastards. Who wants to do their work? Let them do it themselves, tell them to go and fuck."