Lou Reed and John Cale

None of the tv tributes which I have watched to Lou Reed, who died yesterday, have mentioned his collaboration with John Cale in the Velvet Underground. But it was that collaboration which produced Reed's best music, and it was the Welshman's experience of avant-garde music (he studied with Lamonte Young) that injected into rock music at that point a brilliantly discordant edge. Cale also made a brilliant album with Terry Riley called Church of Anthrax which I used to own on vinyl and which doesn't seem to exist on cd. But the fraught, horrified, yet somehow melodious screech of Cale's viola at the start of Venus in Furs is one of the most memorable moments in rock music history.

Christopher J.Koch

The Australian novelist Christopher J.Koch died a couple of days ago: he was most famous for The Year of Living Dangerously, which was made into a film. An early review of that book complained that it required the reader to know too much about its political context, and most of that was left out of the film, which focused on a love affair. Where Koch excelled though was in his ability to define the importance of political context in the lives of individuals, so that in his brilliant Highways to a War the background of the rise of the Khmer Rouge is made movingly urgent because it is related to the fate of the central character, a photojournalist called Mike Langford, whose disappearance inside Cambodia during the civil war initiates and drives the plot. His friendships with fellow journalists, and his relationship with a young Cambodian woman, are a highly believable emotional foreground which reveals the human impact of political disasters. And all of this is underpinned by Koch's marvelous evocation of the Cambodian landscape:

In the time of the monsoon rains, when the Mekong overflows, its tributary the Tonle Sap performs its annual miracle:  it turns around to run backwards. Carrying the Mekong's torrents to the lake from which it takes its name, the river enlarges the lake from a thousand to four thousand square miles. Whole forests are submerged at the country's heart; fish swim among the trees. Then, at the beginning of the dry season, Tonle Sap river flows back to the Mekong. It siphons off the water from the Great Lake and the drowned heartland; it uncovers the underwater forests, leaving fish trapped there by the thousands; it exposes silt-rich acres for rice planting.

Tebbit on the Iron Lady

I was in the Visitors' gallery of the House of Lords and saw Norman Tebbit, amongst others, pay their tributes to Margaret Thatcher. Tebbit's speech was remarkable for the level of bitterness it expressed towards those Tories who finally brought her down. In expressing the wish that he had been able to serve in her final cabinet, and so, as he put it, to save Thatcher from her friends, Tebbit hinted at something that has been missing from the recent reactions to her death. It was fascinating to observe the level of protectiveness that Tebbit evidently felt (and still feels) for his leader, but it also indicates how much Thatcher depended on the support of others in what she did, and there has been too much in the recent responses that has suggested that she was the sole architect of massive change. The vilifying that Thatcher has received from commentators on the left has been unwise in its emphasis because it concedes ground to right-wing thought in the assumption that individuals play a massive role. Another of Thatcher's ex-colleagues in this Lords tribute declared that she played an important part in the downfall of the Soviet bloc because she advised the Polish head of state to speak to Lech Walesa: this sort of approach ignores the pre-eminent role of economics and ignores to what an overwhelming extent the Soviet Union collapsed because of its economic weakeness in the late 1980s. Similarly, Thatcher's changes were possible because of wider cultural and economic conditions in her period of power, and far too little has been said, in the recent responses to her death, about the role of monetarist theory in structuring her policies and of its most fervent adherents in her circle - ideologues such as Keith Joseph.
That's not to say, though, that individuals don't make an impact and some, like Thatcher, make a much bigger impact than most. For that reason I'd want to join in the vilification:  in 1979 Britain was the second-most egaltarian country in Europe and we're now we're about eleventh. The changes brought about by Thatcherism (which is bigger than Thatcher the individual) have ensured that no-one from Thatcher's background will be prime minister in the foreseeable future.

tony conran again

here's the rest of the Conran piece:

The key point is that, in emerging out of a specific community, and addressing itself to specific individuals, the poem transcends lyric and enters the ‘magnetic field’ of the dialogic. Tony wrote some personal poems, but there is remarkably little in his work, for example, about his cerebral palsy which, for many writers with such a major disability, would’ve been the starting-point and core of their work. Instead he invented an outward-looking poetic which was as generous as the stress on gifts implies. So ‘Upright Slate’ explores the way that objects acquire meaning in poems, and the way that poems become centred upon objects. However, it is not itself object-centred, but celebrates how the object had value imposed upon it by individuals, one who carved and abandoned it, and one who later found it and cherished it, and gave it to the poet:

On one side only the flesh of the slate

Has been split:

Was it once the bed of a stream, this featherlike pattern

Rippling through it?

I don’t even remember

Who gave it me –

Only that someone did.

Yet he or she

Liked me and it enough

To carry it home

With hands that its dead weight chilled

To the bone.

two poets

I haven't blogged for a while and that's partly because I was away a long time but also because, soon after I got back, I heard that two poets I knew had died on the same day. One of them, Douglas Houston, I met a long time ago through my association with Hull and poets there such as Peter Didsbury and Sean O'Brien.
He was one of those poets who gets insufficient attention because they have a subtly shifting identity which evades convenient labels. That slipperiness allowed him, for example, to morph for a while into a Welsh poet, but it’s a clear sign of his quality that, during that period, he exerted on Welsh poetry a distinctive and important influence which helped it to learn new tricks more attuned to the contemporary world. The major figure in contemporary Welsh poetry, Gwyneth Lewis, has some marked Houston qualities in her earliest work.
Tony Conran was a major feature of my early days in Bangor. I was asked by Zoe Skoulding to write a piece for him for Poetry Wales, so I'll paste that here:

When my daughter was born in 1985, Tony Conran wrote a ‘gift poem’ for her, and he and his wife Lesley visited us. Because of Tony’s vocal problems, it was Lesley who read the poem, but it was Tony who was directing the performance, which involved a ‘toast’ in milk. The idea of performance was a key one for the Conran poetic , and one of my earliest experiences of Bangor was participating, along with student actors and musicians, in rehearsals, and then performances, of Tony’s poems, including ‘Life Fund’, which was ‘designed as a cantata’ but was made to work ‘as a piece for choral speaking, providing opportunities for the producer to play his full chorus against smaller groups or soloists’.

                It was clearly this that led eventually to Tony’s very successful verse dramas, such as Branwen, but the idea of performance has a wider significance for Tony’s work as a whole, especially in its connections to his gift poems. The idea of a male poet bestowing milk struck me at the time as odd, but it’s a characteristic oddness – in this case it defamiliarises gender, which is a recurrent preoccupation in Tony’s work, but his poems constantly use a sense of disorienting oddness in order to subvert social and cultural assumptions. It connects to one of Tony’s key contributions to Welsh writing, which is his unique combination of passion and scepticism (based on a profound historical scholarship) about Welsh identity – he was always dubious, for example, about Welsh claims to colonial status.

                Deliberate oddness works inside the gift poem poetic as a strategy which questions the relationship in poems between the poet speaker and the addressee; it is in this poetic space that Tony made his most important contribution to Welsh poetry. As he wrote in his collection Spirit Level:

Welsh poetry is second-person poetry. A poem praises, satirises or laments within the magnetic field of I and Thou. The giving and receiving of gifts, like the giving and receiving of poetry itself, formed the central arch of Welsh civilisation; and the celebration of gift and giver an important sub-division of the Welsh poetic art.

So the gift connotes a poetic tradition and a social role – in bestowing a poem-as-milk on my daughter, Tony was simultaneously celebrating her birth and affirming the poet’s bardic role in order to invoke social activity and the Welsh poet’s traditional response to it. For Tony, the poet wrote out of his immediate community which, in his case, was Bangor and its environs. So he once told me off for using the names Peter and Vanessa in a poem because it meant I was ignoring the fact that there was a couple with those names living in Bangor (it didn’t matter that, in the poem, ‘Peter’ was actually a parrot).

                The key point is that, in emerging out of a specific community, and addressing itself to specific individuals, the poem transcends lyric and enters the ‘magnetic field’ of the dialogic. Tony wrote some personal poems, but there is remarkably little in his work, for example, about his cerebral palsy which, for many writers with such a major disability, would’ve been the starting-point and core of their work. Instead he invented an outward-looking poetic which was as generous as the stress on gifts implies. So ‘Upright Slate’ explores the way that objects acquire meaning in poems, and the way that poems become centred upon objects. However, it is not itself object-c

When my daughter was born in 1985, Tony Conran wrote a ‘gift poem’ for her, and he and his wife Lesley visited us. Because of Tony’s vocal problems, it was Lesley who read the poem, but it was Tony who was directing the performance, which involved a ‘toast’ in milk. The idea of performance was a key one for the Conran poetic , and one of my earliest experiences of Bangor was participating, along with student actors and musicians, in rehearsals, and then performances, of Tony’s poems, including ‘Life Fund’, which was ‘designed as a cantata’ but was made to work ‘as a piece for choral speaking, providing opportunities for the producer to play his full chorus against smaller groups or soloists’.

                It was clearly this that led eventually to Tony’s very successful verse dramas, such as Branwen, but the idea of performance has a wider significance for Tony’s work as a whole, especially in its connections to his gift poems. The idea of a male poet bestowing milk struck me at the time as odd, but it’s a characteristic oddness – in this case it defamiliarises gender, which is a recurrent preoccupation in Tony’s work, but his poems constantly use a sense of disorienting oddness in order to subvert social and cultural assumptions. It connects to one of Tony’s key contributions to Welsh writing, which is his unique combination of passion and scepticism (based on a profound historical scholarship) about Welsh identity – he was always dubious, for example, about Welsh claims to colonial status.

                Deliberate oddness works inside the gift poem poetic as a strategy which questions the relationship in poems between the poet speaker and the addressee; it is in this poetic space that Tony made his most important contribution to Welsh poetry. As he wrote in his collection Spirit Level:

Welsh poetry is second-person poetry. A poem praises, satirises or laments within the magnetic field of I and Thou. The giving and receiving of gifts, like the giving and receiving of poetry itself, formed the central arch of Welsh civilisation; and the celebration of gift and giver an important sub-division of the Welsh poetic art.

So the gift connotes a poetic tradition and a social role – in bestowing a poem-as-milk on my daughter, Tony was simultaneously celebrating her birth and affirming the poet’s bardic role in order to invoke social activity and the Welsh poet’s traditional response to it. For Tony, the poet wrote out of his immediate community which, in his case, was Bangor and its environs. So he once told me off for using the names Peter and Vanessa in a poem because it meant I was ignoring the fact that there was a couple with those names living in Bangor (it didn’t matter that, in the poem, ‘Peter’ was actually a parrot).

                more in a minute