my role in chick lit

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30040237-covet

Soyinka and Armitage and Oxford Prof of Poetry

Wole Soyinka and Simon Armitage have now (as well as myself) been nominated. I'm a big fan of Armitage to the extent that I've published a book about him, and I think he'd be great in the role, and a brilliant antidote to fashionable incomprehensibility. Even the current Professor of Poetry, Geoffrey Hill is guilty of that, and I attended one of his lectures where he repeated difficulty difficulty difficulty as a prescriptive mantra. I also reviewed Hill's Without Title and still stand by the anger I expressed about his elegy in that book for Ken Smith - I still think it's horribly inhuman to publish an elegy that has no connection to the person who has died, and is yet another self-advertisingly difficult 'late modernist' effusion. Armitage by contrast has written marvellously intelligent poems which have their difficult moments but which draw upon all the formal resources of poetry to say complex and important things about contemporary life.
However, I think that Soyinka would get my vote if I had one because the post would really benefit from a writer with his political background holding it. His Wikipedia page is one of the most memorable I've ever seen and the life story it tells reveals a very courageous and vivid personality, and he would bring to Oxford, above all, a powerful sense of how literature can still make a political difference.

Ants and the Tories

I noticed today, scurrying across my bathroom floor, about fifteen ants, which seemed to hint at the possibility of far more of their kind. I wondered if they might exit from the bathroom and cross the carpet in the direction of my bedroom. My house has been invaded by slugs in the past, but never by ants. The tories, also today, have won a horribly surprising victory in the general election. There must be some occult connection - far more oblique than the rain that has fallen steadily all day, accompanied by relentlessly gloomy light - between these events.

Byron in the margins

I had some further thoughts re 'Poetry in the Margins' (my piece on the website The Conversation) while I was watching Tom Stoppard's Arcadia in Oxford last week. The play relies upon references to Byron as an historical figure everyone has heard of. But the current marginalising of poetry will lead not just to further marginalising of contemporary poetry but to poetry in general being marginalised, including the great poets of the past. As the prestige of poetry declines, even the great poetic achievements of the past will be less and less acknowledged. Donne and Milton and Wordsworth will  be whittled away in the culture. Byron's reputation may well stand up better than most because it is only partly based on his marvellous manipulation of ottava rima, but it not a great prospect to imagine him being remembered almost solely as a man 'mad, bad and dangerous to know.'

My poem is Guardian Poem of the Week

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/21/squawks-and-speech-ian-gregson-poem-of-the-week

is the link

great commentary by Carol Rumens and 125 comments, mostly interesting, so far (after 24 hours)

Donald Barthelme...and Stewart Lee

Barthelme's most anthologised story 'The Indian Uprising' works like allegory, where 'Indians' stand for all the other races that the US have oppressed (especially, in 1968, when the story was published, the Vietnamese). It's also like allegory in the apparent randomness of many of its references, but where the associations become surreal.
That story isn't all that representative, though, because it's not funny as so many of Barthelme's stories are. I was just reading 'The King of Jazz' and the self-consciousness about language there reminded me of certain stand-up comedians. Stewart Lee in one of his books talks about the comic value of certain words like 'wool' for example. But one of his comic effects is based on being exaggeratedly articulate and wordy, and, when Barthelme describes an especially effective piece of jazz playing he does something similar when he says that it 'sounds like the cutting edge of life...like fumaroles smoking on the slopes of Mt.Katmai...like an oyster fungus growing an aspen trunk...like a mule deer wandering a montane of the Sierra Nevada...like coatimundis moving in packs across the face of Arkansas...

Stewart Lee on observational comedy

Stewart Lee objects to observational comedy in the same way that modernists object to realism:  it's an impatience with a stale, populist and complacent consensus. Lee parodies the observational mode of calling upon the audience to agree that, eg, this is how women behave, or how children behave, because it makes assumptions, for one thing about the observer and the observed, and places the observer in a position of authority, and stereotypes the observed and implies they're thoroughly predictable. He has a great range of strategies at his own command, but an especially brilliant one is to defamiliarise observational comedy by doing it from a radically skewed point of view - from the perspective of an insect in his 'Pestival' riff, and, in his recent TV show, from the perspective of an 'oligarch' living in London. The repeated words emphasise the alienness of these points of view - 'mandibles' in 'Pestival', 'prostitutes' in the oligarch one - because they parody the stale parameters in observational material with concepts that are entirely other to 'common-sense' consensual reality. This mode, like modernist deconstructions of realism, reveals ideological assumptions in what it parodies.

'Martin Amis's England'

I've written in praise of Amis's Money and London Fields, in particular, and those novels did seem to sum up much that was going on in Britain when they were published, so it was shocking to watch Amis on BBC 4 sounding utterly out of touch, describing an England that hasn't existed since the death of Princes Diana. He looked and sounded like someone parodied by Paul Whitehouse and struck a note that suggested that he had stopped thinking actively some time ago. The lowest point (but the whole thing was an extended low point) was when he declared that English people binge drink because of the loss of Empire.  This was accompanied by ancient footage of English youth frolicking in the streets: those youths are by now middle-aged, but even for them the Empire might have been something that Kenneth Wolstenholme had elegised in black and white - 'They think it's all over' - except even older and more irrelevant.

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

Birdwatching in Namibia

I love to watch birds and other wildlife but I'm pretty incompetent so it always feels likely that there's an osprey twenty yards away flagrantly sitting on a branch and I've missed it. I'm happy to listen to blackbirds and to watch flocks of sparrows but what I love above all is to be somewhere that contains astonishing birds which are easy to see, where you don't have to look hard, and then they constitute a marker of the exotic. When you're floating along the Nile, the Nile kingfisher is simply there, pied black and white and hovering over the water. So in Namibia, which I visited recently, there were three different kinds of eagle which could be regularly seen and I saw thirty white-backed vultures circling over a road, and, in one place, flocks of rosy-cheeked lovebirds flaunting their astonishing colours. Even more amazing there was a lit pool, visible from a restaurant, which was visited in daylight by baboons and warthogs, and which at night was visited by a giant kudu with a broken horn and had a speckled nightjar swooping around it, the bird which was audible through the night making an incongruous yapping sound. At the same pool one night an eagle owl sat nonchalantly, not caring he was visible to twenty diners, or that a genet was prowling around, and apparently that powerful bird is quite common now even in the suburbs.

Hawking on myth

Hawking seemed to be on more solid ground in the next episode in his mini-series when he suggested that science has replaced myth. The program invented a group of Vikings watching a solar eclipse and chanting to chase away the wolf god which they believed was eating the sun. Sometimes myth provides a good source of imagery and it obviously provides insight into the primitive mind. But surely quite often the best reaction is just to say that 'aetiological' myths like the wolf god one are quite stupid and boring, and that the scientific explanations are far richer and more beautiful, even if they often take more mental effort. The prestige of myth in the literary world has declined and you don't get, anything like as often, poems like those of Tennyson that centre on mythical characters. But the 'mythic' is still often accorded more respect than it deserves and this can produce things like the Seren series of novels based on stories from the Mabinogion. The ones I've seen in that series are very poor, and I do think that mythic content is very often a sign of lazy thinking, and often of a kind of unexamined mysticism, and that this kind of writing really isn't representing the contemporary world.

stephen hawking on the meaning of life

In a recent TV program, Stephen Hawking said that philosophy is dead and has been replaced by science. Given the astonishing discoveries in recent science you can see what he means - some of the staple questions in philosophy like the mind/body question look entirely different given what science has been saying. Hawking's philosophical outlook has inevitably been shaped by his scientific background which has made him focus on the construction of an infinite universe from atomic particles - which translates philosophically into a form of materialism so that, when he comes to translate this into what the meaning of life might be, he's clearly faced with the premise that human meaning is largely irrelevant. Struggling against that obvious conclusion he decided to say that life does have meaning and that it arises from how individuals impose meaning in their own lives. This is banal at best and demonstrates that ignorance of philosophy is likely to lead you, when you're forced to philosophise, into reiterating philosophical cliches. His line was little better than 'life is what you make it' or, less colloquially, a crude version of existentialism.

David Gaffney

I went, last weekend, to the 60th birthday celebrations for Stand magazine, which has played a major role in contemporary poetry and deserves to be supported in every possible way. I gave a reading and listened to others and the general standard was extremely impressive. The most distinctive though was by David Gaffney who writes micro-fiction, - each piece 150 words long. He read, for example, one about the emotional meaning of the spiral structure of Ikea stores,  a deeply creepy one about wardrobes, and one about a man who hates grocery shopping so much he starts - on the principle that people buy more or less the same things - to commandeer trolleys which have already been loaded by other people. One day his victim notices what he's done, but he decides to pretend he knows her:

'Darling, I'll just get eggs.'
'We've got eggs,' the woman chirped. 'Listen, do you want to go out to the car? You look stressed. You can listen to your tape.'

I talked to David at the interval and, in an attempt to influence him, broached the subject of blowdry handriers: how the conventional ones breathe a death rattle on your hands and leave them no drier than before, but the Dyson Hyperblade is scarily effective - if you look at your hands while it's operating, you can see it drives deep ripples across them, as though it's plunging underneath your skin to dry it from the inside. It may work, he seemed interested.