News from Nowhere

Each year S. spends a week in Durham at a Classics Summer School, and each year she invites us to gatecrash the evening session at which James McKay, one of the tutors and also, in his own words, a 'poet and reciter', reads poetry. This is fairly loosely connected to the themes of the summer school - one year, I recall, he simply read Sohrab and Rustum in its entirety. On Tuesday the menu was more mixed: some of his own stuff, some Byron (not for the first time) and a generous helping of 'my latest crush', James Elroy Flecker (hooray).

He began with The Old Ships (it is the obvious gateway drug) and ended with To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence ("I'm not going to do The Golden Road to Samarkand - you can look it up!") and plenty more in between. His reading was a little over-emphatic for my taste - readings almost always are, I'd rather you let the words do the work - but it was a pleasure to sit back and listen. Here's a sample:



(On Soundcloud, if that embed is not working.)

Of his own poems, I particularly enjoyed the one in which he used dactylic hexameter (not from the forthcoming collection, apparently, but the one after): I hadn't even known that was a thing in English, but yes, apparently so, and McKay recommended A. H. Clough's Amours de Voyage (article links to the Gutenberg text). But, wait! There's more, because that article also refers to Clough's The Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich, a phrase I know as part of my father's vocabulary - though I never knew where it came from, and couldn't have spelled it.

The evening ended with a chunk of Byron's Beppo. Which was fun, but a bit of an anticlimax.

Gail-Nina Anderson doesn't blog, though we try to persuade her. Instead she circulates good things to those of her friends she thinks will most enjoy them. A recent highlight was a poem one of her friends had written about his cat, which I liked enough to ask if I could post it here:

Far-famed despoiler of fixtures and fittings
Lion of the settee, Lord of the blanket-cave
Slayer of Summer Pigeon, Marker of territory
Emptier of food bowls, prodigious of appetite
Generous giver of fur, unbridled in bounty
His hairs travel continents by proxy
Ravager of guests, embarrassment at mealtimes
The thunder-purrer who shakes the windows
Bearer of battle scars, sombre in his years
Grievous the lamentation and wailing
When his bowl needs filling

James Anthony Tucker

ETA: The author reports that the title came to him belatedly in a "duh" moment... Beopuss.

The Queen and I appear to have reached a tacit understanding: she doesn't make a fuss about my birthday, and I don't make a fuss about hers. Shakespeare is another kettle of fish entirely, and we have been enjoying a week filled with Shakespeare-related activities, mostly but not exclusively organised by the Lit & Phil, and starring the fabulous Gail-Nina Anderson.

We started with Gail's Tuesday lunchtime lecture on Shakespeare in Art: when does a painting depict a scene from a play, when a scene from a performance and when is it just a portrait of an actor in a particular rôle? Why did the pre-Raphaelites choose the most exquisitely awkward moments from the plays, and why did the Victorians think it was acceptable to paint naked women as long as you said they were fairies? Time ran out just as we reached photography.

Wednesday early evening was Gail again, this time with portraits of Shakespeare. We got caught in traffic and roadworks and other miscalculations, so we missed the beginning, but I hadn't previously come across the Sanders portrait, so that was intriguing. I've known the Droeshout engraving as the face of Shakespeare for so long that I don't suppose I'll ever imagine him differently, however strong the proof, and it really isn't that strong. Even so... Then back in time for the pub quiz, which this week had a Shakespearean theme. This could be pretty oblique (for example, a reference to the "rude mechanicals" introduced a round of questions on mechanics). The Elm Tree had clearly not got the memo, and was festooned with Saint George's crosses.

On Friday, the Lit & Phil's contribution was a showing of Rivette's Paris nous appartient (good grief, it's available on YouTube, all two and a quarter hours of it - one of Rivette's shortest films!). As Shakespearean theming goes, this too was pretty oblique: yes, the thread which holds the film together is a doomed production of Pericles, but the film is not in any sense about Shakespeare. I don't care: screen a Rivette movie and I'm there. The film deserves a post of its own, but it would just be a series of questions - actually, that's a temptation. So much to post, so little time! I would have told you that I had at least a rough idea of the plots of all Shakespeare's plays, but Paris nous appartient revealed that I have no idea at all what happens in Pericles: so that's a bonus, of sorts.

Saturday being the actual birthday, that's when we hit peak Shakespeare, starting with the morning paper: two sonnets by Wendy Cope, and a 'commemorative' crossword to entertain us on the train (no, it wasn't about Cervantes).

Back at the Lit & Phil, Gail-Nina gave us one woman's view of A Midsummer Night's Dream, complete with monkey glove puppets, inflatable bat-wings and more paintings of nude fairies. Gail takes a strictly practical view of the duties of the jobbing playwright, and explains the origins of the Dream by a desire to get some use out of that ass's head that was hanging around in the props cupboard. Why was there an ass's head in the props cupboard? Well, says Gail, it must have been left over from Shakespeare's lost nativity play - no, think about it, it's completely plausible, a well-established dramatic genre, the virtuous couple, the ruffianly innkeeper, some comic shepherds, a dramatic wicked king (Burbage would have made a fine Herod) an ox and an ass... Lost, presumably, because it was suspected of displaying Catholic sympathies, leaving the company with an underused ass's head. Come to think of it, this is why the setting, this very English woodland, is displaced to "near Athens" - at some point there must have been a scene, which didn't make the final cut, in which Theseus relives his triumph over the Minotaur (the ox's head).

Thereafter, there was winding down in the pub across the way, with good conversation and late lunch. There was shopping at Richer Sounds, with the help of samarcand and her magic phone (despite which we have hit a complication: more on that some other time). Then durham_rambler and I gatecrashed a World Book Night party at the Great North Museum: we were invited, but the party was primarily organised for the reading groups and library staff who had been involved in the 'Great North Book Run', a collaboration (if I've got this right) between PanMacmillan and the Reading Agency to promote reading for pleasure. You don't often get to commune with a narwhal over a glass of wine, so that was special. We also chatted briefly with Ann Cleeves, and with Alison O'Donnell who plays Tosh in the TV Shetland series - which handed her rather a plum in the last storyline. We barely talked about that, because we were too busy talking about Fair Isle.

Back home, we half-watched the live broadcast of the RSC's Shakespeare celebration, reading the paper through the hip hop Shakespeare and the opera Shakespeare, but enjoying the chunks of the plays. I was entertained by a sketch in which a gaggle of Hamlets correct each other's reading of THAT line: "No, it's 'To be OR not to be, that is the question'" "'To be or not to BE, that is the question'". My preference goes to "'To be or not to be, THAT is the question'", but I suspect we were supposed to take "'To be or not to be, that is the QUESTION'" as definitive, since the Prince of Wales, who had been very visible in the audience, came down on stage to deliver it. I know it was a joke, but how often do you get even five minutes of textual analysis on Saturday night television? The show closed with the ending of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and I was impressed by David Tennant as Puck.

Next weekend, something completely different: back to the Lit & Phil for Newcastle Noir!

Jeremy Paxman, who works hard at his abrasive persona, says poetry has "connived at its own irrelevance". At present, it seems, poets write mainly for other poets, and they should aim to engage more with ordinary people.

Fortunately, he has a suggestion of how to improve matters. They say that if you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail; if you are an interviewer, every solution is liable to look like an inquisition, and sure enough:

Paxman called for an "inquisition" in which "poets [would be] called to account for their poetry", appearing before a panel of the public where they would have to "explain why they chose to write about the particular subject they wrote about, and why they chose the particular form and language, idiom, the rest of it, because it would be a really illuminating experience for everybody".

What a pity this would only apply to living poets: I'd pay good money to see Paxman grilling T.S. Eliot about The Waste Land.

I was at a poetry reading last night, as it happens, and one at which perhaps one in three of the capacity audience were poets - and that's just the ones I recognised. This was an extreme example, but in the north east, at least, it's usual to meet poets at each other's events: they read each other, they support each other, they publish each other. It's like any literary genre: the people who read it are the people who write it, and who care about it. Complaining that poets write for each other is like complaining that SF writers write for each other: who else should they write for? They write for people who enjoy the same stuff and recognise the same themes and allusions.

Last night's readers weren't obscure or difficult, anyway: they were all very accessible (possibly too much so for the rarified heights of the Forward Prize). Sylvia Forrest's poems were memories of a long-ago childhood (I can't find an example online, but here's one of her poems, not entirely dissimilar). Alistair Robinson's set was pure stand-up, but here's a more serious poem from him, and a newspaper piece about his new book (it has a puffin on the cover!). And I may have memtioned Ellen Phethean before: her new collection is called Portrait of the Quince as an Older Woman (and here's the title poem).

Most of last week was taken up with the Iron Age, the small but perfectly formed festival organised in the seaside village of Cullercoats to celebrate 40 years of Iron Press, one of the regions more idiosyncratic independent publishers. As it happens, we had other engagements during the week as well, but they got swept away by an iron tide and assimilated into the maritime theme. We had inadvertently double-booked ourselves for one evening of the festival, and while I bore with equanimity the prospect of missing Ian McMillan, I was sorry that we wouldn't hear the Keelers - because one of the features of the festival was that every event offered music as well as words. No problem, serendipity promptly provided an opportunity to hear the Keelers on Monday at the Lit & Phil.

I've brought away two things from that session: one is that I hadn't previously realised what four men singing a cappella could do with the downstairs room at the Lit & Phil: as one of them remarked, what magnificent acoustics - and no volume control. The other was the life and work of Cicely Fox Smith: I hadn't come across her before, and was particularly taken with their setting of Copper Ore.

And then we were into festival mode: Wednesday was play-readings in the Fishermen's Mission church, Thursday was humorous poetry in the upstairs room of the lifeboat station: "If there's a shout, stay put and you won't get in the way..."

On Friday we went to see the Zombies, on the basis that we had both enjoyed several of their singles in the 60s, and knew nothing of what they had done since, nor indeed what they had done at the time in between crafting those cool and perfect pop moments. Turned out they were a noisy and enthusiastic rock band. You can't expect musicians to keep on turning out the stuff they were playing fifty years ago; but those were the parts of their act I found most enjoyable. So now I know. Also, I have known the band for so long, I completely failed to recalibrate how people would react to their name in the current zombipocalypse.



Saturday morning was squally and grey: I love the seaside in this mood, and had a big silly grin on my face as we walked down to the RNLI for the morning's session. One of the morning's plans had been to take small groups of poets out for boat trips, so that they could gather the following day at Bill's Fish and Chip shop, and write sea haiku from authentic experience; this had had to be abandoned. Overcome, I started writing haiku:

Big disappointment:
Stormy weather - boat trip's off.
What? No fish and chips?

Iron Press is very keen on haiku, and one of the morning's readers was Mike Wilkin, whose book of Venice Haiku is one of the press's smallest, a dinky little A7, just room for one haiku per page. Listening to him, I thought first that the experience was like being shown someone's holiday photos: Here's St Mark's Square - and look at my ice cream in this one..., then that it was like Twitter. I was rather pleased with this perception, and felt more positive about both haiku and Twitter as a result, but I was talking later to one of the sea haiku team who told me this was wrong - or at least deprecated by the British Haiku Society. I can't blame them for not wanting people to approach their preferred poetic form as a sort of crossword puzzle, I suppose.



The itinerant banners which marked each venue in its turn were lined up on the jetty, an iron motif was traced on the beach, the band played under an awning - in the sleepless small hours I rephrased that:

On the jetty, four
blue flags beckon the grey waves.
Music in the rain.

Does in work if you need a photo and an explanation to understand it? Perhaps you don't need to understand it. We sloped off for something to eat. Also, there was a book fair with a number of small presses, and books may have been bought.

Music that evening was from Bridie Jackson and the Arbour, a bit sweet and ethereal for my taste, but generally well received. durham_rambler said "They're playing wallpaper strippers!" and they were, too, golden ones (bell plates, apparently: they talk about them here). Follwed by David Almond, whose first books were short story collections published by Iron.

Still misty the following morning, when a small band of runners met to run from St Mary's lighthouse to the Fishermen's Mission, where Andy Croft was to read the 13-mile long poem which grew from his residency on the Great North Run - so misty that Andy managed to miss the finishing line. Listening to poet S.J. Litherland reminisce about visiting Russia in 1987 to collect poems for Iron's Poetry of Perestroiks collection, I wrote one last haiku:

Jackie remembers
Moscow: poets, potatoes,
plenty of vodka.

I think I've got it out of my system now. The other readers were Charlie Hardwick, Sean O'Brien and Melvyn Bragg, which made for a star-studded finale - and there was music from Henwen, stunning a cappella (isn't this where I came in?) from Robin Hood's Bay:



Still not the end, there was more eating and drinking and a film about Peter Mortimer's House, and hanging around chatting to friends until hard-working volunteers were putting away the chairs and sweeping the floor around our feet - because that's the sort of party it was!

Lucy Mangan has written a book, The Reluctant Bride, about weddings. Can there possibly be a whole book's worth of things to say on this subject? I don't know, but there's certainly an article's worth, and Ms. Mangan said them in yesterday's Guardian.

I particularly enjoyed her advice on 'what to do about flowers':

You must have a bouquet. For the simple reason that as you come down the aisle, you have to have something to do with your hands. I wanted to carry a book, in case I got bored, but apparently this is frowned upon. As is waving, picking your nose and – even though the stress of the event means it is the ideal time to take up smoking – sparking up. So a bunch of flowers it has to be.

I hate flowers. Cut flowers, I mean. I don't spend my days shaking my fist at wildflower meadows or anything. But cut flowers – they infuriate me. Forced into life by growers pouring unsustainable amounts of resources into their production; cut down in their prime and then sold to consumers so that we can watch them as they wither and die. Could there be a more potent symbol of our idiocy and greed, of the futility and fragility of life than these wilting blossoms?

Most people, of course, disagree. Violently and increasingly vociferously as the big day draws near. In the end, I gave in. "Two standsful of your whitest memento mori, good woman," I said to the florist. "And a bouquet of barbed associations for me to carry, please." I advise you to do likewise, but sooner. Premarital rows are very draining and you need to save your energy for the ones you have with your fiancé. As all the guidebooks tell you, he is your priority now.

Her advice on 'what to do about drink' is also sound, and much shorter. And, weegoddess, I think you'll agree with her on 'what to do about a frock'

Random PS from the department of Other People's Words: rozk has committed a meta-sonnet.

I wrote in cornwell_feed about last week's book launch for Alistair Robinson's poetry collection, Stereograms of the Dead, so that's the place to go for an account of the event, and a quick overview of the book - bear in mind that I hadn't seen the book before that evening. On the strength of the evening's readings, then, this is the poem I asked Alistair for permission to post here (the more I read, the more poems I find that I really like, Manifesto, say, or If I Were A God. Which isn't to say that I like Birds (2) any less, just that it's a little book full of good things).

Birds (2)
They are like us, but also
completely different. They have
bits of bone-like stuff, sticking
off the front of their faces. Most
do colours better than us. We have been affronted
by their alternative mode of propulsion. They
don't need flutes. We will
catch them because they make it hard
for us to catch them. We will
eat them. We will display them. We will give them
meaning they do not need. When
we're Ancient Egyptian we will
wrap them in sack after they're dead and
fill their bodies with spices and give them faces like ours.
When we're clever we will laugh at such behaviour
and put all our impertinent observations in a book.

---

Birds (2) © Alistair Robinson, 2009, reproduced with permissin
Stereograms of the Dead, Red Squirrel Press

I thought the Literature Northeast web site was dead, and bitterly regretted it, but in one last spark of life it offers us - appropriately - Peter Bennet's Danse Macabre.

One week today, durham_rambler celebrates a significant birthday; and six days from today, there will be a significant party. In the interim, we are doing significant housework. Furniture is being moved (and in extreme cases, disposed of). The linen press has been moved from the hall, but can't be put in the bedroom until the dresser from the bedroom has been moved to the spare room, which can't be done until the surplus furniture from the spare room has gone, and the items which are blocking the hall have been shifted. These items naturally include the linen press. And so forth. But progress is being made, much has been taken to the tip - and the pile of books has been moved from the foot of the stairs.

That particular pile consists of books which have not yet been read, and therefore cannot be shelved. It would be easier, in a way, if sorting through them had revealed that many of them were no longer wanted; but it was quite gratifying to discover how many books I have that I want - that I am impatient - to read. There is a rather beautiful copy of The Wizard of Oz, illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger. There is the copy of Ann Cleeves' The Crow Trap that I was looking for. There is another copy of Flecker's Hassan (I swear I'm not trying to corner the market in this book; I just have trouble leaving it in booksales).

There are several books of Eleanor Farjeon, including The Children's Bells: I sat on the stairs and turned the pages, and kept finding things I wanted to post here. I'll settle for the title poem ( behind the cut )