Beautiful People, part 3 (April 2023)
This is further about a project which began with looking at the Poetry Book Society website to spot titles to review and expanded into downloading five years’ worth of their lists. More analysis has removed some poets (as being Irish or American) so that the list has gone down to 972 names. These posts are like footnotes where I stretch out and get into peripheral ideas in a relaxed way. There isn’t room for this in the book but I find it pleasurable to wander around.
I am identifying a genre of the egoistic, small scale, privatised. But in the 13 publications I hastily scanned during a day at the Poetry Library, there were two pamphlets by Kali Richmond and Madeline Wurzburger which do not fall into this category. W is writing anecdotes from Early Modern history, concise and intriguing but in no way egoistic. Richmond is writing a sort of nature poetry in which nature appears hostile. I much appreciated her poem in which the sight of crows swimming signifies a dead witch (they are happy). Egoistic poetry would include material which is not autobiographical but where the core is a subjective response to the world which tacitly points back to the poet-ego as the apparatus which owns those perceptions. That is hard to apply to Richmond. Her poems are subjective, yes, Gothic, but I don’t feel that they are celebrating her sensibility, as their goal. Gothic is a genre, it is a collective taste. These are issues which would clutter up my text. I am going to identify a Genre A of the privatised without going into the ramifications of how, if you examine a thousand poets they don’t all fit inside that genre.
I looked at 13 publications in a day reading in the Library. Almost too much. I have a list of 972 poets who have published recently (the count of publications is over 1100). There are at least 500 I haven’t looked at but I am not going to keep milling down that list until I get to the end. It doesn't work – suppose I find 200 poets I want to pursue, to read in detail and write about, there is no way I can do that inside a book. The book explodes. Of 13 I actually liked eight … I might not write about someone based on the one pamphlet they have published, but evidently it doesn't work if I like 500 out of 972 people. I did a count yesterday and came up with 300 names whose work I have checked (! more or less). That is not very complete but I doubt the merits of studying another 300.
I did a list comparison yesterday in which I took the names of poets in three volumes of “Best British Poetry” (of a given year, 2011 etc.) and compared them with the Poetry Book Society list I have developed. So 46.6% of 186 “Best of year” names are in that list. Say one in 2.15. That would suggest that the complete set of significant poets is 972 x 2.15, or 2090. I find this helpful even if other operations would give different results.
A piece I have just written: “One difference from the 1970s is that people then thought that the setting of artistic values was done by a few people with absolute power and that after a change of regime (imminent) they would be the few people in charge and that they, themselves, would reset artistic values and then there would be no further questions. In 2022, people don’t think like this any more. They know that culture is like a TV screen with 1000 people fiddling with 1000 remote controls, unstoppably. Only megalomaniacs and adolescents think that they can control what everyone else feels just by force of will. This is the outcome of broadening the apex so much. That belief that your feelings are unimportant and ready to be replaced. This is what changed. A loss of belief in a tiny apex. And even in an heir story – an apex filled with tiny Crown Princes.”
Pretty interesting, I think. So I can have lots of ideas for new paragraphs, but the text is frozen. Afterthoughts can be endless but the text has to be finite in extent.
I have two more things to write: a review of Martinez de las Rivas and a rewrite of a piece on Eleanor Perry. I am listening to “In the end”, a 1973 song by Peter Hammill, as part of the Rivas review. He credits it as the source of lines printed in italics in two of his poems, but the lines don’t all seem to be there in the song. I think Rivas liked the song but eventually replaced its words with his own. It is about friendship and loss. I can reveal that the “Susie” in the previous song on the album is actress Susan Penhaligon. She is familiar if you watched 70s horror films. Hammill as a solo artist was very intense and sparse, with a limited tonal palette leaving a huge empty space for intimacy and introversion. It is as if his band (van der Graaf Generator) had been silenced to leave space for the voice and for feelings of loneliness and anxiety. This may be the sound which Rivas was hearing as he wrote... it is hard to tell. The song is about quitting a beloved enterprise, with lines about footsteps being plain to the edge of the water, and “Last words, last looks, make a final stand”.
This is the time to make my status clear
Too late, I fear, and lonely
As friends and enemies traverse the stage;
All in a rage disown me
And all the pit-props shatter into dust about my ears:
Memory and conscience, hope and fear
As I crawl out further on the limb
Language is about to stop, as the speaker describes its departure.
Am having some problems with researching the idea of kenosis as cited by Rivas in an interview. My image of the historical interest in kenosis around 1890 to 1930 derives from an essay by Peter Fuller (“Fine Art after Modernism”). The trouble is that Fuller was a critic of painters, and they have a Style which they vehemently represent and which they justify by more or less complicated theories. That does not apply to theologians, so finding a separate kenotic moment outside the general flow of Anglican or Protestant doctrinal talk is very difficult. One has to abstract, and bypass the concern of every one of them to stay inside the orthodoxy and to propagate the whole of Christian doctrine. You can't specialise as a theologian because God is a unity. And you can’t be a kenotic theologian without also being a theologian. These learned priests were trying to deny their own originality, because they wanted their ideas to be accepted by all other priests. However, there evidently was an interest in the passibility of Christ around 1900, and Fuller is right to bring this out. This interest in the humanity of Christ was connected with an interest in the condition of the poor, in social welfare, in suffering humanity. For some people this may have meant also a distaste for the sublime and for supernatural religion, for the idea of a priest who speaks to God in Greek and is not interested in the welfare of the parish. I didn’t find a source to back that up.
There is a subterranean view of the Anglicans in which the corporate harmony of the priesthood is a surface thing and underneath it there are great rifts which lead individuals to have contempt for other individuals, so that the spread of opinion is very serious and there are (as if) parties who reject each other. This level of perception is not voiced (except at moments of great stress). I am not sure this is true. Anyway if it is not in print then I can't base an argument on it.
The key moment which causes the difficulty is when Christ cries out “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” This makes sense if Christ had forgotten his divine knowledge, and this is really the kenotic keystone. In order to suffer, he had to have a human body, capable of pain, and to forget that he was the son of God. But I understand that there are factions of Christianity which insist on the divinity of God, throughout, and reject both the physical pain and the feeling of forsakenness. Which makes that Gospel testimony very awkward. It just sweeps it aside. The Greek gospel quotes Jesus’ words in Aramaic to emphasise the documentary nature of the testimony.
It’s just as well I don’t have to reach a conclusion on difficult theological questions in order to write about poetry. All I have to do is explain why de las Rivas is interested in kenotic ideas, and why this connects with the sun going black, which took place at the very movement that Christ died.
I was dreaming about Charles Williams this morning… pretty creepy. In the Poetry Library, I read a verse play by John Heath-Stubbs about the legend of “Helen In Egypt”, the tale that a god snatched Helen away to Egypt and the Helen who was in Troy for ten years was a simulacrum, a magical double. In the play, Menelaus lands in Egypt with the magical-Helen, who has been living as his wife for years. The real Helen has been sunk in magical sleep but has aged, all these years, and is no longer beautiful. I believe, from an essay by Heath-Stubbs, that the theme of doubles comes from a Charles Williams novel of 1937. The occultist theme in ”Helen in Egypt” is rather interesting. This is something I am not going to put in the book… I talk a lot about privatisation, and the poem confined to a monologic state. It is the era of the monologue poem. But, in the Fifties, there were lots of verse plays, with many voices (well, a dozen) in each. They disappeared and people instantly forgot about them. People stopped writing them, even for the page. So I suspect there is no way out of the Single Voice poem. It is not just a convention, it is the substance of the age. I can point out that this is so but can’t describe an alternative. So I can't attack it.
Alternative poets don’t think of what they do as a monologue, but, the more it leaves social conventions behind, the more it isolates the poet and makes that isolation the valuable freight. Radical originality demands a monologue style and is only possible on that basis. So, the more modern something is, the more privatised, poet-centred, even territorial, it becomes.
I was thinking while reading "Helen in Egypt" that Strauss could have done something with this. A week or so later, I find out that Hofmannsthal wrote a play on the same theme and that Strauss (R.) turned it into an opera. I really should have known this. This is a great excuse for watching lots of operas.
I have been reading Deugain Barddas, a celebration of 40 years of the periodical Barddas. I can see that my handling of Welsh poetry in the 21st century is weak. My problem was that I could see major stylistic currents but I couldn't find anything which had changed since 2000. I had an older chapter which really related to the late 20th C, so I cut it. But there has been primarily continuity since 2000. Why… because people are happy with how things are.
Sam Riviere writes about “81 austerities” in the book “In their own words” (2012). So the title refers to deprivation… but what he is deprived of is serenity, he is having trouble thinking of anything to write about, or even a voice. So the link with poverty, with victims of the Cameron government’s austerity package, is not there. He detects an analogy between “deprivation” and a “paralysing yet hyperactive mode of boredom”. Riviere is not doing anything like proposing himself as a martyr… he is forever comic, indolent, under-achieving. This is why his voice is always sympathetic. In the book of poems he advises us in the first three lines that he is being paid £48,000 over 3 years just to write poems, not only is this not proper work but he hasn't got the energy to write the stipulated poems. He is deprived of hardship and suffering. I think the poetry world remembers the book as being a documentary about the Austerity era and an attack on Cameron’s low-budget social policies. The index to the poems sets us straight: “sets out stall as critique of poetry and arts institutions”. He is more like the hero of a Patrick Modiano novel than a victim of poverty and virtue.
The number of poets publishing has gone up by five or seven times since the 1950s. The level of frustration is pretty high. Does this mean that the evil of the cultural managers has gone up by five or seven times in that time? Probably not. Does it mean that the level of competition which each poet has to face, from other poets, has gone up? Yes, obviously. I don’t think examining the prejudices and alliances of the managers is even productive. If you are blocked, it is because poetry is easy to write and thousands of people want to write it. There is a taboo on describing this competition but surely it is as universal as air. My guess is that the idea of developing your own voice, as part of a spiritual campaign of self-realisation, is widespread but is likely to produce poetry which is not addressed to other people and which offers them relatively little in the way of aesthetic reward. It would be better if poets focussed on the audience and the mysteries of their wishes.
An interesting Facebook dialogue took place related to this. John McCullough posted: “Just wanted to say that all the magazines my poems have been accepted for of late like Poetry Review, Poetry London and The Rialto turned down my work on multiple occasions before I had my first acceptances from them back in the day (and they were completely right to say no!). So much of being a writer is about perseverance and being kind to yourself, about trying different approaches and reading broadly, about spending time quietly honing then having a brass neck and sending again. In the long run, strange as it seems to many, I believe these things are more important than talent, or at least my own sense is that they have been for me.”
300 people responded positively. There is a very long reply from Simon Jenner saying basically that he is breaking through because of the decrease of homophobia. This is a crux… I mean, if you decide that rejections are due to inferior writing then you can't also think that they are due to the illiberality of hard-bitten editors who are blind to the unwavering genius of x thousand poets. This comes here because I didn’t want to explore it in the book.
I don’t want to make homophobia disappear from view, but it really hasn't gone up or down in the past ten years. The replies give a view of an invisible sector, that is poets who aren’t getting published because they are being rejected all the time. This might be several thousand people, at any given point. Of course they want to hear that they are brilliant writers blocked by the conservative and reactionary political and social views of the editors. But that is not necessarily the situation. It does seem possible that they are less modern, less reflexive, less innovative, than the ideas of the editors. It may be that they are simply writing bad poems.
So you have a theoretical set of 2090 significant published poets. Then maybe 5000 more who are published but not significant. And then 4000 more who are unpublished, or marginally published? The figures are nebulous. Clearly, a reviewer is trying to get clarity about a limited number of poets, not develop a blurred picture of the Entire Poetry World.
McCullough says “I’ve been writing poems consistently since 1996. My first book wasn’t published till 2011 and all the Hawthornden/Costa/Forward things didn’t happen till after Reckless Paper Birds came out in 2019.“ Obviously he is patient and self-critical. But the pattern for a mass of poets waiting for success might be that they are slowly getting better, or not getting better if they insist that everyone else is wrong. And then they stop before the process completes. McCullough’s subject is gay history and gay ideas, and obviously that subject isn’t going to run out or lose its interest, so that it sustains an effort from 1996 up to 2023 without fading away. It is an unselfish project.
Someone else posts: "I'm also more than happy to live outside the hierarchy. Poetry has its own and, having grown up in the 1970s and 80s, I'd much rather be among the extra-hierarchical sphere, the losers in the stupidities of the so-say poetry wars in the UK back in the day," This use of the word "hierarchy" seems to be prevalent. How do you tell this state apart from simply writing badly?
I looked up the quote in Kevin Nolan’s poem which I reviewed in 2010 (or whenever it was): Agus éisteann leis an bhfuaim ag dul i laghad agus i laghad agus ag titim siar siar isteach san Tost. Agus is ionadh leis an fhuaim agus is ionadh leis an Tost. Agus bíonn an saol lán d’alltacht agus de dhraíocht…
- surprisingly, it is on the Internet and it turns out to be a passage from Sean O’Riordain’s diary for 2/4/1949. The passage starts “What is poetry? The speech of a child”, and the sound which fades away is a recollection of hearing a cart go by, in childhood. Bionn an saol lan etc. means “and the world is full of wonder and magic”. So what I said in the review is inaccurate. I should probably explain who O Riordain was but that would be an elaborate task and perhaps fruitless. Obviously there is no English equivalent, that is just not a valid search to start. Half of O Tuama’s Fili faoi sceimhle is about O Riordain but to tell the truth I haven’t read that half, although I do own a copy of the book. My grasp of the Irish language would be better if I learnt another 5000 words but maybe this state of ignorance sheds light on my ignorance of Western culture when I started, so when I was sixteen or seventeen. You have to start somewhere and the learning process can remind a cultural commentator what they are supposed to be explaining.
O’Tuama says, starting with a general statement: “The generation of Gaelic writers who came to the fore from the war years onwards (1939-) are the first generation after the 17th century who were carrying a generous part of the contemporary world of Europe naturally and without effort inside their minds. There is a hankering after Eogan O'Rahilly, or Pierce Feriter, or the other great writers in Gaelic, in the majority of them, no doubt; but are not alien to them, at the same time, Eliot or Freud, Sartre or Brecht, Marx or Beckett. It is not all a surprise, then, that it is accounted that the work of the poets of this generation is “modern poetry” – one more branch of the modern poetry of Europe.” He then says that Mairtin O Direain was the first but was also marginal to this modernity. Then “But O Riordain's poetry is in the centre of the vortex. He strikes his individual and native mark on the feeling and the metaphysics which have shot up in the western world from the time of Baudelaire, especially. But in fact what makes his poetry remarkable is that this mighty international current suits the general cast of his mind, and that it showed him the potential of a new path, unusual and indigenous.” Indigenous is duchasach, which there is no English word for.
I doubt I can translate 50 words of Irish without making several mistakes, but you can't blame me for being curious. I put down “native” for “Gaelach”. Gaelach is literally “Irish” and means something like “uncolonised”, homely, rustic, but also loyal to the traditional community. There is no similar English word because we were never colonised. You could say “unreconstructed”.
Sunday, 14 May 2023
Tuesday, 9 May 2023
Poetry and 40s cinema
This follows up a post of 3 March. In Portrait from Life (released as “The girl in the painting” in the US) (1948) a British officer goes to the British Occupied Zone to look for a survivor of concentration camps who is also the daughter of an Austrian research chemist who has survived the war in London. He knows her face because the chemist recognised it in a painting which had been made at a resettlement camp – the painter had given some details before dying (of drink, essentially). The officer locates the girl but she has amnesia and has also another set of parents – mystery. She does not remember being Austrian. There is a doll which the daughter had given to the chemist to keep him from feeling lonely, without his family. He sends this to the officer and he confronts the girl with it. I found this hard to watch. The amnesia is part of what we now call PTSD and the recovery of such painful material was likely to cause her a breakdown, I thought. In the scene, the English major, a dominant older male figure, forces her, in quite a threatening way, to recover her memory ... using toys from her childhood. She is a mentally ill DP, he is an Army officer, it’s like an interrogation… I didn’t want to watch it. The ambiguity of the “dangerous healer” reminds me of “The Seventh Veil”, where the ambivalence is the key thing in the whole film. (also scripted by Muriel Box) So this may be Muriel Box’s personal vision – although both stories come from pre-existing novels. That passage where she is under great stress and trying to remember a lost life struck me as summing up the Apocalyptic drive – her rational mind was of no use and she was swimming through dark waters looking for an exit. The Apocalyptic theory predicted this although their poets were not necessarily able to find it for themselves. Of course she does remember the doll, it is called Mitzi and this means she can find her father again. She also knows how to make a musical box open and play, the things show the truth.
The Apocalyptic thing is related to PTSD, as a legacy from the First World War. They locate culture inside PTSD – inside shell shock, to use the term of 1918. So recovery from PTSD is what they are all directed towards. The poems descend into those dark waters and open senses that do not need light.
The quest for a beautiful face seen only in a picture is in “Girl in the picture” but also in a 1947 film called “Corridor of mirrors”, so part of a sort of pond of floating themes of the time. (Also in a Preminger film called “Laura”, see earlier post.) “Corridor” starts with war trauma, the hero was blown up in WWI and recovered only at the cost of an idee fixe in which he looked for a young woman who would incarnate a 16th century painting he owned. This is a variant on the “painting quest” and he also swam in the same dark waters. It is interesting that culture shows an intact world which traumatised people can look to for undamaged ideals. The doll is a sort of intact version of the shattered living girl.
Of course I would like to find more films using the same themes, but it is hard to search through a lot of B-movies, even with the help of YouTube. I really can’t think of a poem in which the basic 40s problem is resolved and the wandering soul emerges into the daylight. I think the approach via films or paintings shows up aspects of Apocalyptic poetry that are reluctant to surface.
My feel is that Apocalyptic poetry got the neurotic state of Europe circa 1939 but by the time 1945 had come, and the mood had shifted to healing, recovery, rebuilding, new life, the style had broken up and was drifting as wreckage, unable to produce major works. I emailed Jim Keery about this restitution idea and he instantly came back with an example of restitution in poetry, being Julian Orde's "Conjurers". This was published as a pamphlet by Greville Press in 1988, and one would dearly like to know the date of composition. Orde (1917-74) was a 40s poet but this poem (of approximately 30 7-line stanzas) may not be so early. It is about insect metamorphoses in a garden and I thought it was too literal, but if you decide that it is allegorical then it becomes like Peter Redgrove or Nicki Jackowska and is definitely about coming to life and bursting through the slough of old lives. The rhyme scheme is so neurotically exact that I would guess the 1950s.
As a face at window palely pressed
Moves, leaving the glass dark,
So now this bottle
Darkens, though a full
Rigged ship awaits tomorrow’s test
Of spindle spars and stays. The clock
Tells fourteen days have passed in the ark.
(The moth is in the shroud like a ship inside a bottle, waiting to raise its spars and shake out its sails. Stays as in mainstay. The shroud loses transparency as the body inside it swells.) So that is ABCCABB? The poet puts seven caterpillars in a tray, the stanzas have seven lines, the pupae take 14 days before moulting. She was WS Graham's girlfriend and the ships may relate to his Seven Voyages? I can see this was published in Poetry Nation in 1976. David Wright guesses the date as before her marriage in 1949, but gives no support for that.
In the film, the girl gives an earlier description of her childhood. The major sees a poster advertising a brewery, pinned up in the camp, and notices that the details she gives seem to come from the poster. This was good writing, I thought – the idea that the past was such a wound that it could not come back, and screen memories gathered in front of it, rolling out to prevent sight, stilling the questions by supplying something thin as ribbon, rigid, of set expression. This is the origin of kitsch. That was terribly depressing as a story but it also pushed us out into the world of post-war trauma, a genuine world with a large population. One has to ask if the world of Fifties culture was simply systematic kitsch, still in denial, or if it was genuinely recorded reconstruction, loving homes, children being nurtured. There is that trio: the painting that comes to England, the poster with a view of oldtime Salzburg (or wherever it was), and the music-box. I guess Mitzi the doll is like the chrysalis, in the poem, waiting to be unwrapped. And becomes the adult young woman, on being unwrapped?
Jim tells me that his edition of Orde's Selected Poems is coming out from Carcanet during 2024. He claims that someone found a parcel of 150 Orde poems under a bed in New Zealand and sent it to Carcanet. This would actually be Orde's first book.
The Apocalyptic thing is related to PTSD, as a legacy from the First World War. They locate culture inside PTSD – inside shell shock, to use the term of 1918. So recovery from PTSD is what they are all directed towards. The poems descend into those dark waters and open senses that do not need light.
The quest for a beautiful face seen only in a picture is in “Girl in the picture” but also in a 1947 film called “Corridor of mirrors”, so part of a sort of pond of floating themes of the time. (Also in a Preminger film called “Laura”, see earlier post.) “Corridor” starts with war trauma, the hero was blown up in WWI and recovered only at the cost of an idee fixe in which he looked for a young woman who would incarnate a 16th century painting he owned. This is a variant on the “painting quest” and he also swam in the same dark waters. It is interesting that culture shows an intact world which traumatised people can look to for undamaged ideals. The doll is a sort of intact version of the shattered living girl.
Of course I would like to find more films using the same themes, but it is hard to search through a lot of B-movies, even with the help of YouTube. I really can’t think of a poem in which the basic 40s problem is resolved and the wandering soul emerges into the daylight. I think the approach via films or paintings shows up aspects of Apocalyptic poetry that are reluctant to surface.
My feel is that Apocalyptic poetry got the neurotic state of Europe circa 1939 but by the time 1945 had come, and the mood had shifted to healing, recovery, rebuilding, new life, the style had broken up and was drifting as wreckage, unable to produce major works. I emailed Jim Keery about this restitution idea and he instantly came back with an example of restitution in poetry, being Julian Orde's "Conjurers". This was published as a pamphlet by Greville Press in 1988, and one would dearly like to know the date of composition. Orde (1917-74) was a 40s poet but this poem (of approximately 30 7-line stanzas) may not be so early. It is about insect metamorphoses in a garden and I thought it was too literal, but if you decide that it is allegorical then it becomes like Peter Redgrove or Nicki Jackowska and is definitely about coming to life and bursting through the slough of old lives. The rhyme scheme is so neurotically exact that I would guess the 1950s.
As a face at window palely pressed
Moves, leaving the glass dark,
So now this bottle
Darkens, though a full
Rigged ship awaits tomorrow’s test
Of spindle spars and stays. The clock
Tells fourteen days have passed in the ark.
(The moth is in the shroud like a ship inside a bottle, waiting to raise its spars and shake out its sails. Stays as in mainstay. The shroud loses transparency as the body inside it swells.) So that is ABCCABB? The poet puts seven caterpillars in a tray, the stanzas have seven lines, the pupae take 14 days before moulting. She was WS Graham's girlfriend and the ships may relate to his Seven Voyages? I can see this was published in Poetry Nation in 1976. David Wright guesses the date as before her marriage in 1949, but gives no support for that.
In the film, the girl gives an earlier description of her childhood. The major sees a poster advertising a brewery, pinned up in the camp, and notices that the details she gives seem to come from the poster. This was good writing, I thought – the idea that the past was such a wound that it could not come back, and screen memories gathered in front of it, rolling out to prevent sight, stilling the questions by supplying something thin as ribbon, rigid, of set expression. This is the origin of kitsch. That was terribly depressing as a story but it also pushed us out into the world of post-war trauma, a genuine world with a large population. One has to ask if the world of Fifties culture was simply systematic kitsch, still in denial, or if it was genuinely recorded reconstruction, loving homes, children being nurtured. There is that trio: the painting that comes to England, the poster with a view of oldtime Salzburg (or wherever it was), and the music-box. I guess Mitzi the doll is like the chrysalis, in the poem, waiting to be unwrapped. And becomes the adult young woman, on being unwrapped?
Jim tells me that his edition of Orde's Selected Poems is coming out from Carcanet during 2024. He claims that someone found a parcel of 150 Orde poems under a bed in New Zealand and sent it to Carcanet. This would actually be Orde's first book.
Sunday, 2 April 2023
Access to culture
Access to culture
The Oldham Coliseum theatre closed on March 31 and the radio broadcast an interview which Chris Eccleston gave, after attending the farewell ceremony. A report said : "Eccleston said, as an aspiring actor, he secured a grant to attend a drama school with no academic qualifications which is now necessary “so there’s no more of actors like me coming through”, he said.
The former Doctor Who star claimed it would be “impossible” for somebody from his background to become an actor today.
He said: “The pathway into the arts is not there for them in the way that it was for me… now you’ve got to go to public school, you’ve got to be Oxbridge otherwise you can’t act.
“It’s a lot harder for people of my background to get in.
“It’s got worse, not better.”
“If you want to be an actor, you’re going to have to put up with the unemployment, you’re going have to put up with the rejection, and that’s going to be double if you’re from a working class background, ethnic minority.
“It’s still an elitist organisation, television, theatre, is incredibly elitist, and getting more so, which is why it’s the North West that is losing its theatres.”
I went to the RADA site and looked up their analysis of the social status, based on income, of their students:
The data dashboard shows a mixed position for RADA in relation to the Index of Multiple Deprivation. Over a five-year period, RADA’s intake of those in the two quintiles of highest deprivation has been between 62% of the student population and 25% of the student population. The trend over three years suggests that we are taking fewer students from more deprived quintiles (1 and 2).
This is a text very hard to deliver emotively and Eccleston evidently would not take it on. However, it does not support what he said. The Coliseum has lost arts council (ACE) funding but they are going to build a new theatre in Oldham to replace it. “ACE is investing £1.85 million in the borough and Oldham Council recently announced plans for a new theatre, reportedly costing £24 million, which is scheduled to open in 2026.” An Oldham Council representative said that the building had come to the end of its life. The sense of disaster is not founded on fact. I understand that Eccleston was saying he got into drama school without A-levels because he passed an audition, but (he thinks) children from housing estates never get A-levels and so (in his reasoning) they can never go to drama school.
he wrapped things up in a histrionic way. The interest for me is that social mobility is the most interesting topic and that it is attractive to make the social mobility actually happening disappear by making your language more emotive and less numerical. I just wonder if Eccleston’s mind has better data than his interviews or whether his thinking is as simplistic. If the state school system is not delivering social mobility, then our society is in a terrible state and we should march out and start again. But in reality the State schools have improved massively since inspection started and most students at our universities studied at State schools. The situation is more that the most radical voices are suppressing the evidence for the success of teachers, and (as is so often pointed out) of pupils and of parents supporting the pupils, for emotive effect. I find it unkind to erase the achievements of 100,000 teachers at comprehensives and allege that they are not delivering anything. This seems to be untrue as well as malicious.
I am not optimistic about equality of wealth. But a large part of that is perceiving that inflation in rents and in house prices is taking away the disposable income of young people who have done very well in the school system and got highly demanding jobs as the outcome of that. I think schools are delivering upward mobility, universities are delivering it, but there are other levels of the economic system which are multiplying the wealth of the wealthy and distracting the wages of the salariate. Generated wealth is going far less to salaried workers, far more to shareholders and lenders, than when I was growing up. The rules have been painstakingly redesigned to produce less fairness. I am NOT happy at someone taking the sector of public endeavour which is delivering more equality and opportunity and writing its success off to make a rhetorical point.
Equality of wealth is not increasing. Part of that is the growth in value of houses, which is so huge and so unequally shared that it outweighs anything else. Also you have de-industrialisation and deskilling. Many households are going downhill, people moving into badly paid jobs. But State education is also delivering greater equality, individuals (future households) are moving uphill and getting good jobs through education.
I find it doubtful that all the successful actors who have trained in the past ten years went to public schools. Probably there has been a shift since the advent of “austerity” and since the financial crisis of 2007-8, but it is a matter of a percentage shift, not a complete “wipe out and monopoly”.
This issue is important for poetry because it is something poets think about a lot. I am unwilling to write about sociology in poetry because the economic rewards are too slight and success does not mean economic prosperity, as it would do for a star actor. The money aspect is not very interesting because there is too little result to talk about. Clearly people who write poetry have normally had higher education, so access to that is critical to poetry, but I don’t see a collapse of that upward current in the way that Eccleston describes. A little studied subject is what aspirant poets (or actors) do while learning their craft. Surely it is beneficial for a poet to have a break between working hard at university and working hard at a full-time job... a period of practising writing without too many distractions. You need some kind of income… maybe State benefits, maybe something even more nebulous. Academic study doesn't teach you how to write poems. It is credible that a more pressurised economy removes the unmonitored free areas where someone with no money can find a space to sleep and maybe a part-time job that provides the bare essentials. Areas of low pressure are benign for people working hard at poetry. They are fragile.
The Oldham Coliseum theatre closed on March 31 and the radio broadcast an interview which Chris Eccleston gave, after attending the farewell ceremony. A report said : "Eccleston said, as an aspiring actor, he secured a grant to attend a drama school with no academic qualifications which is now necessary “so there’s no more of actors like me coming through”, he said.
The former Doctor Who star claimed it would be “impossible” for somebody from his background to become an actor today.
He said: “The pathway into the arts is not there for them in the way that it was for me… now you’ve got to go to public school, you’ve got to be Oxbridge otherwise you can’t act.
“It’s a lot harder for people of my background to get in.
“It’s got worse, not better.”
“If you want to be an actor, you’re going to have to put up with the unemployment, you’re going have to put up with the rejection, and that’s going to be double if you’re from a working class background, ethnic minority.
“It’s still an elitist organisation, television, theatre, is incredibly elitist, and getting more so, which is why it’s the North West that is losing its theatres.”
I went to the RADA site and looked up their analysis of the social status, based on income, of their students:
The data dashboard shows a mixed position for RADA in relation to the Index of Multiple Deprivation. Over a five-year period, RADA’s intake of those in the two quintiles of highest deprivation has been between 62% of the student population and 25% of the student population. The trend over three years suggests that we are taking fewer students from more deprived quintiles (1 and 2).
This is a text very hard to deliver emotively and Eccleston evidently would not take it on. However, it does not support what he said. The Coliseum has lost arts council (ACE) funding but they are going to build a new theatre in Oldham to replace it. “ACE is investing £1.85 million in the borough and Oldham Council recently announced plans for a new theatre, reportedly costing £24 million, which is scheduled to open in 2026.” An Oldham Council representative said that the building had come to the end of its life. The sense of disaster is not founded on fact. I understand that Eccleston was saying he got into drama school without A-levels because he passed an audition, but (he thinks) children from housing estates never get A-levels and so (in his reasoning) they can never go to drama school.
he wrapped things up in a histrionic way. The interest for me is that social mobility is the most interesting topic and that it is attractive to make the social mobility actually happening disappear by making your language more emotive and less numerical. I just wonder if Eccleston’s mind has better data than his interviews or whether his thinking is as simplistic. If the state school system is not delivering social mobility, then our society is in a terrible state and we should march out and start again. But in reality the State schools have improved massively since inspection started and most students at our universities studied at State schools. The situation is more that the most radical voices are suppressing the evidence for the success of teachers, and (as is so often pointed out) of pupils and of parents supporting the pupils, for emotive effect. I find it unkind to erase the achievements of 100,000 teachers at comprehensives and allege that they are not delivering anything. This seems to be untrue as well as malicious.
I am not optimistic about equality of wealth. But a large part of that is perceiving that inflation in rents and in house prices is taking away the disposable income of young people who have done very well in the school system and got highly demanding jobs as the outcome of that. I think schools are delivering upward mobility, universities are delivering it, but there are other levels of the economic system which are multiplying the wealth of the wealthy and distracting the wages of the salariate. Generated wealth is going far less to salaried workers, far more to shareholders and lenders, than when I was growing up. The rules have been painstakingly redesigned to produce less fairness. I am NOT happy at someone taking the sector of public endeavour which is delivering more equality and opportunity and writing its success off to make a rhetorical point.
Equality of wealth is not increasing. Part of that is the growth in value of houses, which is so huge and so unequally shared that it outweighs anything else. Also you have de-industrialisation and deskilling. Many households are going downhill, people moving into badly paid jobs. But State education is also delivering greater equality, individuals (future households) are moving uphill and getting good jobs through education.
I find it doubtful that all the successful actors who have trained in the past ten years went to public schools. Probably there has been a shift since the advent of “austerity” and since the financial crisis of 2007-8, but it is a matter of a percentage shift, not a complete “wipe out and monopoly”.
This issue is important for poetry because it is something poets think about a lot. I am unwilling to write about sociology in poetry because the economic rewards are too slight and success does not mean economic prosperity, as it would do for a star actor. The money aspect is not very interesting because there is too little result to talk about. Clearly people who write poetry have normally had higher education, so access to that is critical to poetry, but I don’t see a collapse of that upward current in the way that Eccleston describes. A little studied subject is what aspirant poets (or actors) do while learning their craft. Surely it is beneficial for a poet to have a break between working hard at university and working hard at a full-time job... a period of practising writing without too many distractions. You need some kind of income… maybe State benefits, maybe something even more nebulous. Academic study doesn't teach you how to write poems. It is credible that a more pressurised economy removes the unmonitored free areas where someone with no money can find a space to sleep and maybe a part-time job that provides the bare essentials. Areas of low pressure are benign for people working hard at poetry. They are fragile.
Tuesday, 14 March 2023
Hittite from the north-east
Hittite from the north-east
This is a response to a recent high-powered paper based on genetic data which offers a new solution to questions about Indo-European origins and specifically the division between the Anatolian languages (such as Hittite) and the rest. The paper is “The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe” and it has 205 authors. It was published in Science in August 2022.
A few years ago David Reich’s groundbreaking book on ancient DNA observed that the DNA of early hunter-gatherers on the steppes included an influence from the other side of the Caucasus Mountains, from a genetic group which lived in the South Caucasus and also further south. This had the implication that the horse hunters who evolved into the early Indo-European (the 'Yamnaya' culture, referring to their pit-grave interments) were partly the product of an earlier migration from the South. This migration preceded the adoption of farming. We are talking about perhaps 5000 BC. "Anatolia is remarkable for its lack of steppe ancestry down to the Bronze Age. The ancestry of the Yamnaya was, by contrast, only partly local; half of it was West Asian, from both the Caucasus and the more southern Anatolian-Levantine continuum. Migration into the steppe started by about 7000 years ago, making the later expansion of the Yamnaya into the Caucasus a return to the homeland of about half their ancestors."
The new work follows up Reich’s work, or rather the work of the world-leading DNA lab which he heads, to say that the DNA of remains located in the area where we know the Hittites lived is different from the DNA of steppe Indo-European areas and so also of the DNA of parts of Bronze Age Europe which were invaded (! or at least settled) by people from the steppes who putatively spoke Indo-European. It follows that the Hittites, Luvians, and related groups came into Anatolia from the north-east, and not via a tortuous migration along regions to the north of the Black Sea and through the Balkans. Their history is separate from that of all other Indo-European groups. Anatolian entered Anatolia from the north-east (or conceivably had been spoken south of the Caucasus since very ancient times).
There is a very interesting paper by Craig Melchert (“western affinities of Anatolian”), following up a 1994 paper by Jaan Puhvel, which traces matches between Hittite and specific other languages which are not matches with the reconstructed Indo-European lexicon. That suggested a shared (and late) geographical history which the new work puts seriously in question. He was thinking of convergence in a shared contact zone after the migrations. This data and the pattern which it supports are now of great interest, but Melchert only saw a tentative pattern in it. “Puhvel (1994) argued for Anatolian as a western dialect sharing features with Italic, Celtic, and Germanic (plus or minus Greek and Baltic). However, his paper was both initially and subsequently universally (but wrongly) ignored.”
Since several other IE languages are known from the area of Anatolia, and points east, one has to ask if it is the Anatolian group only which missed out on a long trip around the Black Sea to end up in that region. Armenian is certainly a candidate, perhaps also Phrygian (a “rubble language”). The Science paper describes the Armenians as the product of a migration from the steppes into Anatolia. I don’t think anyone is going to propose Iranian as such a candidate, which only geographical logic (not linguistic) would suggest.
The earliest written records of Hittite are quite far south, in Kanesh, but this is an artefact of the way in which writing reached Anatolia, evidently from the south-east and originally in the Akkadian language and script, having nothing to say about where the predecessor forms of the Hittite language had been spoken or what migration routes their ancestors followed. We now have the possibility of dating the split between ancestral Anatolian and the other Indo-European stem, from archaeological data. So this may be as early as 5000 BC. The whole history of Indo-European studies has assumed that there was a nuclear area from which Indo-European spread into territories speaking (fundamentally) different languages. But what we now know about the Anatolian branch makes it possible that the area around the Black Sea was populated at least in part by peoples speaking languages related to Indo-European, as distantly as Hittite and Luvian, and even that this facilitated the rapid spread of Indo-European. It is a puzzle that all IE languages lost the laryngeals and yet they still existed just before the break-up. Substrate influences may explain this, at least speculatively.
It remains possible that Greek came to Greece from the east, along the southern shores of the Black Sea (and initially through the Caucasus?), but this has always been a minority view and the genetic data now make it unlikely. It was not the view of the ancient Greeks and they had tales of the settlements in Ionia being founded from what we now think of as Greece.
This is a response to a recent high-powered paper based on genetic data which offers a new solution to questions about Indo-European origins and specifically the division between the Anatolian languages (such as Hittite) and the rest. The paper is “The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe” and it has 205 authors. It was published in Science in August 2022.
A few years ago David Reich’s groundbreaking book on ancient DNA observed that the DNA of early hunter-gatherers on the steppes included an influence from the other side of the Caucasus Mountains, from a genetic group which lived in the South Caucasus and also further south. This had the implication that the horse hunters who evolved into the early Indo-European (the 'Yamnaya' culture, referring to their pit-grave interments) were partly the product of an earlier migration from the South. This migration preceded the adoption of farming. We are talking about perhaps 5000 BC. "Anatolia is remarkable for its lack of steppe ancestry down to the Bronze Age. The ancestry of the Yamnaya was, by contrast, only partly local; half of it was West Asian, from both the Caucasus and the more southern Anatolian-Levantine continuum. Migration into the steppe started by about 7000 years ago, making the later expansion of the Yamnaya into the Caucasus a return to the homeland of about half their ancestors."
The new work follows up Reich’s work, or rather the work of the world-leading DNA lab which he heads, to say that the DNA of remains located in the area where we know the Hittites lived is different from the DNA of steppe Indo-European areas and so also of the DNA of parts of Bronze Age Europe which were invaded (! or at least settled) by people from the steppes who putatively spoke Indo-European. It follows that the Hittites, Luvians, and related groups came into Anatolia from the north-east, and not via a tortuous migration along regions to the north of the Black Sea and through the Balkans. Their history is separate from that of all other Indo-European groups. Anatolian entered Anatolia from the north-east (or conceivably had been spoken south of the Caucasus since very ancient times).
There is a very interesting paper by Craig Melchert (“western affinities of Anatolian”), following up a 1994 paper by Jaan Puhvel, which traces matches between Hittite and specific other languages which are not matches with the reconstructed Indo-European lexicon. That suggested a shared (and late) geographical history which the new work puts seriously in question. He was thinking of convergence in a shared contact zone after the migrations. This data and the pattern which it supports are now of great interest, but Melchert only saw a tentative pattern in it. “Puhvel (1994) argued for Anatolian as a western dialect sharing features with Italic, Celtic, and Germanic (plus or minus Greek and Baltic). However, his paper was both initially and subsequently universally (but wrongly) ignored.”
Since several other IE languages are known from the area of Anatolia, and points east, one has to ask if it is the Anatolian group only which missed out on a long trip around the Black Sea to end up in that region. Armenian is certainly a candidate, perhaps also Phrygian (a “rubble language”). The Science paper describes the Armenians as the product of a migration from the steppes into Anatolia. I don’t think anyone is going to propose Iranian as such a candidate, which only geographical logic (not linguistic) would suggest.
The earliest written records of Hittite are quite far south, in Kanesh, but this is an artefact of the way in which writing reached Anatolia, evidently from the south-east and originally in the Akkadian language and script, having nothing to say about where the predecessor forms of the Hittite language had been spoken or what migration routes their ancestors followed. We now have the possibility of dating the split between ancestral Anatolian and the other Indo-European stem, from archaeological data. So this may be as early as 5000 BC. The whole history of Indo-European studies has assumed that there was a nuclear area from which Indo-European spread into territories speaking (fundamentally) different languages. But what we now know about the Anatolian branch makes it possible that the area around the Black Sea was populated at least in part by peoples speaking languages related to Indo-European, as distantly as Hittite and Luvian, and even that this facilitated the rapid spread of Indo-European. It is a puzzle that all IE languages lost the laryngeals and yet they still existed just before the break-up. Substrate influences may explain this, at least speculatively.
It remains possible that Greek came to Greece from the east, along the southern shores of the Black Sea (and initially through the Caucasus?), but this has always been a minority view and the genetic data now make it unlikely. It was not the view of the ancient Greeks and they had tales of the settlements in Ionia being founded from what we now think of as Greece.
Monday, 6 March 2023
Beautiful feelings two
This is further about a project which began with looking at the Poetry Book Society website to spot titles to review and expanded into downloading five years’ worth of lists and collating them into a spreadsheet with the names of 990 poets featured in their “shop window”. I was asking “who the hell are all these poets”. A book emerged.
I subscribe to an on-line text library called scribd. I have discovered that they have hundreds of volumes of recent poetry which I can read for free. The trouble with this is that they aren't necessarily the books I want to read, and there are too many of them. The stage I have reached with the book is that I have completed the text, I have too much text and I want to reduce it, but I also want to read more books so that I have more context. Right now, I have to take a break. Like, a week with no thinking about the book at all.
This morning I was dreaming of a passage in the book which I had to rewrite. When I woke up, I realised that the passage didn’t exist anyway. This is overload. I want to sleep without worrying about flaws in the book.
I have the idea of thermal sensing – that if you read 100 books of poetry from a 5 year period, then they stick together, and the information which normally wisps away as waste heat remains as evidence. This brings out the unconscious elements of style and treatment. Poets don’t always like this, but it gets you away from simply paraphrasing what they say. The light is the conscious level but the unconscious level is a trace of heat.
It also develops an idea of time and art, namely that there are collective states which animate art, especially poetry, and that these are temporary and so make up the substance of a time. A few years later they have dissipated away.
So I have read 100 books from the last 5 years. Themes do keep recurring. Three mentions of kintsugi – one was actually in a prose book (Nancy Campbell’s The Library of Ice, fantastic) and not the poems by the same writer. But this is a sort of “ping” - kintsugi three times, I have found the edge in some way. Where the edge is, that is part of the frame. Postscript. I have now seen a fourth reference to kintsugi. Surely this is a signal to stop collecting evidence.
I talk about the mainstream of an older era (say 1952 to 1980?) disappearing to be replaced by a new central style, which I actually like. That is the big picture but clearly poets are still writing poems inside the limits of that older style, which was criticised so much. I don't want to name them, in a context which already puts them down, but the pattern is not disappearance. Instead, we have a dozen or more styles flourishing and securing their own parts of a wider public realm. It’s like plants competing in my untended garden – the losers don’t disappear altogether. Although ragwort doesn't seem to have come back since 2018. The Carcanet New Poetries 8 includes poems that hark back to the 1950s stylistically.
I have this image in my mind of 990 poets as a self-sustaining structure with no supports. It is erect, or it can't collapse any further. At any point where you are, the pressure of other poets holds you up. You don’t need economic support. If you have the esteem of your fellow poets, then it is a grand place to be. If you don’t have that esteem it is a painful place to be. Your achievements flow away like rain down the gutter. This is so vivid, but I don’t have any external evidence for it. It is just an image, like a dream. The structure is almost invulnerable to assault, but it puts pressure on all the individuals… the heat of winning, of losing, of being halfway down a field of 100, of seeing other people succeed, is too much. People who buy into meritocracy too much have a hard time because it doesn't allow for serenity.
Teaching a class where everyone assumes on day one that they are more talented than you. Maybe that is the story of our time. A poet with a pay cheque but without the will to write poetry. The class certainly aren't there to read your work. Just the opposite.
Spent a day in the South Bank poetry library basically looking for books by the people in [2013 anthology] Dear World, or about 20 of them. I used the 74 names as a proxy for saying who wasn't included in the PBS lists, but on investigation it may be that a lot of them gave up after one book or even didn’t get a book out. You go to the right spot on the shelves, and only find one slim pamphlet. You have this classic anthology, collecting a swarm of poets under 35, who haven’t reached their peak, in 2013. Did they go on after that? So my text says that the absence of 53 names from Dear World in the lists from the PBS shop window is an indicator of how incomplete the shop window is. But this may be wrong, it may be that half those 53 names had just given up writing regularly, and the PBS thing is actually a good view of who is producing serious, long, substantial books. What if the people you admire give up? I am seeing this picture of people spending ten years learning how to write poetry and then not writing it. They found lots of other things to do which had a bigger audience. There just wasn't a big splash when they got their pamphlet out. This is just a picture. Maybe the amount of poets floating around is so big that it diminishes the space each one can occupy as they write their work. Small audience, big competition. And so people drop out. I am wondering how that would apply to the 990 recent names, in the PBS list trawl which I did. Are they going to be career poets or is one book going to be it?
I have the “Salt Younger Poets” anthology, 2011, hoaching with good poems, 50 writers who hadn't had a book out at that point. A brilliantly edited book, they had done the research to an incredible degree of efficiency. So, if I do the catalogue checks, maybe 30 of them never got a book out. This is depressing; I am not sure I want to do the sociology. Writing poetry just isn’t that rewarding, it is easy to see why people give up. I am not going to do that catalogue work. (However, 24 of the 50 have a book within the PBS list I collated. Not bad.)
This crush of poets, the 990 names I culled from the PBS “shop window”, it is great for the consumer, but maybe there are side-effects which aren't so great. There is pressure because of too many poets striving to get the outlets. And maybe there is resentment of editors and panels because they can’t give young poets what they want. Pressure from below. When people are so angry with the gatekeepers, it is hard for anybody to reach a sense of legitimacy. Possibly the ones who persist are the ones who do respect the institutions and who aren’t charred with resentment.
I am interested now in the level of disillusion. I have a feeling that there were 990 poets in contention in 2010, and that quite a few of those have already quietly given up. The data section I examined in 2022 had too many people who had started in the last five years… the age spread wasn't right, it had too many young people. Someone gets a book out, even two books, and the feedback is almost inaudible. They wanted victory rather than serenity. So maybe, of these 990 now hunting for success, a third are going to give up before the next time someone does a large sample. Being turned down is just so painful, you don't want to repeat it and repeat it.
Have spent a frustrating morning trying to access annual figures for poetry publication. I subscribed to The Bookseller on-line to get these figures, but I can't find anything relevant by searching their back issues. I think they did a breakdown of titles by genre in the 1990s, but I can't find anything in the stuff available on-line. I think the ISBN agency asks publishers to categorise their titles and produces breakdowns annually based on that, but I don’t know where to find those figures. When Randall Stevenson claims 2700 titles being published annually at the end of the Nineties, I think he is using an ISBN report, but I don’t know where he obtained that figure. It's an exciting figure.
I got hold of a 2012 book from Salt, “In their own words”. Statements by 56 poets. This is really weak. It is good to know what poets think about their work, but this is unrevealing. A forgotten book. As always, there is something to be retrieved – Ira Lightman’s statement for example. In general these writers compose intuitively and have no idea what intuition is made of or how to talk about it. Very few of them published with Salt – a lack of coordination there. I would have been interested to see a book about Salt’s debut poets and what they valued as a generation. I was probably hoping for that. Instead, two editors signed up to do this prose book and didn’t have any interest in the Salt list. At a quick glance, only one of the 56 published with Salt. (real count is 3!) This is a lesson, possibly – when someone has a view of what poetry is happening, in a given decade or half decade, their view may not even overlap with yours. It is difficult to have a conversation about poetry when you don’t read the same poets. But the field of readable poets is so huge.
I have doubts about secondary commentary which is 90% about “theoretical” poets, because intuitive poets are unable to explain their processes. But really, what can you do with processes which are so defended and so buried in silence.
I subscribe to an on-line text library called scribd. I have discovered that they have hundreds of volumes of recent poetry which I can read for free. The trouble with this is that they aren't necessarily the books I want to read, and there are too many of them. The stage I have reached with the book is that I have completed the text, I have too much text and I want to reduce it, but I also want to read more books so that I have more context. Right now, I have to take a break. Like, a week with no thinking about the book at all.
This morning I was dreaming of a passage in the book which I had to rewrite. When I woke up, I realised that the passage didn’t exist anyway. This is overload. I want to sleep without worrying about flaws in the book.
I have the idea of thermal sensing – that if you read 100 books of poetry from a 5 year period, then they stick together, and the information which normally wisps away as waste heat remains as evidence. This brings out the unconscious elements of style and treatment. Poets don’t always like this, but it gets you away from simply paraphrasing what they say. The light is the conscious level but the unconscious level is a trace of heat.
It also develops an idea of time and art, namely that there are collective states which animate art, especially poetry, and that these are temporary and so make up the substance of a time. A few years later they have dissipated away.
So I have read 100 books from the last 5 years. Themes do keep recurring. Three mentions of kintsugi – one was actually in a prose book (Nancy Campbell’s The Library of Ice, fantastic) and not the poems by the same writer. But this is a sort of “ping” - kintsugi three times, I have found the edge in some way. Where the edge is, that is part of the frame. Postscript. I have now seen a fourth reference to kintsugi. Surely this is a signal to stop collecting evidence.
I talk about the mainstream of an older era (say 1952 to 1980?) disappearing to be replaced by a new central style, which I actually like. That is the big picture but clearly poets are still writing poems inside the limits of that older style, which was criticised so much. I don't want to name them, in a context which already puts them down, but the pattern is not disappearance. Instead, we have a dozen or more styles flourishing and securing their own parts of a wider public realm. It’s like plants competing in my untended garden – the losers don’t disappear altogether. Although ragwort doesn't seem to have come back since 2018. The Carcanet New Poetries 8 includes poems that hark back to the 1950s stylistically.
I have this image in my mind of 990 poets as a self-sustaining structure with no supports. It is erect, or it can't collapse any further. At any point where you are, the pressure of other poets holds you up. You don’t need economic support. If you have the esteem of your fellow poets, then it is a grand place to be. If you don’t have that esteem it is a painful place to be. Your achievements flow away like rain down the gutter. This is so vivid, but I don’t have any external evidence for it. It is just an image, like a dream. The structure is almost invulnerable to assault, but it puts pressure on all the individuals… the heat of winning, of losing, of being halfway down a field of 100, of seeing other people succeed, is too much. People who buy into meritocracy too much have a hard time because it doesn't allow for serenity.
Teaching a class where everyone assumes on day one that they are more talented than you. Maybe that is the story of our time. A poet with a pay cheque but without the will to write poetry. The class certainly aren't there to read your work. Just the opposite.
Spent a day in the South Bank poetry library basically looking for books by the people in [2013 anthology] Dear World, or about 20 of them. I used the 74 names as a proxy for saying who wasn't included in the PBS lists, but on investigation it may be that a lot of them gave up after one book or even didn’t get a book out. You go to the right spot on the shelves, and only find one slim pamphlet. You have this classic anthology, collecting a swarm of poets under 35, who haven’t reached their peak, in 2013. Did they go on after that? So my text says that the absence of 53 names from Dear World in the lists from the PBS shop window is an indicator of how incomplete the shop window is. But this may be wrong, it may be that half those 53 names had just given up writing regularly, and the PBS thing is actually a good view of who is producing serious, long, substantial books. What if the people you admire give up? I am seeing this picture of people spending ten years learning how to write poetry and then not writing it. They found lots of other things to do which had a bigger audience. There just wasn't a big splash when they got their pamphlet out. This is just a picture. Maybe the amount of poets floating around is so big that it diminishes the space each one can occupy as they write their work. Small audience, big competition. And so people drop out. I am wondering how that would apply to the 990 recent names, in the PBS list trawl which I did. Are they going to be career poets or is one book going to be it?
I have the “Salt Younger Poets” anthology, 2011, hoaching with good poems, 50 writers who hadn't had a book out at that point. A brilliantly edited book, they had done the research to an incredible degree of efficiency. So, if I do the catalogue checks, maybe 30 of them never got a book out. This is depressing; I am not sure I want to do the sociology. Writing poetry just isn’t that rewarding, it is easy to see why people give up. I am not going to do that catalogue work. (However, 24 of the 50 have a book within the PBS list I collated. Not bad.)
This crush of poets, the 990 names I culled from the PBS “shop window”, it is great for the consumer, but maybe there are side-effects which aren't so great. There is pressure because of too many poets striving to get the outlets. And maybe there is resentment of editors and panels because they can’t give young poets what they want. Pressure from below. When people are so angry with the gatekeepers, it is hard for anybody to reach a sense of legitimacy. Possibly the ones who persist are the ones who do respect the institutions and who aren’t charred with resentment.
I am interested now in the level of disillusion. I have a feeling that there were 990 poets in contention in 2010, and that quite a few of those have already quietly given up. The data section I examined in 2022 had too many people who had started in the last five years… the age spread wasn't right, it had too many young people. Someone gets a book out, even two books, and the feedback is almost inaudible. They wanted victory rather than serenity. So maybe, of these 990 now hunting for success, a third are going to give up before the next time someone does a large sample. Being turned down is just so painful, you don't want to repeat it and repeat it.
Have spent a frustrating morning trying to access annual figures for poetry publication. I subscribed to The Bookseller on-line to get these figures, but I can't find anything relevant by searching their back issues. I think they did a breakdown of titles by genre in the 1990s, but I can't find anything in the stuff available on-line. I think the ISBN agency asks publishers to categorise their titles and produces breakdowns annually based on that, but I don’t know where to find those figures. When Randall Stevenson claims 2700 titles being published annually at the end of the Nineties, I think he is using an ISBN report, but I don’t know where he obtained that figure. It's an exciting figure.
I got hold of a 2012 book from Salt, “In their own words”. Statements by 56 poets. This is really weak. It is good to know what poets think about their work, but this is unrevealing. A forgotten book. As always, there is something to be retrieved – Ira Lightman’s statement for example. In general these writers compose intuitively and have no idea what intuition is made of or how to talk about it. Very few of them published with Salt – a lack of coordination there. I would have been interested to see a book about Salt’s debut poets and what they valued as a generation. I was probably hoping for that. Instead, two editors signed up to do this prose book and didn’t have any interest in the Salt list. At a quick glance, only one of the 56 published with Salt. (real count is 3!) This is a lesson, possibly – when someone has a view of what poetry is happening, in a given decade or half decade, their view may not even overlap with yours. It is difficult to have a conversation about poetry when you don’t read the same poets. But the field of readable poets is so huge.
I have doubts about secondary commentary which is 90% about “theoretical” poets, because intuitive poets are unable to explain their processes. But really, what can you do with processes which are so defended and so buried in silence.
Thursday, 2 March 2023
Muriel Box - again
Muriel Box – again
I listened to the Radio 3 documentary about Muriel Box on Sunday and found it quite irritating. Not least because it was called “Carol and Muriel”, pushing the subject aside because she wasn’t interesting enough. Evidently they found Box boring and wanted to reclad it as a Treasure Quest with the focus on the quester and not the cultural material being sought after. The model is “Rat Scabies and the holy grail”, so a historical subject is thrust aside to show more about a perky young presenter. The presenter was perky and we learnt more about her than about M Box. They left out Box as scriptwriter (more or less) because being a director is the Power Job and that is what they found marketable. So the fact that MB was head of the script department at Gainsborough Studios at their peak was not mentioned. I have never found out who invented that style (“The Man in Grey” etc.) but it would have been good to hear a discussion of it. Instead they ignored any change of styles between 1947 or so and 1955 or so… idiotically. They didn't establish any personal style for MB and evidently she didn’t have one. Treatment of someone working deep inside the industry as if they were an auteur pursuing a personal vision is bound to stifle the historical facts. Again, the drive is to find someone Powerful and the possibility of creative collaboration is unacceptable. A key fact about MB is that she moved from febrile melodrama to social realism (“Street Corner”) and on to stultified 1950s smugness. This does not suit auteur theory treatment but it is an intellectual puzzle and one has to ask if the “shadowy person who invented the new period style” actually was Muriel Box at several turning points. On watching “Street Corner” (1953) one is reminded of several hundred cop shows (it is about female police officers) about young coppers learning the ropes, in a semi documentary style, and the question is whether Box had actually worked this out and the idea was then there for a hundred TV producers to pick up as TV matured. Box graduated to directing as the Fifties were getting going and so her films in that job are full of Fifties blandness. “Simon and Laura” isn’t the best British film of the 1950s, as someone claimed in the radio show, it is critical of television and preening actors and smug domesticity, but it exploits those qualities to the utmost and doesn't even propose an alternative. Finch and Kendall are asked to impersonate one-dimensional narcissists, and sleepwalk through their roles. As everyone says, the 1950s saw a roll-back of the feminism which the participation of women in the war effort had advanced between 1939 and 1945, and the Kay Kendall character in "Simon and Laura" wishes only to be beautiful and pampered.
The radio docu was in denial of the fact that directors weren't in control at Rank, so it couldn’t tell the story. Box's films for Rank look just like every other Rank film. I am wondering now who invented Fifties domesticity, smugness, affluence, and blandness… I don’t have a candidate. Some monsters have multiple DNA.
I wasn't impressed by the presenter's repeated claim that nobody except herself and the two people she interviewed had ever taken any interest in MB. I just got the impression that she had never read any books. This is a specialised sort of camera, producing images in which nobody worked on Box’s Rank films except Box and nobody had ever written about Box until the presenter cruised into town. A disappearing camera. This is hardly a way of recovering the truth about cinema history. Erasing the context of collaborative production actually means erasing Box’s own biography.
I had supposed that Box originated the Gainsborough Melodrama style, as head of the script department at Gainsborough, but I now know that is untrue. She didn't join them until 1946 and the films in question began in 1943. Wikipedia suggests that producer Edward Black (1900-48) invented the style, but there is now better evidence on that and based on Sydney Gilliat’s memoirs Black resisted that style.
Robert Murphy's 1989 book about British cinema 1939-49, "Realism and Tinsel" has just arrived. not a great title. Murphy attributes the Melodrama style to the wake of the Tod Slaughter films. No way! they have nothing to do with Slaughter's nostalgic revival of an 1880s theatre style! He does say that Black left Gainsborough at the end of 1943. There is much more detail in his work on “Gainsborough producers”. He says “At the beginning of 1943 Ostrer had told the Kinematograph Weekly that Gainsborough was ‘refusing to bow to the prevailing tendency to concentrate on war subjects.’” And with his ideas vindicated by the success of The Man in Grey he grew increasingly impatient of Black’s desire for a wide range of subjects, particularly when there were men like Minney, who were eager to produce flamboyant melodramas such as Madonna of the Seven Moons." He points to RJ Minney as the producer who wanted melodrama and disagreed with Black. “R J Minney said that 'melodrama is essential in a film if it is to hit the box office since the film is more akin to the music hall and the circus than to a theatre'", and all evidence suggests that Ostrer firmly believed this too.” (Michael Brooke on the BFI website) A check in Wikipedia shows that Minney produced seven key melodramatic films within a few years. So, his involvement was more profound than anyone else’s and the simplest solution is to attribute the style to him. That is, Maurice Ostrer wanted the style but wasn’t a creative figure; Minney was enabled by Ostrer but could actually find stories and put films together. So provisionally the answer is:
-Rank own or control the parent company of Gainsborough from the end of 1941 (but leave artistic control to the team in place)
- the style is first shown in 'Man in Grey' but RJ Minney is the one who works out the blueprint and imposes it on the Gainsborough team
-Maurice Ostrer as studio boss bets on escapism and re-fulfils the blueprint making another dozen films in the same style, usually with Minney
-another dozen imitations surface from various studios
-after quarrels with Arthur Rank, Ostrer leaves; Rank take over artistic control; Sydney and Muriel Box run Gainsborough for roughly two years from late 1946 and abandon the costume melodrama style
- Muriel Box is involved in possibly one of the Gainsborough melodramas, "Jassy"
-Ostrer starts up another company (Premier) and makes a sort of auto-pastiche, "The Idol of Paris", which is widely regarded as the worst film ever made and closes the door
- Rank close down Gainsborough, dislike sensationalism, and the style grinds to a halt
However, Michael Brooke for the BFI says about the origin “The following year [1943], in-house writer-director Leslie Arliss adapted Lady Eleanor Smith's Regency bodice-ripper The Man In Grey. Consciously defying an unspoken convention that British cinema at a time of war should be broadly realistic, Arliss, with cinematographer Arthur Crabtree, production designer John Bryan and costume designer Elizabeth Haffenden, devised a flamboyantly baroque visual approach that established the distinctive "look" of the cycle right from the start, which also belied the film's modest budget.” So Arliss may have made crucial contributions. It was Minney who discovered the novel on which “Man In Grey” is based, and proposed it. I have to add that Alan Lovell’s analysis is that the way the films were made contradicted the basic artistic intent and that they were inconsistent as melodramas. He finds a lack of co-operation, and it is hard to see that the style was the outcome of a creative team effort. Murphy says that the actors involved hated the films. I have a strange feeling that the production team as a whole disliked the style, the dislike is what went down in history, and this is why no-one ever claimed to have been the originator of it.
To recover what Box achieved, we have to see her running that script department, so taking in a variety of original material and re-styling it to match the planned output, matching a proven commercial formula. She was the most important scriptwriter of a certain period and we need to consider about 40 films in which she played a major creative role, not just as director but also as scriptwriter and even as script supervisor. She shifted style the whole time. Murphy says that Box looked at "Love Story" and "Madonna of the Seven Moons" and produced ("successful re-working") a story and script (Pauline Kael called it "a rich, portentous mixture of Beethoven, Chopin, kitsch, and Freud") which yielded "The Seventh Veil" (1945). This is more convincing... she was brilliant at studying the market and at arranging things. This is how films get made. Yes, she got the Oscar. It's a great film.
I have just watched (on Youtube) “The girl In the painting” (1948), with a script by M Box. This misses being a great film but I did enjoy it. The title character has been through several concentration camps and is suffering from amnesia. In one scene, a dominant older male figure (an English major) forces her in quite a threatening way to recover her memory ... using toys from her childhood sent to him by her real father. The ambiguity of the “dangerous healer” reminds me of “The Seventh Veil”, where the ambivalence is the key thing in the whole film. So this scene may be Box’s personal vision – although one of the stories came from a pre-existing novel. That is interesting, but Box’s achievement is surely not to impose a personal style but to organise material, to complete the story arcs, find the drama, and remove or minimise weaknesses. Surely auteur theory was subject to intense criticism in the 1960s, already, because it obscured the collaborative nature of film making. Murphy records that "By the time she [MB] left [Gainsborough] in 1949 there were forty scripts in various stages of development". As Box was supervisor of scripts she probably contributed to all of these.
The quest for a beautiful face seen only in a picture is in “The Girl in the painting” but also in a 1947 film called “Corridor of mirrors”, so part of a sort of pond of floating themes of the time. (Also in a 1944 Preminger film called “Laura”, which may be the start point, who knows.) The idea that one cannot identify with teamwork is irritating… surely the Left approach finds teams at the core of everything. This is closer to how films are made. One does not enter culture to seize power.
Film work starts with a table covered in new pulp novels, which already share the same plot motifs and characters. I am interested in the status of this “pond” of pulp fiction, works which (in the Forties versions] I have had difficulty getting access to. I think they repeated themes endlessly, not being very original; but also that there is a pulp creativity which I admire. “Corridor of Mirrors” is a very distinctive film but there was actually a preceding novel in 1941 which probably has all the story… $40 second hand which I am afraid is too much! It is by Chris Massie (1880-1964). There is a link between this pulp and New Romantic poetry; yet to be defined I think. Somewhere linking Wardour Street and Fitzroy Square. Box started with pulp and added logic and organisation. Then someone else made it visible and visual.
After losing her connection as a director, MB started a publishing company called Femina. I searched for their books in abebooks. They did a 1968 anthology of poetry by women... I think I looked at this before and it was too non-specific, not being contemporary women poets. It wasn’t the first women-only anthology but it deserves honour as being one of the first. The claim is that Femina was the first feminist publisher in Britain, and so far as I know that is true.
The archivist at the BFI interviewed in the radio documentary says in The Observer that “Simon and Laura” is the best British film of the 1950s. This is untrue. It is about two famous actors whose ideal marriage is the subject of a “reality TV” show while off camera they hate each other, and so there are two different stories happening simultaneously. I enjoyed it but it is still very 1950s, full of theatrical glamour, affluent people, and all about marriage. Is it really better than White Corridors, The Ladykillers, the Niven “Elusive Pimpernel”, Gideon's Day, The Cruel Sea, Ice Cold in Alex, The day the earth caught fire… no. But, let's go and watch them all again.
I listened to the Radio 3 documentary about Muriel Box on Sunday and found it quite irritating. Not least because it was called “Carol and Muriel”, pushing the subject aside because she wasn’t interesting enough. Evidently they found Box boring and wanted to reclad it as a Treasure Quest with the focus on the quester and not the cultural material being sought after. The model is “Rat Scabies and the holy grail”, so a historical subject is thrust aside to show more about a perky young presenter. The presenter was perky and we learnt more about her than about M Box. They left out Box as scriptwriter (more or less) because being a director is the Power Job and that is what they found marketable. So the fact that MB was head of the script department at Gainsborough Studios at their peak was not mentioned. I have never found out who invented that style (“The Man in Grey” etc.) but it would have been good to hear a discussion of it. Instead they ignored any change of styles between 1947 or so and 1955 or so… idiotically. They didn't establish any personal style for MB and evidently she didn’t have one. Treatment of someone working deep inside the industry as if they were an auteur pursuing a personal vision is bound to stifle the historical facts. Again, the drive is to find someone Powerful and the possibility of creative collaboration is unacceptable. A key fact about MB is that she moved from febrile melodrama to social realism (“Street Corner”) and on to stultified 1950s smugness. This does not suit auteur theory treatment but it is an intellectual puzzle and one has to ask if the “shadowy person who invented the new period style” actually was Muriel Box at several turning points. On watching “Street Corner” (1953) one is reminded of several hundred cop shows (it is about female police officers) about young coppers learning the ropes, in a semi documentary style, and the question is whether Box had actually worked this out and the idea was then there for a hundred TV producers to pick up as TV matured. Box graduated to directing as the Fifties were getting going and so her films in that job are full of Fifties blandness. “Simon and Laura” isn’t the best British film of the 1950s, as someone claimed in the radio show, it is critical of television and preening actors and smug domesticity, but it exploits those qualities to the utmost and doesn't even propose an alternative. Finch and Kendall are asked to impersonate one-dimensional narcissists, and sleepwalk through their roles. As everyone says, the 1950s saw a roll-back of the feminism which the participation of women in the war effort had advanced between 1939 and 1945, and the Kay Kendall character in "Simon and Laura" wishes only to be beautiful and pampered.
The radio docu was in denial of the fact that directors weren't in control at Rank, so it couldn’t tell the story. Box's films for Rank look just like every other Rank film. I am wondering now who invented Fifties domesticity, smugness, affluence, and blandness… I don’t have a candidate. Some monsters have multiple DNA.
I wasn't impressed by the presenter's repeated claim that nobody except herself and the two people she interviewed had ever taken any interest in MB. I just got the impression that she had never read any books. This is a specialised sort of camera, producing images in which nobody worked on Box’s Rank films except Box and nobody had ever written about Box until the presenter cruised into town. A disappearing camera. This is hardly a way of recovering the truth about cinema history. Erasing the context of collaborative production actually means erasing Box’s own biography.
I had supposed that Box originated the Gainsborough Melodrama style, as head of the script department at Gainsborough, but I now know that is untrue. She didn't join them until 1946 and the films in question began in 1943. Wikipedia suggests that producer Edward Black (1900-48) invented the style, but there is now better evidence on that and based on Sydney Gilliat’s memoirs Black resisted that style.
Robert Murphy's 1989 book about British cinema 1939-49, "Realism and Tinsel" has just arrived. not a great title. Murphy attributes the Melodrama style to the wake of the Tod Slaughter films. No way! they have nothing to do with Slaughter's nostalgic revival of an 1880s theatre style! He does say that Black left Gainsborough at the end of 1943. There is much more detail in his work on “Gainsborough producers”. He says “At the beginning of 1943 Ostrer had told the Kinematograph Weekly that Gainsborough was ‘refusing to bow to the prevailing tendency to concentrate on war subjects.’” And with his ideas vindicated by the success of The Man in Grey he grew increasingly impatient of Black’s desire for a wide range of subjects, particularly when there were men like Minney, who were eager to produce flamboyant melodramas such as Madonna of the Seven Moons." He points to RJ Minney as the producer who wanted melodrama and disagreed with Black. “R J Minney said that 'melodrama is essential in a film if it is to hit the box office since the film is more akin to the music hall and the circus than to a theatre'", and all evidence suggests that Ostrer firmly believed this too.” (Michael Brooke on the BFI website) A check in Wikipedia shows that Minney produced seven key melodramatic films within a few years. So, his involvement was more profound than anyone else’s and the simplest solution is to attribute the style to him. That is, Maurice Ostrer wanted the style but wasn’t a creative figure; Minney was enabled by Ostrer but could actually find stories and put films together. So provisionally the answer is:
-Rank own or control the parent company of Gainsborough from the end of 1941 (but leave artistic control to the team in place)
- the style is first shown in 'Man in Grey' but RJ Minney is the one who works out the blueprint and imposes it on the Gainsborough team
-Maurice Ostrer as studio boss bets on escapism and re-fulfils the blueprint making another dozen films in the same style, usually with Minney
-another dozen imitations surface from various studios
-after quarrels with Arthur Rank, Ostrer leaves; Rank take over artistic control; Sydney and Muriel Box run Gainsborough for roughly two years from late 1946 and abandon the costume melodrama style
- Muriel Box is involved in possibly one of the Gainsborough melodramas, "Jassy"
-Ostrer starts up another company (Premier) and makes a sort of auto-pastiche, "The Idol of Paris", which is widely regarded as the worst film ever made and closes the door
- Rank close down Gainsborough, dislike sensationalism, and the style grinds to a halt
However, Michael Brooke for the BFI says about the origin “The following year [1943], in-house writer-director Leslie Arliss adapted Lady Eleanor Smith's Regency bodice-ripper The Man In Grey. Consciously defying an unspoken convention that British cinema at a time of war should be broadly realistic, Arliss, with cinematographer Arthur Crabtree, production designer John Bryan and costume designer Elizabeth Haffenden, devised a flamboyantly baroque visual approach that established the distinctive "look" of the cycle right from the start, which also belied the film's modest budget.” So Arliss may have made crucial contributions. It was Minney who discovered the novel on which “Man In Grey” is based, and proposed it. I have to add that Alan Lovell’s analysis is that the way the films were made contradicted the basic artistic intent and that they were inconsistent as melodramas. He finds a lack of co-operation, and it is hard to see that the style was the outcome of a creative team effort. Murphy says that the actors involved hated the films. I have a strange feeling that the production team as a whole disliked the style, the dislike is what went down in history, and this is why no-one ever claimed to have been the originator of it.
To recover what Box achieved, we have to see her running that script department, so taking in a variety of original material and re-styling it to match the planned output, matching a proven commercial formula. She was the most important scriptwriter of a certain period and we need to consider about 40 films in which she played a major creative role, not just as director but also as scriptwriter and even as script supervisor. She shifted style the whole time. Murphy says that Box looked at "Love Story" and "Madonna of the Seven Moons" and produced ("successful re-working") a story and script (Pauline Kael called it "a rich, portentous mixture of Beethoven, Chopin, kitsch, and Freud") which yielded "The Seventh Veil" (1945). This is more convincing... she was brilliant at studying the market and at arranging things. This is how films get made. Yes, she got the Oscar. It's a great film.
I have just watched (on Youtube) “The girl In the painting” (1948), with a script by M Box. This misses being a great film but I did enjoy it. The title character has been through several concentration camps and is suffering from amnesia. In one scene, a dominant older male figure (an English major) forces her in quite a threatening way to recover her memory ... using toys from her childhood sent to him by her real father. The ambiguity of the “dangerous healer” reminds me of “The Seventh Veil”, where the ambivalence is the key thing in the whole film. So this scene may be Box’s personal vision – although one of the stories came from a pre-existing novel. That is interesting, but Box’s achievement is surely not to impose a personal style but to organise material, to complete the story arcs, find the drama, and remove or minimise weaknesses. Surely auteur theory was subject to intense criticism in the 1960s, already, because it obscured the collaborative nature of film making. Murphy records that "By the time she [MB] left [Gainsborough] in 1949 there were forty scripts in various stages of development". As Box was supervisor of scripts she probably contributed to all of these.
The quest for a beautiful face seen only in a picture is in “The Girl in the painting” but also in a 1947 film called “Corridor of mirrors”, so part of a sort of pond of floating themes of the time. (Also in a 1944 Preminger film called “Laura”, which may be the start point, who knows.) The idea that one cannot identify with teamwork is irritating… surely the Left approach finds teams at the core of everything. This is closer to how films are made. One does not enter culture to seize power.
Film work starts with a table covered in new pulp novels, which already share the same plot motifs and characters. I am interested in the status of this “pond” of pulp fiction, works which (in the Forties versions] I have had difficulty getting access to. I think they repeated themes endlessly, not being very original; but also that there is a pulp creativity which I admire. “Corridor of Mirrors” is a very distinctive film but there was actually a preceding novel in 1941 which probably has all the story… $40 second hand which I am afraid is too much! It is by Chris Massie (1880-1964). There is a link between this pulp and New Romantic poetry; yet to be defined I think. Somewhere linking Wardour Street and Fitzroy Square. Box started with pulp and added logic and organisation. Then someone else made it visible and visual.
After losing her connection as a director, MB started a publishing company called Femina. I searched for their books in abebooks. They did a 1968 anthology of poetry by women... I think I looked at this before and it was too non-specific, not being contemporary women poets. It wasn’t the first women-only anthology but it deserves honour as being one of the first. The claim is that Femina was the first feminist publisher in Britain, and so far as I know that is true.
The archivist at the BFI interviewed in the radio documentary says in The Observer that “Simon and Laura” is the best British film of the 1950s. This is untrue. It is about two famous actors whose ideal marriage is the subject of a “reality TV” show while off camera they hate each other, and so there are two different stories happening simultaneously. I enjoyed it but it is still very 1950s, full of theatrical glamour, affluent people, and all about marriage. Is it really better than White Corridors, The Ladykillers, the Niven “Elusive Pimpernel”, Gideon's Day, The Cruel Sea, Ice Cold in Alex, The day the earth caught fire… no. But, let's go and watch them all again.
Wednesday, 1 February 2023
New book
December 2022.
am working on a new book about poetry in the 21st century. I started at the end of August and sometime around December 15th counted that I had 150,000 words and it was time to halt. I have been taking a break since then – actually still working every day, just not adding new chapters. The title is likely to be “Beautiful feelings of sensitive people”.
have been checking on early Christian vernacular literature. Heer says that the rise of this new literature in the vernacular (German) was the product of Dominican priests writing for nuns in the 70 Dominican nunneries of Germany. So, not to do with lay literacy but with a relatively un-educated part of the clergy itself. They presumably did not know Latin but could read and hence needed books. The history of lay literacy is slightly different.
The start point was looking at the Poetry Book Society website. I actually wanted to spot books I could review. I became fascinated by this as a shop window, and finally downloaded 19 quarters of their “suggested” books and turned them into a spreadsheet. I filtered out foreign poets and came up with a dataset of 990 poets and 1190 titles. I thought this proved that a survey was impossible, but after a while I felt that it was useful to take a dip into that big river and see what I could come up with. Obviously the background is “depolarisation” – about 20 years ago I began to get into a broader view of poetry than just the Alternative. After a few years of delving and pondering, I produced a book called “The long 1950s”, which still halted in 1997, but took the poets who hadn’t taken on the “innovation package” of the 1960s and had continued to write in the old styles. I found that rewarding and there wasn't much chance of me taking a narrow, Alternative only, view of the last 20 years.
Quote from an email to a friend: “at the risk of going on and on, I want to say that the figure of 990 authors does not represent a target I am going to meet... It is more like a scientific paper where you spend half your energy analysing why the data you have is so incomplete and what questions you can ever legitimately ask of it.
I looked at the classic generational (“under 35”) anthology Dear World and Everyone in it. 74 names. Of which 52 were NOT in the PBS list of 990. What I think this means is that the PBS website is just a shop window, many many powerful poets don’t feature in it at all. Wrestling with the 990 is not going to win the war... it is a battle which will not get you closer to the objective.
So, where are the others? (Dear World is 8 years old but the poets should be at the prime of their careers, roughly.)”
and another email: “I saw Martin last week and he was quite negative about the book. I don’t think he wants to read it. He was really against the subtitle “poetry in the 21st century” although it has to be called that. He did a thesis on the influence of the New York poets on English poetry and wants me to do something like that, where the content matches the title. That is no good, the central thing is that there is a deluge of new poets and the book has to deal quickly with 80 or 90 poets, not find an enclosure and sit in it. And he thinks it is just going to be me writing about poets I like… another statement of self-regard. But he isn’t allowing for me being like a camera and taking new data in, so that half the poets are poets I hadn’t heard of before I started. He is missing something there, the effect of the deluge is to wipe away the old landmarks. We can escape polarisation.”
(A further check revealed some more people who couldn't really be counted as resident in Britain, so depressed the count to 972. These checks are boring to do.)
The effect of thousands of new poets rushing onto the scene is that the past is simply forgotten, buried beneath new and fabulous layers of words. So we don’t need to continue the mainstream; alternative opposition of the 1970s. The new scene is not authentically the offspring of either side. There are just endless new possibilities. My guess is that most of the 990 poets are worth reading. The samples I have taken suggest that, but I am not going to sample every single poet. I have trouble with people who think that anything unconventional must be the product of the unconventional poetry which existed in the 1970s – this is just an act of grand cultural acquisition, although I can see it is tempting. It is “I own the wilderness” more or less. Offspring– poetry is not just the product of poetry but of a whole cultural ocean in which poetry is just one warm current. Alternative poetry was not visible enough to develop a second and third generation – people rebelled against the mainstream culture and worked out a cultural programme before stumbling across the existing Alternative. This is a pity in some ways, but it certainly encourages stylistic diversity.
Have just been reading an interview in Wolfgang Iser’s book where a Norman Holland reports work which researched “reader interpretation” by actually asking people to write down their reactions to a poem. He selects a single poem, by Denise Levertov, and reports that ten people wrote about it without any common element (except that it was about a snake and that the writer was a woman, a fact which is not in the text) in what they wrote down. I like this, but I am wondering how I can respond to it within my book. I suspect that this was quite a simple poem with a dreamlike image which was genuinely open to interpretation. Poems which include interpretation, introspection, argument, etc., are much less subject to variant interpretation. But really, anything I write may mislead someone who reads it, my reaction to a poem may be quite different from theirs. This incites me to record my reactions, not to suppress them. I like the idea of collecting ten responses to several hundred poems, but I am doubtful that I could get people to supply this material for free. I am recording my responses to poems because I can control the material and I don't have to pay for it.
To look in another direction – the responses of poets to poems are of great interest, and the way they write expresses that response. The history of poetry is a narrative of the way poets of one generation respond to the poems of the previous generation. This is a manageable way of capturing subjectivity. Of course, there may be a whole range of subjective responses which I am not capturing at all. And I can’t compose a book in which many volumes of poetry are discussed and ten responses are included for each one. I am trying to give people helpful advice rather than to record every possible reaction.
Nolan. I quote something quoted in a poem by Kevin Nolan about eisteann ri bhfuaim, and so on. I have now discovered that this is a passage from the poet Sean O’Riordain’s diaries, for February 1949. The diaries were published as “anamlón bliana” in 2014. I am unsure how Kevin came to quote from them in a book published in 2006. The quote is at page 78 of Loving Little Orlick. The sense of the whole passage is to define “the wonder and magic of life” (alltacht og druiodhiocht). The sound which we hear dying away is that of a horse’s hooves, pulling a cart, which O'Riordain heard as a child.
So, I have reached the point where the reading is continuing, and I am finding new texts I like, but I am not writing about them because there is no longer room.
I set up the book by observing, early on, that a 1962 anthology by Kenneth Allott included 39.5% Oxford graduates in its selection. Then I gesture towards a set of 990 poets retrieved from the Poetry Book Society website, and say that the theme of the whole fifty-year period is the broadening of the apex. It would be rational to give a figure for how many of the 990 had been to Oxford. I am not doing this – I just don’t want to do 990 internet searches for biographic data. Contemporary poets like to hide their educational career, because of the attention given to it, which may be hostile, and anyway bypasses what they are really saying in their poems. It would be hard to get an accurate figure. I prefer to spend my time reading poems. So this figure is missing. I just don't think anyone is going to examine the figures in print and say “the apex has not broadened”. So the extra evidence does not advance us.
Have been reading David Kynaston’s social history of the 1950s – Family Britain. Think this is the third time. I relate to that decade. He prints Gaitskell’s analysis of the 1955 general election (which Labour lost). He (HG) says that the problem was privatisation – people were more interested in the welfare of their household and less interested in the nation and the collective benefit. So my book puts great stress on privatisation, and the analysis was already there seventy years ago. This is depressing somehow, but, if you write good history, then it does sound familiar, because everyone already knows about it. Gaitskell identifies a shift of balance– so not the annihilation of the collective idea, just a shift of the centre point. Actually, both parties had lost votes since the 1951 election but Labour lost more. Not voting probably does represent a loss of interest in the collective issues, certainly in the possibility of changes to the overall shape of society. So 90% of voters didn’t change their vote in 1955. These small shifts are very interesting, but if I broke down my analysis to include them it would be too complicated. The main point is what Sennett says, that there is a polarity between private space and public space, and in the modern era this polarity has broken down and it is the public space which has lost its energy. I think the point is that the sublime or majestic style is not impossible, but that there are massive inhibitions about it, and that poets tend to do it badly because of a lack of steady long-term development. I think some contemporary poetry is sublime, for example Pauline Stainer or Nancy Gaffield. Rod Mengham delivered a lecture on Tom Raworth as the sublime – I never saw the text but it is intriguing. Raworth slips off everything personal and local in order to give a glimpse of something uncommitted and intact. All the same I hear so many jokes about someone being pretentious, and so little about how people miss the more profound and universal notes.
I think the limit to considering this is that the domestic scale is so much the norm, and if you criticise the norm you have no standpoint. You can write a history of what happened, but much less a history of what didn’t happen. I don’t see how the normal thing can fail to meet the prevailing norms, so I am not trying to define what we have, what we do, as failure. I am just pointing to how this part of history is out of balance, which is probably true of other phases of cultural history.
The sublime is still there and is part of everyone’s experience. If they play Parry’s setting of “Jerusalem” at the Promenade Concerts, that is obviously the sublime, it is an occultist figure like Blake advancing to centre stage. It is just inaccurate to say that that is not happening, or that we don’t get carried away by it. I don’t want to catalogue all such moments, because really it would take too long. We associate these moments with legacy art and not with new art, partly because the new cannot be collective and is not part of childhood memories.
We cannot become conscious of cultural norms unless they are contrasted with some other phase of culture when the rules were different.
28th January and I have reached the end of the book. I think I wrote the last bit of text yesterday. The day before, I went to the cinema (“Babylon”, by Damien Chazelle) with the idea of sitting in a bar and writing the last piece of text. It was about Nat Raha and very difficult to write. I had all the ideas on the bus... that feeling of movement, things rushing past my eyes. I wrote them in my notebook. Later on, I discovered that I had stuffed my bag with so many Raha books that the notebook had escaped from the bag and I didn’t have it any more. This was a sign. I wrote the text down from memory and that was it. Anything else in that notebook could be forgotten about.
I read (most of) a book in which the author had just written poems about insects. And maybe a month, six weeks, before that I had read a book in which there were 20 pages of poems about insects. And we could match this to Mendoza, who works as an insect librarian (storing specimens) and writes about insects, although in a very non-realistic way. So my programme was to read 100 books from a 5-year period, with the idea that minor features of style would repeat, and that you would get the unconscious of the time, the features of style which define a period because they are unconsciously accepted. And finding ideas repeated is a key step towards that. Even if it also means that the process is getting boring. So I have to read a lot more books. Although the book is complete. It is going to be a crisis if I find something else I have to put in. But I have to collect the data. I had to write the book first, because it was convulsive, I just had tons of ideas every morning and I would spend the day writing them down. So this morning I have nothing left to do, but actually it is desirable if I read another 100 books, and that is still part of the project.
Boring tasks get left to the end, and I spent a long time yesterday in a freezing cold shed going through cardboard boxes of books, some of which have collapsed due to damp in the shed. I found the reference I wanted (an essay about the Welsh language campaign in Aberystwyth with an account of a famous demo in February 1963), but also a book which I didn’t read during the project because I hadn’t catalogued it. Digon o fwydod, by Mihangel Morgan. I am not sure I like this, much as I admire Morgan's novels. But I will have to read it properly.
Popol Vuh. The story of this text is fascinating but I didn't have space to expand on it within a review which had to be essentially about Martin Thom. I think it is fair to call it “pre-Columbian” although physically any text we have is much after Columbus. There is no “Mayan codex” of it, but it was written down in Maya by people (who were possibly Maya landowners) in the Latin alphabet around 1560, and then printed in the mid-19th century from their manuscript. The Spanish crown was trying to increase its revenue and tighten up in the 1550s, and the manuscript is probably a titulo, a narrative claim to lordship of certain lands, for use in a court.
“In the 1550s, in Santa Cruz del Quiché, a town constructed about a mile from the ruins of K’umarcaaj, someone wrote a compilation of the K’iche’s tzijs which were found in distinct places – not only wujs – at the moment of the Spanish invasion, composed in Western style (Latin characters, paper and ink). We do not know if this was a single and unique version, or one of many copies; we also do not know why they were written in this way. What is certain is that these texts were selected and set down in a certain sequence that did not exist as such prior to 1524; the content, however, is of the pre-colonial era“
[[tzij is narrative; not sure what a wuj is, although it is the same word as "vuh".]
"Around 1701–3, the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez, while at the church of San Pablo Chuilá, in Chichicastenango, obtained one of the versions of this antique manuscript, laboriously copied the K’iche’ text, and translated it into Spanish"
- this was the Popol Vuh. But what he copied was already in Latin characters. This is so obscure. Scherzer and Wagner published it in 1857, then "in Paris in 1861, the Abbé Charles Brasseur de Bourbourg published a copy of the K’iche’ text along with a French translation. Brasseur gave these texts the name Popol Vuh"
So the 1703 copy was copied from an earlier version, which however was already in Latin characters. The title means “book of counsel”. Popol Wuj is a more modern transliteration.
I asked the question if it could be a fake, like certain other “primordial” books, but this seems not to be true, and reportedly scholars collected texts from oral recitation in the 20th century, and they correspond to the 1703 Popol Vuh. (The correspondences may involve a "core" which allows all the details to differ, the modern recitals may not be Qu'iche - I have been unable to tie this down.)
Gordon Brotherston is reported to have compared several different Amerindian cosmogonies, and called them “chapters of the same book”. This is very interesting, although it is arguable whether they really correspond to each other, even being “basic books” of their respective ethnic groups. He was publishing in the 1970s and I haven’t seen his work. It sounds like the kind of thing which is so rich that I can't remember anything about it afterwards even if it seemed like a whole new world while I was reading it. His book is Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas through their Literature. “Gordon Brotherston sostiene en este ensayo que las diferentes literaturas americanas pueden leerse como capítulos de un mismo libro, que él llama El Libro del Cuarto Mundo. Para ello, establece el texto americano, distribuyéndolo en las distintas regiones geográficas y según las distintas modalidades: glifos, quipus y amoxtli, entre otros.”
"These grammars can be first accessed through the great historic-cosmogonic narratives that Gordon Brotherston calls ‘the books of the Fourth World’, and include texts such as the Ayvu Rapyta (Origin of the Human Language) of the Tupi-Guarani, the Runa Indio (Huarochirí Manuscript) of the Quechua, the Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, the Popol Vuh (Book of Counsel) of the K’iche-Maya and the Books of Chilam Balam (‘Books of the Wizard-Jaguar’) of the Maya; the Amoxtli (painted books) produced by Nahuatl tlacuilos;"
These cosmogonic books could stand as an example of the sublime, the category which I have claimed is one pole of cultural space and which is hard to access for modern poets. I am thinking of Graham Sutherland's painting “Origins of the Land”, which at one time used to hang in the Tate; this is a great example of something which is modern and English and yet sublime, cosmogonic. It was connected with the Festival of Britain and the key point may be authorisation: the Festival was a collective and governmental cultural event, and also it came during (even if late in) an era of collectivism brought about by shared danger during the war. In fact, Sutherland approved of the government and the government approved of him… not a state of affairs which has obtained for many artists since 1951.
Martin Stannard wanted the book to be a complete account of some bounded and small subset of the scene. It was possible that I would do this by writing entirely about politicised poetry. I did say in a review, around 2014, that political engagement might be the key to the new poetry. But I didn’t do this, because it would have been too exclusive. There was a revival of political interest following the 2007-8 financial crisis, and the cuts to welfare services which followed it. But if you look at 100 or 200 poets active in the past ten years, they mainly aren't political. Or, at least, if you focus on their political ideas, you get a very distorted view of their poetry. All the same, this could have been an interesting book. My excuse for writing from my point of view is that there should be ten different books about recent poetry, which all had different views. I am inclined to ask about the unconscious pressures to conform, which mean that most poets aren’t political, or only in the safest possible way. I guess there is an unspoken piece of folk wisdom saying that “If you say something controversial, you halve your audience”. In terms of what I think about, Steve Ely, Andrea Brady, and Sean Bonney have been pretty central over the past decade or more. But if I did a book saying “this is the centre! this is the apex!!”, it would shove hundreds of other people towards the periphery and the dubious lighting conditions. Such a book would have much less about poets, and much more about contemporary history, for example the zombie economy, Austerity, global warming.
If I say “you can fail artistically by failing to write about politics”, that sounds very sensible, but it is also a sort of massacre. You take sights on everyone else and blow them away.
am working on a new book about poetry in the 21st century. I started at the end of August and sometime around December 15th counted that I had 150,000 words and it was time to halt. I have been taking a break since then – actually still working every day, just not adding new chapters. The title is likely to be “Beautiful feelings of sensitive people”.
have been checking on early Christian vernacular literature. Heer says that the rise of this new literature in the vernacular (German) was the product of Dominican priests writing for nuns in the 70 Dominican nunneries of Germany. So, not to do with lay literacy but with a relatively un-educated part of the clergy itself. They presumably did not know Latin but could read and hence needed books. The history of lay literacy is slightly different.
The start point was looking at the Poetry Book Society website. I actually wanted to spot books I could review. I became fascinated by this as a shop window, and finally downloaded 19 quarters of their “suggested” books and turned them into a spreadsheet. I filtered out foreign poets and came up with a dataset of 990 poets and 1190 titles. I thought this proved that a survey was impossible, but after a while I felt that it was useful to take a dip into that big river and see what I could come up with. Obviously the background is “depolarisation” – about 20 years ago I began to get into a broader view of poetry than just the Alternative. After a few years of delving and pondering, I produced a book called “The long 1950s”, which still halted in 1997, but took the poets who hadn’t taken on the “innovation package” of the 1960s and had continued to write in the old styles. I found that rewarding and there wasn't much chance of me taking a narrow, Alternative only, view of the last 20 years.
Quote from an email to a friend: “at the risk of going on and on, I want to say that the figure of 990 authors does not represent a target I am going to meet... It is more like a scientific paper where you spend half your energy analysing why the data you have is so incomplete and what questions you can ever legitimately ask of it.
I looked at the classic generational (“under 35”) anthology Dear World and Everyone in it. 74 names. Of which 52 were NOT in the PBS list of 990. What I think this means is that the PBS website is just a shop window, many many powerful poets don’t feature in it at all. Wrestling with the 990 is not going to win the war... it is a battle which will not get you closer to the objective.
So, where are the others? (Dear World is 8 years old but the poets should be at the prime of their careers, roughly.)”
and another email: “I saw Martin last week and he was quite negative about the book. I don’t think he wants to read it. He was really against the subtitle “poetry in the 21st century” although it has to be called that. He did a thesis on the influence of the New York poets on English poetry and wants me to do something like that, where the content matches the title. That is no good, the central thing is that there is a deluge of new poets and the book has to deal quickly with 80 or 90 poets, not find an enclosure and sit in it. And he thinks it is just going to be me writing about poets I like… another statement of self-regard. But he isn’t allowing for me being like a camera and taking new data in, so that half the poets are poets I hadn’t heard of before I started. He is missing something there, the effect of the deluge is to wipe away the old landmarks. We can escape polarisation.”
(A further check revealed some more people who couldn't really be counted as resident in Britain, so depressed the count to 972. These checks are boring to do.)
The effect of thousands of new poets rushing onto the scene is that the past is simply forgotten, buried beneath new and fabulous layers of words. So we don’t need to continue the mainstream; alternative opposition of the 1970s. The new scene is not authentically the offspring of either side. There are just endless new possibilities. My guess is that most of the 990 poets are worth reading. The samples I have taken suggest that, but I am not going to sample every single poet. I have trouble with people who think that anything unconventional must be the product of the unconventional poetry which existed in the 1970s – this is just an act of grand cultural acquisition, although I can see it is tempting. It is “I own the wilderness” more or less. Offspring– poetry is not just the product of poetry but of a whole cultural ocean in which poetry is just one warm current. Alternative poetry was not visible enough to develop a second and third generation – people rebelled against the mainstream culture and worked out a cultural programme before stumbling across the existing Alternative. This is a pity in some ways, but it certainly encourages stylistic diversity.
Have just been reading an interview in Wolfgang Iser’s book where a Norman Holland reports work which researched “reader interpretation” by actually asking people to write down their reactions to a poem. He selects a single poem, by Denise Levertov, and reports that ten people wrote about it without any common element (except that it was about a snake and that the writer was a woman, a fact which is not in the text) in what they wrote down. I like this, but I am wondering how I can respond to it within my book. I suspect that this was quite a simple poem with a dreamlike image which was genuinely open to interpretation. Poems which include interpretation, introspection, argument, etc., are much less subject to variant interpretation. But really, anything I write may mislead someone who reads it, my reaction to a poem may be quite different from theirs. This incites me to record my reactions, not to suppress them. I like the idea of collecting ten responses to several hundred poems, but I am doubtful that I could get people to supply this material for free. I am recording my responses to poems because I can control the material and I don't have to pay for it.
To look in another direction – the responses of poets to poems are of great interest, and the way they write expresses that response. The history of poetry is a narrative of the way poets of one generation respond to the poems of the previous generation. This is a manageable way of capturing subjectivity. Of course, there may be a whole range of subjective responses which I am not capturing at all. And I can’t compose a book in which many volumes of poetry are discussed and ten responses are included for each one. I am trying to give people helpful advice rather than to record every possible reaction.
Nolan. I quote something quoted in a poem by Kevin Nolan about eisteann ri bhfuaim, and so on. I have now discovered that this is a passage from the poet Sean O’Riordain’s diaries, for February 1949. The diaries were published as “anamlón bliana” in 2014. I am unsure how Kevin came to quote from them in a book published in 2006. The quote is at page 78 of Loving Little Orlick. The sense of the whole passage is to define “the wonder and magic of life” (alltacht og druiodhiocht). The sound which we hear dying away is that of a horse’s hooves, pulling a cart, which O'Riordain heard as a child.
So, I have reached the point where the reading is continuing, and I am finding new texts I like, but I am not writing about them because there is no longer room.
I set up the book by observing, early on, that a 1962 anthology by Kenneth Allott included 39.5% Oxford graduates in its selection. Then I gesture towards a set of 990 poets retrieved from the Poetry Book Society website, and say that the theme of the whole fifty-year period is the broadening of the apex. It would be rational to give a figure for how many of the 990 had been to Oxford. I am not doing this – I just don’t want to do 990 internet searches for biographic data. Contemporary poets like to hide their educational career, because of the attention given to it, which may be hostile, and anyway bypasses what they are really saying in their poems. It would be hard to get an accurate figure. I prefer to spend my time reading poems. So this figure is missing. I just don't think anyone is going to examine the figures in print and say “the apex has not broadened”. So the extra evidence does not advance us.
Have been reading David Kynaston’s social history of the 1950s – Family Britain. Think this is the third time. I relate to that decade. He prints Gaitskell’s analysis of the 1955 general election (which Labour lost). He (HG) says that the problem was privatisation – people were more interested in the welfare of their household and less interested in the nation and the collective benefit. So my book puts great stress on privatisation, and the analysis was already there seventy years ago. This is depressing somehow, but, if you write good history, then it does sound familiar, because everyone already knows about it. Gaitskell identifies a shift of balance– so not the annihilation of the collective idea, just a shift of the centre point. Actually, both parties had lost votes since the 1951 election but Labour lost more. Not voting probably does represent a loss of interest in the collective issues, certainly in the possibility of changes to the overall shape of society. So 90% of voters didn’t change their vote in 1955. These small shifts are very interesting, but if I broke down my analysis to include them it would be too complicated. The main point is what Sennett says, that there is a polarity between private space and public space, and in the modern era this polarity has broken down and it is the public space which has lost its energy. I think the point is that the sublime or majestic style is not impossible, but that there are massive inhibitions about it, and that poets tend to do it badly because of a lack of steady long-term development. I think some contemporary poetry is sublime, for example Pauline Stainer or Nancy Gaffield. Rod Mengham delivered a lecture on Tom Raworth as the sublime – I never saw the text but it is intriguing. Raworth slips off everything personal and local in order to give a glimpse of something uncommitted and intact. All the same I hear so many jokes about someone being pretentious, and so little about how people miss the more profound and universal notes.
I think the limit to considering this is that the domestic scale is so much the norm, and if you criticise the norm you have no standpoint. You can write a history of what happened, but much less a history of what didn’t happen. I don’t see how the normal thing can fail to meet the prevailing norms, so I am not trying to define what we have, what we do, as failure. I am just pointing to how this part of history is out of balance, which is probably true of other phases of cultural history.
The sublime is still there and is part of everyone’s experience. If they play Parry’s setting of “Jerusalem” at the Promenade Concerts, that is obviously the sublime, it is an occultist figure like Blake advancing to centre stage. It is just inaccurate to say that that is not happening, or that we don’t get carried away by it. I don’t want to catalogue all such moments, because really it would take too long. We associate these moments with legacy art and not with new art, partly because the new cannot be collective and is not part of childhood memories.
We cannot become conscious of cultural norms unless they are contrasted with some other phase of culture when the rules were different.
28th January and I have reached the end of the book. I think I wrote the last bit of text yesterday. The day before, I went to the cinema (“Babylon”, by Damien Chazelle) with the idea of sitting in a bar and writing the last piece of text. It was about Nat Raha and very difficult to write. I had all the ideas on the bus... that feeling of movement, things rushing past my eyes. I wrote them in my notebook. Later on, I discovered that I had stuffed my bag with so many Raha books that the notebook had escaped from the bag and I didn’t have it any more. This was a sign. I wrote the text down from memory and that was it. Anything else in that notebook could be forgotten about.
I read (most of) a book in which the author had just written poems about insects. And maybe a month, six weeks, before that I had read a book in which there were 20 pages of poems about insects. And we could match this to Mendoza, who works as an insect librarian (storing specimens) and writes about insects, although in a very non-realistic way. So my programme was to read 100 books from a 5-year period, with the idea that minor features of style would repeat, and that you would get the unconscious of the time, the features of style which define a period because they are unconsciously accepted. And finding ideas repeated is a key step towards that. Even if it also means that the process is getting boring. So I have to read a lot more books. Although the book is complete. It is going to be a crisis if I find something else I have to put in. But I have to collect the data. I had to write the book first, because it was convulsive, I just had tons of ideas every morning and I would spend the day writing them down. So this morning I have nothing left to do, but actually it is desirable if I read another 100 books, and that is still part of the project.
Boring tasks get left to the end, and I spent a long time yesterday in a freezing cold shed going through cardboard boxes of books, some of which have collapsed due to damp in the shed. I found the reference I wanted (an essay about the Welsh language campaign in Aberystwyth with an account of a famous demo in February 1963), but also a book which I didn’t read during the project because I hadn’t catalogued it. Digon o fwydod, by Mihangel Morgan. I am not sure I like this, much as I admire Morgan's novels. But I will have to read it properly.
Popol Vuh. The story of this text is fascinating but I didn't have space to expand on it within a review which had to be essentially about Martin Thom. I think it is fair to call it “pre-Columbian” although physically any text we have is much after Columbus. There is no “Mayan codex” of it, but it was written down in Maya by people (who were possibly Maya landowners) in the Latin alphabet around 1560, and then printed in the mid-19th century from their manuscript. The Spanish crown was trying to increase its revenue and tighten up in the 1550s, and the manuscript is probably a titulo, a narrative claim to lordship of certain lands, for use in a court.
“In the 1550s, in Santa Cruz del Quiché, a town constructed about a mile from the ruins of K’umarcaaj, someone wrote a compilation of the K’iche’s tzijs which were found in distinct places – not only wujs – at the moment of the Spanish invasion, composed in Western style (Latin characters, paper and ink). We do not know if this was a single and unique version, or one of many copies; we also do not know why they were written in this way. What is certain is that these texts were selected and set down in a certain sequence that did not exist as such prior to 1524; the content, however, is of the pre-colonial era“
[[tzij is narrative; not sure what a wuj is, although it is the same word as "vuh".]
"Around 1701–3, the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez, while at the church of San Pablo Chuilá, in Chichicastenango, obtained one of the versions of this antique manuscript, laboriously copied the K’iche’ text, and translated it into Spanish"
- this was the Popol Vuh. But what he copied was already in Latin characters. This is so obscure. Scherzer and Wagner published it in 1857, then "in Paris in 1861, the Abbé Charles Brasseur de Bourbourg published a copy of the K’iche’ text along with a French translation. Brasseur gave these texts the name Popol Vuh"
So the 1703 copy was copied from an earlier version, which however was already in Latin characters. The title means “book of counsel”. Popol Wuj is a more modern transliteration.
I asked the question if it could be a fake, like certain other “primordial” books, but this seems not to be true, and reportedly scholars collected texts from oral recitation in the 20th century, and they correspond to the 1703 Popol Vuh. (The correspondences may involve a "core" which allows all the details to differ, the modern recitals may not be Qu'iche - I have been unable to tie this down.)
Gordon Brotherston is reported to have compared several different Amerindian cosmogonies, and called them “chapters of the same book”. This is very interesting, although it is arguable whether they really correspond to each other, even being “basic books” of their respective ethnic groups. He was publishing in the 1970s and I haven’t seen his work. It sounds like the kind of thing which is so rich that I can't remember anything about it afterwards even if it seemed like a whole new world while I was reading it. His book is Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas through their Literature. “Gordon Brotherston sostiene en este ensayo que las diferentes literaturas americanas pueden leerse como capítulos de un mismo libro, que él llama El Libro del Cuarto Mundo. Para ello, establece el texto americano, distribuyéndolo en las distintas regiones geográficas y según las distintas modalidades: glifos, quipus y amoxtli, entre otros.”
"These grammars can be first accessed through the great historic-cosmogonic narratives that Gordon Brotherston calls ‘the books of the Fourth World’, and include texts such as the Ayvu Rapyta (Origin of the Human Language) of the Tupi-Guarani, the Runa Indio (Huarochirí Manuscript) of the Quechua, the Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, the Popol Vuh (Book of Counsel) of the K’iche-Maya and the Books of Chilam Balam (‘Books of the Wizard-Jaguar’) of the Maya; the Amoxtli (painted books) produced by Nahuatl tlacuilos;"
These cosmogonic books could stand as an example of the sublime, the category which I have claimed is one pole of cultural space and which is hard to access for modern poets. I am thinking of Graham Sutherland's painting “Origins of the Land”, which at one time used to hang in the Tate; this is a great example of something which is modern and English and yet sublime, cosmogonic. It was connected with the Festival of Britain and the key point may be authorisation: the Festival was a collective and governmental cultural event, and also it came during (even if late in) an era of collectivism brought about by shared danger during the war. In fact, Sutherland approved of the government and the government approved of him… not a state of affairs which has obtained for many artists since 1951.
Martin Stannard wanted the book to be a complete account of some bounded and small subset of the scene. It was possible that I would do this by writing entirely about politicised poetry. I did say in a review, around 2014, that political engagement might be the key to the new poetry. But I didn’t do this, because it would have been too exclusive. There was a revival of political interest following the 2007-8 financial crisis, and the cuts to welfare services which followed it. But if you look at 100 or 200 poets active in the past ten years, they mainly aren't political. Or, at least, if you focus on their political ideas, you get a very distorted view of their poetry. All the same, this could have been an interesting book. My excuse for writing from my point of view is that there should be ten different books about recent poetry, which all had different views. I am inclined to ask about the unconscious pressures to conform, which mean that most poets aren’t political, or only in the safest possible way. I guess there is an unspoken piece of folk wisdom saying that “If you say something controversial, you halve your audience”. In terms of what I think about, Steve Ely, Andrea Brady, and Sean Bonney have been pretty central over the past decade or more. But if I did a book saying “this is the centre! this is the apex!!”, it would shove hundreds of other people towards the periphery and the dubious lighting conditions. Such a book would have much less about poets, and much more about contemporary history, for example the zombie economy, Austerity, global warming.
If I say “you can fail artistically by failing to write about politics”, that sounds very sensible, but it is also a sort of massacre. You take sights on everyone else and blow them away.
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