Sailing to Byzantium

Sailing to Byzantium

By Christine Tobin

RNCM Concert Hall, 21 October 2012

Some dozen poems by Yeats, set to music and sung by Christine Tobin, who is accompanied by four fantastic musicians: that’s it, in a nutshell.

To enjoy the concert best, I found, you really needed to foreground the music, to get into it on its own terms and not be too precious about the words or their celebrated author’s intentions.  If you did that it all flowed and even swung, whereas in the first song the music seemed a kind of add-on, a superfluous background.  For it goes without saying, surely, that Yeats’ words as poetry have their own music and require no overlay.

The advice therefore is to focus on the music, rather than be overly concerned with the words of the poem that inspired it, and that way you’ll be assured, what with Tobin’s soulful vocals and a slue of virtuoso improvisations from the likes of guitarist Phil Robson, cellist Kate Shortt, pianist Liam Noble and double bassist Dave Whitford, of an enjoyable, edifying experience.

The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo

The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing
By Richard Hugo
W. W. Norton, 8 October 2010
ISBN: 9780393338720

There is an absence of vague waffle in Hugo’s classic book.

Instead, it contains a series of specific insights – case studies, almost – and what the author gives you is a process or method.  By seeing how Hugo arrives at his conclusions, this method (or way of thinking) can be extrapolated and applied to innumerable other instances.  Hugo presents his thoughts (the fruits of years of teaching) in a relaxed, affable and honest manner.  But be in no doubt: this is a profoundly serious book full of concentrated wisdom.  It will take quite a while to unpack it fully.

In the first chapter, ‘Writing off the Subject’, Hugo makes the point that the relation of the poet to the language that he uses is strong, whereas what his poems are actually about is not as crucial.  A poet is not a reporter.  There’s lots of worthwhile advice here, such as:

If you feel pressure to say what you know others want to hear and don’t have enough devil in you to surprise them, shut up.  (5)

The second chapter, ‘The Triggering Town’, is about what makes you want to write, what generates or triggers a poem.  It may be a particular locale or it may be a perceived injustice or childhood trauma; whatever.  ‘The Triggering Town’ is a metaphor for your obsessions, the subjects that cause you to write, that generate the impulse to put pen to paper.  This can be any complex of obsessions but it is useful, of course, to know what they are.  Again, there are many insights from Hugo.  He makes the point, for example, that what provokes or triggers a poem is one thing: a bundle of stuff.  But what the poem means after it has been written, well, that may be something quite different entirely.

Next, a chapter entitled ‘Assumptions’.  These are the back-story to whatever you’re writing.  It is useful to make these explicit but you shouldn’t question them, at least not while you’re writing, according to Hugo.  He gives some of his own, the majority about an imaginary town.  Naturally some of these assumptions contradict others.  Here are a few of Hugo’s:

I am an eleven-year-old-orphan.  (21)

Two whores are kind to everyone but each other.  (23)

Young men are filled with hate and often fight.  (24)

‘Stray Thoughts on Roethke and Teaching’ is an affectionate, appreciative and an often moving memoir of the poet who taught Hugo in ‘47 and ‘48.  Hugo credits Roethke with introducing him to the music of language.  He discusses Roethke’s approach to poetry and gives a couple of exam questions from his class.  Overall, a very fine and generous appreciation.

The fifth chapter, ‘Nuts and Bolts’, sets out certain rules of writing that work for Hugo; these are like Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules, though there are in excess of that number here.  Hugo writes that ‘by obeying one “silly” rule, I found myself forced to cut the fat from the statement that followed.’  Such rules are arbitrary, proto-Oulipian.  Actually, one could argue that all poets are Oulipian creatures: they obey the constraints of rhyme and meter.  Hugo confesses that he often places his feeling for sound above sense or meaning, in terms of words chosen.  Plenty of good, generic advice along the lines of: write often, work hard.

‘In Defense of Creative-Writing Classes’ has lots of telling anecdotes and killer insights.  It is about teaching mainly, its value and worth.  One question discussed is how to objectively assess a piece of writing.

In chapter seven, ‘Statements of Faith’, we get a slue of insights into writing, being a poet and simply managing life.  My suspicion is that when Hugo uses the phrase ‘a poet’ (which he does quite a lot here) he actually means ‘I’ or ‘me’.  Make this substitution and you have a revealing portrait of the author.
 
‘Ci Vediamo’ is another memoir, written on returning to Italy after fighting there in World War Two.  It delivers the goods.
 
The final chapter, ‘How Poets Make a Living’, is also a memoir, this time about working in a factory.  There is an affecting story of how a squatter was thrown off company land, which became the subject of one of Hugo’s poems.

All in all, this is a terrific book about writing poetry.  In his introduction, Hugo writes: ‘I don’t know why we do it.  We must be crazy.  Welcome, fellow poet.’  And that is the benevolent spirit in which the book is written.  Wonderful stuff.

The Art of Recklessness by Dean Young

The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction
By Dean Young
Graywolf Press, August, 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1555975623

Dean Young’s book is one that I liked very much, 110 percent as they say in some parts of this island, and I’d recommend it to anyone who writes poetry (or hopes or intends to) or anyone who reads the stuff.  Yet I find it by no means a simple matter to summarise the book’s contents.  It is curiously encouraging in this regard that the author writes, some 13 pages or so before the close: ‘I was hoping that at some point I would figure out what this book is about – maybe you are too.’   I’m (and we the readers are) in good company.

The message that I took home from Young’s book was something like this: live to the full and make poetry (if you write it) as vital as your life.  Be sure to make it matter.  He writes early on (some of the prose is in CAPITALS) that:

THE HIGHEST ACCOMPLISHMENT OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE IMAGINATION AND THE HIGHEST ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE IMAGINATION IS EMPATHY and the ability to love, and if you don’t think that takes a profound part in the creation of the world, please close the book right now.  (14)

In fact, I read to the end, though sometimes skipping a little and then retracing my steps.  A fair whack of the book is concerned with Dada and Surrealism, just to give you an idea of where (in significant part) Young is coming from.  And the title is taken, I think, from John Ashbery (quoted on page 42): ‘Most reckless things are beautiful in some way and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful.’

Throughout, there’s a lot of luminous polemic, a slue of terrific poems (Man Ray’s ‘Untitled’ was a new one on me), a bevy of insights about art and poetry.  If you are looking for a classy thought-provoking rant, if you want something to stir and shake you up and perhaps inspire you to start writing poems (if you don’t already) then The Art of Recklessness is prescribed.  And take to heart (and to art) Young’s edict: POETRY IS ALWAYS IN ADVANCE OF CRITICISM!

Amen to that.

Three Hundred Tang Poems

Three Hundred Tang Poems
Translated and edited by Peter Harris
Everyman’s Library, March 2009
ISBN: 9781841597829

This volume contains fresh and vibrant translations of all three hundred poems in Sun Zhu’s celebrated eighteenth century anthology.

Within these pages, you will find about seventy five poets who wrote during the Tang dynasty (618-907), among them poets of the stature of Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu, Li Qi and Wei Yingwu.

The poems convey a diverse range of moods and themes: love and longing, celebrations of nature and music and drinking ale, sorrow and melancholy, mysticism.  One common subject is the sadness of saying goodbye to friend whom you may never meet; another subject, less common, is the joy of meeting a long-lost friend or a family member on the desolate road or in a companionable inn.  We can get a sense here of the vastness of China, an immense country where it would have been easy to lose touch with people.  And easy, hermit-like, to lose yourself in.

Of the three hundred poems here, I’ve selected three short ones that I especially like.  Call it a small sampler, if you like.  First, a poem by Wang Jian about a newly-wed bride which I love for its recognisable quotidian detail and its familiar portrait of family life:

After three days I went down to the kitchen,
Washed my hands and cooked a well-stocked soup.
I didn’t know my mother-in-law’s tastes in food,
So I got my little sister-in-law to try it first.

 Next, two rather melancholy poems.  Li Shangyin’s The Pleasure Gardens is a poem that I read in Rexroth’s translation several years ago.  It captured my attention then.  Here is Peter Harris’s equally fine version:

It’s evening and I am feeling out of sorts,
So I drive my carriage up to the old plateau.
The sun at dusk is immeasurably fine –
Or it would be, but for the coming twilight.

And here is a curiously haunting poem that was new to me, Climbing Youzhou Tower – a song by Chen Ziang.  It is like hearing a voice from beyond the grave, but in the present moment.  An anguished voice, addressing those whom he cannot see, though we can hear him:

Looking back we cannot see the people of the past;
Ahead of us we cannot see those who are yet to come.
I muse on heaven and earth, immense and enduring,
And lonely, engulfed by sorrow, my tears fall.

These are wonderful poems all, and wonderful translations.

Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Poems
By Edna St. Vincent Millay
Everyman’s Library, March 2010
ISBN: 9781841597850

‘She was… an American girl!’  Somehow the voice of Tom Petty came to mind as I read these poems.

It was the publication of her second volume of verse, A Few Figs from Thistles, that established Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) as a major poet and as an exemplar of the New Woman: romantic and often times reckless, always independent.

The two short poems that opened that volume (the ‘My candle burns at both ends…’ one and the ‘Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!’ one) pithily expressed her ‘live and love today, for tomorrow we die’ philosophy.

This went down well with her generation and the one that followed, the flappers and the hard-boiled, wise-cracking dames like Dorothy Parker, but it wasn’t entirely a pose.  She held to it all the way down the line.  In the late sonnet, ‘Let you not say of me when I am old’, she writes that ‘the sands of such a life as mine run red and gold, even to the ultimate sifting dust’ and again: ‘In me no Lenten wicks watch out the night / I am the booth where Folly holds her fair.’

Clearly Millay was attracted to the sonnet as a form and she wrote many throughout her life, as though attempting to out-Shakespeare Shakespeare.  There are thirty among the selected poems here, from the well-known and heavily anthologised (‘Time does not bring relief; you all have lied’ and ‘What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why’ among them) to the little-known and unfairly overlooked.  That the latter are as fine and sometimes sublime as the more famous is apparent.  ‘I think I should have loved you presently’ is the pick, for me.

Reading through these poems it is plain that her themes were the classic and important ones: love, beauty, passion, integrity (which can be construed as independence or inconstancy, depending on the flip of a coin), the passage of time and mortality, death.  You could make a reasonable case that death was as much a preoccupation for Millay as love, with the poem ‘Mariposa’ being as stark an example as any.  Or the sonnet beginning, ‘And you as well must die, beloved dust.’

And, at a pinch, you might describe her as an Emily Dickinson who liked to party (though Emily Dickinson herself may not have been quite as retiring as has been assumed, if Lyndall Gordon’s recent biography is anything to go by).

Though Millay plays to the gallery a bit, mindful that she has a bit of a reputation to keep up (Byron did it too), she is a poet of substance.  This fine, generous selection of her poetry includes also Aria da Capo, a one-act verse drama about xenophobia and the suspicion of the stranger.

Love Speaks Its Name

Love Speaks Its Name
Gay and Lesbian Love Poems
Edited by J. D. McClatchy
Everyman’s Library, May 2001
ISBN: 9781841597454

Just under 150 poems are contained in this compact volume, arranged in various sections which follow the process of falling in and out of love.

So we have sections entitled Longing, Looking, Loving, Ecstasy, Anxiety and Aftermath.  In life, the last two are optional and not really to be recommended, but if  poets skipped them, our literature would be much the poorer.  ‘Domestic as a plate’ (a simile taken from Millay’s poem ‘Grown-up’) does not really cut it.

Among the poets represented here are the famous and the indisputably great – Sappho, Shakespeare, Whitman, Lorca, Auden, Elisabeth Bishop – yet there are poets to be discovered in these pages too.  One such is Naomi Replansky, whose poem ‘The Oasis’ traces a renewal or a reawakening of love.  Here’s the last verse:

I thought the desert ended, and I felt
The fountains leap.
Then gratitude could answer gratitude
Till sleep entwined with sleep.
Despair once cried: No passion’s left inside!
It lied. It lied.

It was good to encounter Housman’s verse once more.  On one level he is an unpretentious and uncomplicated poet and there is nothing fancy about his verse forms at all.  But the direct way in which he communicates emotion is extraordinary: heart to heart.

There are a number of Cavafy’s sensual and elegiac poems: all about beautiful sexy young men who will yet grow old and die.  A single theme, virtually, but he riffs on it superbly.  ‘The Bandaged Shoulder’ is an astounding poem, especially when read in the light of the tragedies wrought by AIDS.  That last line – ‘the blood of love against my lips’ – induces a very definite frisson.

Every poem of Frank O’Hara’s is wonderful and there are four here.  Once heard, his voice is irresistible

I approve of the editor’s decision to include a quartet of song lyrics – such as Noel Coward’s ‘Mad About the Boy’ – along with the regular poems.

This is a fine anthology, although there are some notable absentees: John Ashbery, Genet and Genet’s translator Jeremy Reed being three.

Russian Poets

Russian Poets
Edited by Peter Washington
Everyman’s Library, May 2009
ISBN: 9781841597805

Close to 180 poems, from just over 30 poets, are to be found in this compact, beautifully designed book.

 Along with the greatest (Pushkin) and the great (for example, Akhmatova and Pasternak and Mayakovsky) there are many poets here who will be unfamiliar to English readers; or at any rate there were quite a few (such as Vyazemsky and Batyushkov and Fet, for three) who were unknown to me.  It will come as no surprise, surely, to learn that favoured themes include love and death and Mother Russia herself.

Only Pushkin would have the nerve and the bottle to write ‘Exegi Monumentum’, a poem at once arrogant (‘And I shall be famed so long as underneath / The moon a single poet remains alive.’), magnificent (as a for instance, when he claims that ‘in centuries to come’ he will be loved ‘For having glorified freedom in my harsh age / And called for mercy towards the fallen.’) and deeply ironic (it is in the last verse that the poet comes clean – kind of – and urges his Muse to ‘not argue with a fool’).  You can tell that Pushkin had a thing for Byron, but this is a poem that echoes  Shakespeare’s fifty-fifth and sixty-fifth sonnets above all, and it serves as a companion piece to both.

The great discovery was Andrei Voznesensky and he happens also to be the sole living poet represented in the volume.  In ‘Dead Still’ two lovers lie close together, their warm contentment ‘like a flame held between hand and hand’; later the poet urges the  souls (sic) of his companion to ‘flutter like the linnet / In the cages of my pores.’  He, Voznesensky that is, fills this poem with a slue of other gorgeous images too.

‘Ballad of the Full Stop’ is a playful poem about the nature of death: ‘Our sentence in nature has no period’, writes Voznesensky.  We are granted no definite guaranteed span, nor any assured neat ending come to that.  There is a vibe akin to A.R. Ammon’s great poem ‘Play’ at work here.

A lovely erotic poem, ‘Her Shoes’, is Voznesensky’s final offering.  And he uses those coveted consumer items, pedestals by another name, that lay like ‘doves perched in the path of a tank’, to celebrate their wearer.  That the poem manages to be both poignant and pervy (e.g. ‘The world is pitch-black, cold and desolate / But they are still warm, right off her feet.’ and that’s not the end of it…) is to Voznesensky’s credit, I feel.

There is an abundance of that much vaunted Russian soul – spiritual and cynical, sometimes both at once; continually celebrating and kvetching about creation – in this fine collection.

And finally, God bless translators!

Music’s Spell by Emily Fragos

Music’s Spell
Poems about Music and Musicians
Edited by Emily Fragos
Everyman’s Library, March 2009
ISBN: 9781841597836

There is a splendid appositeness to this anthology, for poetry has its own music and is often song.

At a rough reckoning, there are just short of two hundred poems here and they have been organised under various headings: ‘Music and Love’, ‘Composers’, ‘Voice’, etc.  In total, we have ten such sections.

They are highly portable, these books – the series title, ‘Pocket Poets’, is a bit of a give away in this regard – and can be read on a bus or a tram, during the interval of a play at a theatre or in a cinema when the advertisements and trailers are screened.  When each poem delivers a hit, a discrete jolt of beauty (as happened invariably with the present volume) the day suddenly seems brighter, the neon more sparkly.

You will find it difficult to decide on favourites herein.  Close to the top must come David Wojahn’s poem about the meeting between Dylan and Woody Guthrie at the Brooklyn State Hospital.  Then there is Tomas Transtromer’s poem about Haydn (‘Allegro’), which is quite sublime.  And Dr. Samuel Johnson’s tribute to his beloved friend, Claudy Philips, whose very title has an unmistakable grandeur: ‘An Epitaph Upon the Celebrated Claudy Philips, Musician, Who Died Very Poor’.  Surely a place must be found too for Hardy’s shudder at the immensity of the universe (‘In a Museum’), whose music will never end.

We must have these four certainly, but there are a hundred or so that are as good, from poets as diverse as Rilke, Walter de la Mare and Frank O’Hara (not O’Hara’s ‘The Day Lady Died’, but we do get another poem about Billie Holiday: Rita Dove’s very fine ’Canary’).  Thank the editor and poet Emily Fragos too for including excerpts from a number of Shakespeare’s plays; ‘poetry’ has been defined broadly enough to make this possible. 

Anyone with a liking for poetry and music will love this book.

Some Limericks by Norman Douglas

Some Limericks
By Norman Douglas
Introduction by Stephen Fry
Atlas Press, October 2009
ISBN 978-1-900565-49-3

This is, as far as one can tell, a faithful reissue of a book of quite obscene limericks that was first published by Norman Douglas, privately, in 1928.

There have been several pirated editions since then, but none has been as scrupulously faithful to the original as this one.  The reason for my slight doubt as to the complete accuracy of this edition (the ‘as far as one can tell’ above) is that there appear to be a further two typos on pages 73 and 80, this in addition to the two deliberate typos noted by the publisher on page 107.  One of the latter, ‘to the pure all things are puer’, gives a strong indication of Douglas’ primary peccadillo, which it is not necessary to go into at this point.  Suffice it to say that it got him into hot water on more than one occasion.

In his introduction and commentary to the limericks, Douglas strikes a certain kind of pose: magisterial and magnanimous, mock-authoritative and understanding, bullet-proof as far as being shocked or outraged is concerned.  It is a stance that gives rise to a definite and delightful frisson when set beside limericks that are salacious, scatological and blasphemous – or all three together, a rare treat.  Douglas’ Geographical Index is a helpful pointer toward his choicest and wittiest remarks, for example: ‘Manchester, waggishness of mill-hands near’.

The author makes one or two serious points.  He writes, for example, that limericks are in essence a folk creation: very few can be said to have a specific author.  Even the inventor of the form is unclear, though Edward Lear has been mooted as a possible candidate.  Douglas puts forward the interesting theory that obscene limericks in particular are a reaction to Puritanism, claiming also that they reached their zenith during Queen Victoria’s age.  They are, consequently, ‘as English as roast beef’ though other Britons, and Americans too for that matter, have undoubtedly played a part in their development.  In American culture, too, Puritanism has taken root.  Douglas’ remarks lead one to question whether limericks can survive in a permissive age.

Stephen Fry’s introductory remarks are appreciative of both the author and the subject of his study, so no great worries there.  And on a personal note: I’ve read a version of the limerick on page 90 with the line ‘long-standing fallacies’, rather than ‘old-fashioned fallacies’ as here, and believe the former to be better.  Simply because you are given two or three puns (long-standing fallacies & long, standing phalluses) rather than one (fallacies & phalluses).

All right-thinking people, whether roast beef-eating Englishmen and women or not, should read Some Limericks at some point in their lives.  Surely this is as good a time as any?