Food for writers

Two recommendations from Anton Chekhov, that perhaps shed light on the difference between writers and journalists. While writing, Chekhov, according to Ivan Bunin in a memoir in The Paris Review, would take only coffee and broth.

Let it bleed

The poetry shelf in Borders in Palo Alto is not long. I had to wrestle Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language out from its neighbours the other week; the shelf is packed pretty tight, and I got myself a paper cut. It seemed like it would be worth some trouble: I know Rich’s work from Marilyn Hacker’s using her for epigraphs to her own poems. When I opened the book I found blood on my hands.

So I bought it. Buy any poetry that spills blood.

I’m not alone in my reactions to Richard Dawkins’ clumsy tirade against religious belief. This month’s Prospect pans The God Delusion, making similar criticisms to mine.

Selected Poems:
William Carlos
Williams

Unbelievable: the poetry section of Kepler’s, the big bookstore outside the gates of Stanford University, offered only a single copy of one collection of verse by August Kleinzahler, recent winner of the Griffin Prize, living and working just up the peninsula in San Francisco. And nothing by noted Californian poet Carl Rakosi; nothing by Marilyn Hacker. I suppose these stores know what they’re doing. » Continue reading “The strange books travellers find”

September a poem by August Kleinzahler, copied from the issue of the London Review of Books I left in Palo Alto.

New poem On First Looking Into Keats’ House As we approached the building, my mother was murmuring Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold, the opening line of Keats’ “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer”. I was thinking more of Ezra Pound’s Homeric thoughts: His true Penelope was Flaubert/He fished by obstinate isles. Poor Keats: his romance with the sun was consummated only when he took his tuberculotic lungs to Italy.

Our chequered country John le Carré says of his character George Smiley, hero of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, that he is a romantic, in love with an England that never existed, committed to standards of behaviour nowhere found. While his avowed love was for the German poets, it might have been he who wrote

Reading Dante in a mood of angry dislike
for my fellow sufferers and for myself
that I dislike them.

Dennis still does Holding our own private Dennis Potter season, courtesy of Amazon DVD Rentals. Watched two TV drama series that had been screened while I was living abroad: Pennies From Heaven and we’re halfway through compelling and disturbing The Singing Detective. I don’t like it but I have to see it, says Miki. Potter is surely one of the great dramatists of the 20th century. I wonder if The Gorge or Blade on the Feather can be found on DVD? Or (not Potter but Frederic Raphael now) The Glittering Prizes?

Monet that matters The London Review of Books carried this poem by T.J. Clark on 31 March, in which all outstanding problems of art history are resolved to everyone's satisfaction.

New poem “Waiting For Someone”.

Florida Frost A new poem by Tony Harrison from the LRB 17 Feb 2005

New poem Laughter at your table

All the pretty women Handan Erek sends a poem by Orhan Veli Kanik

An Old Woman’s Birthday Edwin Morgan has a new poem in the London Review of Books. Go on, you know you want that subscription.

Tough times for elitists Andrew O’Hagan reviews Poems To Last A Lifetime (ed. Daisy Goodwin)

These are tough times for elitists. Display will always win out over privacy, as if seriousness was [sic] boring, as if contemplation was excluding, as if understatement was underhand, and as if difficulty represented a kind of dishonesty. In this climate, the ‘democratisation’ of poetry is just another phoney enterprise, like Open Government, a sop to that element in the national atmosphere which says inclusion is everything. Poetry is often difficult, and its difficulty is part of the richness of what we have; it is a crime to make the unobvious obvious, an act of vandalism to render it trite, like turning Mozart into ringtones while calling attention to its improving qualities. Some people, of course, will call that democracy, but what does it leave you with? An increased audience for Mozart? A bigger sale for new volumes of poetry? No, I'm afraid not. Poetry sales haven't budged in the UK for years, though ‘old favourites’ are taking up more and more space in the bookshops, at the expense of new poets.

Unexpected legacy

Graves, yes, said love, death
and the changing of the seasons
were the unique, the primordial subjects
Marilyn Hacker/“Untoward Occurence At Embassy Poetry Reading”

Pass again through childhood In his new essay, The Solid Form Of Language, Robert Bringhurst writes “Mentally and socially, to learn another language, you must pass again through childhood.” Linguist, poet and typographer, he must have passed through many childhoods. If I ever grow up I want to be just like him: tall, athletic, taciturn, gruff-voiced — a courteous and formidable presence in gold-rimmed spectacles. He effortlessly dominated the Purcell Room last night with the openings of two poems he had transcribed and translated from their native American oral forms, which each run to several hours.

Beauty of the classics One of the pleasures of ageing is having the confidence to chat up attractive strangers. Seating myself yesterday on a packed southbound train to London, I found myself opposite a classically beautiful blonde in her twenties. Our other travelling companions were more of my age, and my peripheral vision was reporting pained wincing when I opened a conversation with the beauty. How embarrassing, he's Hitting On The Blonde. To my malicious pleasure, Fay turned out to a postgraduate classics student and we had an animated discussion of pre-Socratic psychology, Julian Jaynes, and Christopher Logue’s recreation of the Troy Story.

Fay, if you’re reading this and get in touch, I have a copy of Logue’s The Husbands for you, that I bought in an over-excited moment in Foyle’s, not noticing I already had it as part of War Music.

Also: August Kleinzahler and Christopher Logue will be reading at the LRB Bookshop on 1 November at 7pm. I’ve been immersed in Kleinzahler’s new collection, The Strange Hours Travelers Keep: here’s the title poem:

Poetry International Poets Robert Bringhurst and August Kleinzahler read at the Purcell Room on Thursday 28 October. You’ll remember Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style went camping in Dorset with me; also my enthusiasm for Kleinzahler’s memoir of his big bad brother Cutty, One Rock, soon to appear in book form, as I see in the LRB.

All too rarely a certain mood settles on me as I scan a library or bookstore shelf. Then lightning strikes. It seems to involve a surrender on my part, a willingness to be surprised. And Providence provides. In such a mood years ago I picked up Tim Powers’ Last Call in a bookstore in Manly, Australia. Once picked, the cover enticed: a Grail story, a fight for a magical Fisher Kingship, set in Las Vegas in Holy Week, 1990. A page sampled at random confirmed Powers can write. And how — he has John Le Carré’s gift with thought and dialogue.

Last week I picked up The Calligrapher, a first novel by Edward Docx. And fell asleep over it the next night, finishing it in a second gulp the following day. How could I resist this tale of a London calligrapher, unreconstructed æsthete and womaniser, woven around the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne, which I’ve now caught as a secondary infection. I wonder, by my troth, what ’twas I read of Donne’s ere I found Docx.
» Chapter 1 of Last Call, by Tim Powers
» Review of The Calligrapher

The occasional whiff of dynamited butterfly Jerry Fodor continues in the LRB an honourable tradition of good writing in philosophy, though he calls (or used to call) himself a “speculative psychologist” and is reviewing a book on Wagner: “It is a nervous tic of analytical philosophy to be forever wishing to clarify distinctions that nobody is actually confused about.”. Good stuff; keep it coming.

Jennifer governs A woman character in Max Barry's novel Jennifer Government is talking to another other woman, who might be a prisoner. She asks the other woman to do something, but is refused violently. She pauses and looks thoughtfully at the floor. "I might have made that sound too much like a request."

Cole Porter — is he the 20th century's most under-rated poet? His entertaining eclecticism, verbal acrobatics and focus on romantic comedy tempt us to dismiss him as a dazzling lightweight. But they're all techniques Shakespeare used to devastating effect on the Elizabethan stage.

I'm biased to rate Porter highly, because beneath the fun is a keen appreciation of the mechanics of romantic illusion. In Anything Goes the restrained English peer, Lord Evelyne Oakley, fantasises in "The Gypsy in Me" about how finding his true love will reveal the repressed side of his character:

When I'm there in that dream
with the one in the world I worship
passionately
In the moment supreme
will be shown the unknown
gypsy in me!

As Robertson Davies wrote, We love the people who make us whole. Or, as the Theory of Romance more prosaically puts it, we fall in love with people who seem to have access to the life we don't know how to live.

Dear Brady

I have long supposed it an error to use ‘hopefully’ where I mean ‘I hope’. Sadly I can find no evidence to support this. Happily I have you to ask. Hopefully I'll get an answer from you soon.

Above, the usage of hopefully is widely deprecated as a sloppy error. But sadly and happily, as similarly (ab?)used, receive no such opprobrium. The late Auberon Waugh, then editor of the Literary Review, not often accused of sloppy writing, wrote to me: Sadly, your subscription has expired. What rule accuses hopefully and excuses sadly?

5mb replies:

Art is saying what we have to say believing what we have to say is true even if it isn’t. Kevin Oxley

Happy in danger in a dangerous place The next instalment of War Music arrived.

» also New music

Chapter 1 of Last Call by Tim Powers

A Latin lesson for a friend

omnibus = for everyone; ignoramus = we do not know

So, not being nouns in Latin, they don’t form plurals ending in -i. You might say, “omnibi are for ignorami”.

There are English speakers who decline to decline English nouns, whether or not they came from Latin. Two mathematicians, invited to attend “a series of colloquia and symposia dealing with some well-known conundra”, replied we are not going to sit on our ba and do sa.

Christopher Logue will read tomorrow night for the Wordsworth Trust at the Thistle Hotel in Grasmere. I spent rapt hours in Tuscany this summer wrapped in his version of the Iliad, a chilling, whip-your-breath-away account of pre-humanist life and a potent mix with Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate and Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

like sucking in cold air on a chipped tooth — painful, but you know you are alive. And the battle scenes belittle anything from Hollywood. reviewer at Amazon

They do, they do.