Someone should have sent this book off to see Dr Nowzardan at his clinic in Houston, Texas. You know him from the famous tv show My 600lb Life. He migSomeone should have sent this book off to see Dr Nowzardan at his clinic in Houston, Texas. You know him from the famous tv show My 600lb Life. He might have been able to get Matthew Hollis to shed a couple hundred Pounds by some expert radical surgery, trimming the walls of fatty tissue and unclogging those silted up arteries and putting a clamp into the whole frankly obese enterprise to stop this exasperating book becoming ever more engorged with microdetail about restaurants, footling arguments, minor publication history, irrelevant holiday itineraries and endless minor illnesses. You may be thinking well all this is relevant to the writing of "The Waste Land", that famous monument of modernism, but most of it is about My 600 Ezra Pound Life (!) (since Eliot and Pound were the Laurel and Hardy of 1920s poetry) and all the other lesser literati that swam around in the same aquarium. For little me, this was how not to write about T S Eliot.
Most of the time I’m not much for poetry, it’s just so precious and thinks a lot of itself, it swanks around preening and sneering.
Most of the time thMost of the time I’m not much for poetry, it’s just so precious and thinks a lot of itself, it swanks around preening and sneering.
Most of the time this is my kind of poetry:
There's a tugboat down by the river Where a cement bag’s just a-droopin' on down Oh, that cement is just for the weight, dear Five'll get you ten old Mack is back in town. (Louis Armstrong)
or
A candy-colored clown they call the sandman Tiptoes to my room every night Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper “Go to sleep everything is all right” (Roy Orbison)
or
Well I’m not the world’s most physical guy But when she squeezed me tight she nearly broke my spine Oh my Lola, lo-lo-lo-lo-la Lola (The Kinks)
I get my poetry from the grooves of old 45s, from the howls of old blues, from surfers and hotrodders, punks and acidheads and proggers and cowboys and from the antique antic folk with their 75 verse ballads about some duke who shagged some other duke’s betrothed and got the heat rained down on his ass and his kith’s ass in 1355.
But just occasionally, an actual poet comes and does something completely magical with words. So I’m reading through Philip Larkin’s stuff and finding I really like his sour, defeated, depressed but soldiering-on-anyway voice.
This one that i want to quote here is I suppose his biggest hit but quite right too – it’s really a fantastic piece. Every phrase is a marvel, exactly sketching out all the banalities of an English train journey in the 1950s and now, but then also unearthing a forgotten, almost unnoticed social ritual which is completely a 50s thing, quaint and moving. Nowadays every other couple get married in Barbados or Bali, and the other ones wouldn’t be caught dead using public transport to start their honeymoon with.
Whitsun is the seventh Sunday after Easter. As both are moveable feasts that information is not so useful, but it happens in late May. In these secular times hardly anyone in England would have the faintest idea what a Whitsun was. It was changed into “Spring Bank Holiday” in 1978.
The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin (1958)
That Whitsun, I was late getting away: Not till about one-twenty on the sunlit Saturday Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out, All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense Of being in a hurry gone. We ran Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence The river's level drifting breadth began, Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.
All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept For miles inland, A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept. Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and Canals with floatings of industrial froth; A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped And rose: and now and then a smell of grass Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth Until the next town, new and nondescript, Approached with acres of dismantled cars.
At first, I didn't notice what a noise The weddings made Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys The interest of what's happening in the shade, And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls I took for porters larking with the mails, And went on reading. Once we started, though, We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls In parodies of fashion, heels and veils, All posed irresolutely, watching us go,
As if out on the end of an event Waving goodbye To something that survived it. Struck, I leant More promptly out next time, more curiously, And saw it all again in different terms: The fathers with broad belts under their suits And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat; An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms, The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes, The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that
Marked off the girls unreally from the rest. Yes, from cafés And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days Were coming to an end. All down the line Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round; The last confetti and advice were thrown, And, as we moved, each face seemed to define Just what it saw departing: children frowned At something dull; fathers had never known
Success so huge and wholly farcical; The women shared The secret like a happy funeral; While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared At a religious wounding. Free at last, And loaded with the sum of all they saw, We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam. Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast Long shadows over major roads, and for Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem
Just long enough to settle hats and say I nearly died, A dozen marriages got under way. They watched the landscape, sitting side by side - An Odeon went past, a cooling tower, And someone running up to bowl - and none Thought of the others they would never meet Or how their lives would all contain this hour. I thought of London spread out in the sun, Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:
There we were aimed. And as we raced across Bright knots of rail Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail Travelling coincidence; and what it held stood ready to be loosed with all the power That being changed can give. We slowed again, And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain. ...more
I tried to read this a month or so back & gave up in a mixture of despair and horror. The dichotomy was complete - on the one side were the poems themI tried to read this a month or so back & gave up in a mixture of despair and horror. The dichotomy was complete - on the one side were the poems themselves, writhing in sensuous colours and exploding with weird life; on the other side was my little tiny brain which emitted whirrrs and whee sounds and fell on its side with its wheels gradually coming to a halt. Between my brain and the poems was an unbridgeable chasm made of thin highly polished glass. I could read these poems forwards and backwards, I could be as close to them as I am to the gorgeous fish in the aquarium, but they were in their world and I was in mine and there was no way to make any intelligible connection. Except to say - look, a green one, look, a yellow one. After a while those banal observations turned into self-mockery.
I couldn't understand the first thing about these poems. Nothing.
So I checked out a couple of essays about Mr Stevens' oeuvre. And I didn't understand the essays either. In fact I got the dismaying feeling that the essayists were not 100% sure what Mr Stevens was on about either, but they were already way past their deadlines.
Wallace Stevens seems to be a poet universally acclaimed by everyone over the age of 12 to be one of the 20th Century's very greatest, but no one seems able to give much of a clue as to what he's on about at all. I don't know whether it's me that's wrong and dimwitted or if it's everyone else. Am I the one person looking on and saying in an appalled voice that the Emperor of Ice Cream has not got any cone at all?
Tea at the Palaz of Hoon by Wallace Stevens
Not less because in purple I descended The western day through what you called The loneliest air, not less was I myself.
What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard? What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears? What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?
Out of my mind the golden ointment rained, And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. I was myself the compass of that sea:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
(Feel free to get back to me about this one.)...more
Suicide of Ted Hughes’s wife Sylvia Plath, 1963 Suicide of Ted Hughes’ current partner Assia Wevill, 1969 Publication of Crow, 1970
This is the cTimeline
Suicide of Ted Hughes’s wife Sylvia Plath, 1963 Suicide of Ted Hughes’ current partner Assia Wevill, 1969 Publication of Crow, 1970
This is the context for the screeching brutality, ugliness and relentless howling nastiness of Crow and its picture of humanity as the scraping of nails on the blackboard of creation and consciousness as worse than anthrax.
Crow is really severe stuff.
Crow is horror poetry.
When Crow cried his mother’s ear Scorched to a stump.
In the poems, Crow is many things – sometimes he appears to be Hughes himself; sometimes the well known trickster, Loki or someone similar, cavorting, disgusted by everything, meddling, cocking things up, himself a scrawny reeking speck of gristle and greasy black feathers with a vast appetite and completely unkillable; and sometimes he’s a kind of reverse Christ (with black feathers).
I love Ted Hughes’ animal poetry, which includes plenty of carnage but taken as a whole is a tremendous celebration, the nature channel fused with Thomas Traherne. But Crow has no compassion, no pity. He's done with that.
Crow’s Account of the Battle
The cartridges were banging off, as planned, The fingers were keeping things going According to excitement and orders. The unhurt eyes were full of deadliness. The bullets pursued their courses Through clods of stone, earth, and skin, Through intestines pocket-books, brains, hair, teeth According to Universal laws And mouths cried "Mamma" From sudden traps of calculus, Theorems wrenched men in two, Shock-severed eyes watched blood Squandering as from a drain-pipe Into the blanks between the stars. Faces slammed down into clay As for the making of a life-mask Knew that even on the sun's surface They could not be learning more or more to the point Reality was giving it's lesson, Its mishmash of scripture and physics, With here, brains in hands, for example, And there, legs in a treetop. There was no escape except into death. And still it went on--it outlasted Many prayers, many a proved watch Many bodies in excellent trim, Till the explosives ran out And sheer weariness supervened And what was left looked round at what was left.
Crow cannot die, his suffering which is only briefly drowned out by his laughter can’t die and it seems has no purpose. There’s no comfort to be had.
Some individual poems are quite incomprehensible (Crowego, Robin’s Song, Crow’s Undersong – sometimes the language is pushed too far and melts down into surrealism) but it all fits into this terrifying epic bleak panorama, so I don’t get the unpleasant complete door-slamming incomprehensibility from Crow, even at its most difficult, that I did from Wallace Stevens, and had to give him the elbow, beautiful language and blue guitars and all. Wallace Stevens was too clever for me, like Shoenberg or something. Ted Hughes is more like Captain Beefheart. This is not to compare Stevens and Hughes, because why should you, it’s just that I read both recently.
But I could fly with this disgusting bird, because after another day watching the news or another brilliantly eviscerating movie about just how fucked things actually are, in the poor parts, in the rich parts, and in the soft parts between, Crow is the appropriate response, Crow is what I wish to say. Sometimes you read a book or hear a song and you think: this is mine. It might not be very nice but your blood recognises it immediately : this is mine.
Crow straggled, limply bedraggled his remnant. He was his own leftover, the spat-out scrag
He was what his brain could make nothing of.
Sometimes weeping, sometimes cawing with laughter, sometimes both, Crow flaps through all our skies.
"Well," said Crow, "What first?" God, exhausted with Creation, snored. "Which way?" said Crow, "Which way first?" God's shoulder was the mountain on which Crow sat. "Come," said Crow, "Let's discuss the situation." God lay, agape, a great carcass.
I'm lying, I have not read this completely, you have to take it in little sips, as the bee said to the bobolink, but this book is pure GENIUS - as youI'm lying, I have not read this completely, you have to take it in little sips, as the bee said to the bobolink, but this book is pure GENIUS - as you know it translates Emily Dickinson's poems - all 1,789 of them - into English. The results are ineffable, thrilling, and exactly like what I imagine a completely insane person thinks like. I will give a few examples.
When I'm dead I probably won't move. But if I could move, I'd move my dead mouth to say "Thank you."
*
It's spring! So how come all the trees aren't screaming with delight? Maybe they don't have mouths.
*
There are angels everywhere. Everywhere! There's one on your face.
*
There were some kids walking home and everything wanted to have sex with them. And it creeped them out.
*
The great events of our time are engendered by the anonymity of their constituents.
*
I am kind of like a little boat in the sea of life who wants to have sex with its brother's girlfriend.
I could go on. In fact, this book has inspired me to steal the idea and use it on Sylvia Plath. ...more
Well, I don't have this book and would only laugh at it discourteously if I did, because it goes for insane second-hand prices, but I feel I've alreadWell, I don't have this book and would only laugh at it discourteously if I did, because it goes for insane second-hand prices, but I feel I've already read The Warlock of Love many times because it was published when Marc Bolan was an elf (1969) and before he shapeshifted into a glam-rocker (1970), so this is all contemporaneous with the gloriously titled first Tyrannosaurus Rex album (wait for it, deep breath) "My People were Fair and had Sky in their Hair but Now They're Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows". So yes, this is hippy poetry written by a former mod who ate a lot of mushrooms and even more Tolkien and had a wonderful, completely loony way with words. I love all the early Tyrannosaurus Rex stuff, so original, just Marc with his minimal but perfect acoustic guitar and extreme baby-goat-like voice, and Steve Peregrine Took (naturally) on bongos, pixiephone (of course) and assorted harmonic wailing - it's beautiful, great tunes and the whole thing drunk on language, who cares what it means or doesn't mean, free your words and your mind will follow, or something like that.
Sample of some early lyrics which may or may not be in this book:
"A mad Mage with a maid on his eyebrows Hunteth the realm for a God Who could teach him the craft of decanting The glassy entrails of a frog.
The Bard of my birth with his ballet Walked the wild worlds in the chase For the black chested canary Who as a moose can sing bass. "
from "Chariots of Silk"
"Small girl with a smiling gibbon Bridled with an orchid ribbon His curved brow in Scarlatti fashion Boots that ride the night sky eagle"
from Salamander Palaganda"
"Roasting his feet by the furnace of peat, He roars at the boars who massively sleep at his feet."
from "Stacey Grovw"
The night-mare's mauve mashed mind Sights the visions of the blinds Shoreside stream of steam Cooking kings in cream of scream. Jackdaw winter head Cleans his chalcedony bed A silken word of kind Was returned from Nijinsky Hind.
Rudyard Kipling is, I think, someone we think we should like only at arm’s length, through filters, with a snowstorm of disclaimers attached, using evRudyard Kipling is, I think, someone we think we should like only at arm’s length, through filters, with a snowstorm of disclaimers attached, using every if and but and apologising in advance with bells & whistles & hooters that yes he had some unacceptable opinions and used at least one unacceptable word fairly frequently, he was a man of his times, but, he was still, if you can squint your eyes, and in a certain light, and with the wind in the right direction, be considered a great poet. There, I said it!
I have a gorgeous edition of this famous book, first published April 1892. This edition was published in 1911 so it’s exactly one hundred years old. It cost me £2 a few years ago.
What I find in these ballads is a profound sympathy. He has pity, endless pity, for the poor idiots caught up in these giant chunks of history, like empire-building and empire-maintenance. The idiots in question are the poor infantry soldiers who get the sharp end of the terrible decisions and criminal indifference of their generals and officers. There's one ballad called "The Widow’s Party", the Widow being Queen Victoria, and the party being a small military disaster which probably went unreported in the press. The soldiers have been invited to this party, and they can’t refuse the invitation, much as they may wish to. It's in the form of a dialogue, and Kipling lays on the sarcasm:
"What did you get to eat and drink, Johnnie, Johnnie?" Standing water as thick as ink, Johnnie, my Johnnie, ah! A bit o' beef that were three year stored, A bit o' mutton as tough as a board, And a fowl we killed with a sergeant's sword, When the Widow give the party.
"What did you do for knives and forks, Johnnie, Johnnie?" We carries 'em with us wherever we walks, Johnnie, my Johnnie, ah! And some was sliced and some was halved, And some was crimped and some was carved, And some was gutted and some was starved, When the Widow give the party.
And Kipling, who we are told was the great supporter of Empire and a colonialist through and through, strikes a poignant, almost despairing note :
"What was the end of all the show, Johnnie, Johnnie?" Ask my Colonel, for I don't know, Johnnie, my Johnnie, aha! We broke a King and we built a road-- A court-house stands where the reg'ment goed. And the river's clean where the raw blood flowed When the Widow give the party.
It’s not exactly bunting in the streets is it. Dour cynicism is pretty much the default emotion in The Barrack-Room Ballads. Here he is on the plight of the new recruits:
When the cholera comes - as it will past a doubt - Keep out of the wet and don't go on the shout, For the sickness gets in as the liquor dies out, An' it crumples the young British soldier. Crum-, crum-, crumples the soldier...!
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An' go to your Gawd like a soldier. Go, go, go like a soldier, Go, go, go like a soldier, Go, go, go like a soldier, So-oldier of the Queen!
And when he’s done excoriating the awful life of the ordinary soldier, and listing the many ordinary miseries (like troop-marching and gonorrhea) and gruesome deaths (like cholera) which await him, he then turns round and exposes the repulsive nature of Tommy Atkins himself, in a remarkable ballad called "Loot" – here we have a jovial, knowing, winking, violently racist manual of how to get the good stuff for the soldier – how this ever saw the light of print and was not censored for the undermining, subversive expose which it was, I can’t say. So here is some “advice” for the new recruit who’s being posted off to foreign parts:
Now remember when you're 'acking round a gilded Burma god That 'is eyes is very often precious stones; An' if you treat a n**** to a dose o' cleanin'-rod 'E's like to show you everything 'e owns. When 'e won't prodooce no more, pour some water on the floor Where you 'ear it answer 'ollow to the boot When the ground begins to sink, shove your baynick down the chink, An' you're sure to touch the loot
When from 'ouse to 'ouse you're 'unting, you must always work in pairs-- It 'alves the gain, but safer you will find-- For a single man gets bottled on them twisty-wisty stairs, An' a woman comes and clobs 'im from be'ind. When you've turned 'em inside out, an' it seems beyond a doubt As if there weren't enough to dust a flute Before you sling your 'ook, at the 'ousetops take a look, For it's underneath the tiles they 'ide the loot.
You wouldn’t get away with satirising the Army like that these days. This is very vicious stuff.
(Chorus) Loot! loot! loot! Oh the loot! Bloomin' loot! That's the thing to make the boys git up an' shoot!
So after all this cynicism and frank horror about what Great Britain was up to in its vast colonies, it’s a relief to come across "Mandalay", a great ballad of a soldier who’s come back from the East to England and realises he must have fallen in love back there in Burma – he just didn’t know it when he was there, but now he does - he remembers with a pang the woman he met back there, he remembers a kind of wonderland and he can't quite believe he was really there:
When the mist was on the rice-fields an' the sun was droppin' slow, She'd git 'er little banjo an' she'd sing "Kulla-lo-lo!" With 'er arm upon my shoulder an' 'er cheek agin' my cheek We used to watch the steamers an' the hathis pilin' teak. Elephants a-pilin' teak In the sludgy, squdgy creek, Where the silence 'ung that 'eavy you was 'arf afraid to speak! On the road to Mandalay... where the flyin'-fishes play, An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!
It’s sentimental, yes, but it’s sentiment dragged out of a dark place and then denied
But that's all shoved be'ind me - long ago an' far away, An' there ain't no 'busses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay; An' I'm learnin' 'ere in London what the ten-year soldier tells: - If you've 'eard the East a-callin', you won't never 'eed naught else. No! you won't 'eed nothin' else But them spicy garlic smells, An' the sunshine an' the palm-trees an' the tinkly temple-bells; On the road to Mandalay... Where the flyin'-fishes play, An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!
Yes, there's a lot wrong with Kipling, but there's an awful lot right too....more
The guy had talent but reading his stuff is like being locked up in that Hansel and Gretel house made of confectionery. You get to feeling ill. In facThe guy had talent but reading his stuff is like being locked up in that Hansel and Gretel house made of confectionery. You get to feeling ill. In fact you need a bucket quite soon. There should be a Marathon Keats Reading Competition to see who can read the most pages of the Complete Poems without losing their lunch. I bet if Keats had been around in the 1970s he'd have been a Genesis fan - and then a Peter Gabriel fan! I can imagine him earnestly glomming onto "Selling England By The Pound" or some such prog rock shite on his Keatsian headphones (ordinary headphones garlanded with anemones). And he would have wanted to write the lyrics for the next one. Yes, that's right, he would have been a lyricist for a prog band - like Yes or Marillion or Van Der Graaf Generator! Ha ha ha! Tough luck, John, you missed a really modest career as a prog rock lyricist. The girls would have loved your soft curls and your early death would have gone down a treat.
I felt a sneeze - as big as God Form in - back of - my Nose Yet being - without - a Handkerchief I Panicked quite - and froze Sneeze I must - yet sneeze -I felt a sneeze - as big as God Form in - back of - my Nose Yet being - without - a Handkerchief I Panicked quite - and froze Sneeze I must - yet sneeze - must not Dilemma - made - me grieve Happy then - a single Bee Saw me - use - my sleeve
Well all right, I did not read every one of the 25,678 but certainly a fair number. You know when she died they found she'd stuffed poems everywhere in her house, up the chimney, down her knickers, tied in little "packets" onto her dogs' hindquarters, someone cut a slice of a loaf of bread to make a sandwich and another 25 poems fell out. I think Emily would have made a great drug mule if she'd have lived another 120 years. Although she may have found a serious conflict between her intense religious convictions and the large amount of cash she would have made, not to mention the radical change of lifestyle.
There's - a certain - slant of - light On - winter afternoons That makes - you feel - high Like - those - small - mushrooms
I put - a poem - in my pants Then sitting - by an Eternal Lake My poem - seemed - to speak aloud "Lay off - the Battenburg - cake"
I work in an office where we get a zillion phone calls from all over the world. The people who call us are doctors or clinicians who have a problem wiI work in an office where we get a zillion phone calls from all over the world. The people who call us are doctors or clinicians who have a problem with one of the many clinical trials we manage. About half of the time the callers have broken English, and in a few cases they have no English so we get a translator by calling a translation service and conferencing them into the call. This one particular evening a female co-worker - we'll call her Sarah because it was Sarah - got this call from a guy who needed a translator. He was talking in Portuguese, a language which sounds beautiful to non-Portuguese-speaking English people. So anyway, the translator introduces herself and Sarah asks the translator to ask the guy what his problem is. Translator turns that into Portuguese. Guy talks in Portuguese a while. Translator pauses then says to Sarah "The gentleman says that he is calling from Brazil and asks if you would be willing to perform oral sex for him. He has money to pay." Sarah doesn't lose the beat and says "Can you please explain that it appears he may have the incorrect telephone number and that we are a clinical trial management company." Translator turns that into Portuguese. Guy apologises and rings off. Sarah thanks the translator and the call ends.
In this analogy, we are all Sarah, every literary critic who's ever written about Dylan Thomas is the translator, and Dylan Thomas is some dickhead from Brazil who sounds so beautiful until you find out he's talking about oral sex all the time. ...more
![The Complete Works of Shakespeare [38 plays, 4 poems, sonnets]](https://cdn.statically.io/img/i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386921187l/32512._SX50_.jpg)
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