Thomas Tallis in London

Thomas Tallis in London

In the soul it's long been winter.
Rivers freeze like human hearts can
and once you know you don't forget
even though the truth keeps changing.
But the world is always waiting
with the sorrow of the earthbound
and, from choir stalls, it comes pouring
in a tapestry of meaning.
The world's so easy to walk in,
a luxury for one who hears
all forever clear inside him
and more things than you've ever known.

COMPETITION TIME

Roll up, roll up.

I'm not the BBC and any competition I want to run here isn't fixed. I can offer prizes and will do so if and when I have something to offer.

I'm soon going to have two copies of James Sheard's fine book, reviewed however briefly below, because I waited three weeks for my order to arrive and then ordered it elsewhere, before the first supplier sent a replacement.
I'm a fan. I buy the books I review. I'm keeping the industry going. It's not like those old days on University Radio when one could keep the books one reviewed. I can't claim to have a readership big enough for publishers to send me review copies, concert promoters to send me tickets or record companies send me new releases. And, in a way, I'm glad they don't.

But Dammtor is a fine book, very much the sort of thing I want to promote and so I'll send my spare copy of it to the one of the people who successfully nominate the winner of the following award.
Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to a few choice events and will review them here and then, for the sake of this competition, say which one I enjoyed the most. All you have to do to win the book is say which one it will be. There are five events and the runners, with notes on form and pedigree and betting forecast, are these.

Maggi Hambling at the Cheltenham Literature Festival.
The ferocious and alarming artist is highly entertaining in person as well as the most convincing living painter I know about. She is sure to go well and the only possible fault would be if she runs through stories I've heard before. I don't know if she'll take the stage clutching her own personal bottle of champagne but she's an obvious favourite for this at 6/4.

Hamlet at the National Theatre this Friday.
I collect Hamlets with only slightly less compulsion than Pete Doherty collects visits from the police. Rory Kinnear is a big ticket this autumn but I can be a contrary little difficulty when I feel like it and don't always admire the biggest names having seen several tremendous local Hamlets over the years, so he had better be good. But there's so much in the play, it's hard to see such high profile people making a mess of it. It is a contender at 2/1.

Philip Larkin at Cheltenham.
Not the poet himself, obviously, but his biographer, editor and the moody offspring of his best mate, Mssrs. Motion, Thwaite and Amis junior. On the occasion of the publication of the Letters to Monica. Will this be a step too far into Larkin's famously guarded privacy or will these stars in their own right, and of Larkinalia, find enough to say that hasn't been said before. And can Larkin's greatness as a poet cast enough light onto an event like this. It opened at 3/1 but, thinking about it more, it's drifted out to 4/1.

National Poetry Day on the South Bank.
Simon Armitage is a banker in this line up but I'm not sure if the supporting cast can make it a great day. Dalgit Nagra is a fine performer and you don't know what else the day might provide. It's a day that has in the past provided a sense of belonging to the poetry world that I don't feel on the other 364 days of the year, so you just can't tell. This could be a dark horse, as it were, but you'd still get 7/1.

Roddy Lumsden and Colette Bryce at Cheltenham.
Roddy's been a much admired poet for years now and I'm glad of the chance to catch him here for free. I'm thinking of growing a beard and wearing a hat as a disguise after my review of the anthology he edited earlier this year but I've never had anything but praise for his own poetry. I must dash to the Hambling event straight after so might not get a book signed by him but, up against Shakespeare, Larkin and Maggi, even with the help of the fine Colette, he's got a job on to win this at 7/1.

So, place your bets at dg217.888@ntlworld.com with an address to send your prize to.

The questions to think about, the prize to be won. You have to admit, it's a fascinating competition. Autumn is the kindest season.

Thunderbirds Have Gone

Is that it, then. Is your political career over as soon as your big ambition to be leader is cruelly snatched away.

I hope that if one of my sisters were to prove more successful as a poet than me (it wouldn't be difficult but I don't think either of them are currently trying), I wouldn't immediately sling it all in.

But perhaps there's a chance that Ed Milliband's election as Labour leader signals the end of Thunderbird puppets as model politicians. It probably actually started with some elements of Margaret Thatcher's re-invention but reached its paragon example with Blair, who was followed up by Cameron.

But, poor David, it must be horrid for him.

James Sheard - Dammtor

James Sheard, Dammtor, (Cape)

James Sheard's Catesby poem was just about the best thing in the Identity Parade anthology earlier this year (according to me), which might be a little bit like winning the League Cup, but, in the old cliche, you can only beat what's put in front of you.

Tim Liardet is the latest to get to express his doubts about that massed attack on posterity, in the latest PNR, while I'm now mostly fascinated by its biographical notes in which most of the poets are defined by the esoteric creative writing posts they hold in universities one's not quite sure one has heard of, as if they bestowed honour or meant something.

But I was looking forward to this book because I wasn't quite sure if Scattering Eva, his first, had provided anything I liked as much as the Catesby poem and there's nothing quite as disappointing as a one-hit wonder. There was no need to worry, although there are more poems that refer to the writing of poems that one would ideally like, one has to appreciate that someone who studied creative writing and now teaches it is likely to think like that and we mustn't think badly of them all the time.

I was also expecting a darker book, perhaps of more mitteleuropean angst, which despite James' genial cover photo, seems to lurk in much of his poetry, but although there is something sinister in the Sheard imagination, there's a lighter attitude here, partly the joy of being a father, also a more structured shape-making in the poems, and I think it's wittier than the blurb gives it credit for, which would sell you a bleak, unremitting book if it could.

The Strandperle Notebook is the most memorable piece, six and a half pages of sharply observed nostalgia for a place and its stored up history. Taking its tone and rhythms from Tony Harrison, it shows Sheard rather more metrical than the earlier book had allowed us to think, as well as adept at fitting captivating words to elusive measures,

Frumped-down Muttis hissing Susse

out from doorways, warm in comfy

coats and hats - their punters

mainly shy and just-past-school boys

needing someone who won't laugh.

After the Funeral is a fine, short poem that captures the sense of absence. The emptiness of Compound Country is out of season quietness but with the same threat latent in it that Sheard so regularly feels, in Taken, in Others, in Postcard from Famagusta and, you almost suspect, all the time.

The poems about the new-born son come at the end, straight after the funeral poem, and end on an undarkened note of thrill and Within Days, That Hour and Nathaniel at Newborough might have been a better place to stop than with The Last Poem, the point of which is lost on me. That Hour, again using a repeated stanza pattern throughout, is perhaps the best, apparently a request from Mrs. Sheard for a poem 'but not one of your usual ones', which one might suspect means more straight-forward and literal. He makes a great job of it. It's a fine thing to see a poet moving between metrical and free verse, rigorous formal patterns and less structured lines. It is a handicap not to be prepared to do so.

James Sheard is assured and accomplished and must be confident of a place among the most respected names in British poetry for years to come. Not too flashy, not too much of it and a sense of development from the debut book to the second, it all looks good from here.

Larkin and Gunn, Self and Others

Larkin25 is currently marking that anniversary of the poet's death in Hull and good wishes to all those near enough to go and enjoy it. I'm afraid it's a long way from here by my Larkinesque standards. I'd like to go to Hull but I'd like to be able to come home the same day. So, by no means in any way an official Larkin25 event, I'd like to do my bit from here, and so present my piece, limited by what a blogspot like this can sensibly take,

Larkin and Gunn, Self and Others

Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn were grouped broadly together as young poets in the 1950’s, perhaps for reasons of convenience or publicity, but have long since been recognized as having diverted from that similarity or perhaps having had precious little in common in the first place, and being very different personalities.
Certainly, their recorded opinions of each other wouldn’t suggest that they would have wanted to be thought similar. Although in one letter Larkin comments that Gunn looks ‘handsome’ in comparison with himself, he soon afterwards comments ‘What a genius that man has for making an ass of himself’. Gunn is more charitable in the opposite direction when he says that Larkin is a poet of ‘minute ambitions’ who carried them out ‘exquisitely’, which I think is something of a compliment although intended as a back-handed one.
Larkin’s reputation is still for many that of a misanthrope whereas Gunn’s is, amongst other things, as a hedonist but they might have a little more in common than it first appears beyond the apparent coincidence that they are my two favourite poets not only of their period but of any period and one of the ways that they might be compared rather than contrasted goes some way to putting back together that original shackling that they underwent, whether under protest or not, as members of the putative ‘Movement’.
The joint Selected Poems published by Faber that featured Gunn and Ted Hughes was originally conceived as featuring Larkin, too, but whereas that book perhaps helped to associate Gunn with Hughes on account of a perceived shared interest in violence, Gunn is nothing like Hughes as a poet in any useful sense and his kinship with Larkin, although not complete, has more substance.
Yeats and Auden were inevitable models for them both as young poets, acknowledged in inter-textual references as well as conscious imitation in early poems, such as Gunn’s Unsettled Motorcyclist and Larkin’s Ultimatum as well as Gunn’s use of personae and Larkin’s Yeatsian idiom in XX Poems. But Gunn and Larkin’s poems, like On the Move and Church Going, are similarly made things, using big Yeatsian stanzas with complex rhyme schemes, that also move from observed specific detail to broader, philosophical conclusions. That isn’t to say that these are the only such poems or poets that ever did such a thing but it is to say that these two poets could work with similar methods.
What the poets of the 50’s were said to be doing was reacting against the trends of the generations that came before them, most obviously the wordy, rhetorical style of Dylan Thomas, with a more empirical, ironic attitude. Gunn didn’t remember it quite like that, though, whatever it looked like to commentators. He said, ‘we were disregarding the leading figures. It is not opposing, it is just not taking any notice and that is what Larkin and I had in common…’ . So, it might have been no more than the avoidance of what they independently saw as excess and bad practice, but it did lead to genuine consensus of method even if that method was to be put to different uses.
Larkin’s misanthropy was perhaps something that he worked on and developed as a kind of defence. As a naturally shy man, he adopted an awkward and sometimes uninviting manner whereas Gunn, a much more adventurous individual, saw the world in his early poems as divided between ‘self’ and others, with a lone protagonist condemned to separation from his fellows. Comparing the poems of The Less Deceived (1955) with those of The Sense of Movement (1957), one might think of Larkin as the poet kneeling ‘by all-generous waters’ whereas Gunn is ‘born to fog, to waste,…/An individual’.
Gunn goes through immense stylistic and thematic shifts, in Touch and Misanthropos, reaching out to ‘break down that chill’ and eventually finds himself merging with natural elements in geysers and under the influence of LSD whereas Larkin’s poems adopt the trademark curmudgeonly attitude in This Be The Verse or Posterity under the influence of gin and tonic.
But Larkin’s misanthropy always had a cartoon aspect to it. One knew that a proper reading of the whole poem and other poems uncovered a rather more generous and celebratory spirit than he sometimes pretended to. Not only are there poems like The Trees, but the heavily qualified ending of An Arundel Tomb and even the return to life at the end of the morbid and terrifying Aubade show for certain that there was a light in Larkin’s gloomy universe. This Be The Verse is ironic and few would read it as a literal piece of advice.
Moving in the opposite direction, celebrating nature, cheap thrills, promiscuity and adventure, Gunn’s heroic quest for fulfilment in his later work is ultimately a way of escaping the anxieties he came from, of Sartrean nothingness and solipsism, and from those he encounters later, like the AIDS virus in 1980’s San Francisco. In The Man with Night Sweats he is inadequately human in his realization,

As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.

It is almost as if they changed places and came to see the world in some small ways from the point of view that had been the other’s. And at some point, they must have passed each other going in opposite directions. Where Larkin writes in High Windows of

The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Gunn had written in Lights Among Redwood,

At once
tone is forgotten: we stand
and stare – mindless, diminished-
at their rosy immanence.

So, perhaps not so different after all, the awkward librarian and the West Coast hipster, the arch Conservative and the cool Liberal, the so-called little Englander and the trans-Atlantic stylist. They were both rigorous critics within their different areas and their poems benefitted from a clarity of diction that their early methods continued to provide them with as well as a wide range of reading from other centuries as well as other languages. There is no photograph of them together because they never met (please correct me if this is wrong) but I’d like to think that if they had tried hard enough they might have found they had more in common than they thought.

Top 6 - Cover Versions

There was apparently some survey on which were the best cover versions and such hot news was it that Tony Livesey was talking about it until 1 a.m. on Radio 5 before the Breakfast Show took it up again at 6.
There is surely only one candidate for the top position but I didn't hear it mentioned on the wireless. Gregory Isaacs' Puff the Magic Dragon has nothing to look over its shoulder for in this race, and here it is to show you why, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIf3xfWVTuo .
I've got The Human League's You Lost that Lovin Feeling next for the way its still carries immense power but through a minimalist arrangement.
Rod Stewart's always a favourite and it would be his version of This Old Heart of Mine that I'd have back a hundred times.
Wild Billy Childish and the Black Hands deliver a tremendous ska version of Mister Hitler, theme from Dad's Army.
Wyclef Jean's Wish You Were Here was so good it made me think better of Pink Floyd.
Boney M's hidden masterpiece is a version of No Woman No Cry on the B side of an early single, probably Daddy Cool.
And just for once, but on this occasion only, because it's me. I can't keep it down to six because I also want The Mamas & The Papas doing their soft, shimmering account of Cliff's Do You Wanna Dance. Shocking rule-breaking, though. Don't be trying that at home.

The Fry Chronicles

Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles (Michael Joseph)

Stephen Fry only got a 2:1 and so I'm just as clever as him. And rarely can bare statistics have been used to contrive such a misleading conclusion. The very nearly First from Cambridge, top in Shakespeare, two dissertations -on Byron and Forster- bashed off in an evening each just before their due date, because he was appearing in every play that the student body could put on, taking wine in his rooms with friends on long afternoons and all sorts of other activity, does not bear comparison with my steady scraping of an adequate mark at Lancaster at the same time. It was always an outrageous lie, presumably put about by lesser universities, that a 2:1 was a 2:1 and a First a First wherever you took them and I've never seen it more graphically illustrated than here.

When he actually read any books in between all his other projects is hard to say but he remembered it all with an awe-inspiring capacity for academic work that he passes off as 'plausible' roguery. On the one hand it is a shame that academic work can be demeaned by such a mind but in the end I'm glad to see there is a level of intellect that can treat it thus.

This volume of autobiography takes us through Stephen's Cambridge years, recapping bits of the wonderful Moab is My Washpot, and up to the age of 30 when he has already established himself as an entertainment polymath, as writer, actor and comedian. After introductory sections on his addictions to sweets and cigarettes, he divides the book into two larger halves, on Cambridge and Comedy. He leaves us as he makes his first acquaintance with cocaine.

It is at first appealing that Stephen wears his erudition and talent so lightly as to be apologetic about them. In fact, he confirms my uncharitable view that he might have been capable of better. Although I'm as confirmed in my admiration of him as all but the most devoted of his army of followers, I wonder if his role as Oscar in Wilde isn't far and away the most authentic and profound thing that he's done. The journalism collected in Paperweight is marvellous and, of course, his roles in Blackadder and QI, and his general standing as liberal, downright fine chap make him worth his considerable stature each on their own but it all seems to have come to him so easily and without trying that one wonders if he shouldn't have been T.S. Eliot or Wittgenstein or someone of equally colossal status rather than just an all-round good egg.

And this, or something like it, seems to trouble him, too. How unkind I am to say so, but he seems to agree. If he had only once or twice digressed to explain his guilt and self-loathing at his lack of confidence, body shape, and feelings of unworthiness at his privilege and innate facilities, it would have been a touching and disarming aside, making us even more sympathetic to someone we thought we loved enough already. But he does it time and again, apparently needing to stop every so often to enter a confessional to unburden himself of himself. So, big, rich, famous people can be insecure, too. Now we know.

One can hardly call it name-dropping to mention that one's friends are Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, then Rowan Atkinson and everybody else who played a part in that generation, my generation, of entertainers because their memoirs will be equally pleased to say they worked with Stephen but he is able to include illuminating anecdotes of Alistair Cooke, Harold Pinter, Olivier, Stephen Sondheim and Douglas Adams not for the sake of their names but for the value of the episodes they appear in.

I've rarely read a book that has used so many words I didn't know (maybe half a dozen or so) unless it was either by or about Derrida, Foucault, Wittgenstein or Stephen Hawking but I didn't bother looking them up. The context allows you to guess at a suitable synonym and it's all done in such a casual manner that you know you're not going to be examined on it at the end of term. It's a bit like reading a book in French and, not knowing what an ornithorynque is, register that the author had some kind of domestic pet although you do end up missing the point that it was a duck-billed platypus.

It's every bit the book you thought it would be- so friendly and approachable that you read it into the night long after you would have put other books down. And so you are disappointed to have finished it so soon. Like his hero, or one of them, Alan Bennett, it would be nice to just be able to switch him on and take part in his world but books and plays are finite and finished things and one's own world comes back to you once you've closed its covers. It was no more and no less than the book I had been looking forward to, a nice, warm blanket of kindly, well-judged chat from a world that few of us have the ability, potential or possibility to take part in but they do it for us, these people, and we are thus glad that they take the time to tell us about it.

Although it's adorable and deliciously lovely, it isn't the best in its genre, which will always or until further notice for me be Terry Eagleton's The Gatekeeper, which was much more laugh out loud and had a different view of Cambridge and Oxford Universities. The value of Stephen Fry is that he appreciates things and does things because he loves them without recourse to consultants, systems analysts or even, dare I say, profit motive because he enjoys a profit as much as any of us would if we could come out as far ahead as he has. But The Gatekeeper is the best book I've ever read and so it would be unfair to say that Stephen has again failed to produce the very best work in this somewhat self-regarding field.

Mr. Home

Mr. Home appeared in 14 Poems, a typed and photocopied set of A4 sheets, sometime in the early 80's that was reviewed in crazy little places as generously as its reviewers could, wasn't for sale as far as I can remember but free to anybody who wanted one. As poems still should be really, whoever you are. I like it to be an amateur pursuit and its pricelessness is augmented by the fact that you don't put a price on it.
I did say, in an interview with Daniel Parsons once -possibly no longer available on the interweb- that I had 'forgotten where the bodies were buried' with regard to when and where I had lifted ideas and 'influences' from other C20th poets. Well, I've dug some of them up here.
Of course, I could never resist the seven-syllable, 'syllabic' , line of Gunn's My Sad Captains in those days but Martianism was all the rage then, too, and the first stanza was my one and only attempt at it. I had forgotten that Mr. Home was married but now see how that compounds his misery but 'that endless air' is obviously taken from Larkin's Broadcast.
It really is shameless, isn't it, all this hommage to the giants of poetry. But, on the other hand, if there weren't such examples that we admired, learnt from, imitated and then tried to leave behind, I don't know how much poetry there would ever have been.

So, with apologies, I give you-

Mr. Home

Suddenly it is morning
and still quiet, the traffic
hums softly by. And local
residents file into church
to examine the nature
of their own clapping.

Mr. Home sips tea and waits
to read the paper, drumming
soft, unhappy rhythms on
the table-top while his wife
swats another household fly
with the News of the World.

He compares an angry wasp,
lifesize and buzzing, inside
his glass, to a distant plane
hanging like a miniature
mobile in that endless air,
all blue, going to America.

National Poetry Day

http://poetrysociety.org.uk/events/event/1383

National Poetry Day. Well, why not. It's been going for quite a few years now and has managed to organize some worthwhile events or happenings locally here in Portsmouth in that time.
At the Poetry Marathon at the good, old, now no longer Arts Centre in Reginald Road, it might have been circa 1999 or so, I did a slot or two and was approached in the bar by a journalist from the Portsmouth News who was keen to interview a poet who had performed and I was one. It was quite remarkable to see my answers to her questions noted down on one of those spiral-bound pads and she did me no wrong in the feature that appeared. She also wanted to know if I would be around in a while because they were going to get a photographer along to take a picture of an actual poet and wondered if I might be prepared to be that poet. Well, okay. But the photographer wasn't there by the time I wanted to go and so I found the newshound and pointed out a couple of other poets who might like to have their picture in the paper and Denise looked fine and lovely in her hat in the paper when it appeared.
I blame this lack-lustre attitude to publicity for my failure to become a household name, as well as the terrible poems, but now appreciate the benefits of not being famous. I don't know why anyone would ever want to be.
There were other years that Portsmouth had fine events to mark the occasion, readings in the library cafe and once when they took the trouble to cover a building in Fratton with poems written on sheets that billowed slightly in the wind like some thought-provoking, post-modern installation.
This year, why not take advantage of the free event on the South Bank (above), where Simon Armitage will, no doubt, be his usual boy-ish but accomplished self. Ian Duhig is a poet worthy of respect, too, and Dalgit Nagra is a performer worth seeing and might do something in Punjabi for us if we're lucky. It is worth a cheap train ride, a day off and lots of good-natured enjoyment. And if you see a git in a hat, the rule is you must buy him a drink.
Poetry Day always has a 'theme' but it is usually a theme that can be so liberally interpreted that almost any poem can be made to fit it. Once it was 'identity', for example, and I was led to wonder if there had ever been a poem written that hadn't been an attempt by the poet to express their 'identity'. And, having read a few poems in Portsmouth Library with no regard to the theme of 'food', I realized afterwards that I had read Longpig, a poem with an extended double-meaning one of which was cannibalism, and (possibly) also Wine Appreciation and, if wine isn't food exactly, it is surely at its best, food for the soul.
'Home' makes me think firstly of Yeats' Lake Isle of Innisfree and then Auden's About the House and also Andrew Motion's poem that ends on the word but I'm not as well-read as I should be. It also reminds me of my early effort, called Mr. Home, which didn't celebrate the place but pictured a man stuck at home, wishing he was elsewhere. Home is just what you make it. It's also an excuse to go and try to find a little piece of almost 'juvenilia'. I'll post it if it doesn't make me too ashamed to have been its author.

Top 6 - Poetry Readings

I'm not in London tonight for Seamus Heaney's reading and it will serve as a lesson to me not to leave the internet unscrutinized for quite so long ever again but what can you do.
What I thought I could do instead is look back on the best poetry readings I've ever been to, as some sort of compensation.
In the early 90's, it must have been, Portsmouth actually had a literature festival or two and the highlight of them must have been Paul Durcan in the third floor room of the library building, holding his audience on an emotional tightrope between laughter and tears with the cliff-edge reading of his poems. That propellor he left in Bilbao became magical and you really wouldn't have thought that an unassuming bloke in a woolly jumper could be quite so spell-binding. Guilt and dysfunction seemed to be a part of the horror but detachment and irony meant it was an effort to question one's impulse to laugh out loud. I've never seen anything quite like it since.
Although last year's appearance by August Kleinzahler in the LRB bookshop was in many ways just as special, an opportunity to see the great man that I successfully searched out having doubted that I'd ever get the chance. Like Durcan, one appreciates the performance made possible by the voice and the added power of being in the presence of a real performer when one is so used to reading poems from the page often with no idea of the poet's reading voice.
The same might be said of Carol Ann Duffy who I eventually witnessed at the Larkin conference in Hull in 1997, the most memorable effect being the dark sarcasm of her World's Wife poems like Mrs. Midas.
Possibly all three of these readers almost scared one into appreciation of their meaning, with an intensity of performance even if it did seem relaxed and low-key in ambience and surroundings. You get precious little sense of the potential power and personality of such poems on paper and this is an entirely different thing to the pop, stand-up tradition of 'performance' poetry which isn't the same thing at all.
Which, already, leaves me with only three places to allocate to as many as a dozen candidates, not being allowed to mention near misses, so I must be careful.
Paul Muldoon appeared at the Poetry International in London in 1999 just after the publication of Hay. I waited for an autograph in the interval while he spoke to someone much more important than me. While he dutifully gave me a sample of his scrawl, I managed to stammer that I'd reviewed his book for the Acumen Poetry Book Review Competition and that he could read it when it won. He said he'd look forward to that so I hope he did when I was more shocked and stunned than anyone else to find that it actually had. But it isn't the anecdote that gets him into the Top 6, it's another wonderful, charismatic reader of word magic, something that I don't really believe in until I hear it done.
Since the last selection is ear-marked for a traditional sixth choice in this Top 6 feature, fifth place has a calamity of candidates all pushing their claims for attention but I'll avoid the claims of laureates past and future, heroes of mine who couldn't find the poem I had asked if they were going to read and go back to the school assembly where Linden Huddlestone read Sometimes a Lantern by Gerard Manley Hopkins in funereal tribute to our teacher, W.G.F. Bradford because, as spine-tingling moments go, it was an early experience, a tremendous poem and as gripping and moving a thing as a 16 or 17 year old could expect to hear.
But having taken the train from Lancaster to Cambridge in November 1979 to see Thom Gunn, I'm not going to leave him out now. He read Bally Power Play and presumably much else from The Passages of Joy but, honestly, now my memories of the reading are somewhat dispersed. But I was surprised to be the only one straight up to him to ask him to sign my copy of Touch. He commented that it was his favourite cover design of all his books but I was too overawed, aged 20, to engage in conversation. Isn't it ever the way.

Audience Figures

Sitemeter, the gadget that measures the volume of visitors to this website, has been reporting a significant upswing in readers over the last couple of weeks. We will soon have enough for a cricket team.
At first there was more than the usual level of interest when the review of Seamus Heaney appeared, proof if it were needed of his overwhelming popularity among living poets in the English language. Derek Mahon has gathered a consistent and ongoing number of visitors but it was nothing like the Heaney-mania that broke all records on this site until I posted some desultory notes on the Monteverdi Vespers Prom, which at one stage was accounting for three-quarters of the latest 100 visits.
This is a bit of a shame, really, as it didn't constitute much of a review and my few picky criticisms were at least partly modified by watching the performance on i-player the following evening. It was, of course, more stately and grand on television than on radio, but the first impressions were begun before the performance even finished and posted with up-to-the-minute topicality on the night.
But it is interesting to see this market research and what internet users are actually in search of. I will be holding onto my hat in a few days' time after reviewing Stephen Fry but it is not the intention to become populist and, once we've gone past ITV4 and Talksport in the ratings, it will be back to the poetry features and the minority appeal that one trusts is more satisfyingly under the radar.
In the meantime it is nice to see googlebot of Mountain View, California returning regularly to read the latest updates. The machine clearly has a keen interest in these aesthetic subjects and we must not underestimate the computer's capacity to think and feel on an emotional and artistic level.

Prom 75 Monteverdi Vespers

Prom 75, Monteverdi Vespers (1610),

Monteverdi Choir
London Oratory Junior Choir
Schola Cantorum of The Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School
English Baroque Soloists
His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts
Sir John Eliot Gardiner conductor,

Radio 3, September 10

.

It's hardly for me to find fault with John Eliot Gardner on the subject of Monteverdi and listening to this latest account of the Vespers on the radio rather than in the Albert Hall might not have had the same stupendous effect. But I have seen it at the Proms, with the King's Consort and Carolyn Sampson and others a few years ago, and in a still sumptuous performance in Portsmouth Cathedral more recently as well as the recordings I have of it, so despite the rapturous reception it received on the next to last night of the Proms, I did have reservations.

It was, I'm sure, as they say, Monteverdi's calling card, job application and portfolio of his compositional talents and so it might well have been intended as the bright, showy concert piece it was here, taken as quickly, it seemed to me sometimes, as decency might allow, and no doubt filling the hall with a jubilant grandeur.

But, not being a religious person myself, I like a bit of solemnity when it comes to sacred music whether it was intended as a concert performance or an act of devotion. It's one of the places I hope to get the glimpse of the heaven I'm never going to see properly for myself. And, honestly, I don't imagine many church services these days using the Vespers of 1610 as one of the hymns, if it ever was. One can take this music in a more luxurious, sensual and sedate mood than this seemed to be and gain more from its langours and passion than treat it like a virtuoso concerto.

The school choir will have had the experience of a lifetime performing this in such a setting and all good luck to them but they were junior voices, drilled to the moment in every detail but sounded young when a profounder maturity might have been of more benefit than well-trained innocence.

Of course, one sometimes prefers what one is used to and my Taverner Consort CD with Andrew Parrott is what I return to now that it is so much trouble to get the boxed set LP's out and see if the record player still works. But I hope I'm not becoming so narrow-minded that one reading of a work will do. I took my chess rating up by about 50 points during this concert so I'm very grateful to it and replaying it over the weekend on BBC TV i-player will hopefully reveal greater glory in the visual effects. As one of the very cornerstones of my hit parade of all-time favourite things in any genre, you never get such a thing as a bad Monteverdi Vespers, not the 1610 set anyway, in the same way that almost any Hamlet will have something to offer, even if it's only the words. But this was Gardner, who first heard the piece at the age of 11 and formed the Monteverdi Choir at University to perform it, so one expects something tremendous, and expectation has ruined things before.

And, yes, it was fantastic really, glittering, shiny and gorgeous in the places where it is supposed to be. But what's the point of saying that if one can tilt at windmills and suggest that one knows better than the world's leading authority on the subject. It is one of the achievements of civilisation and, if you take away any possible devotional meaning, an unexplainable glory that is deeply moving and wonderful for its own sake.

Bewl Water

Whereas several years ago I didn't think anything less than 50 miles really constitited a bike ride, at the elderly and readily aching age of nearly 51, a walk of 12 miles is just about satisfactory, thank you very much.

Bewl Water in Kent is pleasant enough and worth the foot ache it has resulted in.

But what were these mysterious concrete constructions at the end of it. Were we looking at science or art.

I find that they are the draw-off tower and overflow. Very interesting.

Do remember to visit David Green Books for further in-depth coverage of other scientific issues

Radio 5 Review

September is the kindest month in many ways. The air carries a welcome hint of chill, one knows one has seen off the heat and discomfort of summer once again, although some 15 years ago it represented the end of the cycling season for me and another year gone, and one feels like writing a poem about it. One still might but, as sometimes happens, one finds one has written the poem one had in mind already.

But, one thing to celebrate among many is the return of the Greatest Living Englishman (okay, essay question, discuss), Danny Baker, to national Radio Five - I'm old-fashioned and don't call it 'Five Live' because not all of it is- on Saturday mornings.

Sacked a number of times by the BBC and possibly sundry other places, Radio 5 simply isn't good enough without him and the sad efforts of others to emulate his style (like Ian Payne) show how much the broadcasting genius gene is something inborn that cannot be studied and learnt. He almost accidentally invented 6-0-6, which at its very beginning was a sports phone-in but it soon became obvious that football was all that most people wanted to talk about and, so that's what he did. But the laborious calls from fans of this-or-that Rovers, Athletic or Thistle on their passion for the game, the mistakes of the ref or their need for a new left back soon led him to more spontaneous subject matter and nowadays football is the loosest of themes on his show. Remarkably, and indicatively, it was David Mellor who first took over 6-0-6, all workmanlike rent-an-opinion and heavy-breathing, who was then given an award for the show which only goes to demonstrate how this country is run and what prizes are worth.

Baker threw away more wit and wisdom in a moment than Mellor, or most of his successors in that chair, could muster if they'd had all night to think it up. Most brilliantly, in olden days, he muttered in passing, after Alan Dicks resigned as Fulham manager, 'and there went the best terrace chant in the league'. When given the Saturday lunchtime slot with friend and duelling partner, Danny Kelly, I used to have to delay my essential long-distance training rides on bicycle just to hear another half hour.

Last Saturday's return was no more than a re-hash of last season, keeping the Sausage Sandwich Game and several old themes while still loading the show with more new ideas every week than two hours could expect to hold but he is a fine interviewer and gets some engaging guests for the post-10 o'clock chat. On this occasion it was only the scriptwriters of Birds of a Feather, who turn out to be much more interesting than you'd think. But guests with the status of Stephen Fry, Elton John and all that crowd of comedic panel game players from television willingly turn up, the only disappointment last year being Paul Weller. Not interesting, not much good and a small blot on an otherwise great list. I do believe he could spar with Jesus Christ except he said he had bad hands.

Otherwise, of a sporting weekend, it's only really the subversively clever Colin Murray that saves us from the gloom of Claridge, Motson, Green and all the rest of them who have still not discovered that sport is now an over-priced soap opera that doesn't deserve to be treated with any kind of seriousness. On the almost equally welcome back Fighting Talk, it is always good to hear that some of these otherwise professionally dour commentators can have a laugh, like when Jennie Bond stopped being royal correspondant and went on game shows. The broadcasting monster has become so weird to those of us brought up under Reithian values that we might yet see the hapless host of Have I Got News for You, Boris de Blah Blah de Pfeiffl Johnson, become Prime Minister.

The tea-time Drive broadcast gets the likeable, old curmudgeon, Peter Allen, back in September, too. Thank heavens that some people in the BBC still care about getting things right even if they don't know it for themselves. He was slow to identify a Spoonerism this evening but the audience are good enough not only to put him right, in their hundreds, but then supply plenty of great examples. The combined talent of the listeners is obviously in excess of the poor, beleaguered presenters and, having run through a story of a schoolboy in Northern Ireland who had discovered a bomb but was now enjoying his tea of a battered sausage, one wiseacre texted in to ask which was likely to be most injurious to health, the unexploded bomb or the battered sausage.

Tony Livesey has gradually felt his way into Richard Bacon's highly self-referential late night spot so that one now misses Tony as much as one first missed Richard if he isn't there; Dotun Adebayo is an informed and comfortable through-the-night host with an alarming willingness to sing horribly. But it's a terrible shame that Nicky Campbell tries to show off his learning so willingly while falling into the same, old trap of fancying his female co-host like mad without being able to hide it, like a radio version of Adrian Chiles before the fact.

And, finally, Stephen Nolan's sensationalist, over-wrought, late night weekend interviews with any 'human interest' story, its drawing out of every possible strand of tabloid emotion, have only been outdone by his haranguing of the Labour Party leadership candidates in the last week, in which he has been consistently rude and over-bearing, and, quite honestly, made me have more sympathy for each candidate in turn when I wasn't really sure I liked any of them in the first place.

So, I'm glad of the Proms, some Radio 4, when it can lift itself out of its home counties, Open University, comfort zone, and even some local radio or Dale's Pick of the Pops when I need to escape Radio 5's worst excesses but, on the whole, it's doing a fine job. Why they can't get Danny Kelly in, I don't know, but that's why the one-press button to change channels on the digital radio was invented. On some idyllic island, I expect they are programmed to retune to 5 when Baker, Allen or Murphy come on and find you your next best channel when Stephen Nolan, Alan Green or Nicky Campbell show up. But science hasn't got that far yet. All it has done so far is teach us not to switch the telly on unless you really want to.

Top 6 - Timothy Steele

'New Formalist' is a phrase that once denoted some kind of poetic school or movement but is now, as far as I can tell, used exclusively in a pejorative way, as a term of abuse. In the last few years I've only ever seen it used as an insult.

It seems to have something to do with the School of Quietude, another phrase, it says elsewhere on the internet, used by Ron Silliman, that has come to refer to all the poetry that interesting, innovative and progressive poets (or so they would have us believe) find boring and are, in their opinion, writing poetry much better than.

It was ever thus, gang-making, manifesto-writing and generally being rude about each other. These movements are usually clung to by those in need of an identity and no self-respecting individual poet would really want to be included in any of them.

But, in the same way that the gay community reclaimed the word 'queer' from its derogatory intent and adopted it as a badge of pride, I think poets accused of 'New Formalism', any other kind of formalism or 'Quietism', can readily accept it and those who like these glib little labels can carry on using them perfectly happily in their small, small worlds.

Timothy Steele, author of two manifesto titles on the subject of versification and metre as well as his books of verse, is in some way the New Formalist of choice, although no doubt wouldn't want to be. His poems are often on the most apparently mundane of subjects and the verse the most metronomic one is likely to find these days, and even features some rhymes which look a little bit forced, as if to show that the demands of the discipline come before any attempt at naturalism. Except, of course, real life rises out of the fixed forms of art as it does in the poem Woman in a Museum.

Joseph takes the most domestic little scene and extends its scope in a widening last stanza; Education in Music is a self-consciously aesthetic meditation; Ethel Taylor is a longer memoir of a spinster who loved strawberries but couldn't eat them and so enjoyed seeing others do so; Advice to a Student is a considered essay on the most convincing excuses for a late essay and, because Steele did a tribute for Thom Gunn's 60th birthday, Vermont Spring gets the flexible sixth place.

With his last book being as recent as 2006, we might not necessarily be due another one just yet because they appear with reassuringly frugal irregularity, which is often another good sign.