Winter 2021: ...and you're reading WHAT?!

Prynne on Davie:

Davie wanted very much to be a poet. I think he probably knew in his heart of hearts that he actually wasn’t a poet, though he cared enough about poetry to commit himself to substantial efforts to develop some way of ­expanding his own writing practice. He was part of that Movement group of poets who wrote very defensively and traditionally...

Davie always writes very highly of Prynne.

What little of Davie's poetry I have read hasn't done a huge amount for me; but then the same is true of Prynne's.

I was mostly interested in it because I knew Prynne was Davie's student, but have always found Davie's poetry to me just utterly useless.

Prynne, on the other hand...

Has anyone read E. NESBIT?

yes.

she apparently had a very interesting life. Was she a socialist like H.G.Wells and people.
Anyway heard some unexpected backstory to her possibly in a review of a biography of her in a Guardian review or something.

I consider reading a book by her called THE PHOENIX & THE CARPET. If I can find the copy I have already mislaid.

it’s v good. sequel to Five Children and It. V much of that long Victorian quasi mystical/pastoral/arts and crafts space world.

space

Fully automated luxury Victorian quasi mystical/pastoral/arts and crafts gay space comunism world.

the best world.

That feels as good a place as any to say that I finished Jarman's Modern Nature. It's a beautiful book in many ways, with the garden at Dungeness an extraordinary project to take on. But the garden becomes something closer to a figure for Jarman's fight against the entropy of his AIDS diagnosis and a refuge from the useless, flailing rage he feels at the Thatcher government. His recording of its coming into flower also allows for a flowering of memory - particularly to his painful childhood. He was always incredibly productive but the amount he continues to produce (the diary, the garden, the film work, the paintings, the cottage, which in itself functions as an installation) is staggering.

reminded me to check on the campaign to save his garden which seems to have succeeded. maybe because i’ve always been drawn to the dungeness, dymchurch, and rye landscape a single viewing of the garden back when i was a teenager created a disproportionately large imaginative imprint so that i will find myself thinking about it when i wouldn’t have said it was either particularly important or significant to me.

I've always wanted to visit that area; I keep thinking about doing a walking tour of it or something after the pandemic is over. I have a beautiful old naval map of Romney Marsh on my wall but I've never been there.

RE: E. Nesbit: The Enchanted Castle is amazing imo. The Story of the Amulet, the last book in the Five Children and It trilogy, is marred by a hideously antisemitic chapter but is otherwise brilliant. The Railway Children is pretty good but the movie adaptation from 1970 is even better.

I wrote my undergrad thesis on Nesbit, Kipling, and The Jews, ask me anything.

Finished a re-read of Daniel Davidson's brilliant 'culture,' a life-work published only after his death. Truly one of the best poets of his generation, taken too soon and at a most inopportune time, too-- before the internet could really do a good job of celebrating and archiving, but after the most active and bubbly period of little mags and so on.

Today I'm reading workshop poems from various people and a long chapbook from Jason Morris, 'Low Life.'

Lily Dale, I think I thought you were American - probably from your being such a Springsteen expert.

I am American! Just got raised on classic British children's lit.

I'm quite glad to have that piece of reality confirmed.

I picked up THE LATE AUGUSTANS ed. Donald Davie and read a couple of poets.

Thomas Gray: 'Elegy, written in a country churchyard' (1742 or later). This poem is only 6 pages long, 32 quatrains. I thought I knew it but today I'm afraid I realised I had never read it from end to end. It starts by depicting evening falling in a village; the poetic speaker looks at the graves of the poor and considers them virtuous for never having been rich, but also considers that they may have been great talents that were never known: 'mute inglorious Miltons'. What I'd not recalled was the later section where he rather self-indulgently or morbidly imagines his own death and, like Yeats in 'Under Ben Bulben', writes his own epitaph (3 stanzas, where Yeats's was only 3 lines).

I think there is one social or political ambiguity about the poem, namely: is it giving fresh attention and dignity to the lives (via the deaths) of the unknown poor? Or is naturalising their obscurity, in the lines around 'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen'? It was William Empson, perhaps in SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL, who made the political criticism, and I have an idea that Raymond Williams for instance later agreed.

I tried Samuel Johnson's 'The Vanity of Human Wishes' but couldn't be bothered to go far with it - so over to Oliver Goldsmith, 'The Deserted Village', a poem I've meant to read for some time due to Goldsmith's importance in Irish literary history.

Fizzles, your recommendation is welcome: I'll try to read Nesbit.

i spent the weekend mornings, the time i do most of my reading, looking through all the alternatives we've been talking about in that other thread, reading intros and pretty much rejecting them all. 5 pages on the typists involved in converting the Lady Chatterly manuscript to a copy for the printers, 5 pages on why we need another translation of War and Peace, the first chapter of Small House at Allington (which broke the 4th wall too much), intro to the Grand Meaulnes about how even the title is a pain to translate, three pages of the Three Musketeers (a page each)...

and wasn't in the mood for any of them, or anything else, but i've got a week before i need to choose.

my kobo has decided it's going to show the cover of War and Peace when i snooze it regardless of whether that's the last thing i was reading or not. maybe that's fate (cover is terrible generic penguin screen, just the title and author and a penguin logo with a thick black border)

I keep meaning to read The Magic Mountain, maybe you have already read that one?

I never read intros before I read the book.

Introductions vary tremendously in quality, length, and intended purpose. It's usually a simple matter to quickly suss out whether reading it will be an exercise in tedium, or the equivalent of being socially introduced to a remarkably talented stranger by a mutual friend.

i was careful to avoid the spoilery intros, these were more the translators notes or the 'notes on the text' about the various editions over the years. Chatterly was interesting in this respect (private italian edition with tons of errors because of language barrier, the two different paper stocks they used, the first typist who kept 'fixing things', later typists who used different punctuation conventions, the different ribbons they used!, pirate editions, expurgated editions for copyright purposes)

Another vote for E.Nesbit. Can't find my original post, but here's the one I read, my Mom's copy of Five Children and It, the Puffin edition, intro by Roger Lancelyn Green, who nails the appeal:
...The trouble with most grown-up people is that, although they may remember some of the things they did when they were children, they cannot remember what it felt like to do them, nor how they thouhgt about them at the time. The other end of the trouble though many of us can think of the most wonderful imaginary adventures, we never know then how to pick and choose and arrange our own stories, nor to write them down in such a way that they can mean to other people even one tenth of what they mean to us
He then describes the roundabout way she came to her gift: married "very young," soon had several kids and a seriously ill husband, "robbed by his partner, like the father of the Bastables." (So her sense of childhood anxieties rang the truer for grown-ups in the same boat, or too near). To support them, she threw herself into writing for grown-ups, but not very well, says Green, and the same was true when she tried children's magazines, until an editor asked her to try putting a book together, and then only near the end did a line, and image, provide a turning point.
Five Children and It has the Bastable kids mysteriously home alone in the country one summer---well, there are a few servants, and the "cottage" is pretty swanky to us proles, but they're at loose ends, wandering around with their distinct personalities and group dynamic, 'til they encounter a critter which they recognize as a fantastical breed in their books, so they pester him into reluctantly granting their wishes, which of course always have unforeseen side effects, which can get pretty wild, and I think (don't have more time to spend looking back through it) *may* incl. some flashes of xenophobia, not that unexpected in 1902.
Also read an intriguing review of a Nesbit biography, when it was published a few years ago: she became maybe the center of a salon, or those English Country weekends at least, known for her warmth, wit, and beauty (so yeah prob on xpost HG Wells' radar).

Also, Nesbit's ghost stories are fucking awesome.

Was confused because I thought you were talking about the Florodora girl Evelyn Nesbit.

Oh yeah, she did that too. Very versatile.

Had to feed the family, you know.

In THE LATE AUGUSTANS I read Oliver Goldsmith's 'The Deserted Village' (c.1770). Where Thomas Gray 20-30 years earlier talks of a local village (or even hamlet) as a quiet, unchanging place of serene repose, Goldsmith posits such a village as subject to disastrous social change. Discussing a fictional called AUBURN (he always uses capitals!), he contrasts an idyllic memory of the place as one where games were played and ale was drunk, with a recent history of economic decline and depopulation. I was quite struck by the emphasis, late in the poem, on emigration - to America? - which makes the poem seem much more likely to be referring to Ireland than England. (Or do I underestimate English rural emigration to America in the period? This is all long before the biggest Irish famines.) Here he imagines not just people but also abstract 'rural virtues' taking ship:

I see the rural virtues leave the land:
Down where yon anchoring vessel spreads the sail,
That idly waiting flaps with every gale,
Downward they move, a melancholy band,
Pass from the shore, and darken all the strand.

Goldsmith proceeds in rustic style describing the kindly parson; the knowledgeable schoolmaster, whose learning the yokels can hardly believe; and the pub where people drank nut-brown ale. What has caused the damage? Goldsmith refers to 'trade', suggesting what we might call capitalism. Perhaps this is also somewhat 'globalised'. He also seems to point to simply inequality, between luxury and poverty; rich people take up too much space and resources and starve the poor.

But times are alter'd; trade's unfeeling train
Usurp the land, and dispossess the swain;
Along the lawn, where scatter'd hamlets rose,
Unwieldy wealth, and cumbrous pomp repose.

I feel that this is a poem that asks you to consider it as a real argument, that gestures to an actual history. But I don't know enough of the real history to know how far it's more complicated than what Goldsmith says; if what he says is too simplistic or tendentious. Nonetheless it seems like the strongest work of direct social criticism I have read from the poetry of the era. I add the observation that Goldsmith seems, in this limited and specific way, a precursor to Blake.

I then started on a Penguin book marvellously called THE EARLIEST ENGLISH POEMS, ed. Michael Alexander (1966) and dedicated to ... Ezra Pound!

The book translates Old English into modern English. But it takes on the form that we often think of as old English, rather than being 'modernised' the way, eg, Simon Armitage does with GAWAIN. It's actually very close at times to Seamus Heaney, clarifying slightly for me how much he was trying to draw on this tradition. Even 'word-hoard', I now see, a favourite Heaney phrase, is a translation from Old English.

I've skipped most of the introductory material and straight into the poems, starting with a fragment called 'The Ruin'. It describes a Roman ruin, apparently perhaps Bath, as seen by an Anglo-Saxon after the Romans' departure.

Bright were the buildings, halls where springs ran,
high, horngabled, much throng-noise;
there many meadhalls men filled
with loud cheerfulness: Wierd changed that.

'Throng-noise' is precisely the kind of term Heaney uses (not just in BEOWULF). The weird-looking word 'wierd' turns out to mean 'what is, what happens, the way that thing happen, Fate, personal history, death'. That seems to cover most things.

I also read the testimony of the poet Widsith, which mostly just lists different European tribes; and 'Deor', which seeks comfort by recounting bad events then saying 'That went by; this may too'.

I used to have that Gray poem memorized. Took a quarter-long class as a junior in high school on "Politics in British Poetry" which was taught by a PhD candidate at Yale. He was an awful teacher, but I did get exposed to Marvell, Gray, and Clare, among others, at a quite early age for a USAmerican born in the early 80s.

I'd venture to say that Clare is among the most important poets for me, particularly as regards the politics of his work.

I like the turn toward poetry this thread's taken.

"...Churchyard" made an impression on young me, and, as it happened with the Bible, I was surprised when I'd see how popular discourse had absorbed bits of the verses. I like how this era of English poetry could wax philosophical in a languid just-thinkin'-about-things way that would disappear after Shelley, Wordsworth, and, later, Arnold.

I had a helluva 18th century Brit lit professor who taught me to love Pope, still do.

I'd venture to say that Clare is among the most important poets for me

I discovered Clare in the late 1970s, but only because I was haunting libraries and digging on my own as deeply as I could into poetry. No one paid him any attention at that time. I place him high, too.

Pope is such an odd duck. I love/hate his work in about equal parts. He formalizes everything into a kind of perfection, and that formal perfection includes his worst habits, too.

the rat-tat-tat relentlessness of the heroic couplet can prove exhausting, but I cans still read Windsor-Forest and Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot with pleasure.

i finished lolita! good book

Aimless, you might like one of Clare's biggest contemporary fans, Peter Culley. He passed away in 2015, but his Hammertown trilogy is really lovely postmodern take on "the walking poem." Sort of like if Clare had been witness to the rapid suburbanization of Vancouver Island, in particularly the city of Nanaimo. One of my favorite poets, and he works mostly in verse forms, too!

ty, ttitt. i'll look into him.

i am now embarking on dennis cooper's george miles cycle, starting with closer

FWIW Iain Sinclair also wrote a contemporary walking appreciation of John Clare: EDGE OF THE ORISON (2006). As I understand it he connects his own name with Clare's.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/546/54613/edge-of-the-orison/9780141012759.html

It occurs to me that I should read that book, if I didn't have so much else to read.

I love Edge of the Orison. I mean, it's peak Sinclair (obfuscatory, self-indulgent, digressive) but it's got a peculiar energy. I think about it often.

Breaking up the erudite discourse here for another two bits of vapid celeb gossip courtesy the Hardy autobio:

a) Jacques Dutronc was supposed to be in Raiders Of The Lost Ark
b) Serge Gainsbourg tried making a movie in the early 80's and had Robert Mitchum, Alain Delon and Dirk Bogarde all turn him down for the lead role

Lol, somehow I thought you meant a Thomas Hardy bio.

I enjoy those mid-century poets - Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, Thomson - in a slightly cold way, like I read and look at say Gray's personifications bumping around or the careful ethical language sliding into passions or trying for bardic wildness and think 'interesting', but I've never really loved them.

I've been thinking about Pope a bit over the last year. I made this sometime last spring:
https://twitter.com/autodunce
because all those neat and tidy couplets seemed a good fit for twitter.
It's been fun to watch it run. There's been something a bit queasy about watching the pope-machine at work, rhyme by rhyme, but it's now made it through to the stuff I love - Moral Epistles and Imitations of Horace, with the Dunciad to come - and I marvel at what he pulls off, over and over, inside the heroics.

T^he first 2 books by Steven h gardner turned up yesterday. Or that is in the Punk related series Another Tuneless racket.
So I read his article o Rocket From The Tombs which had appeared in Big Takeover in a slightly different guise in 2004, not sure if I saw taht at the time it came out. Quite good anyway. So looking forward to reading through the rest of this.
Seem to be quite well written anyway.

& cover a lot of bands I half know about and a few that I don't really know much about

2 volumes are Origins and Punk I think the next 2 cover post the original punk era

Brad, keep us posted on your progress with the Cooper. (I am very biased, as evidenced by my shelf of Dennis Cooper books).

oh, and Aimless, for a small sample of Culley:

http://users.speakeasy.net/~subtext/poetry/culley/poem1.htm

I look forward, now, to Paul McCartney's book of lyrics - not because I need the lyrics written down (again), but for the prose commentaries edited by Paul Muldoon.

Brad, keep us posted on your progress with the Cooper. (I am very biased, as evidenced by my shelf of Dennis Cooper books).

― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Tuesday, February 23, 2021 10:59 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

fuckin rocks so far