Sigggggh, I love Philip Larkin...

i said 'laforgue' and he said 'who', this is the death of villanelle and haiku

just listened to the second Geoffrey Hill lecture & I was not ready for the baffled/disappointed/angry comparison of Mike Skinner to Sir John Suckling, & incidental knocking of Let England Shake and guardian music journalist Dave Simpson.

i love philip larkin but i hate this thread title.

we have already discussed your problems with the 'gh's' tho

Geoffrey Hill mentioned PJ Harvey???

wow, apparently true: http://vehkoo.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/professor-of-poetry-on-pj-harvey/

He didn’t think much of The Streets’ rhyming (“what has plot ever done but thickened?”) but Polly Jean had apparently made a stronger impression on the Professor.

“Half the staff of HMV followed me to the door. A tramp throwing away his money on PJ Harvey, they must have thought. The economy must be on the mend!”

He took PJ Harvey’s new cd Let England Shake home and listened to it – and was “not entirely displeased”.

and was “not entirely displeased”.

Ha, he actually says that he was not entirely displeased while he "listened to the attenuated wailing of stock epithet after stock epithet" because he would be able to round off the lecture with another oxymoron – but then says he'll tell us what that is in the third lecture. His Streets/Harvey routine is in this mp3/lecture/podcast/whatever, from about 1hr 4min onwards.

listening now. GH says at one point "this may not be true rap", i feel weird about this.

Douglas Dunn maybe? A bit too Larkin in places, but worth reading.

finally got around to reading Elegies, which I bought about 6 months ago. parts of it are a bit too sentimental for me, but there are some brilliant poems in there.

not for the faint-hearted tho is it? it really got at me.

I never remember holding a full drink.
My first look shows the level half-way down.
What next? Ration the rest, and try to think
Of higher things, until mine host comes round?

Some people say, best show an empty glass.
Someone will fill it. Well, I've tried that too.
You may get drunk, or dry half-hours may pass.
It seems to turn on where you are. Or who.

love that one

Use of rhyme is so downplayed it disappears.

is this the thread with the most geoffrey hill talk

yeah, i think so. there's a bit of love elsewhere, but I don't think anyone says anything substantive.

the baffled/disappointed/angry comparison of Mike Skinner to Sir John Suckling, & incidental knocking of Let England Shake and guardian music journalist Dave Simpson.

still feel a bit like I dreamed this

Funny this thread was revived. Intended to drop by & post this line by line, all in caps, while bank holiday drunk.

Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you'll get.

Better mood today, sentence case will do.

ah, how often i use those lines to describe my own and other people's lives

Weird. I reread Hill's Charles Péguy poem a couple weeks ago.

"unbeatable slow machine" might be my most frequent entering-head-unbidden poetry phrase.

watch love & death in hull rece

what a downer

also memorised* this be the verse

*close enough

:) "This Be the Verse" is conveniently amenable to memorization

tho obv i'd be a hypocrite telling folks not to have any kids themselves

How did you get love and death in hull, cozen? I have found only long dead torrents.

my videotaped copy is long gone sadly

LG - you might like don paterson's first couple of collections? he's gotten a bit ~airy-er~ as time's got on but there's def echoes of larkin in the early stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqa6L22m0rY

excellent!

early paul farley channelling larkin to an extent also

I was thinking about trying to develop some thoughts about Geoffrey Hill's most recent lecture and his project in general but I don't know. More relevantly to the thread's nominal purpose, I sold my collected Larkin today.

I wish they'd kept up with mp3s of the lectures. I think only the first three or four went up

Peter Reading is like Larkin without the hatred of all things foreign.

i love Larkin and Reading, but I don't quite see that, or the gap in sensibility isn't really to do with foreignness. Not sure.

just to continue on the Hill lectures (& I would like to hear what you have to say thomp), I am also now remembering the bit where he lays into Sam Leith for no real reason that I can remember.

Mm. I was in Oxford for the last one and the guy I was staying with was going, so I thought I might as well; the last one I saw was last year when I was working on my master's, and I basically could barely follow it at all. This one seemed comparatively plain-speaking, though I asked my friend and the two other people to give me what they thought was the argument, at various points over the next 24 hours, and my friend was totally wrong and the other two just went 'yeah, no, I'd have no idea how to do that'.

yeah, after listening to the earlier ones I'd def have trouble precis-ing an argument - they're deliberately difficult, or roundabout. I remember thinking that I didn't understand quite how we'd got here when he'd be talking about Mandelstam, say, but then there'd be a moment of clarity, and I could see what i thought he was trying to do with the misdirecting and going backwards &c.

Mercian Hymns XXV

Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.

The nailshop stood back of the cottage, by the fold. It reeked stale mineral sweat. Sparks had furred its low roof. In dawn-light the troughed water floated a damson-bloom of dust ---

not to be shaken by posthumous clamour. It is one thing to celebrate the 'quick forge', another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire.

Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.

love that

i love Larkin and Reading, but I don't quite see that, or the gap in sensibility isn't really to do with foreignness. Not sure.

Well, I wanted to say "all things foreign and intellectual", but it felt wrong even when I put "intellectual" in quotes and so I just gave up and tried for something comically reductive (and failed). Do you think it's wrong to suggest Reading as poet similar to Larkin? I think of both as English miserabilists, "laureates of decay" and so on, but I may be off on that as I'm not overly familiar with Reading's work. He's often too cryptic for me, to be honest, which is part of what I meant by foreignness: not just quotations in Spanish or whatever, but an entire aesthetic more in line with the kind of high modernism Larkin made a point of rejecting. Still, looking at some of Reading's early work just now, I did find plenty of Larkinesque moments. One poem in particular, "St James's", seems sort of apropos:

On Holy Thursday cycling in the Lakes
I found St James's on a pewter hill
and force of habit rather than desire
carried me on towards the wrought iron gates.

The dusty Dunlops and the worn out brakes
of my Rudge leaning on the lake-stone wall
seemed more akin to Larkin than to me.

Some stones inside the musty porch were Saxon,
and there, beside the patent-leather Eden
simmering round St James's in Lent sun,
the sexton, one spring day digging a grave,
in 1898 unearthed remains
that proved to be of Viking origin.

The latest stone, marked 1968,
shews that the process is still going on.
I, in my turn, turned the worn rusting latch,
saw the inevitable Norman arch
and, near the font, some notes by Reverend Twigge
about the church and its history —
he was the rector here in nineteen seven,
in his place now is Geoffrey Dennison Hill.

I climbed the old steps up the Western Tower
(added about 1248) and found
barrows of sticks from jackdaw generations,
piled in a stook beside the swaying bell
eggs and dry feathers and winged skeletons,
and I descended into the chancel,
observing, not from interest but a sense
of having to have a sense of history,
the aimless woodworms' doodles in the roof.

The empty Player's Weights pack in the font
belonged to Betjeman, I have no doubt,
and there was Larkin's shilling left in trust
as payment for the Reverend Twigge's epistle;

but I was not there, just a cardboard copy
guiltily going through the motions of
what all day-trippers do before they leave,
replacing bike clips, lingering at the door
giving the closing latch a final twist,
consulting Twigge one final time before
turning from font to underground stone kist.

I do see it, sort of - like Reading as Pound modernism injected into Larkin/Movement anti-modernism (which is sort of a variety of Eliotic conservative modernism, maybe), but I think they're farther apart than they look even in early Reading - too tricksy, too self-conscious, cunning interlocking poems, about Larkin-ness rather than Larkiny. Not denying there's overlap - things like vers de societe, Sunny Prestatyn in particular- but I think the lyric urge isn't quite there in Reading maybe? Or doesn't trust itself. Nice comparison tho', I'm interested in why I draw back from it.

how many different modernisms do you think you can identify

sincere question

I just make them up when I need them

I'm trying to answer this properly but i've been coerced into making a wordle for a powerpoint workshop presentation.

I'd use a few diff kinds when thinking about things - it's fairly fluid & they exist in relation to one another & overlap, so idk, Pound & Eliot would go together in a different discussion. & it definitely reflects what I look at more closely, ie English Poetry, mostly - so, slightly ridiculously, the art/anti-art manifestoing movements of the early c20th are bundled in my head.

So if I just said 'Modernism', I'd mean primarily a big Joyce/Eliot/Pound category; that'd break into a make-it-new style - fractures fragments collages textuality etc etc etc - and then maybe a kind that retreats from that into classicism, that's more the Eliot end of things (& I'd take that line down to Hill).

vs that in my head is a more obviously late-Romantic modernism that's Yeats etc - looks like anti-modernism in places, & drifts towards meeting the Eliot tributary of hard modernism.

Then there are British subsets where the coordinates get more complicated for me - an establishment/bloomsbury variety, then the 30s poets sitting in a funny place where they're in an Eliot camp but still seem to have a dose of Georgian coming through, those nature/grail types in the novel like Mary Butts… categories sort of break down but that's what I'd expect them to do when you look at individuals, they become ways of finding interesting or useful questions.

I should really read that Alexandra Harris book on Romantic Moderns, but I am just a bit sus that she all Bloomsbury, John Piper, marvellous, whereas I think that is backing down from THE PROJECT

Larkin's an odd one because he does seem properly, thoroughly committed to anti-intellectual + pure british trads, but bits of otherness do keep breaking through.

back to wordle

i recently read kevin jackson's constellation of genius, which is a kind of diaryish rundown of 1922, the year in modernism. it's not a theoretical or analytical book at all, but it does give a sense of the SPEED of modernism, and the many different currents (historical-cultural) feeding into it. jackson def favours eliot and (esp) pound as central to it all - and yeah, woolf in particular comes across as a horrible (social) snob about joyce - tho the centerpiece of the book is prob a dinner attended by proust, joyce, picasso and stravinsky. book also brought home to me just how right-wing/reactionary a lot of the modernists were - so there's another connection to larkin etc

"A man who knew so little inner peace should be forgiven anything" -- agree or disagree?

(Asking as a general critical principle, not just w/r/t Larkin. Strikes me as poete maudite received-wisdom bollocks, but I am in the midst of a v.charged personal struggle to emerge from romantic equation of suffering with artistic insight, so maybe projecting

)

I was briefly tempted by that Jackson book - it's a great topic - but I don't really trust him, feel like everything I've read by him has been a bit underpowered intellectually - chimes with what your saying, I suspect.

agree or disagree?

The word "anything" should only be admitted in that statement if it carries a sense so attenuated as to render it useless.