― Ann Sterzinger (Ann Sterzinger), Monday, 21 June 2004 04:04 (nineteen years ago) link
― Sam (chirombo), Monday, 21 June 2004 08:11 (nineteen years ago) link
We are here to mourn the death of our friend Philip Larkin. He was the most private of men, one who found the universe a bleak and hostile place and recognized very clearly the disagreeable realities of human life, above all the dreadful effects of time on all we have and are. The world of his fellow creatures was hardly less forbidding: privacy was to be jealously guarded. In the sense of complete physical solitude, he found it a daily necessity. He saw people as hopelessly cut off from each other, and revealingly misquoted Donne in declaring, Every man is an island. And yet it was impossible to meet him without being aware in the first few seconds of his impeccable attentive courtesy: grave, but at the same time sunlit, always ready to respond to a gleam of humor or warmth. He was surprised if anyone found him a gloomy person: I like to think of myself as quite funny, he told an interviewer, and he was more than funny about those in the literary and academic world whom he considered fraudulent, and he found no shortage of those; and to hear him sounding off about a politician or any other public figure who was not to his taste did the heart good. But there was no malice in it, no venom. If he regarded the world severely or astringently, it was a jovial astringency. He could be at his funniest when uttering those same painful truths about life as those he made so devastating in his poetry. And it was all from the heart: he never showed off, never laid claim to feeling what he didn't feel, and it was that honesty, more total in his case than in any other I've known, that gave his poetry such power. He meant every word of it; and so, though he may not have written many poems, he wrote none that were false or unnecessary. His honesty extended to himself; again, nobody was ever more totally or acutely aware of his limitations. He took life seriously, he took poetry seriously, but not himself -- nobody who said he looked like a bald salmon could do that. No solemnity about himself as a poet either; when he'd written a poem he felt pleased, as if he'd laid an egg. But we take seriously what he has left us. We are lucky enough to have known him; thousands who didn't, and more thousands in the future, will be able to share those poems with us. They offer comfort, and not cold comfort either. They are not dismal or pessimistic, but invigorating; they know that for all its shortcomings life must be got on with. And now we must get on with ours, a little better equipped to do so with the help of those fragments of poignancy and humor in everyday things, those moments of illumination and beauty we should never have seen or known but for Philip. Kingsley Amis December 1985
― lovebug starski, Monday, 21 June 2004 09:22 (nineteen years ago) link
― cºzen (Cozen), Saturday, 24 July 2004 20:13 (nineteen years ago) link
John Updike reviews Larkin in the new New Yorker
― DOnald, Monday, 26 July 2004 03:44 (nineteen years ago) link
i love philip larkin. surprised this thread isn't longer. i bought his collected poems recently after reading martin amis talking about him in the ft (article sadly no longer online)
i read it daily and i find myself staring at some of the couplets and thinking them through, it really washes over you, so devastating but the trivial details give his poems a sort of beauty.
love this one in particular, "the life with a hole in it".
When I throw back my head and howlPeople (women mostly) sayBut you've always done what you want,You always get your own way--A perfectly vile and foulInversion of all that's been.What the old ratbags meanIs I've never done what I don't.
So the shit in the shuttered chateauWho does his five hundred wordsThen parts out the rest of the dayBetween bathing and booze and birdsIs far off as ever, but soIs that spectacled schoolteaching sod(Six kids, and the wife in pod,And her parents coming to stay)...
Life is an immobile, locked,Three-handed struggle betweenYour wants, the world's for you, and (worse)The unbeatable slow machineThat brings what you'll get. Blocked,They strain round a hollow stasisOf havings-to, fear, faces.Days sift down it constantly. Years.
are there other poets i should read if i like larkin? i mean i know he's massively canonical but beyond knowing famous names etc i am a bit of a noob with poetry, i have a frank o'hara anthology and now this larkin book and that's it.
― When a German communicates, you listen (LocalGarda), Sunday, 9 October 2011 10:29 (twelve years ago) link
Louis MacNeice? Has that practical engagment with the unpoetic mundane that I think Larkin has
I do not want to be reflective any moreEnvying and despising unreflective thingsFidning pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting (Wolves)
But listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spireOpens its eight bells out, skulls' mouths which will not tireTo tell how there is no music or movement which securesEscape from the weekday time. Which deadens and endures. (Sunday Morning)
RS Thomas - has the unromanticising of the romantic pastoral that's in Larkin:
There was a sound of voices on the air,But where, where? It was only the glib stream talkingSoftly to itself. And once when he was walkingAlong a lane in spring he was deceivedBy a shrill whistle coming through the leaves:Wait a minute, wait a minute - four swift notes;He turned, and it was nothing, only a thrushIn the thorn bushes easing its throat.He swore at himself for paying heed,The poor hill farmer, so often againStopping, staring, listening, in vain,His ear betrayed by the heart's need.
― Fizzles the Chimp (GamalielRatsey), Sunday, 9 October 2011 10:56 (twelve years ago) link
surprised this thread isn't longer.
some idiot started another one is why
Philip Larkin - "What will survive of us is love" or "Books are a load of crap"?
― Dios mio! This kid is FUN to hit! (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 9 October 2011 11:39 (twelve years ago) link
ah shit maybe i should have used that one.
i love this one, even tho it's totally "society is in the gutter". it's more the beauty with which he delivers that view, and the quiet way it's done. plus in terms of literally the space and the earth there's a truth there.
I thought it would last my time -The sense that, beyond the town,There would always be fields and farms,Where the village louts could climbSuch trees as were not cut down;I knew there'd be false alarms
In the papers about old streetsAnd split level shopping, but someHave always been left so far;And when the old part retreatsAs the bleak high-risers comeWe can always escape in the car.
Things are tougher than we are, justAs earth will always respondHowever we mess it about;Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:The tides will be clean beyond.- But what do I feel now? Doubt?
Or age, simply? The crowdIs young in the M1 cafe;Their kids are screaming for more -More houses, more parking allowed,More caravan sites, more pay.On the Business Page, a score
Of spectacled grins approveSome takeover bid that entailsFive per cent profit (and tenPer cent more in the estuaries): moveYour works to the unspoilt dales(Grey area grants)! And when
You try to get near the seaIn summer . . . It seems, just now,To be happening so very fast;Despite all the land left freeFor the first time I feel somehowThat it isn't going to last,
That before I snuff it, the wholeBoiling will be bricked inExcept for the tourist parts -First slum of Europe: a roleIt won't be hard to win,With a cast of crooks and tarts.
And that will be England gone,The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,The guildhalls, the carved choirs.There'll be books; it will linger onIn galleries; but all that remainsFor us will be concrete and tyres.
Most things are never meant.This won't be, most likely; but greedsAnd garbage are too thick-strewnTo be swept up now, or inventExcuses that make them all needs.I just think it will happen, soon.
― When a German communicates, you listen (LocalGarda), Sunday, 9 October 2011 11:48 (twelve years ago) link
greedsAnd garbage are too thick-strewnTo be swept up now,
is a really beautiful line imo
― When a German communicates, you listen (LocalGarda), Sunday, 9 October 2011 11:50 (twelve years ago) link
are there other poets i should read if i like larkin?
MacNeice and Thomas are good shouts I think. Ted Hughes, despite the early critical blah about him being the opposite of Larkin, shares a lot of themes, especially early on, and since sometimes they're writing about the same landscape or the same history comparisons are interesting. Auden and Spender have got Larkin-ish voices sometimes, or rather Larkin probly has Auden and Spender-esque voices sometimes. Yeats was a big early influence on the dude, tho Yeats has a big sprawling ouevre to pick thru.
― Dios mio! This kid is FUN to hit! (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 9 October 2011 11:50 (twelve years ago) link
Larkin was totally "sociey is in the gutter" but in a sad way that's as much about his sense of himself as it is the wider world; i'm with him on it, tbh.
― Dios mio! This kid is FUN to hit! (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 9 October 2011 11:52 (twelve years ago) link
Seconding Ted Hughes. I suppose you already know Seamus Heaney?
Fell completely in love with Hughes' poetry last year. It's so minimal and evocative, pastoral even.
― Young Swell (Le Bateau Ivre), Sunday, 9 October 2011 11:55 (twelve years ago) link
i love Hughes a lot, as much as Larkin i think, but Hughes' Collected Poems is a lot harder to carry around with you :(
― Dios mio! This kid is FUN to hit! (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 9 October 2011 11:58 (twelve years ago) link
Read Hardy too.
― lumber up, limbaugh down (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 9 October 2011 11:59 (twelve years ago) link
i never liked heaney that much at school, but it is possible we did really boring heaney poems.
must try some of these recommendations, having an amazon binge...i like the fact larkin's poetry is quite modern and urban, think i get switched off by more i dunno, ethereal stuff.
― When a German communicates, you listen (LocalGarda), Sunday, 9 October 2011 11:59 (twelve years ago) link
most of the guys listed here have urban modes...Hughes has a mythological side to him that's still quite concrete and earthy but he does brilliant realist observation of rural life too
― Dios mio! This kid is FUN to hit! (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 9 October 2011 12:03 (twelve years ago) link
But yet there is beauty narcotic and deciduousIn the vast organism grown out of us:On all the traffic islands stand white globes like moons,The city’s haze is clouded amber that purrs and croons,And tilting by the noble curve bus after tall bus comesWith an osculation of yellow light, with a glory like chrysanthemums.
― MacNeice, "Eclogue For Christmas"
as teenagers we dropped acid and walked the deserted 4AM dublin suburbs full of wonders like these, traffic lights an art show, the occasional nitelink bombing down the coast road impossibly. he was from belfast i think.
It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky,All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.― MacNeice, "Bagpipe Music"
this couplet is one of a few hundred things that i suspect are always on repeat somewhere down deep in the subconscious somewhere. something abt the rhythm, and the sentiment.
Ordinary people are peculiar too:Watch the vagrant in their eyesWho sneaks away while they are talking with youInto some black wood behind the skull,Following un-, or other, realities,Fishing for shadows in a pool.
But sometimes the vagrant comes the other wayOut of their eyes and into yoursHaving mistaken you perhaps for yesterdayOr for tomorrow night, a wood in whichHe may pick up among the pine-needles and burrsThe lost purse, the dropped stitch.
Vagrancy however is forbidden; ordinary menSoon come back to normal, look you straightIn the eyes as if to say 'It will not happen again',Put up a barrage of common sense to baulkIntimacy but by mistake interpolateSwear-words like roses in their talk.
― MacNeice, "Conversation"
basically
― zvookster, Sunday, 9 October 2011 12:24 (twelve years ago) link
Early Simon Armitage has the urban thing, the clarity, plain man manner of address, not much of the gloom.
Douglas Dunn maybe? A bit too Larkin in places, but worth reading.
― you don't exist in the database (woof), Sunday, 9 October 2011 12:33 (twelve years ago) link
was just thinking about Dunn, the Larkin that likes human beings
― Dios mio! This kid is FUN to hit! (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 9 October 2011 12:34 (twelve years ago) link
all this looking great...
i also have a totally unrelated question...a friend of mine sent me a poem about a year ago that was sort of a love poem where the author said something like people should have to pay for the words they spoke, or be silent, this sort of whimisical but romantic poem. ring any bells? i can't find it at all.
― When a German communicates, you listen (LocalGarda), Sunday, 9 October 2011 13:55 (twelve years ago) link
so i have been reading macneice a lot...some really amazing stuff. the autumn journal excerpts in the selected poems are incredible. anyone read the whole thing? the section iv about the woman is one of the most amazing expressions of love i've ever read.
i also love this one, Woods.
"My father who found the English landscape tameHad hardly in his life walked in a wood,Too old when first he met one; Malory’s knights,Keats’s nymphs or the Midsummer Night’s DreamCould never arras the room, where he spelled out True and GoodWith their interleaving of half-truths and not-quites.
While for me from the age of ten the socketed wooden gateInto a Dorset planting, into a darkBut gentle ambush, was an alluring eye;Within was a kingdom free from time and sky,Caterpillar webs on the forehead, danger under the feet,And the mind adrift in a floating and rustling ark
Packed with birds and ghosts, two of every race,Trills of love from the picture-book—-Oh might I never landBut here, grown six foot tall, find me also a loveAlso out of the picture-book; whose handWould be soft as the webs of the wood and on her faceThe wood-pigeon’s voice would shaft a chrism from above.
So in a grassy ride a rain-filled hoof-mark coinedBy a finger of sun from the mint of Long AgoWas the last of Lancelot’s glitter. Make-believe dies hard;That the rider passed here lately and is a man we knowIs still untrue, the gate to Legend remains unbarred,The grown-up hates to divorce what the child joined.
Thus from a city when my father would frameEscape, he thought, as I do, of bog or rockBut I have also this other, this English, choiceInto what yet is foreign; whatever its nameEach wood is the mystery and the recurring shockOf its dark coolness is a foreign voice.
Yet in using the word tame my father was maybe right,These woods are not the Forest; each is mooredTo a village somewhere near. If not of to-dayThey are not like the wilds of Mayo, they are assuredOf their place by men; reprieved from the neolithic nightBy gamekeepers or by Herrick’s girls at play.
And always we walk out again. The patchOf sky at the end of the path grows and disclosesAn ordered open air long ruled by dyke and fence,With geese whose form and gait proclaim their consequence,Pargetted outposts, windows browed with thatch,And cow pats - and inconsequent wild roses.”
― When a German communicates, you listen (LocalGarda), Saturday, 22 October 2011 10:28 (twelve years ago) link
don't suppose anyone has a copy or recording of "love and death in hull", the documentary from a few years back? can't find it online anywhere...
― I'm going to allow this! (LocalGarda), Saturday, 10 March 2012 09:51 (twelve years ago) link
i had it on VHS but i think it's gone. i'll ask mrs V when i see her next.
amazingly i was gonna open this thread up myself this morning, to quote one of his cruder opening gambits.
― Kony Montana: "Say hello to my invisible friend" (Noodle Vague), Saturday, 10 March 2012 09:53 (twelve years ago) link
practically dived into larkin book after coming back from a funeral in Ireland a week or two ago. gonna pick up douglas dunn's "elegies" today, not sure why I am massively keen on reading a book about someone's grieving for their dead young wife but that's one for the counselling session.
― I'm going to allow this! (LocalGarda), Saturday, 10 March 2012 09:57 (twelve years ago) link
Love again: wanking at ten past three(Surely he's taken her home by now?),The bedroom hot as a bakery,The drink gone dead, without showing howTo meet tomorrow, and afterwards,And the usual pain, like dysentery.
― Kony Montana: "Say hello to my invisible friend" (Noodle Vague), Saturday, 10 March 2012 09:57 (twelve years ago) link
that only feels tangentially apt but today it's bouncing round my head
― Kony Montana: "Say hello to my invisible friend" (Noodle Vague), Saturday, 10 March 2012 09:58 (twelve years ago) link
Love Again comes back a good bit, unbidden, even when not relevant. More in a "Words at once true and kind,/Or not untrue and not unkind." space at the mo.
going to drop this here, never seen it, mean to watch later.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTdDS05x6d0
― woof, Saturday, 10 March 2012 17:34 (twelve years ago) link
"it is intensely sad" is my line at the moment.
Love Again is immediately and permanently memorable. Perhaps because persistently applicable in one or more of its elements, and its total effect.
Anyone looked into the new exhaustively/exhaustingly complete volume of his poems?
― Fizzles, Saturday, 10 March 2012 18:03 (twelve years ago) link
Philip Larkin is a very good illustration of the difference between loving an artist and loving that artist's work. For all I know, Catullus was a snark and a tosser and you couldn't trust him not to steal the silverware.
― Aimless, Saturday, 10 March 2012 18:19 (twelve years ago) link
Oh I don't know, I quite like his mournful, sardonic humour. Also the early letters between him and Kingsley Amis are fantastically exuberant and hilarious. Accept he was also selfish and in some respects perhaps unpleasant, as he did - but wdn't want to be the sort of person who held people rigidly to account in those areas as for the most part that would make me an unctuous hypocrite, other than in extreme cases. Accept also that this unpleasantness also extended to some extremely unwholesome political beliefs, but happy to sift the good from the bad here.
I mean, I agree in principle wrt artists, but don't find Larkin as a person that off-putting - wd've liked to have had a drink with him.
― Fizzles, Saturday, 10 March 2012 18:34 (twelve years ago) link
yeah i suspect that even his arch-Toryism was at a reasonably superficial level. the vulnerability and humour stamped so hard into the poetry convince me that he wd have been a man you'd enjoy a drink and a conversation with.
― Kony Montana: "Say hello to my invisible friend" (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 11 March 2012 09:50 (twelve years ago) link
That Monitor thing is good by the way, although you can see Larkin thinking, well I can't remember the exact judgment on Betjeman (who he liked), but it specifically referred to his tv persona and was something like 'silly old fart'. He felt rather foolish about the posing with books and stuff as well, iirc. Noticed that one of the gravestones bears the name J Dixon, which is a mildly diverting coincidence, given the intertwining of Larkin and Amis' early lives.
― Fizzles, Sunday, 11 March 2012 10:21 (twelve years ago) link
http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/02/18/34/2183466_9b9111af.jpg
wiki says this statue is "life size" but if so Larkin was huge, I swear it's nearly a foot taller than me.
― Kony Montana: "Say hello to my invisible friend" (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 11 March 2012 10:56 (twelve years ago) link
also it kind of looks more like Gandhi
― Kony Montana: "Say hello to my invisible friend" (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 11 March 2012 10:57 (twelve years ago) link
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
― Kony Montana: "Say hello to my invisible friend" (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 11 March 2012 10:59 (twelve years ago) link
Nah, I'll get round to it, I'm sure , but I'm not that excited really – been reading him a bit lately, so I'm not sure why. I suppose I've never been that much of a fan of the unpublished bits and juvenilia - like Bishop, a very good self-editor and self-selector. Don't need the notes, tend to find big faber collecteds a bit bulky for carrying and reading, etc.
otoh who am i kidding, i'm buying it next payday.
Feels like he's properly out of his post-death rep slump, that's good.
― woof, Sunday, 11 March 2012 11:19 (twelve years ago) link
i keep looking at the book in Waterstone's window but i've got the Collected, i'm not a big fan of the juvenilia and what the fuck's gonna be in the new one other than more of that and a couple of unearthed personal poems to his lovers? and yeah the new hardback'll be uncarryable - i'm still contemplating buying individual Ted Hughes volumes because the Collected is an unwieldy breeze block on my bookshelf
― Kony Montana: "Say hello to my invisible friend" (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 11 March 2012 11:22 (twelve years ago) link
I've done that a bit - my Hughes collected just doesn't move, easier to take Crow out & feels better to read anyway. And I still pick up the old slightly cramped Macneice collected more than the handsome new one.
768pp! I hadn't quite realised. No, that's not moving in with me.
― woof, Sunday, 11 March 2012 11:29 (twelve years ago) link
what pisses me off with the Hughes as well is that you've got childhood poems but they still arbitrarly left out the stories from Wodwo, dicks.
― Kony Montana: "Say hello to my invisible friend" (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 11 March 2012 11:31 (twelve years ago) link
this one fucking slays me, it's just his colloquial gutting of himself that's so direct and disarming.
About twenty years agoTwo girls came in where I worked -A bosomy English roseAnd her friend in specs I could talk to.Faces in those days sparkedThe whole shooting-match off, and I doubtIf ever one had like hers:But it was the friend I took out,
And in seven years after thatWrote over four hundred letters,Gave a ten-guinea ringI got back in the end, and metAt numerous cathedral citiesUnknown to the clergy. I believeI met beautiful twice. She was tryingBoth times (so I thought) not to laugh.
Parting, after about fiveRehearsals, was an agreementThat I was too selfish, withdrawnAnd easily bored to love.Well, useful to get that learnt,In my wallet are still two snaps,Of bosomy rose with fur gloves on.Unlucky charms, perhaps.
― I'm going to allow this! (LocalGarda), Sunday, 11 March 2012 12:15 (twelve years ago) link
I suppose I've never been that much of a fan of the unpublished bits and juvenilia - like Bishop, a very good self-editor and self-selector.
yeah, i don't really go for that THIS INCLUDES EVERYTHING type of volume. Zachary Leader's biog of Amis was similar - you really are going to include everything you can aren't you? select! don't worry! you can represent significant characteristics with single anecdotes. we'll get it. feel it's a feature of some modern (US?) scholarship. Often seems yoked to c- insight. As if EVERYTHING destroys emphasis and proportion.
― Fizzles, Sunday, 11 March 2012 12:59 (twelve years ago) link
i'm happy that stuff is available...but yes a writer is formed by what they choose not to publish ffs
― Kony Montana: "Say hello to my invisible friend" (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 11 March 2012 13:03 (twelve years ago) link
+ I'm not sure this sort of thing does anyone any favours:
the citation Burnett offers from a fellow critic who, warning against a too literal linking of the poet's life and the poet's poems, "correctly insists that 'An April Sunday Brings the Snow' does not specify the sex of the 'you' addressed, the relationship of the speaker to that person, or indeed details of skin colour and ethnicity"
― Fizzles, Sunday, 11 March 2012 13:06 (twelve years ago) link
Here's where I insert a plug for A Girl in Winter.
― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 11 March 2012 13:11 (twelve years ago) link
People leave their curatorial instincts on the shelf and want to include 'everything', true. Wonder if its a mania that's more prevalent due to internet expansion, e.g. "you can find everything through google", "all music is available now", etc.
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 11 March 2012 13:13 (twelve years ago) link
it pre-dates that i think, ties in to the scholarly urge towards the huge biography and a certain section of Academe - i was wondering if a poem like "Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses" is hitting at a similar experience or attitude of Larkin himself.
― Kony Montana: "Say hello to my invisible friend" (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 11 March 2012 13:16 (twelve years ago) link
xps
feel like these sort of editions come from a culture where seriousness or importance or just worth has been jumbled up with academic weight or solidity, ie it is important we have the materials that will allow us to produce serious, not-wrong essays on the topic of this writer, this is our tribute. Justifies expensive archive acquisitions for some libraries too I guess.
Am fond of the classic big library editions, but they've got a job to do & I don't feel like I need that kind of apparatus when i just want to read Church Going.
― woof, Sunday, 11 March 2012 13:19 (twelve years ago) link
Does Larkin or Amis write about living-author archive acquisition somewhere? Maybe just a prfessional thing as a librarian. I half-remember it but can't check, have to go out.
― woof, Sunday, 11 March 2012 13:21 (twelve years ago) link
'Posterity' too is sort of about this iirc - is that the Jake Balakowsky one?
― woof, Sunday, 11 March 2012 13:23 (twelve years ago) link
Larkin seems to have written himself into that mode - in which to write a poem was to make a statement or assess an argument - and not very often moved out of it. I
This is the thing with Wallace Stevens too.
― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 19 October 2022 13:30 (one year ago) link
we shd start a thread where we interpret poems together, i think it wd be instructive (*sharpens trolling pencil*)
So long as we do it I. A. Richards style
― Ward Fowler, Wednesday, 19 October 2022 13:37 (one year ago) link
Mark: we did that, about 18 years ago, when poster Cozen was a notable ILB poster. Among other things (?) we had a rewarding long discussion of a particular poem that I liked by Sean O'Brien.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 19 October 2022 13:49 (one year ago) link
I don't especially see the comparison of Larkin to Stevens, as Larkin's 'ideas' or 'arguments' are usually quite straightforward or at least comprehensible - well, they are often this, though I admit that above I said that sometimes they were not - whereas I don't find those qualities in Stevens. To the point where I am not really sure that Stevens is making a case at all.
I have been reading very early Derek Walcott and he actually reminded me of Stevens, more than anyone.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 19 October 2022 13:52 (one year ago) link
Stevens can be abstruse but is often straightforward:
Light the first light of evening, as in a roomIn which we rest and, for small reason, thinkThe world imagined is the ultimate good.
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
Within a single thing, a single shawlWrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth, A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
Within its vital boundary, in the mind.We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.
― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 19 October 2022 13:53 (one year ago) link
Or:
Ariel was glad he had written his poems.They were of a remembered timeOr of something seen that he liked. Other makings of the sunWere waste and welterAnd the ripe shrub writhed. His self and the sun were oneAnd his poems, although makings of his self,Were no less makings of the sun. It was not important that they survive.What mattered was that they should bearSome lineament or character, Some affluence, if only half-perceived,In the poverty of their words,Of the planet of which they were part.
― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 19 October 2022 13:59 (one year ago) link
Those may be good poems, but I don't understand what ideas they are advancing - in the particular way that Larkin (for good or ill) does.
I emphasise that I don't think poems 'should' put forward clear ideas; I just observe that Larkin sometimes does.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 19 October 2022 14:12 (one year ago) link
"We say God and the imagination are one" and "His self and the sun were one/And his poems, although makings of his self,/Were no less makings of the sun" are as straightforward as you can get!
I'll stop b/c we disagree.
― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 19 October 2022 14:13 (one year ago) link
take it to the poetry parsing thread! a thread in which ilx interprets poems, sometimes line by line, and disagrees a lot (probably)
― mark s, Wednesday, 19 October 2022 14:19 (one year ago) link
For me, Larkin is particular and personal and local: work is a toad squatting on my life. Parents are shit. Hull is other people. I can't get laid even in a sexy time. He has a grasp of details. He touches universal themes from time to time, but his feet were on the ground.
(I love Larkin BTW)
Stevens is an ontological writer concerned with the universe and with Berkelian perception: masts against a seascape create an order (if a perceiving being contemplates them). A jar shapes a landscape and ultimately a universe (if a perceiving being contemplates it). A frozen dessert, while you contemplate it, is an empire. A stupid bird becomes a whole fucking universe, while you are contemplating it. Any observed detail, to Stevens, can be a springboard into the universal. He touches reality from time to time, but his head was in the clouds.
(I love Stevens BTW)
Can't imagine a world without both
― the floor is guava (Ye Mad Puffin), Wednesday, 19 October 2022 14:20 (one year ago) link
being pretty familiar with what's left of much of the region Larkin writes about i see recognisable details dropped in even when the poem itself is predominantly making the kind of arguments Pinefox describes
― saigo no ice cream (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 19 October 2022 14:30 (one year ago) link
otm, Puffin.
― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 19 October 2022 14:36 (one year ago) link
I do wonder about Larkin's endings though, and how these lift him free of the accusation of groundedness (I know it's not an accusation really, but I think Larkin has become 'Larkinised' - kind of a subject of his own poem, frozen in time and space like the lovers in An Arundel Tomb - in a way Stevens hasn't and will never be).
I think 'The Whitsun Weddings' is as good an example as any:
We slowed again,And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelledA sense of falling, like an arrow-shower Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
It's pointedly ambiguous, certainly, psychedelic even, and perhaps a deliberate attempt at unmooring from a perceived anchoring in the local and the particular. 'High Windows' makes the same move.
Perhaps these are the exception that prove the rule.
― Shard-borne Beatles with their drowsy hums (Chinaski), Wednesday, 19 October 2022 16:40 (one year ago) link
Stevens is less of a presence in his poetry; even his grand "we"s are the pronouns of a medium.
― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 19 October 2022 16:43 (one year ago) link
I agree, your Lordship. I get the feeling that Wallace Stevens (the person) would have regarded "Wallace Stevens" (the poet) as a character, as a mouthpiece for a particular epistemological viewpoint that was more or less sincerely held by Wallace Stevens (the person).
To Chinasky's point I don't think Phillip Larkin (the person) would have minded being conflated with "Phillip Larkin" (the poet). And I don't think of ~relative~ groundedness as being a bad thing. Being more "down to earth" than an airy spirit like Stevens is not exactly a criticism.
― the floor is guava (Ye Mad Puffin), Wednesday, 19 October 2022 17:07 (one year ago) link
I may have missed something because am not really clear on why this comparison is being made - like, why are we comparing Larkin to Stevens instead of to Dylan Thomas or Sylvia Plath or Randall Jarrell or Audre Lorde or for that matter Adrienne Rich?
― the floor is guava (Ye Mad Puffin), Wednesday, 19 October 2022 17:12 (one year ago) link
Because ILB poster Alfred, Lord S., above, stated that Stevens was like Larkin in writing poems that made statements and arguments.
No other reason.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 19 October 2022 17:39 (one year ago) link
Chinaski: I don't think Larkin's 'rise to transcendence' moments are the exception at all -- they're a standard feature of his work. I think that most full descriptions of what Larkin does would include this as a major weapon in his armoury, or option in his repertoire, or temptation to which he yields. I think he does it very well, but also that it might risk being routinised by its frequency.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 19 October 2022 17:42 (one year ago) link
Sure, isn't High Windows pretty much a textbook study in contrasts? Awkward cycle clips, religion, awkward cycle clips, transcendence, seriousness, death.
No one would remember it if it were just about bicycling and pants
― the floor is guava (Ye Mad Puffin), Wednesday, 19 October 2022 18:02 (one year ago) link
That's a different poem. 'Church Going'.
'High Windows' is from about 20 years later.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 19 October 2022 18:33 (one year ago) link
Oh duh, sorry, serves me right for posting from work and away from the shelf
I will slink away into ignominy now
― the floor is guava (Ye Mad Puffin), Wednesday, 19 October 2022 18:37 (one year ago) link
High Windows is about kids fucking
― saigo no ice cream (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 19 October 2022 18:38 (one year ago) link
It is also name-checked by Jonatha Brooke on the uber-literary album by the Story, The Angel in the House, 1994ish
― the floor is guava (Ye Mad Puffin), Wednesday, 19 October 2022 18:46 (one year ago) link
I finished THE NORTH SHIP, Larkin's 1945 collection. It would be fair to say: if you think you know Larkin (as most people do), but haven't read these poems (as some people haven't), then there is an aspect of Larkin you don't know.
― the pinefox, Friday, 21 October 2022 09:27 (one year ago) link
A couple of years ago I read the Collected Poems of Larkin. Its a much more approachable volume than the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, which I also have. For one thing the poems tend to be short, and the obscure moments generally surrounded by relatable anecdotes from daily life. Also the generally dour and wistful mood carries you through - even if you don't understand everything you feel like you understand the feeling.
― o. nate, Thursday, 10 November 2022 20:17 (one year ago) link
since this thread was bumped recently i got a copy (collected poems) and have been enjoying it immensely.
Arrivals, Departures
This town has docks where channel boats come sidling;Tame water lanes, tall sheds, the traveller sees(His bag of samples knocking at his knees),And hears, still under slackened engines gliding,His advent blurted to the morning shore.
And we, barely recalled from sleep there, senseArrivals lowing in a doleful distance –Horny dilemmas at the gate once more.Come and choose wrong, they cry, come and choose wrong;And so we rise. At night again they sound,
Calling the traveller now, the outward bound:O not for long, they cry, I not for long –And we are nudged from comfort, never knowingHow safely we may disregard their blowing,Or if, this night, happiness too is going.
― Karl Malone, Thursday, 10 November 2022 20:56 (one year ago) link
The first stanza's last line.
― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 10 November 2022 21:07 (one year ago) link
"Horny dilemmas" as a bashful allusion to sexual frustration seems typical.
― o. nate, Thursday, 10 November 2022 21:42 (one year ago) link