Sigggggh, I love Philip Larkin...

Really enjoying Larkin's Oxford Book of 20th Century English Verse over the last few days. Never used to be able to get into it, but I think I had more ↖MODERNIST↗ hang ups when I last looked at it.

so the big new not-for-reading edition was just sitting in the library, waiting to be borrowed. Will report back.

prelim report: it is big; losing a fresh-page-for-each poem format makes it much less pleasant to read (but I guess the old collected isn't going out of print?); and I am taken aback by the 200-odd pages of uncollected stuff (as against 120pp 'published in the poet's lifetimes').

lifetime, not lifetimes. He only had one. And used it moderately well I suppose.

love and death in hull is on uktv torrent site thebox.bz. i think it's open sign up but if not i have invites, just give me a shout.

From the latest Private Eye:

He fucks you up, the Bard of Hull
He may not mean to, but he does
Combines his rapt, seductive lull
With bouts of misanthropic scuzz

But he was fucked up in his turn
By old-style poets he thought great
Bleak symbols of the funeral urn
Like crappy Auden and crappier Yeats

Man hands on influence to man
It deepens like a swelling ocean
So get out quickly while you can
And don't turn into Andrew Motion

I don't much like that, but then I don't much like parody or light verse, or anything really. But (idly) wondering– does anywhere still run those parody and light verse competitions that you read about in mid-century author biographies? They always seem to be entering the New Statesman poetry competition under a pseudonym (& losing to Gavin Ewart).

What happened to light verse? The slightly respectable sort, I mean. Answer may have to do with Half Man, Half Biscuit.

Whole K Amis essay iirc in his Book of Light Verse. (Auden's got one of these as well, right?) I can't remember what he said, I'll dig it out. Probably mentions the First World War. Half Man Half Biscuit a good answer imo. That pastoral touch, & lightly-dealt with tragic romance.

I think the K Amis essay is one of his reactionary ones btw. Not very appealing.

yeah, Auden has one, I'll see if I have the intro somewhere. Someone must have lured me into reading a lot of Praed at some point, suspect it was him.

Forgot about KA's, & forgot just how much this was a thing with the Movement - he loves Robert Conquest's dirty limericks right?

Correct about Conquest's limericks. (Incidentally, watching the relative frequency of Larkin/Conquest letters in KA's Letters suggests that Amis's sympathies tended to move between them rather than embrace both at the same time).

Praed's mostly dull I seem to remember - no wait I was thinking of Leigh Hunt. Is Praed any good? Beddoes, what about him? Not sure about the Movement generally. With Amis there's several related things going on I think - a suspicion of the sonorously profound and a desire for skilful but light material to be given its dues. There's also the reactionary side, prefers the lyrical tradition to the experimental (at it's worst a version of 'why don't they write poetry that people can understand'). Pro populist too. And that populist side I tend to see stemming from a desire to kick against the pricks in authority after the second-world war.

Praed good at what he does, which is charming verse basically. Beddoes vg indeed, but he's more like macabre-gothic weirdness than light verse. Leigh Hunt I've never had much time for.

does anyone anywhere or has anyone anywhere ever actually liked andrew motion, i wonder

I imagine he's personally likeable, because there isn't any other explanation.

He makes himself v personally likable to female students for instance.

xp (lol)

sometimes I think 'sensible laureateship, visited a lot of schools, a good publicist for poetry' but then think, no, fck a committee man, preferred mystic monarch verse by Ted Hughes (who did plenty for poetry in schools obvs).

Motion, Morrison, Raine, Reid, Fenton. seems like the generation where English establishment poetry collapses.

(tho' I like some poems by most of them.)

(Not Motion, though).

Having got the early funny, stuff out of his system, Glyn Maxwell seems to be setting himself up as the last Eng. Est. poet standing. Could imagine him as a future Tory laureate appointment.

ha, that makes sense. But he should go to Faber, traditional home of the eng. est. poet.

future tory laureate = Olivia Cole.

Actually, Alice Oswald would be a canny appointment, but she would doubtless turn it down.

xp

i suppose maxwell made big gestures to the Eng. est. tradition even early on (too much Auden in the first collections?), but that made him seem quite an odd throwback in the 90s - someone young and bright doing this flash but serious formal verse that didn't bother with Hughes/Heaney density. But stuff about him played up his suburban oddness (plays in the back garden in Welwyn Garden City iirc) rather than Oxford credentials.

god, i know nothing about british poetry

can someone explain geoffrey hill to me

The bebrowed blog loves explaining Geoffrey Hill, tho actually most of the time he spends explaining the problems with explaining stuff.

Thomp have you been going to Hill's lectures? going to download & listen at some point soon. Or download, start listening, then get a bit restless and do something else instead.

i went to his second one. he claimed culture would vanish within twenty years.

i know very little about the guy, i mean, i didn't know he was 'difficult' or w/e. his whole demeanour was kind of spectacular - somewhere between 'santa, only depressed' and 'rowan williams, only terrifying'

I was thinking the other day he's looking like a threatening santa.

I mostly sort of think of him as the last after-Eliot poet (Anglican High Seriousness, ritual, loving the c17th, all that) , tho' that's maybe a hangover from the 80s-90s when he didn't really publish anything (think prozac unloosed the flood of stuff over the last 15 years?). The newer stuff is a bit stranger I think, messier, more expansive. I haven't read enough of it though to really judge.

He does love a jeremiad.

Ppl in the academy often really really love him – allusive, ambiguous, tied closely to history and history of eng lit; I've never been really so sold, but can't get away from him, because I do like a lot of the same stuff.

i don't know enough of Hill's later work but i thoroughly enjoy his earlier stuff because of its density, mostly.

he claimed culture would vanish within twenty years.

tbh am mildly surprised that he thinks culture still exists.

no wait, I'm turning him into a caricature of himself, always forget that he's unpredictable, eg that tribute to Jimi Hendrix.

surely Stevie T can now write some poems about playing in the back garden in Letchworth (Garden City)

I was bothered by that ambiguity yesterday, but decided not to make a clarifying post; however now I feel I must make it clear that Glyn Maxwell's eccentricity consisted of writing plays and staging them in his family's Welwyn Garden City back garden, rather than just playing there.

Listening to the first lecture. It's amusingly doomsaying. ''I am traumatised old man'.

fear it won't help with the 'caricature of himself' tho.

the bits where he speaks in German are particularly splendid.

i have started with the first one.

He's making my head hurt. Maybe I should wait till I'm sober.

No, onwards.

(they're here, for the curious)

the bit where he says STURM AND DRANG is fantastic. more listening to the sound rather than the meaning. about to go out and dance so may not get all of it.

Amis on the death of light verse: "when what is presumably aspiring to be high verse abandons form, a mortal blow is dealt to light verse, to which form has always been of the essence"

(that "presumably" is typical late Amis, him at his snide worst, and I'm not sure I agree with the thrust anyway - form can still exist within the genre and it's surely possible to imagine light verse which has adapted to some of the slightly different forms of prosody that have become acceptable more recently.)

Larkin is rather scathing about Amis' intro, and by extension his selection. He says that he feels Amis' fundamentally good poetic taste battles against his desire to include that which Auden excluded. Auden's seriousness is replaced to a degree by the things which Auden was battling - the twee and painful Victorian humourous style.

Auden's introduction is excellent. He argues the fertile ground for the intimacy and ease which he sees as central to light verse is a homogenous society, because it makes communicating with others easier. There are others, the poet is not alienated or difficult. Is it possible to argue back and say the lack of light verse is an indication of a fractured society? Cautiously, yes.

His final lines are "For poetry which is at the same time light and adult can only be written in a society which is both integrated and free".

This emphasis on social factors leads him to include American folk poetry, although he claims it is dying out. Yet reading it you are reading, as might seem obvious, the language of the Blues - John Henry and Stagolee are included.

So, yes, Light Verse into blues/folk/rock (is it theoretical folly to mention hip-hop, or is that getting silly?) And while I understand the queasiness that seeing the name Half Man Half Biscuit can produce, reading Wordsworth's "Poor Susan" here reminded me strongly of their pastoral side and their light touch with suicide and failed love. Also their lexicon of popular culture could possibly be read as a wideness of communal inclusivity.

^ugh, rather a bathetic post that somehow went from a loose-ish couple of comments on the death of light verse to sweeping, content-hungry off the cuff theory of everything before landing soundly on its arse w' eHMHB.

I blame posting from my phone.

you could think of a lot of the 'what is presumably aspiring to be high verse' might be better thought of as light verse. new yorker poems about having a transcendent moment playing frisbee in central park. poem cycles about 'the oregon trail'. anyone who is a less camp frank o'hara.

Geoffrey Hill is notorious hater William Logan's favorite English language poet of the last forty years. I admire the chiseled terseness of his verse without ever succumbing.

yeah, I suppose beyond academics there are ppl who love him who think english verse just sort of stopped at some point, and ppl who think there are basically an average of 0.3 poets born per generation. (I have bits of all these ways of thinking in me, so am surprised I don't love him more).

Not an easy background listen those lectures, basically can't follow if I'm doing anything else, which I approve of. Drifted into half-sleep during the first one last night, half-dreamt I was being lectured on Mandelstam by Aelfric the Old English monk.

I like it when he says R P Blackmur, then "R. P. BLACK. MUR." again, slowly.

he's playing around w/ being a grumpy old prophet smartly I think - using ironies & unexpectedness to crack through the camp of jeremiads, the temptation to look at him and go 'ho ho ho, here comes Hill decrying faithless modernity, hope he takes a pop at some stuff I hate'.

(have to go out, but I enjoyed the light verse post, will think about it more later.)

(maybe it'll need a new thread of some descrip, prob should let this be Larkin, rather than Larkin, Hill and the death of Clerihews)

the fatigued hawk returns to the mews, this is the death of clerihews

i've had quite enough of this shit, this is the death of limericks

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???