Sigggggh, I love Philip Larkin...

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.

okay well obviously it's hyperbolic, but I'm more curious about the idea that an author's 'private' missteps (odious political views, racism, misogyny, whatever) can be redeemed(? canceled out??) by the author's equally private "self-hatred" and suffering. something about this moral calculus feels off to me, but I can't put my finger on it.

... basically it seems to boil down to "Larkin may have been a shitty person, but he was aware of it, and managed to balance being a shitty person with making non-shitty art; therefore, he can be excused for not using his self-knowledge to become a less shitty person"

(NB I know next-to-nothing about Philip Larkin outside of what's in this thread. I enjoy most poems of his that I've read, and find nothing objectionable in them.)

Good essay by James Fenton:
http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/fenton_su13.html

It is very strange that a poet whose key work lies in three rather short volumes should have caused such difficulties for his editors and such controversy among his readers. But the readers pay him the tribute of a sort of possessiveness and concern: they want their poet to look his best. And it’s hard for a poet to look good in his Collected Poems, if by “collected” we mean anything like “complete.” Most poets’ collected works will include things that would make the author cringe. Presented in untidied form, such gatherings remind me of nothing so much as those yard sales characteristic of recession America, in which families set out on their front lawns the contents of their closets and dens—the Frisbees, the old scooters, the clothes neither wanted nor needed, the dreadful joke presents—all in the hope of raising a little cash.

Here

Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows
And traffic all night north; swerving through fields
Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,
And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude
Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
And the widening river's slow presence,
The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,

Gathers to the surprise of a large town:
Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
And residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires--
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers--

A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where only salesmen and relations come
Within a terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,
Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;
And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges
Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,
Isolate villages, where removed lives

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iJPUPy50Gxc/TTGujk5h1TI/AAAAAAAAAww/4WEwGmfagwY/s1600/Wilberforce-House.jpg

the slave museum

turns out I'm a fan

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thus shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff 5
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font. 10
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new –
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
‘Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant. 15
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, done an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this, 20
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases, 25
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some 30
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone? 35
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew 40
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he by my representative, 45

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation – marriage, and birth, 50
And death, and thoughts of these – for which was built
This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutered frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is, 55
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious, 60
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.