Olympians All

So, who won the first Olympic medals for the Irish Free State, at the Paris Olympics of 1924? The answer is surprising – Jack Butler Yeats, the painter brother of the poet William, and Oliver St John Gogarty, the original of Joyce's Buck Mulligan. This was in a more civilised Olympic era when prizes were awarded for artistic as well as athletic endeavour – a feature of the Games that lasted until London 1948. 
  Yeats won a silver medal in the Painting category with the picture above, The Liffey Swim, depicting a traditional Dublin event. The chap in the fedora and the lady in the yellow hat behind him are probably the artist and his wife. The painting now hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland. As for Gogarty, he took a Literature bronze with his 'Ode to the Tailteann Games', a piece commissioned by the Irish government to mark the revival of said traditional games (a revival that proved short-lived).  
  In 1928 the painter William Nicholson was surprised to find himself the recipient of an Olympic gold medal, but I've written about that before – here...

Clarkson's Concerns

Unsurprisingly after so much cool wet weather, it has been a pretty terrible butterfly season so far, especially for those of us not living in the South of England (though around Lichfield at present grassland butterflies like the Meadow Brown, Ringlet, Gatekeeper and Small Skipper are all doing fine). Jeremy Clarkson, petrolhead turned farmer, has noticed the lack of butterflies and other insects on his land, and publicised his concerns. I pass this piece on partly because it has the rare distinction of containing not a single use of the phrase 'climate change' – hurrah for that. I hope this conspicuous absence might be a straw in the wind, but I rather doubt it, especially with the ludicrous 'Ed' Milliband in place as Energy and Climate Change Secretary. The madness will, I fear, go on...

'Their shadows all a brilliant disrepair'

 Time for a poem. 
Opening my Richard Wilbur New and Collected Poems at random, I happened on this – a poem to which, as with so many of Wilbur's best, all I can really add is an awed 'Wow!'...

Statues

These children playing at statues fill
The gardens with their shrillness; in a planned
And planted grove they fling from the swinger's hand
Across the giddy grass and then hold still

In gargoyle attitudes, – as if
All definition were outrageous. Then
They melt in giggles and begin again.
Above their heads the maples with a stiff

Compliance entertain the air
In abrupt gusts, losing the look of trees
In rushed and cloudy metamorphoses,
Their shadows all a brilliant disrepair,

A wash of dodging stars, through which
The children weave and then again undo
Their fickle zodiacs. It is a view
Lively as Ovid's Chaos, and its rich

Uncertainty compels the crowd:
Two nuns regard it with habitual love,
Moving along a path as mountains move
Or seem to move when traversed by a cloud;

The soldier breaks his iron pace;
Linked lovers pause to gaze; and every role
Relents, – until the feet begin to stroll
Or stride again. But settled in disgrace

Upon his bench, one ageing bum,
Brought by his long evasion and distress
Into an adamantine shapelessness,
Stares at the image of his kingdom come. 

1967

 I was startled to learn the other night that the top-selling single in the US in 1967 – you know, 1967, Summer of Love, psychedelia, Haight Ashbury, flowers in your hair – was the theme song of the film To Sir With Love, performed by the can belto artist still known as Lulu. What's worse, it beat one of the greatest singles ever – The Box Tops' 'The Letter' – into second place. Also left trailing in Lulu's wake were 'Ode to Billie Joe', 'I'm a Believer', 'Light My Fire', 'Happy Together' and 'Groovin'', while another of the greatest singles ever made – Aretha Franklin's 'Respect' – languishes at number 13, just ahead of Stevie Wonder ('I Was Made to Love Her'), Arthur Conley ('Sweet Soul Music') and Sam & Dave's 'Soul Man'. Not much evidence of the spirit of '67 there, though 'All You Need Is Love' just makes the top 30.
  Things were little better in the UK, with the two top-selling singles both recorded by the artist formerly known as Gerry Dorsey – Engelbert Humperdinck, whose 'Release Me' and 'The Last Waltz' were huge hits. However, over here, the great anthem of the Summer of Love, Scott Mackenzie's 'San Francisco', was beaten only by the all-conquering Humperdinck, and 'Whiter Shade of Pale' and 'All You Need Is Love' are also in the top 10. 'Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever', The Move's 'Flowers in the Rain' and Traffic's 'Hole In My Shoe' all made the top 30. So, the lesson is clear – the Summer of Love never happened in the States, it happened over here. Or, alternatively, there's not a lot we can usefully learn from perusing the singles charts of yesteryear – unless it is that much of what sold best (the stuff I haven't mentioned) was forgettable dross. 'Twas ever thus, and not only in the music field. 

Laughs and Bitters

 When I wrote recently about James Hamilton-Paterson's Gerontius, I mentioned that I was 'strongly tempted' by another novel of his with the intriguing title Cooking with Fernet Branca. Well, I yielded to that temptation, bought it (for a song), and I'm happy to report that it's one of the funniest comic novels I've read in recent years. It might even be, almost, what one excited reviewer called it: 'A work of comic genius.' I have certainly been laughing immoderately every couple of pages at least – a positively Wodehousean hit rate, though there's nothing of P.G. about the book. Published in 2004 and described as 'a gleefully tasteless bad dream of modern Italy', it's told through the eyes of Gerald Semper, a snobbish, somewhat effete, thoroughly absurd Englishman in Tuscany, who makes his living reluctantly ghost-writing celebrity memoirs, and has a penchant for cooking pretentiously disgusting food, passing on recipes for such delights as otter in lobster sauce and rabbit in cep custard. (He is rather reminiscent of Damien Trench, Miles Jupp's creation, in the radio series, In and Out of the Kitchen, though Trench's recipes are nothing like so outlandish.)
   Arriving at his new house in the Tuscan hills, Semper is appalled to find that he has a neighbour (albeit at some distance), Marta, whom he instantly mistakes for a half-mad, sex-hungry eastern European peasant woman, though she is in fact a Voynovian aristocrat who writes film music: Semper not only lacks self-awareness but basic awareness of, or interest in, other people. The narrative unfolds through two parallel accounts of events – Semper's often delusional version and Marta's more grounded account of dealing with her tiresome neighbour, whose antics provide her with plentiful entertainment. And what of the Fernet Branca of the title? The notoriously challenging drink is omnipresent, to the point where Semper and Marta each believe the other to be hopelessly addicted to the stuff, though in fact Marta, who has an unwanted box of it, is plying Semper with Fernet to get rid of it. It crops up also in Semper's recipes, one of which is for garlic and Fernet Branca ice cream. Yum.
  Fernet-Branca is an old-fashioned Italian amaro (bitters), a class of drinks of which I am very fond. It's made, of course, to a secret recipe, involving some 27 ingredients, and is very strong (39 per cent alcohol) and very bitter, with a sharp medicinal tang to it – just my kind of drink in fact, but somehow I'd never got round to trying it. Until last night, when, inspired by Cooking with Fernet Branca, I poured myself a glass, over ice, as a digestif. What can I say? It did not disappoint – it was the ultimate bitter bitters, with an almost eye-watering impact, but, once I'd got used to it, I became aware of subtle and intriguing undertones. I look forward to sampling it again – perhaps in the form of a Hanky Panky cocktail (gin, sweet vermouth and Fernet), created by Ada Coleman, head barman of the Savoy's American Bar back in the day, for the actor Charles Hawtrey (no relation to the Carry On actor who stole his name). On first knocking one back, Hawtrey declared, 'By Jove! That is the real hanky panky!'. Many other cocktails feature Fernet-Branca, and it is apparently the favourite tipple of the fraternity of barmen, hence its nickname, the 'barman's handshake'. In Argentina, where most of the stuff is sold, it is drunk with Coca-Cola – I don't think I'll be trying that...
  Anyway, I am grateful to James Hamilton-Paterson for not only providing me with excellent reading material but sending me off to listen properly to The Dream of Gerontius, and inspiring me to finally buy a bottle of the ultimate bitters. 

190 Today

 Born on this day 190 years ago was Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, who would go on to simplify his name to Edgar Degas and become one of the greatest draughtsmen who ever drew – the greatest since the high renaissance, in Kenneth Clark's estimation. 
Here, to mark his birthday, is Degas's Les Repasseuses, an oil painting on rough brown canvas showing women in a laundry wearily working their way through a pile of ironing  ('repasser' in French, so much more expressive of the action than 'ironing').
And here is a poem by R.S. Thomas inspired by the painting (which hangs in the Musée d'Orsay) –

one hand
     on cheek the other
on the bottle
     mouth open
her neighbour
     with hands clasped
not in prayer
      her head bent
over her decreasing
      function     this is art
overcoming permanently
     the temptation to answer
a yawn with a yawn


['decreasing function' is brilliant]

'Let me confess...'

 'Very few people can write poetry,' I opined. 'And he [the subject under discussion, who will remain anonymous] sure ain't one of them.' Actually I'll modify that assertion: very few people can write poetry that anyone in their right mind would want to read. All too many people are writing poetry, or something that can pass for it, and even doing so very competently – but who in their right mind, etc? The internet has massively encouraged people to write poetry, regardless of ability or aptitude – and there are other factors that have been at work much longer, notably the poetry workshop and the creative writing course. I recently came across two poems written by battle-scarred veterans of that particular field of endeavour. Here is Dana Gioia, who has had enough of sestinas (and writes one to say as much):

My Confessional Sestina

Let me confess. I’m sick of these sestinas
written by youngsters in poetry workshops
for the delectation of their fellow students,
and then published in little magazines
that no one reads, not even the contributors
who at least in this omission show some taste.

Is this merely a matter of personal taste?
I don’t think so. Most sestinas
are such dull affairs. Just ask the contributors
the last time they finished one outside of a workshop,
even the poignant one on herpes in that new little magazine
edited by their most brilliant fellow student.

Let’s be honest. It has become a form for students,
an exercise to build technique rather than taste
and the official entry blank into the little magazines—
because despite its reputation, a passable sestina
isn’t very hard to write, even for kids in workshops
who care less about being poets than contributors.

Granted nowadays everyone is a contributor.
My barber is currently a student
in a rigorous correspondence school workshop.
At lesson six he can already taste
success having just placed his own sestina
in a national tonsorial magazine.

Who really cares about most little magazines?
Eventually not even their own contributors
who having published a few preliminary sestinas
send their work East to prove they’re no longer students.
They need to be recognised as the new arbiters of taste
so they can teach their own graduate workshops.

Where will it end? This grim cycle of workshops
churning out poems for little magazines
no one honestly finds to their taste?
This ever-lengthening column of contributors
scavenging the land for more students
teaching them to write their boot camp sestinas?

Perhaps there is an afterlife where all contributors
have two workshops, a tasteful little magazine, and sexy students
who worshipfully memorise their every sestina.

Gioia's barber is taking a correspondence course in poetry – and in this poem, Galway Kinnell writes as an instructor on such a course, who, like Gioia, has also had enough:

The Correspondence-School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students

Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me   

snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting   

you were beautiful; goodbye,

Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain   

brown envelopes for the return of your very

“Clinical Sonnets”; goodbye, manufacturer   

of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues

give the fullest treatment in literature yet

to the sagging breast motif; goodbye, you in San Quentin,   

who wrote, “Being German my hero is Hitler,”   

instead of “Sincerely yours,” at the end of long,   

neat-scripted letters extolling the Pre-Raphaelites:

I swear to you, it was just my way   

of cheering myself up, as I licked

the stamped, self-addressed envelopes,   

the game I had of trying to guess   

which one of you, this time,   

had poisoned his glue. I did care.   

I did read each poem entire.   

I did say everything I thought   

in the mildest words I knew. And now,

in this poem, or chopped prose, no better,   

I realize, than those troubled lines   

I kept sending back to you,

I have to say I am relieved it is over:

at the end I could feel only pity

for that urge toward more life

your poems kept smothering in words, the smell   

of which, days later, tingled in your nostrils   

as new, God-given impulses

to write.

Goodbye,

you who are, for me, the postmarks again

of imaginary towns—Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell—

their solitude given away in poems, only their loneliness kept.

And here is a wonderfully wry piece by Kay Ryan, overcoming a lifelong aversion to all forms of co-operative creative endeavour and attending, for the first time, an AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programmes Annual Conference). The session she gets the most from is on... The Contemporary Sestina!