Talking of Short Poems...

I spent the weekend over the border in Derbyshire, visiting my cousin, and on Saturday we found ourselves dodging the rain in Belper. Where better to shelter awhile than in a large charity bookshop? There I spotted an anthology edited by Wendy Cope – The Funny Side: 101 Humorous Poems. Having found much to enjoy in another of her anthologies, Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems*, I naturally bought this one. When I went to pay for it, the helpful volunteer at the cash desk told me he had another little anthology out the back which I might be interested in... It was Short and Sweet: 101 Very Short Poems, edited by Simon Armitage – so of course I took that too. 
 The poems in Short and Sweet range in length from 13 lines (any more and they'd be trespassing on a companion volume, Don Paterson's excellent 101 Sonnets) to no lines at all, the latter represented by Don Paterson's On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him. None of Dick Davis's epigrams appears in Short and Sweet, but I found this brilliant three-liner by Yeats, which was new to me – 

Three Movements

Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land;
Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand;
What are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand?

A first look also yielded this, by Geoffrey Hill – one of the most shattering four-line poems I have ever read...

I Had Hope When Violence Was Ceas't

Dawnlight freezes against the east-wire.
The guards cough 'raus! 'raus! We flinch and grin,
Our flesh oozing towards its last outrage.
That which is taken from me is not mine.

[The title is from Paradise Lost, Book 11: 'I had hope When violence was ceas't, and Warr on Earth, All would have then gon well, peace would have crown'd With length of happy dayes the race of man; But I was farr deceav'd; for now I see Peace to corrupt no less than Warr to waste...']

* an anthology which includes Dick Davis's great love poem 'Uxor Vivamus'.

An Epigram on Epigrams

 Dick Davis, one of our finest living poets (and translators), has always published sparingly. If and when his complete poems are published – and they really should be – they will not make a fat volume. Davis favours short forms, including epigrams. Here is one of my favourites – 

On Epigrams

This neat, egregious house-style
Parades its insights pat, on time: 
It smiles a very knowing smile...
Here comes another fucking rhyme.

(Its doubles entendres are subtle, supple – 
'To fuck' here means, of course, 'to couple'.)

I've written about Davis before – a search for 'Dick Davis' brings up these posts... 

Here, for good measure, is another short poem by Davis (not an epigram) –

With John Constable

Slow-rotting planks and moody skies;
I look with your impassive eyes

Whose tact is love for what is there –
The worked soil and the moving air,

The reticence of grief: I hear
Through silence your dead voice draw near –

Those words you gave to Ruisdael's art,
'It haunts my mind, clings to my heart.'

Doggy D'Artagnan

 One of the pleasures of grandparenthood is enjoying all over again some of the things that most entertained us in our own childhood and, later, when our own children were young. Books, of course, but also vintage animations – the great Chuck Jones classics, Popeye, Oliver Postgate's Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine, John Ryan's Captain Pugwash, and more from the golden age when cartoons were lovingly made, creatively scripted and free of computer-generated razzle dazzle. And now there's another animation that the Lichfield grandsons (and their grandparents) are loving – Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, an improbable Spanish-Japanese production from the early 1980s. I'd forgotten how good this was (though I hadn't forgotten the signature tune, 'One for All and All for One' – no one can). As the name suggests, it's a retelling of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, with some of the darker elements expunged, the names of Porthos and Athos swapped around (why?), the plot much simplified, and, er, the principal characters mostly played by dogs. Dogtanian, the canine D'Artagnan, looks rather like Snoopy in 17th-century French costume, and has a nose that responds visibly to strong emotion, but he is every bit as impetuous, honourable, romantic and handy with a sword as his human original. The story is as exciting and swashbuckling as Dumas (and told much more concisely), and the ethos is very much that of the original. So far we've watched six episodes, and happily there are twenty more to come. This is going to be fun. 

Porter Day

 Peter Porter was born on this day in 1929, in Brisbane. His career, and his life, got off to a faltering start, but by 1955 he was living in London and associating with the informal group of poets known as, er, 'The Group'. It was this poem, published in the TLS in January 1960, that brought Porter to wider attention – and no wonder...

Metamorphosis

This new Daks suit, greeny-brown,
Oyster-coloured buttons, single vent, tapered
Trousers, no waistcoat, hairy tweed – my own:
A suit to show responsibility, to show
Return to life – easily got for two pounds down
Paid off in six months – the first stage in the change.
I am only the image I can force upon the town.

The town will have me: I stalk in glass,
A thin reflection in the windows, best
In jewellers’ velvet backgrounds – I don’t pass,
I stop, elect to look at wedding rings –
My figure filled with clothes, my putty mask,
A face fragrant with arrogance, stuffed
With recognition – I am myself at last.

I wait in the pub with my Worthington.
Then you come in – how many days did love have,
How can they be catalogued again?
We talk of how we miss each other – I tell
Some truth – you, cruel stories built of men:
‘It wasn’t good at first but he’s improving.’
More talk about his car, his drinks, his friends.

I look at the wild mirror at the bar –
A beautiful girl smiles beside me – she’s real
And her regret is real. If only I had a car,
If only – my stately self cringes, renders down;
As in a werewolf film I’m horrible, far
Below the collar – my fingers crack, my tyrant suit
Chokes me as it hugs me in its fire.

[DAKS is a long-established British luxury fashion house. The Australian slang term 'daks', meaning trousers (see Barry Mackenzie passim) is probably not related, as it's likely a conflation of 'dad's slacks'.
Worthington is one of the biggest British brewers, but now produces bland 'nitrokeg' beers and has dropped its best brew, the bottled White Shield.]

As readers of this blog will know, I've long been doing my bit to keep Peter Porter's name alive – see, for example, this from ten years ago.  He was one of the best. 

School Reading

 Recently I was watching a BBC4 programme about Persian history, and naturally the poetry of Ferdowsi – still a national hero – came up. When the presenter started talking about the tragic story of Rostam and Sohrab, part of Ferdowsi's epic Shahnameh, it rang a loud bell. I studied this tale at school – not in Ferdowsi's telling, but in the form of Matthew Arnold's long narrative poem 'Sohrab and Rustum'. I would have been about 13 or 14 at the time, I think, and in an 'ordinary' state grammar school. And this got me thinking... Surely it would be inconceivable that a teacher today, when excerpts seem to have replaced full texts in schools, should set a class to read a poem as long and challenging as 'Sohrab and Rustum'. And what else was I studying, either as directed reading, prescribed homework or set texts? I've been trawling the memory banks for a little while now, and I've come up with this list, which is surely not complete...

Milton's Comus, L'Allegro etc, Samson Agonistes and chunks of Paradise Lost,
Pope's Rape of the Lock,
Much Shakespeare, definitely including Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Henry IV and Henry V, Richard III, Othello, Antony& Cleopatra, The Tempest, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Lyrical Ballads and a chunk of The Prelude.
Many poems by Tennyson (including Enoch Arden), Browning, the Metaphysicals, T.S. Eliot, etc.
Silas Marner
Bleak House, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
The Wind in the Willows
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Smollett's Humphrey Clinker(!)
H.G. Wells's Kipps(!)
Richard Jefferies' Bevis(!)
Tom Sawyer
Orlando 
A Passage to India
The School for Scandal(!)

As I say, I'm sure there was more. Admittedly I studied Eng Lit to A-level, but most of these titles were read before sixth form. I also stayed on an extra term to be prepped for Cambridge, so read a good deal more for that, including some Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Catullus, etc. 
I repeat: this was nothing unusual, it was standard for an 'ordinary' grammar school in the state system. And now, we are told, Eng Lit undergraduates are turning up at university unable to face the challenge of reading a big, unfamiliar novel. What happened? Well, we know what happened – let's not go there... But I wonder if readers have their own memories of what literature they studied at school, and if they find themselves similarly surprised and impressed? 

Winter Seascape and Wharton

 I've been down in Worthing these past few days (yes, again – and again on family business). A seaside resort in winter is not a terribly attractive prospect, especially if the winter has been as relentlessly rainy and bleak as this one. The sea off Worthing was behaving much as described in this Betjeman poem, 'Winter Seascape', though without cliffs or sea caves, or indeed shrieking shags –

The sea runs back against itself
With scarcely time for breaking wave
To cannonade a slatey shelf
And thunder under in a cave.

Before the next can fully burst
The headwind, blowing harder still,
Smooths it to what it was at first –
A slowly rolling water-hill.

Against the breeze the breakers haste,
Against the tide their ridges run
And all the sea's a dappled waste
Criss-crossing underneath the sun.

Far down the beach the ripples drag
Blown backward, rearing from the shore,
And wailing gull and shrieking shag
Alone can pierce the ocean roar.

Unheard, a mongrel hound gives tongue,
Unheard are shouts of little boys;
What chance has any inland lung
Against this multi-water noise?

Here where the cliffs alone prevail
I stand exultant, neutral, free,
And from the cushion of the gale
Behold a huge consoling sea.

All this wildness out at sea made a violent contrast with the sedate symmetry of the promenade and its terraces of bow-fronted houses and glass-walled apartment blocks, all standing firm against the howling wind. I did not, in the circumstances, spend much time on the beach.

To read on the long rail journey to the South coast I had Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. This is a book – and a writer – I've been meaning to read for many years, but had never got round to, so the last time I spotted The Age of Innocence on a charity bookshop shelf I bought it and resolved, this time, to finally read it. The edition I bought has one of the most off-putting introductions I have ever read, by an academic from the University of Kent, who, in dry academic prose, rehearses all the most negative critiques ever launched against Wharton, mostly by male critics, and finds little or nothing to say in her defence. He gives no idea of the sheer pleasure that was in store for me when I abandoned this deadening Introduction and plunged into the novel itself. I am, in a word, loving it. The satire of high society life in 1870s New York is indeed quite gentle, but so is Jane Austen's satire – saeva indignatio is not obligatory. There are many descriptions of the furnishings of interiors, but they are obviously important to the evocation of the opulent milieu. The story that unfolds is expertly told by an omniscient narrator, in an elegant, lightly ironic tone, with touches of humour; it could be called, as it is on the book jacket, 'a sometimes dark and disturbing comedy of manners', exploring a particularly difficult love triangle. I was reminded inevitably of Henry James, but also of Willa Cather (in particular Alexander's Bridge). In 1921 The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize, making Edith Wharton the first woman to win it. And two years later Willa Cather won it, with One of Ours. I shall be reading more of Wharton... 

Illth Revisited

 Today is the birthday of the great Victorian critic John Ruskin (born 1819). The last time I marked his birth was way back in 2009, when this blog was in its swaddling clothes. I wrote then about the Ruskinian notion of 'illth', the opposite of wealth, creative not of well-being but of ill-being. I was writing when the world was suffering from the prodigious illth-creation of the bankers – this was the time of the 'credit crunch'/ financial crisis (which the bankers of course came through unscathed and unreformed). Today, with the world increasingly controlled by an amoral transnational kleptocracy, and The Machine rolling ever onward in its dehumanising work, illth is everywhere. Ruskin would be appalled, but not, I think, surprised: when a society is without a sacred dimension, a sense of the past and a strong attachment to place and community/nation, this is what happens. A good thing he's not alive to see it – I think even he might be lost for words.