Showing posts with label David Caddy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Caddy. Show all posts
Sunday, September 4, 2016
MAY-AUGUST '16 : SAVED FROM F/B OBLIVION
May 8th
Friday the 29th April '16 was the last possible day to receive mail in Weymouth, eve of the early drive up to Heathrow, with Robin H, and the long flight back to Melbourne. Great pleasure & surprise, then, when package from Kelvin Bowers & Dooze Storey in St Ives was delivered : their gift of David Whittaker's book, Give Me Your Painting Hand : W.S. Graham & Cornwall, published by his own Wavestone Press [www.wavestonepress.co.uk]. Everywhere I went this English Journey '16, conversation ensued in which Sydney Graham's name came up. Kel, Dooze & I talked about him when we looked at the Tate's St Ives book of 1985, in which Graham's poems for painter friends appear within the illustrated text about that golden period of Cornish abstraction (Graham's more or less the poet of that practice I'd like to say). And again, just around the corner from Kel's place, with poet John Phillips, which I worked into my (compulsory) Lighthouse poem soon after. And continued in Weymouth with Lucas Weschke, and then in the New Forest with Tony & Sonia Green (whose new book on Sven Berlin is also recently published), and in Blandford Forum with David Caddy. W.S.Graham was the common un-common element in all my meetings!
Curious to read the headline in the Cornish Review, "neglected giant of Cornish literature"... In our neck of the woods, Sidney Graham is celebrated not neglected. I guess that's the disparity between mainstream & whatever our community of reading & writing is called! Certainly since Faber's whopper of a collected, Graham's been front & centre... And didnt I meself attempt a critique of WSG at the Melbourne Poets Union event at the VWC when it was next door to Collected Works Bookshop in the Nicholas Building ten or so years ago? Rhetorical question! I did! With a little bottle of whiskey beside me --I was sitting on panel with Jordie Albiston & Susan Kruss-- the whiskey was the ghost of St Ives you could say, and I was talking about Sven Berlin and other friends of our poet, imbibing as I delivered. It's on film, incidentally, but i think I'm too embarrassed to view it again! 'My Life in Theatre' indeed!
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I should have shared David Caddy's review in the TEARS IN THE FENCE blog a month ago of Sonia Green's biography of Sven Berlin, but my trip to England & not always having access to a computer got in the way... Better late than never... I've mentioned Sonia Green [Aarons] below in the note on David Whittaker's book on Sydney Graham... suffice to say I met her in 2015 through my woodworker youngest brother Robin, whose art-work relocation had led him to the Greens & their incredible archive of Sven's work... When he was introduced to the Greens he suddenly remembered my own story of meeting Sven in 1963 at Home Farm, Emery Down, in the New Forest, via college friend Billy (Will) Fisher. Robin told the Greens about the elder brother & arranged a meeting. A year on I've met them again, this time via my sister Monique who, remarkably, was able to tell Sonia her memory of Billy at our home in Thornhill, Southampton, on one or two occasions, recalling his vivid blue eyes, his beard, and long locks! Bethatasitmay, in the meantime Robin & his crew moved Sven's major sculpture, The Stag of the Forest, from the Fawley industrial complex (where our father worked for decades, at the Esso oil refinery) to the Greens' garden; and Robin built the protective shelter which has survived the long English winter Tony told & showed me. There's a photo of Robin & crew beside the shelter at the end of Sonia's book, Timeless Man (Millersford Press) and very proud of him we are too! Ah, such legacy mounted on serendipity : the figure Sven became for me, and Billy (Will) too; my life as a poet especially amidst painting & painters; the importance to me of the St Ives scene... such circles, spirals, of significance...I almost swoon!
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May 11th
Re Sharon Thesen F/b post about the Hammer Museum's Black Mountain exhibit at UCLA….
To a certain inner circle of that Melbourne incarnation, 1967-70, namely the La Mama cafe-theatre, established by the late Betty Burstall, with poetry centre stage (--"Tuesday Nights Forever!" : recall when I returned from England, late '72, young poet Pi O visited me in Kerr Street, Fitzroy, quizzed me about that claim... "So what happened?" he demanded! That's history though isnt it! --what happened...? --well, I said, I went back to England for 3 years!), --myself coordinating from start of the year, '68, after Betty's & Glen Thomasetti's Sunday salons from Winter to Summer, '67 --and this Melbourne new poetry platform arguably an outpost of the Black Mountain College we conjured from various sources... The "we" was mainly Bill Beard, Ian Robertson, Paul Adler, Geoff Eggleston, Garrie Hutchinson, Charles Buckmaster, Allison Hill, John Jenkins, Mike Dugan, Mal Morgan, ambivalently Ken Taylor, detachedly Sid Clayton, James Crouch ... I was saying to Aidan Coleman just the other day, --interviewed for his Oz Po research, especially on John Forbes --that Melbourne was Black Mountain (include a couple of Sydney poets in that, Nigel Roberts, Terry Gillmore, the poets around Free Poetry magazine, Johnny Goodall another) whilst Sydney was New York (I'm thinking of John Tranter especially) --I characterised it at the time as Melbourne/Black Mountain 'Honest Joe' vs Sydney/New York 'City Slicker'... In '73 I met Robert Kenny & Walter Billeter and that Black Mountain discussion was on again! Colin & Frances Symes came out from England (Colin's Poetree wall map, an insert in Earth Ship #1 in Southampton, 1970, already a cult reference for our group regarding the Anglo-American, especially Pound/Olson, legacy). Clive Faust returned to Melbourne from Japan & met us via the Cid Corman connection. Bernie O'Regan & Judy Telford came to Melbourne from London and were part of the enthusiasm. Met Finola Moorhead at Adelaide Festival '74 and she joined the parlez (included in the Rushall Crescent Avant Garde meetings). We met the Cantrills who touched similar base via experimental filmmaking (Stan Brakhage to Charles Olson e.g.). Same early '70s add Laurie Duggan, John Anderson, Alexandra Seddon, Ian Reid (with his Levertov, Duncan, Blaser connections)... yes, quite a crew, and my mag of that time, The Ear in a Wheatfield, our international transport... There were of course Black Mountain enthusiasts in Sydney, for example Carl Harrison-Ford, & Bob Adamson, either holus-bolus or for particular poets, Robert Duncan for example... In the early '80s add Pete Spence, Des Cowley, Jurate Sasnaitis...This aint nothing more than thinking aloud folks! Not a thesis so plenty of holes I'm sure! Also to say from the late 60s I'd been aware of New Zealand/Black Mountain connections (Freed magazine), and was in touch with Alan Loney mid-70s... Yep, it's a LARGE subject!
-----------------------
May 13th
Regarding Hugh Tolhurst's memo about the POW! issue of Meanjin Quarterly... and cryptic comment, "happens to all no (A.D.) Hopers, eh Kris Hemensley"...
Not sure if we're on same page here, Hugh... Glancing at the Meanjin Quarterly preview/editorial it looked a bit 'same old' as they say, that is same-old newbies, new-old same-old & the other 57 varieties... I was there once myself, and folks like Ken Bolton quite rightly wondered how it had happened : editor of The Ear in a Wheatfield also poetry editor at Meanjin? People on t'other side asked same question, Dracula at the blood-bank... Hmmm... At that time, 1975, Jim Davidson wanted to make his own mark & to align with 'the new', so his opening salvo including me as poetry ed, Terry Smith sniffin out the art, who else? Finola Moorhead who'd been reading fiction with A A Phillips, and had pushed for me to come on board, was charged with wimmins business...
A D Hope, yes... I once declined a poem or two from him... a discussion around that could have been interesting re- old & new, laying out attitudes... it actually wasnt the poem per se but that it appeared to me to be his patter, --as I said, poetry couldnt be reproduction of one's patter... it had to be addressing the poem's possibility always anew... Ah well... a long way from POW!!!!
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May 28th
Susan Fealy commented on Iggy McGovern, "He held the room with his poetry and his storytelling. A really lovely evening that opened up into great chats about poetry. Thanks Kris and Retta for such a warm, relaxed and stimulating evening. So good to be at a Collected Works event again." 'Great chats' indeed, Susan... George Genovese enquired as to the choice of sonnet for Iggy's William Hamilton book. Iggy discussed Petrarchan & Shakespearian --"And plenty more beside" he said, which gave me an opportunity to describe the 'mirror sonnet' I've been writing for 20/25 years! After the free verse adventure the 'return of/to form(s)' is similarly experimental, I said. And then Patricia Sykes opened up deliciously, instructively, on EE Cummings' sonnets.... Now that was but one portion of the session!
[Patricia Sykes : I second that about the "lovely evening"; such a pleasure to have time to chat at some length about and with a visiting poet in such a welcoming and convivial setting: thanks indeed Kris and Retta. Keen to read one of your latest "mirror" sonnets Kris. Must correct one comment though: It wasn't sonnets I was discussing in relation to eec but the spin-off about form and song the sonnet discussion generated. Lovely way to spend a couple of hours on a damp and cold Melbourne night.]
As Susan Fealy says above, Iggy held the room or at least our circle in the middle, and his storytelling (explications of the poems & their form) took us right into mathematics, poetics, history... By the way, the book is A MYSTIC DREAM OF 4 : A sonnet sequence based on the life of William Rowan Hamilton (Quaternia Press, '14). The book's 64 sonnets are arranged in 4 parts entitled 1805-1820, Geometry; 1820-1835, Algebra; 1835-1850, Metaphysics; 1850-1865, Poetry... What with Jessica Wilkinson's non-fiction (& specifically biography) poetry project via her Rabbit magazine, Iggy's presentation was timely!
-----------------
June 5th
Two wonderful meetings last summer in & around Melbourne, the first with Sharon Thesen, the second with Stephen Ellis; two North American poets & scholars, serendipitously in Oz, with Olson & co at centre of their conversation... A propos her article in Dispatches ["Charles, Frances, Ralph, and me"], our summertime tete a tete meant that I was already across the issues; laudable that Sharon's described here candidly, & so generously, what went down in making the important volumes of the Olson/Boldereff correspondence. She is beautifully found in this comment from the article : "[Which is why] we need artists, poets, and visionaries; philosophers, mystics, and geniuses; autodidacts, elders, and scholars: for the sake of joy. For the sake of the everything that is the world and the everything that is poetry.. "
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June 12th
Have begun visiting artists who exhibited in the recent Dorset Art Weeks exhibition, that is via the fabulous catalogue! As you know, Dorset is where I've been visiting family ever since life-changing 1987 trip. Weymouth in Dorset's become my English HQ & prism. Happy to be a poet amidst painting & painters, especially the West Country section. I'll not launch into vast essay here, about home making & self defining, --suffice to say this late March + April 2016 visit, which included St Ives for first time in years, fell just short of the annual Arts Weeks, but had I been there I would have tried to get around the galleries & studios. So far Ive loved the web sites &/or Facebook pages of Peter Ursem [www.peterursem.co.uk], Colin Moore (& the Chaldon Studios)[www.colinmoore.uk.com], Caz Scott [www.caz-scott.co.uk] & Carolyn Lyness [www.carolynlynessart.com]. Charmed, to say the least, by the stylization of their landscapes (oh yes, I should say that representing landscape, abstracting landscape, is my continuing & sustaining concern). Needless to say, this will become a larger reconnoitre and find it's way to ye olde blog. In the meantime, Good Morning Dorset from your Melbourne friend!
------------
From the Journal,
DREAM, 13-07-16
Discussing Brexit with Cathy O'Brien & other friends in the conference room I recognize from other dreams, --sunlight through large glass windows, different shades of brown-stained wooden furniture, walls, floor. [Possibly regurgitation of conversation about Brexit with Rob Kenny, his colleague Carol, Loretta, Richard Mudford, previous Sunday afternoon at the Kelvin Bar in Westgarth...] So what about Quebec? I say, and also enter Macdiarmid's defence ("you gotta have some nationalism to be 'inter' with")? Rising from low table I cross the room to where Sharon Thesen in rolled-up shirt-sleeves stands smiling, the sunlight catching her arms. I'm wondering how Durham got on in the Referendum. Basil Bunting's great isnt he? she says. Oh yes, I agree --how I wish I could have visited him in Durham… But you can now, she laughs, now you're free… But I'm 75, I say, how can I at 75? How old would you like to be? she jokes. Well, forty, forty-five… She brushes then holds my arm --let's ask this man, she says… Michael Farrell's been standing near us, listening in… I introduce them --Sharon Thesen, Michael Farrell… He's smiling. Dont ask him, I say, he's only 10!
I wake from warm, affectionate dream, telling myself to write to George Stanley to thank him for copy of his book, North of California St., received a couple of weeks ago --initially believing Sharon sent it but George's name is on sender (New Star Books, Vancouver)'s label. Also write to Sharon, so bonny in the dream.
Time flies. Eeek! Write tonight.
P.S. [7th August,'16]
Eeek indeed! Almost a month passed. Distractions, diversions. George Stanley's book is a selected poems, 1975-99, published by New Star in 2014. I think Sharon told me last Summer here that he has another in the making. Or maybe this is that volume. I've read Sharon's introduction a couple of times. So nice to know & here to say, we're on the same page. She refers to his "aboutism" wch has theoretical/political implication but also the straightforward concerns with "ideas, thoughts, locales, occasions, persons, and words…" She says that "aboutism and transportation are natural companions"; hear hear I say often enough myself in train-carriage or tram with notebook!
"Stanley's airplane poems are almost always about mortality and fatality. Flight is a subject that creates opportunities for fear of the loss of "plain reality", of losing touch with the earth, which Stanley likens to 'the truth'". Sharon Thesen continues, "The sense of loss, inspired by flight, of the world, the person, the real, and the familiar, is not a backward-glancing nostalgia for a 'golden' past, which we know, or are told we know, is a fiction; but rather derives from a sensed absence or emptiness in the present…"
Having just handed over my own mss to Kent MacCarter which means having been deeply immersed in it, in its 'vision & process' modus operandi as it may well be, I'm more than a little sensitive to the adjacency I pick up from my Vancouver correspondence…
Now it's 5-02pm!
Eeek!
Time still flying!
A wine date in the offing!
Salut!
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August 6th
Regarding the event on the 21st July arranged by Lisa Gorton... good readings by Lisa (--quite a contrast to the park/topographical poems she read at the Devin Johnston event) & Chris Wallace-Crabbe ("the Puckish chap beside me" she introduced --and his John Keats meets Robert Burns poem, published in the latest ABR, lived up to that) in support of Paul Kane's Welcome Light poems... Ive been thinking about American & British English since the night, including Australian English's situation... Broad-brush as annunciated here of course, but... And though I offered Paul probability of such concern being passe from his point of view he felt it wasnt, still an interesting thought he said... I wondered if inflection within the plain speaking American line (the conversational syntax) might dummy for my sense of British 'music'? And et cetera...
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Friday, May 6, 2016
THE ENGLISH JOURNEY, '16
[27-3-16](At Weymouth Library, 29th March, transcribing from flight notebook)
In which Billy Boo attempts to read the map as described in ornate Thai characters, ditto the travel times & distances, in the second or two before the screen switches to English. "Local Time at Melbourne 3-27 -- Local Time at Bangkok 11-27". Fair enough. He's already in credit : invited to move out of tight fit threesome to the aisle of a comfortable two. Boo thinks it's because he returned clasped hands greeting with hostesses on the ramp and they misheard his Lao 'sabaidee' for Thai 'sawasdee'. He's belted in, tentatively stretches leg beneath forward seat, glances through the porthole at the cloud plain topped by blue, --imagines lick of first G&T assuredly on its way! As the share passenger's snoring establishes its rhythm, Billy remembers his friends, living & dead, either way not here. The cloud clears, beautiful tracts of land thousands of feet below where Christy is, actually happy down there, stone cottage like Ulli & Celia's place in North Wales, '72, similar embellishments, the attic skylight for example, --Nick Johnson's place in Wiltshire, 90s pied a terre, --& the Abbot in attic heaven, nearer to yoga god than any other, no face, no name, though so many statues in his hermitage one suspects he's not yet run through the argument about idolatry! One of the old crew not yet invoked is Ed. Happens each time Billy flies. Ghost is same kind of disembodiment as flying. Forget about angels, Ed wasnt one. I'll give them turbulence, he swears behind conspiratorial hand as though the weather wore jackboots.....
*
Ed has the flight crew from captain to waiters in mind, not really the elements. All the way to deity via earlier English & later Russian divines, manifestations of magnitude. Ed spittin about pretenders, pretence of authority, supercilious from tie to socks, --purple uniform ultimate slight. Ah, Ed! Ed, mate! how goes it in ghost's Yorkshire heaven? Not there yet, he says, I'm in Purgatory writing poems, sans guide, following my own beaky nose. Hah! Ed, Ed, Ed. Tutoring me yet from beyond the grave, thinks Billy Boo.
*
At Bangkok airport Boo realized that following a straight line got you absolutely nowhere, may as well have been walking in circles. So then he walked around in circles, gauging the world, the non-stop airport world, more 'international' than when first coined (--Inge's daughters crooning 'international' over "Miami Vice", late 80s, --B B 's return to Europe after 12 years exile). Seems to him the Chinese had become the new Americans and everyone else from everywhere else in no way lesser. Each elsewhere a somewhere, similarly worldly-wise, ticket to prove it, legitimate travellers, commuters, no longer exotics of any empire.
But what about Christy, and how come he's let off so easily? Mebbe Billy thinks the boyo might bat him one! (What did Peter Finch say of him once, slightly misapprehending the relation of source to poem?-- "if these are Christy's dreams he must have a head like granite!")
[NOTE :
Re- Ulli & Celia's place, in N Wales, '72 ; from Poem of the Clear Eye
(....)
there is a strangeness surrounds
which our thickest wall cannot evict
(for talisman take anything you find
a coloured slate a star from the constellation
which fills the skylight the vault of Caernarvon)
the foul smell from the town still gets to my nostrils --
Panzer fetch paper! go to
Gethsemane i rise up &
fall down i run till my side aches
i will return to the smoke only to bang the
beafeaters dead in their beds! in my boots
will make mincemeat of
rumours & subterfuge.(...)
(pp34/35; 1972/3; UK & Oz)
[In my poem, Ulli has two dogs, Panzer & Perfidy... The scenario is remembered/invented from the visit to Ulli & Celia for the Bangor Poetry Fest or the poetry event Ulli arranged at the Bangor Arts Fest back in '71 or '72... I believe that Jeremy Hilton drove me from Southampton... ah, Snowdonia…]
*
Daily round : walk from Goldy, down road, left at Pottery Lane (note to self : research derivation), through the small housing estate, cross highway at safety island to Radipole Lake foot & cycle path, past the blackberries ringing the lake six months ahead of bloom & harvest, up onto the bridge & into town... Library, Black Dog, pint!
Ed would approve : get a table, snap notebook or loose page onto it, “let’s get it over then!” through gritted teeth, lank hair & lengthening beard the frame for most ambivalent of propositions, --the argument concerning literature, thus “the literary bit”, not so much the sharing of poems but potential for such inflation as snatches poet from universe to be dropped into egotistical slurry (Ed’s favourite quote, Akhmatova’s rooster crowing upon shit-heap) --the “literary”, --snort into handkerchief, begin reading poem, over soon as began, --charmed by his accent & intonations, Bunting-ish but faster, Les Murray-ish too in that dont-take-it-too-seriously / throw-off style --not a style, an attitude --no audience but comrade t’other side of the low table, slosh of pints around & about, raucous fandango, infinitely preferable to bourgeois shush (--when you think of it, the poem cuts through the noise of the world, like sudden silence, the awareness of silence as the world’s hurtle’s suddenly brought to sudden screeching stop)...
Ask: Has my brother been in today? We were in the other day, he had a tomato juice... No, she says, dont think so... The Abbot & bro --two Abbots! --like Jack & Warnie, the Louises, or James & Stanislaus with whom BB once caned his younger for perceived deficit in fraternal support, but what would a teenager know... and too much water under bridge now...
*
All change. Traditional bar's gone. The regulars also unless sculking in the WASHROOM (white lettering on pale green board). The lacquered black of counter, tables, chairs has been replaced by grey & green throughout! What is this snack-bar, b& b, holiday-camp, light & bright in aid of? We've only been gone a year --perhaps longer because didnt we go to the Swan (the Abbot & bro) around the corner from St Nicholas's Church last time? I'll lay bets no change there. Ringwood Breweries' Boon Doggle's the strongest, 4.2... Innocents must understand we're on about the taste, which means a quality that tests the palate, resists it --on a continuum, then, with Frank Prince's teaching about same, --Robert Bridges, he said, ho-hum poetry aside, well worth my while to consider his thoughts on poetics... The point about form, Frank says, is that it stops one going on & on aimlessly... it resists that natural laziness, licentiousness etc...
[Ilchester Arms, Abbotsbury, 7th April, '16]
*
[April 22, '16]
It was great meeting up with John Phillips in St Ives a few days ago... went around to his place with Kelvin Bowers my old amigo from the £10 assisted passage on the Fairsky to Melbourne, FIFTY YEARS AGO on the 26 April, '66 !!! It's due to chance meeting on the coastal path between John & Kel that I've once more caught up with Kelvin, outa sight since '03. In the conversation with John, several mutual friends featured including Clive Faust & David Miller... Nice listening to John & Kel discussing the St Ives painters up on the wall including Mathew Lanyon --the fathers & sons conversation, apropos of which the catalogue of the Karl Weschke show, on in London presently, which Lucas Weschke had given me in Weymouth, also spiced the chat. If only I was in St Ives on May 16th as well for the poetry festival when John gives a reading!
*
[April 25, '16] ·
(Re- Jenni Kerr's Facebook post of actors celebrating Shakespeare anniversary, particularly HRH who finished it beautifully!) Great meeting again y'day with David Caddy at The Dolphin, Blandford Forum, our very own local... ordered our pint and our shiraz, and got the ball rolling saying : "Apart from what's in the latest issue of Tears In The Fence, if I asked you "what's the news?" what would you answer?" David hardly considered the question --well, he said, SHAKESPEARE, the 400th anniversary of course! And so we drank to him, Shakespeare all the way...
*
Karl Weschke’s View of Kenydjack (1962; reproduced in the Tate book of the St Ives scene, 1939-64) utterly different to the Sunday painting seen at the Penwith gallery of which the probably accurate sketching is vacant compared with KW’s monolithised brown tiered landscape, so deep & occupied. Could say ‘preoccupied’ but substantial or dense oughtnt imply brooding, since for all the ‘psychological’, ‘expressionist’, ‘existential’ persona there is always painting’s natural presence and nature always present as matter & sentiment...
[St Ives, Kel & Dooze’s house, 18 April, 16]
*
Every time (how many times?) the bus swings around Portesham through to Abbotsbury & beyond (today Bridport again), see St Catherine’s Chapel on the hill. And in Abbotsbury, out the bus window, there it is leftwards over & between the houses, farms. And leaving Abbotsbury, the chapel behind one on its mount, sheep in the green fields like a canopy beneath. And startlingly distinct, on top, along slow hill climb, Chessil & the Channel over the leftside rolls of green (their rolls eventually into the sea).
What is ‘familiarity’? --the first blessing of repetition one presumes, no story but imperceptibly the rise of feeling, full swell of which is Poem, Song, this Painting...
[21 April, ‘16; Weymouth to Bridport, Dorset]
*
English Journey, ‘16 [from the diary]
Friday 22/4/16
9-05 am. (late) Weymouth --> Yeovil -->Glastonbury
Hurrying up Goldcroft aggravated the leg/thigh strain. Hopefully walk it out. Shld have applied some Deep Heat beforehand.
Rain, not heavy but from drizzle to light. If raining i wont attempt to climb the Tor.
The Classes : Passenger / “My daughter’s studying in Glasgow; when she comes down to Durdle Door it soothes her spirit...”
Driver / “Oh yeah; well anywhere’s better than Blackpool heh heh heh...”
Passenger / “You drive so well; I admire your instincts!”
Driver / “I drove lorries before, buses are much smaller. Driving 800 miles up & back soon teaches you how to drive... A spot of rain, though, and the whole road comes to a stop...”
Thinking of Paul Blackburn -- mentioned him to B. last night, how I’ve picked up his poems each visit to Goldcroft over the years. There’s a Blackburn poem for Pete Spence in the Buckmaster section of my forthcoming book. P B’s the kind of American I have in mind re- intractably American & not easily ‘Anglo-American’ or ‘British/American’ as I wrote to Colin Still last night. Were we American poets after all? i asked B some months ago, phone from Melbourne, repeated in email to Colin. He tells me about all the docos he’s made on the American poets (wch he’s offered to send me). I say that my forthcoming book of poems is partly ‘Neo-Georgian’, partly ‘New American Poetry’!
--> Yeovil... Heavier rain. Great countryside. Stone houses stretches of wall fields & meadows...
Stratton
Crewkerne
Rich country -- fallow, ploughed, strips of woods, dividing stands, --the rain enhances the lushness -- Wonderful expanse of undulating ploughed fields -- Motorway runs between these huge sails, wings, of land -- Somerset’s version of Big Country --
Beautiful dip in the landscape, --trees, fields, cows --
After earlier wet am dry again in the coach -- thank goodness for modern technology! --
Woods then village, car-sales...
Lakegate lane
Yeovil -->
In which Billy Boo attempts to read the map as described in ornate Thai characters, ditto the travel times & distances, in the second or two before the screen switches to English. "Local Time at Melbourne 3-27 -- Local Time at Bangkok 11-27". Fair enough. He's already in credit : invited to move out of tight fit threesome to the aisle of a comfortable two. Boo thinks it's because he returned clasped hands greeting with hostesses on the ramp and they misheard his Lao 'sabaidee' for Thai 'sawasdee'. He's belted in, tentatively stretches leg beneath forward seat, glances through the porthole at the cloud plain topped by blue, --imagines lick of first G&T assuredly on its way! As the share passenger's snoring establishes its rhythm, Billy remembers his friends, living & dead, either way not here. The cloud clears, beautiful tracts of land thousands of feet below where Christy is, actually happy down there, stone cottage like Ulli & Celia's place in North Wales, '72, similar embellishments, the attic skylight for example, --Nick Johnson's place in Wiltshire, 90s pied a terre, --& the Abbot in attic heaven, nearer to yoga god than any other, no face, no name, though so many statues in his hermitage one suspects he's not yet run through the argument about idolatry! One of the old crew not yet invoked is Ed. Happens each time Billy flies. Ghost is same kind of disembodiment as flying. Forget about angels, Ed wasnt one. I'll give them turbulence, he swears behind conspiratorial hand as though the weather wore jackboots.....
*
Ed has the flight crew from captain to waiters in mind, not really the elements. All the way to deity via earlier English & later Russian divines, manifestations of magnitude. Ed spittin about pretenders, pretence of authority, supercilious from tie to socks, --purple uniform ultimate slight. Ah, Ed! Ed, mate! how goes it in ghost's Yorkshire heaven? Not there yet, he says, I'm in Purgatory writing poems, sans guide, following my own beaky nose. Hah! Ed, Ed, Ed. Tutoring me yet from beyond the grave, thinks Billy Boo.
*
At Bangkok airport Boo realized that following a straight line got you absolutely nowhere, may as well have been walking in circles. So then he walked around in circles, gauging the world, the non-stop airport world, more 'international' than when first coined (--Inge's daughters crooning 'international' over "Miami Vice", late 80s, --B B 's return to Europe after 12 years exile). Seems to him the Chinese had become the new Americans and everyone else from everywhere else in no way lesser. Each elsewhere a somewhere, similarly worldly-wise, ticket to prove it, legitimate travellers, commuters, no longer exotics of any empire.
But what about Christy, and how come he's let off so easily? Mebbe Billy thinks the boyo might bat him one! (What did Peter Finch say of him once, slightly misapprehending the relation of source to poem?-- "if these are Christy's dreams he must have a head like granite!")
[NOTE :
Re- Ulli & Celia's place, in N Wales, '72 ; from Poem of the Clear Eye
(....)
there is a strangeness surrounds
which our thickest wall cannot evict
(for talisman take anything you find
a coloured slate a star from the constellation
which fills the skylight the vault of Caernarvon)
the foul smell from the town still gets to my nostrils --
Panzer fetch paper! go to
Gethsemane i rise up &
fall down i run till my side aches
i will return to the smoke only to bang the
beafeaters dead in their beds! in my boots
will make mincemeat of
rumours & subterfuge.(...)
(pp34/35; 1972/3; UK & Oz)
[In my poem, Ulli has two dogs, Panzer & Perfidy... The scenario is remembered/invented from the visit to Ulli & Celia for the Bangor Poetry Fest or the poetry event Ulli arranged at the Bangor Arts Fest back in '71 or '72... I believe that Jeremy Hilton drove me from Southampton... ah, Snowdonia…]
*
Daily round : walk from Goldy, down road, left at Pottery Lane (note to self : research derivation), through the small housing estate, cross highway at safety island to Radipole Lake foot & cycle path, past the blackberries ringing the lake six months ahead of bloom & harvest, up onto the bridge & into town... Library, Black Dog, pint!
Ed would approve : get a table, snap notebook or loose page onto it, “let’s get it over then!” through gritted teeth, lank hair & lengthening beard the frame for most ambivalent of propositions, --the argument concerning literature, thus “the literary bit”, not so much the sharing of poems but potential for such inflation as snatches poet from universe to be dropped into egotistical slurry (Ed’s favourite quote, Akhmatova’s rooster crowing upon shit-heap) --the “literary”, --snort into handkerchief, begin reading poem, over soon as began, --charmed by his accent & intonations, Bunting-ish but faster, Les Murray-ish too in that dont-take-it-too-seriously / throw-off style --not a style, an attitude --no audience but comrade t’other side of the low table, slosh of pints around & about, raucous fandango, infinitely preferable to bourgeois shush (--when you think of it, the poem cuts through the noise of the world, like sudden silence, the awareness of silence as the world’s hurtle’s suddenly brought to sudden screeching stop)...
Ask: Has my brother been in today? We were in the other day, he had a tomato juice... No, she says, dont think so... The Abbot & bro --two Abbots! --like Jack & Warnie, the Louises, or James & Stanislaus with whom BB once caned his younger for perceived deficit in fraternal support, but what would a teenager know... and too much water under bridge now...
*
All change. Traditional bar's gone. The regulars also unless sculking in the WASHROOM (white lettering on pale green board). The lacquered black of counter, tables, chairs has been replaced by grey & green throughout! What is this snack-bar, b& b, holiday-camp, light & bright in aid of? We've only been gone a year --perhaps longer because didnt we go to the Swan (the Abbot & bro) around the corner from St Nicholas's Church last time? I'll lay bets no change there. Ringwood Breweries' Boon Doggle's the strongest, 4.2... Innocents must understand we're on about the taste, which means a quality that tests the palate, resists it --on a continuum, then, with Frank Prince's teaching about same, --Robert Bridges, he said, ho-hum poetry aside, well worth my while to consider his thoughts on poetics... The point about form, Frank says, is that it stops one going on & on aimlessly... it resists that natural laziness, licentiousness etc...
[Ilchester Arms, Abbotsbury, 7th April, '16]
*
[April 22, '16]
It was great meeting up with John Phillips in St Ives a few days ago... went around to his place with Kelvin Bowers my old amigo from the £10 assisted passage on the Fairsky to Melbourne, FIFTY YEARS AGO on the 26 April, '66 !!! It's due to chance meeting on the coastal path between John & Kel that I've once more caught up with Kelvin, outa sight since '03. In the conversation with John, several mutual friends featured including Clive Faust & David Miller... Nice listening to John & Kel discussing the St Ives painters up on the wall including Mathew Lanyon --the fathers & sons conversation, apropos of which the catalogue of the Karl Weschke show, on in London presently, which Lucas Weschke had given me in Weymouth, also spiced the chat. If only I was in St Ives on May 16th as well for the poetry festival when John gives a reading!
*
[April 25, '16] ·
(Re- Jenni Kerr's Facebook post of actors celebrating Shakespeare anniversary, particularly HRH who finished it beautifully!) Great meeting again y'day with David Caddy at The Dolphin, Blandford Forum, our very own local... ordered our pint and our shiraz, and got the ball rolling saying : "Apart from what's in the latest issue of Tears In The Fence, if I asked you "what's the news?" what would you answer?" David hardly considered the question --well, he said, SHAKESPEARE, the 400th anniversary of course! And so we drank to him, Shakespeare all the way...
*
Karl Weschke’s View of Kenydjack (1962; reproduced in the Tate book of the St Ives scene, 1939-64) utterly different to the Sunday painting seen at the Penwith gallery of which the probably accurate sketching is vacant compared with KW’s monolithised brown tiered landscape, so deep & occupied. Could say ‘preoccupied’ but substantial or dense oughtnt imply brooding, since for all the ‘psychological’, ‘expressionist’, ‘existential’ persona there is always painting’s natural presence and nature always present as matter & sentiment...
[St Ives, Kel & Dooze’s house, 18 April, 16]
*
Every time (how many times?) the bus swings around Portesham through to Abbotsbury & beyond (today Bridport again), see St Catherine’s Chapel on the hill. And in Abbotsbury, out the bus window, there it is leftwards over & between the houses, farms. And leaving Abbotsbury, the chapel behind one on its mount, sheep in the green fields like a canopy beneath. And startlingly distinct, on top, along slow hill climb, Chessil & the Channel over the leftside rolls of green (their rolls eventually into the sea).
What is ‘familiarity’? --the first blessing of repetition one presumes, no story but imperceptibly the rise of feeling, full swell of which is Poem, Song, this Painting...
[21 April, ‘16; Weymouth to Bridport, Dorset]
*
English Journey, ‘16 [from the diary]
Friday 22/4/16
9-05 am. (late) Weymouth --> Yeovil -->Glastonbury
Hurrying up Goldcroft aggravated the leg/thigh strain. Hopefully walk it out. Shld have applied some Deep Heat beforehand.
Rain, not heavy but from drizzle to light. If raining i wont attempt to climb the Tor.
The Classes : Passenger / “My daughter’s studying in Glasgow; when she comes down to Durdle Door it soothes her spirit...”
Driver / “Oh yeah; well anywhere’s better than Blackpool heh heh heh...”
Passenger / “You drive so well; I admire your instincts!”
Driver / “I drove lorries before, buses are much smaller. Driving 800 miles up & back soon teaches you how to drive... A spot of rain, though, and the whole road comes to a stop...”
Thinking of Paul Blackburn -- mentioned him to B. last night, how I’ve picked up his poems each visit to Goldcroft over the years. There’s a Blackburn poem for Pete Spence in the Buckmaster section of my forthcoming book. P B’s the kind of American I have in mind re- intractably American & not easily ‘Anglo-American’ or ‘British/American’ as I wrote to Colin Still last night. Were we American poets after all? i asked B some months ago, phone from Melbourne, repeated in email to Colin. He tells me about all the docos he’s made on the American poets (wch he’s offered to send me). I say that my forthcoming book of poems is partly ‘Neo-Georgian’, partly ‘New American Poetry’!
--> Yeovil... Heavier rain. Great countryside. Stone houses stretches of wall fields & meadows...
Stratton
Crewkerne
Rich country -- fallow, ploughed, strips of woods, dividing stands, --the rain enhances the lushness -- Wonderful expanse of undulating ploughed fields -- Motorway runs between these huge sails, wings, of land -- Somerset’s version of Big Country --
Beautiful dip in the landscape, --trees, fields, cows --
After earlier wet am dry again in the coach -- thank goodness for modern technology! --
Woods then village, car-sales...
Lakegate lane
Yeovil -->
Thursday, May 5, 2016
THE BLACK DOG REPORT : English Journey, '16
The Black Dog Report, # 1
There arent many pubs anywhere in the country, he says, where you can get a pint straight out of the barrel. Of course I'm agreeing. Yes, I saw that yesterday (--with the Abbot, and noticed the enclave around & below the taps, and the bar-woman leant down to fish dregs out of bucket Billy thought! --surely not? --clot, Ed mutters, --unacceptable probably would be "twat" pronounced "twot", which is the natural rhyme, expletive or not), poured an Old Speckled Hen, the taste deserving better body but worth it for the palate. But today there isnt any! I dont have it today my love, she tells me, cheerfully. Oh no, says I... You drank it all yesterday, she laughs. The chap who extolled the barrels now recommends I.P.A., --the best drop in my opinion, he says. There's no choice. I go with a half. Let me know what you think, he says. But he's off soon after leaving me to bathe in the brown public bar, variously lighter & darker complexion of tables, chairs, floor boards, counter-top --English history's deep stained & lacquered culture. And that's most of the point of it --the pub thing --through a glass oakly, wallnutly, Andy Capp-ly, Sheila Chandra-ly, David Caddy-ly, Kris Hemensley, & Uncle Tom Cobbly & all & all...
[31st March, '16]
oOo
The Black Dog Report, # 2
Bustling beetling little old lady, "See you later or on a Christmas Tree…" Walk around the different leveled public bar --it's all public bar including snugs, billiard table near the Gents, room with open fire. Looking for a table away from the pop muzak. The only spot is on the walk-through, sufficiently close to the bar to catch eye, exchange word with barman. In the process ("See you at the Dog"), Ive lost the Abbot & the Wheel. Small town, bank on it we'll rendezvous soon.
After rain there's sun --taxi-driver suggested snow! 'Poor old England' the Alexandrian family would admonish seriously, looking down collective aristocratic nose on their in-laws.
Second pint with the crew about me again. They're the photographers, me the pen & notebook man. Drop into a place often enough… no, it's surely more than that --because the environment's familiar from the first, offers itself up, every black beam, each square of purple leaf & olive carpet, accommodating. 'Oldest Pub in Weymouth' the hook of course --snob in a snood, hah!
Next day, late afternoon, drop in for a pint & use of facilities, grateful after long ride from Salisbury. The alternating bar staff together on this occasion wearing blue shirt uniforms, both less voluble than when working alone. Today's piped music is eclectic, sounds authentic, --who'd knowingly pass on Harry Belafonte's There's A Hole in My Bucket duet with Odetta?
[4/5 April, '16]
oOo
The Black Dog Report, # 3
Amble along the sea-front in full sunshine --B B meditative --sea-shell beach sapped his energy, not proud of it. Plonks himself upon bench this morning in sunshine everyone's calling "gorgeous". Penny for 'em, says the Girl (--how long's he known her? --Christy's squeeze once upon a time --more than one Christy, more than one anyone --mebbe more than one life… Sudden voice in ear --Ed's --"only one? be careful what you wish for!")-- Not thinking of anything, he says, --which she wont have a bar of! But B B cant be drawn, old hand. Doesn't mention the Fielding Dawson style of narrative he's been thinking his own might resemble --cogitative, soliloquy, occasionally but unpredictably intersected by expressionistic flurry. This text is ahead of itself. B B simply thought of Fielding Dawson, the Black Mountain artist & writer he once corresponded with, whose stories & novels he devoured. No one talks about any of them, that entire '60s, '70s constellation --"no one" as fraction of erstwhile 'everyone', from way back everyone did read them. Ed's mate Long Tim Ville-john --or Long Johns what the Cornish friends called him after they'd wintered there --so excited when the new Dawson was published, The Black Mountain Book for example, compared it to the earlier work, Franz Kline, An Emotional Memoir, and as far as commentary's concerned, he said, the way to go (--sorry guys, just gotta butt in here : back in the day, attempting to get Fielding out to Oz, enlisted the support of worthies like Michael Wilding, Jim Hamilton, Elwyn Lynn, and sought out, importantly, Patrick McCaughey, but against the flow he declined --the writings by Dawson I'd cited as sparkling recommendations were, he said, the very things which brought art criticism into disrepute! --whaaaat? --1975! --where was he coming from?) --you've probably guessed this reminiscence occurs beneath the antique beams of the Black Dog to the "here you are my love"s &"thank you my darling"s of the mother of the usual barwoman who banters the very same affections in the identical manner, being the ultimate Dorset locals, inside of the piped Ray Orbison & the soul & reggae, in the all-around brown & black lacquered English cave, sunniest Spring day at bay…
[12/13-4-16]
oOo
The Black Dog Report, # 4
"Are there new faces around here or have I just been coming on the wrong days?" "I'm the new landlady… bought the business 7 weeks ago…"
Thinking how I love this pub --I'm sitting at table adjacent to the bar, back to the fruit-machine, facing down one step to the main bar & door, porch, & street.
Ah, the posts & beams. 'Please Mind Your Head' (--how did kids devise Fleas Love Your Head out of that on the school bus? Fleas out of Please, but Love out of Mind? I think it must have been Please Lower Your head. Of course)…
And here he is : black leather jacket & blue denims, the Bogart face but this time's shorn hair, earring. The Sailor. Steps outside for a fag, parks his pint of Thatcher's cider on the bar. Five minutes, puff & flick away, return, puff restored. Billy Boo takes it all in. "Who shot the deputy?" Sailor humms to the muzak. His foot-tapping's natural, the music's fake. Everything else is real.
Given icy breeze no choice between seafront & Black Dog, but choice made without weather in mind. Honour thy local, if not it'll go the way of all locals. Honour thy local bitter, thy Old Speckled Hen, thy Original Mini Cheddars (biscuits).
Sailor complains about the music, doesn't distinguish between the piped crap & the cartoon of rock'n'roll he mimics to the hilarity of bar-staff. "Doesn't like it but knows all about it!" one says behind his back. He's outside again, second cigarette of the day.
[29-4-16]
Sunday, June 2, 2013
ON THE RUN # 2 : Posts Retrieved from Cyberspace
April 15th, 2013
In a couple of hours Cathy & i are setting off for Brittany (St Malo) via Poole... From St Malo to Roskof (spelling? ive only heard it spoken)... The other capn advises warm clothes. Jeans, jumper, good shoes : I dont have many options!!! Raincoat? Forget it!
Y'day bus ride to West Bay to see the Paul Jones exhibition at the great Sladers Yard gallery. Yes, it has a café too! Scones with jam & cream + hot choc, coffee etc But dont spread that around! I'm supposed to be shedding weight!
Paul Jones on a continuum with Nicholson, that is clarity, precision; but then the Tapies-like metallic, mixed-media patina throws the work somewhere else. I guess the Nicholson connection is the constructed abstracted landscape, and the sculptural aspect. Also the topographical element, internal & external map. Looking at a work such as this (and perhaps ANY work) I cant help but 'see' all of the associations as though enabled to review the lot!
Seems to me that West Bay has 'developed' somewhat since last visit [September/October, 12]; like the place is it's own now, not a bedraggled stop before Bridport. Loved the little harbour, and the dramatic cliff wall, and the big seas & spray like steam off the water.
John Anderson recommended S W Victorian coast as nearest to this cliff/sea/green apposition after I returned from late '80s English trip raving about Cornwall, Devon, Dorset coastline... remembered this & John himself as we watched the little kids dare the white seas catch them on the sand!
So, folks, off to Brittany, and probably out of touch til Thursday when we're back to Weymouth again... Salut!
oOo
May 1st, '13
Scoured EVOLVER [Wessex Arts magazine] for likely shows to see and find Lucas Weschke exhibiting at the Bridport Arts Centre... Bernard has told me abt occasional meetings with L W in Weymouth... I knew the name Weschke as of Karl Weschke of St Ives school associations [died 2005, German expat, settled in Cornwall, intimate of Wynter, Hilton, WS Graham et al]... Sure enough Lucas is K W's son...
Contrast of hard, sober lines & apparently whimsical figures tho' the titles suggest o/wise... Exhibition in foyer, 'continues in cafe'... thank goodness we didnt have to peer over coffee & cake patrons to see the linocuts! On the other hand, the large upstairs gallery perhaps too cold & cavernous for L W's pieces...
oOo
PS : May 8th,'13; Heathrow to Bangkok
Captain speaking : 10 hours &15 minutes flight...
There's a general spreading out from allotted to what're perceived as better seats. Christy allows himself gleeful chuckle sufficient to alert jovial ghosts though not fellow passengers. Historically aching legs now have 3 seat spread to flex in.
12.32, rolling...
12.41, taxiing...
12.52, here we go, here we go, here we go... turning, turning, following American Airlines flight to the runway...
Altitude 735 feet hitting the cloud but English fields discernible...
Lost in the fog, says Ed, where blue is sea or sky, archipelagos on high. And Christy spies the drinks trolly though Ed it is who calls it like it is : even better with G&T, he snaps.
From his angle peering up the aisle, Christy sees gowned nurses with portable drips...
At 19,000 feet see the leaving of England, darling strands of beach, the Channel, encroaching the breadth of Europe. The bumf says Eddie...
oOo
May 19, '13
I'll take advantage of the Boswell Festival's focus by thinking aloud, at a tangent, about a contemporary writing that's in & out of (i say 'in & out of' because 'simultaneously' not quite right) biography, autobiography, memoir, history & commentary. 50 years years ago Mailer's Advertisements for Myself wowed me; 40 years ago Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, with its wonderfully novelistic beginning; also the many forms of the New Journalism... Then there's Iain Sinclair's writing, notably his John Claire book... and a book i'm currently reading, David Caddy's Cycling After Thomas & the English...
In fact, now that ive begun this survey it's as though the 'in & out of''s more the rule than the rarity! In this time of which we're writers, 'in & out of' , with its begging of categories, sits happily beside pure biography & history... Local examples would include our friends Robert Kenny (The Lamb Enters the Dreaming) & Evelyn Juers (House of Exile)...
oOo
May 21st, '13
Recall late 60s, copy of the Village Voice at Betty Burstall's La Mama cafe-theatre in Faraday Street, Carlton, --at least i think it was Village Voice? --could have been I.T.? --no, Village Voice --and there was a pic & article about Jim Morrison & Michael McClure --Morrison staying with McClure in latter poet's loft. Mention this as important music/poetry connection in our casual education them thar times. Years later realized that McClure & Manzarek were touring --in Europe i think. Manzarek's novel about Morrison, The Poet in Exile (pub Thunders Mouth, 2001) has its moments; "You son-of-a-bitch," I said, 'Don't tell me the rumours are true." (Morrison replies, "I haven't heard the rumours.") Retta reminds me, singing "When the music's over, turn out the light..." Except it isnt ever over!!! Ray Manzarek, RIP
oOo
May 23rd, '13
Exactly as Mandy Pannett says, the kind of thing i also love! Must see if i can order via Ingram for Collected Works Bookshop...
"Original and fascinating" a review of: Cycling After Thomas And The English...
[www.amazon.co.uk]
22 May 2013
By
Mandy Pannett "wordshopper"
"This is the kind of travel writing I love. Not only is its journey inspired by Edward Thomas, one of my favourite poets, but David Caddy's imaginative counterpart to the linear route he takes is a lateral one, full of anecdotes and observations, everyday tidbits, reflections on literature, history, geography and nature - a broad and intriguing canvas. Robert Frost's poem `The Road Not Taken' is based on the many long walks he took with Edward Thomas and the way his friend would try to show him lots of things at once, all in different directions. There is something of this outspreading, this reaching out to grasp the essence of things, in this book. In the chapter on Salisbury, for instance, the author, stands on a spot where Constable painted and describes what he sees, but the next paragraph begins `I could cycle north west to Salisbury Plain where Wordsworth walked' and in the paragraph after that he muses on the fact that `I could cycle north and east a few miles along the A30 to Figsbury Rings.' Edward Thomas would have understood such dilemmas very well.
The quest (which is how the journey seems to me, a quest that is both physical and spiritual) begins with the author's desire to repeat the poet's travels by cycling round parts of southern England. At the same time there is a wish to pin down the intangible and find what it means to be `peculiarly English'. In this context, throughout the book, certain key words recur: heritage, topography, local, identity, tradition, freedom. We are offered no definitive conclusions, no answers to the questions, only hints and suggestions and the joys of exploration.
`Cycling After Thomas' was inspired by Edward Thomas' `In Pursuit of Spring' (1914). David Caddy's motivation is clear: `When I reread this montage of stories, quotations, voices, literary criticism, digressions and odd juxtapositions, I knew I had to emulate the journey and see what was left and who had subsequently lived along the route.' From this reading begins the bicycle journey that starts and ends in Dorset with many digressions and stopping off points along the way.
There is a wealth of material in this book, too much to cover here. Like David Caddy and like Edward Thomas I could say I'll refer to this, I could talk about that, I might discuss a comment or digress to an anecdote - but since that would be distracting and haphazard I'll just mention parts of the book that interest me most - possibly because they take place in areas I know well. I love the chapter about Box Hill where Jane Austen sets the picnic in `Emma', the discussion on Vaughan Williams' `The Lark Ascending' together with the whole background and roots of folk music, and the wonderful chapter on Winchester where Keats began his `Ode to Autumn' and where, near the water meadows, `by squinting and removing all the cars and car parks there is still a strong sense of the natural world present.'
There is more, lots more. This book entices me, as I'm sure it will other readers, to follow the quest for myself."
I dont have Edward Thomas's In Pursuit of Spring, and since David described it to me, in the Dolphin couple of weeks ago, I've been intrigued, but have found two extracts in a Thomas anthology i do own, Edward Thomas on the Countryside : A selection of his prose & verse, ed Roland Gant (Faber, '77)... Read them last night before sleeping : lovely stuff! And can imagine the encouragement David felt for his own heightened reportage from ET's noting & quoting.
oOo
June 1st, '13
Thank you Andrew Kingsford for yr tip : I regret to say that if i have even heard of Raphael Samuel it's only the merest echo in my thick head...
[See : Bishopsgate Institute - Samuel, Raphael - The Raphael Samuel Archive www.bishopsgate.org.uk Raphael Samuel Archive at the Bishopsgate Library]
The context for Andrew's suggestion was my description of conversations with David Caddy last month in which I wondered about the reception David's book, Cycling After Thomas & the English, might have received in England. In my mind was a sense of a general avoidance by sophisticated criticism of questions of 'identity', characterizing it as passe at best & more often a dangerous distraction. In the conversation with DC, he confirmed his tradition as Christopher Hill, EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm... Andrew agreed there was a left-wing shrugging off of 'identity' but not all them, he said : Thompson, Raymond Williams, and crucially Raphael Samuel...
OK, let's get ready to read!
+
A Melbourne connection with the generality of the above is an argument i began shaping in response to Waleed Aly's opinion piece in The Age (May 17,'13), headlined "Tory Politics : pact to the rafters in contradiction" & sub-headed "Tea Party in the US, the UKIP in Britain --Abbott better beware of the rising attraction of conservative splitters"... It seemed to me, though interesting, that Aly's piece was misleading insofar as its marxist or at least economic template prohibits any mention of questions of identity expressed nationally though deeply, personally experienced. I'm not across Tea Party or (Bob Katter's) Australia Party agendas like Waleed Aly, but have followed the discussion in England for several decades and recognize UKIP as a player in an utterly proper & necessary cultural questioning. (Questioning as critically remembering & celebrating...) At one time the contrast was with the USA --for example the discussion of British & American English (WW1 to the present) as prism for shifting authority (--poetry's foremost in this poet's mind but economic & political power's caught in the same wash). Ever since Britain's entry into the EEC, 'Europe''s been the necessary issue, and certainly what most exercises the minds of any number of people in Britain, let alone UKIP... This is the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and needless to say my response to Aly (probably a book and as much autobiography as political critique) hasnt left my notebook!
+
In his article, Waleed Aly's political-economic analysis contends, "We're entering a new phase in which the Western world is no longer globalisation's biggest winner. Bob Katter's constituency have long been globalisation's losers. (...) Katter and UKIP are, in some muddled way, attempting to capture what conservative politics lost when it got radically liberal : an abiding concern for the local, and privileging of the local, and a rejection of political programs that bring huge structural change." Aly's phrase 'muddled way' perhaps acknowledges the establishment's cliche depiction 'loony', but that aside, he's got the equation right : globalization & the local. And in the heart of the local is the cultural, the identity question. Not at all sure what parallels can be drawn along that line between Australia & Britain. The people ive talked to, as recently as a few weeks ago, are concerned abt sovereignty vis a vis the EEC's bureaucracy. None of them have yet voted for UKIP! Their's is a concern on behalf of a 21st century multi-ethnic Britain against a version of the global emanating from Brussells wch depersonalises & decontextualises a society, an economy, a culture... I'm at one with them in a happy, whole-hearted struggle for particularity against abstraction! Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera....
+
From a review of Raphael Samuel and relating to my interest :
"Theatres of Memory: Volume 1. Past and Present in Contemporary Culture
[Verso, 1994, 479 pages] [Review from Political Science, ?'94]
The idea that the past is a plaything of the present, or a 'metafiction', is only now beginning to disturb the tranquillity of professional historians, but for some twenty years it has been a commonplace of epistemological criticism, and a mainspring of experimental work in literature and the arts. Thus in 'magical realism' or 'modern Gothic' the fairy tale can appear as the latest thing; while in the visual arts, futurist installations offer themselves as parodies of Old Masters. 'Back to the future' is also a leitmotiv in commodity marketing and design - something discussed here under the heading of 'Retrochic' - while in Britain, as in other advanced capitalist societies, conservation has been the cutting edge of the business recolonization of the inner city.
According to critics of the heritage industry the current obsession with the past signals not a return to tradition but the exhaustion of history's grand narratives. The postmodern condition, so the argument runs, is one where the future has spectacularly parted company from the past. Nostalgia is the sigh of the historically orphaned, heritage a symptom of national decay.
In this book - the first of a trilogy - Raphael Samuel takes issue with the heritage baiters. He offers an alternative genealogy of resurrectionism, relating it to the environmentalist movements of our time. He argues that we live in an expanding historical culture, one which is newly alert to the evidence of the visual, and which is reconnecting the study of landscape and townscape to that of the natural world. It is also, he argues, more democratic than earlier versions of the national past, and much more hospitable to hitherto stigmatized minorities. The volume is prefaced with a long essay on unofficial knowledge and has an Afterword on 'allegories of the real'. "
Hmmm. Well, we'll see!
In a couple of hours Cathy & i are setting off for Brittany (St Malo) via Poole... From St Malo to Roskof (spelling? ive only heard it spoken)... The other capn advises warm clothes. Jeans, jumper, good shoes : I dont have many options!!! Raincoat? Forget it!
Y'day bus ride to West Bay to see the Paul Jones exhibition at the great Sladers Yard gallery. Yes, it has a café too! Scones with jam & cream + hot choc, coffee etc But dont spread that around! I'm supposed to be shedding weight!
Paul Jones on a continuum with Nicholson, that is clarity, precision; but then the Tapies-like metallic, mixed-media patina throws the work somewhere else. I guess the Nicholson connection is the constructed abstracted landscape, and the sculptural aspect. Also the topographical element, internal & external map. Looking at a work such as this (and perhaps ANY work) I cant help but 'see' all of the associations as though enabled to review the lot!
Seems to me that West Bay has 'developed' somewhat since last visit [September/October, 12]; like the place is it's own now, not a bedraggled stop before Bridport. Loved the little harbour, and the dramatic cliff wall, and the big seas & spray like steam off the water.
John Anderson recommended S W Victorian coast as nearest to this cliff/sea/green apposition after I returned from late '80s English trip raving about Cornwall, Devon, Dorset coastline... remembered this & John himself as we watched the little kids dare the white seas catch them on the sand!
So, folks, off to Brittany, and probably out of touch til Thursday when we're back to Weymouth again... Salut!
oOo
May 1st, '13
Scoured EVOLVER [Wessex Arts magazine] for likely shows to see and find Lucas Weschke exhibiting at the Bridport Arts Centre... Bernard has told me abt occasional meetings with L W in Weymouth... I knew the name Weschke as of Karl Weschke of St Ives school associations [died 2005, German expat, settled in Cornwall, intimate of Wynter, Hilton, WS Graham et al]... Sure enough Lucas is K W's son...
Contrast of hard, sober lines & apparently whimsical figures tho' the titles suggest o/wise... Exhibition in foyer, 'continues in cafe'... thank goodness we didnt have to peer over coffee & cake patrons to see the linocuts! On the other hand, the large upstairs gallery perhaps too cold & cavernous for L W's pieces...
oOo
PS : May 8th,'13; Heathrow to Bangkok
Captain speaking : 10 hours &15 minutes flight...
There's a general spreading out from allotted to what're perceived as better seats. Christy allows himself gleeful chuckle sufficient to alert jovial ghosts though not fellow passengers. Historically aching legs now have 3 seat spread to flex in.
12.32, rolling...
12.41, taxiing...
12.52, here we go, here we go, here we go... turning, turning, following American Airlines flight to the runway...
Altitude 735 feet hitting the cloud but English fields discernible...
Lost in the fog, says Ed, where blue is sea or sky, archipelagos on high. And Christy spies the drinks trolly though Ed it is who calls it like it is : even better with G&T, he snaps.
From his angle peering up the aisle, Christy sees gowned nurses with portable drips...
At 19,000 feet see the leaving of England, darling strands of beach, the Channel, encroaching the breadth of Europe. The bumf says Eddie...
oOo
May 19, '13
I'll take advantage of the Boswell Festival's focus by thinking aloud, at a tangent, about a contemporary writing that's in & out of (i say 'in & out of' because 'simultaneously' not quite right) biography, autobiography, memoir, history & commentary. 50 years years ago Mailer's Advertisements for Myself wowed me; 40 years ago Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, with its wonderfully novelistic beginning; also the many forms of the New Journalism... Then there's Iain Sinclair's writing, notably his John Claire book... and a book i'm currently reading, David Caddy's Cycling After Thomas & the English...
In fact, now that ive begun this survey it's as though the 'in & out of''s more the rule than the rarity! In this time of which we're writers, 'in & out of' , with its begging of categories, sits happily beside pure biography & history... Local examples would include our friends Robert Kenny (The Lamb Enters the Dreaming) & Evelyn Juers (House of Exile)...
oOo
May 21st, '13
Recall late 60s, copy of the Village Voice at Betty Burstall's La Mama cafe-theatre in Faraday Street, Carlton, --at least i think it was Village Voice? --could have been I.T.? --no, Village Voice --and there was a pic & article about Jim Morrison & Michael McClure --Morrison staying with McClure in latter poet's loft. Mention this as important music/poetry connection in our casual education them thar times. Years later realized that McClure & Manzarek were touring --in Europe i think. Manzarek's novel about Morrison, The Poet in Exile (pub Thunders Mouth, 2001) has its moments; "You son-of-a-bitch," I said, 'Don't tell me the rumours are true." (Morrison replies, "I haven't heard the rumours.") Retta reminds me, singing "When the music's over, turn out the light..." Except it isnt ever over!!! Ray Manzarek, RIP
oOo
May 23rd, '13
Exactly as Mandy Pannett says, the kind of thing i also love! Must see if i can order via Ingram for Collected Works Bookshop...
"Original and fascinating" a review of: Cycling After Thomas And The English...
[www.amazon.co.uk]
22 May 2013
By
Mandy Pannett "wordshopper"
"This is the kind of travel writing I love. Not only is its journey inspired by Edward Thomas, one of my favourite poets, but David Caddy's imaginative counterpart to the linear route he takes is a lateral one, full of anecdotes and observations, everyday tidbits, reflections on literature, history, geography and nature - a broad and intriguing canvas. Robert Frost's poem `The Road Not Taken' is based on the many long walks he took with Edward Thomas and the way his friend would try to show him lots of things at once, all in different directions. There is something of this outspreading, this reaching out to grasp the essence of things, in this book. In the chapter on Salisbury, for instance, the author, stands on a spot where Constable painted and describes what he sees, but the next paragraph begins `I could cycle north west to Salisbury Plain where Wordsworth walked' and in the paragraph after that he muses on the fact that `I could cycle north and east a few miles along the A30 to Figsbury Rings.' Edward Thomas would have understood such dilemmas very well.
The quest (which is how the journey seems to me, a quest that is both physical and spiritual) begins with the author's desire to repeat the poet's travels by cycling round parts of southern England. At the same time there is a wish to pin down the intangible and find what it means to be `peculiarly English'. In this context, throughout the book, certain key words recur: heritage, topography, local, identity, tradition, freedom. We are offered no definitive conclusions, no answers to the questions, only hints and suggestions and the joys of exploration.
`Cycling After Thomas' was inspired by Edward Thomas' `In Pursuit of Spring' (1914). David Caddy's motivation is clear: `When I reread this montage of stories, quotations, voices, literary criticism, digressions and odd juxtapositions, I knew I had to emulate the journey and see what was left and who had subsequently lived along the route.' From this reading begins the bicycle journey that starts and ends in Dorset with many digressions and stopping off points along the way.
There is a wealth of material in this book, too much to cover here. Like David Caddy and like Edward Thomas I could say I'll refer to this, I could talk about that, I might discuss a comment or digress to an anecdote - but since that would be distracting and haphazard I'll just mention parts of the book that interest me most - possibly because they take place in areas I know well. I love the chapter about Box Hill where Jane Austen sets the picnic in `Emma', the discussion on Vaughan Williams' `The Lark Ascending' together with the whole background and roots of folk music, and the wonderful chapter on Winchester where Keats began his `Ode to Autumn' and where, near the water meadows, `by squinting and removing all the cars and car parks there is still a strong sense of the natural world present.'
There is more, lots more. This book entices me, as I'm sure it will other readers, to follow the quest for myself."
I dont have Edward Thomas's In Pursuit of Spring, and since David described it to me, in the Dolphin couple of weeks ago, I've been intrigued, but have found two extracts in a Thomas anthology i do own, Edward Thomas on the Countryside : A selection of his prose & verse, ed Roland Gant (Faber, '77)... Read them last night before sleeping : lovely stuff! And can imagine the encouragement David felt for his own heightened reportage from ET's noting & quoting.
oOo
June 1st, '13
Thank you Andrew Kingsford for yr tip : I regret to say that if i have even heard of Raphael Samuel it's only the merest echo in my thick head...
[See : Bishopsgate Institute - Samuel, Raphael - The Raphael Samuel Archive www.bishopsgate.org.uk Raphael Samuel Archive at the Bishopsgate Library]
The context for Andrew's suggestion was my description of conversations with David Caddy last month in which I wondered about the reception David's book, Cycling After Thomas & the English, might have received in England. In my mind was a sense of a general avoidance by sophisticated criticism of questions of 'identity', characterizing it as passe at best & more often a dangerous distraction. In the conversation with DC, he confirmed his tradition as Christopher Hill, EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm... Andrew agreed there was a left-wing shrugging off of 'identity' but not all them, he said : Thompson, Raymond Williams, and crucially Raphael Samuel...
OK, let's get ready to read!
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A Melbourne connection with the generality of the above is an argument i began shaping in response to Waleed Aly's opinion piece in The Age (May 17,'13), headlined "Tory Politics : pact to the rafters in contradiction" & sub-headed "Tea Party in the US, the UKIP in Britain --Abbott better beware of the rising attraction of conservative splitters"... It seemed to me, though interesting, that Aly's piece was misleading insofar as its marxist or at least economic template prohibits any mention of questions of identity expressed nationally though deeply, personally experienced. I'm not across Tea Party or (Bob Katter's) Australia Party agendas like Waleed Aly, but have followed the discussion in England for several decades and recognize UKIP as a player in an utterly proper & necessary cultural questioning. (Questioning as critically remembering & celebrating...) At one time the contrast was with the USA --for example the discussion of British & American English (WW1 to the present) as prism for shifting authority (--poetry's foremost in this poet's mind but economic & political power's caught in the same wash). Ever since Britain's entry into the EEC, 'Europe''s been the necessary issue, and certainly what most exercises the minds of any number of people in Britain, let alone UKIP... This is the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and needless to say my response to Aly (probably a book and as much autobiography as political critique) hasnt left my notebook!
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In his article, Waleed Aly's political-economic analysis contends, "We're entering a new phase in which the Western world is no longer globalisation's biggest winner. Bob Katter's constituency have long been globalisation's losers. (...) Katter and UKIP are, in some muddled way, attempting to capture what conservative politics lost when it got radically liberal : an abiding concern for the local, and privileging of the local, and a rejection of political programs that bring huge structural change." Aly's phrase 'muddled way' perhaps acknowledges the establishment's cliche depiction 'loony', but that aside, he's got the equation right : globalization & the local. And in the heart of the local is the cultural, the identity question. Not at all sure what parallels can be drawn along that line between Australia & Britain. The people ive talked to, as recently as a few weeks ago, are concerned abt sovereignty vis a vis the EEC's bureaucracy. None of them have yet voted for UKIP! Their's is a concern on behalf of a 21st century multi-ethnic Britain against a version of the global emanating from Brussells wch depersonalises & decontextualises a society, an economy, a culture... I'm at one with them in a happy, whole-hearted struggle for particularity against abstraction! Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera....
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From a review of Raphael Samuel and relating to my interest :
"Theatres of Memory: Volume 1. Past and Present in Contemporary Culture
[Verso, 1994, 479 pages] [Review from Political Science, ?'94]
The idea that the past is a plaything of the present, or a 'metafiction', is only now beginning to disturb the tranquillity of professional historians, but for some twenty years it has been a commonplace of epistemological criticism, and a mainspring of experimental work in literature and the arts. Thus in 'magical realism' or 'modern Gothic' the fairy tale can appear as the latest thing; while in the visual arts, futurist installations offer themselves as parodies of Old Masters. 'Back to the future' is also a leitmotiv in commodity marketing and design - something discussed here under the heading of 'Retrochic' - while in Britain, as in other advanced capitalist societies, conservation has been the cutting edge of the business recolonization of the inner city.
According to critics of the heritage industry the current obsession with the past signals not a return to tradition but the exhaustion of history's grand narratives. The postmodern condition, so the argument runs, is one where the future has spectacularly parted company from the past. Nostalgia is the sigh of the historically orphaned, heritage a symptom of national decay.
In this book - the first of a trilogy - Raphael Samuel takes issue with the heritage baiters. He offers an alternative genealogy of resurrectionism, relating it to the environmentalist movements of our time. He argues that we live in an expanding historical culture, one which is newly alert to the evidence of the visual, and which is reconnecting the study of landscape and townscape to that of the natural world. It is also, he argues, more democratic than earlier versions of the national past, and much more hospitable to hitherto stigmatized minorities. The volume is prefaced with a long essay on unofficial knowledge and has an Afterword on 'allegories of the real'. "
Hmmm. Well, we'll see!
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