Preoccupations

Dyer’s hand

Garden and kitchen have been claiming their time. We were picking and prepping red currants for a couple of days and now — on to the gooseberries. Sometimes, the garden can feel very bossy (and that’s generally a good thing).

A little while back I had several books on the go, including The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, Alice Oswald’s first collection of poems. In the time I’ve had just recently, I’ve been re-reading it. It’s very beautiful.

The sea had mastered them. They couldn’t make
even the simplest sense of what they had witnessed:
the moon, the birds, the crooked boat. They moved
far out between absurdity and wonder,
rocking like figures in a nursery rhyme,
the waves like great smooth beasts shoving them on.

…

The sea was miles and miles of palish tin
and a small countermoon was floating there,
very clear, very irregular perfect —
an aspirin in the middle of the world

and may the mystery move them now — the sea
cannot be finished with; each layer is laid
co-terminous with light but more than light
and seamless and invisible in water —
cannot be closed or opened, only entered …

*****

As we work, the rhythm takes us over, until we look up, backs aching, hands, t-shirts and shorts part-dyed with berry juice. You and the work and the world immediately around you (and that’s all you are aware of now) have melded.

Monday, stacking wood for a couple of hours, the same with differences: splinters in my hands, a little blood on the wood, and, after a time, the feel and smell of the wood in my head.

 

And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.

Lucy straightens up, stretches, bends down again. Field-labour; peasant tasks, immemorial.

… embodied actors interacting in the world, participating in it and acting through it, in the absorbed and unreflective manner of normal experience.

Technorati Tags: poetry, literature, Alice Oswald, embodied, flow, work

The Guardian Saturday Poem

 

King Lear

It does not keep you safe; it does not

give you the words you need, it does not

tell you how much to pay, how much

they owe you. It will not work, like egg-yolks,

to cool the numb heat of lost eyes and treacheries.

It does not surrender to the reasonable

case for not risking everything to keep

secrets and rivals, the white line in the tickling

membrane of freedom. It will not keep you dry: rain,

like crying, sinks down to the bone.

It will not stop: not when you sleep, not

when you wake, not when you want it to,

not when you want to settle with the mirror

of your shame. Never. It will not. Never.

Rowan Williams

Technorati tags: Rowan Williams, poetry

Amongst poets

Adam Foulds came in to school on Thursday and read from The Broken Word (Sunday Times review here, Guardian here). Earlier this term, I read the poem in one sitting: it’s not difficult to do this, but it was, in any case, simply not a poem I wanted to break off from reading. It is very disturbing, not least because of the contrast between the quality of the telling and what it has to tell. Hearing so much of it read affected me greatly and, in winding up the reading, I slipped and called Adam ‘Robin’ — as his reading had melded in my mind with Robin Robertson’s also dark reading from earlier in the term.

Adam talked afterwards about the LRB review which lies behind the poem. You need a subscription, but the review, Bernard Porter: How did they get away with it?, discussed two books, David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire and Caroline Elkins’ Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Adam spoke about how Porter’s review, and then the two books themselves, shook the sense he had grown up with that, on the whole, and despite some shortcomings, British colonial rule had been a good thing. He had, he said, shared the ambient complacency about British rule. Porter’s review put it like this: “The accepted view of Britain’s decolonisation hitherto has been that it was done in a more dignified, enlightened and consensual way than by other countries – meaning, of course, France. It will be difficult now to argue this so glibly.”

Ambient complacency is a potent phrase, is it not?

Something else — unrelated — that Adam said after the reading also struck me: novels ‘take a group effort’. (His previous book is a novel, The Truth About These Strange Times.) They are so long — they can grow so ‘thin and wispy’ — a writer needs the collaboration of others to bring a novel into the world.

Of course, every author is different. Writing in The Observer’s Book of Books (a slim volume, given away free with the paper in May this year) about how he works as an editor (and drawing on his lengthy experience in publishing), Robin made just this point. His short piece should be read in full, but I can’t find it online. Here are some excerpts:

… an editor’s eye shouldn’t pass over a text too often for fear of losing the very objectivity the writer lacks. During a first read … I’m always watching myself for the first signs of inattention; any time that I’m stopped or distracted means there’s probably a problem in the text … If any changes do need to be made, I’d always ask the author to make them. After all, it is their book, and at this stage it’s still a thing in flux … You have to encourage the writer to see the problem, not just tell them there is one. Editing is about reading and listening attentively … I’ve always considered editing to involve quite a large degree of pastoral care.

Technorati tags: Adam Foulds, Kenya, British Empire, editing, writing, Robin Robertson, attention, reading

The certainty of chance

From the Economist's obituary of George Melly:

As a lifelong Surrealist, he was sure that the bizarre and marvellous lay in wait for him everywhere, and carried in his head a Surrealist motto, “the certainty of chance”.

'The 'certainty of chance' was', James Boyle says, 'the phrase André Breton used to describe both modernism and his own philosophy of life'.

Earlier this month, the TLS reprinted George Melly's 1991 review of A Book of Surrealist Games, in which he concluded:

It may puzzle the more pompous as to why this body of men and women, these ardent revolutionaries of the spirit, spent so much time engaged in occupations usually considered more suitable for bored children on wet afternoons. The answer is, to quote the preface, that “Surrealist play is more like a kind of provocative magic”, that it “breaks, the thread of discursive thought” and, above all, helps to confirm the primary Surrealist belief in what they called “objective chance” or “the certainty of hazard”. These games will prove to you that not only was Lautréamont justified as to poetry; one could add a rider: “Surrealism too can be made by all.” 

Of the cover, George Melly wrote:

… a bourgeois interior, painted with the minimal realism of early Magritte. Seated opposite each other in identical armchairs, a young father is engrossed in his newspaper while his wife is teaching their son to read. Something is mildly askew. Is it because, while it is dark outside, the curtains are undrawn, or that the room is lit by anachronistic Victorian oil lamps, or that the newspaper, despite the completely Western ambience of the decor, is printed in oriental typography?

The origin of this illustration is unrevealed. I suspect it may have been an advertisement for a pre-war European product aimed at the Japanese market, or vice versa, but it is a brilliant trailer for the displacement on offer within. In a balloon-shaped inset, replacing perhaps a commercial slogan, is a quotation from Lautréamont, the nineteenth-century writer so revered by the Surrealists: “Poetry should be made by all.”

Amazon carries an "editorial review" (cited as Amazon.com): 'Surrealism is far more than some dead art movement: it is also a collection of tools for perceiving and representing the world in ways that transcend normative perspectives. … If you have any spark of creativity, you are strongly encouraged to get this book to help loosen the holds of quotidian existence on your craft.'

I see Anne's been here before — and quotes more of the preface to A Book of Surrealist Games than George Melly did:

Surrealist games and procedures are intended to free words and images from the constraints of rational and discursive order, substituting chance and indeterminancy for premeditation and deliberation... In one particular and important respect Surrealist play is more like a kind of provocative magic. This is in its irrepressible propensity to the transformation of objects, behaviours and ideas. In this aspect of its proceedings Surrealism makes manifest its underlying political programme, its revolutionary intent.

Before going on to put some surrealist games online, Anne also quotes Philippe Audouin:

It is not to belittle Surrealist activity to consider it as a game, in fact as The Great Game, whose prizes in the eyes of those who played and lived it, can be calculated in promises of freedom, love, revolution, and in anything else that intransigent desire can aspire to.

Unsurprisingly, various things here made me think again about the aleatoric. 

Technorati tags: George Melly, André Breton, surrealism, chance, aleatoric, play, magic

Are you addicted?

Take the Internet Addiction Test and substitute 'read' or 'reading' or 'book' for 'on-line', 'internet', etc. For example:

How often do you find that you stay on-line read longer than you intended?

How often do you neglect household chores to spend more time on-line reading?

How often do others in your life complain to you about the amount of time you spend on-line reading?

How often do you block out disturbing thoughts about your life with soothing thoughts of the Internet a good book?

How often do you find yourself anticipating when you will go on-line be reading again?

How often do you fear that life without the Internet reading would be boring, empty, and joyless?

How often do you snap, yell, or act annoyed if someone bothers you while you are on-line reading?

How often do you lose sleep due to late-night log-ins reading?

Over the course of my life, I have failed, and still fail, with both books and the web on all these questions — if failure is what is meant by answering 'often'. And so would just about any of my friends and family — for at least one, if not both, of the … er … addictive substances.

I've seen some evidence of the Internet Addiction Test being used in, or considered for use in, UK schools. If the aim is to convince our students that we really are very out of touch, then that's a good idea. Otherwise, bin it.

Technorati tags: Internet Addiction Test, reading, schools, digital natives, digital immigrants

Super-Cannes: 'actors in our own self-referential drama'

John Preston, reviewing Super-Cannes in the London Evening Standard, quoted by Stephen Moss in the Guardian:

Ballard loves to go that bit further out than anyone else, to nose around the outer limits of human behaviour and to rub up against the inconceivable. What ought to be daft becomes instead extremely disquieting. His is a world in which anything has become possible. In this twisted scheme of things, it comes to seem quite logical that the one upright citizen in Eden-Olympia [Ballard's suburban madhouse] should be a mass murderer. Morality has disappeared, so has sanity, and all that's left is a kind of institutionalised madness. Reading Ballard is like viewing the world through a completely new set of lenses.

I've quoted Ballard himself before. Here he is on tourism and travel:

Travel is the last fantasy the 20th Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself. There's nowhere to go.

On Cronenberg's A History of Violence:

The title, A History of Violence, is the key to the film, and should be read not as a tale or story of violence, but as it might appear in a social worker's case notes: "This family has a history of violence." The family, of course, is the human family, a primate species with an unbelievable appetite for cruelty and violence. If its behaviour in the 20th century is any guide, the human race inhabits a huge sink estate ravaged by unending feuds and civil wars, a no-go area abandoned by the authorities, though no one can remember who they are, or even if they exist. …

On Blair:

Perhaps only damaged actors can lead modern societies down the crooked paths that they prefer.

Having come to Ballard very late, I've recently finished Super-Cannes — and it's not yet left me alone. Tim Adams' Observer review catches some its darkness and power:

… Eden-Olympia, Europe's ultra-sophisticated answer to Silicon Valley in the hills above the French Riviera. The business park is the world's first intelligent city, one horribly logical conclusion of a corporatised continent in which 'freedom was the right to paid work, while leisure was the mark of the shiftless and untalented'; dreams here come equipped with airbags, and the only sounds are the whispers of sprinklers on lawns and the effortless combustion of computer-navigated German sports saloons.

The city is home to techno-chic supernationals - Ciba-Geigy and Siemens, Mitsui and Monsanto - and to the Euro-elite of chief executives who control their strategies, a post-leisure class which derives its excitement from the imposition of systematic efficiencies. There is no need here for law or religion; Eden-Olympia polices itself; decisions are corporate not ethical, and sex is something one watches on customised adult channels.

Ballard carefully constructs this serpentless paradise in perfectly engineered sentences. His images come together with the satisfying hiss of Japanese micro-hydraulics. 'There was a vast car park concealed behind a screen of cypresses, vehicles nose to tail like a week's unsold output at a Renault plant,' he writes. 'Somewhere in the office buildings the owners of these cars were staring at their screens, designing a new cathedral or cineplex, or watching the world's spot prices. The sense of focused brain power was bracing, but subtly unsettling.' …

Ballard unravels the secrets of his post-industrial elysium with panache, leading us into a society which is both an exaggerated parable for our times and a chill piece of futurology. Along the way there are some signature themes: Ballard's books always feel as though they are shot on security cameras and spotlit by police flash photography; their violence is both sterile and graphic. The worlds he describes are frequently immunised against human emotion. And in Eden-Olympia that deficiency has become a potentially fatal threat.

Much more there. (Adams is good on Ballard's satire: 'His satire, however extreme, is always convincing because its governing ideas inhabit every detail. He sees a strain of totalitarianism running through particular dehumanised philosophies of engineering and design and management; sees the potential for dictatorship in the absence of democracy engendered by the colossal power of corporations.')

Just now, I found a long piece (essay and interview) by Jason Cowley:

The twin engines driving so much of British contemporary fiction have long been a kind of enfeebled realism-with its class and social anxieties-and nostalgia. But Ballard operated outside this loop. The drowned worlds, scorched cities and overgrown jungles of his early fiction; his focus on the media landscape of global celebrity and stylised catastrophe; his exploration of the connections between sex, eroticism and death; his fetishism of motorways, highrises and car crashes-almost alone among contemporary British writers, Ballard wrote about the 20th century in its own idiom. As a result his work is exaggerated, pumped-up, often preposterous; a prose surrealist mining a strange, blurry, psychopathological landscape. It is hard to believe in his fictional world precisely because it is so invented, so radically imagined. Like the paintings of Dali, Max Ernst and de' Chirico which he so admires, Ballard transports you into a fabulous realm, at once real and hysterically unreal.

You can read a Ballard novel without believing a word of what is written. Yet something lingers disturbingly in your imagination, something to do with his understanding of the inherent instability of the contemporary condition-as if we are all actors in our own self-referential drama, as if we are all trapped within a set of immense inverted commas.

So, I'm just starting out on Ballard, after some initial flirtation, and from Super-Cannes so many scenes and ideas and conversations stick in the mind. One I made a note of early on was the scene in the car-park — an 'impromptu piece of garage theatre':

Two Eden-Olympia limousines were making their way down the circular ramp. The chauffeurs stopped their vehicles on the third level, slipped from their driving seats and opened the rear doors, giving their passengers a ringside view of the ugly tableau being staged in an empty parking space.

Or there's this, from much later in the book:

Eden-Olympia's great defect is that there's no need for personal morality. Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems. … Places like Eden-Olympia are fertile ground for any Messiah with a grudge. The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won't walk out of the desert. They'll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.

Penrose's deranged vision of 'a carefully metered measure of psychopathy', the answer to the 'suburbanisation of the soul' that 'has overrun our planet like the plague', is explored by Penrose and Sinclair in chapter 29, 'The Therapy Programme'. This is Penrose:

A  controlled psychopathy is a way of resocialising people and tribalising them into mutually supportive groups. … Violence is spectacular and exciting, but sex has always been the main hunting ground of psychopathy. A perverse sexual act can liberate the visionary self in even the dullest soul. The consumer society hungers for the deviant and unexpected. What else can drive the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that will keep us "buying"? Psychopathy is the only engine powerful enough to light our imaginations, to drive the arts, sciences and industries of the world.

Towards the end of the novel, and despite himself, Sinclair remembers 'the brutal hazings at the RAF flight school, and how they had energised us all': 'At Eden-Olympia, psychopathy was being rehabilitated, returned like a socialised criminal to everyday life'.

Ballard, interviewed in 2004:

My real fear is that boredom and inertia may lead people to follow a deranged leader with far fewer moral scruples than Richard Gould [in Millennium People], that we will put on jackboots and black uniforms and the aspect of the killer simply to relieve the boredom. A vicious and genuinely mindless neo-fascism, a skilfully aestheticised racism, might be the first consequence of globalisation, when Classic Coke® and California merlot are the only drinks on the menu. At times I look around the executive housing estates of the Thames Valley and feel that it is already here, quietly waiting its day, and largely unknown to itself. … I suspect that (as I pointed out in Super-Cannes) the human race will inevitably move like a sleepwalker towards that vast resource it has hesitated to tap - its own psychopathy. This adventure playground of the soul is waiting for us with its gates wide open, and admission is free. In short, an elective psychopathy will come to our aid (as it has done many times in the past) - Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, all those willed nightmares that make up much of human history. As Wilder Penrose points out in Super-Cannes, the future will be a huge Darwinian struggle between competing psychopathies. Along with our passivity, we're entering a profoundly masochistic phase - everyone is a victim these days, of parents, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, even love itself. And how much we enjoy it. Our happiest moments are spent trying to think up new varieties of victimhood ...

Elsewhere, Jason Cowley writes of the character, Paul Sinclair, through whose eyes Super-Cannes is told:

In his quest to uncover the truth … he becomes a kind of detective of the self: the more he discovers about Eden-Olympia, the more he discovers about his own potential for deviance and violence, and the more alienated he feels.

Reading Ballard is a peculiarly enriching experience. Every sentence is absolutely characteristic. His novels, at their best, resemble surrealist tableaux, representations of tortured interiority, and Super-Cannes is one of his best.

 

Technorati tags: Ballard, J G Ballard, Super-Cannes

Poetry, ubicomp and the irreducible, various messiness of the world

From Tom Hume's notes on Fabien Girardin's LIFT07 talk:

The world is messy. … "Seamful design" seeks to reveal the limits, boundaries and uncertainties of ubicomp: reveals the seams. … Seamlessness is the exception: messiness can't be ignored, we need to design technologies with this in mind. Do we really want to live in a calm world?

Jan Chipchase's Future Perfect is amongst my most preferred blogs and I have seen students interested in design light up when they are introduced to it. As Adam Greenfield puts it:

Jan Chipchase’s work is all about surprise. Every time I visit his site I feel that anew, tripped up and humbled by humanity, in all its ingenuity, adaptability and ungovernable particularity.

All of which put into my mind another poet whose centenary falls this year (12 September), Louis MacNeice. Close friend of Auden and, as Grey Gowrie put it on Wednesday, 'lover of women and Donegal', MacNeice died at just 56.

The poem that I am thinking of is, of course, 'Snow' (January, 1935):

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands—
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Technorati tags: messiness, ubicomp, everyware, Louis MacNeice

Hug a shady wet nun

Auden: 'unless I write something, anything, good, indifferent, or trashy, every day, I feel ill' 

Wednesday night I was at the British Library (Shaw Theatre) for the W H Auden centenary reading on the anniversary of his birth. Among the poets, indeed — a good evening. The running order:

• John Fuller: 'Get There If You Can' (1930); 'The Sphinx' (1938); Miranda's Song (from The Sea and the Mirror) (1942–44). 
• Peter Porter: 'At Last the Secret Is Out' (1936); 'Lady, Weeping at the Crossroads' (1940); 'Now the Leaves Are Falling Fast' (1936); 'Under Sirius' (1949). 
• James Fenton: 'Night Covers Up the Rigid Land' (1936); 'Death's Echo' (1936); 'September 1, 1939' (1939). 
• Sean O'Brien: 'The Composer' (1938); 'The Fall of Rome' (1947); 'The Shield of Achilles' (1952). 
• Richard Howard: 'On the Circuit' (1963); 'Auden in Milwaukee' (by Stephen Spender) (1940); 'A Walk After Dark' (1948). 
• Grey Gowrie: 'Deftly, Admiral, Cast Your Fly' (1948); 'In Praise of Limestone' (1948). 
• Andrew Motion: 'O Love, the Interest Itself in Thoughtless Heaven' (1932); Preface: The Stage Manager to the Critics (from The Sea and the Mirror) (1942–4); 'Lullaby' (1937).

Twenty poems by Auden, then, and of these ten are from the 1930s. Five come from Nones (1951), Auden's first post-war collection of shorter poems ('Under Sirius', 'The Fall of Rome', 'A Walk After Dark', 'Deftly, Admiral, Cast Your Fly' and 'In Praise of Limestone'), and just two, I think ('The Shield of Achilles' and 'On the Circuit'), from the last six collections (omitting Academic Graffiti) — The Shield of Achilles (1955), Homage to Clio (1960), About the House (1965), City Without Walls (1969), Epistle to a Godson (1972) and the posthumous Thank You, Fog (1974). The status of the later poetry is, of course, much discussed, and it is probably the case that we have been too close to it to judge it well. Now, though, a new phase in the interpretation and appreciation of Auden may be beginning. Adam Kirsch wrote a good piece in the NY Sun (via 3quarksdaily), part of which touches on this:

Starting in the early 1940s … Auden developed a very different conception of poetry and its purpose. He began to write about the personal, instead of the public; the spiritual, instead of the political. In style, too, he changed drastically. In place of the elliptical shocks of the early poems, he cultivated a new style, one that combined the hyper-articulate and the campily laid-back. … In place of the private mythos of the early work, Auden now turns to the well-worn figures of Greek and Roman myth. And his tone of voice, even when he is not half-joking as he is here, often comes across as not quite serious, as though all his eloquence were just an ultracivilized game.

So great were these changes that it became necessary to talk about Auden as though he were two poets. … Such striking changes led many of Auden's early admirers to see the evolution of his work as a mere decline. … If the Auden centenary sees any major change in the poet's reputation, it is that such a dismissal of the later, American Auden now looks definitely mistaken. It is still tempting, reading Auden's work chronologically, to regret some of the changes that came in the train of his emigration, and to wonder what poems he might have written if he had stayed in England during World War II. The later Auden will never be as mesmerizing as the early Auden. But it is now clear that he was not, like Wordsworth, a poet who wrote himself out early but still kept on publishing. Rather, Auden's breaking of his own style now looks like one of the key moral gestures of 20th-century English literature. Auden was one of the first great writers to recognize that, after World War II, the modernist vision — with its abstractions and myths, its glamorizing of danger and sacrifice — was no longer sustainable. Poetry, to be credible in a new world, had to be ethical in a new way: scrupulous about its claims, its concepts, even its language.

James Fenton read particularly well (his Guardian tribute to Auden can be read here and there are four paragraphs by him here that are worth reading): 'Death's Echo' is a fine poem and 'September 1, 1939', which might have worked so awkwardly given both all that has been written or said about it and how it has been used, was luminous and, to my mind, unquestionably compelling. Sean O'Brien introduced 'The Fall of Rome' as the most influential poem of the later twentieth century — measured, that is, by the number of attempts poets have made to re-write it.

The last poem of the evening, 'Lullaby' ('Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm'), moved me to tears: a popular poem, but I've never heard it read in public before and it is the poem I could not get out of my mind at the end of the week when my father was dying in September, 2004. He looked dreadful and, as I stared at his wasted face (we had never been closer: he had lost all power of speech but we had never communicated so well as in those last few days together), all I could hear in my head was, 'Mortal, guilty, but to me / The entirely beautiful'. To be moved like this, and to be so surprised, was as powerful and personal a reminder as I could imagine of how deeply affecting Auden's poetry can be.

Charles Madge, founder of Mass Observation and a poet, too, wrote in 'Letter to the Intelligentsia' (1933; quoted here):

But there waited for me in the summer morning,
Auden, fiercely. I read, shuddered and knew
And all the world’s stationary things
In silence moved to take up new positions. 

***

Why 'hug a shady wet nun'? (Why? Why?) Here's the answer in the Guardian leader for 21 February, In Praise of … W H Auden:

… as he gleefully pointed out, his name was an anagram of "hug a shady wet nun" …

***

Free copies of the TLS for 9 February were available in the Shaw Theatre and Nicholas Jenkins' long essay on Auden covers a lot of ground. (He devotes a sizeable chunk of his essay to the background of 'Lay your sleeping head, my love'. Michael Yates was the 13 year-old schoolboy with whom the 26 year-old Auden fell in love in 1933, and the role W B Yeats' poem, 'A Prayer for My Son', plays in Auden's poem is teased out by Jenkins: 'The identity of the sleeper in Auden's poem had to remain veiled; but the love that dared not speak its beloved's name in 1937 could at last whisper it through the language of parallelism and allusion'. Yeats' poem is addressed to his son, Michael.)

Auden's was a colossal talent: his poetry apart, the prose writings continue to command our attention — he is a great critic and a polymath in scope — and then there is his work as a librettist and translator. Wikipedia (this is the archived page the W H Auden Society prefers): 

Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of them book-length). His poetry was encyclopedic in scope and method, ranging in style from obscure twentieth-century modernism to the lucid traditional forms such as ballads and limericks, from doggerel through haiku and villanelles to a "Christmas Oratorio" and a baroque eclogue in Anglo-Saxon meters. The tone and content of his poems ranged the pop-song clichés to complex philosophical meditations, from the corns on his toes to atoms and stars, from contemporary crises to the evolution of society.

He also wrote more than four hundred essays and reviews about literature, history, politics, music, religion, and many other subjects. He collaborated on plays with Christopher Isherwood and on opera libretti with Chester Kallman, worked with a group of artists and filmmakers on documentary films in the 1930s and with the New York Pro Musica early music group in the 1950s and 1960s. About collaboration he wrote in 1964: "collaboration has brought me greater erotic joy . . . than any sexual relations I have had".

Nicholas Jenkins' essay is wary of any easy, panoptic view of Auden, but in surveying the range of Auden's work Jenkins stirs up much to go on thinking about. This is a typically careful couple of sentences about Auden's prose writing: 'The prose as a whole is remarkable, full of fresh ideas and commanding yet eccentric speculations and intuitions. When it becomes readily accessible in its full extent, it will surely alter preconceptions about Auden'. I liked this quotation from a letter Auden wrote to his father in 1939 (his father had written to say that he preferred Wystan's old poems to the new): 'The writer's problem is that of everyone: how to go on growing the whole of his life, because to stop growing is to die'; and this, to a New York audience in 1946 (talking about Shakespeare): 'a major poet is always willing to risk failure, to look for a new rhetoric'. Jenkins is also good on Auden 'the poet of a deliberately willed uprootedness; he turned himself into the first great poet of that most symptomatic of all social groups in the modern world: those who will not or cannot go home'. 'He made twenty-nine separate journeys that lasted more than two months; twenty-six of those lasted more than five months, blurring the meaning, especially in his later years, of home and abroad, domestic and foreign, here and there. In addition, Auden's homosexuality helped to enforce the social mobility and unpredictability which he thought essential to his freedom as a writer.'

To end on, 'The Fall of Rome':

The piers are pummelled by the waves; In a lonely field the rain Lashes an abandoned train; Outlaws fill the mountain caves. Fantastic grow the evening gowns; Agents of the Fisc pursue Absconding tax-defaulters through The sewers of provincial towns. Private rites of magic send The temple prostitutes to sleep; All the literati keep An imaginary friend.   Cerebrotonic Cato may Extol the Ancient Disciplines, But the muscle-bound Marines Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK On a pink official form. Unendowed with wealth or pity, Little birds with scarlet legs, Sitting on their speckled eggs, Eye each flu-infected city.  Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast.

Technorati tags: W H Auden, Auden

Don Paterson, Rilke and attention

Good interview with Don Paterson in yesterday's Guardian, by Nicholas Wroe. Paterson's 'versions' of Rilke's Die Sonette an Orpheus were published recently, Orpheus — on my list of books to read this coming holiday. I first discovered Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus in my late teens in the J B Leishman and Stephen Spender (now very dated) translation. The sonnet sequence featured in a booklet on originality, in the Oxford Biology Readers series, that my Biology teacher pushed my way. I wish I could lay my hands on that booklet now: all these years later, I can remember it talked about Rilke, and the extraordinary story of the creation of these sonnets, and Kekulé's dream about the structure of benzene (Wikipedia: 'He wrote that he discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after dreaming of a snake seizing its own tail, a common symbol in many ancient cultures known as the Ouroboros. This dream came to him after years of studying the nature of carbon-carbon bonds.'). I didn't understand then, but that booklet was feeding right into my interest in cross-disciplinary studies and human psychology (something that's now so much easier to enjoy as the barriers between disciplines are being broken down more and more, not least because of the way the web is opening up knowledge to all-comers and allowing people to research and publish outside the formal constraints of faculties, research grant applications, etc).

Here's Paterson talking about his first encounter with these sonnets:

… it is a very strange piece of work and for a long time I knew something just wasn't coming through to me. It deals with some pretty fundamental things which I didn't really understand until I had had the right experiences in my own life and I became more able to ask the right questions of it.

And on jazz (Paterson has long loved music):

I knew there was something in there but I couldn't quite get at it. And then one day I realised that they were speaking to each other and I was overhearing the most remarkable conversations. It was like those 3-D pictures you stare at for hours and suddenly you see the zebra. I was listening to the John Abercrombie Quartet and suddenly I was eavesdropping on something incredibly articulate and deep.

How's that for humble attentiveness, a waiting game and some, from someone who's won accolade after accolade for his own creative work?  The same note of alert attentiveness is struck when he talks about first encountering Borges:

I remember reading Borges for the first time and falling back into my chair. This had never happened to me before. I could barely stand up. It was vertiginous. He introduced ideas that the language shouldn't really be able to accommodate.

I was also much taken with what Paterson had to say about the net and music. 'He is not professionally active as a player at the moment - although he still occasionally records with friends - but still saturates himself in music, mostly electronica and is delighted by the democratising effect of improved and cheaper technology':

The net is a remarkable resource. I came across this astonishing laptop musician from Georgia recently. Of course there's still an awful lot of crap around, but there's also some tremendous stuff.

Mark Doty reviewed Orpheus earlier this month in the Guardian. For those who don't know Rilke's poems, it pays to read what Mark says in his review:

Sonnets to Orpheus, the late sequence that came tumbling out, in a kind of manic trance, over a period of 13 days in 1922, an epic bout of inspiration that Rilke referred to as "dictation" … the marvel of these sonnets, that the nearly unsayable is given a spoken solidity, words that can point towards if not encompass the peculiar flowing fact of human presence. All nerves exposed, Rilke himself becomes the "pure receiver" of experience he calls for his readers to be. Being and becoming, those are his subjects. It is almost a poetry without the trappings of engagement in the particular messy chaos and circumstances of living - and yet somehow, miraculously, as alive as any poetry of the last century.

And of these new versions:

Paterson gives the sonnets, perhaps for the first time in English, a true sense of an inhabited skin, a pulsing body responding to the life of the senses … Paterson's translation restores to the Sonnets to Orpheus their unsettling, destabilising force, reminding us of the pure strangeness of us, the unlikely, thrilling event that human subjectivity is.

One poem:

Dancer

You were still half a child. You came and went.
But you mapped the dancer, in that moment’s chance
to the empty constellation of the dance:
that dance in which we fitfully transcend

Nature’s dumb order. Only Orpheus
could stir you to the deepest listening:
you were the one still moved from that first song,
and still surprised if a tree took long to choose

whether or not to go along with you.
You knew the old still centre, that clear space
where the lyre was first raised up and rang out true.

For this you tried to shape the ceremony,
to fit the perfect steps that might one day
turn his own around, might turn his face.

Don Paterson's website is under development but will be here.

Adam Philips reviewed Orpheus in the Observer and wrote:

In three weeks, in 1922, while working on his Duino Elegies, Rilke wrote these 55 sonnets. 'They are,' he wrote later, 'perhaps most mysterious even to me, in the manner in which they arrived and imposed themselves on me - the most puzzling dictation I have ever received and taken down.'

13 days … 3 weeks … My copy of the Leishman/Spender translation says in the Introduction (Leishman's work), 'between the 2nd and the 20th of February the fifty-five Sonnets to Orpheus, which came as a complete surprise'. 13, 19, 21 days … miraculous.

Technorati tags: Don Paterson, Rilke, Die Sonette an Orpheus, Sonnets to Orpheus, Borges, attention

Practise reading

Zadie Smith, as reported at Orange Crate Art, from a podcast here:

… the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it.

In today's Observer, Peter Conrad reviews Paul Muldoon's The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures:

Poems, if they are good, need never end. A poem, as Auden said when explaining how one was written, cannot be finished: it is simply abandoned by a poet who can add no more to it. The reader then takes over and, with luck, discovers another kind of endlessness: reading leads to rereading, as the words are coaxed into releasing subtler, richer meanings, dilating into ever ampler contexts. Unlike many of his predecessors, Muldoon chooses not to generalise about poetry. Instead, he explicates individual poems, one per lecture. The procedure demands close attention, but the results are revelatory. Reading here is a collaborative recreation and, at their best, Muldoon's interpretations - sometimes whimsically tenuous, often breathtaking in their intellectual boldness - are like improvised, free associating poems. … Two-thirds of the way through each lecture, he reassuringly announces that he is about to reach a conclusion. He never does; the end comes only when the hour is up, because he has demonstrated the inexhaustibility of these poems.

Technorati tags: reading, readers, poems, Zadie Smith, Paul Muldoon, Auden