Blame by Gabriels

Hamish Hawk, The Mauritian Badminton Doubles Champion 1973

 

Their Numerous Cancellations

  The recent furore around Kate Clanchy's Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (Picador, 2019) brings up some pressing questions about what has come to be called "cancel culture" and its impact on writers. Clanchy, of course, started out as a poet, winning the Forward for Best First for Slattern in 1995, one of the plethora of talented female poets celebrated in Roddie Lumsden's Identity Parade anthology. She developed her career as a poet alongside her career as an English teacher, with a particular interest in using poetry and creative writing to allow children from under-privileged and ethnic backgrounds (additionally with a focus on girls) to tell their stories. This lead to her being awarded an MBE for 'services to literature' in 2018 - the memoir about some of her teaching experiences Some Kids I Taught came out in 2019 and won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2020 apparently because it tackled issues around class in education.

  So it seems bizarre that this experienced, lauded writer and long-standing teacher used to working in multi-cultural classrooms would not have picked up on the fact that she was using language associated with racial stereotypes such as "chocolate skin" or "Ashkenazi nose" or that she was negativising some autistic children as "unaccountably odd" and "jarring company".* Equally, it seems remarkable that neither an editor at Picador nor one of the judges on the Orwell Prize panel would have picked up on these breaches in politically-correct discourse; nor did any of the book's early reviewers - uniformly positive as far as I can tell - identify these snagging-points. 

  What happened this year seems a demonstration of how social media can seize hold of a cultural phenomenon and amplify aspects of its character to the point of distortion, inciting hordes of onlookers to contribute their voices to the clamour of outrage and moral opprobrium. On GoodReads and Twitter a growing number of posts started not only to call out these problematic aspects of the book but also to see them as symptomatic of a text that was soon widely reinterpreted and in effect demonised as an adumbration of patronising, middle-class "white saviour complex", full of misguided stereotypes and prejudicial, "othering" perspectives on Clanchy's multicultural pupils. Clanchy herself made matters worse by initially denying and then overreacting to the criticisms, while some of the accusers (including authors of colour Chimene Suleyman, Monisha Rajesh and Sunny Singh) went on to receive racist abuse from social media users themselves.

  It's not my place to defend the book; I'm in the process of reading it and would like to make my own assessment as to its qualities and flaws. The danger is we lose sight of the text itself in this kind of trial by social media (often pitched at a heightened tone of angry, censorious disapproval), where blame rapidly migrates to the personal and simplistic lines are drawn between the words of a literary artefact and the author's subjectivity - I suppose with an autobiographical memoir the presumption that these lines are straightforward is greater than with a poem or novel but there is still a parallax effect operating in the space between writerly intention and reader reception. No doubt it was appropriate for Clanchy to apologise for what some saw as offensive passages or phrases in her book, but it was saddening to see her almost internalise the accusations of transgression by saying "I'm not a good person" and promising to rewrite parts of the book "more lovingly". This sounds like a critique of some undoubtedly ill-judged, questionable elements of a text she has written have morphed into a moral critique of herself as a person, apparently devaluing decades of practice as a teacher and writer who seems to have tried hard to validate the voices of marginalised, non-white female students.

    It's informative to compare this incident (which I'm sure also has implications for how publishers and awarding bodies vet and assess both language and representation in texts they are considering) with the trend for outing/'canceling' earlier literary figures for historical indiscretions or un-PC behaviours. I recently discovered, for example, that Virginia Woolf had a half-sister who had a learning disability and was perhaps on the autistic spectrum. Laura Makepeace Stephen was shut away in institutions and never visited by the family throughout her adult life although I believe she outlived Virginia - no doubt fairly typical attitudes for the time (and later - look at the Royals similar treatment of the "special needs cousins" Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon in the 1970s). But in 1915 Woolf wrote in her diary about a walk she took in Sussex during which she came across "a long line of imbeciles". She went on to say: "everyone in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead or no chin & and an imbecile grin, or a wild, suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."

   Perhaps because this kind of extreme ableist/eugenicist perspective is read as historically determined or because of her status as an icon of 20th century feminism (or perhaps because this is a diary-passage never intended to be published rather than an excerpt from her literary writings), but I have never read any calls for Woolf's work to be "cancelled". It's all the more disconcerting to read this knowing as we do about her own mental health condition and the compelling exploration of post-traumatic breakdown she makes in Mrs Dalloway (which I re-read with great pleasure over the summer) through the character of Septimus Warren Smith, as well as the scathing attack on the psychiatric provision and treatment available to him, which tellingly is implied to be the motive behind Smith's brutal suicide rather than his delusional condition itself. 

    It's true to say that a century ago a learning disability and a mental health illness were seen as two very different things, whereas one of the huge steps forward we have made in comparatively recent years is in believing that they should both be perceived within a spectrum of neurodiversity, a spectrum which certainly reaches far enough to include all of us. In the same spirit, if we examine the life and work of any writer - contemporary or historical - , it will no doubt become apparent that they were or are at best (as Auden wrote of Yeats) "silly like us" ie. flawed, muddled, frequently wrong-headed human beings just as all readers are. This is not to excuse elements of serious prejudice within the works we read (and it seems that examples of questionable ideation and articulation can be upturned in the works of so many acclaimed writers, particularly of the Modernist period) but just an inkling that we should be prepared to make up our own minds about the books we choose to give time to and enter into dialogue with, rather than allowing the blunt, mutable instrument of social media to police our thoughts and dictate what we are allowed to read. 

*As a teacher of students with autism and other complex needs myself, I would suggest these kind of comments are pretty commonplace even among less experienced staff within SEND departments and certainly when mainstream teachers like Clanchy are asked to work with our students - perception of "oddness" is a measure of non-conformity to neurotypical behavioural norms

8 Writers Who Also Made ( or Make) Music

At long last I am conforming to that classic format for the informative blog-post, the listicle of numbered items on a shared theme, even as I toil under the stinging indictment that "no-one reads blogs anymore" (I can't remember on which American sitcom I heard the quip "2006 is on the line, it wants its blog back"). Ploughing on:

1. Frederico Garcia Lorca (who as an adolescent had dreamed of a career as a musician and composer rather than a poet), played piano on this rather crackly 1932 recording of traditional flamenco songs performed by the Spanish-Argentinian singer and dancer, La Argentinita (Encarnación López Júlvez). During this period, he was concentrating more on his work as a dramatist and theatre-director; in the same year he produced his most famous play, Blood Wedding.        

2. Boris Vian was a multi-skilled creative dynamo: not only a poet, playwright and novelist (author of one of my favourite French novels L'Ecume du Jours (1947)) but also a singer, songwriter, actor and jazz trumpeter, as this video of Vian playing with his brothers Lelio and Alain captures. Dead at 39, his life was an intense blaze of literary and musical endeavours, bohemian parties and desperate attempts to cobble money together: he wrote parodic potboiler-thrillers, the earliest French rock'n'roll numbers and even a single for Petula Clarke.

                             

  

3. Out of the extraordinarily varied career outlined in her seven volumes of autobiography, in the 1950s Maya Angelou was working as a dancer and chanteuse in New York nightclubs. She was chosen to perform one of her own songs in Stan Katzman's 1957 movie Calypso Heatwave, which hoped to ride the wave of a new fad for calypso music, briefly seen at the time as a youth trend ready to supplant rock 'n' roll.

4. Nicola Griffith was the lead singer with Hull-based all-woman post-punk band Janes Plane, seen here playing in Brixton in 1982. Griffith went on to write the science fiction novels Ammonite (1992) and Slow River (1995), as well as other works of speculative and historical fiction. In 1993 she received a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and has since written on disability and LBTQ issues. She now lives in Seattle with her wife, the writer Kelley Eskridge

5. In early editions of Ursula K Le Guin's 1985 book Always Coming Home, a kind of "future archive" of texts and images relating to an imaginary people called the Kesh, a cassette was included containing the album she made with electronic composer Todd Barton Music and Poetry of the Kesh, a rich amalgam of field recordings, sounds generated on invented instruments (such as a 7 foot horn called the hambouta) and Guin's intoning of poems in the language of the Kesh.

6. Don Paterson - a stunningly accomplished guitarist as well as poet and aphorist - formed the "folk-jazz crossover" group Lammas with saxophonist Tim Garland in 1990, about the time when his poetry career was also taking off. This video captures a more recent revisiting of the first piece they composed together, demonstrating his intriguing style of playing jazz voicings on a classical guitar. What I didn't know until just reading it on his website was that Paterson also took some lessons with the seminal improvisatory guitarist Derek Bailey in the mid-80 and was part of the London "free-improv" scene before Lammas. 

7. The Kolkata-born novelist and essayist Amit Chaudari is also a singer in the North Indian classical tradition, a skill he learned from his mother Biyoja Chaudhari, also a highly acclaimed singer and performer. He has recorded two albums fusing Indian and western stylings, despite one being called This is Not Fusion (2004) - the other is Found Music (2010). Most recently he published a book exploring Indian music entitled Finding the Raga (2021).

                                       

8. English-Welsh poet Zoe Skoulding, whose poetry is often preoccupied with resonance and transmission (cf. her 2013 Seren collection The Museum of Disappearing Sounds), is also the bass-player and vocalist with "psychogeographical musical/artistic collective" Parking Non-Stop, alongside musicians Alan Holmes and Dewi Evans. In its melding of urban field recordings, industrial soundscapes and elements of krautrock and retro-pop, their album Species Corridor (2008) recalls the evanescent sub-genre of "hauntology" disseminated by Simon Reynolds et al circa 2006, inhabiting a roughly commensurate sonic zone as Broadcast, Stereolab and the brilliant Ghostbox label.

Poetry's Remote Community

   If poetry is built on paradox, perhaps one reason poetry seems to have thrived under lockdown is the paradoxical nature of so much in our current lives. Hived off in our disparate households we are nevertheless engaged in a range of virtual interactions we have all had to stumblingly embrace (Zoom meetings, remote interviews and for we 'nincompated pedagogues' the muffled,  stuttering pleasures of online teaching). Equally, our sequestered, inward-facing condition seems to have fostered a renewed sense of community in us, a concern for the less fortunate which has often been lacking from our discourse under a government intent on stripping back any of 

the commitment to public funding and social care many of us had thought the bedrock of a responsible, thriving society. 

    If at times it has seemed that the whole project of lockdown has been a self-sacrificing effort to preserve the most vulnerable members of our society at the cost of economic benefit, those of us fortunate enough to continue working will feel this a price worth paying, even as cabinet members all too quick to pay lip-service to such noble rhetoric are never far from revealing their true, Thatcherite colours. This was amply demonstrated in the latest disclosure that millions of pounds of tax-payers' money has been siphoned off via the furlough scheme to wealthy non-residents (such as tax exile Jim Ratcliff and members of the Saudi royal family) rather than focused on the smaller businesses it was earmarked for. This seems all the more insulting in the context of the government's proposed pay rise of 1% offered to nurses and other frontline healthcare workers who have continuously put their lives on the line by playing a key role in confronting the crisis in our hospitals under unimaginably difficult conditions.

   Poetry is built on the further paradox that it is invariably conceived and written in solitude but ultimately must function as an act of communication if it's to fulfil its fundamental motive (even if it is a case of "communicat(ing) before it is understood".)  Although the thoughts of writers seem divided about whether lockdown has been beneficial for their creative process or not (eg. this Guardian article), many of us have experienced a fillip purely in the additional writing-time and solitude being at home has afforded us, as well as increased access to the ancillary activities that feed into our writing (eg. reading, nature walks, online research). But at the same time the communicative side of poetry, at least as it is manifested in live readings and face-to-face poetry groups and workshops, has suffered quite as much as the other performing arts and with it the sense that poetry also comes out of a living, breathing, talking community of other poets, "silly like us" (as Auden wrote of Yeats) but also bonded by that strange obsession with making lasting shapes out of the flyaway words that surround and confound us.

   It could be said, however, that poetry has adapted to lockdown circumstances perhaps more easily than music or theatre, many of its live events migrating online with comparative ease. Attending a virtual reading from home can, of course, have its advantages over travelling to and from a venue, especially during winter and especially (as in my case) when you have two small children to put to bed with no literally no chance of a baby-sitter thanks to lockdown restrictions.

   The launch reading for Tears in the Fence 73 which took place last week seemed at first an ambitious undertaking, as the editor David Caddy had invited every single poet with poems included in the issue to read at the event, a generously inclusive gesture which seems in keeping with the ethos of the magazine. In the end an extensive range of poets contributed to the reading, which lasted for well over two hours. As well as the eclectic range of styles and themes on display in the magazine's selection, what was also wonderful was the international diversity of the readers, something again which Zoom facilitates much more practically than a physical reading. The sense that writers from around the world were coming together in a shared purpose was palpable and did restore that feeling of poetic community we often - immured in our little microclimates - mislay. That the Tears in the Fence poets fostered by David are a supportive and highly receptive listenership was also apparent, with generous comments in the Chat panel the norm and an active sense of encouragement in how the writers interacted with one another.

   I almost didn't make it to the reading for the very reasons cited above: my partner was also engaged on an online evening class so it was my turn to put the little ones to bed. I had literally just rocked my crying son to sleep and rested him on the sofa. I logged into the reading which seemed to take a few moments because of connection problems, but as soon as David's face came onto the screen he said "Is Oliver there?" I hardly felt prepared but fortunately had the edition of the magazine to hand and didn't have time to be nervous so just launched into the reading of my poem ('Elegiac Improvisation on the Death of John Hartley Williams'). This first foray into online reading, to an audience of listeners across the UK, Europe and beyond, felt like extending my voice and my words into a broader echo chamber of resonances, taking their place within a creative conversation that is ongoing.

  Copies of Tears in the Fence 73 are still available from the website.

Lee Harwood Memorial

   Sent to me by a friend who discovered it in Brunswick Square, Hove. It's mentioned, in fact, on Lee Harwood's Wikipedia entry.

    In turn it sent me back to LH's poems, often marvellously indirect and floating, like ambient music you can dip in and out of, treating it now as background sound and now as something to home in on the detail of.* "What Harwood’s work manages to achieve is a form of representation which both communicates through language and acknowledges its limitations simultaneously...The incomplete nature of the text allows the reader’s own associative imagination to come into play, to complete the meaning of the text." (from The Poetry Archive, where you can hear Harwood read some of his poems.)

*I was thinking of what has become my most-listened to album of recent months, Robert Ashley's Private Parts, although it would certainly be stretching the definition of "ambient music" to call it such - it really stands outside any genre of music or spoken-word recording and I fear I will have to devote a post to it to do it any justice - in the meantime, take a listen