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.

Great Leaps Forward

 


Peculiar goings-on at the 2012 Forward Prize the other week - they've only gone and awarded it to one of the world's most important living poets, Jorie Graham. And there's me thinking your surname had to be Burnside, Paterson or O'Brien to be even in with a chance...And what's this? One of the UK's most important (and most woefully underrated) poets, Denise Riley, who's never had a full volume brought out by a mainstream publisher, has also won the Best Single Poem prize - I can scarcely credit it...
    But if this is true and not some viral hoax then it's immensely good news that two such uncompromising voices should gain the wider exposure in this country they've long deserved. I've been an admirer of Jorie Graham for many years (three parts intellectual enthusiasm to one part pathetic crush based on photos like this one on the right) - I haven't read all of PLACE, her prize-winning book, but early volumes like Erosion and The End of Beauty are as exploratory and spellbinding as any poetry of the 20thC, powerfully combining fractured lyricism with philosophical and political scope (the Carcanet Selected Dream of the Unified Field is a good place to start if you haven't come across her).
    Denise Riley,similarly, has consistently forged an individual style which one might term post- Cambridge School but which initially emerged out of the 70's climate of critical theory and Eric Mottram's avant garde-oriented Poetry Review. But if her work is informed by feminism and a deconstructionist, self-interrogating view of language (broadly, in these ways, comparable with Graham's) it has nevertheless always been more approachable and couched in the everyday than most of her fellow-experimentalists. The quirky play she makes with the elegiac mode in her winning poem 'A Part Song' is typical of this fine touch.
    With trendy young whippersnapper Sam Riviere also among the prizes for his debut Austerities, does this all reflect a salutary broadening of taste for the Forward? Might the judges even have read Peter Riley's brilliant broadside about 'Poetry Prize Culture' in the Fortnightly Review earlier this year?
   Or is it just that the O' Burnterson conglomerate hasn't produced any volumes this year?
   
  
   

  

Pindaric Mode

                                                  

  Ian Pindar’s Constellations is the most intriguing new volume I’ve read this year for a number of reasons. Like Tim Donnelly’s Cloud Corporation (which I wrote enthusiastically about last year), Constellations finds a way of utilising the great Modernist forebears - chiefly in this case Stevens, Aiken and late Eliot, with perhaps a few Continental masters like Valery, Rilke and Seferis thrown into the mix  – and remoulding their rhetoric of high-flung abstract lyricism into a more contemporary idiom.

     Whereas Donnelly’s style seems an understandable extension of what’s happened in American poetry in recent decades, where Stevens channelled through Ashbery seems a prevalent line of influence, Pindar’s feat seems all the more admirable within the context of an English poetry which has been fairly resistant to these kinds of writers since the Movement declared its highly-damaging moratorium on Modernism back in the late 50s – remember Larkin’s asinine rejection of “Pound, Picasso and Parker”?( His estimation of Charlie Parker as a radical Modernist -  a saxophonist who in the light of subsequent jazz-explorations now seems decidedly old-school – suggests how limited and partial his critical viewpoint was.)

     Even the more experimental British poets who have been interested in American Modernism, such as the ‘Cambridge school’, have taken more from the skinny-lined, syntactically-disruptive Objectivist/Black Mountain lineage than from the lusher, reflective manner typified by Stevens: “the tradition of Pound and Williams rather than the tradition of Pound and Eliot” as Crozier and Longville put it in their Introduction to what’s seen as the ‘Cambridge School’ anthology, A Various Art.

    What’s particularly important about Constellations is the way Pindar has forged a style based on Modernist and non-British role-models that sets it bravely apart from the run-of-the-mill complacencies of so many volumes published today. In so doing, it reminds us both of the restrictive set of tacit conventions many poets are writing by, and of the vastly wider possibilities embodied in looking beyond these same conventions and towards areas of poetry far more ambitious, complex and powerful than anything written in the UK in the last 10 years (the usual source of influence for new poets.)

   For a start, Pindar returns to an essentially impersonal aesthetic in Constellations, avoiding the  autobiographical-foregrounding which all too often dominates mainstream poetry. We learn nothing about Ian Pindar’s personal life or past in these poems because he is too absorbed in the task of crafting beautifully-measured lines and stanzas and allowing these to speak for themselves:

       “Old cars and roses. The yard prepares for evening.

         It knows the colour of yesterday,

         as the shapes in the yard are angles of themselves.”

Without the need to put himself in the frame of the poem, Pindar is free to evoke subtly-modulated scenarios which are frequently both painterly – the luminous semi-figurative landscapes of Matisse or Dufy spring to mind – and musical, with playful variations made on the sounds and meanings of words: “New vistas and visas, new rooms with new aromas”; “each particle part-icicle”; “engendered/in the consciousness, endangered in the consciousness”. The overall structure of the book, which indeed can be read either as a single long poem or as a linked sequence, is also more symphonic than narrative-driven, with themes and motifs (eg. the changing of the seasons) recurring and reconfiguring throughout its length. This is another key device used by Modernist poets, of course, with Four Quartets being only the most obvious example: the effect is to allow a complex, open-ended meditation on certain ideas and images without pinning down meaning to the kind of glib, unitary conclusion invariably encountered in the post-Movement poem.

    Despite its many virtues, my main reservation with Constellations is that the style often sails a little too close to Stevens and ends up sounding almost like an imitation; this is where the book diverges from Donnelly’s Cloud Corporation, which seems like a bold bringing-forward and revivifying of the Stevensian poetic, spicing it up with dollops of absurdist irony and post-Modern  weltschmerz. In attempting to capture the airiness and grace of Stevens at his most lyrical, Pindar sometimes overdoes the mellifluous “gaudiness” of his language and comes out rather over-alliterative and flowery (eg. “The rose/is a replica of a rose in a replica reality”); equally, there is occasionally a naive tweeness of expression which the political poems of the middle sections do not sufficiently offset: “ Life is a holiday. For love and sudden joy”;/ “How nice to make a Paradise./ How nice to know white pansies and white peonies.” Stevens brought darker tones into many of his poems (eg. at random “A little less returned for him each spring”) - as did other Modernists like the early Eliot, Montale and Vallejo – and one might say that Constellations could do with a touch more of this harsher, bassier octave.

  Still, airiness, grace and unEnglish jouissance are perhaps exactly what we need when there is so much dull and unimaginative poetry around.  It is summer, after all (allegedly). Far better poems that are too redolent of Stevens than poems that are too redolent of Don Paterson and Carol-Anne Duffy.

poetic mastermind?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01974zd/?t=6m41s

    Link to today's edition of Celebrity Mastermind featuring Simon Armitage answering questions on The Life and Works of Ted Hughes. He doesn't do too well, but this is perhaps the first instance of a halfway decent poet being described as a celebrity, so worthy of note.
   Who knows, later this year we might see Don Paterson  or Jo Shapcott on Celebrity Big Brother...