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.

The Poet Who Vanished Comes Back

  The most exhilarating and refreshing poetry-volume of last year wasn't by some audacious new upstart but by a remarkable rediscovery from the 1960s whose language sounds to me more vibrant than any recent debut. The Collected Poems of Rosemary Tonks - Bedouin of the London Evening - appeared only six months or so after the passing away of the latter-styled Mrs Lightband as reported in this post from last May. Neil Astley of Bloodaxe has done an exemplary job not only of editing and bringing to light the long-out-of-print oeuvre so rapidly but also of providing a comprehensive introduction which finally details the whole poignant narrative of Tonks' transition from feted Hampstead literateuse, traveller and bohemian to devoutly-Christian eccentric living the second half of her life in solitary seclusion in Bournemouth.
   These days poets are in general such a polite, worldly, often business-like bunch  - always keen to market and promote themselves and further their careers through networking and social media: as in some ways we all have to be now, the market for any kind of readership or critical attention being so marginalised and competitive. It no longer seems enough just to be able to write good poems and hope that a receptive audience will discover and appreciate them.
    Since the Movement's rubbishing of the neo-romantic model of the poet (typified for them in the bibulous demise of Dylan Thomas), it's remained largely unfashionable in mainstream quarters to re-invoke the older and indeed ancient notion that many poets (like writers and artists in general) are not sensible, rounded types with a canny sense of how they fit into the publishing market and moreover that this unworldliness  (and in some cases, lack of balance) is part and parcel of their immersion in poetry as a deeply-engaged personal quest or wrestle with forces beyond him or herself - what used to be called "a commitment to the Muse", a perhaps quasi-religious undertaking. "The lyric poet", as Nietzsche describes it in The Birth of Tragedy, "himself becomes his images, his images are objectified versions of himself...only his 'I' is not that of the actual waking man, but of the 'I' dwelling, truly and eternally, in the ground of being."
    The apparent breakdown and attendant rejection of literature and society Rosemary Tonks went through may seem unfortunate given the imaginative flair and linguistic dexterity evinced in her published work. Seen as such, the tragedy of her abandoning poetry in the late 70s is that - like Keats or Keith Douglas - she left a tiny amount of poems of tantalising brilliance. Astley has not uncovered any other unpublished or fugitive texts, meaning that the Collected Poems is just the two volumes brought out in the 60s, Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms and Iliad of Broken Sentences. One could go further and suggest that her debut, although distinctive, was somewhat indebted to other models (chiefly 40s poets like George Barker and WS Graham) and it was mainly only in her second collection that Tonks began to establish her own form and voice.
    The poems throughout bristle with an impetuous, nervous energy, the questioning intensity of one living on the edge, exploring the underbelly of the city in an endless inquisitive flanerie: "I find exactly what I want to say, then I test it a hundred times with life to make sure it's true"(Interview with Peter Orr). Bundled up in collisions of surreal metaphor that seem closer to the Lorca of Poeta en Nueva York than any English forebear, the sense of dissolution and possible dissociation (paralleling Rimbaud's "je est un autre") keeps breaking through what John Hartley Williams called her "haughty, self-ironising contempt":
                                       " For this is not my life
                                          But theirs, that I am living.
                                          And I wolf, gulp, bolt it down day by day"
   Yet from Astley's description of her later, sequestered existence (based on journals and letters) the same internal pressure and struggle to assert her own meaning on the flux of the everyday is still apparent:
       " Ever restless in spirit, she fought daily battles with her inner demons, plagued by self-doubt and debilitating depression...birds were her soundscape, and birds were associated with her mother, whom she called 'Birdie'...she would base decisions on what to do, whom to trust, whether to go out , how to deal with a problem, on how these bird sounds made her feel".
    In other words, there seems a continuity in Tonks' psychological perception of reality between this kind of augurising, animistic "magical thinking" and the often hallucinatory urban vistas and flickering cognitive metamorphoses of her poems. Again in some ways like Rimbaud - or indeed Emily Dickinson, with her complex scepticism towards even showing her poems to others - it seems Tonks' intensive spiritual project ultimately lead her into areas where the idea of communicating to the outside world through poetry and publication no longer seemed relevant, so private and symbolic had it become. But equally it's the radical individuality and uncompromising integrity of such a vision which informs the bravery and vigour of her poems, and makes it such an important event that we now have them to read and study together for the first time.

Catches Up as Joy: Tess Gallagher at the South Bank

                                                    
   The reading in the Purcell Rooms on Tuesday was a major disappointment in so far as John Kinsella (one of the main draws for me) couldn't make it due to sickness.
   His last-minute replacement was Rachel Boast (author of Sidereal) and,like the other first-half reader Jean Sprackland, she regaled us with the kind of over-familiar, risk-averse poetry aptly placed to garner Whitbreads and Costas and all manner of other commercially-sponsored awards. Boast was certainly the more engaging of the two, however, due to the metaphysical and scientific scope of her work, citing Samuel Taylor-Coleridge as her book's "presiding spirit".
   Tess Gallagher, with a hefty New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe) to promote, was a far more vibrant reader and between-poem speaker, with poems ranging over her links to Ireland, memories of Raymond Carver, a lament for a hummingbird, and the stunning meditation 'At Lorca's Piano'. In many respects her manner has changed little since the 60s, but it's just this post-Beat quality of rambling personal disclosure imbued with a sort of ragtaggle spiritual enquiry that's still so treasurable to hear, offsetting apparently prosaic narratives with potent undertones and crosscurrents, occasionally leading to startlingly beautiful lines such as "our soon-to-be-deadness catches up in us as joy".
   Gallagher should have been the headliner as Douglas Dunn could only be described as dull. Glints of acerbic Scots wryness were the only palliatives to a monotone rehearsal of the same post-Larkinian stylings Dunn has (with the notable exception of his best and most widely-read book Elegies) soldiered on with.