Sir Geoff

  Chuffed to read in the Guardian today that in the New Year's Honours List Geoffrey Hill has been awarded a Knighthood for his 'services to literature'.
   Respect at last for our Greatest Living Englishman.

'More than your subjective rot': Geoffrey Hill at the Barbican

Goeffrey Hill reading at the Barbican last Sunday was exhilarating and wholly affirming of the longevity of hard-hitting, deeply-wrought poetry. Rather than a coherent review I'll merely post a few of my post-performance notebook jottings, particularly trying to record Hill's frequently very amusing between-poem remarks: "It isn't stand-up comedy; they're not paying me stand-up comedy rates...I've written 8 books since 2007; could it be dementia, I often wonder? It could well be ...I tell myself as long as I can write in strict forms - such as the Sapphic odes of Odi Barbari, Clavics derived from Vaughn and Herbert, or the rhyming quatrains of my forthcoming Daybooks-  then I'm still somehow in control...if you have read my books you won't be surprised by what I'm reading today; if not - if you've just drifted in out of the rain, then - you have my sympathy....my work is like iron spikes in a blasted landscape, like the paintings of Anselm Keifer which I think have been an influence on me and the poems of Paul Celan which Kiefer has so admired...this Anselm Keifer -Paul Celan tradition of art is weird and unlovely and has nothing common with Poetry Please! Thanks to The Economist for making Clavics one of its Books of the Year, fitting it should be in a publication in which a phrase lihe 'plutocratic anarchy' or 'anarchistic plutocracy' (which comes from William Morris ) might be used - as that is what in England we have now, an anarchistic plutocracy ...I finish with Hopkins' sonnet on our national genius Purcell (since the reading took place in the Purcell Rooms) ...I've always taken inspiration from the phrase that Hopkins used to one of his correspondents when they said they didn't understand this sonnet: ' it means something more than your subjective rot'..."
      Hill's reading was followed by an Echoes of Geoffrey Hill event in the foyer, in which James Byrne impressed, both with judiciously-timed voicings of Hillian poems from his most recent volume Blood/Sugar and with drafts of several new ambitious pieces from a satirical sequence called 'Soapboxes'. I enjoyed Niall McDevitt's readings of his own poems, such as the excellent sestina 'Wittgenstein in Ireland', but when he began intoning his settings of Hill's 'The Pentecost Castle' with the aid of a tambourine/burren, it was my time to leave.
    

long poem

Like the Pist and Giths editors, I am also (and wholly coincidentally)linking to Long Poem Magazine on this site - futhermore I have the ulterior motive of having a somewhat lengthy text in the next edition. There's a launch at the Barbican Library on Jan 15th  - let's just survive the festive saison en enfer first...

Christopher Logue Has Died

                                                               
 Another of the seminal figures of post-war British poetry, Christopher Logue, has died at the weekend aged 85. The importance and enduring worth of his Iliad versions can hardly be over-stated, but his Selected Poems (Faber) equally shows a varied and lively intelligence at work, never content to stick with one style or tone.
    He also lead a colourful, chequered life, as his highly readable autobiography Prince Charming (also Faber) details. Many of his adult years were passed in Notting Hill, just up the road from where I live, in Denbigh Close (just off Portobello Road). He bought his house for a song back in the 50s when - believe it or not - Notting Hill was a shabby, working-class district and a "mews" still denoted its earlier sense of a row of stables, with living quarters above.

john fahey

  Love the open-tuned droney momentum of this,played with Fahey's characteristic amalgam of meticulousness and passion.
  Interesting what he says at the end, that its 'a quote from Holst's The Planets'. I'm not up on my Holst, so if someone can identify a connection between Red Pony and The Planets please let me know. (Fahey could well have been taking a rise out of the nice young woman, of course.)

In the Shadow of Blossoming Young Girls

                                                        
   I've at last reached the end of the first third of A la Recherche, a re-reading project I mentioned way back in April. Marvellous throughout, but interesting to see how Proust saves some of his profoundest reflections on art via the painter Elstir ( ironically offset by the narrator's beautifully-drawn, flirtatious liaisons with Albertine and her friends) for the last few hundred pages of A L'Ombre de Jeunes Filles en Fleur (how did Montcrieff ever get away with calling it 'Within a Budding Grove'?). There' ve been various speculations on which artist Elstir is modelled on, although this passage makes him sound rather Cezanne-like:

The effort made by Elstir to strip himself, when face to face with reality, of every intellectual concept, was all the more admirable in that this man who, before sitting down to paint, made himself deliberately ignorant, forgot, in his honesty of purpose, everything that he knew, since what one knows ceases to exist by itself, had in reality an exceptionally cultivated mind.

  All important literature (and this is the essence of its importance) imprints the reader for a short time at least with its own distinctive rhythms, syntax, perspectives and colourings - a distillation (at some remove) of the author's individual world-view. There are few books this is more true of than Proust's A la Recherche: reading it on the tube each morning and coming out at Liverpool Street during rush-hour felt like a wonderful corrective  - through sheer contrast and opposition - to the chaotic, money-minded, workaday world I was entering.
    It made me consider how Proust's mode of perception - endlessly concatenating, imaginatively generous, evasive about pinning down a thought or impression whose implications are potentially infinite - might be as impossible to sustain in our short-attention-span, quick-fix society as the kind of leisured middle- and upper-class milieu Proust depicts would be impossible now to aspire towards politically or socially.
    To borrow that rare mode of aesthetic perception, however, albeit briefly, can only amount to a beneficial widening of consciousness, a glimpse beyond the dumbed-down, black-and-white reductiveness and desensitisation we are continually, cynically fed.

Pithy Prose and Reading RIP

   Delighted to see my sequence of prose-poems posted this week on one of the best UK blogs, Gists and Piths. Thanks, Simon and George.
   On the train home I read in the Evening Standard of the passing-away of Peter Reading - no doubt he would grumble to hear himself elegised in such a Tory rag. He was one of the true originals of post-war British poetry, a quietly rebarbative presence doggedly pursuing his own hard-won, hard-edged style in the face of a dominant flaccidity. As the guy in the ES said, his current neglect among poetry-readers is shameful, yet for a writer who has dwelt so obsessively on his own mortality (later volume-titles include Last Poems, Ob and Vendange Tardive ie. late harvest) his death could perhaps not be described as untimely.

                                            

Creep Scanner/Impulse

    Just discovered the compelling music blog Creep Scanner (see Bloglist), notable as much for its acerbic, foulmouthed, misanthropic comments as for the wide-ranging, hard-edged musical choices. I presume the author-name 'Jerry Orbach' is an alias since the American actor of that name (whose photo appears on the 'About Me' area of the blog) died in 2004 and the blog is very prolific (up to 35 entries a month!) and up to date.
     Now I hate shopping as much as the next man but I feel obliged to let you know about an offer I encountered today in HMV. One of the coolest ever labels for interesting jazz, Impulse (the "House that 'Trane Built"), has done a series of 2-for-1 CDs by people like Archie Shepp, Art Blakey, Albert Ayler, Alice Coltrane and Keith Jarrett which are currently available in HMV on a 2 for £10 deal.
    Four Impulse albums for a tenner - you can't go wrong!

ultimate version

   Found by chance - and with astonishment - the source for one of the most beautiful tracks in the reggae canon, Lee Perry's haunting 'Bird in Hand'. Turns outs it's based on a Bollywood song from 1950 'Milte Hi Ankwen Dil Huwa'.Even within the versioning-friendly sphere of Jamaican music, this strikes me as an extraordinary act of cross-cultural recontextualisation by Perry as producer that's years ahead of its time, turning a Hindi love-song into what I'd always thought was a Rastafarian chant of some kind, joltingly conjoining secular and mystical resonances in a sublime dub soundscape.

   

Baume im Herbst (Trees in Autumn): Kurt Kren (1960)