June has shot by...

Paul Muldoon at Charleston Literary Festival

I should correct that heading by saying that May has also shot by, and the flurry of events has not been recorded in this little venture.  Tut.  The fact is that the old creative juices (and they're feeling rather old at the moment) have been entirely devoted to producing poems for the end of my MA's first year.  People say to me "How's the course going?" and I say "Fine", because I'm enjoying it but I haven't got the faintest idea whether I'm writing any better than I was at the beginning.  Perhaps, though, I've got a slightly better idea of what I'm meant to be doing, which is a start.  But, like all subjects, the more you get into it the more difficult it is, and at the moment I'm running the risk of feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all.

Something must be going right somewhere, though, since the rate of acceptance by the wee poetry mags has improved.  It's not like our dog Balzac with the postman, exactly - grabbing my submissions as they come through the letterbox - but the percentage take has I think got a little better than it was.  But we're talking in modest terms here, and I don't think a Nobel Prize is in the offing for a while.

Continuing the poetry theme, I can say that one of the high spots of May was hearing the poet Paul Muldoon give a reading at Charleston Festival.  He read both his own poems and some by his old friend Seamus Heaney, and did it with such wit and charm the whole audience was captivated.  It wasn't just Middle England, either, though there was more than a fair smattering of the well-heeled pensioner set.  It taught me a lot about how to give a reading, though in my case I'm usually limited to eight minutes rather than Muldoon's hour.  

Earlier this month we were in Mallorca, where I was able to continue the theme of Dead Poets (see earlier postings about our trip to Ireland) by visiting Deia, a beautiful and remote village on the west coast of the island where Robert Graves is buried.  We had some difficulty finding his modest grave, but it's nice to add it to the collection. Graves was part of a group of painters and writers who lived in Deia in the second half of the last century.  Their graves, or plaques in their memory, are mostly huddled together at one side - reflecting, I imagine, the way in which they were perceived by the local community.  Graves, however, has a simple stone with an inscription that appears to have been done in freehand while clay was still wet.  There was a group of pebbles on the gravestone, some with messages attached, left by admirers.  It's always interesting to see how far poetry can reach in touching the hearts and minds of others.

The academic term is now over, though we have the joy of a summer school coming up on campus in Lancaster at the end of the month.  A rather intensive week of talks and conferences and hopefully some writing.  Gulp.

Antony Mair   

Morris dancing and bikers - yes, it's May Day in Hastings

The Morris dancing started on the Saturday of the Bank Holiday weekend, though this year it was a little more diffuse and chaotic than last, as a result of the usual venue - Butler's Gap in George Street - being closed off because of the possible danger from a house in partial collapse in the street above.  As a result, confused Morris dancers were found here and there round the Old Town, looking for a place to do their bit.  We caught up with the ones above near the boating lake on the front.  They're of the rhythmic stick-bashing variety rather than the waving-handkerchief ones.  I'm hoping that next year Butler's Gap will be open again and we can get a better look.

Monday is the full Monty of folk battiness, with the Jack-in-the-Green procession and all and sundry dressed in green and/or wearing green face-paint.  One gym bunny we encountered in the afternoon had bodypainted the full expanse of his overdeveloped torso with green, but that may just have been an excuse to take his shirt off.  The procession wends its way through the Old Town and finally up to West Hill, where there are more jolly japes in the afternoon - including Morris dancing, of course.  You have to be a folk history expert to understand some of the allusions - go to The Merry Wives of Windsor, for example, to understand the man with the stag's head.  During the whole weekend there were quite a lot of ladies of a certain age wafting around in yards of green muslin and tulle.  They came into their own in the procession, equipped with drums or waving hankies or just mincing along in a nice fantasy world of their own, joined by a host of others, beating drums, eating fire, or wearing other strange costumes involving green.  All good harmless stuff.
 Meanwhile the bikers were assembling on the front - row upon row of gleaming chrome, and a lot of chaps in leather, wandering around, a little displaced once they'd got off their bikes, rather like snails without their shells.  Facial hair and pewter tankards seemed to be points of convergence between the green-painted folk and the motorcycle fraternity, but in fact they inhabit very different worlds, and the buxom lady element seemed remarkably absent among the serried ranks of bikes.  This slightly weird combination of events was entirely good-humoured, and the weather was such that everyone drifted around in the sunshine with a smile on their face.  Perfick, as Pop Larkin would have said.

Antony Mair

Will Self and the Death of the Novel

Will Self, courtesy of WIkimedia Commons

I was interested by Will Self’s article in The Guardian last weekend, headed The Novel is Dead (this time it’s for real).  Stripped of the baroque ornament of his prose, Mr Self’s basic thesis is that the digitisation of literature has resulted in destruction of the writer’s ability to earn a living and of the reader’s ability to read in the required way.  As a result, the serious novel “will become an art form on a par with easel painting or classical music, confined to a defined social and demographic group, requiring a degree of subsidy, a subject for historical scholarship rather than public discourse”. 

Personally, I think that this point may already have been reached.  More significantly, however, the fate of the novel, as predicted by Mr Self, somewhat postdates the fate of poetry.  “I’ve come to realise that the kind of psyche implicit in the production and consumption of serious novels… depends on a medium that has inbuilt privacy”, he writes.  Nothing could be more private or intimate than the world of many poems – and I’m not referring here to the declaimed works of performance poets, but the carefully crafted poems intended for the page, which account for the majority of what’s written.

Poetry, however, is not dead.  Far from it.  Its following may be small in number, but seems increasingly vigorous.  The internet teems with poetry blogs, online poetry forums, e-zines and online courses.

Unlike novelists, poets have not usually expected to earn a living from their poetry.  Daytime jobs have been commonplace – often, it is true, in academic life – with the writing squeezed in to spare time.  T. S. Eliot was able to achieve this, so why shouldn’t others?

Poetry has something of a longer history than the novel, going back to the mists of time with Homeric epics, continuing through the Middle Ages with verse both sacred and secular, and stubbornly operating as a medium, even today, for the expression of mankind’s deepest thoughts and feelings.  The serious novel, on the other hand, only came into being in the eighteenth century, and its nineteenth century successes were in part due to publication in serial form.    

Will Self may be right about the serious novel becoming a refuge for the academic and the grey-haired.  But the novel’s loss may turn out to be poetry’s gain.  If the public need for story is satisfied by other media – film, television, computer games – the need to express emotion in words can take no other form than the poem, that brief encapsulation of feeling that finds its echo in the hearts of listeners and readers alike.

Antony Mair

Honouring Louis MacNeice

The grave of Louis MacNeice, Carrowdore, Co. Down

In his introduction to Faber's 2001 selection of Louis MacNeice's poems, the Irish poet Michael Longley tells the story of how, in 1964, he visited Louis MacNeice's graveyard in Carrowdore together with fellow-poets Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon.  MacNeice had died the year before, prematurely at the age of 55.  Mahon was the only one of the three who had met him personally, but all three were shocked by the death.  

Fifty years later, I found myself in the same spot, on our recent trip round the northern part of Ireland.  MacNeice enjoys a special place in my affections.  Not only do I admire him as a poet, but I realised comparatively recently that this admiration is something I inherited from my father - who also died prematurely, at the same age as MacNeice, though seven years later.  Among my books are three slim collections - The Earth Compels (1938), Autumn Journal (1939) and Plant and Phantom (1941), with my father's neat handwriting on the first inside page - the first having been bought in his last year at Oxford, the last during the war, in Edinburgh, when he was working for MI5.

MacNeice's reputation has lasted well, but he is gradually fading into obscurity - the 1988 Selected Poems  is half as long again as its 2001 successor, and there has been no Four Weddings and a Funeral to resuscitate his popularity as there was for his contemporary, Auden.  However, he was a great influence not only on Heaney, Mahon and Longley, but also on the younger poet Paul Muldoon, and consequently he is part of a continuity of influence that began before Yeats and will continue after Muldoon and his Irish successors.  Reading his poems now, I find them uneven, some snared in their time, but others beautiful and hopefully surviving for a long time in anthologies that will encourage people to read more of him.  One I am greatly fond of is Soap Suds:

   This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big

   House he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open

   To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop

   To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.

   And these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;

   Two great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;

   A stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;

   A rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.

   To which he has now returned.  The day of course is fine

   And a grown-up voice cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,

   Then crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball

   Skims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then

   Through hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn

   And the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!

   But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands

   Under the running tap that are not the hands of a child.  

Antony Mair

Hotels vs. bed and breakfast

The Merchant's House, Derry

 I can't remember when I last had a touring holiday - i.e. a holiday where you move from place to place.  Usually we book an apartment somewhere and stay put.  But on our recent trip to Ireland we took the car over and travelled around, sleeping in seven different beds over eight nights.  One of the interesting lessons this taught me is the need to shop carefully when booking hotels.

Far and away the best accommodation for us was the elegant Merchant's House, a Derry town house owned by Joan Pyne and her husband.  We had an attractive bedroom at the rear of the first floor, the front room being a stunning sitting-room for guests.  Breakfast was served round a large table in the dining-room below, which gives you the opportunity to mix - briefly - with others staying.  In our case there was an Australian couple, a trio from Bilbao and a silent Frenchman.

I hadn't known what to expect, but had been attracted by the architecture.  The interior was a dream of perfect proportions and beautiful detailing in cornices and ceiling roses.  Joan was a delight and breakfast was copious.  And we slept like tops in the comfortable bed.

Canal Court Hotel, Newry

This was all very different from the soulless monoliths I had booked us into in Newry and Sligo.  In Newry the Canal Court, at a cost of £115, offered a spacious room overlooking a carpark, but the public areas on the ground floor were a nightmare of bad taste and thronging partygoers, increasingly the worse for drink as the night wore on.  The ground floor bar was dominated by a vast screen showing a football match. Call me oldfashioned, but I expect a bit of style in what purports to be a four star hotel.

In Sligo I'd been impressed by the picture of the Clarion Hotel.  I hadn't thought it through: to fill a place that size during the Easter school holidays you need to bring in the families and children.  We had a particularly garrulous tot in the room next door, whose delighted babble could easily be heard through a communicating door.  When the tot fell quiet, its siblings and cousins and friends amused themselves by running up and down the long corridor.  The Clarion Hotel was originally built as a lunatic asylum.  We left before our sanity was threatened.

The basic contrast in all this was between the corporate and the personal.  It's not just a question of cost - the Clarion was reasonable enough.  But if you're offering budget rates in a large hotel it looks as if you'll be employing undertrained staff with little interest in making you feel like a valued customer.  Something that came naturally to Joan Pyne in the Merchant's House.

Antony Mair 

Clarion Hotel, Sligo

The start of Hastings Stanza

JD Bar Bistro, Claremont, Hastings - venue for Hastings Stanza meetings

Stanza groups are offshoots of the Poetry Society, and consist of people in a given area who come together to talk about poetry - whether to workshop their own work, hear readings or talks by poets, or discuss poetry generally.  For almost two years now I've been attending meetings of Brighton Stanza, which has workshops each month, and have found it enormously helpful with my own writing.  One or two people then suggested I might start a Stanza in Hastings, and after a contact with the Poetry Society to try and gauge the extent of interest I took the plunge and organised a meeting a couple of weeks ago.  I'd been tipped off about an available space at JD Bar Bistro, so seven of us congregated there for the inaugural meeting.  I'd suggested we follow the Brighton pattern of workshopping our poems, which everyone seemed to be happy with, and the result was an interesting evening with very varied work.

Hastings isn't Brighton, and it's going to be interesting to see the direction we take as time goes on.  The Brighton Stanza is well established after eight years or so, and attendances, while varying, are usually in the teens - on one occasion there were twenty-three of us, which is rather more than ideal.  There's a good spread of both age and talent, which makes meetings stimulating.  Our little fledgling in Hastings has a long way to go before we have that kind of zing, but I have every hope we'll get there.  After our first gathering I just felt delighted that I'd set the ball rolling.  Meetings are now to take place on the second Wednesday of each month, and I'm already looking forward to May 14.

Antony Mair

Haute cuisine on TV, junk on the motorways

Last week we watched a Masterchef  programme, in which a group of amiable young-ish people produced a series of elaborate dishes judged by experts on grounds of presentation, combinations of flavours and general technique.  I am newly aware of the perils of a split sauce or a cardamom crême anglaise that's not thick enough.

The following day we set off for Holyhead, 375 miles northwest of Hastings.  Our journey involved calls at various service stations for refreshment along the M25, M40 and M6.  Nothing could have better illustrated the gulf between the cooking programmes on the television and the brutal reality of daily eating on the country's motorways.

Franchises to Costa's, Starbuck's, McDonald's and the like result in a variety of processed foods without either taste or originality.  "Welcome Break" announced one of these refuges.  "Welcome to whom?" I wondered, as we ate a burger from a cardboard box - the bun was like a wrung-out flannel, the meat indeterminate (I am hoping it was cow rather than horse), the vegetables tasteless.  The accompanying chips were good.  Cutlery is considered superfluous, or perhaps it's felt that customers don't possess the necessary skills to handle a knife and fork.  If I'd raised the point with the establishment, doubtless there would have been references to "street food" - the growingly fashionable pretext for cutting corners by modelling our eating habits on the third world's poor.

These are seriously depressing places.  Our fellow-customers - a cross-section of the modern British? - were in many cases grotesquely overweight, hunching myopically over the sugar, carbohydrate and emulsifier concoctions on their trays with a weary apathy before waddling out, like so many penguins, to their oversized vehicles.

Perhaps it was always thus: the all-day breakfasts of transport caffs have merely been replaced by a more homogenised version, more slickly marketed.  There was no sign of a freshly made crême anglaise, let alone a sauce out of anything other than a sachet or branded bottle.  Seen from the motorway, Masterchef appears like an encounter with an alien species, heading alarmingly for extinction.

Antony Mair