Cliff Collapse

The Lads Were Really Up For It

Meditation at Lagunitas, with Bacardi Breezers

Carcanet have revisited the 1979 anthology Five American Poets thirty-one years on, and a peculiar assembly they make now, as they did then, Robert Hass, John Matthias, James McMichael, John Peck and Robert Pinsky. The presence at the outset of the book of Hass’s ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’ though, reminds me, again, of that poem’s almost totemic representativeness, as short lyric poems go. It also reminds me how much that poem embodies so much about a certain kind of lyric poem that I find, well, hard to stomach. Here in parody form is an attempt at explaining why. Hass:

There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed.

And my parody rewrite:

There was a woman
I met down the pub and I remembered how, holding
her garish tattoos in my hands sometimes,
I felt a nauseous boredom at her presence
like a thirst for Bacardi breezers, for my childhood clone town
with its pound shops, hospital radio from the cancer ward,
muddy places where we caught the little shit-eating flatfish
called spunkbubble. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless tedium. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way she devoured the take-away
pizza, the thing Tyson the staffie did that hurt her, what
she puked.

What I don’t like about the original is its intense atmosphere of privileged private experience. George Orwell used to intone threateningly about how some things could in fact be true even if they were in the Daily Telegraph, and if this sounds like I’m coming out in an Easthopeite or even Sillimanesque allergic reaction to Hass as quietist, I hope it’s not quite that reductive. I really dislike the paternalistic, patronising narrative framing of ‘There was a woman /I made love to’, and the litany of self-consciously sensitive associations she triggers. ‘I must have been the same to her’, we are told. How does the speaker know that? He or she is silencing the other’s perspective to speak on her behalf, but with a sanctimony and a show of benign superiority I find oleaginous and fake. ‘The thing her father said that hurt her’ is as queasy a moment as any I can think of in contemporary poetry. But consider this comparison. MacDiarmid’s ‘The Watergaw’ ends:

There was nae reek i the laverock's hoose
That nicht - an nane i mine;
But I hae thocht o that foolish licht
Ever sin syne;
An I think that mebbe at last I ken
What your look meant then.

Here again is private lyric experience. But the reader experiences this privacy as something disquieting, uncanny, alarming even. Whereas in Hass’s case we are flattered into the illusion of a shared intimacy, but one against which every fibre of my instinctive response rejects. My use of the term ‘privilege’ has nothing to do with class, since in strict fairness the woman in Hass’s poem might have been just as fond of Bacardi breezers down a grim boozer as the speaker of my parody. It has to do with a sense of self-importance and assumed readerly consent which I find, finally, repellent, and which I find utterly absent from the alarming privacies of the MacDiarmid poem. No doubt there is a dollop of terrible unfairness in this judgement of mine. But there you go. I can’t read ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’ without pulling a very sour face indeed, not just on its own account, but because of how much po-faced, prissy, bloodless, downright terrible contemporary poetry I think flows from its example.

(Five American Poets, ed. Clive Wilmer, Carcanet, £14.95)

Return of Keats and Chapman

Keats and Chapman hired a gardener, one Shmuel Abramovich. It all worked out very nicely, and a dab hand he proved to be in the cabbage patch, and as for the turnips! Unrecognisable was hardly the word, from the washout of last year’s paltry crop. Soon it’d be like New Jersey in a Philip Roth novel, Keats joked. How, Chapman foolishly asked. With a rose in bloom on every corner, honk honk, came the reply. There was only one problem. Shmuel repeatedly, and in ways that seemed beyond his control, broke into Fiddler on the Roof routines, usually in response to some gardening-related stimulus. ‘Shmuel, I was thinking about the marrows for the garden fête...’, Keats would begin, only for Shmuel to launch into a rendition of ‘If I Was a Rich Man’, kicking and lurching round the garden in a most theatrical way. It got worse and worse, to the point where he was ringing in sick most days. Chapman decided that firmness was required and, noticing a climbing-plant infestation on the side of the house, made him come back to deal with it. But it was too much for Shmuel, and a half-hour of klezmer-themed song and dance routines later, the poor man keeled over and died. ‘I blame myself’, announced Chapman. ‘Don’t do that’, said Keats, ‘It was obviously a case of Poison Oi Vey’.

Off to the sunny south-west for a few days.

The Pine Marten

There is blood on the snow
and a trickle of rowan berry juice

on his bib where the pine marten
stands for a moment like a man.

What colour should I turn, slipping
after him into the woods, his trail

gone cold and his scent lost
among the dead leaves and tree bark?

Elusive familiar: there is no reason
why we need meet. Will we

have so much as been here at all?
I too have never seen my own face.

The Weasel

This time I have you
I tell myself pouncing
on the tip of your white
weasel’s tail in the snow
who am left with a mouthful
of wiry black hairs
and the line of your pawprints
in that white carpet
telling me where to go.

Icebergs

I was asked, the other week, to write something for a forthcoming anniversary issue of Icarus. Looking through the issues of that magazine I edited in 1988-9, in between squinting, grimacing, and yelping at practically everything else I contributed to the issues (which was a lot, pseudonymously), I came across this translation from Henri Michaux. What a fine poem it is, in French:

Icebergs, without parapet or girdle, where ancient
crestfallen cormorants and the souls of sailors
recently dead come lean against the hyperboreal
nights of enchantment.

Icebergs, icebergs, secular cathedrals
of eternal winter, enfurled in this planet Earth’s
calotte, all frostyfingered.
How high, how pure your brinks,
children of the chill.

Icebergs, icebergs, spine of the North Atlantic,
august Buddhas frozen from seas uncontemplated,
sparking beacons of issueless death,
the aghast cry of silence lasts centuries.

Icebergs, icebergs, wantless solitaries
countries numbed in distance, beyond the vermin’s prowl.
How well I see you, original parents of the scattered islands,
the headstrong currents, how intimately you move in my mind’s arena.

Have You Seen This Cat?

Publicity Roll-Out for New Martin Amis Novel Includes Home Visit from Author Insulting Your Curtains ('I've Always Hated Your Curtains')

John Terry is a Rat-Faced Knicker-Model-Botherer, or, My Daily Mise-en-Abyme Hell, Never Mind the Other Things I Find to Worry About

One thing I’ve noticed in my life, and Lord knows there haven’t been many, is that I am never more than a prompt or two in the nearest media outlet away from a spot of absurdist mise-en-abyme, and this worries me. For instance, I see John ‘Champions League Vodka’ Terry (slogan: ‘Bottled in Moscow’) has got into a spot of misplaced-winkie-and-tabloids related bother. He attempted to take out not just an injunction against the media to prevent them reporting on his knicker-model-bothering ways, but a super-injunction to prevent them reporting that they were unable to report on his knicker-model-bothering ways. But would he then have had to take out a hyper-injunction to prevent them reporting on the fact that they were unable to report on the fact of his knicker-model-bothering ways, I wonder, and there’s my aforementioned mise-en-abyme in the bag. It could quickly spiral into a very time-consuming activity indeed, could it not. Someone once told me of putting an out-of-office automated reply on his email before going on holidays but sending an email just before he did so, which prompted an automated out-of-office reply at the other end, which then generated an out-of-office reply at his end, and so on, in a cycle terminable only in death or the uninvention of the computer, whichever comes soonest, a bit like the story Evelyn Waugh used to tell about his father’s thank you cards for birthday cards which generated thank you cards for the thank you cards which then etc. If there was any way of transferring his travails (travaux?) to the computer example I’ve just described, perhaps John Terry could bludgeon this story to death with a flood of automated out-of-orifice replies to requests for comment? Yes, that’s exactly what he should do.

In other news, I see a branch of Tesco’s in Wales has introduced a dress code to discourage people from wandering round its aisles in their pyjamas. ‘I’ve got lovely pairs of pyjamas, with bears and penguins on them. I’ve worn my best ones today, just so I look tidy’, snorted Elaine Carmody, in an I-really-am-too-lazy-to-dress-myself-have-you-got-a-problem-with-that kind of way. ‘Do they have any idea how difficult it is to get three kids off to school when you are a single parent? You haven’t got time for a cup of tea, never mind getting all dolled up.’ Which would be why I wander the streets dressed only in my underwear after staying up late the previous night doing a simplex crossword, and with my balls hanging out if I’ve gone for the cryptic instead. Put your goddamn trousers on women, with bears and penguins on them if necessary. I, however, am not putting my underpants on, because unlike getting your mewling brats out of bed, doing a cryptic crossword the night before - that is actually work.

The above two examples raise the question of standards and relative standards, even. Which brings me to my third point. Are appalling criminals in one particular field universally amoral or do they get to be judgemental about forms of criminality outside their field of, em, expertise? There is a sign on the back of Hull buses listing consequences of drink-driving, one of which is ‘Dropped by Friends’. Suppose you were a heroin dealer or paedophile and your fellow heroin dealer or paedophile, let’s call him Keith, got done for drink driving. What would you say to him when he rang you up for a bit of heroin dealing or bairn-worrying? Sorry, don’t want to know you, I think that kind of thing is disgusting? But if that seems disproportionate why don’t heroin dealers and paedophiles always make a point of drink-driving, since it’s hardly any worse than what they’re already doing, is it? Isn’t there a consistency issue here?

I bet you wouldn’t catch a heroin dealer or paedophile walking round Tesco in bear and penguin pyjamas though. These people have some standards, you know.

This is the kind of thing I walk the streets thinking about, believe me.

Christopher Reid

Christopher Reid has won the Costa Prize, outright, for his book of elegies, A Scattering.

I’m the riddle to an answer:
I’m an unmarried spouse,
a flesh-and-blood revenant,
my own ghost, inhabitant
of an empty house.

Ghosts don’t come more companionable than Christopher’s work, from which I have derived such pleasure these many years now. He’s not so bad in person either, and I salute him on his entirely deserved triumph, with much pleasure and fondness.

Zero at the Bone

I have written a play. That’s the title above. It features two men in the disused lighthouse on Spurn Point, and their various and violent shenanigans when a mysterious stranger turns up. Coming to a room over an East Hull pub any week now.














Hour after hour finds lined up, stern to prow,
boats from Monrovia, Gdansk or Nassau,
fabulous holds containing Lord knows what,
a UN of unknowns sailing past each night.
Try out my binoculars on the view
and someone’s training his right back on you.
[Pause.]
I see things that are there and things that aren’t.
At me too they are looking. [Pause.] What do you want?
[Pause.]
To think I stand here gazing at the south bank
and ask why life clings on somewhere so blank,
human life that is, life other than mine,
as if a total blank wouldn’t suit me fine.
A low tide’s worth of curlews now, or ruff,
or godwits, that’s what I call world enough,
here where earth and sea and sky collide
and the only place a man might hide’s a hide.
I never saw a bird I would not follow
if only mine were, like birds’ bones are, hollow.

Beckett Speaks

This is unexpected. A youtube clip of Beckett reviewing footage of the TV adaptation of What Where. Sound quality poor, but nevertheless: Beckett on tape.

Voltaire on Earthquakes

O malheureux mortels! ô terre déplorable!
O de tous les mortels assemblage effroyable!
D’inutiles douleurs éternel entretien!
Philosophes trompés qui criez: « Tout est bien »;
Accourez, contemplez ces ruines affreuses,
Ces débris, ces lambeaux, ces cendres malheureuses,
Ces femmes, ces enfants l’un sur l’autre entassés,
Sous ces marbres rompus ces membres dispersés;
Cent mille infortunés que la terre dévore,
Qui, sanglants, déchirés, et palpitants encore,
Enterrés sous leurs toits, terminent sans secours
Dans l’horreur des tourments leurs lamentables jours! (...)
Un calife autrefois, à son heure dernière,
Au Dieu qu’il adorait dit pour toute prière:
«Je t’apporte, ô seul roi, seul être illimité,
Tout ce que tu n’as pas dans ton immensité,
Les défauts, les regrets, les maux, et l’ignorance.
Mais il pouvait encore ajouter l’espérance.

Renowned for their Larders

The butcher bird, or shrike, is given to impaling its prey on ‘larders’ of barbed wire or branches. As noted in passing in my review of Simon Armitage and Tim Dee’s The Poetry of Birds, here.

Apparently Not Enough Dumb Animals Suffering in the Snow For Liverpool's Liking (So Here's Another Eleven)

The I Don't Believe It Ref That Was Never Offside Curlew

The Path Taken

Rampaging Hordes of Mink Wish Roger Scruton Harm

Gathering some thoughts on animality in Beckett, I find myself reading Randy Malamud’s Poetic Animals and Animal Souls, an unusual book, in the sense that most academic critics would not interrupt their thoughts on animal poetry (composed by, rather than about animals, you understand) to give you their email addresses, and request you send them any examples you’ve encountered (I’m presuming he’s already seen the above example from icanhascheezburger...). There is also a lengthy description of his son’s experiences at ‘bug camp’, and of a trumpet-playing elephant. But I digress. Malamud frequently finds himself in the position of preaching a state of virtuous ignorance, I find. Are you reading this blog in Scandinavia? If not, then the chances are the view through your window does not include any reindeer. And careful not to go in search of one in the nearest zoo either! ‘I believe strongly’, he writes of Marianne Moore’s ‘Rigorists’, that ‘Moore feels, as I do, that Brooklynites like herself are simply not meant to be in immediate proximity to reindeer, and that we do them (and ourselves and our art) a disservice when we glibly traipse through their habitats, or imprison them within our own, for the purposes of observing them or representing them aesthetically.’ (Since he mentions Brookyln, I can’t help thinking that world’s-single-most-boring-woman, Eilis from Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn, which I read during 24 hours of enforced captivity in Dublin Airport the other day, would strongly agree about the undesirability of reindeer around the place in Brooklyn: I mean, whatever would Father Flood say, not to mention her landlady Mrs Kehoe say, eh? What would they SAY? Are reindeer even CATHOLIC?!) No, those ‘vast herds’ belong in the ‘altogether elsewhere’ Auden imagined for them in ‘The Fall of Rome’, leaving us to contemplate them from afar, but in a state of virtuous ignorance. For such an ardent admirer of Moore’s work (as am I), he would seem to skirt round the small, or not so small, problem from his point of view of her delight in zoos. But maybe that’s a debate for another time.

I was only too happy to see Malamud attack the tedious Mary Oliver, who may not want to skin and eat the animals she likes at, but seems, to me at least, every bit as determined to subjugate the animals she looks at to her entirely anthropocentric sublime (‘If an animal lives in the forest or river, and a poet like Oliver does not see it, does it make a noise? Yes, but we wouldn’t know it from her poetry’). But here’s a conceptual brick wall he finds himself contemplating more than once. If a lion could speak, Wittgenstein said, we would still not be able to understand it. ‘The more we know them’, John Berger has said of animals, ‘the further away they are.’ So when Malamud devotes a chapter to ‘Mesoamerican Spirituality and Animal Co-Essences’ he has to remind himself, a couple of times, that the coyote or the rabbit no more cares about our certified-sensitive indigenous ecopoetic posturings than it does about some piece of lazy schlock by Mary Oliver. All the animal wants is for us to leave it alone. Which is what makes Marianne Moore’s formulation, in a review of Wallace Stevens’ Ideas of Order, so striking: ‘poetry’, she says, ‘is an unintelligible unmistakable vernacular like the language of animals.’ An animal poem does not get any extra points for saying Love the animals! Care for them!, which is one reason at least why the arch-carnivore Ted Hughes is the astonishing animal poet he is. The animal poem is engaged in an exercise in non-relational art, writing for and about a subject from which it should expect neither understanding nor approval. And this is an entirely praiseworthy thing to do. In fact, I can hardly think of a better basis for writing something, anything.

Poetry is a non-relational art.

Elsewhere, I have enjoyed reading Roger Scruton’s latest attempt to grapple with the concept of animal rights in a TLS review of Andrew Linzey’s Why Animal Suffering Matters. I think of Scruton as a Jeremy Clarkson with a taste for Wagner, and down the years, in between, I presume, throttling Down’s Syndrome babies to death with his bare hands, he has resorted to the argument that animals cannot have rights, as they don’t have any responsibilities either (a less amusing variant, perhaps, of Mark Twain’s crack about animal rights meaning ‘Votes for shrimp’). Recalling, in a passage on fur-farming, John Stuart Mill’s argument that ‘the coercion of the criminal law can be justified only in order to prevent us from harming others, and never in order to force our compliance to a moral code’ he then wonders ‘what happened to the argument for decriminalization of homosexuality, despite widespread moral outrage’, meaning what, I wonder. Gay people should not be persecuted because right-wing Christian types (like Roger Scruton) find them distasteful, therefore people who want to skin mink should not be prevented from doing so either, despite my, em, distaste for them? ‘He is right to want to protect animals from people. But people also need to be protected from people’. At which point he has begun to sound like Sarah Palin, who likes to remind us that if God didn’t want us to eat animals he wouldn’t have made them out of food. Dangerous things too, mink. I mean, remember what that kind-of-a-mink, an otter did to Terry Nutkins’ finger. And what of the pine marten, ‘the most nasty, vicious bird you have ever seen’, as former Westmeath Fine Gael councillor Michael Newman recently described it. So be careful in the barn, Roger, and keep the shotgun loaded at all times.

Finally, for factoid-hunters, does anyone know the personal connection (well, almost) between Beckett’s Watt and Roger Scruton? Answer in the comments stream.

Six Steps from Iris Robinson to a United Ireland

Iris Robinson toyboy story sparks wave of sexual hysteria among female DUP voters, leading to collapse of Unionist family values.

Mental-health services stretched to breaking point by resulting hospitalization of guilt-stricken Evangelical types.

Smug-marrieds’ tasteless mansion sector of Northern Irish construction industry implodes, contributing to general economical collapse.

Sammy Wilson seizes control of DUP, squanders province’s entire budget on creationist display at Ulster Museum, leading to widespread food shortages, breakdown of law and order, general anarchy.

Dissident Republicans enter power-vacuum.

United Ireland established.

Arse to the Wind

Powerscourt Waterfall

Icicles, Maulin

Mont Sainte Victoire, Otherwise Sugarloaf

Caution Tree Feeling

Djouce

Pines, Devil's Glen

Devil's Glen

Still South I Went and West and South Again

Wretched Spew

January first,
Two-faced, like Janus:
Shooting a soldier,
Taking a bonus.

February next,
A poet’s Valentine:
Roses are red,
Sir Fred’s a swine.

March arrives
And spring’s at the door,
March-ing the daffodils
Off to war.

For the rest of this parody, titled ‘Bankers and Soldiers’, and a much more enjoyable and accomplished piece of writing than the wretched laureate fare Carol Ann Duffy has been spewing for the doggerel-loving House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, see here.

Advertising High-Definition TV on non-High-Definition TV

He shoots, he scores. My word! Fine set of freckles on the lad Rooney too (handy third-round cup win for United at the weekend, I see (ha ha)). Well, that’s high-definition TV for you, as this ad has just more than comprehensively reminded me. Is it even possible to tell Wayne Rooney and Didier Drogba apart on non-HD TV? Probably not. Lucky for me then I’m able to see just how wonderful this HD TV business is on the ad for it I’m watching now on that poxy old TV I have, imagine how miserable the image quality on that piece of junk must be [snip].

Poems That Matter

Countering the contemporary distrust of the word, the poststructuralists’ rejection of the possibility of truth and meaning, Heaney reasserts the metaphysics of presence. His poem is informed by belief in a transcendent metaphysical order which is pre-literary, pre-rational, and ultimately mysterious. (Elmer Kennedy-Andrews on Seamus Heaney’s ‘Mycenae Lookout’)

It is striking nonetheless that both ‘For the Union Dead’ and ‘Keeping Going’ operate through a series of juxtapositions of image clusters extrapolated from a little suite of master images introduced at the outset. If there is a Lowellian influence at work in ‘Keeping Going’, however, it is an influence absorbed so deeply that it issues in a poem that is radically unLowellian in tone and vision. Indeed Heaney’s text is one of only a tiny handful of poems written in the fifty years since the completion of ‘For the Union Dead’ to achieve a comparable weight and authority of utterance, and it does so in a music no less decisively new and distinctive. (Patrick Crotty on Seamus Heaney’s ‘Keeping Going’)

Mere topicality, of course, is a far from adequate explanation of the poem’s long-term influence, however much it might account for media attention in the 1970s. It is not the fact of the poem’s response to the Troubles which renders it so compelling but the manner of it. As with the later sequence, ‘Wreaths’, from 1979, ‘Wounds’ is notable for a deceptive simplicity of style allied with a complex political (in the broadest sense of that term) layering. In a letter to Longley from 1973, Brendan Kennelly describes it as ‘the best poem I know written about the troubles in Belfast.’ ‘The problem with most of the poetry written about your city’, he continues, ‘is that, to put it bluntly, the poems are sectarian and therefore crippled. “Wounds” knows no frontiers and its pity is unconfined.’ (Fran Brearton on Michael Longley’s ‘Wounds’)

Jazz is an endless source of invigorating possibility and Longley’s profound engagement with this “huge” art form marks him out as a poet of the world, a poet of humanity who embodies and embraces paradox and play, order and indeterminacy. Like jazz musicians, the poet is a performer, and the relationship between performer and audience, poet and community is central […] “Words for Jazz Perhaps” not only speaks to the large-scale complexities and wide-reaching extent of Longley’s unique, intricate music but insists upon breathing new life into Irish poetry and broadening the scope of all poetry to ‘accommodate everything’ in this way. (Maria Johnston on Michael Longley’s ‘Words for Jazz Perhaps’)

These from the new issue of Irish University Review, a special on the theme of Poems That Matter 1950-2000 edited by Peter Denman. The other choices are:

Louis de Paor: Seán Ó Ríordáin, ‘Adhlacadh mo Mháthar’
Maurice Harmon: Austin Clarke, ‘Ancient Lights’
Moya Cannon: Patrick Kavanagh, ‘The Hospital’
John McAuliffe: Patrick Kavanagh, ‘Epic’
DW: Derek Mahon, ‘The Forger’
Gerald Dawe: Padraic Fiacc, ‘By the Black Stream’
Bernard O’Donoghue: Richard Murphy, ‘Pat Cloherty’s Version of The Maisie’
Brian Donnelly: Seamus Heaney, ‘The Digging Skeleton After Baudelaire’
Lucy Collins: Derek Mahon, ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’
Neil Corcoran: Paul Muldoon, ‘Our Lady of Ardboe’
Christina Hunt Mahony: Paul Durcan, ‘Going Home to Mayo, Winter 1949’
Frank Sewell: Gabriel Rosenstock, ‘Mussolini ag dul ar Neamh’
Catriona Clutterbuck: Eavan Boland, ‘Mise Eire’
Borbála Faragó: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘The Informant’
Máire Ní Annracháin: Biddy Jenkinson, ‘Gleann Maoiliúra’
Moynagh Sullivan: Medbh McGuckian, ‘On Her Second Birthday’
Paul Durcan: Michael Hartnett, ‘He’ll to the Moors’
Patricia Coughlan: Thomas Kinsella, ‘High Tide: Amagansett’

Much to chew on here, from the memoir style of Neil Corcoran’s piece, with its antenna-twitch of sensitivity to the Heaneyesque intertexts in ‘Our Lady of Ardboe’, to the suasive density of Patrick Crotty on Heaney (with a side-order of MacDiarmid intertexts), the unblushing bardic mantras of Elmer Kennedy-Andrews on the same author, the fascinating inflections of poetic dinnseanchas offered by Máire Ní Annracháin in Biddy Jenkinson’s ‘Gleann Maoiliúra’ (and that’s Lugnaquilla in Glenmalure up above), to the as-ever-richly-suggestive Maria Johnston on jazz in Michael Longley. All yours for €12.

And for the record, the sentence by me at the end of the first paragraph on page 220 should read ‘Modernism in Mahon is more a rumour than a presence, ritually acknowledged rather than acted on’ (scratch the plethoric ‘rather’ printed – aagh! – after ‘rumour’, in other words.)

Pearson Park Zero at the Bone

Always Check Left and Right for Snowballs

In the Dreariest Places

It is almost ten years now since I moved to the shipping forecast area-in-waiting that is East Yorkshire, once those rising sea-levels do the decent thing and bury my house at sea. ‘These old P.M.s are gruesome, but I often find them –’, as Krapp confesses to his tape recorder (the joys of aposiopesis), and while I’m rarely, I hope, reduced to drawing water from the fetid lagoon of my day-to-day life for material here, it might seem prissy and affected to avoid the subject altogether. So then: all in all a fairly uneventful-to-comatose ten years of my life, Teflon years, leaving no trace, but bearing the small gift of my previous investment in Ireland and the home place, all my belief in it as my natural centre of gravity, having drained away to nothing, to be replaced by also nothing, since here is hardly home, whatever home means. Here is just a place, like any other, to live, for some reason, whatever reason. And yet there are things to be said for the condition of non-attachment, if that is what I have come to inhabit. I am walking by the Humber just past the non-event of an estuary village that is Paull and thinking of one my very favourite poems John Clare’s ‘To the Snipe’:

Lover of swamps,
The quagmire overgrown
With hassock-tufts of sedge — where fear encamps
Around thy home alone

The trembling grass
Quakes from the human foot
Nor bears the weight of man to let him pass
Where he alone and mute

Sittest at rest
In safety ’neath the clump
Of huge flag-forest that thy haunts invest
Or some old sallow stump

Thriving on seams
That tiny islands swell.
Just hilling from the mud and rancid streams
Suiting thy nature well -

For here thy bill,
Suited by wisdom good
Of rude unseemly length, doth delve and drill
The gelid mass for food,

And here, mayhap,
When summer suns hath dressed
The moor’s rude, desolate and spongy lap,
May hide thy mystic nest -

Mystic indeed,
For isles that ocean make
Are scarcely more secure for birds to build
Than this flag-hidden lake.

Mystic, eh? Speaking here the other week, Hilary Mantel discussed her novel Beyond Black and its psychic protagonist. Pointing out the similarity, on one level, between psychics and writers (both hear voices, both make the dead speak), she insisted that the authenticity or otherwise of her medium, Alison Hart, was not the principal issue in the book and... at that point the discussion veered off in a different direction, though not without the residue of unease it left adding to the sedimentary drift I’m collecting here. Psychics and writers are indeed alike, with the one simple distinction that psychics are nauseating frauds (cue reprise of the Dara O Briain routine about ‘bogus psychics’, as though the bogus ones were going around giving the genuine one a bad name, as if all psychics are not total frauds). But walking by the river and contemplating the array of waders in the shallows (dunlin, redshank, godwit, curlew, egrets, but no snipe that I could see), I thought yet again of my desire to – what? discover and inhabit, me too, their mystic nests? channel these creatures’ voices, speaking, like Yeats’s Cuchulain, no longer with his own voice but the voice of the birds? What am I doing if not taking advantage of their inability to answer back, to peg my precious non-attachment to these innocent birds of passage? Even as we (I) scrape the mange of ego off our (my) attempts at writing with the rusty spoon of self-mortification (Humphrey Lyttelton homage there, I think), does a deeper temptation not hove (hove!) into view, of self-extinction as a proxy for a deeper and even more pernicious form of egotism and vanity? At which point we succumb to Becket’s final temptation, in Murder in the Cathedral, of doing the right thing but for the wrong reason, and I may as well have saved myself the bother of buying those boots and binoculars and stayed down the pub.

My walks also remind me of Tim Robinson’s stopping to wonder, somewhere, about the status of the respect he accords the holy wells and tales of saints and fairies he has collected on Aran and in Connemara given his own frank avowal of atheist materialism. In what sense ‘mystic’ nest, then, I ask myself, mysticism minus religion equalling what? Emptiness, I suppose, for a start, the romance of the void, and (there is no) God knows, I’ve spent enough time wallowing in that. Reading Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn with some students the other week I drew attention to the self-parodic eternal emptiness of his landscapes, which we agreed, my students and I, formed an ideal correlative to his melancholy shouldering of the tragedies of history. But just around the corner from your empty restaurant in East Anglia, Sebald, I expostulated, there is a pub! with people! serving refreshing and intoxicating beverages! Here’s a couple of blokes called Terry and Geoff talking about today’s football and what a tosser Gordon Brown is. Now snap out of it and buy me a drink. So what do I believe in, and what am I doing with those small brown birds, I ask yet again? The short answer is nothing, given my rejection of any and all forms of religious belief, but the longer answer involves the point at which the empty landscape, the condition of non-attachment, the attempt to channel my birds, would appear to come up short against the language of mysticism. And where I part company with Sebald and his lovingly cultivated melancholia is my concern, at all costs, not to dress up the mere emptiness and dreariness of life into a form of mystique, but to snap back out of it into the deeper desolation of banal reality. There is indeed a pub around the corner full of brash and amiable drinkers talking about football. It is no betrayal of your terrible vocation of seriousness to go there. If anything, going there will remind you that it’s not all about you or even all about not-you, come to that, it’s about the work itself and how, oddball loner or bloke down the pub, it’s all the same to the work since nothing else matters but that, the work. I am entering a defence, in other words, of the dreary, the non-eventful, the aching tedium of it all, as entirely preferable things to the alternatives waiting in the wings to fill the vacuum I’m describing here, out in that wintry emptiness and dark. A real hell, or purgatory, or limbo, really is preferable to an imaginary paradise. The snipe in the reeds is not singing for you. The river spirit does not require your devotions. Writing is not religion or mysticism by proxy. Do not dress your quivering awareness of your insignificance up as some secular epiphany of the sacred-lite. Nothing is sacred. There is no spirit. There is, however, snow falling on the disused mill and the swing bridge I passed walking to the pub last night, where the landlady kindly brought me a plate of roast chestnuts, for which many thanks, again. There is a small brown bird in the reeds:

In these thy haunts
I’ve gleaned habitual love;
From the vague world where pride and folly taunts
I muse and look above.

Thy solitudes
The unbounded heaven esteems
And here my heart warms into higher moods
And dignifying dreams.

I see the sky
Smile on the meanest spot,
Giving to all that creep or walk or fly
A calm and cordial lot.

Thine teaches me
Right feelings to employ:
That in the dreariest places peace will be
A dweller and a joy.

Lord William Percy, Three Studies in Bird Character

(Typos now fixed)

As one of the 7th Duke of Northumberland’s thirteen children, Lord William Percy (1882-1963) may have had more free time on his hands than most to devote to the study of waders. The account of his findings, published in 1951, is a wonderful small classic of a book, Three Studies in Bird Character: Bitterns, Herons and Water Rail, abounding in bittern lore. Sir Thomas Browne kept a bittern in his study in an attempt to discover of its mysterious boom. Our author weighs in:

Whatever may be the mechanism by which the booming bittern produces these notes, they have certainly not struck the human ear with associations of the season of the resurrection of life and hope, for allusion to the bird and its voice in ancient literature is uniformly that of a symbol of desolation and woe. As the prophet announces the doom of Babylon, ‘I will also make it a possession for the bittern and pools of water. I will sweep it with the besom of destruction saith the Lord of Hosts’ (Isaiah xiv.23), so the inhabitants of Nineveh are warned that ‘the bittern shall lodge in the upper lintels of it; their voice shall sing in the windows, desolation shall be in the thresholds’ (Zeph. ii.14).

[A footnote adds:] The Revised Version in substituting ‘porcupine’ for bittern mars the rhythm of the passage and seems to convert a paradise for bitterns into a purgatory for porcupines. [Foonote ends.]

If as the age of superstition recedes the implication becomes less harsh, Chaucer’s ‘As a bitore bombleth in the myre’ still retains the ring of melancholy, and it is not till the Middle Ages that references to the bird in the ballads and folklore of our forefathers have lost their former sinister connotation. From then on the bird becomes a cherished object of the chase – ‘euery egge of euery Bittour’ rigorously protected by such laws as Act 25 Henry VIII, XI, 25 – and a favoured delicacy on their tables.

{Ends}

The reference to eating bitterns may explain another folk name for the bird, the butterbump, though the good Lord forbears from offering any recipes. The birds’ melancholy aspect no doubt accounts for their presence (‘the bogey bittern’) in Fungus the Bogeyman, that most fennish of books, as I was reminded by a commenter the other day. ‘Like Surface Bitterns, and like Bogeymen themselves, they are SOLITARY, SKULKING and CREPUSCULAR.’

Our twitcher Lord follows his three species for an entire season, spending what must have been hours a day deep in the reeds stalking the birds, and giving instructions not just for how to approach a bittern but even how to pick one up:

If you think it worth while to assure yourself that the thing can be done, you may wait till the booming starts again, rise silently to your feet, and dash across the intervening space to find Botaurus half defiant, half cringing, at your feet. At the cost perhaps of a blood-stained knuckle from a stab from his bill, which is neither as vicious nor as powerful as it reputed to be, and is in any case no more than you deserve, you may pick him up, for in such circumstances his physical or emotional condition seems to rob him of the power of pulling himself together for sudden flight. Tossed into the air from your hand he will wing away heavily to the other end of the reedbed, or, loosed on the ground, slink off hunch-backed into the reeds.

{Ends}

The book contains no fewer than 80 quizically-captioned plates: ‘A heron descending through the branches of a tree resembles a man walking on a slippery road in imminent danger of losing his balance’, ‘The impasse reached in plate 51 [two bittern chicks tugging at either end of an eel] is resolved, the parent first abstracting the eel from both her young, re-swallowing it itself, and then suppressing all further contention in spite of their protests’, and, combining evidence of the water rail’s habit of picking its young up in its bill with an unintentional, surely, schoolboy pun (our Lordship is far too high-minded for that), ‘One laggard grabbed by the cock and carried off in his bill.’

I have enjoyed reading this book so much that I more or less resent taking time off from looking at it to have to talk about it here instead. In case anyone is wondering what on earth that owl is doing in the plates I’ve reproduced above, the answer is that it’s stuffed. Lord WP decided to experiment by placing the owl by the bittern’s nest with some dead eels lodged between its claws. ‘With an air of the utmost confidence she strode across the nest, walked straight up the owl, seized the eel from between its claws, and swallowed it.’

When I read Tim Dee’s The Running Sky and looked up copies of John Buxton’s out-of-print study of the redstart, which TD was recommending, I blanched at the prices I found. Copies of Three Studies, by contrast, are available for about a tenner.

I can now almost feel the year has ended on a positive note. But let’s not get carried away here. And yet: Lord William Percy, master naturalist, I salute you.

The Water Rail

Pursuing my current birdy obsession the other day, I was trawling through amazon in search of books about bitterns, and found a total of one: Lord William Percy’s 1951 study Three Studies in Bird Character: Bitterns, Herons and Rails. Annoyingly, the copy I bought hasn’t turned up yet, but in the mean time I can’t resist reproducing this picture I found here of a water rail, known to John Clare (since I mentioned him the other day) as the ‘water craik’, and a species with the most unusual habit of carrying its young in its beak. What a fine photograph.

'Nothing so dogged as the silent air...'

This I don’t remember doing before, but a comment left by one ‘Look – it has fallen through’ is a striking enough piece of writing, I thought, to deserve posting out here in the open. Thanks, whoever you are.

Nothing so dogged as the silent air
will come. Will come through tears
a running figure, stuck shadow on the bricks
The city’s dark and tastes of smoke, fireworks

may be gunshots and which ricochet
like sirens like neon grinning thru the rain
off wet road and bricks, finish too.
A running figure, still shadow on the roof

dogged against headlight squalls & wind
vanished at dawn. Will come in hours
When dark the streets are cold and taste of junk, takeouts.
breathe suddenly between us the fissuring spoke

Nothing as dogged as the silent air
rush quiet is permanent vanishes too.

Glyn Morrow of York, I Salute You

Glyn Morrow of York, I salute you. Writing to the Guardian’s Notes and Queries page today, in answer to the question ‘Is a dead badger still a badger?’, you rip to pieces the bubble-wrap that has for too long shrouded philosophical discussions of language in its prophylactic of shame. As you write:

A badger was never really a ‘badger’ even when alive, at least not to itself or another badger, for badgers – and iguanas, camels, ants, etc – have no human language; therefore a badger is/was only a ‘badger’ to a human. So a badger, alive or dead, exists (or not) only as a badger in an anthropomorphic universe [...] to insist it is or was a badger, blaireau, or dachs, is to miss the essence of the matter.

{Ends}

Badgers are not in fact badgers, nor are the blue tit and the tree it is sitting in outside my window a blue tit or a tree. They are a blue tit and a tree as so described in an unthinkingly anthropomorphic world whose language has been designed by and for humans without so much as a consultation exercise first with the badgers, blue tits and trees. Wow!

You may have got away this for going on a few millennia now, humanity, but there are going to be some changes round here, buddy, before the badgers are finished with you. You’d better believe it. Ghost of Ludwig Wittgenstein, please copy.

Glyn Morrow, I salute you.

Evening 'Out'

I went to a restaurant the other evening and had some ‘dinner’ there. The ‘reason’ I’m doing that thing with the quotation marks is that the menu listed the cheese as ‘English’ and the fish as ‘locally’ sourced, and unless someone has been watching (and slightly misunderstanding) that episode of Friends where Joey slightly misunderstands the quotation marks sign people do with their fingers, I couldn’t work out what the menu was trying to tell me. I wondered, during my token one veggie option main course (which worked out at £2.50 a spoonful of risotto: cue Woody Allen joke about the food here being awful, yes, and the portions are so small too) whether having ‘asked’ for the bill at the end they would accept me ‘paying’ with some of this ‘money’ (jelly beans) I was carrying in my pocket, but coward that I am I merely ‘went home’ fuming silently to myself at the brass neck of abattoir-friendly ‘restaurants’’ idea of torturing not just animals but the English language too in an attempt to ‘impress’ their ‘customers’.

Call for Papers

Speakers for a conference on sleep are invited
from across a range of disciplines
to put us to sleep then nod off
themselves, concentrating furiously.

Epic

his shortest poems
his fullest
in the sense
they could not contain
one syllable more

Thread

Wing-mirror spider
sitting tight
all motorway long

takes my finger
come journey’s end
cuts loose and moves on

Scarlet Ibis

Red-Breasted Geese