This thing of beauty never fails to get me. I’m sure I’ve posted it before… Just another Bloomsday outing for the day, & thanks in the first place, some time ago now, to Ian Duhig.
And remember, you can tweet Ulysses 140 characters at a time. Here. You need a Twitter account but that’s quicker than watching this delightful video again.
Filed under bagatelles, Irish, James Joyce
Here are some of the notes I wrote today during Sean O’Brien’s TS Eliot prize lecture, which was on the subject of Michael Donaghy, Black Ice and Rain, and City of God.
I’ve written a first response to the lecture on the Poetry international blog, but as I say there, I don’t want to engage too fully with the lecture itself until I’ve had a chance to read it, which should be tomorrow. There are lots of things I could say, but in the mean time here are some immediate things that struck me as O’Brien spoke up on the stage…
The Collected Prose will be called The Shape of a Dance; the Collected Poetry will be about a third (!?) previously unpublished poems.
“echt Donaghy” – the thing O’Brien apologised for being unable to give us. I’m trying to think of a joke involving echtoplasm, but it is true: he didn’t.
He spoke of Donaghy moving in his later work “towards greater lyrical economy and directness” – hmm…
Of the impact of Michael’s collection Shibboleth, in I think 1985: “He didn’t simply have opinions – he knew things” – and lists a huge number of areas of knowledge, eg archaeology, astronomy etc.
His “delight in the connectedness of things” most closely resembles, among his contemporaries, that of Ian Duhig. This is absolutely true; “delight” is a key word here.
The phrase “imaginative plenitude,” comparisons with Hecht and Wilbur, both of whom Michael claimed as influences – though no mention of James Merrill, whose wit and lightness of touch – but I said I wasn’t going to do this! A list of Richard Wilbur poems which might cast a light on Donaghy’s work: Shame, The Undead, The Mindreader
He spoke of the dangers of creating “an imaginary monster: the ‘Donaghy’.” Something heard of & described but never seen.
“There is an entire essay to be written on the role of fire in Donaghy’s work.”
Big discussion of Ramon Fernandez?, the Spanish Civil War and Franco, political poetry and Donaghy, his Irish uncle in Auto da Fé, Wallace Stevens, more Wallace Stevens, The Man With the Blue Guitar, The Idea of Order at Key West etc
“In the dawn of totalitarianism nothing lies outside or above the sphere of the political.”
“the ultimate sterility of the ‘poem as anecdote’.” A phenomenon much in evidence in contemporary poetry, which Donaghy’s narrative work operates way beyond.
O’Ryan’s Belt, his important sequence of poems in Dances Learned Last Night, in connection to the forthcoming Collected: “although he had published this work he had by no means finished with it” – in fact, Michael used to talk of writing a novel about Police Chief Francis O’Neill, who was in fact a historical character and big in the annals of Irish music, and appears in a fragment in the posthumous Safest
“The speaker [that is, in Donaghy’s poems eg The Excuse, or Caliban’s Books] cannot know the father, though he may turn into him.”
Eliot – Portrait of a Lady – sterility something something erotic something – this in regards to Black Ice & Rain
Ditto, “While the narrator makes a stance of his damnation, its reality is not to be denied”
Donaghy’s despair over the “fetishising of creativity and the denial of artistic integrity”
Filed under Hecht, Irish, James Merrill, Michael Donaghy, poetry, wallace stevens
Okay. I did receive an email request regarding Morrissey earlier in the week. This was after I had announced my intention to do something with the Guardian “Great Lyricists” booklet, I hasten to point out. But then I never had a chance to do it. (And like, what was it, Monday??)
“I really think you should blog about our Stephen, he’s a national treasure,” wrote my correspondent. This is an interesting epithet, especially as that other great National Treasure Alan Bennett is invoked in the same email.* (By the way, I don’t think Morrissey is at all the ‘Alan Bennett of pop’. He just isn’t.)
The email goes, referring to the booklet’s intro: “Tim Lott is right, of course, in stating that the lyrics just make you sing the songs in your head – so how much of a convert reading the lines cold will make of anyone I’m not sure.” This is directed directly at me. Oh, dear.
The thing is, right, I never thought the Smiths really mastered that key element of a song, the melody. I know Leonard Cohen himself has that drony, singsong thing going on, but the Smiths songs always seemed to me kind of, oh, talky. I mean, the tunes (or whatever they are) always seemed to me more like that kind of making-it-up-as-you-go-along singing that little kids do, and this rendered their lyrics LESS effective for me.
That and the National Treasure’s hair.
Another friend has written (more quickly, and on Facebook): “i was baffled by the smiths when they were current, but i think i was too young. the penny dropped (and rolled down the drain in which i got my hand caught trying to rescue it) when i was about 25, and now i glory in the misery! how can you listen to ‘last night i dreamt somebody loved me’ and not feel chipper?”
This feels more compelling. I did the research. I listened to Morrissey, both Smiths and beyond, for two days. I realised that I have never actually disliked “Every Day is Like Sunday”. I started to hear more of the words. And I did experience something like the joy my friend refers to when listening to the song I quoted the other day: “I was happy for an hour in a drunken haze…” To be brutally honest, it made me laugh with happiness. And as for that talkiness, some of them do rhyme, though I was just beginning to get the concept of a pop song in free verse.
(Even this point is spurious, as I’ve been listening to all sorts of people for years, like Patti Smith etc – but then, she never set herself up as Miss Everybody USA, or even Miss Everybody New York…)
I missed that Patti Smith booklet, by the way; the two copies at work were whipped by others, and I never managed to get out of the building at all that day till long after the newsagents have done their returns. So the greatness was not to be.
But there has been some chat, as the subject seems to be like boy catnip. It turns out that the mere mention of the bequiffened one is enough to draw people out of the woodwork. Even if they have nothing to say they just want, somehow, to be part of it. One person said to me, quite engaged with the whole topic, “you know, the thing is, they’re great lyrics. But I don;t think they’re poems. I think if Morrissey wanted to write poems he could always just write a book.”
Anyway, the first email gets into its stride, clearly written from the heart: “Also, the selection seems to focus on the gloomier songs (like the one about the Moors murders) rather than the funny, joyous ones – in particular, I was sorry to see they’d left out ‘This Charming Man’, which has some great imagery and is one of The Smiths’ most positive numbers. But at least they print ‘Everyday is like Sunday’ with its nod to Betjeman and peerless evocation of the bleakness of an English seaside town (Southport, apparently).”
A note here: I think it’s more like Larkin. And note how the “bleakness” is evoked as being “funny, joyous.” Only in England, I tell you.
“Morrissey’s England (continues the email) is that of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’, early ‘Coronation Street’, ‘A Taste of Honey’, ‘Billy Liar’, etc.: he’s interested in that period in the 1950s and early 60s when working class northern-ness acquired its own cachet and glamour.” (My friend of the poetry book remark says of this, “I think that England never really existed, it was a wishful construct in Morrissey’s mind, and a lot of other people’s minds.”) This in turn has reminded me of one of the things that really drove me nuts about the Smiths, back in the day when they were the best thing since sliced Hovis. Their name. Oh, Smith! Geddit? That faux everyman nobodyness of it. Lord. It struck me as so attention-seeking. And not even original. In a nice little twist, which would have annoyed all of them, I always used to get them confused on some level with those other anonymously-named popsters, the Thompson Twins. Ha! (Mind you – their hair…)
Anyway, I’ve read the booklet. It just takes a few minutes. Now the thing is, if this is poetry it’s pretty thin stuff. (Though I do really like this bit: “The dream is gone/ but the baby is real”). Because he IS a good songwriter, our Stephen has done this thing of leaving enough space between the words for the music to sit. So song lyrics are still not poetry, even if they are ‘poetic’. (Of course, I have yet to do the side-by-side comparisons of the ouevre of that other aforementioned Smith, the otherwise-suburban-sounding Patti: her lyrics published as lyrics against her poems published as poems. If she’s any good they’ll be different.)
My email ends, however, with a wonderful telling detail of the kind that only ever comes straight from the REAL Alan Bennett – one that sheds a light that Morrissey could not even quite muster the wit to shed on himself: “When he lived in Primrose Hill he had Alan Bennett as a neighbour, who said that whenever Morrissey came round for tea all he wanted to do was discuss the career of northern dwarf comic Jimmy Clitheroe.”
Okay. A grudging convert; maybe it’s all these years of New Labour. Or like my facebooking friend, maybe I had to grow into Morrissey’s peculiarly English brand of youthful angst. Oh, I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.
* This expression, National Treasure, is something that gave me great happiness when I first heard it all those untold aeons ago when I came over here. America does not have National Treasures. Over there they like National Heroes, Great American Novels, things like that. The idea of a National Treasure, like something you would keep in a cigar box under your bed just because you LOVED it, would never occur to them.
Filed under England, Irish, music, poetry, the Line on Beauty
Of course neither of the conversations of the week is anything your correspondent herself has been involved in. No, no: there has been no conversation of the week in Baroque Mansions. Sometimes we like it that way; and last night, I’m pleased as punch to say, I slept for a dizzying* eleven hours. Even with the toddler downstairs being left to cry, scream, wail and grizzle for an hour or more when he woke up, which is how his parents (mis)manage him. It’s worse in the summer, he wakes up earlier and of course windows are open – if you’re lucky. Mine was firmly shut last night, after yesterday morning.
Anyway, I’ve been neglecting things a bit in the quotidian whirl, and one of the things I hate to admit to neglecting is a blog I like a lot: the ever-interesting New York-based Maud Newton. So I had a look this morning and what do I find but a conversation you couldn’t even make up: it’s made my day, already. (Something had to: I tried on all my summer skirts this morning and none of them do up. I have gained back all the weight I lost being sick last year – and that just isn’t right! And I have a party to go to this evening. At least my feet aren’t fat.)
Maud writes:
“Critic: [Upon introduction.] Maud Newton… Wasn’t there a novel called that this year?
Me: I don’t think so.
Critic: Yes, I think there was a novel or something.
Friend: Are you thinking of Elizabeth Costello? Or some other book with a name for a title?
Critic: No, Maud. It’s such a common name now, all of a sudden. Recently I met a Rachel Maud. And Maud Newton, yes, it’s definitely a book.
Friend: Maybe you’re thinking of a blog?
Critic: [Pulls out phone.] Let me just check Amazon.
Me: I think I’d know if there was a novel called ‘Maud Newton’.
Journalist: Yes, I think she’d know.
Critic: No, I’m not finding anything. Let me put it in Google…
There’s more! Go check it out.
In related “Never-trust-a-critic” news, a conversation elesewhere brings up this article from the Dublin Review on poet-critics by David Wheatley, the, er, poet-critic. (Takes one to know one, I say.) I enjoyed it very much, especially the how-to at the end.
Before that, though, there is this delicious paragraph which casts, perhaps, a tiny ray of light on the critic in Maud’s story above (and don’t get me wrong: a tiny ray is all he deserves):
“Dennis [O’Driscoll] is the Ulysses** of the quotation business, pursuing his quarry like a sinking star over horizons most of us never even sight. Who else would have thought to look in the Farmer’s Gazette for a reaction to Seamus Heaney’s Nobel Prize win? And sure enough there it was: ‘Bellaghy Celebrates as Farmer’s Son Wins Top Literary Award’. He has quoted Alan Bennett’s suggestion that, just as abandoned cars sometimes have notices slapped on them reading ‘Police Aware’, beauty spots or ‘some particularly touching vagrant’ could have an equivalent reading ‘Poet Aware’. Maybe the unread poetry books and magazines piled high in shops could have a ‘Dennis Aware’ sticker. As for trying to find something he hasn’t already seen or read before you, forget about it: a friend-who-shall-remain-nameless has tried casually dropping the name of a non-existent poet in conversation with him, only for Dennis to fall on the unknown name like a chameleon’s tongue on a passing horsefly: Who?”
Ah! Such happy days. And now, having already been out once this morning, to the pound shop to get a feather duster and some Windolene, I am now off out again to get that coffee…
* Literally: I now feel a bit dizzy.
** You know, I read this several times before I realised he probably means Ulysses the ancient character, not the book! Bloody hell. You just sort of assume everything’s about Joyce, don’t you.
Filed under bagatelles, books, clothes, coffee, Irish, James Joyce, New York, parties, pseud's corner
Carl Jung, puzzled
It seems I missed Joyce’s birthday, being too busy in Southwold to take note. But Sheila O’Malley of the Sheila Variations has done the work so I don’t have to (though I did, so I did, totally mention and quote our man yesterday, or was it the day before – he must be in the ether):
“Carl Jung read Ulysses,” she writes, “and was so moved and disturbed by it that he wrote Joyce a letter about it:
‘Dear Sir, Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.
Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I’m profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don’t know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn’t help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil’s grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn’t.
Well I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.
With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,
Yours faithfully,
C.G. Jung’
My favorite thing is that Joyce was so proud of this letter (and rightfully so) and he read it outloud once at a dinner party, and Nora snarked after he finished: ‘Jim knows nothing at all about women’.”
Do read Sheila’s whole post: treasures galore.
Filed under bagatelles, birthdays, books, Irish, James Joyce, jolly holidays, Living With Words, poetry
Baroque in Hackney 