Category Archives: Life

July 1, 2011 · 9:10 pm

My world and welcome to it, as the saying goes

Oh my dears, what a week. A whirlwind of work, teaching, iron and mineral supplements, family crises of relatively vast proportions, trouble at t’mill in Poetry World with emails intensifying and proliferating, and the kind of sheer, sheer, utter exhaustion that leaves you feeling like a broken toy.

There was a day or two when the eldest Baroque offspring was in a complete panic, trying to find the rent money with his girlfriend and their housemate, her wastrel brother (picture him now, as the landlords found him the other day: in his filthy bedroom at the top of the house, sat at his computer in his pants) (and no, they shouldn’t have been in there: the agents are to blame; but my view is that the brother really should have had some clothes on and been looking for a job) – they were completely desperate, nobody has any money and they’ve been trying to find work – at least, the ex-Urban Warrior, now fledgling web designer genius, has – and he’s also the only one with the organisational skills and sheer drive to make even paying the rent happen at all, really, and anyway look at muggins here. I didn’t pay the rent but I did buy the groceries, and then there was some business with some Eon arrears, from those ridiculous monster computers they will keep running. You know: they’re emitting double the national average of CO2 so I don’t have to.

Well, the poor kid. I had my own personal evening from hell – the elderly aunt,  a friend whose personal situation (divorce, unemployment, out-of-date skills, MS, lack of world view, lack of a plan) is so much more huge than his inner personal resources that he has become a giant deranged ball of NEED, which rolls ever and ever onward – in which the calls from my kid did figure prominently, and he was so stressed out that it was hard not to feel actually worried.

We made a plan. Your correspondent here talked and soothed and unruffled and reassured and made promises, and offered money, and consolidated and wished good night, and went to bed paralysed with anxiety and the really very serious needs of others and the impossibility of actually doing anything about anything at all – full in the knowledge that not a job spec had been searched for that evening, not an application or email had been sent, once again.

The next day I wake up – jangled, exhausted, after not enough hours – is everyone all right, have I brutally offended my old friend with my requested “feedback” which was much more honest than what he thought he requested, will I be unemployed in a month and if so for how long, how bad is it going to be, I wonder what my 1826 set of Johnson is worth, has my kid had a premature heart attack in the night, is the decrepit aunt still – but let’s not even go into that place – and there was an argument based on a misunderstanding with someone else, too, and what time did Mlle B need to be up – drag myself up, take my pill for my stomach and my iron & mineral tonic, sort out the money for my eldest, some cash which was stashed in a secret place waiting to be given to Mlle B for her summer hols – drag myself through the tube, into Pret and with my coffee into work, and somehow through the morning, via a secret phone call to my aunt’s GP. (Everything has to be secret. She’s very paranoid that the few people left in her life are talking about her.)

At lunchtime I speak to my kid. How’s it going. Well don’t even ask. He spent the whole evening sorting out the mess – reading the riot act to the wastrel brother who has now promised on his life to put his trousers on and spend six hours a day looking for a job – and they are all going to do this once they get the present difficulties ironed out, the running about collecting all the money they have borrowed and cleaning the house – and at the end of the whole thing, just as he was daring to think he might have solved his present problems and cleared the deck enough at least to get some sleep, he went and started getting ready for bed. And one of their kittens walked in – the lovely fluffy kittens they are looking for homes for, which I wanted one of but now think I can’t really manage – and threw up bile on the carpet.

One of those moments.  He called the vet, the vet said don’t feed him overnight but let him eat in the morning and see how he goes.

The kitten is now fine. Phew.

The landlords are coming to make an inspection on Monday afternoon.

After he takes the cat to the vet to get spayed. They spay them for free, at least. Student rates.

And it’s the same day as my blood test. But having written all this down I’m thinking maybe I don’t need to have anaemia to feel dizzy…

5 Comments

Filed under cartoons, Life, the end of the worr-uld

Tagged as , , , , ,

June 15, 2011 · 8:41 am

In which Ms Baroque is a climate change scientist

Okay, this is what happens when you add job-hunting on top of everything else I’ve already been trying to do: no blog posts. And then when there is one, it has this random stuff on it that goes all over the place. Trust me, there is a lot going on.

Wallace Stevens said it “gives a man character” to have one foot in the world of daily work – or indeed two feet – and indeed a woman too. But character isn’t really the current issue: I’ve got that. It’s more about sleep, headspace and work-life – oh, no, that’s last yea – apparently the so-called “work-life balance” was just some New Labour thing. (That explains it.) Right now I’m less about the balance  and more about finding the work. Copywriting? Editorial? Commissioning editor? I’m at at the cutting edge of environmental communications and editorial – up-to-the-minute with all kinds of stuff, RHI, FITs, Green Deal, heat pumps, smart technologies, rebound effect, EVs – and I can manage staff, and I bring cakes. My website is here.

But anyway, I have a book to promote. The intrepid one (me) has been to Oxford! In the rain! and done a reading at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop, a place it would be lovely to return to and which reminds one inexorably of the good old Golden Notebook in Woodstock, NY. Fellow readers delivered a cracking line-up of sets: Ernest Hilbert, James Byrne, and Niall McDevitt.

Egg Printing Explained is now reprinted, by the way, and Salt has new stocks in; so their office-move nightmare is now officially over, their internet is plugged in and they’re happy to hear from you.

And I’m running a one-day workshop on sonnets, on June 25th. It’ll be fun; the theme is “how stretchy is a sonnet?” so I’m currently reading sonnets that play with the form in various ways. We’re not going to go too avant garde or conceptual (maybe); the idea is to look at the elements of the form and expand your own understanding of how a sonnet works – and maybe expand that in your own writing, too. If you’re interested, read the Facebook page and/or drop me a line.

And there are more readings – oh, my dear, the readings. I will be at the Poetry Café in Betterton St, Covent Garden, on Friday the 24th, with Christopher Reid. And on the next night, Sat 25th (after my workshop!), I’m going to take part in a special extravaganza night of the eminent Saturday-night reading series, The Shuffle. Same place, Betterton St. More on that later, I’ll be with a glittering line-up of quirky, fun, funny, dark, interesting poets.

Then, on Thursday July 28th, Poets in the Bookshop at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, with Tamar Yoseloff. Yes! Land of my fathers! (Except my fathers were from the North, and lived down a slate quarry, where they wrote ancient Welsh riddle poems and parables of the Church. I’m very much looking forward to being in Wales.)

So it’s all go – to say nothing of Mlle B’s summer social round beginning, now the exams are over. Avebury this weekend.

Um…

And I’m reading this really fun book: The Calligrapher. By Edward Docx.

A novel! Essentially a rom-com – which is to say it very compellingly describes and presents the condition of being in love, in all its modern neurosis – set in the arcane and exotic depths of West London, written in very elegant prose, with digressions into metaphysics and the art of lettering, and structured according to the poems of John Donne (because love-neurosis is timeless, not just modern). Sound unlikely yet? Well, it has kept me going in a dark, wet week of travail, travel, and trouvailles… and indeed trolls. Trillingly, I trail the trellis of the tra –

No, really, it is very enjoyable indeed. The happiest bit of my week in some ways was the hour-plus  I spent in a salted bath the other day, topping up the hot when necessary, reading over 60 pages of this book. A novel! And, reassuringly, I met a friend of the author last winter at a party (after I bought the book), and he promised me that the novelist has NOT named himself after a Windows word-processing programme. It is his real name. (I was a little worried about that; if only because nothing seems to be compatible with it.) Anyway, all other things being equal – which they more than are, I completely believe in the characters and the setting, and the prose, as I said, satisfies even me – I kind of would like it, wouldn’t I. Calligraphy’s just old-fashioned for fonts.

Er, and aside from that, well I’ve been reading some sonnets and stuff… and writing job letters…

Cause I’m a climate change scientist.

2 Comments

Filed under books, Life

Tagged as , , ,

June 5, 2011 · 11:59 am

A message from Michael Horovitz

This LOLcat, insopired by Gil Scott-Heron, is brought to you by the Baroque brother, Mr Dog.

You see, everything is influenced by everything else: this is what we mean by the mysterious word Zeitgeist. The ‘Zeitgeist’ is a powerful image, the ghost or spirit of the age – but if you applied a different image to the concept you might find something like this creepy satellite dish manned by cats; or a bag, into which is thrown everything that makes makes up a part of the web of influence. It operates along lines of place as well as those of time. The Zeitgeist is almost like a secret mirror world in which everything that’s granted a place is extra bright, colour-saturated and hyper-significant. We expend a lot of energy looking for Meaning, and that mirrorball world is where it resides.

One of the most delightful corners of the poetry world I occupy – and its mirror world – is the one occupied by the sixties Beat legend Michael Horovitz. (I refer you to my previous blog post in support of his bid for Oxford Professor of Poetry, which links to some other great material.) I say delightful, because this is a corner where the business of poetry is to give pleasure and delight, in the most serious or silly way possible – where the serious and silly intermingle, as they should. It’s the same part of the sack where Blake jumbles, and where Keats’ Nightingale warbles – unlikely as it might seem that the Horovitz Anglo-Saxophone (more like a kazoo, really) is in any way related to that bird. (But it is.)

Of course, I can talk about the Zeitgeist, but that sixties spirit isn’t really in it, is it. It’s all about getting ahead, getting your MFA, building your career as a Poet – what Horovitz calls the Enter-Prize culture – and of course, on the quotidian level, trying to  hang on to some kind of work, an income, a chance to be allowed to use your skills. We have no time to write poetry any more; we’re too busy establishing our brand on LinkedIn. It seems there’s no such thing now as the freedom just to exist.

Michael Horovitz is now in his 70s, existing, and still apparently (as Blake did) working harder than most people in their 30s: gigging, selling his books, playing his Anglo-Saxophone with an amazing verve and most unseasonable joy. He goes around the place with the openness and interest of a person less than half his age, the lack of pretension of a person who never heard of an MFA; he rests on no laurels; he claims no entitlements; and he is still deeper, smarter and funnier than just about everybody else.

He’s been sending versions of this message round to his mailing list for the past month or so, and I am now sharing it with you. If anyone has any ideas or can offer to help, please do share them. And if you’d like to be on his mailing list – the first part of this email was all about upcoming events and appearances – just email me, and I’ll make sure your details get forwarded.

Michael Horovitz writes:

I’m reluctantly appealing to any of you who might lead to my finding STORAGE &/or WORKSPACE, ideally within a few miles of Portobello Road, because all three of the local places I’ve been renting have this week given me notice to evacuate them within another two months maximum. (n.b,the beginning of July).

There is a mass of irreplaceable archive materials along with more than 50 years’ accumulated culturally invaluable items, including artworks by a number of remarkable artists, audio & visual recordings featuring both celebrated & unjustly neglected spoken word, song, musical & multimedic performers, and much else.

It has long been my hope to get quite a lot of these materials published/issued on CD/DVD – but unfortunately as the number of worthwhile tasks I’d like to fulfill increases daily, my capacities & resources to get them sorted decreases.

As well as any suggestions of low rental or even free premises to move these materials into, I would be equally grateful if any of you might lead to – or might yourselves consider – giving a hand or two on some of the daily biz of catching up on the most essential/dated of New Departures/Poetry Olympics jobs.

The most constant urgency, now that UK postal services have been so effectively dismantled by the seemingly unstoppable ruthless greed of The New Philistia, is for anyone who might have time to offer operating the iMac computer I blew impossible money on replacing its clapped-out predecessor with about a year ago.

I myself can’t wield the mouse or begin to understand webworlds at all, but would be unable to earn £1 a day were it not for the long-suffering helpmates who have been mega-generous over the years since cyberforces took over most official communications.

Courtesy of some much appreciated gastronomic patronage there is nearly always some pleasant food & drink at my abode, & also largeish quantities of some of the New Departures CD/print backlist, abundant supplies of which will be available to anyone who might visit with a view to auditioning for some part-time assistance (– there are many areas apart from computerland, including various kinds of shlepping, around which my dwindling powers could use reinforcements). Another possible bonus for anyone who likes playing table tennis would be that I’ve access to a spaciously installed table over the road foe selected hours on most days.

1 Comment

Filed under Keats, Life, money, poetry

Tagged as , , , , ,

April 19, 2011 · 9:51 pm

Out of time

Gustav Doré again, stepping out of time with Coleridge. Note the glittering eye; it really is good. And not unmemorable.

Ah, it’s springtime – the world afresh… At 8.30pm as I write this, it’s only just getting dark, and the weather was downright warm today. I was, however, a bit late for work, so had no time to get out at Green Park and walk down through the parks. At lunchtime I was feeling too stressed out and, frankly, under deadline to go sit in the park with my colleague, so just went down the road to get some food instead, and ate it at my desk. Did I leave dead on 5.30 and walk back up through the parks? (They’re not that nice at the moment anyway: swarming with tourists and completely chewed up with enclosures, scaffolding and plastic walkways in advance of the royal wedding.) No, as you can by now guess, dear reader, I did not. I had not yet finished the utterly vital, deadline-based task I was endeavouring to complete. I managed to slip out at about 6.10, but with some quick catching-up to do first thing in the morning. Then just too tired, and wanted to get home at a reasonable time. The Victoria Line, Sainsbury’s, a spot of light cooking…

The laundry is in, the plants are watered, I’ve commissioned an 11th-hour fiction review for Horizon Review, and am now – as you can see – tending to poor little Baroque Mansions.

My five minutes of reading today, on the way in to work, amounted to one poem from David Kinloch’s new book Finger of a Frenchman. I read the first of “Five Portraits of Mary” (Queen of Scots): “Mary Stuart’s Dream,” the first poem in the book.

From what I can make out, the book is an exploration of Scottishness (which indeed has ties to Frenchness, as the figure of Mary, who was also Queen of France, illustrates; basically, think “opposite of English”), with a time dimension in it. The poems are largely if not all historical, and written in sympathetically period diction.

This project is interesting  to yours truly. It wasn’t till I was putting the manuscript together for Egg Printing Explained – no, not till I was having to describe it to people for one reason and another – that I realised how much in the past it is, and in other kinds of voices. And the question is, how do you do that? Do you go pastiche, ham, do you just go native, is it a question of contemporary-formal with a few olde wordes thrown in? Clearly the pirate in my Pirate Prufrock poem was easy. I was just trying to be as piratey as possible. There’s one where the voice appears to be of a queen, who appears to be unmarried and used to people being beheaded; I just did that one straight, really.

Here is Kinloch’s Mary:

When I sit late at works, almost
within the verdure of this tower’s
only tapestry – rabbits in an orange tree
by my shoulder – an old globe
chases silly latitudes beneath
the casement window and looking out,
the scant, dank countryside makes up
fields of Poitou mist. Distantly at first,
– but the globe birls it closer – a giant
oak shaped like a country crests
towards my berth. A man wreathed
in raindrops disembarks. Do the King’s
swans flee him? Is that cry a peacock
at midday? I hear his feet discreetly
pad the pockmarked steps and now
he is before me. Alone. With his box
of little instruments. He is a humble man
and the Scots leid on his lips is just
the burr that made my cradle sleepy.
Together we compare our cabinet of works…

This voice seems to coalesce relatively slowly; I was thrown off a bit by the poety “birls, but of course the word has a purpose in “burr;” and the countryside cresting towards her berth is a wonderful image. I particularly admire the slightly off-kilter syntax or punctuation of line 5; and this bit – I hear his feet discreetly/ pad the pockmarked steps and now/ he is before me. Alone. With his box/ of little instruments. He is a humble man” reminds me of something, but I can’t think what. It’s gorgeously paced, though.

I’m looking forward to reading the rest, with luck in increments of more than five minutes.

I lie, anyway: I had more minutes of reading, on the way home, and was looking at Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook. Regular readers will know that Mary Oliver is not my favourite poet, and indeed there is some material in the chapter on metrics and more in the chapter on “being free” that got on my nerves.

Speaking of which, it got on my nerves just like an article in the Guardian about someone who sounds like the brother of Jonathan Safran Foer, who has written a book on mnemonics, and was using convoluted visualisations of golf balls with beards growing out of their thighs etc, to train someone else to remember the beginning of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

“The whole art of this sport,” explains Foer, wrapping the word sport in qualifying air quotes,* “is in transforming information that’s unmemorable into imagery that’s so weird and raunchy and smelly and emotionally resonant that you can’t forget it.”

I ask you. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner “unmemorable”! Now I know that Michael Donaghy was of course a huge fan of the Renaissance Memory Palace, which Foer is using as his model. But Michael would also never have stood for this idiotic idea that The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – of all poems – needs to be made more memorable by imposing surreal and silly cartoon imagery on it! Oh, for Gods sake, these people, well never mind, let’s move on and stay happy.

So the thing that Mary Oliver said, and it strikes me that this chimes with the Ancient Mariner issue too, is this: “Time – a few centuries here or there – means very little in the world of poems.”**

This really resonates with me. And it is why anyone who wants to should be able to remember:

There is an Ancient Mariniere,
And he stoppeth one of three.
“By thy long grey hair and glitttering eye,
Now wherefore stoppest me?

The bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,
and I am next of kin;
the guests are met, the feast is set –
may’st hear the merry din.”

He holds him with his skinny hand:
“There was a ship,” quoth he…

Boom! And you’re in. (This poem by the way is also historical; it’s full of archaic-in-his-day spellings and vocabulary; Coleridge was writing a dream of the past… See, even in his day everyone thought their own life was more prosaic than the previous generations… Seems we need that time magic.)

The big triumph of my day – okay, maybe just a small one – was booking off a series of odd days of annual leave – especially if my contract isn’t going to be renewed, I need to take them. (But we don’t know yet.) So I’ve got a whole series of long weekends coming up, even to the extent of having tacked two extra days onto the second four-day weekend, so I’ve got six days off then… (And a two-day week in the middle, a chance to get caught up, maybe?) So with luck that will sort me out for a chance to get out of London for a day maybe, and to prep my ten poetry classes, and to finish Horizon Review (like painting the Forth Bridge), and to write blogs and maybe read a book… Most importantly, it kind of buys me out of the time of my usual days. That particular parceling-out of it. Getting lost in the past feels like a very good idea.

* This in itself is enough to induce a mini-rant.

** There are other things I’ll use from the book, too.

6 Comments

Filed under Life, Living With Words, poetry, the past

Tagged as , , , , ,

April 1, 2011 · 4:17 pm

The day after the job cuts

Well, that really was the week that was! I’m sitting in a graveyard of desks, grabbing a few minutes to record it. Plates of biscuits that were put there yesterday by teams now gone, bits of cake left over, even a bottle of white wine, which our team purloined as if picking the pockets of the dead. (As predicted! I already have a staple remover, thanks.)

The pub last night – a cavernous place with lots of large side nooks that make it perfect for a leaving d0 (and we had dozens of leavers) – was heaving. Every nook and cranny had a leaving do in it, it was like trying to have a drink in the rush hour tube, and the bar staff were completely taken by surprise. They had sweat pouring down their faces. Food was not served. We’re in an area with lots of the kinds of organisations that will have had their funding cut, NGOs and charities that needed to be near Parliament, plus government departments – so we’re at the epicentre (if there is one) of the national Day of Cuts.

Today, as in other workplaces up and down the country, we’re here in a half-empty floor trying to figure out how to get into drives no one thought we needed access to, or who to ask about a particular project, and quickly getting logins for things so they don’t go moribund just at this sensitive juncture – keeping it all ticking over while making plans for what plans we have to make next week to get our smaller, rearranged team up and running. Because, paradoxically, we have lots of work on. Which is a good thing.

One of the team went into the kitchen earlier to make tea. “Anyone want a cup of tea?” he asked.

“Sure,” replied my other colleague, “but you might have to empty the dishwasher first.”

Well, we laughed. Up till yesterday we had someone who looked after that whole side of things – the dishes, kitchen, milk and tea supplies, catering for meetings. “We’re in the Big Society now,” I said.

3 Comments

Filed under Life, the end of the worr-uld

Tagged as ,