Bits and Pieces

No one told me..

I didn't know, until I read it in the paper the other day, that this is The National Year of Reading Shakespeare on behalf of which a national survey was commissioned to discover the preferred reading matter of 11 to 14 year olds. And guess what? Shakespeare did not come top. Not only that, but the bard escaped bottom spot only by the narrowest of margins, with homework pushing him up one place. First and second places were taken by Heat and Bliss, celebrity gossip magazine and teenage girls mag, respectively.

These unsurprising results were followed by the disconcerting "news" that most serious theatres are concerned that there is no source from which to replenish their existing audiences when, from one cause or another, these fall by the wayside.

All this led up to a consideration of how to interest the teenage youth in the Sweet Bard of Avon. (Why do we insist on referring to him as the bard, by the way? The one thing he never was, was a bard.) Putting him back in the school curriculum is ruled out, Tom Stoppard having been asked what he had thought of his first encounter with Shakespeare (which, as it happened, was Laurence Olivier's Hamlet), and having received the reply that it had bored him "shitless". (Not sure of the connection there, but I do know that I was put off Shakespeare at school, mainly by "The Merchant of Venice" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream". What wouldn't I have given for Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet"!)


There was much discussion of the various media available for communicating Shakespeare these days: opera, dance, radio, T.V., film, music, musicals... no mention was made of puppets or X boxes... but the most likely saviour, it was thought, was cartoons, particularly the Manga series, which are Japanese in style. Particularly, it was thought that the Japanese style of the Manga comics alongside Shakespeare's "funny English" would appeal to teenager Gothic tastes. The Classic Comics series was also thought to be a runner as these come in triplicate with a complete text, a "plain" text and a quick text". (There is also a no text version.)


I don't think the comic approach would have tempted-in many of the adolescents I have taught, though many of them, I am sure, would gladly have read them. But maybe the present teenage population.... maybe I am not well-placed anymore to judge. I would be interested to hear what others might think.

The comic page is from Richard III "plain" text.
Click on it to see larger size.

A Change of mind?

This is a follow-up to my post One man's meat is another man's Haiku, and has been occasioned by my discovery of a recently-published book by Maryanne Wolf, "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain". In my post I touched on the changes to a brain's structure that result from the process of learning to read, and how those changes vary enormously according to the type of reading matter being mastered. The example I took concerned how the structures resulting from learing to read an alphabet-based text such as English will differ from those in the brain of a person learning to read, say, Chinese, a visual encoding whose method is based upon the ideogram. One of my illustrations involved fMRI scans of the two brains. Wolf has a more powerful image which I would certainly have used had I been aware of it at the time: she tells of a bilingual man, a fluent reader in both English and Chinese, who suffered a disasterous stroke which destroyed parts of his brain, such that he could no longer read a word of English. His ability to read Chinese, however, was undiminished. She makes the point that reading is an unnatural activity, or as she puts it: "Our brains were never wired for reading." Reading was only ever made possible by the capacity of the neurons in the brain to forge new links in response to new demands being made upon the brain. This allows the language form being used to write a particular structure to the brain. Or as Wolf puts it: "We are what we read." I think that sums up quite succinctly what I was struggling to express in my original post.

A Subaltern's Love Song

Sad to hear of the death of Joan Hunter Dunn. I am sure many thought she was a fiction. As many as those who think John Betjeman was too light-weight or too jingly to be considered as a serious poet. Much of his work was maybe too light-weight and too jingly to have made of him a likely Poet Laureate, yet Poet Laureate he became. And there was more: he has been called parochial and passe and has been faulted for not doing the big themes - except for death. All of which is fair comment. He was not a nature poet, not a Wordsworth certainly, but perhaps his biggest crime has been that of becoming known for the wrong poems. A Subaltern's Love Song, would, I suppose, be regarded as typical Betjeman. And it is, but if that is to summarise what he achieved, it sells him short. He was best known for his nostalgia, his sense of place and of Victorian architecture in particular, even for his melancholia, but to my mind he was, above all, a poet of landscape, nearer to Crabbe than to Wordsworth. For me his best works are the poems from and of Cornwall and Ireland:

Stony outcrop of the burren,
Stones in every fertile place,
Little fields with boulders dotted,
Grey-stone shoulders saffron-spotted,
Stone-walled cabins thatched with reeds,
Where a stone Age people breeds
The last of Europe's Stone Age race.

He was also a splendid writer of blank verse and was happier with it than with prose. And what an incredibly lucky poet! How many others have been lucky enough to find a muse with a name like Joan Hunter Dunn? You couldn't even hope for it, could you? To what extent she was his muse, I am not sure, not in the same way that Maud Gonne was Yeats's muse, I think. To the best of my knowledge Joan Hunter Dunn inspired only the one poem (though I am happy to stand corrected on that), but Betjeman's muse is what she is, and I guess, will remain.

Short Official Guide VI

My Short official Guide to Ancestral Home reaches its conclusion with a look at the grounds. If you have stayed with me, my thanks. If you were not around for the earlier posts you can catch up on them by clicking on the label short_guide.

The Parklands

From the avenue that brought you to our door,
interminable though it would have seemed,
you would have seen a tiny fraction
of a small part of our land.
The work of many owners and the consequence
of many annexations. It contains:
a fountain (high-Baroque),
a lake with islands,
islands with fantastic grottoes,
grottoes with attendant ghosts
skeletons and water gardens,
woods,
a French parterre,
three formal gardens,
kitchen garden,
maze,
two burnt-out towers (North and South)
small theme park - and

The Sculpture Gallery

currently our hottest property. Cassandra Tiffany,
mother, father, midwife to the scheme,
self-styled Defender of the Average Man,
first ever data junkie, hooked
on ideas of a free society
and detonating smoke bombs in the halls of art,
found (as like as not)
polishing the bronze maquettes
of Epstein's Angel (wings like ruffled water),
a perfect combination of an earthly weight,
a gravitas with airiness
and what so nearly might have been.


In contrast, on a massive convolution of giant toes,
solid and supreme, a Hittite God;
purchase of stone,
earth-rooted weight,
Yazilikaya's finest, stands.
From toes to tip
of his comical,
conical hat,
a very modern model of the modern macho-man.


His sword has lions along its hilt.
The muscles rip.
The thrust is down and through the earth,
into an underworld of stone.
The lions are squeezed like hamsters in his grip.


The blade trepans the stone skull. Milt
of cold, cerebral thought is spilt:
red marrow from the bone.


Cassandra Tiffany departs
to keep the turnstiles clicking
with hurdy-gurdies, roundabouts
and throws in the casino.


You'll trust her as the dowager
survivor of Guernica...
The lithograph is value if you want a keepsake, dear…


Lord Noah for all his trekking,
could find no wilderness,
but hush! hush! deny them who dares,
Mandelbrot and Koch are mapping theirs
while all the frightened people say their prayers.


A louring sky, a souvenir,
a flurry of rekindled life
and sawdust in a dance.
Shabhala the ancient city is as near
to us as France.

My April Haiku Challenge

Back at the beginning of the month I kind of accepted the challenge of April being Poetry Month in which the more foolhardy poets and would-be poets undertake to write a poem a day. Never a prolific wannabe, I did limit the strain on myself by saying that it would probably be a Haiku a day. There has been one other along the way, and although not yet at the half-way point, I thought I would post what I have so far -in case that's as far as I get or I fall off the edge of the world or something!
Remember, I also got in first by saying I was not expecting to produce anything other than stuff to work on later.

wind and rain all day             two perfect rosebuds
hitting the magnolia              one glistening with dew, one
the day it flowered               snug in morning frost

the rain that brings to life      spooky moon, weak sun
hidden colours in a dry stone     snowflakes in a strong north wind -
does nothing for drab clothes     nothing moves the rainbow

wise indeed who knows             reading replaces sleep
where to scatter the ashes        when fireworks or near thunder
in this nor' easter               leave the mind in fear

the rhododendron                  men with blowers
blushed to see its snow veil      dancing leaves across the road
tattered by the wind              while traffic waited

after the hailstorm               the fading bracts
a new moon in the acer            waited and waited to greet
and a dying sun                   the new arrivals

a soft staccato                   a drift of hail stones
wingbeat of a startled bird -     and the back steps glaciated
no greater sound that day         in the grip of spring

The weasel under the cocktail cabinet.

Back in January (the 22nd) (Was it really that long ago?) I ventured a comment on Jim Murdoch's Post, Judging a Book by Everything Bar it's Cover that I was coming round to the idea of literature being what is left when you subtract the story. The actual phrase was not original, was not from my fast-breeder of a brain; nor, I guess, was the concept. Both seemed to have been hanging around at that time. However, the ground in which the seed for that thought might have grown had been prepared a little over forty years ago, and having left the comment I was reminded of a fascinating puzzle encountered in those dim and distant days, a puzzle that fascinated me then and still does today. At any rate, my comment on Jim's post set that old train of thought back upon its rails, and I have decided that it is now time I went somewhere with it. At the end of the day you might come to doubt the wisdom of that decision.

In the early days of my teaching career I worked in a special school for children with learning difficulties. Looking back, it was one of the most interesting periods of my career. Each child's special difficulties were individual to that child, but in any one there would be some sort of combination of: short attention span, immature language development, poor verbal- and abstract reasoning, some degree of hyperactivity... They were all aged between eight and ten. You will understand my amazement then when I tell you that their favourite television programme, was Perry Mason, an American, Emmy-winning drama. That is, you will understand my amazement if you are ancient enough to remember Perry Mason - or if you happen to have one or more of his D.V.Ds. in your collection. It was basically a courtroom drama written to a formula, the formula being that, in the first half hour a murder is committed and the police arrest the wrong person. Perry, a lawyer, is engaged for the defense and sets out to prevent what seems like an inevitable miscarriage of justice. There is a trial. Perry and his assistant investigate. Perry ties the prosecution up in knots before producing a pyrotechnic display of verbal wizardry that traps the guilty party into a dramatic court room confession, usually while giving testimony on the witness stand. The second part would consist of Perry and the innocent principals getting together for Perry to explain the intricacies of what happened: how the dastardly deed was done and covered-up and how the villains were eventually trapped by their one fatal mistake. That at any rate is how I remember it forty years on.

What I do remember and for sure is that the whole programme was geared to their weaknesses. The emphasis was all on the talk and away from the action. The 'action' was, for the most part, explained, not shown, other than in brief flash-backs - a further complication, for children not as television-sophisticated as they are today. The time-line must have been quite beyond their powers to unravel. And yet they were in no doubt about it: it was their favourite programme. The enthusiasm with which they recounted the previous evening's story was corroboration enough, if any were needed. They could not wait to explain the latest happenings, to tell me "What it was about". But here was the problem: the stories they unfolded bore no resemblance to the one I had watched. Consistently so. Week after week I failed to reconcile "their" plot to the one I had watched. I began by making the assumption that, not able to understand the speech (in which was the action, remember), they were in some way creating their own action and attributing it to the characters, rather as they might manipulate dolls or action men, projecting appropriate motives onto them as they did so. These alternative plots, I supposed, were the direct result of their lack of understanding or of their misunderstandings. That was very condescending of me, a fact I was to realise only when it finally dawned on me that my twenty pupils were not producing twenty different scripts. Some weeks they would all be telling the same tale, like crime suspects who had carefully rehearsed their alibi. (I did check that one out, by the way: they had not had the opportunity to compare notes to that extent, many of them having come straight off different coaches - not that they would have been able to get their stories together that well, in any case.) Other weeks there would be two or three versions with varying degrees of agreement between them, but impressive correspondence within each. And then a moment of intuition: watching the broadcast one Sunday, I tried to rid myself of all the extraneous baggage that I had been bringing to it, baggage which they did not possess: knowledge of the formula to which the stories were written (their versions rarely conformed), familiarity with the conventions of film and video drama (their story lines were always linear, not always as simple as you might expect, though flash-backs would often be absorbed into the present), my greater susceptibility to spoken language than to body language or to other forms of non-verbal communication (it was not so much that the actual words used were beyond them, as that the sentence structures would be unfamiliar), etc, etc. There was a colossal amount of it when I got right down to it. Too much ever to have allowed me to succeed in my self-appointed task of divesting myself of it! However, to the extent that I managed something of my plan, I was able, at least to intuit - no more than that - the possibility of alternative interpretations beneath the author's complex plots. False ones, you might think (the author would have, I am sure!) but that perhaps is to show the prejudices with which our culture so unthinkingly equips us - then sometimes (as in the case of those youngsters), doesn't. Assuming that I was correct in my suppositions, who are we to say that those alternative versions were less valid than the ones the programme-makers had in mind? Less valid to them, perhaps, but to those youngsters? (Another source of divergence, I decided later, after a little more "research", was the fact that they consciously took cues from the mood music - as they called it - while, it being anathema to me, I had always done my best to filter it out.)(I still practice this occasionally, with a kind of detached viewing when watching the soaps - the results can be quite interesting!)

So what did I glean from all that? A good deal that was valuable to me as their teacher, but for our purposes, an understanding that in any play or novel there are things going on that are not in concert, so that for the reader, viewer, listener what they take from it will depend upon where their focus is located. How many plots are there in even a simple tale well told? What, for this reader, that viewer, listener, is the tale about? Who but they can know? Certainly not the author. In a slim volume, an anthology of his work, a real gem of a book called Various Voices, Harold Pinter tells how many years ago he was taking part in a discussion on the theatre. A lady asked him what his work was about. As it happens, Pinter hates having to answer that particular question, and so replied "with no thought at all and simply to frustrate that line of inquiry: The weasel under the cocktail cabinet. It was a great mistake," he says, for "Over the years I have seen that remark quoted in a number of learned columns. It has now seemingly acquired a profound significance, and is seen to be a highly relevant and meaningful remark about my own work." I believe theses have been written on it since, and no doubt Doctorates awarded and professors appointed on the strength of it. For Pinter the remark had meant "precisely nothing".

Munch's Scream

The news that Edvard Munch's Scream, stolen in a dramatic Heist, you may remember, and then recovered in a damaged condition, is beyond repair came as a bit of a surprise, to say the least. After all, they have been restoring it now for four years. You might have thought that they would have realised a little earlier that the cause was hopeless. But then, reading on a bit, it transpires that the scratches to the paint surface and the areas of flaking have, in fact, been successfully dealt with. All that remains is some water damage, as I understand it, a loss of shine in an area of dark, loose brushmarks, well away from the central focus of the picture. This cannot be treated as the painting is on cardboard stuck to board. Had it been on canvas, the moisture would have been sucked out from the rear, but as it is, there is nothing that can be done.

Okay, so we have a painting whose main areas have been fully restored, but there is a water mark low down in an unimportant area, one to which Munch certainly did not give much care or attention. It's a great shame, but perhaps not the end of the world for the owners. So what's all the fuss about? Well, reading on still further, we discover that as a result of that unremovable mark, the paining has, in all probability, gained appreciably in value - and will certainly be an even greater crowd-drawer than it was before. Now am I being overly cynical here? Are they really unable to do anything about a mere water mark, these experts in their temperature- and humidty-controlled vault, behind their fingerprint-operated locked doors, with high-tech equipment and their genuinely jaw-dropping skills? After all, this is the era in which it has been known for conservators to remove the paint film, restore the canvas and then replace the original paint. Could they really not prise apart the board and the cardboard? And remember, it is not the only version of The Scream, but it has become - and even more so because of the mark - the most famous one, the one with star quality, the must-see one.

To a point I agree with the museum authorities that the damage has now become part of the painting, but are there any other cynics out there?

Short Official Guide V

The penultimate page. Next week we finish with a stroll around the grounds.

The East Wing

The Chapel

door is opposite.
A place of meditation now.
(Shambhala the ancient city
can be reached.)
Put to many uses in its time:
mosque, temple, wine store.Popular with tourists,
it bids you pause
and spare a moment,
read (at the open page
and for your own enlightenment)
its “Angel Bible",
paraphrased by Clare
in blank,
unpunctuated verse
and annotated in her hand,
illuminated in the style of Blake
and bound in Angelskin -
the formula for which
died with her, we believe.
Her finest work.
And then the wagons really rolled!
Machines took over; Clare controlled
the commerce; visuals
were left to others.
Unit-planned, prefabricated frescoes
multiplied the scale
(and distribution schemes the sale)
by several-thousandfold. Of all those sold,
few went to churches.

The Eastern Priest's Room

part old, part new, was once the sacristy
and then The Figurine and Puppet Room.
Now furnished in pale greys and greens,
its damp walls, blotched with portraits of past owners
(faces grow like fungi in the gloom)
and tapestries of scenes
that moulded them, this house and you and me,
allow each owner, son and wife
when tourists come to come to life.


Explorers all, the psyche was their continent who said:
All that we cannot know is flesh and bone.
The rest is local colour. They who led
us on in Pollock rhythms trailed around the world
or spent themselves in tricks and dribbles
(in and out of bed),
seem more substantial to us now they're dead.
Scene after scene is peeled away,
web after web of soft, reflected glow,
reflecting what we can and cannot know.

The Music Room

contains no instruments these days.
Instead,
a loop of tape
(and earpiece with acoustic boom
supplied at token cost)
gives flavour of
(a few short extracts only)
Ms Beatrice Paul's unlikely cult spectacular: A
Child Called Caryatid, or
A Pillar of Society.
Two verses from the lyrics follow here:


She'll dance with the devil for an offering on the drum,
the spirit of an age that has flown around the sun,
that wants to live for ever and believes it can be done.
Her brain is full of knowledge and her loins are full of love,
For a mind she has a gun-sight with its cross-wires trained above.
On how she will reach it, she is far from being clear,
for it's far beyond her range and she hesitates for fear
that the sun will melt her wings if she dares to venture near,
but she's calculated the trajectory and mapped it on a graph,
so suggest she will not reach it and she'll dance away and laugh,
and dancing to the music like a woman in a trance,
the images that come to her, she'll abandon in the dance.


It is hard now to remember that this woman proudly stood
among her people as the sanity among the superstitions of the wood.
Then the coldness of her thighs and the coldness of her brow
held an image that was clear, but is lost to man for good.
She's the mistress of our passions, she's the passion we avow,
so we listen to her stories of the days that are long gone,
of public adulation and the offerings upon
the altar stone she stood before, high above the people,
motionless, expressionless, dumb beneath the steeple,
and we think her stern and distant, with an act to run and run,
a bowl of living water from a river on the sun,
and we listen to her murmurs and interpret what we hear
as meaning that all meaning passed its use-by date last year.

One man's meat is another man's Haiku...

The accompanying image is from an fM.R.I. scan (the f stands for functional). It shows a human brain. The fM.R.I's. rather remarkable ability to highlight active areas of the brain so that they are clearly differentiated from the more quiescent ones derives from the fact that oxygenated haemoglobin is diamagnetic - i.e, it slightly repels a magnetic force - while deoxygenated blood is paramagnetic - i.e. itself becomes slightly magnetic. Looking at an M.R.I. image, it can clearly be seen which areas stand out as active and which are the quiescent ones. By scanning a subject while he or she is reading a book, for example, the scan will reveal which specific areas of the brain were involved in that process.

A few weeks ago I came across the results of some studies which set me thinking and have resulted in this post. The studies compared the brain activity in Asian (Chinese) and Western (Canadian) subjects when reading. The two groups were scanned as they read and the two sets of scans produced very different results: those areas of the brain that were shown to be active when the Asian subjects were reading were not the same as those involved when the Canadians read. This has been attributed to the fact that in the West, language is alphabetic (or ideophonic), while Asian languages are ideographic. In the case of the Western reader, the activity is a sequential one, the letters must be read and then broken down into phonemes which then have to be matched to a known meaning. The reading (or recognizing) of the letters is a visual activity, whilst the matching of the phonemes must be done to a meaning that has been learnt by listening to the speech of others. In other words, the matching is from a visual area of the brain to an aural one. Initially there is nothing in the structure of the brain that would allow this to happen, so when a (western) child is learning to read, physical connections must be laid down between the two areas. In the case of the Asian child learning to read, however, the activity is more akin to the parallel processing of a computer, for the brain must grab meaning from a pictogram, and almost simultaneously determine the sound of it.

It will be seen that something happens in the first case, i.e. when a Western person is learning to read, that does not happen in the second: the structure of the brain is significantly modified - or if it is happening in both instances (likely) it is happening in different ways. And as in the case of reading, so it is with other speech and language skills: their acquisition permanently modifies, subtly or distinctly, the way in which the brain is structured, and that modification predisposes us to favour - to be able to fully comprehend or be moved by - certain forms and patterns of the spoken and written word.

I have long had this fanciful image of two archipeligoes; the islands in one are composed of words, those in the other are meanings. Between the words on the one hand and the meanings on the other there exists a network of narrow shipping lanes in which we writers, would-be writers,. lovers of poetry and others, move and have our being. Truth and beauty - and therefore poetry - inhabit the shallows between the lanes, visible, touchable at times, but ultimately elusive. They make their ways to and from the islands under their own steam and by their own routes. For us the connections between the islands are real, but never fixed or certain - and certainly never exclusive, never one-to-one and never immutable.

I have, I say, long held that image, but reading the results of these studies, I begin to get the notion - and here I risk exposing my ignorance - that this image of mine applies only - or mainly - to those of us in the western world for whom reading involves mastering an alphabet. It would seem that for the Chinese subjects of these studies the connections between my two archipeligoes are less fluid by far; the shallows play no part in the analogy, the lanes are firm, dry paths, the word-islands are mirror images of their meanings, the ideogram incorporates the visual experience to which it relates.

Having possibly exposed my ignorance, I am now going to risk my head above the parapet by daring to compare a triplet of my poor attempts at Haiku with three from recognised masters - or rather, two masters and a mistress. I have chosen Haiku as being both a convenient form of Japanese poetry and the one most familiar to most western people, though my interest is not in its brevity, but in what might lie behind it. I am hooked on the idea that something is going on in oriental poetry (and in Japanese poetry particularly) that we cannot fully comprehend. I am tempted to make the analogy of a colourblind person looking at a Matisse painting - but the thought raises the analogy with Chinese and Japanese painting, and that is a whole new subject that I will not get into now. Many poetry lovers will say they miss the the compression, the musicality of the rhythms and the assonance when confronted with a Haiku. To me they have often seemed little more than acute observations - and, indeed, Buson, a pupil of Basho, criticised the master for favouring unusual observations. But I slightly digress, I think, so here goes... my Haiku first:

Disappearing birds.
Silent woodlands. Silent homes.
Disappearing words.

Even in the fields
the city street is sounding like
a noisy neighbour

Wind and rain all day
hitting the magnolia.
That day it flowered.

And now a Haiku from the pen of Suzuki Masajo, a twentieth century poet:

Spring loneliness -
it falls short of the surf
this stone I toss

From Basho, seventeenth century, and probably the best known of all haiku writers:

The temple bell dies away
The scent of flowers in the evening
Is still tolling the bell.

And from Buson Yosa, eighteenth century:

The air shimmers.
Whitish flight
Of an unknown insect.

You will have no difficulty, I warrant, spotting the difference in quality between the first set and the second, but to me there is a deeper, more fundamental difference. I remarked just recently in a comment to a post from Jim Murdoch on minimal poetry, Less is more or less (part one) (24/03/08) that I had embarked upon a cull of my Haiku scripts. Of the three used here, two were the only survivors of that cull. By definition, therefore, they are the two that pleased me most - or perhaps, displeased me least. The third Haiku I have written since, so I have not abandoned the form which Jim brilliantly refers to as a Haiku approximation. That, surely, is exactly what it is. The clue is, I think, that when I come to compare my efforts with, say the Basho, I do not just see a great gap yawning between them; I see two different animals, a familiar life form and a very unfamiliar one. It would be no different were I to take another Japanese form; say tanka (rendered in English as a 35-syllable form) or Senryu (like Haiku, but using irony instead of a seasonal word). What would be different would be taking the example, say, of a sonnet. I might reasonably expect to be able to write a sonnet of sorts. It might not prove to be a very good sonnet, but it should still qualify as a sonnet.

Visiting Sorlil's Blog recently (thoroughly recommended, by the way) I was reminded that April (the cruelest month) is poetry month, for the duration of which, some unwise souls take on the challenge of writing a poem day. I, impetuous as always, laid a promise that I would try - no more than that! - but said it would probably be Haiku (approximations, of course) all the way. I do not think I could find the time for more than that - I know, I know, three lines take twice as long as thirty! But this, for me, is just the discipline of getting something down that perhaps I might be able to work on later.

In Less is more or less (part one), Jim also suggests that maybe Haiku is impossible for the Western (he says "English") mind, but goes on: That doesn’t mean some very nice poetry can't be produced using that structure and adds, I think realistically, but perhaps haiku is not the best name for it. By all means let us borrow the structure. If someone finds it will work for them they would be foolish not to, but to my mind Haiku is not about 5-7-5 or any other format or formula. It is about experiencing. It is about experiencing the walk between the islands along paths that may not even exist in our western world - or in our western minds, perhaps. It is about sights and smells, about sounds and feelings and about an intangible that belongs somewhere in Eastern philosophy.

Short Official Guide IV

Loyalty is rewarded this time with a shortish extract.

The Study

Here, on a bureau, overlooked by most,
find stories, scrapbooks,
anecdotes
and photographs from Picture Post.


Cabinets display Noah's logs,
itineraries, trophies, relics,
souvenirs and diaries
of ocean voyages and treks;
of vain attempts
to find that most
elusive wilderness. Read
thoughts on sail-aways
and welcomes home,
including that last time,
The Voyager's Return.
We picture Noah
complete with bride, The Princess
Able Clare,
on whom he wrote a thesis for the tech'
and whom he treasured as a jewel until the fall.


Reluctant to reveal,
open at their arbitrary pages,
revealing in their very arbitrariness,
admittedly not all,
but much of our relationship
to those remote and foetal ages.


Shannat... Shannapse... Shambhala!
Shambhala the ancient city can be reached.
Tickets cost... excursion rates...
the native guides, 'shifty-eyed'
deserted - it was said.


Brochures and travel agents
flood the centers of our minds,
now difficult to reach,
with neon light.


See in the final montage: the long night
slowly freezing from its first beginnings to a stop
(the sunken eyes, the wasted limbs,
the questionings awaiting en famille
having screwed him to his station),
as Lord Noah,exiled from his milieu, stands,
boots no match for water nor Pak-A-Mac for frost,
out-waiting the reluctance of the dawn to break.
Before he gets his turn to pay, the milk is gone.
Then with the armistice comes liberation.


Too late by far: Noah's child has died.
Chi-Chi, you may spot, has tin upon tin of milk put by.
His child (well-overfed)
is dancing with the ballet.


Featured here: Petrouchka's final act.
Sprawling in the marketplace.
Sky grown dim,
stitches leaking sawdust,
every limb
disjointed.
(You'll find him in the nursery,
still in disrepair,
propped up in the corner with the teddy bear.)

Beowulf

I have read a number of comments lately on the recent illustrated version of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, including a review by Nicholas Lezard, which I tore out of a Guardian Review before Christmas with the thought that I might, perhaps, just conceivably, but probably not buy the book. These ancient tales are, in the main, not for me. There are a few exceptions, Njal's Saga being a notable one. Sure, that is a fault in me, but there it is.

Seven years ago, Nicholas Lezard says, he, too thought as I do... Well, he didn't actually say that, didn't actually mention me, but he admits to having thought Beowulf "brainless macho trash". I remember it well. I think. I certainly read something along those lines when Seamus Heaney's translation first appeared. Thank heavens, I thought, at long last some other occupant of planet earth thinks as I do. Now, though, with the appearance of what he calls the coffee-table edition of Heaney's version, it appears he has changed his mind. But it is not some new Epiphany wrought by a more careful reading of the text that has brought this about. No, his changed opinion is entirely due to the pictures. They have convinced him that Beowulf is "a serious and complex work of art". He gives an example:

"'Boar-shapes flashed
Above their cheek-guards'

and on the left there is a large colour picture of a carefully-wrought boar surmounting a helmet excavated from Benty Grange, Derbyshire."

I have not yet seen the new edition. I may well sport out the £13.99 being asked for it, but if I do I shall be buying it for the graphics, not for the text, for the images do indeed sound well worth the outlay. As to the text, the one fact that might have won me over to it seven years ago, the knowledge that Seamus Heaney had thought it worth his while to translate it, failed to do so. My world will be shaken to its foundations if it turns out that pictures (props, which ever way you look at them) achieve what he could not. I am sure it is a fault in me, but the issue I am hammering on about is whether we should require a work of art to stand alone, or whether there is a place for props, and if so, what that place might be. Should we be swayed in our judgments by external factors, however inspiring or enlightening? I can accept props as an introduction, say in school, remembering that we are going to journey beyond them for our final understanding. I can see them as they are used in this new edition of Beowulf to provide insight into the poem's background and the society that produced it, or to correct misconceptions concerning that society. That is why I might yet buy the new edition. But such pictures are at most guide book illustrations to give us a taste of what lies before us or to explain its history, its culture or its politics. If the terrain, when we visit it, turns out to be "brainless macho trash", the photographs in the guide book, however appealing, will not alter that. Not unless it is that we are seeing what we are told to see and not what is in us to see.

I shall visit my local bookshop and have a look. I may, as I say, even buy the book... but then again, don't hold your breath, for on the same page of The Guardian Review was a very enticing write-up on Paul Muldoon's translation of Neil O'Gallagher's "The Fifty Minute Mermaid". If the Virgin shelves happen to be carrying that, and if it's half as seductive as the review makes it out to be, then that's where my cash is likely to be going. Unless my foundations do get thoroughly rattled!

Short, Official Guide III

If you have stayed with me this far, thank you and welcome to part 3, The Nursery.

The Nursery

 
Designed by Jane, Third Marchioness,
cradles of a culture, like or not,
faithfully preserved. Her taste 
(as always), careless, brash and bold.
Room for a thousand childhoods -
but the room was always cold.


You must not miss the dolls' house, very small,
a replica of this house and its contents,
and inside that a perfect replica again,
and inside that, 
                brought to you by the power of virtual reality 
                a host of life-size families
with every detail of those times 
scaled down 
to fit the present age. 


For a pound coin in the hardware
adopt the mind-set of a former generation:
experience at first hand, act 
with empathy,
see palaces of good and ill 
                           see local knights,
your heroes once, promoted or demoted to a myth. 
Ride out with us. 
                You'll see one or you'll see one not,
but where you see, there that uncertain king,
by Heisenberg , rides time past, present and continuing.   ref


And the word of God was Euclid's    ref
and the complex plane    ref
was void and vacant. Darkness lay
in the abyss.
             And men like Koch and Mandelbrot    1 2
said: "Let's give geometry a new dimension!" and 
infinity began to bleed into the world again.


See Adam's single fruit upon its single tree
bifurcating endlessly to such diversity.   ref
It seemed a simple plot 
                       before division ruled the roost,
before turbulence was king,    ref
when storm and chaos as we thought    ref
grew only out of fear
and Gaston Julia had yet    ref
to intuit how beauty met
with chaos and disorder
in a geometric set.












The lights flash on: GAME OVER! 
An invitation: one more 
coin, another world:
step right inside the dolls' house, step
right back to when it all began. There walk 
with Newton on his solid hills,    ref
meet Ptolemy or Abraham,     ref
wear on your sleeve the soul of Einstein, Blake    1  2
or Hubble - Caedmon even, he whose polygene,    1 2 3
yours for a coin, 
became our genius. 
Technology, our modern grace, 
enables you to sing 
as he sang: 
wild and hauntingly,
full-bodied, as a bird sings, 
matching every note
to the subtleties and splendours of a God who spoke.


There dream his dream with us,
a man apart from what we call reality. There feel
his lack of choice, his wounded pride;
share with him his lowly station, 
experience his flat, untutored voice
and know as he knew, this:
that just because he sang so in a dream
the power came to his life.
You, too, may sing of things you know not,
hear your voice power through the pious monasteries
and watch the bleak religions of your day awake to pray.


His world was shadowy. 
You can explore that shade, 
learn how the cattle were reality, 
that Abbess Hilda was not real:   ref
he knew her, of her, fed her cattle;
she remained a symbol of his bread and butter.


Facing her across the hallowed study,
terrified to speak lest you should break the spell,
feel the symbols change, feel living water 
well up from the abbess in her, welcome him.
Be her and lose a servant;
be the world and gain a limb.
                  
               
And everywhere, the great abyss, 
the Dachau moment reigns supreme;    ref
our second Genesis   ref
begins in pain.  
Tiresius,     ref
blind hero of blind poets down the years,
blind in the way that all blind men are blind,
blinded by the light's ambivalence,
but snake-eyed, 
bridges our divide
                  uniquely 
                          with his twofold vision.
Divisions multiply. 
                   With visual cortex 
wired to sighted retinas around the world, 
he bids you turn the virtual page
and join his Masterclass. 
Here feel the moment grip and twist you, 
feel desire in either form, see images 
that freeze the sight-lines to the brain
and watch them spiral from the sky.
All that was human lies inhumed - until
a millionth of a thought-time later: miraculous free fall!
The dark sparks hammer in the brain again
to leave you breathless at the Berlin Wall.   ref

                             
From here and there, this one and that,
a world-wide web of whispers from the ruins
brings to the darkness of our cave, a patina of light.


The ivy broke the stones apart,
the dust encroached upon the heart,
the two towers crumbled into dust,   ref
swallowed by a holy lust -
the lust that saw the Caryatids fall
then raise this more surpassing hall.
She and the hall were ever one,
who holds the host above her head
to give us all our daily bread.


See her days exposed to view.
The Dreamtime spread its arms in welcome. Those who knew   ref                 
her in the old days 
might not recognize her now. 
The steel tap, tap on cobblestone and sett of her high heels
is both a proclamation and a provocation to their ears.


Wiser now and wealthy, elemental in her role,
she's our New Age Voodoo Lady with a mix of fetish doll.

Easter Treats

No, not chocolate eggs and Easter bunnies, though I have no objection to either, but no, I am thinking of larger treats than these, the sort I like to give myself at such times. Just as at Christmas I like to listen to Handel's Messiah or Britten's St Nicholas Cantata, so at Easter Bach's Matthew Passion sets the mood, as does standing among Giotto's frescoes in the Arena Chapel at Padua or before da Vinci's Last Supper.... seasonal treats indeed! Of course, since I got rid of the private jet as part of my green contribution, I am reliant on reproductions for such pleasures. Given the standard of present-day reproductions, this represents a relatively small diminution of the aesthetic experience. It is true that there are losses; of scale, for example, but there is modern technology and imagination to come to our aid, and all-in-all not so much is sacrificed that the artist's vision is lost. Not in the case of the da Vinci, at any rate, though the Giottos present a rather more severe problem - but more on that anon. For now I should confess that my favourite Easter treat is Bellini's Agony in the Garden. Once, for a short time, for personal reasons, it was Salvador Dali's Crucifixion, and that being so, the Dali will always have a special place in my affections. But for the moment, and because life is, I think, the poorer for being deprived of the occasional digression: a small diversion. There is currently a photographic exhibition running at The Photographers' Gallery in London. On show are the entries for The Photography Prize. Worth £30,000, it is awarded annually to an international photographer who is judged to have made the greatest contribution to photography over the previous year. This year's finalists are John Davies (UK), Jacob Holdt (Denmark), Esko Männikkö (Finland) and Fazal Sheikh (USA). Founded in 1996, the Photography Prize has become one of the most prestigious international arts awards. What caught my attention was a remark made by Adrian Searle, the art critic: Half the photographers up for the Deutsche Börse prize have a moral point to make. But it's the ones who don't that are the most interesting. No, actually, it didn't catch my attention, not immediately, for when you think about it, it is a pretty okay remark, an orthodox viewpoint, uncontroversial. Moral points got themselves a bad press thanks to the Victorians, and although some aspects of Victorian taste are making a bit of a come-back, moral points in art are still not fashionable. So if I registered anything at Searle's remark it was a big indifferent, "You don't say!" It was just what most of us (I suspect) would have expected.

I suppose the discussion hangs on what you term as a moral point, but although Searle's remark is in key with today's thinking and would not raise an eyebrow (not even one of mine) in the normal run of things, when I applied it to the works I have mentioned (and, of course, I could have applied it to many more), it seemed just fatuous. It certainly would not always have been the case. In the Middle Ages art was very much a practical craft, but one that served a spiritual end. The artist was a kind of auxiliary priest, tilling the sensual fields the priest could not touch, and bringing forth from them his spiritual harvest. The eventual disassociation of church and artist and the rise of genre painting took a long time to mature - and, arguably, was never completed. So we have Giotto at the beginning of the fourteenth century painting his frescoes in the Arena Chapel at Padua. What perhaps is not sufficiently appreciated is that Giotto's fame rests squarely on his genius for picture cycles, and a picture cycle is what he gives us in the Arena Chapel. The cycle is a form of art quite distinct from that of the single picture, or even a series of single pictures, and as such is unfamiliar to us. We tend to see them in isolation, even discuss which one we like best, but cycles do not work like that. They obey their own laws and form a continuous narrative in which each is influenced by the rest, and in its turn casts its own influence. It may be easier to see the difference if we think about their origins: they represent the end result of a long development from the friezes of ancient Greece and Rome, through the mosaics and illuminated manuscripts of the fourth and fifth centuries. In one such manuscript we find several versions of the Genesis story side by side. It was not until much later that the highlights would be selected out and isolated in frames of their own.

The painter of frescoes such as Giotto was as circumscribed in what he could and could not do as any painter of eikons. Today's artist would probably brush in a landscape or a building and then place the figures in it. The artist of Giotto's day would start with the figures and then contract the background. Even if they were supposedly in the building shown, it would be positioned behind them. The figures were actors who were always stage front with the scenery behind them. The dramatis personnae for these actions had been developed by the painters of Byzantium, in whose works they were mask-like figures, but Giotto mastered the principles behind their use and breathed new life into them, using them for his own purposes.

Meanwhile, poetry was following an almost parallel course, with Dante describing journeys undertaken beyond the known worlds of life and death, journeys frightening enough to be thought of as the Star Treks of their day. Line by line he was creating verses equating to Giotto's picture cycles and following many the same principles.

We have, though, largely lost the feeling for Giotto's art and for the art of all those like him who worked in picture cycles. Perhaps it was inevitable, sad, but a sadness over which we should not linger, merely wipe away the occasional tear and move on. Even in these days of the installation, when we may find ourselves actually walking into an art work, our focus remains very much on the single picture, yet the cycle was, in a sense, the installation of its time. Perhaps if we could try to see it that way we would be drawing closer to the way it would have been seen by its creator. Maybe before we wipe away that tear and move on, we should make one last effort to rediscover the laws of the picture cycle. You stand at the centre of a chapel and the figures are part of the setting, as much so as the pillars in a cathedral. And as part of the purpose of the pillars is to lift the mind to heaven, the figures are there to draw you into a divine narrative. A useful analogy might be drawn with our modern surround sound.

There is a sense in which the picture cycle was never to surpass the achievements of Giotto, but there is another in which it was to reach its zenith in the work of Bellini, and yet another in which the feeling for it was already beginning to be lost. As always there was a demon at the heart of the tragedy. In this instance the demon was the altar piece, which would increasingly become the focus for the congregation's attention. And as the altar piece grew in importance, the power of the cycle could not be sustained. Focus is not always a goodly (or a Godly)thing.



image of Arena Chapel from Web Gallery

Short, Official Guide Book II

Continuing the threatened serialisation of Short, Official Guide Book to Ancestral Home from its introduction of 12/03/08, the tour proper begins here:-

The Great Hall.

You enter next the Great Hall.
Grande it was in days of old, its oak 
carved with the chronicles of folk 
back almost to the fall. 
A gallery of excellence, a temple of the arts, 
A blossoming of hothouse plants 
before the frosts got in.


Facing you, the hardy Caryatid.               ref
See her now that her hour has gone:
the stones she proudly held aloft
are dust to walk upon -
or splayed in patterns round her feet,
white petals from a rose. 


Impassive as a firedog, 
older than steel, 
remembering the days when people used to kneel,
now daubed with pop art circles
to produce a modern feel,
she stands beneath a stained glass eye, 
has stood there long 
in glass-stained sun;
an apparition who has seen 
all changes come to pass, 
watched dispositions, forms, 
configurations move 
like adders in the grass 
or shadows on the carriage window 
as the engine gathers speed. 


Move in stillness if you will
to view the bas-relief.                      ref
Here all is shadowed flux and flow.
Think: shifting sands, life-giving bleed,
motif leaching into motif; light 
and dark, an ocean tide:
our ever-moving picture show. 


Our history in silhouette: 
shadows of a shade. The youngest son, 
not blooded yet
(and truth to tell, not quite
legitimate),
perplexed, beset
when chattels, house and grounds seemed lost, 
our father dead, the heir unfit -
and that far from the end of it, 
for then was found 
an unknown, virulent decay 
worming its spongiforming way                 ref
from floor to floor 
into the very heart and core 
of our imaginings - a modern
Atlas suddenly, a Jacob, took                   1 2
the world upon his shoulders, stole
birthright and title, self-esteem,
his brother's seniority, 
to sell abroad, illegally,
the instruments of dignity,
the family identity: 
our diaries and history, 
our manuscripts and tapestries, 
the precious jades and ivories,
the lily of pure gold. 


The family and house were saved, 
but narratives we'd loved of old 
and treasured beyond life were told, 
in strange, unsympathetic languages. 


Dear visitor, you entered by the very door 
through which they came, those
auctioneers
and profiteers, 
financiers, and the whole cast 
of racketeers,
to strip and asset-strip and rip 
out all the grandeur that was here. 


Nowhere now, the words, the talk, 
the child-like figures carved in chalk, 
the riverside sold off for shops, 
The Queen Anne gardens ploughed for crops. 
Nowhere, the lead glaze earthenware, 
the chinoiserie anchorite,                  1 2
the painted alabaster bear,                 ref
the Buddhas carved in andesite,             ref
but here instead (from truckle bed,         ref
from engine head and hammerhead, 
nails, bow saws, axe and trowel) was born 
this strange, mutated quadruped 
with bullshit on its horn.

Gordon Brown's Natty Line in Lineation

In case you might have missed it, I thought the following worth passing on:-

A Turkish Kurd, Nehmet Basci, has spent the last five years teasing out of our world leaders (or those close to them) the titles of their favourite poems. Somewhere along the way he unearthed the the intriguing fact that Gordon Brown's favourite piece is by an American, James Stockinger. Gordon is said to be so taken with this particular poem that he is given to quoting it in his speeches. A few lines should give the flavour...

The hands of other people lift us from the womb,
The hands of other people grow the food we eat,
weave the clothes we wear and
build the shelters we inhabit.

Stockinger is reported to have been very flattered by the P.M's. opinion of his poem, even though, as he himself was honest enough to point out, it... er... wasn't actually a poem... not as such. What it actually was... well, actually, it was a misquotation from his doctoral thesis. Not the end of the world, though... a few unplanned line breaks and in no time at all it was the poem that the P.M. had always thought it was, as proof of which his publishers have included it in their latest anthology. Hands up, all those who have ever thought that perhaps too much contemporary poetry was just chopped-up prose!

The Roar of the Canon

The full phrase was "drowned out by the roar of the canon", used , if I remember correctly, by a correspondent to a local paper. He was having a rant about the difficulties encountered by young ("experimental"!) poets in their attempts to make their voices heard, about the "carve up" of so-called poetry competitions in which poets belonging to the exclusive club of those who have "made it" award each other prizes (I've heard that one a few times since), and about several other beefs, the natures of which escape me for the moment. He seemed, though, driven by the belief that we(e) poets who don't quite make it into the anthologies are poetry's equivalent of canon fodder. I was reminded of the article a week or so back by what struck me as something of a coincidence: The Guardian newspaper announced that it was to give away booklets on The Great Poets of the Twentieth Century and it was launching the said give-away with a plea to bring back the canon. Meanwhile, the Independent was announcing the launch of its free booklets on the great poets from Chaucer to Hardy. And how was it launching its bonanza? With a plea for the restoration of the canon!

The word canon comes to us, as does so much, from the Greeks. Their word kanon meant a measure or a rule. Our derivation of it was first applied to those books of the Bible that were accepted as authoritative. So Matthew, Mark, Luke and John became the canonical Gospels. Later, it came to be applied to an agreed body of work, say poetry, against which other such works could be measured. It had another benefit: any well-educated young person would grow up becoming familiar with the canon, and this would give him or her a way in to other, newer, works. Poets frequently borrow from other poets or allude to their works in their own poems, and the frequency with which a particular work is alluded to or borrowed from is one of the factors that may, or may not, see it included within the canon. So, any reasonably well-educated person reading in Eliot's The Waste Land

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man
You cannot say or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

would realise, at least in broad terms, that we are entering Biblical territory here, Ezekiel country to be precise; but still there is work to be done, for a poet may allude to works in order to disagree with them as readily as to enlist them to his cause. The Gospel according to Eliot equates Ezekiel with The Son of Man, but then states that the prophet knows nothing of the roots or branches that grow out of the "stony rubbish" because all he knows is a place where the "sun beats" and there is no relief. In the Bible the prophet is commanded by God to stand up and listen. Eliot marginalises God's listening prophet, saying that he knows nothing. God leads Ezekiel through a wasteland of bones. The reference is from Ecclesiastes 12 and is followed by another biblical allusion, "and the dry stone no sound of water", a reference to Moses in Exodus. So we have two images: the dead tree and the dry stone. Both speak of people being forsaken, of a place where there is no relief, no water. Eliot ignores the original meaning of Ecclesiastes 12 to make the point that even a prophet can not know the feelings of freedom introduced briefly near the end of the previous verse (In the mountains, there you feel free) because it is eclipsed by the place of no relief.

A poet writing today could not assume that his readers would have such familiarity with any book or poem, never mind the Bible, and would know that to rely so heavily upon allusion would be to render his work a closed book to most. Which, I suppose, is simply another way of saying that there is no agreed canon upon which the poet can rely for his allusions. Ask why that should be and you will receive a variety of answers. Some will say that Eliot rewrote the canon - or tried to. Others will put it to you that the canon fell into disuse because all the poets included in it were white males, and that the effort to redress the balance led to such an expansion that it became too all-inclusive, too unwieldy. Nearly everyone was in somehow or other! (Interesting that, seeing that between Chaucer and Hardy, The Independent could find only one woman, Emily Dickenson, whilst in its selection of Great Poets of the Twentieth Century, The Guardian also found only one woman, Sylvia Plath. And just don't ask how many non-whites!) Some might tell you that the canon does not exist today because it has never existed.

Obviously, the canon means different things to different people. A canon certainly did exist in the eighteenth century when Erasmus and other humanists demanded a universal knowledge. Later, it was put to good use by the universities. Some will say it was easier then, that the canon more or less chose itself. After all, how many classical works had come down to us ?
Similarly, the Elizabethan canon, in terms of poets, caused little controversy. Something like:
Edmund Spenser
Sir Philip Sidney,
Christopher Marlowe,
Wiliam Shakespeare,
Ben Jonson,
John Donne.

But still today academics refer to poems and write books on particular works or poets, and as, inevitably, their subjects and their quotations coincide or overlap, and as the same works become anthologised again and again (or don't), a sort of canon begins to emerge. So some will contend that, as each different purpose tends to produce its own canon, we end up with too many canons for them to be of any real use. A modern canon, for example, might select works in terms of traditional characteristics; the Alexandrians, to take a different example, chose works that displayed good grammatical usage; a canon could evolve that was socially or environmentally inspired; and so on, you could think of many more, I have no doubt.

So: there are many competing canons and there always will be; or there is no canon, never has been a canon and never will be a canon. It all depends upon your particular viewpoint, but what I truly cannot fathom is how one could bring back the canon! Who would do that, seeing that, as far as I am aware, no canon was ever created by someone sitting down and deciding what was in and what was out. Neither is it a matter for a committee. For many, particularly for those involved in teaching, The Norton Anthology (scroll to 15/11/07) is perhaps the nearest we have to a canon just now, but new voices being drowned-out by the roar of canon? I don't think so; more like some distant, sporadic musket fire! But what do others think?

The Short official Guide Book

I have decided to publish my only long poem, here on my blog. Big deal! I hear you say, and for me it is, if only because until very recently I did not think I ever would. What brought about the change of mind, I have no idea. However, I am not publishing it in one go, but a "page" at a time, in serial fashion. An earlier version was on my web site until recently. Indeed, "Short Official Guide to Ancestral Home" has had been around in one form or another for quite a while. It began as the germ of an idea while on a guided tour of an ancestral house. Our guide was excellent in that he was lucid, witty and patient with questioners. He knew his material thoroughly and had a fund of anecdotes, each of which was associated, in his mind at least, with a particular room, and he kept the group interested and wholly amused. Occasionally he would bring from his store a colourful character we had not met before and would not hear of again, but mostly it would be past owners or residents already introduced to us, who who would be the subjects of some new anecdote. However, because the stories were linked to the various rooms, they were in no chronological order, so, for example, I would find myself wondering whether the "Captain George" of the present story was the "Captain George" who had escaped ignominiously through the kitchen window, or would that have beent his father? And did Fanny's wedding come before or after the accidental shooting of the Viscount? Would Lad May have known about the twins when she wrote the letter, or did the party take place at a later date? And so on. In other words, the details fascinated, but the broad picture escaped me. Sir Frank was obviously in fine fettle when he set sail, and in a bad way at the funeral, but which was the earlier occasion? Had his condition made good progress or had it deteriorated? I remembered having similar difficulties getting the broad picture from my school history lessons, but on the guided tour the ambiguity of it all struck me as a metaphor for society. Civilisation even. Indeed, it occurred to me that the house might itself be a metaphor for civilization. Taking that a step further, some of the house's major players began to assume roles corresponding to those of various figures from history, some historical, some mythical.

I should say that today I can recall almost nothing of the house itself or of its many occupants over the years. None of them appear in the poem - as far as I am aware! The slowly developing imagery of the poem has obliterated all the images of its source. I should also say that it would probably be unhelpful to look for symbols of the usual kind in the poem. Symbols are by definition constant. They stand for what they stand for. In the poem, though, these symbols, like those in the poem's meeting between Caedmon and The Abbess Hilda, are subject to change. The house, for example, may stand for different things at different times.

The drawings (not illustrations in the true sense) are by my grandchildren.

Short, Official Guide to Ancestral Home

Preface to the second edition

In houses such as this
was history shaped, were
revolutions planned. In rooms
like these great men and women
honed their special skills, found
passions ready-made -
and not just ready-made: arranged
like books on shelves for easy reference
and, ultimately: choice. All that are here:
dust, furniture, fine paintings speak
of other days and other ways; of past
explorers, knights to the Crusades,
missionaries of many faiths and creeds
(or none), exploiters, slavers,
traders, smugglers and murderers,
fools and vagabonds; all grew
within these walls, and then set forth
to work their wonders or disasters.
Inventors, torturers and doctors,
men of science, dancers
and romancers, artists,
artisans and engineers,
politicians, parasites and public
men of all descriptions,
bishops, generals and thieves,
all in their day
and in their various ways
lived here.


Walking sticks (unless you are infirm)
and brollies, bags (not handbags),
cameras and overcoats, mobile phones
and parcels, food and drink
must be surrendered in the Entrance Hall.
Whilst doing so, please note
(for we are very proud of them)
the geometric patterns in the floor;
intricate, they are
of Portland stone and Devil's Black.
Beyond (majestic is the only word),
the cantilevered staircase
rises to the upper rooms.
Staircase and the bedrooms may be viewed
on Tuesday afternoons, September
through to January, when
her Ladyship goes south
and you are free
to take the Long Tour, one
we have designed
especially for connoisseurs. Today
should whet your appetite. The door
beyond the staircase is your
open sesame, not just
to our world, but to many.

Ambiguity in Poetry

Good to be back, though in truth I am only partly back, courtesy of a long-defunct, now resurrected dial-up connection that will not do all I ask of it: specifically, it will not allow me to read or write comments. so your indulgence for a few more days, please - and my thanks to those who sent or left messages of support and/or commiseration.

---

In her Times2 column of 3/3/08 Frieda Hughes examined the poem Heart of Cold by Gregory Woods ("Quidnunc", Carcanet), a poem unknown to me until then, but one which I found both strange and strangely compelling. Forsaking her usual form of analyzing a poem's content in terms of opinions expressed, her interest on this occasion was on what is withheld, the ambiguity resulting from demands made on the reader to contribute. "Heart of Cold" describes a male figure, one which those whose voices are the poem's voice, find ravishing. The ambiguity begins in the question as to what form this figure takes: is it a painted figure or a sculpted or a living one. There are indications for and against each - and, I would hazard a guess that there are indications for and against any others you might propose. Here are the opening lines to the second of its three verses:

No part of him has not been fondled, worshipped, kissed or licked
By strangers. Every inch of him has been not only looked
At but assessed by touch and taste, concavities unlocked,
Convexities enfolded, ..............................

Which suggests to me that we are speaking here of a sculpted or a living form - or would be, were it not for the fact that the first verse ends:

We wouldn't have been nearly as excited
If anything unphysical had ever been inserted.

What on earth could that mean? Hughes obviously thinks it indicates that the subject is a painting or a photograph, perhaps in a magazine, and that the poet is suggesting that the introduction of, say, text, would have broken the spell. But if I read the poem in its entirety, I do not find that an easy interpretation to sustain. Furthermore, I cannot think that the word "inserted" would be the preferred word for that circumstance. But the truth is that we do not know for sure.

Looking back to the sentence which immediately precedes this rather odd statement, we read:

...................................Extreme detachment suited
Both him and us.

The nature of the relationship existing between this mysterious figure and the reader is characterized by distance. He may be an object of adoration; it may be that no part of him has escaped the kissing, fondling and licking of strangers; but the relationship between him and them is one of cool, remote physicality. As I see it then, the poet is saying that if something unphysical was ever to intrude into this relationship, say feelings of eroticism, of love or of some mental or spiritual imperative, then the excitement that his body held for them, the voices of the poem, would be over.

The poem set me thinking again about the whole question of ambiguity in poetry. What is it? Where does it come from, and why?

The first question is the most easily answered: it is the lack of a single, clear, incontrovertible meaning. We often speak as though ambiguity belongs only in poetry and literary writing, but, like the other constituents of poetry, rhyme, rhythm etc, it is part of everyday experience. WAY OUT PEDESTRIANS is a sign I saw recently. REFUSE TO BE PLACED IN THIS BIN is another well-quoted example.

As to where it comes from, there are numerous sources, metaphor and the way the poet manipulates the metaphors, for example; the juxtaposition or conflation of conflicting or contradictory meanings is another; then there is the ambiguity arising from puns, allusions, allegories, etc; sudden changes in the poet's perspective can mystify; tautology and contradictory or irrelevant images confuse, as might the use of words such as "let", meaning both to allow and to hinder. Any of these might be either accidental or intended by the poet.

"Why" is perhaps the most fundamental question. Why is it that something which in much prose writing (as in the two notices above) would be thought an error of either diction or reasoning, becomes not merely legitimate for the poet, but prized? Because poetry is such a compressed and information-rich language, with so many parts of speech banging up against one another unprotected by the redundant words of prose, it would be almost impossible to exclude ambiguity altogether. Fortunately, the poet is able to turn it to good account and use it: to increase the richness and the subtlety of the language still further; to hold conflicting thoughts in a kind of balance; to expand the literal meaning of what is being said; or to give layers or shades of meaning. There are others, but it might be more to the point to take an example. I have chosen an early poem of Seamus Heaney's: The Play Ways. It dates from the sixties. Heaney, a teacher for a short time, is writing from experience, and what he describes is a lesson that is very much in the spirit of the sixties: he plays the class a piece of music and then they write. Nothing comes between those two experiences, no guidance from the teacher, no examples, no questions, nothing. He is happy that they should forget him, forget that he is there. Heaney has some notes, but nothing as formal as a lesson plan. Part of the charm of this piece for me, I suppose, is that I was teaching then, and saw and took lessons such as this and was thrilled (at times) by the results. Impossible now, of course: the culture has changed. Nothing is worth teaching now unless the results can be measured - and how do you measure a child's response to a piece of music. Well, yes, you could count how many punctuation marks were in the "right" or "wrong" place, but that somehow misses the point, I do believe.

I find it an interesting example in that much of the ambiguity is inherent in the content rather than either the syntax or the choice of words. It could be no other way unless Heaney had been happy to conjecture about what was happening to his pupils. He doesn't; for the most part he describes what he sees and hears. He tells us, for example, that the pupils are unsure what to do, but also that something (we presume something wonderful) has happened to them such that for the moment he is surplus to their requirements. So he proceeds ambiguously, as he must, given that the whole exercise is ambiguous in terms of expected outcomes, etc. But before even that, the title is ambiguous: does the word Play have to do with learning by play or is it play as in music. Either or both, would be appropriate. And what about that last line? Does it apply to the children, to the notes in the symphony or to both?

The Play Way

Sunlight pillars through glass, probes each desk
For milk-tops, drinking straws and the old dry crusts.
The music strides to challenge it
Mixing memory and desire with chalk dust.

My lesson notes read: Teacher will play
Beethoven's Concerto Number Five
And class will express themselves freely
In writing. One said: `Can we jive?'

When I produced the record, but now
The big sounds has silenced them. Higher
And firmer, each authoritative note
Pumps the classroom up as tight as a tyre

Working its private spell behind eyes
That stare wide. They have forgotten me
For once. The pens are busy, the tongues mime
Their blundering embrace of the free

Word. A silence charged with sweetness
Breaks short on lost faces where I see
New looks. Then notes stretch taut as snares. They trip
To fall into themselves unknowingly.


Finally, and this is for those odd occasions when for some reason you feel unable to go with the flow, to live with Keats's uncertainties, doubts and mysteries; perhaps you have an essay to write (and ambiguity is big with essays) and need something you can sum up; whatever, for all such occasions here, as a possible way in, are a few simple questions to ask yourself before diving into a full analysis of what on earth it means.

• Does the ambiguity matter? Does it add anything? Would the poem be impoverished if the ambiguity did not exist? Try to see the poem without it.


• Could both (or all) the possibilities allowed by the ambiguity be valid? And would that enhance the poem?


• Is there a reference to it? It is ambiguous when you first encounter it, but maybe there is something later in the poem that will refer back to it, or something earlier that upon rereading the poem will throw some light on the passage.


• Does it result from a simple omission, accidental or intended? Words (which the reader is meant to supply) are sometimes omitted for the sake of rhythm or compression. Punctuation may be omitted. Any such may cause confusion as to meaning.


• Is it simply a decluttering? The poet has stripped away all the inessentials to make, say, an image stand out more starkly, but in removing something from the context has opened up the possibility of new interpretations of the passage in question.

Six Word Memoir Challenge

I have been tagged to write a six-word memoir by poet hound, a challenge which appealed to me, the challenge being to sum up my life in six words. I do believe that in the attempt I have learnt a bit about myself!

The game is an interesting twist on a challenge Earnest Hemingway was once offered. He bet $10 that he could sum up his life story in six words. He wrote: For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Here are the rules:

* Write your own six word memoir
* Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like
* Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere
* Tag five more blogs with links
* And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

Details at World Class Poetry

My effort:

rambling
signpost misaligned
path more rewarding

I have challenged:
Jim Murdoch
Patteran
John Baker
Maitzen
Orgrease-crankbait

"Illustration" John Minton

With this post it is adieu for a few days. (See previous post)


Towards the end of last year, a very good friend lent me four or five back editions of Illustration, a quarterly magazine that I had not met before. As the name suggests, its area of interest is book illustration. I was at once impressed by the quality of its production; the typography, general lay-out and design had all received generous portions of care and attention to detail, as, indeed, they should have in an art periodical, but that is not always the case. The articles are varied, interesting, well written and well researched. For a publication of its type and price (£6 at time of writing) it is excellent, and I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone whose interests lie in that direction. Its stated aims are worth quoting, I think: "The aim of the magazine is simple. We wanted a general magazine about illustration - the artists, the collectors, the collections, the exhibitions, the history, the philosophy and the key events relating to this subject. We wanted to discuss the work of great artists from the past as well as new graduates currently coming out of college. We wanted to explore children’s book illustrators alongside those who work on adult novels and classics - or even political manifestos and train timetables. We wanted to consider the humorous, the serious, the sinister and the surreal".

It was nostalgia, I have no doubt, that directed my attention first to the Spring 2006 edition featuring John Minton. I was at art school in the early fifties, studying for a N.D.D. (National Diploma in Design) in book illustration. I would rather have been studying painting, if the truth be known, but it was not to be, and book illustration was a compromise. Painting was on the syllabus, of course, and sculpture, and there were evening classes where I could top-up, but in the illustration sessions I was probably more interested in what the others were doing than in what I was producing. And what the others were mostly doing was polishing their credentials as up-and-coming Mintons, for Minton's star was at its zenith just then. (He was to prove himself something of a shooting star in the very best Bohemian tradition, when, following an unhappy childhood, he would plunged - or find himself plunged - into a life of booze and drugs, resulting in a tragic and untimely death.) It seems incredible that in a life so short and so filled with distraction, he managed to leave so much, but being force-fed Minton at every turn, to the point where his way of representing lush, tropical vegetation was de rigueur, as, indeed, were Samuel Palmer moons and trees with crescent-shaped branches, I was to that extent put off the whole subject. It was all very tight and formulaic and not at all to my taste. It was not until much later in life that I came to see his achievements in a somewhat different light. Had I not come to that realisation, Illustration would certainly have steered me towards it. I do still find the paintings, as I found them then, lacking in substance. He strikes me as an illustrator's painter rather than a painter's illustrator. The illustrations to Kay Dick's novel An Affair of Love for example, and the rather lovely (slightly Lowryish?) paintings to accompany an article on St Helens for Future magazine are both represented in Illustrationby excellent reproductions, as are my own personal favourites, the delightful images for The Snail that Climbed the Eiffel Tower.

Minton : The Tate Collection