The Lyre

That Carbonating Fizz

2012-01-27T11:50:00.024Z

This week, The Lyre hails a new poet. The last time we read about John Ashbery in the London Review of Cakes -- our one-stop-shop for all that's happening in contemporary poetry -- his most recent volume, Planisphere, was being packed off in a stairlift by young Michael Robbins:

Forever bowled over by the same old thing, finding difference in repetition, Ashbery is the Duracell bunny of American poetry.

The bunny is getting rather long in the tooth – Ashbery turned 83 in July – and he has been writing the same book for more than 15 years. Each new model struts gorgeously down the runway, a bit aloof, a bit silly, and the critics can’t tell them apart.

This is great criticism, and will no doubt have saved many readers the hassle of enjoying 'language art at its finest' in Planisphere itself. 'Ashbery’s singular achievement', as Robbins says, 'is to have made his strangeness so familiar'.

Who, then, is the upstart in this month's PN Review, offering seven new poems under the same name, all of which seem to assert 'there's not enough strangeness / in the world, only damper pedals seething?' The Lyre can't recall anything quite like this in the Bunny's recent output:

... And over and behind it all the old shade,
as deleted as a Chinese risk factor. Oh, say,
all along the way it turned into light. Was supple.

Without that carbonating fizz his self-deprecating
gambit fell into shards like patterned shawls, are to this day.

Or, indeed, a line like this:

My real-time dappled logic wanted to apologise.

Evidently, the batteries have been transferred to a new model. Long may its coppertop alkaline continue to spark.

Sewing Division

2012-01-20T11:43:00.015Z

The Lyre is shocked to discover that someone has been publicly impersonating the English Poet Laureate, Mrs. Nostradamus. The penny hit the fan when we sore -- sorry, saw -- that the Guardian had issued a correction to her recent poem on the racist murder and subsequent blossoming of the London teenager, Stephen Lawrence (for 'sewed' read 'sowed').

As British readers will know, the Grauniad enjoys an unrivalled reputation for its sub-editing. The Laureate herself, meanwhile, is famed for her attention to both verbal and natural detail. The only explanation, therefore, is that the poem must be the counterfeit work of a semi-literate impostor: J.H. Prynne, perhaps.

Our suspicions had already been aroused by Ian Patterson's blogpost for the London Review of Cakes, which deprecates the poem for 'a weak conceit (the sew/sow idea), and a clapped-out symbol'.

As a longstanding scholar of the Nostradamus canon, The Lyre refuses to believe it has suffered such a decline. Has Dr. Patterson forgotten the following lines one of our Laureate's earlier works, 'Warnings', first published on p. 68 of Ambit 92 in 1983? Surely they are familiar to every schoolchild:

I am alarmed. Thunder and folly at the door.
You stand there smiling, attired as autumn
in the middle of May, and when I return
with the absinthe you are masturbating.

Clapped-out symbols, indeed.

Readers wanting to keep up with the real Mrs. Nostradamus are directed to Twitter, where @young_laureate reveals all, including -- with the help of our own Ron Paste (see above) -- her true feelings on being 'robbed' this week by John Burnside of 'the most controversial T.S. Eliot Prize in decades' (Grauniad).*

* 'The T.S. Eliot Prize was inaugurated in 1993' (Guardian)

Re: Laureate Poems

2012-01-13T10:16:00.001Z

Bewildering sounds, such as Spring wakens to

Rossetti has been preparing a very intricate balance between directness and evasion through his use of meaning. This creates a separate world of the imagination in which his abstract themes and concrete details of technique block the reader's desire to refer the poem back to the 'real' world, even while it invokes 'real' emotions, situations, and objects in order to create its fictions.

[...]

Such power given to abstractions that seem yet more real than the ordinary world of persons and objects is the power of allegory, and the fact that in this sonnet Rosetti makes the ordinary world ambivalent through his technical devices is what I mean by saying that Rossetti's allegorizing lacks the literal level: the level at which things are just things and persons are persons and a rose is a rose is a rose.

This lack of the literal level is felt as such by the reader who then tries to supply it from the other realities of sound and poetic technique -- thus linking allegory to unrealism. With such pure intentions, the reader encounters the next line, 'Bewildering sounds, such as spring wakens to,' which immediately pushes the reader back onto the level of allegory and makes him ask, what sounds? Answer: 'bewildering sounds.' You said it, D.G. Rossetti!

-- Veronica Forrest-Thomson, from 'Lilies from the Acorn' (1973-75?), Chicago Review 56: 2/3 (Autumn 2011), pp. 40-41

Offa With His Head

2012-01-06T10:31:00.010Z

The Lyre is delighted to learn from the Bromsgrove Standard that British poet Geoffrey Hill has been made a 'Knight to remember' in the New Year Honours list.

Earlier in the holiday period, the seventy-nine-year-old Oxford Professor of Poetry gave an interview from home to BBC Newsnight, in which he emphasised his fun-for-all-the-family qualities. Dressing up as Raymond Briggs' Father Christmas for the occasion, Hill asseverated his admiration for the Liverpudlian comedian, Ken Dodd.

This set The Lyre wondering what quips Sir Geoffrey might have scribbled on his cuffs when he kneels to be dubbed sò by the Queen. His later poetry, after all, is notable for its light-hearted cracks at the reigning British monarch and her family. Here are a few:

I cannot say how
much is still owing
to the merchant house
of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha

('To the High Court of Parliament', Canaan (1996))

                         Comedienne to act
SORRY for hostile nation

(On the Queen's response to the death of Diana, Speech! Speech! (2000), 114)

                                             when circling
Heathrow on hold we are entertained
by Windsor's scaled-down perfect replicas

(On 'our chequered country' and / or Legoland UK, The Orchards of Syon (2002), LXXI)

Say, thirty years until H.M. commands
a small obstruction for the mantelpiece

(On the poet's 70th birthday, Scenes from Comus (2005), 1.4)

Getting into the act I ordain a dishonoured
and discredited nation.
                                  [...] It smacks rather
of moral presumption. Things are not that bad.
H. Mirren's super.

('On Reading Milton and the English Revolution', A Treatise of Civil Power (2007))

The Lyre admits to an uneasy feeling that this is not altogether fool. As one seasoned Hill-watcher commented on this flourish of the poet's tickling stick:

You have to read between the lines [...] The reference is to The Queen -- last year's film about the death of Diana -- but also to the Queen. When Hill abbreviates Helen Mirren to "H Mirren", he means to imply "H[er] M[ajesty]". The British monarchy is an Oscar-winning distraction. It is to be hoped that there is a good close reader on the staff of Buckingham Palace, before someone accidentally offers Hill the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

The Christmas Spirit

2011-12-23T11:17:00.020Z

For the next fortnight, The Lyre declares a Christmas Truce. We had hoped, in fact, to bring you Mrs. Nostradamus' magical poem on that subject, only to discover that our copyright had expired. Disappointed readers can obtain a special gift edition of The Christmas Truism, complete with thought-provoking illustrations, here.

We leave you instead with a cryptic communiqué we found on the desk of our sub-editor, Ron Paste (pictured above, and last seen photocopying Kenneth Goldsmith's Day at the office party).

The text -- which appears to be taken from a local newspaper -- was left on a pile of poets' obituaries and small press pamphlets from the last year. The title has been scribbled over something about an 'industrial estate distillery'.

The Lyre wishes all our readers a merry Christmas.

That's the Spirit

The main distinctive marks

by which the spirit can be identified

include that the duty stamp is not

fluorescent under UV light,

the barcode 0123456789

is not a valid bar code,

there is no spirit manufacturer's

lot number on the bottle

and no name and address

of the manufacturer on the label

The Lyre's Most Looked At 2011

2011-12-16T11:27:00.046Z

1. Obituary for R.F. Langley

‘It is probably 404 years since Hamlet first said, “The rest is silence”’

2. To the Poetry Society in Crisis

'The names... are put in not out of malice or satire but merely for their euphony' (Sir John Betjeman)

3. News Flash: J.H. Prynne Writes Poem of Lifetime, Calls it 'Kazoo Dreamboats'

*JESUS H. CHRIST*

4. He Who Smelt It

'Blogs are still split between responsible, informative and entertaining sites... and too many anonymous others which resemble farty wee boys' gang-huts' (Don Pétomane)

5. Sacred Church

'The Lyre's public... believes itself superior to the rest of the middle class... for precisely this reason that it believes itself to possess culture' (The T.S. Eliot)

6. Backwards Together

'Sean O’Brien is no Forward bridesmaid, but a rather experienced bride'

7. An Open Letter to the LRB

'Burt, we believe, has hit the coffee table on the head'

8. Draught of Vintage

'The muted brilliance of autumn leaves
Me cold'

(A Poet)

9. No Success Like Failure

'Seemingly endlessly... resonant... childhood' (Success Kid)

10. The Republic of Letters

'Shame on the poets' (The Lyre)

Oswald Sticks It To Hedge

2011-12-09T14:04:00.013Z

T.S. Eliot explains hedge funds to his friend, Ezra Pound

As The Lyre reported only six weeks ago, this year's T.S. Eliot Prize is sponsored by Aurum Funds, a private investment management firm specialising in the transfer of wealth to wealthy people. As such, Aurum seemed the perfect partner to the Poetry Book Society, who in March lost their Arts Council subsidy.

This week, however, news of the City of London's connection with Eliot's name finally reached Devon. Fibre & Fibre poet Alice Oswald, shortlisted for her acclaimed volume Banks etc (sorry, Memorial), promptly withdrew. As compliancy-services.co.uk reported on Tuesday,

In an unusual event for the financial services, a poetry prize nominee has withdrawn her book from the competition because of the hedge fund sponsoring it.

[...]

The poet suggested her reasons for this were ethical as she feels the literary tradition should revolt against hedge fund managers.

[...]

“I think poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions and for that reason I’m withdrawing for the Eliot shortlist,” the news provider quoted.

[...]

In other news, a recent survey from Aksia showed 42 per cent of hedge funds agreed there was potential for Italy and Spain to default on their debt as the European economic crisis deepens.

The Lyre admires Oswald, a professional horticulturalist, for showing such moral Faber (sorry, fibre) in grasping the hedge-fund nettle. 'The only good bank is a riverbank,' she added.

We hope, now, that poets such as Sean Bonney and Keston Sutherland will recant their careers as glorified bourgeois dancing bears and get serious about speaking truth to power.

One-man Australian poet, John 'Sheilas First' Kinsella, did just that the next day. Speaking from the squat offices of his anarchist publishing collective, Picador, he said:

"I support Alice," he said. "My politics and ethics are such that I can't accept money from such a source [...] as an anticapitalist in full-on form, that is my position."

"Hedge funds are at the very pointy end of capitalism, if I can put it that way," he said, pointedly.

The other nominees -- John Burnside, Carol Ann Duffy, Leontia Flynn, David Harsent, Esther Morgan, Daljit Nagra, Sean O'Brien and Bernard O'Donoghue -- were too busy eating blood diamonds yesterday to comment.

Source: Readers' Cartoons

The Republic of Letters

2011-12-02T14:33:00.057Z

The phone has been ringing off the hook here at The Lyre ever since our mid-week newsflash. It is philosophers / newspaper books editors, mostly, wanting to know -- in a cognitively positivist sense -- how they can get hold of the latest and greatest work by J.H. Prynne:

'What does this sentence mean?', they ask. 'What's behind it? Whodunnit? What's its level of accessibility? And whither literary fiction?'

We have tried to explain to them what a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose. We have even directed them to the poetry list dedicated to this philosophical task.

We refer, of course, to Fibre & Fibre, publishers of *regular* poetry, and now being edited again -- we see over at the Guardian -- by former employee, Craig Raine. As is traditional, the Fibre list has done very well in the end-of-year round-ups. In this week's TLS, for example, Fiona Sampson votes for David Harsent's 'aptly titled' Night as the 'stand-out book' of the Forward Prize shortlist, while reminding readers that his previous volume, Legion, 'made war easier to read about by using short ballad and lyric forms'. That's the Fibre effect.

Also in the TLS feature is a contribution from our American poetry correspondent, Al Dante, who has been enjoying some literary fiction of a less accessible kind, as well as a poet whose admiration for the great poets of this country really deserves to be reciprocated (The Lyre hopes that one of Fibre & Fibre, at least, will take note). Al appears under his Anglophile pseudonym:

JEREMY NOEL-TOD

At the end of last year, an extraordinary work of detective criticism briefly appeared, despite legal threats. Kent Johnson’s A Question Mark Above the Sun (Punch Press) movingly speculates that Kenneth Koch forged one of Frank O’Hara’s greatest poems as a posthumous tribute to his friend. A noir-ish middle also recounts some very funny run-ins with the English avant-garde. Shame on the poets who forced its redaction and suppression.

Another American who reads and feels trans-Atlantically is Peter Gizzi. Threshold Songs (Wesleyan University Press), Gizzi’s fifth collection, is his most profoundly rueful and wildly humoured work to date. This is a wintry ‘un gathering’ of poems, sung in the name of ‘Tradition & the Indivisible Talent’ – a company whose ghosts include Basil Bunting, W.S. Graham and the late R.F. Langley: ‘nothing / but earth and peat and mold / and rich soft living manna / you can breathe. The must’.

News Flash: J.H. Prynne Writes Poem of a Lifetime, Calls It 'Kazoo Dreamboats'

2011-11-30T16:52:00.012Z

*JESUS H. CHRIST*

You need to read this

'He described the process of writing this poem

as one of self-imposed isolation, with its

myriad poetic allusions coming through memory'

*

What's that humming sound? The so-called outside.

Too-Woo Brains

2011-11-25T10:01:00.009Z

We have no desire

to be put into the driving seat.

There are chairs enough in our libraries –

would that there were more libraries –

and these are the only seats of learning

that we would wish to know.

This week, David 'Two Brains' Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science and All That, was driven out of Cambridge by poetic execration. Over to 'Hilarius Bookbinder', reporting from the newly ignited Flammae Pulchritudine (The Lyre throws in the owl):

The Minister for Owl-Torture, David Willetts, has, one learns, tonight been compelled to abandon a lecture which he had incautiously been invited to give in Cambridge by that University's Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).

Willetts had been scheduled to speak to the pressing topic of 'Owls: Their Nature, Habits, and Destiny, with some remarks on culinary preparation'. Advance leaks of the Minister's speech suggested that he had intended to cover, among others, some of the following points:

     -- Owls, whilst in their own right beautiful and even admirable creatures, might nevertheless in many cases create a perception of falling short of best practice for price-sensitive and workplace-flexible contributors to a fully modern food chain;

      -- Owls must take urgent measures to ensure wider public access to their charming hoots and mouse-hunts, and must above all abandon their completely outdated and inefficient nocturnalism;

      -- Owls would be free to set their own fees for consultations and audiences (except where they would not be free to do so). This would put power in the hands of owl-purchasers, by ensuring that the calls, swoops, plummets and ascents of owls would no longer be freely available to non-paying onlookers;

      -- Owls could (it was insufficiently widely understood) make a tasty and nourishing snack if slow-roasted for six months at a low heat wrapped in white paper;

Carrier pigeons returning from the scene, however, report that, as the Minister began to speak, a discordant -- a human -- voice was heard from somewhere in the barn... [continues]

Read what the owls heard here.

Learn what J.H. Prynne -- wise old owl -- said about it here.

Hoot as you will.

A Draught of Vintage II: Real Ale

2011-11-18T09:30:00.002Z

This morning in November in the bar
of the Angel there is an open fire.
I tell you this so you imagine it
as though the bar in the Angel were a
place that has been given to itself, full
of itself, filled with the things there are in
here, such as the fire. Not the words but the
flames.

-- R.F. Langley, 'Skrymir's Glove'

uphill to Alstonefield, sinking with night into the
George Inn with chicken and chips, mild and
Jamesons surrounded by talk, talking the world
into a biological shroud on the mind, doing
fine, having a good time, making news tonight.
The fire burns within, the owls hoot out
in the cold I am a happy lapsing overdraw

-- Peter Riley, Alstonefield, III

Peter, the phallic boys
Begin to wink their lights.
Godrevy and the Wolf
Are calling Opening Time.
We’ll take the quickest way
The tin singers made.
Climb here where the hand
Will not grasp on air.
And that dark-suited man
Has set the dominoes out
On the Queen's table.
Peter, we'll sit and drink
And go in the sea's roar

-- W.S. Graham, 'The Thermal Stair'

A Draught of Vintage

2011-11-11T13:47:00.008Z

As The Lyre was leaving the John Keats Steak House last week, a postcard on the bar caught our eye. Extracting it from under the glass and drying it off, we felt the excitement of once again encountering some strange new poetry. What was this unearthly marriage of words and picture? The internet told us more:

Vintage Inns teams up with Sir Earlyday Motion

Mitchells & Butlers' country pub restaurant collection, Vintage Inns, is on the lookout for budding poets in a national competition backed by former Poet Laureate Sir Earlyday Motion.

Over seven weeks, contributors are being invited to co-author an eight-line poem inspired by Sir Earlyday's work on Vintage Inns' latest national press campaign, which honours the Great British rural pub. He was born into a family of pub-owners and brewers and so was the natural choice.

[...]

This lyrical competition with a difference is being hosted at a 'Poetry Competition' tab on the Vintage Inns Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/vintageinns from Monday 17th October. The first line to start minds wandering is: The muted brilliance of autumn leaves....

Sir Earlyday will judge the best each week, which will be added to the poem and uploaded ready for the next line the following week.

[...]

The poem should be in rhyming couplets, so lines one and two should rhyme with each other -- and so on. And for those seeking inspiration, here is one of the evocative poems Sir Earlyday has written exclusively for Vintage Inns, which is themed around discovering your perfect rural pub...

From the hassles of our working
and the tangles of our streets
we arrive in winding villages
where peace and pleasure meet.

All around us worlds of trouble
turn and tremble as they please.
We are rich in the fulfilment
of our vintage life at ease.

The Lyre already has these eight simple lines by heart, to recite during the hassles of our working. Rarely have the words of The Observer rung more true:

It is Motion's engagement with a classic lyric line that makes his work rewarding. His clarity, iambic rhythms, natural idiom and subtle evocation of shades of emotion place him in apostolic succession to Wordsworth, Keats, Hardy, Frost, Thomas, Bishop and Larkin.

The spirit of the project inevitably reminds one of Fiona Sampson's outreach work for Marriott Hotels earlier this year, when she advised budding customers how to become better poets ('change the bits that aren't so good, and make them better'). Vintage Inns' Facebook page has already received some promising first draft entries:

couldnt find the survey on the website so here goes..... Went to the white rabbit in maidstone was absolutely disgustion 1st time going there i would have expected more so 1st and last time would never go there again! Dirty tables, Rude unattentive staff, food was rotten (microwaved as gravy was congeiled, yorkies were hard, other than that it were stone cold) best part about tonight was leaving and going to get a macdonalds

Hungry Outside a Pub on Darien

2011-11-04T14:39:00.013Z

This week, The Lyre was startled to read some poetry news in the Guardian. As part of their Books Season, Nicholas Lezard weighed up the price of Carcanet's New Poetries V against 'a good main course at a gastropub'. Heroically, he came out in favour of beans on toast and the lyrics of William Letford, a Scottish poet who works as a roofer:

I can honestly say that on reading his 14 very short poems here, I feel just as Keats did when he read Chapman's Homer: that a new planet has come into the sky.

As Adorno said, however, it is barbarous to read poetry without thick chips. The Lyre is grateful, therefore, to Carcanet for sending a copy which saved us Lezard's dilemma. As we hit the sticky toffee pudding, Letford's poems swam into our ken too and -- like a less stout Cortez -- we actually stopped chewing for a minute. 'It's aboot the labour' pretty much gets to the heart of the matter:

hammers    nails
hammers    nails
hammers    nails

heh Casey did ah tell ye a goat
a couple a poems published
widizthatmean
widayyemean
dizthatmeanyegetanymoneyfurrit

eh      naw
aw     right

hammers    nails
hammers    nails
hammers    nails

We also breathed moments of the pure serene in poems by Oli Hazzard, James Womack and Kate Kilalea, and travelled much in the realms of gold generally, until we got the bill.

Here at The Lyre, though, we like to think that new poetry is not only a luxury product for 'poncey southern metropolitan softies', as Keats -- sorry, Lezard -- would have it. Readers restricted to the price of a pint instead should ask for a glass of tap water and an all-day helping of Andrew Spragg's Notes for Fatty Cakes.

This riotous love sequence, with a cover painting by Emily Critchley, comes recommended by Lyre favourites Tom Raworth, Vahni Capildeo and Brian Catling. Spragg's poems hit the nail on the head too, but on the slant, and into unexpected objects. Here's one of our favourites from his first collection, The Fleetingest:

cash

their disposition was poor
in the interests of work avoidance
he shot them down with a .44

money has a caustic
weight and there is
a sound that rang like

a baby grand finding
the first step before
halting -- they

call it 'ice' sometimes.

Thoughtful and Stable

2011-10-28T08:05:00.009+01:00

The Lyre brings you a special report this week from our High Modernist man in the Unreal City, Ulysses Research Grant:


A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet

wrote T.S. Eliot when he worked in a City bank. Now, the Square Mile has returned the compliment by sponsoring the prize named in his honour.

The T.S. Eliot Prize is an annual £15k home improvements fund for poets sold by Waterstones (sorry, 'the world's top poetry award'). Earlier this year the future of the prize looked uncertain, after its administrators, the Poetry Book Society, lost their Arts Council funding.

Fortunately, Aurum Funds -- a private investment management firm founded on the philosophy of capital preservation, growth and transfer of wealth -- has agreed to transfer the wealth needed to save the world of poetry from imminent collapse.

Aurum aims to achieve this by managing assets in a thoughtful and stable manner, which makes it the perfect partner to a poetry book business (there are some legal bills at the Poetry Society it may be interested in too). To quote the inspiring words on the company's website:

'It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change'

Clarence Darrow

For more hedge fund poetry, click here.

The T.S. Eliot Prize is worth £15,000. According to The Lyre's sister publication, Hedge Fund Review, the minimum investment required by Aurum Funds is $25,000 -- or £15,500. With a bit of luck, sales of the winning title will help to make up the shortfall.*

* Sales of poetry can go down as well as up.

Snap It Up

2011-10-21T14:26:00.005+01:00

The Lyre admires Tom Raworth. So when we saw that he has a new book out, bearing this cover, the 3-5 business days couldn't start soon enough. Incomprehensible Things is only available here: we encourage readers to avail themselves.

The back cover of the book features a brilliantly beachcombed likeness of the author (by Florence Wylde Raworth). The National Portrait Gallery should snap it up as a companion piece immediately.

The author himself is available here, where we hope to hear of his better health soon. The Lyre was encouraged this week to see that the Cambridge English Faculty has taken up Raworth's great verse lecture, 'How to Patronise a Poem', as a model for their outreach and engagement work (click to close read):

While the Clouds Alter the Light

2011-10-14T10:01:00.001+01:00

Painted at Hendon late in the Summer of 1855. The stacking of the second crop of hay had been much delayed by rain, which heightened the green of the remaining grass, together with the brown of the hay. The consequence was an effect of unusual beauty of colour, making the hay by contrast with the green grass, positively red or pink, under the glow of twilight here represented.

-- Ford Madox Brown on The Hayfield

How was I so
willingly defeated? I was forced to give
over when I felt the big drops piercing

the foliage overhead. The warmth of the
uncut grass. In impossible furrows. In
tufts. Near green. Dove gray. An unusual

rosy pink in the unmade hay.

-- R.F. Langley, 'The Long History of Heresy'

Every brushstroke changes the picture. If it's crimson it intensifies all the greens and there's the new problem in how to respond to that. The poem makes a start and you read what you've written, and from this and from what you half have in mind, the next bit comes. [...] I don't write many poems, so each one has to be able to keep running faster than I can, for as long as possible. I can't do without the autobiographical experiences, whatever happens to them in the subsequent process, however they got together in the first place. The sharpening of their distinctiveness, and the sense of their being separate from each other, and from me, lift, as Wallace Stevens said, the 'loneliness of thinking'. The shocks of fear and joy that specific moments seem to carry, for me, are often what matters most. 'What is really here.' 'Nooks and ends.' A flycatcher. A nest in the hammerbeams. Ford Madox Brown in August 1855 painting in the fields at Hendon, determining to 'make a little picture of it', while the clouds alter the light and the farmer carries away the corn Brown had chosen for his subject. He decided, eventually, it was better not to 'dream of possession'. But entertaining the dream is trying for more than a 'mock-up of consciousness'. It calls for testing all available strategies. 'Not things, but seeing things'. That could involve for instance finding out again, this time, what would happen if rhyme came back in to do a lot of the running.

-- R.F. Langley, 'Note', PN Review 100 (November-December 1994)

The Lyre remembers R.F. Langley

Britain, Britain, Britain

2011-10-07T13:34:00.026+01:00

Like the unelected line manager of this great country, The Lyre believes in the hard-working, pioneering, independent, creative, adaptable, optimistic, can-do spirit of Britain. If we all pull together, we can run this ship aground.

It's a spirit that we see in the London Review of Cakes, who have ended their near-four-year neglect of British-baked poetry with a nibble at the selected poems of Peter Porter.

That's leadership.

Technically, of course, Porter was an Australian poet. But he did keep a cat here -- so to speak -- for most of his life. So in recognition of the LRB's gesture towards the spirit of the Commonwealth, we are resetting the counter in our right hand column. We're sure it won't be long until they give another much needed shot in the foot to Britain's small poetic businesses.

Someone else flying the flag hard this month is Roddy Lumsden, who has just launched Salt's new Christmas annual, Britain's Got the Poetry Factor and Possibly A New Celebrity Paul Muldoon Soapstar Superstar Strictly on Ice.

'The format of the book', admits the introduction, 'owes a debt to The Best American Poetry series of anthologies.'

A debt, of course, is something you intend to pay off, and Salt no doubt have deficit reduction arrangements in place for loan of the Best American concept and typography. The clever twist to the UK version, though, is that the best British poets aren't, on the whole, represented. As Lumsden writes:

The word ['best'] irks some people who feel that the subjective nature of selecting and editing a book like this is at odds with such an objective word as ‘best’. I can see that, but there is no manifesto behind the word, no ulterior motive. If it really bothers anyone, a cup of tea and a nap might help.

That's leadership.

The 'Best' British Poetry draws from poetry published in UK magazines over the last year. But it doesn't include the late R.F. Langley's 'To a Nightingale', winner of the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem this week.

The Lyre noted the appearance of Langley's poem in the London Review of Books last November. Lumsden doesn't take anything from the LRB, though, on the undeniable grounds that it 'seems to favour non-UK poets on the whole'.

The Lyre sympathises. Langley was, in many ways, as good as an American. To the untrained eye, it might take a whole box of PG Tips and a coma to tell the difference. Fortunately, the LRB have responded to the radical demands of the Nationalise Poetry Day activists, and made the poem free to all at the point of need. You can read it here.

The Rage of Caliban

2011-09-30T13:59:00.004+01:00

We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. [...] The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning [...] One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.

-- T.S. Eliot, 'The Metaphysical Poets', 1921

What the poet does is as ordinary and mysterious as digesting. I question. I break life down. I impose chaos on order. [...] The body is a dark continent. The mind is another. So I can say very little about what I do. I accept nothing as read. I attack the pretence that we know how things work.

-- Craig Raine, statement for 'Contemporary Writers', 1988

Eliot was one of the great High Modernists, who were notorious for their unbending intellectualism and their artistic difficulty. [...] This view of modernism has been so influential it has spawned a postmodern poetic school led by JH Prynne whose purpose is to be difficult -- emulatively difficult. (Not difficult to be difficult, actually.) [...] The reader shouldn't expect anything in the way of conventional "meaning" since the poetry was anyway fetched up from the dark womb of the poet's unconscious.

-- Craig Raine on T.S. Eliot, 2008

The Poetry Society

2011-09-23T11:24:00.008+01:00

The Lyre likes to think of poetry as a collective activity -- an '...arty wee boys' gang-hut', if you will, or even the ground of social life. As someone once said, a poem is between two persons, not two pages.

Recently, we enjoyed this collaboration between Chris McCabe and Tom Jenks. And we are sorry not to be able to attend this get together at the London Art Book Fair over the next couple of days (not to be confused with the equally attendable Poetry Book Fair, poster above):

Saturday 24th and Sunday 25th September, 3pm

Crossing the Painted

Readings of new work from poets in a collaboration between Painted, Spoken magazine and the Crossing the Line live poetry series. For two events only, six poets read individually, prefaced and 'afterworded' by a rules-based group work. Although representing a vast range of poetry practice the poets all come from modernist traditions with art practice selfconsciousness: hear how their work diverges and overlaps, creating a unique live event. Vahni Capildeo, Giles Goodland, Jeff Hilson, Francesca Lisette, Richard Price and Simon Smith.

But we are pleased to be able to publish, as a warm-up to the main event, new poems by some of the gang:

Richard Price

NAMESAKE

I always wanted.
At the age of sixteen I was born,
talented, dynamic, a glamour.

A tough industry to circuit –
few stand.

I’m frank, direct, bold.
(Concern me:
no-nonsense has earned.)

Me, the thinking-man’s realistic!
Icon and a family,
I suppose.

My future looks looking forward,
sharing my challenging,
my you.

(Katrina Amy Alexandria Alexis Infield Price, b.1978, “Jordan”, England).

Vahni Capildeo

DANCING BEAR SONNET (TRUNCATED)

You've lied through your teeth and it's not a pretty sight.
The fox pulls on his gloves, the poisoner says good night,
the drunk's wife grants him pardon, the drunk necks a drink,
something stirs to gentle life in the kitchen sink;
you say it is not so, no matter what I think,
the drunk's wife beats him up, the drunk's wife needs a drink,
your eyes pinned to my breast are jewelled with regret.

Hand me a stick to poke between the bars you've set.
Walk in the kind of wind that blows dogs inside out.
I too might need a drink. Your skull will do for that.
Always flying off. Nothing to write home about.

Simon Smith

AERODROME

The brimmed felt hat mouthing

Wings tangled with ivy

What is in the history of toothbrushes

About the corner your voice

Echoing at the angle

Song comes into my throat

‘I am breaking up before you’ – Zhivago

Still anchored in my spell check

A garden chair – a pencil stub.

Giles Goodland

PSEUDOSCORPION

Over the grey peneplain nothing moved

apart from god's hand

and then some stillness was hurtling towards me—

beetle-driver, custodian of dust

gatelegging its lapidicolous metalegend.

It forklifted its pedipalp

gleaning with smallarmed suckstance

to polish language’s mirror

and climb the last smeltal sentence.

Light in a junkbonded carapacet

metallurging its countermemory

to uneven the scopic crepuscule,

its clauses depend from trees.

Hold till you see the whites of their eggs.

The dark is under attack from more dark,

breeds inside the wreck of a fly.

The father and the man in robes let him do this

in its meetings with the hard stone floor.

Giant, Disembodied Phalluses

2011-09-16T11:23:00.007+01:00

Now: The Lyre enjoys a good critical shafting as much as the next red-blooded poetry reader. The notice given to Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout by David 'C.' Ward in the latest issue of PN Review, though, may be a new direction in negative reviewing.

Here is the thrust of it, with our own unsimulated commentary:

'COME AGAIN?'

RAE ARMANTROUT, Money Shot (Wesleyan University Press) $22.95

In porn films [the 'money shot'] is the depiction of the male orgasm in order to establish that an actual sex act has occurred, not been simulated. And to show this climactic moment, the discharge has to be seen.

Ohhhh... I love it when a critic... talks like a medical professional...

So the unsavoury and demeaning convention of the 'cum shot': the male performer (actor isn't quite the right word) shown splattering semen onto the face or breasts of the female performer.

Mmmm... it's so hot when you use... the right... word...

A climactic moment indeed, although perhaps not of the kind envisaged by Northrop Frye or Orson Welles.

Hey... you didn't tell me you'd invited friends...

And one doesn't want to dwell too long on the kind of audience involvement that this kind of money shot entails.

Please... dwell... longer...

The jacket copy tells us that 'Just as the money shot in porn is proof of the male orgasm, these poems explore questions of revelation and concealment.' One hopes that Armantrout didn't write this herself [...] because it makes no sense.

Make sense of it... make sense...

There is no concealment in the porn film's money shot, and little revelation either, if revelation now means anything more than documenting a fairly uncomplicated bodily function that is usually performed in some degree of privacy.

Ohhh... hello again... doctor...

Maybe Armantrout and the publishers are unaware of what is depicted in hard-core porn films and are imagining something more decorous and veiled than the hydraulic reality.

And hello... garage hand...

The issue of porn and the culture is a complicated one but I have to say there is something politically distasteful about Armantrout's easy citation of one of porn's more disturbing tropes:...

Cite it... harder...

...submissive women being sprayed by giant, usually disembodied phalluses.

Not... too hard...

The title poem has to do not with connection or fulfilment but its absence: 'I'm on a crowded ship / and I've been served the wrong breakfast.' There is no explicit sexual content but this rather unpleasant image: 'This small mound / of soggy dough / is not what I ordered'. A less sensual or erotic stanza can hardly be imagined!

Nothing's off limits here... indulge your fantasies...

The poem concludes not with a climax but with continued inarticulacy, miscommunication and exasperation: '"Why don't you just say / what you mean?" / Why don't I?' This is styled more after the black comedy of Beckett or Tom Stoppard than the effusions of John (Wadd) Holmes.

Hey... how many more guys did you invite...?

The language throughout Money Shot is discontinuous, torn-off and fragmentary.

Yes... yes... yes...

There is no narrative and little lyric.

Yes... yes... YES...

Surrealistic juxtapositions [...] aren't really earned and don't go anywhere.

Yes... YES... YES...

Like porn, there's a lot of this kind of verse around these days. And like porn, it gets dull quickly.

YES! YES! Oh... oh no...

That's OK... don't worry... it's a fairly uncomplicated bodily function...

The whole mindblowing review can be read here ('members only'). Readers after a deeper probing of Money Shot -- and the various ways in which 'people are more than willing to enjoy their positions of superiority over the self-degrading other' -- click here. Anyone curious about hardcore porn since John 'C.' Holmes, try here.

Friday, 2001

2011-09-09T10:48:00.044+01:00

Like the rest of the serious media, The Lyre looks back ten years this weekend. We prefer, though, to draw a veil over the terrible poems of September 11th, 2001. Instead, we turn to Canadian poet Lisa Robertson's The Weather, published by the excellent Reality Street in the same year (with soothing cover design by Robin Mitchell).

As its author explains, this long poem was the Indian summer of a six-month stay in Cambridge as Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow in 1999:

Wanting to make a site-specific work [...] I embarked on an intense yet eccentric research in the rhetorical structure of English meteorological description. I began by listening to the BBC shipping forecasts. Wordsworth's Prelude served as a guidebook for the rustic. Mr. Prynne kindly directed me to the work of Reverend Blomefield, an early 19th century Cambridgeshire enthusiast of low and creeping mists. [...] Back in East Vancouver, all of these texts, broadcasts, conversations and their rhythms contributed to the composition of this poem. It is the weather, and it is for friendship.

The book, which is structured around the days of the week, also features an alternative 'Introduction', in the form of a folded blue insert from 'The Office for Soft Architecture', who add:

This weather is the vestibule to something fountaining newly and crucially and yet indiscernibly beyond. Perhaps here we shall be other than the administrators of poverty.

With all that in mind -- and everything else that's in the air -- here is a passage from 'Friday', issued by The Lyre at 10.48, Friday 9th September:

Body of cloud personified. If we abandon a pronoun an argument is lost. We rest on the fringe of a vigorous architecture fighting and sliding as the orange lights of description therefore we're inflected by the site. Construct the real games and emotions. Blocked soliloquy. Tacit. New face of cold presented. Body of cloud of our minds. We want to speak the beautiful language of our times. Lashed by change. With no memory. Without admonishment. We rest in the shack. Construct texts leaflets and positions taken. Poverty fables. We rest on the tiny-leafed material and resist. Body of cloud of the conventional pieties. Not for whom do we speak but in whom. Umpteenth agony. We rest on the uncertain depth. Speak to us non-responders. Construct so much decoration. Just pour doubt. Body of soft cloud unleashes.

Sale warning: The Weather has decreased to £2 this month over at Reality Street, along with a number of other backlist bargains. Moderate to occasionally poor, click here.

iTiresias

2011-09-02T09:32:00.031+01:00

When Faber and Faber launched their iPad app for The Waste Land earlier this year, The Lyre thought we had foresuffered all.

Surely to augment Eliot's text with the insights of Jeanette Winterson, a full-colour picture of Dante and a performance for the deaf by Fiona Shaw was to extend the variety and complexity of our civilisation too far?

Apparently, we were wrong. Earlier this month, markets around the world rallied at the news that The Waste Land app is performing buoyantly vis-a-vis the profit and loss of e-book publishing.

Now, The Lyre does not like to miss an opportunity to monetise old rope -- sorry, reimagine poetry for the digital age. So we asked our resident blue-sky-thinker, Ron Paste, to produce a low-tech version which can be rolled out to the ten-year-old mobile phone demographic too.

Here's what he came up with on his SMS platform during a mini-break on Margate Sands last week (the connectivity is surprisingly good these days). For enhanced audio, type each line into your Sat Nav:

The Paste App

A Wicked Pack of Sim Cards

Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be googlable

T.S. Eliot Quotes

I. Skip This Ad

Faber do the coolest books

II. A Game of Angry Birds

Wht r u txtng? Wht txtng? lol

III. The Search Engine

She smooths her phone with automatic hand

IV. Death by Predictive Text

Pilebar the Phoenician

V. WTF

These Favourites I have stored against my ruin

Notes

OMG: Abbreviated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. 'Shantih shantih shantih' is our equivalent of this word.

When It's Time to Go

2011-08-26T16:36:00.001+01:00

...when an inverse brand of professional unhappiness
taps on its wrist watch 'as a realist, I...' -- then

set this boy free

No this isn't me, it's just my motor running

Denise Riley

Backwards Together

2011-08-19T14:25:00.122+01:00

The Lyre is disappointed to discover that our newsdesk sub, Ron Paste, has been moonlighting under a patently absurd pseudonym again:

The Forward Prize Shortlist Round-up

Daily Telegraph, 14th August 2011

Jeremy Noel-Tod reviews the shortlisted poets up for the Forward Prize this year.

These six books of poetry, all by substantial and accomplished writers, already come recommended to you by the judges of this year’s Forward Prize, who have shortlisted them for the £10,000 Best Collection award. The Forward’s purpose is to ‘raise the profile of contemporary poetry’. So let me play modernist’s advocate and suggest why this otherwise worthy half dozen might be considered old hat.

Having already won the prize three times, Sean O’Brien is no Forward bridesmaid, but a rather experienced bride. His work is undoubtedly consistent in its evocative laments for a mid-century Britain always just about to build the Welfare State: ‘Fog and drizzle, frost and cigarettes, / And dank austerity and blessed peace!’

The key words of November (Picador), his seventh collection, are ash, history, light, hell, and the various synonyms for passenger train. Imagine Philip Larkin translating Dante into iambic pentameters as stolid as a barman calling time, and you may just have the prize-winning formula.

David Harsent is another connoisseur of Grim England, having written episodes of Midsomer Murders as well as ten books of poésie noire. His ninth, Legion, won the Forward in 2005, with a sequence on modern warfare that was praised for its ‘rightly discomfiting fluency of execution’.

Night (Faber) is no less fluent, but its local paper Gothic is more homely. ‘Necrophilia’ aside, these are poems that shiver over the familiar horror: ‘the turn of a key, / or else the turn of a card’; ‘the rusty stain on the pillow’; ‘the face in the water-butt’. W.H. Auden popularised this semaphore of the definite article 80 years ago (‘the corpse in the reservoir’), and George Rostrevor Hamilton’s judgement on its influence has not been improved: ‘the superior wink of the shared secret’.

The uncanny free verse yarns of John Burnside’s Black Cat Bone (Cape) have their own formula for being mysterious with specifics: ‘a spill / of lights and woodsmoke’, ‘a net of dreams / and phantoms’, ‘the moss and curvature / of nightfall’, ‘centuries of thorn / and Lindenbaum’, ‘years of rent / and kidskin’, ‘icebound realms / of hyacinth and vellum’.

The numinous is a reliably elusive theme for a writer, and Burnside hunts it across line breaks like an indefatigable lepidopterist. But the ‘quest for what is actually there’ in his 12th collection sometimes seems to be chasing its own tail.

For the last decade or so, the octogenarian Geoffrey Hill – currently Oxford Professor of Poetry – has been hectically prolific. Clavics (Enitharmon), his fourteenth volume, offers seventeenth-century shape poems which, seen sideways, make keys on the page (in Latin, claves). Their typographically-racked arguments have been wrongly dismissed as ‘sheerest twaddle’. The real problem is they mean too much.

Rhyme-strung stanzas exacerbate the crossword setter’s syntax and High Anglican angst of Hill’s late work, as they drag the public intellectuals of 2011 off to a Paradise Lost re-enactment afternoon: ‘He talks / Well – Dawks – / Casts bonhomie / To all save Mortal Sin’.

On his ninth collection of well-turned lyrics at seventy two, Michael Longley looks like a modest perfectionist beside the competition. The blurb writer who claims that A Hundred Doors (Cape) demonstrates ‘remarkable powers of reinvention’ is surely teasing, though. Anyone who has enjoyed the rest of Longley’s oeuvre will be glad to know that the variations on a theme here are subtle.

This short book meditates again on love, lost friends, and his father’s experience of the Great War. Its present is his own stoic grandfatherhood amongst the flora and fauna (frequently enumerated) of rural Ireland, where the twenty-first century only occasionally interrupts ‘the greenshank’s estuarial fluting’, not to mention the questing vole.

Voices Over Water is D. Nurkse’s second book, which makes it the odd one out in this line-up of old-timers. Odder still, Nurkse also recently published his ninth. Voices first appeared in America in 1996, and has now been reprinted by the admirably wayward small press, CB Editions.

Imagining the life of an early twentieth-century emigrant Estonian couple in Canada with an easy period vividness (‘fog thick as frayed felt’), Voices quietly outshines the various verse narratives of its British rivals. It’s just a pity that, if it wins this year, it’s not technically ‘contemporary’.

The homogenous profile of this shortlist – all white men over 50 nearing the summit of a Collected Poems – is unfortunate but not surprising. The question that it raises for the profile of poetry in this country, though, is not ‘where are the women?’ but ‘what’s new?’

None of these books (Hill's almost excepted) extends the license granted to poetry a century ago to use a language that leaps logic. They are all, in that sense, conservative. A full spectrum would include some more forward-looking poets.

Not the Last Night of the Proms

2011-08-12T00:28:00.005+01:00

Fearing that Albion should turn his back against the Divine Vision
Los took his globe of fire to search the interiors of Albions
Bosom, in all the terrors of friendship, entering the caves
Of despair & death, to search the tempters out, walking among
Albions rocks & precipices: caves of solitude & dark despair,
And saw every Minute Particular of Albion degraded & murderd
But saw not by whom; they were hidden within in the minute particulars
Of which they had possessd themselves; and there they take up
The articulations of a mans soul, and laughing throw it down
Into the frame, then knock it out upon the plank, & souls are bak'd
In bricks to build the pyramids of Heber & Terah. But Los
Searchd in vain: closd from the minutia he walkd, difficult.
He came down from Highgate thro Hackney & Holloway towards London
Till he came to old Stratford & thence to Stepney & the Isle
Of Leuthas Dogs, thence thro the narrows of the Rivers side
And saw every minute particular, the jewels of Albion, running down
The kennels of the streets & lanes as if they were abhorrd.
Every Universal Form, was become barren mountains of Moral
Virtue; and every Minute Particular hardend into grains of sand:
And all the tendernesses of the soul cast forth as filth & mire.

High Hopes

2011-08-05T10:33:00.018+01:00

The Professoriate

Shaking out the Times Literary Supplement this week, The Lyre was edified by Christopher Ricks' charismatically chiasmic defence (or is it the other way round?) of his involvement in A.C. Grayling's controversial New College of the Enormous Fees:

High hopes can be good for people, good for the people who pay through the nose for [sorry, hold] them and for the people upon whom those fees [sorry, hopes] are bent. I have high hopes [sorry, fees] for the students at the New College. As to my colleagues within the Professoriate, several of whom I have long known, I have more than hope to go on. Their intellectual energy and their professionally-styled-to-give-all-day-shine-and-lasting-confidence [sorry, cultural] vitality are what they are famous for. These are people who love what they do, having been granted the salary [sorry, opportunity] to do what they love. In them, the life of the talking head [sorry, mind] is the real thing. And the larger Faculty, already being recruited, of which the Professoriate is only one necessary part, will be at one with us as we will be with them.

Amen to that, Vicar.

When the world-class doors open to the Thin Young Ladies of A-C Grading later this year, the former Oxford Professor of Poetry estimates that he will be giving about twenty lectures. As an inveterate lectern-gripper, Professor Rich will presumably have many of these in the bank already, so to speak. And, from what we hear, the New College of Old Rope [sorry, High Hopes] will have no objections to a recycled syllabus.

Ricks's cautionary admission that 'there are some bad lecturers out there', however, reminds us of a review last year by The Lyre's High Fees Modernism correspondent, Ulysses Research Grant, of a book that began life as a lecture series at a private liberal arts college:

True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell under the Sign of Eliot and Pound, Christopher Ricks (Yale University Press, 2010)

Christopher Ricks’s great gift as a literary critic might be called his phonographic memory. He is fascinated by the recurrence of words across poems and between poets. His witty style of analysis distinguishes him from the academic average and, over 50 years, he has written original books on Milton, Keats, Tennyson and T.S. Eliot. Yet Ricks has also resisted the bigger ideas pursued by other modern critics and neglected the most interesting developments in contemporary poetry.

His latest book comprises three essays examining the way in which a trio of rather po-faced post-war poets – Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell – might be related to the great modernist experimenters Eliot and Pound. Throughout, Ricks’s echo-chamber model of the English canon exposes the limitations of his critical judgment.

It is traditional to remind readers that WH Auden once called Ricks “exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding”. But when Auden issued this praise, shortly before his death in 1973, he was not the poet every critic once admired. What poets want, he continued, is someone to notice the “technical means” of their effects, not “decoders who discover… secret symbols and meanings”. Late Auden was undoubtedly a technician, but he had purged his poetry of what once gave it its mysterious power.

Ricks is not interested in poetic mysteries. His title is taken from a maxim by William Blake (“Opposition is True Friendship”) but it is hard to imagine that visionary hoping he would be read for his neat enjambments. As an exegete, Ricks sweats the small stuff. For him, Eliot’s concept of the “auditory imagination” is a description of the way poets creatively borrow words from one another – not the more profound sounding of language that Eliot seems to have intended.

Creative borrowing, mainly from Eliot, is the theme of True Friendship, which is itself remarkably creative in the ways it finds of repackaging literary debt. “Inspired transporting”, “pervious to”,“convergence”, “transformation”: with such phrases, Ricks finesses the idea of writing “under the sign of”, as his subtitle has it. It would have been more straightforward to have said “in the shadow of”. These essays, however, are about as straightforward as the Large Hadron Collider.

The first concerns the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. Ricks has long championed Hill as a poet of Eliotic ambition. But any reader who has not followed Hill’s recent quarrel with Eliot’s last major poem – and there must be some who were washing their hair – will be baffled by this three-man tango around Four Quartets.

For instance, having cited a reference by Hill to Julian of Norwich, Ricks leaps immediately to the words that Four Quartets famously quotes from that medieval mystic (“And all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well”). This isn’t modernist rocket science, although Ricks uncharacteristically misplaces a comma in the quotation. He also leaves Hill’s meaning entirely unglossed.

Ricks’s determination to see “Eliot’s art” in almost every letter that Hill's hand forms quickly becomes exasperating. He is often right, but he has no argument for assessing the wider significance of his finds. In places, Hill clearly intends some pointed “transformations” of the earlier poet’s images and phrases. But other echoes are accidental at best, and Ricks seems oblivious to the distinction.

The essay on Anthony Hecht is the weakest, for the simple reason that Hecht is Ricks’s weakest poet. This book, however, was first delivered in the United States as the inaugural series of commemorative "Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities", so he could hardly have been left out. Fortunately, Hecht's allusions to Eliot are so heavy-handed that even the audience of Cats would get them. An audience of cats would probably get them too.

Ricks’s polite blindness to the distance between Eliot’s electrifying poetry and Hecht’s stiff, florid, bathetic verse is embarrassing, and leads him into parodies of professorial ingenuity:

"[George] Herbert had in T.S. Eliot’s heart and mind, too, a special, albeit a different, place – ever deeper as the years went by, as was likewise the case with Hecht’s Herbert"

"‘A strange word [‘bus’] in that it is entirely everyday and even demotic while being at the same time an imaginative appropriation of Latin"

The essay on Robert Lowell is the best largely because it isn’t really about him. Instead, Ricks uses a translation of Dante that the American poet sent to Ezra Pound as an occasion to find out allusions to Pound and Dante in Four Quartets. Finally, the critic’s gifts find a substantial focus, and the close reading is subtle and illuminating. It bodes well for his ongoing work as editor of Eliot’s collected poems. But his failure to distinguish between the modernists and their more modestly talented imitators makes True Friendship Ricks’s least critical book.

An Open Letter to the LRB

2011-07-29T10:57:00.028+01:00

With The News of the World gone, and the situation in Libya -- sorry, at Poetry Review -- unclear, The Lyre feels that it is more incumbent than ever upon the London Review of Cakes to provide the nation with the contemporary poetry coverage it craves.

After only six weeks of campaigning on the issue, we were delighted this month to get half a result in the form of Stephen Burt's review of Anne Carson's book-in-a-nox, Box, a £20 'anti-book about the futility of language in the face of death' (yes please).

Carson is a Canadian, and Burt an American, so we are still waiting on the 'London' bit (see the counter to your right). But it's a start. We were particularly struck by the following analysis, and especially one key phrase:

[Box's] reception also testifies ... to the continuing prestige but diminished actual interest that poetry as such seems to hold these days. For many readers, and not a few editors, Box and its ‘poetry of a kind you’re not used to’ has turned out to be poetry of the most welcome kind: a work you can admire and interpret simply by opening the nox and unfolding the pages; a book of poems you don’t even have to read.

Burt, we believe, has hit the coffee table on the head. Evidently, the editors of the London Review of Box are -- understandably, on the whole -- bored of the kind of poetry they are used to. Shamed by The Lyre's fearless investigative coverage, they commissioned this unmistakable We Are Sorry moment.

That's OK, LRB. We, too, dislike it -- sometimes. This week, though, has brought a stack of excellent, still-interested publications to our desk, which we recommend to jaded Bloomsbury palates:

Cambridge Literary Review 5 features poems by Lyre favourites Ray Crump, Michael Haslam and Peter Gizzi, as well as more from Emily Critchley's selection of new American poetry and a tribute to R.F. Langley (something else we look forward to seeing in the LRB). The best as well as the best printed literary magazine going.

halfcircle III, its cover letter-pressed straight outta the Bibliography Room of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, contains pretty much all the rest of the new poetry that's fine to print. John Wilkinson, Amy De'Ath, Emily Critchley, Keston Sutherland and Jonty Tiplady are among the names we know to be the home of engagé enjambment. Tucked inside, too, is a poetry postcard from Andy Spragg's extremely neat Infinite Editions site (our picture this week shows Ron's set of Pastecards, printed on some official stationery he hacked into. Click to enlarge.)

Painted, spoken turns 10 this year, but it'll always be a little magazine to us. Issue 21, edited by the ever-discerning Richard Price, includes poems by Tim Atkins, Peter Manson, Catherine Wagner and Francesca Lisette. There's also a prose supplement on some recent experimental projects, including Peter McCarey on performing The Syllabary in Geneva. If there are any left, they're available in exchange for two A5 envelopes, each with two second class stamps on them, from 24 Sirdar Road, London, N22 6RG. If there aren't, console yourself with the back issues here.

Alternatively, if you can't decide which modern British poetry book reflecting the work of a lifetime to review in the next three years, let us recommend Peter Riley's The Glacial Stairway (Carcanet) and Geraldine Monk's Lobe Scarps & Finials (Leafe Press). Or, if you feel like breaking the habit of four years and reviewing a first collection by a British poet, why not try James Davies' Plants (Reality Street) and Jonty Tiplady's Zam Bonk Dip (Salt)?

As someone almost once said, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you might find, after all, that you are interested in occasionally reviewing poetry.

Sincerely,

The Lyre

To the Poetry Society in Crisis

2011-07-22T10:25:00.030+01:00

Not you, lean stapled zines and swarthy small presses
with your studious incursions toward the obscurity of art,
nor you, performance poetry in which High-Energy Delivery
is wedding Offbeat Humour perpetually, nor you,
paratactic Late Modernism, obvious patient table (though you
are close to my heart), but you, British Mainstream Poetry,
it's you I love!

In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.
And give credit where it's due: not to Greece, but to you,
glorious Poetry Review, tragic PBS, amorous Poetry Please!,
ageing New Generation and upstart Faber New Poets, with all
your heavenly next collections and longer pieces and loose updatings! To
Roddy Lumsden as the 'tol'able' boy barefoot and in pants,
Kate Clanchy of the flaming hair and lips and long, long neck,
Ruth Padel as she sits for eternity on the damaged fender of a car
and smiles, Jo Shapcott with her pageboy bob like a sausage
on her shuffling shoulders, peach-melba-voiced Fiona Sampson of the feet,
Gwyneth Lewis, the seducer of mountain-climbers' gasping spouses,
the Tarzans, each and every one of you (I cannot bring myself to prefer
Sean O'Brien to Don Paterson, I cannot!), Carol Ann Duffy in a furry sled,
her bordello radiance and bland remarks, Sir Andrew Motion of the moon,
its crushing passions, and moonlike, too, the gentle Alan Brownjohn,
Mimi Khalvati dropping her champagne glass off John Stammers' yacht,
and crying into the dappled sea, Hugo Williams rescuing Vicki Feaver
from Russia and Paul Farley rescuing Wendy Cope from Roger McGough,
John Burnside coughing blood on the piano keys while Ian Duhig berates,
Alice Oswald in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls,
Jackie Kay puzzling and Owen Sheers puzzled and Carol Rumens
eating orchids for lunch and breaking mirrors, Penelope Shuttle reclining,
and W.N. Herbert reclining and wiggling, and David Harsent reclining
and wiggling and singing, Selima Hill being calm and wise, Peter Reading
in his stunning urbanity, Daljit Nagra blossoming, yes, to you
and to all you others, the great, the near-great, the featured, the extras
who pass quickly and return in dreams saying your one or two sestinas,
my love!

Long may you illumine space with your marvelous workshops, readings
and radio dramas, and may the money of the world glitteringly avoid you
as you rest after a long day at the Arvon Foundation with your faces
on dustjackets for our edification, sitting in Waterstone's for another night
until Head Office operates its returns system. It is a not-for-profit precedent
you perpetuate! Roll on, Poetry Review Autumn 2011, as the great earth rolls on!

Frank O'Hara

Somewhat Unusual

2011-07-15T07:50:00.011+01:00

Last month, The Lyre received notice from the Editors of The Cambridge Quarterly of

a somewhat unusual poetry reading event to take place here in Cambridge on Thursday 7th July. There will be opportunity to hear prepared readings in Chinese of poems that have been translated into English (ancient and modern), and also vice versa, with also some discussion. There will likely also be some sung musical performance, of texts in modern settings composed by Chinese and English composers, to allow for sonorities to be explored and compared.

The event last Thursday afternoon marked the publication of a selection of J.H. Prynne’s poems translated into Chinese, and very civilised and sunlit it was too, with flowers for every reader, and China tea for all. We hope the Poetry Society will take note.

The Lyre particularly enjoyed exploring the sonorities of Prynne's own reading of Day Light Songs, written 43 years ago ('The whole cloud is bright / & assembled now'). And we recalled with gratitude our first encounter -- in a student anthology he edited -- with this extraordinary poet's somewhat unusual way of looking at things:

Spread across the four centuries of the Han Dynasty the central apparatus of early imperial China included a Bureau of Music, the Yueh-fu, answerable to the Emperor in person and at its height employing a substantial secretariat. Its task seems to have been the collecting of song-texts and their melodies from all over the empire and beyond and adapting the collection to meet the needs of state ritual and enlivening the formal genres by commissioning new settings and fitting them to current uses. Perhaps this was also a shrewd way of taking the nation's pulse, tuning in to its changing sentiments and understanding the tendencies stirring in different parts of the empire.

-- J.H. Prynne, from 'Introduction', The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Poetry, 1998

If The Lyre is not here next week, it's because we've finally gone on that gap year.

Readers in search of an alternative tribute to Prynne in China are directed to Tom Raworth's blog

which offers this small piece I made five or six years ago when D[on] P[aterson] made one of those “now you can’t understand in two languages” arsehole remarks. Just click on the first image.

Don Paterson fans are encouraged to do so, and follow the links.

Ron Doing

2011-07-08T08:16:00.024+01:00

The Lyre today announces that this Friday, 8 July 2011, will be the last issue of The Lyre.

You do not need to be told that The Lyre is 20 months old. That it is read by fewer people than any other British poetry news source. That it has enjoyed little support from Britain’s largest versifiers.

The good things The Lyre does, however, have been sullied by behaviour that was wrong. The Lyre is in the business of holding others to account. But it failed when it came to itself.

This week, the poetry police (remember them?) focused their investigations on one man: The Lyre's assistant editor, Ron Paste. It is alleged that statements published on his Gathering Swallows Twitter feed were taken from other sources.

It is inconceivable that The Lyre knew about this. But we are grateful to Infinite Editions for getting to the bottom of repeated Ron-doing. Out-of-court settlements to Sir Thomas Wyatt, J.H. Prynne and Frank O'Hara have been approved.

Ron's doings turned a good newsroom bad and this was not fully understood or adequately pursued.

This was not the only fault.

In his zeal to discover what is going on at the Poetry Society, the same bad apple crossed the line.

Many of you will have seen the Guardian's fearless report on developments this week. Members requesting an extraordinary general meeting took a red wheelbarrow full of signatures to the Society's London headquarters. In return, they were given 'some plums' by a press officer. As the doctor said, no ideas but in things.

Regrettably, Paste decided to continue the misplaced allusions to William Carlos Williams by

deleting
the voicemails
that were in
an inbox

and which
he should probably
have saved
for Jo Shapcott.

'Forgive me,' he said in a statement. 'They were uninformative.'

The Lyre does not have a proud history of fighting crime, exposing wrong-doing or even setting the poetry news agenda for the nation. But, in our final post, we are pleased to announce that our month-long campaign to get the London Review of Books to review a modern poetry book has been successful.

In this week's issue, Stephen Burt explores Anne Carson's Nox, the poem in a box that the Canadian poet's agent forgot to mention to her British editor. Further investigation suggests that the last time the LRB reviewed a British poetry book was January 2008, when it urgently addressed itself to John Haynes' 2006 Costa-prize-winning Letter to Patience.

Our appeal counter in the right-hand column has therefore been re-set accordingly, and the campaign will continue next week as part of our all-new quality poetry pink-top, The Lyre on Friday.

Thank you for listening.

Wonder How Many People Noticed This

2011-07-01T09:45:00.013+01:00

At its 200th issue (bless you!), PN Review is still one of the best sources of poetry news not available in most British bookshops. This month it carries reviews of Ted Berrigan and Simon Smith, an essay on W.S. Graham as a letter writter, a talk with John Ashbery about his favourite films, and a report of R.F. Langley's funeral, in place of the regular columns from his prose journals ('Roger's special signature of stillness and silence were marks of the profoundest spiritual intensity' -- J.H. Prynne).

There is also a round-up of the Faber New Poets pamphlet series by Alison Brackenbury, who ends on the lurking 'shoals of potential' she sees in Sam Riviere's hot-pink pamphlet No. 7. Over in the TLS last week, John Greening called the same poems 'droll, knowing, busy as a laptop', not to mention 'genuinely experimental'.

The Lyre suspects both reviewers may have their minds rather blown, therefore, by the digital fish-storm coming their way in the form of Riviere's new 81 Austerities sequence, currently unrolling with extra video-art, screen grabs and poems-on-the-way here.

New media lyricism isn't all about going on your nerve, however -- Frank O'Hara was never kept this busy in the Olivetti Typewriter showroom:

ON DELETING A VIDEO DUE TO TYPO CORRECTING TYPO & PUTTING VIDEO UP AGAIN

Wonder how many people noticed this
my promotional video marred by a typo
i had to take that shit down immediately
i had to make corrections
in the old version of imovie & upload again
the view counter was returned to zero
yesterday there were 58 or 38 views
not that many unless you imagine
38 people in a darkened room
38 people looking at you while remaining silent
& withholding any sign of judgement

No Success Like Failure

2011-06-24T09:21:00.000+01:00

Failure

Success

Good Works

2011-06-17T21:52:00.021+01:00

The Lyre is all in favour of a little 'spoof' poetry news on occasion, but surely nobody fell for the report last week in the Evening Standard that

Fiona Sampson, editor of the Poetry Review, the magazine overseen by the Poetry Society, had asked for autonomy from the director, and has been pushing the focus of the society from education to promoting high-profile poets

The Lyre has long admired the work of Fiona Sampson -- as editor, poet, reviewer and public educator -- so we know that she has already been pushing 110% to promote high-profile poets. What more could one person hope to do? Sorry, 'Londoner's Diary': you'll have to do better than that to fool us.

More plausible, and welcome, was the news -- unreported in any newspaper -- that the spectacular Crater Press this week won the Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet Publisher Award 2011. Previously on The Lyre, we praised the full colour sonneteering of Crater 6: Petrarch, by Tim Atkins. We should also mention that Crater 5: The Stats on Infinity, by Keston Sutherland is the standard work in this office on 'the proxy inhumanity of forklifts', while Crater 8: For the Administration (After the Rimbaud), by Sean Bonney, finds the words -- like all great poetry -- for a common sentiment:

'George Osborne, god of love, we have spurned beauty'

The beauty of £360,000 to promote 'the welfare of poets and poetry', that is. As another nominee is reported to have said: 'pamphlets don't need subsidies to survive'.

Review of Books

2011-06-03T12:47:00.027+01:00

The Lyre will be on holiday next week. PLEASE continue to pray for an end to the drought in Bloomsbury, where the London Review of Books has now gone 9 months without reviewing a volume of contemporary poetry -- though hardly a fortnight without a poem or two. As someone once said, it is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.

In the meantime, we recommend you get your poetry news from this month's PN Review, which features more from John Ashbery's exact magic-lanterning of Rimbaud, as well as an interview with the late, much-lamented R.F. Langley, who leaves us a reading list:

Any Klein and Winnicott. Wittgenstein in bits. Iris Murdoch: The Sovereignty of Good, and Existentialists and Mystics. W. R. Bion: Attention and Interpretation. Thomas Nagel: Mortal Questions, News from Nowhere. Keir Elam: Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse. John Cage: Silence, A Year from Monday. Richard Wollheim: The Thread of Life, Painting as an Art, The Mind and Its Depths, On the Emotions. Richard Cody, The Landscape of the Mind. Merleau-Ponty: The Phenomenology of Perception. Adam Phillips: Promises, Promises. Any work by Adrian Stokes, especially The Quattrocento, Colour and Form, and the later psychological essays, The Image in Form, etc. Marion Milner: A Life of One's Own. Elizabeth Sewell: The Field of Nonsense. Robert Bresson: Notes on a Cinematographer. Keith Thomas: Religion and the Decline of Magic, etc etc.

All on 3-for-2 in Waterstone's this summer. See you at the beach.

One of the Best Things

2011-05-27T14:47:00.035+01:00

The Lyre packed its overnight bag last weekend, to go to Guildford, where the some of the brightest young British poets had banded together to avert the Rapture. And, look... here we all still are.

Thanks, young British poets! And especially to your leader, Amy De'Ath: a force for good among the nations not even St. John of Patmos predicted.

I, Ron, saw these things and heard them:

'This song is diegetic, which is why I can't sing it.'

Joe Luna on FAILCORE

THAT MERCILESS AND MERCENARY GANG OF COLD-BLOODED SLAVES AND ASSASSINS, CALLED, IN THE ORDINARY PROSTITUTION OF LANGUAGE, FRIENDS

Not to be confused with Now That's What I Call Faber New Poets 56, or, indeed, I Know What You Did Last May Anthologies.

Crater 6: Petrarch, by Tim Atkins

One of the finest, hand-sewn marriages of poetry and orange ink we have ever seen. We are grateful to the author for his advice on how to cut folded pages (don't use your finger, even if you think it's sharp). And for having written the following, which makes us feel better about having managed to rip them anyway:

Final Sonnet 366

The boys are singing to drive away the noxious birds
Before women it is useful to practice on statues
& now I am here to tell you all that I have discovered
That living is one of the best things—
there where I ripped it
That her eyes couldn’t have been more beautiful—
I just thought they were
Driving my utopian car over the dystopian roads
I go over and look at myself
& look surprised
Because living is one of the best things I go over
I stand there listening to the sunshine burning the grass
My horn a crumpled dream
Earthlings ! Comrades ! ¡ Adiós !
Work out your salvation with diligence
As if everything were still possible

Where's Denise Riley

2011-05-20T07:49:00.005+01:00

For the last fortnight, The Lyre has been pitting its wits against The Observer's fiendish 'Spot the Intellectual' feature. Here, a handful of thinking types were randomly scattered among all the literate celebrities the editor could remember. Think Where's Wally, but in reverse.

Representing the Poets of Britain were:

Kevin Crossley-Holland
Carol Ann Duffy
James Fenton
Seamus Heaney
Christopher Logue
Michael Longley
Andrew Motion
Paul Muldoon
Tom Paulin
Craig Raine
Denise Riley
Derek Walcott

There's undoubtedly one intellectual here, and possibly two or three on a good day. There are definitely only two women. Cunningly, the only name in both camps is also the only one not to have been reviewed in The Observer.

Critchley and Lehoczky

2011-05-13T20:41:00.005+01:00

Hermione Grammatike, Girton College

The Lyre congratulates Emily Critchley and Agnes Lehoczky on winning the inaugural Jane Martin Prize for Poetry at Girton College, Cambridge this week. Chair of the judges, Ian Patterson said:

Two entries stood out, for their ambition and for the sustained level of their achievement: Emily Critchley's intellectual and poetic virtuosity and vitality, and the haunting, disturbing and beautiful interior worlds of Agnes Lehoczky's prose poems.

We are proud to publish one of each:

The Flight Feathers’ Tale

An autumn trip. Inside the house of numerous gardens. A passage indoors. Across a hall of mirrors. A walk in is a walk out. A concave one into a convex one. Dependent. On whether you breathe in or breathe out, as if you have not quite decided yet whether to start your life from the very beginning. Without audible pauses. With provisional stops. You take no advice as such seriously ever again. This garden is the garden of three peacocks, that move so pompously within the premises of the orangery, with such distinction around the place, that your life feels more pastel in contrast. Or more precisely, it feels as if your life up till now was not worth a penny, not a coin. It feels as if only from now, from this citrus tree, could it at last cast at least a shadow and bear any exotic fruit… as if only from now did it gain just as much signification as a retrice-feather signifies fallen on the ground. Like a snakehead in silhouette. And indeed. One does wonder. If, all this time, what exactly happened up till now, until you arrived at a garden entrapped by the curve of the peacock’s flight feathers, as if your entire afternoon was enclosed with no end. And the garden began its pompous courting, you.

Agnes Lehoczky

Untitled 1

You dodged a ladder thru the infolds of yr sex

Already there; you crawled thru fields of such

Fleeciness, dropped as loathe to drop it from

Out best as deliberation. You drew a cherry branch

Toward them for an out-of-reach moment, it snapped

Back a hand-me-down to make its own fall softer.

You tried bringing italics to England but you were

Too late. You yawned so hard we’d never catch

You. Two’s a company, you said, in the Campagna

Hours. Let’s not wait til dark to do something

About it, I replied. You cried open field & generous!

I sighed I know I already felt the lack of them.

You repelled self-interest brightly, using the same

Hands used to brush away others, stamping your

Spread across the table. Lets not eat over all this

Again.

Emily Critchley

Fog's Parted

2011-05-06T18:39:00.013+01:00

Bishop: I'm afraid you've got a shit sandwich, Mr. Clegg.

Curate: Oh, no, my Lord, I assure you that 32% of it
wants a miserable little compromise!

*****

After much soul-searching, The Lyre has decided not to publish its poem on the anniversary of the coalition negotiations. Our spokesman, Ron Paste, said: 'It is important for us to make sure that very graphic verses in which somebody is rhymed in the head with 'a curate's egg' are not floating around as an incitement to additional satire'.

So this week instead we look back to a poem written in July 2000, when American soothsayer and Frank O'Hara scholar, Lytle Shaw, was looking forward to the new century:

Bin Laden is coming on the right day!
                                                         fog's parted
from the Trade Center's mullions
(argument for island's best minimal sculpture).
            But down with it!
ambient producer of mathematical sublimity.
"Of course New York is ready to begin again.
Those people have courage"
            says Le Corbusier,
            and Bin Laden would begin.

The Lyre is told by a reputable person that Le Corbusier is dead. Hot damn.

Fairy Tale

2011-04-29T11:43:00.003+01:00

A noise in the head of the prince. A noise that travels a long ways
Past chances, broken pieces of lumber,
"Time future," the golden head said,
"Time present. Time past."
And the slumbering apprentice never dared to tell the master. A
       noise.
It annoys me to look at this country. Dead branches. Leaves unable
       even to grimly seize their rightful place in the tree of the heart
Annoys me
Arthur, king and future king
A noise in the head of the prince. Something in God-language.
        In spite of all this horseshit, this uncomfortable music.

End of Book of the Death of Arthur

Caving In

2011-04-15T09:56:00.008+01:00

It’s no go the avant-garde...

... apparently, so The Lyre is heading underground for a couple of weeks:

              To reconstrue, outward from the nip of
              shadow pecking at the graver's tip, to
              wrist, to crank of elbow, up the angle

              of the rays to the vital candle with
              its wick, its twist of burning conifer,
              ruby charcoal crumbling in a cup-shaped

              scab of exfoliated limestone, held
              aloft to right or left.

              R.F. Langley, 'In the Bowels of the Lower Cave'

Church History

2011-04-08T16:35:00.005+01:00

Since its inauguration the Society has offered its members a service consisting of four new books of poetry a year. Books already accepted for publication are submitted by their publishers in proof form prior to publication. These are read by specially appointed selectors, who are changed from year to year. The service is undoubtedly of special benefit to those who live in isolated parts of the country, or overseas, and find it difficult to be in touch with a good bookseller.

-- Poetry Book Society: The First Twenty-Five Years, ed. Eric W. White (1979)

I have never been very much in favour of introducing the work of living authors into school curricula of the study of English literature, for two reasons. First, I think that schoolboys and girls should be given a background of the classic authors of our language whose work is part of history and can be taught as such. Second, I think that all growing boys and girls should have an area of literature which they're not taught anything about, on which they don't have to pass examinations, in which they can make their own discoveries, their own errors, and learn for themselves.

-- T.S. Eliot, 'Poetry and the Schools' (PBS Bulletin, 1956)

Blest
Infinite things
So many
Which confuse imagination
Thru its weakness,
To the ear
Noises.

-- Louis Zukofsky, from A 1-12 (PBS Choice, Christmas 1966)

Sacred Church

2011-04-01T12:17:00.020+01:00

The Lyre is sobered to announce that, despite its commitment to researching the Big Society, it has received no settlement in this year's Arts Council funding round. This amounts in real terms to a 0% cut in the state funding of British poetry news and will, we believe, impact on tens of poetry lovers everywhere.

The Lyre is widely recognised as the second-best place online for anything poetry-related. Because we believe that poetry is 'news that stays news', all our current recommendations are at least 12 months out of date. A grant of £100,000 per year is vital to our pubic mission never to misspell the word 'public' next to a picture of T.S. Eliot:

Mrs. Nostradamus, the People's Prophet, said:

This news goes beyond shocking and touches the realms of the disgusting. The Lyre was established by the Reverend Eliot in 1953 and is one of poetry's most sacred churches with an influence and reach far beyond its membership. This fatal cult is a national shame and a scandal and I urge everyone who cares about poetry to read The Lyre every Friday as a matter of urgency.

T.S. Eliot, when he was younger and less sacred, did not say:

The Lyre's public is a smallish but important public, it is that offensive part of the middle class which believes itself superior to the rest of the middle class; and superior for precisely this reason that it believes itself to possess culture.

Travellers' Tales

2011-03-25T20:40:00.023Z

The Lyre was charmed this week to discover Topics and Events, the travel blog of American poet Alfred Corn, which currently offers an intimate glimpse of some of Britain's most prize-winning poets:

After his extraordinary reading, Sean [O'Brien] and I went out to dinner at an Italian place in Exmouth Market, joined by poets Alan Brownjohn, Leah Fritz, Tamar Yoseloff, and her husband Andrew Lindesey [...] Sean was in a convivial mood during dinner, leaving us all in compulsive laughter with his ironic asides. The publication of his next book November (paradoxically published in April) should be one of the main literary events of the coming months.

[...]

A week or so later, I attended a reading at the London Review Bookshop, featuring Don Paterson, Jo Shapcott, and David Harsent. By chance I ended up sitting with Fiona Sampson, with whom it’s always a pleasure to discuss things. Don gave a topnotch reading, and next day he and I had lunch at a Spanish place near King’s Cross and had a chance to catch up.

Corn also went to Oxford to meet Craig Raine, but unfortunately he wasn't there.

Over at n+1 magazine, meanwhile, Emily Witt has been on the trail of a poet close to the hearts of all the above:

When I encountered the prose of J. H. Prynne for the second time, I knew more about him than I had the first. I knew, for example, that he was not only a scholar but also a poet, and not only a poet but a famously obscure and difficult poet. Some people said he was the most important British poet since Wordsworth. Other people said that he was terrible. Since I did not know anything about poetry, nor did I read it, nor did it strike me as a vibrant part of contemporary literature, the actual poetic aspect of Prynne mythology did not interest me in the least. At the time I just wanted to know what people were so interested in.

We must say that this doesn't appeal as much as the table talk of Sean O'Brien, but perhaps things will perk up over supper at a little Greek place. As Kent Johnson's true account of talking to Mr. Prynne in Cambridge in 2007 reminded us, tête-à-têtes with mythologies can be very revealing:

I stopped myself suddenly, realizing that I had gotten carried away, gone on for way too long, and likely insulted, beyond any possible redemptyon, the (and I say this sincerelie) great poet, J.H. Prynne. I looked over at him, nervouslie.

Mr. Prynne? Uh, Mr. Prynne? His eyes were closed and his mouthum a little bit open, as his chinum rested upon his chestum. He was asleep! I nudged him and he startled.

O! Yes, yes, Bei Dao, I'm back on my camel, old chap... Water, wat... uh, Oh, my, I seem... to have fallen fast asleep... All this bloody flying back and forth to China! Oh, I'm dreadfully sorry.

That's ok, I said, No probleme.

Guess That's All

2011-03-18T12:41:00.003Z

After wandering inter-war Europe for several months without so much as a postcard -- and we do worry -- The Lyre's High Modernism correspondent, Ulysses R. Grant, writes:

Modernist poetry has grown old. From initial scandal in the early years of the 20th century to influence and authority in the middle decades and renewed scandal over its politics in recent times, the writings of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound – the men who made The Waste Land – have arrived at a new stage in their quest for immortality: embalmment.

The second volume of Eliot’s Letters appeared in 2009. Containing every piece of correspondence the punctilious Eliot sent over just three years, it covered 900 pages. Admirers of the poetry had to hunt for the letters of interest, while scholars quibbled over the omission of a hyphen.

Now come nearly 900 of Pound’s letters to his parents, down to the last guilty filial note (“Guess that’s all”) and pre-mobile text message (“April 22, 1908 [Genoa] / Arrived OK / EP”). Pound’s arrival at this pass seems particularly ironic. His fame rests on the invention of a poetic technique – “Imagism” – which reduced verse to its essence (“use no superfluous adjective”), and criticism that is similarly impatient with dilution (“read as much of Wordsworth as does not seem too unutterably dull”). His report on a college sermon at the age of 19 is already fully formed: “complicated hot air: nothing said”.

Pound’s loving parents are, of course, not to be blamed for keeping every sign of life received from their wayward only child. Between 1895 and 1929, he attended school and college in the United States, and then went rogue in literary Europe, eventually settling in Italy, where they joined him. At this point, the editors conclude, “letters were no longer the vital means of communication that they had been”.

If some principle of vitality had been applied to the whole volume, however, it might have been much shorter, with more connecting matter, and several hundred fewer requests to send “coin”, books and velvet suits. There is a human amusement to hearing the enfant terrible of literary London boast of his “blood-curdling” poetry one day, and attest that he has cleaned his hairbrushes another. But this does not outweigh the many null or puzzling moments beyond the reach of footnotes (“Who said I had the milk COLD?”)

Modernist scholarship has increasingly operated on a follow-the-money principle. In theory, the smallest change from an author's life may illuminate the complexities of their work and career. These letters are undoubtedly revealing of Pound’s canniness in making his name, as he managed publicity for the family “genius” long distance (“of course I figure as the modest retiring rose in all this”). But the “pore overwurked” poet’s self-confessed “never violent desire to endite epistles”, combined with an intimate bullet-point style, means there are few revelations.

As a memoir by Mary de Rachewiltz – Pound’s daughter and one of this collection’s editors – confirms, his father, Homer, was the more sympathetic correspondent of the two “Reverend Progenitors”. He is the addressee of a long ambivalent letter from London about the American entry into the war in 1917 and, later, an abashed defence of the fascistic views that would eventually get Pound arrested for treason in 1945 (“I hate SOME JEWS but I have greater contempt for Christians”).

In 1926, Homer sent his son a copy of one of his own youthful sonnets, preserved for two decades. In return, he was treated to a private demonstration of his son’s modernised principles, which remove the “lines stuffed in to rhyme”, and transform it into a taut piece of imagism (“forges sunlight into strips, / carves clouds, paints upon air”).

These letters are full of sincerity, charm and vivid pugnacious living. Of the British Museum, Pound writes that he has “chewed a small hunk from its knowledge plant daily”; of the English oyster, that it “tastes very much like decayed leather slightly flavoured by zinc”. But after so much hasty “scratch”, it is almost a surprise to be reminded what an unerring poet he had become.

Poetry for the People

2011-03-11T20:32:00.048Z

The Lyre couldn't be more in favour of the Big Society. So we're delighted to see that Britain's poets are doing their bit. For instance:

Fiona Sampson, editor of charitable publication Poetry Review, has teamed up with Marriott Hotels' literacy initiative, which aims 'to share the nation’s love of waxing lyrical by creating a collection of poems that reflect the love, romance, happiness and humour associated with the big day'.

The wonderful thing about this outreach project is that there is absolutely nothing patronising about it. Ordinary hardworking potential Marriott Hotel customers are treated as if they were just the same as all those awful poets we love to hate:

So if you’re perplexed by The Prophet, confused by Cummings, or sick of Shakespeare and think you can match them, there’s no better time to put pen to paper.

The mature, knowledgeable tone continues in Sampson's 'all important top five tips':

1) Write what you know. You know about your own experience of love, for example.

2) Big, abstract words don't tell us anything new. The devil's in the detail -- show the readers what you mean.

3) Traditional rhyme and completely free verse are equally fashionable. But whatever you pick, stick to it!

4) Read your poem aloud. It needs to work out loud even more than as a pattern on the page. If something sounds odd, or it's embarrassing -- change it!

5) Don't rush it. This is your poem and it's worth getting right. None of the poems, or lyrics, you have ever heard of are first drafts. You are writing the poem, not the Muse (she doesn't exist!) so change the bits that aren't so good, and make them better.

One thinks of Pound.

Elsewhere, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts have been promoting localism in the narrow zone between a Marriott Hotel and a council recycling facility. Edgelands, they write, are

places where the city's dirty secrets are laid bare and successive human utilities scar the earth or stand cheek by jowl with one another; complicated, unexamined places that thrive on disregard

By lending edgelands a little of their own regard, though, they hope to encourage others to mooch around sites of 'crushed fingers and low wages' in the hope of getting a book deal -- sorry, 'celebrate these places'. Anyone can have a go at waxing their mixed metaphors on an edgeland:

Such are the constantly shifting sands of edgelands that any writing about these landscapes is a snapshot. There is no definitive description of the edgelands of Swindon or Wolverhampton – only an attempt to celebrate [...]

Time and again, we found a place that is as difficult to pin down and define as poetry, but like poetry, you'd know it when you saw it.

As Fiona Sampson might say, 'whatever you pick, stick to it'.

Lastly, there was the piece of Sky arts programming simply known as Poetry: Doherty to Motion -- a title which surely encompasses all that is great about modern British poetry -- and which featured vibrant contemporary pieces from Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats and John Cooper Clarke.

As Sir Earlyday has argued elsewhere, many people are turned off poetry at school by a curriculum that is narrow and unchallenging. The Lyre breathes easier now that we have seen how the private sector will step in where the state system is failing.

Obituary for R.F. Langley

2011-03-04T09:10:00.006Z

The Times, 2nd March, 2011

‘It is probably 404 years since Hamlet first said, “The rest is silence”.’ It is a unique mind that wakes in the small hours with such a thought. Roger Langley, who has died of heart failure aged 72, was one of the most remarkable poetic thinkers of his generation. He was also an inspiring teacher and extraordinary journal writer, whose meditations on art and nature over 40 years fed an intense, late-flourishing body of verse.

The next thought recorded in Langley’s Journals (Shearsman, 2006) after Hamlet’s last words is ‘how every moment since had been, has been, filled with particulars’. It was a characteristic reflection for a writer whose work looks steadily down dizzying perspectives, to find the radiant detail that brings another life close. ‘Nothing is less than / particular’ ends the poem ‘Experiment with a Hand Lens’, a sentiment and a title that might apply to his lifelong scrutiny of brushstrokes and birdsong, insects and etymologies.

Born in 1938 in Staffordshire, Roger Francis Langley experienced the value of observant words and pictures early, through the illustrated letters that his schoolteacher father sent home from Africa during the war. The eldest of three brothers, he shared a family passion for natural history. He attended Queen Mary’s Grammar School in Walsall until 1957, when he won an open scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge.

His contemporary at the college and in the English Tripos was J.H. Prynne, with whom he formed a close friendship over poetry and art. Both were interested in the ongoing modernism of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, and in their final year were supervised by the poet and critic, Donald Davie. Neither was yet writing poetry, but their tutor – who once sent them away from a tutorial because he was – introduced formative books, including the verse of Charles Tomlinson and the art criticism of Adrian Stokes.

On graduation Prynne and Langley followed Stokes and Pound to Italy, in an old Jowett Javelin van acquired from a greengrocer, to study Italian Renaissance art. Returning to England, Langley began secondary school teaching in Staffordshire, although he was encouraged by Frank Kermode to pursue graduate work on Shakespeare. Instead, he spent almost forty years in West Midlands classrooms, fascinating generations of pupils as he pursued his feeling that ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream might still be the answer to everything’.

His career began at Shire Oak Grammar, Brownhills in 1961, moving to Wolverhampton Grammar in 1965, and then Bishop Vesey’s Grammar, Sutton Coldfield, as Head of English in 1980. He taught Art History as an extra-curricular enthusiasm, and invented creative writing classes for the junior years. His pupil and friend, Nigel Wheale, recalls that ‘in a school full of wonderfully eccentric teachers, no-one had ever seen anything like Roger’. Teaching the sixth-form, his favourite occupation, Langley introduced students to the ‘projective verse’ of American poet, Charles Olson, which influenced the first poem he preserved, ‘Matthew Glover’.

Although a recipient of The English Intelligencer, the late 1960s Cambridge poetry newsletter where Prynne and others were appearing, Langley remained tentative about his own, slowly accumulated work. After a brief first marriage, he settled in the village of Shenstone with his second wife, Barbara, whom he met on the staff at Wolverhampton. During term he put his energies into his job, marking homework with a diligence that was a wonder to his children as well as his pupils. He wrote and painted on family holidays with friends in Suffolk. In 1970, he began his reflective journals, which he continued almost to his death, recording small moments of revelation. They ‘lit up my life’, he said.

In 1999, he retired with Barbara to Bramfield, Suffolk. The church down the road held Nicholas Stone’s memorial statue of Elizabeth Coke, the subject of a poem (‘The Ecstasy Inventories’) published in his first collection, Hem, by Wheale’s infernal methods in 1978. Sidelong (1981) and Twelve Poems (1994) followed. With the remarkable ‘Jack’ poems – a figure inspired, he said, by the dictionary columns under that word – he reached seventeen. Carcanet’s Collected Poems (2000) saw him shortlisted for the Whitbread prize and enthusiastically reviewed.

In East Anglia he enjoyed the most productive decade of his writing life. The entirely original combination of irregular rhyme and syllabic metre in his later verse proved a spur to invention. The Face of It (2007) collected 21 new poems, which drew their ‘bright bait’ from landscapes, churches and galleries, at home and in Italy, as well as favourite philosophical reading. He enjoyed accepting invitations to read in public, and made a masterly recording for the Poetry Archive. Extracts from his journals became a regular feature in PN Review.

The affection and esteem in which he was held by fellow poets was shown by a festschrift, Sneak’s Noise: Poems for Roger Langley, printed on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. His personal canon included American and British moderns equally, from William Carlos Williams to W.S. Graham, with Hopkins and Wordsworth remaining important early influences, and Shakespeare, as he said, ‘all the time’.

Roger Francis Langley, born 23rd October 1938, died 25th January 2011.

Expanding Women's Voice

2011-02-25T17:45:00.005Z

UN Women will focus on five thematic priorities:

1) Expanding women’s voice, leadership and participation, working with partners to close the gaps in women’s leadership and participation in different sectors and to demonstrate the benefits of such leadership for society as a whole

-- UN Women Executive Director Michelle Bachelet, 24 February 2011

*

When I say I believe women & men read &
write differently I mean that women & men
read & write pretty differently. Whether this
is biologically 'essential' or just
straightforward like when you left the toaster
burning or because women have a
subordinated relationship to power in their
guts I don't know. Is this clear enough for you
to follow. I don't know. When I say we should
try not to forget the author, this is because that
would be bad manners as well as ridiculous.
When I say there is a centre into which
exclusion bends I mean nothing. When I hear
you ask how much money did you get or how
far have you got into your work, something
internal plunges for the exit, like puking, it
wants to get out - because you're still being
hostile (after all these years) - & look toward
the charcoaled meats for rescue. There they
are still on fire.

-- Emily Critchley, 'When I say I believe women'

*

I sleep in nature where warrens
serve as nail bars

I'm a stubborn boy and poised
at that beat replaced in love.

wherever my body takes precedence
I do not owe a boy either.

it's like this forever

...

Wherever I am, Hello boy.
I do not owe a law either

-- Amy De'Ath, 'Poetry for Boys'

*

I’m on a crowded ship
and I’ve been served the wrong breakfast.

This small mound
of soggy dough
is not what I ordered.

“Why don’t you just say
what you mean?”

Why don’t I?

-- Rae Armantrout, 'Money Shot'

Horace Goes Skiing

2011-02-18T23:38:00.017Z

It is a long time since The Lyre was a gamer. But this new production of Beckett makes us think there is an exciting partnership to be forged between Britain's computer programmers and innovative poets. After all, the ZX Spectrum isn't the only thing that was invented in Cambridge.

Keston Sutherland's Hot White Andy, for instance, has both the title and the platform concept good-to-go:

Lavrov and the Stock Wizard levitate over to
the blackened dogmatic catwalk and you eat them

-- lines to which J.H. Prynne's 'Of Sanguine Fire' is surely the ancestral PONG :

Swift as a face rolled away like
pastry, turned up the stairwell oh
cough now room for two &
faced with bodily attachments:
evidence hovers like biotic soup

Readers are invited to suggest others. Mercian Hymns, we fancy, would make a good fantasy text adventure ('So much for the elves’ wergild'). And Crow has already been done.

Remembering R.F. Langley

2011-02-11T13:41:00.015Z

Mummy-portrait of a youth / Roman Period, c. AD 100 / Egypt
Wax encaustic on wood panel / h. 40.3 cm / UEA 326

From about the middle of the first century AD, and extending into the fourth century, painted portraits on wood replaced mummy masks of plaster in Egypt. Some of the mummy-portraits, like this example, were probably painted from life, and others were clearly mass-produced. Almost all portray the deceased in the prime of youth: hardly any aged people are depicted.

The youth at Fayum forgot

he had big ears and that his mouth was still

somewhat tucked up as he imagined he

was dead. He felt how far it is. The nip

is in the small purse of his lip. It is

conclusive. Now it is flourishing in

his winter face. Now it has signed him. You

see that? And it is written so there is

nothing to translate.

R.F. Langley, 'Birdwatching Poem' (2006)

He Who Smelt It

2011-02-04T13:05:00.023Z

The world of British poetry news can be a confined, not to say airless, place. So The Lyre was heartened to see Don Paterson, OBE and Picador poetry editor, opening a window on it in the Guardian recently, as he discussed the problem of finding new poets as good as John Stammers:

Blogs have helped enormously, though the blogs are still split between responsible, informative and entertaining sites such as Katy Evans-Bush's excellent Baroque in Hackney, and too many anonymous others which resemble farty wee boys' gang-huts, and where membership is conditional on hating the right people.

Paterson is, of course, famous for his own critical eclecticism, which covers as many shades of mindblowing prizewinning poem as there are numbers in the Norwich phonebook (we've checked). And The Lyre has always deplored the anonymous poetry editor who branded Sir Earlyday Motion 'a bag o' shite' in the Guardian when he was appointed to the Laureateship.

Where exactly in the woods these suffocating hate-filled prefabs are to be found, though, remains a mystery (the boys at georgiasam didn't know either). Nevertheless, one could almost smell the fresh air of truth and reconciliation rising from Paterson's promotion of his own poetry prize, on a website edited by one of his fellow judges.

We were further aerated when we opened the TLS last week and saw Paterson's letter in response to Alistair Fowler's review of his book on Shakespeare's Sonnets. Like other commentators, Fowler wondered about the wisdom of the book's decision to adopt 'the voice of an imagined tutor struggling over the generation gap, fatally yielding to the temptation to be one of the boys, his speech padded with otiose spacers'. He himself, however, may have been tempted too far in the other direction, as Paterson -- who has evidently been in the library, making up for lost time -- explains:

Sir, – If Alastair Fowler had taken the trouble to read my book on Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the context in which it was presented, he may have found it a less distressing experience (January 14). As my Introduction makes clear, the book is not a work of scholarly criticism but a series of improvised and sometimes personal responses to the poems, written for a general, not an academic readership. This can’t, of course, excuse clear errors of scholarship. However Professor Fowler’s impatience to discredit the book has led him into considerable error himself.

[...]

As to the figure of correlatio: I found the term missing from Lanham, from Silva Rhetoricae, and from Lee Ann Sonnino’s Handbook to Sixteenth Century Rhetoric – a thesis I believe Fowler himself supervised – before venturing to declare it a bit recherché. “The admission tells much about what Paterson considers obscure.” I fear that this tells us more about what Fowler considers widely known. I confess I failed to follow up “Duncan-Jones’s reference to Sir John Davies, whose editor, Robert Krueger, instances famous examples of the scheme”. I suspect Fowler also failed to follow up my reference to Kanye West’s “Gold Digger”, but I doubt he holds it against himself.

[...]

As for Clare Campbell’s “independent commentary”, I can find no record of it anywhere. Perhaps Fowler meant to type “S. C. Campbell”, author of Shakespeare’s Sonnets Edited as a Continuous Sequence, published by Cassandra Press – whose very occasional output, as far as I can ascertain, appears largely to consist of books by a single author – with which I am as familiar as I suspect he is.

[...]

I have nothing but respect for “the elite standards of scholarship”. I do not, however, find them present in Professor Fowler, nor any other scholar happy to misrepresent for his own ends, and for whom the lovely human mark of the poem itself – to which we are all perfectly entitled a personal response – seems nothing more than a mere inconvenience.

DON PATERSON
4 Law Street, Dundee.

Yowch! And, judging from Professor Fowler's silence in this week's TLS, a very palpable hit, as someone once said. Professor Paterson, The Lyre salutes you. As, indeed, does Baroque in Hackney ('very meaty indeed'; 'slightly misunderstood'; 'the thought of Don Paterson as Willy Wonka is one to be encouraged').

Swifts

2011-01-28T00:21:00.005Z

         We should accept the obvious facts of physics.
         The world is made entirely of particles in
         fields of force. Of course. Tell it to Jack. Except it
         doesn't seem to be enough tonight. Not because
         he's had his supper and the upper regions are
         cerulean, as they have been each evening
         since the rain. Nor just because it's nine pm and
         this is when, each evening since we came, the fifty
         swifts, as passionately excited as any
         particles in a forcefield, are about to end
         their vesper flight by escalating with thin shrieks
         to such a height that my poor sight won't see them go.

R.F. Langley

1938 - 2011

Multiple Choice

2011-01-21T16:41:00.035Z

The Lyre has long admired the critical prose of the editor of Poetry Review, Fiona Sampson. But her review of Carol Rumens' new collection in the TLS last week was such a masterclass in nuanced judgements, that we feel it might in future be set as a test to students of the art. Readers are invited to pit their wits against the following:

1) [The] offstage injunction adopts the homely metre of ballad and proverb: 'Take care -- you'll have indigestion. / Never mix lunch with a philosophical question!'

Is there

a) a ballad
b) a proverb, or
c) a home

of which these lines remind you?

2) Rumens is a poet who needs no dressing up.

Name a poet who does need dressing up.

3) This is lovely, exact imagery that doesn't stop where a lazier poet would, with personification, but goes two steps further.

Name two lazier poets who go one step further.

4) A loosened pentameter lends dignity to 'The Concentration-Camp Poplars Remember their First Gardeners', in which personification is no longer tricksy but, rather, creates a 'slant' perspective from which to break the taboo of lyric poetry after Auschwitz.

Either:

a) loosen the pentameter in a dignified manner
b) find a new, non-tricksy 'slant' on the Holocaust
c) start writing lyric poetry at last.

5) Rumens is equally unafraid of the sonnet and of the Welsh englyn.

Which do you find more frightening:

a) the sonnet
b) the Welsh englyn
c) Rumens?

6) Her subject matter consistently trumps any suggestion that such virtuosity is mere play, but here she is most vulnerable to a narrowly gendered reading, since she applies her deft intelligence to experiences including not only unrequited love and 'A Lecherous Professor', but a childhood 'On the Autistic Spectrum'.

Applying only your deft intelligence, is it possible to understand this sentence?

Cambridge Poet

2011-01-14T22:06:00.007Z

The Lyre welcomes

Peter Gizzi

Judith E. Wilson Fellow in Poetry 2011

Cambridge Faculty of English

                     from 'Tradition & the Indivisible Talent'

                                   And now the word is fire,
                     fire in the heart, fire in the head.
                     Fire above and fire in bed –
                     seemingly the only element
                   to get gilded up in song.

                     How about dirt? I love you
                     like dirt. I miss you dirty mouth,
                     dirty smile, oh, and my dirt
                     is your dirt is nice also.
                     Closer to the ground, perhaps,
                     on the ground, that’s real enough
                     and those goddamn spuggies
                     are fledged and it’s spring
                     and the books in my shelves
                     in my head have all turned, nothing
                     but earth and peat and mold
                     and rich soft living manna
                     you can breathe, the must.

                     The must at the root of it all,
                     desire and wanting, must know.

Advice to Authors

2011-01-07T13:36:00.012Z

GET AN AGENT

I wish I'd published: Anne Carson's Nox (New Directions), as Cape have brought out all the rest of Carson's poetry, but her agent didn't tell me it was delivered. It comes as an illustrated text in concertina form in a solander box: very complicated and expensive to produce. By the time I knew about it, New Directions had already gone to press. Through gritted teeth, I salute a magnificent book.

-- Robin Robertson, Guardian, 1st January 2010

LISTEN TO YOUR LOVER

That sort of easy lazy flatness you must watch -- you could easily find a better way of saying it. Even the beautiful 'At Grass' has its tiny threat of that sort of weakness, as I thought when I first read it & still think -- it is the 1st half of stanza 3, & the uneasy feeling comes on at the second run-on line: 'against the sky' is all right until 'outside' picks it up again; then the stanza recovers so nicely that it doesn't matter & is nothing serious, but if it has a weak spot, it is there. Do you see what I mean?

-- Monica Jones to Philip Larkin, 16th June 1951

BURN YOUR BEST WORK

Alfred Lord Tennyson is supposed to have written many fine erotic limericks, perhaps as a release from composing the saccharine stanzas of his Idylls of the King; but all of them were destroyed soon after his death.

-- W. S. Baring-Gould, The Lure of the Limerick (1968)

WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW

Men of England, ye are slaves;
Beaten by policemen's staves

-- National Chartist Hymn Book (1845)

The Lyre's Most Plucked 2010

2010-12-31T20:19:00.024Z

Oh, wicked, wicked blog! -- modernpoetry.org.uk

1) What Would J.H. Prynne Say ('Sigh' -- Don Paterson)

2) Large Prynne Book ('I can hide my whole forearm and elbow behind Sub Songs' -- Benjamin)

3) The Glacial Question, Solved? ('Well worth a spotter's badge' -- Matthew Sperling)

4) Tears at Bedtime ('Has only changed the names of certain individuals to protect their identity' -- Boris Jardine)

5) Don and Don ('I love you, The Lyre' -- Anon)

6) Oxonian Hymn ('Conditional Offa = aka Ethelbert the Hesitant' -- Anon)

7) The Poetry of Fusion ('"Acted as Walcott sex mole"' -- The Independent)

8) The Problem with Small Presses ('The all-important Grange Hill information' -- mr. ravoon)

9) Mrs. Nostradamus' Poem for 2010 ('Wretched Spew' -- georgiasam)

10) A Scumble By Any Other Name ('The best reaction I've seen this side of the pond' -- Ken Edwards)

Christmas Message

2010-12-24T20:44:00.004Z

It is Christmas. And in any case you should get out more.

Keston Sutherland

Books of Next Year

2010-12-17T23:58:00.030Z

Poetry is everywhere in modern Britain, as we feel this photo shows. It's even turned up in the current issue of The Rialto, thanks to the second installment of Nathan Hamilton's Poets Under 35 selection. As Mr Hamilton writes, 'there is a lot of sub-Armitage, sub-Duffy, sub-Donaghy, sub-Heaney around' -- not least in books by etc -- but not here (or here).

The Lyre will be busy taking snow to Africa for the next fortnight. But in the New Year we are looking forward to reading first books from two of Hamilton's tips, Jonty Tiplady and Amy De'ath, and, later, new books -- from his own Eggbox press -- by Agnes Lehoczky and Vahni Capildeo.

Our readers are known to dabble in the gentlemanly pastime of poetry publishing themselves. So while we're away, we'd like to invite advance notice, in the comments, of other butterflies due to settle on the baize of 2011, in the championship match of our times.

Infinity and Beyond

2010-12-10T13:22:00.020Z

In the progressive future that no-one voted for, it seems likely that scientists will have to undertake much of the important work previously known as literary studies.

So with one eye on our 'impact' narrative, and the other on the space we had to fill, The Lyre has teamed up with one of the leading television presenters of our day to ask...

The Big Question Science Must Answer

by Professor Sir Earlyday Motion

Can someone adequately explain the meaning of infinite unpublished Philip Larkin poems?

The idea of there being no end to unpublished Philip Larkin poems seems logically impossible. How can there be no limits to unpublished Philip Larkin poems? We know the Larkin oeuvre is expanding, but what is it expanding into? Is it squeezing into something else and making that contract, or is the Larkin oeuvre just venturing into nothingness? In which case, nothingness and BBC4 appear to be much the same. We are also told the Larkin oeuvre may contract in time; this raises similar questions. What replaces the space that was the something of the Larkin oeuvre?

On a more frivolous level, I'd also like to know whether my cat is fully evolved as a species. She certainly gives every impression of having pretty much all the Philip Larkin poems she needs. Following on from this, I'd also like to know whether Philip Larkin was the final step in the primate evolutionary ladder, or whether there will be another poet running the world one day while we get fucked up by your Mum and Dad and forced to eat an awful pie. I'd die a happy man with answers to these questions.

Sir Earlyday Motion is available for birthdays, weddings and black holes.

Big News

2010-12-10T13:20:00.011Z

Appalled by the anarchism of the tiny minority who decided to drive down Regent Street last night, The Lyre respectfully reprints, at this time of national crisis, Sir Earlyday Motion's 2005 tribute to the Royal Variety Couple (as told to Tom Raworth):

If I could take my tongue out of your arse
(Though drag me as a train down aisles you tread)
The tiny Royal turd upon my tongue
Would quiver as my heart that you are wed.

The Poetry of the Future

2010-12-03T21:37:00.011Z

Having got Seamus Heaney's Human Chin under our belt a couple of months ago, The Lyre -- like most high-minded literary people -- had been hoping that was enough new poetry for one year. But now the TLS Books of the Year turns up with an inconvenient list of titles we're sure the Review Show never even mentioned: Timothy Donnelly's The Cloud Corporation ('the poetry of the future, here, today' -- John Ashbery); James Richardson's By the Numbers ('[my] dear colleague[...] at Princeton' -- Paul Muldoon); and Jeff Hilson's In the Assarts ('a post-Wyatt sequence of torn, comic sonnets with multiple loves' -- Jeremy Noel-Tod).

Actuallly, that last one does ring a bell (Front Row?). But we can't help feeling that it would be just as interesting, come December, to know the poetry bought the other day that everyone is hoping to get around to in the near future. Ours is Kent Johnson's A Question Mark Above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding A Famous Poem 'By' Frank O'Hara -- which strikes us as poetry in spirit, if not form, but which we have so far admired only as a piece of fine printing. What, busy reader, is yours?

You Knew What He Meant

2010-11-26T17:08:00.014Z

But, on higher education, I want to be crystal clear. I will defend the government's plans for reforming the funding of universities, even though it is not the one I campaigned for. It is not my party's policy, but it is the best policy given the choices we face.

-- Nick Clegg, Hugo Young Lecture 2010

He leaves you with a sense that you knew what he meant, even if explaining it back would leave you lost for words.

-- Nick Clegg, 'My Hero Samuel Beckett', April 2010

This is What is Happening

2010-11-19T23:59:00.016Z

The Lyre respects restraint in a poet: where's the fire? R.F. Langley's Collected Poems (2000) came to seventeen poems. The Face of It (2007), his second Carcanet volume, pushed the boat out with another twenty one. In 2006, he also published a selection of prose from his Journals (Shearsman). Now in his 70s and living in Suffolk, Langley has rightly -- if not widely -- been called 'one of the finest writers in England today'.

Two new poems from such a writer in the same month is, therefore, big news. Slow down, R.F.! Unfortunately, online reader, neither is available here. 'To a Nightingale' is printed in the current edition of the London Review of Books, while 'At South Elmham Minster' can be read in the latest PN Review.

The latter also contains a recent journal entry, written after becoming a grandfather, which well illustrates the Langley moment of many things meeting in an immediate perception:

Bush warbler droppings on a rice cake on the edge of the verandah. Basho, 1692. 'This is the sort of thing I am trying to do in the hokku nowadays'. And a baby, in Oxford, now. Sheer existence. Last night, feeling the rawness of Suffolk, I lay on the sofa and covered myself with the blanket we keep there. The first time I remember ever having slept in my clothes. And tonight the baby is certainly being born.

I open the window and put out my head into the darkness, into quick, cold touches of small rain. This is what is happening.

With a Dead Sound on the Final Stroke of Ballard

2010-11-12T09:45:00.004Z

Sometimes, The Lyre doesn't have to make it (all) up:

Iain Sinclair Designs a Watch

At last, a watch for the psychogeographer in your life!

Designed by Iain Sinclair and manufactured by Mr Jones Watches in a limited edition of 100, the Compass Road positions eight of Iain’s heroes around the dial, each according to a geographical link to London. A pattern on the hour disk causes their names (from Clare to Celine) to fade in and out of view as the time passes.

You can buy yours here. Insane but satisfied customers wrote:

July 18 -- 1841 -- Sunday -- Felt very melancholly -- went a walk on the forest in the afternoon -- fell in with some psychogeographers one of whom offered to assist in my escape from the mad house by selling me a limited edition watch to which I almost agreed but told him I had no money to start with but if he would do so I would promise him one hundred and forty five pounds

-- J.C., Helpston, Northants.

The banks of the Thames are clouded! the ancient porches of Albion
Darken'd! they are drawn thro' unbounded space, scatter'd upon
The Void in incoherent despair! Cambridge & Oxford & London,
Are driven among the starry Wheels, rent away and dissipated,
In Chasms & Abysses of sorrow, enlarg'd without dimension, terrible
Albions mountains run with blood, the cries of war & of tumult
Resound into the unbounded night, every Human perfection
Is available in an edition of 100 pieces, each numbered on the
Caseback with an insert card signed by Urizen & Los!

-- Mr.W.B., London

Glass

2010-11-12T09:40:00.002Z

Yan tan tethera pethera pimp

nothing to waste but nothing to skimp.

Lambs and gimmers and wethers and ewes

what do you want with political views?

Keep the glass in your windows clear

where nothing whatever's bitter but beer.

Basil Bunting, 1978

Like It or Not

2010-11-05T11:44:00.015Z

The work of the “Language Poets” and of the alternative poetries in Britain -- associated with people in Cambridge University like J. H. Prynne -- is not the charlatan work some perceive it to be; however, these poets form a kind of cult that shuns general engagement, regarding it as a vulgarity and a decadence. There’s a phrase I heard as a criticism of W. H. Auden and I like the sound of it: somebody said that he didn’t have the rooted normality of the major talent.

-- Seamus Heaney, 2008

...a postmodern poetic school led by JH Prynne whose purpose is to be difficult -- emulatively difficult. (Not difficult to be difficult, actually.) And this take on modernism has created the critical idea of a "new poetic" -- essentially the notion that the reader shouldn't expect anything in the way of conventional "meaning" since the poetry was anyway fetched up from the dark womb of the poet's unconscious.

-- Craig Raine, 2008

On the other side we have the avant-garde so desperate for transcendence they see it everywhere: they are fatally in the grip of an adolescent sublime, where absolutely anything will blow your mind, as your mind, in its state of recrudescent virginity, is permanently desperate to be blown. The Norwich phone book or a set of log tables would serve them as well as their Prynne, in whom they seem able to detect as many shades of mindblowing confusion as Buddhists do the absolute.

-- Donne Paterson, 2004

[Prynne's] latest volume, Sub Songs, a handsome small press production in a very large format – similar in size to a volume of sheet music – continues to blend his favourite fierce ingredients: ominous developments in biotechnology; political, erotic and philosophical questions about identity and difference; terror and warfare; the role of song in various human and animal contexts; complicity and agency. The criss-cross of contradictory movements and bitten-off phrases resembles late Beckett as much as anything else he has written (“deny for why none or again, nor at / all time-fast”). The title of the opening poem, “As Mouth Blindness”, is a reference to dysgeusia, an alteration or distortion of the sense of taste; this may or may not be a wry reference to his poems’ deliberate departure from mainstream English poetry’s more cautious ironies and ambiguities.

The reason why the late poems are so challenging is that Prynne’s work has increasingly offered a high-speed polyphonic approach, with phrases and quotations overlapping or interrupted (“a dialectic with the laterals marked in” as he once put it); and the astonishing economy with which he now disposes his hard-won words means that even his shortest poems are now carrying alarmingly extensive hinterlands of epic debate. It is still possible to say what these poems are about; it remains unlikely that anyone will or can be sure what they mean.

If the result is therefore sometimes so entangled as to leave no hook or handhold even for a committed and diligent reader, what results nonetheless is still a remarkable sonic and visual construction; words become uncannily palpable as sounds and signs, and the musical or plastic arts become easier (if treacherous) points of reference. Whether this is success or failure is hard to say: de gustibus (or dysgeusia?) non est disputandum. In 1913, Debussy wrote that “the century of the aeroplane deserves its music”; but as “the century of suspicion” ends, aptly and predictably, in a credit crisis, J. H. Prynne’s poetry may – like it or not – be most fully and restlessly the music of our times.

-- Robert Potts, Times Literary Supplement, November 3rd, 2010

Lunch Criticism

2010-10-29T14:04:00.007+01:00

The Lyre has lamented in the past that there just aren't enough hours in the day to read all the new poetry that pours from the contemporary British poet. Today, however, we realised that we could use our weekly blogging time itself for reading poetry instead of just writing about it. And so Lunch Criticism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts choice pieces of poems squarely between the blogger and the reader: think Arnold's touchstones with a meal deal to one side.

Lunch Criticism will, of course, be sharing its crisps with Frank O'Hara, a poet really knew how to use his noonday rest. So it seems appropriate to begin this occasional series with a book that shares our 'Love for Frank / O'Hara's "I do this, I do that"': Simon Smith's London Bridge (Salt). Here are our crumbs for the pigeons:

Late summer shower, rows of shiny business class

Criss-cross sight-lines with flight paths in secret
Cross-hairs, feel their way down the spokes and invisible
Corridors of power to Heathrow

('On Telegraph Hill')

Mothers to toddlers

Oven chips, ketchup, bed.

That order.

('Address')

A car approaches and then recedes
Drenching a wall of data

('CCTV')

Isn't Nature wonderful!
She being a phone-call away and sweet as a drop down menu!

('Ode on a Grecian Urn')

Comfy jumbo hotdogs

('Online O.E.D.')

Let's meet, discuss plumbing, give up phone conferences, be happy.
Pink cloud tinged, a little sunlight to offices, London clays all walks
Of human life. I take the opposite view, but no matter.

('Personal Note')

That's by no means the whole book, but that is lunch. We look forward to tea.

The Marriage of True Minds

2010-10-22T16:46:00.012+01:00

The Lyre could not be more in favour of the current politics of collaborating, compromising, trimming, cuttting, hacking, axeing, slashing, shafting, reducing the state with a view to its eventual privatisation and generally having a good time.

So this week we offer an experiment in futurity. Writing in the Guardian on Saturday, Professor Don Paterson OBE showed that, when it comes to undermining the case for research funding in the humanities, poets can be as pro-active as politicians. 'Wary of academic criticism', Paterson has been writing about Shakespeare's sonnets as a break from his evidently dreary well-paid academic job:

Rather than lock myself in the library for six months, I wrote my commentaries on the poems while awake, bored, half-asleep, full of cold, drunk, exhausted, serene, smart, befuddled and stupid. I wrote on the train, in bed, in the bath and in my lunch-break; I wrote them while I was fed up marking papers, or stuck on Bioshock on the Playstation, while I was watching the bairns, Family Guy or the view out of the window.

The Lyre looks forward to reading the results of all this unscholarly activity next month, although we hope some editor might have cut the more 'befuddled' bits e.g. "A Shakespeare sonnet" is almost as much a synonym [sic] for "love poem" as "Mona Lisa" is [a metonym] for "beautiful woman".

In the meantime, we present a vision of what future criticism of the sonnets might look like if Paterson's Family Guy prose were imposed as an 'impact' model on some old-fashioned la-di-dah library-going poet-critic. Someone who sounded like William Empson, for instance, or Veronica Forrest-Thomson, or J.H. Prynne. Here goes:

I wanted to say something to counteract the perception of Shakespeare's compositional method as a kind of lyric soduku. In order to watch the emergence -- or non-emergence -- of any thematic attitude, sympathy, complex irony, or anything else, we should look at the line-arrangement from which it must emerge. However, the question: "was Shakespeare gay?" strikes me as so daft as to be barely worth answering. Of course he was. Within the development of Shakespeare's sequence as a whole the fluency of vocabulary usage across indistinct gender boundaries demonstrates a striking experimentalism. An honest answer to: "What are these poems to us now?" soon becomes: "What are these poems to me now?" since I can't speak for anyone else. There is no reason why the subtlety of the irony in so complex a material must be capable of being pegged out into verbal explanations. I made a parallel translation from bullshit into English.

At the Coal Face

2010-10-15T21:03:00.003+01:00

The Lyre dispatched 26 reporters to follow up the rumour that there may be more unpublished Ted Hughes poems trapped deep in the British Library this week.

Until they return, you can catch up on the poetry news here and here.

Lying in a News Grave

2010-10-08T22:52:00.022+01:00

The Lyre congratulates Seamus Heaney for winning the 2010 Backwards Prize with his latest collection, Human Chin. Chair of the judges was Ruth Padel. Heaney -- who last year signed a letter to the TLS expressing 'dismay and disgust at the cowardly smear campaign' which saw Padel elected as Oxford Professor of Poetry over Derek Walcott -- was 'out of the country'.

The Lyre commiserates with an unfinished poem by Ted Hughes for having been discovered by the brilliant scholar, Melvyn Bragg, who had only the poet's widow and the staff of the British Library to help him.

A friend once discovered that Birthday Letters was a book best read in the voice of Speedy Gonzales. Unfortunately, like Sylvester the Cat, Channel Four News was unable to get hold of the little mouse.

The Lyre regrets to announce the retirement of our News That Stays News News Titter feed. The quality of poetry reporting on Notional Poetry Day this year confirmed that our work here is done. Our lone follower will be offered resettlement at ronpaste, who will continue to keep the poetry news sprawling on a pin.

Soft Dying

2010-10-01T08:06:00.002+01:00

A man walks into a barred cloud and falls over

It was an iron barred cloud

John Paste

Eye Told You So

2010-09-24T07:31:00.005+01:00

The Lyre is shocked. The one word every schoolchild associates with Matthew Arnold, on whose professorial Oxford chair Ruth Padel so nearly sat, is disinterment... er, disinterestedness. So we were appalled to read in this week's Private Eye that another interpretation might be put upon the terrific piece of criticism to which we drew to our readers' attention three weeks ago:

Another misbehaving judge is the poet Ruth Padel, whose appointment as the chair of this year's Forward prizes panel was as eyebrow-raising as [Sir Earlyday] Motion's [as chair of the Booker prize] (in her case because her involvement in the Oxford poetry professorship scandal is so recent, rather than due to a longstanding tendency to treat stablemates kindly).

Only in zany poetryland would a head judge even contemplate reviewing one of the books she has just shortlisted, as Padel did when acclaiming Fiona Sampson -- who is up against Seamus Heaney, Lachlan Mackinnon, Sinead Morrisey, Robin Robertson and Jo Shapcott for best collection -- in the Guardian.

Her panting precis of Sampson's CV left little doubt as to her enthusiasm: this princess of polymaths 'has a PhD in philosophy of language, won the Newdigate prize for poetry at Oxford (as did Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde, Andrew Motion and Jane Griffiths) and is a founding editor of a journal of east European writing, so there's bags of intellect. But she was also once a professional violinist...'

What's more, as Padel notes, she is 'editor of Britain's central poetry magazine, Poetry Review', making her a significant dispenser of patronage, and among the parade of poets in periodical's latest issue is... Ruth Padel, represented by two poems and awarded star status by being placed first in the running order. Still, the chairwoman could -- like her predecessor Josephine Hart, who was not fond of Don Paterson's Rain, last year's best collection winner -- be outvoted when her possibly restive panel meet next month.

The Lyre hopes so -- perhaps Don Paterson might even be allowed to win again?

Blurb Thou Never Wert

2010-09-17T11:45:00.013+01:00

The Lyre would like to thank readers for all messages of sympathy posted in the comments box last week. Really, we're fine now. It was just something Ron picked up while subbing our previous post.

Mopping our brow with a recent TLS at the height of the fever, we were reminded that the poet Peter Riley must once have said something very rude about J.C.'s mother. That, at least, is the only explanation we can think of for the resident humorist's repeated mockery -- in his Lyre-esque column, 'N.B.' -- of Riley's elegant and thoughtful endorsement of John Seed's Collected Poems as 'poetry babble'.

It's all very well, The Lyre feels, to mock the attempt to summarise a complex book in a sentence, if, like J.C., you are able to devote plenty of time to actually reading contemporary avant-garde verse. But for some of us, a good blurb may be the only poetry we get round to for weeks. Take, for example, the following, all from books recently received, which The Lyre looks forward to reading as soon as humanly possible:

Simon Smith, London Bridge (London: Salt, 2010), 80pp.

The occupants of Simon Smith’s poems are names for contemporary urban detail ratcheted up to experiential intensities that actually open (rather than shut down, as all too customary) the reader’s senses of place and person. The “mesh” is thereby not amiss, nor are these “Great buckets of Reality” hoisted to no purpose. A rare pleasure found so succinctly in the telling. As Smith’s refresher take on Martial has it, “Wouldn’t every man live, if he knew how, / Giving it all away to here and now?” -- Bill Berkson

Jeff Hilson, In the Assarts (London: Veer, 2010), 92 pp.

Jeff Hilson's hilarious, tragic, wobbling, witty poems mix the high seriousness of Stein, Spicer & Ceravolo with the pleasingly ridiculous Englishness of both Stevie & Mark E. Smith…Reading [them] is like encountering Buster Keaton in a codpiece staggering down the Walworth Road clutching a handful of Clifford T Ward & Krautrock albums whilst being pursued by Francis Picabia & the Sheriff of Nottingham. Hooray! Jeff Hilson's happy project is the most exciting in contemporary British poetry. -- Tim Atkins

Linda Hadley and Edwin Hak, 6 London Fountains (Canterbury: Panda Press, 2008), 8pp.

One ragged sheet they complicate down, a small hand-inked dribbler, of slit and fold and press within the pages. 13 spumante pencils, the central higher than the rest.

The “rational fountain”, bisected by the shadows of financial courts, turns water to a fabric draped unwrinkled over marble slabs. But a wobble turns a ravel, and it seams.

The dampened husk and scaffold of a civic flow: the blocked stone fountain gathers surplus, of material, of rainspots, in the park. -- James Wilkes

OK: this last, we admit, is from Wilkes' prose poem, Reviews. Which we have read, and very good it is too. What more do you need to know?

Sick and Nonplussed

2010-09-10T11:46:00.001+01:00

The Lyre is unwell. See you next week.

The Poetry of Fusion

2010-09-03T08:46:00.009+01:00

Regular readers of The Lyre will be familiar with enthusiasm as one of our characteristic modes e.g. it's good to see the Guardian has now run two reviews of Don Paterson's latest book -- we look forward to the wallchart. This week, the same news source brought us an example of literary criticism that we can only recommend in the warmest terms.

We refer, of course, to Ruth Padel's review of Fiona Sampson's Rough Music. In light of recent events in Oxford, we must confess that we had begun to fear the rumours that Padel was a somewhat unwise poetic "'sex-mole'" (The Independent). However, she has obviously learned a great deal from her recent foot-washing workshop with fellow poet the Archbishop of Canterbury, and she is now back in a position of public responsibility as chair of the 2010 Backward Poetry Prize panel.

In the running this year for the Backward is Sampson's latest collection, which Padel introduced to readers of the Guardian with a remarkable critical analogy:

The creative tug-of-war in British poetry between experimental freedom and the ancient delights of ballad and song, where lyrics cohere with end-rhyme, is very old.

How true, we thought, how true. But there was more:

The battle, still very much alive, does not merely spark arguments between poets; it generates important tensions within poets, even within poems.

Anyone very much alive who has felt an argumentative spark of tension importantly within themselves can, again, only assent. And yet, there was more:

In 2005, when Fiona Sampson became editor of Britain's central poetry magazine Poetry Review, she made it a place where both impulses could flourish, and the same spirit of electric opposites cohabitating animates her own new collection, which has been shortlisted for the Forward prize. Rough Music, it seems, is the fusion of modernist and lyric.

For too long -- since the outbreak of that tug-of-war, in fact -- The Lyre had feared that the centre of British poetry had been knocked down to make way for luxury flats. So we were relieved to hear that it's still there, with a magazine edited by a poet whose work is powered by an ethereal common-law marriage of rechargeable chalk-and-cheese polarities, whilst being that of a bona fide intellectual to boot:

Sampson has a PhD in philosophy of language, won the Newdigate prize for poetry at Oxford (as did Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde, Andrew Motion and Jane Griffiths) and is a founding editor of a journal of east European writing, so there's bags of intellect.

Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde, Andrew Motion and Jane Griffiths. And East European writing.

You can read the rest of this terrific piece here. We leave you with one final insight:

One of Sampson's themes is how limited language is, and this book belongs to the art of hint. The tone is controlled and lightly pitched; there is a lovely surface smoothness with the rough, as in "Skater", where a lone "you" skates under the moon like a migrating bird, and "The line behind you brightens / with crystal, then darkens / as you draw it out".

Limited though language may be, this is indeed lovely. How often we have seen a lone migrating bird skating under the moon, and yet lacked the right pitch-controlled rough-smooth modernist-lyric fusion of ancient experimental rope-burned freedom and singsong delight to express the image.

Message Clear

2010-08-27T08:33:00.004+01:00

sur e

the d i e

i s

s e t and

i am the sur d

a t res t

o life

i am he r e

Edwin Morgan

1920-2010

The Silly Season

2010-08-20T18:57:00.015+01:00

Like Matthew Arnold, The Lyre has always felt that parody is a 'vile art'. We have never been moved by Sir Earlyday Motion's cruelly thin imitations of the Georgian poets, and Mrs. Nostradamus' pastiches of what Simon Armitage might have written as Poet Laureate leave us cold. So we were grateful to learn this week, from Seamus Perry's TLS review of The Oxford Book of Parodies, that parody does have a place in civilized society. Citing Wendy Cope's 'Waste Land Limericks' (which begin 'In April one seldom feels cheerful'), he writes:

[They] really do have a critical point to make: their comedy is one of generic misfitting, pointing up the range of qualities that you might reasonably look for in a limerick (slightness, charm, good manners, moderation) but which are sadly lacking in your normal modernist masterpiece.

The Lyre fears that Dr. Perry has been reading the wrong limericks. Nevertheless, he has a critical point to make:

Cope's limericks implicitly appeal to some idea of shared human normality against which the idiosyncrasy or disproportion of literary language can be tested and found wanting [...] That investment in the virtue of what is ordinary lies behind the tendency to conservatism that Macdonald shrewdly discerned in parody, and its hostility to things that are too clever by half always runs the risk of becoming merely philistine.

Yet it seems to us there is a greater philistinism in not recognizing disproportionate masterpieces by parody, as has been the case in recent years. So we gave our Newsdesk sub, Ron Paste -- who, frankly, is having a quiet month -- one copy of Cope's Having a Coke with Kingsley Amis, one copy of J.H. Prynne's Triodes, and an artificial insemination kit. The result is now in:

Trioletode

This chick called Pandora
               her sister Irene
        made points that were sore uh,
box hedge fund, Pandora!
   in firm terra war, uh
           d'you see what I mean:
        split bet on Pandora
                     with ice-cream, Irene.

Next week: Clive James, 'The John Wilkinson Clerihews'.

In Lit

2010-08-13T09:57:00.007+01:00

You don't have to read Maud
to work here, but it helps

*

This Lime-Tree Power-
point Prison

*

Like an office PC
on a hot stove

the poem must ride
out its team meeting

Ron Paste

Prize Poet

2010-08-06T11:35:00.009+01:00

Between donkey rides on Dover Beach last week, The Lyre was moved to prize-winning tears by Sean O'Brien's TLS poem in memory of Peter Porter. As Private Eye has previously reported, O'Brien, who awarded Porter the Forward Prize in 2002, and Porter, who awarded O'Brien the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2007, were good friends.

The couplet

Flute-playing psychopaths all must
Like cats and poets come to dust

struck us in particular as a fitting tribute to a stylist who won the Forward with such poignant distichs as

Unlike our bodies which decay,
Words, first and last, have come to stay

We were moved to further tears later the same day when we realised that the poem 'Envoi', in Tom Raworth's new volume, Windmills in Flames, was also a tribute to the jauntily adept prosody of the Master:

I could go on like this all day
Ti-tum ti-tum and doodly-ay
With every now and then a glance
To see if I've still on my pants
And if I have, if that stain's jism
Or just a trace of modernism

The revealing hat-tip of the final lines -- 'Let those who think that piss is water / Sup deeply this insipid Porter' -- will no doubt win Raworth the many friends and prizes his work deserves.

[You can, apparently, read a 'brilliantly perceptive review' of Windmills in Flames here. We would not presume to demur, but we think that this one is better.]

Away

2010-07-30T11:59:00.012+01:00

The Lyre is on holiday this week.

Instead, we recommend

Vahni Capildeo's

Five Measures of Expatriation

in Gangway #40

Extra Audenary

2010-07-23T17:08:00.019+01:00

Ever scholarly, The Lyre is embarrassed to discover that the passages we exclusively revealed a fortnight ago from W.H. Auden's abandoned Dantean adventures were in fact already in the public domain -- and indeed known to schoolchildren everywhere -- as Choruses from his 1935 play, The Dog Beneath the Skin. We are grateful to our readers for sparing our blushes, and have signed up for a two-week refresher course on 1930s experimental verse drama. By way of apology, we offer the following passage instead, which we feel fairly certain is not widely known (unless we have misremembered Four Weddings and a Funeral):

A stocky person in a plus four suit
With a face like a joint and greased dark hair,
Wearing a Hawk's tie, hailed us thus.
'How's the game? This afternoon
I went round with old Damners; he did the nicest
Slice at the seventh you saw in your life.
Straight into the rough. Roared? My god
He stamped in the tee, tore up the turf
Calling it all his quarterdeck names
And cuffed a caddie by him for laughing
Which started a row. I couldn't stay to the finish
For I had to push off to prod an old cunt
In a cottage away near Washtub Wood.
Labour was slow; she sang like a bloody thrush.
Her husband came in one over the eight
And as randy as a stag: I smote him one
Right on the jaw to keep him quiet.
You're chasing to-morrow like me? Good man.
Alright Carrie, I'll come in a second.
Well see you chaps in church. So long.'

Edward Mendelson's editorial judgement that the whole fragment is 'of far more scholarly than literary interest' is also borne out by the beginning of Canto II, which may perhaps be of note to researchers in the field of early electrical depilation:

Dawn was a glimmer, like a great lamp
With the switch at the first resistance stuck,
Descrying furniture cold in room,
When my shoulder was shaken, I ceased to sleep
And Sampson I saw, bending by bed
Holding a metal cup in his hand,
Pouring hot tea from a Thermos flask.
'Drink this first, before you get up.
It's five o'clock and a chilly morning
It's too early to hope for any hot water
So you'd better borrow this beautiful gadget.
It needs neither soap nor shaving brush',
He said, and produced from his dressing gown pocket,
Attached to a coil of twisted flex,
An object the size of an infant's fist,
Pear shaped, broad at the base for a grip
But flattened out to a serrated edge
Like a barber's clipper at the business end.
'Your bedside lamp has a plug. Use that.
This finger trigger controls the current.
We'll start as soon as I've seen to the car.
I wait downstairs until you are dressed.
And one thing more. The hills are boggy,
Peat hags and a path nowhere.
There the loveliest shoes will leak. Wear boots,'
He said and turned, switching a light,
And the cushioned thick door clicked behind him.
Hot from sheets into cold air,
I moved through room to mirror on wall,
Obeyed instructions about his engine,
And such a hum as on autumn evenings
Is heard by farms and though hidden by trees
Is pictured the thresher and its proud gang
Strewing on ricks with stabbing pitchfork
Or dwarfed in enormous doorway of great barn
Lads with terriers looking for rats
Fathoms of earth alive in air,
I heard, and soft as insect palps
Felt the pulsating blade sweeping my face,
Reaping that field which first is fertile
When the male begins to forget his mother.

The last line does, we feel, gain an extra poignancy when placed alongside the photograph (above) of the great poet aged five and dressed as a beetle -- which is also unaccountably not widely known.

Tears at Bedtime

2010-07-16T09:36:00.005+01:00

In March this year, we commented on a volume called Diddle Diddle Dumpling: Nursery Rhymes by UK Bedtime Poets. We were unimpressed. Most of the time we didn't know what was going on, and quoted a few passages by way of illustration. One was by (and about) Mary Mary:

                           ...quite contrary,
     How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
      And pretty maids all in a row, row, row,
And pretty maids all in a row.

Ms Mary offered a pre-emptive reproof to the likes of us: "It depresses me when someone says... 'I don't get nursery rhymes'". Don't be depressed, Ms Mary, we thought, but don't be surprised when no one appears to "get" your cockle shells.

The Cambridge Little People's Review, itself a dedicated temple of obscurity, discusses our comments in an editorial, together with the information that the "formaldehyde of witty analysis" we applied to Diddle Diddle Dumpling -- elsewhere characterized as a "snotty-nose wipe" -- amounted to the book's "most noteworthy review". Wiping is in the nose of the wiped-at, but the gist of our objection was simple and we take the liberty of repeating it: "The effect of reading through the poets... is that if you come across one that is prepared to meet shared experience even halfway, you catch yourself thinking you've got it". The shared experience of under-fives, we meant, including linguistic experience.

The editors of the Cambridge Little People's Review urge us (not very politely) to be aware that "in certain contexts shared experience might be something actively rejected by the parent, undesired by the child". We didn't intend to be babyish about this. The toddler in Somerset and the toddler by the pier on Orkney recognize a common foundation as soon as they open their mouths. If one talks gobbledegook, the other is entitled to say so. No effort of imagination enables us to conjure a small child or a slightly larger child who would welcome the self-alienation of the Diddle Diddle Dumpling poets. If this leaves us dripping with formaldehyde and snot we'll just have to accept it. Meanwhile, for the benefit of those who reject what is generally understood as "meaning", here is something from the Cambridge Little Person's Review by (and about) Little Nancy Etticoat (also present in Diddle Diddle Dumpling). We set it out in a discrete section, as found in the Review:

Little Nancy Etticoat,
In a white petticoat,
And a red nose;
She has no feet or hands,
The longer she stands
The shorter she grows.

If you get it, please share.

-- J.C., N.B., Bedtime Literary Supplement, 16th July 2010

Very Audenary

2010-07-09T14:41:00.036+01:00

Having read both New Year Letter and The Age of Anxiety, The Lyre has never been especially thrilled by the news -- reported by Edward Mendelson in The English Auden -- that

in the autumn and winter of 1932 Auden [...] worked on a long poem in cantos, a dream vision in which Gerald Heard as Virgil led Auden as Dante through the hell of England. Auden wrote about a thousand lines of alliterative verse before abandoning it, although he saved a few fragments for later use elsewhere.

The unpublished poem, Mendelson observes, is 'of far more scholarly than literary interest'. So we were surprised this week to find a generous selection from it in Eric Griffiths and Matthew Reynolds' far-from-middle-of-the-road anthology, Dante in English. Scholars! we thought: when will they ever learn?

Here, for instance, is a typically dull passage, with no variety in its versification, originality in its imagery, or energetic accomplishment in its control of language:

'Here's mud in your eye', he murmured, lifting a glass
Blown on the Danube, beautiful here,
And unfolded a napkin, fuller's delight.
And we sipped a wine of such a flavour
Now as I write I also thirst.
Silver and cutlery shimmered on linen
Stamped with the mark of that sombre town
Which fouls the Don still fresh from the moor.
Waiters scuttled from side to side
Of the vast hall feeding the valuable people,
Or as goldfish come to the glass of their tank
For a second then vanish with a flick of their tails,
Interested for a moment in another life,
Would come to a stop, suddenly still,
Attentive at table, taking an order.
Issuing from somewhere an easy tune
Was making all kinds of memory important
And in the shaded light of standard lamps
Clever and sad looked the simplest face.

Even worse, later on:

The street we traversed with setts was paved
Cracked and uneven as an Alpine glacier,
Wretched and dirty as a run for chickens,
Garbage chucked in the gutter and slops
Had collected in the hollows in loathsome pools,
And back to back houses on both sides stretched
A dead straight line of dung-coloured brick.
Here I made certain of a sorrow not
To be forgotten even in the act of love.
Full as a theatre was that foul thoroughfare
With a great multitude of men and women,
Some sitting like sacks, some slackly standing,
Their faces in the glimmering gaslight grey,
Their eyeballs drugged as a dead rabbit's
Or child I saw at a window by want so fretted
His face had assumed the features of a tortoise.

Ever scholarly, we were reminded -- without a flicker of pleasure -- of the Auden-does-Dante quality of John Wilkinson's 'Cité Sportif' (Lake Shore Drive, 2006):

A dining club door squelches back to let him pass.
     The greeter glides forward assiduously.
The waiter flurries cloth, accepting him
from the far end, enticed into his personal chair
& re-embodied.
                          What
sherbet can I get you, purrs the sommelier,
since you betrayed your folks to get here,
what can I get you to feel, what performances,
what turns
        do you bring to the party?
Dabbing at his mouth with starched napkin, dab-
bing at the spill on the table, blotting his investor's
dress-shirt, dabbing shit, body fluids, sir shall I
put this on your slate for you.

Learned readers (with access to Jstor) can explore the whole fragment's lack of literary interest here.

Like a Villanelle

2010-07-02T10:08:00.020+01:00

We’re never far from a frilly poetic comparison, even in stories featuring emphatically non-poetic characters: a retarded adult leads a life 'like a villanelle', a new mother realises 'that ordinary children could manage the equivalent of a sonnet-sequence of actions'

-- Tim Martin, review of Heartbreak by Craig Raine

The dull brain perplexes and retards -- Keats

A retarded mind is 'like a villanelle':
Its notions all recur in a refrain
That doesn't always cope with change too well.

All poets fancy they can write a novel,
And never see why novels should be plain:
A retarded mind is 'like a villanelle',

For instance, is a simile that tell-
ingly interpellates the kind of brain
That doesn't always cope with change too well,

And ought to be the sort of stuff to sell
A poet's prose as reading for the train.
A retarded mind is 'like a villanelle',

And every repetition helps to swell
The pseudo-troubadorian strain
That doesn't always cope with change too well --

[abandoned due to profoundly non-poetic learning difficulties]

Large Prynne Book

2010-06-25T17:06:00.030+01:00

The news this week comes flatpacked in a 1 x 1 1/2 ft Jiffy bag from Barque Press. Dark shiny blue, with sky blue endpapers, it is called Sub Songs -- and at first sight it's J.H. Prynne's attempt to corner the Late Modernist Large Print market (it's already available as an audiobook here. Yes, dear: HERE).

At second sight -- and many more to come, The Lyre expects -- it's Prynne's most immediate and moving work in a decade: that is, since the double marvel of Pearls That Were and Triodes in 1999. The publishers' description helpfully orients those who may not appreciate the significance of the book's form, in all senses:

This is the first book by Prynne since Triodes in 1999 to depart from the sequence of reiterated stanzaic blocks into a suite of more freely shaped individual lyrics. It's the first since Bands Around the Throat in 1987 to give individual lyrics each with its own title. The dimensions of the object point a comparison with Brass, 1971.

The dimensions of the object are also, we find, directly responsible for enhancing the effect it has on its reader. Having taken delivery of Sub Songs at Lyre Towers, we despair of ever reading it anywhere else: it simply won't slip into a manbag. Instead, it occupies the hands and forearms like sheet music, and pretty much asks to be read out loud (if you happen to be reading The Lyre on an iPad, you might experience some of the same effect). Here is the first passage of the opening poem:

AS MOUTH BLINDNESS

Right now beyond the brunt yet afforded, gainsay now

for aspect close to residue, you'll see it there. Not full
scanned at damage so far, ridges debased fetch so plainly
or even gradual, nothing not due. Lay a hand over plus
to connote slant cutting life and knife, the road on offer
be level be sane two for one. Her voice was ever low, nil
transfusion plot negative to hum under par in the race
to tint and show a true recoil, you are there from the shot,
the star flinched openly.

'Mouth blindness' is right: like all late Prynne (and much early Prynne, too) you have to feel your way word by word, scanning the damaged landscape 'so far'. Alas, your geo-positioning app won't help. But the elaborate size of the book is one way in which these are the songs of a 'sub': like a speaker dedicated to low frequencies ('her voice was ever [soft, / Gentle and] low'), Sub Songs' lectern-spread pages make all this ominous muttering that much more magnificent.

To anyone who thinks all this sounds like a self-important or self-indulgent approach to publishing poetry, we say, with the first poem: 'lie in your broken bed if / form is contented with that'. Being a woofer, Prynne's latest work is significantly not a tweeter -- though we do hear that another meaning of 'subsong' is

[bird]song of low volume that doesn't seem to have any relevance in territorial arguments, or invoke any hostility in other males. Subsong has great potential to confuse the birder, because it is usually given from dense cover, is often full of mimicry, and may bear little resemblance to familiar adult songs we usually rely on in species identification. It is most common in first year birds. Listen for a continuous stream of twittering, stammering and babbling, littered with call notes, typically on August and September mornings.

-- Mark Constantine, The Sound Approach to Birding: A Guide to Understanding Bird Sound, pp. 93-4

Sub Songs is available for £10 + £4 sub to the Royal Mail pension fund. Make sure you're in when they deliver it.