Curiously Strong

COMMITMENT

Here's the piece on "commitment" that I wrote for The Spanner (see below).

It was 1964. I was fifteen and had just discovered commitment. It took the form of a black polo neck jersey, French cigarettes, and a copy of Camus’s L’homme révolté, which I found quite hard to read. Peace News was easier but less intellectually exciting, and whatever else commitment was, it was intellectually exciting. Even the word ‘intellectual’ was exciting, maybe even the most exciting thing. It was probably the word I was most committed to. And a commitment to words was what being an intellectual meant, committing things to words, committing writing, committing myself to paper, and committing myself to writing. It’s hard to disentangle the pose from the poesy at this distance. When Camus was replaced by Marcuse and Althusser, and Keats gave way to Pound and J.H. Prynne, commitment to writing came up against revolutionary commitment. So much of the modernist poetry I liked was engagé in quite the wrong way, or jauntily non-committal, and so much of the most politically committed poetry was bad, that I had to start thinking about the co-existence of commitments, a project to which I became completely committed for some years. But it led to boundary disputes. Radical politics and the political magazines I was editing or otherwise involved with didn’t mix with avant-garde poetry and the poetry magazines I was editing or otherwise involved with. I was completely committed to incompatible activities, and that put part of each commitment out of commission.

For ten years, some while later, I was a second-hand bookseller, with a commitment to left-wing commitment in literature and politics. The old trouble surfaced in a new guise when I found it hard to justify making a profit out of what I was doing. I mean, it was quite hard to make a profit out of it anyway, but putting a huge mark-up on out-of-print socialism and selling it to underpaid academics and down-at-heel ex-revolutionaries didn’t seem right. I was committed to too many unprofitable things to be successful in the book business. I did read a lot, though.

Despite my commitment to my customers and numerous commissions to find recondite books and pamphlets, I sold up and became an academic. I wanted to find out more about commitment and writing, but found that academics are so committed to so many other things, like students and teaching and administration and examining that it sometimes seemed that my commitment to commitment had been swallowed up by committees and commissions, and that half of those had been swallowed up in a commitment to defend education against philistine and destructive government interventions. I had vastly more commitments than ever before, and I had to make them all co-exist if I was to get anywhere. Yet underneath it all, I could feel the prickle of my black polo-neck, like a reminder that things weren’t impossibly complicated, even if they seemed to be, intellectually. Taking sides still works. And it still involves committing that process to paper, committing myself in actual words.

(May 2014)

Quick, while there's still time

Maybe I'll start writing stuff here again. More often than before, I mean. Hubris? I hope not. We'll see. It might be a good idea to have a bit more space for ranting than the 140 characters I usually rant in, for example. That's one possibility. Then there are the things I write which nobody reads, either because they're academic articles or because they're poems, neither of which set the world on fire. If I post them, nobody need read them here, either. And I can keep my reader(s) up to date on the progress of my new book (currently a bit slow). It might encourage him/her/you to buy it when it's finally done and published. And there are the occasional pieces I write which often disappear into limbo, like the short piece I wrote for the last issue of The Spanner. At least I think it was the last issue: I've seen an online copy of the issue (it was on the theme of Commitment), but not a paper copy. A pity, that, as it was a very nice occasional journal. I hesitate to ask you to watch this space, but you never know. Things might appear.

T.S. Eliot's library and Eliot first editions

I know it's a long time since I've posted anything on this blog, but a story in today's Evening Standard http://www.standard.co.uk/news/londoners-diary/valerie-eliot-portraits-to-go-on-sale-amid-whispers-8951564.html raises some troublesome questions about the fate of Eliot books mentioned in other portions of Valerie Eliot's will. The will leaves Valerie Eliot's collection of Eliot 'first editions' to Magdalene College, Cambridge; but the term 'first editions' is not itself clarified; will it include all editions that include new material (such as the third edition of the Selected Essays)? first appearances of significant poems, such as The Waste Land in periodicals? the revisions of Anabasis? Who will make such decisions, and on what basis? Equally unclear, and equally important, is the decision as to what constitutes Eliot's working library, or in the words of the will 'all other books which in the opinion of my Executors were of importance to him in his work': who decides what was important? Who knows what will be thought important in the future? Surely all his remaining books should be kept together? I very much hope the trustees will consult widely and openly with Eliot scholars before making any irreversible decisions...

The following are the relevant portions of Valerie Eliot's will.

"6. I give the bust by Epstein of my late husband T S Eliot to Eliot College in the University of Kent at Canterbury free of inheritance tax.

7. I give the following items, free of inheritance tax, to my Executors upon trust with the intention that they shall give the same to Magdalene College, Cambridge, on condition that they are accepted in their entirety as a collection not to be dispersed, and if the said College shall not accept the same on that condition then to the trustees of the Old Possum’s Practical Trust a charity with registered charity number 328558 (the ‘Old Possum’s Trust’) for its general purposes absolutely:

    7.1 my collection of T S Eliot first editions in English and foreign languages

    7.2 T S Eliot's gold Nobel Prize medal;

    and 7.3 T S Eliot's sets of Dickens and Shakespeare; his copy of Bradley's Appearance and Reality and all other books which in the opinion of my Executors were of importance to him in his work.

8. I give the following gifts, free of inheritance tax, to the trustees of the Old Possum's Trust for its general charitable purposes:

    8.1 My collection of miniatures, with the request that the trustees of the Old Possum's Trust lend them to the Victoria and Albert Museum

    8.2 Such of my portraits of T. S. Eliot and other portraits of major interest as the trustees of the Old Possum's Trust shall in their discretion select, with the request that the trustees of the Old Possum's Trust lend them to the National Portrait Gallery;

    and 8.3 All of the rest of my personal chattels not otherwise gifted by my Will with the request that any items relating to T. S. Eliot should be retained by the trustees of the Old Possum's Trust to be lent out as necessary."

Treading on Glas

It has, once again, been an awfully long time since I wrote with my finger in the dust of this blog. But I am spurred, maybe even galvanised, into sluggish response and pedestrian prose by Jeremy Noel-Tod's consistently entertaining blog, The Lyre. In a recent (yes, really quite recent) post he tasks me with explaining the connections between the long poem I published last summer,The Glass Bell, and Derrida's curious 1974 essay, Glas. Rumours of some devilish pact between the two texts seem to have been whizzing around, and I'd better acknowledge the truth of them. So here goes. The poem is divided into three sections,whose titles both reference a set of complications to do with utterance (glossalgia, glossolalia and glossoplegia), and develop the phonic axis between the ambiguities of 'glas' and 'gloss'. This sets up the basic terms of the poem's material operation. This becomes more emphatic in the third section where there is a consistent patterning of 'gl' throughout. The text itself derives from a rough acoustic translation of the top line (only) of the two columns of the Derrida source text, starting at the
beginning and leaving off somewhere round page 100. I used a November 2004 impression of the 1974 Galilée edition, chastely bound in paper wrappers, 24cm square, and printed for the most part in two columns of different font size, with occasional incursions from a third column in a smaller san-serif font. The poem bears no direct trace of the columnar voices, although Derrida's polyvocality is carried through or gestured towards at other levels. The first draft of the poem retained the order in which the lines were composed, but in later workings some of the poems altered their place in the sequence; as a result it is not directly possible to read my text back into Derrida's, although it could be done with a bit of effort and detective work. Occasionally, though, the practice of acoustic—or  Rousellian—translation was sometimes varied by the direct translation of a word or phrase; and I sometimes took other liberties.

I'll explain a little of what I mean. The opening line of the first sequence, Glossalgia (which means a pain in the tongue), begins with a word selected because it can be both French and English. 'Chose' (simultaneously 'thing' in French and 'selected' in English) formally inaugurates the poem's procedure. It replaces 'du reste' in the opening of the first French line, which reads 'quoi du reste aujourd'hui, pour nous, ici, maintenant, // "ce qui est resté d'un Rembrandt déchiré en petits". 'Quoi' becomes 'wire'. The first two lines transform the French to read:

Chose wire today for news to see maintained

skies resisted down and more remembered cheer.

That should give some idea of how the first stages of the composition process worked. It got more complicated as the poem proceeded and other kinds of fluency, reference and allusion were required.One other thing. The two epigraphs, both attributed to J.D., come from Jacques Derrida and Jenny Diski, respectively. 

Back in ten minutes

Inkspot has pointed out, quite politely, that it is practically a year since I last set foot here. He’s right. And really what’s the point of having a blog if you don’t ever write anything? It’s not as if it was gym membership, or anything else with talismanic properties of that sort. Did you ever see that cartoon (early sixties was it?) with two young men in corduroy jackets, or roll-neck sweaters, at a drinks party? One says, with an air of casual superiority, ‘I’m writing a novel’. ‘Neither am I’, says the other.

Regard this as an ice-breaker, then. Nothing in it except a resolution to come back soon and write something else. As soon as I’ve finished the piece on New York little magazines of the 1950s (Folder, Neon and Yugen, to be specific), and polished off the essay on literature and pacifism and conscientious objection in Britain in the twentieth century, and done a conference paper on Veronica Forrest-Thomson and the Tel Quel poets. In a few days. Honestly. Before term starts again. The thing is, the older I get the less good I seem to be at writing things. I need to feel a lot of loose time around me in order to get my thoughts together. Not isolation, or concentration: just an absence of the general sense of vague urgency which moved in between my shoulders a few years ago. Also, the Novelist has been in the Norwegian Arctic for the last week, which ought to have forced me back on my own resources and let me relax into a bit of solitude, even with the aftermath of Christmas and all that sort of thing. But her presence, when she’s here, is strangely comforting, and it’s even harder to concentrate when she’s away. The insides of drawers get cleaned instead, and socks arranged in alphabetical order. And notes get pinned to the blog, like this one, saying ‘back in ten minutes’.

P.S. Oh, and I did finish the long poem I mentioned last time, if you can remember that far back. It's called The Glass Bell and will be out from Barque Press in the nearish future. More on that soon. Happy New Year.

dusting

It almost seems a pity to disturb the dust and silence that has settled over this blog since I last posted anything. At this time of year, I'm particularly conscious though of living in two time-worlds, the academic year, which begins in late September or early October, and the calendar year, with its insistence on new beginnings in the middle of winter. So this is another start to the things I was saying three months ago. If the last post was a resolution about anything it was a determination to overcome the difficulty of starting to write. It may not have worked very well, but at least it shows I'm confronting things before I'm sixty. Just.

Anyway, here's the news: I'm halfway through the Ulysses experience on my iPod. It sustained me on the journey to work and back all term, but it took longer than I anticipated, for several reasons: first, I couldn't always remember which numbered segment I was up to, so there was a fair bit of overlap. Some sections I've now heard four times. Second, they don't always finish at the right time; I'd get to work half way through an episode, and have to start again as I set out homewards at the end of the day. And then sometimes I meet people, and have to take off the earphones and talk instead, sometimes walking most of the way back in company. Which means I've got the second half of the book to look forward to this term.

Last term was an exceptionally heavy one, teaching all day every day, so I was glad of the Ulysses distraction. But it meant that not much else got done. However two essays from the late summer are now out in book form, and I hope to get another one written during the next few days. There's an excellent new collection called Complicities: British Poetry 1945-2007, edited by Robin Purves and Sam Ladkin, (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2007). My contribution is called 'Born Again, Born Better: Text Generation and Reading Strategies in Michael Kindellan and Reitha Pattison, Word is Born', and looks at their 2006 book of re-workings of poems by Bertrand de Born. And I have a somewhat autobiographical piece in A Room to Live In: a Kettle's Yard Anthology, edited by Tamar Yoseloff (Cambridge: Salt, 2007) about the beginnings of my on-off relationship with Jim Ede's art collection at Kettle's Yard over the past forty years.

While I'm on the subject of stuff I've been writing, I did a short piece for that excellent blog Writers Read. It's one of Marshal Zeringue's blogs (he does The Capaign for the American Reader and The Page 69 Test, among others), and it tells you all you need to know about what I've been reading and (more likely) what I hope to be reading soon. But actually the main thing I have to do before term starts again, apart from everything, is finish the long poem I've been working on since the summer. More about that soon, I hope.

binge writing

I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm a binge-writer. Days and weeks go by and I hardly write anything except emails, comments on students' essays, references and recommendations for past and present students, and pages of bibliographical notes in one of my several black notebooks, listing books I never seem to have time to get to the University Library to read. Then for a few days, I binge. I sit at my desk for several days at a time, writing. Almost always because I've run right up against a deadline and if I don't do it now I'll be a failure / ashamed of myself / a laughing stock / have to return the advance, or never go out of the house again. This, as several people have been pointing out to me, is not the way to run a life or, more importantly, a blog. It's meant to have new stuff on it from time to time.

Still, things may be looking up. Despite the fact that my two terms of sabbatical leave are over (and, no, there wasn't a great deal of binge writing to show for it), and I'm back in the deep waters and swift currents of university term, I'm determined to reform myself. Everything (more on what that is later) will be written with time to spare, I've decided. It's time to grow up and be a proper writer. And while I'm about it, the garden needs quite a lot of attention. And I need to lose two stone in weight. As a first step, I've decided always to walk to work. No more dicing with death on the bike, or dodging the rain in the car, it's shanks' pony from now on.  I've been helped in this resolve by the Novelist, who gave me a recording of Jim Norton reading Ulysses for my birthday. I've transferred all 25 hours of it to my iPod: by my calculations that should last me for most of the term, allowing for days when I meet someone I know and have real conversation instead. (And if I run out, I've got plenty of Beckett, too. Music is just so, you know, predictable.)

This will make me fitter, more energetic, and better able to overcome my bad writing habits, that's the plan. One of the things about being on leave is that you begin to imagine life will always be like that, so you blithely  and enthusiastically say yes to all sorts of requests to write things. I've now got half a dozen chapters to write on a load of different subjects, all fascinating, all absorbing, and all due by this time next year or sooner. And some conference papers to research and write and deliver. But it's term time again, with wall-to-wall teaching and meetings and seminars and all the associated bits of writing that keep me away from what remains of my intellect. So it's a really good thing it's all going to be different from now on.  Periods of painful silence will no longer alternate with orgies of  productve writing.  Poems will appear at regular intervals, books pile neatly up in manuscript, editors raise eyebrows at early delivery of articles. And just to prove I can do it, I'm going to stop writing right now.

names

Never explain, never apologise, they say. But I thought the name of this blog called for a bit of a journey back in time, in case anyone was, well, curious about it. In the late 1960s the American poet Fred Buck, who was at that time in Cambridge, started a free duplicated poetry magazine, along the lines of The English Intelligencer. It was just a few foolscap pages stapled in the top left corner, and sent out to anyone interested enough to send the editor a stamp. It was called The Curiously Strong, a phrase Fred took from the description of a kind of mint made by Terry's that came in a tin. When he went back to Gloucester, Mass., in 1969, I took over the editorship, and the mag continued in various forms until the mid-1970s, mostly publishing slender pamphlets by poets from Peter Ackroyd to Peter Riley and John James, from Barry MacSweeney to Nick Totton. All rather a long time ago. After a brief foray into proper poetry book publishing, the name became dormant, and might have remained so except that every few years, when I bump into Mike Horowitz, he says, "Ahhh! Curiously Strong!" which has been just enough to keep it in my mind.  Out of which it emerged again the other day. 

good readers

Well of course I know theoretically that once a book is published it becomes the property of its readers, but it's still sometimes hard to see what some readers make of what you've written. Or don't make of it. So I was particularly pleased to discover Valerie Trueblood writing acutely and positively about my Guernica and Total War on Maud Newton's excellent blog. The book is about the way the aerial bombardment of civilians developed during the first half of the twentieth century, and how poets and writers (in particular) responded to it. It's also about the stupidity and inhumanity of it, and the need to stop doing it as soon as possible. If there's one lesson to learned from the sorry history of bombing it's that it seldom has the effect confidently predicted by military planners.

windows

The poem below is one I wrote for The Novelist's sixtieth birthday (you can read a version of the story behind it on her blog) and the responses she got to it there are one reason for my starting a blog of my own. I usually use some kind of structuring or text-generating device for what I write: here the rule was to take phrases that included the word 'window' from page sixty of sixty novels and simply arrange or re-arrange them, with nothing added.

SIXTY WINDOWS FOR JENNY

Tiny room whose window was never opened
Curtain for the window
On the cane chair under the window

    *

Pale green even in the window
Emptying the basin out of the window
Halts by the window and gazes

    *

Lay on the ground under the window, bellowing
Kneeling up to the window
An octagonal vaulted chamber with a balconied window

    *

Her bed had its back to the window
Through the curtainless window day stole in
She went to the other window

    *

Sitting at the table near the window, working
Opened windows into the wrong world
A gale, exploding against the window

    *

Muted by awnings lowered outside the windows
A reproduction of a stained-glass-window angel
Whistling up at vague windows

    *

Got up and went to the window. It was raining again.
Early light, coming through the uncurtained window
With its tiny windows looking on to the street

    *

Pat wandered from the window and took up the George Moore novel
He came out through the French windows
She got up and stood at the window

    *

There was moonlight in the window
There's a sharp rapping at the window
I am in the window, smoking

    *

They had seen it happen from a window
Then went to the window that looked on the street below
Watching you from the apartment window

    *

In my memory, at the window
The rain was still thudding against the window-pane
I think that I might open the window

    *

A camera is being held to the window
Silver things in the window
From the street the windows were in darkness

    *

His reflection could be seen in the front window
High up, from one of the small barred windows
His right arm through the open window

    *

I put all the lamps on and opened all the windows
A huge wall broken by gaping windows loomed above
Sordid glare of shop windows, made beautiful by distance

    *

A board nailed across a broken window
They opened all the windows
Sat and sewed by the window in the clear autumn afternoon

    *

The room was almost in darkness, the windows quite covered
The night I stared at from my window
A castle whose windows were glittering orange squares

    *

The windows, between lengths of white embossed satin
Our windows, on the second floor, overlooked the street
The butcher pulled down black window shades

    *

She had been sitting in her own window
The inner courtyard on to which my window looked out
The middle one of the three windows was half way open

    *

The sun filtered through the windows with remarkable subtlety
Rushed to the window, not to sail out of it
No lights behind its white painted windows

    *

Has to look out of the window at the elements, at nature
Draw down the upper frame of the window
The windows were shuttered. But there was a crack.