BANK VERSE

Continuing the theme of puffing pet authors, I've been reminded recently - listening to the fervid debates about workers in the financial sector and their considerable rewards - of a gloriously silly Mervyn Peake poem about same.

THE MEN IN BOWLER HATS ARE SWEET

The men in bowler hats are sweet
And dance through April showers,
So innocent! Oh it's a treat
To watch their tiny little feet
Leap nimbly through the arduous wheat
Among the lambs and flowers.

Many and many is the time
When I have watched them play
A broker drenched in glimmering rime,
A banker, innocent of crime,
With lots of bears and bulls, in time
To share the holiday.

The grass is lush - the moss is plush
The trees are hands at prayer.
The banker and the broker flush
To see a white rose in a bush,
And gasp with joy, and with a blush,
They hug each bull and bear.

The men in bowler hats are sweet
Beneath their bowler hats.
It's not their fault, if in the heat
Of their transactions, I repeat
It's not their fault if vampires meet
And gurgle in their spats.

This is from the at least partially mis-titled A Book of Nonsense.

David

COMPULSORY PURCHASE

I know, I know. Why don't I just change the name of this platform to the Leonard Cohen blog and have done with it. This post is really, however, about the very serious problem of book addiction. Despite a chronic lack of domestic shelf space, and the fact that the tome depicted to the east of this text (a new compilation of poems and song lyrics) contains very little that is not already burdening said shelves in other forms, can you blame me for crumbling before the sheer desirability of the format and design.

Besides, I felt the need to participate, via a commercial transaction, in the enshrinement of The Grocer of Despair into the canon of Everyman Pocket Classics. Can sainthood be far behind?

David

THE DANES ARE COMING

Our sister imprint, Stacey International, occasionally publishes poetry and fiction and an interesting new title in the former category has just been announced for May 2011.

Treading the Dance is a beautiful, bilingual, illustrated collection of medieval Danish folk ballads, in which the English reader will discover many ideas, images and themes familiar from British folk song and literature, including desperate lovers, magical animals and bloodthirsty nobles. The Danish ballads are important because they show us key aspects of the Northern European sensibility in a vernacular style and were the first European ballads to be collected and written down.

Over the centuries, the ballads have inspired songwriters, poets and playwrights, served the needs of World War II resistance fighters and even formed the basis for a radio jingle.

For the Romantic poets in both Denmark and England, the revived interest in the ballads sprang from their ability in both style and content to produce a powerful narrative drama that taps into fundamental aspects of human experience.

Here's a snippet:

From The Maiden in Birdskin

He cut the flesh out of his chest
And hung it on the tree,
She spread her wings and down she flew
Great was her grief to see.

But when the little nightingale
Pecked at the bloody meat,
She changed into the fairest maid
That you could ever greet.

David

THERE ONCE WAS A BLOGGER WHO WROTE....

To round off Poetry Week at the blog with something of an amuse-bouche, here are a few of my favourite limericks. Although usually a vehicle for reasonably crass, lowbrow humour of a sexual nature, this form can also yield surprisingly witty and intelligent examples, and there is something about the combination of rhyme and metre that produces a strong impact, even in the humblest of manifestations.

From, respectively: Anon; Wendy Cope (stanza III from her limerick version of 'The Wasteland') and Maurice E. Hare.

There once was a man from Peru,

Whose limericks stopped at line two.

************************************

The Thames runs, bones rattle, rats creep;

Tiresias fancies a peep--

A typist is laid,

A record is played--

Wei la la. After this it gets deep.

************************************

There was a young man who said "Damn!

I perceive with regret that I am

But a creature that moves

In predestinate grooves

I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram.

Please feel free to inundate me with your own limerick efforts as comments.

David

MYTH HITS

I'm reading - with great pleasure and not a little pleasant perplexity - Leonard Cohen's first poetry collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies. This has been recently reissued as an attractive facsimile of the original 1956 publication.

Those who are familiar only with his songs will already be aware that he is a densely allusive writer, who sometimes uses and combines systems of symbolism and reference in ways that demand a thoughtful response from his audience. His poems, even those he produced at the age of 22, offer the same challenge, but also many rewards in terms of the power they carry through imagery, metre, theme and vocabulary.

Occasionally, an apparently more straightforward example appears, and consequently has the impact of a ballad (a word Cohen uses in some titles), lullaby or chant. One of my favourite such is:

SONG

My lover Peterson

He named me Goldenmouth

I changed him to a bird

And he migrated south

My lover Frederick

Wrote sonnets to my breast

I changed him to a horse

And he galloped west

My lover Levite

He named me Bitterfeast

I changed him to a serpent

And he wriggled east

My lover I forget

He named me Death

I changed him to a catfish

And he swam north

My lover I imagine

He cannot form a name

I'll nestle in his fur

And never be to blame.

For an astonishingly erudite and intelligent discussion of Cohen's (and other artists') poetry and lyrics, as well as interesting explorations of many other related themes, The Leonard Cohen Forum is to be recommended. See especially the sections at the bottom.

David

METRE READING

I've been renewing my interest in poetry recently. My Christmas reading was graced by a lovely new collection called Songs of the Darkness, by Lawrence Sail. Sail often uses ideas and themes which relate more obliquely to the traditional festive concepts and objects, and cleverly weaves these into the overarching themes of hope, death and rebirth. At his best, he builds layers of imagery, sound and theme to create subtle and beautiful poems, and is particularly good on celebrating natural history. All royalties from sales of Songs of the Darkness will be given to Trusts for African Schools, a registered charity which acts as a conduit for money raised in the UK to be sent out to some of the poorest schools in Africa

Also noted is a new initiative from The Poetry Book Society, namely a virtual reading group, based around a selection of books they suggest, which can also be purchased at discounted rates.

More on writing which doesn't make it to the right hand side of the page in the next blog.

David

A THING OF CELLULOID

You've read the poems, now see the movie and visit the house.

I'm intrigued by the forthcoming film Bright Star, which charts the relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne. Films about major British poets are not thick on the ground, (Shakespeare in Love is the only recent example I can bring to mind) but the young, tubercular romantic figure that Keats cuts in the popular imagination makes him the obvious choice. The film is directed by Jane Campion, best known for The Piano, and always a watchable film-maker. It will be interesting to see how the film affects sales of Keats' poetry, especially with the genre being so well treated to such good effect by the recent BBC programmes. I wonder if we're in for a bout of Keats mania, in the same way that the Auden poems featured in Four Weddings and a Funeral were given such a boost by that film. I think we can rule out Keats and Fanny action figures, however.

I'm not sure which Keats lines now resonate most within the public consciousness, but my favourite poems are Ode on Melancholy, for its superb, melodramatic, gothic atmosphere and The Eve of St. Agnes for its bold evocation of the medieval and its narrative brilliance.

I was pleased to read that the Keats House in Hampstead has reopened after a major refurbishment. This is one of the many London landmarks that I am ashamed not to have visited, and I look forward to remedying this deficiency.

David

BODY LANGUAGE

I jokingly remarked to a very academically gifted friend of mine recently that tackling a chapter of her thesis on Shakespeare using only my under-equipped brain had given me nosebleeds, dizzy spells and fever.

This started me thinking about the relationship between words, reading and physiological effects, and I recalled an SF novel by Neal Stephenson, Snowcrash, in which a computer virus threatens the brains of those who 'read' it through their internet connections. It's a novel bubbling over with wit, invention and humour, and thoroughly recommended.

AE Housman famously declared that he couldn't think of a great line of poetry while he was shaving because it would give him goose-pimples and he would cut himself. Also, in the lovely novel The Crock of Gold by James Stephens, one of the characters says: "I will make a poem some day....and every man will shout when he hears it".

Said thesis-writing friend added:

and consider as well Elizabethan antitheatricalists with their theories of physiological mimesis in spectators (men turning into women, for instance, after witnessing transvestite performances onstage).

Every Man will Shout was also, incidentally, the title of a poetry anthology we used in middle school, which has stuck in my mind, as does the gentle refrain of our then English teacher that:

Literature is life, and studying literature is studying life.

David

BETTER FOR VERSE

I know I'm not the first blogger to respond enthusiastically to the BBC's superb series of programmes on poets and poetry, but could not resist adding my voice to the chorus of approval.

Thanks to modern technology, I recorded several of these broadcasts and have been watching them when time has permitted. The T.S. Eliot programme was unimpeachable in its detail, scope and balance, including a frank and fair investigation of the poet's attitude to Jews and Judaism. Among the sections I found particularly enjoyable, however, were those depicting Ezra Pound, who radiated intelligence and an eccentricity bordering on personality disorder with every word and gesture. I hadn't realised how indebted we are to Pound for the version of The Wasteland with which we are familiar. Still waiting in an electronic pigeonhole is the Louis MacNeice programme, which I am eagerly anticipating. For me MacNeice is a prime example of an under-celebrated writer, and it is largely thanks to his being set on my A-Level English Literature paper that I came to his work when I did. MacNeice wrote one of my favourite poems, The Sunlight on the Garden, a poignant, elegant and beautifully crafted celebration of the limitations and potential of human existence.

I was very glad to read in the trade press that the series had translated into enhanced -in some cases massively so - sales of poetry through bookshops, which is heartening in an age when poetry sections in bookshops are shrinking dramatically and are dominated by a miserly and unimaginative offering of bland anthologies and set texts.

David