We are ugly but we have the music

I went for a drink with John Clark and Malcolm Harding and talked about writing and horror movies and George Best and how confidence is vital to so many kinds of self-expression, whether it be sport or art. It was great but I stayed too long and woke up exhausted.

I mentioned I'd been blogging about poetry. I can't recall whether Malcolm expressed an opinion, but John was pretty dismissive. But saying that you don't like poetry is like saying you don't like painting or you don't like music - it is probably that you haven't come across anything that speaks to you, or that - for whatever reason - you have constructed a barrier to it. Once you decide that something isn't for you, then you simply stop exploring its possibilities.

Strangely enough I wrote a poem about George Best for a book of football poems that Tony Bradman was compiling. It goes like this. . .

Man U played in grey

When I was a kid,

At least they did on our TV.

Except Best of course;

Even in black and white

He was in colour.

Tony didn't use it. I can't think why. . .

Not content with defending poetry I also attempted a defence of Leonard Cohen against the charge of being bedsit misery-maker. I have never regarded him like that. A big part of art is finding someone who can give a voice to your feelings. It can be liberating to find that you are not alone in dark thoughts. It can be cheering.

But anyway, Cohen is often very funny, in a droll way. This is a verse from one of his most famous songs, Chelsea Hotel #2 - but it was also a poem first of course. Cohen was an established poet in Canada before he was ever a singer. It is about Janis Joplin. It's a sad song, but a very grown-up one. I naively thought the 'fixed' referred to her hair or her clothes rather than - as I subsequently realised - to drugs when I first heard it..

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were famous, your heart was a legend.
You told me again you preferred handsome men
But for me you would make an exception.
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty,
You fixed yourself, you said, "Well never mind,
We are ugly but we have the music."

It does rhyme, but not in any obvious way - legend/exception and beauty/music. It sounds natural. 'You told me again you preferred handsome men, but for me you would make an exception' is just a great bit of writing. The 'again' conjures up both a joke too often repeated.

I've always taken comfort from 'We are ugly but we have the music'. I love that line. I think it probably strikes a chord with you or it doesn't. I have to say think the 'music' stands for all creativity or personal expression and the 'ugly' is not necessarily about looks alone. It's a rallying cry for all us unlovely, awkward, shy or troubled painters and poets, singers and writers.

I think troubled (albeit good-looking and glamorous) George Best would have got that too.

The wealth ye find another keeps

This is fast becoming a Richard Holmes appreciation blog - but hey, there could be worse things.

This is my battered copy of Shelley: The Pursuit. What can I say about it? It is simply one of the best books - of any kind - I've ever read, plain and simple.

Shelley's life has the narrative arc of fiction. Edited down it can read like a Romantic novel (and a melodramatic one at that) rather than biography. But the great strength of Richard Holmes is the fact that he doesn't need to slim his subject down - he can pack a book with fascinating detail and still have this incredible page-turning flow.

I came to Shelley through Mary Woolstencraft Shelley's Frankenstein, not through his poetry. I read the book and saw the James Whale movies. In Bride of Frankenstein Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary and the bride. I read about the book's conception in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva (referred to in that movie) rented by the mad, bad and dangerous to know Lord Byron and the ghost story competition there in the summer of 1816 between Byron, Shelley, John Polidori and the nineteen year-old Mary.

I read Anne Edwards Haunted Summer, a novelisation of the event. I read Frankenstein Unbound by Brian Aldis in which a split in fabric of space and time sees both the writing of the book and the action of the book happening side by side; a book that was turned into a huge stuffed turkey of a movie by Roger Corman. Gradually - like many people - I just became a little obsessed with the people involved.

Richard Holmes evokes that night in the Villa Diodati wonderfully, but it is just one of a hundred extraordinary incidents in Percy Bysshe Shelley's life. He was sent down from Oxford for writing an atheist tract, his radical politics meant he was spied on by the government, he deserted his pregnant wife Harriet (who subsequently drowned herself in the Serpentine) and took off with Mary (Godwin as she was then) and her infuriatingly fascinating half-sister Claire Claremont, wandering around Europe in the company of the notorious Lord Byron. Shelley and Byron had a schooner built though Shelley could not swim (refusing lessons from that famous swimmer, Byron) and he drowned aged thirty in a storm in the Gulf of Spezia. His body was burned on the beach and his heart plucked from the funeral pyre to be kept by Mary ever after.

He also found time to write some rather good poetry.

Like Coleridge, Shelley could be very bad at being a man. But it says a lot about Holmes' biography that you still care about him, for all that. The account of Shelley's last days has haunted me ever since. Oh and in case you find it hard to imagine a poet like Shelley ever writing anything so radical he would be seen as a security risk, check out the opening verse from To The Men of England. . .

Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?

It goes on to say. . .

The seed ye sow another reaps;
The wealth ye find another keeps;
The robes ye weave another wears;
The arms ye forge another bears.

Sow seed, -- but let no tyrant reap;
Find wealth, -- let no imposter heap;
Weave robes, -- let not the idle wear;
Forge arms, in your defence to bear

That still sounds pretty radical to me. My guess is that were he alive, he'd still be attracting the attentions of government spies.

Hold off! unhand me, greybeard loon

This talk of Coleridge gives me a chance to sing the praises of Richard Holmes.

I don't know where my peculiar fascination with the English Romantic poets began. Certainly not at school, because I have no recollection of having studied any of them. The one exception was Coleridge, in that I must first have had The Rime of the Ancient Mariner read to me when I was eight or nine and thought it was just about the most extraordinary thing I had ever heard. I'm not sure my opinion of it has ever really changed.

But I knew nothing about Coleridge at all. Gradually as I got older I learned that he was an opium addict. I read the famous story about the 'person from Porlock' interrupting the hallucinogenic Kubla Khan. I lived in the North-East and so visited Cumbria and realised that he had a connection with the Lakes and with Wordsworth. But it was all pretty sketchy.

It wasn't until I read Richard Holmes' superb Coleridge: Early Visions in 1990 or so that I appreciated how fascinating a man he was or what an amazing life he led. Holmes is a brilliant writer. His emotional approach to his subject results in some harrumphing, How Dare He! reviews, but I have always found it really works. He brings his subjects to life. Because he clearly has such real affection for the people he writes about he makes you care about them, despite (or maybe because of) their flaws and failures. He makes Coleridge human - and that only makes the work all the more compelling.

It is a father's tale

I had an email from Mardi Dungey today in response to what I wrote yesterday about early memories of poetry in school. She was making the perfectly valid point that the English Romantic Poets did not seem very relevant to her childhood in Tasmania.

They didn't seem that relevant to a council estate in Newcastle-upon-Tyne either, it has to be said.

This issue of whether these poets still have anything to say to us, comes up time and again. But I think good art is always relevant. Poetry has an ability to catch you unawares, emotionally - regardless of when it was written. It is similar to music in this respect. It won't do it to everyone at every time, but when it does, it's startling.

I was painting the kitchen in our old house in Norfolk some years ago. It was a job I hated - painting woodwork, with its multiple coats of primer, undercoat and two coats of eggshell. To alleviate the tedium, I had the radio on. I think it was Poetry Please on Radio 4. The reader read Coleridge's The Nightingale. It was a poem I knew (I have a bit of a thing about Coleridge) and yet it had never meant anything to me, particularly.

On it went, until it reached the last section and then it hit me. I was a father myself now. I had been impatient with my own small son the day before and shouted at him. I knew too of Coleridge's damaged childhood and the troubled, depressive addict he would become in later life. I knew what a poor father (and husband) he would actually turn out to be. The hope that his son will have a happier life and a cheerier disposition (and the pain that is at the back of that wish) is heartwarming and heartbreaking simultaneously.

The first few lines have that Farewell! O Warbler! with its crazy exclamation marks and I guess these things do put people off. But get past that.

Read from line five, where he begins, My dear babe and you will hear Coleridge talking to you across the centuries, heart to heart. You'll see him standing in that midnight orchard plot, his baby son in his arms. You'll see the moonlight in those tears. If you are anything like me, you might have a few of your own by the end.

All parents have these special, diamond-bright moments with their children. How many of us would be able to set them down so well? That's Samuel Taylor Coleridge talking to you - not a Great Romantic Poet, but a flawed human being who happened to be able to write. . .

Farewell! O Warbler! till tomorrow eve,
And you, my friends! farewell, a short farewell!
We have been loitering long and pleasantly,
And now for our dear homes.That strain again!
Full fain it would delay me! My dear babe,
Who, capable of no articulate sound,
Mars all things with his imitative lisp,
How he would place his hand beside his ear,
His little hand, the small forefinger up,
And bid us listen! And I deem it wise
To make him Nature's play-mate. He knows well
The evening-star; and once, when he awoke
In most distressful mood (some inward pain
Had made up that strange thing, an infant's dream)
I hurried with him to our orchard-plot,
And he beheld the moon, and, hushed at once,
Suspends his sobs, and laughs most silently,
While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears,
Did glitter in the yellow moon-beam! Well!
It is a father's tale: But if that Heaven
Should give me life, his childhood shall grow up
Familiar with these songs, that with the night
He may associate joy. Once more, farewell,
Sweet Nightingale! once more, my friends! farewell.

By the nine gods he swore

I downloaded Bill Wyman's (Si, Si) Je Suis Un Rock Star to help my son with his French homework and to improve his vocabulary for his upcoming French trip, but there are some errors in the grammar apparently, so he tells me.

Talking of poetry - as I was yesterday - one of my first school memories (I am guessing that I must have been eight) was of reading a poem out loud as a performance to parents. Wooden sword in hand, I stood in line with the other children to recite my part of Horatius by Lord McCaulay.

That was what counted for interactive learning in my day - learning great tracts of an epic poem by heart. You could be forgiven for never having heard of it. It begins thus:

Lars Porsena of Clusium, by the Nine Gods he swore
That the great house of Tarquin should suffer wrong no more.
By the Nine Gods he swore it, and named a trysting day,
And bade his messengers ride forth,
East and West and South and North,
To summon his array.

I remember that first verse as though it were yesterday. Anyway - so it goes its windy way for verse after verse after verse, illuminated here and there by flashes of Gladiator-style violence. This bit sticks in my mind.

Stout Lartius hurled down Aunus into the stream beneath:
Herminius struck at Seius, and clove him to the teeth:
At Picus brave Horatius darted one fiery thrust;
And the proud Umbrian's golden arms clashed in the bloody dust.

Clove him to the teeth. For some reason, at the time I had imagined some kind of upward blow that had split his whole body in half up to his jaw (ending up like an old-fashioned clothes peg), rather than the downward blow McCaulay was clearly envisaging. Likewise I thought the proud Umbrian really did have golden arms (and who wouldn't be proud of that?), and they had been chopped off.

Then, whirling up his broadsword with both hands to the height,
He rushed against Horatius and smote with all his might.
With shield and blade Horatius right deftly turned the blow.
The blow, yet turned, came yet too nigh;
It missed his helm, but gashed his thigh:
The Tuscans raised a joyful cry to see the red blood flow.

He reeled, and on Herminius he leaned one breathing-space;
Then, like a wild-cat mad with wounds, sprang right at Astur's face.
Through teeth, and skull, and helmet so fierce a thrust he sped,
The good sword stood a hand-breadth out behind the Tuscan's head.

That's gotta hurt! as my son would say. Those Victorians certainly knew a thing or two about gratuitous gore-fests.

Hard marbly baas

My son's football season has come to an end and so there was no match today. At least he ended it on a high point last week, with not only a goal but a fantastic run down the wing in which he simply outran the opposition defense and drew gasps of admiration. It was poetry in motion.

And speaking of poetry (did you see what I did there?). . .

I have been enjoying the BBC4 programme, A Poet's Guide to Britain, in which Owen Sheers looks at various poems in relation to their setting, analysing the poem and talking about how it came to be written. He does this incredibly well and schools could do a lot worse than showing the programmes to their students in their entirety.

Last week he looked at a poem I must confess I did not know at all: Sylvia Plath's Wuthering Heights.

The horizons ring me like faggots,
Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.
Touched by a match, they might warm me,
And their fine lines singe
The air to orange
Before the distances they pin evaporate,
Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color.
But they only dissolve and dissolve
Like a series of promises, as I step forward.

There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.

The sheep know where they are,
Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,
Gray as the weather.
The black slots of their pupils take me in.
It is like being mailed into space,
A thin, silly message.
They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,
All wig curls and yellow teeth
And hard, marbly baas.

I come to wheel ruts, and water
Limpid as the solitudes
That flee through my fingers.
Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;
Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.
Of people and the air only
Remembers a few odd syllables.
It rehearses them moaningly:
Black stone, black stone.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright
Among all horizontals.
The grass is beating its head distractedly.
It is too delicate
For a life in such company;
Darkness terrifies it.
Now, in valleys narrow
And black as purses, the house lights
Gleam like small change.

On Raglan Road

I keep meaning to draw your attention to a couple of sites run by friends of mine. Adrian who designed my websites at Bloomsbury is cycling in India and blogging as he does so. It is fascinating. I had no idea that Adrian was such a good photographer. His pictures go well beyond the casual tourist shot. Take a look.

And speaking of photography, Judith Weik and family went to the Suffolk coast a little while after we went. I took lots of photos, but none of them came close to the beautiful picture Judith is using as the opening page of her site. It is so simple and yet very powerful. There is something very satisfying about those weightless stones and the calm sea behind.

Paul May's blog includes a lovely set of photographs of trees near his house. I wish I had thought of doing that when we lived in Norfolk. Again - very simple, but very satisfying. His musings on nature and loss (and the rhyming of leaf with grief) got me thinking and I left a comment mentioning Patrick Kavanagh's On Raglan Road, a poem set to music.

Here is Sinead O'Connor (looking particularly elfin) with an especially beautiful version. . .