On the 20th of this month I got up and went downstairs and there were leaves across the kitchen floor, as if blown in on a gust of wind. They are still there. Autumn always comforts me.
The same day, blowing in on another wind, there came two different leaves in the form of packages for me. One of them was a volume called Japanese Love Poems, edited by Jean Bennett and illustrated by Scott Cumming. Poetry is notoriously difficult to translate, especially between two such dissimilar languages as Japanese and English, but I find the translations in this volume to be very fresh and evocative.
The poems date as far back as the third century (possibly further), which does tend to make me wonder for how long, exactly, humans have had the same emotions? Here's an undated Japanese lyric from the selection:
Two things cannot alter, Since Time was, nor to-day: The flowing of water; And Love's strange, sweet way.
Reminds me of another old lyric:
Of course, these are things I know nothing about, but I am anthropologically and aesthetically interested.
It's a very beautiful book, in content and as an object, the illustrations forming a significant part of its charm.
The book was not coming to me for the first time, actually. I had sent it (after my initial purchase) to the illustrious illustrator, and he very kindly wrote an inscription and sent it back.
The second package I received that day was a Japanese purse - the purse equivalent of this:
Today I received another package in the post. It was this book:
I've read and appreciated Alan Watts before, so am looking forward to reading this. I am actually, very, very slowly, working on my own translation of the Tao Te Ching and this looks as if it will help me.
By the way, talking of the "flowing of water", here's a little extract from Alan Watts' book:
... Tao is the flowing course of nature and the universe; li is its principle of order which, following Needham, we can best translate as "organic pattern"; and water is its eloquent metaphor.
Earlier today, I was going to whimsically post Morrissey's Interesting Drug on my blog and say that that was what my day today would be, except without the drugs (and I don't mean it would be interesting), but I found what I had suspected might be the case, anyway. The official video for the song has no sound on YouTube:
Oh well, it was a silly idea, anyway, I thought to myself, and forgot all about it. I should probably explain a little background here, though. I'd noticed before that the same thing has happened to a great number of the official Morrissey music videos on YouTube recently. I wondered if this had anything to do with the recent leak of Morrissey's new album on the Internet. It occurred to me that Morrissey himself might have got pissed off with people having free access to his creative output. However, I noticed this time that the only videos affected in this way seem to be the Warner Music Group videos, and Morrissey has changed label a number of times since then.
Anyway, I've been meaning to look up some Dorothy Parker poems, and so I took myself along to Poemhunter. I noticed that the homepage of the site lists the "top 500 poets"... of what? It's typical these days to find that people don't define their parameters. It's really quite annoying. Presumably this means the five hundred poets who are most searched for on Poemhunter. And this, presumably, is a selection already narrowed down to include only those poets who have poems reproduced on Poemhunter in the first place. Anyway, this idea intrigued me for some reason. Probably far too trustingly, I took the poets to be arranged in order of Internet popularity. Is Shel Silverstein really the sixth most popular poet on the Internet? If he were that would be fine by me, but... it is a little unexpected. If you click for the full list, however, suddenly he becomes the ninth most popular and I begin to believe that I see the usual Internet unreliability creeping in here. Anyway, I became interested in who would be the very last poets on the list. At 500 we have - who would have thought it? - Abraham Lincoln. After a cursory perusal I pronounce one of the poems not bad, and one fairly poor.
There must be plenty of poets who are not on Poemhunter at all, though, I thought. I put 'Yang Lian', a favourite poet of mine, into the search window, and there were no matches found. Then I thought, I bet Wendy Cope won't have any poems on here, either - she'd object to her poems being reproduced without permission. This search, however, did produce two matches, neither of them actually authored by Wendy Cope. One was called 'Wendy Cope's Bank Statement (in answer to her article in the Gaurdian Weekly)' (I notice someone has transcribed the title incorrectly, with the misspelt "Gaurdian"). I presume, judging by the sentiments expressed in that poem, that the poet, John Thorkild Ellison, will not mind me reproducing it here without permission. So here it is:
Wendy Cope's Bank Statement (in answer to her article in the Gaurdian Weekly)
Wendy Cope You have no hope If you think the Muse will make you rich,
You may get fame And make your name, But the little lady is a bitch!
Whate'er you do When writing verse Won't earn you any money,
The joke's on you And what is worse It isn't very funny.
The first thing that strikes me is the third line. I don't think Wendy Cope has ever said that she expects to become rich by writing poetry. No one expects to become rich by writing poetry. No one. Is it wrong to expect to be able to make a living by it, though? Well, apparently it is. Okay. In that case, is it wrong to want any earnings that might proceed from writing poetry, as a supplement to a struggling writer's income, not to be compromised by people ripping that poetry off? According to the tone of the above poem, yes, apparently that's wrong, too.
Just about everyone I've heard express an opinion on the subject (including a friend of mine who is a poet) seems to think that Wendy Cope is wrong, or misguided, or they are "disappointed" in her tone. I must say, at least judging from the Guardian article, I find what she says eminently reasonable. No one would be "disappointed" in a greengrocer for not wanting to give away all his plums to anyone who felt like taking them. Why are they disappointed with Wendy Cope?
Now, there's nothing wrong with giving plums away, don't get me wrong. However, generosity consists in giving things yourself, not in expecting others to give them. Being humble is not being humble if you expect everyone else - to the point of coerciveness - to be humble. Then it becomes self-righteousness.
Just to make myself slightly clearer - if any content on this blog (for instance) is in breach of copyright laws, and someone wanted me to pay up or take the content down, I would happily accept that ultimatum. I wouldn't just think they were a fascist for wanting me to pay for what I had taken, as so many these days seem to.
I do have mixed feelings about this, because the Internet and the digital age are changing the way that information is treated, and I enjoy free content too. However, I support the idea of creative people trying to make a living from their creativity, and not having the means of making a living snatched from them.
It's still a very grey area for me, as, perhaps, it is for many people. For instance, not long ago I discovered that a story of mine was available to read on the Internet without any permission from me. I was a bit miffed, especially as I was offering that story, with what I thought a reasonable amount of exclusivity, to a book publisher, for a collection. I'm not going to say what the story is. I sighed, but I have taken no action. Perhaps I should. I don't actually know.
A few days ago, Momus wrote an entry in his blog entitled The Death of Magazines, about the way the Internet seems to have hamstrung the circulation of printed periodicals. I left a few half-ranting and possibly half-baked comments there, from the starting point of Morrissey's new album being leaked on the Internet:
I'm actually officially a freelance writer. That's even how the tax office knows me. However, I kind of wonder if there's any future for people whose talent is to create information in some way. The advantage of media such as text and music is that you can record them and distribute copies (you don't need the original). However, with information now so easily copied, leaked and spread, who will go on paying creators to create?
Morrissey's album was recently leaked on the internet. I didn't download it, because I don't do that (released today, so I should hear it soon), but here's a comment from the Morrissey Solo website about the poor chart position of the single:
"too many download it for free I can't say anything really because I downloaded it for free, too. Still, that's the reason it's not a bigger hit. It's too bad cus it's a good song. How's it doing in France? LOL."
It might be hard to feel sorry for a millionaire like Morrissey, but there are still plenty of artists struggling to survive. Will the new generation of free-downloaders simply say "too bad LOL" as they strip our corpses?
It would be FINE if getting things for free applied to everything, but it's only information based work that is affected in this way. If you're a musician you still have to buy food and pay your rent (you can't download these for free).
I wrote to the poet friend I mentioned briefly above in an e-mail that probably said something like, "I hate life and I want to die. The world is ending and there's no future for anyone whose only skill is to create 'information'."
He wrote back reassuring me that though the world may indeed be ending, it is still quite possible to make a living by producing 'information'.
I wrote back:
Ah well, I'm reassured.
I don't care about the end of the world, as long as there's still a future for me as a writer.
Yesterday, after an internal struggle regarding my financial situation, I ordered a CD copy of Morrissey's Years of Refusal from Amazon. I expect it will arrive tomorrow, if the sorting office staff are not too boozed up. I noticed that the CD is to be shipped from Jersey. I heard recently that a tax loophole has meant that many traders are shipping from Jersey in order to undercut the market, and a lot of independent record shops can't compete with this.
Just before Christmas last year, I managed to make a trip to London and met up with a friend whose acquaintance I made in Devon. Before I left he said, amongst other things, that he always enjoys catching up with Devon friends because there's that whole 'Devon thing' that the world at large doesn't know about, believing, as they do, the Devon accent to consist in farmers chewing straws, saying, "Ooh, arr!"
This reminds me of another little fragment of conversation that must have occurred at a party in London when, many members of the Devon posse all happening to be there at once, some urbanite or other remarked that there was a considerable and largely unobserved Devon diaspora in the UK, and possibly in the world at large.
Google 'Devon diaspora', and the most enlightening thing you'll find is probably this, which is as it should be. Nonchalance, Socratic irony, leaving-be-ness, general inability to take oneself seriously, animal-tracking and invisible omnipresence are some of our main weapons in the conspiracy to drink more cider in haystacks.
Famous things from Devon? There are few. Cream teas. Agatha Christie. Sir Francis Drake. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tarka the Otter. Part of the shared life of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Cider. (Not The Wurzels, who are, I believe, mainly from Somerset.) Chris Martin. The geological Devonian era. Sir Walter Raleigh. Lorna Doone. Donald Sinden. The United States of America. Johnny Kingdom.
That might, in fact, be exhaustive.
Good things that are not (yet) famous from Devon, there are perhaps somewhat more. Of these, I now present the poetry of Mark McGuinness, who, if he resembles anything at all on the list above, perhaps most closely resembles Donald Sinden Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
I've just been thinking about someone I haven't thought about in a very long time.
I hope he's well.
I remember a conversation. I don't even remember the setting. Maybe his house, in Barnstaple. We were students, of that generation where some of the blokes probably even thought of themselves as feminists, and wanted to be known as Loretta.
We were discussing the various pros and cons of being male and female. Women, of course, seem to have all the difficult things (was the conclusion we were coming towards), childbrith, menstruation, possibly the lion's share of sexual abuse, and so on. And then there was the question of what problems men have (of course there are some), baldness was almost definitely mentioned. And then someone said, and I paraphrase, hoping to regain the simplicity of the remark, "Of course, the biggest tragedy in a man's life is that he's not a woman."
Someone told me that Algernon Blackwood made TV appearances in which he read his tales, back in the early days of television, and that he had a very wrinkled face, like Auden. Naturally, I wondered if anyone might have put these on Youtube. The closest thing (the only thing, in fact) I found was this, a clip using excerpts from Blackwood's story The Wendigo. Now, one thing that fascinates me very much is the resonance contained in certain words whose meaning you do not know. I don't know where I first came across the word 'Wendigo', but it has always seemed wonderfully evocative to me. I haven't even read Blackwood's story, but I want to, just because of the title. Now, I think I had an idea, early on, that the Wendigo was something a little bit like Sasquatch, but the very mystery of the word excited me, and I didn't want to define it too closely. In some ways it has been enough for me just to have the word and the mystery, and to know that Algernon Blackwood has written a story about it, and, oh yes, not to forget, to see this picture:
Now, whatever else I write about on this blog, this is the kind of thing I really feel at home with. Monsters. Not just any monsters, either, but monsters who stride through the snowy night with their antlers in the Milky Way and a paw full of stars. Eerie, mysterious monsters. Monsters of the blackest eldritch midnight. In fact, I don't know why I don't write more about this kind of thing - the kind of thing that whispers to us from the shadows. Well, of course, I do, but not much on this blog. Perhaps I like to keep such things to myself and those who have the gumption actually to buy my books. Even then, I don't indulge as much as I might like to, because I've told myself time and time again to go easy on the H.P. (Lovecraft) sauce. But it's been so long since I spent some time with those shapeless monsters in the cellar I grew up with, the monsters known to me at the time as Gooligars - they were not so terribly different, I believe, to Lovecraft's Nightgaunts, from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath - it's been so long, I say, that I'm really getting quite nostalgic and homesick. I want to feel the breath of the eerie once more. But when? When will I feel it again? We shall wait, and we shall see.
Let's get back, for the moment, to the Wendigo. Another association I have with the word is a poem by Ogden Nash, which, like Blackwood's story, is simply called, 'The Wendigo'. You'll find it at the bottom of this link, here. I do urge you to read it. Nash is known as a humorist, and, being a fan of preposterous rhymes, I know that he can trot a few out when he wants (check out the title of this blog post, for a start). However, I also find this poem eerie with the same eeriness inherent in its whispering way in the word 'Wendigo' itself. It's that nursery rhyme effect, perhaps, bringing back memories of a child's fear of the dark. There's also that almost onomatopoeic quality in his use of words, too:
You loll, It contemplates, It lollops. The rest is merely gulps and gollops.
Lovecraft knew how to use words in this way, and the names of his creations are masterpieces of this sort of almost-onomatopoeic suggestion: Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Cthulhu. Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!
I looked up - for the first time - some of the details of the Wendigo myth on Wikipedia just now, and am sorry to say that the actual myth Blackwood's story, Nash's poem and the above illustration are based on was a little too corporeal for my taste, dealing as it does with cannibalism and a kind of walking-corpse spirit. I was disappointed. Still, perhaps if I dig deeper I will discover more details that furnish me with the frisson of the sinister I seek. In any case, I did notice something strange. It was this line:
At the same time, Wendigos were embodiments of gluttony, greed, and excess; never satisfied after killing and consuming one person, they were constantly searching for new victims.
I don't know why it is, but this is really tickling my deja vu-bone. I've encountered or been thinking about something with this theme recently, I'm sure, and I can't quite remember what it is. Perhaps I should sleep on it. Who knows what dreams I shall have, or what dreams shall have me.
Back in February, I was invited to take part in a project being carried out at the Southbank Centre. This project was the digitisation of the Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre. I quote from a memorandum from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport:
The Poetry Library magazines archive is a free access site to a full text digital library of 20th and 21st century English poetry magazines from the Poetry Library Collection housed in the South Bank Centre. The archive is part of an ongoing digitisation project at the Library funded by Arts Council England.
My own part in this project was very small. Through the kind intervention and good offices of Mami McGuinness, I was given the opportunity to translate some of the poetry of Tawara Machi into English for the Spring 2006 issue of Magma Magazine. Tawara Machi is a contemporary Japanese poet working in the tanka form - the thirty-one syllable poem from which the seventeen-syallable haiku is derived. I was not really a fan of Tawara Machi when the opportunity was first presented to me, though I knew of her work. However, once I had accepted the task, and sat down with the poems in order to translate them, I discovered what a knack she has for conjuring up subtle and sometimes strong emotions with great precision and economy.
Being called upon by the Soutbank Centre after my translations of Tawara Machi appeared in Magma was something of a surprise. More than anything, it made me feel the thoroughness of the archiving taking place. I believe that Kew Gardens has a kind of domesday seed bank project. This felt like something similar for poetry. They had not even missed me out, that's how thorough they were, though I suppose I should only be modest on my account and not on Tawara Machi-san's account. Anyway, it did feel a little bit as though I was the aye-aye, or, no, perhaps more appropriately, the silverfish, that Noah had not neglected to round up for the Ark.
I went along to the Southbank Centre on the 3rd of May, as instructed, and waited in the lobby until I was called up. I was met there by my friend, who had edited the issue of Magma being recorded, and taken to a room where I was stood in front of a microphone and a reading lectern. I asked for some water, wet my throat, and read the translations in question. I realised that I had not given all the necessary information in my introduction, and we did a second take. The whole thing was over in about ten minutes or so, and then I donned my coat again, and left.
The results are now available on the Internet. You can hear me reading the translations from Salad Anniversaryhere, and those from Pooh's Nosehere. The text may be read here and here.
It's strange how some poems come back to you seemingly unbidden. Recently Stevie Smith's 'Not Waving But Drowning' has been calling to me to be re-read. It's a very terse verse, but there's some power in it that stops it from becoming the 'old saying' that it seems always on the verge of being. Perhaps there are people out there who are familiar with the title, as a sort of idiom, but who have never read the actual poem. It's one of those. I'm never too sure about global relevance, those kind of things, but if such is needed, perhaps I could say that, even those who are only waving now will probably soon be drowning, as the 'quiet desperation' of the 'civilised world' collapses and gives way to simple desperation:
Not Waving But Drowning
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
WIDGETIZE