click to read an article by Ernest Hilbert... and I absolutely love this picture.

Yes, it’s still pancake day, but it’s also happy birthday Uncle Wiz time, so here is a poem I wrote, a sort of mini-cento, on the ocacsion of Auden’s centenary. I honestly can;t remember which bits are mine, or that I changed, and of course like the poet I am didn’t even keep a note of what poems I could the linmes in, that I used. So it exists as a monument. Or a folly.

And because I’m not at home right now, I’ve had to find this on the internets in my previous Baroque WordPress post from 2007. There, I say it is a draft. But I can’t even remember if I worked more on it.

Therefore I offer it up here as a topical but – ahem – mutable experience.

2007: Based on Lines from Auden

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after:
no one, not even Cambridge was to blame.
He knew human folly like the back of his hand
and forgave us our folly in his own name.

Therefore we love him because his judgements are so
apposite to the dilemma in which we find ourselves;
he who from these lands of terrifying mottoes
emerged into the blinking light of 52nd St’s little hells,

where he saw and dispensed to us a homeopathic faith
in his marvellous long letters but kept none, not one word:
but no. He kept his own faith, that’s correct.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd.

All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
what was it your shadow unwittingly said?
From life to Art, it’s a painstaking adaption.
Pray for me and all writers, living or dead.

Butterflies courtesy of Amy Key.

,,,,,,

Okay, the server was down the other day but it’s back up now – it was about migrating the server of the server or something like that – it was like losing your housekeys, pacing around in the garden and realising you can’t break in anywhere… but we’re now in, with a cup of tea, and it is a new day. A new world.

The news here is of things stacking up undone, books unread… even books I want to read. They don’t seem easy enough. Even the guinea pigs aren’t easy enough, because they’ve become massively jumpy in the past couple of days and I think it’s because I hoovered. Well, you can’t not hoover, can you… Chet’s the really jumpy one, which is the really unusual thing. Wooing them back with parsley.

Wooing myself back with a box of Earl Grey, and catch-ups on Season 2 of Wallander. It’s long, you can lie on the couch in a blanket, and it washes over you in a way that is sort of Swedish, yet you can understand it… and there’s this novel feeling of liking Kenneth Branagh.

Anyway, if Lent is here, can spring be far behind? I’m hoping the above picture will prove a spur, since my ‘morning look’ is not the most beautiful of the day, generally. I have breakfasted on two actual pancakes (shopbought, last night in Sainsbury’s, on a whim) with Greek yogurt (come on, it’s breakfast), sugar and lemon. I have had a cup of tea. I have done the dishes so Mlle B can come in and make her own pancakes while I am teaching this evening. (Imagism, since you ask. possibly with some MacNeice. Possibly with something else. I’m kind of  in the mood for talking about Imagism, but I’m really not in the mood for Pound and HD.) We might have ‘Snow‘, because it is just always right.

Last night I had a dream, in which I’m in a house. It’s a big, empty house, which I’m living in even though I don’t really feel like I am. Things are missing. I can’t find my handbag anywhere – my large dark green Vivienne Westwood bowling bag, in fact, my favourite bag, is among the things that are missing, and I’m going up and down these giant staircases, wide and slightly drafty – it’s like a blown-up version of our house as a kid, I suppose, with sort of invisible furniture… anyway, then I realise the front door is open, and my green back is sitting there in the doorway looking like a sort of patient hound. It’s been like that overnight! And it’s still there! I’ve had a bath and I’m naked; there’s a slight angst about this as the bag is in the doorway but I decide to go get it and suddenly a blanket or something looms up and around me, or covers me. I get my bag. Phew. I look in it and rummage. It does seem quite empty but that’s because I took the books out, and there is my purse. Still there.

There is a moment of wondering about my make up bag, but it’s not a serious worry as it could be somewhere else, and now I have my pan cake make up I’m sure I’ll be fine.

Srsly, in dreams the house is significant, because it is where you live. Your psychic dwelling place. So the fact that it’s big, and beautiful, and I’m going up and down and all over it, is a really good sign, even if it was mainly in the shared, public bits of the house – that stands to reason, as that’s what you’re left with. And the open door (and the sense of the world beyond), and the bag being there. Surprisingly good signs at a moment when you feel (as the dream recognises) a bit small and lost and alone and exposed. I suppose I will be covered and will find my safe space eventually. One bit at a time. A bag – not even up to a small room, yet.

So let us have pancakes stacking up today as well as unread books, let us gird our loins for the forty days of Lent, which even if you aren’t a Christian, and even if you aren’t in the throes of the death of a relationship and questioning every cross word you ever spoke in the past four years, are still the hard-slogging dogged days of winter…

And the equally wonderful John McCullough has just said on Twitter that he is teaching DA Powell today. Much more life-affirming than Pound. I’m going to go get the books off the shelf and maybe even just carry them around with me. And now I must go and indeed quickly have a bath, for I have got a long day of work, and then teaching.

Beautiful look. Poetry, unwieldy green handbags, pancakes, and make up. And tonight, maybe a proper night’s sleep.

World. It is crazier and more of it than we think, incorrigibly plural.

My route into town today takes me right past the hospital where MacNeice died. I’ll look for a butterfly.

Editing in: From DA Powell, Cocktails: ‘We need a little glamour and glamour arrives: …’ He means it ironically of course, but equally of course he means there is something real that we need.

How many days since my last post? Well, it’s a crazy time. In fact, it’s a time of Death & Rebirth, or I suppose Transition, which is how I got the idea for the workshops in the first place. We’re hovering on the cusp of a brink of a precipice of a new life, which is always as unimaginable (and frankly as undesirable) as the afterlife, until you’re in it. The universe gives you the shove.

In my current case, it’s a relationship break-up (or ‘changing relationship’). But everyone is in transition right now, because the world is. It’s all around us, in figurative terms, and we’re going to be staring in the face of the death of this-or-that for some time. The economy, America, the planet, the NHS, our jobs, the book, to name a few I’ve seen mentioned… I guess I’ve been leading up to this idea for ages, thinking back to my last two New Years posts: I started with ‘rolling with the punches‘ and an idea of 0s and 1s, then went on to ‘taking the bull by the horns’. This year was a bit more about valuing what you’ve got (not realising as I wrote exactly what was about to give), and now it’s the final weeks of winter and the rest of the year IS going to happen.

So how do we do it?

So I do still want you to sign up for my poetry workshops in March – and beyond – see the webpage I made, a whole programme of Saturday workshops. Lots of visuals, lots of different takes on things, lots of idea-generating, lots of writing.

Meanwhile, yesterday morning a friend sent me this poem by Samuel Beckett. It’s like a tiny jewel, tightly constructed of rhymes, assonance and homophones, so that it can’t be translated.

en face
le pire
jusqu’a ce
qu’il fasse rire

Roughly, though: We face/ the worst/ until/what will make us laugh.

How’s this for two linked poetry workshops. They’ll suit any level of writer, at any stage of your writing practice.

It’s the end of winter. Spring is coming. Easter is coming. It’s been a long cold winter (a phrase that comes into my head with a tune, which I belatedly realise is the tune whose words are normally, ‘It’s gonna be a cold, lonely summer…’) – we have experienced blackness, and for now we are still in the cold. But what hppens when you reach the limits of what you can imagine? What’s past that door?

On Saturday March 3rd, a workshop from 11-4.30 on Death. We look at different poems and symbolism around death, and how it manifests itself in modern daily life. Is the end of winter a death? Is the end of the economy a death? What about ghosts? What about depression? What about the slush that’s still on the pavement, as I write this? Can death be funny? Poets have been asking all these questions for as long as there’s been poetry. Reading, discussing, and a visual ideas slideshow like I did at Christmas. Writing, sharing, discussing.

'There must be more to life than this, Henry'

Then on Saturday March 31st, a workshop from 11-4.30 on Rebirth. We look at poems and pictures and shake off the slush to look around us at the shoots of the future springing up around us – the rebirth that can only be understood through the death of what went before? The beginning of a glorious summer? Green shoots of ambition? Babies?  New jobs? Spring weddings? What about dreams? What about the new beginning you never wanted? What IS rebirth, how can we experience it, grasp it, write it? We’ll write and read and talk, look at another slideshow, and probably eat some chocolate eggs…

'But he who kisses the joy as it flies/ lives in eternity's sun rise...'

And I promise you will go home with new ideas and some poems in your notebook.

And because of the linked nature of these two workshops, I’m thinking of a way of incorporating that link into the sessions, so that students can explore the link in the work we generate. Maybe in the form of homework in between, or even a little website or a private blog… To be confirmed!

And how many of them have I managed to rearrange today?

So far, very few.

You don’t even need to rearrange them very much, as this short radio play by Samuel Beckett shows. I was reminded of it this morning when the always percipient Simon Barraclough invoked, on Facebook, the line:

white world, bitter cold, ghastly scene, old men, great trouble…

Well, great trouble is right. It being Beckett, and as Hugh Kenner reminds us:

Their great trouble is that they are each of them alone; out of all his intimate sense of his own identity, which no one can ever share, comes Bolton’s bitter ‘Please!’ across the gulf…

Well, we’ve all been there. Is this the truer the older we get, until we finally reach old age proper and are incapable of speaking to anyone at all…? Is that what all these misanthropic male modernists are telling us? Or can we just stay normal?

And a cat would be nice…

But for now, with the black and white world left outside – don’t be fooled by the title, I got no further than the bitter cold balcony today – it’s back to work. I’ll just start slowly, and rearrange a few at a time…

I have been given a present! And it’s a sign. Claire Trévien found this image of my long-lost sister of the spirit while doing her fascinating PhD researches on the notion of spectacle in the print culture of the French Revolution.

Well, I’m proud that the Baroqueness is such an integral part of that research. As you all know, we here in Baroque Mansions like to mix our metaphors, iconography, genres, signifiers, and even eras whenever possible – while keeping everything perfectly straight, of course. In fact, look. What the poor donkey is running over is not grass, but water. For my döppelganger is the Nymph of the Thames, using ‘methods then unknown’ to save the English Admiral from imminent danger. With a galleon on her head, of course. And her donkey! Even a poor beast had to be able to perform multi-tasking miracles in the French Revolution, apparently – a spectacle only too familiar here in the Old Manse of Baroque. God knows there are enough cannon balls flying at the moment to sink a galleon.

This year will be a Baroque Revolution indeed. There are changes afoot, what with the freelance change, and the Aunt change, and some other changes too, not written about here… and in September Mlle B will go off to Uni and that will be it. The Revolution will be in place. After 23 solid years as the mum, Ms B will be starting the world again with her fortune to discover, and just when I feel like I could do with a bit of a rest. It may be eight months away, but it’s only just beginning to come clear what the implications are – that it will be a whole new life here, or ‘life’; a blank thing with inescapable new demands, and indeed neglects, a bawling infant republic of one, tyrant-and-peasant-headed; and that the only certainty of life is that that’s not grass but water under your feet.

Well, perhaps my little donkey will help me along. Maybe even with ‘methods yet unknown’. In times like these it has to be good to have the Nymph of the Thames on your side.

You gotta love this. This is Picasso, in 1949 – a year of the Ox. (Picasso himself was born in the Year of the Snake, I looked it up; seems odd, as he was so fascinated with bulls and the Minotaur all his life.)

I missed the Chinese New Year earlier this week – or, rather, last week – and with all the talk of Dragons I thought maybe best to keep my head below the parapet on that one anyway. But I’m now told by trusty reader Simon Gladdish that:

According to my Chinese Astrology bible, ‘In China, dragons are associated with strength, health, harmony and good luck; they are placed above doors or on the tops of roofs to banish demons and evil spirits.’

This sounds a lot more like it, and I will be endeavouring to acquire some suitable Chinese dragon-spirit very soon. In the meantime, I will make do with a Lego one we have hanging around here.

I think my picture of Picasso looks a bit dragonish, frankly.

You  might like to know that, while googling the above picture (easier than the whole faff, you know), I found this quote on a blog (it’s an entire post):

I really shouldn’t be in tears at 3am every other night because of a fucking green lego dragon. But maybe that’s sharing too much.

Not sure what you think, but I wonder if she isn’t sharing enough? I feel the pain, whatever it’s about. Lego does have a way of taking over the place.

Topically, there’s a big article in yesterday’s Observer about Picasso – or, more specifically, about the big exhibition of his work at the Tate in 1960. I found it hard to buy the assertion, repeated a few times near the beginning, that that was the moment Britain learned to love modern art, or  ‘Modernism’; aside from the fact that Britain patently doesn’t love Modernism (and is Picasso a Modernist, per se?), I spent much of the eighties listening to my then-father-in-law guffawing, ‘Sure, Picasso’s a great artist. A great con artist!‘ Har har har. But once you get past all that, the description of preparations for the event is gripping – a time capsule. And what an event, most of the old Tate stripped bare for the great man’s work, the excitement – in a day when art books and magazines had black-&-white plates – and the hard work by Roland Penrose to make it all happen. And there’s this  bagatelle:

Perhaps for the first time, “colour supplement” writers were dispatched to the show’s opening, rather than just art critics. Olga Franklin in the Mail did not know what to make of it all. Watching the pictures being hung, she struggled in particular with a painting of Lee Miller, the photographer (and wife of Roland Penrose), from Picasso’s pink period. “What did it mean?” she wondered of Mrs Penrose, who was standing nearby. Mrs Penrose replied curtly that the painting was “wasted on her because she was clearly ‘the nervous type’. ‘You don’t really dig all this, do you?’” she said.

The link is Hockney, of course, for whose Bigger Picture there are already 24-hour crowds and no tickets, and one strangely moving element in the article is the descriptions of both Hockney and Hodgkin going back again and again to see the Picassos. Hockney went eight times.

I would LOVE to go see the Hockneys. I love him. And I badly need a reminder that the sunny, happy, outdoor, ongoing world, slow, serene, full of colour, is still out there somewhere. Not full of dragons. I need a ticket to that.

Ah, Jimmy Durante. One of the greats. He left school after 8th grade to play jazz with his cousin – also called Jimmy Durante – and went on to become a vaudeville & radio star by the 1920′s, known as ‘Ragtime Jimmy’. (Why don’t we call people interesting things like this any more? It’s straight out of Damon Runyon and you’ve got to love it.)

Well, he did make someone happy. For many years his signature sign-off – both on the radio and on his TV show in the 50s – was, ‘Goodnight Mrs Calabash – wherever you are.’ No one knew why he said this, and theories abounded. But in fact, Mrs Calabash was his pet name for his wife, Jeanne. She died in 1943, and he never finished a show without saying good night to her.

So, today is the anniversary of Jimmy Durante’s death 32 years ago , and as good an opportunity as any to prove I’ve always had this soft spot for the Schnozzola.

We look everywhere for the meaning of life. Sometimes it’s right in front of our nose. This (more or less) weekly series brings you the meaning of life in an easy, bite-sized nugget, every Sunday (more or less) (recently, less).

Dredged up from the Creek: Deptford is not kind to writers.

Slowly, slowly trying to creak into gear this slow month of January. Either I’m forgetting, or it’s been worse than usual this time. Busy, in a way – I’ve been out seven nights in the past two weeks, if you count teaching (which I do; there’s the pub after, after all) – and it’s all for poetry. Everyone else feels a little scarce at the moment, maybe just worrying themselves sick or trying to do their tax returns… there’s a sort of gap at the centre of this month, if you ask me.

But nothing stays the same forever. As I said for New Years, something’s gotta give! Roll on February.

The days are getting longer, that’s one thing.

I did have a brief reunion the other with my wonderful Uncle Mike, last seen by me when my cousin Morgan was (I think) in a sailor suit, and he’s now a 34-year-old rock journalist; and Uncle Mike’s wife of many years, whom I’d never even met but now love. It was beyond wonderful! Honestly. Just the best. We could have done with more than two hours, frankly.

I was turned down for a job the other day, a freelance blogging job I thought I was really in with a good shot at… Excelsior.

The poetry news is all good: and the other night I went to the launch of the latest crop of Rack Press pamphlets. Martina Evans, Denise Saul, Michele Roberts and Dan Wyke all read poems to a packed room in Bloomsbury, blowing away some cobwebs in the process. Wonderful stuff. Power to Rack Press as it continues to publish distinctive, literary, flavourful poetry in hard times, in its beautiful format.

Denise Saul’s reading impressed me hugely: lyrical, fluent, deceptively simple, narrative, dreamlike and full of colour. Martina Evans mined the story of her education in Catholic Ireland, with a title – ‘Oh Bart!” – taken from The Simpsons… Michele Roberts read beautifully, poems studded with French, observations of street life, and a wonderful overheard-on-the-train poem about a woman talking on the phone. Dan got the laugh of the evening with the following lines from his ‘Days of March’ – a sequence of small lyrical moments strung together by the act of writing them:

After sex last night I thought, ‘Christ, why am I
so hard on myself? There’s only this life;
go and buy James Tate’s Collected Poems
and stop waiting for the price to go down.’

On Monday night I read at the Troubadour in Earl’s Court, and that was a great reading too. The line-up included Liz Berry, who just gets better and better, plus Tamar Yoseloff, with whom I’ve read so many times this year; plus Karen McCarthy Woolf, and Dante Micheaux, whose book I felt compelled to buy; and Jonathan Davidson, who was new to me, as well as Edward Mackay, whose work I knew, but I hadn’t heard him read a set before.

The Scottish Poetry Library has a fabulous and spandy  new website. It is impressive: very well thought-through, beautiful in look and feel and easy to navigate. Possibly a little arch in its headings, but easy to distinguish the levels and use the site. And it’s deceptively packed with poetry and information and STUFF. Well done SPL!

I missed a reading last night that I wanted to go to, but I was too tired, and also getting a little worried about spending any more money… the ultimate act of rebellion! Staying home. Instead, curled up with a DVD from my Christmas Almodovar box set, ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This?’ a brilliant dark farce about a woman living with her awful family in a soulless block of flats overlooking the motorway in Madrid.

In this clip, Grandmother’s helping the kid with his homework in a mainly illiterate family: who’s a realist and who’s a romantic? Ibsen – ‘romantic’. Lord Byron – ‘He’s a realist’. Goethe? ‘Realist.’ Balzac – ”Romantic. It’s easy!’

I should have been getting my accounts in order.

Or doing some of the poetry tutorials that are backed up.

Or writing some of the stuff I have to write.

Or working up some of the many projects in mind.

Or applying for a job.

I have been working on a poem, but that doesn;t get me anywhere and anyway it’s called ‘Austerity Party’. Maybe a sequence for the Jubilee…?

Today Occupy London is marching.

And I’ve sent an email protesting against a weird ruling that means the BBC has to pay Murdoch to get its programmes shown on BSkyB – not the other way round. Do it – and don’t forget to edit your message.

I did think of Holocaust Memorial Day yesterday; people were posting poems up on Facebook and so on, and it was of course Shabbat in my neighbourhood (and still is) but I somehow lacked the impetus. By the same token, also this week missed Chinese New Year and Burns Night. You just can’t be everywhere, and sometimes it’s all you can do to be anywhere.

My Hilary Mantel fixation continues: I’m whizzing through Beyond Black, her pitiless novel about a depressed medium, her dourly caustic personal assistant, and her evil spirit guide, set in a relentless suburban dystopia. It’s very funny and just gorgeously written.

And now it’s 2pm – the paperwork and scary letters are strewn about in piles, the sun is shining, no one expecting me till late on Monday afternoon, and it is time to get off the Baroque butt and make something happen.

Just go crazy in your own time…

…

Moriarty: ‘I owe you, Sherlock’.

Cut to close-up of badly-cast actor’s babyface.

Then, just in case we didn’t catch that: ‘I. Owe. You.’

A minute later, just in case we didn’t catch that, Sherlock picks up an apple with which Moriarty has been fiddling. Knife plunged into middle of apple. Carved into apple: ‘I O U’

Ahhhh… now we get it.

The first sign that the drama’s not working is that everyone has to scream at each other. (I call this ‘the Truly Madly Deeply moment’, as per Juliet Stevenson’s snot-laden grief-porn crying scene in that movie.) It’s a sign that the filmmaker has nothing really to show us. It’s drama imitating reality TV.

In Episide 3 of Series 2, the trivial-looking lunatic Moriarty and Sherlock both spend a lot of time screaming at people, including each other. Perhaps it’s because Moriarty’s supposed to be a psychopath (a real one, not like sexily dysfunctional Sherlock): but merely being a fruitcake isn’t enough to make him interesting. The screaming certainly isn’t making him look like a criminal mastermind. And if it’s intended to make us, the viewers, see that this episode is extra-specially tense – well, it doesn’t feel tense. It just feels a bit hysterical.

The second sign is this plodding need to say everything twice. Or three times. To explain the action as it goes along. There are a few possible reasons to use this device:

• You don’t think the audience is capable of keeping up
• You’ve forgotten that you’re in charge of making sure they keep up
• You’re not quite keeping up, and like to remind yourself as you write
• You can’t think of anything else to make them say

The third sign is that the drama introduces its meta-issues through the medium of the characters talking about them. Declaring the secret frissons is in my book the most common, and the worst, way to jump the shark. Simultaneously mythmaking, and discussing your mythmaking.

I began to worry in what might even have been the first episide of Series 1. The ploddingly dull policewoman describes Holme’s (we can still call him Holmes?) character, calling him psychopathic (or something), and predicting to Watson that he’ll go beyond his petty fixation on solving crimes and commit one himself. This is very boring and unearned. I remembered it because, in this last episode, this same pedestrian character says to Watson: ‘See? I told you he was going to commit a crime’. This is of course a sign that she’s been duped by Moriarty’s evil plan to make everyone think Sherlock has committed the crime – and I admit that it’s quite nice and clever to refer back to something from over a year ago. If her delivery hadn’t been so wooden we might have taken it for the bit of dramatic devil’s-advocacy it seems meant to be, but it just reminded me how lame that dialogue was last time.

And I seem to recall that in Episode 1 the policewoman also categorised Sherlock as ‘autistic’. Why spell it out? Why not just depict it, use a sort of ASD model for the character (a very interesting twist) and then leave us to draw our conclusions or not? Trendy sanctimonious label. Plod plod.

Jumping the shark in Series 2:

• The deerstalker. One gag, he grabbed out of the costumes in a theatre & wore it for five minutes? Fine. Several conversations in each episode? It’s too central to the iconography. To let Watson tell Holmes, ‘It’s just become a Sherlock Holmes hat now’? Appallingly bad.
• Watson’s worried people will think he’s gay. One joke: fine. Conversations in each episode? The boring girlfriend in Episode whatever-it-was accusing him of being a ‘good boyfriend – to Sherlock’? No.
• Everyone talking the whole time about Sherlock’s personality. First, we already had this when the policewoman said he was autistic. More problematically, it strips the jokes that are any good of their power: as in the bit of business where he gets given thank-you presents he doesn’t want, and Holmes has to tell him to say thank you. This comes back later when Polly the lab woman tells him he could at least say thank you, and he says it – but, brilliantly, he says it as if he actually has no idea why. Once we’ve seen this we really have no need to see Mrs Hudson blustering on about ‘what he’s like’.

I don’t know what ‘Renegade 3′ was, but this quote from the page I linked to above did resonate in the current context:

“Renegade 3 didn’t so much jump the shark as repeatedly jump up and down on the shark, whilst screaming, ‘Look at me, I’m Mr. Jumpy-Sharko.’”
— Stuart Ashen, Terrible Old Games You’ve Probably Never Heard Of, “Renegade 3: The Final Chapter”

A final word about Moriarty. That punky thing, I’m sure he’s meant to be a bit on the edge, a bit irrational, more evil because out of control – but it isn’t working, guys. He reminds me more than anyone of the troublesome-kid-gone-bad, Syndrome, in The Incredibles. And then he’s a nutcase. In the final screaming scene on the rooftop – where they’re both just screaming in each other’s faces like the least effective criminal and sleuth in the world – Moriarty screams into Holme’s face that he’s a ‘doofus’. Doofus! CLANK.

It’s even a word that Syndrome would use.But The Incredibles is sixties pastiche, so that would be fine.