Cambridge and Clare Hall

King's College Chapel, from across the Cam.

Since last writing, I've come to Britain and to Cambridge--specifically, to Cambridge's Clare Hall, where I will be a Resident Fellow until June.  Clare Hall, founded in the 1960s, has a program of accepting fellows from the world over, scholars or artists who work on a special project during their residency. In my case, I'll be completing a new translation of Rilke's Duineser Elegien. It's a project I've contemplated a long time, never up to now finding the circumstances or occasion to begin it. The reason I didn't simply propose writing new poems or fiction is that I'm not able to guarantee in advance that I will produce new writing of my own.  Sometimes a period of three or four months can pass during which I don't feel compelled to write.  And I never force myself to do it if I don't feel that drive to get something down. A sufficient number of dutiful, uninspired works already exist, and there's no point in adding others.

I was met at Heathrow by James Byrne and Sandeep Parmar, who drove me directly to Cambridge.  Sandeep is also a Resident Fellow at Clare Hall, doing research at the Newnham College archive for a biography of the British Modernist poet Hope Mirrlees.  Last year an edition of Mirrlees's poetry that Sandeep edited was published by Carcanet, so the biography is the next logical step. Also, her first book of poems will appear in March with Shearsman publishers. James has been named the Poet in Residence at Clare Hall and meanwhile is teaching poetry workshops in London, while continuing to edit The Wolf and write his own poetry.  Not knowing anyone else in Cambridge, I was glad that they would both be here during my residency, and in fact we see each other every week.  I had been in correspondence with Professor D K Midgely of the German Faculty before arriving, and had lunch with him last month at St Johns College, where he is a Fellow. A bonus of being here is that you have the opportunity of seeing the various colleges at considerably less than the usual tourist speed.  Cambridge amounts to a trove of brilliant architecture from several centuries, a sort of library of architectural styles from the 14th right up to the 21st century.  Above, I've added a picture of King's College Chapel, which is the signature structure representing the University.   Several of the older colleges have "backs" that go down to the River Cam, crossed by bridges also of architectural interest. 

I've been down to London once, attending the TS Eliot Prize festivities.  The reading for it was held at Royal Festival Hall on January 16, with the eight shortlisted candidates each appearing for ten minutes.  Sean O'Brien was the only poet I knew personally, though I knew the work of most of the others.  They read to an audience of 2000, a figure that will have to be swept under the carpet by commentators who continue to insist that "no one cares about poetry."  We can assume that for every person attending there are fifteen or twenty who wish they could have attended. Many poets were among the audience. I sat with Mimi Khalvati, who has appeared in this blog before now. There was also time for brief greetings to Ruth Padel and Fiona Sampson.  

The actual award ceremony was held the following night at the Haberdashers Union headquarters in the City, not far from Smithfield Market.  A luxurious modern building with handsome paneling and large rooms, reminding us how profitable the clothing industry is. There were about two hundred guests at the party, I would estimate.  One reason I attended is that I knew it would be a convenient way to re-establish contact with poet friends.  Apart from Kathryn Maris (who was putting me up in London), I had lively conversations with Don Paterson, Sean O'Brien, Elaine Feinstein, Maurice Riordan, Ruth Fainlight, Katy Evans-Bush, and Dennis O'Driscoll. Dennis and I got acquainted through correspondence as long ago as the 1980s but had never met face to face.   He was one of the panel of judges for the prize and when I mentioned I didn't know John Burnside (the favorite for the prize, according to bookmakers), Dennis took me up to him.  I found him a thoroughly likable person, a bit on the shy side, but then he was waiting to hear the prize outcome.  Other people I met included Bernard O'Donoghue, Imtiaz Dharker, Gillian Clarke (also one of the prize judges), Neil Astley, Carol Ann Duffy, Daljit Nagra, Esther Morgan, Michael Symmons Roberts, John Dugdale, and Kathleen Jamie. Quite a field of fair folk, including a good portion of the most-discussed poets in Britain today.  Eventually the prize was announced: and the favorite won.  I haven't read Burnside's book yet (I will), but there didn't seem to be any carping afterwards, so apparently the prize was deserved.

Returning to Cambridge, I can say that my stay is well launched. I've begun making the acquaintance of other Clare Hall Fellows, meeting as we do for lunch in the College dining room every week day.  One of these is the gifted American prose writer Thomas Glave, who will be here for an entire year. Everything looks promising, and in fact I now have in hand a translation of the First Elegy.  On to the Second.

Peaceful Assembly and the Poets' Corner

James Baldwin

I went to New York again early in the month to participate in the ceremony whereby James Baldwin was inducted into the Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights. 

This was my first New York neighborhood (I enrolled in graduate school at Columbia in 1965), and the Cathedral, like all the environs thereabouts, is a familiar reference point to me.  Sunday mornings in those years, I used to take walks in Harlem, at a time when things were quiet.  There’s a poem about those walks in my book A Call in the Midst of the Crowd. Harlem in 1965 was quite different from what it is now.  It’s easy for me to imagine James Baldwin as a boy venturing into Morningside Park, looking up at the vast unfinished cathedral overlooking it, and wondering what went on there. Knowing what I do about him, I’m certain that he came to have a look inside, though I can’t quite imagine what he must have thought about it.

On the other hand I take it for granted that he sympathized with the students at Columbia University who in May of 1968 went on strike and occupied Columbia’s Low Library to protest university plans to annex part of Morningside Park and build a gym there.  It was an egregious, imperial move to take away part of a park that residents in west Harlem used every day.  CU said it would open the gym to non-university residents, but we will never know if the plan would have been put into effect because the project was abandoned in the face of student and community opposition.  Unfortunately, this came only after Grayson Kirk, CU’s president, had ordered the buildings cleared of occupying students, a raid performed by the NYPD with no restraint at all.  During clearance, large numbers of students were hit repeatedly with nightsticks or truncheons, including my friend the poet David Shapiro. It happened that I was on my Fulbright year in Paris when this occurred, so I wasn’t part of it, except as an appalled observer from across the Atlantic.  Instead, I had the May uprisings in Paris in that same spring to live through.  Details about both events can be found in the long narrative poem Notes from a Child of Paradise (1984), which retells my life in the years 1965 to 1969.                                                                                                                                                                                                    

David Shapiro in Kirk's Office, May 1968

                                                                                                                  

To return to Baldwin and the Cathedral: he was as an adult awarded the Cathedral’s Centennial Medal in 1974, and in December of 1987, his funeral was held there.  Induction into the Poets’ Corner would seem to be the next logical step. Marilyn Nelson was appointed the Cathedral’s Poet in Residence in 2011 and earlier this year asked me to serve a five-year term as one of the electors for the Poets’ Corner, which I was glad to do.  Baldwin was chosen as this year’s new “poet,” though poetry is only a minor part of his oeuvre as a writer. The Corner includes novelists (indeed, our most famous) as well as poets. A brief inscription from the inducted writer is always placed under the name, and the electors settled on this for Baldwin: “Artists are here to disturb the peace.”  Then plans were made for an induction and a celebration on November 6th and 7th.

The event on Sunday the 6th was a liturgical service, with the Cathedral choir singing arrangements of the spiritual songs, “A Balm in Gilead,” “Deep River,” and “Steal Away to Jesus.”  There were prayers, a psalm, and congregational hymns.  The poet Jericho Brown read, I read (the conclusion of his essay “Notes of a Native Son), and David Leeming, Baldwin’s biographer, spoke about the author, whom he knew personally, in general terms. The inductee’s great-nephew Trevor Baldwin spoke feelingly about his famous relative, then we had a brief homily-eulogy from the Dean of the Cathedral, James Kowalski, as well as words of greeting from Marilyn. At the end we processed to the rear of the church to the side chapel where the Corner is, and Marilyn unveiled the inscribed stone. Flashbulbs went off, and then the choir sang “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” and it was over.  Elizabeth Macklin, whom I’d invited to the ceremony, came up, and I introduced her to Marilyn.  Quincy Troupe was there and introduced himself, but I reminded him we’d met at the Writing Division at Columbia many years ago. I spoke briefly to Cynthia Zarin and then to Jaime Manrique, but each had to rush off to other events. Then someone introduced me to Patricia Spears Jones, whom I’d only known through Facebook before. Ceremony completed, we walked over to the Cathedral House where there was a buffet dinner for all participants.

The celebration the following night was smaller, unassisted by the choir and unliturgical.  Dean Kowalksi participated but only briefly.  Readers/speakers were Sharan Strange, Patricia Smith, Thomas Sayers Ellis, myself, Quincy Troupe, and Dr. James Cone, a professor of religion. Also, Marilyn, who read Baldwin texts to the accompaniment of a vibraphone.  We weren’t seated in the choir and everything was conducted with less formality than on the previous evening.  At rthe conclusion, an amplified recording of Baldwin singing the hymn “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” was played in the transept and a professional singer chimed in with her responsive asides as his voice resonated through the building. A haunting moment.  Afterwards, I spoke to Patricia Smith, whom I hadn’t met face to face before, only online, but we had a good-humored “live” conversation. My friend and host in New York Walter Brown came with me for the buffet meal at Cathedral House afterward.

I went to the Metropolitan Museum to see the new rooms for the Met’s collection of Islamic art and found amazingly beautiful examples of art in ceramic, metal, weaving, painting, wood and stone sculpture, glass, and calligraphy.  Though I can’t read Arabic, the wonderful varieties of Arabic script fascinate me, and I have a special liking for Kufic. It’s worth noting that the proscription against representation was often ignored in the history of Islamic art, so that we have the beautiful renderings of people and animals in the small Mughal paintings.  Someof the rugs, too, go beyond abstract geometry and give us stylized animal figures.  Islam is a flexible tradition, historically incorporating a wide spectrum of beliefs and practices, and that remains true today.
                                                                                                                                                                          
While I was in town I visited Zuccotti Square again, glad to see that Occupy Wall Street was in good shape.  This was only a few days before participants were banned from staying there overnight, and since then I’ve been distressed that police efforts to restrict or disperse demonstrations in New York and elsewhere have become violent.  Teargas, pepper spray, and unwarranted use of what they now call “batons.”   All of this has become epidemic, and it must stop.  I wonder if authorities realize that any person who is gassed or beaten by police becomes radicalized for life.  Also, any demonstrator who witnesses brutality like this.  During the past couple of weeks, riot police have themselves in effect rioted, particularly in Oakland at on the campus of UC Davis.  A smear campaign sponsored by conservative interests has tried to depict the demonstrators as lazy, spoiled youth, espousing unsanitary conditions, drugs, and free love.  The reality is very different, but when mud is slung, some of it always sticks, influencing he conduct of law enforcement officers.  Many policemen have working class backgrounds, and class anger can be stirred up among them if the hot-button libels have been previously planted in their minds.  (But how can any police officer, no matter how angry, feel justified pepper-spraying the face of an 84-year old woman, as happened ten days ago?) I saw these same developments back in the 1960s. It’s all depressingly familiar. Dr. King’s civil rights movement was libeled and suffered repressive action from misguided law enforcement, as well as vigilante attacks.  He persisted and eventually lost his life. There is also the horrifying instance of the Kent State killings, carried out, incredibly enough, by the National Guardsmen.  To engage in peaceful assembly is a risky undertaking, not to be undertaken lightly in a country where violence is taken for granted.  But as Baldwin reminded us, “Artists are here to disturb the peace.” And not artists alone, but all people concerned with social justice in a climate where it has been forced to take a back seat to the national addiction to wealth, no matter the cost of that pursuit to social cohesiveness, fair dealing, and responsible freedom.

Visits from Friends, Wall Street Occupied

A friend called from London this weekend and seemed disappointed that I hadn’t been posting anything on this blog.  I’ll be self-indulgent and blame the time-consuming process of buying and then furnishing a condo in Rhode Island, near Westerly.  Moving, unpacking, and arranging are taxing enterprises: where to put the sofa, and which shelf for which books, all of that.  Meanwhile, I’ve had visits from several poets—Wendy Battin from Mystic, Benjamin Grossberg from Hartford, Chard de Niord down from Providence, Jason Roush from Boston, Peter Covino from Kingstown, where he has just been tenured at URI, and Doretta Wildes from Middletown.  (Actually Doretta is doing more fiction nowadays, her first novel Rinse Cycle out this past summer.)  Then Leslie McGrath, coming up from North Stonington for a daytrip we made to Providence—but there’s more about that further on.


I went down to New York in early October, and after I’d greeted my host Walter Brown, I went down to Liberty Plaza (or Zuccotti Square) to join in the Occupy Wall Street demonstration.  An energizing experience, to understate.  During the week following, the Occupy movement went global, with significant demonstrations in London, Paris, Hong Kong, and other cities across the USA.  Critics of the movement say it has no defined goals.  But what it has done is to alert the distressed majority to facts they may not have known before, for example, that 1% of the US population controls 40% of the nation’s wealth, or that a typical CEO’s salary is 900 times that of a typical worker in his company.  The electorate has begun to see that Congress is in the hands of the donors to election campaigns, a situation made worse by the Supreme Court decision to allow unlimited and anonymous donations to campaigns.  The donors need not even be US citizens.  Electoral reform is urgent, otherwise Big Money will continue to make laws for us by remote control.  A brief description I wrote of Occupy Wall Street is found on the Occupy Writers site here:

 http://www.occupywriters.com/


I’d reserved a couple of tickets for the 9/11 Memorial on October 11, exactly one month after the inaugural ceremony.  Walter and I picked them up around 4:00, then walked some distance down to the intake site on Thames Street.  The path leading inside runs between walls of blue-painted plywood, with lots of twists and turns, your ticket inspected at several checkpoints, until you reach the security portal, identical to an air terminal security check.  Off come your belt and shoes, etc. Once you’re reassembled, there’s a bit more walking, and finally you are in the park, among young oak trees and low, granite benches.  We walked to the edge of the south pool, which duplicates the “footprint” of the destroyed building, a deep reservoir outlined by a smooth bronze rim inscribed with the names of those who died.  Inside that rim is a shelf filled with water that flows down all four sides in a considerable drop to the lower level. The scale is enormous.  If the pool qualifies as a fountain, it must be the world’s largest.  A much smaller square cistern is sunk in the center, and water proceeds to flow into it also.  Sinister detail: you can’t, from the outer rim, see the bottom of this cistern. There’s no upward jet here, the governing direction is down, flowing water vanishing earthward as into the underworld.  Did I say that the walls of the entire pool are black?  They are. You can’t see the ensemble without encroaching feelings of gloom.  Add to that the damp, overcast, misty day we had, and a somber experience it was, all told. 

We walked to the north pool, which was exactly like the south.  As I was reading the names I came across the name of a friend’s sister, whom I knew had died on the fateful day.  A strange moment, when everything seemed to go very quiet. I wondered how inevitable it was to find that name, among so many—Anglo, Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish, Arab, Latino.  Some of the names had little flags stuck in the inscribed letters, others had roses.  It’s a wrenching experience to see those because it’s clear that family and friends had left them as some sort of apotropaic gesture made against finality.

The museum is still under construction as well as two high-rise office buildings, the first of which will, once again, be taller than the Empire State. You might question the wisdom of that Babelian plan, though extraordinary construction precautions have been taken to countervail any attack and demolition.  I agreed with Walter that the new buildings looked undistinguished, as architecture.  Of course I’ll return when construction is complete for another look.  If it seems I have an unusual interest in the 9/11 site, maybe this poem written several months after the calamity will make that interest understandable:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/poem/2003/09/window_on_the_world.single.html

From there Walter (the person named as “W” in the poem) walked to the Occupy Wall Street demonstration and mingled in the crowd for a while.  One group of Jewish demonstrators held up a sign saying that the Sukkot holiday required the faithful to live in temporary shelters for several days, and that in their estimation staying in Zuccotto Square was a way to enact the ritual of the holiday.  This was not the only pleasing sign held up.  Creative slogans were to be everywhere, and the human composition was varied as to age and ethnicity. History in the making.

In the days after, I had lunch with Grace Schulman and saw with her the exhibition of Indian paintings from the Mugal period at the Metropolitan. I also spent an hour at the offices of The Hudson Review with Paula Deitz, who regrettably couldn’t come with me to see the exhibition of Stieglitz’s art collection (also at the Met.)  Add to these events several long walks through various neighborhoods of the city, and the visit can only be called full and stimulating, with plenty of matter for reflection.

I mentioned that poet Leslie McGrath had driven up the following week to see my new place and then to continue on to Providence. Not for shopping or entertainment, but to take part in Occupy Providence and to join the poet Doug Anderson, whom I knew through Facebook but had never met in person.  We had an enlivening couple of hours together, but suppose I refer you to the description Leslie wrote about our day for the Best American Poetry blog. She also asked Doug and me to add a few words, which we did.  Here is the link:


http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2011/10/occupying-providence-with-alfred-corn-and-doug-anderson-by-leslie-mcgrath.html

There is more that could be said, but for a blog post this one is moving toward epic length, so I will just conclude with a “To Be Continued.” 

Rhode Island, Boston, and Robert Pinsky

Since returning from six months in London to the US in early April, I’ve had an outpatient operation to free a pinched nerve in the spine that was causing back and leg pain.  There needed to be some down time for recovery, and so, apart from physical therapy to regain strength, I haven’t done much here in southern Rhode Island except rest and make excursions to the seashore, never far away in the Ocean State.  People sometimes express curiosity as to why I live in the smallest of the fifty when I’m in the US and "smallest" is in itself part of the answer.  It seems I’ve come to adopt a contrarian approach to a lot of things. Why?  Because the standard m.o. for our supposed American dreams, goals and deeds, active for a century, has led us to the brink of failure as a nation. The American Way is to do everything on the biggest and most expensive scale possible.  

 

The representative American believes in cutthroat competition, getting rich (especially by bonuses), driving as fast and as rudely and dangerously as you can to shave ten seconds off a twenty-minute trip, the accumulation of as many toys as possible before one's expiration date. The fundamental attitude is, “Get out of the way, because I am the best.”  So for me small is good, just as non-competitive is good. I own practically nothing, neither house nor car, just a few books, CDs, clothes, and a computer.  I rent, I use public transport, and the public library. I don’t suffer from stress, and I don’t expect a lot of attention to be paid to me. Competition is the micro version of the macro wars that have become so popular lately as powerful individuals and nations of the world try to beat each other out of available goods and services instead of cooperating in a reciprocally interested way. The result hasn’t been good either for the modern West or for the exploited planet.  So why not take the opposite tack from what has been considered proper conduct and suitable aspiration up to now? Why not care less about conventional measures of success?  If we’re male, why not share power with women, and if white, with people of color?  Possibly we’d see some real improvement in the way things are going. To return to the micro level, it’s nice if I can write something that is topnotch, but it’s equally nice if someone else does. 

The one public event of the past month was an appearance at the New England Institute of Art in Brrookline. To arrange the reading, my Cambridge/Boston friend Jason Roush had put me in touch with David Blair, who teaches creative writing there and we agreed on a May 24th date.  I got to Boston shortly after eleven on that day and walked outside South Station to where Robert Pinsky, a friend for more than three decades now, was expecting me in his black car.  He looked well, and off we drove to for lunch in Cambridge at a Taiwanese place Robert said the novelist Ha Jin had recommended to him.  I always enjoy seeing Robert, partly because of his quick, warm intelligence and partly because it’s a pleasure to know someone generally recognized as among the very small number of world-class American poets of our era.  If his name doesn’t appear on the roster of Pultizer, NBA, or NBBC prizewinners, that’s not the fault of his work.  He has just published a magisterial Selected Poems, which, even so, I told him I found too severely pruned. I’d have preferred a more inclusive volume, but he reminded me that the earlier books are all in print, and said he wanted to put out an affordable book that would serve as an introduction to new readers.  Fair enough.

Robert Pinsky

To reread his startlingly original work for me is to relive my experience as a poet going back nearly four decades.  Robert’s first book, Sadness and Hapiness appeared in 1976, the same year as mine (titled All Roads at Once).  The YMHA in New York had in those years a program called “Introduction,” whereby four books were chosen by senior poets as the best first books of the year. The 1976 poets were Tess Gallagher, Maura Stanton, Robert, and myself. We were all invited to read at the Y, and that was the occasion when Robert and I first met. I immediately recognized him as an important new talent, and wanted to be his friend. Actually, I wrote a detailed review of his second book, An Explanation of America (collected later in a book of essays titled The Metamorphoses of Metaphor).  And then in the 90s, I wrote a review of The Figured Wheel, which was Robert’s first collected poems.  Over the years, we’ve kept in touch and I remember many glowing reunions, beginning with an evening dedicated to American poetry at the White House during the Carter Administration.  That’s when I met Ellen, to whom Robert is married. I also recall seeing him in Berkley, when he taught there, and in Oklahoma, when I was teaching at the U. of Tulsa, and he was the featured poet in the Cimarron Review literary festival.  Another time I called on him at his summer place in Truro.  I’ve also attended many readings of his, and we’ve met in Boston a couple of times.  I don’t know how Robert keeps on the go as much as he does. Apart from his writing, he gives several readings every month, keeps in touch with the Favorite Poem Project (which he launched when he was Poet Laureate), and teaches writing at B.U.  For a couple of years now, he has been giving poetry readings accompanied by a jazz combo, a format that was popular among the Beat poets back in the 1950s, but then became rare: the Rebirth of the Cool in the 21st century, we might say.  Robert is also poetry editor at Slate magazine, where he emcees online forums about classic poems.  As one of the few contemporary poets who has a regular doctoral degree in English lit (his grad school mentor was Yvor Winters), Robert knows the tradition very well and has a special affinity for Renaissance figures like Fulke Greville and the 19th century poet Landor, about whom he write an engaging critical book.  

He seemed glad for me that the spinal operation was a success.  We talked about mutual friends, discussed new books, exchanged a few jokes. And that was our meeting. He dropped me off near Harvard Square, as I had some free time before the next appointment.  I strolled around the Square, noting familiar landmarks, and dropped in at Grolier Books on Plympton Street to introduce myself to the new proprietor, a friendly woman named Carol Menkiti. Then it was time to go to Brookline Village, where Jason Roush was waiting for me.   I hadn’t seen Jason since March when he came to lunch in London (he makes an annual trip there during spring break).  Jason was introduced to this blog back in April of 2009, for those who want to look him up, and his books are available online at Amazon.  Teaching courses now at the NIE, he had planned for me to speak to one of them that afternoon, and so I did, a little surprised at how interested the students seemed to be. 

Next on the schedule was dinner with David Blair (author of a first book of poems titled Ascension Days), and Paul Rivenberg, who was putting me up that night.  After a good Venezuelan meal, it was time to go to the room at the NIE where I was to read.  Many students from the afternoon class showed up, and one or two faculty members, and Kevin Cutrer, whom I know from Facebook but had never met face to face. After the reading and a few books signed, I spoke to Tom Yuill, author of a first book titled Medicine Show. He studied with Robert Pinsky and Rosanna Warren and now teaches creative writing himself.

Next morning Paul and I had breakfast, and we talked until it was time for him to go off to work. Not long after, Jason arrived to spend the first part of the day together.  We walked to the Museum of Fine Arts, which I’ve visited many times of course, but I wanted to see the new wing, recently built to house the MFA's “Art of the Americas.”  A soberly handsome addition, faced with white marble interrupted by glazing in a faintly greenish tint.  Jason and I hit the high spots of the collection, familiar works like Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, which seems to encapsulate the subject matter and tone of the Brown Decades, as recorded by Henry James, not to mention Howells, Wharton, and, elsewhere, Sargent himself.  I’ll also mention Copley’s iconic portrait of Paul Revere, a patriot suddenly in the news again because of Sarah Palin’s mixup about which side his lantern was giving a warning to during the famous midnight ride.  (One if by land and ignorant, two if by sea and scatterbrained.) Judging from Revere’s shrewd and steady gaze, I could well imagine what he might have felt before “refudicating” Palin’s various bloopers over the past few years. Still, as portrayed by Copley, the craftsman’s hands clasped the silver teapot he had made, his strong fingers (with the sort of attention to detail we associate with Vermeer) perfectly reflected in its polished surface.   

 

 

Paul Revere, by John Singleton Copley

A Season Summarized

Once again I’ve neglected for a long time to post anything here, part of the explanation being that I was caught up in so many activities I didn’t stop to think about writing about them.  Highlights would have included attending, with Marina Warner, a play titled Tiger Country, by the new playwright Nina Raine, whose father Craig Raine, the poet and critic, also a professor at Oxford, I met many years ago at Amy Clampitt's apartment in New York.  The play is set in a large London hospital and presents some of the difficulties of any such institution working under current rules established by the National Health Service. 

Other plays seen: a revival of Noël Coward’s playlet Red Peppers, followed by his short play Still Life, at Pentameters Theatre, which will produce my play Lowell’s Bedlam this April. Also, Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, at the Comedy Theatre, whose cast included stars Ellen Burstyn ad Keira Knightley. 

Sean O'Brien

As for seeing poet friends, I attended a Poetry Review launch at the Free Word Centre, which featured Sean O’Brien, reading, along with a young poet named Karen McCarthy Woolf.   I hadn’t seen Sean since last summer in Newcastle, and, regrettably, Gerry Wardle didn’t come down this time. Many poets were in the audience, including Poetry Review editor Fiona Sampson, of course, Elaine Feinstein, and Ruth Fainlight. After his extraordinary reading, Sean and I went out to dinner at an Italian place in Exmouth Market, joined by poets Alan Brownjohn, Leah Fritz,  Tamar Yoseloff, and her husband Andrew Lindesey.  I hadn’t met Brownjohn before, but we got onto the topic of Robert Lowell, whom he met during the years Lowell was married to Caroline Blackwood and indeed visited them at Maidstone, Kent.  Sean was in a convivial mood during dinner, leaving us all in compulsive laughter with his ironic asides.  The publication of his next book November (paradoxically published in April) should be one of the main literary events of the coming months.

Adam Mars-Jones

Adam Mars-Jones and I saw the Thomas Lawrence exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, an occasion to speculate again why portraiture is the special excellence of British painting.  Maybe something to do with theatre, which has a preëminent place in British literature: the study of character, also carried out in fiction using techniques borrowed from drama. Consider, too, the dramatic monologue, brought to perfection in Browning's poetry.  After having tea, Adam and I walked to Foyle’s and there was a copy of his new novel, titled Cedilla, a sequel to the first volume Pilcrow, published a couple of years ago.  It continues the narrative of a disabled gay man, the story based on the life of a friend of Adam’s.  An original subject, told, surprisingly, with a lot of wit, verbal acuteness, and mischief.    

Invited by Kathryn Maris, I attended the award ceremony for the T.S. Eliot Prize, held this year at the Wallace Collection (not in the galleries themselves, but in the covered courtyard).  You can never say much at these gatherings, but at least it was a chance to greet poet friends like Don Paterson, Elaine Feinstein, Colette Bryce, and Ruth Fainlight, and to meet for the first time Robin Robertson and Lavinia Greenlaw.  Anne Stevenson, the head of the prize committee, announced that the winner was Derek Walcott (not present), and discussed the virtues of his magisterial collection White Egrets.  I spoke to Anne afterwards, and we calculated that we hadn’t seen each other since 1986, at a time when she was still living in here London, in Belsize Park.  That’s how, insensibly, a quarter century can pass. 

The Queens College, Oxford

I made a day trip to Oxford, planning to see David Constantine and Craig Raine. A telephone mixup meant that I missed Carig, but David and I had a pleasant hour around teatime, and the trip was also a chance to revisit what is no doubt the most beautiful assemblage of academic buildings in the world.  That would include David’s Queens College, one of Hawksmoor’s most resplendent designs.  

Don Paterson

A week or so later, I attended a reading at the London Review Bookshop, featuring Don Paterson, Jo Shapcott, and David Harsent.  By chance I ended up sitting with Fiona Sampson, with whom it’s always a pleasure to discuss things. Don gave a topnotch reading, and next day he and I had lunch at a Spanish place near King’s Cross and had a chance to catch up.  These days he is writing critical prose as well as poems, in fact, a couple of months back I reviewed his recent commentary on the Shakespeare sonnets (see the online journal Thethe):

http://www.thethepoetry.com/2011/02/marriage-counseling-for-true-minds/

Marilyn Hacker

Mimi Khalvati has come to dinner a couple of times, and I had Marilyn Hacker here to lunch when she came here from Paris, where she now lives. Marilyn was one of the readers for  the spring Poetry London launch, on her way the following morning to the Stanza Festival up at St. Andrews, Scotland. Marilyn has the distinction of being one of the very few American poets published abroad in France as well as the U.K.









I mentioned the upcoming production of my play Lowell’s Bedlam and am happy to announce that rehearsals for it have now begun.  The cast is as follows:

                                                    Theresa Brockway              Celeste Haydon

Lowell

Lowri Lewis                     Elizabeth Hardwick
David Manson                    Robert Lowell               
Hannah Mercer             Elizabeth Bishop               
Roger Sansom                    Dick Jaffee                    
 

The director is Daniel Ricken, and the producer is Leonie Scott- Matthews.

Bookings can be made at http://www.pentameters.co.uk/index.html

London Continued

Pasolini

To wind up the year, a brief summary of whereabouts and events.  I got to London in mid-November and have spent the last month and a half settling in. I’ve seen friends, beginning with Kathryn Maris and her husband Herman Dietman, who put me up for a couple of nights when I first arrived.   At Kathryn’s suggestion I attended a performance of a Pasolini play, translated by the poet Jamie McKendrick as Fabrication, and performed at a fringe theatre in Notting Hill called The Print Room.  Afterward, Jamie gave a reading and answered questions.  We spoke briefly at the end, a chance to renew acquaintance after a hiatus of a couple of years. From there Kathryn and I went to a launch party for Anne-Marie Fyfe’s new book, titled Understudies, and recently published by Seren.  A big party, so there was no chance to do more than greet and congratulate Anne-Marie, and to listen to her read from the book. 

I’d seen Ruth Fainlight at the launch party and a week later went to have tea with her at her place in Notting Hill.  We tried to recall the circumstances of our first meeting and dated it back to 1987, during my second long-term stay in London. It was a dinner party with the novelist Madison Smartt Bell and his wife the poet Elizabeth Spires.  Ruth came with her husband Alan Sillitoe, whose novels I’d read, though I didn’t in those days know about Ruth’s poetry.  She has just now published her New and Collected Poems with Bloodaxe. Because of that event and Alan’s death this past spring, it’s likely that 2010 will have proved a pivotal year for Ruth.

Mimi Khalvati

Reform Club, Pall Mall

I saw Mimi Khalvati, in fact, attended a reading she gave at the Reform Club on Pall Mall. Mimi looked wonderful, and I gather that she is receiving a lot of favorable attention these days. The Reform Club is an immense building, constructed just at the beginning of Victoria’s reign by affluent Whig political figures.  We walked up the stone steps and into a vestibule, where we were met by Mimi’s contact person Mary Louise (sorry, didn’t hear the last name).  Another stone flight up to the central atrium, some three storeys high, with dark, gold-fluted columns topped by Corinthian capitals placed at decoratively strategic points around the hall.  Under a central mirror at the rear, a marble bust of Victoria, gazing towards her left.  Portraits of notable Liberals are placed in convenient niches around the atrium, for example, Palmerston, Gladstone, and others with names less recognizable.  Mimi and I went upstairs under Mary Louise’s guidance and had a quick survey of several rooms off the central atrium—a dining room, a library, a reading room.  The evening’s event was to be held in a large reading room on the second level. We drifted in and settled near the fire, the chimneypiece boasting a bronze head of Lloyd George. People began to trickle in, taking the little gilt ballroom chairs that had been set up.  Mimi was introduced and then read, very winningly, might I add.  After the final poem, applause, then people gathering round to congratulate her and buy a book.  And that was it.  We reclaimed our coats and put them on in the vestibule, where I noticed a strange, highly polished brass object.  I asked the doorman what it was and was told it was a cigar-lighter, no longer used but still in operation as late as the Second World War, when figures like Churchill made use of it.  Apparently there had been a gas flame in it accessible through an aperture where you inserted the cigar.  The only such object in the world? Very possibly.

From there we walked to a nearby Lebanese restaurant and had a pleasant dinner, a chance to catch up on each other’s news.  A few days later, we both participated in a marathon reading as a benefit for The Long Poem magazine at a café near King’s Cross.  Our bit done, we walked to a nearby restaurant and had dinner.  Many topics touched on, including the fact that Mimi’s new and selected poems are now in production and will be out next year with Carcanet.    

David Plante

I had dinner with the novelist and memoirist David Plante at his place in Marylebone, where I’ve often been a guest over the years. But this may be the last time I’ll have seen it, as he plans to move house very soon.  I met David here in London back in 1986, and we’ve been intermittently in touch ever since.  His partner Nikos Stangos, for many years an editor at Thames & Hudson, was also a dear friend, so there is, ever since Nikos’s death a few years ago, a touch of sadness when David and I reunite. He last year published a moving memoir about their relationship, Nikos’s illness and death, and its aftermath, titled The Pure Lover.  David was preparing to go to Lucca, where he has an apartment, for the Christmas holiday, but I expect to see him in 2011.  

Goldsmith

I’ve seen three plays, first, Goldy, based on the life and work of Oliver Goldsmith, staged by Pentameters Theatre in Hampstead (which will also produce my play about Robert Lowell this coming spring).  It’s an affectionate portrait of an underrated writer, from whose long poem The Deserted Village Tony Judt borrowed the title of his powerful last book Ill Fares the Land. To prolong the Augustan mood, I saw Sheridan’s The Rivals in the Peter Hall production at the Theatre Royal, a work seldom revived and performed this time with a lot of brio.  Not too many plays result in the coinage of a new word, but this one does. A “malapropism” is the term used to describe the verbal habit of the character Mrs. Malaprop, who confuses polysyllabic words, applying them in contexts where they don’t fit—as when she speaks of “allegories on the banks of the Nile.”  That tic and other comic elements produced a nefarious evening filled with knowing chuckles. Finally, with my friend Miguel Mansur I also saw the Young Vic production of The Glass Menagerie, which seemed only partly successful, yet had its moments. 
 

George Szirtes

Shortly after I settled in my sublet flat in Tufnell Park, George Szirtes, whom I hadn’t seen for over a year, came to lunch; and from there we went to Smith Square in Westminster for a cultural event George was scheduled to appear in. This was to be held in the recently established Europe House, the London headquarters of the European Commission, whose mission is, I believe, purely cultural.  At the door we were greeted by Jeremy Sullivan, who arranged the event and commissioned George’s poem.  We were guided into a small auditorium and there found Elaine Feinstein, dressed all in red and black.  She and I spoke as preparations for the evening were underway. Eventually people began coming in and one or two introductions were made, in particular, to Lázló Magócsi, the Science and Technology attaché to the Hungarian Embassy.  Naturally he wanted to speak with George, a British poet born in Hungary, yet the topics centered mainly on the scientific achievements of Hungarians in the 20th century, which are more considerable than I’d realized.

Europe House’s chief officer, a man named Scheele, launched the evening’s program. Then George read his commissioned poem, titled “The Door is Open,” concluding with this quatrain:

Here histories, manners, speech, vision, dance,
Commerce and custom, constitution, chance,
And strategy, seek concord and a voice.
Open the door. The house is yours. Rejoice.


After this, several ambassadors read poems in their language.  We had Austria, Poland, Denmark, Romania, Spain, Estonia, Belgium and, as mentioned, Hungary.  A translation was read after each poem, and then at the end Elaine read a few poems of her own (non-commissioned).  Applause, closing remarks, then drinks and snacks. Finally, there was a dinner party for participants and their guests, an occasion for interesting conversations with others present. George had a train to catch so we left a little early, I saw him to his cab and then walked to the tube, returning the same way I came.

James Byrne and Sandeep Parmar, back in London after several months in New York, came to call and have a look at my sublet for this year.  We had lunch here and engaged in an unbroken flow of talk about what we’ve been doing and writing.  Sandeep is teaching at Wagner College now and finishing her book on the Modernist British poet Hope Mirrlees. James has one more term at NYU before he gets his MFA and is putting the finishing touches on the next issue of The Wolf, expected in January. 

Marina Warner

Christmas roared in and out and on Boxing Day I walked to Kentish Town to attend a party given by my friend Marina Warner and her partner Graeme Segal.  I hadn’t seen Marina for quite a long time, so it was a pleasure to meet again.  I have very clear memories of her house because I once, back in 1987, rented it for four months.  Lots of changes have been made, so that seeing it now is like looking at a double exposure.  Marina introduced me to several people, all new to me. Then I had a brief conversation with her son, Conrad Shawcross, a rising young sculptor whom I hadn’t seen since he was a boy.  Conrad was on the eve of a month-long journey to India and Tasmania, which promises to be extraordinary.  Marina herself is completing a study of The Arabian Nights, a book I look forward to reading when it appears, as I do being her neighbor this winter and spring.  

For those interested in looking up publications, I have a review of UA Fanthorpe’s complete poems in the current Poetry Review. Also, under Sudeep Sen’s editorship, a long poem published in an online journal called Molossus. The poem’s titled “Eleven Londons” and describes my stays in this great city from 1967 to 2007. Here’s the link:

http://molossus.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/world-poetry-portfolio-7-alfred-corn/#more-1906



A happy New Year to all.

Multiple genres

This blog seems to have become intermittent only, and I can guess the reason. Since I went on Facebook, it’s come to seem easier to post updates and thoughts there than here. So I invite people to join me on Facebook if they’d like to keep in touch.




The preceding blog records my visit to Scotland, but not the two weeks in London following it. It seems a little late now to report on that, even though I so much enjoyed seeing my friends there. I left London in mid-September and stayed in southern Rhode Island for the past two months. There was a knee operation that needed attending to—nothing grave, just a meniscus tear. Recovery went smoothly and in October I went down to New York to see friends, staying with Walter Brown, who has appeared here in earlier posts. Among the friends I saw was Edmund White, the novelist, and his partner Michael Carroll, also a fiction-writer. I’ve known Edmund since late 1966. In those days he worked for Time-Life Books as a staff researcher and writer, and I was then a grad student at Columbia in French. He had had a play produced Off-Broadway but hadn’t published a novel yet. For some reason he found both myself and Ann Jones, with whom I was then living, worth befriending. I had no publication credits to my name, but eventually confessed to him that I wanted to be a writer. I found him brilliant and funny, and he was one of the few people out as a gay person. Of my friends, only Ann knew about my own sexuality, which she had accepted without shock or embarrassment.



Edmund had written an autobiographical novel, which I read and liked. Still I was busybody enough to urge him to look into the French nouveau roman, in other words, to be more experimental. Like all beginners, I thought the avant-garde was the only worthwhile approach to the making of art. It isn’t a nouveau roman, but his first novel Forgetting Elena is certainly not a realist-naturalist work, and it remains among his most intricate and brilliant. During the composition of it, he read individual chapters to Ann and me, and we cheered him on. Possibly for that reason, the dedication page has our name on it.



There have been periods when we didn’t see each other; also, he lived for many years in Paris, where I nevertheless did visit him at his Ile St. Louis apartment. After that he also taught for a couple of years at Brown and I visited him in Providence once. Eventually we do always re-establish contact, and so it was this visit. I went to his place on Twenty-Second Street, a reunion laughter-filled as so many others have been. We spent a couple of hours catching up, and I have to say that Ed is a fascinating source of news and insight about mutual friends as well as people whose names I know even if I haven’t met them. He has just completed a new novel titled Jack Holmes and His Friend, and I’ve begun reading it in manuscript. It resembles the novel I read back in the 1960s, which means Ed has come full circle. Whether it qualifies as avant-garde I doubt, but I no longer care. It hardly makes sense to insist, in the name of artistic freedom, that only one approach is permissible in the production of new works.



In 1970, Edmund introduced me to Richard Howard, whom I’ve kept in touch with intermittently ever since. In the first years of my friendship with Ed, I was entirely absorbed in writing fiction. It was really my friendship with Richard that led me back to writing poetry. He was helpful with my early, unreadable efforts, giving me books to read and responding tactfully to what I showed him. I never signed up for an MFA program (quite a rare career path in those days), but Richard, along with the critic David Kalstone, to whom he introduced me, became something even better than a substitute for that. They offered informal instruction and encouragement. Richard in his capacity as poetry editor published some of my earliest poems. Not long after, Ed was named editor of The Saturday Review and published poems and almost my first critical essay. Without these friends, I doubt I would ever have made my way as a writer.



I saw Richard during the New York trip, smiling, unruffled by and fully recovered from some recent age-appropriate health problems. I recall dozens and dozens of visits to his book-lined rooms on Waverley Place in the Village. From there we walked to a nearby restaurant for lunch. Richard has reached something like philosophical acceptance about the death earlier this year of his close friends Sanford Friedman and Ben Sonnenberg. As for himself, he is busily engaged in teaching in the graduate writing program at Columbia, where I taught off and on in the years 1983-2001. He was working on a review and a translation, something to add to a staggering bibliography of poetry, critical writing and translated work. I wouldn’t call him a man of letters so much as a Hercules of letters. His conversation is like no one else’s, filled with references to literature and art (he seems to have read and seen everything), including all writers of note in the present century. Because we have so many friends in common, we were able to bring each other up to date on them and comment on the changes the time inevitably brings. It was difficult to stand and go; I felt we easily could have talked another several hours. But there was work to do. My plan is to schedule another meeting on first opportunity.



I write poetry. I write fiction. I write criticism. I see all three as related projects. But less attention has been paid to what I’ve done in the prose. There seems to be an almost invincible prejudice against poets who publish novels, perhaps a little less when they publish stories. A review of a poet’s novel never fails to say, “This is a poet’s novel,” whereby the reader is relieved of any expectation that s/he might enjoy it. And there is the feeling among imaginative writers that when you write criticism, you have somehow gone over to the enemy. I don’t think so. Rather than argue, let me list a few names: Coleridge, Hardy, Lawrence, Eliot, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop. And of course many, many more.