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.

London and Hawthornden

I spent most of April in London, staying with Mimi Khalvati at her maisonette in Stoke Newington. We had time to wander the neighborhood, stopping at cafés for lunch or coffee, making excursions to the Lea Valley marshes and Canal, and attending events such as the launch of the spring Poetry Review. After which, the plan was to go to dinner with Fiona Sampson and this year’s winner of the annual poetry competition, a Buddhist monk who was once a student of Mimi’s. The judge of this year’s prize was Glyn Maxwell, whom I remember meeting after a Walcott reading in New York a few years ago. We spoke briefly at the end of the evening, and then our group went on to a nearby restaurant. By chance Alan Brownjohn and the American expatriate poet Leah Fritz were having dinner there, so they joined us at our table. Fiona was filled with anticipation about her planned trip next morning to Belgrade, which she has visited many times and written about.

My friends Adam Mars-Jones and Keith King came to lunch one day, and the small world cliché was again confirmed when it emerged that the poet Daljit Nagra, who was one of Mimi’s students is on faculty at the same school where Keith teaches. Another event I’d been looking forward to was lunch at the National Portrait Gallery with George Szirtes, with whom I’d exchanged email letters but never met face to face. A pleasant meeting altogether, during which George told me about coming to the U.K. after the 1956 events in Hungary.  Going further back, several of his family members were killed in the concentration camps. He still speaks Hungarian but not as well as English.

George knows a lot about both literature and visual art, as he was a painter before he was a poet. After our meal and wide-ranging discussions on various topics we went upstairs to see the “Indian Portrait” exhibition, a survey of portraiture in India from the Mughal period up through the 19th century. There seems ti be renewed interest in Indian civilization these days. I think it’s fair to say that the “boom” in Latin American culture has now been overtaken by the Indian, British- Indian, and Indian-American counterpart, the last flare of Latin American brilliance being Bolaño’s fiction. One difference is that those novelists all wrote in Spanish, whereas many of the current Indian books were originally written in English: That tradition begins with Narayan and Ved Mehta and continues with Naipaul, Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Pankaj Mishra. As for contemporary poetry written in English by poets of Indian ancestry, there is Vikram Seth, Sudeep Sen, Sujatta Bhatt, Imtiaz Dharker, Daljit Nagra, Ravi Shankar, Sandeep Parmar, and the late Reetika Vazirani. (I know that people will tell me I’ve left out important names, but a blog isn’t a formal literary study.)

Mimi was commissioned by the Gulbenkian Foundation to edit an anthology of fado songs, with translations done by a dozen or so British and American poets. I participated in a mini-launch of the anthology at the London Book Fair, under the auspices of the Translation Centre. The participants were David Constantine, Sarah Maguire and myself.  Fun to do and now I've read the anhtology, which offers many approaches to the task of translation. Recommended.

Mimi has been commissioned to write a text to accompany an art installation at Somerset House by the American Bill Fontana. The installation incorporates recorded riverrine or maritime sounds and video projections, all of it installed on the below-ground level of Somerset House, which used to be subject to floods from the Thames. Mimi and several other writers will read their commissioned texts at some point over the summer. Of course the Courtauld Gallery is there in Somerset House, and I also saw the current exhibition of Michelangelo drawings, something I will perhaps write about in detail later on. The month of April seemed to present an embarrassment of choice as to art exhibitions. I saw both the Arshile Gorky career survey at the Tate Modern and “The Kingdom of Ife” at the British Museum, sculptures in bronze and terracotta from 15th century Ife, in what is now Nigeria. Works of serene realism, reminiscent in some ways of the better known Benin ivories and bronzes.

At the end of the month I boarded a train for Edinburgh and came to the Hawthornden Writers’ Retreat about a half hour out of town. Details about the Retreat, founded by the American philanthropist Drue Heinz, can be found on the Internet, but the essential facts are these: a medieval castle set on a promontory overlooking a wooded gorge through which the North Esk flows. The castle has many times been renovated and expanded. It was the country seat of the Scottish Renaissance poet William Drummond, who invited Ben Jonson to stay here in the early 16th century and recorded their conversations. Unlike other artists’ colonies, Hawthornden hosts writers only, and never more than seven simultaneously. Since it was going to be a month's stay, I was worried that luck might not be on my side and that a month with the same company would be monotonous. But I had nothing to fear. The other residents are Fiona Shaw (not the actress), a novelist from York; Chew-Siah Tei, a novelist from Malaysia, now living in Glasgow; Sophie Mayer, a poet, film critic and translator; Beena Kamlani, an editor at Penguin in New York who has published short stories; John Greening, poet and critic from Cambridgeshire; Ian Colford, a novelist and critic from Halifax, Nova Scotia. And of course the author of this blog. More about the stay in the next installment.