Friday 1: exercise and U A Fanthorpe

Today I should be writing about exercise, but I have done none all week.  In Waterstones this afternoon I bought some poems of Elizabeth Bartlett “Mrs Perkins and Oedipus” and read part of the collection on the bus back from town.

While walking the dogs in Church Wood, in the rain, I was reflecting on the similarity in some details of their lives of Bartlett and U A Fanthorpe, and on the differences and similarities in the poems.  The language of Fanthorpe is more direct, the meaning always clear, the poems often carry a sting in the tail (the Ozymandias sting).

A couple of years ago, visiting my daughter in Gloucestershire I saw a poster for the church fete in Wotton-under-Edge, to be opened by U A Fanthorpe.  I know I ran with a smile on my face from the family pub lunch to the fete, wandered around with half an eye on the stalls, and one and a half looking out for her; and then listened, with the same idiot smile on my face, as she said a few words.  She spoke to some people and then I went up to her, almost silenced by shyness (most unlike me) and spoke about my little pilgrimage to see her.  She asked me my name and said she would remember it, and I was left with the thought that I might take a place in a poem, after just two minutes made to feel valued and respected.

And what I wanted to say was that like the dying man in the Patience Strong poem her poems had given me strength and pleasure, but with a bouncing stride I went back to the family and the pub.

Thursday 1. Two American poets

On the Book programme last week Mariella Frostrup talked to a thriller writer, Jeffrey Deaver, who’s books I have seen bit not read. The topic should have been the book he would not lend because of concern he would not get it back.  The discussion made it clear that it was the physical identity of that copy of that book that was an element.  It could not be lent not because the words could not be returned, but because the appearance, texture, smell of that particular copy was part of the strength of the memory.

I say ‘should have been’ because he immediately knew it was two books, and was unable to choose, and with (I daresay) a ‘boyish twinkle’ got away with it.

The second was ‘The Joy of Cooking’ the book that told him there was food that did not come out of ‘cans’. Conversation with a friend when I mentioned this did not immediately connect to Alex Comfort, but went “By Delia Smith?” “No, it was published in 1937 and even she was not around then” “wasn’t she?” “No this was even before the blessed Elizabeth was running round misbehaving in Egypt let alone bringing joy to cooking”. But that is not my concern here.

The first was an edition of the Collected Poems of Robert Frost from the 1940’s, so before the end of his writing career, and earlier than the copies I have read.  I came across Frost first on the A-Level syllabus I studied.  And brought up on English Romantics, in complete thrall to W B Yeats, and a few moderns – Eliot, Henri, Zbigniew Herbert I despised the apparent homespun.

And yet I quoted it, I felt the lives and landscapes through the simplicity of the lines.  “Something there is that does not love a wall, that sends the frozen ground swell under it, and spills the upper boulders in the sun”. I may have misquoted, it is long since I read it, but it is the exactness of a geomorphological process translated into a direct poetic language and clear image of the New England landscape. And behind the poem deeper thoughts of boundaries and the ‘truisms’ that can make the complexities of life easy.

And over the years I converted to Frost (not away from the others, but adding him in).

Deaver recalled what Frost had said about his poems – that someone in another room, hearing a poem being read, but not able to hear the words, should know what the poem is about from the sound alone.  It was a quality, he said, that he sought to emulate in his own writing.

I will now re-read (does that make it a classic?).  But just reading ‘The Silken Tent’ From ‘The Witness Tree’, the only Frost first edition that I have, I understand what he means.  It was the poem I actually had in my A-Level exam. The reflective tone in the words matches the reflection, the slight questioning at the end is picked up in the harder tones of ‘taut’ and ‘bondage’.

My son has a phone ‘app’lication called ‘Quizzer’, and competes on a range of topics, under a range of names, and from a range of places.  He is waiting for the ‘Satanism’ strand to start so that he can compete from The Vatican City.  I pointed out that there would be too much competition there.  One topic is ‘Poetry’, and he and I have competed while driving around.  The questions cover a very limited range, the same names come up over and over again – a few early (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marvell, Donne), the Romantics and pre-Raphaelites, some earlier Americans (Whittier, Longfellow, Whitman), only Owen of the War Poets and a few moderns (Yeats, Eliot, Frost, Pound, Plath).  Very little beyond.  My son says that I can contribute – Which term in the card game piquet does Baudelaire quote ? (O Satan prends pities de ma grande misere) – I wish I could do accents on this machine, and get all my French grammar right). Which poet wrote the autobiography ‘The Man it was that died”. Where are Heaney, and Cavafy, Herbert and Herbert (or even A P) – the list could be endless. Derek Walcott made an appearance for Omeros, and so he should, but what of other poetry laureates – Neruda, Quasimodo, Heaney, Szymborska for a start. Where are Yevtusheno, Tsvetayaeva, Mandelstam; the list goes on.

I was reflecting on this and a chance phrase about the literature of the First World War while walking the dogs on the Chevin this morning and wondering if the lament by Pound at the end of “Ode pour l’election de son sepulcre’ on the futility of the war would be included: “There died a myriad,/and of the best, among them,/for an old bitch gone in the teeth,/for a botched civilisation/  /Charm, smiling at the good mouth,/ Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,/ / For two gross of broken statues,/ for a few thousand battered books”.  This certainly passes the Frost test – anger and despair. The problem is that the passage is not simple and presumably reflects a condemnation of a western civilisation ripe to be cured by the Fascism that Pound later espoused.  The link of the thought to ‘Quizzer’ is that the questions on Pound focus on the politics and not the poetry (I know MacDiarmaid condemns both in Campbell), and I want to dissociate the two: the question is, is that right?

Wednesday 1 Legal Aid

I have recently finished reading ‘Injustice’ the book by Clive Stafford Smith about the operation of the American legal system in capital cases, a book built around the  defence of a Briton sentenced to death in Florida and reaching 25 years in the jail system, but which uses this as the pillar around which a wide ranging critique of the operation of the system is built.

One of the strands is concerned with the lack of financial resources available for the defence of people held on capital charges:

“Fredeirco Martinez-Macias was represented at his capital trial .. by a court-appointed attorney paid .. $11.84 per hour” (Obama in his address to the nation yesterday spoke of raising the minimum wage to $10.10) ” A federal court later reviewing the death sentence noted caustically that you get what you pay for” The lawyer did not interview or produce witnesses and no proper defence was prepared until volunteer lawyers worked on the case and Martinez-Macias was released – but only after this innocent man had spent 9 years on Death row, because his lawyer was not paid enough to prepare a proper defence.

We have an image in this country of a benevolent and maverick Rumpole ferreting out the truth in his own time, but that time is money, and that money comes from the legal aid budget.  Cuts to legal aid cannot be designed to do anything except make it more difficult for defendants to run a proper defence.  The public is softened up with tales of fat cat lawyers making vast sums from the legal aid budget, as though that were criminal, but behind it there must be an assumption that if the police and CPS have decided the evidence is good enough for a conviction then defence is a temerity, and supporting it a wrongful use of money.  Then the legal aid budget is cut, and more poor people go to prison, conviction rates go up – so the government is doing something right and can claim the credit.

On one side there are the resources of the state, on the other some misguided knit-picker finding a loophole to get the guilty person back on the streets.  While the state has the resources to prosecute it must be a breach of the rights of the defendant to deny them the resources for their defence.  The principle is the one being defended that the defendant is innocent, upholding that innocence should not be a question of adequate funding, if the state can fund a prosecution it must, morally, fund the defence.

Tuesday trading 1 eBay beginnings

I can resolve to do better with trading.  There is no reason why I cannot spend several hours of my long day listing things to sell on the various websites I could use.  I have an underlying social concern.  When we middle classes started to send our unwanted items to the charity shop, the jumble sale – a social event as much as anything – died out.  Car boot fairs put in another ‘boot’, why give tat away if we can find someone to buy it.  Retired couples would frequent auction rooms buying up mixed boxes to sell at the car boot. Sites like eBay create a car boot fair for the middle classes who do not want to be seen at a car boot fair, but worry about giving something away that might have value; real shops compete with those trading from their back rooms, buying up electro-plate and selling it on world wide.

Taking another tack we can see eBay as the operation of a fairly free market.  I have something I do not really want.  I can discard it. I can give it to a charity shop and a person who wants it might see it and pay the small sum requested. I can sell it to a specialist shop who will advertise it to the interested.  I can put it on eBay and watch it drop off after its listing time or see a mad scramble because the six people across the world who want it are all in a position to see it – is giving the real enthusiasts the opportunity to buy without paying all that they might have had to pay to a dealer, and me happy that it has gone for a market price that is fair to me.  Clearly the dealer has made no profit, there is no guarantee that I am not unknowingly (or worse, knowingly) selling on something of no value, my description of condition may not be as fastidious as your understanding.

I began to sell on eBay early last summer, and my first sale excited me.  In the clearance from my mothers house I found a box of scout badges.  I was a cub at St Thomas More (Catholic) church in Seaford, then in the scouts at school – Lewes County Grammar School for Boys. At 15 I stopped.  Some of the badges were mine.  Before me my father had been enthusiastically involved in Scouting.  Whether he was a cub or not I do not know, but he went through Scouts, Senior Scouts, Rover Scouts and the scout mastering at various schools into his fifties.  In 1954-55 he worked at a special school in Three Cocks and belonged to the Radnor Scouts.  In the box was a Radnor county badge and this was my first ever listing on eBay.  Of course the county had disappeared in 1971, maybe scouting in Radnor was not popular – but this badge was.  Listed for free at 0.99p it sold for £58.  Of course the others did not do so well… I have in the final clearance found a second badge, in better condition that the first, and have not listed it.  I cannot list it for 0.99p – it might sell for that and I would feel robbed; I cannot list it for £58, the only person willing to spend that much might already have one, if I start it at £25 I would not feel robbed by its selling at that, but if it did not sell eBay would still levy its charge …..

Of course the real problem with a successful online sale is that you then have to package and post, and hope that the amount that comes in covers the cost of this, the cut taken by the website,  the financial charges – PayPal or Visa, and still leaves you in profit..

This is a public musing of a person who should feel disappointed but is planning not to be so. It is not a tribute to W N P Barbellion – that level of disappointment is not mine, and when it stops being regular I will have disappointed myself again.

I have not made plans for today so it is just an expanse of about 16 hours running ahead of me in which I might achieve a couple of dog walks, the washing up and some ironing.  Not a lot to show for five degrees and sixty years of living.  My original plan was to title this journal ‘Give us this day..’, but the blog domain name was taken – for all I know a set of religious musings.  My worry was that if I chose that title it would be assumed that mine was the same, and for the determinedly non-religious that would be a little upsetting.

The plan was to have a daily topic, something linking to part of my life – one day literary, another political, and so on, and the first I considered was the allotment.  It was from this last that my original title came (and until these last few months it could have been the current title). In one of his essays Tolstoy muses on a book by a fellow countryman and discusses the theme of ‘bread-labour’ – that for some time each day we should do something that makes our daily bread in a direct way, most obviously by growing some of the food that we eat.  In my recent disappointments the most positive period, a period of repair, was when I spent ninety minutes a day at the allotment, very occasionally less, but not more.  Part way along a row I would stop digging, clear the roots and waste away and at 90 minutes leave.

What was a bed dug became a row across the allotment, and then that row of dug ground lapped along the allotment, the area of turned soil extending daily.  For a break I started to redig and rake, levelling across, and then I had some ground for autumn planting of broad beans, and some peas that might overwinter; of Japanese onions and garlic.  In the recent wet and cold my daily habit has stopped, I have started to fatten, and go into hibernation. But there is no time for that.