Tag: Thomas Hardy

RED ROSES FOR A BLUE LADY

Red roses for a blue lady. Staying with my mother, we listened to this song at least six times, singing along.

Her condition (Alzheimer’s) means she doesn’t notice repetition, and each time a favourite song comes round, it brings as much surprise and delight as the first time.

It’s never occurred to me before, somehow, to admire the lyrics of songs as much as they deserve. Yet, here I go, banging on about the power of simplicity in poetry, and never noticing it staring me in the face in songs. Or maybe noticing it as a thing of lesser value. I suppose that’s because popular songs are the wellspring of sentimentality.

I used to think of my dad as embarrassingly sentimental. As a kid, I sat beside him in the cinema and when the film came to an end, there would be tears running down his cheeks. I had all the hardness of youth on my side. Cry? Me? Never! I didn’t even cry at the end of Bambi.

And now? Here I am singing ‘Red roses for a blue lady’ and the tears are comforting old friends. These words, once fixed, endure. They cement themselves at a deeper level than almost anything else. They last through the ravages of an illness that destroys memory bit by bit. And the story they tell is hopeful. There are only two verses (repeated of course) and here they are:

I want some red roses for a blue lady
Mister florist take my order please
We had a silly quarrel the other day
I hope these pretty flowers chase her blues away

I want some red roses for a blue lady
Send them to the sweetest gal in town
And if they do the trick, I’ll hurry back to pick
Your best white orchid for her wedding gown.

There’s a narrative in there. A quarrel, a romantic relationship, two people both unhappy about the way they fell out. And it turns out it’s not a light relationship, it’s one in which one half is about to propose marriage to the other. And we know the red roses are going to work because the lady is blue, not angry. She never wanted the fight.

The tune works brilliantly with the words. ‘I . . . want . . . some’ trips gently into the ‘red’ of the roses, where the tune birls into action. The neat little play on words (red for blue) is funny and endearing. Great opening line. After that, the words are nice – but ordinary I think – until you get to ‘And if they do the trick, I’ll hurry back to pick’ where the double rhyme heralds a climax – and what a climax! Best white orchid. Wedding gown! Yesssss!

I had never heard of the guys who wrote this, or perhaps I had and immediately consigned their names to the bit of my brain I don’t care about much. It was Roy C Bennet and Sid Tepper. And of course they wrote loads of other stuff I knew too: lots and lots of Elvis songs, as well as the title track to the Cliff Richard film The Young Ones, which I saw in 1961 with my dad, one of my first ever visits to the cinema. (He would have cried at the end, I have no doubt.)

My mother would have got to know ‘Red roses’ in the 1949 Vaughn Monroe recording. It would have been in the charts in 1949, the year before she married my father. She was 25. I’m pretty sure I first heard it sung by Vic Dana in 1965, when I was 12, just beginning to feel sentimental and hide it well.

Poets can learn a lot from songs. The metaphor of poem as song runs through the genre anyway. This took me back to Thomas Hardy, Late Lyrics and Earlier, published 1922, same year as The Waste Land. The book was on my mother’s shelf, just behind her as she sang along to ‘Red roses. . . ‘, so I lifted it down and later on I read it as she dozed.

Hardy was drenched in the lyric tradition of course, and his ability to pack a narrative into a few lines is unparallelled. Here’s one he subtitled as ‘Song: Minor Mode’. I wonder if he had a tune in his head? And the title ‘The Rift’ puts it in precisely the same category of story as ‘Red roses for a blue lady’, though Hardy’s love stories rarely turn out well. Here’s the lyric:

The Rift

Twas just at gnat and cobweb-time,
When yellow begins to show in the leaf,
That your old gamut changed its chime
From those true tones – of span so brief! –
That met my beats of joy, of grief,
            As rhyme meets rhyme.

So sank I from my high sublime!
We faced but chancewise after that,
And never I knew or guessed my crime . . .
Yes; ’twas the date – or nigh thereat –
Of the yellowing leaf; at moth and gnat
            And cobweb-time.

I didn’t remember this particular poem (Hardy wrote a lot) but I can tell already which phrase will stick: ‘at moth and gnat / And cobweb time’, the repeated phrase, culminating in the key rhyming sound (time, chime, rhyme, sublime, crime).

How perplexing the paradox that sadness, in poetry and song, proves a source of comfort.

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SCHOOL KILLS POETRY

I can’t abide Visiting Hour by Norman McCaig. Marking school work has killed that poem for me. Too many nostrils bobbing down too many corridors in too many essays.

I can’t stand Visiting Hour by Norman MacCaig. Marking school work has killed it for me. Too many nostrils bobbing down too many corridors in too many MacCaiging essays.

However, Visiting Hour wasn’t dead when I was at school. It happened later, when I grew up and somehow turned into a teacher. I was appalled by the way schools in Scotland nurtured an obsession with certain texts. They taught the same poems, two or three of them, year in, year out. How could they bear it?

I think it’s because most school teachers don’t actually like poetry. But I don’t think this bizarre obsession with particular texts totally exterminates the Life of Po. Instead, it does something worse. It creates a disproportionate love for a particular piece, to the exclusion of all else. School leavers re-sitting exams in my evening class sometimes protest, ‘But I LOVE Visiting Hour. Please can I just write about it again?’ Arrgggh. I’m a teacher. Get me out of here.

Why do they love it? Perhaps because it’s the only poem they’ve ever studied and survived. The experience doesn’t seem to make them want to read any more poems, not even by Norman MacCaig.

I’ve just fished out the book we used for O level when I was at school in Cheshire forty-three years ago. It’s small and blue and the title is Ten Twentieth-century Poets, edited with notes by Maurice Wollman, first published in 1957. There’s a sticky label at the front: Wilmslow County Grammar School for Girls, and the book was once used, in turn, by Susan Heald (5B), Rosemary Green (4X), Lindsay Brown (4E) and Sheila Foster (6”). At the end of the year we were allowed to buy a copy if we wanted to, and I did.

The book contains poems by Auden, Betjeman, De la Mare, Eliot, Yeats, Andrew Young, Edward Thomas, Edwin Muir, Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost. We studied five of these – the last five in the list, the ones to whom I’ve given first names. I read some of the rest as well, including ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ (a boy I had a crush on told me it was good).

I thought all poets were dead men. I was at an all-girls school studying poetry by all men.

They weren’t all quite dead. Most were: Edward Thomas, Thomas Hardy and Edwin Muir had been gone for ages. Frost was more recently defunct. I would have been astonished to know that Andrew Young was still alive. . . .

We didn’t obsess over one text. We read a clutch of poems by each of our five. We talked about some of them more than others, liked some of them more than others, and learned some of them off by heart, ready for the exams. We learned poems, and French irregular verbs, on the bus. I still have ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ (Frost), by heart, and sections of the other poems – Edward Thomas, for example, in Out in the Dark:

How weak and little is the light,
All the universe of sight,
Love and delight,
Before the might,
If you love it not, of night.

I don’t believe we analysed poems to death. Or if we did, I have no memory of it. Only the poems.

I probably do love them more than I should, like Herman’s Hermits and Elvis Presley’s ‘Wooden Heart’. They undoubtedly underpinned my sense of what poetry is, which is why, when I began to write myself, free verse wasn’t my first choice.

I think our class teacher liked poems. I think the girls in my class quite liked poems too. But I don’t know that. Perhaps while I was sitting there liking these words and phrases, they were being slowly asphyxiated for other people in the same classroom. Susan Heald, Rosemary Green, Lindsay Brown, Sheila Foster – where are you? What have you got to say about this?

Special offer: If you’re reading this, and you’re still at school (which doesn’t seem likely, but it’s worth a try), I’ll send you some free poetry (which you may or may not like). It won’t include a copy of Visiting Hour. Just email your address to nell@happenstancepress.com

It’s here

Although the Autumnal Equinox isn’t until September 23rd, Autumn has arrived.  The rowan berries are  brilliant and gleaming, in wind wild enough to bring the leaves down in swathes. Oh hang on, you leaves, a little while longer!  The nasturtiums are fantastic too — such value for money these glorious little flowers, yellow and orange and red, They spring up every year without seeding or feeding. They love late August sun and I love them.

Although the Autumnal Equinox isn’t until September 23rd, Autumn has arrived.  The rowan berries are  brilliant and gleaming, in wind wild enough to bring the leaves down in swathes. Oh hang on, you leaves, a little while longer!  The nasturtiums are fantastic too — such value for money these glorious little flowers, yellow and orange and red, They spring up every year without seeding or feeding. They love late August sun and I love them.

It’s a strange thing, the human response to natural beauty. I wonder what purpose it serves, what evolutionary logic has brought it into existence?

Meanwhile, this lesser mortal continues to create little artefacts. My mother’s narratives about her grandmother’s family (my great-grandmother and great-grand-aunts and uncles) is on its way out to to various people. There is a date error on the first page (my author mother spotted it immediately, although it escaped through all previous drafts) and a layout error later. But the cover is lovely and the content is a delight.

Who’s in the Next Room?, which comprises lyrics by Thomas Hardy as well as new work by four Dorset poets (Paul Hyland, Kate Scott, Catherine Simmonds and Pam Zinnemann-Hope), is at the printers about to emerge. Alan Dixon came up with a fabulous print for the cover — a real cracker. At the same time, Kate Scott’s individual pamphlet is at first draft stage and I have started work on some new Samplers. Isobel Montgomery-Campbell is first in the group. . . .

The Samplers hold so few poems that they’re lovely to work on. Each individual poem has to make its case irrefutably. There’ll be new PoemCards too: two are at the printers. More are waiting for their illustrations to be done by Annie-Ellen Crowe’s great-great–great-grand-daughter, Gillian.

The new website is nearly ready to get kicked into touch. Not quite. . . . The biggest thing is changing all the customers from the shop over.

At college, (my other job) it’s the start of the academic year. New students will enrol this week. Today they’ll be apprehensive, and the wind will make them even more restless. But what could be better than paper, books, new things to learn and company to learn with?

Enough! Or Too much

I feel this week as though I’ve read more poetry than anybody else in the world. It’s an enriching experience, in some ways, reading a great deal of verse — I mean bookfuls every day. At the same time, it’s frustrating because  what I really like is spending time with an individual poem, turning it inside out, trying it on for size. Perhaps that’s why I like doing the pamphlets: typing out each poem by hand, getting the feel of it, hanging it outside on the line to dry.

I feel this week as though I’ve read more poetry than anybody else in the world. It’s an enriching experience, in some ways, reading a great deal of verse — I mean bookfuls every day. At the same time, it’s frustrating because  what I really like is spending time with an individual poem, turning it inside out, trying it on for size. Perhaps that’s why I like doing the pamphlets: typing out each poem by hand, getting the feel of it, hanging it outside on the line to dry.

I feel this week as though I’ve read more poetry than anybody else in the world. It’s an enriching experience, in some ways, reading a great deal of verse — I mean bookfuls every day. At the same time, it’s frustrating because  what I really like is spending time with an individual poem, turning it inside out, trying it on for size. Perhaps that’s why I like doing the pamphlets: typing out each poem by hand, getting the feel of it, hanging it outside on the line to dry.

I was very taken, as they say, with a little pamphlet of poems by A C H Smith, a  Greville Press pamphlet. Smith has written lots: novels, plays, ‘novelizations’, libretti, thrillers, non-fiction — but his Wikipedia page doesn’t mention poetry. This brief selection, with a foreword by Tom Stoppard, consists only of ten poems (though one, ‘Structures of Cancer’, is a long one). Something about the quiet particularity  reached out and grabbed me. I’ve read so much lately where lines break arbitrarily or to achieve some kind of fracturing effect — attempts to render the text as ‘poem’ rather than a set of words. But here is a man who just offers a handful of beautiful phrases, and they add up to a great deal more. The opening of ‘No 11, The Polygon, in Winter’ is:

You are potential in this room’s air, about
To condense, always about. The flowers I bought
Last summer still imperishably bloom
On my desk, except when I look for them.

For years I used to think all poetry was about either love or loss. These days I think love and loss are simply two sides of the same coin. This little pamphlet has just enough poems in it. You could read it for a long long time and dispense with much else.

On the other hand . . . I’m working on a pamphlet of poems by four contemporary Dorset poets (Kate Scott, Pam Zinnemann-Hope, Catherine Simmonds and Paul Hyland), all responses to poems by Thomas Hardy, and some of the old poet’s poems are in there too.

 

Thomas Hardy

 

Doing this, of course, took me back to The Complete Poems, all 954 pages of them. I recall having an argument with Angus Calder about Hardy’s poems: not all of them were all that great, I said. But Angus was for having the bard’s absolute calibre in every word. It is so much easier to be nice about huge works by dead poets. At least you know they can’t rush off and write another 500 poems and brandish them.

I’m inclined to think Hardy wrote some bad lines, as well as quite a lot of poems I could live without. But then some of them have such lovely bits in them and all of them have that beautiful musicality and playfulness of form.

And occasionally one just catches you with a little shock, like static electricity, and you cannot imagine how you didn’t notice it before.

There’s much that contemporary writers can learn from Hardy at his best, not least the power of what is not said. Here’s ‘In the Moonlight’:

‘O lonely workman, standing there
In a dream, why do you stare and stare
At her grave,as no other grave there were?

‘If your great gaunt eyes so importune
Her soul by the shine of this corpse-cold moon
Maybe you’ll raise her phantom soon!’

‘Why, fool, it is what I would rather see
Than all the living folk there be;
But alas, there is no such joy for me!’

‘Ah — she was one you loved, no doubt,
Through good and evil, through rain and drought,
And when she passed, all your sun went out?’

‘Nay: she was the woman I did not love,
Whom all the others were ranked above,
Whom during her life I thought nothing of.’

Merriness in Midhurst

This week I flew away to visit my mother and sister in Midhurst. I did take some poetry submissions with me but I didn’t read them. Instead, I read through one of the anthologies I loved and grew up with, which sits in my mother’s bookcase: John Smith’s My Kind of Verse. Fascinating when you go back to these things to see where you first saw unexpected people: two of Paul Dehn’s poems, for example, are in that lovely anthology. So that’s where I knew them from!

This week I flew away to visit my mother and sister in Midhurst. I did take some poetry submissions with me but I didn’t read them. Instead, I read through one of the anthologies I loved and grew up with, which sits in my mother’s bookcase: John Smith’s My Kind of Verse. Fascinating when you go back to these things to see where you first saw unexpected people: two of Paul Dehn’s poems, for example, are in that lovely anthology. So that’s where I knew them from!

This week I flew away to visit my mother and sister in Midhurst. I did take some poetry submissions with me but I didn’t read them. Instead, I read through one of the anthologies I loved and grew up with, which sits in my mother’s bookcase: John Smith’s My Kind of Verse. Fascinating when you go back to these things to see where you first saw unexpected people: two of Paul Dehn’s poems, for example, are in that lovely anthology. So that’s where I knew them from!

It doesn’t rain in Midhurst apparently. Not like here. So we had a very nice time visiting beautiful gardens and I took our photograph on automatic through the teapots.

 

Moving Life with Teapot

 

There was serious work going on too though. For some time, a pamphlet has been in hand called Night Brings Home the Crowes. Written by my mother (Kathleen Curry), it tells as much of the story as we can recover (from her memories and a few other sources) of the Crowe family — that’s my mother’s grandmother and her nine siblings. It will mainly be of interest to family, but there is some lovely period detail that others will also enjoy, I think.

Anyway, one of our tasks this week was careful proof-reading, page by page, and collecting a few more photographs to go in. The publication, with luck, will be finished and go to the printer this week.

And yet another publication under scrutiny this weekend has been my own next collection, which John Lucas of Shoestring Press is publishing. It’s due some time in the autumn – perhaps October – and although I got it together, more or less, a good few months ago (in fact, last summer, I think), I put off finalising it until the ultimatum came.

Which it did, while I was dipping in and out of A Field of Large Desires, an anthology of Greville Press poems, brought out just a few months ago by Carcanet (I thoroughly recommend it — the contents are different from anything you will find elsewhere). Astbury’s Greville Press is, of course, chiefly and justifiably renowned for poetry pamphlets. In the preface to this book-length volume, Grey Gowrie says,

Poems are best read [ . . . ] with but few of their fellows. The great collections of great poets are useful for reference but hell to read. A slim vol is okay; a pamphlet best of all.

Increasingly, I agree. My Shoestring Press book will be a slim volume, but even at that, it’s weighing down the world with more poetry. I hope Plot and Counterplot justifies its place. We’ll see. When your main task has come to be publishing other people’s work, you end up feeling bizarrely guilty writing poems yourself. Like counselling people to smoke less, while cultivating your own cigar habit on the side.

Anyway, this week I’ll also be working on the Thomas Hardy pamphlet, amongst other things. Thankfully, the submission period is now over, so letters to poets are off the agenda, unless they’re poets in progress, as it were. I’ve been amused to find that several people have congratulated me for publishing Selima Hill’s winning pamphlet, which of course I did not. I haven’t even seen it: it hasn’t come in to Sphinx for review. Speaking of which, there are a couple of reviews nearly ready to go up too. Another task for today.

I’ll conclude with a bit of James Reeves (another under-rated poet) from the Greville Press Anthology. It’s titled ‘The Prisoners’, and every second line should be indented, but I can’t make WordPress do that for me (if anyone reading this knows how, please tell me):

Somehow we never escaped
Into the sunlight,
Though the gates were always unbarred
And the warders tight.
For the sketches on the walls
Were to our liking,
And squeaks from the torture-cell
Most satisfying.