"The Verb"

[Lateralthinking1]

Friday 11 March 2011

The details of this week's programme:

Ian McMillan presents another chance to hear a special edition of Radio 3's cabaret of the word, looking at prison writing.

No less than three of the following five things will be happening:

Long-term prisoner turned writer Noel Smith presents a new commission.

Johnny Cash returns from the dead to relive his experiences in San Quentin before joining The Imagined Village to sing "Cum On Feel The Noize".

Academic Molly Murray reveals the history of 16th and 17th century prison writing.

Newcomer Hannah Silva makes her very first appearance on the programme, reciting her latest song-poem "Bird Cage and Airy Porridge". Marvel as she escapes from a bowl-shaped UFO with her feet in a ball and chain while eating breakfast cereal to a background of chromatic transpositions.

Toby Litt visits Parc Prison to learn about its creative writing programme, meeting inmates and writer-in-residence Graham Hartill.

The Verb - This Friday, 9.15pm-10pm, Radio 3

Also available for 7 days on BBC I-Player

The programme was first broadcast on Friday 1 October 2010.

[Lateralthinking1]

Apologies. I have dragged my feet on this one. My attempt at humour, above, may have been to lighten what I expected would be some rather heavy content. Frankly, I wasn't in the mood for doom and gloom about prison life and I didn't attempt in listening to the programme to analyse it all too deeply. Still, this edition had its moments.

Noel Smith, who has published "A Rusty Gun" about his experiences in HMP Grendon, claims to have not been able to read or write until in his late teens. His education came via a stint in a Rochester borstal since when we were told that he was having to serve 33 years for 58 offences. He took to writing as a part of a rehabilitation programme following the death of his teenage son. He was affected emotionally by not being permitted to attend the funeral. Smith writes well in a gritty, straightforward, style. He is not an interviewee with whom it is difficult to sympathise, without hearing the full detail of his crimes. Prison life often revolves around boredom, gambling and violence. All very grim. However, there were some interesting observations. The idea that televisions in prisons have killed off reading, for example, and the way in which a small greeting card "business" emerged, combining his talents as a poet and those of another inmate in the visual arts. We also heard how it is when macho stances are dropped that art can flourish but also how in a prison environment this would be difficult without the context of a formal programme.

A Rusty Gun - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010...el-razor-smith



Photo: Noel 'Razor' Smith in his cell at Grendon Underwood prison.

Molly Murray teaches and writes about the non-dramatic literature of early modern England at the University of Columbia. Her prison interests focus on the period between Henry VIII, who would sling someone in "the clink" for almost anything, to the passing of the Habeas Corpus Act which gave certain rights to prisoners. The period was marked by a significant increase in the numbers of prisoners and in prison writing and we heard extracts from, among others, Thomas Wyatt and Walter Raleigh. The former was imprisoned in the Bell Tower in London for supposedly being Anne Boleyn's lover and it has been said that his writing is about hearing her execution. Murray tends to comprehend it more in the light of his confusion. In the absence of a formal prison system, she says that many simply wondered what on earth they were doing there. This could be accentuated by the fact that prisoners were often free to come and go and, in the case of someone like Raleigh, were allowed to have their families staying with them. Perhaps most interestingly, the rapidly changing policies of the Tudors and the Stuarts made many enemies of the state with law-abiding folk suddenly falling into the category of religious dissidents. Hence, there was more fluidity between the prisoner classes and the elites. This was why the writing wasn't overly anti-authoritarian in tone but mainly about bewilderment.

The Poetics of Conversion - http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledg...e_locale=en_GB



Photo: Thomas Wyatt by Hans Holbein the Younger, about 1535-7.

Toby Litt teaches writing to the already literate at Goldsmiths. On his visit to Parc Prison in Wales, he learnt about its creative writing programme by meeting inmates and writer-in-residence Graham Hartill. Hartill explained that he wasn't there to pass moral judgement. Other parts of the prison service had that responsibility. Some prisoners read pieces they had written and were interviewed without being able to give their names. One had a story called "The Bailiffs" which described vividly the sense of fear in the whole family during the moments when they were confronted by the law. It was, of course, quite chilling, particularly when set against the description from Litt of the prison itself with its barbed wire and rattling keys, its shouting and its crashing doors. As the prisoner said, he wrote about "real life" rather than "goblins and elves" but to get there some had to overcome "a mental block" to the arts. It was a point that Smith had made too using exactly the same phrase. Generally, there seemed to be an acceptance that some didn't want to dwell on their misdemeanours or their confinement while others found it comforting to manage such things through processes of self-expression. Was this a form of rehabilitation? Well, they said, what would they be doing with their hours instead? For some, I think, it just might be the first few steps towards a life beyond the prison complex.

Creative Writing with Male Prisoners at Risk of Self-harm - http://www.lapidus.org.uk/SpreadtheWord/self.pdf

Journey into Space - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/b...tt-review.html

[Lateralthinking1]

Friday 18 March 2011

The details of this week's programme:

(Not all the links and extracts are discussed in the programme. They are included to provide an introduction to, or reminder of, those featured.)

Ian McMillan presents a live edition of Radio 3's lively language cabaret:

Writer and broadcaster Garrison Keillor performs love sonnets from his first collection of poetry.

77 Love Sonnets - http://guyslitwire.blogspot.com/2009...eillor_13.html

The director Laurie Sansom and the actress Liz White offer a close reading of the dramatic language of Tennessee Williams in his centenary year.

Spring Storm - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/t...rthampton.html



Photo: Liz White with Michael Malarkey in Tennessee Williams's Spring Storm at the National Theatre

The acerbic duo Ginger and Black perform musical comedy with a dark side.

The Lieutenant's Wife - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3o5i...eature=related

Damian Barr explains why he can often be found in his pyjamas in other people's hotel rooms, clutching a book.

The IPOD Generation and the Quarterlife Crisis - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkUP-EW0mJE

The Verb - This Friday, 9.15pm-10pm, Radio 3

Also available for 7 days on BBC I-Player

[Lateralthinking1]

A bit of catching up today. I have added a few links and pictures to the last few previous posts. Some might find them to be of interest. There are also some new links in the post below which are relevant to last Friday's programme. That one will be available on the I-player until this coming Friday. I would still welcome feedback from other people on the programmes and even some new links about the performers. Have you been encouraged to explore any of the artists featured? It would also be interesting to have some dialogue on the kinds of performers you would like to hear on "The Verb" and, a long shot this, examples of your own writing.

I found the edition of 18 March ok. It wasn't one of my favourites. Apparently, it tied in with Comic Relief. Didn't everything that day? I have to mention the next bit. There was a terrific opener in which the phrase "red nose" was completely obliterated by the absolutely sensational reference to a tin of Campbell's Tomato Soup. More of the latter would be extremely welcome.



Photo: Garrison Keillor

Garrison Keillor

Garrison Keillor is a difficult one for me. He is a distinctive broadcasting voice. I like that - and there is little doubt that "Lake Wobegon Days", based on material from his radio show "A Prairie Home Companion", was hugely successful. Personally, I always looked forward to the stories of Lake Wobegon, "a quintessential but fictional Minnesotan small town "where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average". However, it never seemed to me to be quite as charming or as whimsical as I had hoped and there was something of a stumbling block in his Mid-western drawl. While I have generally had the feeling that I never gave it the patience it deserved, the poems from his latest work "77 Love Sonnets" were not particularly to my liking. He read no fewer than four of them on this edition of "The Verb" - "The Beach", "Manhattan", "Lent" and "Baltimore". Again my feeling was "not quite sure". There is a distinct discomfort in his apparent ease. If I ever am to take to Keillor's writing in a bigger way, I doubt that these will be the route in.

Tennessee Williams - Presented by Laurie Sansom and Liz White

Drawl, of course, is very much a feature in the work of Tennessee Wiliams. 2011 is one hundred years on from his date of birth and there have been a number of recent productions of his plays, perhaps most notably "Spring Storm" first in Nottingham and then later at the National Theatre last year. Directed by Laurie Sansom and featuring Liz White, it was acclaimed by the critics and both came to "The Verb" to discuss this work and the more famous "A Streetcar Named Desire". In fact, Laurie and Ian mainly discussed them while Liz re-enacted short sections, later describing how she managed to perfect the southern delivery by constantly thinking about living in almost overwhelming heat. We were told how Williams's personal life informed his work - his homosexuality and his alcoholism and the responsibility he felt for his sister who was schizophrenic and underwent a pre-frontal lobotomy. There were also examples of his use of imagery - particularly roses and light - which shifted kaleidoscopically through his writing. All interesting enough but as someone unfamiliar with his work I am not sure that the descriptions made it any more accessible to me. I was left with the idea that Williams's plays may be among those better seen and heard than forensically analysed.



Photo: Ginger and Black

Ginger and Black

It is hard to describe the comedy duo Ginger and Black. They did a piece about Frankenstein, the play of which has also recently been performed at the National. The duo sing, sort of, in a stop-start way, punctuating the silences with wittiness often reflecting the tone of the street. As this is frequently and deliberately in juxtaposition with the main content or theme, it raises questions as well as providing much humour. What exactly are they doing here? What are they conveying? Do these parts fit together in any coherent, meaningful, way? Overall, I think that they might best be comprehended as positioning a spotlight on sound as it is used in production and highlighting its obviousness and even cynicism in raising the emotional temperature. There is, though, a lot more going on in their work including perhaps taking a pin to pomposity and locating in everyday speech patterns both the wise and the inane. I didn't much take to the piece they performed on the programme - a bit too much silliness and some rather irritating gabbling - but several of their clips on You Tube are thought-provoking and very entertaining.

Damian Barr

Finally, Damian Barr did a nice enough piece about being a "library call boy". This seemed to take him off into areas similar to those who literally sell themselves physically except with him the service being provided was strictly literature. He rented himself out to people who wanted to have a book read to them. Some were simply lonely. Others had exotic tastes while a few were very weird in their preferences. Inevitably, there was humour as well as pathos. It wasn't at all bad, this, and I wish him the best of luck. It isn't easy, though, to assess just on the basis of this piece quite where he is likely to go next as a writer.

[Lateralthinking1]

Friday 25 March 2011

The details of this week's programme which was broadcast last Friday:

(Not all the links and extracts are discussed in the programme. They are included to provide an introduction to, or reminder of, those featured.)

Ian McMillan presented a live edition of Radio 3's lively language cabaret:

Singer-songwriter PJ Harvey performed material from her new album and explained how war poetry influenced her songs about armed conflicts.

The Last Living Rose - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWBrWhrKchQ

There was a new poem from Daljit Nagra.

Look We Have Coming To Dover - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1glwVx_4BFg

Hanif Kureishi read an unpublished essay.

Weddings and Beheadings - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSpUP3VEB3A

The doyenne of the spoken word scene, Salena Godden, took to the floor.

Patti Smith - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgse-...eature=related

The Verb - Every Friday, 9.15pm-10pm, Radio 3

Also available for 7 days on BBC I-Player

[Lateralthinking1]

This one was a live performance with guests to suit the occasion. Several would have been less suited to a radio studio setting.

PJ Harvey explained how a wide range of mainly non-musical artists were informing her work - Pinter, Goya, Loach and Butterworth among them. She performed two songs from her latest album "Let England Shake" including "The Last Living Rose" featured in the trailer for the programme above. In the past, Harvey has tended to write mostly from personal experience but now she is looking outwards and attempting to represent several voices. Interestingly, she attends a poetry group near to her home in Dorset which enables others to comment on her lyrics in draft. Many reviewers in the serious newspapers have described "Shake", her eighth album, as her finest yet and one that sees her reaching creative maturity. One says:

"She has found a way to bring her often jarring musical instincts into one coherent place, setting off high, thin vocals against acoustic washes, electric scratches and rough hewn rhythms that evoke the ancient textures and mysteries, if not the sonic palette, of folk music.This is an England lurching towards apocalypse, ruined by blindness to its own virtues, selling off its natural resources and sending its young men to die in foreign fields".

Heady stuff and there is clearly a place for it but me, I'm not wholly sure yet. It has always been that way about Polly. More admirable than musically enjoyable perhaps but one never for wishing instantly to dismiss.



Photo - Polly Jane Harvey

Daljit Nagra's poems relate to the experience of British-born Indians and often employ language that imitates the English spoken by Indian immigrants whose first language is 'Punglish'. There are similarities here with the recently deceased Smiley Culture who mixed cockney dialect with London's version of Jamaican patois and made it not only widely accessible but in many ways his own. Daljit is a likeable chap, unusually open, genuine and often quite funny. His debut collection, "Look We Have Coming to Dover!", received extremely positive reviews and the poem he performed on "The Verb", "The Balcony Song of Raj and Jaswinder" was well received by the audience. That audience by the way. They sounded odd throughout the programme as if they had enjoyed more than a glass or two of the jolly juice.

That aside, I couldn't understand the howls of laughter that greeted every utterance from Hanif Kureishi. His essay was a serious and rather bleak affair about change, immigration and writing, making extensive reference to Fassbinder and Rushdie. I wasn't quite sure what to make of it and nor it seems was he because he was quite unable to describe himself what the essay was intended to say. That immigrants are frequently given a raw deal almost goes without saying and we are all, I think, increasingly aware of the complexities of living in a foreign country. One point though that did leap out was that fascism starts at the bottom rather than from the top. I have to say that I really couldn't disagree more with him on that point.

Kureishi, voted one of the greatest 50 British writers since 1945 by The Times, and appointed CBE in 2008, is no stranger to controversy. Starting his career as a pornography writer, "My Beautiful Launderette", a screenplay about a gay Pakistani-British boy was followed by "The Buddha of Suburbia" which won the Whitbread Prize. Allegedly semi-autobiographical, his sister has claimed that he always tends to misrepresent the family. She says that their grandfather was not "cloth cap working class", their mother never worked in a shoe factory, and their father was not a bitter old man. "Intimacy" was controversial for its unreserved sex scenes and "The Mother" focussed on a 70 year old woman seducing a 30 year old man. Given this background, his essay on "The Verb" was surprisingly colourless, even if it contained his characteristic meandering hue, and as he read it aloud in what were dulcet tones, one wondered if he was running out of steam.



Photo - Hanif Kureishi

Finally in this edition were poems performed by Salena Godden who not only writes but has been involved in the ska-punk-breakbeat duo, SaltPeter, whose album "Hunger’s The Best Sauce" was tipped for the Mercury Prize. Originally from Hastings and often focussed on the characters who live in that town, she seems to be on a mission to prove that Essex girls don't have all the best lines. A legend on the live poetry scene and "The General" of The Book Club Boutique in Soho, she has been described as "notorious" and "boozy" with a penchant for writing "mucky poems for punks". More flatteringly, the promotional material for her latest work reads:

"Godden leads you through her scrumpy-soaked teenage years in Bottle Alley to the tumbling, breathless Soho streets, to graveyard snogs and chance meetings with Patti Smith in Saint Michel". It is bursting with romanticism and longing, triumphing over a more seedy, sinister undertow".

Salena read the title poem on the programme and it was evocative. Under the pier “the magic mushrooms make the sea all blood and ink.” This isn’t deckchairs and knotted handkerchiefs – this is “where it’s as cheap as chips / and the bad boys, they crack on / even when the condom rips.” Another poem about an air stewardness was less successful. God knows what it was all about. The audience enjoyed it though and clearly had a great night out.

[Lateralthinking1]

Friday 1 April 2011

The details of this week's programme:

(Not all the links and extracts are discussed in the programme. They are included to provide an introduction to, or reminder of, those featured.)

Ian McMillan presents:

Ben Okri who reads a new piece specially commissioned by The Verb.

What is the Book of Life? - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e9QU...eature=related

Mark Crick who explains the craft of literary pastiche.

Kafka's Soup - http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...ck-515308.html

Sartre's Sink - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/vide...-hemingway-poe

Harriet Tarlo and Carol Watts who read and discuss radical landscape poetry.

Scrap Paper Thinking - http://scrappaperthinking.net/content/view/44/9/

Wrack - http://freespace.virgin.net/reality....arolwatts.html

Ira Lightman who has fun with fonts.

Absolutely Sweet Marie - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwrDOS0Junk

The Verb - This Friday, 9.15pm-10pm, Radio 3

Also available for 7 days on BBC I-Player

[Globaltruth]

Salena Godden was one of Charlie Gillett's favourite performers when she still had her band.

Some tracks on Spotify, but make sure your maiden aunt is wearing those crocheted ear-protectors...

I like the sound of her.

[Lateralthinking1]

Oh really? I didn't know that. Interesting. I have watched a few clips of Salena on You Tube. I had to select one for this forum carefully. Responsible host etc. She has a lot of colour and is not lacking in self-confidence.

I confess that I haven't heard that edition yet. One to do today. On paper, PJ Harvey and her are a good combination. I haven't got the Friday Fright Experience this week. Still, sometime soon, I do need to show that I have actually applied for some strawberry picking jobs and I've also got to deal with fragmenting tubs of compost in the garden.

[Globaltruth]

Oh really? I didn't know that. Interesting. I have watched a few clips of Salena on You Tube. I had to select one for this forum carefully. Responsible host etc. She has a lot of colour and is not lacking in self-confidence.

I confess that I haven't heard that edition yet. One to do today. On paper, PJ Harvey and her are a good combination. I haven't got the Friday Fright Experience this week. Still, sometime soon, I do need to show that I have actually applied for some strawberry picking jobs and I've also got to deal with fragmenting tubs of compost in the garden.

Charlie played her on Wo3 a couple of times...an interesting choice I always thought and he always spoke most highly of her.
I like the idea of PJ Harvey more than the reality, I was impressed with the investigation and research she has done for her latest project.

..And I will be interested to hear what you think of Mr Kureishi....I'll hold my comments on him until you've listened.

I need some compost at the moment for our new allotment project which is being carved out of mud even as I write. perhaps you could pop it into the matter transmitter?

[Lateralthinking1]

Yes, I'm the same on PJ. The link I put on the trailer for Mr Kureishi was very depressing but I try to provide a mixture of stuff. I do hope that you won't be spending so much time on your allotment that your host duties suffer. Maybe we should swap notes about our allotment and garden work and schedule accordingly. No, I'm joking. The matter transmitter is temperamental. On some days it just keeps repeating that I need to do an A'level in physics. Currently, it is in lethargy mode - more mutter than matter.

(Edit - The review for that edition of the programme is now at post 36.)

[Lateralthinking1]

Oh dear. I struggled with this edition. Put it down partially to some pressing priorities offline. To summarise, the programme was about verbal pastiche and the manipulating of structures. At least, that was how it looked and sounded to me. A kind of things are never quite as they seem to be. Expect the unexpected. As I tend to like to know where I am, the second aspect was never going to appeal to me hugely but the first, on paper, seemed to be worth a go. In a sense, there is always a question in writing about the purpose and even the location of the author's voice.



Photo: Mark Crick

I particularly liked the idea of the work of Mark Crick from the reviews that I had read. However, the introduction to Crick didn't grab me much. Each participant presented an ode to a goldfish in the style of a well-known writer, a rather wacky idea that to my mind was only partially successful. This is not to say that it was an out-of-place beginning for Crick himself is not particularly conventional. Possibly best known for the literary parody Sartre's Sink, in which he presents DIY tips using the verbal mannerisms of the author in the title, he has done similar things with other areas of domesticity. He has a cookery book with a difference, Kafka's Soup, and has produced gardening advice in Machiavelli's Lawn. He is undoubtedly very clever in being able to produce such commonplace self-help books in the voices of specific writers. However, he seemed more ordinary in this programme than I had expected. To my mind his originality comes across more clearly on film. The ingredient that adds is comic drama and, not to wish to be too cutting, it is probably a better way for him to plug his latest book.



Photo: Harriet Tarlo

Crick's application of meaningful voices to what are essentially household routines does at least provide for amusement. In contrast, I found the approach of Harriet Tarlo and Carol Watts to landscape poetry just a little too seriously different. The latter is one of several contributors to an anthology put together by the first and each read one of their own poems. They were not in any sense awful but I found them rather lacking in emotional impact. The objective of the anthology appears to be to move away from the lyricism that one might associate with someone like Wordsworth. Interspersed in standard descriptions of the rural are numbers and even mathematical formulae. These are intended to offer a different frame through which to view familiar scenery and perhaps to make it more tangible if not grounded. I felt though that it lacked romanticism and that it was actually somewhat disorientating. Not only did it seem a bit remote. There was a clear contradiction in the concept of accentuating the visceral through dryness. While the sporadic use of rational symbolism did suggest an actual looking at the landscapes described, the way that it was scattered through the verse like branches on soil required scrutiny of map. There was an additional need for some focus on feet to avoid any unnecessary tripping. This was in more than one way a journey into the wild.



Photo: Ira Lightman

Ira Lightman is possibly the only person in the country who has worked simultaneously on three font based projects. Based in the North East of England, he works closely with community groups on specific themes such as "Ambition Within Life". The results are not simply pieces of writing but features of mainly urban architectural schemes. Lightman has found that an introduction in art workshops to fonts can encourage those with a lack of interest in poetry to find a suitable entry point. He doesn't draw a distinction between the typeface and the content for each he believes is a form of artistic expression. In a sense, he says, the former is more raw. In line with this notion, he has worked in concrete and steel as well as more conventionally on paper. Like the other contributors to the programme, he revises established concepts and shifts perspectives away from assumptions. Again, it was all ok, this "Blue Sky Thinking". Sometimes though there is more than enough scope to explore inside the box. In fact, it might be said that this is the more remarkable aspect of literature, that capacity for being able to introduce new light and tone and structure without digging up the foundations, changing the shape of the accommodation, and moving it to a new place in the mind.



Photo: Ben Okri

I thought that Ben Okri made the strongest contribution to this edition. Not that the piece he had written for the programme, "A Sinister Perfection", was all that easy to assimilate either. It featured a doll's house in which the child who owned it imagined a broad range of occurrences. Those then subsequently happened to increasingly alarming effect in the town house where the doll's house was located. The house was also the home of the child until the day it suddenly burnt down. If this was a horror story as it seemed to be, then it was true to its form in having some slightly mystical, symbolic characters, including a man in a turban carrying blue stone. Okri was unable to explain the nature of his representation precisely but he appeared to vary the lines between fantasy and reality. Beyond the home as a replica of doll's house, he introduced the idea of a world beyond them both. As I think I have already implied, the unfolding drama had a psychological dimension. In a superstitious way, it could have been a morality tale about the possible power of drawing in whatever it is you contemplate. More directly, it was also about the shifting of perspectives and disorientation. One had to keep asking what was happening where and only until those questions were answered was it possible to comprehend scale. The small house inside a home was bigger in the mind of the child than her home. It was therefore her in a manner of speaking. She was trying to manage coping alone with a lot of very difficult and complex emotions.

[Lateralthinking1]

Friday 8 April 2011

The details of this week's programme:

(Not all the links and extracts are discussed in the programme. They are included to provide an introduction to, or reminder of, those featured.)

Ian McMillan presents:

The daring singer-songwriter Tim Minchin performing a song about the angst of songwriting and wanting the glories of fame.

Tim Minchin - Inflatable You: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6raVzrbqrM

Work in progress from American biographer Blake Bailey who's now writing a memoir. How has writing the lives of others impacted upon the way he is approaching his own life?

Blake Bailey - Cheever - A Life - http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...y-1843598.html

Recently returned from Galicia, the part of Northern Spain with ancient Celtic connections, Fiona Sampson introduces poetry from the region with two writers Marilar Aleixandre and Xesús Fragar.

Fiona Sampson - The Poetry Archive - http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetrya...o?poetId=10247

Marilar Aleixandre - Wikipedia Biography - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilar_Aleixandre

Xesús Fragar - No information available

Poet Roger Garfitt examines the life and work of Harold Massingham, the Yorkshire poet who was the contemporary of Ted Hughes and who died in March.

Roger Garfitt - The Horseman's Word - http://www.waterstones.com/waterston...+word/7919960/

Harold Massingham - Obituary - http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/...gham_1_3197384

The Verb - This Friday, 9.15pm-10pm, Radio 3

Also available for 7 days on BBC I-Player

[Lateralthinking1]

The theme of this week's programme was lives and places. It was a terrific edition, very possibly the one I have most enjoyed this year. Roger Garfitt, poet and former Editor of Poetry Review, joined Ian to discuss the work of Harold Massingham who, like Ted Hughes, was taught English in South Yorkshire by John Fisher. Hughes, of course, became Poet Laureate. Quite why it is that Massingham has never been seen as a giant of poetry is a mystery to me. His use of highly evocative metaphor to describe industrial and pastoral northern landscapes could often be breathtaking and, as Roger revealed, he also had a mastery of perception on different levels. While his poems always retained the familiar bounce of Anglo-Saxon, he was highly adept at shifting gears in his poetry to stunning effect. He could move upwards from a focus on life's earthy realities to an almost mythic intensity and then, equally effectively, come back down again, with insight, to street level.

As a compiler of crossword puzzles, he had, according to Ian, the biggest vocabulary of anyone he had met. This arguably shaped his work for, like Hughes, he began to write in fairly standard quatrains but, by 1972, he was ahead of his contemporary in experimenting with form. With the publication of "Frost-Gods", for example, he introduced a new "smash and grab" style of imagery. Hughes only attempted that much later. In "Frost-Gods", Massingham describes frost as an exploding "air-berg". He gives us a picture of a cow standing "heavier than grand mahogany" and of a walk down a lane where "rain had siled it down for days" and "my collar clung like Sellotape, my clothing like surgeon’s gloves". Astonishingly, his work is no longer in print and apparently there are also 70 poems that have never been published. It is to be hoped that in this, the year of his death, that outrage will be addressed.



Photo: Harold Massingham

Fiona Sampson, the current Editor of Poetry Review, has recently published a supplement on Galician poetry. On Friday, she and Ian discussed this writing with the poet Marilar Aleixandre and Xesús Fragar, who has translated Nabokov into the Galician language. I have always tended to see Galicia as a little like the west of Ireland but Fiona felt that there were strong cultural similarities between Galicia and Wales. Both were small, bilingual, territories facing towards the Atlantic. Neither Galician or Welsh have specific words for "yes" and "no" but rather tend to use the terminology "is" and "not is". While Welsh had to survive in spite of its close proximity to the English language, Galician could be described as almost Portuguese with a celtic inflection.

It was fascinating to hear how poems have such significance in Galicians' lives. In their bookshops, there are as many books on poetry as in our own shops there are novels. Xesús described how the Middle Ages had been the golden era for Galician poetry. Even Keats had written in Galician. It had again become influential in the 19th century to counteract the oppression by Spanish kings. At that time, Galicians rediscovered their heritage through romance. Some time later, there were further fallow years when all of Spain was under Franco. In recent decades, though, Galician poetry has flourished and it has done so by combining the traditional with the modern. Poets born in the 1950s, such as Chus Pato, have often a little self-consciously drawn some influence from the beat poets. More recent writers are notable both for their use of free verse and associative dream logic.



Photo: Marilar Aleixandre

Marilar read two of her own poems in Galician - "The Head Eaters" and "Sweeping Up The Ashes" - which were subsequently translated by Fiona into English. The former piece particularly stood out for me. It described wonderfully the peculiar Galician custom of eating fish heads while playfully deconstructing Galician myths associated with the sea. As Marilar implied, people living in Galicia can need reminding that they are human beings rather than sea creatures. Born in Madrid, and only coming to Galician in her early twenties, she clearly enjoys the benefits of having an outsider's eye. As for me, there is something about the languages of Spain that can send a slight tingle along my spine. Her readings were so absolutely beautiful that it hardly seemed necessary to know what the words meant exactly in English. However, Fiona's re-rereading of them as translations were immensely sympathetic. On hearing them, I thought that there were some interesting similarities between the poems of Marilar and Massingham. Each made considerable use of striking, rather gutteral sounding, imagery and yet managed simulateously to convey an atmospheric mystique.

Blake Bailey has received critical acclaim for two 700 page biographies, one about Richard Yates, an alcoholic, chain-smoking, manic-depressive who lived alone in hovels where he pursued what was very arguably an addiction to writing, and the other on the even more colourful novelist John Cheever, whose life revolved around infidelity, drunkenness, drug abuse, closet bisexuality, sexual promiscuity, cruel parenting, and abusive marital discord. Like these men, Blake's background was American middle class suburbia, with all manner of darkness and disturbance behind the respectable veneer. While settled, or so it seemed, in Oklahoma, his family was Venetian in origin and this, I would imagine, may have contributed to its days of fiery temperament. Blake has begun a memoir in which he is seeking to tell how life actually was from his perspective and to come to terms with what was a difficult upbringing. In debuting the prologue on "The Verb", he provided listeners with a rare opportunity to review a book in the making.



Photo: Blake Bailey

It was immediately apparent that Blake has a gift for presenting bleak events with a charming, if sardonic, humour. The characters of the family members are vividly brought to life - the uncle with a glass eye who regarded him as a "bleeding heart liberal"; another who was described by his father not exactly charitably as "salt of the earth"; the father himself who was certainly not everything he seemed to be to the general public, even if there were very few endeavours in which he appeared to feel he hadn't excelled. There are old guys at the rodeo, friends of his grandfather with confusion about time, who are convinced that Blake is his son rather than his grandson. They are the ones who take whiskey and cigarettes to his hospital bed just before he has a second heart attack and dies. The wife and sister of Blake's father have warned against it but they are still subjected to his father's rage. "He's dead", he declares during one of his more memorable tantrums, "are you two happy now?"

Ian observed that there was a lot of focus on other people, given that this was a memoir. Blake explained that the book was to be mainly about the relationships between him, his father and his brother. The latter, a drug addict who had often made his life not merely difficult but hellish, had eventually killed himself at the age of 42. The essence of writing a memoir was then discussed briefly. Roger, who has completed one, thought that it was a bit like holding up a slow-motion camera to a past that had been lived at a different pace. Blake felt that it was harder to write a memoir than a biography because emotions were more intense. This could affect judgement although he hoped that the process could enable understanding to be found. One of his family members had said of others that they were "not worth the powder it would take to blow them up". His own view of his father now was that he was a seed of virtue, a man's man and a pariah in his own home while, he concluded, the cause of his grief was his "failure of love".



Photo: Tim Minchin

Tim Minchin is a genius. He just doesn't know it yet. Justifiably given the award of best newcomer at the Edinburgh Festval, he is a comedian and songwriter in the tradition of Lehrer, Stilgoe and Victoria Wood, albeit one updated. He says that his main influences were the Beatles and the Kinks, Queen at their most self-knowing and self-mocking, and the work of Gilbert and Sullivan. He is brilliant at rhyme and at what one might describe as verbal pastiche. In his performance on the programme of "Rock n Roll Nerd", he somehow managed to convey the affectations of almost every well-known seventies rock and pop god. Elton John, David Bowie, the Bee Gees, erm, Dean Friedman - they were all in there, if haphazardly and obliquely. As with the link of his above, I found myself laughing out loud. Tim has also set Roald Dahl's "Matilda" to music and in doing so has won the praise of Dahl's family. There are then clearly many strings to his bow. Expect to hear much more from him in the coming months.

[Lateralthinking1]

Friday 15 April 2011

"From the multiverse to a many-sided table, that's The Verb."

The details of this week's programme:

(Not all the links and extracts are discussed in the programme. They are included to provide an introduction to, or reminder of, those featured.)

Ian McMillan presents Radio 3's language cabaret with:

A Verb commission from Sarah Hall, the author of The Electric Michaelangelo and How To Paint A Dead Man.

The Electric Michaelangelo - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004...ardianreview24

Singer-songwriter Emmy The Great and poet Jack Underwood who celebrate the Dewey Decimal classification system in an excerpt from a new show.

The Black Cab Sessions - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2q_L...eature=related

Interview on Ideas Tap - http://www.ideastap.com/Magazine/all...Underwood-Poet

Poet and dramatist Philip Ridley who introduces a new play 'Tender Napalm' and explains how performing his poems live shapes his poetic drama.

Biography: The Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005...drelationships

And, John Schad who champions experimental writing and reads from GodotOnSea.

At Lancaster University - http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/...es/John-Schad/

The Verb - This Friday, 9.15pm-10pm, Radio 3

Also available for 7 days on BBC I-Player