The Guardian's Blog, page 211

Poster poems: Licence to steal

This month, your challenge is take up the example of many other poets and pick up another writer's line. Then see where it leads you

This month, our eggs are poached. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, "Talent borrows, genius steals". Poets, I like to think, are poachers, and having taken what they need, they sneak home in the dark to savour their ill-gotten words. In the most extreme cases, poems like The Waste Land for instance, it seems like every line has been pocketed from somewhere or another, but this month's poached egg challenge will be a more modest form of the art of borrowing. We're talking about poems called 'Poem beginning with a line by …'

In Robert Duncan's "A poem beginning with a line by Pindar", the borrowing is at one remove, being from the Loeb translation of the Greek original. Pindar is celebrating the lyre's ability to make the dancer's feet attend to the music it plays. Duncan's poem quickly moves from Pindar to other artists and writers, and is, in part at least, a meditation on art and its role in our attention to the world, to history and to love.

John Ashbery's "Errors" is a study in human relations in the poet's characteristically oblique manner. Randall Mann poached Ashbery's opening line, "Jealousy. Whispered weather reports", and built a kind of deconstructed villanelle around it in his "Poem Beginning with a Line by John Ashbery". In Mann's poem the jealousy is no longer that which sours things between people; it has become an almost universal natural phenomenon.

Ashbery himself was no stranger to the art of foxing the gamekeeper. His "Poem Beginning with a Line from Gammer Gurton's Needle" is one of the oldest extant English comic plays. Ashbery's poem starts out in the low farce world of its source but soon moves to an entirely other sphere, an indeterminate narrative hovering on the verge of articulation.

Australian poet John Tranter liked a line by Kenneth Koch so much that he wrote not one but two poems beginning with it. The line "This Connecticut landscape would have pleased Vermeer" comes from Koch's "Fresh Air" and was intended as a parody of the kind of poem that tenured poets in American universities were producing at the time. Tranter takes the satiric intent a step further in his first poem, dismissing not just the poetry, but the whole faux countryman lifestyle that went with it. The second poem has a pop at representative art, as exemplified by Vermeer, and, by extension, the cult of landscape. Once again, we've moved some considerable distance from the original contents of the poacher's bag.

All the poems so far have begun with lines from other poems, but Anthony Robinson takes a line from an interview with the New York poet David Shapiro as his starting point. In the interview Shapiro says "I never gave up my love of what I already loved", referring to his love of poetic variety, his refusal to abandon the poetry he loved in his youth in favour of the latest orthodoxy. Robinson takes the line and turns it into a meditation on his love of an individual fellow-human, which is, in turn, love of life in all its rich variety.

Lisa Jarnot's "Poem Beginning with a Line by Frank Lima" is an almost incantatory riff on "and how terrific", the first three words of the poached line. The result is a maze-like structure, with syntax and imagery constantly turning back on themselves. The Lima poem that provided the line is not available anywhere online; maybe women make more adept poachers than men?

Of course, the source of a borrowed line doesn't have to be a poet. Donald Hall turned to a philosopher, and his two-line "Poem beginning with a line of Wittgenstein" is an extraordinarily neat upending of the reader's expectations.

And so this month's challenge is to write poems beginning with a line from a source of your own choosing. The source can be any kind of text, from canonical poet to advertising hoarding. The only requirement is that you make it your own. Happy poaching.

PoetryBilly Mills
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Reading group: Bogged down on Swann's Way?

As well as being famously long, Proust is also often thought of as boring. Is this true, and will we get through this first volume?

So, Proust. Have you made it past the first 50 pages?

I'm guessing that a healthy proportion of people who pick up the book don't even get beyond page 51. Within a similar word count, Raymond Chandler could have got through two murders, six whiskies, half a dozen wisecracks. Raymond Carver could described at least six suburban households descending into despair. And Hemingway had almost finished The Old Man and The Sea. Yet, in pure plot terms, pretty much all that happens in those first pages of Proust is that the young Marcel struggles to fall asleep.

Of course, describing Proust in terms of plot alone does no justice to the reflections, counter-reflections, digressions and musings that form so much of the immersive pleasure he offers. But it does explain why so many readers feel themselves going under so quickly. Even those who find his writing lovely struggle to progress, as Reading Group contributor AndrewLesk puts it:

"I have started this book four times. Once got to page 200. Why did I stop? Time, ironically. It's the most beautiful thing I've read. Looking forward to getting through it all now that the Club is onto it."

He wasn't the only one to struggle. JuliaC42 wrote:

"I started reading it once (the Moncrieff) but it took me so long to read the first chapter that I gave up. It is now doing a good job of supporting my clock radio at the correct height."

Sallycosstick adds:

"Like others I have had this in my reading pile for the last few years, since I retired.. the three fat volumes of the penguin Moncrieff translation have come with me on several camping holidays, and once I did start and reached page 157, loved it but didn't keep going when I came home …"

When I started out on my Penguin edition, I even wondered how many people made it as far as the opening chapter. The general editor Christopher Prendergast's preface starts off by quoting a New Yorker cartoon featuring a "peevish shopper saying to a salesman in a bookstore 'I want something to get even with him for that new translation of Proust he got me last year.'" Later on, he also states alarmingly: "There seems to be no good reason to make Proust reader friendly …"

Meanwhile, it isn't just the prose style, the long sentences, the great piles of subordinate clauses, the Mississippi-wide meanderings, the slow-flowing course of the narrative that might cause problems. You could easily be forgiven for taking against the narrator himself. At first glance, he seems a tremendous egotist and snob. Who is he to imagine that every aspect of his life is so precious and important that he has to share it in such detail? Who is he to suggest that his family know so much about life well-lived? Who cares about his precious hawthorns? Why does he make so much of social niceties and conventions? Why does it matter to us who his relatives do and don't snub? Why should we care why?

If you ask yourself such questions, you aren't the first. That particular honour goes to no less a writer than André Gide, who turned Swann's Way down for his publishing house precisely because he thought Proust a "snob", and a "social butterfly" who did no more than report on tedious high society events.

On the subject of rejections, Proust also received a beauty from the publishing house Ollendorff, whose reader confided to Proust's brother: "My dear friend, perhaps I am dense, but I just don't understand why a man should take 30 pages to describe how he turns over in bed before he goes to sleep. It made my head swim."

Another rejection, which I have unable to source (beyond a quote in Andre Bernad's Rotten Rejections) but seems all too convincing, reads:

"I only troubled myself so far as to open one of the notebooks of your manuscripts; I opened it at random, and as ill luck would have it, my attention soon plunged into the cup of camomile tea on page 62 – then tripped, at page 64, on the phrase … where you speak of the 'visible vertebra of a forehead."

Console yourself with those judgments if you're also finding the book hard-going. But also, be warned. Proust eventually had the book published at his own expense with Eugene Grasset (100 years ago, in just a few weeks time, as luck has it). Soon after it came out, Gide read the book properly. He was overwhelmed and wrote to Proust, apologising for the rejection, calling it "the gravest error" and "one of the most burning regrets, remorses, of my life."

Gide, like so many others who actually stick with the book, had realised that it was a masterpiece.

In terms of my own reading, I've barely even reached the foothills. I'm a few hundred pages in, at the start of the story about Swann's great love. Sometimes it has felt like I'm in a tiny rowing boat, floating aimlessly on a great dark lake, no sight of shore, no real sense even of which direction I might expect to be heading. Yet even then, in spite of an occasional fear that I might tip over and descend to the depths, never to emerge, and in spite of a general feeling of bewilderment - and notwithstanding an occasional fear that my own prose might be polluted by Proust's own strangely addictive style, as it was once many years ago when I first read Sacred Hunger and found myself curiously apt to start writing in a style favoured more in the 18th century ...

Where was I?

Oh yes, wafting away. You see even when I've felt myself hopelessly drifting in my little boat, I've felt the lulling beauty of Proust's writing. This is a man who can make a multi-page description of a Hawthorn blossom fascinating – and then do it again, and again, and again. What's more, when you actually focus, pick up those oars and start powering through those dense waters, you realise just how much is going on beneath the surface. What insights. What subtle ironies. What teasing jokes. What sensual pleasures. What feats of memory and description. What loving characterisations. And what devastating character assassinations. You realise, in short, that this is the stuff. Chris Power summed up the feeling neatly in his fantastic series on reading Proust:

"Writing from the other side of volume one, The Way by Swann's [the more literal translation of Du côté de chez Swann favoured by recent English editions], I'm experiencing that odd feeling you get when a piece of art so culturally enshrined as to become meaningless turns out to be - stop the presses - really rather good."

At this stage, my main fear isn't so much that I won't be able to continue as that I won't be able to stop. Suddenly, those other six volumes are looking mighty tempting. Suddenly it all seems overwhelming again. I should heed the typically sound advice from BillyMills:

"I think it's probably best not to think of it as one big book but as a series of averageish ones. That way it's less daunting. I think."

There have been other good tips.

LordAdonis says:

"Don't be put off by the first half. It can seem intimidatingly dense, philosophical and painfully slow when you first read it, but just take your time and let it wash over you. The second half of the novel actually has quite an engrossing plot (!), but you need to pay attention to the ruminations that kick it all off to get the most out."

In other words, stick with it. I can already see that the rewards far outweigh the costs. Mind you, ChrisIcarus has a warning:

"If there are Guardian readers who have not yet swum in the deep ocean of Proust's full masterpiece then I offer this advice: read no more than one paragraph at a sitting and no more than three paragraphs in a day. This is the CRACK COCAINE of art and if you want to stay on the sane side of Dionysian madness imbue this nectar sparingly."

I've been devouring great chunks at a time, as well as listening to an excellent audiobook reading by George Guidall. I think I may be in trouble. But if I am, it's the kind of trouble I want. Especially if this beautiful comment from Theodorou is anything to go by:

"Forty-some years ago, having just read James Joyce's Ulysses, I decided to tackle Proust. I read 'Swann's Way' and with each page wondered where Proust was taking me. At the end of that first volume of 'Remembrance' I found that none of my questions about the book, or the story itself, were answered. I'd have to soldier on. And so I began 'Within a Budding Grove'. Midway through that second volume I realized the scope, the majesty and the scale of Proust's accomplishment. I felt as though I was holding in my hands the literary equivalent of all the works of Michelangelo, all the symphonies of Mahler, all the paintings of Cézanne, all the films of Fellini. This was not simply a book, this was a life's work. Proust was inviting me to co-exist with him as he lived his life andput everything he knew into these seven volumes.

"And so I gave myself over to Marcel. Moved in with him. Co-habited with him for two years and I read every word. Sometimes I would read a page-long sentence over and over again to hear the music of it, to luxuriate in the profundity of the thought, to re-experience the incredible beauty of the writing. I had never known such joy in reading a work of literature before and haven't since. This is not to say I don't read or care for other authors. I do. But Proust holds a special place in my life. He is the wisest and most perceptive person I (n)ever knew.

"In 1971, I went to Paris on the 100th anniversary of Proust's birthday and I laid flowers on his grave .

"Two years ago I re-read it and found that now, in my old age, Proust's magnificent sentences don't simply delight me, they move me to tears. And so I would like to say here, in this little blog about one's first attempt at reading Proust: you will either be smitten by him or not. But don't expect to necessarily 'get Proust' by just reading the first volume. Swann's Way is only the very beginning in the life of this masterpiece. You might need to go a bit further. Remembrance is not a book like any other. It's a journey of a lifetime."

How to say no to that? Onwards! More Proust please. And then more. And more again.

Oh, and if you're yet to embark on the journey, you might be tempted by the excellent offer from the Guardian bookshop. Volume I of the Prendergast Penguin for just £6.99.

Marcel ProustFictionSam Jordison
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Should traditional biography be buried alongside Shakespeare's breakfast?

A major conference of writers and academics is to discuss how biography should evolve in the age of the internet and Wikipedia

Leading authors including Shelley and Coleridge's biographer Richard Holmes and Claire Tomalin, recent chronicler of the life of Charles Dickens, are set to gather this weekend to debate whether the internet and the rise of Wikipedia have caused a crisis in modern biography.

A major conference at the University of East Anglia gathers biographers and academics from around the world to discuss the future of biography, and if the traditional, cradle-to-grave narrative is dying out. The debate comes as biography sales have slumped significantly in recent years, from a high of over 7.3m sold in 2006 to just 2.7m in 2012, according to book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan. The market overall has declined over the period, but Nielsen said that biography and autobiography sales have fallen "far more sharply". The autobiography category has done better than biography, it added, with the latter representing over 40% of the sector in 2001, and less than 30% by 2012.

"Can biography evolve to meet our current demands? Has the internet killed off the demand for the authoritative? In an age of bestselling celebrity memoir, does anyone still care what Shakespeare had for breakfast?" asked conference organiser Kathryn Holeywell, a postgraduate student at the university.

"There's a big anxiety among biographers these days – the Wikipedia anxiety," said Kathryn Hughes, professor of life writing at UEA and author of The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton and George Eliot: the Last Victorian. "The worry is that, if you can get all that information from Wikipedia, what's left for biography?"

Holeywell believes there has been a shift in biography away from traditional "life" narratives to what she is calling "partial lives", stories that look at a group, a particular event or an age. In recent years, the UK's major non-fiction prize, the Samuel Johnson award, has gone to a range of innovative, sideways takes on biography rather than cradle-to-grave narratives. Last year's winner Wade Davis's Into the Silence looked at George Mallory's attempts to scale Everest, while previous successes include Philip Hoare's "biography" of the whale, Leviathan, and James Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.

The last "traditional" biography to win the award was Like a Fiery Elephant, Jonathan Coe's take on the life of BS Johnson in 2005, while the Costa biography prize was won this year by a graphic novel, Mary and Bryan Talbot's Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, and in 2010 by Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes, which tells the story of his family through a collection of miniature statues.

Conference attendees in Norwich, who will include Margaretta Jolly, Charles Nicholl, Miranda Seymour, Jeremy Treglown, and Frances Wilson, are to consider topics including, "what kind of life do we get when depth overshadows breadth?" and how "shorter, closer cuts stand up to definitive, cradle-to-grave lives", as well as how the serious biography is changing and adapting to the modern age.

"What seems to be happening is that biographies are having to do something different. Being a chronicler of a life is no longer enough – fleshing out a timeline just won't do," said Hughes. "It is all about added value, and it is quite liberating. I feel I don't have to get all that quotidian detail in – instead I have to find something that nobody else can find, through years in the archive, months of ferreting out.

"What I'm hoping is that what will be left is the good biographies. I think it will make everyone get cleverer and sharper and more inventive, and that has to be good. At the bottom level, biography has got that slightly ploddy, unimaginative way of doing things, and if that goes, and I think it's going – that is great."

BiographyPublishingWikipediaWilliam ShakespeareCharles DickensAlison Flood
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Written on the body: Literary hunks and hotties

Considering the attractiveness of fictional characters may be cheap, but it's hard not to

Word that Slate has been marshalling the 20 most attractive characters in fiction (top 10 babes here, studmuffins yonder) reminded me of a good moment from my A-Level English class. While I was busy trying to impress the teacher-that-changed-my-life by tracing the symbol-plot of The Great Gatsby, a girl in my class was picked up for describing one of its leading males as a hunk. "You cannot call Tom Buchanan 'hunky," said Mrs Schooling. We tittered, she blushed.

By effectively admitting to the class that she found Tom Buchanan fanciable, my classmate was making an aesthetic faux pas that Mrs Schooling was probably right to guess would not impress external examiners. The sternly moral more-or-less Leavisite reading that we were taught aspired to an Olympian dispassion, approaching books like scripture (as I still more-or-less do). There was no room for bodily passions when paying proper attention to Fitzgerald's oafish plutocrat, striding around the Jazz Age endorsing euthanasia.

And of course there is something queasily Grazian about this kind of froth. What next? Romanticism's 40 hottest dresses? Some kind of bannerish display in big-font pullquotes of the most embarrassing slipups in literature? ("Tess in Britneyesque eyebrow disaster after Angel dumps her" "Frock horror as Dorothea Brooke's Honeymoon Happiness Ends in Tears") That might at least be a sour balm for the chick lit readers driven to body dysmorphia by thin heroines), but it's not engaging the mind or the soul as holy literature is supposed to.

Yet the truth is that surely Tom Buchanan IS hunky. Check out those polo jodhpurs. Nobody who watches films can avoid its erotic spell and – after a shaky start in its infancy – it's nevertheless gained aesthetic respectability. Howard Barker, probably today's most cerebral playwright, has theorised the erotic dynamics between audience and actor in performance and declared them essential to theatre. Literature, though, isn't really supposed to go in for this kind of unpleasantness. But like it or not, books - good books – engage your whole self, and that includes our baser drives (the ones that also encourage you to "identify" with characters). Martin Amis's alter ego in The Rachel Papers, you'll remember, was drawing up a list of Eng Lit's hottest babes 40 years ahead of Slate. Maggie Tulliver walked away with that dubious honour as I recall.

Some of literature's arousing facets are of course linguistic. Think of Nabokov's sensuous sentences, or the moment when Proust's Marcel hears Swann's daughter Gilberte pronounce his name and headily feels himself inside her mouth. The Paul Muldoon poem "Promises, Promises" has a similarly red-blooded charge when he writes: "The cardinal sings from a redbud / For the love of one slender and shy, / The flight after flight of stairs / To her room in Bayswater, / The damson freckle on her throat / That I kissed when we kissed Goodbye." In this reader at least, mind, heart and body stir at those lines.

FictionF Scott FitzgeraldPaul MuldoonGeorge EliotThomas HardyMarcel ProustVladimir NabokovLindesay Irvine
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

A writers' weekend in 1920s Paris

The Rest Is Noise festival is about to focus on this thrilling artistic era. I'd like to go, but I'd rather time-travel to the city as it was then

The Rest is Noise, the investigation of the culture of the 20th century at London's Southbank Centre, continues this weekend with a trip to 1920s Paris. And is there anywhere you would rather be?

To put the question another way: Has there ever been a greater concentration of literary talent and output in one time and place? By 1922, the city had already seen Proust write the last words he would manage for A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, James Joyce finishing and publishing Ulysses, Ezra Pound polishing drafts of The Waste Land while working on his own Cantos. Meanwhile, a young war veteran called Ernest Hemingway had arrived in town, met Gertrude Stein and started writing In Our Time (the best collection of short stories ever. Fact!). He'd also started forming the memories he would set down with such eloquence in A Moveable Feast. Soon Hemingway would also meet Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, Scott and Zelda Firtzgerald. Not too long afterwards, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin would burst into town. William Faulkner would come on another boat. Sherwood Anderson had already visited. As had Djuana Barnes. Lawrence Durrell would be there soon …

If that roster of names isn't enough, bear in mind that his was also the high water mark of surrealism, and of Dada and other modernisms – and a great deal of it was happening in Paris. Viewed through the reverse telescope of history it seems like an extraordinary place to be. Woody Allen had it dead right in Midnight in Paris. How could a scenario involving being transported back there be anything other than fun? I know where I'd go if I had a time machine and only one trip allowed. Naturally, I'd seriously think about San Francisco in the 1960s, Ancient Athens, and Rome at the time of Augustus. I'd also be quite tempted by the dinosaurs. But if you threw an invitation to Gertrude Stein's apartment and introduction to Hemingway, it would be hard to say no to the French capital in the 20s.

But of course, getting to know Gertrude and Ernest would depend on knowledge, good fortune, privilege and talent. It must have been mighty exciting to be Hemingway himself – but what of the average Parisian? While the talks this weekend about the American invasion, surrealism, Proust and Dada sound fascinating, the one I'm possibly most interested to see will be cultural historian Andrew Hussey's talk on "The People's City", looking at life for the less artistically inclined or fortunate inhabitants of the city. All those Americans arrived in town on the back of an unusually strong dollar, cheap rents and cheap food. Because, in other words, life was hard for the the average Parisian.

It's also worth remembering that so many of those Americans, not to mention the British and French in town, were damaged. If they drank and partied more than most, it was because they had more to forget. This was a city still in the shadow of the first world war. The generation that we imagine having so much fun were seen by Gertrude Stein as "lost". Many of them had served in the war – all of them must have known someone it had destroyed. Hemingway's sharp, angry short stories and A Farewell to Arms, The Waste Land, Tender Is the Night, Manhattan Transfer. These are masterpieces. But they are not the products of happy minds. Les années folles contained as much tragedy as fun. I'd still like to visit. But only on a return ticket …

Guardian Extra members can win the weekend of a lifetime at Southbank Centre's The Rest is Noise Festival. Find out more at guardian.co.uk/extra

FictionPoetrySam Jordison
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Home thoughts, and abroad | AL Kennedy

It's been some tiresome time since I last blogged, but a trip to Germany provided some more sombre reasons to worry

Forgive, once again, my lack of blog filing. I have been navigating the joys and wonders provided by English property law – losing a home, trying to buy another, firing a bad solicitor, retaining another solicitor to deal with the bad one, finding out how many items the removers who got me from Scotland broke during their progress (most of them) overseeing the new removers taking me out of storage in London (they were wonderfully careful) and their merry, and ultimately futile, attempts to haul my old sofas up my new stairs. I was also as delighted as you can imagine to be technically homeless for three months and end up borrowing other kind people's premises while trying to keep body and typing together.

It's been a bumpy time and yet also a wonderful one. I now know I have friends who will support me in all manner of circumstances and that if I ask for help I will get it. I'm very bad at asking for help and it's a habit I hope I will retain when necessary. I also hope I will remember that when I was at my most vulnerable, still slightly ill, behind with work, in need of cash and with no address, I was held, encouraged and looked after until life slowly evened out and many of the bad things went away.

Of course, I wasn't that vulnerable. I'm a relatively articulate middle-class person with a passable accent and some funds behind me. Had I been genuinely destitute and really homeless I would have been lost in every sense, because I live in a country which now punishes the weak for their weakness. I am lucky in an unlucky time.

Last week I travelled to the capital of another country – Berlin – to take part in a discussion about the place of writers and artists in the wider world and the role they can have in binding us together, helping us to understand each other, to see that our individual suffering is not greater than anyone else's, only closer to us and that any suffering is neither a good nor a safe thing for any of us. That's the kind of stuff they talk about in Berlin. I know because I've been there before. It seems they talk about it all the time.

Germany is a country with cause to remember what happens when a population is force-fed a national media diet of fraudulent journalism, threat-mongering hatred and debased gossip. Nazism not only took great care to produce a toxic and dehumanising culture, it sought out and destroyed work that sustained, that inspired, that made private and subversive joys, that gave officially unacceptable lives value and dignity.

Before the wholesale destruction of living, breathing human beings comes the destruction of what they create, the rehearsal of murders in effigy.

Whenever the UK's national obsession with the second world war rears up around a sports fixture, or an EU wrangle, or a tabloid spat over beach towels, I despair that all we seem to remember about that war is that we won. It's simply become the ultimate away match. We don't recall why we won – that a whole nation united in the face of horrible pain and hardships and was supported by its government so it could do so. The short-termism, self-interest and prejudices of our betters crumbled, as did the class divides, and our press eventually had to admit we were all worthwhile.

Would such a thing as the new bedroom tax have been possible to introduce in the Britain of 1945, or 1949? In 1979? I don't think so.

As it happens, I have a bedroom over-capacity. My new study could technically be used to house at least two people. I won't be taxed on it, because I don't claim benefits. Basically, because I can afford to pay the tax, I don't have to.

If I had the courage of my convictions I probably should be using the room to house at least two people. In fact, it's where I work – where I'm working now - and where I store my books, for the first time in my life, all in shelves where I can see them. From here I can see the spine of The Wind In The Willows – the same volume I read in bed when I was a child. It has been my friend for more than 40 years, there for me, a kind light. Here is the volume of Raymond Carver I threw across the room when I was a student because it was so amazing, so tender with broken people. Here is Alasdair Gray and his mind-blowing Lanark, which taught me the courage inherent in thinking and creating when I had no courage of my own. Here is my library.

Here are all my reasons for being inhumanity-averse. Here are all my reasons to take the next step and the next, even when I am tired, or lonely. Here are all the pathways back and forth to be with love, to express love. Here are some of the things that get me through. They are cheap and simple and unelectronic, some of them are very old, or scruffy. They are all threads of life within my life. If they were burned, or lost, or confiscated, or had to be sold they would stay with me indelibly, contagiously – the fire from so many words from so many other minds and lives. Here are gifts which are the opposite of death and silence. They're not as weak and small as you might think. Onwards.

AL KennedyCreative writingPropertyAL Kennedy
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading today?

A weekly space for us talk about what you're reading this week, and our review list

There's two week's worth of reading covered in the last TLS thread. Here are the highlights, starting with the merits of reading in stereo:

Ribena:

I'm reading A Heart So White by Javier Marias after hearing him on a BBC World Service podcast, talking about the book. It had been on my Amazon wishlist for years but I found him such an engrossing and interesting guest on that podcast, that I ordered the book almost as soon as I had finished listening to it.

frustratedartist:

I'm currently reading and listening to "Parade's End" by Ford Madox Ford. And it's very enjoyable. I like the listening/ reading combination, especially with a complex dense novel like this one: in effect it means I read the book twice. The narration into the audiobook I am listening to is superb. I sneaked a look on YouTube at the previews for the recent television dramatisation, but don't really feel tempted to watch any more of it. For me a well read audiobook can bring a text to life far more vividly.

Any other audiobooks recommendations? Do post them in the thread below.

MsCarey:

Just finished The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey. Think Little House on the Prairie meets Han Christian Andersen. Not as whimsical as I'd feared but something altogether more solid and grounded and an absorbing read.

And a popular idea posted by Dylanwolf:

I'd definitely be interested in reading some novel/film adaption analysis articles. I'm very anxious about the impending "Cloud Atlas" film - not at all sure that I want to go and see it.

I'll see what I can do. Here's the trailer - the long one - if haven't seen it and would like to.

Reading on mobile? Watch here

So, on with this week. Here are the books we'll be writing about and reviewing this week, subject to last minute changes, as always.

Non-fiction

• The Real Jane Austen by Paula Byrne
• London Bridge in America by Travis Elborough
• Give Me Everything You Have by James Lasdun
• Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century by Paul Kildea
• Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found by Cheryl Strayed

Fiction

• Gone to the Forest by Katie Kitamura
• A Working Theory of Love by Scott Hutchins
• Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis
• Marry Me by Dan Rhodes
• How to be a Good Wife by Emma Chapman
• The Investigation by Philippe Claudel

Children

• Positively Last Performance by Geraldine McCaughrean

Guardian readersHannah Freeman
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Amid depression, bleak stories can be as consoling as self-help

Rather than exhorting the depressed to help themselves, fiction can provide a welcome realisation that we are not alone in despair

The plan to refer people with mild depression and anxiety to books has provoked some fascinating discussions, not least the discussion here of how fiction can be more helpful than non self-help. Having studied philosophy, I still have Elizabeth Anscombe's injunction to stop doing philosophy and start reading novels ringing in my ears, so this is no surprise. What I want to make the case for is those works of fiction that go beyond the positive, beyond stories of survival, works many wouldn't imagine offering help, would even want to keep out of the hands of the mentally fragile.

I made the case for the dangerousness of the blanket prescription of self-help in the comments on other posts here, the guilt when we do not succeed in pulling ourselves from the mire, the placing of responsibility squarely on the shoulders of those already weakened, vulnerable and sinking between the weight of helplessness.

I say blanket because the thing about mental health is everyone's experience has unique elements, affects them in subtly different ways, and the thing about treating everyone as the same is that we deny people the uniqueness of their voices. We become complicit with a condition that has already stripped people of so much of themselves, play the role of the seemingly good Samaritan who finds a victim on the road, proffers a seemingly friendly hand, and uses it to administer the final beating.

So the only real starting place I have is not a generality but my own experience. Depression for me is like the thickest, blackest fog. When it shrouds you, you see nothing. There is just you, alone with your thoughts, any screams dampened instantly and being met, in return, by silence. The far horizon of wellness is unimaginable. All you can hope for in your isolation is to feel the nudge of human contact beside you. Like a character emerging from the ground into a post-apocalyptic dystopia, you long to breathe out the long, toxic sigh of utter relief that you are not, after all, alone.

There have been four times in my life when the fog has descended. Each breakdown has had its own characteristics but, and I know this is not universal, each time fiction has been able to nestle itself alongside me inside that blinding blanket. I know for many others, depression takes away the ability to concentrate altogether, so storytelling of any kind becomes white noise, meaningless squiggles dancing on the page. I was lucky, but even for me I am careful to say fiction because there were times when just holding a book was impossible, when only film could reach me.

I want to talk very briefly about the fictions that spoke to me, kept me warm in the loneliness, slowly cajoled me through. They were never survivors' stories, though many of the protagonists did survive. What mattered to me was always the honest, detailed, unflinching accounts of their darkest moments, of the reality of those moments and how they blanked, greyed, sensually cut short and tortured their lives. What these fictions, or rather characters within them (much more than the stories of which those characters were a part), provided was the knowledge that I was not alone, that there was someone somewhere who was ale to articulate the seething, jumbled, brutal, pre-linguistic, thrashing, writhing, hazing, dulling pounding in my head. It wasn't just me. That single thought was the most important thing in the world to me, sometimes the one thing that kept me alive – a single false note of optimism would have shattered it all for me, left me thinking yes, it really is just me – the words people offer me really are just that, words, the hope they contain utterly irrelevant because they relate to an experience that is not mine. Two-and-a-half decades after my first breakdown, when I curated the event What There Is Instead of Rainbows, I wanted to capture that lack of false promise, that focus solely on the moment, asking a selection of authors to write about the what-it-was-likeness of their darkest moment.

So, these are the characters who held my hand under those stifling blankets as it were – Teresa from Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Betty from Philippe Djian's Betty Blue, Julie from the film Three Colours: Blue and finally someone real, Holly from Blood and Pudding, a memoir from New York-based writer, artist and model Katelan V Foisy about a childhood friend whose life ended in the tragedy of an overdose. Each reached through the fog, made points of contact in different ways.

Aside from the fact that there is a Juliette Binoche theme here (Damage's Anna Barton or Michèle from Les Amants du Pont-Neuf would also have been at home on the list), let me look at what it was about these characters that spoke to me. Teresa and Betty are both doomed, and their journeys to their doom are in man ways opposites. Betty's story is that of a spiral from anarchic abandon, a life completely outside of society, ever downward to the hospital bed in which she will ultimately die – every ounce of her life force has been sucked from her until she is just a shell.

Teresa's life on the other hand is cut short at just the moment she has found happiness. For me at my lowest, their tragedies felt very similar to each other and to my own experience. Both Teresa and Betty strove (something the current ludicrous "striving" propaganda would do well to note) with every sinew to expand their worlds and both were thwarted. Betty is thwarted from outside, by a world whose demands crush down on her; Teresa from inside, from an inner fragility – what she describes as a weakness in the resonant line "I am weak; I am going back to the country of the weak" – that simply cannot weather the rough waters of life's open sea. Teresa finds a kind of comfort in her shrunken horizons, in no longer having to strive, whilst the fence the world builds around Betty's dreams forces her restless mind in on itself until she implodes. Teresa longs to be something she is not, Betty longs to be something that she is but is not allowed to be. These two books express those simple frustrated longings that felt like the two halves of my deepest self with honesty, poignancy, and not a false note.

Three Colours: Blue is a strange one, because it is a survivor's story. In many ways it is the archetypal survivor's story. Its heroine, Julie, loses everything when her husband and daughter are killed in a crash. She makes that "everything" into a reality, selling her home, giving away everything in it, cutting herself off from everyone she knew in her former life only to emerge from a cocoon of absolute numbness to a future whose content we don't really know other than that her freedom from the past offers her endless possibility (symbolised by the colourless sugar cube soaking up coffee in one of the most famous takes in 20th-century cinema). As a survivor's story, this should have left me cold, hurt, alienated. Maybe one reason it didn't, when I first saw it in the mid-1990s in the midst of a breakdown that had stripped me of every vestige of self-worth, has to do with my deep love of the textures of Kieslowski's films, or of Zbigniew Preisner's soaring scores. But there's more to it than that. Again it's the honesty of Julie's total numbness in the weeks and months after she comes out of hospital following the crash. The way Julie divests herself of her old life as though she is washing away a dirt that has crept beneath her skin, the absolute lack of emotion, a void at the centre of her being that comes not from an inherent coldness but a coldness that life has planted in her, an ice crystal grown from seed. What I learned from Julie was not that it was OK to feel down, but that it was OK to feel nothing.

Holly's story in Blood and Pudding is absolutely not that of a survivor. The book is a series of transcriptions of recordings from a teenage roadtrip, intercut with anecdotes from the brief years between those few days and Holly's death from a heroin overdose. It is difficult subject matter to discuss in the context of mental health. Holly was bipolar, she didn't survive, and more than one person I've spoken to about this remarkable story (which includes wonderful moments such as the time she and Katelan were ejected from a video peep show booth for playing spaces invaders on the "select a screen" joystick) has asked whether it's not a dangerous glorification of a reckless lifestyle.

I think, rather, it's the perfect illustration of the way everyone responds differently to things. For some people, a how-to book will be the ladder out of hell. For others, the guilt it induces, the sense that "so this is one more thing I cannot do" will be the thing that finally pulls the ladder out of sight. For me, Blood and Pudding is a book that shows the light and shade in every life. At my lowest ebb it showed me that there could be moments of joy, showed me that even the briefest, bleakest life could be a life fully lived – and it was that which helped me on the road to making my life not so brief. Yes, for others it may have the opposite effect. But it asks the vital question – why is there a general assumption that a book that "ends well" is a good thing and one that "ends badly" is not? Do we instinctively value those people whose problems are easier to fix or is it just that we would rather put our heads in the sand when it comes to those who respond to something we don't understand?

Everyone's depression is different. That is one of the things that makes it so hard to treat. Acknowledging the differences is one of the most important things we can do, both because no one is an expert as much as the person who has the mental health problem, and because this is the first step to re-empowering people not further stripping them. So widening what we do for mental illness to include books can play an important role in finding the right blend for each person. But it should be part of finding an even more, not an even less personalised approach to mental illness, and using it either as a replacement or the narrowing it right back down by offering only a tiny list of titles riddled with preconceptions is a step backward from that person-based approach.

FictionMilan KunderaKrzysztof KieślowskiDepressionMental healthHealthDan Holloway
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

English literature's 50 key moments from Marlowe to JK Rowling

What have been the hinge points in the evolution of Anglo-American literature? Here's a provisional, partisan list

BBC Radio Three is currently broadcasting a fascinating series on the "50 key works" of classical music. This is a spin-off from Howard Goodall's BBC2 television series and its tie-in book, The Story of Music (Chatto), and it crystallises – for the amateur listener – the turning points in the evolution of the classical tradition in the most enthralling way. Did you, for instance, know that Procul Harum's Whiter Shade of Pale contains a harmonic line that is pure Bach?

So much for music. Following Radio 3, I've found myself speculating about the 50 key moments in the Anglo-American literary tradition. Arguably, Goodall's very good idea works almost as well for the history of the printed page.

Note: what follows is not merely a book list, but an attempt to identify some of the hinge moments in our literature – a composite of significant events, notable poems, plays, and novels, plus influential deaths, starting with the violent death of Shakespeare's one serious rival …

1. The death of Christopher Marlowe (1593)

2. William Shakespeare: The Sonnets (1609)

3. The King James Bible (1611)

4. William Shakespeare: The First Folio (1623)

5. John Milton: Areopagitica (1644)

6. Samuel Pepys: The Diaries (1660-69)

7. John Bunyan: Pilgrim's Progress (1678)

8. John Locke: Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

9. William Congreve: The Way of the World (1700)

10. Daniel Defoe: A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)

11. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels (1727)

12. Samuel Johnson: A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

13. Thomas Jefferson: The American Declaration of Independence (1776)

14. James Boswell: Life of Johnson (1791)

15. Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography (1793)

16. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)

17. William Wordsworth: "The Prelude" (1805)

18. Jane Austen: Pride & Prejudice (1813)

19. Lord Byron: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812)

20. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Shakespearean Criticism (1818)

21. Ralph Waldo Emerson: "The American Scholar" (1837)

22. Thomas Carlyle: The French Revolution (1837)

23. The uniform Penny Post (1840)

24. Thomas Hood: "The Song of the Shirt" (1843)

25. Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights (1847)

26. Charles Dickens: David Copperfield (1849)

27. Herman Melville: Moby Dick (1851)

28. Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South (1855)

29. Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species (1859)

30. Henry Thoreau: Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)

31. Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)

32. Lewis Carroll: Alice In Wonderland (1865)

33. Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone (1868)

34. First commercially successful typewriter, USA. (1878)

35. George Eliot: Middlemarch (1871)

36. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

37. Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

38. Thomas Hardy: Poems (c.1900)

39. JM Barrie: Peter Pan (1904)

40. James Joyce: Ulysses (1922)

41. TS Eliot: The Waste Land (1922)

42. F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (1925)

43. George Orwell: George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
(1949)

44. Ian Fleming: Casino Royale (1953)

45. Jack Kerouac: On The Road (1957)

46. Maurice Sendak: Where The Wild Things Are (1963)

47. Truman Capote: In Cold Blood (1966)

48. WG Sebald: Vertigo (1990)

49. The launch of Amazon.com (1994)

50. JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)

Plus a bonus book - Ted Hughes: Birthday Letters (1998)

This catalogue, in conclusion, is highly partisan and impressionistic. It makes no claim to be comprehensive (how could it?). Rather, it aims to stimulate a discussion about the turning-points in the world of books and letters from the King James Bible to the present day.

Over to you.

Christopher MarloweWilliam ShakespeareJohn MiltonSamuel PepysJohn LockeWilliam CongreveDaniel DefoeJonathan SwiftSamuel JohnsonMary WollstonecraftWilliam WordsworthLord ByronEmily BrontëCharles DickensHerman MelvilleCharles DarwinLewis CarrollWilkie CollinsGeorge EliotRobert Louis StevensonOscar WildeThomas HardyJM BarrieJames JoyceTS EliotF Scott FitzgeraldGeorge OrwellIan FlemingJack KerouacMaurice SendakTruman CapoteWG SebaldAmazon.comJK RowlingTed HughesFictionPoetryTheatreJane AustenRobert McCrum
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Poem of the week: Love-Letter-Burning by Daniel Hall

A meticulously crafted poem, balancing informality with a tight formal structure, folds a Zen legend into a reflection on the end of an affair

This week's poem, "Love-Letter-Burning", is by the award-winning American poet, Daniel Hall, currently the writer-in-residence at Amherst College. It's from his 1990 debut collection, Hermit with Landscape, chosen by James Merrill the previous year as a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. His third and most recent collection, Under Sleep, was published by Chicago University Press in 2007.

In a period when formal poetry sometimes arouses accusations of reactionary politics, and poetry criticism may be equated with blasphemy, it's not necessary, though not a bad idea, to seek cover in the Collected Poems of Philip Larkin, or plod backwards with the plodders of New Formalism. There are contemporary poets whose work is of its moment, but still reminds us that the word, poem, comes from the Greek verb, poiein, to make. Of course, lively poems are constructed in the style of shopping lists, prayers, journalistic reports – almost any verbal artefact – and they too can be properly made. But it's good to be reminded how a lyric poem may be uniquely a lyric poem, not masquerading – however thrillingly – as another sort of verbal object, but being its unquestionable self.

"Love-Letter-Burning" draws attention to its care for language from the start, even before the unobtrusively noticeable word, "archivist". Its overall shape is simple and satisfying. It has a framing story-cum-meditation, and a nested, inner story, and is arranged in two inner and two outer quatrains. The rhyme scheme miniaturises this pattern like a fractal: ABBA. The poem's surface is almost suave, the emotion well tamped down, with rueful wit and graceful playfulness preponderant. The fact that grief, heroism, violence etc, may be implied in the destruction of love letters is kept at bay by the very title. "Love-Letter-Burning" sounds like a slightly old-fashioned art or sport, demanding a specific skill and painstaking dedication.

That the emotions are controlled doesn't mean they can't exert tension. This tension registers in Hall's lineation, for instance. The first-line enjambment is neatly plotted so that we feel the shudder of the word "cold" before we realise the sentence is going on, and "cold" will turn out to be an ironically un-exciting, non-shuddering word when properly connected to its hyphen-mate to become "cold-blooded". And then there's a further tease, a near-pun threaded through the further enjambment. In line three the speaker isn't saying "we commit our sins" but "we commit our sins/ to the flames". The lines twist and slough off the expected like a skin, but the skin hangs on suggestively. There's a lingering suspicion, despite the light-hearted hyperbole, that "sins" have been or are being committed. In fact, the letters, as sheets of paper and segments of words, may be sins, or perhaps played a part in a larger sinning.

Heightened emotion remains potent, though coiled into elegant-sounding French and the two caesurae clipping the last line into three segments. Why is it necessary to save yourself if you can? Fear of what "makes us bold"? The letters are somehow dangerous. It's as if evidence of a crime were being destroyed: if it's simply evidence of an unhappy, ill-judged love affair, psychological risk is still implied. The speaker's tone is of course laced with irony, but it's far from wholly ironical.

Picking up "bold" from the last line of the previous stanza in "Tanka was bolder", the poet makes an agile transition from lyric to anecdote. Again, the tone is light but edgy. The weather turns "from fair to frigid" as the story about the Zen master begins. That alliteration ("fair"/ "frigid") adds an extra dash of flamboyance to the artifice. Both epithets are exaggerated, both have sexual undertones (which is surely the point) and "fair" summons echoes of Elizabethan love poetry. The enfolded quatrain-form is itself a reference to the rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet's sestet.

Perhaps now to ensure the mannerism is not overdone and the voice remains conversational, the iambic pentameter is pared to 4 stresses: "To build a sacrificial fire." The economy also allows the word "sacrificial" to stand out, connecting to the fire which will consume the letters, and foreshadowing the painfulness of the act.

The parentheses of the third stanza suggest a little jokey aside, something muttered privately by the speaker to his auditors. In the legend, when the chief monk complained about the destruction of the temple Buddha, Tanka claimed he had burned it in order to find its indestructible "Essence." The objection "But if it shows up only in the flesh --?/ … Let's burn the lot!" may be shared by the poem's speaker, at least momentarily. A soft half-rhyme which nevertheless highlights the very different sounds and near-opposite meanings of "ash" and "flesh" hints at the sensuous sweetness of what has gone. A lot of pent-up feeling is released when Tanka grins and says "Let's burn the lot!" Meaning is suddenly stripped from the priceless Buddha – and, perhaps, from the loverless love letters.

The sacrifice becomes, in the last stanza, a "purifying rite" – if only for "believers in the afterlife". It seems both necessary, and an act of superstition. The voice grows curt again: "At last/ a match is struck: it's done". The use of the passive, and the pauses of the caesurae, deflect the emotional crisis. "Love-Letter-Burning" ends with a memorable aphorism, but one divided by enjambment to evade slickness or too-certain closure. It remains memorable and worth remembering, because patently so often true: "The past/ will shed some light but never keep us warm". The fire is nothing much in terms of fire, and the light, too, seems to have cast mostly shadow. But the savour and elegance of the poem linger on. Through symmetry and variety combined, and through polished, faintly teasing but not over-exquisite diction, it has transmitted emotions everyone has felt, and no one easily talks about. This is a well-made poem, but it's also poignantly alive.

Love-Letter-Burning

The archivist in us shudders at such cold-
blooded destruction of the word, but since
we're only human, we commit our sins
to the flames. Sauve qui peut; fear makes us bold.

Tanka was bolder: when the weather turned
from fair to frigid, he saw his way clear
to build a sacrificial fire
in which a priceless temple Buddha burned.

(The pretext? Simple: what he sought
was legendary Essence in the ash.
But if it shows up only in the flesh—?
He grinned and said, Let's burn the lot!)

Believers in the afterlife perform
this purifying rite. At last
a match is struck: it's done. The past
will shed some light, but never keep us warm.

PoetryCarol Rumens
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds