Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 41
November 22, 2011
RIP John Neville
This man was so much part of my youth. I lived in Nottingham from when I was about 14 to when I went to uni, and at that time Neville ran the Nottingham Playhouse. He made a point of trying to include in the repertoire some of the classic texts the city schools were studying for A-level, which is why I got to see him performing Iago to Robert Ryun's Othello. I saw him in much else too, though never, alas, in the famous portrayal of Petruchio during which, as he flourished a stage sword, the wooden blade flew off and landed somewhere in the audience. Neville made a great show of looking for it, all over the stage. Then he turned to Grumio (Bill Maynard, who told the tale for years after) and uttered what was in fact the next line in the play: "We are beset with thieves". Now that's thinking on your feet. Great actor, great theatre manager.
November 6, 2011
George Formby and the Latin sentence
This is one of those posts about Things All Writers Know that turn out to be less clear-cut than you think. In this case it's inversion, the violence that poems sometimes do to normal word order in the name of rhyme and metre. This was commonplace in the 18th and 19th centuries, fell out of use in the 20th and nowadays will cause an editor to bin you without a second thought. And quite right too, in most cases. But just now and then, something happens to make you think twice. In my case, it was pondering the construction of Latin sentences while listening to a recording of a wartime George Formby ENSA concert.
He was singing the slightly less polite version of "When I'm Cleaning Windows" that he reserved for such occasions, with the verse:
Now it's clear that the inversion in the second line is needed for the rhyme (and forgivable anyway in a song lyric), but it's also clear, to me at least, that it's actually funnier. Even if "she takes her bath" could somehow be got to rhyme, something else would be lost, and I think it has to do with the three hammer-blows of those verbs, wakes-takes-breaks, ending the lines. And this is where Latin comes in…
Your typical English sentence goes: subject (with any necessary qualifiers), verb (ditto), object, any other business. There can be alternative orders, but they are limited, because English nouns, like those of most modern languages, don't decline and therefore depend on their position in the sentence to make their function clear. Take the sentence "A boy kisses a girl in a garden". You can alter the placing of the garden, but move the boy and girl and you invert the meaning. Nor, normally, does it seem at all natural to put the verb at the end.
You might compare this sentence to Rolf Harris painting a picture: first he puts in the main figure, then makes clear what he's doing (say draws a bat in his hand). Then comes the object, the ball, and last of all he fills in the background – grass, spectators, etc. Rolf, of course, could paint in a different order, but this sentence hasn't got many alternatives. Certainly it can't go "a boy a girl in a garden kisses". But that is just what Latin does: puer puellam in horto osculat. Here too there are alternatives, more in fact, because the function of declined nouns does not depend on position in the sentence; puer is nominative wherever you put it. But the verb, typically, does come at the end.
This sentence is less like a painting than a scene being shot in a film. The director places the actors, arranges the scenery, however he wants, but only then comes the call of "action" that animates the scene – the verb. And that's what happens, three times over, in the Formby verse. The lady – wakes, and we at once mentally fill in the background of the bed. Her bath she – fills, runs, cleans? No – takes, and we have as good as seen her undress and get in. And the ladder… breaks. Those three line-endings are so sharp, and so funny, because they are verbs, because they are dropped into the scene to animate it like the director's "action".
It's interesting that, though amateur poets these days surely do invert "for the rhyme", I'm not sure this was how it began, because if you look at old folk songs and ballads, you won't find much of it. They use other rhyming expedients like stock filler phrases and approximate rhymes, but they don't invert normal word order near as much as you might think. It's far more common among the literate, educated poets of the 18th and 19th centuries, and I do wonder if it seemed more natural to them because they knew Latin.
None of this means, of course, that contemporary English poets can construct their sentences as if they were writing Latin. But it is interesting, and instructive, to look at how other languages structure sentences, and what a verb can do if you can somehow manage – and it can now and then be done, with inventive syntax – to get it in what is arguably its natural place, the equivalent of the director's "action", without sounding contrived.
I wonder how that verse would run in Latin…
He was singing the slightly less polite version of "When I'm Cleaning Windows" that he reserved for such occasions, with the verse:
At eight o'clock, the lady wakes,
At ten past eight her bath she takes,
At quarter past, me ladder breaks,
When I'm cleaning windows.
Now it's clear that the inversion in the second line is needed for the rhyme (and forgivable anyway in a song lyric), but it's also clear, to me at least, that it's actually funnier. Even if "she takes her bath" could somehow be got to rhyme, something else would be lost, and I think it has to do with the three hammer-blows of those verbs, wakes-takes-breaks, ending the lines. And this is where Latin comes in…
Your typical English sentence goes: subject (with any necessary qualifiers), verb (ditto), object, any other business. There can be alternative orders, but they are limited, because English nouns, like those of most modern languages, don't decline and therefore depend on their position in the sentence to make their function clear. Take the sentence "A boy kisses a girl in a garden". You can alter the placing of the garden, but move the boy and girl and you invert the meaning. Nor, normally, does it seem at all natural to put the verb at the end.
You might compare this sentence to Rolf Harris painting a picture: first he puts in the main figure, then makes clear what he's doing (say draws a bat in his hand). Then comes the object, the ball, and last of all he fills in the background – grass, spectators, etc. Rolf, of course, could paint in a different order, but this sentence hasn't got many alternatives. Certainly it can't go "a boy a girl in a garden kisses". But that is just what Latin does: puer puellam in horto osculat. Here too there are alternatives, more in fact, because the function of declined nouns does not depend on position in the sentence; puer is nominative wherever you put it. But the verb, typically, does come at the end.
This sentence is less like a painting than a scene being shot in a film. The director places the actors, arranges the scenery, however he wants, but only then comes the call of "action" that animates the scene – the verb. And that's what happens, three times over, in the Formby verse. The lady – wakes, and we at once mentally fill in the background of the bed. Her bath she – fills, runs, cleans? No – takes, and we have as good as seen her undress and get in. And the ladder… breaks. Those three line-endings are so sharp, and so funny, because they are verbs, because they are dropped into the scene to animate it like the director's "action".
It's interesting that, though amateur poets these days surely do invert "for the rhyme", I'm not sure this was how it began, because if you look at old folk songs and ballads, you won't find much of it. They use other rhyming expedients like stock filler phrases and approximate rhymes, but they don't invert normal word order near as much as you might think. It's far more common among the literate, educated poets of the 18th and 19th centuries, and I do wonder if it seemed more natural to them because they knew Latin.
None of this means, of course, that contemporary English poets can construct their sentences as if they were writing Latin. But it is interesting, and instructive, to look at how other languages structure sentences, and what a verb can do if you can somehow manage – and it can now and then be done, with inventive syntax – to get it in what is arguably its natural place, the equivalent of the director's "action", without sounding contrived.
I wonder how that verse would run in Latin…
October 26, 2011
Editors and reviewers
There's been a lot of debate recently in the literary world about whether women are under-represented in the field of reviewing, both in terms of reviewing books themselves and getting their work reviewed. And editor after editor, some of them female, have complained that "women don't put themselves forward". According to a writing friend of mine in a recent tweet, "she [editor] said "women don't contact her, but men send her lists of books they want to review, and why, and when".
This was all news to me, cos when I was reviewing, editors contacted reviewers, not the other way about. And I can't help feeling that though it may well make an editor's life easier to sit back and wait for reviewers to contact them, it's a bit of an abdication of responsibility. If I were an editor, and Joe Soap sent me a list of books he fancied reviewing, unless I knew him very well, alarm bells would ring; I would think, either these folk are his mates and he wants to puff them, or his enemies and he wants to shaft them, and neither is much use to the reader who just wants an unbiased opinion. I would also feel it was my job to decide what was reviewed and who reviewed it, and that he was being a trifle forward. If I liked his style, I would probably write back saying, none of these are available but you're welcome to review x, y and z if you like. If he refused that offer, I'd take it that I had been right about his having an agenda.
Editors are a kind of journalist, and as far as I know, journalists do not wait for news items to put themselves forward; they go out and look for them. If editors content themselves with those reviewers who put themselves forward (dear God, what an unBritish thing to do!) then we shall indeed hear from a narrow group of people. They may well be mainly male; they may also be disproportionately privately educated, because those schools, while in my view (and I'm speaking here as an ex-uni admissions tutor) offering no better an education than state schools, do tend to imbue their pupils with a self-confidence that sometimes amounts to an inflated sense of their own importance. If reviewers are mainly male, and choosing their own texts to review, then those texts too will be overwhelmingly male. I know this because more than one editor has noted a reluctance among male reviewers to assess women's writing - when I was reviewing for Poetry Review in the relatively happy days of Peter Forbes' editorship, I once asked him why he sent me so many women poets to review. He said he had to send women's books to women, because many of his male reviewers refused them. To his credit, he then sought out female reviewers who wouldn't say no; another editor, who was having trouble getting her regular reviewers to look at books from a certain part of the kingdom, simply jacked in the attempt. Me, I'd have concluded those reviewers came from too narrow an educational and geographical pool and that I needed to look elsewhere.
Editors have a hard and often thankless job, but I think it is part of that job to be proactive and independent. They, and no one else, should decide what is to be reviewed; if they go along with the suggestions of would-be reviewers they are opening the door to a great deal of intentional or unintentional nepotism, because many reviewers are also mentors of writing, and of course they think their own ex-pupils are the brightest and best; that's how teaching works. And there's nothing wrong with their promoting those whose talents they believe in as long as they do it in their own space; I use this blog to review and interview those I believe in and who might otherwise be overlooked. But part of what an editor is for is to counteract the influence of those with the loudest voices and widest connections and make sure quieter voices get heard as well.
This was all news to me, cos when I was reviewing, editors contacted reviewers, not the other way about. And I can't help feeling that though it may well make an editor's life easier to sit back and wait for reviewers to contact them, it's a bit of an abdication of responsibility. If I were an editor, and Joe Soap sent me a list of books he fancied reviewing, unless I knew him very well, alarm bells would ring; I would think, either these folk are his mates and he wants to puff them, or his enemies and he wants to shaft them, and neither is much use to the reader who just wants an unbiased opinion. I would also feel it was my job to decide what was reviewed and who reviewed it, and that he was being a trifle forward. If I liked his style, I would probably write back saying, none of these are available but you're welcome to review x, y and z if you like. If he refused that offer, I'd take it that I had been right about his having an agenda.
Editors are a kind of journalist, and as far as I know, journalists do not wait for news items to put themselves forward; they go out and look for them. If editors content themselves with those reviewers who put themselves forward (dear God, what an unBritish thing to do!) then we shall indeed hear from a narrow group of people. They may well be mainly male; they may also be disproportionately privately educated, because those schools, while in my view (and I'm speaking here as an ex-uni admissions tutor) offering no better an education than state schools, do tend to imbue their pupils with a self-confidence that sometimes amounts to an inflated sense of their own importance. If reviewers are mainly male, and choosing their own texts to review, then those texts too will be overwhelmingly male. I know this because more than one editor has noted a reluctance among male reviewers to assess women's writing - when I was reviewing for Poetry Review in the relatively happy days of Peter Forbes' editorship, I once asked him why he sent me so many women poets to review. He said he had to send women's books to women, because many of his male reviewers refused them. To his credit, he then sought out female reviewers who wouldn't say no; another editor, who was having trouble getting her regular reviewers to look at books from a certain part of the kingdom, simply jacked in the attempt. Me, I'd have concluded those reviewers came from too narrow an educational and geographical pool and that I needed to look elsewhere.
Editors have a hard and often thankless job, but I think it is part of that job to be proactive and independent. They, and no one else, should decide what is to be reviewed; if they go along with the suggestions of would-be reviewers they are opening the door to a great deal of intentional or unintentional nepotism, because many reviewers are also mentors of writing, and of course they think their own ex-pupils are the brightest and best; that's how teaching works. And there's nothing wrong with their promoting those whose talents they believe in as long as they do it in their own space; I use this blog to review and interview those I believe in and who might otherwise be overlooked. But part of what an editor is for is to counteract the influence of those with the loudest voices and widest connections and make sure quieter voices get heard as well.
September 30, 2011
query
How can I move pictures from "unsorted" to other galleries? I tried help and of course it didn't....
Update on Victor Tapner's "Flatlands"
I posted a blog review of Victor Tapner's fascinating poetry collection set in East Anglian prehistory, Flatlands, some time back, and also did a blog interview with him. Now I can report that Flatlands has been shortlisted for two awards, the 2011 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and the East Anglian Book Awards. Fine book: hope it wins.
September 24, 2011
Review of "From the Dark Room" by Sue Rose, pub. Cinnamon Press 2011
The title "From the Dark Room" is a phrase from a sequence of poems called "Travelling Light". Some unexpected things happen with light and dark in this collection. In "Rare Old", whisky abandoned in Antarctica and "protected by the freeze" is "brought into the damage of light". Nesting house-martins in "Hemispheres", by contrast, are pictured "sliding the dark around themselves" in an act of protection, while "Globe" ends with the sinister volcanic image of
A translator also needs to preserve a certain amount of detachment from the material with which he/she works, and Rose seems unusually able to do this with her own original material. Some of this is very personal, like the old age and death of parents and the unfulfilled desire for children, but it is handled with a remarkable lack of sentimentality, an ability to stand back and create the distance that makes for accurate observation (and, incidentally, licenses the reader to feel the emotion the writer has suppressed). In "Hard Skin", the relationship of mutual dependence between a mother and daughter is expressed entirely through their care for each other's feet:
We may certainly read into the practicalities of this event something about the relationship – "brusque and careful/though we both sometimes draw blood", but it is not dwelt on. The most powerful example of this method is perhaps "Making a Gem", in which she combines the ashes of her parents and dispatches them to be turned into a diamond. From the mundane details of queuing at the post office to the dispassionate account of the refining process in "a hot oven, three hundred centigrade", this distance is maintained, with the result that the one phrase capable of a less literal interpretation, "Matter breaks/under such forces", acquires a great poignancy.
Such material could be grim, but Rose often allows a sense of humour to come through. "Sample" may seem an unlikely scenario for a poem – a woman, on her way to the clinic in pouring rain with a sample of her husband's sperm, speculates that if the Flood were to return now, she'd be well equipped to board the ark as a pair – but it works beautifully, and in "Minute Waltz", a sense of ageing and loss are treated with a rueful self-deprecation that ends in a genuine punchline (which obviously I'm not going to reveal, but it is both funny and moving). This collection combines universal themes with a care for exact language and dispassionate observation that is far from universal.
what might ooze if the eggIt will already be clear that verbal interactions are being carefully considered in these titles. "Hemispheres" and "Globe" are juxtaposed; the "Dark Room" and "Travelling Light" are susceptible of more than one interpretation, as is "Birth Rights". Rose is a professional literary translator, and it is tempting to see in her method of composition the translator's constant awareness of how many shades of meaning one word may contain, and how it may be nuanced and slanted by its context.
of the Earth were cracked, light
hatching from the world's blown sphere.
A translator also needs to preserve a certain amount of detachment from the material with which he/she works, and Rose seems unusually able to do this with her own original material. Some of this is very personal, like the old age and death of parents and the unfulfilled desire for children, but it is handled with a remarkable lack of sentimentality, an ability to stand back and create the distance that makes for accurate observation (and, incidentally, licenses the reader to feel the emotion the writer has suppressed). In "Hard Skin", the relationship of mutual dependence between a mother and daughter is expressed entirely through their care for each other's feet:
She rests her legs on mine. I massage
her bunions, rub the lump on top of her foot.
She kneads my protesting arches, the corrugated bone
of my ankle
We may certainly read into the practicalities of this event something about the relationship – "brusque and careful/though we both sometimes draw blood", but it is not dwelt on. The most powerful example of this method is perhaps "Making a Gem", in which she combines the ashes of her parents and dispatches them to be turned into a diamond. From the mundane details of queuing at the post office to the dispassionate account of the refining process in "a hot oven, three hundred centigrade", this distance is maintained, with the result that the one phrase capable of a less literal interpretation, "Matter breaks/under such forces", acquires a great poignancy.
Such material could be grim, but Rose often allows a sense of humour to come through. "Sample" may seem an unlikely scenario for a poem – a woman, on her way to the clinic in pouring rain with a sample of her husband's sperm, speculates that if the Flood were to return now, she'd be well equipped to board the ark as a pair – but it works beautifully, and in "Minute Waltz", a sense of ageing and loss are treated with a rueful self-deprecation that ends in a genuine punchline (which obviously I'm not going to reveal, but it is both funny and moving). This collection combines universal themes with a care for exact language and dispassionate observation that is far from universal.
September 22, 2011
"Turn over the leaf, and choose another tale"
Woman emails to berate me for saying on my website that I dislike one of my poems - "whenever I read this remark, it makes me very cross". Well don't read it then, pal. It's a free country, even the author has a right to an opinion and NOBODY HAS A RIGHT NEVER TO SEE SOMETHING THAT OFFENDS THEM.
Fairly seething, to be honest. I could have taken the damn poem out of circulation and prevented its ever being reprinted anywhere; as the author I'd have been well within my rights. I didn't, because I know that some folk, particularly those prone to depression, find it comforting. But I'm damned if I feel obliged to keep quiet about my own opinion of the thing as an artistic production. Clearly she feels that by criticising it I'm implicitly criticising her taste in poems, which may well be the case, but when did that become illegal? And if this remark, which AFAIK appears only on my website, offends her so much, why does she keep reading it?
Fairly seething, to be honest. I could have taken the damn poem out of circulation and prevented its ever being reprinted anywhere; as the author I'd have been well within my rights. I didn't, because I know that some folk, particularly those prone to depression, find it comforting. But I'm damned if I feel obliged to keep quiet about my own opinion of the thing as an artistic production. Clearly she feels that by criticising it I'm implicitly criticising her taste in poems, which may well be the case, but when did that become illegal? And if this remark, which AFAIK appears only on my website, offends her so much, why does she keep reading it?
September 4, 2011
Take 2 fantasies and a delayed main verb...
Some writers definitely have a formula, even if they aren't aware of it. As Aristophanes pointed out in The Frogs, Euripides opens prologue after prologue with a sentence in which the main verb is delayed by a long subordinate clause, while Aischylos has a habit of leaving a main character onstage for yonks without saying anything.
It's true of poets too, as occurred to me while at a Simon Armitage reading yesterday. I'm not saying they do it all the time, but they do develop habits of composition. For instance, Billy Collins, in whose Ballistics I've been happily immersed, has poem after poem in which he sets out his stall and then, right near the end, introduces a "but" or "however" that changes the poem's direction and partially undermines what has already been said. "But for now I am going to take a walk" (The Poems of Others), "But what truly caught our attention" (Scenes of Hell), "but I am here to remind you" (Adage).
That's a syntactical tic: Armitage's is more a compositional one. A lot of the poems at this reading were constructed on the basis: "this fairly dull thing happened to me, but what if it had gone off at tangent x", whereupon he follows Cpl Jones off into the realms of fantasy. I don't recall this happening so much in his early work, but you could almost predict when the veering-off-into-fantasy is coming now.
It's true of poets too, as occurred to me while at a Simon Armitage reading yesterday. I'm not saying they do it all the time, but they do develop habits of composition. For instance, Billy Collins, in whose Ballistics I've been happily immersed, has poem after poem in which he sets out his stall and then, right near the end, introduces a "but" or "however" that changes the poem's direction and partially undermines what has already been said. "But for now I am going to take a walk" (The Poems of Others), "But what truly caught our attention" (Scenes of Hell), "but I am here to remind you" (Adage).
That's a syntactical tic: Armitage's is more a compositional one. A lot of the poems at this reading were constructed on the basis: "this fairly dull thing happened to me, but what if it had gone off at tangent x", whereupon he follows Cpl Jones off into the realms of fantasy. I don't recall this happening so much in his early work, but you could almost predict when the veering-off-into-fantasy is coming now.
September 2, 2011
In praise of online publication and sticking to one's guns
I've got a couple of poems online in the latest edition of Horizon Review and the thought occurs that this is certainly the way to get feedback; post links on FB and Twitter and blow me if comments don't roll in - now with a print mag, you could wait from now to the end of the century for any indication that human eyes had actually seen the thing.
And when you get feedback it can sometimes reinforce your confidence that editors don't always know best. The first of the poems up there, "Extremophile", spent ages looking for a home in a print mag in vain. When that happens, sometimes you start thinking: well, maybe it isn't as good as it should be. But insofar as I ever like mine, I was quite made up with this one and didn't lose faith in it, eventually finding it a home when the discerning Katy Evans-Bush took over as editor of HR. At least half a dozen editors had turned it down first, though. And whaddya know, this is the one that's getting lots of positive feedback from yr actual reader...
And when you get feedback it can sometimes reinforce your confidence that editors don't always know best. The first of the poems up there, "Extremophile", spent ages looking for a home in a print mag in vain. When that happens, sometimes you start thinking: well, maybe it isn't as good as it should be. But insofar as I ever like mine, I was quite made up with this one and didn't lose faith in it, eventually finding it a home when the discerning Katy Evans-Bush took over as editor of HR. At least half a dozen editors had turned it down first, though. And whaddya know, this is the one that's getting lots of positive feedback from yr actual reader...
August 25, 2011
Two similes
There's currently a thread on the Magma poetry blog about imagery and it started me thinking. Metaphor is a trickier beast and needs thinking about longer, but I found I could pretty quickly identify the two similes that always come first to my mind if I'm looking for good examples.
The first is Thomas Wyatt, in the Tower and with good reason to fear for his life, praising the faithfulness of his pet falcons, who stay with him (I don't suppose they had much choice) when his friends have unanimously mislaid his address:
This must have had enough of an impact in his own day, but it comes as a real shock to a modern reader, as much as anything because we suddenly realise that he not only knows whereof he speaks, he has almost certainly seen it, both dead bodies and lice being a deal commoner back then. It works in other ways, notably the grim pointer to how close his own death may be, but its principal virtue for me is that it creates a sort of immediate trust on the part of the reader; you just sense, without ever having seen such a thing yourself, that he's got it right, that this happens, and the picture in the head is so immediate and striking that it takes a long time to get rid of.
The other is not from a poet at all but a politician, Daniel O'Connell's famous remark that Sir Robert Peel's smile was "like the silver plate on a coffin". I think this works partly by the surprise it creates; we expect "is like" in this context to mean "looks like" (or "sounds like", "smells like" etc), and in this case it isn't so. I suppose, stretching a point, a stiff, tight-lipped smile could be said to physically resemble a rectangular coffin-plate, but it isn't really a physical likeness we are being asked to see at all, more a likeness of function. The silver plate is the decorative, ornamental aspect on an otherwise unprepossessing and sinister object, and the comparison speaks volumes not so much about Peel's smile as his personality.
Of course I'm now wondering what the fact that both my favourite similes are so morbid says about me...
The first is Thomas Wyatt, in the Tower and with good reason to fear for his life, praising the faithfulness of his pet falcons, who stay with him (I don't suppose they had much choice) when his friends have unanimously mislaid his address:
But they that some time liked my company,
Like lice away from dead bodies they crawl.
This must have had enough of an impact in his own day, but it comes as a real shock to a modern reader, as much as anything because we suddenly realise that he not only knows whereof he speaks, he has almost certainly seen it, both dead bodies and lice being a deal commoner back then. It works in other ways, notably the grim pointer to how close his own death may be, but its principal virtue for me is that it creates a sort of immediate trust on the part of the reader; you just sense, without ever having seen such a thing yourself, that he's got it right, that this happens, and the picture in the head is so immediate and striking that it takes a long time to get rid of.
The other is not from a poet at all but a politician, Daniel O'Connell's famous remark that Sir Robert Peel's smile was "like the silver plate on a coffin". I think this works partly by the surprise it creates; we expect "is like" in this context to mean "looks like" (or "sounds like", "smells like" etc), and in this case it isn't so. I suppose, stretching a point, a stiff, tight-lipped smile could be said to physically resemble a rectangular coffin-plate, but it isn't really a physical likeness we are being asked to see at all, more a likeness of function. The silver plate is the decorative, ornamental aspect on an otherwise unprepossessing and sinister object, and the comparison speaks volumes not so much about Peel's smile as his personality.
Of course I'm now wondering what the fact that both my favourite similes are so morbid says about me...
