This Be the Verse

J.D. on the money, that poem destroys me, it's my internal monologue

same

just this last weekend i re-read MCMXIV; the bit that jumps out at me is "And the countryside not caring". i welled up at that.

do people ITT think he was the best of his generation? over-rated? what's your hot Larkin take?

Yep. "Unresting death" destroys me. Two words that became a whole concept for me.

xp

Wow at aubade

Deepens like a coastal shelf" is not terribly evocative for me - meaning, it gradually deepens and then there's an abrupt drop?

Was thinking abt this poem today & nearly quoted it in the Masculinity thread - a weird coincidence

Aubade is my fave too. I also really like ... is it called And The Wave Sings Because It Is Moving? And of course the one about the toad “work”. His Collected is worth shelling out for. Haven’t read him in many years, but huge memorized shards of his work stick in my head. If pressed, I probably know more lines of Larkin by heart than of any other poet.

Larkin generally v good and v accessible - a “pop” poet in a way, tho (of course) not undeserving of serious consideration because of that. I think you can say his best work lacks the depth & richness of (insert “rock” poet here) without meaning it as a knock on him.

In the end his unrelenting pessimism - and his misogyny (fortunately expressed less in his poems than his letters) - makes him a tough gruel for me to stomach too much of at once.

Oh yeah, the mower too! We should be careful of each other; we should be kind / while there is still time.

IT'S A POEM ALL THE LINES COUNT THE SAME

says Mr Never-Polled-A-Poet

Aubade and Water are my favorite Larkin.

Larkin could've been a novelist of exquisite refinement. I loved A Girl in Winter a couple years ago.

Larkin generally v good and v accessible - a “pop” poet in a way, tho (of course) not undeserving of serious consideration because of that. I think you can say his best work lacks the depth & richness of (insert “rock” poet here) without meaning it as a knock on him.

our beloved Harold Bloom considers Robert Lowell and Larkin the most overrated 20th century English poets. I've struggled with Lowell for years, going so far as to read the new psychoanalytic bio and spending a summer with his poetry, but Larkin is like Frost in his accessibility.

IT'S A POEM ALL THE LINES COUNT THE SAME

― she carries a torch. two torches, actually (Joan Crawford Loves Chachi), Thursday, November 16, 2017 4:51 PM (seventeen minutes ago)

I don't think the poem being a thing negates the possibility that the lines of the poems are themselves things. Both the poem and the lines of the poem, severally, are interesting. And polling the lines of a poem both amuses me and serves as a framing device for considering the poem in its made-up-of-lines aspect.

Many poems rely on a rhythmic shift that also signals an emotional shift. The key line in Thomas Hardy's "The Voice" is, "Thus I; faltering forward..."

coastal shelf

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in.
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

deepens like a coastal shelf

I used "High Windows" on the first day of my lit classes for years – it never failed to impress the students.

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, November 16, 2017 1:10 PM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

god "high windows" is my fucking jam

the BBC made a Larkin documentary, in the early 90s I think it was, and they used some footage of a couple of friends of mine playing Frisbee in the park that Larkin's room overlooked to represent the "couple of kids" I guess. It worked pretty neatly

and he was a technician. the accessibility of his verse is deliberate and hard-won. his politics and personali

ty are obviously horrible in a ton of ways but "what will survive of us is love" is bett

er for that. It wasn't sentimentality, it was a reach for goodness in a shitty world that he knew he belonged to

"This Be the Verse" doesn't work as lazy misanthropy. We can feel it because the poet isn't trying to step outside of the shit he's joking about

this may not be his best, but I'm fond of it:

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

also NV otm I think... this exchange:

the difficulty I have with this poem isn't its poetry, which is sublime, but that it delivers an imbalanced idea so sublimely that it convinces you it is true when it is only half-true.

― A is for (Aimless), Thursday, November 16, 2017 6:38 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think lots of great art does that in one way or another

― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Thursday, November 16, 2017 6:45 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

really tickled me, as I've just been re-reading Michael Hamburger's The Truth of Poetry (1960something) which begins with basically this exact conversation, except Hamburger is defending Rilke's Duino Elegies from the charge of conveying mistaken ideas (or, more precisely, from the kind of criticism that would yoke its aesthetic value qua poetry to the essential rightness or wrongness of its ideas).

"fullgrown thickness" is an apt description of the cluster of consonants in the first two verses of the last stanza.

xp ... the Hamburger book also touches on "Ode on a Grecian Urn," making (or borrowing? I don't have the book at hand to check) the point that, despite what most people would tell you, Keats never said that beauty is truth -- rather, it's what Keats said the urn said; and the ode derives considerable emotional tension from the poet's struggle to believe it.

to Alfred: yes! those lines in the last stanza don't quite make sense to me on the level of literal signification, but I still love the sound of them, which I have heard compared to wind rustling branches

Okay I just looked it up and it makes a bit more sense now that I know "thresh" is an older variant spelling of "thrash," though one that is clearly only there for the rhyme... I think one of the major differences between British poets and American poets is that the latter can't get away with this kind of wordplay.

Love Larkin - completely forgot til now we did him in high school. I always think of the line "past smells of different dinners" when I'm having a stroll in the neighbourhood in the evening.

I was listening to Melvyn Bragg & friends this morning talking g about Germaine de Stael and one of the semi-quotes that was discussed was along the lines of "taste kills genius". Larkin is one of the writers I feel strongly backs up that

Great thread so far

Btw anyone here read that Rilke/Rodin book I’ve had my eye on?

in my head all the time is this fragment from Faith Healing:

...In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures.

xp Is that the one from Archipelago Press? I can't say I've read it all through, but I own it, and I don't regret the purchase -- it's a lovely book!

Still find Bleaney mortifying

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread

That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.

Fuck

I'd go back to bed but I mean he's spoiled even that

xp Is that the one from Archipelago Press? I can't say I've read it all through, but I own it, and I don't regret the purchase -- it's a lovely book!

― bernard snowy, Friday, 17 November 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It was issued on Archipelago (although I read a version of that essay years previously). Almost all his writing on art and sculpture is worth anyone's time.

They tuck you up, your mum and dad - I used to say this to my kids every night at bedtime. One day they'll get it.

This parody from Adrian Mitchell was going round the internet last year after being shared by Billy Bragg. I find it massively annoying.

They tuck you up, your mum and dad,
They read you Peter Rabbit, too.
They give you all the treats they had
And add some extra, just for you.

They were tucked up when they were small,
(Pink perfume, blue tobacco-smoke),
By those whose kiss healed any fall,
Whose laughter doubled any joke.

Man hands on happiness to man,
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
So love your parents all you can
And have some cheerful kids yourself.

Eurgh Jesus that's awful.

It is in every sense a tribute to the original.

Billy Bragg is one of the biggest twats in the UK, I hate him more than Boris tbh. He is that type of grinding bore that would find something as bad as that witty and amusing.

ffs that is sick. horrible.

i watched love and death in hull recently - where did they get the tape of larkin and his wife singing their own homemade nazi national anthem - that was incredibly dark and creepy imo, like the meticulous nature of it and the fact they were both singing along. also the general idea of him sliding further into heavily drunken nazism in his last days.

i agree about aubade, that is prob my favourite. but afternoons comes in a close second. "something is pushing them to the side of their own lives" stays in my head.

Almost all his [Rilke's] writing on art and sculpture is worth anyone's time.

Have you read the book of letters on Cezanne? That one has been calling to me lately, though I suspect I'm more interested in it as autobiography than as criticism.

The photographs in this book are excellent, but as I wanted a factual history of Rodin, the narrative was disappointing for me. I should have realised that this book was written by a poet who once worked for Rodin. As a result the text is too aesthetic for my needs.

brb, going to find Adrian Mitchell and beat him to death

with a keep calm and carry on mug

without Larkin I guess I'd never know what it felt like to be a miserable twat who moved to Hull and stuck around for whatever reason, wasting life on equal shares of administrative work, train journeys and booze.

hahah sick

Excellent

ha wrote itself rly

A good idea need only be done half-well

nice

Kudos

We should poll more poems and do the same.