The Slightly Deceived?

I've just received my copy of Faber's Philip Larkin "lost recordings", The Sunday Sessions. It was a necessary purchase - after all, Larkin, for better and worse - is the face of non-modernist British poetry post-1945 - and is also one of the English language's greatest coiner of phrases. He's not a poet you just ignore, even if (as I do) you disagree with some or all of what he thinks about poetry. Still, I disagree with Pound often - but enjoy some of his poetry.

Larkin's also something of a closet modernist himself (if one notes how much he drew on Yeats, Auden, Eliot and others). Anyway, imagine my surprise when I played the CD, and found that it was less than 46 minutes long (45 minutes, 20 seconds to be exact).

The back of the attractive CD promises "Running time approx. 1 hour". Maybe in a Bangkok massage parlour, - but for this listener, "approx. 1 hour" should be approximately 60 minutes, give or take one or three. The back cover gets other things wrong, not even mentioning the fact some poems are from The Less Deceived - though many are. So many of Larkin's great poems are here, I am glad to have 45 minutes of him: "An Arundel Tomb", "Days", "Mr. Bleaney", "The Whitsun Weddings", "Church Going" and "Toads".

Few other poets have so many fun poems. Of course, for those who want poems to always resist commodification, he's crap - but more and more I cannot really imagine a world beyond reification that is based on this planet (as much as I would like) - and I am not sure poems, and poets, need to always strap-on their spaceage helmets to blast off above the planetary; sometimes, the empirical world is enough. The danger is in claiming that one's chosen limits are the limits of the world - a mistake Larkin may have made.

As for the recording itself, Larkin sounds a little distracted, or tired - hardly upbeat, anyway. It sounds precisely like someone reading on Sundays, after lunch, in Hull - liquid lunches? Still, he does try to enact the poems, a tad. He does inflect, and offer nuances of tone - he offers ways in to interpretation, or appreciation. Better these, than none at all.

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise...

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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