Sad news. The great English poet, R.F. Langley, has died. I wrote about his work here a few years ago. Here one can find him reading. One can purchase The Face of It here directly from Carcanet.
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
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To be taught by him was to be taught to see the world with new eyes. He challenged the young mind, teaching – in a way that is simply impossible in the brave new educational world of today – As You Like It, Spenser, Carlos Williams and Beckett's Molloy in what is now called Year 9; Wuthering Heights, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, Hopkins' Journals/Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves, Donne, Herbert, Oppen, Ed Dorn and Olson’s “Kingfishers” in Year 10; with Wordsworth, Henry James, Pope, Shakespeare, Prynne in the Sixth, seasoned with Pevsner, Panofsky, the meaning of Michelangelo's Medici Tombs, F T Prince, Rakosi, Adrian Stokes, Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and a dash of Melanie Klein thrown in along the way as one entered the Sixth. He formed the sensibility of many of us. He taught us how to feel and how to think.
Like so many of his former pupils, I remember with much affection the devotion of at least a week's lessons to the first line of a Shakespeare play, whether Barnardo's "Who's there?" or Philo's "Nay, but this dotage of our general's, o'erflows the measure". For many of us, the implications of these lines formed our sensibilities, just as the discipline of intellectual rigour and meticulous attention to detail informed our analytical practices.
He has left school and nobody cares about his motives now. Some sort of dancer has been here, who perched and glowed and whizzed and picked the pepper out of the closing air.