A blogger yearns to care about banal junk once more

Hi everybody, new readers and old. It's been a weird few days. I'm snowed under by work, but kept getting distracted by the antics of Michael Gove and the popular response to the piece I wrote about him yesterday. I normally get around 200 readers daily: yesterday that one piece attracted nearly 4000 of you, for which you have my thanks and apologies. The driver of all this traffic was Twitter, particularly the Re-Tweets of two of my favourite people, Graham Linehan (the TV writer) and Cory Doctorow, hero of the Utopian Techno-age.

I'm heartened to learn that a) a lot of people feel the same way as I do and b) that my jokes occasionally hit the target: the people I interact with in meatspace usually respond to my humorous forays with groans, grimaces and occasionally sharp objects delivered at considerable velocity. Perhaps Blogger is the new Reader's Digest funnies page. I also want to thank those of you who commented. I really care about blogging as a way of extending a conversation: I link as much as possible and I take comments seriously, learning a lot from support and criticism alike. Apologies too for the length of the post: I kept thinking about more stuff to put in - I'd be an editor's nightmare. Another joy of blogging: no editors.

Against my higher instincts, it was also fascinating and gratifying to sit watching the readership increase, minute by minute. Despite cherishing you all for your unique characteristics and abilities, there's something ego-fuelling about watching numbers tick upwards on a screen. I know really that these figures are arbitrary and in isolation meaningless, but I now also fully understand why they call it 'stat porn'.

However, it's back to normality today. My 15 minutes are over and despite the gratification, I'm also relieved. My regular readers will know how inconsequential my writing usually is, and you new folks will soon pick it up (or leave). That said, I gather that my piece about the university's uncritical promotion of entrepreneurial discourse, and its links to frankly unimpressive salesmen, has attracted a complaint to my superiors. I will of course, keep you posted. I see this as a matter of free speech and academic freedom. I made justifiable intellectual points: the disciplinary process is not the appropriate forum to explore them. That's what the comments box is for!

And so to today's duties. You know when I said I'd be an editor's nightmare? Well I've just submitted a grossly extended review of RS Thomas: Uncollected Poems and RS Thomas's Poems to Elsi to Poetry Wales. In my defence, they approached me to do it, and they're paying me, so I reckon they're getting value for money, at least in terms of volume: my work comes out at 2p per word. Let's not talk about quality: I've told the editors to be as blunt as they need.

Poetry's Marvin the Paranoid Android greets the day with his customary good cheer

I won't repeat my review here, but I'll say this: buy the books unless you've never read any of his work, in which case you should started with the Collected Poems. They're great works of scholarship and they deepened my understanding of RS Thomas's work and method. Thomas was a fierce Welsh nationalist, a campaigner for the language who learned Welsh late and wrote poetry only in English. He was an agnostic vicar and a hater of technology who remained fascinated by quantum physics, through which he detected a space for the God he hoped existed. He was cold, rude, searching, misanthropic and also (I think) loving and very funny. One of things I say in the review is that lines like 'the incorrigibly human / with their dogs and their fags and children… the smut and the crap re-begin' ('Thoughts by the Sea') and 'Went to the sea; stared / at the birds. Did they / stare back?' (Excursion) surely deliberately play up grumpy Thomas's reputation to comic effect.

Anyway, if you want to read more, you'll have to buy Poetry Wales. It's a great and beautifully-designed magazine, so buy it anyway.

So it's back to marking and the quiet life. Lots of dissertations and essays to read, but some fun stuff too. I'm going to a recording of Radio 4's Any Questions tonight. Not as brutally unintelligent as Question Time, but still potentially infuriating. I lead a sedentary existence, so cold fury is the only cardio-vascular exercise I get. After that, I'm off to see the Star Trek film – I've never warmed to Star Wars, and on Sunday, I've been put on the guest list for Athlete, which should be a lot of fun.

It's not all work work work. See you next week, if I haven't been sacked.

Poem for National Poetry Day

I don't read as much poetry as I feel I should. Which is a complex cultural position in which to be, especially for someone who once ran the Introduction to Poetry module. Why do I feel I should read more poetry? Perhaps because it's the oldest genre, and therefore privileged. Perhaps because it used to be the mode for high-achieving gentlemen (failed again…). Maybe because it's the premier literary field as far as the canon goes. Or is it because poetry is held to be the genre which gives the greatest access to the emotions? Being 'emotionally dead', as I was once described, perhaps spending some time with Rossetti, RS Thomas, Spenser and co will resurrect me? 

All bollocks, of course: a lot of poetry is vicious, forbidding and bitter: the idea that it's some kind of well of human kindness is a post-Victorian attempt to make literature 'nice' and tidy - probably for 'the kids', an entirely misguided effort given that a lot of children and vicious, forbidding and bitter, and like to read novels which offer them similar joys. I read a fair amount of poetry: RS, O'Donoghue, Millay and plenty more, and it's singularly failed to make me a nicer or more caring person. I read poetry for its reflective qualities - I don't often read plot-driven work, but go for those which take short-cuts to the core of an issue, and those which make me think about the complex relationship between language and thought. I don't read poetry for therapy, or for 'answers' - that's the kind of rubbish you get on birthday cards. I do think poetry's special because it's a way of making sometimes quite ordinary things strange, which is very necessary in a culture which has hijacked pretty much everything for the purposes of making us consume more stuff. 

As it's National Poetry Day, here are a couple of my favourites. First, Edna St Vincent Millay's 'Sonnet XLIII'. It's a female incursion into the previously masculine sexual history of the sonnet - but also a plangent reflection on a sexual life which has drawn to a close. 


What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

Although Simon Armitage stood up the Map Twats on his supposed perambulation of the Pennines, here's 'Poem', which was always received well on my Intro to Poetry courses. It's so deceptively shallow - inviting you to dismiss the narrator as a self-regarding young man - until the final couple of lines, when you realise (I hope) that he - and we (or men at least) - are brought face to face with mortality and our emotional denial. (A 'Sony Walkman', kids, was what rich kids had before iPods existed). And no, I don't know why the stanza breaks are there either. 

Frank O'Hara was open on the desk

but I went straight for the directory.

Nick was out, Joey was engaged, Jim was

just making coffee and why didn't I

come over. I had Astrud Gilberto 

singing 'Bim Bom' on my Sony Walkman

and the sun was drying the damp slates on

the rooftops. I walked in without ringing

and he still wasn't dressed or shaved when we

topped up the coffee with his old man's Scotch

(it was only half ten but what the hell)

and took the newspapers into the porch.

Talking Heads were on the radio. I

was just about to mention the football

when he said 'Look, will you help me clear her

wardrobe out?' I said 'Sure Jim, anything.'

Oddly enough, my colleague Paul McDonald has just won the John Clare poetry prize with a poem about another ageing Jim:

John Clare Poetry Prize 2012

Lucky Jim

Paul McDonald

1st Prize: Adult Category

I went to Brenda’s house for dinner

She’s clearing out the fridge which meant

A first course of fishcakes and yoghurt

Lucky they’re compatible, she said.

Main course prawns, peas

And croquette potatoes;

Angel cake with ice-cream for afters.

She’s clearing out her cupboards too: Jim’s stuff.

I scored a pair of Argyle socks.

Lucky they’re in fashion, she said.

We debated widow’s pensions

But weren’t sure of the details;

She plans to pick a booklet up from Age Concern.

She’s terminating Sky – making do

With Free View and knitting.

Lucky I’m a reader, she said.

She’s cancelling the Racing Post,

Arranging for collection

Of his hearing aid, tablets, and orthopaedic bed.

His Lotto numbers will survive: I just have a feeling, she said.

And finally one to puncture the rather smug jollity of National Poetry Day: RS Thomas's 'Death of a Poet':

Laid now on his smooth bed
For the last time, watching dully
Through heavy eyelids the day's colour
Widow the sky, what can he say
Worthy of record, the books all open,
Pens ready, the faces, sad,
Waiting gravely for the tired lips
To move once -- what can he say?

His tongue wrestles to force one word
Past the thick phlegm; no speech, no phrases
For the day's news, just the one word ‘sorry';
Sorry for the lies, for the long failure
In the poet's war; that he preferred 
The easier rhythms of the heart 
To the mind's scansion; that now he dies
Intestate, having nothing to leave
But a few songs, cold as stones
In the thin hands that asked for bread.