During the latter part of my stay in Newcastle, things began to pick up speed. I took a trip down to London to see Mimi Khalvati, with whom I had lunch near her place in Stoke Newington. That same week, I spent some time with James Byrne and Sandeep Parmar, too, in fact, they put together a sort of joint birthday dinner for us, with guests Margaret Obank and Samuel Shimon, plus Nina Zivancevic over from Paris with her son Vladimir. It was something of a going-away party since James and Sandeep’s plans were to New York in early September to live for a couple of years, Sandeep pursuing her postgraduate research and James enrolling in NYU’s MFA program.
Back in Newcastle I began to get to know poets living there or nearby. Sean O’Brien (one of the most praised poets now publishing in the U.K.) and his partner the literary agent Gerry Wardle were especially kind to me. Sean has won all the major British poetry prizes, but surprised everyone this year by bringing out his first novel, titled The Afterlife, which I saw favorably reviewed in several papers. It’s a dark fable (also, bitingly funny), the story of several aspiring Cambridge poets in the 1970s, whose lives epitomize the confusion and anomie of that decade. I asked Sean if he planned to write a second novel, and he assures me that he does. So much for the notion that poets can’t write fiction--Hardy, Lawrence, Blaise Cendrars, James Dickey, and Margaret Atwood all cases in point, and I might as well let Alfred Corn be the caboose for this distinbguished train.
Sean and Gerry took me on an excursion to the Northumbrian coast one bright early-August morning, an unforgettable day that managed to crowd in many sights, including a visit to Ashington’s coal-mining museum, where, among other things, I was shown paintings of the “Ashington School.” They were a group of coal miners (or “pit men”) who in the 1930s had been given art instruction by a progressive painter named Lyon, who came up from London to the industrial sector of Northumbria. His pupils mounted an exhibition to some acclaim and began to be collected, not really incredible if you recall the progressive politics that characterized British cultural life in the Thirties. Besides, the paintings have a lot of originality and appeal. More about the painters follows farther on.
From Ashington we drove to the coast, stopping in the pretty town of Alnmouth for lunch. On the sand beach there you see Farne Island with its lighthouse and a beautiful expanse of light blue sea. When we continued on the road we saw Alnwick Castle (used for the Harry Potter films), Bamburgh Castle, ancient seat of the Percys (vide Hotspur in Henry IV), and finally the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, the cradle of Celtic Christianity in Northern England. I’m not going to attempt in a blog to register the full impact that seeing these things made.
We turned inland and drove through the moors north of Newcastle to get me back to my place, where we toasted our day with a drink from my balcony thirteen floors above the Tyne. I saw Sean and Gerry once more for lunch before leaving Newcastle, and we plan to meet again when I return.
Through an email introduction made by Anne-Marie Fyfe, I also met the poet Colette Bryce, whose refreshing recent book Self-Portrait in the Dark I’d been reading. Colette came over for a drink, bringing with her the poet Paul Batchelor, who besides publishing well-received volumes of poems wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on the Northumberland poet Barry McSweeney. I’d actually met Paul four years earlier, when he came to a reading I gave for the Proudwords Festival in Newcastle. But it was a pleasure to see him again, now fully fledged as a poet.
I made a daytrip to Whitby, which I’d never visited, to see Kennedy Fraser, an old New York friend (English by birth) who divides her time between New York and this small seacoast town that has a special history. Begin with the fact that the earliest surviving poem in Anglo-Saxon was written there by the shepherd Caedmon and that St. Hilda, the abbess of Whitby, flourished during the same period. We had good weather and made a tour of some of the sites, including the ruined abbey, the old church, and the graveyard made famous by the opening chapters of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But the awful traffic and swarms of tourists firmed up a recent resolve never to visit such places except in the off season.
Through James Byrne, I was put in touch with Toby Martinez de las Rivas, a young poet who lives in Gateshead with his Italian wife and child. Toby’s grandfather, a Basque from Bilbao, came to England during the Spanish Civil War and married and Englishwoman. Though he grew up in southern England, Toby is now a proud Northerner, which leads me to the reflection that nearly everyone who lives in the North of England is or becomes a staunch partisan of the region. Apart from its gorgeous landscapes and architecture, a long rich history that includes Roman garrisons and Hadrian’s Wall, constant invasions from Northmen and Scots, Celtic monks and saints (e.g. Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede), the interest of shipbuilding and coal-mining industries, and many resident poets, how can local pride be explained? But no further explanation than those facts is really needed. While there, I felt the strong magnetism of Northumbria and certainly plan to stay there again. Anyway, Toby has yet to publish a book, but he was chosen to number among the new poets whose chapbooks have ben published by Faber, and he has already won prizes.
In mid-August I met kind and charming Valerie Laws, poet and playwright also concerned with the matter of the North. We made a day trip out to Hadrian’s Wall and to the excavated Roman settlement Vindolanda, which Hadrian is believed to have visited shortly before the wall project was begun. Reconstructed Roman dwellings have been added to the site, including a little temple dedicated to the nymphs of the water source that ran through Vindolanda. Even without the archeological attractions, the site would have visitors, beautiful as it is. Its rolling fields offer vistas of nearby mountains, the slopes on the day we visited pale purple with heather.
I had an arrivederci final dinner with Paul Attinello (musicologist and writer who teaches at the U. of Newcastle) and then went down to London the first week in September, where I stayed in East Dulwich with my friend Paddy Navin, the actress. Paddy called up other actor friends and we had a reading of the play about Robert Lowell (in 1949) that I drafted during the summer. A revealing experience to hear your text performed by other voices. I hope to set up another such reading when I go to New York in October. Paddy and I saw the NT production of Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters, a play based on the story of the Ashington coal miners described above. Some topnotch performances, especially from Christopher Connel, who played the miner/painter Kilbourn. I also saw the NT’s Mother Courage in a new translation by Tony Kushner. Fiona Shaw gave a star turn in the title role, a heroic two-and-a-half-hour embodiment of Brecht’s excruciating narrative, under Deborah Warner’s direction. It will sound as though I’m a theatre addict (in fact, I may be), but I also saw the ENO production of Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre in a startling realization by the Barcelona troupe La Fura dels Baus, one feature of which was an enormous effigy of a crouching woman out of whose body characters emerged at different points during the narrative. Also attending were Adam Mars-Jones and Keith King, the three of us joining up to discuss what we’d seen after and to catch up on our respective past months.
Other events: I atended the launch of James Byrne's and Clare Pollard's new Bloodaxe anthology, Voice Recognition, a gatheirng of poets who haven't yet published a book. It was held at King's Place and featured twelve of the anthologized poets, including Toby Martinez de las Rivas, who apart from reading beautifully made the startling decision to dedicate one of his poems to me. The book has all the earmarks of success and performs its prospecting and introductory function very well.
I'd been invited by Katy Evans-Bush to participate in her reading series, held at a cafe in Stoke Newington. Three other American-born poets read, including Joseph Harrison, in London on a Guggenheim. We had never met before nor did I know about Waywiser Press, for which he is the American editor. But now I do.
Mimi Khalvati attended the reading, and a few days later she and I had a laughter-filled evening over dinner at a little Turkish restaurant in Spitalfields, preceded by a stroll around that out-of-the-way old neighborhood. I first got to know the neighborhood more than twenty years ago when an American friend, a longtime resident in London named Dennis Seaver, introduced me to it. (Dennis has since died, I’m very sorry to say.) He owned a house on Folgate Street, an old dwelling that he had turned into “living theatre,” a sort of architectural narrative involving the fortunes of an old Huguenot family, specialists in silk weaving, that had come to London shortly after the Edict of Nantes (which exiled Protestants from France). Each floor of his house dealt with a different generation of the family he had invented. Not absolutely accurate from the standpoint of history, it was even so an enthralling experience, casting a spell not easily forgotten, as you see. Mimi and I also walked up to Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, which figures in Peter Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor, a strange historical fantasy I read back in the 80s, when Spitalfields had just begun to attract artist gentrifiers. The old Market is now lined with boutiques, Christ Church restored and cleaned, and the whole ambiance is more upscale than it was twenty years ago.
On my last day in London I was to meet George Szirtes for a drink but for some reason my phone failed to deliver the confirming message (a chronic problem all during the last few days of my stay), so we didn’t manage our rendezvous after all; it will have to be postponed till next spring. But Paddy and I went out for a sumptuous Indian dinner at a place nearby, and the London stay came to an end.
I’m in Rhode Island for a few weeks and, in fact, a few days after arrival gave a reading on the 24th at the University of Rhode Island, where my friend the poet Peter Covino teaches. In the audience were Sandeep Parmar and James Byrne, up from New York, where, as mentioned above, they will be living this year. Also, Jason Roush (see the blog for April 12) came down from Boston, a convenient occasion for a reunion after my four months away. The reading done and books signed, we all went out to dinner, joined by Peter’s partner Tim, Mary Cappello and her partner Jan Walton (both on the faculty at URI). A certain flush of excitement stirred up during the reading carried over into our dinner, which takes its special place among memories of other high-spirited gatherings organized around the bardic vocation, an unquenchable Olympian flame to which poetry’s adepts bring so much enthusiasm and dedication.
Showing posts with label Mimi Khalvati. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mimi Khalvati. Show all posts
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Teaching Writing
My summer is going well. I’ve had two visitors. First, James Byrne came up for a couple of days and then a week later, Mimi Khalvati. Because neither had ever been to Newcastle, I played one of my favorite roles, as tour guide. Things seen and done included a look at the temporary exhibition at the Baltic Museum for Contemporary Art showing works by artists who could be construed as having been influenced by Darwin—a timely topic. Also, a visit to the permanent collection of the Laing Art Gallery in the city center, which includes canvases by Gauguin and John Martin, the Blakean painter of sublime subjects that might be said to involve Wordsworth’s “beauty and terror.” We also ferreted out medieval remnants of the old city, for example, the Castle Keep, with its four crenellated towers and the Black Gate, which sounds suitably Gothic, though the name probably comes from a Mr. Black who once lived there. James Byrne particularly wanted to see the Morden Tower (built into the city wall in the western part of town) because of its association with contemporary poetry. Bunting first read Briggflatts there and later readers included Creeley and Ginsberg. Newcastle’s Chinatown is close by, perhaps because the 13th-century ramparts reminded Chinese immigrants of their own Great Wall. Another echo of that would also be Hadrian’s Wall, which begins not far west of Newcastle, a remnant from the Roman occupation of Britain that embodies some of the mystique of ancient parapets. During my first visit to Newcastle in 2005, I went out to Hadrian’s Wall and began shortly after working on a poem titled “Hadrian,” which appeared here in PN Review and can be found in their online archive, if you’re a subscriber. It’s an impressive structure along some stretches and goes west all the way to Carlisle.
New subject: Because of a recently published and widely reviewed book by Mark McGurl titled The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of the Creative Writing School, the topic of creative writing schools is being discussed again, though I’m not sure the attack and defense positions have made any points not familiar to us already. McGurl restricts his discussion to fiction, leaving aside poetry and non-fiction; and he comes down in favor of the phenomenon by citing a number of successful graduates of MFA programs, including Flannery O’Connor. I think we can safely say that O’Connor is a permanent figure in American literature, but it’s too soon to guarantee that some of the more recent successes McGurl mentions prove his point. They may or may not have lasting value. Nor do we have any testimony from these successes (to my knowledge), confirming that they regarded their courses as a help.
I only took one creative writing course, and that was in short story when I was an undergraduate at Emory. The teacher was H.E. Francis, who published several collections of stories and edited a little magazine called Poem, which I believe is still going, though I haven’t checked. I never had a poetry-writing class, and I’m not sure that I had even heard of the Iowa School back in the 1960s, or, a bit later, the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia, founded by Stanley Kunitz. And since I hadn’t heard of them, it never occurred to me to apply to them. So I will never know if such a program would have helped me or not. My substitute was the freely offered comment that friends made, beginning with Edmund White, whom I met in 1966 before he had published fiction. And then Richard Howard and David Kalstone. And then James Merrill and John Hollander. I don’t think I properly appreciated at the time what an enormous service was being done, given that no payment was involved. But now I do. I’ve taught poetry writing classes off and on since 1977 (but only one fiction-writing class). This was only occasionally full-time employment, I was never tenured faculty; which may explain why I didn’t suffer from burnout.
Flannery O’Connor, when asked whether she thought creative writing courses discouraged young writers answered, “Not enough of them!” So one argument against such programs is that they annually unleash hundreds of merely competent writers onto the marketplace, flooding it, and making the task of sorting out the topnotch from the middling much harder. It also gives magazine editors a lot more work, since all these new writers constantly submit (and submit the same work to multiple publications simultaneously). I really don’t think it is humanly possible for editors to read huge stacks of unsolicited mss. with anything like close attention. That is a problem. I would estimate that the beginning writer who has no literary contacts and hopes to be discovered by sending in unsolicited work to a magazine has practically zero chance of success. So, apart from the course content, one value writing programs can have is to serve as a first screening: the instructors who find good students can then recommend them to editors or other professional associates. Of course job descriptions don’t list this task as a professional duty, yet I think most teachers undertake it voluntarily.
But what about the actual course instruction? Is it really helpful? Harmful? There’s no way to avoid the banal answer: some students are helped and others are harmed, depending on individual temperament of the student and the quality of the teaching. (I’ve already written here a little about teaching creative writing and the students I’ve had. See the blog for February 23, 2008.) Certainly there are harmful teaching styles, for example, the teacher who wipes the floor with student work, the critical assessment amounting to nothing more than a sneering dismissal. Nearly as bad is the teacher who smilingly accepts all entries with “That’s just wonderful, keep writing.” It wins popularity for the teacher, but is valueless as instruction.
In my opinion the teacher who tries to coerce students into writing exactly the way she or he does is harmful, particularly if she or he plays favorites, rewarding the close imitators with lots of praise, high marks, and out-of-class social interaction from which the non-imitator is excluded. (And of course if social interaction turns into a sexual relationship or even the offer of one, that is harmful, indeed, unethical.) I’m aware that it isn’t possible for a writer actively engaged in developing an oeuvre and winning an audience for it to regard all approaches to literary composition with equal favor. But the teacher should not insist on overriding an approach that she or he regards as substandard, beyond pointing out its disadvantages and acquainting the student with alternatives. Once that has been done, to demand conformity with the teacher’s personal style is coercion, not fine arts instruction. The arts are not like math and science; no proofs are available. We have a few guidelines, but the rest is an interpretation of experience, it is taste and educated guesswork. On the other hand, students ought to familiarize themselves with the teacher’s writing before enrolling. If it is clear there are no shared aesthetic perspectives at all, then working together will not be easy and possibly not very helpful.
I question the value of writing programs that consist entirely of workshops. Some of the courses should involve reading from contemporary poetry, in more than one language tradition, and of course poetry from earlier periods. At Columbia, I taught many literature courses, the MFA equivalent of “Physics for Poets.” That is, students were not required to write MLA-style essays, but instead to see what plunder they could make off with when reading the assigned texts. Usually no more than one or two informal papers were required per term, just as a way to see what class members were getting from their reading, and what sort of critical skills they were developing. Needless to say the professor in question also learned a lot in the process. I won’t say workshops never taught me anything, they did; but certainly I learned more from the literature courses I taught. Continuing my own education wasn't of course the basis for my salary, only a fringe benefit. Primarily, these courses were the means of bringing to students’ attention artistic resources and authors they were unaware of.
In the workshop format, the teacher can convey to students what sort of audience expectations greet new work published in our era, and, clearly, these expectations differ from what they were a century ago or even fifty years ago. This might sound too obvious to mention; but, occasionally, I got students who hadn’t read anything written after, say, 1925, and wrote accordingly. The sense of audience expectations is conveyed by the instructor, but also by fellow students when the workshop format is used. And there are normally some differences in the instructor’s sense of what is valuable and the other class members’. Fairly often a student will rise up in indignation and say, “I don’t care what audience expectations are, I already know how I want to write!” Which is fine but leaves unanswered the question of why a genius would ever enroll in a course of instruction to begin with. Though not in every case, usually the instructor’s preferences are more conservative than the students’. He or she has probably read quite a lot more than the class members, and long ago worked through the excesses associated with juvenilia. Just as there are some students who haven’t read anything published after 1925, there are others who have read nothing (slight exaggeration) published earlier than two years ago, a disadvantage that cries out to be repaired.
Given that universities have for a long time now offered courses in visual art and in music composition, without anyone’s objecting, it’s hard to understand why some writers and critics anathematize writing courses. Is there really any intrinsic difference in the nature of the creative process in art, music, and literature? Obviously, you can’t teach—what to call it?—inspiration, but you can equip aspiring writers with basic compositional skills (including prosody), expand or refine their sense of what a subject is, and perhaps develop critical faculties, so that students can rush to the circular file when necessary.
Of course employing notable writers as teachers is a left-handed way for universities to serve as patrons for contemporary literature. Yet I doubt that motive is foremost in the decision to set up writing programs, which, to university administrators, are generally regarded as nothing more (or less) than cash cows. The idea that poets might gain a living by teaching poetry was first proposed, I believe, by Leopardi, in his Zibaldone (or notebook). He imagined an Academy where aspiring poets came to consult acknowledged masters concerning their mss. and paid for the opinions offered. But the project wasn’t realized till more than a century later. Well, then, does teaching help the writer-teachers? It helps them not to starve, which, given the current national indisposition to support literary artists with a regular stipend (as is done, for example, in the Netherlands), is a real value. But teaching, especially full-time teaching, may harm writers, gobbling up their time. Still worse, it may actually overwhelm them with boredom and disgust for the whole process of literary composition, whose results can come to seem like an industrial product, not the pure elixir drawn from the fountain of life that first drew them to writing.
As said before, I only rarely taught full-time and didn’t suffer burnout. My sense is that teaching, apart from paying the rent, improved me as a writer. I learned from the literature courses I taught, but also from my students as well, who sometimes opened new avenues for me I might not otherwise have bothered to explore. On the other hand, as tuition costs began to skyrocket, I began to worry that it was a serious imposition on students to crush them under the heavy debt of student loans incurred for the MFA degree, which is null as a credit toward employment unless also accompanied by solid publications. Obviously, only a few of the students were going to become full-fledged writers, with a long list of publications and steady income. I did notice that some got places in arts administration or arts funding, or found posts as editors of magazines. (Among former students who are now editors, I can name Ben Downing, Gabriel Fried, Timothy Donnelly, Susan Schultz, Ravi Shankar, and David Yezzi.) On the most general level, I don’t question that writing courses help class members be better readers, and I wish that more people realized the value thereof. Being the chief isn't the only worthwhile goal in life: being a member of the tribe is a noble and honorable estate. It also seems likely that most MFA candidates will acquire the habit of reading new works of imaginative literature as these appear, a solid cultural value. (It would be interesting to know what percentage of the readership for contemporary literature is made up of former writing students.) But the tuition costs and resulting debts began to climb to terrifying levels, at least in some universities. So conscience was eased when I gave up regular teaching. I do occasional workshops, where the tuition isn’t stratospherically high, and that satisfies my wish to work at the classroom context. Sometimes people seem shocked when I say that all I do is write. But writing is (and in truth, always was) a full-time occupation.
New subject: Because of a recently published and widely reviewed book by Mark McGurl titled The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of the Creative Writing School, the topic of creative writing schools is being discussed again, though I’m not sure the attack and defense positions have made any points not familiar to us already. McGurl restricts his discussion to fiction, leaving aside poetry and non-fiction; and he comes down in favor of the phenomenon by citing a number of successful graduates of MFA programs, including Flannery O’Connor. I think we can safely say that O’Connor is a permanent figure in American literature, but it’s too soon to guarantee that some of the more recent successes McGurl mentions prove his point. They may or may not have lasting value. Nor do we have any testimony from these successes (to my knowledge), confirming that they regarded their courses as a help.
I only took one creative writing course, and that was in short story when I was an undergraduate at Emory. The teacher was H.E. Francis, who published several collections of stories and edited a little magazine called Poem, which I believe is still going, though I haven’t checked. I never had a poetry-writing class, and I’m not sure that I had even heard of the Iowa School back in the 1960s, or, a bit later, the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia, founded by Stanley Kunitz. And since I hadn’t heard of them, it never occurred to me to apply to them. So I will never know if such a program would have helped me or not. My substitute was the freely offered comment that friends made, beginning with Edmund White, whom I met in 1966 before he had published fiction. And then Richard Howard and David Kalstone. And then James Merrill and John Hollander. I don’t think I properly appreciated at the time what an enormous service was being done, given that no payment was involved. But now I do. I’ve taught poetry writing classes off and on since 1977 (but only one fiction-writing class). This was only occasionally full-time employment, I was never tenured faculty; which may explain why I didn’t suffer from burnout.
Flannery O’Connor, when asked whether she thought creative writing courses discouraged young writers answered, “Not enough of them!” So one argument against such programs is that they annually unleash hundreds of merely competent writers onto the marketplace, flooding it, and making the task of sorting out the topnotch from the middling much harder. It also gives magazine editors a lot more work, since all these new writers constantly submit (and submit the same work to multiple publications simultaneously). I really don’t think it is humanly possible for editors to read huge stacks of unsolicited mss. with anything like close attention. That is a problem. I would estimate that the beginning writer who has no literary contacts and hopes to be discovered by sending in unsolicited work to a magazine has practically zero chance of success. So, apart from the course content, one value writing programs can have is to serve as a first screening: the instructors who find good students can then recommend them to editors or other professional associates. Of course job descriptions don’t list this task as a professional duty, yet I think most teachers undertake it voluntarily.
But what about the actual course instruction? Is it really helpful? Harmful? There’s no way to avoid the banal answer: some students are helped and others are harmed, depending on individual temperament of the student and the quality of the teaching. (I’ve already written here a little about teaching creative writing and the students I’ve had. See the blog for February 23, 2008.) Certainly there are harmful teaching styles, for example, the teacher who wipes the floor with student work, the critical assessment amounting to nothing more than a sneering dismissal. Nearly as bad is the teacher who smilingly accepts all entries with “That’s just wonderful, keep writing.” It wins popularity for the teacher, but is valueless as instruction.
In my opinion the teacher who tries to coerce students into writing exactly the way she or he does is harmful, particularly if she or he plays favorites, rewarding the close imitators with lots of praise, high marks, and out-of-class social interaction from which the non-imitator is excluded. (And of course if social interaction turns into a sexual relationship or even the offer of one, that is harmful, indeed, unethical.) I’m aware that it isn’t possible for a writer actively engaged in developing an oeuvre and winning an audience for it to regard all approaches to literary composition with equal favor. But the teacher should not insist on overriding an approach that she or he regards as substandard, beyond pointing out its disadvantages and acquainting the student with alternatives. Once that has been done, to demand conformity with the teacher’s personal style is coercion, not fine arts instruction. The arts are not like math and science; no proofs are available. We have a few guidelines, but the rest is an interpretation of experience, it is taste and educated guesswork. On the other hand, students ought to familiarize themselves with the teacher’s writing before enrolling. If it is clear there are no shared aesthetic perspectives at all, then working together will not be easy and possibly not very helpful.
I question the value of writing programs that consist entirely of workshops. Some of the courses should involve reading from contemporary poetry, in more than one language tradition, and of course poetry from earlier periods. At Columbia, I taught many literature courses, the MFA equivalent of “Physics for Poets.” That is, students were not required to write MLA-style essays, but instead to see what plunder they could make off with when reading the assigned texts. Usually no more than one or two informal papers were required per term, just as a way to see what class members were getting from their reading, and what sort of critical skills they were developing. Needless to say the professor in question also learned a lot in the process. I won’t say workshops never taught me anything, they did; but certainly I learned more from the literature courses I taught. Continuing my own education wasn't of course the basis for my salary, only a fringe benefit. Primarily, these courses were the means of bringing to students’ attention artistic resources and authors they were unaware of.
In the workshop format, the teacher can convey to students what sort of audience expectations greet new work published in our era, and, clearly, these expectations differ from what they were a century ago or even fifty years ago. This might sound too obvious to mention; but, occasionally, I got students who hadn’t read anything written after, say, 1925, and wrote accordingly. The sense of audience expectations is conveyed by the instructor, but also by fellow students when the workshop format is used. And there are normally some differences in the instructor’s sense of what is valuable and the other class members’. Fairly often a student will rise up in indignation and say, “I don’t care what audience expectations are, I already know how I want to write!” Which is fine but leaves unanswered the question of why a genius would ever enroll in a course of instruction to begin with. Though not in every case, usually the instructor’s preferences are more conservative than the students’. He or she has probably read quite a lot more than the class members, and long ago worked through the excesses associated with juvenilia. Just as there are some students who haven’t read anything published after 1925, there are others who have read nothing (slight exaggeration) published earlier than two years ago, a disadvantage that cries out to be repaired.
Given that universities have for a long time now offered courses in visual art and in music composition, without anyone’s objecting, it’s hard to understand why some writers and critics anathematize writing courses. Is there really any intrinsic difference in the nature of the creative process in art, music, and literature? Obviously, you can’t teach—what to call it?—inspiration, but you can equip aspiring writers with basic compositional skills (including prosody), expand or refine their sense of what a subject is, and perhaps develop critical faculties, so that students can rush to the circular file when necessary.
Of course employing notable writers as teachers is a left-handed way for universities to serve as patrons for contemporary literature. Yet I doubt that motive is foremost in the decision to set up writing programs, which, to university administrators, are generally regarded as nothing more (or less) than cash cows. The idea that poets might gain a living by teaching poetry was first proposed, I believe, by Leopardi, in his Zibaldone (or notebook). He imagined an Academy where aspiring poets came to consult acknowledged masters concerning their mss. and paid for the opinions offered. But the project wasn’t realized till more than a century later. Well, then, does teaching help the writer-teachers? It helps them not to starve, which, given the current national indisposition to support literary artists with a regular stipend (as is done, for example, in the Netherlands), is a real value. But teaching, especially full-time teaching, may harm writers, gobbling up their time. Still worse, it may actually overwhelm them with boredom and disgust for the whole process of literary composition, whose results can come to seem like an industrial product, not the pure elixir drawn from the fountain of life that first drew them to writing.
As said before, I only rarely taught full-time and didn’t suffer burnout. My sense is that teaching, apart from paying the rent, improved me as a writer. I learned from the literature courses I taught, but also from my students as well, who sometimes opened new avenues for me I might not otherwise have bothered to explore. On the other hand, as tuition costs began to skyrocket, I began to worry that it was a serious imposition on students to crush them under the heavy debt of student loans incurred for the MFA degree, which is null as a credit toward employment unless also accompanied by solid publications. Obviously, only a few of the students were going to become full-fledged writers, with a long list of publications and steady income. I did notice that some got places in arts administration or arts funding, or found posts as editors of magazines. (Among former students who are now editors, I can name Ben Downing, Gabriel Fried, Timothy Donnelly, Susan Schultz, Ravi Shankar, and David Yezzi.) On the most general level, I don’t question that writing courses help class members be better readers, and I wish that more people realized the value thereof. Being the chief isn't the only worthwhile goal in life: being a member of the tribe is a noble and honorable estate. It also seems likely that most MFA candidates will acquire the habit of reading new works of imaginative literature as these appear, a solid cultural value. (It would be interesting to know what percentage of the readership for contemporary literature is made up of former writing students.) But the tuition costs and resulting debts began to climb to terrifying levels, at least in some universities. So conscience was eased when I gave up regular teaching. I do occasional workshops, where the tuition isn’t stratospherically high, and that satisfies my wish to work at the classroom context. Sometimes people seem shocked when I say that all I do is write. But writing is (and in truth, always was) a full-time occupation.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Translation Prize Ceremony
The first month of my stay here has rushed by with a speed that would, if I’d let it, push me toward clichés about time’s winged chariot and comparable proverbs. On Friday I move to my new place in Belsize Park. I’ve had Mimi Khalvati to dinner here, then Adam Mars-Jones and Keith King. Mimi was recently awarded an Arts Council grant, which will give her a sabbatical from teaching and allow her to complete a new book of poems. Adam says the next installment of the mega-novel whose first part Pilcrow appeared last spring will be coming out in September 2009. Keith is producing his art works in ceramic. An amateur London historian he tells me that the area I'm now staying in was once London's primary quarter for the stabling of horses, including Iliffe Yard, which these windows overlook. There are now no more horses, but I feel surrounded by energy and originality.
The translation prizes for 2008 were awarded last night at Queen Elizabeth Hall, with winners in Arabic, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Greek. Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the TLS, presented the prizes, but his participation also included some good-humored dispelling of what Eliot once called "the depressing highbrow effect." He'd also arranged to distribute copies of the current issue to the audience, its pages as usual containing articles you want to read as son as you see the subjects.
I’d been invited to attend the evening by Samuel Shimon and Margaret Obank under the auspices of Banipal magazine, which administers the Arabic translation prize. I looked forward to seeing Fady Joudah, whose translation of three Darwish books under the title The Butterfly’s Burden was this year’s winner. It was published by Copper Canyon Press in the U.S.A. and Bloodaxe Books here. Actually, there was a less formal prize celebration this past Saturday at a pub in Holborn, where Margaret, Simon, and Fady greeted me warmly and also welcomed James Byrne, who came with me. The whole evening had a spirited, Middle Eastern family feeling, and, in fact, I was introduced to Fady’s mother and father, who had flown over from Tennessee in order to attend. I met several Arab authors, including Amjad Nasser and Aamer Hussein, and I was glad to see Mimi (who knows Farsee but not Arabic) at the party, and the American poet Margo Berdeshevsky, who came over from Paris just for this event. Margo and I first met about fifteen years ago when she signed up for a poetry workshop I gave at a cultural center in Maui, and we’ve seen each other in New York a couple of times since then. Her first book But a Passage in the Wilderness was out last year with Sheep Meadow.
Fady read very movingly from Darwish in both Arabic and in his translation. Also, with eloquence and reined-in passion, Amjad Nasser recited from memory a Darwish poem. Hearing the sounds of that language, I reflected on what could be called its “epic” history, given that Arabic has traveled to so many parts of the world and formed the basis of so many high points in civilization. (My own special favorite moment is the golden age of El Andalus, where Christian, Jewish, and Arab cultures coexisted peacefully and were able to influence each other in surprisingly productive ways.) Samuel recounted how he began learning Arabic at an early age (his first language was Assyrian or Aramaic) but didn’t make much progress until he began reading Darwish, whose poems more or less guided him toward a deeper understanding of the language.
I mentioned that Copper Canyon has published The Butterfly’s Burden in America, and I’m proud to say they have also just brought out the new edition of The Poem’s Heartbeat, as well as the paperback edition of Contradictions, both findable on Amazon and B&N.
For Jewish friends, Lshanah tovah, happy 5769!
The translation prizes for 2008 were awarded last night at Queen Elizabeth Hall, with winners in Arabic, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Greek. Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the TLS, presented the prizes, but his participation also included some good-humored dispelling of what Eliot once called "the depressing highbrow effect." He'd also arranged to distribute copies of the current issue to the audience, its pages as usual containing articles you want to read as son as you see the subjects.
I’d been invited to attend the evening by Samuel Shimon and Margaret Obank under the auspices of Banipal magazine, which administers the Arabic translation prize. I looked forward to seeing Fady Joudah, whose translation of three Darwish books under the title The Butterfly’s Burden was this year’s winner. It was published by Copper Canyon Press in the U.S.A. and Bloodaxe Books here. Actually, there was a less formal prize celebration this past Saturday at a pub in Holborn, where Margaret, Simon, and Fady greeted me warmly and also welcomed James Byrne, who came with me. The whole evening had a spirited, Middle Eastern family feeling, and, in fact, I was introduced to Fady’s mother and father, who had flown over from Tennessee in order to attend. I met several Arab authors, including Amjad Nasser and Aamer Hussein, and I was glad to see Mimi (who knows Farsee but not Arabic) at the party, and the American poet Margo Berdeshevsky, who came over from Paris just for this event. Margo and I first met about fifteen years ago when she signed up for a poetry workshop I gave at a cultural center in Maui, and we’ve seen each other in New York a couple of times since then. Her first book But a Passage in the Wilderness was out last year with Sheep Meadow.
Fady read very movingly from Darwish in both Arabic and in his translation. Also, with eloquence and reined-in passion, Amjad Nasser recited from memory a Darwish poem. Hearing the sounds of that language, I reflected on what could be called its “epic” history, given that Arabic has traveled to so many parts of the world and formed the basis of so many high points in civilization. (My own special favorite moment is the golden age of El Andalus, where Christian, Jewish, and Arab cultures coexisted peacefully and were able to influence each other in surprisingly productive ways.) Samuel recounted how he began learning Arabic at an early age (his first language was Assyrian or Aramaic) but didn’t make much progress until he began reading Darwish, whose poems more or less guided him toward a deeper understanding of the language.
I mentioned that Copper Canyon has published The Butterfly’s Burden in America, and I’m proud to say they have also just brought out the new edition of The Poem’s Heartbeat, as well as the paperback edition of Contradictions, both findable on Amazon and B&N.
For Jewish friends, Lshanah tovah, happy 5769!
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Hasta la vista
I’m in Alicante Aiport as I write this, and have an hour before check-in time. This will have been the only chance to say anything here during the last week, which was taken up with classes, hikes around town, and meals enjoyed at a leisurely pace. We didn’t have ideal weather in Relleu, in fact, more consecutive days of rain than anyone ever expected so far into the spring. It certainly made everything green, and the last two days gave us warm temperatures and pellucid skies. I think the classes went well; we got some good writing done. Even I stole a few hours to draft a new poem, stimulated, I suppose by the productive atmosphere.
In class we read poems by Elizabeth Bishop and by Mimi Khalvati, in particular, “The Mediterranean of the Mind” (mentioned in an earlier blog), which Mimi wrote a few years back during her stay at Almàssera Vella. It describes the village of Relleu, but it also speaks of Michael Donaghy, who taught a course here just a week before Mimi arrived for hers. They were good friends, colleagues who respected each other’s work. The sad thing is that Donaghy died of a brain hemorrhage the week following his course, and the poem brings in his death as it develops. In fact, it is an “in memoriam” poem dedicated to him.
My encounters with Michael Donaghy were minimal. In the late 80s, he had the galleys of his first book sent to me, requesting a jacket comment. I wasn’t aware of him them, didn’t know that he had served as editor of The Chicago Review before expatriating to London and making his living there as a performer of Irish music. Eventually he became integrated into the London poetry scene, forming close ties with other young poets like Mimi Khalvati, Don Paterson, and Matthew Sweeney. Everyone I’ve spoken to about him says that he was enormously well liked. We only met face to face one time, but I can’t quite recall the circumstances. I believe it was in 1986 at a pub in, I think, Camden Town, where I was then living; or maybe 1987. I don’t remember who introduced us, but I do recall that he said he’d come to live in London and was performing on what he called “the penny whistle” as a way of supporting himself. Then, probably ten years later, after he became well known on the British poetry scene, a friend gave me his telephone number and suggested I call; this was during one of my stays in London in the late 90s. But our schedules didn’t match up, so we didn’t see each other. A few years passed, and suddenly he died. Those are the facts, and it’s hard to feel resolved about them. I keep thinking that with a normal life span, we’d have seen him do even better work. But the books we have stand on their own merits, original and intelligent as they are. However tangential the contact, I feel as though I know him and wish things had turned out otherwise.
I’ll be in London this weekend and then participate in the celebration of American poetry that Anne-Marie Fyfe has scheduled for the Coffee Poetry series on Monday. We’re not reading our poems, but instead poems of an earlier generation—Stevens, Roethke, Bishop, and Merrill. (I’m the Bishop reader.)
In class we read poems by Elizabeth Bishop and by Mimi Khalvati, in particular, “The Mediterranean of the Mind” (mentioned in an earlier blog), which Mimi wrote a few years back during her stay at Almàssera Vella. It describes the village of Relleu, but it also speaks of Michael Donaghy, who taught a course here just a week before Mimi arrived for hers. They were good friends, colleagues who respected each other’s work. The sad thing is that Donaghy died of a brain hemorrhage the week following his course, and the poem brings in his death as it develops. In fact, it is an “in memoriam” poem dedicated to him.
My encounters with Michael Donaghy were minimal. In the late 80s, he had the galleys of his first book sent to me, requesting a jacket comment. I wasn’t aware of him them, didn’t know that he had served as editor of The Chicago Review before expatriating to London and making his living there as a performer of Irish music. Eventually he became integrated into the London poetry scene, forming close ties with other young poets like Mimi Khalvati, Don Paterson, and Matthew Sweeney. Everyone I’ve spoken to about him says that he was enormously well liked. We only met face to face one time, but I can’t quite recall the circumstances. I believe it was in 1986 at a pub in, I think, Camden Town, where I was then living; or maybe 1987. I don’t remember who introduced us, but I do recall that he said he’d come to live in London and was performing on what he called “the penny whistle” as a way of supporting himself. Then, probably ten years later, after he became well known on the British poetry scene, a friend gave me his telephone number and suggested I call; this was during one of my stays in London in the late 90s. But our schedules didn’t match up, so we didn’t see each other. A few years passed, and suddenly he died. Those are the facts, and it’s hard to feel resolved about them. I keep thinking that with a normal life span, we’d have seen him do even better work. But the books we have stand on their own merits, original and intelligent as they are. However tangential the contact, I feel as though I know him and wish things had turned out otherwise.
I’ll be in London this weekend and then participate in the celebration of American poetry that Anne-Marie Fyfe has scheduled for the Coffee Poetry series on Monday. We’re not reading our poems, but instead poems of an earlier generation—Stevens, Roethke, Bishop, and Merrill. (I’m the Bishop reader.)
Friday, May 23, 2008
In London
This is being written in London where I’ll stay for a week until time to go to Spain for the course I’m teaching at Almàssera Vella. It’s been about forty years since London first swam into my ken (see the Keats Chapman-Homer sonnet), and there have been a dozen visits since, three of them long term. I broke up my Guggenheim year into two three-month installments here, one in 1986, the second in 1987. Those months fed a novel I began around that time, later published under the title Part of His Story (still in print with Mid-List Press if anyone is interested). Another long-term stay came in 2005-2006. Though it wasn’t the main motive for coming here (London enthusiast that I am, I don’t really need one), a course I taught then for the Poetry School, which added some variety and company during those months. I also taught a week in Devon for the Arvon Foundation, my partner for the course the poet Mimi Khalvati. Mimi is unmistakably among the top poets writing now in England, though I’m not sure she is well known in the U.S.A. Her recent book The Meanest Flower was a T.S. Eliot Prize nominee, along with Fiona Sampson’s The Book of Common Prayer, but for some reason neither of these books won.
I don’t usually dabble in bean-counting where gender or ethnic categories are concerned, but it does seem to an outsider that women poets in England don’t quite get a fair shake. Most of the poetry editors of magazines are men (exceptions including Fiona, for The Poetry Review, and Martha Kapos for the summer issue of Poetry London, but not one of the big-name publishers has a woman who edits poetry; and few of the small presses for poetry have women editors. How to explain that? There’s certainly no lack of editorial ability here, Fiona being a prime example. Furthermore, I get the distinct impression that the lion’s share of the poetry readership here consists of women. (On the other side, let it be said that Anne-Marie Fyfe presides over the Poetry Society and runs the most visible poetry reading series, the Coffee Poetry evenings at the Troubadour Café. How she does all that, appears at so many literary festivals in Britain and her native Ireland, and still manages to write first-rate poems is a mystery to which only she has the key.) But my point remains: considering how progressive the British literary scene is, why has it lagged behind in finding women poetry editors for the trade book houses? Not that it usually counts for much, but no woman has ever served as Laureate here, either. Apparently Carol Ann Duffy is close to being tapped these days, or closer than she was, now that she has broken off her relationship with Jackie Kay. It seems a woman living in a unconcealed relationship with another woman wouldn’t suit the public, no matter that Duffy is probably (along with Roger McGough and Adrian Mitchell) among the most popular poets now publishing in the U.K.
This leads me to another curious fact. Although same-sex relations between consenting adults are perfectly legal here, and people of the same gender can marry, almost no openly gay poetry is published in Britain. Even Duffy’s lesbian poems are veiled, using the genderless “you” and other kinds of indirect expression typical of queer poetry during the years (what am I saying, centuries) when same-sex relations were taboo, not to mention illegal. Yes, there is James Fenton, but his love poems are all cast in the second person. The only really out-in-the open contemporary gay male poet I know of is Jeremy Reed, who twenty years ago used to be fairly well known but now has been pushed to the sidelines. And I’m sure there are younger gay poets, but they don’t seem to have acquired a wide audience yet. I hope I’m mistaken about this and that someone will correct an outsider’s view. The same goes for Ireland, as far as I know, despite the fact that some of their most famous novelists are gay—Colm Toibin and Jamie O’Neill, to be specific. And then apparently same-sex desire stops at the Scottish border, judging from the apparent absence of gay writing from that part of the island (Wait, though a resident in England now for many years, Duffy was born in Glasgow, so maybe she is the rule-proving exception.) Anyway, I wish someone could explain the weird and unnecessary reticence on the part of writers here insofar as gay experience is concerned. I thought the “No Sex, Please, We’re British” years were over. Even getting Boy George to fess up was apparently like wading through chilled tar.
I’m staying near the Barbican Centre in the City. I’m a fan of the City (as opposed to Westminster) because of its mysterious ancientness, its remnants of centuries of history, all the way back to bits of the original Roman wall built around tiny Lundinium. And yet City’s mostly passed up (excepting the Tower) by tourists, rabidly elbowing each other aside to see the changing of the guards or Big Ben. Finsbury seems to be the currently favored bohemian artist district, an easy walk from here. I just got back from a short expedition to Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, to pay respects to Blake and his wife Sophia, who are buried there, not far from Defoe and Bunyan. By the way, a couple of years ago Tracy Chevalier published a sensitive novel about the poet, or rather, a family that gets to know him. Title: Burning Bright. Recommended. I got acquainted with Tracy the last time I was living in London, when she was being talked about a lot for one of her novels The Girl with the Pearl Earring. There was a natural affinity based on, if nothing else, our respective fascination with Vermeer. Tracy’s an American, married to a U.K. citizen, and now a permanent resident here. Not to mention being a thoroughly likable person and a reader (obviously) of poetry. But then all the novelists I know read poetry, even those who don’t write it—which ought to help destroy the old cliché “Nobody reads poetry except other….”
Yesterday the stroll went in opposite direction, along Carthusian Street as far as the Charterhouse (the French for that would be La Chartreuse, as in the Stendhal novel). This is a tourist-free site because you don’t see much of the edifice from outside; only those attending Evening Prayer are allowed in, and, if you can take that in stride, the hidden courtyards and sanctuary are worth the detour.
From there I walked to the old Smithfield Market, a handsome Victorian limestone and cast-iron structure where, early mornings, meat is sold wholesale. It’s a venerable London fixture, built on the site of Bartholomew Fair (anyone read the Ben Jonson play of that name?), and was, traditionally, one of the roughest districts in London, as you might judge from the play. Walking through the market, you see commemorative plaques from several periods, one noting that William Wallace, the Scottish patriot, was drawn and quartered here early in the 14th century, his only crime having sought Scottish independence. Another plaque summarizes routine and extraordinary events that occurred at the market over the centuries. Those include “wife selling,” popular five hundred years ago. It’s explained that disaffected husbands used to bring their wives to Smithfield and sell their bodies; not for prostitution but as special viands. Unsuspecting wives were jumped, slaughtered, and carved up like veal—which sort of contextualizes Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. True, for us non-meat-eaters, the animals hanging on hooks embody a morality not at all defensible, either, but let that go.
I walked on to St. Bartholomew’s the Great, an older church than Westminster Abbey, similar in construction material (flint, limestone) to Southwark Cathedral; but less often visited. You can see it if you rerun that bit of nonsense Shakespeare in Love, but the movie doesn’t identify the church or attempt to explain what it’s doing in WS’s biography. An interesting fact for Americans is that during a period when the building was secularized and broken up into shops, young Benjamin Franklin worked as a printer’s devil there.
Restored in the 20th century, it was one of John Betjeman’s favorite churches, in fact, he lived in a little flat just opposite on Cloth Fair Street, as a blue marker will tell you if you look for it. Nowadays on the ground floor of his building, there’s a rather stylish pub bearing his name. During the hour of my walk, I saw Londoners engaging in their favorite after-workday occupation: hanging out at pubs, or in good weather spilling outside onto the pavement, pints of bitter in hand. Pub after pub and the same phenomenon. And the snuggeries all have such quaint names, more than half of them metaphorically decipherable as referring obliquely to sex.
I’m struck again by what a leafy-green city London is as compared to other world capitals. Parks everywhere, little squares, gardens, brick walls with elderflower peeping over them. Late spring is a good time to be here, when the leafage is mint-fresh and many shrubs (like elder) are in flower. It all feels very, very familiar now; and Wordsworth’s lines about the “meanest flower that blows” (Intimations Ode) keep coming to mind, with “thoughts too deep for tears” as I look back over my four decades of visiting this city.
I don’t usually dabble in bean-counting where gender or ethnic categories are concerned, but it does seem to an outsider that women poets in England don’t quite get a fair shake. Most of the poetry editors of magazines are men (exceptions including Fiona, for The Poetry Review, and Martha Kapos for the summer issue of Poetry London, but not one of the big-name publishers has a woman who edits poetry; and few of the small presses for poetry have women editors. How to explain that? There’s certainly no lack of editorial ability here, Fiona being a prime example. Furthermore, I get the distinct impression that the lion’s share of the poetry readership here consists of women. (On the other side, let it be said that Anne-Marie Fyfe presides over the Poetry Society and runs the most visible poetry reading series, the Coffee Poetry evenings at the Troubadour Café. How she does all that, appears at so many literary festivals in Britain and her native Ireland, and still manages to write first-rate poems is a mystery to which only she has the key.) But my point remains: considering how progressive the British literary scene is, why has it lagged behind in finding women poetry editors for the trade book houses? Not that it usually counts for much, but no woman has ever served as Laureate here, either. Apparently Carol Ann Duffy is close to being tapped these days, or closer than she was, now that she has broken off her relationship with Jackie Kay. It seems a woman living in a unconcealed relationship with another woman wouldn’t suit the public, no matter that Duffy is probably (along with Roger McGough and Adrian Mitchell) among the most popular poets now publishing in the U.K.
This leads me to another curious fact. Although same-sex relations between consenting adults are perfectly legal here, and people of the same gender can marry, almost no openly gay poetry is published in Britain. Even Duffy’s lesbian poems are veiled, using the genderless “you” and other kinds of indirect expression typical of queer poetry during the years (what am I saying, centuries) when same-sex relations were taboo, not to mention illegal. Yes, there is James Fenton, but his love poems are all cast in the second person. The only really out-in-the open contemporary gay male poet I know of is Jeremy Reed, who twenty years ago used to be fairly well known but now has been pushed to the sidelines. And I’m sure there are younger gay poets, but they don’t seem to have acquired a wide audience yet. I hope I’m mistaken about this and that someone will correct an outsider’s view. The same goes for Ireland, as far as I know, despite the fact that some of their most famous novelists are gay—Colm Toibin and Jamie O’Neill, to be specific. And then apparently same-sex desire stops at the Scottish border, judging from the apparent absence of gay writing from that part of the island (Wait, though a resident in England now for many years, Duffy was born in Glasgow, so maybe she is the rule-proving exception.) Anyway, I wish someone could explain the weird and unnecessary reticence on the part of writers here insofar as gay experience is concerned. I thought the “No Sex, Please, We’re British” years were over. Even getting Boy George to fess up was apparently like wading through chilled tar.
I’m staying near the Barbican Centre in the City. I’m a fan of the City (as opposed to Westminster) because of its mysterious ancientness, its remnants of centuries of history, all the way back to bits of the original Roman wall built around tiny Lundinium. And yet City’s mostly passed up (excepting the Tower) by tourists, rabidly elbowing each other aside to see the changing of the guards or Big Ben. Finsbury seems to be the currently favored bohemian artist district, an easy walk from here. I just got back from a short expedition to Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, to pay respects to Blake and his wife Sophia, who are buried there, not far from Defoe and Bunyan. By the way, a couple of years ago Tracy Chevalier published a sensitive novel about the poet, or rather, a family that gets to know him. Title: Burning Bright. Recommended. I got acquainted with Tracy the last time I was living in London, when she was being talked about a lot for one of her novels The Girl with the Pearl Earring. There was a natural affinity based on, if nothing else, our respective fascination with Vermeer. Tracy’s an American, married to a U.K. citizen, and now a permanent resident here. Not to mention being a thoroughly likable person and a reader (obviously) of poetry. But then all the novelists I know read poetry, even those who don’t write it—which ought to help destroy the old cliché “Nobody reads poetry except other….”
Yesterday the stroll went in opposite direction, along Carthusian Street as far as the Charterhouse (the French for that would be La Chartreuse, as in the Stendhal novel). This is a tourist-free site because you don’t see much of the edifice from outside; only those attending Evening Prayer are allowed in, and, if you can take that in stride, the hidden courtyards and sanctuary are worth the detour.
From there I walked to the old Smithfield Market, a handsome Victorian limestone and cast-iron structure where, early mornings, meat is sold wholesale. It’s a venerable London fixture, built on the site of Bartholomew Fair (anyone read the Ben Jonson play of that name?), and was, traditionally, one of the roughest districts in London, as you might judge from the play. Walking through the market, you see commemorative plaques from several periods, one noting that William Wallace, the Scottish patriot, was drawn and quartered here early in the 14th century, his only crime having sought Scottish independence. Another plaque summarizes routine and extraordinary events that occurred at the market over the centuries. Those include “wife selling,” popular five hundred years ago. It’s explained that disaffected husbands used to bring their wives to Smithfield and sell their bodies; not for prostitution but as special viands. Unsuspecting wives were jumped, slaughtered, and carved up like veal—which sort of contextualizes Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. True, for us non-meat-eaters, the animals hanging on hooks embody a morality not at all defensible, either, but let that go.
I walked on to St. Bartholomew’s the Great, an older church than Westminster Abbey, similar in construction material (flint, limestone) to Southwark Cathedral; but less often visited. You can see it if you rerun that bit of nonsense Shakespeare in Love, but the movie doesn’t identify the church or attempt to explain what it’s doing in WS’s biography. An interesting fact for Americans is that during a period when the building was secularized and broken up into shops, young Benjamin Franklin worked as a printer’s devil there.
Restored in the 20th century, it was one of John Betjeman’s favorite churches, in fact, he lived in a little flat just opposite on Cloth Fair Street, as a blue marker will tell you if you look for it. Nowadays on the ground floor of his building, there’s a rather stylish pub bearing his name. During the hour of my walk, I saw Londoners engaging in their favorite after-workday occupation: hanging out at pubs, or in good weather spilling outside onto the pavement, pints of bitter in hand. Pub after pub and the same phenomenon. And the snuggeries all have such quaint names, more than half of them metaphorically decipherable as referring obliquely to sex.
I’m struck again by what a leafy-green city London is as compared to other world capitals. Parks everywhere, little squares, gardens, brick walls with elderflower peeping over them. Late spring is a good time to be here, when the leafage is mint-fresh and many shrubs (like elder) are in flower. It all feels very, very familiar now; and Wordsworth’s lines about the “meanest flower that blows” (Intimations Ode) keep coming to mind, with “thoughts too deep for tears” as I look back over my four decades of visiting this city.
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