Ian Pindar

I Hear America Singing

2012-02-14T09:48:00.000Z

Great speech from President Obama, quoting Emily Dickinson ("I dwell in possibility") and Walt Whitman. Intelligent and heartfelt, with due recognition of the role of the Arts and Humanities in forging a nation's soul. (Compare & contrast with the UK.)

Al Pacino is there, as is Rita Dove (don't mention Helen Vendler), and many others.

Mr Ashbery is called around 15:28. Hoorah!

Ashbery meets Obama

2012-02-12T19:51:00.000Z

John Ashbery will collect his National Humanities Medal from President Obama at around 1.45 p.m. eastern time tomorrow (Monday 13 February).

That's about 6.45 p.m. in England, I think. There should be a live stream here, for fans of elected heads of state presenting modern poets with prizes.

The White House press release says: "he has changed how we read poetry and has influenced generations of poets".

Perloff on Niedecker

2012-02-06T14:46:00.000Z

A great piece in the Times Literary Supplement by the great Marjorie Perloff on the poet Lorine Niedecker (1903-70).

Everyone interested in poetry should read Niedecker's The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems (I have an old second-hand edition).

In her poem Paean to Place ('I am the solitary plover') Niedecker quotes some lines from Robert Duncan's wonderful essay 'Towards an Open Universe':

We live by the urgent wave
of the verse

In fact, Duncan actually wrote:

In the very beginnings of life, in the source of ourcadences, with the first pulse of the blood in the egg then, the changes ofnight and day must have been there. So that in the configuration of the living,hidden in the exchanging orders of the chromosome sequences from which we haveour nature, the first nature, child of deep waters and of night and day,sleeping and waking, remains.

We are, all the many expressions of living matter,grandchildren of Gaia, Earth and Uranus, the Heavens. Late born, for the moonand ocean came before. The sea was our first mother and sun our father, so oursciences picture the chemistry of the living as beginning in the alembic of theprimal sea quickened by rays of the sun and even, beyond, by radiations of thecosmos at large.

Tide-flow under the sun and moon of the sea, systole anddiastole of the heart, these rhythms lie deep in our experience and when we letthem take over our speech there is a monotonous rapture of persistent regularstresses and waves of lines breaking rhyme after rhyme. There have been poetsfor whom this rise and fall, the mothering swell and ebb, was all. Amoebic intelligences,dwelling in the memorial of tidal voice, they arouse in our awake minds aspell, so that we let our awareness go in the urgent wave of the verse.

A Nazi king

2012-02-05T11:02:00.000Z

WTF? Who in their right mind dresses as a Nazi?

Madonna's W.E. appears to rehash the idea that Edward VIII gave up the throne in 1936 for the woman he loved. But this is nonsense, as Anindya Bhattacharyya points out in the Socialist Worker:

The British establishment did not object to Edward and Wallis’s romantic entanglement. They objected to the consequences of their fascist political sympathies.

For more on which, Bhattacharyya directs us to Paul Foot's 1988 review in the London Review of Books. Foot observes that:

In all the innumerable versions of the ‘Greatest Love Story of the Century’ it is assumed that the British Establishment, led by Stanley Baldwin and the Archbishop of Canterbury, could not stomach the idea of a monarch marrying a twice-divorced woman. The objections, it is said, were moral and religious. The truth is, however, that throughout the centuries archbishops and prime ministers have miraculously overcome their moral objections to royal idiosyncrasies in the bedchamber. The real objection to the liaison between the King and Mrs Simpson was that both were Nazi sympathisers.

For Prince Philip's Nazi connections see New British Empire.

The artist vandalising advertising with poetry

2012-02-04T13:36:00.000Z

Nice piece in the Independent on Robert Montgomery, who covers over advertisements with his poetry -- a great improvement. View gallery here.

Stop Subsidising the House of Commons Restaurants and Bars

2012-02-02T15:36:00.002Z

If, like me, you find it rather disgusting that food and drink in the bars and restaurants of Westminster are subsidized by the taxpayer, when everyone else is struggling to survive, you might like to sign this e-petition and forward the link to others.

The Taxpayers' subsidy of the House of Commons Restaurants should be terminated and all customers should personally pay the full market value of the food and drink consumed

Sadly, it has to reach 100,000 signatures before MPs willpay any attention.

Happy Birthday James Joyce

2012-02-02T12:08:00.000Z

business, reading newspaper, smoking cigar, arranging tumblers on table, eating meals, pleasure, etcetera, etcetera, pleasure, eating meals, arranging tumblers on table, smoking cigar, reading newspaper, business; minerals, wash and brush up, local views, juju toffee, comic and birthday cards; those were the days and he was their hero
(Finnegans Wake)

The ‘Preposterous Charade’ of the Honours System

2012-01-26T12:38:00.002Z

Praisebe to these honourable men and women who turned down an ‘honour’, among them JG Ballard, who rejected a CBE because he was opposed to the ‘preposterouscharade’ of the honours system.

Full list here, courtesy of the BBC.

And here are some of the less honourable, investigated by Private Eye.

Support a Bulletproof Arms Trade Treaty

2012-01-26T11:10:00.000Z

Take action

The Mother Courage of Rock by Luc Sante

2012-01-24T20:00:00.000Z

Luc Sante's fine piece on Patti Smith in the New York Review of Books is well worth reading.

By then the poets I liked best and tried to emulate — Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett — spoke to the eye and the refined internal ear. Apart from Allen Ginsberg and Helen Adam it was hard to think of contemporary poets who honored poetry’s ancient connection to song.

Joyce's new look

2012-01-21T16:27:00.000Z

My book on James Joyce has a new livery -- very pleasing to see it in this more colourful design. Order it now if you feel so inclined.

Meanwhile, on the world stage:

It’s a heady thought — if a bit preposterous — that a few lines of verse might undermine a government. But poetry, it is now clear, can be tantamount to treason in China, just as it was in Czechoslovakia (Václav Havel), the Soviet Union (Joseph Brodsky and many others) and other authoritarian regimes of yesteryear.

Read more about Chinese poets in trouble in the International Herald Tribune.

Hedge fund alchemy

2012-01-20T08:50:00.000Z

Intriguing piece by Boyd Tonkin in the Independent today, suggesting that the poets who withdrew from the T. S. Eliot Prize might have misjudged the Aurum Funds group.

'[Aurum] also runs something called the Synchronicity Foundation, linked to a dedicated investment fund that finances its goals. And, ironically enough, Synchronicity turns out to be driven by just those high-minded, holistic and slightly mystical ecological ideals that you find so eloquently voiced in poems by Alice Oswald or John Kinsella.'

John Burnside

2012-01-18T13:37:00.000Z

As much as it has ever done, poetry renews and deepens the gift that most surely makes us human: the imagination. And that is as essential to public as it is to private life, because the more imaginative we are, the more compassionate we become – and that, surely, is the highest virtue of all.
A fine piece by John Burnside in the Telegraph, musing on his win and poetry in general.

No alarms and no surprises

2012-01-17T09:37:00.000Z

No great surprise at the T. S. Eliot Prize, as John Burnside won, although it is something of a coup for the New Statesman.

Meanwhile, over the pond, the University of Pennsylvania has launched an online radio station that plays nothing but poetry. Try it here. Marvellous. Or, as the Americans like to say, marvelous.

Constellations preview

2012-01-07T12:45:00.005Z

The Guardian seem to have omitted to mention the appearance of my second collection in their round-up of publishing highlights of 2012. Still, you can get a sneak preview of the cover of Constellations in the new Carcanet catalogue, which is full of many other good things, too, as you'd expect.

Through a Glass Darkly

2012-01-04T19:56:00.000Z

After Harvard, you spent two years at the University ofCambridge. What are the differences between American and British poets, or therelationship between them?

I remember feeling how oddly unrelated British and American poets were in the'70s. At the "high" end, there's more interchange — we read SeamusHeaney; some people here read Geoffrey Hill. You read Robert Lowell, or evenJohn Ashbery in certain quarters. But in the middle it sometimes feels thatthere’s almost no connection. I remember going to hear poets like Lee Harwoodread, sort of British “New York School” poets, in London when I was a student.They were very much on the outer edge of experimentalism in Britain. Asstudents, of course, we would read David Jones and people who had historicalrelevance, and Philip Larkin was still alive then, who was very great. Iremember being totally overwhelmed reading "The Whitsun Weddings" ona train in England. But a lot of the "everyday" poets don’t reallyspeak to each other. It’s almost as if they are reading each other through aglass darkly. I think that’s particularly true of the Britons reading Americanpoets.

Jonathan Galassi, President of Farrar, Straus and Giroux,and one-time poetry editor of the Paris Review, interviewed in The Economist.

Emporium review in Poetry Review

2011-12-27T09:39:00.001Z

“There is real gold in this volume. Although many ofPindar’s poems are informal, it includes a fine satirical sestina, ‘LesVacances de Monsieur P.’, an off-beat sonnet sequence, ‘The Prophecies’, and animpressive pantoum, ‘Death of a Senator’. His interests are broad, hisresponses to them musically gratifying and emotionally and intellectually deep.Pindar’s inspiration comes from the fragility of life, his atheistic convictionthat death is just that . . . Whether or not you share his views on God, theMonarchy or women, I expect you will be moved by the eloquence in much ofEmporium. I was about to say that Ian Pindar is a promising poet; but no, he isalready a significant one.”

Leah Fritz in Poetry Review (Vol. 101:4 Winter 2011)

Music Review

2011-12-21T10:56:00.002Z

Many music lists seem to have decided that PJHarvey’s latest is the finest album of the year. I’ve tried to like it, I really have, but in the end it strikes me as abit, well, sappy. So as an antidote to all that here’s my choice . . .

Album of the Year: Fucked Up, David Comes to Life
So this is where punkwent. Some might say up its own fundament, but here it is: a punk conceptalbum. It’s a story of boy (David Elliade) meets girl (Veronica Boisson), girlgets blown to smithereens, boy wrestles with inner demons and comes through itall somehow (although even the band seem unsure quite what happens). “Queen ofHearts”, the song in which David meets Veronica, is a lovely angry romp. Here’s the video – and there’s also anotherversion sung by school children:

And here are the lyrics of “Queen of Hearts”,so you can sing along.

Sun rises above the factory but the rays don’t make it tothe street. Through the gates come the employees, beaten down and draggingtheir feet. A group of lefties hand out pamphlets to the workers coming in. Fortwo people on the pavement life will never be the same again. When she placedit in his hand, people must have seen the sparks. Neither understands what justhappened to their hearts. “Another morning in this place has ripped me out ofmy dream.” Realizing life’s a waste as the whistle lets off steam. One thingabout it all is nothing’s ever going to change. It’s like our progress has juststalled and everyday is the same. “She placed it in my hand.” Co-workers musthave seen the sparks. “I couldn’t understand what just happened to my heart.” “Hello,my name is David, your name is Veronica, let’s be together, let’s fall in love.Hello, my name is David, your name is Veronica - let’s be together, until thestars go out.” All we need is for something to give, the dam bursts open, wesuddenly live. “The boot off my throat, life is returning, the boot off mythroat, let’s all emote.” “Dawn breaks across this town and a new dawn breaksfor me. I couldn’t take the pains of the underclass, trying to smile throughgritted teeth. We must now all join up and throw off the shackles of shame. Unitedwe can’t be defeated, they shall hear us proclaim. I placed it in his hand.Comrades must have seen the sparks. I couldn’t understand what happened to myheart. Hello, your name is David, I am Veronica, let’s be together, until thewater swallows us. Hello, you must be David, I am Veronica - let’s be together,until we’re all finally crushed.” All we need is for something to give, the dambursts open, we suddenly live. The boot off my throat, life is returning, theboot off my throat, let’s all emote.”

The CD comes with all the lyrics, and perhaps unusuallyfor a punk band Fucked Up’s lyrics include unexpected rhymes such as “facade”and “laud” (“Running on Nothing”). There’s also a song called “The Other Shoe”,which includes the refrain de nos jours: “We’re dying on the inside.” There’s a short film about the making of the album here. Wonderful stuff – and Pink Eyesreally gives it his all (his voice reminiscent of the lead singer ofKilldozer).

Single of the Year: The Weeknd, “House of Balloons/Glass Table”
Sadly, I’m old enough to remember Siouxsie and theBanshees’ “Happy House”, so it was nice to hear it sampled here, but sloweddown to make it appear even more sinister/deluded. It seemed to sum up the moodof this pretty wretched year, really. We’re all in it together in the happyhouse. The segue into “Glass Table” (why “bring out the glass table”? Cananyone explain? Cocaine?) is utterly inspired. Not since Tortoise’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die have I enjoyed such a crashing change of gear. Inexplicably, youcan download “House of Balloons/Glass Table” for free – quite legally – here,along with the rest of the album, also called House of Balloons, the songs on which,being “chillwave-tinged R&B” (it says here), can at times be a little sappyfor my taste, albeit satisfyingly potty-mouthed.

But it’s not all “popular” music. Here’s some of the other stuffI’ve been listening to:

Debussy, Complete Works for Piano, Vol.1 (Jean-YvesThibaudet)

Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande (Suisse Romande Orchestra)

Elliot Carter, Piano Concerto; Concerto for Orchestra;etc. (Michael Gielen, uRsula Oppens, SWF Symphony Orchestra)

Gamelan Music of Bali

John Cage, Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano(John Tilbury)

Martha Argerich: Debut Recital

Natalie Dessay, Mozart Heroines

Rang Puhar Carnatic Group, Music of Southern India

Scarlatti, Keyboard Sonatas (Mikhail Pletnev)

Schubert, Octet (Wiener Oktett)

Stravinsky, Works of Igor Stravinsky (box set)

Sviatoslav Richter, The Sofia Recital 1958

Toumani Diabate, King of the Kora

And that’s quite enough of that.

Happy Holidays, etc.

Thought for the Day

2011-12-18T10:48:00.003Z

The major facts are simply not faced. It is admitted, for instance, that people sometimes lose their jobs; but then the dark clouds roll away and they get better jobs instead. No mention of unemployment as something permanent and inevitable, no mention of the dole, no mention of trade unionism. No suggestion anywhere that there can be anything wrong with the system as a system; there are only individual misfortunes, which are generally due to somebody’s wickedness and can in any case be put right in the last chapter. Always the dark clouds roll away, the kind employer raises Alfred’s wages, and there are jobs for everybody except the drunks.

George Orwell, 'Boys' Weeklies' (1940)

Epic capitalist onanism

2011-12-13T10:28:00.000Z

'Even in the best of times, the finance sector hasn't paid anything like as much to the state as the state has had to pay for them since the great crash. According to the IMF, British taxpayers have shelled out £289bn in "direct upfront financing" to prop up the banks since 2008. Add in the various government loans and underwriting, and taxpayers are on the hook for £1.19tn. Seen that way the City looks less like a goose that lays golden eggs, and more like an unruly pigeon that leaves one hell of a mess for others to clear up.'

Great piece by Aditya Chakrabortty in today's Guardian. I'm not sure 'bankocracy' will catch on, though.

Should the arts be more selective about sponsors?

2011-12-11T09:40:00.001Z

I love, by contrast, the way that Thomas Bernhard unfailingly bit off every hand that fed him: denouncing all the prizes that came his way but always accepting them because, in his own words, "I'm greedy for money, I have no character, I'm a bastard too." What integrity!

Geoff Dyer in the Observer

Alice Oswald stands out

2011-12-06T11:12:00.001Z

"I’m uncomfortable about the fact that Aurum Funds, an investment company which exclusively manages funds of hedge funds, is sponsoring the administration of the Eliot Prize; I think poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions and for that reason I’m withdrawing from the Eliot shortlist."

Gosh. Alice Oswald withdraws from T S Eliot Prize over hedge fund sponsor.

Update: Now John Kinsella has withdrawn. I feel sorry for the Poetry Book Society (even if it is a little conservative and stuffy in its poetic tastes), which is a victim, indirectly, of hedge fund managers and other banksters... And TS Eliot was indeed a banker, although not, as far as we know, a bankster. Banking was a more respectable and responsible business in his day, as Ian Hislop recently explained in When Bankers Were Good.

Ashbery and Time

2011-11-28T09:08:00.001Z

TIME: What do you think it'sgoing to be like to meet God?

ASHBERY: Episcopals are famed fortheir martinis, so I imagine he will hand me one when I arrive.

Time interviews John Ashbery

Thought for the Day

2011-11-27T13:36:00.001Z

Carl Spitzweg: The Poor Poet

'Much, though not all, of the vital poetry around is published by smaller presses far from the centre, while the commercial publishers too often tie themselves to hyped fads and mainstream fashions. What else should we expect? Fine poets are individualistic, living on the fringes, metaphorical and geographical, of the literary scene.'

Paul Hyland, Getting into Poetry (Bloodaxe)

David Cameron’s Jizz Shack

2011-11-25T11:45:00.001Z

I’ve become quite addicted to The Keiser Report on RussiaToday (available on Freeview). Here is Max Keiser beginning with a bizarre debt-as-pepper-spray trope,before turning his attention to the UK and laying into the Prime Minister’s housingplans. It’s a welcome antidote to the colourless news reporting we get in theUK.

Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil

2011-11-25T09:40:00.001Z

WhenI was an editor at the Harvill Press I put out feelers regarding a shortbiography of Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, the woman who lived in Samuel Beckett’sshadow. The answer came back that there was ‘nothing there’, but in my view sheremains a rather fascinating figure.

Tim Parks’s review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1941-56 in the London Review of Books only confirms this. Beckett changed over the war years,says Parks, but the war was not the only factor:

“. .. most of all there was Suzanne. Already acquainted with Beckett, she had drawnclose to him when he was at his most vulnerable, hospitalised in 1938 for stabwounds received in a mugging. Six years older than Beckett, Suzanne would allowhim to depend on her economically, while letting him retain an independence ofaction few partners would have granted. She would also provide a buffer betweenBeckett and the literary world, taking his manuscripts to publishers, writingto them for him and later going to productions of his plays to check that allwas being done as he wished. It wasn’t quite the scenario of First Love – theman barricaded in his bedroom while the beloved provides – but Beckett hadfound a remarkable facilitator.

Yetwe hear almost nothing about her from his correspondence: Suzanne sends hergreetings, Beckett tells us at the close of many letters; she asks to beremembered; she thanks someone for chocolates. In one letter he mentions her‘heroically spreading out her dressmaking’ and in another that she has painteda wheelbarrow red. But nothing about their relationship or her opinions. Whatletters Beckett wrote to her and she to him have not survived; one assumes thiswas deliberate. Towards the end of a letter to Duthuit, written from Dublin inAugust 1948, Beckett comments: ‘Suzanne writes, letters that are more and moredismal. At bottom, she is inconsolable at living.’”

Youcan read the full review here.

Emporium reviews

2011-11-18T09:40:00.001Z

My poem 'What is the Matter?' (from Emporium) has been chosen by the judges of this year's Forward Prize to be included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2012, 'a collection of the best poems of the year'.

I've also become aware of two new reviews of Emporium.

Rob A Mackenzie in Magma 51 calls it 'dark, witty and entertaining . . . "Mrs Beltinska in the Bath", "Armageddon", "Time Remaining" and several others are as ingenious as anything I've read for a while, and few collections have been half as entertaining.'

And then, over in Poetry London (Autumn 2011 No.70), Claire Crowther says: 'Pindar uses varied forms, a sestina, collage ("Chain Letter" is a tour de force of other poets' lines from William Langland to Maxine Chernoff), as well as open form . . . Pindar is urbane, funny and profound. A brilliant first collection.'

Disaffected, numb, alienating

2011-11-15T14:14:00.001Z

I've only just stumbled across this: “His work is disaffected,numb, alienating.” Judy Kendall in PN Review in 2003, describing my contributionto New Poetries III.

I shall wear that as a badge of honour, I think.

“Disaffected,numb, alienating.” Wow.

One does one’s best.

A Whiff of Rot in the West

2011-11-09T15:55:00.001Z

'Poetry is a form of dissent', says Simon Armitage, CBE.

A Dangerous Mixture

2011-11-08T16:17:00.000Z

Larry Elliott on the Guardian's Economics Blog:

". . . the latest phase of Europe's sovereign debt crisis has exposed the quite flagrant contempt for voters, the people who are going to bear the full weight of the austerity programmes being cooked up by the political elites. Here's how things work. The real decisions in Europe are now taken by the Frankfurt Group, an unelected cabal [. . .] What matters to this group is what the financial markets think not what voters might want. [. . .] This would be deeply troubling even if it could be shown that the Frankfurt Group's economic remedies were working, which they are not. Instead, the insistence on ever more austerity is pushing Europe's weaker countries into an economic death spiral while their voters are being bypassed. That is a dangerous mixture."

more

Corporatocracy vs The Rest of Us

2011-11-06T12:35:00.000Z

Naomi Wolf in the Observer:

'The conflict is no longer between right and left, but between the "one per cent" – a corporatocracy that, without transparency or accountability, is claiming the lion's share of the planet's resources and capital, while disregarding democratic processes – and, well, the rest of us.

This single global family, transcending national boundaries, just wants a peaceful life, a sustainable future, economic justice and basic democracy. On the other side, the global corporatocracy, also transcending national boundaries, has purchased governments and legislative processes, developed its own military, mercenary or quasi-military enforcers, engaged in systemic economic fraud and plundered treasuries and ecosystems.'

More here.

Push Open the Window

2011-11-04T15:21:00.000Z

"Regrettably, most people have little or no appreciation of the best of today's Chinese poets and their work. Much of the poetry collected in this volume will, at the very least, reveal to the readers of poetry in two countries…the true features of China's fine contemporary verse." Qingping Wang, editor

"Thought is making a fresh start."

Xi Chuan

Death of The Poet

2011-11-02T13:59:00.001Z

The young Occupy OKC protester who was found dead in his tent on Monday was known as "The Poet".

"Dry my tears in the wind
You say you feel my pain
But you don’t even know what pain is."

RIP.

English riots & Tintin

2011-11-01T20:00:00.000Z

Yes I am still alive.

Excellent documentary about the English riots here. Highly recommended.

You can also read my review of Tintin: Hergé and His Creation by Harry Thompson here.

The Ambassador from Venus

2011-09-28T20:47:00.000+01:00

Looking forward to this . . .

Wave Composition #2

2011-09-23T10:25:00.001+01:00

The second issue of Wave Composition is upon us, full of interesting things, not least two poems by Peter Gizzi, plus an interview with the industrious Ron Silliman, who has this to say about Louis Zukofsky:

"One of the things that’s quite clear in Zukofsky’s work is that while it starts out following the Poundian model of having an all-over surface characteristic—not unlike what you find in Duncan’s Passages or Olson’s Maximus Poems—so that if you read the first poem you can intuit what every other poem in the sequence might look like; not necessarily would, but might. The parameters are clear. Zukofsky’s very much the same way through “A” -6, and then from “A” -7 onward there are radically different changes. He really attacks the part-whole relationship of the long-poem in a very different fashion. And that to me has always seemed like the secret, that each work really in some basic way needs to be different from every other."

Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book

2011-09-21T14:33:00.000+01:00

I've been meaning to post my review of this book for a while -- it appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (29 July).

RobertDuncan

THEH.D. BOOK

Editedand introduced by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman

696pp.University of California Press. $49.95. 9780520260757

Reviewing H.D.’s Tribute to the Angels in 1945 Randall Jarrell declared that “Imagismwas a reductio ad absurdum upon which it is hard to base a late style”. H.D.’snew poem was “one for those who enjoy any poem by H.D., or forthose collectors who enjoy any poem that includes the Virgin, Raphael, Azrael,Uriel, John on [sic] Patmos, Hermes Trismegistus, and the Bona Dea.” Jarrell’stone is an indication of the depths to which H.D.’s reputation hadfallen by the 1940s. Once celebrated as the quintessential Imagist poet, HildaDoolittle (who was persuaded by Ezra Pound to sign herself “H.D.”) had turnedin her later, post-Imagist work to a freer, more flexible style, drawing onarchetypal figures, myths and legends. The critics hated it. As Michael Boughnand Victor Coleman, the editors of The H.D. Book, put it: “She became lost,hidden to the official world of poetry, her work out of print, her memory keptalive by a few dedicated readers.”

Oneof these was the poet Robert Duncan. At school he had experienced a momentof “self-revelation or life-revelation in the pursuit of Poetry”, when histeacher read to the class H.D.’s early Imagist poem “Heat”, but it was notuntil he encountered The Walls Do Not Fall (1944) that Duncan elevated herto his pantheon of master poets, alongside Pound and William Carlos Williams.That volume was followed by Tribute to the Angels (1945) and TheFlowering of the Rod (1946), published together as Trilogy. Duncan’sresponse to what he calls The War Trilogy was as different from Jarrell’s ascould be imagined: “In smoky rooms in Berkeley, in painters’ studios in SanFrancisco, I read these works aloud; dreamed about them; took my life in them;studied them as my anatomy of what Poetry must be.”

Duncan’sdecision to start work on The H.D. Book – “a book ‘On H.D.’ or ‘For H.D.’, atribute and a study” – can only be understood in the context of this widespread“critical distaste for H.D.’s work”. “I must make up for the criticaldisregard,” he writes. “To take up arms in her honor? . . . to fight for hercause that I saw as my own.” The H.D. Book is written against “theNew Criticism, from the generation of Ransom or Yvor Winters to the generationof Jarrell or James Dickey”. (After reading Duncan’s pioneeringessay “The Homosexual in Society” a shocked John Crowe Ransom had withdrawnDuncan’s poem “An African Elegy” from publication in The Kenyon Review.)According to Duncan,the NewCriticism is aconspiracy of protestant schoolmen to “exorcise” the magic of poetry.

Inthe literary establishment Eliot had won the day – he had, indeed, designedthat literary establishment in his essays; and H.D., along with Lawrence andeven Pound . . . belonged with those who had departed from what reasonable menconsider of concern and had lusted after strange gods . . . The concept of arevealed poetry was not in tune with the mode of the great literary reviews ofthe forties. The new critics were partisans of what they called the rationalimagination . . . ‘Inspiration’, ‘spell’, ‘rapture’ – the constant terms of TheWar Trilogy – are not accepted virtues in the classroom, where Dream or Visionare disruptive of a student’s attentions . . . The War Trilogy was not written,any more than Paterson or The Pisan Cantos were, for classrooms, anthologies,or the new reviews.

Althoughelsewhere he acknowledges T. S. Eliot as one of his “old masters”, Duncanlargely disparages him in The H.D. Book. The Waste Land he describes asa “period charade”, while Williams’s Spring and All is “the spring of a new poetics”.Williams declared The Waste Land “the great catastrophe to our letters”,and Eliot ensured, Duncan says, that “Williams was never taken up in England”.

Duncancorresponded with H.D. from 1959, when he started The H.D. Book, to herdeath in 1961, but what began as a brief homage to the poet grew into a projectof unmanageable proportions, and was abandoned in 1964. Segments of The H.D.Book were published, but this is its first appearance in book form. As Boughnand Coleman observe, “for some forty years, the only access to the text wasphotocopied assemblages of the various magazine publications, treasured – andsometimes passed from hand to hand – by Duncan’s loyal readers”.

TheH.D. Book is more and less than an explanation of H.D.s work. It is about thegrowth of a poet’s mind: “I am searching out, a poetics . . . my initiation ofself as poet in the ground of the poet H.D. . . . how I had found my life inpoetry through the agency of certain women”. It is also a history of Modernismand of the New American Poetry:

“TheWar Trilogy, The Pisan Cantos and Paterson were battlegrounds in ourown struggle towards the realization of a poetry that was to appear in theearly fifties. ‘Aroused’, ‘excited’, ‘inspired’, ‘fired’, we found ourselvescontending for these masterpieces against those for whom our own work was neverto have a place.”

Duncantouches on his debt to Charles Olson and on open-form poetry or “composition byfield”: “to work not from preconceived form but toward a form yet to becreated”; the idea being that a poem should retain what Pound called “thedefects inherent in a record of struggle”. TheH.D. Book is also a reassertion of Pound’s occultism, which, Duncan argues,never went away, and haunts the Lear-like ruminations of the Pisan Cantos.Pound might affect “the ‘spiel’ of the American businessman”, but he cannothide “the shamanistic poet he is at heart”. Duncan never forgets Pound’sPre-Raphaelite roots stretching back to Dante, and the influence of W. B. Yeats’s“daemonic experiment”. Yeats’s occultism is easily mocked, while the poetry itproduced is revered. H.D. and Duncan have not been so fortunate. Yeats wassilly like us, and silly like Duncan, who points out in The H.D. Book that“silly” derives from “seely”, meaning “spiritually blessed”. “H.D. is silly inthe head,” Randall Jarrell announced after reading The Walls Do Not Fall. Thatvolume was written in London during the Blitz, and Duncan shows how the secondworld war brought forth the best work of his poet-heroes, with old age as itscrucible:

Wasit that the war – the bombardment for H.D., the imprisonment and exposure tothe elements for Ezra Pound, the divorce in the speech for Williams – touched aspring of passionate feeling in the poet that was not the war but was his age,his ripeness in life?

Theautobiographical sections of The H.D. Book cast light on Duncan’s uniqueposition in modern poetry – and on why he might regard becoming a poet as akinto entering a cult. His mother died giving birth to him, and his adoptiveparents belonged to the Hermetic Brotherhood of California. “In my childhood,”he recalls, “there were still mediums who talked in Indian voices among thoseadults meeting in the other room.” It was, by anyone’s standards, a peculiar upbringing.Having consulted astrological charts, his parents informed the young Duncanthat he had lived on Atlantis in a previous incarnation, and recorded here is hischildhood “Atlantean” dream, which some commentators regard as central to hiswork. Duncan could talk without irony about magic and angels, and in The H.D.Book he observes how the world of faery in its otherness resembles theotherness of being a “fairy”, his sexuality connecting with H.D.’s in “a cultof mediumship, poetry and homosexuality”. Duncan’s occultism was sincere andserious, but autonomous. He borrowed only what he needed for his own purposes. Toquote H.D. in The Walls Do Not Fall, his was a “peculiar ego-centric /personal approach / to the eternal realities”.

Whilewriting The H.D. Book Duncan produced some of his best poetry, from TheOpening of the Field (1960) to Roots and Branches (1964) and Bendingthe Bow (1968). His decision in 1968 not to publish anything for fifteenyears has been seen by some as disastrous for his career and reputation. TheH.D. Book is the first phase of a larger commitment by the University ofCalifornia Press to get Duncan back into the bookshops. TheCollected Early Poems and Plays will follow, together with the Collected Later Poems and Plays,the Collected Essays and Other Writings, a new Selected Poems and aSelected Letters.

Robert Duncan’sinsistence on the interconnectedness of all things seems well suited to anage of ecological crisis, as is his recurrent fear of some impending apocalypsewith its origin in that early Atlantis dream. The unique mood of Duncan’sverse, the precise music that keeps us engaged in the midst of obscurity, theintimate prophecy, deserve to be celebrated.

David Tebbutt

2011-09-13T19:49:00.000+01:00

David at Harvill

Shocked and saddened at the murder of David Tebbutt. I worked with him at The Harvill Press and he was a rather shy, softly spoken, gentle chap with a self-deprecating sense of humour. He was, in short, a thoroughly nice bloke. My thoughts go out to his family as we await news of his wife Judith.

Aldeburgh

2011-09-09T10:55:00.000+01:00

Good to see such a wide range of publishers on the shortlist for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2011 and my congratulations to the poets shortlisted.

Naturally, I would like to have seen Emporium on the shortlist, but I cling to T. S. Eliot’s observation (in ‘The Social Function of Poetry’) that ‘If a poet gets a large audience very quickly, that is a rather suspicious circumstance: for it leads us to fear that he is not really doing anything new.’

Free Verse: The Poetry Book Fair

2011-08-21T20:20:00.000+01:00

Saturday, 24 September 2011

Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QE

Do come along to the Poetry Book Fair – it’s free if you are.

More than 20 poetry presses will be represented there, including Carcanet.

I’ll be reading from Emporium around 2.30 p.m.

Emporium review

2011-08-17T19:26:00.001+01:00

There's a review of Emporium in the Boston Review:

Emporium
Ian Pindar
Carcanet, $19.95 (paper)

Emporium, the darkly genial debut collection from London native Ian Pindar, exhibits a variety befitting its title and its author’s range as a critic, editor, and translator. Luring the reader in with deceptive informality, these poems delight in surprises, not always happy: “Youth and beauty have left me / a full packet of cigarettes / and this balcony.” Though some poems feel limited by the effervescence of jokes—to be cracked only so many times before losing their fizz—others, such as the grisly “Advice for Travellers” or the tale of hapless Big Bumperton, sustain rereading with their tremulous unease. Subtle sound patterning, including unobtrusive rhyme, adds a vocal dimension, as does astute parody of worn-out speech: “I don’t recall the last time / we met. I think it was in Berlin.” In many poems, Pindar the ironist and satirist becomes a gadfly, sometimes displacing exhortation into dramatic utterances (for instance, ventriloquizing ancient Indian materialist philosophy). At other times, apparently speaking in his own voice, Pindar displays keen timing in both the comedic and historical senses: “every royal wedding is a funeral / for democracy.” If these poems tend to burst like bubbles, they delight, before doing so, with their livid iridescence. Pindar’s inventiveness and sense of linguistic and literary history make this an enjoyable collection, holding promise for the future.
Paul Franz

Emporium review

2011-08-13T14:03:00.001+01:00

There's a review of Emporium in the Guardian today:

Emporium, by Ian Pindar (Carcanet, £9.95)

Here's a poetry that's light, clear, at times almost throwaway, full of political scope and menace. The two sonnets that make up "The Prophecies", for example, relish surprising connections, their images coming in and out of focus – "In June the instincts will go / backwards, dragging the economy. Riches / will turn to rags and winos will be sober, ushering in / an era of Total Responsibility." Pindar's writing gestures towards a public language ("There are no / virtuous people / only good acts") though this is regularly undermined by the comic and sardonic ("Everywhere I go / People are talking about Antonin Artaud"). The poetry thrives on this flexibility of tone, its declarations constantly being shifted, contested and contradicted. See the poem "Parable", where the blithe hope of "you are your own / purpose, / at ease with a life / incomparable" is immediately undercut by "(So much leads to thinking otherwise)". Much of the book is made up of elusive, uneasy parables, such as "Snow" or "Advice for Travellers", that hover between pessimism and hope, and the potential of language to articulate this predicament: "All founded on / nothing, like you / said. Only your words / found it."
Charles Bainbridge

Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book

2011-07-29T09:43:00.001+01:00

My review of Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book is in this week's Times Literary Supplement (print only). Here's a little taster to whet your appetite (the long quote is from The H.D. Book):

According to Duncan, the New Criticism is a conspiracy of protestant schoolmen to “exorcize” the magic of poetry.

In the literary establishment Eliot had won the day – he had, indeed, designed that literary establishment in his essays; and H.D., along with Lawrence and even Pound . . . belonged with those who had departed from what reasonable men consider of concern and had lusted after strange gods . . . The concept of a revealed poetry was not in tune with the mode of the great literary reviews of the forties. The new critics were partisans of what they called the rational imagination . . . ‘Inspiration’, ‘spell’, ‘rapture’ – the constant terms of The War Trilogy – are not accepted virtues in the classroom, where Dream or Vision are disruptive of a student’s attentions . . . The War Trilogy was not written, any more than Paterson or The Pisan Cantos were, for classrooms, anthologies, or the new reviews.

Fallout 2

2011-07-26T15:18:00.000+01:00

The Arts Council has indefinitely suspended public funds to the Poetry Society, according to the Independent

"I feel sad that many small poetry publishers had their funding axed earlier this year. Maybe the Arts Council shouldn't have put all its books in one basket." Joan Bakewell

Fallout

2011-07-23T13:25:00.000+01:00

"The Director has been shockingly treated and in a manner that endangers the future of the Poetry Society."
George Szirtes tells it like it is in his useful summary of the Poetry Society's EGM.

Meanwhile, Jane Holland accentuates the positive on her blog, predicting "A New Dawn for the Poetry Society"; Richard Fair gives his account of the meeting (plus a little poem); and Phil Brown at Silkworms Ink offers his perspective.

Extraordinary

2011-07-22T08:44:00.003+01:00

It's the Poetry Society's EGM today. There's a useful summary of the context over at Baroque in Hackney, while some will be tweeting from the meeting at #posocegm.
Well, as Yeats once observed, 'Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.'

Update: Extraordinary statement from Paul Ranford, resigned Finance Manager of the Poetry Society.

Update update: And there we have it -- truly extraordinary!

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

2011-07-20T16:15:00.000+01:00

The GOOD

How amazing to read that the bestselling Stieg Larsson Millennium Trilogy now accounts for more than 60 per cent of Quercus’ total book sales. More than 60 per cent! That is an astonishing achievement for my old boss, Christopher MacLehose.

The BAD

Very sorry to see that the University of California Press has decided to suspend the publication of its poetry book series New California Poetry. The Culture Crunch continues, and poetry is suffering. Why not buy something from the series?

The UGLY

It seems the young David Cameron had a friend at Buckingham Palace, who helped him on his way to the top. Now it looks as if Anonymous at the Palace has decided to put the boot in. And they tell us the monarchy is above politics. Or at least, they want us to think it is.

Forward and back

2011-07-15T14:08:00.000+01:00

So Emporium didn't get shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize. Ah well. I guess you get used to this sort of thing after a while. My congratulations to the six poets who did get shortlisted: Rachael Boast, Judy Brown, Nancy Gaffield, Ahren Warner, John Whale and Nerys Williams.

Two Little Boys

2011-07-15T09:51:00.000+01:00

This song was in my head when I woke up this morning. I think I must be going mad. It’s saccharine nonsense, of course, but this was the first Number One single of the 1970s, and I remember hearing it on the radio when I was a boy.

‘Two Little Boys’ was actually written in 1902 by an American and refers to the American Civil War. You won’t find that reflected in this video, though, which mixes up the First and Second World Wars, plus a few others.

But if all this maudlin sentimentality proves too much, here’s a different take on the 1970s: Billy Connolly singing ‘Two Little Boys in Blue’, which contains the immortal lyrics:

Now the duty sergeant said, ‘Tuck the prisoners into bed
But before you take their cocoa through
Keep them in their cells and hit them where it tells
But don’t leave them black and blue.
You can kick them in their balls, bounce their heads off of the walls,
Bash them on the kidneys, too.
Beat them on the legs and thighs, but don’t give them black eyes
Or you’ll be a prisoner, too.’

Red Wheelbarrow

2011-07-05T14:17:00.000+01:00

I see that William Carlos Williams's red wheelbarrow is being wheeled out today filled with requests for an EGM from concerned members of the Poetry Society. There has been much debate as to what the Poetry Society should be and this put me in mind of a letter from William Carlos Williams to Marianne Moore on 23 December 1936:

"If only – I keep saying year in year out – it were possible for 'us' to have a place, a location, to which we could resort, singly or otherwise, and to which others could follow us as dogs follow each other – without formality but surely – where we could be known as poets and our work be seen – and we could see the work of others and buy it and have it! Why can't such a thing come about? It seems so brainless and spineless a thing for us to be 'exiles' in too literal and accepted a sense. Being exiles might we not at least, as exiles, consort more easily together? We seem needlessly isolated and we suffer dully, supinely. I am not one for leading a crusade, but I'd lead a little group through the underbrush to a place in the woods, or under a barn if I thought anyone would (or perhaps, could) follow me. Or I'd follow. The basis for an agreement is the thing that is perhaps lacking. And perhaps your catholic breadth of character, more than your mind, even, might be that thing – and the thing we admire. But nobody moves – or moves only singly. Is this hope?"

John Ashbery Goes to the Movies

2011-07-01T20:45:00.000+01:00

You can read Michael Glover’s “John Ashbery Goes to the Movies” over at PN Review.

Some of his [Ashbery's] recent favourites have included David Lynch's Inland Empire and There's Something About Mary, starring Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz. 'I saw that one about four times. All the essential dirty parts were cut for TV.' For all his addiction to home cinema, he made at least one trip out to the movie house recently, to see Sacha Baron Cohen camping it up in Brüno. 'That has to be the filthiest non-porn movie ever made,' he wrote to me later, 'and worth seeing if only for that, though it's quite funny. There was only one other person in the audience.'

Glover also mentions the cartoon Duck Amuck, which inspired Ashbery's poem "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" (Houseboat Days). Ashbery says more about this in his interview with Mark Ford:

FORD: You've said that Daffy Duck's predicament somewhat resembles that of Satan in Paradise Lost.

ASHBERY: Well, yes, in particular in relation to a Daffy Duck cartoon called Duck Amuck, in which you see the artist's pen being dipped in the inkwell and then drawing Daffy, and then sort of tormenting him by adding an extra beak or drawing a monster about to destroy him. All the time the artist is invisible. The same thing, it seems to me, happens to Satan and his fellow fallen angels in the first book of Paradise Lost, where God is almost comically absent, at least as far as the denizens of Hell are concerned. (pp.58-9)

Actually, I've watched Duck Amuck countless times (it's one of my daughter's favourites) and the big reveal at the end is that Daffy's invisible tormentor is [spoiler alert] Bugs Bunny.

Steak and Poetry

2011-06-28T19:52:00.000+01:00

As one of the comments observes, "This is a lovely article about nothing, really," but Emily Witt's "Steak and Poetry from the Rooftops" in The Paris Review captures well the distractedness of a poetry reading, as the poets are assailed on all sides by the smells and sounds of the city. I think Lisa Jarnot comes off best here. And her daughter.

WTF?

2011-06-27T13:12:00.001+01:00

Poetry Society 'embroiled in row over funding'

(link to the Telegraph)

and for reference

'Poetrygate' (on poet Jane Holland's site Raw Light)

Update: A little more clarification in the Guardian today, but not much.

Churchill and Nietzsche

2011-06-26T10:15:00.000+01:00

Cabinet War Rooms, London

My Guardian review of Churchill's Bunker by Richard Holmes can be read here. And there really is a vast tunnel network under Whitehall called . . . Pindar.

In other odd news, I nearly fell off my chair whilst reading Private Eye (Eye 1291) yesterday evening. It pointed out that Hugh Tomlinson QC, "the barrister to go to if you want a gagging order" – whose clients include Sir Fred Goodwin and Ryan Giggs among others – is the same Hugh Tomlinson who translated Gilles Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy and Dialogues and the book on Kant – or, as the Eye puts it, "Tomlinson used to earn a crust translating impenetrable works of philosophy by the French 'Niezscheo[sic]-structuralist' Gilles Deleuze." How extraordinary. Can this really be true?

Happy Bloomsday, One and All!

2011-06-16T14:03:00.000+01:00

'. . . and there was no-one to see only him and her when she revealed all her graceful beautifully shaped legs like that, supply soft and delicately rounded, and she seemed to hear the panting of his heart . . .'

(Ulysses, 'Nausicaa')

Emporium encore

2011-06-15T21:12:00.000+01:00

I’m not quite sure how to take Sean Colletti’s review of Emporium.

I should be grateful for the attention, I think.

After all, he writes:

‘Any writer of poetry will tell you how difficult it is to write even just a mildly successful sestina, and Pindar shows us how it's done while using ambitious end-words in “affection” and “remainder” without making us want to gouge our own eyes out at regular intervals. Form enhancing content is a common occurrence in Emporium, and it makes the Eliot comparison appropriate.’

But (and there’s always a but, isn’t there?) he really hates my anti-monarchy poem ‘The King’s Evil’: ‘a voice planted embarrassingly on a massive pedestal’. Oh dear. He doesn’t mention the echoes of Pound at all in this poem. Ah well. You can’t please everyone all of the time.

(Also, I don’t think he realises that ‘Society of Blood’ does not represent my views – the voice is not mine. NB in a previous incarnation it was entitled ‘Faschismus’.)

Anyway, he says of Emporium as a whole:

‘It emanates creativity, at one point joining lines of over one hundred poets, from Langland to Chernoff, in a poetic “Chain Letter”, as it's titled. This kind of experimentation stands as its main charm and makes it worth reading and re-reading. And as this is Pindar's first collection, I'm already excited to see what he comes up with in his follow-up. Hopefully, though, he'll have made his political opinions more seamlessly integrated into the poetry, which he has such a natural connection with, whether it's echoing the storytelling brilliance of a peak-performance Tennyson in “Big Bumperton on the Sabbath” or using rhyme and form in the most contemporary of fashions.’

Desert Island Discs

2011-06-13T14:21:00.000+01:00

Belgianwaffle is playing Desert Island Discs, so I thought I’d list my choices here, just for fun:

- Miles Davis, ‘Mademoiselle Mabry’ (Filles de Kilimanjaro)

- Franz Schubert ‘Nacht und Traüme’

- The Congos ‘Don’t Blame on I’

- Leos Janacek ‘The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away’ (On an Overgrown Path)

- Bob Dylan ‘Visions of Johanna’

- Robert Johnson ‘Come on in My Kitchen’

- Anton Karas ‘The Harry Lime Theme’

- Muddy Waters ‘Honey Bee’ or T-Bone Walker ‘I’m in a Awful Mood’

and if forced to choose: Janacek – I’d like it played at my funeral!

Emporium encore

2011-06-11T20:39:00.000+01:00

Have I mentioned my debut poetry collection, Emporium?

It's currently part of Carcanet's June promotion, celebrating first collections, which means you can get a 25% discount. Just thought I'd mention it.

Apropos of nothing, Lydia Davis has written a pleasing review of John Ashbery's new translation of Rimbaud's Illuminations (also available from Carcanet) in the New York Times:

When Rimbaud’s mother asked of “A Season in Hell,” “What does it mean?” — a question still asked of Rimbaud’s poetry, and of Ashbery’s, too — Rimbaud would say only, “It means what it says, literally and in every sense.”

Andrei Platonov (1899–1951)

2011-06-10T10:38:00.000+01:00

You can read my review of David Bellos’s Romain Gary: A Tall Story (Harvill Secker) in the Times Literary Supplement this week, where you can also read the first English translation of Andrei Platonov’s ‘On the First Socialist Tragedy’, described as ‘one of the earliest and greatest of classic ecological texts’.

‘The relationship between technology and nature is tragic’

Platonov

Wave Composition

2011-06-07T08:46:00.000+01:00

Wave Composition -- a new online literary journal edited by Ed Sugden and Stephen Ross -- has just gone live. Do take a look. It's full of interesting things, but also four poems from my forthcoming collection Constellations: 'tests in a landscape of thinking'.

Emporium encore (I am the Walrus)

2011-05-30T21:23:00.000+01:00

Huge thanks to Jonathan Jones (aka Belgianwaffle) for saying nice things about Emporium.

Jonathan creates exquisite poem-books at the Sticky Pages Press, such as this one, the library of last resort.

Saturday Poem

2011-05-28T20:53:00.000+01:00

Forgot to mention I had a poem in the Guardian last week: 'On the French Riviera'. You can read it here.

That's it. I can't think of anything else to fill up this blank space with.

Oh, but there is this petition from Save the Children. Do sign it if you feel so inclined:

Emporium Day

2011-05-27T10:39:00.000+01:00

My debut poetry collection Emporium is officially published today, so I would like to say woo-hoo.

It was accepted for publication in October 2008, so it has been a loooooooong wait.

But worth it.

It is being published at a time when the poetry sector of British publishing – a "delicately balanced, even fragile, ecology" – is under threat as never before.

It is being published at a time when the "biodiversity of poetry publishing in England" is in "jeopardy".

It is being published after swingeing cuts by the Arts Council to many fine independent poetry publishers.

It is being published in what appear to be the last days of the Poetry Book Society, established by T. S. Eliot.

It is being published today!

Happy Birthday Miles Davis (1926-91)

2011-05-26T16:28:00.000+01:00

The Guinness Test: Monarchy vs Democracy

2011-05-23T21:04:00.000+01:00

One of these Heads of State did not have to get elected – the other knows how to at least appear to be having a damn good time . . .

EXHIBIT A

EXHIBIT B

As a daily consumer of the Black Stuff, I know which Head of State I prefer.

Thanks

2011-05-14T09:45:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Peter Gizzi -- who read from his raw and powerful forthcoming book Threshold Songs (NB do get hold of his other books The Outernationale and Some Values of Landscape and Weather if you can) -- and to all who organised the Albion Beatnik Bookshop reading. I think this notice in The Oxonian Review qualifies as my first review:

Emerging from the broad French Symbolist and Surrealist traditions, via T.S. Eliot, and with more than a touch of NY School glitter and wide allusiveness, Pindar’s learned, witty, and admirably controlled poems tend to follow an attractively quirky logic not often seen in contemporary British poetry. At their best, they expose the dark underside of the Metaphors We Live By.

Event Update

2011-05-04T18:39:00.000+01:00

My Albion Beatnik Bookshop reading with Peter Gizzi will be starting an hour later than advertised -- 7.30 p.m., so as not to clash with the great Geoffrey Hill's latest lecture.

AV Referendum

2011-05-03T15:07:00.000+01:00

and even some Conservatives support AV

Poetry Reading

2011-05-02T21:04:00.000+01:00

Albion Beatnik Bookshop, 34 Walton Street, Oxford

Tuesday, May 10 • 6.30pm - 9.30pm

The Albion Beatnik will be hosting poets Peter Gizzi and Ian Pindar for a reading on May 10th, beginning at 6.30 pm. Free entry for all. Wine will be available too.

Peter Gizzi is a highly acclaimed American poet, author of four books of poetry (most recently The Outernationale) and editor of numerous publications, notably My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (2008).

The Information by James Gleick

2011-05-02T14:02:00.000+01:00

Review in the Guardian here

Post-wedding analysis courtesy of Johann Hari on Democracy Now

2011-04-30T15:24:00.000+01:00

Johann Hari: Frenzy around Britain's Royal Wedding "Should Embarrass Us All"

2011-04-29T07:51:00.000+01:00

Copies of Emporium have been sighted . . .

2011-04-13T15:20:00.000+01:00

One has even turned up in Sweden (thanks, Sis)

Really the Blues

2011-04-10T10:54:00.000+01:00

Man, I was gone with it ―inspiration’s mammy was with me. And to top it all, I walked down Madison Street one day and what I heard made me think my ears were lying. Bessie Smith was shouting the Downhearted Blues from a record in a music shop. I flew in and bought up every record they had by the mother of the blues ― Cemetery Blues, Bleedin’ Hearted, and Midnight Blues ― then I ran home and listened to them for hours on the victrola. I was put in a trance by Bessie’s mournful stories and the patterns of true harmony in the piano background, full of little runs that crawled up and down my spine like mice. Every note that woman wailed vibrated on the tight strings of my nervous system; every word she sang answered a question I was asking. You couldn't drag me away from that victrola, not even to eat.

from Milton ‘Mezz’ Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues (1946), as quoted in William Carlos Williams’s Paterson (V.2)

WANTED: HARRIET SHAW WEAVER

2011-04-01T10:05:00.000+01:00

Not only did the magnificent Harriet Shaw Weaver (1876–1961) keep Ezra Pound’s The Egoist afloat (later becoming its editor), but she gave financial support to James Joyce. She serialised A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in The Egoist and then set up the Egoist Press to publish it. She did a similar thing for Ulysses: serialising it in The Egoist, then arranging publication. She didn’t really like Finnegans Wake, but she never imposed conditions on Joyce and continued to support him financially.

Now I am in no way comparing myself to James Joyce, but what I do need – right now – is a literary patron! So anyone who thinks they might like to support a struggling poet, please use the email address in the contact section on the right. You’ll find me a relatively inexpensive acquisition, but I have so many projects as yet unfulfilled, I sometimes wonder if they’ll ever come to fruition.

So Harriet Shaw Weaver, if you’re out there, come to me now in my hour of need!

. . . und wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit? (Hölderlin, ‘Brod und Wein’)*

2011-03-30T13:27:00.000+01:00

An extraordinary decision today by the Arts Council to cut all funding for the Poetry Book Society.

Chris Holifield, Director of the PBS, says: "We are stunned by the Arts Council decision which will impact on thousands of poetry lovers, poets and poetry publishers. We will try to find a way for the PBS to survive but its future must now be in doubt, and the poetry world and especially poetry readers will be the losers. It is ironic that an organisation set up by the Arts Council and strongly supported by our greatest poets has its future undermined by the same organisation."

You see, the Poetry Book Society was set up by the Arts Council in 1953!

"This news goes beyond shocking and touches the realms of the disgusting. The PBS was established by T S Eliot in 1953 and is one of poetry's most sacred churches with an influence and reach far beyond its membership. This fatal cut is a national shame and a scandal and I urge everyone who cares about poetry to join the PBS as a matter of urgency." Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate

* ‘. . . and who wants poets at all in lean years?’ ‘Bread and Wine’ (Michael Hamburger trans.)

Finnegans Wake and the Nazis

2011-03-16T14:29:00.001Z

Sylvia Beach, the American owner of the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company, recalls life under Nazi occupation in 1941:

“My German customers were always rare, but of course after I was classified as ‘the enemy’ [when America entered the war], they stopped coming altogether – until a last outstanding visit ended the series. A high-ranking German officer, who had got out of a huge grey military car, stopped to look at a copy of Finnegans Wake that was in the window.” The officer came into the shop and said to Sylvia in fluent English, “I want that copy of Finnegans Wake you’ve got in the window.” She recalled the encounter in an interview: “‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s the only copy left in Paris, and you can’t have it . . . You don’t understand that anyhow. You don’t know Joyce.’ And he said, ‘But we admire James Joyce very much in Germany.’ He was very angry, and he went out and got into his great car, his great military car, surrounded with other fellows in helmets, and drove away.” [. . .]

Then, just after Christmas, the Wehrmacht officer who had demanded Sylvia’s copy of Finnegans Wake returned.

“He came back in about ten days, and he said, ‘Your copy of Finnegans Wake is gone from the window. What did you do with it?’ I said, ‘I’ve put it away. It’s for me.’ He was so furious. He said, ‘Well, you know, we’re coming this afternoon to confiscate all your goods.’ I said, ‘Very well. Do so.’ And he said, ‘Now will you sell Finnegans Wake?’ And I said, ‘Not at all. Come along.’ So, he disappeared in a rage, booming down the street. [. . .] I immediately had everything removed from my shop. In about two hours, there wasn’t a book left in it, not only Finnegans Wake but everything else disappeared. [. . .] I had the name Shakespeare and Company painted off the front by the house painters, who lived in the house. And the carpenters took down the shelves even. Everything was removed. And the shutters were up. The Germans must have come and saw nothing, nothing left at all. And I retired upstairs.”

from Charles Glass, Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940–1944 (2010), pp.205-6.

“Ten men, ton men, pen men, pun men, wont to rise a ladder. And den men, dun men, fen men, fun men, hen men, hun men wend to raze a leader.”

from Finnegans Wake, p.278 (a reference to Hitler)

Choose Your Weapons: The British Foreign Secretary – 200 Years of Argument, Success and Failure, by Douglas Hurd and Edward Young (Phoenix)

2011-03-12T15:02:00.000Z

British Foreign Secretary William Hague

This unexpectedly enjoyable book begins with Lord Castlereagh and George Canning choosing pistols for a duel on Putney Heath in 1809. Both men survived and went on to become foreign secretaries, but according to Hurd and Young, Castlereagh and Canning represent two competing approaches to British foreign policy. Castlereagh was cautious and favoured compromise, Canning was more progressive and interventionist. Should British foreign secretaries try to change the world? Yes, one might argue, if it means abolishing slavery; no, if it means, say, colluding in the overthrow of the elected government of Iran – and, of course, Blair used “humanitarian intervention” to justify invading Iraq (disaster generally follows when PMs assume the foreign secretary’s responsibilities, says Hurd). The book explores the private lives and public careers of 11 foreign secretaries from 1807 to 1956; Lord Salisbury and Ernest Bevin shine, but others in the post went about appeasing dictators, alienating allies and losing influence abroad. It’s a spry account with some vivid vignettes.

from the Guardian 05.02.11

Is this the end of Eng Lit?

2011-03-11T09:43:00.000Z

"English departments have little to offer the world of business: we're not going to attract subsidies from investment banks to teach 14th-century literature, and arms companies won't buy the products of our research. We cannot compete with science and technology subjects when it comes to balance sheets and profitability. When market ideology is implemented and state funding withdrawn it is the arts and humanities that lose the most."

from the Guardian

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

2011-03-11T09:34:00.001Z

The longlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is out and I'm rather proud to say I had a hand -- an editorial hand only -- in shaping two of the chosen books. I won't say which ones though! You can see the longlist here.

Bye, Bye Andy?

2011-03-07T16:13:00.001Z

There's a wonderful formal complaint against Andrew Windsor here. Seems pretty obvious to me he should go. Expect a full investigation into these allegations. Not.

Scarce the Poor Man Can Buy a Morsel

2011-03-02T15:21:00.000Z

Scarce the Poor Man Can Buy a Morsel
a poem by William Forrest (still active 1581)

The poor man to toil for two pence the day,
some while three-half-pence, or else a penny:
having wife, children and house rent to pay;
meat, cloth and fuel with the same to buy,
and much other things that be necessary,
with many a hungry meal sustaining:
Alas! maketh not this a doleful complaining?

The world is changed from that it hath been,
not to the better but to the worse far:
more for a penny we have before seen
than now for four pence, who list to compare.
This sueth the game called making or mar.
Unto the rich it maketh a great deal,
but much it marreth to the Common weal . . .

A rent to raise from twenty to fifty,
Of pounds, I mean, or shillings whether:
fining for the same unreasonably,
six times the rent; add this together,
must not the same great dearth bring hither?
for if the farmer pay fourfold double rent,
he must his ware neadys sell after that stent.

So for that ox, which hath been the like sold
for forty shillings, now taketh he five pound:
yea, seven is more, I have heard it so told;
he cannot else live, so dear is his ground;
sheep, though they never so plenty abound,
such price they bear, which shame is here to tell,
that scarce the poor man can buy a morsel.

Twopence (in beef) he cannot have served,
neither in mutton, the price is so high:
under a goat he can have none carved:
so goeth he and his to bed hungrily,
and riseth again with bellies empty;
which turneth to tawny their white English skin,
like to the swarthy coloured Fflawndrekyn.

Where they were valiant, strong, sturdy and stout
to shoot, to wrestle, to do any man’s feat,
to match all nations dwelling here about,
as hitherto manly they hold the chief seat;
if they be pinched and weaned from meat,
I wis, O king, they in penury thus penned
shall not be able thy realm to defend.

Our English nature cannot live by roots,
by water, herbs, or such beggary baggage,
that may well serve for vile outlandish coots;
give English men meat after their old usage,
beef, mutton, veal to cheer their courage;
and then I dare to this bill set my hand:
they shall defend this our noble England.

c/o A Radical Reader: The Struggle for Change in England 1381–1914 (ed., Christopher Hampton)

NB The price of basic foods rose by more than 110 per cent between 1500 and 1550

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by Michael Lewis (Penguin)

2011-02-24T17:10:00.000Z

In this stylish account of economic duplicity and incompetence, Michael Lewis introduces us to a handful of hedge-fund managers and bond salesmen who became extremely wealthy by betting against “the interest-only negative-amortising adjustable-rate subprime mortgage” market. They were the first to detect a dramatic decline in lending standards in the banking system, and to predict it would all end in tears, but the terrifying question remains: why didn’t anyone else? Groupthink would seem to be the answer. Lewis likes to write comic stories, he says, but this was a monumental tragedy. The Big Short brilliantly emphasises the virtues of being a loner and not a lemming. The prescient misfits whose tales Lewis tells all tend to confuse and upset the people around them – Steve Eisman is rude and obnoxious; one-eyed Michael Burry has Asperger’s – but correctly believed they were watching a disaster movie unfold. There are no heroes in this compelling book. For the oddballs who bet on a recession happening and won, it’s a hollow victory.

Economic Revolution

2011-02-24T09:54:00.000Z

If only I'd studied economics . . .

Kick It Over Manifesto

We, the undersigned, make this accusation: that you, the teachers of neoclassical economics and the students that you graduate, have perpetuated a gigantic fraud upon the world.

You claim to work in a pure science of formula and law, but yours is a social science, with all the fragility and uncertainty that this entails. We accuse you of pretending to be what you are not.

You hide in your offices, protected by your mathematical jargon, while in the real world, forests vanish, species perish and human lives are callously destroyed. We accuse you of gross negligence in the management of our planetary household.

You have known since its inception that one of your measures of economic progress, the Gross Domestic Product, is fundamentally flawed and incomplete, and yet you have allowed it to become a global standard, reported day in, day out in every form of media. We accuse you of recklessly projecting an illusion of progress.

You have done great harm, but your time is coming to a close. Your systems are crumbling, your flaws increasingly laid bare. An economic revolution has begun, as hopeful and determined as any in history. We will have our clash of economic paradigms, we will have our moment of truth, and out of each will come a new economics – open, holistic, human scale.

On campus after campus, we will chase you old goats out of power. Then, in the months and years that follow, we will begin the work of reprogramming your doomsday machine.

Students can sign the manifesto here

“We’re all on the Titanic together. If we hit the iceberg, the first-class cabins are gonna sink just as rapidly as the steerage cabins below the water line” ― Professor William Rees, creator of the ecological footprint concept, in the video below:

[all c/o Adbusters]

Tha Banker (starring that nice Bill Nighy)

2011-02-20T12:31:00.000Z

c/o The Robin Hood Tax

Further reading: How the Guardian was gagged from revealing Barclays tax secrets

Culture Crunch (cont.)

2011-02-17T13:47:00.000Z

Worrying words from Chris Holifield, the Director of the Poetry Book Society, in the latest PBS Bulletin:

“But there is a more sober message too, as small arts charities like the PBS weather the storm of the cuts. Next year we will all have our funding cut. Like other regularly funded organisations we have just applied to the Arts Council for new funding for 2012–15 as part of their new National Portfolio Funding. The future is uncertain but we very much hope that we will get the money which will enable us to continue running the PBS as we have always done . . .”

So if you aren’t one already, why not support the Poetry Book Society by becoming a member? Or perhaps buy something from its bookshop, the only online bookstore specialising in poetry.

Don’t let T. S. Eliot’s dream die.

Lighthead by Terrance Hayes

2011-02-13T17:12:00.001Z

I’ve been meaning to say something about Terrance Hayes’s Lighthead ever since it won the 2010 National Book Award, but all I need really do is point you towards Stephen Burt's review.

So buy it: it’s refreshing to read poems that are funny and intelligent – and effortlessly cool.

And if you don't believe me, here is a clip of Hayes reading “Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy” and “Fish Head for Katrina” (but sadly not “A Plate of Bones” or “Three Measures of Time”, two of my favourites).

According to Lighthead's blurb, Hayes is "a neo-bluesman whispering existential riffs against modern chaos". Enjoy.

Carcanet Catalogue 2011

2011-02-12T10:40:00.000Z

Very exciting to see Emporium, my debut poetry collection, in the new Carcanet catalogue for 2011. Lots of great books on the way, too, including John Ashbery's translation of Rimbaud's Illuminations.
Hooray for Carcanet!

Pitt the Elder: Man of War, by Edward Pearce (Pimlico)

2011-02-07T13:09:00.000Z

"I know that I can save this country and that no one else can," William Pitt famously declared a year before taking office, but as Pearce argues in this forthright history, "England didn't need saving". The stark theme of this unflattering portrait is Pitt's overweening ambition and lust for power: "hubris, indeed psychosis", Pearce concludes. Too many historians have taken Pitt at his own estimation, he says, but the tide has turned. "Not to be nice about it, this is rubbish," he thunders early on with regard to Pitt's glorious reputation, and this knockabout approach makes the book a delight to read. Pearce attacks Pitt's "privileged civilian's dinner-table ruthlessness" and shows how "the itch for power ran in Pitt with an almost monarchical presumption". The monarch himself fares no better. George II's refusal to pardon an overcautious admiral who should simply have been retired meant that "Poor Byng" was shot in the head on his own quarterdeck, as recounted in Voltaire's Candide. The sight of Byng's public execution convinces Candide that the English are barbarians.

Who Gets the Best Jobs?

2011-02-03T13:41:00.000Z

Another excellent BBC programme about inequality of opportunity (and, sadly, of aspiration). Who Gets the Best Jobs? made the obvious point that to get to university at all, students from working-class backgrounds “probably had to overcome greater odds than their wealthier counterparts”. As one interviewee observed, “those that come through that can actually be better equipped ultimately than those who had the easier journey, almost having things on a plate”.

What does Milton’s Satan call it? “Resolution from despair” . . .

. . . And reassembling our afflicted powers,
Consult how we may henceforth most offend
Our enemy, our own loss how repair,
How overcome this dire calamity,
What reinforcement we may gain from hope,
If not what resolution from despair.

Happy Birthday James Joyce!

2011-02-02T10:51:00.001Z

Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake

(c/o A Piece of Monologue)

The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain: Writings 1989–2000, by Ian Jack (Vintage)

2011-01-28T14:46:00.000Z

Nostalgia drives this collection of Ian Jack’s journalism. His parents, he says, were “survivors from a previous British age”, but a dominant theme in the book is that we all are – at least those of us no longer young. Jack loves to unearth the past, delving into his teenage diaries (“What a little prick”) or recording his mother’s recollections (“We’ve lost so much”) or examining the contents of his late father’s toolshed or bookcase. The best long essay here explores the Hatfield rail crash of 2000 and shows how unflashy investigative journalism can uncover searing truths. Two other stand-out pieces have as their subjects the contralto Kathleen Ferrier and the sinking of the Titanic. There are enjoyable shorter essays, too, on giving up smoking or the films of Mitchell and Kenyon. Jack’s backward-looking stance works best when he is exposing the vandalism of the past (like the fragmentation of Britain’s railways under the Tories), but his unrelieved emphasis on what has been lost leaves one wondering if he feels anything at all has been gained.

PS The image above comes from footage from Mitchell and Kenyon's Pendlebury Colliery c.1900. Nostalgia-buffs might enjoy some of the archive films available for free at Moving History.

Nonplussed

2011-01-27T10:58:00.000Z

I have mixed feelings about Andrew Neil’s documentary last night: Posh and Posher: Why Public School Boys Run Britain (you can see it here on the BBC iPlayer).

Neil’s main thesis that meritocracy seemed to die around the turn of the century (that is, 2000) appeared unassailable, but so did Peter Mandelson’s point that the 11 Plus is not the answer.

“That appalling selection at the age of eleven,” Mandelson said, “in which people are almost sitting an exam on the flip of a coin, where there were some people who were going to go on and go through their grammar school and enter the professions, and those who were – forever and a day – relegated to, frankly, not only a different type of education, but a lesser type of education”.

Neil still pushed the selection line, although he admitted that “nobody wants a return to the black-and-white system of the Fifties and Sixties – the 11 Plus was far too brutal a watershed, consigning those who failed to second-rate secondary moderns”, but he suggested a more “sophisticated” exam might enable a split in state education between “good vocational schools” and “academic hothouses”, “without consigning anyone to the dustbin”.

In my view that would be making the same mistake. There is always the danger that someone will slip through the net, and that an academically gifted child might end up at one of Mr Neil’s “vocational” schools.

I know because it happened to me. I failed the 11 Plus in 1981 – yes, as late as that – and as a result was sent to a second-rate secondary modern. (My father, a builder, thought this was a good choice as there was a strong emphasis on woodwork and metalwork.) Fortunately for me, I escaped and went on to get a First from Oxford University in 1991, but I did this against the grain of the education system – and also in large part thanks to a select few teachers* who recognised my potential, plus an enormous helping of luck.

So it just makes me angry when pundits like Tony Parsons say bring back grammar schools “because they work” – they might do for some, but spare a thought for the bright working-class girls and boys who will always fall through the net.

* Eternal thanks to Mike Coy, Marilyn Davies, Mrs Caws and others.

The Beautiful Changes

2011-01-21T09:23:00.001Z

A lovely brief lecture on poetry from John Ashbery here (courtesy of the indispensable Silliman's blog)

I've never agreed with Williams's statement . . . that "men" -- and presumably women -- "die every day for lack of something that poetry contains." They die anyway.

Happy Birthday, Gilles Deleuze (18 January 1925–4 November 1995)

2011-01-18T13:10:00.000Z

“I am not claiming here that the poetry of the Movement Orthodoxy is fascist. Nor am I claiming that [J. H.] Prynne’s ‘The Numbers’ is either schizophrenic or anarchist. I am, however, claiming that if a continuum is drawn from a reterritorializing fascist-paranoid tendency to a deterritorializing anarchist-schizophrenic tendency, then innovative poetries are closer to the latter and are in this sense radical (pushing towards the limits of capitalist possibility and therefore gesturing beyond it) while Movement Orthodoxy poetry is closer to the former and is in this sense conservative (pulling away from such limits and attempting to centre itself on firmly traditional or ‘common-sense’ ground).”

from Jon Clay, Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze: Transformative Intensities (Continuum, 2010), p.41.

The novel: a minor genre

2011-01-11T09:45:00.000Z

It’s not often one comes across a statement by the French novelist and full-time controversialist Michel Houellebecq that one can agree with, but John Dugdale in the Guardian Review’s ‘The Week in Books’ has unearthed this from Public Enemies:

“He [Houellebecq] sees poetry and its subculture as ‘something precious disappearing before our eyes . . . I have seen the poetry sections in bookshops get smaller, seen the poetry collections gutter’; ‘poetry simply has no place any more’. And he is typically unsentimental about the cash-strapped verse-reading circuit and annual claims of a ‘growing appetite’ for poems. Yet he is in no doubt which form is superior: ‘the novel (even in the hands of Dostoevsky, of Balzac, of Proust), in comparison to the poem, remains a minor genre’. In poetry ‘words seem to be surrounded by a radioactive halo. They suddenly find their aura, their essential vibration’ whereas the novel is a mere ‘piece of machinery’; ‘compared to a poet, no novelist has or can ever have a style’.”

Guardian Review, ‘The Week in Books’, 08.01.11, p.5

Bye-Bye 2010

2010-12-28T10:17:00.000Z

QUOTE OF THE YEAR

'Freedom of Information reveals that 8 out of 9 positive comments on the ID cards website were written by Home Office personnel themselves.'

NO2ID

SINGLE OF THE YEAR

'Photoshop Handsome' by Everything Everything . . . the lines 'Airbrush! -- What have you done with my father? -- Why does he look like a carving?' have now entered Pindar family lore.

I have a piece on Henri Michaux in Poetry News – available to Poetry Society members . . .

And you can read 'my' poem 'Chain Letter' (a cento – or is it a cento?) on the PN Review website . . .

This poem appears in my debut collection Emporium.

It's out next year.

I wonder what people will make of it?

I shall keep by me at all times this quotation from Oscar Wilde's ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891):

'In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them they leave them alone.'

The English Opium Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey, by Robert Morrison (Phoenix)

2010-12-12T16:04:00.000Z

It began with toothache. Thomas Quincey (who called himself De Quincey) bought a tincture of opium at a druggist’s shop in 1804 and discovered that “Happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket.” It was the start of his “opium career”, as recounted in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), which influenced Baudelaire and Poe among others and did so much to romanticise the drug. Drawing on new sources, Morrison has written a balanced and affectionate account of a life of unfulfilled promise. He is especially good on De Quincey’s life-changing encounter with Wordsworth and Coleridge and his role in establishing the cult of the Lake Poets (although later Wordsworth shunned De Quincey for marrying a farmer’s daughter). It is also illuminating on Ann, the prostitute who rescued De Quincey in London, then mysteriously disappeared. De Quincey certainly visited prostitutes, Morrison says, but Ann is probably a composite of several women, including Mary Magdalen and his dead sister Elizabeth.

MPs vote to raise tuition fees in England

2010-12-09T21:44:00.000Z

A defining moment. I'm utterly disgusted. How did it come to this?

Our central concern is that the removal of the fees cap - and the differentiation in costs between university degrees that will follow - will hamper efforts to widen access to higher education and increase social segregation across the sector. We believe that the claw-back mechanism proposed by Browne will not, in fact, keep fees down – and there is little disincentive for elite universities, where the access issue is most acute, to charge very high fees. A parallel concern is that those university subjects associated with the highest earnings premiums will see the highest fee rises, making them off-limits for youngsters from non-privileged homes.
The Sutton Trust response to Lord Browne’s review

(thanks to Red Dog for this)

Ecologica, by André Gorz, tr. by Chris Turner (Yale University Press)

2010-12-03T09:38:00.000Z

Ecologists often talk about species extinction, but in Ecologica the social philosopher André Gorz (1923–2007) contemplates the extinction of capitalism. Shortly before his death, Gorz predicted the global economic meltdown. “The real economy is becoming an appendage of the speculative bubbles sustained by the finance industry,” he observed in “The Exit from Capitalism” (2007), included here, “until that inevitable point when the bubbles burst, leading to serial bank crashes and threatening the global system of credit with collapse and the real economy with a severe, prolonged depression.” Unlike most economists, however, Gorz regarded our over-dependence on the financial industry as a sign that capitalism has reached its “internal limit”: “the art of making money by buying and selling nothing but various forms of money”.

But which will come first, capitalism’s extinction or the extinction of humankind, the logic of capitalism leading to climate catastrophe? In place of a destructive “religion of growth”, Gorz argues for “de-growth”, a productive alternative to capitalism. We need to develop “self-limiting” lifestyles of our own, he says, wasting and consuming less, but also working less. Our quality of life cannot be judged by GDP figures alone, he says. We need to get away from “growth in itself” as our raison d’être, especially when growth in recent years has meant nothing but a “growth in debts”. Economists lack any notion of what is sufficient – some idea of a limit beyond which we are producing and consuming too much.

So how do we achieve the long-promised “exit from capitalism”? Here, Gorz is less forthcoming, but it seems to involve “‘social experimentation’ around new ways of living communally”, and the use of “alternative technologies”. The emergence of free software on the Internet might offer a new model, he suggests. Skilfully translated by Chris Turner, this provocative collection of essays challenges “the domination by capital of our mode of life”. One of the best pieces here is “The Social Ideology of the Car”, a masterpiece of clarity and insight, in which Gorz argues that the car killed off the city, as it did all alternative modes of transport, and now, as the roads become increasingly congested, “the car is killing off the car”.