SEAN RAFFERTY

The webmagazine Intercapillary Space has the work of Sean Rafferty as their latest topic, a collection of thoughtful pieces starting with a personal recollection from his publisher Nick Johnson. I knew Rafferty’s work had, late in his life, been supported by Ted Hughes, but I didn’t know he looked after the laureate’s chickens. Nick has a way with elderly poets of course. He organised a reading tour for Carl Rakosi when the latter was in his nineties – Nick’s press Etruscan had just brought out ‘The Old Poet’s Tale’. The reading Rakosi gave at the Voicebox on the South Bank was extraordinary. He read the title poem, where the poet recounts how his great friend Oppen, suffering from Alzheimers, is taken from his home and goes into an institution. The sequence has a stoic calmness and gravity and hearing it read by someone himself so old – Rakosi refers to himself in the poem as ‘shade’, and ‘the reliable shade’- was a powerful experience. And then there was David Gascoyne reading at Diorama, another of Nick’s events. Would it have been the last reading Gascoyne gave? I remember he described at one point how he had turned up at the regular café in Paris to be told by Breton that he, Gascoyne, had from this point henceforth been expelled from the Movement. ‘I see you have become both a Stalinist and a Catholic’ Breton announced. Quite what provoked this I’m not sure – must have been something he wrote. O there was Sorley Maclean reading at Nick’s festival in Stoke-on-Trent . . .

READINGS etc

On Sunday August 17th I’m reading at Torriano with Sue MacIntyre (7.30pm at Torriano Meeting House, 99 Torriano Avenue in Kentish Town). Sue MacIntyre’s ‘Picnic With Sea-Fog and Elephants’ was the final publication I brought out with my press, The Many Press. That was back in 2003. Sue is someone who, having written earlier in her life, put it aside and took it up again many years later. Her work is conversational in tone, scrupulous, and tends to display a distinctive and very attractive wariness and sense of surprise. She deserves a full-length collection.

There’s a new venue here in Hackney, in Dalston, Café Oto (see their website at cafeoto.co.uk) with a programme of readings currently being prepared. It looks as if it may develop into a combination of word and music – the space already hosts music events. Dalston is undergoing some quite massive and inevitably controversial development. Is this the ‘Shoreditch effect’ moving north? It wasn’t like that when we moved here back in the early 1970s. Back then Dalston still had Kossoff’s Bakers – this is the painter’s David Kossoff’s family isn’t it? He did paintings of Dalston. There were still other Jewish Bakers around – but most of the Jewish population, other than the Hassidim who are still here in Stamford Hill of course, had moved on and the Turkish / Kurdish population was starting to increase. And then gentrification, albeit patchily.

O and Peter Hughes' Oystercatcher Press has a website now at oystercatcherpress.com.

THE COLLECTED

My ‘Collected Poems’ has now been well and truly launched, all 450 pages of it, with a reading at the Swedenborg Hall on 8th May – here is a photo of me courtesy of Laurie Duggan, the Sage of Graveney Marsh. All thanks to Tony Frazer of Shearsman Books. Also reading on the 8th May was Hazel Frew, launching her Shearsman collection ‘Seahorses’.

More Shearsman readings are in the pipeline – next is an extra one, this time at the Calder Bookshop where the performance space has recently been refurbished. Mercedes Roffe is reading with Ken Edwards on 20th May at 7.30pm. Next for Shearsman at the Swedenborg Hall is Nathaniel Tarn, based in America for many years now, who is over to launch a new collection, and who reads with Lee Harwood.

Another poet, one who has been published by Shearsman, will be over from America shortly to launch his ‘Collected Poems’ published by Carcanet. This is Christopher Middleton, a major figure who has the merit perhaps of not quite fitting in – not in the mainstream, but not to be identified with any particular section of the ‘avant-garde’. I guess his affiliations are with traditions of European modernism, rather than looking to America, and I first came across his work in my teens when I borrowed ‘Torse 3’ from Hendon Public Library and back then was puzzled but very intrigued. It was in this same library that I first came across Bob Cobbing in the shape of a little mimeo pamphlet – this would have been in the late 1950’s – featuring work by a local poetry workshop coordinated by Cobbing. He was teaching in a local Secondary School. So it was all happening in Hendon . . .

Christopher Middleton’s book will be launched at the Peter Elllis Bookshop, 18 Cecil Court, off Charing Cross Road, on 3rd June at 6pm.

And there’s a new Oystercatcher, Peter Riley’s ‘Best At Night Alone’, price £4 from Peter Hughes at 4 Coastguard Cottages, Old Hunstanton, Norfolk PE36 6EL.

'SPOT THE DELIBERATE MISTAKE'

Apologies for the typos in my new book 'Dreaming Arrival' (see previous post). And occasional awkward repetitions. I hope these things can be cleared up in a later printing.

I'm not the greatest proofreader and was revising right up to the wire. I did some pretty terrible things when I was running
The Many Press. There was the line 'Vomit up greed', I remember (this was more than thirty years ago now) that came out as 'Vomit up green.'

O and the howler on page 191. The Shakespeare play to which I devote a page and a half or so is of course 'As You Like It' and NOT 'Love's Labours Lost.' I know I shall never get those 'proverb' titles sorted out in my head.

DREAMING ARRIVAL

My ‘memoir’ – I feel obliged to put the word in inverted commas – appears from Shearsman at the same as my Collected Poems. The first part of ‘Dreaming Arrival’ actually to appear in print was published in the London Review of Books, in their regular ‘Diary’ slot, back in 1999. It was an account of a breakdown I experienced when I was nineteen and serves as a point of reference for the overall narrative. Back then I spent seven or eight months in Holloway Sanatorium, a mental hospital in Virginia Water. The building has now been converted into flats. I wonder whether shades of departed patients still patrol the building. I’ve recently learned that there were certainly two other poets in there at about the same time as I was. One was Nancy Cunard no less, poet, heiress, patron of modernism and compiler, with her lover the jazz pianist Henry Crowder, of the anthology ‘Negro’. By the time she came to Holloway she was in a state of near-terminal decline. Her Selected Poems have recently appeared from Trent Editions edited with an introduction by John Lucas. In my account of my time there I recall a time when we had to help clear out the cellars – I was on the Gardening Squad, which counted as ‘occupational therapy’ – and found that what we were clearing out were patients’ notes from the early part of the twentieth century. I managed to read one of these before tossing it onto the wheelbarrow to be taken down to our bonfire. It was a female patient. "She refuses to wear any clothes but goes around naked”, I read. “She says they are building a golden cage to lock her in..." There was much more in the same vein. I daresay Nancy Cunard was in a ‘golden cage’ however hard she fought to escape.

The other poet, was who was published by Hogarth Press before the war but then disappeared from view, was Joan Adeney Esdaile. She is the subject of a new biography by her granddaughter Celia Robertson, titled ‘Who Was Sophie’. Like me, she was given doses of ECT. That, along with very large quantities of pills, was the order of the day. Were we ever standing in the queue together in the patients’ café, I wonder, waiting for our evening cocoa? I recently met Stuart Montgomery, whose Fulcrum Press was such a major force in poetry publishing in the decade from the mid-sixties, when he was reading in London – he has a new book, ‘Islands’, just out from Etruscan. He is now a leading academic expert on anti-depressants and when I mentioned what I’d been given when I was in there he seemed surprised to see that I was still around.

Setting out to write some sort of account of all this may have been an act of folly. I’ve been working on the material for ten years or so. I was in therapy or analysis – whichever you like to call it – in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. I kept a journal during this time and conceived the idea, while I was still going, of eventually writing a book and I embarked on that as soon as the analysis finished. I have found it difficult to pull the thing together, difficulties which I have touched on in the text and which raise issues of course about this kind of ‘confessional’ writing or personal testimony – the temptation is to construct a conventional narrative which embodies a process of self-discovery, culminating in an explanation of what it was that made things turn out in the way they did. In the event I’ve found it impossible to construct such a narrative without falsifying the experience. What I’ve produced is variations on a theme or set of themes.

Then there is the way writing about the experience affects the experience of the therapy itself, becomes entangled in it. I quote the American analyst who is the subject of Janet Malcolm's book 'An Impossible Profession'. He maintains that the sign of a successful analysis is that the analysand subsequently forgets all about it. This of course would make writing about it an admission of failure – and would incidentally place the analyst beyond criticism . . .

GREAT WORKS

Re my post of 18th January concerning Souheil Sleiman's 'All Dressed Up and Nowhere To Go', my poem sequence 'Yearn Glass', which owes a lot to his piece, is now on the Great Works site, at www.greatworks.org.uk, along with much other new work . . .

PILGRIMAGE?

A couple of weeks ago we got back from our three weeks in Tuscany. We were in Tuscany two years ago for a short trip – it was the wedding of a friend’s daughter. We stayed then out in the country in an agriturismo. The people who ran it were delightful and it was a perfect Tuscan setting, unrolling like a carpet, vineyards and olive groves, the group of farm buildings. It’s an idea of ‘the good life’; breakfast in an Impressionist painting perhaps, or – going back a bit – a John Minton dust jacket on an Elizabeth David cookery book. Why, when you get just where you want to be and it is all set up, why from time to time this edginess? Why does it seem to be mocking you? Everyone kept commenting on the wonderful smell round the pool – but no one could quite identify which shrub was responsible. I found myself fantasising that this ‘perfume’ was actually a giant, hidden air-freshener, pumping out artificial fragrance, maybe to conceal some awful problem with the drains? Maybe the whole landscape was a fantasy – because it was all a bit too good to be true, as if we had backed into the travel video, the ‘good life’ snatched at with money, trying to get a purchase on it.

Our trip this time ended with a few days in Siena. The Cathedral and space around it were full of people even in March. But the galleries were often deserted or nearly so and those few that did get in there sometimes looked a bit lost, a ‘well exactly why am I here’ sort of look, ‘better try and make the best of it.’ And the ones in the crowded places often didn’t look too happy being lectured. People are very deferential and religious parallels are hard to resist. Is it about ‘seeing the world’? More to do with the ‘having seen it’ that the experience at the moment of seeing it? That and the fear of missing something. Does the queuing enhance the experience? It develops its own rituals, such as the Africans who come up to you at the first sign of rain trying to sell you an umbrella. It’s all too easy to sound patronising of course – and who am I to complain? It’s their money that maintains this enormous infrastructure, so that I can wander as I please round the all but empty Pinacoteca looking at the paintings. All the same it is a puzzle.

Maybe 14th Century Sienese Art is a specialised taste. But what about 15th Century Hospitals? Across the square in front of the cathedral is Santa Maria della Scala. It’s a fascinating place – and most people nowadays have more dealings with hospitals than they do with cathedrals. The first written reference to the hospital it housed until only a few years ago dates from the 11th century. Almost the first thing you see as you go in is a marvellous fresco by Beccafumi, bafflingly described like this in Frommer, a leading American guide: ‘Domenico Beccafumi's luridly coloured Meeting at Porta Andrea (after 1512).’ The colours, sober greys, blues, and pale ochres, are anything but lurid. In the enormous Pilgrims Hall there’s a cycle of frescoes showing the work of the fifteenth century hospital – people being stretchered in and bandaged, the wet-nurses being paid and so on and so on. It seems to have been a remarkably advanced institution for its time. On the same level are other huge rooms, some inexplicably empty, but in one area you can climb up onto the scaffolding where frescoes are being restored. You then go down to the shrine of ‘St Catherine of the Night.’ You pass a skull set in the wall with its inscription which reads ‘As you are I was once; as I am now you will be’ and then you reach the overwrought chapel, a tangle of fantastical carving. Beyond and below are more puzzlingly empty rooms. The guide book describes it as ‘creepy’. But it doesn’t seem inappropriate, a shrine set in the depths of the hospital devoted to prayers for the deceased.

Carrying on further in you are passing through a maze of tunnels dug into the tufa, raw brick and knobbly stonework. You are now in the Archaeological Museum, described somewhat patronisingly by Frommer like this: ‘while there's nothing of earth-shattering significance, there are some surprisingly good pieces for a museum hardly anyone knows exists.’ At one point you reach a wider tunnel sloping gently down lined with Etruscan funerary monuments. It’s as if they have re-buried the artefacts. As you round a corner here are two massive jars, taller than a person. From now on some of the spaces are empty but clearly prepared and waiting for their exhibits, others already filled. It has all been cunningly devised to maximise the dramatic impact – it’s hard not to see it as the setting for an episode in a Fellini film. The thing is, there seems to be absolutely nobody here, not even an attendant. A long way back you did pass two women chatting in front of a split screen closed circuit TV, but that was all. You wonder if you’ll ever find your way out. Eventually you do come out, down a long slope ending in a small deserted square in contrast to the thronging space where you first came in.

My first experience of ‘pilgrimage tourism’ was in India when I was eighteen, nearly fifty years ago I spent a sort of gap year – this was before they became the norm, and before there were hippies – in Pakistan, where I was attached to a boys’ school in Lahore. While there I travelled, often on my own. I went up to the Northwest frontier, to Peshawar and to Swat. And I travelled in Northern India. But all through my time there I was preoccupied with what I was missing. There was so much of it to see – how could I possibly manage to see it all? This thought induced a kind of desperation. On one trip I went to Banaras and while there I decided to go to Sarnath a few miles away, and the spot where the Buddha is said to have received enlightenment and preached his first sermon. A cycle-rickshaw man had already appointed himself my guide the previous day, showing me around Banaras itself.

So here I was, an eighteen year old public schoolboy oddly enthroned on this already somewhat archaic machine. By this mode of transport, both intimate and absurd, we proceeded through a bleak landscape dotted with stupas like little water towers while I stared at the rickshaw man’s wiry calves as they went up and down, up and down. When we got to Sarnath, here was the Dhasmekha Stupa built by Ashoka in the Sixth century. But there wasn’t exactly anything much to see. The stupa is simply a fat tower about a hundred feet high with a round top. There is some decoration near the base of it, but I have no memory of it. Apparently a Colonel Cunningham once drove a shaft into the centre of it and all he found was a stone tablet saying, yes this is where the Buddha preached his first sermon. I remember I was baffled and wondered, not for the first time, why I had come all this way. I stood there and watched the saffron-robed pilgrims with their big umbrellas. Round and round and round they went unceasingly, blissful expressions on their faces, bowing and kissing the stone. Many were from refugees from Tibet and in Delhi a few days before I’d bought a couple of things, a metal cup and a scent bottle, made by Tibetans who selling them on the pavement.

A few years later I wrote a group of poems about my travels in Pakistan and India. In the one about my expedition to Sarnath I suggested a parallel between the endlessly repetitive actions of the monks and the motions of the rickshaw man’s legs but I was never satisfied with the poem – it was like a game of patience that never quite came out. It was as if I’d gone to see something and found nothing – which was maybe the point. The ritualised circuit around a few prescribed places is a bit like the monks circuit around the stupa. Out come their cameras in an attempt to seize the moment, to have something to take away. As for the monks, maybe they have a better grasp of what they are actually doing, seizing the void?