大象传媒

Just a note William for your colleagues in the 大象传媒 regarding the Get Writing NI Lois MacNeice page, they have him dying a date late.

I've always enjoyed mahon's elegy. I took it with me to the grave last year and read it aloud in honour of MacNeice. He deserves more attention in his home country, even though he never felt at home here.

I think I'm getting a snow job here. (Oh don't tell me I'm only showing my ignorance making myself look foolish again, I've read enough 20th century art critics to know that you are only asking for trouble when you say the emperor is naked.) Apparantly MacNeice's education, family, and employment were no handicap to his pursuit of his profession or noteriety. Does't one normally think of the struggling artist living in the privation of an ice cold garret as a prerequisite for inspiration to his art? Or at the very least in Paris especially between the wars. Do you think Hemmingway ever really put a worm on a hook and actually caught a fish himself? I wonder. These writers like Hemmingway, Mailer, and probably this guy so utterly detestable in person. I guess that was a big plus for them. It makes up for their lack of a wit like a Dorothy Parker had. Watching Mailer interviewed on BookTV a few weeks ago, I really think whatever his literary merrit, he has caused more real pain and suffering in life to those around him than anyone has a right to, certainly too much to justify his existance. And Kurt Vonnegut, how could I have almost forgotten that curr?

How apt to call MacNeice a drunken Irishman. I can't imagine anyone writing these words sober. I can't imagine anyone reading them all the way through sober either. What is much 20th century poetry? If it is comprehensible, it isn't poetry. (I myself much prefer Carl Sandburg, at least I understand what he is saying.) or certainly Dylan Thomas. How trite, I almost didn't get it, rhyming trees with Euripides. Euripides, I rip-a-dose. If you even have an accidental passing with two words that rhyme, make it as unobvious as possible or it's not a poem, at least not in the 20th century, poems are not supposed to rhyme. Screw up the meter and you're even a better poet.

"From pneumonia of the ditch." Too bad he didn't write pneumonia of the cave. He would have written his own poetic epitaph.

"He may be the only poet to have died while making a radio program." Yes maybe so but I wonder how many in the audience died listening to one. Now there's a subject for a poem, the obsessed radio listener, glued to his set every week of a gripping dramatic series, only to die alone in his chair of a heart attack just before the actors deliver the punch line at the end of the final episode. Poetic irony? Well, Rod Serling anyway.

I think I'm getting a snow job here. (Oh don't tell me I'm only showing my ignorance making myself look foolish again, I've read enough 20th century art critics to know that you are only asking for trouble when you say the emperor is naked.) Apparantly MacNeice's education, family, and employment were no handicap to his pursuit of his profession or noteriety. Does't one normally think of the struggling artist living in the privation of an ice cold garret as a prerequisite for inspiration to his art? Or at the very least in Paris especially between the wars. Do you think Hemmingway ever really put a worm on a hook and actually caught a fish himself? I wonder. These writers like Hemmingway, Mailer, and probably this guy so utterly detestable in person. I guess that was a big plus for them. It makes up for their lack of a wit like a Dorothy Parker had. Watching Mailer interviewed on BookTV a few weeks ago, I really think whatever his literary merrit, he has caused more real pain and suffering in life to those around him than anyone has a right to, certainly too much to justify his existance. And Kurt Vonnegut, how could I have almost forgotten that curr?

How apt to call MacNeice a drunken Irishman. I can't imagine anyone writing these words sober. I can't imagine anyone reading them all the way through sober either. What is much 20th century poetry? If it is comprehensible, it isn't poetry. (I myself much prefer Carl Sandburg, at least I understand what he is saying.) or certainly Dylan Thomas. How trite, I almost didn't get it, rhyming trees with Euripides. Euripides, I rip-a-dose. If you even have an accidental passing with two words that rhyme, make it as unobvious as possible or it's not a poem, at least not in the 20th century, poems are not supposed to rhyme. Screw up the meter and you're even a better poet.

"From pneumonia of the ditch." Too bad he didn't write pneumonia of the cave. He would have written his own poetic epitaph.

"He may be the only poet to have died while making a radio program." Yes maybe so but I wonder how many in the audience died listening to one. Now there's a subject for a poem, the obsessed radio listener, glued to his set every week of a gripping dramatic series, only to die alone in his chair of a heart attack just before the actors deliver the punch line at the end of the final episode. Poetic irony? Well, Rod Serling anyway.

Great Blog.

In the final analysis, perhaps one's taste in poetry is a matter of personal taste. So Mark is entitled to the hostile comments he writes above. However, I do not agree with him. In my opinion, MacNeice wrote many fine poems. He was a skilful poet and wrote in a variety of styles: satirical, elegiac, observant, etc. He had an eye for vivid detail and a good ear for rhyme and rhythm.

One of my favourites is The Sunlight On The Garden. On first reading, the juxtaposed rhymes may seem intrusive and jangling, but I find that further readings bring out a dying fall in those rhymes which suits the mood of the poem exactly. It is a poem which celebrates the joys of living, both in bold actions and in quiet moments, but it does so in the sombre knowledge that life is finite and all joys must have an end. The sunlight "grows cold."

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

Derek Mahon's elegy for MacNeice, which I had not read before, seems to me to be a fitting tribute. It is a well wrought poem with apt detail and striking metaphors. Mahon shows his appreciation of the skills that MacNeice employed in his work.

I am glad that the 大象传媒 is honouring the memory of Louis MacNeice over the coming week. He is one of our best poets and he deserves to be remembered. I hope that the programmes will help many people to discover what a fine poet he was.

Just a note William for your colleagues in the 大象传媒 regarding the Get Writing NI Louis MacNeice page, they have him dying a date late on the 4th instead of the 3rd of September.

It is no stretch of the imagination to say that MacNeice was one of the most important poets of the twentieth centruy. He was a modern day polymath, being a highly acclaimed translator, radio dramatist/ producer, critic (he wrote the first book on Yeats which was recommended by Ellman no less!) and not least of all the author of such masterpieces as 'Autumn Journal', 'Snow', 'Sunlight on the Garden' and 'Thassala'
If anything his star will only continue to rise given that poets such as Muldoon, Longley, Durcan and Mahon have all drawn on MacNeice in some form or another. Yet it is not for me to argue MacNeice's place in the pantheon of twentieth century poetry. Eliot, Berryman, Spender and MacNeice's great friends W.H.Auden and Dylan Thomas (to name but a few) have all testified in their lifetime to his genius as poet! Indeed, Patrick Kavangh, who was notoriously chary and billigerent when it came to poetic rivals, was a big admirer of MacNeice.
As for his character, MacNeice was no doubt a flawed human being, but then tell me a great writer that isn't(Oscar Wilde, W.B.Yeats, Ezra Pound?) in fact that is what appeals to me about him. And in terms of the things that mattered MacNeice tried his best. Auden says of him: 'When it can be said of a poet that, without in any way sacrificing his artistic integrity to Mammon, he sponged on no one, he cheated no one, he provided for his family, and he paid his bills, these facts, I consider, deserve to be reorded'. MacNeice was not a saint but he was humane, he spoke out against apratheid in South Africa (and actually worte a satirical radio drama which was refused by his conservative overlords at the 大象传媒), he sat on top of St. Pauls cathedral during the blitz (a extremely perilous job) working as a fire watcher, and his great poem 'Autumn Journal' saught to engage with and represent the larger communal experience of those living in pre-war urban and sub urban Britain - he can be justly said to have played his part in defining the zeitgeist of that era.
For me personally it is the shorter lyrics which hooked me on Louis MacNeice. The first time I read 'Snow' it was as if a window had opened into a reality which was as wondorous as it was mysterious:

'The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

The poem has a freshness and vitality which transcends its era, yet it has a tactile, visceral power which immdiatelty draws the reader into the time and place of its composition.

MacNeice deserves more from his country of birth, of which he grew fonder as he got older. It is time this remarkable poet is given his due. Perhaps more than any of the other twentieth century Irish poets, he suits our current dispensation - politcially compromised, yet always advocating a society of individuals which were more broad minded and tolerant, we would do well to open our minds to sentiments of one of his very last poems - freedom in all walks of life may not be possible but the quest should never cease:

'Put out to sea, ignoble comrades.
Whose record shall be noble yet;
Butting through the scarps of moving marble
The narwhal dares us to be free;
By a high star our course is set,
Our end is Life. Put out to sea'

Nobody can accuse MacNeice of writing for the masses. Now let's have a confession, how many of you WITHOUT looking it up on the internet know what the phrase;

"We are dying, Egypt, dying"

means and why it was used? What is it's context in the poem "The Sunlight on the Garden?" No fair cheating. I didn't know what it means. Out of billions of pages in Google, there were fewer than 200 references to it. I could have sat in a conventional library for days without finding out what it means. If poetry is a form of communication between people, MacNeice is only interested in communicating with an elite, he was a pedant who used words to impress, not to connect to a wide audience. I am not in that small select few he has in mind. Perhaps these poems are important to literary scholars but they are not important to me. It's the kind of blather that puts most people off poetry in the first place. How can you find a desire to read what is made almost deliberately incomprehensible? His works are full of this kind of stuff, words that have no comprehensible meaning in any ordinary sense, it might just as well have been written in Sanskrit. "And flames with a bubbling sound." I've seen a lot of fires in my life, lots of flames but they never bubbled. This is pure pretense as far as I am concerned, the emperor really has no clothes.

"Antony and Cleopatra" is a great play because it shows the loving relationship between those two people without idealising them. They love, they fall out, they have fun, they betray, they are reconciled, etc. Shakespeare created a wonderful, romantic yet realistic relationship when he presented their love story in what is to some critics (FR Leavis, for example) his greatest play.

The scene in which Antony says, "We are dying, Egypt, dying,.." is one of the great romantic scenes in which lovers take their last farewell. And yet the play continues for several more scenes as Cleopatra tries to make arrangements for her children, before she commits suicide to join her Antony. So the romance of Antony's farewell is set against the realistic problems that she faces.

Why shouldn't MacNeice refer to that great love story, if it suits his purpose?

He could have used Romeo and Juliet, if he had wanted to ensure that everyone would recognise the reference. But that play is overly romantic, indeed juvenile, by comparison.

MacNeice's poem is about the joys of living (which include love) and about the transience of those joys, because time is always slipping away and life is finite. There is a clear rapport between his concerns in the poem and the themes of Shakespeare's play. Therefore he had every right to quote from the play and draw on the realistic view of love that it conveys.

People who know little or nothing of Shakespeare's plays will miss that reference, but there is still a lot of the poem left. If they pursue the reference, as Mark did, and discover its source, then they may be inspired to read or watch the play itself, and that, I hope, will be a very rewarding experience for them.

Mark's comments about literary references in poems could be applied to any significant writer. It's just the case that all writers play with allusions and literary reference and that many readers will mis their point on a first reading. Sometimes research is necessary; sometimes making an effort is necessary more generally. If you want writers to limits themselves to references that everyone will get, you are limiting writers to the lowest commond denominator.

"Why shouldn't MacNeice refer to that great love story if it suits his purpose?"

And what would the purpose of using an obscure quote from a Shakespearean play be?

a) that he couldn't find his own words to say what he wanted to.

b) that he was trying to impress that small handful of the handful who read this poem that he knew this obscure passage leaving everyone else in the dark as to what he was talking about.

c) that it sounded good even if it made no sense to most people who would read it, something mysterious and deep.

d) all of the above.

"'Put out to sea, ignoble comrades.
Whose record shall be noble yet;
Butting through the scarps of moving marble
The narwhal dares us to be free;
By a high star our course is set,
Our end is Life. Put out to sea'"

What I like most about this poem is that while it seems completely lacking in substance it has the virtue brevity. I think if you have nothing to say, the least you can do is not subject an audience to wading through endless tedium. Anyone who has ever had a job which required attending periodic corporate meetings knows what I am talking about.

Sooner or later, I think most writers, poets, and artists have to confront the sea because it is one of the greatest primordial forces in nature and life. Compare how MacNeice treats it to for instance Walt Whitman's in his poem "Leaves of Grass." This epic is so profound it inspired Ralph Vaughn Williams to compose what may be his greatest musical composition of all, his Sea Symphony. From the liner notes of Slatkin conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus in regard to first conducting it at rehearsal; but nothing had prepared him for the reality with tremendous sound he unleashed with the first bars of the symphony--"Behold the sea itself"---"I nearly fell off the rostrum" he said." I don't think MacNeice's poem would have meritted him a ditty from RVW after Sea Symphony.

True to form MacNeice uses obscure language even in this short piece. Narwhal (aloso narwal) n. An Arctic whale (Monodon monoceros) that has a spotted pelt and is characterized in the male by a long spirally twisted ivory tusk projecting from the left side of its head. I got that out of a dictionary but I'm certain all of you knew that just from having had such a fine education. Why I'll bet you see narwhals every week or two. I have no idea what the "scarps of moving marble" refers to. Are these giant ice floes? It seems to me what little I know of whales, moving among ice flows hardly makes them feel free, they much prefer the open ocean. Can someone tell me what this means. Clearly I am too ignorant to make heads or tails of these poems. Perhaps that is why I don't like them, they don't speak to me in anyting resembling my own language.

The 'scarps of moving marble' are the sea. An unusual image I'll admit, but if you look at the sea in a certain light it can seem like moving marble.And we all know what a narwhal is now. It was believed to have magical properties in Nordic culture; a Narwhal husk was seen as a sort of talisman or good luck charm.
In response to the question of literary reference, obscurity of meaning and elitism etc(Apart from the fact that nearly every great writer in history alludes to and engages with other texts, Joyce, Shakespeare, Heaney, Auden, and WHITMAN), For me, a good poem can provide different meanings each time you read it. It is meant to be re-read. If the poem yielded up everything it had in one sitting then it simply wouldn't be a very good poem. A great poem operates on several levels: emotional, intellectual, spiritual, even physical i.e.the aural pleasure of the sound of the words. If you memorize just one of MacNeice's short lyrics such as 'Sunlight on the garden' or ' Meeting Point' (which I might add is included in the 'Nations Favourite poetry of the twentieth century') and let it sit with you for a while, I fail to see how you couldn't appreciate the genius of MacNeice's craft
If MacNeice is not to your taste then you are perfectly entitled to your opinion, but make sure its for the right reasons - just because you have never perceived a fire as bubbling doesn't mean MacNeice didn't or indeed anyone else couldn't.
In his day, MacNeice was an incredibly popular poet and he quickly grew out of any pretention he had in his youth.In terms of his mass appeal, some of his raido plays went out to literally millions of people in his lifetime and they were liked by the vast majority of his listeners. How many poets have tested their writing on an audience of such scake (a truly mass audience)?

This has been a good discussion as it makes people think about his poetry. The worst thing for a poet is indifference!

p.s. In reference to Vaugh Williams, he and MacNeice had very similar tastes in literature. Both admired George Herbert's poems and both drew on Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in their work: Williams for 'Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis'(1910) and MacNeice for his great radio play 'The Dark Tower'. MacNeice said in praise of 'Pilgrim's Progress' that 'it came from the people and was addressed to them', identifying therefore with the works democratic aspects.

So all you have to do is combine some obscure words, some words with arcane meanings, and quote some literary phrases with some oblique meaning that only someone very well read in literature and poetry would remember and in Irish eyes, that鈥檚 a great poem. I鈥檓 not surprised. Believe it or not, I鈥檝e had first hand experience having become a certified honorary Irish poet myself. (I couldn鈥檛 make this stuff up folks, fact is stranger than fiction.) It happened probably about 30 or 35 years ago when the makers of Paddy鈥檚 and Murphy鈥檚 Irish Whiskey invited entries into an Irish poet鈥檚 contest advertised in the Sunday New York Times Magazine offering a prize for the best poem extolling the virtues of their distilled spirits. My sister and I composed what had to be the silliest and one of the funniest limericks either of us could recall, we laughed and laughed and sent it in as a lark. (Sadly it鈥檚 lost forever to some obscure nook in one of countless boxes in my basement.) Now I don鈥檛 mind losing to the better man or woman but when the winning poem was published, it was one of those sickeningly sweet odes to a Colleen whose hair and clothing were blowing in the wind as she was 鈥渁 comin鈥� through the rye.鈥� Kind of reminded me of Maureen O鈥橦ara in The Quiet Man. It was truly disgustingly soapy and sappy, almost a parody on a Victorian era formula poem. At least we got a certificate attesting to our being genuine Irish poets out of it, also lost to one of those countless boxes. Now how many of you have ever thought about a Colleen when you were belting down a shot of Irish whiskey? Maybe if you were, they were thoughts that needed a lot more than one shot.

Forgettable; 鈥渂y a high star our course is set鈥�

Unforgettable: 鈥淎nd all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.鈥�

I don鈥檛 know if MacNeice wrote his line first but against Masefield, he revealed himself as a hack. That鈥檚 what all of his references tell me, he can鈥檛 stand on his own. BTW, Masefield had whales but no narwhals in his poem. Perhaps I鈥檇 have thought better of him had he written;

We are dying Erin dying
From pneumonia of the pen
From anemia of the ink
From sclerosis of the mind
From atrophy of the imagination
Alas poor garden, I knew him well

I think that if MacNeice could have stuck to his subject and taken some of the saccharine out of his writing, he might have had a fine carreer at the Hallmark Greeting Card Company. 鈥淢y fondest wishes to you and deepest sympathy upon learning of the loss of your literary heritage.鈥�

Interesting discussion, Mark, but perhaps you are getting over excited about a minor 'poet'?

I won't ask you about your views on painting but you might enjoy this article. It asks the question "What is Painting" and opines "Who Cares!"

Regards,
Michael

Cargoes

QUINQUIREME of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amythysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

John Masefield

No obscure words or references there then. I understand it all completely??? 'QUINQUIREME' everyone knows what that is.
But I do quite like Masefield and I want to find out! Why should that word impede my initial enjoyment of the poem?!

I'm tempted to ask 'How can a pen have pneumonia?' but thats poetic licence, the same way a fire can bubble I suppose! ' Anyway,
The charge(among other things) against MacNeice seems to be that he uses obscure literary references in his work, and obscure/arcane words. Yet during the argument, Vaugh Williams, John Masefield, and Walt Whitman have been referred to.isn't there a contradiction here i.e using 'obscure' literary references to prove that a poet shouldn't use obscure literary references!

Anyway, whether some institution or critic, classifies Louis as minor or major, is beside the point for me in the final analysis. He left something behind that inspires and challenges still. Personal taste is a strange thing, but to me he was one of the very great writers. Here is poem to which the term saccharine could never be applied; which is low on intertext and high on good old fashioned plain language and genius with words

Louis MacNeice - Prayer before Birth
I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

Marvellous!!!!

Nice hearing from you again Michael. I thought this discussion might just bring you out of the woodwork. I wouldn't be surprised if Maureen puts in an appearance.

So what is art? (or poetry, or anything?) If you took my philosophy of life at face value, then you know that ultimately if I am forced to tell the truth, the answer is not that it doesn't matter but that the question itself is absurd. As you know I firmly believe that life is purposeless and pointless and that one day all traces of human existence will vanish forever. Some people of course have to invent rationalizations like god and religion to keep from going insane from knowing it. Maybe that鈥檚 one reason why it is so important to them that they kill each other to protect their own carefully constructed psychological fortress, which defends them against this realization and avoids facing the horrible truth of existence, 鈥渓ike sands through the hourglass, so go the days of our lives.鈥� And that鈥檚 my happy thought for today.

You can define art any way you like so that you can include or exclude any and every effort ever proffered as art. I think this is the power of a Noam Chomsky, a clever linguist can invent new meanings to words or twist words around to say and mean whatever he likes although Chomsky鈥檚 motives are far more sinister than to merely condemn a painter or poet he doesn't fancy or boost the prospects of one he does.

So what's the point of this discussion? It's to pretend that it does matter, merely as a diversion to take our minds off the fact that the time between now and eternal death is passing with each second. Most of us don't know how much time we have left but we know it is finite. So for the sake of amusement we pretend that there is such things as art and poetry and argue pointlessly and endlessly over what they are and aren't.

Simon;
Oh I like that one 鈥渞owing home to sunny Palestine.鈥� Masefield should have stuck around a few more decades, he鈥檇 have thought better of writing that line. And鈥︹�漺ith a cargo of鈥pes.鈥� Today that would be like sending coals to Newcastle. Had 鈥淧rayer Before Birth鈥� been better composed, surely the anti-abortionists would have used it extensively and chanted it as their mantra. Maybe they could have put it to music and adopted it as their international anthem.

How can a pen get pneumonia? The same way a ditch can. If MacNeice can have a ditch flooded with pleural fluid, I can have a poet鈥檚 pen on inspirational life support. I think he was dragooned into being as a 鈥渓ethal automaton鈥� just as he feared. Only as Michael points out, we define it with the term 鈥渕inor poet.鈥� Imagine taking a course where this stuff is required reading. Literary Trivia 101; The collected works of Louis MacNeice and other minor poets. If people could actually die of boredom, would an endless string of mediocre verse violate the Geneva Conventions? Would Satre鈥檚 play 鈥淣o Exit鈥� have been scripted to have taken on this vision of hell where there is no merciful death to end the suffering? Yeeech. :-)

Well as MacNeice once said: 'If you constantly see through things, you never see into them.'

Re 17:

Simon:

Or as C.S. Lewis put it ....

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Regards,
Michael

PS: Mark: I have been 'off the air' because of technical problems with posting to this blog (now corrected). Re: Maureen ... over in Ireland at the moment!