More of the wisdom of William Plomer

A very happy
St. Patrick's Day to you--
and to my mother on her
rather large St. Patrick's Day
Birthday--

ART AND THE WORLD

from "A Writer's Faith"

"I believe in art because of its ability not only to console one when life is disheartening but for its power at any time to make life less disheartening and more exciting, to make life fuller and happier, when it already seems full and happy--when one is young, for instance, and in love, and beginning to succeed in one's chosen work."

"When we come to the question of what my belief in art has meant to me in my own life, I would say that it has meant first and foremost a battle. I do not mean a battle against any wavering or weakening of that belief held by me, but a battle against the pressure of the everyday world."

THE DEATH OF CIVLIZATION

from "Leonard Woolf"

"Leonard Woolf loved life and enjoyed many things right up to the time of his last illness. But he did feel, and had reason to feel, like most people who can recall the atmosphere in the early years of this century and who were living above the powerty-line, that the kind of hopefulness or confidence which largely imbued life in Western Europe before 1914 became, from then on, hardly tenable and eventually impossible. He felt that civilization, in his sense of the word, had largely declined and had on a large scale been destroyed..."

CAVAFY AS MIRROR

from "C. P. Cavafy"

"Cavafy is like that old mirror which 'had seen, and seen, / In the many years it had been / In existence, thousands of things and faces;' and he has that kind of serene disillusionment and spiritual urbanity that is only to be found in old, noble, and corrupt civilizations." --C. P. Cavafy

PEASANTS IN GLORY

from "R. S. Thomas"

"Round the obscure, small village spins 'on slow axis' a world 'vast and meaningful', everything matters, the transient is seen in the light of the eternal."

SWEETNESS

from "The Church Operas" (from essays on Benjamin Britten)

"It would be a mistake to suppose that the refinements of Nō make it a precious or remote or esoteric form of musical drama. 'The purpose of all art', Zeami wrote, 'is to bring sweetness to the hearts of all people and to harmonize high and low.'"

SECOND-HAND LIVES

from "Marginalia" (27 July 1952: Houghton)

"Conversation with the Queen Mother about Elizabeth I. She said she greatly wished she had had a classical education. I asked her if she had had any classics at all. Only a little Latin, she said. She rather wistfully wondered how there could be a 'new Elizabethan Age' when people were too easily satisfied with second-hand things, cinema, television, newspapers, etc."

OBLIGING LORD BYRON AND HIS MUM

(17 May 1969)

At the Poetry Dinner at the Rembrandt Hotel, over which I presided, a Nottinghamshire member told me that there is an elderly chemist stilll living in Nottingham whose grandfather, or great-grandfather, carried on the same occupation there, being spoken of in those days as an apothecary. He relates that Byron's mother once came over from Newstead, and said that if Lord Byron were to come in and ask the apothecary to make up a poisonous draught, she wished him to dilute it with distilled water. Shortly afterwards Byron came in and said, 'If Lady Byron comes in and requires you to mix a poisonous draught, you will oblige me by diluting it with saline.' The apothecary supposed that these visits were the result of a great row between the mother and son.

"THE DARK PLACES OF THOUGHT"

from "Herman Melville"

"He saw what the world was and he saw what it might be, and the difference between these two visions sent him into a kind of trance."

Not enough? http://thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/2009/01/christmas-to-epiphany.html All these quotes from Plomer are from Electric Delights, a lovely book from David R. Godine.

Photograph of a whitewashed and thatched Irish cottage with rhododendrons and a heap of dried peat: courtesy of http://www.sxc.hu/ and the photographer, Mira Pavlakovic of Croatia.

Christmas-to-Epiphany

2009 WRITING RESOLUTIONS

Finally, finally, finally come up with a topic for the nonfiction book request because in the current Titanic-going-down publishing climate, one should be grateful for requests from a high-class house. Then work on it!

Don't be lazy. Send out those dratted little white envelopes now and then. I still hate submitting poetry and am glad some magazines have online submissions.

Work on collecting a book of stories.

Don't be lazy, no. 2; do something about What Sits on the Shelf.

Don't be lazy no. 3; do more readings.

Another long narrative poem? More poems, definitely and already.

Write a ghost tale worthy of M. R. James and Henry James. Perhaps a few other stories.

Commit surprise.


NEW YEAR'S EVE

I usually post our dinner menu (8:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. this year), but I don't seem to have kept track of wines and champagne and drinks. Unless I extract them from my husband later, you'll just have to keep imagining the stars in the glass...

It was a bit like Epiphany, as we had three Kings from afar for dinner--one from Australia, one originally from Canada, and one who was born on runway nine at Heathrow, back when it was a village and not an airport. Peter King, the runway child of 86, is one of the funniest men of my acquaintance and gives me hope that elder ages can be joyful.

Appetizers

Tapanade

Seared ahi tuna kabobs marinated in soy sauce and sesame seed
with wasabi mayonaise dipping sauce

Soup

Eggplant and roast red pepper pother

Fish

Backfin Crab cakes

with Rutabaga Scratchbacks and mongolian fire oil

Salad

Candied Walnuts, Blackberries and smoked gouda
on greens with olive oil and vinegar

Main

Braised short ribs and rosemary-cabernet sauce
Gorgonzola, wild mushroom and shallot polenta

Dessert

Old-fashioned gingerbread cake with mango ice cream

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WHAT I'M READING IN THE NEW YEAR

I'm reading the Potter books to N at bedtime and finding that I've changed my mind about Rowling, so that's interesting. I'm reading an old Godine book that collects essays of William Plomer--right now I'm reading some about English and Welsh poets and wondering if I am related to all these Welsh poetry-committing Thomases, as I have a fiery Welsh Thomas in the bole of my tree. I just picked up a copy of Eudora Welty's "The Robber Bridegroom" illustrated by Barry Moser and thought I might reread it and see if it's still on my love-list. Lots of poetry. Some William Logan essays. An anthology of ghost stories edit by Brad Leithauser.

SOME QUOTES FROM ELECTRIC DELIGHTS BY WILLIAM PLOMER
The electric delight of admiring what is admirable. --Charlotte Bronte, Shirley

Plomer puts me to shame, genre-wise. In these days of uniform packaged goods, I am inconvenient because I don't stick to one thing but write lyric poetry, long narrative poetry, novellas, stories, and novels. But Plomer! Poetry, novels, stories, biographies, autobiographies, children's book, libretti (with the great Benjamin Britten), and diaries (as editor). What a time that was, when one could be anything!

Although he declares that "poetry is simply an art to which the special gifts of women, who excel in so many things, are not as rule adapted," he is clearly in love with Christina Rossetti's poems and biography: "We have seen what that experience was: it was the experience of a woman of deep feeling who was frustrated in love and continally oppressed by illness, and whose heart and mind were subjected to a religious discipline, but who could not help singing; her sensuousness, her playfulness, her longings and regrets, her dreams and fears and fantasies, all found expression in her poetry. She has been called morbid, and if it is morbid not to take an easy way out of one's difficulties, not to except life on the cheap and easy terms that are good enough for most people, not to compromise, not to be ashamed to be sad and admit it; if it is morbid to be oppressed by the vanity of human wishes and worldly shows, well, then, she was morbid, and morbid in good company. But in reading her, we do well never to lose sight of the religious discipline, which causes her to strike often a strong and stoic note."

"A poet is liable to be a kind of exile in his own country or time: the consciousness of difference, and the effort to communicate it, may provide his motive power as a poet."

"It is needful for a serious writer to try and measure his own limitations; it must be his hope and it may be his luck to transcend them. Much of the verse offered to editors and publishers, and some of the verse they cause to be printed, is deformed by the inability of its authors to harmonize what they intend to say with their way of saying it, or to convince even the well-disposed reader that it is worth saying. Looking for poetry, that reader is often confronted with feeble or facile or bardic posturings, empty rhetoric, strainings after effect, reach-me-down diction, turgidity, false simplicity or false complexity." That was a passage from a positive review of R. S. Thomas in 1956. I wonder how he would sum up poetry's weaknesses in our time. It seems to me that ours are far greater than these.

ILLUSTRATION
That's a quick doodle by R, a few years back. She must have been around 15. I'm on my husband's computer and found it in his collection of pictures... And today is a Snow Day, free of school.