selected letters 1994
Wednesday
October 19th 1994
Dear
R
Here's the three notes for the contents. I have sent by Swiftair the requests for permission for Reznikoff and Rothenberg, including the full works to show the contexts of quotes. To Black Sparrow I have pointed out that the essay is a work done by a poet out of love for Reznikoff's work and in the hope that people will read him: ie it is not a scripted career move by a salaried academic. I will phone Black Sparrow at the beginning of the week in California to see how that is faring. Jerome Rothenberg knows the people at the press I think so I've asked him to put in a word for me if it gets difficult.
Thanks very much for the script and the suite of books. As a whole the latter seem nicely to combine the tradition of the Cape Pocket books of the seventies with a certain unashamedly literary paperback tradition I associate with eg Penguin New Writers of the late forties and others of the early fifties. It's something to do with the colour range, though the texture declares them contemporary. It's a distinct identity.
I wonder if you would be interested for them in the new work that Gerrie Fellowes has been doing. She was one of the "five women poets" I invited to Bell College in September. Her book Technologies published by Polygon showed technical skill and her growing ability to write of landscape. But her new long poem, still in manuscript, in which she describes a return to the New Zealand of her childhood, is I think both a much more ambitious and a much more achieved work. It presents a personal recollection and description of a return to the places where she lived the first twelve years of her life, together with an imaginative recreation of the history of her Scottish predecessors there, and especially the "unrecorded" of the histories. It's the sort of thing that thematically could be a contemporary cliche, but in her hands it's extremely skilful and sensitive. She's not wholly finished, and had been thinking of Bloodaxe but I thought I would mention the work to yourself in case you want to ask for a look.
Thanks for being decent about my plaints. I will look up the letter to William Plomer to see if I ought to be outraged or flattered.
Wednesday
December 28th 1994
Dear
K
You
maybe remember my enthusing to you about the translations
by Dom Sylvester Houedard of Ernesto Cardenal's Spanish
translations ( a Russian doll of a sentence this) of the
Psalms. Dom Sylvester - I think I've shown or given you
some of his contemplative typewriter-abstracts - died
about a year ago. Cardenal ( I remember mentioning him in
relation to your work in my review in The Herald) was the
Jesuit Minister of Culture in the Sandanista government
1979-89, though you probably know that. Peter Manson who
used to come to my Glasgow University writers' group now
runs a quarterly, very formally progressive, poetry
magazine called Object Permanence. He plans to include
these previously unpublished translations in a June issue
of the magazine; he obtained them from Hayden Murphy, who
knew Dom Sylvester well and wrote his obituary for the
Guardian. I heard some of them when Dom Sylvester came to
a festival I organised at the then Third Eye Centre in
1978. I thought you'd like a copy of them.
Thanks
for the letter with your card. I hope your forthcoming
twelvemonth is at least as rewarding as the last evidently
was. I like your Ireland peace poem. It reminds me very
much of a poem I never wrote, which I wished I had, very
much, but felt I didn't have quite enough
information, because an encounter was cut short.
It
was when Sonya and I were in Galway town last summer, and
we were in a bar at the central square, I think now called
Kennedy Square. The bar was in a hotel, a Gaelic speaking
place, bustling with women with shopping bags who would
come in and wait on the next bus with or without a drink,
pubmen sitting around, children running up and down, cups
of coffee and tea in among the pints. At the bar I asked
for a drink for myself and Sonya, but the barman thought I
had asked for something I hadn't. They
won't understand your Glasgow accent here, said a
bloke sitting on the stool at the bar, on his own. He was
very friendly, told me he really liked Glasgow, then
explained that he was a former Linfield footballer in
Belfast, who had got a trial with Glasgow Rangers, then a
place in their reserves. But he had got homesick, and went
home. He had apparently been quite a big noise in his day
with Linfield - the notorious (to my childhood culture)
Linfield, who had put Belfast Celtic out of business while
their supporters attacked Belfast Celtic players, and the
RUC/ B Specials had looked on. I felt a strong instinctive
kinship with this guy, two outsiders in this Gaelic
Catholic pub, I'd very happily have sat there a
while and had a good crack and a drink. Anyway: some poems
come through, and some don't. The poem "To my brother in
Ireland - an anecdote" never had enough to get it there,
and to force it would have made it a sentimentality, like
one of those Symbolic Social Significance poems that
schools thrive on, and make me want to boke. But I wish I
had been able to have had a longer talk with him, with or
without a poem.
I will be in Northern Ireland this summer as it happens, Michael and Edna Longley have invited me to their July summer school somewhere in the glens of Antrim. I append one poem that did come through a few weeks ago, I suppose a myth of revolutionary circumstances, in sundry fields.
(undated)
I
apologise for the fact that my being on holiday has meant
that I have been unable to reply sooner as referee to
Bobby Christie, who has applied for admission to the
Diploma Course in Writing. He would make an excellent
student on the course, of that I am certain. I have known
him personally and as a writer for ten years. He is of
independent mind, an independence substantially gained I
am sure from having earned his living since leaving school
without going through the university phase, whilst
remaining throughout a keen reader and writer. He has
always been eager to extend his experience of life, a life
he nearly lost after contracting malaria on a trip through
Africa for which he had saved up while working as a
glazier. But, the important thing was that he not only
survived but he emerged with his fine book of
poems,Transit Visa. Not that he is someone "who wanted
some experience" to tip into the jug of his verse. His
achievement in producing the poems in this book was more
precisely to do with the formal progress he had made over
a decade of writing, and booklet publishing. He's a
listener, and a dispassionate studier of other people's
techniques: his own opinion is now much respected, and
rightly, in the writers' group he sometimes attends, and
which I was asked to chair for a season last winter. I
have seen in manuscript a recent sequence of unpublished
poems: poems, some of which I like very much, which bring
together "moments" of friendship, moments of sexual
happiness, and moments of political disclosure, of anger
and perception. His political and artistic commitment are
total: it was appropriate that if there had only to be one
festival in Britain which commemmorated the twentieth
anniversary of Neruda's death last year, it was Bobby
Christie who organised it. I won't go on further about his
work as editor of anthologies, sufficient to say that he
rejects much as well as accepts, and that he has provided
necessary space for others besides himself to have their
voices heard. In sum I admire Mr Christie as a writer and
as one always trying to learn more, which therefore makes
it not wholly surprising that he should have applied for
this course.
[Undated though among the 1994 letters on my hard disk. Bobby read and published as part of the Itinerant Poets in Paisley in the 1980's, a group which included Jim Ferguson, Graham Fulton, Margaret Fulton Cook. He set up the Neruda Press and still writes.]