Messiaen's Birthday

I can't let today pass without noting that it would have been the 100th birthday of that great 20th century composer Olivier Messiaen, a favourite of mine. I've blogged before about what makes him so great for me, and my enthusiasm only deepens the more I hear his music.

Radio 3 is celebrating the centenary in suitable style: Messiaen was Composer of the Week last week (download the podcast here while you can) and his Quartet for the End of Time was the subject of Discovering Music on Sunday, but there is much more besides. And this after a summer and autumn already packed with Messiaen pieces! I'd be in heaven if I had the time and space to listen to them all.

The Essay and Much More

It's a good season for poetry on Radio 3. The Essay last week was deeply under the influence: five contemporary poets each on a poet who influenced them. I'd recommend in particular Michael Symmons Roberts on David Jones; WN Herbert on Edwin Morgan (don't ask me what the picture of Eilean Donan castle is about!); and Menna Elfyn on T Gwynn Jones. But hurry up and listen before they fall off the end of the iPlayer, which starts happening tomorrow.

But that's just the canape in comparison to the cornucopia of programmes on and/or involving work by Milton up till the end of the year. His shorter poems are being dropped into Breakfast and Afternoon on 3. They started in earnest with the Sunday Feature tonight, to which I'm listening as I write this, and continue with the Essay this week.

Poets on Radio 3

I love the work of Michael Symmons Roberts. He's one of the finest writers in Britain at the moment and quite possibly the best religious poet we have. This year, he has published two books: his second novel, Breath, and his fifth collection of poems, The Half-Healed. Both fine books, of which I intend to say more in due course. In this coming Sunday's Sunday Feature on Radio 3, he'll be exploring why elegy is such an enduring poetic mode. Apparently, he

talks to poets Douglas Dunn, Michael Longley and Gillian Clarke about their own elegies and discusses with Andrew Motion the challenges of writing elegies at times of public mourning. Michael writes a series of elegies to the elegists of the past and asks whether, in the way it captures lost moments, objects and people, all poetry is elegy.

Michael's radio style is distinctive and interesting. Should be worth hearing.

Another fine poet and novelist, John Burnside, was the guest on Sunday past's Private Passions, also on Radio 3. I like the programme for its focus on music, as befits its home. Burnside's choices are varied and beautiful; his comments on them typically intelligent and illuminating of his sensibilities and insights. Definitely worth listening to on the iPlayer before next Sunday's edition expunges it.

The Secret is Out

Interesting to hear Tom Paulin talking so much about the sound texture of poems on yesterday's edition of The Verb. Worth listening to while you still can (seven days). It's a trailer for his new book, The Secret Life of Poems, which Faber describes as

a primer which offers [47 poems] - or on occasion an excerpt - with succeeding commentary in which rhythm, form, metre and sources are the order of the day, not ethical commentary or descriptive paraphrase.

Sounds interesting. The Guardian Review carried what I assume is a sample from the book in December (an essay on Keats's "Ode to Autumn"). I didn't get round to reading it, but I should. This, of course, connects closely to my own reflections on rhyme (Note to new readers: start at the bottom).

In Denial?!

On last week's edition of The Verb, Paul Farley opined that "we" are "in denial about rhyme" because, when "we" rhyme, "we" use relative rhyme*.

If you've read my Reasoning Rhyme posts, it won't surprise you to learn that this is, in my opinion, utter tosh. Far from being a denial of rhyme, relative rhyme is a more linguistically subtle and complex form of rhyme, a realisation of the potentials inherent in the rhyme system but repressed by half-baked aesthetically conservative statements like Farely's.

Note too the insidious nature of the statement: Farley doesn't actually say we shouldn't use relative rhyme, just implies that twin rhyme* is real rhyme, boys and girls. And who is this "we" anyway? I presume it is the mainstream poetry-writing fraternity, Farley being a self-confessed guardian of the mainstream.

I have nothing against rhyming, whether twin or relative. Yes, I will confess to doing it myself sometimes, but only in the privacy of a poem. Moreover, I like some of Farley's work, even if I dislike anyone positioning themselves as mainstream or bust. However, ill-thought-out statements that creep towards closing down possibilities in poetry rather than opening them up really rile me. Okay, so it was radio and maybe it was off the cuff, but it sounded like something that had been bothering him for a while. Thankfully, he was paired in this discussion with Eleanor Rees, who spoke more sense.

There is always a danger that I might make daft statements like that myself, though obviously not such reactionary ones on rhyme. If I do, betake yourself to your local arms dealer and purchase a small surface-to-air missile with which to shoot me down.

*My terms, not his. See here for an explanation.

Scheduled Acts of Criticism

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I recommend a listen to this week's edition of "Poets and the Nation". It's a good, intelligent piece of broadcasting about how cultural change in Scotland has been reflected in poetry through the ages. It bounces about time a bit more than last week's, which is one thing in its favour.

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Radio 3 is celebrating the Auden centenary this week. It started with "Six Unexpected Days", a feature on Auden and the landscape of the Northern Pennines, and continues this week with the first run of a new series "The Essay", a 15-minute feature broadcast at 11pm Monday to Thursday. Last night's essayist was Dana Gioia on Auden as example. Tonight's is Kate Clanchy on the early political poetry.

Poems on Pillows: the Renga

After the horror of the photoshoot, we settled down to writing, with Ken first recording an introduction to the renga for the BBC Radio Scotland arts show Radio Cafe. Elspeth had to shuffle off for a live studio interview with them at lunchtime, but Richard and I were left voiceless on the airwaves.

Participating in a renga seems to attune the writing mind well to the sharp focus of the haiku style. It probably helped that the morning was glorious and there was plenty fodder for imagery in the view from the hotel room (I think it's the one at the top of this page) and even in the room itself. The four of us generally took quite different approaches to the strictures of the schema, which made for a stimulating day. Several stanzas that didn't make it into the renga were the equal of any that did.

Word is that, aside from the excerpts on the postcard, the whole renga will be published on the websites of the Scottish Poetry Library and Ten Hill Place. I'll post a link when that happens. It also might be displayed somewhere in the hotel, but you'll have to stay there to be able to see that!

Oh Do Desist, Dear Boy

Not that I'm given to watching Sunday morning TV, but I happened to see the art historian Brian Sewell pontificating disdainfully about modern art in churches on BBC 1 this morning. I assume the item, which was part of the Heaven & Earth show, was a brief televisual extension of his BBC Radio 3 show for Christmas week, the rather pompously entitled "Divine Art", which I missed, at least partly by design.

Sewell maintained that "we must insist" on a "spiritual" quality to religious art. The latter term seemed to mean visual art associated directly with Christian worship, which seems a remarkably narrow conception in today's society. However, although the rallying cry might not seem particularly controversial at first sight, it is hopelessly vague. Sewell did not define the "spiritual quality", but as far as I could gather, it is something to do with a sense of mysticism (a term Sewell used), transendence or the ethereal. From his reaction to the Henry Moore piece he lambasted, it certainly seemed to rule out any strong physiciality.

This is one of the most irritating things about Sewell's approach. Christianity in its orthodox forms--and remember, all the pieces he considered were for Christian places of worship--is founded on the belief that God became human in Christ or, to express it slightly differently, that Christ was fully human as well as fully pine. Therefore, the physical is as essential to the faith as the spiritual and ought be as strong an element in Christian art as the spiritual. God's transendence and immanence must be held in tension, if not necessarily in any single artwork then at least across the totality of Christian art.

The other irritatant was that Sewell didn't have anything positive at all to say about the modern and contemporary art he examined, except the grudging acceptance that Moore had at least considered the architectural setting of his altar, unlike another artist he critiqued. Granted, some of his criticisms were justified, but if he had lifted his head above his prejudices and ventured north, he might have found something to shake his disdain in Alison Watt's wonderful, award-winning painting Still in Old St Pauls Episcopal Church in Edinburgh. In this piece, presence and absence, the physical and the spiritual, death and resurrection meet naturally and powerfully. Surely even Brian Sewell could not fail to be moved.