My recent absence from this blog is not a mark of faux respect for the death of the queen. But I have used the hiatus in normal life to immerse myself in the poetry of Ed Dorn, for which I am grateful to the poet Roy Kelly. A few weeks back, he posted a tweet:


The rain came down softly
a soaking thing,
a line from a book read
54 years ago, a line remembered
these 54 years, and still
to be found in pages now
tanned and brittle, pages
appropriately water-stained,
the rain still falling there,
falling forever, there and
in my word memory.


That opening couplet resonated, and stuck with me for a couple of weeks during which I Googled the lines, the final phrase, and various beat poets I thought might be responsible. Eventually I contacted Roy. Had he remembered the forgotten poem and/or the forgotten poet? Well, yes and no.

It’s a long story. He had tracked down the poet, finding a review of a public reading in which the lines were quoted. It was Ed Dorn, a poet with whom I had a brief obsession in the early ‘70s following the publication of Gunslinger. He was a prolific poet and a purchase of his Collected Poems failed to locate the lines.

Roy however has access to The Poetry Library and had a sense that the source was to be found in an ancient volume entitled New Writing in the USA. They found the publication for him and he  turned to the Ed Dorn section and read the poems. It wasn’t there.

But all was not lost. The Poetry Library offers a Find-a-Poem service, which is a kind of Apple Genius Bar for forgetful lovers of poetry. He registered his enquiry and returned New Writing in the USA. He was turning away when the Genius called him. “I’ve found it” he said.

And there it was. Not a poem. Two sentences from a prose-piece entitled 1st Avenue.

The rain comes down softly. A soaking thing.

It is prose but a reader would be forgiven for remembering it as poetry. It is poetry, isn’t it? Or is it a prose poem? Or prose which has a poetic flavour?

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. But I’m glad I now know it. And I’m grateful to Roy Kelly for recalling it, tracking it down and using it as the impetus for the exquisite poem above.


Today from the everysmith vaults: Only connect. The synapses function in this manner: from Ed Dorn to Jack Kerouac to his prose poem October in the Railroad Earth to the band Railroad Earth and Elko. That’s what’s playing as I post this.

If you place a government in a sealed box - let's call it the UK - together with something that could kill it - let's call it the unions - you would not know if the government was dead or alive until the UK was opened. Until that happens, one could say that the government was both dead and alive.

Johnson is allegedly on holiday in Slovenia, where he arrived from a round of parties at Chequers. Zahawi, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is also on holiday. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, has disappeared off the face of the tabloids. Dominic Raab, the Deputy Prime Minister, is at the time of writing in Thames Ditton. Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, is engaged full-time in her spat with Rishi Sunak. Oh, and the Leader of the Opposition is also on holiday.

There is clearly nothing for them to do at the moment. There is of course a cost of living crisis, which is casting millions into fuel and fuel poverty and which is forecast to get worse and worse in the coming months. But that can wait until September. Or maybe October or November.

So too can the climate emergency.

So too can the parlous state of the NHS.

So too can education, the housing crisis, the problems for trade in the aftermath of Brexit.

None of these, in the view of the governing and opposition parties, require immediate attention.

We used to call this the 'silly season'. Nothing happens, so newspaper headlines focus on frivolous inanities, the less serious stories.

The problem this year is that we have a succession of issues which are very serious indeed, which are profoundly important and fundamental to all of us.

Is the government alive to them? They are certainly dead to me.


Today from the everysmith vaults: TS Eliot once said (admitted? confessed?) that The Waste Land was "just a piece of rhythmical grumbling". Hearing his reading of it, I was inclined to agree. But to 'celebrate' the centenary of the poem, Drama on 3 put out He Do The Waste Land in Different Voices, a reading which while faithful to the text, shows us the different characters and different voices of what is not merely a poem but the first radio play. Quite brilliant.

James Darke is not Rick Gekoski, and Rick Gekoski is not James Darke. But sometimes they rhyme.

I have known James Darke for a mere five years - since 2017, when I saw him at his keyboard, Googling local handymen and adding to the search criteria, the word taciturn. I knew him, I understood him, immediately. Or so I thought. The paradox is that it has taken three volumes of autobiography for this anti-social misanthrope to explain and develop his contrarian - oppositional is the word used - life and lifestyle.

I have known Rick for rather longer, since 1987. And yes, he is also “bookish”, a man of letters, someone for whom books - reading them, writing them, trading them - has been both the business and the pleasure of his life. In the process, he has arrived, as has James, at some judgements of writers which are not mainstream; in fact, might be perceived as being deliberately against the mainstream.

It is tempting, when one knows both author and his character, to read the book with an expectation, even a hope, of finding parallels between the two. (I did so in After Darke when reminded of a weekend at Goddards, a Lutyens house in Surrey, to which James takes his family.) That such parallels exist throughout the Darke trilogy is incontrovertible, but they are irrelevant, even misleading, because James springs into our world fully formed with that single and singular addition to his search criteria.

That was five years ago. And into those five years is condensed an extraordinarily diverse series of events. I am trying to avoid spoilers, but it is noteworthy how his grief in the first volume has been mitigated by genuine wit in the third. Not cynicism; not sarcasm. He is no longer angry, even if he continues to be ‘oppositionsl’.

For example: The attempted hoax on the publishing trade is a fine conceit - a witty concept, wittily executed. And perhaps it is prompted by the author’s own experiences with agents and editors and publishers, which goes back to 1998 and the publication of Staying Up.

Or perhaps not. Only James Darke knows and he won’t tell, because we have come to the end of this chapter, this novel, this trilogy.

I, for one, will miss him. Immensely.

Today from the everysmith vaults: A random choice from the Rough & Rowdy Ways Tour from LA last month. A special delight is the encore, a fine version of Friend of the Devil.

Every time I see Devers, or Story, or Big Papi, or Manny hit the ball out of the park, I am reminded that Ted Williams reckoned it was the most difficult skill in sports. (Even Bob Dylan knew it was beyond him. “I wish I could hit a 100mph fastball” he said, “but you have to stick to what you know”.)

I never saw Williams play. I never read his book The Science of Hitting. In fact, I had never heard of him until I read a piece in the New Yorker by John Updike, entitled Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, and I only read that because it was by John Updike, whose laconic prose style and risqué story-telling was a phase I was going through back in the '60s.

Typically, Updike's essay on the final appearance of Ted Williams, the Kid, was more about his relationship with his current mistress, who had cancelled a tryst that afternoon and Updike had sought solace at Fenway Park, where he was privileged to see Williams sign off with a home run, hit into the Sox bullpen in right centre field.

It was the last of 521 homers that he hit for the Red Sox in a career which, interrupted by World War 11 and the  Korean War, spanned 21 years, of which nearly five were on military service. A new book, by Bill Nowlin, celebrates not all of them but those which were 'winning' HRs. By the criteria applied by Nowlin, there were 110 of them. His final hit, in his final game, was a deep drive to right field on a pitch by Jack Fisher. There were only 10,000 fans in the park, but they gave him a two minute ovation.

Williams being Williams, with a famously ambivalent relationship with what became the Red Sox Nation, he did not emerge from the dugout to tip his cap. As Updike said, “Gods do not answer letters.”

Bill Nowlin is no John Updike. But he has written half a dozen or so books about The Kid and more about the Sox. He was also the co-founder of Rounder Records, specialists in country and bluegrass music and released the first Alison Kraus album as well as re-releases of recordings by the Carter Family, Jelly Roll Morton, Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie.

His thoroughness is awesome. His prose style less so, but that's because he is dealing in facts. Facts - and stats - are what American sports writing are about, unless you are John Updike or Bernard Malamud or Philip Roth or (my favourite) Don DeLillo. And this book* - The Kid Blasts a Winner - is a winner, not least because, by definition, it concerns itself with all Ted's game-winning (or to be accurate, game-deciding) home runs.

Which, by definition, means the Sox won every game he writes about.

For me, that makes it a great read. From beginning to end.

I was lucky. From the moment this Englishman’s obsession with the Sox began,  I only had to wait just a few years for my first World Series championship. Ted Williams played in only one series, in 1946 when, injured, he was ineffectual. But his couple of decades in a Red Sox uniform were a time that I wish I had been part of.

Bill Nowlin was right there, to the extent that he once put a mitt on a Ted home run to the centre field bleachers.

What's more, I wish I had divided my time between Fenway and the recording studio in which Alison Krauss was singing. Bill Nowlin did.

So, maybe, I wish I was Bill Nowlin. But you have to stick to what you know.

* I am grateful to Summer Game Books for my pre-publication opportunity to read this book. I loved it.

Today from the everysmith vaults:​ In the early years of this century, Phil Lesh put together a quintet which took improvisation to new levels. This morning, I am attempting (again) to get to the heart of this extraordinary stuff.

On the 17th of May 1649, three leading Levellers - Private John Church, Corporal Perkins, and Cornet James Thompson - were executed by firing squad in the churchyard at Burford. This event, which achieved its objective of diminishing and almost eliminating Leveller influence within the New Model Army, is commemorated each year in the town

This year, for the first time since the pandemic, it reverted to a live demonstration in defence of democracy and the right to protest. Speakers included the Reverend Canon Professor Mark Chapman, Ann Hughes - whose study of the Civil War in my county of Warwickshire is seminal, John Rees author of the definitive The Leveller Revolution, Richard Burgon MP and, loudest of all, Attila the Stockbroker.

The attendance - a few hundred - did not match some previous, pre-pandemic, years but it was representative of almost every strand of socialist thought - from communists and clerics to academics and activists, from Greens to Labour, from trades unionists and the International Brigades Trust to a plethora of maverick radicals like me.

This demographic and political diversity is appropriate. The Levellers were equally diverse. Those who wore the sea-green colours came from many social classes and espoused many political aspirations. The Diggers originally called themselves The True Levellers. And Henry Denne, in 1649, wrote that “We were an heterogeneal body, consisting of parts very diverse from one another, settled upon principles inconsistent with one another.”

But they united in the common cause.

Today, few of us can argue with any of the demands outlined in the Agreement of the People. And nor did those who organised around it in The Saracen’s Head.

They may have had different emphases, disagreements over detail, more ambitious objectives for the long-term. But in their debates, no-one accused another of factionalism. Such accusations were the tactics of those who would be prominent in the counter-revolution, the Grandees, and the most prominent of their actions is surely the Cromwell’s order and the executions at Burford.

Which is why Levellers’ Day is important. At Burford, on the Saturday nearest to the 17th of May, the broad left can put aside differences and show solidarity not merely with the three martyrs but the commitment of hundreds of thousands of people of all persuasions to the greater good.

We can learn from them.

And if I have one key take-away from the day, it is this from Richard Burgon MP:

“The Tories know what they are doing” he said. “We must be as class conscious as they are.”

Today from the everysmith vaults: I used to love Jacques Loussier’s transcriptions of Bach but seldom play them any more. But I have recently discovered that he has given Erik Satie the same treatment. Playing now are the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes. Exquisite.

“History doesn’t repeat itself; but it often rhymes.” This take on Marx’s famous dictum, in 18 Brumaire, that history repeats itself - the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce - is widely attributed to Mark Twain, although it was in fact coined by the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik. Both the Marx and Reik quotes occurred to me yesterday, appropriately May Day.

I was listening to Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast. After nine of them, including the English, the American, the French, the Haitian, the July, the 1848, the Commune, and the Mexican revolutions, Mike finally arrived at the Russian Revolution back in May 2019 and is still going strong.

I am always a few episodes behind, so I was listening to #10.94 which was concerned, inter alia, with the 10th Party Congress in 1921 and, in particular, the response of Lenin and Trotsky to the criticism by the Workers’ Opposition and the Democratic Centralists of the Communist Party leadership.

Their response was to accuse the critical organisations of factionalism. Apologies to you Trots out there, but Trotsky was the strongest and most vicious in his condemnation of the WO demands: How could the party which was “the political manifestation of the industrial proletariat” betray the industrial proletariat? To claim this, was to deny both the vanguard role of the party and, thus, the revolution itself.

Of course, in its criticism of the top-down hegemony of party bureaucrats, it was doing no such thing. But Lenin (and Trotsky) were more concerned by the fact that the opposition was organised. The party had already taken over the unions, on the basis that the workers needed no protection from an employer which was their own state. Now, by banning factions, it was extending this theoretical concept to anyone with concerns or criticisms of the party. Especially if they expressed them in meetings or published them in newspapers and periodicals.

But ban them they did. No manifestations of factionalism of any sort would be tolerated, and failure to comply with this resolution “is to entail unconditional and immediate expulsion from the party”. And the power to define factionalism and expel members?

The Central Committee.

This resolution, On Party Unity, is crucial to the future of the party and the country. Because one man, Stalin, saw the opportunity to dictate what was right, what was wrong, who was in and who was out. And if you didn’t like it, you were guilty of factionalism and expelled.

I’m writing this on May Day, less than a month since a Jewish comrade and friend in my constituency was expelled from the Labour Party for anti-semitism.

I’m cautious about drawing precise parallels. But are you concerned about the denial of free speech within the party and the diktats of Starmer and Evans? Do the recent and continuing purges in the Labour Party, aimed primarily at left-wing Jews and socialists, ring a bell?

If it does, then the bell tolls for thee.

Today from the everysmith vaults: The John Adams Violin Concerto. A recent discovery which is haunting me day and night. The recording I have is by Leila Josefowicz and the St Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson. I’ll be checking out others in the weeks to come.

"When we genuinely speak we do not have the words ready to do our bidding, we have to find them. And we do not know exactly what we are going to say until we have said it, and we say and hear something new that has never been said or heard before." 

​This counterpoint to Wittgenstein's famous 7th proposition in TLP is from Auden's Secondary Worlds published in 1968. I wish I had read it then.

In recent years, I have used this blog and these posts to work out positions and identify issues. Not exclusively, but primarily. Seldom do I have a preconceived argument to advance in advance, and my faux-Oulipian approach (500-ish words and no more than an hour at the keyboard) is intended to sharpen my focus.

It also serves to establish priorities. In the last few weeks, there has been and remains much to consider. Ukraine, of course, but also Syria and Afghanistan; the expulsion of a friend and comrade from the Labour Party for anti-semitism (yes, of course he's Jewish); the awesome shows from Dylan on the Spring leg of the Rough & Rowdy Ways tour; the imminence of a new baseball season (we play the Yankees in the Bronx tomorrow); the selling-off of Channel 4; the fact that Covid has preventing me seeing many of my grandchildren for months; the culling of a beautiful tree in a nearby garden.

​You will note that, even half way through this post, I still do not have the words ready to do my bidding. In fact, I have not yet even an inkling of what my bidding should be. So some random thoughts on a recent discovery.

I have stumbled on a series of books by Timothy Venning, entitled An Alternative History of Britain. I started with the English Civil War.

Venning concerns himself with the ‘what-ifs’ of history. In the volume I have read, the chapter headings give the game away. His Edgehill chapter, for example, is entitled Could the war have been won quickly by the King?  The year 1644 is headed Was the war winnable in 1644 - by the King, or by parliament without resorting to the creation of the New Model Army?

Not snappily worded, I agree. But good questions. And inside these larger questions are small details of what might have happened has something happened or not happened.

A new one for me is the fact that Parliamentary cavalry commander Stapleton had a clear shot, at close quarters, at the charismatic Prince Rupert during the first battle of Newbury. His pistol misfired.

Would Rupert's death have destroyed morale in the Royalist cause? Would the King have given in? Or would he continued his stubborn approach? Would he, perhaps, have refused to engage at Marston Moor?

​Venning describes it as “the most vital what if of the battle”. Of such mishaps is history made.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Not actually in the vaults but it will be. It is PJ Proby reading from Eliot’s The Waste Land and its bloody brilliant. The recommendation comes from the poet Roy Kelly (@stanfan49) who writes: “Summer and PJ surprised us.” Thanks, Roy.

If anyone mentions 9/11 to me, the television images flood back. The tanks in the streets, the thousands confined in football stadiums, the bombing of the Presidential palace, the torture and murders, the burning of books, the death of Allende.

No, this 9/11 is not the attack on the twin towers. This 9/11 was in 1973 in Chile when Pinochet and the CIA launched a coup d’etat against the democratically elected presidency of Salvador Allende and for nearly twenty years imposed a vicious programme of neoliberalism.

Essentially, the Pinochet regime turned Chile into a laboratory for experimenting with the ideas of Friedrich Hayek. Hayek was primarily an economist, but his economic liberalism forced him into political philosophy. As thousands of trade unionists and leftists were tortured and murdered, Hayek was writing to The Times to defend the coup.

“I have not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet that it had been under Allende” he wrote.

He should have got out more. But his small circle was convinced that democracy was an irrelevance. The free market, he wrote, is ‘indispensable for individual freedom … the ballot box is not.’ Small though the circle was and is, this conviction was and is powerful and influential.

Hayek and Pinochet were, of course, both friends of Thatcher, who carried a Hayek manual in her famous handbag. Hayek wrote to her complaining of the slow progress of neoliberalism in the UK, comparing it with the ‘achievements’ in a short space of time in Chile.

We are nearly half a century on and neoliberalism is still hegemonic, although the term itself is not. Its adherents are in denial. Although I have never heard Sunak use the term in public, he is on record as stating that he emphatically favours Hayek over Keynes. And of there is the odious Nick Cohen in a column published in The Observer on the Sunday before the second round of polling in Chile, claiming that not Blair, not Cameron, not even Thatcher herself, were neoliberals.

In his victory speech, Gabriel Boric told us that ‘If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave’.

I profoundly hope so. For Chile, Latin America, and the rest of the world.

Today from the everysmith vaults: I have been revisiting the Airplane and subsequently the Starship. I think the prompt was a proposed live performance of Blows Against the Empire, which is where I started this morning. The mono version of Surrealistic Pillow followed, then Crown of Creation, and right now the final Airplane show at Winterland in August 1972. Love anything with Papa john Creach.

In October 1818, John Keats responded to a letter from Richard Woodhouse complimenting him on a review of Endymion which had appeared in the Quarterly Review. He wrote: “As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself - it has no self - it is every thing and nothing - It has no character - it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated - It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet." He goes on to point out that “A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity.” He has “no self”.

The parallel is clear. John Bauldie’s posthumously published book, titled The Chameleon Poet and sub-titled Bob Dylan’s Search for Self is a tardy but nonetheless interesting contribution to the faux Dylan-Keats debate of decades ago, a debate in which I engaged at the time but always with an understanding that, although I was a lover of Keats and remain so to this day, the quarrel was of no relevance to an appreciation of either. Then, it was about defending the genius of Dylan against the snobbery of people like AS Byatt and, crucially, defending the song against the poem. It was about defining poetry.

Bob of course, Bob being Bob, he was ambivalent. “Yippee, I’m a poet and I know it” he sang, before adding (just in case he was being taken seriously) “Hope I don’t blow it!” And when asked directly if he regarded himself as a poet, he replied “I think of myself as just a song & dance man”. Michael Gray, the pioneer of Dylan studies, seized on this conceit in his seminal triptych, Song & Dance Man, the first volume of which was published as far back as 1972 and in which I am not aware of any mention of John Keats. 

According to Bill Allison’s excellent (and for me, informative) introduction to The Chameleon Poet, Michael’s first volume inspired Bauldie. Reading it, he realised he wanted to be more of a Dylanologist than a Bobcat (although he is credited with the coinage of the latter term, which refers to those who follow the shows as compared with the desk-bound scholars). Certainly, Bauldie makes no reference to shows, to music, to performances. His emphasis is almost exclusively on textual analysis, including the movies and - importantly - Bob’s writings on the back cover of the sleeves. It's practical criticism. Throw in his degree in English and his experience as a teacher of English, and you have the nub of Bauldie’s approach.

It is, in many ways, a schoolmasterly book. You see how I started this piece talking about Keats and only by association moved onto Bob himself? That’s a trick Bauldie uses in this book as he must have done many times in classrooms as both student and teacher. One chapter, ostensibly concerned with Bob’s early work, begins with a lengthy exegesis of King Lear. Others reference Hesse, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Jung. Even if one didn’t know about Bauldie’s untimely death, one could make an informed guess at the date of the manuscript of this book.

Bauldie was older than me. By five days. We were both born in the last days of the summer holidays in 1949. We both combined our love of Bob with support for under-performing football teams. His interests were my interests at that time and the compare-and-contrast methodology with which we had been imbued is a way of thinking and explaining adopted by all of us in and out of the classroom.

He is not as meticulous in his readings as Michael Gray, who, in turn, is not as meticulous as Christopher Ricks. But who is? Nevertheless, there are some keen insights here. He is particularly good on Planet Waves and John Wesley Harding. And, passim, he is excellent in his distinguishing of the noumenal Bob from the phenomenal, the inner from the outer, the masked and anonymous from the simple and direct.

I wish I had known John Bauldie. But I know him well enough now through this book. And I am reminded of one of my favourite Bob stories.

“You don’t know me, but I know you” said a fan, outside a show.

“Let’s keep it that way” said Bob.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Bob’s first show back on the road, in Milwaukee, on Tuesday night. A wonderful show, with eight songs from Rough & Rowdy Ways and the sound of Shadow Kingdom. It’s only been in the vault for 48 hours but it is currently playing for the fourth time around.

Bob's birthday took about three weeks. It included much preliminary listening to albums and shows as well as tuning in to Radio 4 which ran a number of Bob-related broadcasts which exceeded my expectations; notably the Front Row conversation and the play Dinner with Dylan.
 
I commend both to you. But the celebrations really began with the arrival – by courier! – of Michael Gray’s Outtakes on Bob Dylan (#13 since you ask).
 
Anyone with even a passing interest in the extraordinary genius of Bob Dylan will be aware of the commentary, critiques and criticism provided by Michael Gray. We have all taken from our shelves our copy of The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia to confirm a fact or check a reference and found ourselves, hours later, moving seamlessly from one entry to another.
 
Outtakes on Bob Dylan is different from the encyclopedia and from Song & Dance Man. It is more personal, more subjective. And because the selected pieces were written in real time, more alive and immediate, less retrospective.
 
The book begins in 1966 and subsequently covers if not every year, certainly every period of Bob. Part of my enjoyment is the realisation that Michael and I attended many of the same shows, though not always coming to similar judgements. One show on which we agreed was Bob’s dreadful performance on the first night in Birmingham (UK) with Tom Petty in 1987. It is the only Bob show I have ever left early, out of embarrassment, and the story goes that, as Bob started a new song, one Heartbreaker asked Petty what it was. “Dunno, but it’s in D” said Petty. Michael is right that the next two nights were a transformation. But that’s Bob being Bob and there are countless examples in Outtakes, because Michael is always honest. He is, primarily, a fan but his academic rigour is never relaxed. He will never, as I do, look to justify or praise when there is no reason.
 
Many of the selected pieces are familiar, but even I cannot keep up with every item of Dylanology in every periodical. So many are new to me, including of course the recently written essay on Rough & Rowdy Ways.
 
This is a fine piece of work, worthy of the exhortation given to Michael by an editor many years ago that he “should do an FR Leavis on Dylan”. Spoiler alert: Rough & Rowdy Ways “isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s a work of depth, warm resonance, invention and generosity.”
 
One final recommendation: the penultimate essay is a moving tribute to Bob Dylan 8-for-43 Willis. I met Bob Willis, a long-standing friend of Michael, twice only. The first time was at a Bob concert (one of the Birmingham shows in ’87)when we stood at adjacent urinals before the show and talked cricket; the second was at Lord’s when we talked about the number of bootlegs we each possessed.
 
That Michael who watches tennis in the summer was a friend of an English cricket legend is a measure of the man. And this obituary a measure of his writing.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: The three shows in Birmingham from 1987. Jeez, that first night was awful.