1997

Poets on Poets

Carcanet’s major project for this year involved correspondence (not emails) with over fifty poets, of which a sample appears below. The editors’ pleasure was the matching of present poets to past poets; the copye ditor’s pain the late arrivals, second thoughts, hurried proof-reading. The response to the invitation seems to be almost invariably one of pleasure at the task. Seamus Heaney politely declined the invitation to select Yeats – Thomas Kinsella did that; and late in the day, having selected poems for the Australian mini-anthology, Les Murray backed away from Shakespeare. Edwin Morgan stepped up to the plate (‘Fortunately I know my sonnets and turtles fairly well, and shall plunge into the pages tomorrow. I refuse to make any pun about saving your Bacon,’ he wrote on 9 June 1997); he had already delivered his choice of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins. While Andrew Motion on Keats, Thom Gunn on Ben Jonson, and Don Paterson on Burns were orthodox partnerships, Wendy Cope on A.E. Housman, Simon Armitage on Lord Byron, Alice Oswald on John Skelton and Roger McGough on Kipling were some of the less expected combinations. It was in Waterstone’s for National Poetry Day in October.

FROM MICHAEL SCHMIDT

Manchester

[late 1996 – early 1997]


Dear [poet]


Nick Rennison of Waterstone’s, who compiled the Guide to Poetry Books and I are assembling an anthology of English poetry.1

      Ours is an anthology with a difference. It includes writers who began their careers before the turn of the twentieth century, and we’re inviting poets we admire to make primary selections from fifty of the major poets, starting with Gower and running up to Yeats. We will not limit ourselves to British and Irish writers but include work in English from around the world.

      Waterstone’s designers will give the book a visual distinction. It will run to 400+ pages in a handsome columnar format. Published by Carcanet in paperback at £9.95, for the first year [it] will be sold exclusively by Waterstone’s. We intend to publish in October 1997.

      Our aim is to emphasise vital continuities: this is demonstrated in the range of poets we are inviting to make selections quite as much as in the unusual geographical scope of the volume.

      We invite you to select from the work of [poet’s name] a maximum of 240 lines [varied according to the poet] and spaces (allowing 3 lines for each title) and to write a headnote of no more than 300 words to describe the choice. We need selection and headnote by 5 March 1997. Each contributor will receive a copy of the book and a modest honorarium of £50. The book, given [its] scope, will not make a profit: we aim to encourage a wider readership of classic English poetry and to signal the generative connection between new poetry and the best of the past.

      We have decided to exclude dramatic verse, but translation and extracts from long poems are admissible. The selection can be as radical and distinctive as you wish.

      Please let us know if you can join us in this project. We would welcome your reply by 20 January if possible.


Yours sincerely,
Michael Schmidt & Nick Rennison


FROM CHRISTOPHER LOGUE

London

29 December 1996


Dear Michael & Nick:


An honour accepted. One snag: I am completing a memoir. Quite taxious. Having given a promise to others to finish by Jan. 31st, I must do my best to keep it. I will let you know how things stand before Jan 20th.


Sincerely,
Christopher L.2


FROM MICHAEL SCHMIDT

Manchester

7 January 1997


Dear Christopher,


Thank you so much for your card of 29th December. I am delighted that you can do Dryden for us. It is one of the crucial selections of the book!

      I appreciate there may be a little bit of a glitch in terms of scheduling but we are so keen to have you in that if you over-run our proposed deadline by a week or two it would not matter. It must be extremely taxing to write a memoir – I look forward to reading it!


With warm regards,
Yours ever
Michael


FROM CHRISTOPHER LOGUE

2 February 1997


Michael:


I am getting on with the DRYDEN – I shall need more space.

Best.
Christopher


PS Am away for 10 days.

PPS Shakespeare will have to give up some of his space.


FROM CHRISTOPHER LOGUE

London

25 April 1997


Dear Michael Schmidt:


My Dryden mini-antho herewith. A little under 600 lines. I wanted to make his work interesting in fact as well as art – hence contextual notes. Apologies for the delay.


My best,
Christopher L.


 FROM MICHAEL SCHMIDT

Manchester

1 May 1997


Dear Christopher Logue,


That selection of Dryden is absolutely first-rate. I am delighted with it even though you broke my rubric about including dramatic verse! Also the rubric about linking narrative – but all is forgiven in the light of the quality of what you have produced. I am most grateful.


With kind regards and best wishes,
Yours ever,
Michael Schmidt


FROM CHRISTOPHER LOGUE

London

5 May 1997


Dear Michael Schmidt,


I am glad you liked the Dryden select. Agreed, your letter of 12.12.96 did exclude dramatic verse which I took to mean ‘from the play texts’ – Hammond (’96) Kinsley (’58) & Gilfillan (1855) include under ‘Poems’ (in their editions of such) the Songs, Prologues & Epilogues. As for the commentary/narrative, JD is so close to his own day an inexperienced reader really needs a hand up – and you have to admit Gwynne playing St Cecilia is a remarkable contrast…3


Best
CL


MNS TO RlM, 1 AUGUST 1997


It looks as though we should have complete proofs by the end of the week of August 16th and we will have two weeks to turn them around and get CRC to Mike Nicholls if we are to get delivery before the end of the third week of September and get the books out to the Waterstone’s branches in time for National Poetry Day.4 In fact we should aim for completion of the whole operation no later than 16th September (Mexican Independence Day). That is the date by which I feel we should have books ready to go into the warehouse. I know this is a horrendously tall order. Can we square our holiday plans? I shall be away from August 16th through 23rd.


MNS TO RlM, 11 AUGUST 1997


Here is a section of a fax we have had from John Ashbery:

I want to make another teeny change to my note on Beddoes on page 10 (ten) of the anthology. In my last communication I made the change ‘Edmund Gosse, whose pioneering edition of Beddoes’s work appeared in 1890…’ I now want to change ‘pioneering edition’ to ‘landmark edition’. (My problem is that Gosse’s edition actually wasn’t the first edition as I originally wrote therefore it can’t really be called pioneering either. ‘Landmark’ seems a suitable face-saving alternative.)5

MNS TO RlM, 27 AUGUST 1997


Here are Elaine Feinstein’s Wyatt proofs, and Penny has sent a batch of others that came here by mistake.6

      […] We ought to have delayed it but National Poultry Day is The Occasion, and if we miss that we will lose the Waterstone’s order and have one hell of a lot of books to dispose of. Sorry, sorry, sorry.


MNS TO RlM, 28 AUGUST 1997


I enclose Kenneth Koch’s Herrick.7 In the battle between we’re and w’are, I think we side with the former despite the cogency of the latter prosodically.

      Neil Powell sounds almost human again after the Waterstone Ravages. I am sorry, again, to have given you both, not to mention Pam and Penny, such a nightmare. Next year let’s publish one book, preferably a straight reprint, and nothing more.


NOTES


  1. Nick Rennison is a writer, editor and bookseller. His books include Sherlock Holmes: An Unauthorised Biography, the Bloomsbury Good Reading Guides and 100 Must-Read Historical Novels.
  2. Christopher Logue (1926–2011) is best known for his bold, brilliant, blank-verse adaptations of the Iliad; his other poetry was often political. He also wrote screen-plays, limericks, and pornography under a pseudonym. His memoir, Prince Charming, was published by Faber and Faber in 1999.
  3. Actually it was St Catherine of Alexandria, in Dryden’s play Tyrannic Love (1669), although the contrast between her fate and that of Charles II’s mistress Nell Gwynne is still marked. In his headnote Logue calls Dryden ‘the master poet of his age’: ‘quick, witty, sane, fertile, conversational, better able to argue in verse than any other English poet’.
  4. Mike Nicholls was the genial, brisk but patient Sales Director of Short Run Press, based in Exeter, which still prints Carcanet’s books.
  5. While Logue’s headnote was a crisp 16 lines, Ashbery’s to Thomas Beddoes (1803–49) ran to 114 lines. He savoured the poet: ‘Pound evokes the “odour of eucalyptus or sea wrack” in Beddoes; one could add those of rose, sulphur and sandalwood to that unlikely but addictive bouquet.’
  6. Feinstein remarks of Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) that he was ‘the earliest English exponent of that tug between speech and melody on which a whole tradition of English language depends’. Elaine Feinstein (1930–2019), poet, novelist, biographer and translator, first came to Carcanet with her translations of Three Russian Poets (1979), and then with her own Selected Poems in 1994. Her most recent Carcanet publication is The Clinic Memory: New and Selected Poems (2017). Penny Jones began her career in press and marketing at Carcanet, and is now one of the founding directors of Kirby Jones Management.
  7. Koch’s brief headnote begins: ‘In the poems of Robert Herrick (1591–1674) there is a music that seems to belong exclusively, and naturally, to the English language but which has appeared nowhere before or since.’

THE YEAR IN BOOKS


      John Ashbery, The Mooring of Starting Out

      Charles Baudelaire, Complete Poems, translated by Walter Martin

      Silvio Bedini, The Pope’s Elephant

      Patricia Beer, Autumn

      Sujata Bhatt, Point No Point

      Elizabeth Bishop, Exchanging Hats, edited by William Benton

      Michael Brander, The Language of the Field

      Sophia de Mello Breyner, Log Book, translated by Richard Zenith

      Gillian Clarke, Collected Poems

      Anne Cluysenaar, Timeslips

      Allen Curnow, Early Days Yet: new and collected poems

      John Eddowes, The Language of Cricket

      Hazel Edwards, Follow the Banner: an illustrated catalogue of the Northumberland miners’ banners

      Alistair Elliot, Facing Things

      Salvador Espriu, Selected Poems, translated by Louis J. Rodrigues

      Elaine Feinstein, Daylight

      Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End, edited by Gerald Hammond

      Ford Madox Ford, Selected Poems, edited by Max Saunders

      John Gallas, Grrrrr

      Natalia Ginzburg, The Things We Used to Say, translated by Judith Woolf

      Louise Glück, The First Five Books of Poems

      Robert Graves, The Complete Poems Volume 2, edited by Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward

      Robert Graves, The White Goddess: a historical grammar of poetic myth, edited by Grevel Lindop

      Ivor Gurney, Eighty Poems Or So, edited by George Walter

      Lincoln Psalter: Versions of the Psalms, translated by Gordon Jackson

      Mimi Khalvati, Entries on Light

      Thomas Kinsella, The Pen Shop

      Kenneth Koch, One Train

      Frank Kuppner, Second Best Moments in Chinese History

      Eugenio Lisboa, The Anarchist Banker and Other Stories

      Eugenio Lisboa, Professor Pfiglzz and His Strange Companion and Other Stories

      John Lyly, Selected Plays and Other Writings, edited by Leah Scragg

      Hugh MacDiarmid, Albyn: Shorter Books and Monographs, edited by Alan Riach

      Hugh MacDiarmid, The Raucle Tongue Volume One: Hitherto

      Uncollected Prose, edited by Angus Calder, Glen Murray and Alan Riach

      Edwin Morgan, Virtual and Other Realities

      Alistair Niven and Michael Schmidt (eds), Enigmas and Arrivals: an anthology of Commonwealth fiction

      Neil Powell, The Language of Jazz

      Frederic Raphael, The Necessity of Anti-Semitism

      Nick Rennison and Michael Schmidt (eds), Poets on Poets

      Rainer Maria Rilke, Neue Gedichte/New Poems, translated by Stephen Cohn (revised edition)

      Peter Robinson, Lost and Found

      Sylvia Rodgers, Red Saint, Pink Daughter

      José Hermano Saraiva, Portugal: a companion history edited by Ian Robertson, translated by Ursula Fonss Harvey Shapiro, Selected Poems

      Adam Schwartzman, Merrie Afrika!

      Stephen Tapscott, From the Book of Changes

      James Tate, Selected Poems

      Thomas Traherne, Select Meditations, edited by Julia Smith

      Izaac Walton, Selected Writings, edited by Jessica Martin