Poetry Focus: Bernard Spencer

Peter Robinson on Bernard Spencer

Bernard Spencer (pictured above with an unknown singer), born a hundred years ago next November, is still read and admired.

Talking recently to the poet John Welch about him, I was pleased to hear that he had recited Spencer’s "On the Road" at a daughter’s wedding. Since Spencer, a British Council lecturer for much of his life, had died in Vienna, his body discovered by suburban train tracks in September 1963, I included his "Night-Time: Starting to Write" in a reading at the festival there to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Council office’s founding in 1946.

Jo Shapcott, who performed with me, mentioned that she and Matthew Sweeney had chosen his "Boat Poem" for their Emergency Kit anthology, published in the same year. His poem "A Thousand Killed" is discussed by Christopher Hitchins in a 2004 article in Slate. From a collateral line of the Spencer-Churchill family, he can also be found on the peerage website.

During his lifetime, Spencer published just three books of verse, Aegean Islands and Other Poems (Editions Poetry London, 1946), The Twist in the Plotting (University of Reading, 1960), With Luck Lasting (Hodder and Stoughton, 1963), and the first collection of George Seferis in English, The King of Asine and Other Poems, co-translated with Lawrence Durrell and Nanos Valoritis (John Lehmann, 1948).

Alan Ross published a Collected Poems in 1965, and Roger Bowen edited an enlarged edition for Oxford University Press (1981). Now out of print, some of these books can be found second-hand online.

Here is an uncollected translation from the Spencer archive at the University of Reading, reproduced with permission of the poet’s estate. It is taken from the script for "Poems by Seferis", selected by Ian Scott-Kilvert, producer D.S. Carne-Ross, broadcast on The BBC Third Programme, Sunday 8th December 1957, 9.55-10.15 p.m.

The Mourning Girl

You sat on the rock waiting
as the night came on
and the pupil of your eye showed
how much you suffered.

And your lips were drawn in a way
exposed and trembling
as if your soul were whirled like a spinning-wheel
and your tears were pleading.

And you had in your mind the thought
of yielding to tears
you were a body falling from its bloom
back to its seed.

But there was no cry from your heart’s breaking:
that breaking became
the meaning, scattered upon the world
by the sky, all stars.


Peter Robinson is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. His most recent book of poems is The Look of Goodbye (Shearsman, 2008), reviewed on Eyewear in April, and currently one of the recommended books at the blog.

White Keys For Bond

The James Bond theme songs have always been hit or miss. Often avoiding super stars or iconic singers for mediocrities, and expressing left-field production choices more enigmatic than M, they have nonetheless managed to feature, among others (and famously) songs by Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Nancy Sinatra, Paul McCartney, Madonna, Duran Duran, Tina Turner, Gladys Knight, and even Louis Armstrong. Songs by Garbage and A-ha were perhaps missed opportunities to have selected more interesting indie or alternative bands (U2? Depeche Mode? REM?). Why never Oasis, or, for that matter, Sting? Perhaps the saddest news is that Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson, reported to be doing the song for 22, have been replaced, seemingly last-minute, by arguably the oddest couple ever assembled. Alicia Keys and Jack White (he penned the tune) are hardly in the same musical room, but are undeniably major contemporary American figures. What they come up with will no doubt be some, if not much solace.

Review: Fleet Foxes

Many critics have been suggesting that the eponymous album from Fleet Foxes is the best of the year (from an American group). It is surely one of the oddest. Eschewing a booklet with lyrics or photos, one is instead presented with a flimsy inner flyer, which is mainly a rambling diatribe against holiday snaps, and an argument for the "power that music has, its transportive ability" - as opposed to photographs, which ruin the imagination.

Well, it is hardly transgressive or even novel to argue that music is persuasive - music has charms, as we all know. However, striking out against images is less bland - though vaguely fundamentalist (one thinks of the breaking of stained glass windows, or the blowing up of statues) - and, as well as being politically dodgy, is not well-founded. Many mystics, and others, have testified to the power of a vision, sometimes based on an image, or fetish object, to assist in the concentration on higher truths. Yeats used, for example, a Japanese sword. Photos may sometimes rob us of purer memories, but also, of course, provide memories where none were before. Films are an example of the sublime powers (transportive) of images.

Anyway, the Fleet Foxes album is lovely, and nostalgic. It's very well-textured, and moody - as its editorial note would imply - and has a "haunting" element that comes from the seasonal and elegiac themes - and use of echo chamber, folk instrumentation (especially tom-toms and chimes), and rather old-fashioned production sounds. It feels like a long-lost classic from the late 60s or 70s, maybe via Cat Stevens' "Morning Has Broken" - or some Walker Bros. work - but sadder than that. It really is beautiful songwriting. "Tiger Mountain Peasant Song" is particularly moving, as is, indeed, "White Winter Hymnal" (which owes much to Arcade Fire, in theme and tone - surely the subject of winter and childhood treated in such a fashion comes from that Montreal band). "He Doesn't Know Why" and "Your Protector" are the other standout tracks.

This sort of album was more common forty years ago, when quality in songcraft was more prevalent - and when soaring, heartfelt songs needn't be tediously anthemic, but could be offered in a more nuanced fashion. Highly recommended. And yes, listening to this I feel ten again, when I first really began checking out my parents' record collection, and falling in love with old records. I recall my first hearing my mother's 45 of "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky: A Cowboy Legend". I think it was the Vaughn Monroe version. Fleet Foxes has trace elements of that potency, that stirring grandiosity, especially in "Your Protector".

Bad Brideshead, or, Arcadia Fire

Hollywood is so often blamed for ruining the great cultural objects, that it is worth noting that a mainly British team have managed to lay waste to the latest screen adaptation of classic 1940s novel Brideshead Revisited - or so the commentators have been lining up to claim (Eyewear will see the film in the fullness of time).

The irony is that Americans and Canadians (critics and audiences alike) grew up in love with the Granada TV series, which was aired on PBS. The fact that a vast audience in North America was primed and ready for a cinema version seems to have been overlooked by the cynical fire-sale crew who remade it ("everything must go") - who chucked out, apparently, the Teddy Bear, most of the Oxford stuff, and, of course, the religious subtext about grace, and Catholicism. This is like The Jewel In The Crown being remade, without "India".

It hardly makes sense for the current director (even if he is an atheist) of this lamed new version to claim to be "anti-Catholic" - and for most of those involved to have intentionally avoided the original TV version, or, indeed, the novel itself, which is famously about opulence versus austerity. This seems like a self-inflicted wound - but not, at any rate, stigmata.

One of the current tragedies in the cultural life of Britain is that, while in America, where 90% of people believe in God, cultural works can be made, open to the possibility of a divine presence, here, in the UK, far too many in the media and culture industries are militantly anti-religious - neutering their ability to sensitively and robustly engage with most of human history, and culture. Since film is also about good box office, it seems the producers bungled, in turning over such a potentially erotic-if-religiose (and hence, popular) product to a being of less than exquisite imagination.

Michael Bullock Has Died

Sad news. Michael Bullock, the British-Canadian poet, translator, and artist, has died. I am proud to own his original copy of his translation of the Siegfried Lenz literary thriller, The Lightship, made into a kitsch film in the 80s. It's one of my favourite novellas. Bullock warrants a Wikipedia entry - hopefully someone will set one up for him.

Beach and Crane

I've been reading, lately, The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry, by Christopher Beach, who knows a thing or two about contemporary (and avant-garde) poetry and poetics. I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about the current state-of-the-art thinking on American poetry. Still, there's a strange moment in it, in the invaluable Chapter 3, "Lyric Modernism: Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane".

Beach, who should (and does, I think) know better, rather oddly parrots Yvor Winters, and his outlandish (if fascinatingly maverick) poetics, when discussing Hart Crane's The Bridge. Beach is excellent on Crane's excessive, exuberant rhetorical style (of great interest to my own poetry), but writes "if The Bridge is to be judged primarily as a modern epic celebrating the mythic and historical sweep of America .... then it must be considered a failure." This ain't necessarily so.

Only really by evaluating The Bridge within New Critical, or modernist, terms, especially Winters' curious version of such (Winters was, of course, opposed to much modernist critical thought) can a critic easily call The Bridge a failure. In fact, I am not sure what it would even mean, for a poem to "fail" - a poem is not a Boeing 747 (or real metal structure like a bridge) able to weaken under stress and strain; poems do not corrode. Crane's poem is deliriously, deliciously flawed, perhaps - but yields too many verbal pleasures to be anything less than a wonder, and, I'd argue, a success, as a poem.

Beach may be right in assigning failure to the grandiose final intended version, that Crane never completed, or achieved - his ideal poem in the mind - but criticism can hardly use neo-Platonic ideals to beat poets up with. I wonder at why Beach chose to take this line regarding Crane's masterwork. He acknowledges it has "brilliant lyric sections" but ends up as merely "a qualified success". Who is fit to qualify Crane? Beach's own interest in indeterminacy and post-modern poetics might have allowed him to read Crane against the grain - as the experimental scout for strange linguistically excessive poetry - not within narrow critical demands for order or unity of design.

Viva NASA!

Eyewear wishes NASA a very happy 50th birthday today, tomorrow (its precise anniversary), and in the future. The space agency has, famously, put men on the moon, and used a Canada arm to good effect. Hopefully, it will redouble its efforts, in years to come, to get men and women onto Mars. Terraforming the Red Planet needs to be one of the later 21st century's goals. Meanwhile, the unmanned probes go on, allowing us to extend, literally, human knowledge. While I have never been an Asimov-addict, or a slide-rule afficionado, I do believe that hard science, heavy lifting, and all systems go can inspire. Houston has sometimes been the Cape of Good Hope. Talk about retro: Obama as Kennedy, NASA back in the news (in a good way). Is it time to release the clones of Elvis from captivity?