‘Bard of Dollis Hill’, poet Daljit Nagra |
An everyday story of poets and publicity
John Horder contrasts the reception of two volumes of poetry and questions fame as a key ingredient of literary success
Look We Have Coming to Dover! by Daljit Nagra. Faber £6.95 order this book
Duino Elergies, by Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated by Martyn Crucefix. Enitharmon Press £9.95. order this book
ONCE upon a time, when instant fame was the prerequisite of literary success, there were two poets who were both teachers.
The first, an Indian called Daljit Nagra, received trunk-loads of publicity for his entertaining first book of poems, Look We Have Coming to Dover!, even before it was published by Faber and Faber at their grandiose offices at 3 Queen Square
At around the same time, Enitharmon Press, a small but prestigious poetry publisher hidden away in Caversham Road near Kentish Town Tube, published the second teacher’s translation of the mystically invisible German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elergies. His name was Martyn Crucefix.
Both books were deserving of media coverage. But the entertaining one got too much and the over-serious one too little, as is so often the case in these times of Celebrity Big Brother and too many channels.
Consider the story of Daljit Nagra. He lived with his partner in Dollis Hill, not all that far from the Jewish Free School in north-west London, where he taught English literature.
He conceded to one hungry journalist that it would have been more likely that he had won the lottery than receive the call telling him Faber wanted to publish his first book of poems.
It must have been the most thrilling moment in his life to date.
Daljit’s Look We Have Coming to Dover!, eight years in the making, was launched by Faber in front of an audience that included his friends from West End Books in West Hampstead.
Among the luminaries present were his editors at Faber, Paul Keegan and poet Matthew Hollis, and Eddie Linden, editor of the literary magazine Aquarius.
The delightfully gifted but nervous Daljit wisely only read for 20 minutes, leaving his audience wanting to hear his poems a second, third and fourth time.
I was still baffled by the title poem, whose backcloth was Matthew Arnold’s classic poem of shifting beliefs in Victorian England, Dover Beach.
The following day Daljit, who was born in this country, told me at The Wet Fish Café in West End Lane, West Hampstead, that he is in the process of inventing an identity for himself in all his poems.
He has such a wealth of raw material to draw on and digest thoroughly, including the poems of the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, that the wonder is, his Mr Nice Guy image notwithstanding, he is within three to four books from finding it. Look We Have Coming to Dover! has persuaded some of his pupils at the Jewish Free School that he will soon be earning more money than Roger McGough and Brian Patten put together.
One sixth-former, R L Wolfson, wrote a mischief-making review on Amazon.com that recently set the media cats among the pigeons: “Puts Keats to shame”, “a wonder to behold” and in conclusion “if you enjoy poetry, genius of any kind, buy this 21st century bible of poetry” gives the gist.
Paul Morley waxed lyrical on Newsnight review on BBC2. This in turn triggered “The Bard of Dollis Hill”, a two-page spread in the Guardian, and an over-flattering piece in the Observer.
Judge for yourself whether too much or too little publicity makes as much difference as all we media-weary punters might imagine.
Look We Have Coming to Dover! consists of 31 poems, beginning with one knock out, Darling & Me!, and ending with another knock out, Singh Song! I particularly enjoyed the confrontational warmth and humour of the Punjabi undercurrents in the refrain:
Hey Singh, ver yoo bin?
Yor lemons are limes
yor bananas are plantain,
dis dirty little floor need a little bit of mop
in di worst Indian shop
on di whole Indian road –
I found out later that three of Daljit’s poems were published in 2003 by Enitharmon in Entering The Tapestry, the second Poetry School anthology, edited by Mimi Khalvati and Graham Fawcett.
They included Trendy Woman Blues, which begins: “Why not now be naked? You naughty western woman!”
Martyn Crucefix is a teacher, has written six books of poems and is published by Enitharmon. When writing about angels at the beginning of Rilke’s The First Elegy, I prefer his more sensitive translation:
For their beauty is really nothing but the first
stirrings of a terror,
We are just able to endure and are astonished
at the way it elects, with such careless disdain,
to let us go on living. Every angel is terrifying.
to the better-known one by James Blair Leishman and Stephen Spender:
For Beauty’s nothing but beginning of Terror
we’re still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
Each single angel is
terrible.
Rainer Maria Rilke, the German poet, was brutalised out of this world, and made to live in invisible worlds, at the age of 11 when his parents sent him away to the Military College of St Pollen. The date was September 1888.This was the equivalent of sending English boys to boarding school at the age of seven around the time of the First World War.
Rilke’s best-known book-length poems, which include Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, were so much products of his genius complex and brutal perfectionism, that he has made life impossibly painful and chaotic for all his translaters ever since.
These include two recent literary high-fliers, Martyn Crucefix and Don Paterson. Rilke is over-serious to a degree, but so is Daljit, in a more light-hearted way. He could do for Faber what T S Eliot did for them financially all those years ago when he wrote Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. If it hadn’t been for Macavity the Mystery Cat and some of the same gang of cut-throat thugs, Andrew Lloyd Webber couldn’t have made them into the musical Cats and Faber wouldn’t have survived as an independent publisher.
The moral of this story is that whether a poet is entertaining and makes lots of money, or takes himself too seriously and is on the poverty line, money does matter in the end, as it always has done in most stories.
Click here to buy Duino Elergies
Click here to buy Look We Have Coming to Dover!
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