{"id":14864,"date":"2023-05-25T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-25T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=14864"},"modified":"2023-05-14T19:22:02","modified_gmt":"2023-05-14T18:22:02","slug":"knopflers-kronikles-part-3-bunting-out-for-basils-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2023\/05\/25\/knopflers-kronikles-part-3-bunting-out-for-basils-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Knopfler\u00b4s Kronikles Part 3: BUNTING OUT FOR BASIL\u00b4S POETRY"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Norman Warwick<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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If Basil Bunting (left) <\/em><\/strong>were not remembered for \u201cBriggflatts\u201d\u2014his longest and best poem, first published fifty years ago\u2014he might still be remembered as the protagonist of a preposterously eventful twentieth-century life. By the age of fifty, he had been a music critic, a sailor, a balloon operator, a wing commander, a military interpreter, a foreign correspondent, and a spy. He had married twice, had four children, lived on three continents (and one boat), survived multiple assassination attempts, and been incarcerated throughout Europe. He had also apprenticed at Ezra Pound\u2019s poetic \u201cEzuversity\u201d in Rapallo, played an\u201cindifferent\u201d game of chess with General Francisco Franco in the Canary Islands, and communicated with Bakhtiari tribesmen in classical Persian. Educated in Quaker schools, he was imprisoned for refusing to serve in the First World War\u2014and released after a brief hunger strike\u2014only to high-mindedly rush into the Second, during which he served in the Royal Air Force and MI6. Eventually, as he boasted to Pound\u2019s wife, Dorothy, he became \u201cchief of all our Political Intelligence in Persia, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc.\u201d As a London Times<\/em> correspondent in Tehran, in 1952, he watched as a hired mob congregated outside his hotel and chanted, \u201cdeath to mr. bunting<\/em>!\u201d Guessing, correctly, that nobody calling for Mr. Bunting\u2019s death had ever seen the man, Bunting joined the mob and chanted along with them. Soon after, he and his family fled the country, driving from Iran to Bunting\u2019s mother\u2019s house in England\u2014a one-month trip\u2014in a company car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the nineteen-sixties, though, Bunting\u2019s life was at an uncharacteristic lull: he had spent the previous decade in his home of Northumberland, working at local newspapers, where he ended up subediting the business page and stock tables. He confessed in a letter to the publisher Jonathan Williams that his life had been \u201cone of struggling to keep my belly filled and my children\u2019s bellies filled, and no time whatever for literary pre-occupations.\u201d His time as a chameleonic world-traveller, and as a poet, seemed to be behind him. From 1930 to 1951, the never-prolific Bunting had published several multi-movement \u201cSonatas,\u201d a few dozen shorter \u201cOdes,\u201d and translations from Persian and Latin, which he modestly called \u201cOverdrafts\u201d (drafts, that is, penned over poetic predecessors\u2014overdrafts taken on the literary treasury). Enchanted early by Pound\u2014Yeats\u2019s first impression of Bunting was of \u201cone of Ezra\u2019s more savage disciples\u201d\u2014Bunting obeyed Pound\u2019s modernist commandment to \u201cMake It New,\u201d resuscitating and recombining past traditions. But he had published nothing since his apocalyptic war poem \u201cThe Spoils,\u201d and he had never secured a British publisher, not even a small press of the sort that disseminated his work in the U.S. and Italy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Then, in the summer of 1964, Bunting received a phone call from the Newcastle poet Tom Pickard (right)<\/em><\/strong>, who turned up at his house an hour later. \u201cA boy of 18, long-haired and fairly ragged, with a fist full of manuscripts,\u201d Bunting later recounted to Dorothy Pound. \u201cHe said: I heard you were the greatest living poet.\u201d Pickard and his wife, Connie, were running countercultural readings out of the Morden Tower, a thirteenth-century stone turret room on Newcastle\u2019s city walls, and they invited Bunting to participate. There, in the turret room, sitting on the floor, Bunting found an audience he never anticipated: precocious students, proto-hippies, poetry-curious delinquents\u2014the \u201cunabashed boys and girls\u201d to whom he would dedicate later collections. The idealism of this supportive subculture, with the Pickards\u2019 young marriage at its core, seems to have sparked both Bunting\u2019s return to writing and an unprecedented drive to \u201cmake new\u201d his own adolescent experience. He started accumulating lines\u2014a few on the commuter rail to work, a few more on the ride home\u2014for an autobiographical poem, centered on a place of historical and personal significance: Brigflatts Meeting House, a couple of miles from the founding site of Quakerism and in the village where Bunting met his first love, Peggy Greenbank, in 1913, when he was twelve and she was eight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That overflowing of verse produced twenty thousand lines of raw material, Bunting would later claim. He pared that down into a poem of a little more than seven hundred lines, which he titled \u201cBriggflatts\u201d (Bunting, reaching back toward a more antiquated spelling, added an extra “G”) and dedicated to Greenbank. He d\u00e9buted it at the Tower in December, 1965. In the January, 1966, issue of Poetry<\/em> magazine<\/a>, it sprawled across the first twenty-five pages. And it was a sensation: a spectacular second act to a long-neglected career, the assimilation of the American modernist long poem by an English writer. But today \u201cBriggflatts\u201d (left)<\/em><\/strong> seems even more prescient and unlikely. Like other cultural touchstones of nineteen-sixties Britain\u2014like the Beatles, like Anthony Burgess\u2019s \u201cA Clockwork Orange\u201d\u2014the poem takes youthful exuberance and ingenuity with the utmost seriousness. And yet \u201cBriggflatts\u201d was the work of an unsentimental sixty-five-year-old, who was looking back on a life of incidents and accidents, wondering whether he could piece them all together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Briggflatts\u201d has many antecedents\u2014Anglo-Saxon and Persian epics, Wordsworth\u2019s \u201cPrelude,\u201d (my favourite prose piece)<\/em> the late and labyrinthine poems of both Pound and T. S. Eliot\u2014but it is grounded less in literary history than in the history of a single place: Northumberland, Bunting\u2019s first and final home. Much of the poem plays out across a landscape of \u201cstone white as cheese,\u201d populated not only by local fauna\u2014with local names, such as \u201cspuggies\u201d for little sparrows, and the \u201cslowworm,\u201d which is a kind of lizard\u2014but by the ghostly legacies of Vikings and ancient bards, \u201ccrying \/ before the rules made poetry a pedant\u2019s game.\u201d \u201cBriggflatts\u201d alludes to another elaborate Northumbrian masterpiece, the illuminated manuscripts of the Lindisfarne Gospels<\/a>, but it now looks like an utterly contemporary project: a geographical, even ecological mapping, tugging the poetic tradition away from familiar settings toward unsung regions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cBriggflatts\u201d chronicles both a teen-age love affair and the growth of a poet\u2019s mind. Its central narrative, in which a broken-off young romance inaugurates a life of self-blame and restless wandering, sounds, when summarized, like a tale of \u201cthe one who got away.\u201d But the poem is something more sober, and more unsettled: a five-movement composition in the key of unfulfillment, with, as its opening and closing theme, love that is not simply abandoned but \u201cmurdered,\u201d \u201cdiscarded.\u201d The poem\u2019s arc mirrors Bunting\u2019s own travels, beginning and ending in Northumberland, and it overlays his adventurous life with the journeys of legendary leaders (Alexander the Great, King Eric Bloodaxe), as if to suggest that conquerors and lovesick teen-agers can be equally ambitious, and equally frustrated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poem\u2019s first movement, set at Brigflatts, memorializes Bunting\u2019s first love by cataloguing the remembered sounds of the landscape. Its opening fanfare is a young bull\u2019s bray (or \u201cbrag\u201d), harmonized with the nearby River Rawthey: \u201cBrag, sweet tenor bull, \/ descant on Rawthey\u2019s madrigal, \/ each pebble its part \/ for the fells\u2019 late spring.\u201d Bunting\u2019s field recording leaves dissonances\u2014love and death, nature and humanity, a mason chiselling a gravestone who \u201ctimes his mallet \/ to a lark\u2019s twitter\u201d\u2014unresolved, depicting a scene that is far from idyllic; if this memory of adolescent love serves as a refuge, it also foreshadows the adult life to come. And few love poems have ever been so alert to the facets of adolescent sexuality\u2014the giddiness, the cluelessness, the sacrament\u2014which Bunting dignifies with the same patient description he bestows on the natural world:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He has untied the tape<\/p>\n\n\n\n

of her striped flannel drawers<\/p>\n\n\n\n

before the range. Naked<\/p>\n\n\n\n

on the pricked rag mat<\/p>\n\n\n\n

his fingers comb<\/p>\n\n\n\n

thatch of his manhood\u2019s home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rainwater from the butt<\/p>\n\n\n\n

she fetches and flannel<\/p>\n\n\n\n

to wash him inch by inch,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

kissing the pebbles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as Bunting deserted his first love and locality, \u201cBriggflatts\u201d abruptly leaves love behind, in search of monumental permanence, and the language that can serve as lasting epitaph:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mason stirs:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Words!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pens are too light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take a chisel to write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other four sections speed through decades. The poem embodies a concise equation that Bunting stumbled on in a German-Italian dictionary, and passed along to Pound, who quoted it in his \u201cABC of Reading\u201d: dichten<\/strong> = *condensare<\/em>*, to write poetry = to condense. English, in \u201cBriggflatts,\u201d is compacted into mouthfuls crunchy with alliteration and internal rhyme. \u201cWho sang, sea takes, \/ brawn brine, bone grit. \/ Keener the kittiwake.\u201d An entire year abroad is abbreviated into a single image, northern Italy encapsulated in \u201cwhite marble stained like a urinal \/ cleft in Apuan Alps, \/ always trickling, apt to the saw.\u201d The poem cites, as its closest antecedent, the music of Domenico Scarlatti, who \u201ccondensed so much music into so few bars \/ with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence, \/ never a boast or a see-here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poem\u2019s final movements refuse any simple answers or happy endings\u2014\u201cfollow the clue patiently,\u201d Bunting cautions, \u201cand you will understand nothing.\u201d In the poem\u2019s pianissimo<\/em> close, abandoned love is at once as present and as irrecoverably distant as starlight, and Bunting radically reduces his unsummarizable life to the \u201cday\u201d of innocent love and the \u201cuninterrupted night\u201d that ensues:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then is Now. The star you steer by is gone,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane<\/p>\n\n\n\n

spider floss on my cheek. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sirius glows in the wind. Sparks on ripples<\/p>\n\n\n\n

mark his line, lures for spent fish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fifty years a letter unanswered;<\/p>\n\n\n\n

a visit postponed for fifty years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She has been with me fifty years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Starlight quivers. I had day enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For love uninterrupted night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Though some reviewers were exasperated by its difficulty, \u201cBriggflatts\u201d was received by most as a masterpiece, hailed as the successor to Pound\u2019s \u201cCantos\u201d and Eliot\u2019s \u201cFour Quartets\u201d by such critics as Thom Gunn and Cyril Connolly. Bunting went from obscurity to worldwide recognition, earning new admirers among the Beats (and the Beatles), invitations to read and record, critical celebrations, and the occasional attentions of documentary crews. That reception crossed over to the U.S. and Canada, where Bunting embarked on a reading tour and was given teaching posts, congratulations from the Wisconsin State Legislature, and the reverence of such younger poets as Robert Creeley\u00a0and Allen Ginsberg (left),<\/em><\/strong> who called Bunting \u201cthe best poet alive, of the old folks.\u201d Its first readers praised the poem in varying, even opposing ways\u2014where one heard Anglo-Saxon grit, another heard refreshingly plain speech; where one found heartfelt expression, another found allusive mastery. But all seemed to agree that Bunting, at long last, had arrived.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Though some reviewers were exasperated by its difficulty, \u201cBriggflatts\u201d by Basil Bunting was received by most as a masterpiece, hailed as the successor to Pound\u2019s \u201cCantos\u201d and Eliot\u2019s \u201cFour Quartets\u201d by such critics as Thom Gunn and Cyril Connolly. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14872,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-literary","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14864"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14873,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14864\/revisions\/14873"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}