A note from Mick Imlah

There have been many fine tributes to our poetry editor, Mick Imlah, who died last week.

I thought I might say something more here. But saying something about so perfectionist a poet and editor has made me freeze - as though I were trespassing on one of his areas of special interest, Tennyson, cricket or Walter Scott, and he were still looking over my shoulder with a hard pencil in his hand.

So this will be no new obsequy.

The only thing I have for a blog is a note already written, sometime in the early 1980s, and  inserted in one of my three copies (yes, Imlah in unexplained triplicate) of his first book, The Zoologist's Bath and other adventures.

I was a features editor on The Times in those days and the note consists of a set of points which I must have thought I'd ask him about, perhaps for an interview, perhaps because I wanted him to judge some competition, maybe  for some other reason long ago lost.

It reads:

1) no poems which look like rubble

2) eat cheese to stir up dreams

3) the glamour of not travelling

4) in alleys and toilets in places like Norwood

I never did get to ask him about rubble, cheese and the facilities of south east London. I'm not sure we ever did meet until I joined him at the TLS.

Twenty five years ago he did leave a message at the side of my desk, in large clear letters written on the side of a corrugated cardboard box.

All it said was that he'd passed by and I'd missed him.

He had, I did and I do.

Comments

[Clayton Burns]

You (Clayton Burns, from Vancouver, Canada) wrote: The new book section in The Globe and Mail is somewhat quiet, as the old one was. The web presence is also peaceful.

If you were to mention "Wuthering Heights," perhaps you would not bother to notice that the PBS Internet version does not play in Canada. What does? How about Times of London video? Afraid not. Anything needing Flash 10? A certain world top 35 university will get around to it some day. This is why we are paying Harper. He is on top of it.

One improvement would be if The New York Times shrank and then perished. At least we could stop checking in by reflex on its worthless Paper Cuts. Everything is going quiet these days. Even at TLS the blogs have become vanishingly silent. It is fine to have a list. I've run my finger over the sentences. In a strict case of formalism. I've "read" the text.

What is it all about? I haven't the faintest idea. If we were to review "The Scarlet Letter" as if it had never been scribbled about before, what would we say? More or less nothing, of course. If you can't see anything, you can't say anything. Can we have an analysis of the great chapter 9 in Hawthorne's romance, "The Leech"? Without having some hapless professor butcher it?

If you were to draw an inference just from the book pages (and blogs), you would know that newspapers are dead, even if they migrate to the web. Even if you climb up on the roof and rattle your bones, you are still a corpse. At a world-class university with over 40,000 students, Wall Street Journal delivery had to be stopped since some days not a single paper sold. Where they have 60 or 70 doctoral candidates in Economics. And a massive business faculty. Maybe they are reading it on the Internet. As if they cared. When you can't even sell one copy, you may as well just take to faking it. Which at least the book reviews of the world have the decency to do, with conviction. After the last review, turn out the lights.

Let's have a decent sleep and an untroubled death. PBS? US only. ID? Canuck...?

[Clayton Burns]

The coverage in The New York Times of the President's reading list presents book blogs with the opportunity to work over the English file in a cooperative way, in Australia, Canada, the US, and the UK, at least:

One of the President's first acts should be to order a careful analysis of American education, starting with a formal audit of practices in the teaching and testing of English.

Infuriating is the only word that could capture the parasitism of the English language by ETS, Kaplan, College Board, and Pearson, among the most evil practitioners.
What does it mean to be able to read Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, James, and Dickinson? Why don't we have an American Literature Grammar? Why is American Linguistics so awkwardly aligned with American literature?

Why has America in effect ignored the corpus revolution in Linguistics, now 20 years old, in teaching literature? In teaching "The Scarlet Letter," why do we fail to extract full value from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary online, and the http://www.oed.com and http://www.m-w.com sites? Why are we so confused that we don't even know enough to make the COBUILD Intermediate English Grammar official for the country as a source for the patterns in "The Scarlet Letter"?

There is only one great teaching grammar of English for beginning and junior high students, the COBUILD Intermediate. At the Language Log blog, why do we never see careful systematic analysis of what needs to be done to teach the sound systems of English, the vocabulary, and the grammar? Why are professors so negligent? Why can't they respond intelligently to Alan Finder's "Unclear on American Campus" with an official database of lyrics?

Why do students have so little understanding of how to construct memory pages so that they would have a subtle grasp of 60 verb elements of the past and 10 conditions? Why do teachers stupidly recommend that students write in the present tenses about literature?

The best way to refine our teaching of grammar would be for the federal government immediately to commission four major universities to develop a grammar corpus of American literature from about 1840 to 1940. "The Scarlet Letter" would be an excellent starting point. In "Hester at her Needle," the word that the Puritan children say is terrible for the wearer of the "A:" "It seemed to argue so wide a diffusion of her shame, that all nature knew of it…". Here we have a cluster of clauses (manner and result) that would become exceptionally powerful in Melville and Henry James. It is the master cluster of American fiction, better expressed in these writers than in any British novelists. Better even than in "Great Expectations." Even than in Hardy. Or in "Jane Eyre."
Powerfully, Hawthorne in this chapter integrates manner and result with counterfactual conditions: the Puritanic word to Hester "could have caused her no deeper pang, had the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story among themselves,–had the summer breeze murmured about it,–had the wintry blast shrieked it aloud!"
When the modern student "reads" such a text under the direction of the distracted modern teacher, it is usually just a rapid once-over for the story. We often pay little attention to the writing, so that what we have far downstream is fly-away concentration, fantastical manipulations on Wall Street, lawyers' illiterate churning for cash, and rank parasitism in higher education.

The new President has made the claim that he reads a lot of history and fiction. Let him prove that he understands the urgency of asking fundamental questions about the slovenly teaching and testing of English in the schools and universities of America.

A good chair of the 2009 American English Audit would be John Sinclair, the founding editor of COBUILD. Paper Cuts could find out by independent interviews if students could read "The Scarlet Letter," learn the vocabulary up to the standards in the three online dictionaries I have mentioned, and the grammar patterns in the COBUILD Intermediate. This project would be one trillion times more valuable than a spelling bee.

The New York Times could offer a $10,000 reward to the American school student who could best complete this project during this year, up to the end of August. The fake trillion dollar banknote of American education should be withdrawn.

[Dion Per Sona]

Gloria Mundi is pretty sick,
And taking quite a lot of stick.
Our commere notes among those struck
Are scribes in fealty to lame's named duck,
About whose shibboleths we warned
Whose pontiff's blessings proudly scorned,
Carpe diem: name the day

Now!

....while they look the other way.

[spencer lord]

condolences