tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5010170380967519230.post1445888610159494787..comments2024-03-23T20:37:37.891-07:00Comments on First Known When Lost: "A Quality Of Irresponsibility Peculiar To This Century, Known Sometimes As Modernism"Stephen Pentzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14882220887712092005noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5010170380967519230.post-56692743157150488552011-07-20T22:05:55.713-07:002011-07-20T22:05:55.713-07:00PAL: as always, thank you very much for your thoug...PAL: as always, thank you very much for your thoughtful comments and for your kind words.<br /><br />I defer to you when it comes to jazz, about which I am woefully ignorant. But what you say about "arrested development" in some people's taste in music is very true. (Which is why Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are still prancing about on stage, I suppose.) The original New Orleans jazz was (as you know) the pinnacle for Larkin (and Amis), wasn't it?<br /><br />I defer to you on Charlie Parker. But I agree with you on Picasso. And, as we know, Larkin liked to be provocative. It has been a while since I read Larkin's actual reviews, but I seem to recall that he did now and then say something good about, say, Miles Davis and Paul Desmond (one of the few who I do know and who I do like).<br /><br />Thank you again.Stephen Pentzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14882220887712092005noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5010170380967519230.post-14866757166101488812011-07-20T01:13:48.601-07:002011-07-20T01:13:48.601-07:00Mr Pentz: your blog continues to be never-failing ...Mr Pentz: your blog continues to be never-failing source of stimulation. Being a jazz- and Larkin-lover myself in fairly equal degrees, I can’t but put in my rather belated two pennorth/ bits’ worth. <br /><br />I think the jazz-lover suffers from the same disease as the rock fan – arrested development of the musical sensibility. Your taste tends to ossify some time in your late teens to early 20s and thereafter serves principally as a means of revisiting your youth . In a way, that’s exactly what Larkin wanted from it. It is as true of the musicians as the fans. The great musicians make their innovations early and thereafter are usually content to stay in the same groove – Armstrong, Ellington. A few – Miles Davis, John Coltrane - continue to flail about in a constant search for innovation but little good comes of it. Jazz is rather like another young man’s game, lyric poetry – short-winded, intense, winging it. <br /><br />Modern critics tend to be fearful of making judgements on new stuff that might well look foolish some decades down the line. Larkin suffered no such inhibition and I think that time indeed taken its toll on his judgements on jazz. Charlie Parker was the musician who to Larkin epitomised everything that has gone wrong with jazz – chaotic self-indulgence, contempt for the audience, Yet these days, to my ears at any rate, the qualities most apparent in his solos are the classical, apollonian ones – poise, grace, balance, proportion. And I often get that feeling looking at certain Picassos, too.PALhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06416373332534756944noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5010170380967519230.post-61919008812239913222011-07-16T22:14:14.057-07:002011-07-16T22:14:14.057-07:00Mr. Sigler: as you probably know, Larkin also did ...Mr. Sigler: as you probably know, Larkin also did a brief review of "Highway 61 Revisited" that was somewhat positive. He thought that "Desolation Row" had "an enchanting tune and mysterious, possibly half-baked words." Given his views as noted above, I would have thought that he might have appreciated these lines: "And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot fighting in the captain's tower, while calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen hold flowers." <br /><br />I understand your point about a bit of inconsistency in Larkin's criticisms of modernism -- he did try to play the bumpkin, but he knew what was what.<br /><br />And thank you for your kind words about my "third stream approach." I hadn't thought about it that way, and I can't say that I intended to follow such a course. But I now see that that may be where I have ended up -- or at least the poems I like have by chance led me there.Stephen Pentzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14882220887712092005noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5010170380967519230.post-54712296938482418032011-07-16T15:01:28.682-07:002011-07-16T15:01:28.682-07:00Larkin wasn’t too keen on anything new in jazz aft...Larkin wasn’t too keen on anything new in jazz after 1945, but he loved the Beatles (“unreachable, frozen, fabulous”) and the Stones (“the pain and strength of being young”) for the same reasons he loved earlier jazz: the pain was accessible, the humanity syncopated, like his verse. That being said, I’m not sure how seriously to take the sentiments from this essay, it’s penned after all by the gentleman who introduced four-letter words to serious verse and whose seemingly traditional poems are drier and more hopeless than even Eliot’s. <br /><br />They are interesting thoughts, though. Sometimes I feel art took a detour towards novelty and materialism with the so-called modernist movement, other times I feel modernism was a necessary revivifying of beauty that just became repressive and conservative over time. Is the coldness in the art or in humanity? I for one can’t tell. Certainly I appreciate the “third stream” approach you bring us with the “illuminated writing” of your neglected British (and other) poets.WAShttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.com