Backlisted - Briggflatts by Basil Bunting

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

Today’s episode focusses on a single long poem – Briggflatts by the Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting. It was recorded live in St Mary’s Church, Woodstock in Oxfordshire, as part of the Woodstock Poetry Festival. Andy and John are joined by Neil Astley, the founder of Bloodaxe Books, who knew and published Bunting, and Kirsten Norrie, a poet and composer who writes and performs under her Highland name, MacGillivray. The episode begins and ends with recordings made in 1977 of Bunting reading from the poem, which was first published in 1966. Until that time, Bunting, who in the 1930s had been a friend to W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, was living in semi-obscurity in rural Northumbria. It was his live readings of the poem, subtitled ‘An Autobiography’ at the medieval Mordern Tower in Newcastle that transformed his reputation. We discuss his remarkable and sometimes controversial life – before his exile he was at various times a music critic, a sailor, a balloon operator, a wing commander, a military interpreter, a foreign correspondent, and a spy – and its relationship to his work, and particularly Briggflatts, now regarded as one of the greatest English poems of the 20th century. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, join in the books conversation, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here http://bit.ly/backlistednewsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BetterHelp.com. meeting with friends before the show, we can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. MUSIC PLAYS APPLAUSE Hello and welcome to this special live recording of Backlisted from the Woodstock Poetry Festival in Oxfordshire. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, where people crowdfund the books they really want to read.

And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and we're here to discuss the remarkable long poem Brig Flats, first published in 1966 by the Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting. And today here in this beautiful church in Woodstock, where a full congregation has joined us to worship Basil Bunting in a way. How many people here have read Brig Flats? Everybody. That is incredible. Well, it's a truly remarkable piece of work. And the thought of what I know you're about to hear in a moment, which is the author reading,

that in and of itself is going to be a very special moment so and we're joined today by two guests please welcome neil astley and kirsten norrie who writes and performs under her highland name mcgillivray welcome neil astley is the editor of the poetry publishing house blood act books which he founded in 1978 in Newcastle, which he then moved out into Northumberland in the mid-1990s. As well as editing over a thousand poetry collections, published by a thousand. That's extraordinary.

Over a thousand. Do you know how many exactly? Probably about 1,500. Oh, 1,500. No, over a thousand. Just under 2,000. I bumped that up. Published by Bloodaxe,

he also edited the popular Staying Alive series of anthologies and has published two poetry collections and two novels of his own, one of which, The Sheep Who Changed the World, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. One of Bloodaxe's very first publications in 1980

was an LP record of Basil Bunting reading Brick Flats, and the extracts we are playing in this podcast are from that recording. For many years, Neil was the only person, apart from her family, who knew what had happened to the poet and novelist Rosemary Tonks. Rosemary Tonks. Now, we on Backlisted made an episode about Rosemary Tonks' remarkable poetry and her very peculiar but wonderful novel, The Bloater, two, three years ago, I think that was. Anyway, Tonks famously disowned all her published work and disappeared in the late 1970s. Neil was able to publish Bedouin of the London Evening, her collected poems with Bloodaxe in 2014,

which was followed by two mentions on our show about her poetry and fiction, and those led directly to her novels being reissued by Vintage in the UK and New Directions in the US, with Stuart Lee, who had enthused about her work on Backlisted, writing the introduction to the first one to be re-released in this country, The Bloater.

Neil, how has it been? I know Backlisted listeners will want to know how it has been seeing Rosemary Tonks return to the world against her will. Well, it's quite extraordinary. I mean, fortunately, it was with her family's backing because her family, along with many, many readers who knew her work, greatly regretted the fact that she'd basically completely changed into another person, another personality, under the influence of extreme Christian fundamentalism.

So she, in a sense, wasn't the person that wrote those books. And yet everyone loved those books and they wanted them to be available again and she's now much more widely read than i think as a poet than she was in her life yes it's extraordinary isn't it it's fascinating to see i know when i read i remember saying to you john when i read the poetry in better end of the london evening that it was it's what i look for in poetry uh i understood half the poems and the half i didn't understand i absolutely loved more of that later more of that later mcgillivray is the highland name of writer and artist kirsten norrie she has published four books of poetry including the last wolf of scotland published by pig hog red hen in 2013 and ravage an astonishment of fire just

published by blood axe books indeed launched tonight with this very church forthcoming books include non-fiction work scottish lost boys 10 renegays, a pamphlet The Demon Trapped, and a novel An American Book of the Dead, all out with Broken Sleep Books in 2024-5. Winner of a Paul Hamlin Composer Award, her music has appeared on the BBC for film soundtracks including The Whalebone Books, Sworn Down, and By Ourselves, a 2015 film by British director Andrew Cotting, in which she appeared in a cameo opposite Toby Jones. She has also performed internationally with the what now? With the fall? Performed internationally. I performed once in the O2 Academy in Islington. With the fall? Yeah, we went to the wrong green room.

Are you a previously unknown member of the group no oh okay i'll never mind this is big news this is big news on backlist the fall come up with um regularity let's just call it that well it says here you've performed internationally with the fall and i just go with that ar Yeah, yeah, yeah. Arlo Guthrie, Arthur Brown, Shirley Collins, Michael Moorcock, Vic Goddard, Toby Jones, Alan Moore, Gem Finer, Curran 93, Gallon Drunk, and you survived, Ian Sinclair, Trembling Bells, The Incredible String Band, Thurston Moore, and Band of Susans. Good Lord! Bunting will be nothing after that.

Good God! In 2017, she recorded Sitting Bull's Great Grandson, reading from The Last Wolf of Scotland. Extraordinary. She has created 10 albums, working with long-term producer James Young, who performed and recorded with Nico for the last decade of her life, of course,

and wrote the book Nico, Songs They Never Play on the Radio, about this experience, a book featured on another podcast as a particular favorite of me, Andy Miller. That is one of the great, sad, hilarious books about what it takes to be an artist, let alone a musician. So please welcome both our guests. please welcome both our guests. We're going to start the evening with an excerpt of Bunting reading from the beginning of Brig Flats with the kind permission of the Bunting estate. This is important because sound, the sound of poetry, was of supreme importance to Bunting. Indeed, he wrote that

poetry lies dead on the page until some voice brings it to life. Brick flats, an autobiography. Son los pasarellos del mal pelo echidos. The spuggies are fletched. Brag, sweet tenor bull, descant on Rothes' madrigal, each pebble its part for the fell's late spring. Dance, tiptoe bull, black against may,

Ridiculous and lovely, chase hurtling shadows morning into noon. May on the bull's hide and through the dale furrows fill with may, paving the slow worm's way. A mason times his mallet to a lark's twitter, listening while the marble rests, lays his rule at a letter's edge, fingertips checking, till the stone spells a name, naming none, a man abolished. Painful lark laboring to rise. The solemn mallet says, In the grave's slot he lies. We rot.

Decay thrusts the blade. Wheat stands in excrement, trembling. Rothy trembles. Tongue stumbles. Ears err for fear of spring. Rub the stone with sand. Wet sandstone rending roughness away. Fingers ache on the rubbing stone. The mason says, rocks happen by chance.

No one here bolts the door. Love is so sore. Stone smooth as skin, cold as the dead, they load on a low lorry by night. The moon sits on the fell, but it will rain. Under sacks on the stone two children lie. Hear the horse stale, the mason whistle. Harness mutter to shaft, fellow to axle squeak. Root thud the rim, crushed grit. Stocking to stocking, jersey to jersey, head to a hard arm, dawn. At Hawes, tea from the can. Rain stops, sacks steam in the sun, they sit up. Copper wire moustache, sea-reflecting eyes and Baltic plain song speech

Declare by such rocks men killed blood-axe The reading is taken from the book of Brickflats, chapter one. What's an extraordinary thing to hear the sound of him turning the pages when did you say that when was that recorded new that was a 1977 recording in carlisle organized by tom picard with aid and vision studios and i was at that recording so it was in a studio no it was in a in a studio with a live audience. Yeah, okay. And so that was recorded 10, 11 years after the poem was first published. That's right. To get it on the record.

Yes, there's a previous recording which is available from 1966 that was recorded by Stuart Montgomery at his house in London, which is also available. There is actually an e-book with audio of Big Flats published by Bloodaxe where you get both recordings available. You like to make it easy for yourself. Just putting on a slim volume of footage. Did you know that you were going to release it as a record

when you recorded it? I didn't record it. I released it as a record when I, I founded Blood X in 1978. And I've been at that recording. And so it was very much in my mind that I would like to make that available. Well, listen, let me ask you what we always ask. McGillivray, I'm going to ask you first. Where were you when you first heard or read or became aware of basil bunting i have a shortish story about

this i was in edinburgh i was very poor i was working in the old town bookshop which was on victoria street as you went down into the grass market it was a medieval granary store so it was like a ship's galley right there two days a week and i got my 30 quid for each day and um it was winter so the shifts went down to one day so instead of 60 i had my 30 and i was living with my mother in her studio she's paint so sleeping on the campuses we didn't have a shower. So we used to strip wash. And we were very... It's all very munching. And the SPL emailed me. They said, look, we want to put from the first collection

on Make Your Poem, Palm of the Week in the Scots. I said, fantastic. But I didn't have any money to celebrate. I think I had three quid. And I went out walking. I went up the road into Newington. And there was a charity shop that was closing down. It was closing as I went, but it was actually shutting down that night.

And I found a sort of, I think it was a man's coat, a tweed coat. And it was three quid. And I thought, well, will I get the Scotsman or will I get the coat? And I thought, no, I'll get the coat. It'd be sensible. So I got the coat, walked on up the road, really really cold now put my hand in the pocket and there was a ring and it was heavy and I thought oh no I know what this is it was a wedding band so I thought I've got to go back and then of course the whole thing was not only closed but

shut down so I took it to a pawn shop and I got 30 quid for it so I thought this is fantastic now I can celebrate and I went up to black quil Quilts on the bridges, which was open late Brick Flats, and I had resonant frequency. I thought, this is it. I took it, paid for it, and then I went over to Sandy Bells, which is a great pub where Hamish Henderson used to drink. It's great folk music. And I sat in the corner with a whiskey and Brick Flats, the Scotsman with my own, you know.

And it enthralled me for about an hour and the light was fading. I had to go home. And I turned to get my things. And I don't know if they still have them, but they used to have bookshelves in there. And along with Ian Rankin and, I don't know, Diana Gabaldon or something, was my first collection sitting on the shelf in sandy bells and uh so there was a strange sort of genesis for me he was um a really strong imprint and um yeah that meant a great deal to me because that was the first time i've been either published as a public properly

published you know in a scotsman that was a big deal and and um yeah ever after he became one of the greats basil was there to help you celebrate. Were you immediately gripped by Brick Flats? Yeah. The sonic landscape alone, but the spiritual landscape in it and the sense of excavation. Okay, we're going to come back to this topic. Neil, let me ask you a version of the same question.

Obviously, given we heard basil bunting pronounce the name blood axe there bunting has meant a lot to your life and your career can you remember when you first encountered this poem yes um after leaving school i worked as a journalist for four years. I ended up in Australia working on the Lawn Territory News in Darwin, um, which was destroyed by a cyclone on Christmas Eve, uh, 1974. Uh, I headed back to England having been sort of got out of the house, which had been flattened by the cyclone, decided I was going to go to university applied for various universities ended up choosing newcastle but i couldn't start until um october that year so i got a job on the buses as bus conductor on northern buses and i finally decided

to jack it in because i still had a month or so before i started and i decided to have a break and just when i was finishing as a bus conductor, wearing my bus conductor's uniform, I walked past a theatre royal in Newcastle where the poet John Silken was selling copies of his magazine stand. He'd just been to Australia. We got talking. He discovered that I'd been in the newspaper for the production. He needed a production editor. So he offered me a part-time job as his production editor which i would do while i was at university the following week i was in his house working on his magazine amongst the back issues was a special issue from 1966 on the poetry of northeast england in which basil bunting featured promin. And it was also a very interesting analysis of Brig Flats,

one of the early essays on it by Robert Wolfe, who would end up being one of my tutors at university. And I would end up starting Blood Axe in Robert Wolfe's office in the university after I'd finished my degree. And then I immediately was interested in getting a hold of Brig Flats. John Silken had a copy, which I read, and I went into the Thorns Bookshop in Newcastle

and got a copy there. So that was my first encounter. And then, of course, I got to hear and read because I started going to Morton Tower Readings, the medieval turret room on Newcastle City walls where he first rebrigged flats in December 1965

and there are further things I could talk about but that's probably best answer to that question. John can you better either of those first encounters with Basil Bunting? I really can't mine was in mine but mine was when i was a student in oxford like a lot of people i was kind of i'd heard i'd heard rumors because i'm

originally from the northeast and i'd heard rumors of this great northumbrian poet who was friend of pound and zikovsky and yates and uh went and got a copy of break break flats out of the college library, not dissimilar to yours, but exactly this time of year, my first term of first year. And I was sitting in Merton Library with the sun going down over the meadows. And yeah, I couldn't believe it.

It didn't, of course, like everybody, got the understanding of the work. It doesn't reach out and leave me with a stripe, but the words and the music and the intensity of it was quite unlike anything else I'd read. And then, yeah, I suppose from then on, we became curious, and there's plenty to find out about Bunting,

I think that's... Well, we're going to play a clip now curious uh and there's plenty there's plenty to find out about bunting to think that's well uh we're going to play a clip now from a documentary that was broadcast on um bbc last year to which you contributed neil um presented by the former mp um and now podcast host Rory Stewart, tracing Basil Bunting's life and career in Northumbria and speaking to people who knew Bunting or only know of him via his work. And the clip we're about to hear will fall into the latter category. So let's hear that now. It was written by Bunting when he was close to retirement as a junior sub-editor on a regional newspaper. This was a dead-end job he hated, but it paid for his large, comfortable house in a Newcastle commuter village,

a house now owned by Veena and Rajendra Duggal. Hello. Nice to meet you. Thank you very much for having us. Thank you. Pleasure. Thank you. So this is much for having us. Thank you. Pleasure. Thank you. So this is Basil Bunting's house. When we first moved in, we were aware of Basil Bunting's being,

you know, having lived here. So we bought, I think we bought his poems first. I didn't understand it at all. Did you people know what Basil Bunting did? His poetry is quite difficult, as you say. Yeah. I asked you,

Aguilibre, if it grabbed you straight away, because I'm going to be along with that lady, the voice of the public. My first encounter with Brick Flats was in my bedroom at home nothing extraordinary happened I read it and I thought I don't understand that at all I must ask John

Mitchinson which I did and then I went back he was very helpful I went back to it and I tried it again we heard Basil Bunting reading, I'd like to ask you first and then my other panel guests. Is Bunting better read or heard? Brig flats, let me say brig flats. Or better read aloud, certainly. Read aloud, why better read aloud why why better read aloud well because he had the poetry that the me as he says the meaning is in the sound um the work is so mellifluous and there's so much going on in terms of what he does with sound um and also when you hear him read you get the northumbrian r's you get his his pronunciation um you get the narrative flow of it better read aloud than you do on the

page when you hear it read aloud particularly by him it makes a lot more sense even if you're looking for sense because of the narrative flow i mean he really didn't care about that whether it it made sense he says there's a great essay from 66 he says reading in silence is the source of half the misconceptions that have caused the public to distrust poetry without the sound the reader looks at the lines he looks at prose seeking a meaning prose exists to convey meaning and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry that's not poetry's business poetry is seeking to make not meaning but beauty or if you insist on misusing words it's meaning as of another kind and lies in the relation to one another of lines and patterns of

sound perhaps harmonious perhaps contrasting and clashing which the hero feels rather than understands so i think it's almost like his his whole aesthetic is about the the it's the it's it's musical i think he talks at some way about the architecture of architecture of feeling or architecture of him that's as important as the architecture of form but that's also he's in that he saw himself and was perceived as being in a modernist tradition, right? Where we might think of, say, Joyce, the Joyce of Finnegan's Wake, where there is a very musical, you know, it's heard as much as read. And I wondered whether when you first read it, I mean, don't take this too literally, but did you think this would make a, what an excellent script this would be?

This needs to be heard. Interesting idea. Because I think somebody like Alan Lomax would have loved, you know, in his Highland adventures across, if he'd come across bunting in the flesh, I think that would have appealed to him enormously because he was so entrenched. It didn't strike me immediately as that because of the visual, the tremendous cover. And there's that paradox, isn't there, where he's so insistent on the aural, and yet you have this fundamentally visual pattern running throughout, so that the images that are emerging are inevitably sonic. But there is that duality.

I wonder how much he plays with us in terms of his insistence on on the sonic it strikes me that there is a part of his any great artist or any poet or anyone who has the forming bones that it becomes the two things become linked together because if i remember right neil brigflax was first published wasn't it it wasn't first heard it was published in poetry review is that published in an american journal called poetry poetry it's the beginning of 1966 but bunting had given the first reading had it at gordon tower a month or so before and could you just say a bit about those readings and that venue? Because that's such a part of the creation myth of this.

Yeah, I mean, the Gorton Tower isn't now used as a reading venue, but when it was, in the early days, they had gaslight. They didn't have any chairs. By the time I got there and started going there, they had chairs. It's an octagonal space, and the sound of listening to poetry in there is quite extraordinary.

So Bunting's voice was perfect for that. And in those early days, he was reading to basically crowds of young people on the whole. He talks about there being students and beats and sort of a whole mixture of people. And they weren't academics. And, and you know he liked that in particular and it became a mecca didn't it i mean we're going to hear a clip in a minute moment from alan ginsberg but ginsburg fernan getty uh creely a lot of the great experimental beat poets of the 1960s made a made a kind of beeline to more so you you mentioned alan lomax the folk song collector amongst other achievements and i wonder therefore does does bunting overlap what what we would think of as some kind of 60s counterculture and a revisiting of

the folk tradition which would blossom in the few years after that, in the late 60s and early 70s. You know, you saw Bunting Reed. What were the audiences like? Were they young audiences in that era? Yes, something I first heard in Reed in, I think it was 1975. And then I heard him in 77. And then a couple of years later as well um by that stage newcastle had become a real mecca for poetry a lot of poetry magazines were based there poetry presses uh a real buzz to things it had shifted from the 60s which was

largely based around the beats and the Liverpool Poets and so on. And it had become a much wider range of poets reading at the Tower and other venues. It wasn't as young an audience, I don't think, by the time he was giving those later readings when I was there. Neil edited, I think, a completely brilliant anthology of people who are interested in poetry of the Northeast, called Land of Three Rivers, which Bloodhook's published. But a lot of poets in there, some of whom are well-known, some of which are, but it's, I mean, you'll be right, that period, I mean, from the late 60s through into the 70s and beyond, astonishing. Why don't we hear Alan Ginsberg say a little bit about Basil Bunce? He has a verse describing a cart rolling through countryside on an old road, and the entire landscape and the nature of the cart and the nature of the road are described in four or

five words. It went, a fellow mutters to Axel, rut thuds the rim. And it was that rut thuds the rim that really blew my mind because these four white Anglo-Saxon words, rut thuds the rim, you get a picture of the road, rut. The rim gives you the cart, the nature of the cart and the wheels of the cart. Thuds gives you the cart, the nature of the cart and the wheels of the cart, thuds. I give you the whole physical jar and motion of the cart going through ruts in a country road. What I meant by Hinkistone, rut, thuds, the rim, there's four words, three of which are

very heavy solid vowels, rut, thuds, rim. And in that you get a picture of the landscape. So that's how I understood his notion of condensation. And I use that line in teaching still, because it's so obvious and so jarring in a sense. Okay. So we've heard Ginsberg describe the poem. We've heard Bunting read from the poem. We've heard some members of the public be baffled described the poem we've heard brit um bunting reed from the poem we've heard some members of the public be baffled by the poem so the next thing i'm going to ask all three of you

is and i'll start with john to give our guests time to think you have i'll give you two sentences two what is brieg flats about what is big facts about it is about a man um I think it's a band summing up making sense of his life using perhaps the most obvious structure the structure of the seasons four seasons and it's him making a count of where he's ended up as a 66 year old man looking back on a particular particular moment perhaps when he was a child a young man it was one sentence a long one but a golden one thank you very much kirsten i think it's a headstone oh well that's good do you wish to yeah do you wish to add or subtract well i was i was rereading it obviously again for this and i was thinking about the excavation of stone and it's it's really lithic you know and he had such profound friendship or kinship with McDermott. There's this sort of stoniness in, well, I mean, some of McDermott's stoniness is much

earlier, but still it persists. There's this relationship to the land. There's a relationship to the excavation of his life. There's the stonecutter's daughter, the great love of his life. There's this stoniness in the heart. When you read about his time as a conscientious objector in his own words, however embellished, I mean, you know, it's brutal. They put them naked into a dark room with no food, no drink,

nothing to sleep on. And if you survived three days and came out copious, man, just they'd put you in again. And they repeat it until they break your spirit. So he did his desert time i think early on so the whole thing i mean i could go on you provided a footnote to this is a headstone so so thank you neil well he would say it is a it's the culmination of a life it's um a life story told through the music of poetry i mean that comment of alan ginsberg's about that line about the rut as a poet his work was so concise and so pared down and that's part of the the magic of the sound of the work is that it is

so compressed. And that's why, in a sense, if you're just reading it on the page at first, there are difficulties in actually working out what's going on there. But if you read it aloud, it makes much more sense. Listening is one thing, but reading it aloud actually gives you a lot of the clues. There is a kind of a narrative in there. So it's not just the seasons, there is the middle passage.

That line at the beginning, Son los pasarellos del mar, elo exidos, which is medieval Spanish from the book of Alexander. And he translates that into Northumbrian, spogies, sparrows are fledged. And it's all about Alexander

goes to the mountain to meet the israfel the angel of judgment who is about to cast the world into darkness and suddenly he doesn't and alexander finds himself on the ground after the experience of going up to the mountain and then he takes all his men back to macedonia so there's a little story going on in the middle of the sonata that middle section but it is like a dante-esque hell in the middle of the seasonal structure of the poem but also structurally we mentioned a lindisfarne on the cover of the book i mean the lindisfarne gospels the intermacing lattice work of the gospels is in a sense one of the structural

methods of the poetry there's so many themes that interweave and so many sounds you get so many images that weave through throughout yes and also where you call it a sonata it's not just the structure it's also the way in which in the sonata, all the sounds sort of, you know, the things are recalled, things come back and so on. So there are two areas of structure that he has in mind in the writing of the poem. You don't necessarily aware of it when you're reading it or hearing it, but that's part of the brilliance, I think, of the construction of it. Yes. I want to bring us back to hearing the poem from time to time.

So is there a section you could read for us now? I would actually quite like to read the opening three stanzas, partly because I understand he wrote the bull in last. Is that right? I think this was his last line which became his first which gives it the sort of persian as a almost a sufi circuit there are lots of circularities and there's a filigree sensation as well and i was reading about there's a wonderful book written by ivan ilich in the vineyard of the text and he discusses the monastic um tradition through hue of didascallion um really about the

bull and the sweetness of words chewing the cud the monks would really savor the honey of of the biblical uh passages that they were reading so um if i can if i just briefly outline so they they talk about um a desirable treasure resting in the mouth of the wise you know and the notion of um a monk in his monasteries like the samaritan's beast in a stable haze given to one in his stall you know they're chewing on the sweetness of the words, the cud. And there's this whole sensation really of the bull, although he's dancing, perhaps his audience is of these cows chewing on the sweetness of this rather monastic tract by bunting.

There's this sensation of the land, but also something very deeply religious in there and considered and obviously sonic brag sweet tenor bull descant on rothes magical each pebble its part for the fells late spring dance tiptoe bull, black against May, ridiculous and lovely, chase hurdling shadows morning into noon. May on the bull's hide and through the dale, furrows fill with May, paving the slow worm's way. A mason times his mallet to a lark's twitter, listening while the marble rests, lays his rule at a letter's edge, fingertips checking, till the stone spells a name,

naming none, a man abolished. Painful lark, labouring to rise, the solemn mallet says, in the grave slot he lies we rot decay thrusts the blade wheat stands in excrement trembling wrothy trembles tongue stumbles ears err for fear of spring rub the stone with sand wet sandstone rending roughness away the fingers ache on the rubbing stone the mason says rocks happen by chance no one here bolts the door. Love is so sore. It's just devastating when you get to the last line.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you. We've got a clip of Bunting talking about himself. It's him in a wonderful film by Peter Bell, which was made in 1980, I think. And that film is actually available at the back of Bloodaxe Books. It is. It's in the Brick Flats along with a 1966 Audi, I recall.

It's brilliant. And all at £12. Once upon a time, I was a poet. Not a very industrious one. Not at all an influential one. Unread and almost unheard of, yet good enough in a small way to interest my friends, whose names have gradually become familiar. become familiar. Alan and Zukovsky

first, Carlos Williams, Hugh McDermott, David Jones, Ness, few indeed, but enough to make me think

my work was not waste. Now they are all dead and I am old, much too old to say or write anything worth listening to. Bit by bit, childhood, youth, and middle age have become works of fiction, which I scarcely believe myself. Neither am I really convinced that the poems which bear my name

are not the work of some other person, lol vanished, whose passport and pension card i have somehow inherited but with all my only a slight acquaintance basil bunting master of the humble brag if you don't mind me saying he like he knew how to drop a name there but then he met a lot of very, very famous people in the course of his 85 years on Earth. And one of the things I want to say about Bunting is

what's fascinating to me about Bunting is that the image that he projected from 1966 onwards, it would surprise people to learn what his history had been up to that that point that he'd been a conscientious objector as you say he'd been privately educated conscientious objector he fights in the second world war doesn't he he goes on to become the head of the well it was a translator and then he became um would eventually ended up as a squadron leader or wing commander because he was working for british intelligence he wasn't actually doing any fighting as such.

But he became the Times correspondent in Iran. That was after that, yeah. And then he became head of British intelligence in Tehran. We have to mention this. He then married a much younger woman, a girl in fact. younger woman, a girl in fact. And it's well worth digging into Bunting's biography because this is a complicated situation, not least because of how it might or might not manifest in Brick Flats itself. Because part of Brick Flats is about a relationship presumably a sexual relationship between two very young people right yes yeah so i feel we have to sound that note of warning in

2023 it is more complicated perhaps today than it would have appeared at the time john she was 14 and she gave birth to his to a child when she was 15 and it cost him his job as the head of intelligence he was sacked and from everything that you can see it was a huge crisis in his life a turning point there's a story about the protesters in tehran asking death to bunting outside and he got away by by joining them as the sort of rabble were kind of asking for his blood and then drove his wife and family out of the country

and came back to Britain. And also he worked for, as Ford Maddox Ford's secretary in Paris, John, which meant that he knew Gene Rees. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he was very, he thought Hemingway's portrayal of Ford in Movable Feast was unforgivable, really.

He's extremely complicated. He has three links to Gene Rees. Would you like to know where they are? Go on. Okay, so they knew one another through Ford Maddox Ford when she was 28 and he was 18. They both enjoyed late flowering literary success good in the 1960s him with brick flats her with white sargasso sea and they shared an accountant

michael henshaw oh my god famous michael hensaw, who was accountant to all manner of drunken poets and writers. In other words, the portrait we're painting of Bunting could seem, Neil, to be at odds with this simple man of the rock and the soil that he was, I'm not even going to say pretending to be, but that sport had come to the fore by the time he, when he was writing Brick Flats, he was working at the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, wasn't he? Yes, that's right. And he was in the junior sub-editor. He was a junior sub-editor. The head of British intelligence in Tehran.

You know who the Saturday boy was on that paper? Mark Knopfler. Mark Knopfler. And William McSweeney, the poet, was also on the paper. Bunting was just doing a very humdrum job editing the shipping and the financial news. Neil, how do we square then this rich, multi-traveled life with the seemingly parochial poet? Well, I mean, Brimflats is a poem about the contradictions of the life. It's about trying to reconcile

what the mistakes he's made in his life, the wrong, the wrong paths he's taken because he ended up, really, until Brid Flats, he ended up in poverty.

You know, he had, you know, the mortgage man was after him, the rent man was after him or whatever. Spectacular fall from grace.

Yeah, but it was through Brigg Flats that he suddenly had got grants given to him, got public attention given to him. Very interestingly, but in a very short time, his earlier work was quickly made available again so that people could then see who'd come to Brigg Flats all the earlier work. And it was that earlier work that had been admired by Pound and so on in Paris and Italy

in the 20s and 30s. Although people like Zukovsky remained a correspondent with him throughout his life. People coming to Brig Flats for the first time had no sense of the work which had won him so many admirers in the States. I mean, the whole story about how he came to write Brig Flats was that Tom Pickard and Connie Pickard started Morden Tower. They were talking to the poet Jonathan Williams, and he told them that Britain's greatest living poet

lived just up the road from then in Wylam. Tom was 18. Yeah, Tom was 18, and tom went out to ask him for something for his magazine uh and he ended up getting the script of the spoils which had been neglected for years and mordenthal then put that out this was before brig flats was published that was a piece of work from that whole earlier period. But the American poets knew and respected his work long before Brig Flats, but he'd become forgotten here. I mean, T.S. Eliot famously didn't get on with him and he turned him down and he said some very

disparaging things about Eliot. So he got shut out of British publishing very quickly, but it was the Americans that kept his work going all those years. That's quite often the case, isn't it? Because I have a sort of brewing fat theory that there are a couple now. There's Bunting and there's the great lost Scottish wilderness, Joseph MacLeod, who practically nobody's heard of. He was a BBC broadcaster. So in a way, he had his professional assistance.

I like Bunting's, and he was blocked. I mean, they published the ecliptic, but after that, Faber declined. And that's the story here. You just wonder how much Eliot was nervous. He wanted to maintain his own coterie. But I mean, there are similarities in some ways between between brig flats and focal text well i've wondered that that sense of the relationship at the core of brig flats we should all to say something about the fact that brig flats is a quaker meeting house and it was peggy who the poem is dedicated to

i think they met when he was 11 and she was 8 and and they, at some point, when they were quite young, had a relationship. And it's the going back to that relationship that is the kind of frame of the poem. And not everybody likes the way that he has dealt with that. I know one of your fine poets, Katrina Porches, said it makes her feel uncomfortable, the relationship, because they were children.

And he says they were children. People talk about him as being a Quaker poet, but his family weren't Quaker. It was the Greenbanks were the Quakers. That's where he got his introduction to Quakerism. And then his conscientious objection in the First World War was based on Quakerism. Yeah, there's a lovely thing that he says in his note on Brick Flats,

which he's quite grumpy about having to. He said, Brick Flats is a poem, it needs no explanation. And then he goes on to give you one. The day's incidents hide our ignorance from us, yet we know it beneath our routine. In silence, having swept dust and litter from our minds, we can detect the pulse of God's blood in our veins, more persuasive than words, more demonstrative than a diagram. That is what a Quaker meeting tries to be, and that is why my poem is called Brick Flats. let the incidents and images take care of

themselves i would like to hear some more of poem because i think we need to keep coming back to the poem so um neil do you have a extract to share with us i've got two short extracts and i think the first of these shows that there are parts of Brig Flats that are crystal clear to any reader. Yes. So this is from part five. Shepherds follow the links, sweet turf studded with thrift. Felborn men of precise instep, leading demure dogs from Tweed and Till and Tivydale, with hair combed back from the muzzle.

Dogs from Reedsdale and Coquitdale, taught by Wilson or Telfer. Their teeth are white as birch, slow on the black fringe of silent, accurate lips. The ewes are heavy with lamb, snow lies bright on Hedgeup and tacky mud about Till, where the fells have stepped aside and the river praises itself. Silence by silence sits and then is diffused in now. And that theme of then is diffused in now, the present is past, the past is present is very much a theme of the book and of the work. And one other short section. Brief words are hard to find, shapes to carve and discard. Bloodaxe, King of York, King of Dublin, King of Orkney.

Take no notice of tears. Letter the stone to stand over love laid aside, lest insufferable happiness impede flight to Stainmore, And that relates to the death of Eric Bloodaxe, the Viking king, a man who made many mistakes, ended up being murdered. That was the end of his kingdom. The English took over not long after that. And there's the figure of Bloodaxe in the poem, and there's also the figure of Cuthbert.

And it's like two sides of the Northumbrian identity, two sides of how Bunting saw himself, the warlike side, and the contemplative holy side that are in those two figures in the poem um can i ask you a question we've said the brig flats like much poetry of course is is condensed the words contain so much that when you put them into the water they unfold i wonder if you could tell us how your response to the poem has changed on subsequent readings i think it it's mellifluous the first impact for me was sonic it's also the impression's so strong because he uses so many monosyllabic impressions. So you get this incredible crafting of the syllabic structure and a great deal of silence around that.

So as a landscape, as a sonic landscape, you are literally walking with the ear. landscape you are, just really walking, you know, with the ear. And at the beginning that, I think, resonated with me on a second reading, thinking about the sort of the Highland Gaelic death tradition in poetry where the monosyllabics are connected to the notion of earth being dropped on a grave. So again, you've got this sort of dispensing of sound that's very tactile. But then again, revisiting it, thinking again around it for discussing it here. The visual kept coming through. And when I was reading about his embedding of structures like the cross within, and again, returning to the Lindisfarne G fun gospels thinking about perhaps farsi persian

indications and that temporality that that doesn't necessarily spiral but it it does have a circularity um i was thinking about jill purse you know a great researcher into circles these sorts of things started to become much more image driven for me and i felt there was a tactile sense that was visual that's fascinating so there's a kind of um development from the herd to the scene to the touch to the fascinating, to the touch, to the fascinating. It kind of floats, doesn't it? It floats around. It floats, but it also activates you, the poem. It's incredibly performative, and he does this through such skill, the phrasing and the extended vowels and the quantitative stress.

He's working all of these elements together, quantitative stress he's working all of these elements together so it's this enmeshed situation um that gives you a profound sense of uh the beat and you are activated by it as much as it activates you do you know there's a symbiosis there it's really powerful very raw i think we have to wind up in a minute i would i would love to ask the same question to Neil, because you've lived with this poem. You've built a life around this poem. It's not unreasonable to observe over 50 years. And I wonder how it's changed for you in that time.

I mean, in a sense, we're talking now about 50 years on. I mean, the poem is about remembering 50 years, but there's now nearly 50 years since Br mean the poem is about remembering 50 years but there's now nearly 50 years since yeah since brick flats was first read by um basil bunting in morton tower in 1965 i'm in an odd situation of sort of having a kind of proofreading relationship with it with having published it in different editions also i've heard him read it live three times. I've got the two recordings in my head. But certainly when I went back to it before our discussion, just the more I read it, the more I find in it.

It's more, I mean, Kirsten talked about phrasing. I mean, phrasing is a musical term also. There is that sense of him writing as a musician. You know, he was a musicologist. He did write about music for the london dailies he made a disparaging comment about vaughan williams in relation to the lark rising that kept rising and it was as though he was factually challenging the fact that the lark rose so long it would probably hit a satellite in the oven. Actually accurate. He was very funny, very witty in his music,

but he really knew his music inside out. And what would happen if one set this to music? Well, part of it has been set to music in that part of section four, he used to, you know, one of the recording, we're not going to hear it today, but one of the recordings, part of the poem he reads to Scarlatti's Sonata in B minor. I think we will hear a bit of that at the end. But when he actually reads it, he's reading it whilst the Scarlatti is playing, and it's a kind of counterpoint. The two weave in and out of each other. Yeah, okay.

Thank you, is I think what we should say. First of all, to Neil and Miglore for their stories and insights into this strange and brilliant poem, and to Nicky Birch, our producer, who wheels her microphone like a chisel, and to Alexis and all the wonderful team at the Woodstock Poetry Festival. Thank you. If you want show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show, and the 200 that we've already recorded, please visit our website at backlisted.fm. If you want to buy the books discussed, visit our shop at bookshop.org

and choose Backlisted as your bookshop and we are still available to hear from you on twitter on facebook on instagram on blue sky by postcards by skywriting everywhere you want to reach us you can yes medium that's fine if you want to hear backlisted early and ad free subscribe to our patreon up to our newsletter, www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Finally, Kirsten, is there anything you would like to add on the subject of Brickflats or Basil Bunting that we haven't already covered? Now is your time. Now is the time to come. The singer Stephen Duffy, once known as stephen tintin duffy who is a great

poetry enthusiast said the thing that always sticks with him about basil bunting is basil's ear hair which which he grew proudly and uh allowed to become luscious well i think i think um the slow worm is worth mentioning yes the. The slow worm is a phenomenal creature, to look at part snake, part lizard, but actually it has its own identity. I think that the slow worm embodies, to a certain extent, this transitional, complicated, unresolved contradictory nature of experience the experiential situation that bunting had and i saw one last summer for the first time it was dead i just

finished editing my husband's manuscript where a slow m features large as a central motif and i went out for a walk and there was one lying in the road. I didn't know what it was. They give off quite an auras that perhaps it was recently dead. But having seen that now, I understand the slow worm in his text, because it's just shy of being a glow worm or something more benign, something more magical. It's actually really,

like everything else about the text, it's contained within the sphere of its own existence. It's a mystery, you know. It's a mystery. I like that too. A headstone and a mystery. Thank you. So there's through the power of the slow woman.

Right. Neil, is there anything that we haven't covered, anything that you would like to add about Brickflats or about about basil bunting i'd like to just read a couple of lines where he writes about scarlatti that we'll hear in a minute because he's writing about scarlatti but he's also writing about his own work as the player's breath warms the fipple the the tone clears. It is time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti condensed so much music into so few bars, with neither a crab turn or congested cadence, never a boast or a sea here, and stars and lakes echo him, and the copse drums out his measure. Snow peaks are lifted up in moonlight and twilight, and the sun rises on an acknowledged land.

Thanks very much, everybody, and thank you to our lovely audience here at the Woodstock Poetry Festival, and we'll see you next time. And now we're going to leave you with another extended excerpt of Basil Bunting reading from the final section, accompanied by the sonata in B minor, K87, by Scarlatti. things, stars, free of our humbug, each his own, the longer known, the more alone, wrapped in emphatic fire, roaring out to a black flue. Each spark trills on a tone beyond chronological compass, yet in a sextant's bubble, present and firm, places a surveyor's stone or steadies a tiller.

Then is now. The star you steer by is gone. Its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane, spider floss on my cheek, light from the zenith spun when the slow worm laid her lap fifty years ago. The sheets are gathered and bound, the volume indexed and shelved, dust on its marbled leaves. Lofty and empty coom, silent but for bees. Fingertips touched and were still fifty years ago. Sirius is too young to remember. Sirius glows in the wind.

Sparks on ripples mark his line. Lures for spent fish. Fifty years a letter unanswered, a visit postponed for fifty years. She has been with me fifty years Starlight quivers I had day enough For love on interrupted night Uninterrupted Night A strong song tolls us long earsick. Blind we follow, rain slant, spray flick to fields we do not know.

Night float us. Offshore wind, shout. Ask the sea, what's lost? What's left? What horn sunk? What crown adrift?

Where we are, who knows of kings whose sup while day fails? Who, swinging his axe to fell kings, guesses where we go? Thank you. Gourmet Thank you.