Up Late

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And being “gay in spite of it” is what affirms Yeats’s “gaiety transfiguring all that dread,” his “Lapis Lazuli” Chinamen whose “ancient, glittering eyes are gay.” There’s a fair bit of intertextual dialogue arising out of mutual respect between them. The title of Tate’s last collection The Government Lake was lifted from Berman’s poem ‘Classic Water’ in the only collection he published, Actual Air. And while ‘Purple Mountains’, Berman’s moniker after disbanding Silver Jews, supposedly came from a mondegreen in ‘America the Beautiful’, ‘the purple mountains majesties’, what I think of is Tate’s poem ‘Ashes of Roses’ in Memoir of the Hawk, in particular the lines ‘the purple mountain’s/ silver cloud’. (Incidentally, ‘Cloud’ became David Berman’s middle name. And silver? Stop me!) Speaking of the morally ambiguous, I also watched a lot of film noir, of which my favourite was The Last Seduction. What can I say? I love to see women getting away with things. Up Late was written by Laird as an elegy to his father, who died of Covid in March 2021. The judges felt Up Late “sincerely engaged with death, grief and the private and shared lived experience of the pandemic in ways which readers will find profoundly moving and cathartic”.

He is always described, and self-described, as homosexual, though for several years in the 1940s he had a sexual relationship with a woman, Rhoda Jaffe, and brief affairs with women at other times in his life. ↩ The man who, during the thirties, was one of the five or six best poets in the world has gradually turned into a rhetoric mill grinding away at the bottom of Limbo, into an automaton that keeps making little jokes, little plays on words, little rhetorical engines, as compulsively and unendingly and uneasily as a neurotic washes his hands. Why do so few ask why those most affected by the train are forced or reduced to writing about the train? Who pushed us onto the train and what would happen if we refused to bring everything we create on board? Mónica Parle, co-executive director of the Forward Arts Foundation, the charity which runs the Forward Prizes, added: “We are incredibly proud of this year’s shortlist: it represents such a strong mix of known names and new talent, and perfectly embodies our aims at Forward, to champion the diverse scope of contemporary poetry published in the UK and Ireland. Auden’s move to America prompted some rancor in the literary world. He was recruited to the Morale Division of the US Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany, 5 where he interviewed German citizens about the war and “got no answers that we didn’t expect.” He returned briefly to London in 1945, and Robert Graves’s attitude seems not untypical: “Ha ha about Auden: the rats return to the unsunk ship.”

Danny Denton‘s most recent novel is All Along The Echo. He lectures on writing at University College Cork, and is a contributing editor for The Stinging Fly. Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York in 1907, the youngest of three boys. (His brothers became a farmer and a geologist.) When he was a year old, his father, George Auden, became the school medical officer for Birmingham, and the family moved there. Dr. Auden served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in Gallipoli, Egypt, and France during World War I. Auden boarded at St. Edmund’s prep school in Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood, who became his lifelong friend, his collaborator, and in the late 1920s and 1930s, his lover. Between 1920 and 1925 Auden boarded at Gresham’s School in Holt, Norfolk, and at the suggestion of a fellow pupil, Robert Medley, with whom he was in love, began to write poetry. The Book of Symbols – Reflections On Archetypal Images (Taschen), winds its way through creation and cosmos, animal, plant, human and spirit worlds, image after image, accompanied by their cultural and historical context. In this book’s company, the world beyond the everyday reveals itself in light and shadow, holding the tension between them. It could be something they had recently discovered or something they found themselves returning to time and time again. We asked everyone—nicely, of course —to choose one thing and one thing only to write about.

Being an inveterate schematizer, 3 Auden cannot resist a further categorization when it comes to Berlin, who takes his two classes of thinkers from Archilochus. Auden, in response, goes to Lewis Carroll: all men, he insists, may be divided into Alices and Mabels. (Mabel is one of Alice’s friends, who “knows such a very little.”) Auden’s elaboration is slightly nonsensical—he decides that a Mabel is an “intellectual with weak nerves and a timid heart, who is so appalled at discovering that life is not sweetly and softly pretty that he takes a grotesquely tough, grotesquely ‘realist’ attitude,” and he puts Donne, Schopenhauer, Joyce, and Wagner in the Mabel column—but it’s typical of Auden to steer the argument to childhood. Nicole Flattery is a writer and critic. Her story collection Show Them A Good Time, was published by The Stinging Fly and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, will be published by Bloomsbury in March 2023. Nicole took over as host of our podcast in September 2022. Auden discovered Freud at thirteen, according to Mendelson’s biography, “when his father began using the new psychology in his school medical practice.” All his life the poet argued with and borrowed from Freud, becoming, perhaps, the first major poet to use modern ideas about psychology in his work. According to the Cambridge Companion, “From adolescence he would startle or bully his friends with Freudian diagnoses.” ↩Her greatness—and she is one of the finest poets writing today—is due, in no small part, to her intransigence. Many of her poems are great in the same way. The child’s anger and resentment at his parents in, say, Firstborn and Ararat becomes Telemachus’ anger and resentment against Penelope and Odysseus in Meadowlands. The poems are franked with the distinct impress of a personality. The central long poem that gives the collection its title is perfect - an elegy for Laird's father, a meditation not just on death and grief, but on how we try to explain or capture death and grief and what's been lost; and how language always fails to do this, but it's all we have, so on we go. With each new segment of the poem Laird opens this up into more expansive, philosophical, spiritual spaces while keeping it completely individual, through details gathered about himself and his father. A masterpiece.