Comments on: Make This My Default Location (I)

By: Ange

Ange — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 01:52:07 +0000

Don, I didn’t know there’s a new Helen Adam book out. But she did occur to me as I was thinking about balladry, which is such a simple solution to the problem of “information” and free verse.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:09:53 +0000

It’d be interesting to compare Tom Pickard’s balladry with that of Helen Adam, just collected and republished in A Helen Adam Reader. For those who’ve not heard of her, Charles Bernstein characterizes Adam as “the most exuberantly anachronistic of second wave modernist poets.”

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:17:16 +0000

Pastiche doesn’t mean fake, it just means imitation– I didn’t mean to imply a value judgment, just a question about use of sources, and yes, Pickard has lived his whole life there. It’s not the same thing for Pickard to write his own ballad as to transcribe one and put it into his poem– but the ballad isn’t worse if he wrote it.

By: Ange

Ange — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 18:52:00 +0000

A DVD, perfect! I’ve got to get my hands on it.
Steve, I’m not sure what constitutes pastiche in this context! There was no sense of Pickard being a tourist of this material, especially as — I forgot to mention this in the body of my post — he’s lived his whole life in Jamie Allan country. Those rhythms and that imagery seem ingrained.

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 16:36:58 +0000

That sounds worth more than a look! I know Pickard as Bunting's inspiration more than I know him as a poet in his own right, though I have spent some time with Pickard's earlier selected (also from Flood). It sounds like he's writing his best poetry right now. I wonder whether and to what extent "Hawthorn" incorporates lines from traditional songs, or whether it's simply a really well-done pastiche? There's only one line ("I thought that it was snowing") that would sound out of place in, say, Child.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 16:30:37 +0000

Thank you for this, Ange! One of the best readings I ever hosted or even went to was by Tom Pickard – as it happens, he read quite a bit from both The Ballad of Jamie Allan and The Dark Months of May – we recorded it, along with a separate studio version, and I play it back constantly. You can really hear the ballad form spring to life in his beautiful voice.
Readers of Harriet might like to know that there’s a DVD out of a live performance of The Ballad of Jamie Allan: a Folk Opera with Tom’s libretto and music by John Harle, directed by Simon Clugston, John Harle and the cast, choreographed by Micha Bergese, and featuring a video and photographic montage by Tom Pickard.