Basil Bunting, mentioned in yesterday’s note, was so many things he’s hard to describe.
Gareth Prior, a poet who is also a perceptive reader of Bunting, gave this account:
In his 85 years Bunting remade himself as frequently and substantially as Yeats: conscientious objector; expat drunk; student; lecturer; hack-writer; skipper; spy; military tactician; diplomat; foreign correspondent; jobbing local journalist; professor; husband; father; neglected genius; lauded poet.
Bunting was born in 1900 and grew up among the Quakers in Northumberland. His long poem Briggflats is named after a Friends meetinghouse.
He was jailed as a conscientious objector in World War I and was an Air Force officer in World War II. At least in legend, he edited Shakespeare’s sonnets as a schoolboy, finding the raw poem under accretions.
In the 1920s, he met Louis Zukofsky, who later edited the edition of Poetry magazine dedicated to the Objectivist poets. I love the Objectivists and came to read Bunting, who was something of a kindred spirit.
One section of Briggflats describes the carving of a tombstone.
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.
That passage is wonderful to me.
• Sources: The excerpt from Briggflats: An Autobiography can be found at the Poetry Foundation’s site:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/30206/briggflatts
Gareth Prior’s post “A Tremulous Thread: Basil Bunting” is here:
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