Camila is editing an anthology of Allen Ginsberg poems that relate to his 1948 auditory vision of William Blake’s voice coming to him across the vault of time, reading poems from Songs of Innocence and of Experience. I am writing the foreword. To do this we first had to agree on the meaning of each selected poem. I thought I was familiar with them all as I once spent a year editing Allen’s tape collection and selecting the best live recording of each of his published poems, but even so I was occasionally puzzled as to what he actually meant. (Allen himself sometimes didn’t know, sometimes placing two words together in the same way as Cezanne placed two colours together to get what Allen called ‘eyeball kicks’. He had also written quite a number of poems since I did that work back in 1971. By reading them aloud and discussing each one the meanings became clear. It was insightful work and, in fact, a delight to revisit poems that I mostly hadn’t read in decades. As you can see it was exhausting work.

Although we worked every day, there was still time for meals, for a drop of wine, and visits to friends. Martha has a swimming pond, surrounded by plants and flowers with a superb view of the mountains.

We went with Martha to a concert of Bach Cantatas played by the Ensemble Correspondences at the tenth century abbey of St. Michel de Cuxa, part of the Pablo Casals Festival. The building was erected in 950 in the Mozarabic style and has superb acoustics. I was not that happy with the lighting which was sometimes distracting and would have preferred to see the 1000-year-old horseshoe arches in their natural colours, but it was a great concert. 

I forgot to mention the Anselm Kiefer-Van Gogh show in last month’s post. Jill and I went to the show which was at the Royal Academy. As usual I found these artist pairings to be a little forced. It’s true that Kiefer liked Van Gogh but he wasn’t that much influenced by him. There were some nice Van Goghs though. 

Back to France and my next visitors were Ken Weaver and Maxine. I hadn’t seen them since I visited their place last year with a film crew who were making a documentary about Ken’s fellow-Fug Tuli Kupferberg. Here’s Roslyn with Maxine and Ken in Prades. They overlapped with Richard and Suzy. Suzy had just completed a six month residency at the Citie des Arts in Montmartre and I really regret not having the time to visit them there. They brought with them some rather interesting anarchic local wines from the other wise of the Col.

I saw quite a lot of Roslyn and Gordon which was good because they rarely come down to London. Unfortunately, we didn’t overlap by many days as they had to return to Britain because of Brexit rules (a pox on all who voted Brexit!). There was time for one more concert: the Cobla Sol de Banyuls did a free concert at the local church. It is some of the strangest music you will ever hear in Europe; despite the bass being the only stringed instrument, it sounds like the string section of an orchestra. A cobla consists of 10 wind instruments and a double bass, with one person playing both a flute and a hand drum attached to his wrist. Women have only been permitted to play in a cobla since the 1980s and to my disgust, at the end of the concert, only the men were called to stand and take a bow by name. They played modern works, but all had the distinctive triple beat of the Sardana at their root (actually a 6/8 rhythm). It has a slightly sinister feel, an echo of the distant past. The earliest reference to the Sardana is from 1552. Here’s more what-we-did-on-our-holidays pix of the cobla and of Gordon and Roslyn with Catherine and Billy and their daughter Niamh.

My final visitor of the summer was Marsha Rowe, veteran of Australian Oz, English Oz, co-founder and editor of Spare Rib and co-founder of Virago Books. We have been fellow travellers for decades, hoping to subvert people! She last appeared here throwing eggs with Sara Lucas. Meanwhile, bamboo threatens to overtake the garden and life goes on, at least for a bit longer.