BACKLISTED PODCAST DISCUSSION ON BASIL BUNTING’s BRIGGFLATTS

Backlisted: Basil Bunting - Briggflatts, Episode 201, 12 December 2023

A special edition of the Backlisted podcast devoted to a discussion about the late Basil Bunting’s long poem Briggflatts was recorded at the Woodstock Poetry Festival on 2 December 2023.  Hosts John Mitchinson and Andy Miller were joined by Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley and poet MacGillivray, who had just launched her new book Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire at the festival.  Neil Astley’s role in republishing the poetry of Rosemary Tonks was also discussed in the introduction. The episode began and ended with archive recordings of Basil Bunting reading extracts from Briggflatts.
 

‘Briggflatts’ is included in Bloodaxe’s 2000 Complete Poems, and is also available in the separate edition Briggflatts, which includes a CD with an audio recording Basil Bunting made of the poem in 1967, and a DVD of Peter Bell’s 1982 film portrait of Bunting.

 

‘Today’s episode focuses 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.’

https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/201

 

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In June 2016, Bloodaxe released enhanced e-books with audio of Basil Bunting's Complete Poems and Briggflatts (the latter includes video as well as audio), marking the 50th anniversary of the first publication of the poem Briggflatts in June 1966.

 

Bunting wrote that ‘Poetry, like music, is to be heard.’ His own readings of his own work are essential listening for a full appreciation of his highly musical poetry. 

 

The e-book of Briggflatts includes the video of Peter Bell's film portrait of Bunting previously available only on the DVD accompanying the print edition along with two audio recordings of Bunting reading Briggflatts: the 1967 London recording from the CD accompanying the print edition, and the 1977 Carlisle recording previously released by Bloodaxe Books on an LP record in 1980, the latter featuring Domenico Scarlatti's sonata in B minor, L.33, one of the poem's main structural models. Readers can choose which performance to listen to while reading the poem, or can switch between them. As well as his own notes to the poem (and a posthumously published additional Note), this edition includes his seminal essay on sound and meaning in poetry, ‘The Poet’s Point of View’ (1966), and other background material including many archive photographs. 

 

The e-book of Complete Poems draws on audio recordings of readings given by Bunting in Britain and the US during the 1960s and 1970s, with 50 audio files embedded with the texts of the poems, including all his major works, Briggflatts, Villon, The Spoils and Chomei at Toyama, along with many shorter poems.

 

Many thanks are due to Newcastle University for their assistance with this project under the KTP scheme. 

 

At the same time, Faber & Faber published The Poems of Basil Bunting, edited by Don Share (2016) in hardback (624 pages) at £30. This includes three minor poems not in the Bloodaxe edition, together with a number of variants, anomalies, fragments and "false starts": apart from those additions, Bloodaxe's Complete Poems is complete (but has no critical apparatus). The ironic aspects of this will not be lost on Bunting’s many dedicated readers: Bloodaxe has sublicensed the right to publish the new scholarly edition to Faber, but T.S. Eliot rejected Bunting’s own submission of his collected poetry as Faber poetry editor in 1951.

 

The anniversary was also marked by Briggflatts-50, ‘an incarnation of modernism, memory and radical art to mark the 50th anniversary of Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts’. This involved events, speakers, performances and poetry readings organised with Newcastle and Durham Universities on 24 and 25 June 2016. Venues included Morden Tower, the historic medieval tower room on Newcastle’s city walls where Bunting gave the first reading of Briggflatts in 1965, and Newcastle’s Mining Institute and Culture Lab. Events included a collective reading of Briggflatts at Morden Tower, a tribute reading by younger generation poets, a walking tour of Bunting’s Newcastle, and a tribute concert featuring music and poetry by Tom Pickard, Richard Dawson, Jude Murphy and Banjo Billy Lloyd.

 

The enhanced ebooks with audio (and video for Briggflatts) work on iPad, Kindle Fire and iBooks on laptops.

 

They can be ordered via the title pages on the Bloodaxe website (click on Glassboxx): Complete Poems and Briggflatts.

 

They can be also downloaded from Amazon via these links:

Briggflatts

Complete Poems