Barcelona

Above Placa Reial the palm trees nod
like caged giraffes. Pubescent prostitutes,
dressed-up in ra-ra skirts and Lurex boots
patrol their pitch. As evening falls an odd
pink light pervades the patched Baroque arcade.
A girl steps from the shadows, face aglow,
like some doomed saint by Caravaggio;
her sallow beauty mocks the drab parade.
Across the faded square a duo plays
upon accordion and clarinet,
up-beat and strangely phrased, 'Those Were the Days'.
Absorbed within some lost bohemia, regret
becomes our shabby surrogate for blame—
a pretence that 'our dreams are still the same'.

There's a scene in the TV programme 'Classic Albums' where Paul Simon, looking back on the making of 'Graceland', sits  at a mixing desk listening again to the title track. 'This is my best song' he says, with pride in his voice and a look of fondness in his eyes as if he was flipping through snapshots of his firstborn. In the same way, 'Barcelona' is my best poem and I doubt if I will ever write anything finer.

I've said before that I cannot always recall when and how some poems were written;, however the making of 'Barcelona' is well documented both in my notebooks and in workshop posts at Sonnet Central. Mike Alexander, the administrator of 'The Sonnet Board'  refers to  'Barcelona' as an example of a poem perfected over time through comment and feedback from readers. It's true, I was pushed to iron out weaknesses by responding to others and I did end up with a stronger poem.

However, maybe it is more interesting look at the gestation of this poem before it got to the workshop stage. We first visited Barcelona in the Spring of 1997 on a day trip from France. We'd rented a static caravan on a site near Perpignan which enabled us to explore Barcelona and the Costa Brava as well as the mountains and coastline of Rousillon over the Easter break. There is a snippet of holiday video taken in Placa Reial, maybe a minute or two in length, showing the fountains, tall palm trees and two buskers thoroughly murdering 'Those Were The Days'. Then there is some footage of me trundling a Mclaren buggy as Laura was still too small to walk any distance. I remember falling behind the rest of the family by a few yards as a young women stopped me to ask if I could find somewhere or other on the map I was carrying. Perhaps she stepped out of the shadows, I can't remember. The poem itself was written six years later; so although it purports to be a travel piece, really it is not. Richard Wilbur called it a Baudelairean city sonnet, and who am I to disagree?

Above Placa Reial the palm trees nod like caged giraffes....

In my small black note book, just above the first draft of the poem, there are some jottings about transvestites and street artists, then a line about the street musicians playing 'Those Were The Days'. It is this image, I think, which became the magnet for the rest. Quite a bit of the other material seems to have been influenced by a description of Barcelona in the 'Shell Guide to Spain' written by Angus Mitchell which we bought after our first visit , possibly in preparation for a trip to Asturias in the summer of 1999.

Just down from the opera house is the elegant neoclassical Placa Reial with its palm trees, golden ochre facades and Gaudi-designed street lamps. If you sit here, quite soon you will get your first taste of the Barrio Chino that lies on either side of the Rambla de Santa Monica. Travellers are generally warned away from the narrow streets where pickpockets, transvestites and prostitutes inhabit a small universe of sex and drugs, reminiscent of Jean Genet's Barcelona.
(p 52)

The excerpt reads like wishful thinking, even back in 1997 this portrait of 'low-life' Barcelona felt somewhat anachronistic.. Since then I've been back twice, each time the influence of Ryanair seems much more prevalent than Jean Genet. That being said, Barcelona remains, of all the cities I've visited, the one where I have witnessed the most petty street crime in the form of handbag snatching and mugging. It is a bit edgy even now.

What I suppose my sonnet does is to take this basic bohemian view of the city, then 'pimps it up'. I saw no evidence of street prostitution in Barcelona; it's prevalence in Italy however came as quite a shock when we went there in the mid-nineties. The sight of girls sitting on the roadside on the edge of major tourist spots around Garda, often perched on fold-up picnic chairs, quietly reading or knitting while awaiting their next customer comes as quite a shock to English sensibilities. When you realise that many of the girls seem to hardly have even reached  their mid-teens then the whole business becomes darker and upsetting. So, the lurex booted and ra-ra skirted girls are an image from Italy not Spain.

The evening light is pure invention; I've never been to Barcelona in the evening. What I wanted to create was a sense of magic realism, like  de Chirico's haunting, light flooded arcades or Delvaux's odd, dreamlike parades of solambulant women. The Caravaggesque bit  is a good example of the efficacy of rhyme as a way of sparking association - what rhymes with aglow? Caravaggio! - job done!
 

'A girl steps from the shadow, face aglow / like some doomed saint by Caravaggio.'

The key phrase in the sonnet is 'doomed saint'. All the participants are doomed saints not least the colluding 'us' observing the 'drab parade'.

The poem has been published with two different endings, In 'Prospero at Breakfast' the final lines were as follows:

Fooled by the atmosphere of veiled regret,
we quietly deny what we became,
pretending yet, ‘our dreams are still the same.’

In terms of atmosphere and cadence then the lines are reasonably effective. I was never completely happy with them though. Firstly, I never could quite accept 'what we became' as correct grammar. Surely, as my inner English teacher kept telling me, reaching for the red bic, that should be 'what we have become?'. 'Thanks, Mr Grieve' (I thought you'd died years ago!) Quite correct, became/same is rhyme is now totally screwed. Secondly, any kind of analysis of the lines reveals them to be quite nonsensical. 'Veiled regret' - the song is not about 'veiled regret' at all, it concerns heart-wrenching, overwhelming regret. It seems to me that the 'we' in the poem are not 'fooled' either, they are willing participants colluding and co-creating the atmosphere of regret.

For a while, I just lived with it. In his commentary on Eratosphere's annual Sonnet 'Bake-off', Richard Wilbur did not pick the problem up, neither did the British poet, Martyn Crucefix, when he awarded the poem first prize in the Ware Poets annual sonnet competition in 2006. When Mike Burch discussed publishing some of my work on his Hypertexts site his standards proved to be more exacting and he persuaded me to re-write the ending:

Absorbed within some lost bohemia, regret
becomes our shabby surrogate for blame—
a pretence that 'our dreams are still the same'.

I'm happier with this. It works better grammatically. Moreover, the point that one way of sustaining love is through shared regret rather than some kind of blame ridden 'holding to account' seems to ring true to me and this sentiment lies behind the song. I suppose

 'Those Were The Days' has reached some kind of iconic status as a kitch, cliched ballad. It's provenance is actually a little more venerable. The words are a translation of a well known  Russian romance song "Dorogoi dlinnoyu" ("Дорогой длинною", lit. "By the long road"), composed by Boris Fomin (1900–1948) with words by the poet Konstantin Podrevskii. It deals with reminiscence upon youth and romantic idealism. The American folk singer, Gene Raskin, re-wrote the lyrics and simply stole the tune. Like most people, I first heard the song in the version by Mary Hopkin which was a major hit in 1968. I've just been thinking, a small head-shot of Mary Hopkin which appeared in Melody Maker or NME's 'bubbling under' section just before the song charted is probably the first picture where I remember thinking, hmm... she looks nice. There followed a string of infatuations in early adolescence with Sixties blondes' - Julie Christie Susannah York...and so on. So the tune does have a particular significance for me, does that forgotten memory fuel the poem's intensity? 

Anyway, a couple of years ago the American painter and poet, Rick Mullin, took the poem home. He sent me a video reading of the sonnet recorded on his i-phone from Placa Reial itself. Now that is pretty cool.


Thanks Rick.