One of the highlights of my visit to Havana in November was going to see Adalberto Álvarez and his band live at the Casa de la Música in Galeano. Adalberto is a mainstay of Cuban dance music and one of its finest songwriters. If you’ve danced salsa at all you probably know several of his tracks even if you don’t know that they’re his.

Adalberto’s roots are in Cuban Son music – he keeps this prominent by calling his orchestra ‘Adalberto Álvarez y su Son’ – but he has merged this with Timba and what we think of as Salsa.
But he also has roots that go deeper than that. Like many Cuban musicians his spiritual source is in Santería. The night I went to hear him he started off with internationally popular dance music including his wonderful and witty song about Rueda – Para Bailar Casino – but later in the set he embarked on a long, long song in Rumba style that went through passages about all the main Santería gods and goddesses in turn – Elegguá, Yemayá, Changó, Ochún and so on with the appropriate drumming and invocations.

This is the superb thing about Cuban music, that it has all the attack and fun quality of pop and at the same time it can be deeply religious. Even American Gospel to me doesn’t quite manage to do this so completely and with such spontaneity.
But for the dancers, as so often recently, the climax of the set was – appropriately – Gazando en la Habana, where Adalberto sings about someone who has done what so many of us did – got hooked on salsa, dreamed about going to Havana, and finally got there, learned the real Cuban style and danced the night away.
What’s fascinating to me is that the song isn’t really written from a Cuban point of view. It’s written to speak for its international audience, the countless people around the world who go to Cuba to dance. The nearest parallel I can think of is the way Chuck Berry in the 1950s wrote rock’n’roll songs to speak for white teenagers. His songs broke through because he wrote about the experiences which as a black teenager he hadn’t had – driving his girlfriend in a car, for example.
Adalberto has done the same. A young Cuban can’t easily travel the world, and their experience of Havana will be a much harder and less affluent one than Susanna’s. Despite the nod to Cuban youth at the end of the song, they can’t afford to go to the Casa de la Musica every night because it costs ten dollars – more than a week’s wages. Yet I don’t think either Berry or Adalberto writes with condescension, cynicism or exploitiveness. Of course they want to appeal to an audience and they want to make their dollars. Good luck to them. But there’s also a generosity of spirit, an imagination that crosses racial and political boundaries. And Adalberto like so many Cubans is very proud that his country, whatever its problems and restrictions, leads the world in dance music and is loved by millions of people for its wonderful culture – of which he’s an important part.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the video clip above of Gozando en la Habana. Especially the little boy at the front, who even has his own microphone! And now I’ve talked about it so much, I’ll translate the words here:
Susanna is a modern girl
she might live anywhere
she could be from Paris, Rome or Milan
from New York, Switzerland or Panama.
Susanna’s dream is to be in Havana
where she always wanted to dance:
a lover of Cuban music,
now her dream has become reality.
She’s only been a short time in Havana
and already she’s dancing like the Cubans
at the Casa de la Musica in Galeano or Miramar
dancing all night, the dawn surprises her
And everyone in her neighbourhood’s looking for Susanna
because they can’t imagine that she’s partying in Havana.
They say that over there in her district they’re looking for Susanna
but Susanna, gentlemen, is partying in Havana!
The girl’s disappeared, no one knows where she is.
Look for her in Galeano, or if not, over there in Miramar,
and you’ll see…
Look how everyone enjoys themselves, dancing to Cuban music
But I assure you the one who’s enjoying herself most is Susanna,
she’s doing the whole thing in Havana.
Lots of people ask, where’s Susanna -
She always goes out at night and comes back in the morning?
Look! she goes to the school every day to learn how to dance:
And she’s always keen, Oh Susanna’s not wasting her time in Havana!
Oh my God! Look for her! (And I’m gonna look for her, with the mambo…)
How do you like Havana, Susanna? Susanna the most beautiful,
the one who dances, the one who parties!
She goes to the Macumba, she goes to the Tropicana,
and if you want to find her, look for her at the Tropical!…
I don’t know if she’s Argentine, Cuban or Venezuelan,
In every part of Cuba you’ll find a Susanna
When she arrived in Havana she hardly knew how to dance
and now she moves so that no one can equal her!
She’s really got into Cuban music.
Hey Susanna, how do you like Havana?

It looked like a grey cold day but Wednesday turned out to be pure gold. Having some work to do in the Lakes (on which see below) I went up a day early, planning a walk (weather permitting) from the Newlands Valley.

It was my first day out this year (I had pneumonia over Christmas and didn’t leave the house for a month!) and after scraping thick ice off the car in Manchester I was expecting near-hypothermic conditions on the fells. I had thermals, quilted shirt, multiple sweaters, gloves, woolly hat, the lot. So after parking at Newland Village Hall I put on my woollies and set off for the footpath up Catbells.

I soon discovered my mistake. The sky had already cleared and before I reached the foot of the path I’d shed the gloves, then the hat. Once I started on the slope, most of the rest followed. If I’d been certain of privacy (though I only met 4 people all day), I’d have taken off the long johns as well. By the time I reached Catbells summit, all I had above the waist was a thin t-shirt (plus bulging rucksack, of course) and it stayed that way until after 3 pm.

Derwentwater was a perfect mirror with hardly a quiver of air to stir the glassy surface. I kept north over Maiden Moor and along to the wonderfully solid and elegant cairn on High Spy, erected I suppose as a landmark by long-departed nineteenth-century slate miners.

Then I took the path down (left, east) just before the tiny tarn – the point where this path leaves the main one is at about 232154 - down through the old slate workings. Not having taken this route before I hadn’t realised how weird and wonderful this little enclave is. The path twists and turns and sometimes follows long stairways of slate steps across the fellside.

There are fragments of derelict mine buildings and some extraordinary pieces of old mining equipment still standing about. You’d need to be extremely careful coming down here in poor light, or in a hurry, but it’s fascinating. I even found a tunnel entrance containing a snowdrift, still intact and hardly melted weeks after the departure of the snow. A natural ice-house. I wonmder how many weeks it will take for the snow to vanish completely?

Eventually the path reached the beck, where I swayed precariously across on the wet boulders and found myself joining the main route alongside the foot of Castle Crag. By now of course I was steadily replacing the clothing I’d rejected earlier. And having (as always) underestimated the distance, I found myself finishing the walk in twilight, rewarded by the sight of a big warm-gold full moon rising behind Walla Crag with its reflection in the lake. A splendid walk, lit first by blazing sun and then by golden moon, and all in January!

I stayed overnight at Sycamore Cottage, Ellonby (up near Greystoke): a small but delightful holiday cottage – I’ll put the link in just below  in case anyone’s interested – which I was kindly lent by Nicky Godfrey-Evans of Cultural Tourism Training, who had asked me to come up and talk to trainee Tourist Guides, the following day, about literature. www.sycamorecottage.info is the link for the cottage! Do take a look.

These accredited Guides are required to know a huge amount about British life and culture, quite apart from their local knowledge (of Cumbria in this case). My brief was to give an outline of the history of English literature in the morning, and a more detailed history of literature in Cumbria in the afternoon. Quite a challenge – but an interesting one that turned out to be great fun.

So in the morning we whizzed from Beowulf  to Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and the Man Booker Prize by way of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens et al; and in the afternoon it was Thomas Gray, the Wordsworth circle, Beatrix Potter, Arthur Ransome, Melvyn Bragg and so on. We had a few coffee breaks, and lunch. I met dozens of lovely and fascinating people. And I was completely hoarse. But it was a great day.

By the time we left the building (in Kendal) the weather had changed again for the worse, and I drove slowly back to Manchester in the thickest fog I’ve ever taken a car through. Fortunately it thinned out a little on the way down. But after a walk like that I’m not going to grumble about the weather.

BBC4 continues to put out some of the best music programmes on any channel. But last Friday’s offering, ‘Godmother of Rock’n'Roll: Sister Rosetta Tharpe’ was one of the all-time greats.

Sister Rosetta, who started as a 1930s Gospel singer from the USA’s deep South, graduated by way of nightclub singing at the Cotton Club and touring work as a jazz, blues and gospel soloist, to being a pioneer of Rock’n'Roll and one of the all-time great figures. yet she’s been almost forgotten.

Listening to her wonderfully percussive guitar style you could hear at once how much Chuck Berry learned from her; and the archive footage of her hugely energetic performances, full of movement, power and infectious delight, made it quite clear that she was a – if not the – key figure in the transition from Black gospel music to Rock. Popular music history needs to be rewritten to put this lady at the centre!

But the most amazing thing for me was to learn that, when her career (like that of many blues musicians in the US) had stalled in the early ’60s, she was invited to the UK by Chris Barber of all people – and that Granada TV invited her to perform at the disused Chorlton-cum-Hardy railway station about five minutes from where I live in Manchester. Just take a look at the clips! And more important, listen!

The rationale was something to do with freight trains and all that – the vague mythology of train tracks and the Blues. Whatever. Granada decked the old station out as a kind of Wild West scene, with a fake ‘Chorltonville’ sign which they must have thought sounded American. They put the band on one platform and the audience on the other, and delivered Sister Rosetta in a horse-drawn carriage. The horse is a typical piebald cob – a ‘gypsy horse’ of the kind you can see by the hundred at Appleby Fair every year. Her affection for the horse is typical of this immensely sweet and loving woman who seems to radiate kindness and warmth with every ounce of her being. Good to know, then, that the UK tour put Sister Rosetta back on the map and she remained a big star in Europe at least until her death.

We all knew Chorlton was special (Quentin Crisp died here, Badly Drawn Boy lives here, and of course it’s full of wonderful creative people) – but now we know it has a place in Rock’n'Roll history too. The station is about to reopen as a Metrolink stop. Maybe there ought to be a blue plaque on that platform.

One of the best and most unexpected things that happened to me last year came right at the end of 2010. To my amazement, Carol Rumens chose my poem ‘My Grandmother’s Opal’ as Poem of the Week on her Guardian Books blog. (In case you’re interested, here’s the link): 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/dec/27/poem-of-the-week-grevel-lindop

It was like a surprise late Christmas present, especially as Carol’s introductory essay gave a very sensitive and imaginative reading of the poem, of a kind I’d never imagined anyone would offer.  It was quite difficult to believe it had really happened. And not the least surprising thing was that I’d almost forgotten about the poem myself. As it chanced, my wife Amanda was glacing at an old diary and noticed that I’d finished the poem in 1978 – more than half my lifetime ago.

Naturally that prompted all sorts of reflections – not least, on the question of whether I could write that poem now, if I hadn’t already. Obviously, in one sense not. I’m a different person, with different proccupations. But also, the ego naturally starts wondering ‘Can I write as well as that these days? Have I lost even whatever minimal skill with words I had then?’ There’s an irrational sense of needing to compete with a younger self.

But we can’t do that. All anyone can do is to write as well as they can (however they might define ‘well’) at a given time. A poem is made in the mould or matrix of not just a mind but a language, a culture, and a personal moment. There can’t actually be a competition, with oneself or others. Any poem that gets as far as being genuine is a species all by itself.

I also found myself wondering about form. On the few occasions when a poem of mine has been brought back from the past like this, for a critical discussion or an anthology, it has very often been a poem (like ‘My Grandmother’s Opal’) in fairly strict metre and rhyme.

In that particular poem I’d chosen a strict form (or rather, felt the need of it – you don’t really choose these things) – rhyming or half-rhyming quatrains – because I wanted the shape of the poem to be a bit like a faceted stone or piece of jewellery – quite highly polished. But Carol Rumens’s choice did make me wonder again whether poems in strict forms are more likely to survive through time, to be remembered, or just look reasonably good, after the lapse of some decades.

This could be because rhyme and metre are devices that help memory (that’s surely one reason they developed in the first place); so lines from such poems perhaps have a tendency to stick in the mind more than passages from free verse poems. I wonder also if, as the language moves on, speech rhythms change, and a free verse passage that seemed very effective at one time comes to seem less so; whilst a metrical passage gives more emphatic clues to the reader about how to stress and time the words?

I find myself that the free verse passages that stay in my memory are mostly ones that have the force of a proverb or aphorism – W.C. Williams’s ‘No ideas but in things’ or Whitman’s ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself…’ or R.S. Thomas’s man ‘nailing his questions/one by one to an untenanted cross’ – though even that last line is in fact metrical, so maybe it proves the opposite.

I write plenty of poems in free verse, but soetimes I wonder if I’m making them ephemeral for that reason. Yet, again, you can’t often choose the form of a poem (maybe you can sometimes? but if you do, that’s a different poem…). And some things maybe can’t be written about in metre. I wonder.

Anyway, thank you, Carol Rumens, for a choice that encouraged me and made me feel that all those hours of toiling away over my notebook in the evenings, in my dusty bedsit, back in the faded 1970s, had been worthwhile after all.

This week’s Poem of the Week, a witty comic salute to the New Year by Winthrop Mackworth Praed (a big mouthful of a name you don’t hear often enough these days!) is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jan/04/poem-of-the-week-winthrop-mackforth-praed

And Carol Rumen’s own website is at http://www.carolrumens.co.uk/

For me, the most exciting poetic event of 2010 was the rediscovery of the superb Ennerdale poet, Tom Rawling (1916-1996).

Rawling, who spent most of his life as a teacher and died in Oxford, came from a family that had farmed in the Ennerdale valley, Cumbria, for centuries. He was the son of the village schoolmaster.

He left the valley early  but kept contact with his native region and his extended family, and returned often for fishing trips. He was an expert salmon fisherman, and worked with the naturalist and fishing-writer Hugh Falkus studying not merely the catching of sea-trout but their mysterious life-cycle.

Rawling only began writing poetry when he retired from teaching, but what poured out then was a rich and powerful flood of poems about his Ennerdale childhood, his memories of the farm and the village, and about fishing. The poems are vivid, sharp and close to the earth – and they bring to life a whole world, social and agricultural, much of which has vanished from the Lakes.

He had success with two books (Ghosts at my Back, 1982 and The Names of the Sea Trout, 1984) and got to know many of the leading poets of his time – Ted Hughes was a frequent fishing companion, Anne Stevenson encouraged his work, Seamus Heaney wrote friendly notes and comments on draft poems – but then somehow his work was forgotten.

But late last year, thanks to pioneering work by Cumbrian writer Michael Baron, the Lamplugh and District Heritage Society (not usually a major poetry publisher) issued How Hall: Poems and Memories – A Passion for Ennerdale (£7.50), together with a superb CD (£5.00) of Rawling’s passionate, hypnotic voice reading his own poems.

Anyone who loves poetry por Lakeland needs to know these poems. As Chris McCully and I wrote in the magazine Trout and Salmon (my first venture into a fishing magazine – I haven’t held a rod in 50 years! – )

“Rawling’s grip on the texture of rural Cumberland life was both sensory and philosophical. Writing of ‘Clipping Day’ he remembers

           the ewe’s flesh flinching

as shears neared the throat

for the first cut into the rise

where new wool pushes off its past

in order to repeat it.

Often the recollections have a richness that rises to celebration, the glimpse of a good world charged with benevolent power that hints at the Biblical:

                                                A good summer

            was a full barn. Carts came, turned back empty,

            came again, ironshod hooves struck cobbles,

            a mare snorted as she charged the rising causeway,

            winged shelvings swayed with the load,

            wheels rattled. Then thunder, the barn floor

            booming under fetlock-feathered Clydesdale feet.

A confirmed atheist, Rawling would have repudiated any religious overtones here but the sensory precision of his work (that ‘fetlock-feathered’ Clydesdale) would have earned respect from possibly the greatest nature-poet ever to have written in English, Gerard Manley Hopkins. And always there’s the accuracy. Architecture-buffs reading the last excerpt would recognise that ‘causeway’ as the stone ramp up to a raised Lakeland granary…

“[And Rawling's fishing experience] bore fruit in poems like ‘Night Fisherman’, where sight is extinguished and the world slips all the more sharply into relief:

            Now touch is master, blindman fingering

            of reel and rod, the hook’s keen point.

            Feet shuffle-feel the ground,

            delicately crunch gravel;

            body poised ready to reach

            beneath the mirror of the pool…”

Here’s one more poem, in full:

Sloe Gin

for Seamus Heaney

Let the first hard frost
expose the spiny twigs
reveal the bare-black fruit.
Reach through jutting thorns
for the blue-hazed sloes,
ignore the blood on your wrist.
Needle-prick to the hard stone,
watch their transfusion seep
through the gin. Each day
an agitation of the jar,
and after many days of alchemy,
decant this ruby in your glass
to taste silk-sliding fire
of frost and thorns
and bitter fruit.

From The Names of the Sea-Trout (Littlewood Arc, 1993)

Besides the new collection, How Hall and the excellent CD (both available from stanandmarina@aol.com or bobnet.64@btopenworld.com) several of Rawling’s original books and pamphlets are still just about available, new or second-hand, so I’ll add the links here. If you want to catch up with possibly the finest 20th century Cumbrian poet (and yes, he stands at least equal to Norman Nicholson) then you need to read them. For me, they helped to make 2010 a memorable year for English poetry.

And now, here’s to creativity – yours, mine, everyone’s – in 2011! Happy New Year.