Poet?

Yes, says I.

Learn something to your advantage?

Always, says I.

We ride to the bottom of the Angel escalator. At the bottom, I notice they've added another that wasn't there before..

Onward, says the corpulent prelate.

As we continue to descend, fiery adverts leap out with invitations to sinister carnivals, and I ask my companion if we should maybe call the fire brigade, and he shows me his glowing teeth, and I get the picture and wish I was humming my way northwards to High Barnet.

Call me Forktongue, says he.

At the bottom, we enter a large, silent hall.

This, says my companion, is the First Circle

Perched at various elevations, on benches made of cold steel, are poets, swinging their legs idly, gazing at nothing. A single vast clock hand sweeps round and round. The poets sag as time whizzes by. They grow beards and whiskers, bellies, drooping breasts and dentures.

Every now and then the hush is punctuated by a feeble cry; a poet topples from the heights and smacks the floor. A pair of stalwart friars picks the poets up, re-assembles bones, pastes youth back on fractured features, and places them upon a bench to start again 

Magazine Submission Hell, my friend remarks. Each one here awaits a letter from an editor.

Which never comes, I say.

Oh it does, says Forktongue. And editors know to hone their insults. Watch that one there. She's about to get a message from the TLS.

A female poet, with a ghastly shriek, flies splat against a buttress and slithers down like egg yolk to make a puddle on the floor. The friars make an omelette of her, then reshape her into human form, and glue her back.

I take a peek in an adjacent room..

These poets send their poems to competitions, says Forktongue.

I contemplate a hopeful multitude. A junior devil enters, blasts the lot with fire, and a dildo-shaped, self-propelling vacuum cleaner snakes in to suck the ash.

Obliteration is the curse of competitions, smiles Forktongue. Not so much as a rejection slip! Not even the dignity of an editorial no. Why do human beings embrace such nothingness? 

*

We journey on.

Here, he says, we have the Second Circle.

Why, it's Rufus Twistle, says I, and Margolita Margarine, and Thumper Broadbent. Why are they all stabbing each other?

This is Anthology Hell, Forktongue says, and they are in it. One has twelve pages, I fear, the other two. And so forth.

I gaze into a stygian chasm from whence an abominable howling rises.

Not a single soul down that pit has a poem in the anthology, says Forktongue. Let's move on.

*

In the Third Circle lies Self Improvement Hell.

A frowsty room. Eight harrowed visages lean toward a ninth. All hold a sheet that bears a single poem. The ninth is blubbering..The eight are keening a monodic chant:

 Your tercets are lazy, Your dactyls are crap, Your language is flaccid, Your metaphors pap.

Well at least they can rhyme, says I. Sort of, anyway.

The accused turns like Niobe to tears and rivulets of her dissolved essence flow across the floor and out under the door.   

So much for the Reading Group, says Forktongue.

Here, he says, opening a door, we have the Poetry Workshop.

Twenty five adults on hard chairs have turned to stone. A twenty-sixth is reading his translation of Proust into English rhyming couplets. There has clearly been a lengthy lapse of time since he began.

Novel, says I.

Indeed, says Forktongue.

As we leave, I notice cracks appearing in the stone.

*

The Fourth Circle is a vast, empyrean emptiness that stretches to the edges of dark matter, where strange cosmic materials appear and vanish into the beyond behind the beyond.

Awesome, says I.

Writers' Block Hell, says Forktongue.

Suddenly a hideous, toothed creature with a tail rushes gibbering across the nothingness.

What's that? I enquire.

A poetry fan, says Forktongue. A lot of them about in the Universal Abyss.

Nothing wrong with having fans, says I.

A fanged enthusiast, salivating with admiration, appears in front of me and starts spittingly to explain what one of my poems means. I'm glad when my pal emits a sulphurous belch, and the fan explodes with a squawk.

It dawns on me that Writers' Block Hell, by spreading out to occupy the cosmos, has left only tiny corridors in space into which the poets are crammed like worms in a wormery. Here is no privacy. Here everybody can read the work of others, copy from it, adapt it, and 'improve' it. The piracy is shameless. I hear cries of It's mine! No, it's mine! Those who eschew such activity lie on their backs with bottles of whisky or other people's genitalia glued to their lips, or puff on enormous trumpets of Skunk Weed.

Could be worse, says I

But what if you couldn't stop?

That is depressing, says I.

You ain't seen nothing yet, says Forktongue.

*

The geography of the Fifth Circle is alarmingly allegorical. Three hill tops are surmounted by three camps with tents, pennants, and soldiers carrying lances. Down in the valley flows a pellucid stream. I behold lush fields where cows graze and bucolic maidens make cheese. The maidens keep a slim volume open beside them as they work, and mouth the words as they set the cheese with rennet. Stalwart young men are apple-picking, or planting gooseberry bushes. Open volumes of Robert Graves and Edith Sitwell have been planted in the trees, with branches holding the pages like bookmarks. Elderly folk loll in hammocks reading Ezra Pound. Suddenly horsemen from all three camps ride down their respective hills and clash in the meadows. The young men and women are raped and carried off on horseback. The elderly folk see their books torn from their hands and tossed into the river of poesy. The remaining horsemen pee derisively into the stream, which turns foul.

What on earth…? I cry.

As you can see, says Forktongue, we have not one Parnassus but three. That is the Formalist Parnassus, that is the Go-With-The-Flow Parnassus, and that is the Avant-Garde Parnassus.

We mount each hill in turn. The formalists are eating lunch and Forktongue explains that every mouthful must rhyme. One who eats a carrot is obliged, with the next mouthful, to eat a morsel of fried parrot, or swallow some claret. Turbot and sherbet are permitted, but only after a penance, which, in this case, might be the obligatory consumption of half a pound of maggots. Great constraints are thereby put on lunch.

I watch, amazed, as the formalists abuse their teeth with rakes, zips, and Squirish excrement.

On the second hilltop they are taking in each other's washing and hanging it out on lines which stretch beyond the horizon. Each poet bids farewell to his companions and sets out with an overladen basket, staggering under its weight, reaching up from time to time to clip some bedraggled garment to the line.

I have never seen so much dirty washing in my life.

On the third hilltop, the avant garde poets have inserted sharp tongue studs and are lashing an emaciated fellow with abandon.

It strikes me that what in another, would be a scream of pain, is here a yodel of militant x, y and z sounds accompanied by depolarised punctuation. Weird.

What crime, says I, has this poor chap committed?

He deviated into sense, says Forktongue.

*

The Sixth Circle, explains my guide, is Laureate Hell.

And indeed it is: The Smoking Fire, The Drawbridge, The Staircase with the Trophies, The Giant Wheel, The Prisoners on the Projecting Platform, The Pier with Chains, The Man on the Rack - it's all there.

Modelled on Piranesi's imaginary prison, says Forktongue with satisfaction. You mortals do supply us with good ideas.

So where are the laureates? I enquire.

Nowhere, says he. Where else?

He explains that the vertiginous architecture of the prison shrinks the imaginations of laureates, or anyone with the insolence to proclaim himself a Professor of Poetry.

We also push hubris to its logical conclusion, says Forktongue.

We enter a chamber where a devilkin is operating a treadle, smoking, and reading Geoffrey Hill. The treadle works giant bellows from whence tubes connect to the body of Dolores Write-a-lot, the well-known critic and editor. Inflated beyond recognition, her last identifiable feature is her trademark rimless glasses. Then all that remains of her is an ever-swelling ovoid.

Let us make a move, says Forktongue, before it gets messy.

I notice, as we leave, that the devilkin is reading The Triumph of Love.

We stroll back into the labyrinth of fuliginous walkways, towering, inexplicable machinery, and shrieks of palpable agony soaring through dark spaces.

A tiny figure hurtles downward from the high platform and vanishes into a bottomless well with teeth.

Who is that? I enquire.

Some Major Prize-winner, says Forktongue.

On the high platform, devils with smoking tridents are nudging a crowd of Recidivist Prizewinners toward the Eternal Droppe. The devils sweat eruptive beads as they poke at the throng.

Betrayal, says Forktongue, earns you the high jump.

What have they betrayed? says I.

Their vocation, says my pinguid partner.

Seems a bit hard, says I.

When they land, says my guide, it will be very hard indeed.

*

And this is Evil Bulge, says Forktongue. The Seventh Circle.

We gaze down into a broad canyon. Below us, a meandering torrent of brown filth stretches into the distance, and along its banks, flailed onward by devils with nine-tailed lashes, go long lines of tiny figures. A terrible stench wafts on the breeze.

Ignoramus Hell, says my guide. Recognise anything?

I stare intently. Slowly I begin to discern the gigantic form of a man under the vile effluent, a Gulliver to the Lilliputian figures who are approaching it. The figure is naked, face down, and mostly sunken, except for two wrinkled, whitish hillocks. The head is turned to one side so that the profile is discernible from our vantage point.

I'd recognise that nose anywhere! says I. That's Dante Alighieri!

Hoist with his own petard, says my guide. Observe.

Driven with hoarse cries up the slopes of Dante's heels, the figures stagger along the thighs toward the two white hillocks. The hillocks part to reveal the inner sanctum of Dante's fundament, and with ululations of horror the marchers are whipped through the vile gates and disappear.

Good God! I exclaim. What have they done to deserve this?

Ignorance, says Forktongue. They have read nothing. The corn is orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor ever sown. As for the verses they presume to write… Squeaking of rats on a sinking ship!

My guide's vehemence surprises me.

Are you also…? I begin, when there is a terrible explosion. Dante's cheeks part and an eruption blows the tiny poets from that mighty Italian sphincter like peas out of a cannon. Far off I see the long lines re-form and the pantomime starts again.

Forktongue hands me a clothes peg..

*

Suddenly we are sitting together on the train.

Have you read Dante? says I.

Never, says Forktongue. In English, it's Peter Pan with lead boots on. I've no Italian. You?

Same problem, says I

Who needs a Dante when you have Chaucer? says he.

Absolutely, says I.

My stop, says he. Arrivederci.

And my train rattles on toward High Barnet.