Bogging Down: Lines From my Tasmanian Exile

Food companies have been criticised in recent months for describing various products - such as metre-long batches of so-called 'Cumberland' sausages, and air-dried pallets of steak and kidney pies - as 'British' when in fact the meat they contain was found to have been reared and slaughtered thousands of miles away from the British Isles, and with blades tempered in non-European furnaces.

A new Home Counties' lobbying group called British Poets in Defence of Received Vernacular Usage have been lodging similar complaints about the increasing use of words in poems which appear to bear little relation to English as it has been spoken in these islands for the past four hundred years or more. They complain of the 'mongrelisation' or the 'bastardisation' of the language, and even of a tendency amongst younger unpublished poets to play fast and loose with the word 'traditional' - as if the word itself should not be reserved for poems of a certain age. According to the Food Standards Agency, the word 'traditional' means 'something made in its original form', and a product airily described as a 'British Classic' should never contain matter, verbal or otherwise, of an Antipodean origin.

The Poetry Library will shortly be convening a meeting with the Food Standards Agency in order to endeavour to establish some common ground. Various embassies in and around South Kensington will then be alerted to the problem. A prototype of a library face mask is thought to be on the drawing board. The possibility of an 'Honest Poetry Labelling Campaign' is also said to be in the offing, according to various unconfirmed reports emanating from The Poetry Society in Betterton Street.

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Where is London's National Poetry Centre?

The Stuff of Dreams: one proposed location for the new National Poetry Hub very close to fashionable Hoxton, East London

Look at the photograph above. It was taken by one of our brilliant team of resident Bow-Wow artisans who work in the shed at the end of the garden, overlooking the railway line. Can some miracle rise, Phoenix-like, from these ashes? Could this be the very building which will, in time, come to house London's New National Poetry Centre? 

At present it is nothing but an aspiration, a sculpted cloud. We have always been fond of unrealized projects. Some unrealized projects are unrealizable, of course. That is their comic purport. The Russian artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have produced quite a spate of them in their time. Homes in the sky. Heavens on earth. That sort of thing. Having been nurtured under Communism, the Kabakovs have very vivid notions of unrealizable dreams with tragi-comic endings.

London's Barbican Art Gallery is currently hosting a big show of work by the artist-cum-designer Ron Arad. He's the man who makes chairs that look like stretched lengths of well-chewed gum. Occasionally you can even sit in one of them. A large part of the ground floor of Arad's show is given over to glamorous models and drawings of architectural projects which have never taken off. They may never take off. They are much too absurdly idealistic. Or just too absurd.

Ours, however, the one above, is highly significant because it is a disegno of London's new National Poetry Centre. Or perhaps it should be called National Poetry Hub.  It doesn't exist, not yet. But it needs to exist. All capital cities need a national poetry centre. Many have them. Not London.

What about the Poetry Society in Covent Garden? Isn't that a National Poetry Centre? No, not really. Once upon a time, when it lived in Earls Court, it came quite close to being one. The difficulty is that when it moved from one part of London to another umpteen years ago, it failed to take its splendid poetry bookshop along with it. When challenged about its absence by a bookseller, the then director (who left years ago) replied that it was not the sort of thing that the Poetry Society did any more. What did they do then? They did cafés. And so it now has an eye-and-stomach-pleasing café, but not a brain-and-soul-nurturing bookshop. What a pity. And, more to the point, what a manifest dereliction of duty.

So what should a National Poetry Centre be for? And what should be in it? Most important, it needs to have a bookshop which will stock every copy of every poetry book published - on sale or return, of course. London, that great capital, does not have a poetry bookshop, and that is a scandal. Once upon a time it had the splendid Bernard Stone's Bookshop, first on Great Queen Street, and then later - briefly - at Lamb's Conduit Street. Long gone. Like Bernard himself. And Compendium too, in Camden Town, is long gone, which once had a brilliant stock of newly published American poetry…

Poetry turns up here and there, of course, in the bookselling chains, but seldom in any quantities. We know the names we'll find there. Well, why should they bother with poetry when poetry so seldom has much truck with money? Some bookshops represent poetry quite well - Foyles, for example - but not well enough. Not comprehensively.

But what else does a National Poetry Centre need? Well, it needs a piano and some sofas. It needs to be a place for book launches and general hob-knobbing, for the serious things and the more casual things. It needs room where poets can crash out, after convivial hours of booze-fuelled emotion expended on the subject of their neglect.

This is where we come in. But who will find us the thirstily empty Pop-Up Shop?

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A Wholly Exemplary Public Library

I wish I knew why it is that librarians like new books. In fact, books seem to be getting newer and newer in our public libraries, shinier and prettier. Do these books think that they have to pretend to be something other than mere books after all? Aren't they happy just to be print on the page for the most part? Do they need to look as if they have just tricked themselves out for a party? 

Once upon a time, libraries used to be full of relatively old books - or, at worst, newish books - and no one seemed to mind. People borrowed them all the same. No one sighed when they noticed that they had been well used. No one cursed those books. No one made them feel terrible by suggesting that they might have outlived their usefulness. No one took exception to the fact that they - like so may of the borrowers, then and now - looked a little battered about the edges, as if they might have been involved in some minor skirmish or a small-scale road-rage incident between non-readers. (Some of them may even have been repaired.) No one feared that they might catch something if they took these books home and read them between the sheets.

Yes, these days the best books are always the ones that are being put out for sale, often in small cardboard boxes or brashly coloured plastic crates beside the door, at 5 for £1, so that you almost catch a cold when you're looking through them. (Think what the poor books must be thinking and feeling). But it's not just that the books are new these days. Would that it were just that. So many of the books in our libraries these days don't seem to be real books at all. There are too many pretty non-books pretending to be books in our public libraries, too many cheap gimmicks masquerading as books. I have an idea. Let's buy up all the books that are being sold off, the good, old books, and set up a new, parallel borrowing service from our homes, for real books. No money need change hands.

That was all by way of a rather long preamble to what I really wanted to say, which is that there is only one public library that I can wholeheartedly recommend in the entire Western Hemisphere, and it is in Woodstock, the old hippy capital of upstate New York. It's a lovely, single-storey wooden building which hangs back coyly at the end of a lovely stretch of wooded lawn. Now that library is full of old books. It positively revels in early editions of Henry James and Edith Wharton and so much else. Almost every book is in a fairly bad way, but they have all grown old so gloriously, so handsomely. They look so loved, so revered, so prized for being nothing other than what they are. They look as if they are looking forward to a future of unrelieved bookishness.

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Flaming Books