Blood-Letting at Old Bailey
Artist's Impression of the tumultuous scenes in Court Five
Just days before she was due to undertake a mercy flight to Haiti, bearing freshly duplicated copies of recent poems printed on edible rice paper (a separate seat had been booked expressly for this purpose), an entire pallet-load of The Bloodaxe Book of Rhymed Compassion by Seventeen Severed Hands, and many general words of versified succour for thousands - if not hundreds of thousands - more, England's Poet Laureate, Carol Ann 'Daffy' Ducky, suffered a rude reversal at the Central Criminal Court in London. At the Old Bailey yesterday, amidst unprecedented scenes of fervour, horror and general mayhem, Dame Polly Syllabix, who had been representing herself from first to last, wrested back the Laureate's crown from Ms Ducky.
What began in mere words rapidly descended to physical confrontation in the well of Court Five. Six burly Australian ushers managed to separate the warring poets. When Dame Polly eventually emerged, victorious, on the front steps of the building, with nothing more than a scratched wrist to show for the unseemly courtroom scuffles, she was heard to say: this is no less than a victory for the species of common sense which is shared by all robust rhymesters. (It is believed that Ms Ducky had already sped away, by white-as-the-driven-snow, fog-windowed police van, for her home in Manchester, with her head swathed in a bloodied towel.)
Later that evening, Dame Polly gave a reading, of unprecedented authority and aplomb, from her Collected Poems of 720 pages in the octavo, at the Arts Club in Dover Street, Mayfair. The film of that triumphal reading can be seen elsewhere on this website.
Amidst the rhythmical rising and falling of brimming flutes of Bollinger, Michael Glover, editor of The Bow-Wow Shop and her ceaseless champion, welcomed her to the podium as the rightful heiress of Colley Cibber.
*
Poets Sweep Dung out of Horse Hospital
Not a reek of horse dung anywhere, I'm thinking to myself as I descend, somewhat steeply, reining back on myself as I go, to the basement reading room of The Horse Hospital, which is situated just behind the Russell Hotel in Bloomsbury, for another evening of poetry crying out loud, would you believe.
This was the place where the old draymen used to drag their hobbled nags for rapid repair in those bygone days before the internal combustion engine turned our streets into a living hell. I prefer the reek of horse dung any day. At least I think I do.
Tonight it's all about pamphleteering, that noblest of small-press endeavours. Rack Press, fresh from the Welsh Marches, has brought along three poets for our delectation. Newly minted pamphlets are bristling everywhere. There's scarcely room on the table for the shelled pistachios or the Sainsbury's Basic mineral water.
The poet to whom I give the most attention is Philip Morre, who spends the greater part of his life running a bookshop in Venice - the Cannaregio district, just on the way out of the Ghetto. I'm sure you know the place. It's a lovely, messy spot, full of ziggurats of helplessly, hopelessly teetering books, where the Prosecco cork comes popping out, regular as clockwork, when the bells toll - and there are many melancholy bells tolling bendily in the air, in Venice - the hour of 6pm.
Tonight Philip reads just four poems. You can tell from his somewhat engagingly droll and slightly idling demeanour that he's not about to over-extend himself much between here and the bar. I especially like the way he slowly circles his stomach with his hand as he reads, as if gingerly winding up the workings of a rather precious old clock. He's a bit like a character out of a Graham Greene novel, says the poet Patrick McGuinness, who's seated beside me, fingering the texts of all the pamphlets - a very mock-scholarly thing to be doing at this time of the evening.
The poem I like best is about one tiny corner of an Annunciation by Fra Angelico. Who ever said you couldn't make much out of little? Here it is.
After Fra Angelico
In the top left corner of this Annunciation
there's inset an Expulsion from Eden.
Here, we are meant to infer, the story begins.
The androgynous angel - oddly, a ringer
for Adam - is visibly sad it has come to this:
even if the long sword prodding the miscreant's back
will brook no nonsense, a tender hand on his shoulder
seems extended to reassure as much as to push.
Adam's still stunned by what he has done.
On his arm a toy hoe pre-empts our guess:
He has no idea what a life of toil might mean.
His white hairless legs and delicate fingers
show how unsuited he'll be (his own dawning thoughts)
to pulling up tares.
Eve too is pretty upset - it's not every day after all
one's expelled from bliss -
but already her eyes have that hint of 'making the best'.
It will, we imagine, be she who takes things in hand.
Many years on we might hear her calling to Cain
to stop bitching at Abel in the yard.
She'll remind him how lucky they are:
they have learned where the country lifts and sinks
with the season's moods, they have biddable land
and amenable beasts..
Also (she may not add) the sex has improved
Since her feller put on muscle and got a nice tan.
The better half of him, now, her own creation, she thinks:
Adam, for good or ill. The First Man.
'I read that not long ago, in Venice,' Philip told me later. 'I'd enunciated every word, every syllable, perfectly. Yes, everything was going swimmingly - until the very last line, which came out as "Adam, for good or ill. The Last Man." There was nothing to be done.'
We laughed and wept together over his misfortunes.
What is more, I discovered later that this particular poem is not even in the Rack Press pamphlet. It's in another pamphlet altogether that was published, not long ago, somewhere in Italy. Doubtless somewhere between here and there. Such is the winning perversity of poets.
All four Rack Press pamphlets are reviewed elsewhere in this issue by Peter Daniels, who is now giving much attention to the sterling, and largely unsung and under-regarded, efforts of pamphlet publishers everywhere.
Well, perhaps not quite everywhere. There is a limit to one's energies, one's patience.
*
English Alphabet Snatches T.S. Eliot Prize
It was the people's poet Simon Armitage's marvellous paean of praise to the English alphabet - a mere twenty-six humble characters - that really got us going, spoken in that lovely, no-nonsense, West Yorkshire burr of his, with his head tipped sideways, and the hair of his head lolling forwards, so humbly, so somnolently, before the microphone.
Not that he slept though.
What a marvel that a mere twenty-six letters of such an unassuming size, he expatiated, could have scrambled themselves together, so ingeniously, so speedily, to create the entire, impregnable body of English poetry - if not English poesy! And much else too, of course, he might have added. Yes, he might even have said: including these few brief words in the North Country vernacular that I am uttering in front of you now. Together with those timeless expletives of Elizabethan provenance which are being tossed around in various taverns just beyond the door of this establishment of such otherworldly graciousness, he might also have said.
Otherwise, this year's T.S. Eliot Prize for the best poetry collection of the year, awarded just a few nights' sleep away in the back courtyard of the Wallace Collection in central London - thankfully, it's got a fine skylight thrown high across its windy half-acre these days - was notable for the fact that a poet who was not really expected to win it won it (I refer to that fine poet from the West Country, Philip Gross, who is now £15,000 the heavier).
Gross Measure: £15,000
Otherwise, it was a pretty unexceptionable occasion. What else? The sudden sideways jerk of a careless arm ensured that a glass got broken just beside us. Peering across the heads of the assembled multitude, we saw that Mrs Valerie Eliot looked sleeker and more stream-lined than she ever had before. The winner, reciting a poem from his prize-winning collection, had to pause in mid-stream for a quick change of spectacles. We also heard Robin Robertson, poet and publisher of Cape Poetry, fuming over the injustice of a list that could have excluded his friend Don Paterson and the poet John Burnside - one of his own authors, you may remember …
*
I love the Dutch. I love their language, their poetry, their irredeemable flatlands. Yes, for once I find myself disagreeing with Glen Baxter, our cartoonist - I fear he may be trading in tired, old clichés - though I very much doubt whether it will come to blows this side of Lent. We need each other too much.
Yes, I do so love the Dutch. I'm passionate about Vermeer. The way he throws all that soft light about. The inwardness of those touchingly sturdy Vermeer women. I once shook hands with Holland's most celebrated contemporary poet, Rutger Kopland, on the steps of Cheltenham Town Hall. We had a bit of a conversation about the weather - it was teeming that day. It teemed almost every day that week of the Cheltenham Literary Festival. This was some years back. The weather will probably have corrected itself by now. After hearing Rutger read, I remember marvelling at quite how lean and laconic his poems had been. Not an ounce of fat on them at all.
I've also read Cees Noteboom, in spirited translation.
The other day, in a mood of genial defiance of people like Glen who, I do suspect, is one of the rough-housing sort, I took myself along to the launch of A Literary History of the Low Countries, published by Boydell & Brewer, in the rather smart café at the National Gallery in London. Once upon a time Derek Brewer was a mere lecturer in English at Cambridge University. Medieval studies, I seem to remember. Now he's a publisher, in Woodbridge, Suffolk. As you move through Woodbridge in the train, you see the prows of moored boats, gently nodding at you beside a quay. A rural idyll of a place. It's been an ever onward and upward flight for Derek.
Yes, that café, unlike many others I can think of, definitely has an accent on the 'e'. Part of the café had been cordoned off, by a fine shank of lolling blue rope, for the launch. You had to snuck under that cord to reach the bar. No problem at all, just in case you were wondering. Once beyond the rope, I noticed that they were serving wine in an interesting way - perhaps it's the National Gallery's way. Here's how it's done. The waiter would snatch up a metal beaker of quite a decent size, fill it to the brim from the bottle, then drain the beaker into the glass. It left you with quite a sizeably cheering drink. There was also a gently teetering ziggurat of copies of A Literary History of the Low Countries a little further along the bar, each one heavily discounted for the night, and thirsting to be welcomed into a good home.
It was seething with Dutchophiles, behind that cordon. There were many faculty members from the Dutch Department of University College, London. Someone announced that it was exactly ninety years ago that the department had been established. Happy ninetieth birthday! I shook hands with several members of that faculty. Each one had a powerful grip. One, a professor of history, was working on a book about religiously mixed marriages. I told him that sounded an absolutely fascinating subject. His fine teeth shone in the half-light as he acknowledged my praise.
Then someone bawled out that we were due in the Trafalgar Room for the speeches. Somebody else pointed to a door-shaped hole in the corner of the room. The rope came down, and we were all in there fast as mice through an inch-wide crack when the shadow of the feline falls across the bare boards. Less good when you got there though.
The place is a strange, cube-shaped room with louring, deep-set black casements - just like a chain-smoking manic-depressive. There was just a trickle of chairs, ranged around the walls, for a veritable seethe of people. I sat. Many stood, the majority of them tall Dutch. The odd word sifted through: from the editor of the volume, the National Gallery's curator of Dutch paintings, literary critic Paul Binding, and then, finally, a young Dutch studies' graduate from University College, London, who had fallen into a job soon after graduation. At the Dutch Embassy.
I had hoped to become further enlightened upon the subject of the Dutch poetry of our times: whither? Who? On what themes? Not a word came through. So I asked Paul Binding to drop me a note about it.
Then, all of a sudden, something exciting was happening. I could see a bit of a scrum in front of me, flailing arms and legs. There would have been no point at all in getting up from my chair. 'What's it all about?" I asked a member of the UCL Dutch Department. 'I think a cheque may have been handed over by the Embassy,' she replied, her voice rising to a heady, mouse-like squeak.
When I got home I pulled out my selected Rutger Kopland and read a few lines. Simple language. Stripped of all rhetoric. A Dutch childhood mooned away in a rural fastness. That night - and, admittedly, it was late by the time I got to the book - my particular favourite was 'Self-Portrait as a Horse.' Here are a few lines from it, in James Brockway's translation, to give you a taste.
When I was still a horse in a meadow
I must have lived in his body
have seen in his eyes what he saw
that life would never begin nor
would ever end, nor be repeated…
When I woke up, I was standing four-square, in a darling little field of plashy mud just outside Delft, gently browsing. What a magical world that book had opened up to me! Thank you, Rutger. And thank you to Derek and the team.
*
I've always thought that the original, situated as it is over in that slightly pokey gallery at the Louvre, was maddeningly small, and especially so when thronged by tourists. So few genuine connoisseurs even seem to manage to get a look-in these days. The last time I tried to get my eye in, a bit of an altercation ensued. So a very big reproduction, even if it is in South Wales, seems like just the answer we have all been looking for.
I would go even further than that. I would say that the same principle should be adopted for great poems. (Not all of them by any means. Let's try and maintain a sense of proportion here.) Something makes me feel that these too should be reproduced on the pavement to the size of, say, twenty-four double-decker buses. The consequence of this brilliant tactic - apologies for that sudden rush of immodesty - is that we will all be obliged at last to read poems at the speed they deserve, very slowly, letter by letter, syllable by syllable, phrase by phrase, savouring every last minor felicity. I would be prepared even to read Pope's Homer if someone were prepared to run it, line by line, beside the M1.
Any sponsors out there to make all this begin to happen?
*
What Tom did next
Up the long hill to Heath Street, Hampstead on a rain-flurried evening, ho hum, where, at the pretty Catto Gallery, a flurry of new pamphlets from the Greville Press - named after the poetical earl - is being launched in an interior made cheerful by many flower paintings of an egregious size.
Tom Stoppard is there, sallow of complexion, modelling a finely tailored grey suit. Gray Gowrie sits on a low chair beside the wall, fiercely clutching his articulated aluminium walking stick, and showing to the world the scalloped grey waves of his magnificent hair. He expatiates from his chair for a minute or two, on the 'three great Shakespearean jeux d'esprits' - Dryden's 'All for Love', Auden's 'The Sea and the Mirror' and - well, well, well - Tom's 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern'…
Meanwhile, Elspeth Barker, be-hatted, is looking distantly, terribly pale. Alan Brownjohn soodles around in his lilac suit, gently gesticulating with his small hands, and Lady Antonia Fraser passes by in front of me with that eternally serene smile of hers, meant for everyone and no one, but especially for me - if she but knew my name...
Then Tom Stoppard, magnificently hirsute, craggy features hewn out of some distant Czech escarpment, looks directly at Anthony Astbury, the press's founder, and strikes up with a wisecrack. 'I didn't think you needed financial help. I always thought you had a jewellery shop in Bond Street…' Uproarious response from the assembled poetasters.
Anthony Astbury furiously works his mouth and rocks on his heels.
What is Stoppard doing here anyway? He is present here in his role as benefactor and editor. He has funded one of these two pamphlets, a small gathering of poems by his old thespian friend, A.C.H. Smith. Tom has even edited the pamphlet, he tells us, whittling a first choice of several hundred down to a tidier ten or eleven or so. He thought he might have to absent himself from the day job for three months in order to whip them into shape…
He reads one of them out loud, ear-strainingly quietly, with affection. Then, A.C.J., tremendously agitated to have the innermost workings of his soul exposed in this way, hair all a-drizzle down his forehead, reads a couple more.
Meanwhile, dear old Alan Brownjohn carries on with the story he's been trying to tell me throughout all that distracting racket of poems, about the two literary prizes he's ever won in his life. One of them was awarded by the Arts Club, Dover Street, the very place he'll be reading next week as part of our celebrations of the appearance of the third issue of The Bow-Wow Shop. But it's the other one, the lesser prize, he really wants to tell me about. This one was worth £7 and ten shillings, he tells me, because he had to split it with another winner. Before I even have time to ask him who had brazenly snatched away half of his prize money, he tells me it was Sylvia Plath.
Just then the front door of the gallery opens to the ping of a bell, and in she walks. Well, why not one more ghostly poetical celebrity on a heady night such as this one?
*
John Ashbery's poem 'Sleepers Awake' features this teasing final line: Beware of anonymous letters - you may have written them in a wordless implosion of sleep.
I wonder how many of John Ashbery's current readers are sufficiently familiar with the televised adventures of the great English comedian Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock to be aware that this line encapsulates the plot of an entire episode of Hancock's Half Hour, in which Hancock is being harassed by some well-informed poison-pen letters? After watching half an hour of his amusing but futile attempts to find the culprit, we discover that he is writing them himself while sleep-walking (using his left hand to disguise the writing).
Might Ashbery, one wonders, have stumbled across Hancock on an American PBS channel?
In one of his 1950s' radio shows, Hancock (aided by his script writers Alan Simpson and Ray Galton) ventures into the world of poetry. When the episode begins, Hancock has fallen in with some East Cheam bohemians. Having set aside collar-and-tie and short-back-and-sides conformity in favour of obligatory long hair, beard and roll-neck sweater, he has invited the group to his home for a literary evening. The success of this event looks like being compromised immediately when his disreputable associates (Sid James and Bill Kerr) also insist on staying.
Hancock's guests recite a few pretentious poems. One, which is supposed to have been commissioned by UNESCO for translation into sixteen languages, consists of about ten repetitions of the phrase 'straw in the wind'. A female member of the group (can it be more than mere coincidence that she sounds uncannily like Dame Polly Syllabix?) reacts to some of Bill's more uncouth interruptions by referring to him as 'an adorable little savage'.
Sid and Bill do not, however, restrict themselves to mocking the visitors. Sid gets hold of a copy of the group's rule book and discovers (a) that the leader and deputy leader are eligible for financial support from the other members; and (b) that one can become leader by composing a sufficiently outstanding and original literary piece.
Bill therefore delivers a pastiche of what he has been listening to - a pastiche of a pastiche in terms of authentic poetry - featuring lines such as I am mauve - you are puce. This is immediately hailed as a work of genius by everybody except the mortified Hancock.
In an attempt to prevent Bill being elected leader, he counters with a pastiche of his own which is, predictably, dismissed as shallow trash. His discomfiture is complete when Sid is chosen as deputy leader on the basis of a poem involving betting jargon and the theft of lead pipes. In spite of his increasingly frantic efforts to impress the gathering, Hancock is eventually expelled from the group - and from his own house.
It was evidently possible, in the late 1950s, to build comedy around an audience's preconceptions and prejudices about 'modern poetry'. But times change and poets these days might say 'chance would be a fine thing'. There is little public awareness - however garbled - of what contemporary poetry is doing (aside perhaps from what the newspapers publish by the Poet Laureate).
Nowadays it is in the field of the visual arts that people imagine they have a working knowledge of what is going on. Thanks to widespread media coverage, people are happy to be flippant about stuffed sharks and unmade beds. We might wish that good poetry would arouse more widespread interest: but would John Ashbery or Geoffrey Hill be all that keen to be brought to the public's attention in the manner of a Hirst or an Emin? I rather doubt it.
Mike Bartholomew-Biggs
*
I am staring into a three-quarters-empty glass of house white over at the Arts Club in Dover Street. My mind is floating on nothing. Then all of a sudden, the Iraqi poet Fawzi Karim, who is sitting opposite me, asks a question to which I see I must give my full attention. Why do you need to have humour in The Bow-Wow Shop? he says, mock-innocently. Doesn't humour trivialize poetry?
Yes? says Fawzi.
'Well, it proved to me once and for all that poets have a sense of humour too, that poets and laughter do go together. And that's why I like there to be some humour in The Bow-Wow Shop, because it leavens the whole, it reminds us that laughter and high seriousness can go together!'
Fawzi has picked up his glass now. He may even begin to take a delicate sip from it any time soon.
Now you will no longer need to go defenceless into that dark night.
*
Although
I didn't exactly see it happen myself, I often think that I did. Well, there's
just no taming the power of the human fancy, is there?
Yes,
there I was one day, on the south side - the wrong side - of London's Waterloo
Bridge, grimly footslogging my way through one of those horrible underpasses
that eventually lead you to the glorious oasis of the IMAX CINEMA, glittering
there in the night like a squat, self-illuminated soup can. It's just a hop,
skip and a jump from Waterloo Station. I'm sure you know the place.
Anyway,
there I was, nursing the usual catalogue of miseries and self-contradictions,
when I suddenly looked up and saw a great herd of Westminster Council bullyboy
employees, tricked out in their nasty shiny yellow jackets, daubing over what
was evidently a POEM that had been put there to lighten our spiritual darkness
as we tread the endless streets of urban anomie. I managed to read just a few
lines of it before it was obliterated forever. It went something like this.
I am not
afraid as I descend,
step by step,
leaving
behind the salt wind
blowing up the corrugated river
I would have read more had I not been rudely jostled from behind. Anyway, the poem disappeared, and now the poet, Sue Hubbard, wants it back. She thinks that an outrageous act of cultural despoliation has been committed, and she may well be right. So she's set up a fighting fund to pay for it to be reinstated. There is currently £750 in the coffers. If you want to toss in a tad more, drop her a note at: suehubbard.london@virgin.net