More Damned Poets Again

 

Ryan Mosley, Backstage, 2010-2011. Oil on linen, 220 x 190 cms, 86 5/8 x 74 3/4 ins

This telling image by the painter Ryan Mosley shows us three poets preparing to give a public reading in London. The time of day is approximately 7.30 in the evening. It is spring, and there is a hint of a light drizzle in the air just beyond the window. You may already be asking yourselves why this is not a photographic image. Then you would have had no trouble whatsoever in identifying this trio of nervily expectant readers. The less subtle of our two answers is that Ryan Mosley is a painter, but we shall set that argument aside. Frankly - and to cut to the quick - we are sick of photographs. Photographs never get to the heart of the matter. They identify, but they seldom dig very deep. And that is precisely what we wanted to do on this occasion.

What then is happening here? Well, it is perfectly evident that two of the poets - the slightly-puffed-out, purply-blackish ones - have the potential to interlock. Their shapes and their common coloration suggest as much. It is even possible that at a certain moment, they could merge into one. The third - the one who stands proud, and who looks positively clownish - inhabits an altogether different order of being. He believes himself to be a constellation of sorts. He knows that he will glitter when he speaks. And he may well be right. We - like you - have not yet heard his words. He has not yet proved himself. You may also be  asking yourselves: how can these be said to be poets at all when they have such odd shapes?

Poets, you need to be aware, come in all shapes and sizes and hues. Some of them look freshly extruded from a cement mixer; others are as lean and quick and diffident as sand worms. We know these creatures only by their fragile casts, on the beaches of Suffolk, at which we marvel. Above all, these shades are not at all to be regarded as ridiculous, though, admittedly, they are a touch stylised. Well, that is within the remit of the painter's art. He has the right to see them as he sees them. A poet is not a painter, although painters have been known to communicate - during the Italian Renaissance, for example. What is more, if we poets are as we are, we have only ourselves to praise - or to blame.

*

What is to be done [Chto Delat]?


What is to be done about the excessive over-production of poems? High-definition data from a new, poetry-customised satellite navigation system, kindly made available to us this week by its recent purchaser, the Poetry Society of England, indicates that there are various poetry 'hot spots'  across the country that require urgent attention.

Where there is an acute concentration of poetry-writing in any particular location, the map glows with violent red clusterings, and if the activity is even more brisk and intense than usual, the map has even been known to throb like a pulsing human heart.

Looking at the screen this evening, we noticed that three particular areas of the country were throbbing and glowing: London, Manchester and Newcastle. This means that every minute of the day at least one new poem is being created across every square metre of ground. What is more, thanks to the smooth, country-wide spread of unemployment, all this poetry activity, once confined to the early-morning or evening hours, is now happening at all hours of the day. Multi-culturalism is not helping either because cultures other than our own are less sceptical of the intrinsic value of poets. They are inclined to pedestalise them. In all, this is the kind of shocking level of activity that the usual range of CCTV cameras, located on important civic buildings such as banks, does not capture, but being less visible makes it no less nefarious.

How then do we set about reducing the number of poems that are being written? How do we set about dealing sympathetically with the intolerable burden which is currently being placed upon the sagging shoulders of the editors of poetry books and poetry journals? The first question to be asked is: how, physically, are these poems being made? Do they come into being as a result of the use of pen and paper - the so called 'antique' method? Yes, in many cases. This is because poets, who have been writing for millenia, are excessively fond of old tools. But we need to refine upon this unsurprising discovery. What kind of paper do they write on? And what kinds of tools do they wield?

Old paper is the answer. Used paper. Poets have an abhorrence of newly purchased paper, clean paper. The paper on which they write their poems must display incontrovertible evidence of earlier use - chin smears, beery amber stains, flecks of ordure, shopping lists, almost anything will serve to prove to them that their act of writing is to be a palimpsestic one, that they are contributing to a dialogue that has already begun. But how do we prevent poets from gaining access to this primary material? Entire families must get involved. When letters arrive through the post, for example, the poet's primary custodian - often the wife or the male partner - must take it upon himself to read the letter to the poet, quite quickly and matter-of-factly, in order not to draw too much attention to its material value, and then destroy the paper on which it is written - by burning it. How many memorable stanzas have ever been written on a tiny, spilling ziggurat of ash?

Unfortunately, poets are no fools. In certain respects. We have seen poems which have been composed on fragments of cereal packets. If this is the case, supermarkets must be lobbied to change their packaging to something smooth and malleable and almost impossible to write upon - such as grease-proof paper. And what of the fingers? Could they be manually thwarted in some way by the use of FINGER IMPEDERS, those devices, available in toughened plastic or metal, and so familiar to historians of the Inquisition, which lock one finger to another? But what of the computer? Do not poets write directly onto the computer these days? Some do, alas. If that is the case, the computer must be kept out of the house. It might be possible to locate a group of pre-literate youths in the edgelands who would be willing to look after it until the partner needs to call it back.

Have we got to the heart of the matter though? No, we fear not. Poems begin in the hearts and the minds of their creators. They bubble up. They effervesce. They can be unstoppable, unquenchable. Or perhaps not. If there were some harmless way to act directly upon the brain of the poet, some primary method of  disablement that we could put in place, it is possible that the activity could be stopped once and for all. Hard drugs could be a possibility - not least because they create illusory worlds. Under the influence of hard drugs, poets are often safe to be left with their pens and their dirty scraps of used paper. They might even be encouraged to scribble away in the locked privacy of their own dark, dank, book-choked rooms.

When they finally emerge, red-eyed and trembling, from under the influence, and read what they have written, even they are likely to conclude that it is nothing but nonsense. And when that happens, the poem is quickly destroyed - in frustration, disappointment and acute exasperation - by its very maker! And so the poet himself provides an elegant and painless answer to our problem by destroying his own work before it even leaves the house. In short, self-help may be the key to that coming kingdom of sweet silence.

*

Latin soon yes please

When I use my English on the streets of Clapham, jaws occasionally fall open in incomprehension. When I use my French on the streets of Paris, jaws habitually fall open in incomprehension. When I use my nascent Arabic on the streets of Damascus, jaws often fall open in incomprehension. We are therefore campaigning for Latin to be re-established as the common language of discourse amongst all learned citizens. It is for this reason that you can now read below John F. Deane's translation of a celebrated poem by Catullus, which has just appeared in an anthology published in the Republic of Ireland - where, it is said, Latin is already in the throes of re-establishing itself as the common language of discourse amongst its learned citizens.

We print it here in John's English translation because, according to a recent survey, the great majority of the readers of The Bow-Wow Shop are still struggling to re-acquaint themselves with the language after years of disastrous schooling in the private sink schools of the Home Counties of England.

Catullus

"Quod mihi fortuna casuque oppressus acerbo. . ."

 

To Manlius

 

Because you, borne down by fortune and bitter fate,

have written me this letter wet with tears,

 

wishing me to save a shipwrecked soul flung out of foaming

waves of the sea and lift him to life from the lintel of death,

 

to whom neither sacred Venus allows rest in sweet repose

abandoned as he is and sad in his celibate bed,

 

nor whom the Muses may enrich with the poetry of ancient writers,

while his mind is ever watchful and alert: all this, I mean,

 

pleases me profoundly, for thus you name me as a friend,

requesting of me rewards of the Muses and of Love.

 

But lest my own misfortunes be unknown to you, dear Manlius,

and lest you feel I dread fulfilling the duties of a friend,

 

learn how I fell, overwhelmed by floods of ill-fortune,

so you may try no more for blessings from one so troubled.

 

At the time when first I adopted the white toga of adulthood,

my young spirit flexing itself in the flowering of spring,

 

I played gaily everywhere; but she, the goddess, is aware

and brings us to a sweet bitterness with her cares.

 

All love of this has now been lost in the deepest lamentation

at my brother's death. Oh grieving am I, brother gone,

 

you, brother, in your death, destroyed my wellbeing,

bringing along with you our house for burial;

 

joining you in death my joys completely perished,

that your sweet love gave support to while you were alive.

 

And so I have banished from my mind and thoughts

all such concerns and each delight the carefree soul can know.

 

Therefore, when you write how unworthy it is of Catullus

to be in Verona because here now everyone of better note

 

will heat their frigid limbs up in the couch I have deserted,

that, Manlius, is not mere shame, but a misery even more.

 

Pardon therefore if I cannot promise gifts, you will see

I am unable, mourning has taken away my store.

 

Moreover there is no great wealth of writings here about me,

since my home remains in Rome; in that home,

 

my home-place, there are the joys my age allows;

here merely one out of many small boxes follows me.

 

Since this is so, you must not think me merely stingy

that I behave this way, nor because of mean temperament

 

you have not received abundance of the bounty that you sought;

I would have offered all, and more, if it had been my lot.

 

From: The Irish Catullus or One Gentleman of Verona,

ed. Ronan Sheehan, A & A Farmar, Dublin 2010

* 

Spinning in the Maelstrom

 

The other day a young poet came to us for some advice, roaring into the lobby like a greyhound. He explained that he was looking for a publisher. He showed us a sheaf of poems. We weighed it on the scales of destiny which were once bequeathed to us by a distant admirer from the Valley of the Kings: two kilos. How many poems? we asked him. One hundred and forty-two, he replied, without a vestige of ironic detachment. No good, we advised, in chorus. Editors are very idle, we told him. They don't have the patience to read ten fourteen-liners, let alone one hundred and forty-two. Cut it in half, and then trim the excess fat off that remaining half. He began to walk backwards away from us, sullenly dragging his feet.

I see him today in the mind's eye, spinning in the maelstrom, genitals and much else fully exposed - as in that celebrated painting by Georg Baselitz, who knows a thing or two about poets.. The volume is now in excess of one hundred and sixty poems in length. Meanwhile, it is dawn out in the world, and editors are facing partially fogged bathroom mirrors the world over, practising their indifferent stares.

*

Chronic Poetry Fatigue Syndrome

Chronic Poetry Fatigue Syndrome has been with us for a very long time, albeit under different names. It is easily recognisable in the sufferer: a poor memory for verse of any kind, even those once-familiar nursery jingles; a generally unwillingness to stand - or even fleetingly hover - within reach of any of the numerous anthologies of poetry devoted to the Great War; and a predisposition to nausea and intermittent projectile vomiting whenever any word which begins with the letters P, O and E are uttered.
There has been limited success with Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. Patients are invited to test the limits of their toleration for verse by reading, under strictly controlled conditions, a single stanza from a poem by Wendy Cope or, in extreme situations, something sickeningly similar by Pam Ayres. If the patient is able to consume this relatively tiny gobbet of verse without noticeable ill effect, the entire poem of twelve short lines will then gradually be introduced. Needless to say, lights remain lowered in the room throughout. One sufferer in Staffordshire recovered so rapidly that by the end of the month he was devouring entire extracts from Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King'. He has now been hired as a part-time amanuensis for the Oxford Professor of Poetry, who is currently bleeding verse at an alarming rate.

There have been various troubling new developments in recent months - which is why, being a journal of record, we choose to address the issue now. Statistics gathered in the UK alone suggest that sufferers now number in excess of 2.5 million. What is more, the kinds of poetry to which sufferers are particularly averse has widened alarmingly. In the 1970s, only poetry of the 20th century induced extreme nausea in the majority of sufferers. Tennyson Societies were still common in villages throughout the East of England and a broad swathe of the Midlands. In 1979, for example, it was discovered that the postal workers of East Illsley were still inclined to christen their second daughters Maud. Now poetry of the nineteenth century has been almost entirely obliterated from the map, and buildings once owned by those very same Tennyson Societies have been converted into crèches for the elderly or Cryogenic Research Centres.

Note: Only adults were surveyed. Goodness knows how many children are quietly suffering, unremarked.

*

Poetry and Excessive Drunkenness: a Bow-Wow Shop investigation

Government statistics prove yet again that public drunkenness is on the increase in England, Scotland and Wales. We are pleased for a variety of reasons. It indicates that as a nation we have become more prosperous again. The surplus cash is being spent on alcoholic beverages. That must be a good thing. We provide for others, and then we congratulate ourselves on having done so with heavy bouts of public drinking. This kind of communal activity bonds us in ways not immediately apparent to those who suffer losses as a result of such communal excesses - property owners who may lose their windows, and even the entire fabric of the building, if the hilarity reaches a certain pitch; car owners whose tyres are torched and sent bowling down the high street accompanied by heady shouts of encouragement  from those who run beside; dog lovers whose faithful friends lose the inflammable roofs of their kennels. Such people need to be encouraged to raise their eyes from the quotidian and think, hard and long, about the wider picture.

The second reason for our pleasure is not quite so widely evident. Another consequence of excessive consumption of alcohol is that a great deal more poetry is written than ever before. When a man or a woman drinks to the dregs of the Hennessy bottle [product placement? Ed.], he or she begins to imagine that he has the capacities, the soulfulness, the breadth of spirit, of a true poet. He buys - or steals - pen and paper. Well, perhaps these days he is just as likely to sit, swaying and gently intoning to himself, in front of a computer screen. He loses the deep-rooted fear that takes a grip on adults when the word POETRY flashes up in the mind's eye like a terrible warning sign on a particularly ferocious stretch of highway. He knows that poetry is no longer incomprehensible, beyond reach. Lines from the schoolroom slowly seep up from the depths. These surging rhythms seize hold of him, python-like. He begins to write. And as he writes, the fear of self-censorship - that absolute bar to success experienced by so many - little by little falls away. Words come tumbling out in a very particular order. He knows himself to be a poet.

And it pours forth, powerfully, for hours at a time, pure, crystalline, gently effervescing, and wholly unadulterated by punctuation. Nothing stands between himself and the expression of his deepest feelings. Everything, at last, has been torn away. In the buff - and on the buff. And then, with an almighty, triumphal whoop, he stuffs the entire ferocious outpouring, glistening, raw, into an envelope. He seals it. He sends it off. And then, in a mood of slavering expectancy, he falls sideways into his bed like some great Doric column wrested by thieving locals from a neo-classical portico.

*

On Some Words by A.E. Housman

 

Elsewhere in this issue, there is something rather odd. Odder than usual, I mean. Or perhaps, upon reflection, slightly less odd than usual. It is a lecture by a poet which was delivered to an audience in Cambridge more than seventy years ago. It proved rather popular at the time - Cambridge University Press published a little book of it, which sold 10,000 copies within a year.

One of the reasons for its popularity was that the lecturer was himself a very popular poet, even though he wrote so little. His name was A.E. Housman, and when he delivered the lecture, he had been Professor of Latin at that university for almost a quarter of a century. Housman was a brilliant Latin scholar, the finest of his generation, but he was better known to the general public as the author of A Shropshire Lad, an extraordinarily popular collection of poems, first published in the 1890s, which grew and grew in popularity as the years passed by. The book is about death and soldiering and homo-erotic yearning.

Housman was also a writer of exquisitely funny letters. They are barbed, witty, dismissive, self-effacing. We recommend that you read them. He was inclined to be especially testy when his correspondents asked him about the next book of poems, when it was likely to appear. There was no next book, not really. There were some poems that came after, the slowest of slow trickles, but nothing with the self-sufficient coherence of A Shropshire Lad. Housman never regarded himself as a professional literary man. The whole idea of such a thing filled him with horror. So the tone of the lecture is that of the amateur. To the serious literary theorist, his arguments will seem puerile and hopelessly, almost laughably, outmoded. What he says, essentially, is that poetry is not about meaning. Meaning really doesn't come into it. It is about feeling, and the lecture is written in praise of rank amateurishness.

We tend to agree with him. Like Housman, we at the Bow-Wow Shop are a rowdy bunch of impassioned amateurs with a profound suspicion of words such as intellection. We are re-publishing the lecture now because it rhymes, fully, with our own instinctive sympathies. It rudely interrupts the present, we are aware of that. But that is the function of the past, isn't it? We hope you enjoy it.

* 

The Isolation Sickness of Poets: a Remedy

The least consequential matters can turn into poems in the end - or, at worst, reflections upon the nature of poetry. And so it was this morning, out in the street, amidst the grey drizzle of a South London Tuesday. There I was walking back from the supermarket, threading my way, idling somewhat, up through the estate. There are no knife-flashing bully boys out and about at this hour of the day. They are all sleeping it off in anticipation of the evening's excitement to come, when life will turn red and super-charged and energisingly demonic. Ahead of me, I spotted an elderly couple. They too were fresh from the supermarket. The sight of them there touched me. They were walking side by side, swaying a little. His right hand was locked into her left. And yet it was not quite as simple as that. They were both holding, suspended between them, their orange Sainsbury's shopping bag, full of life's wherewithals. It was gently swinging between them like a grandchild. This tiny scene was such an emblem of togetherness that I felt my eyes blearing over. Then I noticed again that it was drizzling.

As I looked, I came over all brooding and melancholy because what I was seeing with my eyes was the polar opposite of the habitual circumstances of the poet. Generally speaking, when a poet is writing what he needs to write, he is alone with himself and the voices that range around his head. This degree of isolation is a sickness of sorts, and it often has the most undesirable consequences. Too many poets are perpetually in the business of re-visiting the same old themes. Or their vocabulary becomes constricted. If you are privileged to be W.B. Yeats, you become fixated on such words as 'clamorous' and 'some' and 'mire'. Other poets write the same poems over and over again, changing nothing but the words. Yet others write the same poems in the same words. One of the books reviewed by our esteemed reviewer James Sutherland-Smith is this issue consists, for the most part, of poems that have appeared in earlier books. Now I believe, contrary to James, that the poet in question is not to be condemned for publishing poems from books one and two in book three. I believe - such is the isolation sickness of poets - that he genuinely believes these to be new poems - just as that character in the celebrated story by Borges genuinely believed that he was writing Don Quixote anew when he accurately transcribed it in its entirety, word for word.

But what is to be done about this isolation sickness of poets? We have an idea. It is our earnest wish to create here at Bow-Wow headquarters what is best described as a hectic, communal, newsroom situation. Every Friday afternoon one entire floor of Bow-Wow Towers will be given over to this unique experiment in poetic socialization. A minimum of fifty poets will be press-ganged together, in groups of ten or more, around relatively small circular tables. Above them will hang television monitors, angled to catch the attention at all times. There will be a cacophonous medley of channels on offer, from the urgency of Al Jazeera to the malign Fox, and even on to the soporific BBC News as day gently declines to evening. The poets will be urged to write - but they will also be obliged to talk as they write, simultaneously. This perpetual clamour, so shocking to their habitually dreamy sensibilities, will introduce into their lives a free flow of words in such abundance that never again will they be able to limit themselves to the familiar words and the familiar themes of yesteryear. A fee will be in order.

*

On Receiving the Same Book Twice

Last week a publisher sent us two identical review copies of the same book of poems. This is always a bad sign. Generally speaking, if a thing needs to be said twice, it is not worth saying once. If someone says to you 'Look at this!' and then, just minutes later, 'Look at this', and he is gesturing towards the same book, you know, generally speaking, that he is not worth listening to. A good book of poems does not need to shout itself hoarse in this way. It barely needs to raise its face from the cloud of unknowing at all. It inveigles itself. It contaminates you, quite slowly. It almost never insists on hitting you over the head, and then stepping back to admire its own handiwork.

 

What is more, this was a book of poems in translation, I now recall. In this case, the rules are quite different. Such books need to be sent three times. Twice can never be enough. Ignore the first paragraph entirely.

*

Crossing the Same River Twice, Now in Spate

What are we to expect next from The Bow-Wow Shop? That is what they always ask us, those eager readers who importune us in the street. In what direction are you travelling? they add, pulling at the hems of our garments. 

We look at them in wonderment, and with mild bemusement, of course, because there is no answer but one to this question.

 

There is no direction, we begin to explain, quite courteously (all the staff - like the best employees in the newest Apple store - are given lessons in sweetness and ingratiation. It is a way of encouraging public sympathy for the enterprise.) There is no direction because poetry does not have a direction. It does not get better. It does not get worse. It erupts when it needs to erupt, and then it goes quiet again. That has always been the case.

This particular moment happens to be one of eruption - if we are to believe what we read in the press. Poetry is on the radio as never before. Gwyneth Williams, the controller of BBC's Radio 4, is said to be planning a series of round-Britain poetry master classes. The network is said to be eager to 'tap into the connection between listening to contemporary poetry and the current explosion of poetry writing.' Even Tennyson was read out loud the other week. By an actor, of course, though it is possible to hear Tennyson himself by purchasing the British Library's latest batch of spoken-word CDs of British Poets reading their own work, which begins with Tennyson, continues with Browning (who forgets his lines, and is cheered on all the same), and ends with Hughes. There are other signs of public and private excitement. When poets shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize for the best poetry book of the year read collectively - as they did in January of this year - they managed to fill the Royal Festival Hall. Fifteen years ago, it was the Almeida Theatre in Islington, a much more modest affair altogether. Gulp, we say. Great scot, we add.

*

When Poems Come: a conversation in the corner of the room beside the crisps and the ziggurat of plastic cups

It's the usual poetry-reading jostle and babble in a small, tense room, the usual race for the crisps and the half-full plastic cups, of one or the other, before the words come solemnly pouring out from a phalanx of nervy voices seated behind a table at some far distant point.

Before I know it, I am deep into a conversation with another poet, and we are agonizing over the speed at which poems can come - when they come at all. We are asking ourselves: is there any reason to suppose that they are worse if they come quickly? Surely poems should come slowly, gestating somewhere, in the dark. They need to be left alone for a while to think their own thoughts. Is that necessarily how it happens though? No.

The man I am talking to in this corner of the room is handsome, young and worried looking. His quiff is half-decent, as is his upturned collar. He is waiting for a woman. He glances towards the door from time to time. He is a poet with a full-time decorating business, he tells me. It has to be fitted in between-times. There is no other way. We talk about this and that: poets who seem to have come up from nowhere, bypassing the usual routes. We mention one in particular, even talking about the book, which was part good and part a disgrace. Was the editor asleep when he signed the contract? How could it have happened? 

Meanwhile, we are continuing to marvel at the idea of the poem coming at all, no matter how indecently hastily. He lives in fear of typecasting himself, he tells me. Blue- Collar. Those are the words - capital B, capital C - that he has used about his poems. Now he is beginning to be afraid that he is nothing but that, that he has defined himself into a corner, that people will expect nothing but that from him, that he will not be able to escape his own characterisation of himself.