Hughes Trashes Poets' Corner 


Marmoreal-serene in death: Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, photographed by the resident Bow-Wow shop photographer, just minutes before a powerfully destructive incursion by the late Laureate of England

Cleaners working for Westminster Council are threatening strike action this morning. In the early hours of yesterday, Doris Turdisch, who has long had sole responsibilty for sweeping out the rat droppings from Poets' Corner with a long-handled balai de chambre, was disturbed in her labours by a forceful, heavy-breathing giant of a man, 'moving... almost gliding,' as she reported, 'steady and formidable on his great legs as the ghost of a prime Herefordshire bullock...,' and muttering in a thickly guttural-stuffed, mid-Yorkshire accent, as he prowled from memorial to memorial, checking for his name, and hurling horrible expletives at the names of others.

This story contributes to the growing unease being felt in certain circles over the unilateral and wholly undemocratic decision, announced just the other week by the Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Dr John Hall, to erect a memorial to Ted Hughes in Poets' Corner. Details are also beginning to emerge of a séance which is said to have taken place at the Deanery three weeks ago. During a particularly vigorous session of table-rapping, various letters were said to have emerged - the letters H, U and G, for example - when an extremely shrill and elderly female voice from beneath the table, suddenly cried out, 'HUGHES, CHILDREN, HUGHES! MY DARLING, BROWSING YORKSHIRE LAD! OH, IT HAS TO BE TED, TED, TED!' After a short scuffle, the interloper was ejected, leaving a gross trail of Snappy-Snap biscuit fragments behind her.

*

Lament for Rety's Passing

It is quite difficult to imagine that dear, scruffy John Rety, stalwart anarchist, poet, novelist and sometime refugee, who roamed the streets of Kentish Town in North London with such restless dedication for so long, is gone from us. Marius Kociejowski did a marvellous interview with him in PNR just a few issues back. What an extraordinary hinterland of a life!

A few weeks ago I paid a visit to the Torriano Meeting House in North London, that delightfully ramshackle poetry-reading venue over which John presided with such  gruff geniality for so many years. It's a cramped little space, more akin to the needle-like prow of an ocean-buffeted lifeboat than a room for poets to read in. Four chairs to a row! And such a funny old, high stage too - more poop deck than stage - all clogged with screens to hide mountains of clutter, and an old, tuneless upright piano. Readers peer down at the audience from above, as if seeing microbes through a microscope. The elderly lady sitting next to me, one of the many expectant readers from the floor, took out her compact, eyed herself soulfully, and then proceeded to refresh, oh so carefully, the rising black arc of her right eyebrow before reading a very, very sad poem about the bombings in Madrid in the Year of Our Lord 2000.

John could be quite strict with readers from the floor, and even though he was not present on that particular night, his tough-minded spirit was still ruling the roost. I felt saddest of all for another reader, Alan, who told us from up there on the stage, as he dexterously leafed through page after page of manuscript balanced across his slightly jittery knees, that he had a written a very personal response to the allied invasion of Iraq. There was a tiny tremor of alarm. Loquaciousness was in the air …

Quick as a flash, that evening's Terminator, whose job it was to keep unruly poets in order, enquired after its length. 'Seventy lines'. 'There's a maximum of forty.' Blasted from the skies. We shall never know what terrible, heart-felt truths we were spared.

John would surely have nodded his approval of her behaviour. He watches over us still, red pen in tough-minded, Magyar fist. 

*

Civil Partnership Between Unequals

As time drips along, second by precious second, you begin to understand that some things are more important than others. Here is the most important announcement of the day. From our purblind perspective.

The Bow-Wow Shop wishes to announce that it has entered into a bindingly flexible civil partnership with PNR, a reputable literary magazine of some maturity. The two partners will continue to occupy their respective residences in Clapham and Manchester. There are no immediate plans to pool assets, which consist for the most part of several thousand unsaleable books, various venerable sticks of furniture, and a store cupboard of pirated software. There will be no public celebration, although both parties are said to be mildly excited in the extreme. The parties have been circling each other for a while, pouting a little, making various wholly inoffensive finger gestures. They met most recently across the gleaming surface of a crowded grand piano at the Savile Club in Mayfair as the ghost of W. B. Yeats descended the back stairs.

Are the parties compatible? Are they not too dissimilar in age? You may well ask. PNR is the venerable heir to a hardy strain of literary Modernism. It has decades of mature pronouncements at its back. The Bow-Wow Shop, on the other hand, has barely slithered, howling, down the birth canal. It scarcely knows its end from its beginning. Its pedigree is uncertain. And where exactly does the Bow-Wow Shop stand in relation to the great debates of our day? Too early to say perhaps. The mists of futurity have not yet parted. A tonnage of Icelandic  dust, recently deposited upon South London in a welter of re-cycled hessian sacks, has not been helpful. One view, expressed in a late-come email from an intensely dedicated reader in Kowloon, put it quite succinctly: 'You, sirs,' he wrote, 'cleave to a position which I would describe as a wierd, modishly post-modern variant upon antiquarianism'. So there we have it. It also needs to be said that, in addition to their fondness for each other, both partners have more than a passing interest in contemporary verse.

The first fruits - or reeking deposits, as you will - of the partnership will soon be visible. PNR has kindly agreed to set aside a small corner - about the size of a kennel - for the Bow-Wow Shop's mascot  (a small and frisky blue dog) in forthcoming issues. Within that stinking, confined space, the dog, strictly tethered by its wiry hind leg, will be allowed to rage and roam to its heart's content. Goodness knows what the consequence of any of this may prove to be. Life is too short to dream idly of the future before it happens. Others, less pleased, have already hazarded the opinion that this may prove to be a Bridge too Far. All we can say for sure, dear reader, is this: nothing comes of nothing.

* 


Do you happen to know this man at top left? Yes, me too. There's something alarmingly unstoppable, unquenchable, unsnuffoutable about Michael Horovitz, that noisy Grandchild of Albion who has just celebrated his 75th birthday. Can he really be that old? Can the world really be that young? He's not so much a poet as a perpetual-motion-machine-of-a-poetry-phenomenon. Does any week pass by when he does not send an email reminding us of his latest gig? Can there ever have been such an utterly inexhaustible self-publicist? Do we like him? Do we have a high regard for his poetry? These questions are utterly irrelevant. Is Eros still ruling over Piccadilly Circus this morning, bow stretched to the limit? Of course he is! Did Eros notice when horse-drawn omnibuses gave way to Roadmasters way back when? Of course he did! Similarly, I can't really imagine that dear old Horovitz was not present at the Sack of Rome, glittery flower-power jacket stuffed with fliers exhorting you to turn up to his next Poetry Olympics gig at the Colosseum once the human debris had been tidied away.

The other day he sent me his contribution to a little feature we ran a couple of issues ago on the subject of what poetry might or might not be good for. Here's what he wrote. 'Poetry is good for the soul and the healing of nations, the cleaning of passions, transcendence of fashions, fulfilment of missions, unconsidered positions beyond the first range of hills, exploring aery shapes and rills, warbling faery woodnote trills. Even not such good poetry's better than adspeak or rabble rows, and good poetry is one of the rare high points of achievement human kind has to draw on as valid justification for our existence - both proven and potential.'

Finger-snappy stuff eh, peaceniks?

*

The Key to the Kingdom


Intellectually As Broad as he is Long: poet Les Murray launches yet another mirthful sally in the direction of his enemies in the north-western territories of Australia

Until about eighteen years ago - I wish for your sake that I could be more precise than this so that you could conjure the whole thing up in the mind's eye, rather in the way that W. B. Yeats once saw those pale, unsatisfied ones appearing, and then disappearing, in the blue depths of the sky - I rather imagined, young and untested fool that I was, that poets understood each other's poetry.

That at least could be depended upon. I was well aware that the General Public often didn't quite understand what poets were writing about. But I was utterly convinced that all poets had the keys to each other's doors. Until I met a poet in the street in Hay-on-Wye. He was a young Irishman. Tousle-haired, and a touch benignly  dreamy-looking, as if, in his mind, he was half way between here and there. He had none of that wary, ferocious edge that many poets seem to possess for reasons best known to themselves. Anyway, there we were, standing idly on a street corner, chowin' t fat, as my dear old mother from Sheffield used to say. I was thinking about Les Murray, and I happened to ask my new friend whether he understood Les' work as completely as I often understood it. 'No.' he replied, 'I often find it utterly incomprehensible.' That remark has stayed with me: that poets can be as baffling to other poets as they are to the general public.

I felt reassured by that, as it happens. I felt that I wasn't quite so alone in the world. I also found myself beginning to feel, quite wickedly, that perhaps it didn't matter too much if no one made much sense. Perhaps it even meant you didn't have to try so hard if a kind of reckless waywardness was to be the order of the day.

*

Jazz Interlude down Oxford Street

I was footslogging along a rather drizzly Oxford Street the other night - that rather sullied, seedy patch between Oxford Circus and Tottenham Court Road - thinking about the fact that I've seldom had much time for jazz poetry, with the exception of one or two really wonderful poems, such as Roy Fisher's lovely tribute to Joe Sullivan.

Why such dislike though? I kept on asking myself as I swung from one lamp post to the next, idly twirling my late Uncle Bartholomew's ivory-handled cane.

I think it's something to do with the fact that jazz poems seem to feel that they have to ape the music itself, rhythmically, and all that sort of thing usually sounds rather forced and crude and tedious in the extreme. As I was musing on these matters, I happened to pass by the door of the 100 Club, that immortal jazz venue where I once used to listen to the likes of Memphis Slim and Louisiana Red. Such beautiful, bygone days…

Sounds, words, delivered by a sweet and huskily melodious female voice, accompanied by what sounded like a six- or seven-piece band, were lazily seeping out through the door. I stopped to listen. I quite liked what I heard. In fact, I liked it enough to want to jot it down on the stiff white cuff of my thrift-shop-sourced Jermyn Street dress shirt.

Here's how the words went. You'll just have to do your best and imagine the music.

 

Gonna

 

Gonna go tomorrow in my paprika hat

With my Cannonball recordings and my old lemon cat

Gonna go tomorrow in my patchwork pants

With a picture of my aunt and her aspidistra plants

Gonna start the Ford that's sitting outside

Gonna fill the back and start to drive

Gonna find a place where nobody stares

Gonna sing by myself where nobody cares

Gonna watch the parrots in the ban-yan trees

Smell the ocean, feel the breeze

Gonna go away and be myself

Baby won't you please come too?

 

       No

 

Wanna use whispers to build our shack

Wanna write poems on your naked back

Wanna teach geckoes how to speak

Wanna play the saxophone like Eddie the Freak

Wanna raise butterflies big as the moon

Race those butterflies right around the room

Wanna paint a picture that's ten miles high

Of a multi-coloured donkey with a rainbow eye

Wanna think of something no one has

Invent something else that's as good as jazz

Wanna go away and be with you

Baby won't you please come too?

 

       No

 

 

Omens

 

We'd had the glimpses and the glances,

                     you gave me a rose,

we'd had the moments and the chances,

                     the first hello's,

we made the invitations,

                     lent each other books,

showed our admirations,

                     exchanged the deepest looks,

we'd had the sweet nuances,

                     the little quelquechoses...

you approved my choice of writer,

                     the vigour of his prose,

but frankly there was something

                     that didn't do the trick

something wasn't happening

                     something didn't click

you were cooler than a beanbag

                     calmer than a brick

uninvolved as ice cream

                     remote as Reykavik 

 

I put my mojo in the kitchen

a juju in the loo

a horseshoe in the bathroom

a rabbit's foot or two

a totem in the hallway,

a fetish in the den,

kept a voodoo record playing

a lucky charm for when

I bought a yellow idol

wore a saint around my neck,

threw salt across my shoulder,

never crossed a cheque.

I counted lucky numbers

from seven up to ten

If I saw a raven flying

I counted down again

Oh that little yellow idol

from the East of Katmandu,

no it didn't, no it didn't

make my dreams come true

 

We'd had the evening walks,

                     we'd strolled across the park,

we'd had the lengthy talks

                     till it was getting dark,

you brushed against me twice,

                     as you helped me with my coat,

you said that I was nice,

                      you touched me as you spoke,

you phoned me up from Cork,

                     & then again from Sark,

you wrote to me from York,

                     you said I drew a spark...

but frankly there was something

                     that didn't do the trick

something wasn't happening

                     something didn't click

you were cooler than a beanbag

                     calmer than a brick

uninvolved as ice cream

                     remote as Reykavik 

 

I put my mojo in the kitchen

a juju in the loo

a horseshoe in the bathroom

a rabbit's foot or two

a totem in the hallway,

a fetish in the den,

kept a voodoo record playing

a lucky charm for when

I bought a yellow idol

wore a saint around my neck,

threw salt across my shoulder,

never crossed a cheque.

I counted lucky numbers

from seven up to ten

If I saw a raven flying

I counted down again

Oh that little yellow idol

from the East of Katmandu,

no it didn't, no it didn't

make my dreams come true

 

Someone told me later - he was a bit drunk, so he may not have vouchsafed the whole truth (so help us god) - that some of those words, those song lyrics I'd been listening to, had been written by a fully paid up member of the poetry fraternity called John Hartley Williams for his daughter Natalie Williams, who is a rather wonderful jazz/soul singer. Well, well, well.

*

Neither Indoors nor Out of Doors

It was a day like many other days in the summer time in Lower Manhattan. The quality of the heat in that Vietnamese restaurant just off Fifth Avenue, right around the corner from Washington Square, where a hippy was happily beating down with his fists on an under-loved old Joanna, was truly inexpressible.

Which would help to explain, in part, the hypersensitivity and the irascibility of my interlocutor who, for want of better, I shall call Rembrandt O' Shea. Rembrandt was headed towards the ministry. Yes, four years later he would be ordained a minister in the Episcopalian Church after years of beating at the doors. Eventually, the fathers of the church had yielded, and he had stepped through. Four years later, I would be able to see an image of him, on screen, standing on the steps of his church, vested all in white, pure as his mind, in the immortal words of John Milton - who, as you may recall, was writing about his dear, dead wife. Rembrandt would be standing there, grimly assured, surrounded by his small and devoted family. And on that day in Manhattan, amidst the heat and the reek of the Vietnamese food, Rembrandt  knew he was destined there. 'I see it as my job,' he told me. He also saw it as his job to lecture me about the state of contemporary verse.

'You know, Michael, I don't read much of that stuff. I just can't seem to engage with it. It's not like a novel. The problem is that, so often I just don't even know what a poem's supposed to be about. It doesn't really seem to have an identifiable subject…'  I mumbled some response. That same year, this time in a restaurant in Toronto, I was talking to a film maker about poetry too. Unlike Rembrandt, he'd been quite a reader of 20th century poetry in his time. He'd even studied the thirties' generation at Oxford. Not any more though. 'It seems to me that the problem of verse these days is that it's too bound up with issues of subjectivity,' he said as he poked his fork into a plate of black beans, pushed and poked. His pony tail bounced gently as he bobbed and weaved his head.

These two remarks, both voiced by intelligent, literate people who had read a lot and seen a lot and done a lot, coalesced in my mind. They also troubled me. They continue to trouble me. To what extent was what they said true? Is there enough respect shown for the objectivity of the common world which exists beyond the confines of the self in the poetry of today? These are thorny matters.

* 

Poetry's Dogged Appeal

Even though I was taking the stairs up from the basement of the London Review of Books Bookshop in Bury Place two at a time - I'm sure you know the place; it's just a skip and a jump from the gloomily ponderous portico of the British Museum - the black lurcher immediately ahead of me, who was blessed with the most powerful pair of back legs imaginable, was still outpacing me. Who was it that said only humans enjoy the launch of a new press with a keen interest in contemporary poetry in translation?

I'm referring, of course, to the launch of an anthology called Oriel just the other evening over in Bloomsbury. The publishing house itself is called Black Sandal Press, and its principal motor is Hilary Kassman, who has done some fine translations from the German of poems by Ingeborg Bachmann that you can read elsewhere in this issue.

Anyway, once I got up to the ground floor, I decided to stand right at the back, beside the street door, because I needed to make a fairly quick getaway after I had sampled a poem or two from the mouth of Naomi Foyle, who is one of the poets featured in the anthology.

Downstairs, amongst the pizza slices and the olives and the six bottles of one colour or the other, I'd fallen into conversation with an eager-faced man who at first told me that he was an author, but then later admitted that he was a journalist. 'I always introduce myself as an author,' he added, 'for obvious reasons…' He gave me a particularly penetrating stare.

'What do you write on?'

'Miscarriages of justice,' he replied.

'Is there a lot of that about these days? I asked, intrigued. 'More and more.'

'Why is that?'

'Because this Labour Government has been introducing more and more laws which make it easier to convict the innocent.'  

Surprisingly, he smiled quite a lot when he said that.

Just then Hilary put a stop to the traditional music that had been drizzling away in the basement's far corner, and the lurcher led us all upstairs towards the reading.

When Hilary mentioned that Naomi would read first, I happened to notice that the lurcher, who was lying just behind me, had its head flat to the ground. Occasionally, as Naomi read and read, it would raise its fine, aquiline nose from off its paws, sniff the air, and then, very gently, let it sink again. All of a sudden, a rolled newspaper appeared at the level of my right shoulder. A grey-haired lady, gentle and slightly confused of demeanour, was pointing towards it. She had written something along the white margin of the front page. I read the words with some difficulty: Swedenborg Hall. 'Ah yes,' I whispered, 'Swedenborg Hall is just around the corner.' She'd found herself at the wrong reading. I gave her directions, and she hurried out just as Naomi was launching into a poem entitled 'In the Lap of the Gods'. A minute or two later, Naomi had finished, and I bolted out into the night air with some words from that poem still resonating in the inner ear: 'your genitals lie purring,/dreaming of my hips…'

Out in the street, where Bury Place meets New Oxford Street, I saw the woman with the newspaper again, standing beside the kerb, slowly turning on her heel. She was looking just a touch helpless. I walked up to her. 'That's Swedenborg Hall over there,' I said pointing to a building on a not-too-distant corner. Lights were blazing in the windows. 'Oh good,' she said, 'thank you.' She looked triumphal. Then she kissed me, quite robustly, on both cheeks. Just then the lurcher overtook me on the inside. It was encouraging its owner along at quite a lick. Was that a copy of Oriel it was carrying between its teeth? I do hope so.

*

Yes, I do wish that someone would tell us - someone in a position of authority, someone whose opinion we knew we could trust - such as a senior social worker from Birmingham or a  Baltimore police commander or a peacefully retired Catholic archbishop from Co.Wicklow - what poetry is good for. So that we could settle the matter once and for all, and proceed happily, carolling, to our graves.

I still don't quite understand why it is that the sudden and often announced appearance of a poet in an otherwise completely unremarkable room does cause a certain stir from time to time. I recently gifted a books of poems to a dear and extraordinarily eloquent young man from India - a Buddhist from Mumbai, as it happens. He seemed to light up inwardly when I slipped it to him - quite casually, of course, as if it were nothing but words on paper. He told me some weeks later that he had been reading it beside the Indian Ocean, on a small stretch of private beach. His family is fortunate enough to live in a gated compound. 'I'll tell you the true test of the worth of a book of poems,' I told him. 'If it floats, there's promise of a reputation to come. If it sinks, that's a stark demonstration of the quality of the poems.' He told me that he'd hedged his bets by keeping it wrapped up in a colourful beach towel.

John Mortimer used to think very highly of poets too - and he was a trained advocate before he took to the pen. 'I think that poetry is the greatest of all the arts,'  I once heard him say to the young Simon Armitage at a literary festival which was being staged somewhere fairly significant -  amidst howling gales and teeming rain, should you want a clue. Given that young Armitage was the only representative of the species on the stage at that particular moment, he looked both pleased and a bit embarrassed. 'Fiction is nothing beside poetry,' added John in his best avuncular fashion, spectacles skidding down his nose. Fortunately for the reputation of fiction, not all fiction was written by John Mortimer, a quick-witted member of the audience might have been moved to add. 

*

Hugo Cracks Another Joke

Was the joke ok? Hugo Williams seemed genuinely concerned, genuinely anxious to know whether or not it had gone down well. Well, you would, wouldn't you, especially if you were the son of an actor. He had been reading from his new books of poems at a gathering to celebrate the Faber poetry list, and he had started off, as so many poets do, with a joke to loosen things up a bit. 'My last engagement was with a group of gay AAs, so it's nice to be here amongst friends…'

I told him I thought it was terrific. And all the other gay alcoholics in the audience fell off their seats too, simultaneously.

*

The first three issues of The Bow-Wow Shop have disappeared from this website. We decided that we did not want to create an on-line equivalent of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Those who wish to read the first three issues can still do so at the British Library website. Go to: www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/subject/69/page/3.

Where then is Issue 4? It is still on this site. It runs immediately after this latest issue, which concludes at page 29. Think of a Canadian goods train, with carriages tagging along behind. How bothersome. How maddening. How needlessly complicated, etc.