EDITORIALS
It's quite strange how a bit of graffiti art by an interesting young artist called Michael Bucknell can get you going. The night before last, I had a dream that Richard Dawkins believed in God. Last night, in a dream even more vivid than the first, he confessed to a belief in poetry. Whatever is going on?
In the first of these two dreams, he had converted to Catholicism. He was standing in a darkened alcove, vested all in white, pure as his freshly cleansed mind, loomed over by a monstrance, muttering the Nicene Creed over to himself, as if it had all the veracity of some logically unassailable premise.
I knew it was all a lie. I knew my Dawkins. I woke myself up by dashing a goblet of distilled water over my face which I had collected, with such care, from the de-humidifier just hours before.
Last night, there he was all over again, dressed this time in a Brazilian carnival shirt, confessing to a belief in poetry. His eyes were shining, his fingers snapping. This time I was less sure. I let the dream run on. I listened, with bated breath, to his every word. Here is what he said.
"I love poetry, I love language. I read poetry. I know a lot of poetry by heart. I don't really understand, although I love it. I don't quite understand what poetry is. I don't understand why it works. I am haunted by it, it gives me goose pimples, it gives me shivers up the spine, but I still don't really quite understand it. I do think…"
Some dreams end so tantalizingly abruptly.
Later that same day, by a stroke of sheer good fortune, a dear Canadian geophysicist by the name of Professor Gerhard Pratt sent me a link to a recent interview with Dawkins in which he repeats the very words which had turned up in my second dream, and which I have just quoted for your delectation. So it was all true. My dream had been true!
The consequence of all this argy-bargy is that I have been left in a state of deep uncertainty about the nature of Richard's cultural-cum-spiritual questings. Is there a quest going on at all? Or does he, as usual, know what he knows?
What I mean is this. (At least, this is what I think that I mean. To be perfectly frank, I'm edging my way ahead here, as if in the grip of some profound psychological disablement.) Yes, what I cannot seem to prevent myself from thinking is as follows. Is Richard aware that someone once said that with the boxing away and wheeling off the stage of organised religion, poetry would take over in some way, by filling that yawning void in the inner life? And if he knew this, would that fact trouble him? Is he aware that poetry might just be priestcraft, tricked out in a slightly different garb; that poetry, with its strangely profligate use of such big words as soul and spirit and such like, often feels as if it is an appeal to a Someone who is just on the other side of the partition wall, the reaching out of a hand in the dark?
And if he knew all of this, would it make him wake up in night sweats? Oh dear, I do hope not. Far be it from me to want to stop him from knowing what he knows. Richard Dawkins is one of life's few remaining unassailable certitudes, thank goodness.
It still puzzles me a bit though that he is puzzled by the kind of thing that poetry is. Oh well.
*
There is so much bad verse being written these days - wretched, spontanous effusions as misdirected as steam from a kettle - that I feel we must learn a lesson from the Malaysians.
I think we need to restore the long dormant practice of public caning, in football stadia, for those who wantonly persist, day in, day out, in writing bad verse without making the least effort to read - let alone purchase - chance would be a fine thing! - any of the good verse written by other people - such as the many fine contributors to this magazine.
I suggest that we establish a Whipping Office, preferably in the basement of the Poetry Society in Betterton Street, Covent Garden, to be overseen during office hours by its extremely able employees. If the practice proves too popular, freelance recruits, fresh from the playing fields of Iraq, may be needed to man the office out of hours.
At a single brisk stroke, we would have removed the need to encourage the pestilential growth of Creative Writing Courses at a tertiary level. Or at any other level.
*
Things are getting worse and worse and worse! The late Michael Hamburger (whose achievements are celebrated elsewhere in this issue) once said that to me, as he leant, right elbow propped, bent slightly forward, legs crossed, against his great mantelpiece at Marsh Acres in Suffolk. Then he laughed at himself for being so jolly and so baleful, simultaneously.
And yet certain things do irritate beyond belief. Certain things do indeed seem to be getting worse and worse and worse. Think of the misuse of words, for example. Which, is the most abused word in the English language? We all have our favourite poisoned drinks. I would nominate 'poetical'. Here is a quotation I recently spotted in the current issue of the Royal Academy's quarterly magazine. It was a statement made, part way through a long interview, by the sculptor Anish Kapoor. 'As an artist I have nothing to say, but when meaning arises I'm willing to take it seriously. The power of a work comes from its ability to accrue layers of meaning - whether poetic, political or historical,' Now I think I have some idea how meaning can be attached to the words 'historical' and 'political'. I know the sort of thing he is talking about. But I'm blowed if I know what ballast of good sense, if any, the other adjective is intended to carry. What is more, I doubt whether he knows either. And yet that vapidly meaningless word 'poetical' is tossed around everywhere these days. Its ubiquity gives poetry a bad name. After all, with the word poetry we are on much firmer ground, aren't we?
Did you hear me?
*
We need good anthologists just as much as we need an adequate satellite navigation system when we are stumbling, blindfolded, through the mazy back alleys of Mayfair or Calcutta, with insurgents muttering incomprehensibly at our backs. As Alison Brackenbury reminds us elsewhere in this issue, a good anthology is often the only place where readers get a real taste of poetry at all. Single collections are far too intimidating for the casually interested reader.
Such a one was the late Kenneth Allott, whose Collected Poems have just been re-published by Salt, and who is also remembered in this issue in a memoir by his sometime student at Liverpool University, Herbert Lomas. Allott's skills as an anthologist are seen to their best advantage in The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, which was first published in 1950, and then re-published in 1960, by which time Allott had managed to accommodate such young whippersnappers as Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Geoffrey Hill.
Allott is an editor with a personal touch. He is gruffly opinionated, slightly rancorous. It is quite refreshingly shocking to notice how few genuinely positive things he has to say about the poets he chooses to include in his anthology. And yet he chooses them all the same because all the other contenders for possible conclusion were so much worse. What a marvellous tonic in this era of tepid, mealy-mouthed backscratching!
*
A few days ago I was in conversation with Fiammetta Rocco, Books and Arts Editor of The Economist. She mentioned something to me that I found quite astonishing. During the months of September and October, she said, there are approximately 700 books published every day in the United Kingdom. The reason for this is simple. During these months a lot of excitement is generated around various big literary prizes. Books are in the news to an extent that doesn't happen during the rest of the year. Publishers want to snatch a bit of that glory, bathe in the sunlight of all that attention. Or so they fondly dream. The consequence is that huge quantities of books are published almost simultaneously. Which almost guarantees that most of them will stand less of a chance of being mentioned than if they were published at other times of the year. How ridiculous! It is the same with art. The Frieze Art Fair happens in October. Many exhibitions open at exactly this time in order to benefit by the Frieze Effect, so many of them that the great majority barely get noticed.
What is to be done about all this nonsense of book over-production? Who needs all these books? Many of them don't deserve to be published anyway. Thy are a product of the vanity of a few individuals, who believe that the book is the thing. So, more trees are cut down, and yet more books, a few months down the line, get pulped. There's too much poetry published too. What we need are fewer books. What we need is for poetry to be read and disseminated in a way which keeps the trees in business and doesn't fill up the landfill sites. Try sending your poems to The Bow-Wow Shop, a weightless medium. You'll feel all the lighter for doing such a good deed. Dame Nature may even kiss your hand.
*
It was on 16 August 1843 that the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon wrote the following words: 'The rapidity of railway communication destroys the Poetry & Mystery of distant places.' Quite so. And then, powering into view in its wake, came the internal combustion engine, not to mention the steamship, the car, the aeroplane...
Nothing but noise and more noise, filth and yet more filth, and ever increasing disruption. There were fewer and fewer truly distant places left, and so few of this ever diminishing few seemed to harbor the least breath of Mystery, let alone the least breath of Poetry…
Fortunately, we have a local patisserie here in Clapham, just a stone's throw from Clapham Common Underground Station as it happens, in which, only the other day, I found just a vestige of that Mystery.
I was sitting there, cradling a piping hot cappuccino, tearing at a small croissant with my finger ends, when I began to sense that, yes, after all, it might just be there. The cars in the street fell wholly silent. I bowed my head. I listened out for something a bit untoward. And there it was, just a touch of it. The merest glimpse.