The Poetry Riots (Part 1): the extraordinary aftermath
In the wake of the horrific Poetry Riots of August 2011, The Bow-Wow Shopdecided to conduct a series of in-depth interviews throughout the length and breadth of the British Isles. We needed to get to the root of this problem for poetry's sake. Was there a terrible sickness endemic to the entire poetry community? Why had a succession of wholly EU-funded Poetry Superstores - almost the entire CraftVerse chain - in places as far distant from each other as Toxteth, Dagenham, Tottenham, Grimsby and elsewhere been looted with such ferocity on the nights of 7 and 8 August? In order to abide by our own self-imposed rules of strict impartiality, we gathered our team of interviewers from far-flung locations - North Korea, the Cayman Islands, the Pacific Rim. We were concerned to use analysts who, being entirely unfamiliar with our local mores, would see through to the heart of our cultural strangenesses as a poetry-loving nation.
Various questions required urgent answers. Each of these poetry superstores - alas, no more! - consisted of seven floors of merchandise. Ninety per cent of the stock, needless to say, consisted of books of poems by single poets. The remainder of the stock included such peripheral, though often extremely useful, adjuncts to the everyday making and mangling of poems such as pencils, pencil sharpeners, note books, pacemakers and defibrillators. Each store was organised in a similar way. The ground floor was devoted to poetry of the English-speaking world. The second floor was filled with books from the entire range of francophone communities. And so on and so on. The topmost floor offered a wide variety of translations of poetry from the Baltic States.
Early in the evening of 24 August, a coordinated series of assaults were made upon all these stores simultaneously. Extraordinarly well organised gangs of poets from various Polish, French, German and Lithuanian communities throughout the British Isles then proceeded to loot, ruthlessly and systematically, all the stock that spoke to their particular linguistic interests.
The most zealous - and the ones which inspired the most terror - were the teenage Lithuanians. Various eyewitnesses reported that they had never before seen such steely-eyed determination. They had never before witnessed entire armfuls of books being stolen so rapidly, so avariciously, and with such apparent glee. Thankfully, many of the perpetrators of those crimes are already enjoying long periods of incarceration for their misdeeds.
Another outcome, wholly unanticipated, has also been recorded. Yes, there seems to have been a more morally ambiguous result of that night of almost unrestrained despoliation. We have discovered - and you read this here for the first time - that since that night in August an astonishing appetite for the writing and public recitation of verse in their native languages has gained a grip on the young people of these communities - to such an extent that, according to the teachers at their local academy schools, they are currently putting their English counterparts to shame. From evil good some may arise.
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The disappearance of the editor of the Poetry Review: an utterly implausible theory
As we go to press, it is impossible to establish the exact whereabouts of the editor of the Poetry Review. Readers of The Bow-Wow Shop may recall that during the summer months, a war of supremacy broke out at Betterton Street, headquarters of the Poetry Society. A mighty clash of titans took place within those relatively straitened premises.
According to those who were witness to the slanging matches that were said to have gone on for several long days, the issues were as follows. The editor of thePoetry Review was insisting upon increasing the width of the margins of each page of every issue by approximately ten millimetres so that approximately eight per cent less copy would need to be commissioned. Calculated over a twelve-month period, this would have cut down on the workload of the editor by approximately three entire working days.
The director of the Society cried foul on the perfectly reasonable grounds that no other staff member was in the throes of rewarding his own efforts by granting himself three extra days of annual leave. Matters quickly went from bad to worse. In-trays were forcibly overturned. Manuscripts disappeared. Smoking was tolerated indoors.
The Arts Council tried to investigate. They were obliged to force the door of the editor's office. When they eventually gained entry, the editor's window was yawning open, and the editor herself was nowhere to be seen. Since then, her whereabouts have been unknown. Various theories have been floating about the ether. The least implausible of these - well, least implausible in the opinion of the theorist - has been making reference to a curious discovery of a singed page (why singed? you may well ask) from an unfinished doctoral dissertation on the work of the seventeenth-century French painter Charles Le Brun found beneath the editor's desk.
This particular page had pasted into it a reproduction of some celebrated images by Le Brun which reveal his fascination with the similarities that are to be noted between the faces of birds, animals and men (see above). The unlikely theory is this. Although the editor is not likely to be readmitted to the premises of the Poetry Society any day soon, it is felt that she may well want to do a little mischief in order to be revenged upon her former employers. What better way than to perch on the window sill in the guise of a malevolent owl?
Utterly preposterous, I am sure you would agree. A grown woman is many times larger than an owl. A female face scarcely resembles that of an owl at all even if good money has been spent to incline it in that direction. And would her presence there really be as detrimental to the peace of mind of the Society as she might hope? All so much raging nonsense, in our opinion. I hope that the Society can rid itself of such wild notions and get back to business just as quickly as possible.
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The Poetry Riots (Part 2)
The terrible aftermath: The VerseCraft Emporium, Tottenham, North London, August 2011
The poetry riots that brought shame upon the entire cultural community of England during several dog days of a truly torrid August have not been entirely extinguished.
Skirmishes broke out in the centre of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, only last weekend when a group of Formalists bussed in from the University of Mansfield set fire to a small stall in the market place which was openly displaying a range of unbound pamphlets by an elderly group of free-verse poets from the local area.
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Dead Letters
I do occasionally sincerely regret the fact that I did not offer just a little more than the £96,000 paid by some anonymous donor at Bonhams Auction House earlier this year in order to keep the only surviving love letter of the thirty known to exist from John Keats to Fanny Brawne - the one in which he calls himself a 'poor prisoner' who will 'not sing in a cage', I'm sure you remember it well - secure for all time in the Bow-Wow archives on this side of the Atlantic.
So much has gone astray. A recent wave of sadness even drove me downstairs to the archives the other day in order to examine exactly what we had. I even asked the archivist, who happened to be on-screen at that moment, and therefore relatively uncommunicative, where it all was. The place used to be full of teetering boxes. Where is it all then? I asked, looking around. The place looked immaculate. Digitised, he replied, slightly robotically, without a second's hesitation. You said we should digitise it all, and then flog off the originals in order to keep The Bow-Wow Shop going. Otherwise I wouldn't be sitting here now, would I?
Could I really have said that? I asked myself as I climbed back up the ladder, and began to breathe God's good air again. Had things really reached such a pretty pass? Later on, he drew my attention to a desperate note I had sent him earlier that year. It certainly looked authentic. I would recognise that yowl of pain anywhere.
Still, that doesn't really make me feel any more contented. Almost everything is in the throes of being digitized, it seems to me. Things you can touch, taste, feel barely exist any more for the most part - and especially not letters, of which I happen to be particularly fond.
My old friend Marius Kociejowski (who also happens to be a contributing editor to the Bow-Wow Shop) had a terrible time with this sort of thing last year. He lost all his emails - all 2,000 of them - at one fell swoop. The whole damned machine crashed and for some reason - and in spite of the fact that the emails were supposed to be stored somewhere out there - they all went with it. Needless to say, they have never returned.
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Morre's the Merrier
Some poets don't make enough of a splash about themselves. More's the pity. Speaking of which, Philip Morre is an English bookseller long resident in Venice. He trades in used books from a lovely, congenial wedge of a shoplet in the old Jewish Ghetto. Once inside, the space feels as comfortable as a well fondled glove. One of the wonders of that bookshop is its beige curtain on the right near the back, which conceals a niche with a fridge. That self-replenishing device never fails to contain an unopened bottle of Prosecco ever thirsting for attention. There's not much of a market for used books about Venetian history and ancillary matters these days, so life's on a bit of an ivory paper knife's edge. From time to time a passing stranger slips through the door, tosses down a ten-euro note, and leaves with a book about Paolo Sarpi or similar without having said a word. Philip, who occasionally glances up from between the teetering ziggurat of books on his desk to scowl at a pesky child or an even peskier dog, also writes a poem from time to time. Not too often though. Not often enough. He has just persuaded the Venetians to put poems on the vaporetti. He is also the creator and judge of our new poetry competition (see elsewhere in this issue).
A few issues ago we published a translation of his from Montale in The Bow-Wow Shop. He has a website devoted to poetry matters which he updates irregularly. Last year he wrote seven poems that pleased him, and he has just published a pamphlet of them called 2010. At first reading, his poems can sound a bit world-weary, even languorous. A little like his character, in fact. Don't be deceived. They are rich and delightful, crafted with the aid of a keen-edged scalpel of an intellect and a magnifying glass of an eye that carefully scrutinises the absurdities and the frailties of humanity. Below you can read two of them. They are fanciful versions of epigrams by Callimachus. Here is how he introduces them: 'Callimachus, or Kallimachos (roughly 305-240 BC), now in Libya, spent most of his adult life some thousand kilometres along the coast in the Ptolemaic capital of Alexandria, where he enjoyed the patronage of Ptolemy II, working in the celebrated royal library, for which he compiled a multi-volume catalogue, no longer extant. Little of his work in fact survives, relative to his prolific recorded output. He is best known for his sixty-odd epigrams, of which the two attributed poems here are versions.'
Argonaut Argo
I was once a prodigious egotistical seashell,
goddess of promontories, and now I'm all yours,
on yours, since Selenea offered me up.
Oh once I was an argonaut, the song goes,
argonaut argo, I was a paper nautilus,
and when there was wind I waved my arms
like little sails, scudding the seas,
so Aristotle thought, wrongly of course,
and Callimachus who might have known better.
When a glassy calm, a calm of glass, prevailed,
and the Nereid smiled idly over the ocean,
I rowed lustily with my tentacles,
I lived into my name, until I was finally
beached on a beach at Kea in the Cyclades
and had surely been kakavia
by daybreak were I not old and chewy;
and now, and now, I'm a bauble in your temple,
Arsinoe, I'm an empty envelope,
any message of love I bore an ago ago
cried through and lost, no longer a nest even
for halcyon foundlings (oh I've suffered
immodesties in my time I've seen things).
Look kindly, goddess, on the prayers
of Clinia's daughter, there's a deal of good in her,
- in the way her skirt swings
as she corners the agora -
and she comes from Aeolian Smyrna.
Where the Girls Are
My half-mirror is lost, my egregious twin,
and all four-handed chores without him
are tedious: folding the sheets, for one.
Could be from sheer ennui he's just gone
down to the foreshore and had done with it;
else he's ensnared in some barely licit
liaison. My tart neighbour insinuates
he's snuffing around the jailbait,
the gym, the Sappho Centre, the Eve Bar,
wherever it is the girls are,
being all gentlemanly and helpful
with their duffel-bags. The fat cop whose amble
that is (beat's too sprightly) has promised
to send him home if sighted; the boy's missed.
Silvia, won't you help me? We know,
don't we, what he's at, trawling the meat shows,
the singles dives, the drive-ins - asking for trouble?
No hanging offence, you'll say, in these parts.
But why scan only the callous hearts?
He's out there, Silvia, looking for your double.
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Savage Impulses
The world is full of savagery. That much at least is incontestable. The latest manifestation of this ancient human impulse is threatening to make its make its mark in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. Sheffield has known much savagery in its time. Some of it has been relatively benign. Being a great centre of the cutlery trade, it has whetted a thousand knives. And then there have been the darker moments. During wartime. At closing time too, after thirsty Saturday nights out, when tempers have frayed over a pretty face. Militias roamed the streets during the eighteenth century, putting working men and their inconvenient poverty firmly in their place. The Luftwaffe blitzed the city through two long nights of horror in 1940, careful to choose vulnerable civilian targets. Today's savagery, thank goodness, is of a more gentle complexion.
A new poetry imprint, Savage Poets Collective, has just published its first book. More will follow if the benigner gods descend in their chariots, bearing gold. Savage Poets Collective, the poetry imprint of an enterprising local publisher called ACM Retro, is to be both a poetry imprint and a little more: a poetry hub. What exactly is a poetry hub? It is a kind of crossroads, a place for the gathering and the dissemination of poetry matters. And poetry does matter, of course, to those to whom it matters. How will all this work? There will be a new website, which will be a source of news and information. There will be much publishing of the best work by local and regional poets, and much talk about the poetry history of Sheffield, from the Corn Law Rhymer Ebenezer Elliott (whose statue guards the entrance to Weston Park) through to Stanley Cook, the best poet of the post-war years, and beyond. All this could prove very timely. Sheffield recently had its first poetry festival of national and international importance. Very good poets teach at its two universities. Good presses already thrive there.
The fact is that the best of our presses are firmly grounded in the regions. Think of Bloodaxe in Newcastle or of Carcanet in Manchester. By comparison, London's poetry imprints seem bloodless, rootless and relatively uncommitted to the future of the art. Now it is Sheffield's turn to show off a bit of poetical savagery.
The author of the first book from Savage Poets Collective is by the editor of TheBow-Wow Shop and it is called Only So Much. (To sample a poem from it, go to: www.acmretro.com/savagepoetscollective). Needless to say, and speaking with the utmost partiality, we wish it well. We say that shamelessly, and at the tops of our voices.
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The most savage messiah of them all?
Anyone growing up in the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s, would have principally become familiar with the work of the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915) from two sources: the memoir by his friend Ezra Pound, which was published soon after Gaudier-Brezska's death in 1916, and the first full biography, which was written by his early champion and collector, H. S. Ede, the Tate curator who bought much of Gaudier-Brezska's work for a song at a time when that institution seemed utterly incapable of recognising its qualities. It is for this reason that Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, Ede's former home and now part of the University of Cambridge, holds such an extraordinary collection of drawings and sculptures by Gaudier-Brzeska.
And yet there is always more to be said - and this includes the much more that could be said about Ede's own early biography, Savage Messiah. A remarkable new edition, published eighty years after the book first appeared, not only includes the original text in its entirety, but also supplements that text with scholarly essays, drawings which were published in the first de-luxe edition of the book but which were omitted from subsequent paperback versions, and, most interesting of all, a chapter about Gaudier's mysterious Polish companion, Sophie Brzeska - Gaudier added her surname to his in order to make one deliciously unpronounceable whole - which was never published at all. Until now. (Sophie was twenty year older than Henri, and the two posed as brother and sister.) You can now read that suppressed chapter in its entirety elsewhere on this site.
Savage Messiah, H. S. Ede, Kettle's Yard/Henry Moore Institute, £25
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Russell Square Mysteries
Consider the following brief biography: an American-born writer who made a name for himself in the first half of the 20th century; who came to England as a young man, after spending time in Paris as a student; who found this country so much to his liking that he stayed and married an English wife; and whose subsequent writings were so rooted in Englishness that his US origins were often forgotten by his many admirers. Who does this bring to mind? Of the several candidates who fit this description, the one I wish to single out is the detective story writer John Dickson Carr - often called the master of the 'locked room mystery'. Carr's name is nowadays not as well-known as it once was; but I hope to raise his profile again by drawing attention to a most intriguing - and, I believe, previously undocumented - possibility that his writing was partly informed by the work of a very eminent poet.
Carr's most famous novel, published in the USA in 1935 under the title The Three Coffins, is set in London and introduces the crime scene in the following way: The car shot into Southampton Row. The street was a bleak canyon, opening into the bleaker canyon of Russell Square.... If you know the telephone box at the north end, just after you pass Keppel Street, you will have seen the house opposite even if you have not noticed it.
Keppel Street no longer emerges into Russell Square, having been cut short by the London University Senate building; but otherwise this description pretty well identifies 24 Russell Square which, in 1935, contained the Faber & Faber offices where T.S. Eliot worked. Is this simply an accident, arising from Carr's attempt to create atmosphere and show off his knowledge of London streets? Possibly. But a more substantial and deliberate connection begins to appear when we recall that Eliot's poem 'The Hollow Men', has the epigraph A penny for the Old Guy and contains the lines: Let me also wear / Such deliberate disguises / Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves. Can we now seriously believe it is mere coincidence that The Three Coffins involves a murderer disguised in a long coat and Guy Fawkes mask - especially when we discover that the book was published in Britain with the title The Hollow Man?
Nor do the links between poem and thriller stop there. In Carr's mystery, some time elapses between the sound of a shot and the discovery of the victim's body as it choked, rolled over on its side, and lay still. Surely this is an artful dramatisation of Not with a bang but a whimper?
Faced with such compelling evidence, we must ask whether Carr consciously set himself the problem of incorporating elements of Eliot's poem (published ten years previously) into his own thriller. Is it even possible that Eliot himself had challenged him to do so? As two expatriate Americans in London, it is not unlikely that they met each other.
Once we have come this far in linking the two writers, it becomes tempting to consider whether Carr might have put Eliot himself into his narrative. And it is arguable that he has indeed done so, in the guise of a man called Drayman who is one of the occupants of the Russell Square house. Although this character is not a direct portrayal of Eliot (he is much too elderly), his background is quite suggestive. He is described as a 'broken-down ex-teacher' (Eliot once taught at Highgate School) formerly associated with a university in Paris (Eliot studied at the Sorbonne). We are also told that Drayman is fascinated by the rituals and traditions of Guy Fawkes Day, just as Eliot himself apparently was when he first arrived in England. Furthermore, Drayman makes the novel's only reference to poetry when he mentions his failing eyesight, and says he can see faces and the morning sky and all those objects which the poets insist blind men should rave about. Is there an intention here to remind alert readers of blind Tiresias in The Waste Land?
The more one looks, the more one finds. An oblique - but still persuasive - indication of an Eliot-Drayman link may lie in Drayman's very elusiveness. His whereabouts at the time of the murder remain unknown for several chapters; and his eventual contribution to solving the mystery is made from offstage, so to speak, since his evidence is given at second hand. In other words - like Macavity - Drayman is frequently not there. (Although the Old Possum book was not published until 1939, the poems themselves were written at various times in the 1930s, and hence Macavity's absences could have been well known in literary circles.)
And the more one finds, the deeper one digs. Closer study yields the possibility that Carr chose the name Drayman because it also provides a subtle pointer to another Eliot. In chapter 9 of The Mill on the Floss George Eliot, reflecting on young men's lack of respect for the accumulated wisdom of their seniors, writes It is only when you have mastered a restive horse or thrashed a drayman or have got a gun in your hand that these shy juniors feel you to be a truly admirable and enviable character. Did Carr intend his puzzle-minded readers to detect this buried reference, and to recognize it as a young thriller-writer's teasing of an older and more conventional poet?
Investigations should surely not end here. Maybe it is time to re-examine Carr's numerous other works for signs of Eliot's influence - or even for evidence of his collaboration. Carr's output was so prolific that he also published books under the pseudonym Carter Dickson; and since he appeared to have enough imagination for two people, one is entitled to wonder whether another mind and hand were not sometimes providing assistance...
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
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Nasty Images 1: Georg Baselitz
The Big Night Down the Drain (1962-3), Museum Ludwig, Cologne
This painting seems to be waging war upon refinement of any kind. It is not asserting its own beauty - in fact, quite the opposite. It is not harmonious. In fact, it is lumpen, squat, gross and lumpish. It is not tailored to appeal to any market. It would not sit easily above the mantelpiece in the home. It is the very epitome of savagery, tastelessness, ugliness, offensiveness, crudeness and ferocious defiance. It seems to exist in order to be nothing but that, a fist shaken in the face of the respectable and self-possessed onlooker.
The masturbating dwarf stares blankly, not ahead, but to the side. He is ridiculously small in stature, slightly knock-kneed, dressed in what might belederhosen. The eyes are small and mean, ridiculously wide-spaced, deep-sunken within their sockets, hollowed out, the pupils defined against the eyes' grey-black outlining. The look is leaden, mechanised, wallowing in its own emptiness, beyond the call of morality. The nose is a flattened, mashed agglomeration of smeary colours. Everywhere there are nasty little lumps, swellings, excrescences, evidence of abnormality. We feel that the figure believes himself to be as massive and as indomitable as any Titan - such is his steady, purposeful look of leaden menace. The visual truth is the exact opposite. He is laughably small and slight, ungainly, easily swept aside, utterly preposterous and anti-heroic.
He holds the disgustingly extended penis out in front of him, as if he is engaged in the act of swinging it from side to side, wielding it like a cosh. This is his only weapon. The hands look too small and malformed, the fingers awkwardly crossed over each over, the blooded left ear so grotesquely large that it must have been pummeled, repeatedly. The face is a messy blur of ill-defined features, created from small, splattery, smeary wedgings of paint.
The texture is messy and hectic looking, quite deliberately so. Did he paint parts of it with his thumb and fingers? Possibly. The individual dibs and dabs of paint go in so many different directions. There is no feeling of easy flow, no attempt to disguise the fact that this has been a laborious build up of paint, an extended act of raw application of crude colour. There is no context for this figure. He stands, weakly defiant, preparing himself for the next approach, in the middle of the canvas, against the darkest of dark grounds, a figure punily defined against nothing. There is no hint of a landscape of any kind. He is from nowhere. He stands in a nowhere place - no man's land, in fact. He is everyman - or perhaps he is the no-man of that world. The only figure against which he is defined is a second human form on the floor, on its side. Dead? Almost certainly. A slumped corpse, partially concealed, legs drawn back, by the standing figure. Once again, the figure is very crude and ill defined. One important detail links the standing figure with the recumbent corpse - redness. The same red that is used to define the hugely swollen ear of the standing figure, and that reappears, in spattery smears, on his chest, arms, penis and legs, is also smeared on the corpse, quite close to his neck.
This was a group of paintings made for his first exhibition in West Berlin at the Galerie Werner & Katz in 1963. The entire show was confiscated by the police on the grounds of obscenity. Many of the works in that show consisted of close scrutinisings of human flesh, and especially of the foot and the lower leg. Every one of them has that same raw, crude, pitiless quality. Baselitz is staring at something which might be repulsive to him. They were being made at a time when many artists were being seduced by the formal qualities of abstraction, the coolness of minimalism. Baselitz, by comparison, who as a boy had huddled in the village schoolhouse as the allied warplanes bombed nearby Dresden, could not go down that road. He was seeking out his own response to a more urgent question: how and what could a German painter paint in the aftermath of the humiliations of war, in the aftermath of the atrocities of Hitler? Abstraction was to step back too far. Abstraction would be a dereliction of duty. So he chose to anatomise, ruthlessly, human flesh, to search into it, to mock it for its ridiculous fanfarings of its own heroic qualities. And in the painting on this page, he made his own portrait of that ludicrous immoralist Adolf Hitler, the Austrian dwarf-man with the receding hairline, the sometime meagerly talented artist of schmalzily traditional scenes, wielding his bloody, penile cosh in the darkened wasteland of his own tragic devising.
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How to Conduct a Poetry Reading in English, Dutch or double-dutch
If you are a Dutch-speaking resident of the Low Countries, and you are happening upon the translations of your poems into English for the first time moments before the reading, try not to baulk physically at the turn of each line as if you were repeatedly approaching a five-barred gate.
Read through your poems before you perform them in public. Too much surprise at the sight of the material in front of you can prove both disconcerting and off-putting for an audience. It is vexing to see a poet wrestling with a text that appears to have a daunting air of unfamiliarity about it.
Do not say: I don't know what I'm going to read tonight, and then proceed to leaf through the book, front to back, back to front, flush-faced, accompanied by exaggeratedly awkward page-turning gestures from your one free hand.
The microphone is neither a lover to slobbered over nor an enemy from which you must keep your distance. Popping microphones are an enormous distraction.
Don't forget that poems are unruly, warring individualists. When deciding which ones to read aloud, do not necessarily listen to the voice that shouts loudest.
Do not say the following towards the close of your forty-five minute reading: for my last poem, I am going to read a long one.
Make sure that you punctuate your poems with useful and amusing titbits. Try to ensure that these comments are not even more memorable than the poems themselves.
For the sake of encouragement, find a face in the audience which appears to be smiling at what you are saying - even if it is that of your long estranged daughter.
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As Free As if He Were Dead
In a letter from the front to Eleanor Farjeon sent about a month before he died, Edward Thomas inquired after his friend Kenneth Hooper, himself due to ship out to France. This is E.F.'s gloss on that letter.
Kenneth Hooper, still in England, never in fact left it. His story is an odd one. Edward was the first to go, and Kenneth was to follow. The day before his company sailed he was knocked down by a motor-bus and carried unconscious to hospital. By the time he came to and remembered who he was his draft was in France; and when he was fit enough to present himself to the authorities, they informed him that he too was in France. His absence from the Company had not been noted; the records confirmed that he was now serving his country overseas. Protest was useless; military regulations cannot be knocked down by a single motor-bus. Kenneth walked out of Headquarters as free as if he were dead, and went back to farming and dog-breeding for the rest of the war.
from: Eleanor Farjeon - Edward Thomas, the last Four Years (OUP 1958), p.255
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Dismantling the Mechanism
We take poems apart as best we can. Needless to say, it is a long and cumbersome process, and not without cost. When we first offered the service, the response was wholly negative across the entire poetry community. Every poet said the same. The poem is inviolable, they all intoned, not even to be approached - let alone touched - until left to cool for several days.
Our approach, we explained, would be utterly - brutally - different. The poem would be regarded as any other piece of mechanism. If it tried to escape from us, it would be wrestled to the ground, trussed, and then the interrogation-cum-partial dismemberment would begin. Immediately. At last one poet - the one who had not written a poem for upwards of three weeks, and who was therefore beginning to doubt whether he could safely describe himself as a poet at all - stepped forward with a poem. We could see the look of suspicion and distaste as he slipped its leash into our hands. There was a certain amount of growling and straining, but not quite as much as we had expected. We knew the reason for this, of course.
The poem, on being handed over quite unceremoniously, had looked back at its begetter only to notice that his head was averted, and he was fiddling with a notebook in his back pocket. Whereupon the leash visibly slackened and the poem lay down. It had lost the fight. We set to right away, tearing away compound adjectives, stamping on conjunctions, brutalising adjectives with the keen edge of a hacksaw. There was a certain amount of blood spilled, but not more than was to be expected. The period of convalescence was approximately two months, at the end of which the poem died peacefully. Its begetter is yet to collect it. We give them a maximum of three weeks.
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Twenty-Five Quadroons of Reluctance
Oh dear. It is so difficult to make poets cohere. When you look at them across a crowded room, talking to each other in that half-hearted, semi-engaged kind of way, half-nursing their finest solipsistic impulses, they so often seem like a jumble of ill assorted stones rattling around inside a trouser pocket. Unsurprisingly, even less lacking in coherence are many of the books of poems written by those same poets.
Books of poetry are difficult to pull together at the best of times. Where should it begin or end? When you leaf through them, the poems themselves often look and sound like eighty or ninety unruly individualists, all pulling in a slightly different direction. No wonder the customer is so reluctant to invest in a book of poetry. He simply does not know what he is in for, and this is especially the case when the book comes tricked out with a deliciously enigmatic title such as Twenty-Five Quadroons of Reluctance. If only a book of poetry could announce itself clearly and guilelessly. If only it had a readily graspable theme such as my last two purchases from our local independent bookshop: An Illustrated History of the Pencil and Away Days in Vietnam.
A few months ago, I was sitting around a table in a small, lakeside town in Southern Ontario with a genial Canadian poet and his wife. The candles were flickering low. We had drunk a glass or two of a robust Hudson Bay Shiraz. Self-esteem was set on a gently rising curve. Having eaten the largest dessert on the menu, we were back to tackling a familiar theme: how to persuade any human being to buy a book of poetry if he or she is not either a close relative or a former lover of its author. We agreed on one thing at least. An appetising title made a huge difference. Which were our favourite titles? To our astonishment, the title which had lingered on in our memories above all others belonged to an early book written by the Serbian-American poet, Charles Simic. The book was called Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk. Oh, how it resonated and resonated for the two of us! We raised a glass to its author. We smiled all over again as we ran it past ourselves and then drank it down.
As it happens, I was recounting all this just the other day to a doctorate student in an Oxford bookshop. He looked hard at me before replying. The real problem of coherence starts much earlier, he told me. It begins at the level of the sentence. How can any poet know what the next line should be, let alone how to conclude the stanza or endeavour to pull together an entire collection. We felt each other's pain just then. I knew how we were both experiencing our writing lives at that particular moment of near exquisite insecurity: a jumble of ill-assorted stones in a trouser pocket. And doubtless it would be a pocket with a hole in it.
Life's Most Difficult Question
Leading questions are so difficult to deal with. The one I hate the most is this one (I doubt that you will disagree): who is your favourite poet? The shaming fact is that I almost never know for certain. My point of view changes as rapidly as the weather of south London. Had you asked me this question the day before yesterday, the answer would have been different from the answer I will be giving you today, which will itself differ from the answer I am likely to give you tomorrow.
The day before yesterday, for example, having fallen into a familiarly comfortable, late Elizabethan cast of mind, I would have been extolling the virtues and the unrivalled brilliance of John Donne. Yesterday, I would have hitched my wagon to the star of a man who tomorrow I may well come to be regarding as a bit of a rackety, undependable, lower-middle-class street trader: Robert Browning. Things get worse and worse. The day after tomorrow I have no doubts that I will be once again doffing my cap to John Milton and all his gloriously indomitable Republican sentiments. And then, of course, there is Shakespeare. Ah yes, there is always Shakespeare sniggering in that maddeningly superior way of his from behind the arras.
But wait a minute. This argument seems to be misting over. Are we talking about our favourites or not? No, we are not. We are back to creating a hierarchy of poets, which is completely different. Favourite poets are not necessarily the best poets by any stretch of the imagination. Our favourite poets, surely, are the ones we regularly talk to, the ones from whom we learn, the ones who, for all their undeniable talents, also have scabbed knees and stutter a little, and who have moments of complete blankness. In short, they partially resemble ourselves. That is why we seem to know them from the inside. The others, those lofty beings whose reputations are trumpeted by sky-y-pointing pyramids, live elsewhere. We wave at them from a safe distance.
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How Long, Lordie, How Long?
Last Thursday afternoon a young poet asked us to tell him how long he should expect to devote to the writing of a single poem, and how he would know for certain that a poem was indeed finished. He had very little time to spare on his hands, he explained. He needed a sensible answer from a poetry professional as quickly as possible.
We explained to him with as much patience as we could muster that the question, when posed like that in the abstract, was an unanswerable one. We cited one or two instances that might be of use to him - the fact, for example, that it had taken the Irish-American poet John Montague fifteen years to bring one of his poems to a successful conclusion. We also told him that T.S.Eliot is said to have raced to the finishing line of 'The Journey of the Magi' in nineteen minutes flat. We then added that W.H.Auden once remarked that no poem is ever truly finished. It is only ever abandoned. By way of an addendum, we mentioned that some poets - the late Robert Creeley, for example - did not necessarily work on a single poem at a time, nor at a particularly laborious pace. In fact, had not Creeley once said somewhere that he tended to write two or three poems in rapid succession, and that he seldom revised them once they were written? We also reminded him, by way of a conclusion, of Thom Gunn's cautious practice. After old Thom had finished a collection of poems, he would leave it in the drawer for six months before deciding whether or not it was in a condition of sufficient readiness to send off to a publisher.
The young man looked thoroughly bewildered and even crestfallen by the time we had explained all this. He told us that he would go away and think about it. He also informed us that he really liked the three poems he had written that morning, and that his girl friend to whom they were addressed did so too - barring a line or two of gross hyperbole. He had a soft spot for gross hyperbole, he added, provided that it was deployed sparingly.
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Who exactly are we seeing in this drawing of an emaciated, shrunken-cheeked old man in a fez, and in the painting by Hervé Constant (see below) based on the drawing? It is the thirty-seven year old Arthur Rimbaud, prodigious teenage poet, who abandoned the life of literature in order to become a trader in North Africa. This little seen esquisse by his sister Isabelle shows him, weak and about to be re-admitted to the Hopital de la Conception in Marseille, where he would shortly die on 10 November 1891. It was the second time he had seen the inside of that hospital. During the first visit he had had his leg amputated. What a difference a few years makes! Can this really be the same boy who, a couple of decades earlier had written the great poem-cycle Illuminations, which is reviewed elsewhere in this issue in its new translation by John Ashbery?
