2014 – Page 4 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

THE FLEAS THAT TEASE

Give me a poem starting ‘I remember’ and I will suggest you drop the first two words. And yet . . .

. . . one of things poetry does – that it is surely driven to do – is preserve memories. Little things that happen, thing that can’t be allowed to go unrecorded. (Sometimes big things too, of course, though the size isn’t the issue: it’s the immediacy.)

Why do I bossily score out the words ‘I remember’? Two reasons. First: because too many poems start that way, so it’s old hat. Second: because it invites a tone of easy nostalgia: here comes a memory we all share and love.

In fact, the memory poems I like best (at least I think this is true) draw me into a memory that’s vivid, fresh and alive, but it’s not my remembered experience, though I may recognise parts of it. It belongs to the poet. Until I read and learn to love the poem, that is. After that, it belongs to me. I own shares in Wordsworth’s daffodils. I often visit Hilaire Belloc’s inn in the High Pyrenees.

Such a wonderful, and endlessly available resource: memory. And magical too. In a lifetime we visit thousands of places, and can call to mind only a few. We were at school with hundreds of faces and can visualise only a couple. We wear countless garments in our lives and forget their colour, texture and style completely. But a few precise moments stick in the mind. They haunt us like clues to an unsolved mystery.

This is a lengthy introduction to Rosemary Hector’s Knowing Grapes. But one of the things this poet does is draw you into memories, vividly enough for you to possess them. Here is ‘Plums’, for example:

Red-black against the pale blue institutional plate,
the plums sat in a puddle of their own blood.
On Thursdays, always stewed fruit with a flood
of custard, poured from a jug of dented metal.
It was odd how adept I became at the count
of fruits per head, serving in equal measure, could
recognise this fruit was little harmed
by the kitchen process; was, in fact, quite good.
All class three watched as I spooned them out.
The first plate was passed to the senior at the end.
Gonads again, said the small boy to my left.

The first line captures attention with the colour. It recreates the photographic image, without needing to say ‘I remember’ (although this is an ‘I remember’ poem). The reader may also recall the colour of stewed plums, never a popular pudding at school dinner. But the “puddle of blood” and the “flood / of custard” has humour in it. And as for that jug of “dented metal”, not only did my mother have one, but there’s a replica lurking at the back of my cupboard downstairs. So yes, all this chimes with memories of my own: I’m experiencing nostalgia, comforting and nice.

And the voice of the narrator is so grown-up. She is the adult, serving the small boys. Her language is confident and controlled. It is the voice of the British Empire, “adept / at the count / of fruits per head, serving in equal measure”. A whole world in a phrase.

But then the last line! “Gonads again, said the small boy to my left.” Dismissive, precise, authoritative. The adult world crumbles in the face of a child’s summary. He doesn’t say “balls”, as he might well have done. He uses the biological term to sum up his (low) opinion of the pudding. He will be talking like this when he’s eighty, if he makes it that far. Besides, it’s clear, isn’t it, that the whole of class three calls plums “gonads” (and probably gonads “plums”, come to that).

So this is my memory too now. Each time I revisit it, I get the same thunk of satisfaction.

‘Plums’ can be found in Knowing Grapes with a number of engaging companions: emotive memories, served without pretension but with delight.

SHOULD POETRY PAMPHLETS BE THEMED?

A good question . . .

It certainly works for Candlestick Press, which has two titles in the top ten poetry sales in the UK listed in the current Bookseller. Everything at Candlestick is themed: Five Poems about Teachers, Ten Poems about Gardens, Thirteen Poems of Revenge. These are adorable little publications. They reach the parts other poetry doesn’t penetrate.

But nearly all the Candlestick Press publications are anthologies. That is to say, the contents are poems by several poets. Not all of them are famous or classic or dead, but some certainly are. And the editors tend to have kudos (notably Carol Ann Duffy with the Christmas pamphlets).

Themes certainly seem to boost anthology penetration. The Emma Press (keep an eye on this new imprint) first did an anthology of “Mildly Erotic Verse” (great title), has since done one on Motherhood and there’s one on Dance in the making. Send your poems now and join the Emma Press Club (another neat marketing idea).

Second Light did Parents, as well as embracing ‘Women’ as a general theme. Grey Hen has done anthologies about the sea; the bee; the Brontes, birds; trying circumstances; and “aging older women”. Bloodaxe has cats, and Irish Poets. Faber & Faber has trains.

Does the theme sell the publications? It certainly makes them stand out. Themed books lend themselves to gift purchase too, presumably. Poems about golf for a golfer. Poems about dance for dancers, motherhood for mothers.

What about single author collections? Diana Gittins’ HappenStance pamphlet Bork!, which is a sequence of poems about chickens, has certainly sold a good number of copies either to poets who keep hens, or to people with friends with hens. Many purchasers have sent for two or three copies, not one, which suggests gifts are in the offing.

I’m willing to bet Kate Clanchy’s Newborn has sold more widely than her other books, though of course I don’t know. Slattern won more prizes but I bet Newborn sold more copies. it makes a great gift for a new mum. The cover picture of the baby is a winner – I bought it myself when my daughter had her baby. And doesn’t Picador have The Book of Birth Poems edited by no other than . . . K. Clanchy.

I conclude: themes are Good Things.

This is not why I’m about to publish two pamphlets with themes. Sometimes themes just happen. The first, and most imminent themed item, is Rosemary Hector’s Knowing Grapes. The central idea is (you guessed it) fruit. The next is Helen Clare’s Entomology. Theme: insects. Will Knowing Grapes sell to fruit lovers? Will Entomology sell to . . . insect lovers? Are there any insect lovers?

Okay – the theme helps with distinguishing one pamphlet from another. But so does the picture on the cover and the name of the author and a whean of other things. The theme can also be a smokescreen. Rosemary Hector’s fruit poems, for example, are not really about fruit. Or not just fruit. This is even more true for Entomology, which may be about love.

Alas, there’s only one way to find out what these new pamphlets (and they aren’t even in the shop yet) are really about. You have to read them. You can’t read them yet though because they’re not published yet. Sometimes new publications are described as “eagerly awaited”. It’s spring. Please start cultivating your eagerness now.

In the meantime, Richard Osmond’s Variant Air, which is in the HappenStance shop, has a sort of theme. But the lynchpin is more of a style than a theme – and it belongs to Gerard Manley Hopkins. If you’re a Hopkins afficionado I think you’ll find this publication particularly compelling. But don’t take my word for it. There are better words inside the pamphlet.

RICHARD OSMOND DOUBLE DEBUT

Standing room only at the Torriano on Sunday – and now a double debut for Richard Osmond!

I waved the new pamphlets around in London on Sunday but very few people have seen them. HappenStance has never before published two pamphlets at the same time by the same person. Two different pamphlets, that is. One is Shill, which is Richard Osmond in twentieth century mode. The other is Variant Air, a set of poems in the mode and style of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

I hope people will buy both at the same time. You get a price reduction if you do. Here is an unusual young poet, at the start of a long and strong writing life. Catch him now.

Richard’s London launch is on Saturday May 3, at the Johnson Bar in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, Wine Office Court, 145 Fleet Street, London EC4A 2BU. This historical pub has a network of cellars and tunnels once frequented by Yeats and his rhymers club, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker and more. How delicious!

There’ll be a couple of brief readings, but this is a relaxed informal affair. Come even if poetry is not your favourite food. Drinks (excellent beer at this pub) and merriment.

ps Check out Poor Rude Lines for a review of Shill.

HAPPENSTANCE AT THE TORRIANO

On Sunday evening, there will be a most unusual event. Probably unique, in fact.

About 25 HappenStance poets (I have lost count) will be reading at the Torriano Meeting House, in Kentish Town in London. Here’s the link: http://torrianomeetinghouse.wordpress.com/events/

We kick off at 7.30 but if you want to sit down, it would be a good idea to be there earlier than that. We’re going to tell the HappenStance story via poets and poems. I will be doing the links, and reading a couple of bits and pieces.

So the poets will read in order of being published, starting with Eleanor Livingstone and ending with D A Prince, whose second book-length collection, Common Ground, is due out this summer.

I think it will be entertaining, varied, fun, and it will never happen again. So come if you can! And come early to get a seat.

THE LAST TRICK

I was in Galway last week launching Tom Duddy’s ‘The Years’. But the author wasn’t there.

It’s a strange and moving experience introducing a book whose author is dead. Especially when so many of the poems, with the benefit of hindsight, seem to anticipate his own demise.

Some of them, of course, were written when he knew he was dying. But others were created long before the fatal diagnosis.

Introducing the book in Ireland was wonderful. All around me were the warm accents of the land where the poems were engendered. I could hear Tom’s voice through every word, even when reading some of the work in my own Scottish/English accent.

With each month that passes, I am more persuaded of his singular talent and achievement. The melody of key phrases and lines haunts me. I wish he were still here. I wish he were here to talk and write about these poems himself, though he would hang back. He would not say much. He was ever an under-stater.

Obviously he’s not here. But his voice is. I give blatant notice now that my mission is to promote this book. I want you to read it more than I want you to read this blog. It’s the benchmark. It’s the watchword.

Tom liked magic. He was a member of the Munster Society of Magicians and acted as official conjuror at parties for the children of his family – his own children, as well as nephews and nieces. He was good with cups and balls, something that will turn out to be a link with a forthcoming pamphlet by Richard Osmond (more of that very soon). But I also think, with a corner of his mind, Tom subscribed to the concept of ‘real’ magic – that belief accomplishes inexplicable transformations.

Duddy has pulled off a particular trick in his last book. It’s as though a little piece of his own intelligence is running permanently, like film on a loop, inside the lines. The volume feels alive in a peculiar way. Almost eerily alive. The phrase ‘truer of ourselves than our own /self-seeming’ echoes endlessly in my head. The contrast between how things seem and how they are underpins even the quiet act of reading. Is he doing it on purpose? How is it accomplished?

With the very best stunt, you never find out how it’s done.

I can’t stop thinking about the poem called ‘Situation Vacant’. It talks about the need, in the face of death, to have a particular person present, although that person is missing. The individual in question is the type to stand ‘a stride or two back / from the rest of us’, the type to notice tiny details others miss, the type to see brightness where life struggles to persist, the type to ‘take note’.

I think that person is Tom. He is sorely needed. He is not here. But here he is:

Situation Vacant

We needed to have with us today
someone who was part of the crowd
but who stood a stride or two back
from the rest of us, in the shadow
of the roofless chapel,
on a ridge of high ground.

We needed someone to take note
of the vestiges of snow still bright
in the sunken places where growth
is rank, half-lodged, yellow-stemmed.
We needed someone to tell a story

truer of ourselves than our own
self-seeming, truer of the place
than all measures of ordnance,
truer of the world itself than the laws
crystallising in the brooches of ice
held together by grave grass.

WHO KILLED DYLAN THOMAS?

Ruthven Todd is very clear about it.

In The Ghost of Dylan Thomas, he sums it up: ‘Honesty had to declare that Dylan died of Dylan.’ Not whisky. Not the doctor who administered the drugs that probably finished him off. Dylan lived and died the myth. He was certain he wouldn’t see 40. His life proceeded towards the destruction he anticipated.

But on the back cover of Paul Ferris’s biography of Thomas’s wife Caitlin, another culprit is identified. “Here, for the first time, we are shown the extent of his dependence on her, and how, as their marriage collapsed, her despairing behaviour helped to destroy him.” So Caitlin turns out to have been an accomplice.

Several weighty biographies of Dylan Thomas have been written. The combination of the poetry and dramatic/tragic life style made him a marvellous subject.

But Caitlin rarely emerges as a sympathetic figure and there is a significant gender issue, I think, in the way she has been treated. She behaved very like her husband, but without the redeeming quality of ‘genius’. She also lacked the advantage of being a man.

Paul Ferris, who wrote biographies of both Dylan and Caitlin, didn’t like her much (a lot of people didn’t like her much). Brenda Maddox suggests that “Ferris’s toughest target was Caitlin Thomas, Dylan’s wife, his slave (according to her) and, in later life, his greedy, drunken widow. Ferris admits ”Mrs. Thomas wasn’t my cup of tea; nor was I hers.” When Caitlin: The Life of Caitlin Thomas, in which she collaborated (for a fee), was published, one of her sons asked him the dreaded question: ”But did you like my mother?” All Ferris could do, he says, was lie.’ http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/bookend/bookend.html

‘Greedy, drunken widow’! What a stereotype! Kathryn Hughes, in reviewing one of the films about the doomed Thomases, creates a truer snapshot: ‘. . .while Dylan’s early life was pinched and stable, Caitlin’s was disturbingly free. She lived in gentrified chaos in a tatty house in the New Forest with her sisters and brother. While Dylan started his sex life among the local high-school girls, including possibly Vera Phillips, later Vera Killick, Caitlin was brutally initiated by her father’s friend Augustus John, who considered sleeping with teenagers one of the perks of artistic genius.’

Paul Ferris mentions the rumour that Augustus John was thought by some to have been Caitlin’s father. He thinks it unlikely. However, the ‘great’ painter did have sex with her mother and her sister. He had casual sex with innumerable partners, just as Caitlin did later. But promiscuity in a male artist causes little damage to the reputation: it may even enhance it.

In Glyn Jones’s obituary of Caitlin, in The Independent, (2 August, 1994), he says she was ‘seduced by John himself when she started to model for him’.

Seduced? According to her own account, she was raped. He was a close family friend, almost a father figure. She was nursing a crush on his son Caspar, but she got the father instead. Here is what she says, in Caitlin, Life with Dylan Thomas:

One day Augustus said, ‘Come over to the studio. I want to paint you.’ So I did. It seemed quite an honour, although I didn’t think of it like that because I had known him since my earliest childhood.’

Augustus was then at the height of his fame; in fact, his reputation had become somewhat inflated because of his notorious lifestyle. As an artist, I thought he had great talent, especially with his drawings and some of his portraits.

[. . .]

The first time I went to sit for him he didn’t speak to me or say anything to put me at my ease: he just glared most ferociously, without the trace of a smile, with his long black hair and long black beard accentuating his fierceness. He usually offered his models £1, but he didn’t pay me a penny, and then right at the end of the session he suddenly leapt on me, pulling up my dress and tearing off my pants, and made love to me, although you could hardly call it love. It was totally unexpected and I was still a virgin. He didn’t ask for my consent or even try to woo me; he just pounced and I couldn’t fight because he was an enormous, strong, bestial man. I was cowed and too frightened to resist. What drove me nearly crazy was that I had wanted Caspar and now I had his hairy animal of a father on top of me instead.

I was petrified. When he had finished (and it didn’t take long) Augustus just got up, adjusted his clothes, and left the room. He didn’t say anything to me, not even ‘sorry’. I didn’t burst out crying. I just got dressed myself, thinking how disgusting he was. I suppose it was rape, but that thought didn’t enter my mind; he was a very old friend of my father’s.

[. . .]

I went and posed for Augustus again the next day – I had to, the painting wasn’t finished – and the same thing happened.

Augustus did have a reputation for behaving like that, but nobody had warned me in advance. In the end I was more disgusted than frightened. Every time I did a sitting I knew what was coming at the end – the big leap. I just waited for it, thinking, ‘Oh my God. If only I could escape.’ He could see that I was miserable because he would ask me sometimes, ‘What are you so sad about?’ But I couldn’t tell him. Sometimes, I tried to push him away but I didn’t want to offend him, and eventually I think he became quite fond of me. He painted several portraits of me in oils: one is well-known, but I don’t know what happened to the others. He also did many drawings, which I hated sitting for because he did most of those nude. I used to die a thousand deaths because he would sit me down on a divan and tear my legs apart until I was in the position he wanted.

Augustus made me very anti-sex: you couldn’t call his man-handling making love; there was no tenderness at all. It was horrible, with his great hairy face: I don’t know why I didn’t fight it; why I just let him get on with it when I certainly had no pleasure myself – it was like being attacked by a goat. The saddest thing is that my whole sexual development happened the wrong way round. It was a catastrophe from which I have never quite recovered.

[ . . .] I never became fond of Augustus, although he did start taking me around a bit. He took me out to lunch and dinner, introducing me to people as Francis’s daughter. Afterwards we used to stay the night at his flat in Fitzroy Square: I didn’t enjoy the love-making part, but I liked going out with him because he would take me off to the Eiffel Tower and other restaurants where the food was good, and I came to look upon the sexual side of it as a necessary sacrifice.’

Poor Caitlin. Her early experience of sex – she was only in her teens – was abusive. What did she learn from it? That sex was a necessary price to pay, that ‘proper’ men were dominating, that she ‘didn’t want to offend him’.

No wonder she settled with Thomas, a wimp of a man who liked to be treated like a baby and even have his pullover put on for him by his wife. It was the opposite kind of sexual relationship (though equally frustrating).

Ferris seems to conclude that Caitlin’s later promiscuity was simply a character feature: he assumes she liked sex and wanted lots of it, like her father. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that promiscuity is often an adult feature where sexual abuse occurs earlier, and that in such cases, the promiscuous person often drinks heavily. It’s a sign of damage, not of moral ‘badness’.

So Augustus John used Caitlin and later she used him. She was a survivor. But she was not a courtesan. Until he raped her, she was almost certainly a normal young girl, full of life and spirit, and ambition to be a dancer. He interfered, and she wasn’t his only victim.

But look what happens to her in retrospect. Paul Ferris’s biography of Caitlin includes a plate of Augustus John’s painting of her – and the text below picture reads: ‘Augustus John’s painting of a radiant but predatory Caitlin, not long before she married Dylan Thomas in 1937.’ Predatory? It is clear which of the two, painter or model, was the predator.

Even more disturbingly, earlier in the biography he discusses a photograph of Caitlin with her two sisters. The girls are on holiday in France, and they seem to have been swimming. They are naked, anyway, with towels slung round them. Caitlin was eight, pre-pubescent. ‘Brought up, as were all the Johns and the Macnamaras, to be relaxed about showing off their bodies, Caitlin was soon making the most of hers.’ [She was EIGHT].

He goes on to say: ‘A snapshot of Us 3 at Cannes, 1922, during a visit to the Majoliers, shows the sisters draped in bathing towels. Brigit, aged ten, is covered up. The towel around Nicolette, aged eleven, has fallen open, conceivably by accident. In Caitlin’s case she is clearly parting the towel for maximum effect, her right foot bent back to touch the ground with her toes, eyes closed and a ‘look at me being naughty’ smile on her face. She was eight, already posing and arranging her limbs.’

Considering the recent furore about a UK barrister calling a 13-year old girl ‘predatory’, we may think we have made some advances since Ferris’s biography. But the book was first printed in 1992, updated 1995. That’s only twenty years ago.

Caitlin’s early experience of sex – abusive and disturbing – was likely to have been a key factor in her later alcoholism and promiscuity. You don’t have to be a psychoanalyst to see that. She struggled hard with her demons, and so did Dylan, but they were probably, in the modern sense, ‘co-dependent’ in terms of alcohol. It was terribly sad.

Paul Ferris talks about Caitlin’s ‘campaign to prove she had been an alcoholic’, as if drink was never a problem. He talks about her dismissal of sex in old age as the brushing aside of ‘what was once a natural taste for it’. Natural? So Augustus John’s use and abuse of her was catering to a ‘natural taste’? He comments on her violent nature (she was prone to battering Dylan with her fists) and suggests that ‘more than once she was on the receiving end of violence from men, without much protest’. So she enjoyed it then? He refers to her as Augustus John’s ‘lover’. He talks about her story of unhappiness at school and says that ‘like many of Caitlin’s’, it ‘manufactures despair.’

We go through our lives trying to make sense of them. We manufacture our stories. We make the best we can of what we have.

It is best not to become the partner of a dysfunctional artist, in whose biographies you will inevitably become a character. If he dies young and tragically, you will never ever escape him. It is not just Dylan Thomas who becomes more myth than man. Poor Caitlin. Poor Caitlin.

THE MYSTERY OF RUTHVEN TODD

The past is not as past as we think it is.

1914 seems such a long time ago. A century. But a century is short. Some people born in 1914 are still alive.

Others born in 1914 were killed neither in the first world war nor the second. They were twentieth century people and although their stories ended, the trail’s still warm.

Two 1914 babies were Dylan Thomas, the poet, and his Edinburgh friend Ruthven Todd, (also a poet). You’ll have heard of the first; maybe not the second. But Ruthven was an important person in the Dylan Thomas story. For a start, he was the first official biographer after Dylan’s spectacular demise in New York, though his account of the Welsh poet’s life and death was never completed.

To mark the centenary of the births of these two poet-friends, HappenStance has just published two prose pamphlets (http://www.happenstancepress.org/index.php/shop/category/49-dylan-thomas-centenary)

The first is a witty essay by Robert Minhinnick, another Welsh poet of note, about the advantages of dying in New York (for a poet). The other is by Ruthven Todd, largely rescued from his archive in the National Library of Scotland. He had a marvellously engaging style.

Human lives metamorphose into printed papers. It’s almost possible to forget they were real, especially Dylan, who carefully made sure he was larger than life even before he died. But yesterday I met Peter Main, Ruthven Todd’s biographer, in the flesh, in Edinburgh. We sat in a pub on Victoria Street and Peter told me the story of how he came to start writing about Ruthven – the book is not yet done, though it is promised for 2015. We toasted our dead friends. Peter downed a pint of Stewart’s No 3 for Ruthven and Dylan. I drank whisky and ginger for Caitlin.

It was Peter who supplied the picture of Ruthven, on the title page of his pamphlet, wearing the hat he was sporting when he first met Dylan with Geoffrey Grigson:

“Dylan, at this time, was short and slim, with lots of curly hair of a neutral brown, and when his full, but not yet blubbery, lips were parted, they disclosed irregular, slightly yellowed, but adequate teeth. A suggestion of the nineties still hung around him. A piece of silk was knotted below a would-be floppy collar, and he seemed to be trying to give the impression of a stunted Yeats. To be fair, I was wearing the broadest brimmed black hat Edinburgh could supply, and my own aim was to be Wyndham Lewis as The Enemy. Beside us, Geoffrey must have seemed anonymous.”

So Ruthven Todd’s story is still unfolding. Peter, who is also a detective fiction buff, is on the case. If anyone can track Todd down in living detail, he is the man.

But that same day, I had had an email from poet Angela Kirby who noticed I’m to talk about Dylan and Ruthven at a Poetry in the Pumphouse event on June 22^nd in Aldeburgh. She told me Ruthven (which is Gaelic in origin and pronounced Riven) was a friend of her sister, the late IM (Iris) Birtwistle, a poet, gallery owner and marvellous character in her own right. Ruthven’s sister Alison stayed in their family home in Lancashire for part of the war as a refugee from the bombing. He was a real person in their lives. Gordon Jarvie, whom I chatted to at StAnza only a week ago, also pursued his interest in Ruthven to the school annals at Fettes (he wrote about him in Duncan Glen’s magazine Akros). And Christopher Todd, Ruthven’s son, sent me an MP3 recording of Ruthven reading ‘Laugharne Churchyard in 1954’.

So the past is really not as past as we think it is. We hand the memories and anecdotes and events from one person to another. Dylan Thomas died in 1953, four months after I was born. It’s a living thread. We’re all characters in the story. There are lots of chapter endings, but the book itself is never done.

WHEN TIME STOPS

At StAnza this year, time stopped (for me) more than once in St John’s Undercroft, one of my most favourite venues in the world. Click on this sentence to see a picture.

The undercroft is an unexpected offshoot on South Street, not far from the fish shop. You just suddenly turn left into what seems like a doorway, shuffle down a few steps and find yourself in a medieval barrel vaulted cellar, which forms the cellar of a younger, but still ancient building. The stone ceiling arches over you, light streams in gently from windows on one side, and birds in the garden on the window side can be heard, as a backdrop, through every reading.

You can’t fit many people into the undercroft – perhaps 50? The small audiences intensify the listening experience, and it’s as though the words, released from the poets at one end, circle and embrace the listening human beings. A magical sort of space.

You would think the sound of the birds outside might distract. Somehow it does the opposite. I have never been more caught up in the sound of human voices than I have in the Undercroft.

You can be caught up there in meanings you like or dislike. You can be fascinated by verbal pictures that attract you or repel you. Whatever the experience, when you come out, blinking, into the shopping street outside, you are slightly changed. Occasionally, profoundly changed.

I sat in the Undercroft yesterday, listening to the remarkable Diana Hendry, one of our national treasures. She delivers her poems so beautifully that I found tears running down my cheeks not once, but twice. She read with SMSteele, whose poetry on the subject of soldiering, delivered with astonishing verve and charisma, filled me with unease in so many ways I was even more grateful for the birds. What was it Edward Thomas said somewhere – ‘Verse is the natural speech of men, as singing is of birds’?

War is a theme this year at StAnza, because it’s a hundred years since one started. And the first World War is the war for studying through literature at school. I have always been interested in (and slightly alarmed by) the relish young people have for the ghastly details in Wilfrid Owen. One of my former colleagues was a specialist on concentration camps. She went on holiday to visit them. Please don’t think I make light of this. I only remember it was so.

How to react to it all? How to process the meaning of wars that go on always somewhere? How to make sense of what we human beings are? Verse may be our natural speech. But we make weapons too. We maim and kill and hate. I once thought women might stop it all. Now I don’t think that.

In the Undercroft, both J.O. Morgan and Tomica Bajsić read about war too. Tomica is Croatian. He seemed incredibly young to me, but he is a war veteran. He spoke about the friends he lost in the war: his five dead friends. He read in English, his accent wrestling the English words slightly out of shape. Something in his process of mastering the language made it even more moving. I think it was his vulnerability, offered in language, as in content – his truth, his absolute honesty. If you are reading this now, at this minute, Sunday morning 9 March, 2014 ten past ten in the morning, you can hear him live streamed from a poetry breakfast. If time has elapsed, that chance will have been missed. http://www.ustream.tv/channel/stanza-2014

After Tomica, there was J O Morgan, about whom I have written before, delivered a long sequence from At Maldon. This time he had it by heart. I have never heard anything like it. I had heard him read before but I have never heard anything like this. For the first time in my life I grasped the living concept of the epic — I inhabited it. J O Morgan took us inside that terrible, beautiful, ancient story of what men do, and held us there. Time stopped. If I had only heard him when I was reading Virgil at school, or later when I feebly attempted Homer, how different things might have been. But I’ve heard him now. I have heard him now.

PUBLISHING DEAD POETS

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

O! how shall summer’s honey breath hold out,
Against the wrackful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O! none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Shakespeare Sonnet 65

One of the reasons poets want their poems published is so they’ll live on, after their death —the poems, I mean — though there’s a sense in which we want to believe a bit of the author is preserved along with them. If a UK book or pamphlet has an ISB number, copies will nestle in the copyright libraries forever. Or not. There are six mandatory receiving libraries in the UK. (In Poland there are 19).

There is a cost to this for publishers, of course, and also for the libraries. Cambridge University Library has been a legal deposit library since 1710. It currently houses its print contents over 100 miles of shelving, expanding at the rate of two miles per year.

Still it’s a comfort to know that once a book is positioned securely somewhere in those 100 miles, it’s safe. The words between the covers are protected from ‘the wrackful siege of battering days’ for a good while.

But publishing dead poets is problematic – unless the authors have already achieved school textbook status and outlasted copyright restrictions. Poets like Keats and Shakespeare sell well (in the context of a genre whose sales stats sink the heart). Other poets sell poorly at the best of times, and if they’re no longer around to help promote . . .

Because increasingly living poets have a dynamic role as marketers and promoters of their own books. They announce publication in social networks; some of them blog online; they work hard to get online reviews and offline readings. They ask all their friends to write to Poetry Please and request them. Publishers mainly don’t do this any more, if they ever did.

Living poets are placed between two stools. On the one hand, many of them are modest, bookish people. On the other, they are producing their own promotional text, with varying degrees of unease. Some of them turn out to be amazingly good at it. Others are frankly terrible.

Dead poets are spared this. With luck, some of their friends will continue to promote their book(s). But with the best will in the world, enthusiasm vacillates and wavers over time.

And other factors come into play. The work of dead poets is hard to get reviewed, even if the publisher is sending out myriad copies. Many publications don’t review the work of dead poets as standard policy. There are too many books every year from living poets clamouring for attention.

Dead poets can’t apply for grants or residencies. Dead poets can’t take on commissions. Dead poets can’t answer letters. Dead poets can’t network or blog. Dead poets can’t appear at festivals. Dead poets can’t write new topical poems. Dead poets can’t upload recordings on YouTube or SoundCloud.

And books of dead poets are usually ineligible for prizes and awards. The Forward Prize, for example, stipulates that ‘work submitted on behalf of an author who is deceased at the date of publication of the work is not eligible.’ What does a dead poet need with a cash prize? But it’s not the cash. It’s the attention that both the dead and the living most need. That’s what brings readers to poems.

If the poet is not there demanding attention, who is doing it for them?

The original idea was that the poems would continue doing the job. ‘Time’s best jewel’ would ‘still shine bright’ in ‘black ink’. People would read the printed poems and share them. That phenomenon known as ‘word of mouth’ would do the business.

Theoretically ‘word of mouth’ is more powerful than ever before. Publishers are keen to exploit the possibility that any text could go viral. It worked for J K Rowling. So far as I know, it has never (yet) worked for poetry.

Where am I going with this? HappenStance has just published a book of poetry by a dead poet. The Years, by Tom Duddy, will not be promoted or circulated by Tom Duddy, though his friends and family will do their best. It will not be entered for any prizes. It will gradually find its way to a number of very good readers: at least I hope it will. It is a beautiful book with the highest production quality we could get. There are times when an absolute belief in the work must override all other considerations. This is one of those times.

Meanwhile, a living HappenStance poet, C J Driver, will be taking part in a memorial service for Nelson Mandela in Westminster Abbey at noon on March 3^rd. Among other words, Jonty will be upholding the faith by sharing a bit of Shakespeare, undying proof that some poetry really does endure.

RED ROSES FOR A BLUE LADY

Red roses for a blue lady. Staying with my mother, we listened to this song at least six times, singing along.

Her condition (Alzheimer’s) means she doesn’t notice repetition, and each time a favourite song comes round, it brings as much surprise and delight as the first time.

It’s never occurred to me before, somehow, to admire the lyrics of songs as much as they deserve. Yet, here I go, banging on about the power of simplicity in poetry, and never noticing it staring me in the face in songs. Or maybe noticing it as a thing of lesser value. I suppose that’s because popular songs are the wellspring of sentimentality.

I used to think of my dad as embarrassingly sentimental. As a kid, I sat beside him in the cinema and when the film came to an end, there would be tears running down his cheeks. I had all the hardness of youth on my side. Cry? Me? Never! I didn’t even cry at the end of Bambi.

And now? Here I am singing ‘Red roses for a blue lady’ and the tears are comforting old friends. These words, once fixed, endure. They cement themselves at a deeper level than almost anything else. They last through the ravages of an illness that destroys memory bit by bit. And the story they tell is hopeful. There are only two verses (repeated of course) and here they are:

I want some red roses for a blue lady
Mister florist take my order please
We had a silly quarrel the other day
I hope these pretty flowers chase her blues away

I want some red roses for a blue lady
Send them to the sweetest gal in town
And if they do the trick, I’ll hurry back to pick
Your best white orchid for her wedding gown.

There’s a narrative in there. A quarrel, a romantic relationship, two people both unhappy about the way they fell out. And it turns out it’s not a light relationship, it’s one in which one half is about to propose marriage to the other. And we know the red roses are going to work because the lady is blue, not angry. She never wanted the fight.

The tune works brilliantly with the words. ‘I . . . want . . . some’ trips gently into the ‘red’ of the roses, where the tune birls into action. The neat little play on words (red for blue) is funny and endearing. Great opening line. After that, the words are nice – but ordinary I think – until you get to ‘And if they do the trick, I’ll hurry back to pick’ where the double rhyme heralds a climax – and what a climax! Best white orchid. Wedding gown! Yesssss!

I had never heard of the guys who wrote this, or perhaps I had and immediately consigned their names to the bit of my brain I don’t care about much. It was Roy C Bennet and Sid Tepper. And of course they wrote loads of other stuff I knew too: lots and lots of Elvis songs, as well as the title track to the Cliff Richard film The Young Ones, which I saw in 1961 with my dad, one of my first ever visits to the cinema. (He would have cried at the end, I have no doubt.)

My mother would have got to know ‘Red roses’ in the 1949 Vaughn Monroe recording. It would have been in the charts in 1949, the year before she married my father. She was 25. I’m pretty sure I first heard it sung by Vic Dana in 1965, when I was 12, just beginning to feel sentimental and hide it well.

Poets can learn a lot from songs. The metaphor of poem as song runs through the genre anyway. This took me back to Thomas Hardy, Late Lyrics and Earlier, published 1922, same year as The Waste Land. The book was on my mother’s shelf, just behind her as she sang along to ‘Red roses. . . ‘, so I lifted it down and later on I read it as she dozed.

Hardy was drenched in the lyric tradition of course, and his ability to pack a narrative into a few lines is unparallelled. Here’s one he subtitled as ‘Song: Minor Mode’. I wonder if he had a tune in his head? And the title ‘The Rift’ puts it in precisely the same category of story as ‘Red roses for a blue lady’, though Hardy’s love stories rarely turn out well. Here’s the lyric:

The Rift

Twas just at gnat and cobweb-time,
When yellow begins to show in the leaf,
That your old gamut changed its chime
From those true tones – of span so brief! –
That met my beats of joy, of grief,
As rhyme meets rhyme.

So sank I from my high sublime!
We faced but chancewise after that,
And never I knew or guessed my crime . . .
Yes; ’twas the date – or nigh thereat –
Of the yellowing leaf; at moth and gnat
And cobweb-time.

I didn’t remember this particular poem (Hardy wrote a lot) but I can tell already which phrase will stick: ‘at moth and gnat / And cobweb time’, the repeated phrase, culminating in the key rhyming sound (time, chime, rhyme, sublime, crime).

How perplexing the paradox that sadness, in poetry and song, proves a source of comfort.