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Poetry-related posts
That is to say, ten good reasons.
The 5th Free Verse Poetry Book Fair at the Conway Hall last Saturday was . . .
. . . grrrreat.
Brilliantly organised, brilliantly achieved. Sorry to tell you this, if you weren’t there. I thought it was going to be quieter than usual, but at some point in the afternoon I realised the buzz was buzzier than ever before. A lot of fun, joking, chatting, and some really lovely folk around. A great atmosphere. 
Yes, there were a few poets pursuing publishers, almost certainly hopelessly, but hey — that too is part of the fun and it seems less painful than the usual postal process. The publisher (or his or her envoys) stands there wanting to sell STUFF. The poet approaches hoping the publisher may secretly want more STUFF (from her or him) to sell. Most of the poets are too shy to mention the poetry they have hidden in their vests. Most of the publishers pretend they don’t sense the indivested.
Everybody is able to feel, at least temporarily, that they LIKE poetry. It feels like a Good Thing — otherwise why would everybody be so jolly?
Meanwhile, the publisher (at least this publisher) is desperately hoping to go home carrying less than s/he came with. The bargains in the bargain book box get better and better as the day goes on (a top tip for buyers next year). There is a point at which it might even be possible to pay people to take the publications away with them.
I exaggerate. The punters were good and generous. They ate the jelly bears. They bought pamphlets. They bought books (which is even better because they’re heavier to carry home). And best of all, they let me give them the challenges I had carefully sealed inside 100 envelopes. Poetry challenges. It seemed like a nice idea. It’s much more fun giving people things than selling them.
And I did get more than twenty back again, which is pretty good going compared to your average consumer survey, especially when accepting the challenge meant significant mental processing, and a pen.
This was the challenge on the piece of paper inside the envelope handed to people as they drifted past the HappenStance table:
Think Ezra Pound. Think ‘In a Station of the Metro’.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Your challenge? On the back of this piece of paper, write your own imagist poem. Capture one image that has stuck in your mind from today’s Free Verse Poetry Book Fair. Not more than 14 words, one of which should rhyme with ‘bough’.
Mostly people brought them back within a couple of hours. Some broke the rules, of course. One was really hard to read. Three emailed them later that same day. One sent a photograph of hers via Twitter. Did they add up to a better account of the day than I can give you? I don’t know. But they are, because poetry is sometimes fun.
************************************************
Then, the Metro reeked of Gauloises, onions, scent and sweat; but now
Nothing much.
A poet imitates a car alarm, EEEE
To happy laughter but alas no dough.
Searching for his red T-shirt,
a buoy to cling to in this drowning sea.
A half-bitten strawberry,
sharp, neatly frilled
with absence from
a prow of teeth
Assembling – Poets, Poems
How did they all decide,
these little black characters,
words, now . . .
Green
Aerial photographs of Slough
Words
Did Nothing
Now
Green leaves upon a crooked bough.
Friends Meeting by Happy Chance at Poetry Book Fair
– a hug, & shared grin
of mock despair: so, how many
have you bought?
Ezra Pound
was a
Fascist
boughstard
All this know-how,
Solid brass handles,
Serious doors.
‘Quiet seats up here’.
Quiet? How?
Silent seats don’t spill beans about bottoms.
Poets seeking words to peddle:
further through the crowds they plough.
In hedgerow ripe with fruit to browse
Glut of glut, the dormice drowse.
At the Free Verse Fair
Leaves whirling, flying in the gale of language,
leaves turning in September now.
Faces dance, letters on the page;
only now, glasses on
the words come clear.
Black bony t-shirt, how
he bends to the bookstall;
a crow stabbing for food.
slantend i w lav to the Conway Hall
sensing overheated armits’ logo
The worry of poets
bends the bough of an
oak trestle
slipping tight tables
wondering how to get by
till stopped by a shimmering skirt
Melancholy human panels, brown wooden ones
Now the clock moves on with us.
Yes, she says, yes and yes.
No, he says, not now. And means it.
One little girl how high on his shoulders.
She’s talking right over our heads.
Does a slant rhyme count?
It could. It depends.
How slanted
do you allow?
Are all these poetry books?
How awful! Whose idea was this?
Where is he?
Thanks to: Anon, Oliver Comins, David Collard, A.B. Cooper, Harry Gilonis, Elizabeth Hourston, Nigel Hutchinson, T.O.Ilets (!), Marion Tracy, Julie Mclean, Sarah Miles, Diane Mulholland, D.A. Prince, Terry Quinn, Sally@trp, Helen Tookey, Webleaf, Gareth Writer-Davies.
The fact is this house is beginning to resemble my brain, in which bits of rhyme and reason are all jumbled up together in a glorious mess. Half the time, I don’t know who wrote what or where. Only that someone did.
Today it was Hilaire Belloc. Could I find him? No. I fell off the library steps looking.
In the house where I grew up his Cautionary Tales were in a brown hardback with illustrations by B.T.B. (Basil Temple Blackwood, who was killed at Ypres in 1917). The book was located on one of the shelves to the right of our fire-place in the sitting room, which was odd, because all the other books on that shelf were for grownups. I adored this book. How did it get there? Where did it go?
There’s also a copy in this house somewhere: not the one I grew up with; a remaindered paperback. I can visualise it clearly, but I can’t find it, even though its contents are rattling around in my head with the pictures, which stick in the mind forever. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, the Cautionary Tales, complete, with B.T.B. illustrations, are accessible. Even if it’s not quite the same.
But I learn from Wikipedia (how interesting a Sunday morning can be) that Belloc’s The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts (1896), which sold 4000 copies in three months and considerably helped his grocery bills, got caught up in a plagiarism wrangle. Lord Alfred Douglas brought out his book of funny verse for children two years later: Tails with a Twist by ‘A Belgian Hare’, also with fabulous illustrations (by E. T. Reed) and was promptly accused of plagiarising Belloc. But Douglas later suggested the theft was the other way about: Belloc had imitated him. His rhymes, he claimed, ‘had been written at least two years before Mr Belloc’s, and were widely known and quoted at Oxford, where Mr Belloc was my contemporary’.
So plagiarism (though you knew this already) is nothing new, nor is writing silly verse at Oxford. But both Belloc and Douglas thought of themselves as serious poets writing serious poems. It’s unlikely they planned to be remembered for what they are mainly remembered for: in Belloc’s case the humorous verse for children; in Douglas’s the unhappy relationship with Oscar Wilde. But without Belloc’s Cautionary Tales, could Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes (with illustrations by Quentin Blake) ever have materialised? And did they not create a climate in which the incomparable A.A. Milne could flourish?
The facility for witty rhyming, when it comes to the immortal memory, should not be underestimated. That, and the moral tale, goes back a long way. Belloc would have known Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter, 1858, a volume of which we also had in our house, though Struwwelpeter is painful in its morals, and Belloc is funnier. In fact, Hilaire is hilarious, and if there is ever to be a poetry flash mob, I predict he would serve us well. I could even volunteer to organise it – though not today.
I recommend Belloc’s Lord Lundy for when you have more time but I’ll leave you (because it is short) with Henry King, who chewed bits of string and was early cut off in Dreadful Agonies. If you follow the link, you can also see the pictures.
The Chief Defect of Henry King
Was chewing little bits of String.
At last he swallowed some which tied
Itself in ugly Knots inside.
Physicians of the Utmost Fame
Were called at once; but when they came
They answers, as they took their Fees,
‘There is no cure for this Disease.
Henry will very soon be dead.’
His Parents stood about his Bed
Lamenting his untimely Death,
When Henry, with his Latest Breath,
Cried – ‘Oh my Friends, be warned by me,
That Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch and Tea
Are all the Human Frame requires . . .’
With that the Wretched Child expires.
Think the oral tradition is lost? Wrong. We’re more drenched in it than ever.
My granddaughter Lois is two. One of her favourite silly songs is ‘One, two, three, four five, Once I caught a fish alive’. It’s a counting rhyme, like ‘One, two, buckle my shoe’, but better.
If you like words, and making things out of them (which most of us do, as little children), counting rhymes count. It’s like Alexander Pope says in his Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, ‘As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, / I lisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came.’
I’m being naughty, of course. By ‘numbers’, Pope meant metrical stuff (measured verse, and maybe rhymes), not counting songs. But counting songs are measured, and it’s the measure that deepens (or doesn’t) the satisfaction.
I donate to Wikipedia every year, simply because it tells me things like this: the rhyme ‘One, two, three, four, five, Once I caught a fish alive’ is not immeasurably ancient. It was first recorded in Mother Goose’s Melody around 1765. Not only that, it wasn’t even any good in 1765:
One, two, three, Four and five,
I caught a hare alive;
Six, seven, eight, Nine and ten,
I let him go again.
I bet it was a lot harder to catch a hare than a fish, but let that be. There’s no rhythmic satisfaction in that Hare. Pope would have dismissed it with a curl of the lip and:
Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see,
Thinks what ne’er was, nor is, nor e’er shall be
Yep. The rhythm of that Hare rhyme is awful. But through common usage, it was improved. There’s an instinct for metre in human beings, and the oral tradition mainly makes things better. Rhythmically better, at least. So the current version, the version I know and which proliferates in dozens of different recordings and films on YouTube, is (according to Wikipedia) derived from three variations collected by Henry Bolton in the 1880s from America. (The source footnote to this is the Opies’ Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes).
Three variations? I’m clinging to the one I know (though YouTube has at least one minor, and lesser, variation). It goes:
One, two, three, four, five,
Once I caught a fish alive.
Six, seven, eight, nine, ten,
Then I let it go again.
Why did you let it go?
Because it bit my finger so.
Which finger did it bite?
This little finger on the right.
Why is this good? Because it is good. Ask any two year old.
One: the rhymes are good, perfect rhymes (which is more than can be said for ‘It’s raining, it’s pouring / The old man’s snoring. / He went to bed and bumped his head And couldn’t get up in the morning.’)
Two: there’s a commanding, dynamic stress on the first syllable of every line (except ‘Because’, but we all say Cos so that doesn’t matter; or we say ‘be’ very tinily before even more emphatic CAUSE).
Three: all those monosyllables in the first verse, trickling along there so nicely. The variations are ‘alive’ and ‘seven’ – and ‘seven’ is particularly satisfying with the tune (you get to lean on the ‘sev’ of ‘seven’ in a delicious way).
Four: it does question and answer – a technique in poem and song that yanks the listener smack into the action. And the question-words (Why and Which) draw the metrical stress into them like magnets. You can’t miss them. WHY? WHICH?
Five: it ties in neatly with gesture. It acts out. Which finger? This one!
Six: it sounds so good, that second verse in particular, because of the multiplicity of ‘i’ sounds. The ‘i’ in the fish is in did and it and which and finger and this and little, and then it bends slantways in my and why and bite and right. This is so good, I mean really so good.
Seven: there are three ‘fingers’ in the second stanza. Finger is a great word. You can linger over finger.
Eight: the word ‘little’. It’s a great word for little people. It’s personable and precise. You have to smile to say it.
Nine: oh the rhythm the rhythm of the last line. It rushes through to the end so neatly, so agilely, so delightfully. This little finger on the right. It’s as quick as a minnow.
Ten: it’s comical. (We remember funny things.) It’s a neat story in which fish and man meet, and fish gets the (sorry about the pun) upper hand.
All this stuff learned when you think you’re just doing one to ten. All this stuff fed into your greedy young brain. All this po-stuff in your fingers forever.
Sometimes, compared to the pressing matters of the world, it feels self-indulgent and pointless.
What is it, after all, this writing of poems and filing them away? Filing them away and stacking them up. Stacking them up and putting them in pamphlets. Putting them in pamphlets and collecting them in books.
And before that, the laying out of the lines. The disposition of commas. The agony of a semi-colon. The messiness of dashes.
And before that the rehearsal of a line, the snatch of a few words, the distraction of it, the idiosyncrasy.
Sometimes it feels, and can be suggested, that such a preoccupation is unnatural. Especially when – let’s face it – for most of these little poemettes there are no readers. There is no reason. There’s only the irrational making of things the maker calls ‘poems’, not knowing what else they might be.
You could call it attention-seeking. You could call it self-obsessed. But not all poems are about their authors. Not all poems are hurled into the ether, or the mail. Not all poems feel the need to be ‘published’. Not all poems try to find readers.
And perhaps the why of it is not the point. There are people who need to keep making things, and poems are some of the things they need to make, and there’s an end of it. You can have worse things on your shelves than poems.
All this because I woke thinking about Sylvia Townsend Warner’s poem ‘Wish in Spring’. You can find it in one of the volumes published by Carcanet Press. And here it is:
Wish in Spring
Today I wish that I were a tree,
And not myself,
Confronting spring with a neat little row of poems
Like cups and saucers on a shelf.
For then I should have poems innumerable,
One kissing the other;
Authentic, perfect in shape and lovely variety,
And all of the same tireless green colour.
No one would think it unnatural
Or question my right;
All day I would wave them above the heads of the people,
And sing them to myself all night.
But as I am only a woman
And not a tree,
With piteous human care I have made this poem,
And set it now on the shelf with the rest to be.
Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-19780
When I was about twelve years old, my mother had the idea of making an anthology of science fiction poetry.
I don’t suppose she knew how such a book could actually be published, but that didn’t stop her (and me) starting to look for worthy poems to go into the book.
And we did find a good number, bit by bit, in unexpected places. Or we found poems we would allow to qualify. At the time, my father read every scrap of science fiction prose from our local library, all the Gollancz series in with shiny yellow covers, among others, so there was a ready influence at hand.
I wrote a poem for this anthology myself. Mum wrote one too. But mainly the poems were by real poets. I wish I could remember what all of them were, because we spent much time talking about and compiling the set. I think we admitted John Smith’s ‘A True Story’, though it is more fantasy than science and begins:
My eldest uncle had an extraordinary habit
Of turning young girls into birds;
He kept them in exquisitely jewelled cages.
How he did it I could not tell,
But only that they were inexplicably beautiful.
I still love this poem and would quote the lot, were I not working towards another contender, namely John Masefield, whose star (apart from Sea Fever, Cargoes and Tewkesbury Road) has sunk somewhat low these days, though not as far as John Smith’s (which just goes to show that being the author of more than seven collections of poetry, one a PBS choice, and at least one other a recommendation, is no guarantee of poetic immortality).
You may not think of Masefield as a science fiction man, but he has at least one poem that qualifies. It calls on the idea of space as a great sea, through which one might sail, and of course sailing was something the poet knew about. To this day, ‘I could not sleep for thinking of the sky’ is, for me, beautiful and haunting, though rarely included in anthologies. The last line, in particular, where the iambic rhythm changes, is a corker.
My mother, at the age of 91, has now departed on her final voyage. I have another close and dearly valued friend about to follow. For them both, here is John Masefield’s science fiction sonnet, which is the twelfth poem in Lollingdon Downs, first published in 1917—the year Edward Thomas died. You can hear Brian Blessed reading it on Youtube, bless him, but I don’t recommend it. The language of the poem is already theatrical. It needs to be read quietly, simply.
Sometimes poetry can perform the function of prayer for non-praying people, and this must be, I think, why it’s so often included in funeral services. But prayers are best when you know them well, and the words have worked their magic over years of repetition, and this is true of poetry too. I have known this Masefield sonnet most of my life, but never learned it by heart. My mother had a far better memory than me before Alzheimer’s got in the way and would have recalled most of the lines with a simple prompt, as well as screeds of others. For me, recalling whole poems is more difficult.
I think I will learn it properly now though. It’s a tricky one because the second and third quatrains are all one long rolling sentence, re-enacting a great and glorious journey. But the final couplet is easy, if you can speak it without your voice breaking.
I could not sleep for thinking of the sky,
The unending sky, with all its million suns
Which turn their planets everlastingly
In nothing, where the fire-haired comet runs.
If I could sail that nothing, I should cross
Silence and emptiness with dark stars passing,
Then, in the darkness, see a point of gloss
Burn to a glow, and glare, and keep amassing,
And rage into a sun with wandering planets
And drop behind, and then, as I proceed,
See his last light upon his last moon’s granites
Die to a dark that would be night indeed.
Night where my soul might sail a million years
In nothing, not even Death, not even tears.
For each generation, the lyrics that stick are different.
But something’s sticking. It’s sticking even when you don’t know it. And over there, in the future, the reminiscence gurus are trawling the past to find it.
It sticks best in childhood. The brain’s busily storing tunes to underwrite everything, the melodies for measuring beauty and meaning (See Red Roses for a Blue Lady).
So what you sing (if you sing) to your children and nephews and nieces, or what they watch and hear, is going to matter. One day it’ll be a resource like no other.
The theme tune to Sarah and Duck, for example, is currently being filed mentally by thousands of bairns. In 80 years, if they hear it, they’ll perk up immediately, they’ll say quack in all the right places. It’ll be—trust me—a comfort served in a whirlwind.
So, are you of the Bagpuss generation? That would mean born late sixties maybe, though parents and aunties and uncles of sixties’ kids will also remember Bagpuss because there’s a second generation thing where we learn songs later, with our children.
I missed Bagpuss. That’s to say it was going on at some distance, but I was grown-up by then and it wasn’t cult with my friends, unlike The Magic Roundabout which students gathered to watch in the common room when I was at university. Star Trek, The Magic Roundabout and some royal wedding or other—those were the things that filled the TV room! But The Magic Roundabout is just tune, so it wouldn’t work too well for reminiscence, unlike Trumpton.
(In my head the names of the Trumpton fire brigade are already shouting themselves: Hugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb!)
I wasn’t around for Bagpuss, so I’ve come late, but not too late, to the Mending Song, a ‘round’, sung in the little high voices of the mice. And such magical words.
Last week at Lumb Bank, while Linda Goulden and I were singing Mending Song, twice people came into the room, their faces lit up and they said, ‘Isn’t that Bagpuss?’ They were the right generation. They’ll know that song forever.
The song of the Bagpuss mice, though short, isn’t just a silly little tune. It’s a spell, a spell for making things right, things gone far wrong. It’s the spell of the fixers, the quiet little under-pinners, the tiny busy determiners, who work at putting things back together, no matter how broken they may be.
Stuff Auden, Eliot, Plath and Dickinson – today, anyway. When it comes to fixing sadness, I’ll take the Bagpuss mice.
We will find it, we will bind it,
We will stick it with glue, glue, glue
We will stickle it
Every little bit of it
We will fix it like new, new, new.
There are people who are collectors, and there are people around whom things collect.
I’m not really a collector in the true sense, though I once blogged about collecting spoons, and it could be argued that I collect poets. I don’t keep the poets in the house though. They wander off all the time. Besides they’re not things, and collectors collect things. Although things are never exactly things, are they? Which makes it complicated.
Anyway, just now I’m collecting buttons, because the more you have, the more time you can spend running them through your fingers and liking the shine and shape, and differences between them. The tiny ones and the huge ones. Although in fact, the buttons are also collecting round me.
Why buttons? My mother is currently living in a nursing home, so her former home had to be tidied and cleared. She was a great sewer, embroiderer, tapestry maker, knitter. There were needles, knitting needles, thread, thimbles, safety pins and buttons all over the place. They had collected around her over the years in drawers and cupboards and even in the bookcases. Much was discarded, but I saved the buttons.
Because when my mother was two and a half and ran away from home to her Aunty Louie’s, this is what she played with:
My favourite of the delights of the house was a small harp, which was kept behind the curtain in the living room, and the next (behind the same curtain) was the button box. This was a large wooden box full of buttons of every shape, size and colour. In those days, buttons were much more varied and ornate. I was never tired of making patterns with those lovely coloured buttons, until I was old enough to go to school.
I wonder where Aunty Louie, who died before I was born, got her buttons? Did she inherit them from her mother? Was she the collector of the family? Either way, at some point in the past I had a button tin that somebody gave me (perhaps my mother) and when my children were small they used to play with the buttons. There was one particular button in that tin, a big one, with bits of mother of pearl, my favourite button. But the button tin was lost when the marriage broke. I don’t know where it went, and anyway by then the children were too old for buttons, though I continued to keep my spare ones in a china dish.
But now I have a grand-daughter, Lois, so I’m collecting buttons again for her to play with. These days craft people make things with buttons, so they’re easy to get on Ebay. But there’s craft and there’s crafty. There are true button collectors.
For example, browsing through Ebay’s buttons (instead of working on the next poetry publication) I found quite an interesting little button, an old brass one with a rabbit on it. I had put in a bid, and it didn’t cost much – a pound or so (though for me, this is a lot for ONE BUTTON), and then in the last five minutes before bidding closed, there was a sudden acquisition frenzy. Bidders leapt out of the ether, and when the sale closed the rabbit button had fetched well over £20.00. Lois might not even have liked it.
Meanwhile, one of the invaluable poets who collect around me from time to time read my recent blog about lists, in which I mention ‘Do not buy more buttons on Ebay: you do not need them’, and she sent me five wonderful farm buttons. The tractor is particularly magical.
I need a bigger tin.
It’s good to have a grand-daughter, because I like playing with buttons myself, but it’s not something I would normally do (even though these days they have mindfulness colouring-in books for grown-ups). I wish I still had the buttons in my married tin, because lots of those were older and most of my current collection are modern buttons. But I think more may collect around me yet, and perhaps some of the old ones will find their way back.
My mother has lost the bits of memory in which her buttons were stored. They have rolled away. That might be another reason for me collecting them back: all the glittery, valued bits of life that get lost under the rug, or are hoovered up by mistake.
Yep, the buttons are symbols of treasure and loss, and this reminded me of ‘The Wayward Button’ by Gill McEvoy, from her pamphlet Uncertain Days (2006), which was one of the first HappenStance pamphlets to sell out inside a year.
If you possess a copy of Uncertain Days, it’s a collector’s item now.
Here’s that Wayward Button poem. Made me cry in 2006. Still does.
The Wayward Button
I burnt your coat in November,
Bonfire Night, when else?
God knows, that coat was you—
stubborn in the way it wouldn’t burn,
awkward in the way it slumped on top the pile,
out of shape with everything,
the world, itself.
That coat was every morning
when I couldn’t start the day on time:
kids to wash and dress, and get to school,
and you, soiled again, three more lines
of washing, sheets, pyjamas, towels
to hang outside.
That coat was each Day Centre afternoon
when you refused to get in the car and I—
with murder in my heart, shopping to fetch,
washing to bring in before the rain,
dinner burning slowly on the stove—
would force you in, all sixteen stone,
then feel the scald of tears.
It played a last trick when it burned.
A button loosed by flame fell from the fire,
rolled to rest at my right foot. It lay there
like a small dog begging amnesty.
Next morning when I raked the ashes flat
I picked it up. Now it goes
everywhere with me.
I spend a lot of time (too much?) thinking about poetry, about what it is, or may be.
About what it’s doing, or might be doing. About what I’m doing making it, publishing it, playing with it, endlessly reading it, helping other people to make more of it (and sometimes less). There are wars going on. There is death and pain and work and money. Why poetry?
But maybe the question isn’t a real question, more another way of thinking about life. Thinking by question and counter-question. Whatever else poetry is or may be, it is language and the expression of human consciousness. Whatever I think and whatever I say about the stuff, poetry (whatever it is) is what it is. It sits in front of me in this book being its own self.
Which is not to say it has no needs. It needs a reader or two, and that can be difficult with poetry. Because with po-material you never quite know how to read, or how demanding it’s going to turn out to be. Each poem (or poet) is different from the rest as well as (sometimes) apparently similar. Poems look like pages of neatly arranged words, but they’re more than that. We throw a lot of words around in our lives, most of us, but we don’t call most of them poems. So when we do, we mean something special.
Special, huh?
Yep. Not ‘special’ as in exclusive or expensive. Special as in specific to this text. But I don’t want to get into deep literary territory. I want to keep simple, because the poems I’ve been reading the last two days do that. They keep simple, though they’re not. Well, they are and they’re not. Both.
It’s easy to say (and I’ve done it more than once) that writing simply is the hardest thing to do. But it is hard to write simply and at the same time have layers, even though language itself draws on those layers, every minute, even while we’re hurling it around as though there aren’t any.
Here’s a phrase, for example—you could call it a cliché if you wanted to: ‘his days were numbered’. I said that last week when talking about a particular friend, and I shook my head when I said it. I meant he wouldn’t live long, and if I’d said it to you, you would have understood, I think. But what a strange cliché it is, when you think about it carefully. I’m visualizing a calendar with dates on it, and numbers. I’m connecting with another phrase (a happier cliché) ‘counting the days’. And ‘countless days’. But I’ll drag myself back into the context in which I found the phrase.
Which means coming clean about the book I’ve been reading—with such pleasure—this weekend. It is Peter Sansom’s Careful What You Wish For, a book worth wishing for, I’d say, and ‘his days were numbered’ occurs in one of three poems about Antoine de St Exupéry, whose name (if it is familiar to you) is probably in your memory because of his children’s tale, which is not for children, Le Petit Prince, or The Little Prince, for which the author also drew the illustrations. It’s the saddest book, but beautiful. And the author himself died at the age of only 44, and somewhat mysteriously, when his plane crashed somewhere and was not found. Not long ago there was another report of finding wreckage that may have been his: there have been several over the years.
Anyway, the author of Le Petit Prince lives on in his own literary work, as well as in three poems in Peter’s book, two of which began as translations of parts of St Exupéry’s 1931 novel Vol de Nuit. And here’s the cliché I was talking about, and how it is embedded:
His days were numbered but he understood them
and everything for a while, just having travelled
alone in all that sky, the blackness
of the bright heavens, not to mention
the dark side of the moon.
This isn’t even the poem I most wanted to write about in the book. Nonetheless, here I am with it, because the lines are doing something that connects with what I think about when I’m reading poetry and working out how to read it and at the same time thinking about what poetry is and what it’s doing. I know poetry has something particular to do with language, and the mystery of communication in and over time. But I only have language itself to express my thoughts in, so this is difficult.
‘His days were numbered’ is oh so familiar. But not in the context of ‘His days were numbered but he understood them’. How can you understand days? How does the concept of numbering connect with the understanding? How can I feel the same bland acceptance of this cliché ever again?
But there’s more. A line break and the sense continues. Actually, the sense and the sentence continues over five lines, and it’s trickier to read with line breaks than without. He ‘understood them / and everything for while’. It’s a simple and vast statement. He understood everything. But only for a while. And why? Something to do with ‘just having travelled / alone in all that sky’. Some insight to do with solitude. Some insight to do with ‘the bright heavens’ (glory?) but also the polar opposite: ‘the dark side of the moon’.
I’m beginning to get worried now because I want to say something simply, but already it’s complicated. It’s the cliché, and then the layers added to it, one and then another, and then another. None of the lines is hard. Each draws you gently after it. The ‘dark side of the moon’ can almost be another cliché, if it’s life we’re talking about. Is it? No, it’s literal. He saw the moon. He was up there in the bright heavens. All that sky. And then more lines follow, piling simple phrases, one on top of the next, layer upon layer:
He climbed down
in the end from the cockpit, larger than life,
though only a man, still a young man,
somebody’s son, and still alive.
It’s in the past. It’s the past tense. He was ‘still alive’ then but, we know, not now. He (not Saint Exupéry himself, but yes, also St Exupéry himself) is ‘larger than life’ (cliché) but the phrase has to be packed with irony in a poem where the word ‘life’ is key because the pilot (whoever and whatever he is) is certainly dead. The repetition of ‘still’ tells us this for sure, even if no other intuition is helping out. And then there’s ‘only’ (‘a man’) and ‘somebody’s son’: the connections of mortality and humanity. The pang of looking back to the past, the sense of aliveness in the context of knowing our days are numbered and some of our loved ones already gone.
Back to the start of the poem. A poem occurs in time, but it’s a circle. The end takes you back to the beginning, or it will if it’s any good (and this is good). The plane with the young man at the helm is ‘a plane / from another time’. He’s a sort of Time Lord before The Tardis was invented. And in this regard, he connects with an idea that runs through this whole book and its individual consciousness. ‘Careful what you wish for’ (another cliché) hinges on the future, on what was about to happen but hadn’t happened yet, seen in the past, from what is now the present (once the future). The poem in which the title phrase occurs (‘Sofa’, though it flickers as well in ‘Lava Lamp’) makes it clear that the wish resulted in walls of books—
this wall-to-wall
of yellowed intent unread or forgotten,
and times’d by ten since, by fifty.
Such irony! Here I am reading a poem in a book I’ve just bought, and the poem is warning me about wishing for too many books of poems yellowing and unread (or forgotten) over the numbered days and years. I am sitting inside three walls of books reading a poem about the danger of wishing for walls of books. And my smile is broad, because I don’t regret the purchase. Not this time. Not one bit.
Poets are always writing about memories. Some say they do it too much. But others claim memories are, for better or worse, what we’re made of and what we make things out of. Here, Peter Sansom looks back and forward and round him: the many layers of time wrap themselves round the poems. It is eerie, and funny, and nostalgic and sad. It is full of loss, and yet offers such richness! It may be the saddest funny book of poems I remember reading ever. It contains at least two fabulous love poems, one of which is about a hat. I have walked inside its world and am still partly there.
I think the book discloses something crucial in a mild, careful, personable way, and you need to read the whole book to get the whole view. I learned from it, and was moved by it. It doesn’t say ‘I am a Great Poet’ anywhere (be careful what you wish for). The poet’s method (there is one) trips you up from time to time, so you have to smile at yourself just at the moment you’re taking the poetry too seriously or giving it a capital P. It deals with love and loss, and it’s alive.
Here’s the final stanza of ‘Hathersage, December Morning’, with all its layers:
A rusted barrow, grips perished so you’d burn
your hands, could be done something with
even at this end of the year. At this end of the year
a breeze through the trees and remembering
stops me where I stand. In the hedgerow the darkness
is decay that knocks at the day’s door
and what else is there to do but let it in.
When I was a child, my mother bought me poetry books.
Many years later, my own children complained I didn’t do the same for them. Perhaps by then I thought the whole house too full of the stuff. Too late now, though I may give some to my granddaughter and see what happens.
The poetry books I read in my early years were anthologies ‘for children’, and many of them had pictures. I specially loved the Oxford Book of Poetry for Children (1963), edited by Edward Blishen and illustrated by Brian Wildsmith, which I got when I was ten. The picture of the forsaken merman starts on a right hand page, with his fishtail and his sceptre and then finishes overleaf with his great flowing beard and sad face. I once read this poem aloud to my mother, from this very book, and she cried.
And there was The Golden Treasury of Poetry (1961) edited by Louis Untermeyer, with the poky puppy and Edward Lear’s the Akond of Swat.
I found Walter de la Mare’s Come Hither (1957) on a bookshelf in a classroom (we lived in a school) all by myself later. It’s best of all, I think, but I wasn’t truly young when I found it.
More modest was A Puffin Quartet of Poets (1958). I was unreasonably fond of this little book with its cameo woodcuts and read it many times. Last night I had it with me at a poetry reading because I was looking for a poem while waiting for the event to start. A charming woman sitting near me immediately recognised the cover and dived towards me – she too loved that book!
I like the word ‘anthology’ (it comes from the Greek for collecting flowers) and ‘treasury’ too, and I thought of these books as containers for treasure. Like the button tin, you would rummage through and find the magic ones, and sift through the rest to check there wasn’t a gem you’d missed. It’s still the same now. If I go back to these books, I know right away which poems I loved and pored over, and which washed past without effect.
I didn’t know I was reading poems by ‘big’ poets as well as small, Keats and Wordsworth as well as Ben King and Thomas Heywood. When did I begin to know who ‘anon’ was? There were loads by anon:
The common cormorant or shag
Lays eggs inside a paper bag.
The reason you will see no doubt
It is to keep the lightning out.
But what these unobservant birds
Have never noticed is that herds
Of wandering bears may come with buns
And steal the bags to hold the crumbs.
Often (but not always) it was the little poems I liked best. Here is ‘The Tickle Rhyme’ from A Puffin Quartet. It’s Ian Serraillier, perhaps known better for his children’s novel The Silver Sword, which I also loved and must read again. But Serraillier was a poet too. I have no doubt about it.
His ‘Tickle Rhyme’ taught me that magical thing which I still love above all else in poetry – the way the sound, the shape and the movement of the words can become the very thing at the heart of the text – when form, feeling and meaning mysteriously and perfectly fuse.
Thank you, Ian Serraillier. I will not forget you.
The Tickle Rhyme
‘Who’s that tickling my back?’ said the wall.
‘Me,’ said a small
Caterpillar. ‘I’m learning
To crawl.’
Ian Serraillier
