David Herman
Here’s a radical suggestion for the BBC’s next poetry season. How about making some programmes about poetry? Not poets’ unhappy marriages or their sex lives, but actually having someone who knows and cares about poetry talking about language and verse.
The worst offender of the recent BBC poetry season—which ran from 20th May to 13th June on BBC Two and Four, as well as on Radio 3 and Radio 4—was, predictably enough, the historian Simon Schama. It is now a decade since his book on Rembrandt and 20 years since Citizens, his great history of the French revolution, which made his name. Those were the days when he wrote about what he knew. Now he’ll talk about anything but.
There was much to be grateful for in Simon Schama’s John Donne (BBC Two). No ghastly cheap dramatisations, as in the infamous Caravaggio episode of Simon Schama’s Power of Art in 2006. A simple format, even glimpses of the words, and Fiona Shaw, one of the best actresses of her generation, reading the poems. There was even someone who knew about Donne, the literary critic John Carey. The problem was that there was someone else who didn’t and he did most of the talking.
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Julian Gough
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The Book of My Enemy: Collected Verse 1958-2003
by Clive James (Picador, £8.99)
Angels Over Elsinore: Collected Verse 2003-2008
by Clive James (Picador, £14.99)
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Julian Gough
Reading Sarah Palin’s anguished interview with Greta van Susteren of Fox News just after the election, I had an epiphany: Palin is a poet, and a fine one at that. What the philistine media take for incoherence is, in fact, the fruitful ambiguity of verse.
Here she is, in a work I have taken to calling “The Relevance of Africa.” (Not a single word or comma has been changed, but the line breaks are placed where they naturally fall.) In it, Palin blends the energy of free verse with the austerity of a classic 14-line sonnet.
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Frieda Klotz
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney
by Dennis O’Driscoll (Faber and Faber, £22.50)
When the 20-year-old James Joyce first met WB Yeats, it is said that he told the older poet: “you are too old to help me.” Seamus Heaney’s first meeting with the poet Patrick Kavanagh makes a telling contrast. They encountered each other in a Dublin pub as Kavanagh—35 years Heaney’s senior, and an established eminence of Irish poetry—was on his way back from the gents’ toilets. Heaney, aged 28 and already something of a success, asked: “Mr Kavanagh, can I buy you a drink?” Kavanagh at first said “no.” But when a friend told him who the person offering to buy the drink was, he changed his mind: “Kavanagh says to me, ‘Are you Heaney?’ rhyming me with Rainey, as people did in the country at home. ‘Well, I’ll have a Scotch.’ So I took that as a pass.” The two poets then talked for a short while; they would meet again just once.
The anecdote illustrates both Heaney’s geniality and his humility, traits that appear consistently through Stepping Stones (and that differentiate him sharply from both the abrasive Joyce and from Kavanagh himself, a notably touchy poet). These interviews took place over five years, and the result is both an illuminating record of Heaney’s poetic development and a store of some lesser known facts about his life. Readers expecting it to document a spontaneous dialogue may be disappointed, however: O’Driscoll (likewise a poet, and Heaney’s long-term friend) notes in the preface that, at Heaney’s request, “the interviews were conducted principally in writing and by post.” The result is carefully measured, but never stilted. As a young man, we learn, Heaney took pride in his skill at herding cattle. He spent time as an MC for Irish dancers (that’s fear a’ tí in Irish, or “man of the house”), occasions on which, he observes, no priest was on duty because “it was a time when everybody was provided with their own inner priest.” At different points Heaney worked as a waiter, and at the British Passport Office in London. His first piece of work published in a national paper was not a poem, but an article arguing that jive should be incorporated into Irish dancing.
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Tom Chatfield
Poetry is a minority occupation in 21st-century Britain. A glance at the meagre, or non-existent, poetry shelf of most major bookshops confirms it. Serious verse is largely the province of academics, students and recipients of grants and residencies—those people, as Philip Larkin wryly noted, who are either paid to write or paying to read. Fewer than a million poetry books sell each year, compared to almost 50m novels; and fewer than half of these are written by living poets, among whom only a few regularly sell over 500 copies.
Yet shelves and sales are far from the whole story. In the live arena and online, a very different kind of poetry is starting to reach audiences for whom even ten years ago poetry barely existed outside of school: the under-30s. There are many reasons for this: the popularity of hip hop has bred a new interest in lyrical substance; the growth of the internet has given less marketable arts free access to a wider community; and there is always a demand for something new, or at least for something old being reinvented. But is this a trend we should be excited by? I recently spent an evening with one of London’s newest spoken word groups trying to find out.
Spoken word artists don’t share the PR instincts of their colleagues in the music industry. It’s only after several beers with the four members of “A Poem in Between People”—PiP to its friends—that I can persuade them to list some of places they’ve played in the last year: “Er, Tate Modern, Royal Festival Hall, Oxford Playhouse, Glastonbury, the Big Chill, the Forum…” Who’s played their recordings? “BBC 6 Music, Radio One, XFM, Channel 4.” And who are their influences? “Give us a bit of time on this one, please. Shakespeare. Ben Okri. John Keats. Mos Def. WB Yeats. The Streets. Hemingway’s short stories.” They see no conflict between admiring the old and wanting the new to happen as soon as possible.
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Bernard Wasserstein
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Occasionally an event, in itself trivial, captures the essence of a historical moment: the Boston tea party, the first performance of The Rite of Spring, the incarceration of Paris Hilton. In England, such episodes often take place in Oxford: John Henry Newman’s passage from Anglicanism to Rome in the 1840s; the king and country debate at the Union in 1933; the dons’ rejection of Margaret Thatcher for an honorary degree in 1985.
The non-election of Yevgeny Yevtushenko as professor of poetry in Oxford in 1968 was one such incident that somehow fused the cultural switchboard of its time. As I played a minor part in stage managing this mixture of opera buffo and grand guignol, it falls to me to act as—an admittedly prejudiced—recording angel. Yevtushenko’s candidacy was my idea. A history undergraduate at the time, I had read a little of his poetry in translation and also his Precocious Autobiography. He struck me as a raw, individualist voice speaking boldly from within the confines of a conformist society. Some of the lines buzzed in my head. But I confess that my main motive for initiating his candidacy was political, though at the time I strenuously denied it to my fellow campaigners, to the press—and to myself.
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Gwyneth Lewis
I am probably the only person to look round a particle accelerator in two-inch peep-toe sandals.
It was my first visit to Cern (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), and I had come to Geneva to see the world’s largest particle collider as it prepares to go live. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a circular tunnel built 100 metres under the suburbs of Geneva, overlooked by the Jura mountains, a limestone wave about to break on the valley below. Soon, this 27km-long tunnel will be used to fire two beams of protons at each other, reaching 99.999999 per cent the speed of light. The beams will create up to 600m collisions per second and create showers of new particles, some of which have not existed since the big bang. Detectors will record their tracks as they smash off each other. It is hoped that, among other things, this will prove the existence of the Higgs boson, an entirely theoretical entity.
The Higgs particle matters hugely to physicists because it might explain why bodies have mass and open a window on the earliest moments of the universe. It became a kind of holy grail for experimental physics after it was christened the “God particle” by Leon Lederman in 1994. It is believed that a Higgs-like mechanism could have played an important role in the early universe, contributing to the structure of the world we see today.
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Terry Eagleton
TS Eliot by Craig Raine
(OUP, £12.99)
For a good many decades, thick fumes of incense have been wafting from the English literary establishment in the general direction of TS Eliot. The latest offering by the acolytes to the high priest is this study by Craig Raine, which admits that some of Eliot’s drama isn’t up to much but otherwise won’t hear a cross word about the great man. “There is no evidence,” Raine piously remarks, “that Eliot was either a fornicator or a homosexual,” as though being homosexual was a trespass to be vigorously rebutted. Eliot was not, he rashly maintains, a misogynist either, even though the poetry is shot through from end to end with a fear and loathing of women. He even seeks to face down the charge that this ascetic ex-bank clerk was a bit of a dry old stick, although Eliot himself admitted as much.
Why do critics feel a need to defend the authors they write on, like doting parents deaf to all criticism of their obnoxious children? Eliot’s well-earned reputation is established beyond all doubt, and making him out to be as unflawed as the Archangel Gabriel does him no favours. It is true that the poet was a sourly elitist reactionary who fellow-travelled with some unsavoury political types in the 1930s, and as a Christian knew much of faith and hope but little of charity. Yet the politics of many distinguished modernist artists were just as squalid, and some—Pound and Junger, for example—were quite a lot worse. There is no need to pretend that all great writers have to be uxorious, liberal-minded, philosemitic heterosexuals. Why does Raine write as though discovering that Eliot was a paedophile would change our view of Four Quartets?
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Michael Horovitz
The centenary of John Betjeman’s birth heralds a further series of pushes for the Betjeman product range, which will doubtless continue trucking for yonks. Exhibitions documenting his achievements are opening at the Bodleian and British libraries and Sir John Soane’s Museum. Radio and television programmes old and new are en route, in commemoration of one of the most pioneering and popular broadcasters ever. And a massive array of books by and about Betjeman and his works will be on display in stores all over England to an extent inconceivable for any other 20th-century poet.
Betjeman’s lifelong production of poems has enjoyed bigger sales—over 2m of the “Collected Poems” to date—than that of anyone since his beloved Tennyson, presumably abetted by the fact that Betjeman did so much else, more and more publicly, in his later years.
His reputation among his younger poetic contemporaries remains mixed. The late capo of literary hatchet-men, Ian Hamilton, who loved to hate any versifier with the slightest whiff of homosexuality about him, often lambasted JB’s alleged “look-at-me predictability.” Tom Paulin deplores his alleged “anti-intellectual antiquarian” pitches for cosy unquestioning conservative Englishness. Winnie the Pooh-style infantilism certainly informs some of the grounds on which many readers have hugged Betjeman’s output close to their breasts—sometimes, it would seem, by analogy with the way Betjeman himself hugged the most constant of his bedfellows, Archibald the teddy bear.
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Michael Horovitz
A Glass Half Full by Felix Dennis (Hutchinson, £6.99)
Lone Wolf by Felix Dennis (Hutchinson, £8.99)
Dear Felix,
As you know, we go back long—if divergent—ways. In the late 1960s and early 1970s you coedited Oz, the rebellious hippie magazine to which I contributed the occasional poem. While you were choreographing squads of miniskirted teenyboppers to flog Oz up and down the King’s Road, I was taking “Live New Departures” jazz poetry circuses round the country. We’ve enjoyed close friendships and love affairs with some of the same people. For the last three decades you’ve been a very successful magazine publisher, and over the last four years an increasingly strident and public versifier. Your personal fortune is estimated in the region of £500m, whereas I survive, by the skin of what’s left of my teeth, on precariously financed poetry gigs and a state pension of £92.32 per month.
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