In Memoriam Poetarum

 RIP - may they rest in poetry.....

Someone once said to me that, 'Poets are at the forefront of language.....'  And that does make sense, in a way, though who is to define a poet?  Or who can really define poetry?  From Homer to Chaucer to Byron to John Cooper Clarke, via William McGonagall, and via every child who has made up a rhyme, there are poets everywhere, in every language.....

But then there are those whose poetry resonates, whose words remain, and whose words make a difference to others.  For me, the greats include W B Yeats, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas, but then the list goes on and on, and I want to remember Keats, and Causley, Hughes and Heaney, Montale and Mayakovsky, Brecht and Blake.....

There is an extraordinary richness out there, some stored in people's memories, some stored in libraries and bookshops, on private shelves and in dusty attics. 

And the lives of poets come and go, passing time as time passes us all.  And just this week, we have lost two more voices of our age.  On September 29th, Brian Patten (1946-2025), and three days earlier Tony Harrison (1937-2025).  

And as the great survivor, Roger McGough, says:

Let me die an oldman's death

a clean and in between the sheets holy water death

famous last words?  You must be joking death

been there, done it, seen it all before, death

Corruption, greed, can't take any more, death

It will be our turn soon.....

All those years ago Brian wrote to me (I was proposing a book) about his friend, Roger:  He has priests hands, don't you think?  (Adrian has childs hands.  I'm looking at mine now. But we can never see ourselves.  That's one reason to distrust primary sources.) Another reason is that the primary sources might not like the sauce.....

In memoriam Brian Patten, a man of love, a man of playful, deeply felt words.  As he wrote, in One another's light,

But it's hard to guess

How one thing on another

Works an influence.

We pass - 

And lit briefly by one another's light

Think the way we go is right.

I met R S Thomas (1913-2000) in Cambridge, when he had just driven himself from the wilds of Wales to read at a conference.  He was a craggy, austere man, but his observations were clear and gentle:

A poem that always went down well with my students was Poetry for Supper, which has two old poets, Hunched at their beer in the low haze/Of an inn parlour, discussing poetry, while the talk ran/Noisily by them, glib with prose.....

                                     'You speak as though

No sunlight ever surprised the mind

Groping on its cloudy path.'

'Sunlight's a thing that needs a window

Before it enters a dark room

Windows don't happen.'

Adrian Henri (1932-2000), and his girlfriend Catherine, stayed with us in Italy when I persuaded him to visit in the wake of his pal, Roger McGough.  Adrian was a larger than life character, an artist, playwright and poet, and he thoroughly enjoyed performing for my school, enlisting the support of a bluegrass group of friends to perform a talking blues, among other highlights. 

As a painter, his poetry is more visual than his Liverpudlian mates, but this one, Poet in School, appropriate in the context of his visit to my school, tells a painful story:

'Write about

something that's happened to you

or someone you know.'  Half an hour

to go, and still nothing written.

Just sitting, face blank as the empty sheet,

shuffling his feet.  'Come on, son,

you must know something that's happened

to someone.'  'No, Sir.'

'Your family, your friends?'

'Sir, my brother's best mate died.'

'How?'  'Sir, electrocuted.  A train...'

'Was he on the track?'  'Sir...'

The empty eyes fill with tears.

Somehow the years between us

aren't enough to take the words back.

Adrian Mitchell (1932-2008) first came into my life when he performed, with, among others, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Christopher Logue, in Wholly Communion at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965.  His poem, To Whom It May Concern, with the refrain Stick my legs in plaster/Tell me lies about Vietnam, made him famous, perhaps, as it combined incisive rhythm with arresting images spoken in his gentle but insistent voice.

Later I encountered him at Lancaster University, where he was friends with my mentor David Craig.  And then I met him again in 1992 at Lerici, with others including Dannie Abse (1923-2014) and the Italian poet Paolo Bertolani (1931-2007), to celebrate the bicentenary of Shelley's birth, and I took the opportunity to invite him and his wife, Celia, to Rome.  

Adrian read at my school (St George's - at the time it was St George's English School, Rome.....  now it is changed - utterly changed.....) In the morning he read a poem (I am not sure, but I think it might have been Victor Jara of Chile - look it up - ) and my then Headmaster said he thought that Adrian should not read it that evening.  I mentioned this, dutifully, to Adrian, who read it very clearly that evening.....

But, in memoriam, after all, this is the poem to remember Adrian by:

Beattie Is Three

At the top of the stairs

I ask for her hand. O.K.

She give it to me.

how her fist fits my palm,

A bunch of consolation.

We take our time

Dow the steep carpet way

As I wish silently

That the stairs were endless.

At a tangent, perhaps, Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) was a very different poet. He was a professor (prior to early retirement in 1980) at Glasgow University. He also had connections with David Craig, and I met him when I lived in Lancaster. His poetry was tense, acerbic, and inventive in an ultimately modern way. Some of his writings belonged to the school of concrete poetry, where shape was the prime issue; but he also translated poetry from Russian, Hungarian, French, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and other languages.  A poem that affected my students particularly was In the Snack-Bar, which tells of an old man with disability seeking help to go to the toilet in a cafe and then taking a bus.  Another that inspired young listeners was, The First Men on Mercury, where invasive beings exchange greetings with indigenes, and then leave changed.

Glasgow 5 March 1971, one of his "Instamatic" poems, clicks like a photograph, an instant in the life of a city, a moment in life's timeline that shocks and makes us pause, and think, and wonder about outcomes:

With a ragged diamond 

of shattered plate-glass

a young man and his girl

are falling backwards into a shop window.

The young man's face

is bristling with fragments of glass

and the girl's leg has caught

on the broken window

and spurts arterial blood

over her wet-look white coat.

Their arms are starfished out

braced for impact,

their faces show surprise, shock,

and the beginning of pain.

the two youths who have pushed them

are about to complete the operation

reaching into the window

to loot what they can smartly.

Their faces show no expression.

It is a sharp clear night

in Sauchiehall Street.

In the background two drivers

keep their eyes on the road.

Jonty Driver (1939-2023) was a friend of my parents, and we got to know each other towards the end of his life. He was a South African, and was active in the anti-apartheid movement, became a political prisoner, and latterly a school master and a poet.  Not everyone loved Jonty, and in Private Eye, on February 11th 1978, Auberon Waugh wrote in his diary, GOOD NEWS that C J Driver, whoever he may be, is going away to teach in Hong Kong and will not be reviewing any more novels for the Guardian.....  Although, Waugh goes on, Lorna Sage is undisputed as Lord Gnome Trophyholder for Most Boring Reviewer of All Time, Driver comes second with his record-breaking three-year run of picking dud novels.....

Not for me to make war with a Waugh, but, certainly in my experience and later in his life,. Jonty was an engaging and entertaining observer of life, and, when I last saw him read, at the Sea Fever Festival in Wells-next-the-Sea in Norfolk, he carried off the persona of poet with grace and clarity.

In his last book, Still Further, there is a poem entitled Sunset & After which, I think, expresses common humanity in a way that all can relate to:

The tide is out, the sand is firm beneath

my feet, the sun about to set.  I'm here

again on Noordhoek Beach.  Another day

is sauntering to its casual end.

I've journeyed back from where I don't belong

to where I also don't belong......

The point of being here is not revealed;

perhaps you'd find it out from time to time

and wander on, pretending that you had

a plan.  Not true, as far as I'm concerned.

If God has worked His purpose out, He's not told me.... 

Of all these gifted and imaginative men, the one I was most in awe of was Tony Harrison (1937-2025) who died just a week ago, aged 88.  Initially approachable, and affable, Tony concealed a cauldron of thoughts and ideas, and attempts at light-heartedness seemed brittle. He read his poems as if they were wrought from hard material - carved, as it were, from blocks of words.  Marked with D. (where D stood both for Dad and Death) a poem about the cremation of his father, who had been a baker, begins:

When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven

Not unlike those he fuelled all his life,

I thought of his cataracts ablaze with heaven

and radiant with the sight of his dead wife.....

I listened, and tried to note his intonation, and any changes between my text and his recital, and was swirled in a sea of words and images.  Poetry has potential, a power that perhaps no longer works against the competition of electronic wizardry.

At the end of his reading, Harrison turned to A Kumquat for John Keats, a relatively long poem about what happens if you don't die young, about what it feels like to live in a world that has the possibility of total extinction.  That febrile state where we know not what will become of us while we still should be alive:

I find I can't, as if one couldn't say

exactly where the night became the day,

which makes for me the kumquat taken whole

best fruit, and metaphor, to fit the soul

of one in Florida at 42 with Keats

crunching kumquats, thinking, as he eats

the flesh, the juice, the pith, the pips, the peel,

that this is how a full life ought to feel,

its perishable relish prick the tongue,

when the man who savours life's no longer young,

the fruits that were his futures far behind.

Then it's the kumquat fruit expresses best

how days have darkness round them like a rind,

life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.

It is sad that those we love pass away before us.  We mourn the silence that fills our lives where conversations and laughters once shone like silver and gold.  But we know that this is life, and we know we have our memories.  With poetry we are blessed by the remaining words, on paper or in our minds.  And, for those who remain it is good to rehearse the life of others as it is good to love the life that we still hold.

Some thirty years ago I was attempting to write a book about Roger McGough, and I sent a draft of the first part to Brian Patten.  I asked him to be honest, and he was.  I found it interesting but now and then it sounds a bit chummy, he typed....  Perhaps there could be a bit more background colour....  I suppose in any biog the background against which a life is lived is hugely important and maybe more of that is needed.

Brian then hand-wrote a footnote:  I really hope you don't find my comments dispiriting at all,

Very Best

Brian

And the very best to you, Brian, and all in the afterlife.  

Where would we be without you?

The Gulf of Lerici - 1992

....and the scent to winged flowers,

and the coolness of the hours

of dew, and sweet warmth left by day,

were scattered o'er the twinkling bay...

P B Shelley

Lines written in the bay of Lerici

[for 02/11]