‘OXFORD ANTHOLOGY OF TWENTIETH CENTURY POETRY’

To Simon Jenner

NO ARMITAGE (I’d like to see his rage)

NO DUHIG (one dig long overdue)

NO GREENLAW (M & S might sue)

NO IMLAH (ditto the TLS)

NO CRICHTON SMITH or JAMIE

(Tuma’s not haggis-crazy)

NO CONSTANTINE (who’ll miss his donnish whine?)

NO LONGLEY (the QMP tick didn’t do the trick)

NO PORTER (long overdue for slaughter)

NO MAXWELL, MORRISON or MOTION

(to miss that lot I’d swim an ocean)

NO PATERSON, NO BURNSIDE,

NO SWEENEY or O’BRIEN

(triumphs of criticism by omission),

BUT WHY DID PRYNNE REFUSE TO BE IN?

-wilful obscurity, hidden grandiosity-

-what is this Prynne idolatry?

All those New Gen poets

Thwacked by omission

NOT EVEN PAULIN IS IN

NO DUNMORE OR DURCAN

O’DONOGHUE or BHATT

-you can hardly do better than that!

It really made my day

Pity it was too late for you

To review in ERATICA TWO

Note: QMP- Queen’s Medal for Poetry

 OPEN LETTER TO ANDY C.

Sorry, Writer in Residence on the Great North Run

The last thing I’d ever do is listen to your spin

“You risk losing potential allies in your war

                             against the philistines,

Astley, Armitage, Duffy, Sansom, unashamedly provincial,

Defiantly Un-Oxbridge, not the enemy!”

Sorry, Andy, arse-licking's not to my taste.

I always thought it wasn’t yours, my mistake!

SORRY I MISSED YOU

(or ‘Huddersfield the Second Poetry Capital of England  Re-visited’)

What was it Janice Simmons said to me as James lay dying in Ireland?

“Phone Peter Pegnall in Leeds, an ex-pupil of Jimmy’s. He’s organising

A benefit reading, he’d love to hear from you and have your help.”

‘Like hell he would’ I thought but I phoned him all the same

At his converted farmhouse at Barswill, a Lecturer in Creative Writing

At the uni. But what’s he written, I wondered, apart from his CV?

“Well I am organising a reading but only for the big people, you understand,

Hardman, Harrison, Doughty, Duhig, Basher O’Brien, you know the kind,

The ones that count, the ones I owe my job to.”

We nattered on and on until by way of adieu I read the final couplet

Of my Goodbye poem, the lines  about ‘One Leeds Jimmy who could fix the world’s.

Duhigs once and for all/Write them into the ground and still have a hundred

Lyrics in his quiver.’

Pete Stifled a cough which dipped into a gurgle and sank into a mire

Of strangulated affect which almost became a convulsion until finally

He shrieked, “I have to go, the cat’s under the Christmas tree, ripping

Open all the presents, the central heating boiler’s on the blink,

The house is on fucking fire!”

So I was left with the offer of being  raffle-ticket tout as a special favour,

Some recompense for giving over two entire newsletters to Jimmy’s work:

The words of the letter before his stroke still burned. “I don’t know why

They omitted me, Armitage and Harrison were my best mates once. You and I

Must meet.”

A whole year’s silence until the card with its cryptic message

‘Jimmy’s recovering slowly but better than expected’.

I never heard from Pegnall about the reading, the pamphlets he asked for

Went unacknowledged. Whalebone, the fellow-tutor he commended, also stayed silent.

Had the event been cancelled? Happening to be in Huddersfield on Good Friday

I staggered up three flights of stone steps in the Byram Arcade to the Poetry Business

Where, next to the ‘closed’ sign an out-of-date poster announced the reading in Leeds

At a date long gone.

I peered through the slats at empty desks, at brimming racks of books,

At overflowing bin-bags and the yellowing poster. Desperately I tried to remember

What Janice had said. “We were sat up in bed, planning to take the children

For a walk when Jimmy stopped looking at me, the pupils of his eyes rolled sideways,

His head lolled and he keeled over.”

The title of the reading was from Jimmy’s best collection

‘With Energy To Burn’

with energy to burn.

DIRECTIONS/MISDIRECTIONS

I sit inside the train of tears

The station mellow in shade

Unoriginal phrases air-brush the canvas.

Puzzling minds I wonder

If all are like my own

Closed to stillness.

From girders hang the acrobats of gone

Pearl grey Whistlers. We sat on

A train like this once, you and I,

Face to face but travelling

In opposite directions-

Or was it you alone I watched depart,

Stood on the platform edge, anxious and alert?

FOR JAMES SIMMONS

Sitting in outpatients

With my own minor ills

Dawn’s depression lifts

To the lilt of amitryptilene,

A double dose for a day’s journey

To a distant ward.

The word was out that Simmons

Had died eighteen months after

An aneurism at sixty seven.

The meeting he proposed in his second letter

Could never happen: a few days later

A Christmas card in Gaelic - Nollaig Shona -

Then silence, an unbearable chasm

Of wondering if I’d inadvertently offended.

A year later a second card explained the silence:

I joined the queue of mourners:

It was August when I saw the Guardian obituary

Behind glass in the Poetry Library.

How astonishing the colour photo,

The mane of white hair,

The proud mien, the wry smile,

Perfect for a bust by Epstein

Or Gaudier Brjeska a century earlier.

I stood by the shelves

Leafing through your books

With their worn covers,

Remarking the paucity

Of recent borrowings

And the ommisions

From the anthologies.

“I’m a bit out of fashion

But still bringing out books

Armitage didn’t put me in at all

The egregarious Silkin

Tried to get off with my wife -

May he rest in peace.

I can’t remember what angered me

About Geoffrey Hill, quite funny

In a nervous, melancholic way,

A mask you wouldn’t get behind.

Harrison and I were close for years

But it sort of faded when he wrote

He wanted to hear no more

Of my personal life.

I went to his reading in Galway

Where he walked in his cosy regalia

Crossed the length of the bar

To embrace me, manic about the necessity

Of doing big shows in the Balkans.

I taught him all he knows, says aging poet!

And he’s forgotten the best bits,

He knows my work, how quickly

vanity will undo a man.

Tom Blackburn was Gregory Fellow

In my day, a bit mad

But a good and kind poet.”

I read your last book

The Company of Children,

You sent me to review -

Your best by so far

It seemed an angel

Had stolen your pen -

The solitary aging singer

Whispering his last song.

INCOMPATABILITIES

For Brenda Williams

La lune diminue; divin septembre.

Divine September the moon wanes.

                        Pierre Jean Jouve

Themes for poems and the detritus of dreams coalesce:

This is one September I shall not forget.

The grammar-school caretaker always had the boards re-blacked

And the floors waxed, but I never shone.

The stripes of the red and black blazer

Were prison-grey. You could never see things that way:

Your home had broken windows to the street.

You had the mortification of lice in your hair

While I had the choice of Brylcreem or orange pomade.

Four children, an alcoholic father and

An Irish immigrant mother. Failure’s metaphor.

I did not make it like Alan Bennett,

Who still sends funny postcards

About our Leeds childhood.

Of your’s, you could never speak

And found my nostalgia

Wholly inappropriate.

Forgetting your glasses for the eleven plus,

No money for the uniform for the pass at thirteen.

It wasn’t - as I imagined - shame that kept you from telling

But fear of the consequences for your mother

Had you sobbed the night’s terrors

Of your father’s drunken homecomings,

Your mother sat with the door open

In all weathers while you, the oldest,

Waited with her, perhaps

Something might have been done.

He never missed a day’s work digging graves,

Boasting he could do a six-footer

Single-handed in two hours flat.

That hackneyed phrase

‘He drank all his wages’

Doesn’t convey his nightly rages

The flow of obscenities about menstruation

While the three younger ones were in bed

And you waited with your mother

To walk the streets of Seacroft.

“Your father murdered your mother”

As Auntie Margaret said,

Should a witness

Need indicting.

Your mother’s growing cancer went diagnosed, but unremarked

Until the final days

She was too busy auxiliary nursing

Or working in the Lakeside Café.

It was her wages that put bread and jam

And baked beans into your stomachs.

Her final hospitalisation

Was the arena for your father’s last rage

Her fare interfering with the night’s drinking;

He fought in the Burma Campaign but won no medals.

Some kind of psychiatric discharge- ‘paranoia’

Lurked in his papers. The madness went undiagnosed

Until his sixtieth birthday. You never let me meet him

Even after our divorce.

In the end you took me on a visit with the children.

A neat flat with photographs of grandchildren,

Stacks of wood for the stove, washing hung precisely

In the kitchen, a Sunday suit in the wardrobe.

An unwrinkling of smiles, the  hard handshake

Of work-roughened hands.

One night he smashed up the tidy flat.

The TV screen was powder

The clock ticked on the neat lawn

‘Murder in Seacroft Hospital’

Emblazoned on the kitchen wall.

I went with you and your sister in her car to Roundhay Wing.

Your sister had to leave for work or sleep

You had to back to meet the children from school.

For Ward 42 it wasn’t an especially difficult admission.

My first lesson: I shut one set of firedoors while the charge nurse

Bolted the other but after five minutes his revolt

Was over and he signed the paper.

The nurse on nights had a sociology degree

And an interest in borderline schizophrenia.

After lightsout we chatted about Kohut and Kernberg

And Melanie Klein. Your father was occasionally truculent,

Barricading himself in on one home leave. Nothing out of the way

For a case of that kind. The old ladies on the estate sighed,

Single men were very scarce. Always a gentleman, tipping

His cap to the ladies.

There seems to be objections in the family to poetry

Or at least to the kind that actually speaks

And fails to lie down quietly on command.

Yours seems to have set mine alight-

I must get something right.

TO DAISY ABEY

In sleep I dream the gratitude I know I cannot say

Now you are in a latitude where palm trees hold the sway

There are always things between us that keep getting in the way

And stop me from expressing the things I mean to say

In a night of wind and weathers love will not go away.

APOLOGIES FOR ABSENCE

Sorry, Neil Oram (with an orange in my pocket)

I can’t make ,your loch-side commune by bonny Drummadrochit.

Sorry Brenda Williams, I can’t share your park bench protest near the Royal Free

At sixty I need a fire and slippers, -4 outside just isn’t me.

Sorry, Chris Torrance, I can’t make your Welsh eyrie

Just spelling Gymmercher Isaf Pontneathvaughan quite fazes me.

Sorry, Seamus Famous, your hide away in Dublin Bay

No doubt is bloody grand but I can’t face the journey to a far off foreign land.

Sorry James Kirkup, your Andorran niche

Is just too complicated for me to ever reach.

Apologies especially to Emily Bronte’s ghost -

You are the mostest hostess that I could ever boast

Your heather moor and cobbled street’s allure

Are something I’ve put off until the braw New Year.

NEW YEAR POEM

For Jeremy Reed

Rejection doesn’t lead me to dejection

But to inspiration via irritation

Or at least to a bit of naughty new year wit-

Oh isn’t it a shame my poetry’s not tame

Like Rupert’s or Jay’s - I never could

Get into their STRIDE just to much pride

To lick the arses of the poetry-of-earthers

Or the sad lady who runs KATABASIS from the back

Of a bike, gets shouted at by rude parkies

And writing huffy poems to prove it...

Oh to be acceptable and

IN THE POETRY REVIEW

Like Lavinia or Jo

With double spreads

And a glossy colour photo

Instead  I’m stuck in a bus queue at Morden

London’s meridian point of zero imagination

Actually it’s a bit like ACUMEN with the Oxleys

Boasting about their 150,000 annual submissions-

If what they print’s the best God help the rest...)

At least my Christmas post had - instead of a card

From Jeremy Reed - his ELEGY FOR DAVID GASCOYNE -

The best poem I’ve had by post in forty years

And Jeremy’s best to date in my estimate -

The English APOLLINAIRE - your ZONE, your SONG

OF THE BADLY LOVED - sitting in a cafe in South End Green

I send you this poem, Jeremy, sight unseen,

A new year’s gift to you, pushing through

To star galaxies still unmapped and to you, BW,

Sonneteer of  silence, huddled in the fourth month

Of your outdoor vigil, measuring in blood, tears and rain

Your syllable count in hour-glass of pain.

POEM TO BE PLACED IN A BOTTLE AND CAST OUT TO SEA

for Ken Kesey and his merry pranksters in a bus called ‘Further...’

Dear _______ and here’s where the problem begins

For who shall I address this letter to?

Friends are few and very special, muses in the main

I must confess, the first I lost just fifty years ago.

Perhaps the best.

I searched for years and wrote en route

‘Bridge Over the Aire’ after that vision and that voice

“I am here. I am waiting”. I followed every lead

Margaret Gardiner last heard of in the Falmouth’s

Of Leeds 9, early fifties. Barry Tebb your friend from then

Would love to hear from you.”

The sole reply

A mis-directed estimate for papering a bungalow

In Penge. I nearly came unhinged as weeks

Ran into months of silence. Was it. I wondered.

A voice from the beyond?

The vision was given

Complete with backcloth of resplendent stars

The  bridge’s grey transmuted to a sheen of pearl

The chipped steps became transparent stairs to heaven

Our worn clothes, like Cinders’ at the ball, cloaks and gowns

Of infinite splendour but only for the night, remember!

I passed the muse’s diadem to Sheila Pritchard,

My genius-child-poet of whom Redgrove said

“Of course, you are in love” and wrote for her

‘My Perfect Rose!’

Last year a poet saw it

In the British Council Reading Room in distant Kazakstan

And sent his poems to me on paper diaphanous

As angels’ wings and delicate as ash

And tinted with a splash of lemon

And a dash of mignonette.

I last saw Sheila circa nineteen sixty seven

Expelled from grammar school wearing a poncho

Hand-made from an army blanket

Working a stall in Kirkgate Market.

Brenda Williams, poète maudit if ever,

By then installed as muse number three

Grew sadly jealous for the only time

In thirty-seven years: muse number two

Passed into the blue

There is another muse, who makes me chronologically confused.

Barbara, who overlaps both two and three

And still is there, somewhere in Leeds.

Who does remember me and who, almost alone.

Inspired my six novellas: we write and

Talk sometimes and in a crisis she is there for me,

Muse number four, though absent for a month in Indonesia.

Remains. I doubt if there will be a fifth.

There is a poet, too, who is a friend and writes to me

From Hampstead, from a café in South End Green.

His cursive script on rose pink paper symptomatic

Of his gift for eloquent prose and poetry sublime

His elegy on David Gascoyne’s death quite takes my breath

And the title of his novel ‘Lipstick Boys’ I'll envy always,

There are some few I talk and write to

And occasionally meet. David Lambert, poet and teacher

Of creative writing, doing it ‘my way’ in the nineties,

UEA found his services superfluous to their needs.

― ― you may fuck like hell,

But I abhor your jealous narcissistic smell

And as for your much vaunted pc prose

I’d rather stick my prick inside the thorniest rose.

Jeanne Conn  of ‘Connections’ your letters

are even longer than my own and Maggie Allen

Sent me the only Valentine I’ve had in sixty years

These two do know my longings and my fears,

Dear Simon Jenner, Eratica’s erratic editor, your speech

So like the staccato of a bren, yet loaded

With a lifetime’s hard-won ken of poetry’s obscurest corners.

I salute David Wright, that ‘difficult deaf son’

Of the sixties, acknowledged my own youthful spasm of enthusiasm

But Simon you must share the honour with Jimmy Keery,

Of whom I will admit I’m somewhat leery,

His critical acuity so absolute and steely.

I ask you all to stay with me

Through time into infinity

Not even death can undo

The love I have for you.

A FINE MADNESS

Any poets about or bored muses fancying a day out?

Rainy, windy, cold Leeds City Station

Half-way through its slow chaotic transformation

Contractors’ morning break, overalls, hard hats and harness

Flood McDonalds where I sip my tea and try to translate Valéry.

London has everything except my bardic inspiration

I’ve only to step off the coach in Leeds and it whistles

Its bravuras down every wind, rattles the cobbles in Kirkgate Market

Hovers in the drunken brogue of a Dubliner in the chippie

As we share our love of Joyce the Aire becomes the Liffey.

All my three muses have abandoned me. Daisy in Asia,

Brenda protesting outside the Royal Free, Barbara seeing clients at the C.A.B.

Past Saltaire’s Mill, the world’s eighth wonder,

The new electric train whisperglides on wet rails

Past Shipley’s fairy glen and other tourist trails

Past Kirkstall’s abandoned abbey and redundant forge

To Grandma Wild’s in Keighley where I sit and gorge.

I’ve travelled on the Haworth bus so often

The driver chats as if I were a local

But when the rainbow’s lightning flash

Illumines all the valleys there’s a hush

And every pensioner's rheumy eye is rooted

On the gleaming horizon as its mooted

The Bronte’s spirits make the thunder crack

Three cloaked figures converging round the Oakworth track.

Haworth in a storm is a storm indeed

The lashing and the crashing makes the gravestones bleed

The mashing and the bashing makes the light recede

And on the moor top I lose my way and find it

Half a dozen times slipping in the mud and heather

Heather than can stand the thrust of any weather.

Just as suddenly as it had come the storm abated

Extremes demand those verbs so antiquated

Archaic and abhorred and second-rated

Yet still they stand like moorland rocks in mist

And wait as I do till the storm has passed

Buy postcards at the parsonage museum shop

Sit half an hour in the tea room drying off

And pen a word or two to my three muses

Who after all presented their excuses

But nonetheless the three all have their uses.

AN EVENING WITH JOHN HEATH-STUBBS

Alone in Sutton with Fynbos my orange cat

A long weekend of wind and rain drowning

The tumultuous flurry of mid-February blossom

A surfeit of letters to work through, a mountain

Of files to sort, some irritation at the thought

Of travelling to Kentish Town alone when

My mind was flooded with the mellifluous voice

Of Heath-Stubbs on tape reading ‘The Divided Ways’

In memory of Sidney Keyes.

“He has gone down into the dark cellar

To talk with the bright faced Spirit with silver hair

But I shall never know what word was spoken there.”

The best reader of the century, if not the best poet.

Resonant, mesmeric, his verse the anti-type of mine,

Classical, not personal, Apollonian not Dionysian

And most unconfessional but nonetheless a poet

Deserving honour in his eighty-fifth year.

Thirty people crowded into a room

With stacked chairs like a Sunday School

A table of pamphlets looked over but not bought

A lacquered screen holding court, a century’s junk.

An ivory dial telephone, a bowl of early daffodils

To focus on.

I was the first to read, speaking of James Simmons’ death,

My anguish at the year long silence from his last letter

To the Christmas card in Gaelic Nollaig Shona -

With the message “Jimmy’s doing better than expected.”

The difficulty I had in finding his publisher’s address -

Salmon Press, Cliffs of Moher, County Clare -

Then a soft sad Irish woman’s voice explained

“Jimmy’s had a massive stroke, phone Janice

At The Poet’s House.”

I looked at the letter I would never end or send.

“Your poems have a strength and honesty so rare.

The ability to render character as deftly as a painter.

Your being out-of-fashion shows just how bad things are

Your poetry so easy to enjoy and difficult to forget.

Like Yeats. ‘The Dawning of the Day’ so sad

And eloquent and memorable: I read it aloud

And felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle

An unflinching bitter rhetoric straight out

Hence the neglect. Your poem about Harrison.

“He has to feel the Odeons sell

Tickets to damned souls, that Dante’s Hell

Is in that red-plush darkness.”

Echoed in Roy Fisher's letter, “Once Harrison and I

Were best mates until fame went to his head.”

James, your ‘Love Leads Me into Danger’

Set off my own despair but restored me

Just as quickly with your sense of beauty’s muted dance.

“passing Dalway’s Bawn

where the chestnuts are, the first trees to go rusty,

old admirals drowned in their own gold braid.”

The scattered alliterations mimic so exquisitely

The random pattern of fallen conkers,

The sense of innocence not wholly clear

The guilt never entirely spent.

‘The Road to Clonbarra’, a poem for the homecoming

After a wedding, the breathlessness of new beginning.

Your own self questioning, “My fourth and last chance marriage,”

Your passionate confessions of failure and plea for absolution

“His thunder storms were in the late night bars.

Home was too hard too dry and far the stars.”

You were so urgent to hear my thoughts on your book

And once too often you were out of luck,

Heath-Stubbs nodded his old sad head.

“Simmons was my friend. I’d no idea he was dead.”

Before I could finish the poem John Rety interrupted

“Can you hurry? There’s others waiting for their turn!”

I muttered to my self, but kept my temper, just...

Eventually Heath-Stubbs began - poet, teacher, wit, raconteur and man

Of letters - littering his poems with references

To three kinds of Arabic genie

The class system of ancient Egypt

The pub architecture of the Edwardian era.

From the back row I strained to see his face.

The craggy jaw, the mane of long white hair.

The bowl of daffodils I’d focused on before.

He spoke but could not read and

Like me had no single poem by heart.

In his stead a man and woman read:

I could forgive the man’s inability to pronounce ‘Dionysian’

But when he read ‘hover’ as ‘haver’

My temper began to frazzle

The woman simpered and ruined every line

As if by design, I took some amitryptilene

And let my mind float free.

‘For Barry, instead of a Christmas card, this elegy

I wrote last week. Fond wishes. Jeremy..’

“So often, David, I still meet

Your benefactor from the time:

her speedwell-blue eyes, blue like yours,

with recollection, while we talk

through leaf-fall, with its mosaic

mottling the toad-spotted wet street.”

I looked at Heath-Stubbs’ face, his sightless eyes,

And in a second understood what Gascoyne meant

“Now the light of a prism has flashed like a bird down the dark-blue,

At the end of which mountains of shadow pile up beyond sight

Oh radiant prism

A wing has been torn and its feathers drift scattered by flight.”

You were the one I wanted most to know

So like yet unlike, like fire and snow,

The casual voice, the sharp invective,

The barbed wit, the lapsed Irish Protestant

Who never gave a shit, crossed the palms

Of the great and good with coins hot with contempt

For the fakers and the tricksters whose poetry

Deftly bent to fashion’s latest slant.