Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

In the build-up to that most inconsequential of literary prizes, my own nomination for Best Poem and Best Collection of the year, I read two short-listed poems to the meeting of Portsmouth Poetry Society on Wednesday evening, one of which was Pastoral by Helen Farish and it was received tremendously well (as was the other one). I said I had seen, and heard, Helen read at Oxford several years ago and not been overly impressed. I can't remember if it was her that treated her conference audience to her own analysis of one of her own poems- maybe it wasn't- but I thought, what a nerve. But I said if Helen's next book was full of poems as good as Pastoral then I'll be first in the queue for it. So I look it up and check and, bless my cotton socks, The Dog of Memory was published in September, so I wasn't.
Someone only on the edge of the poetry circuit needs to keep their wits about them to track down the poems they might like the most so heaven help anybody who doesn't know where to look.

But whether or not analysing one's own poem for an audience is proper or not, it doesn't suggest the poet is shy.
In a particularly good edition of the TLS this week (or is it only that I'm finally getting the hang of it), Katy Guest reviews Shrinking Violets, a field guide to shyness, by Joe Moran.
Are we all shy but don't realize that everybody else is, too, but they are all pretending not to be. I very much doubt it. I've met far too many people who had no concept of shyness, nowhere near enough self-consciousness to ever worry about such lacksadaisical drivel.
It might be self-indulgence, verging on a self-importance that makes the individual unwilling to be social and make the effort to connect with others. On the other hand, they might just be terrified.
Alan Bennett is quoted, as he often is found to be, quoting his mother who told him that being shy was preferable to being common but,
'I clung far too long to the notion that shyness is a virtue and not, as I came too late to see, a bore.'

And that's easy for him to say, having made his fortune from writing about social difficulties from the likes of Me, I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf onwards.

One can, with some effort, overcome the condition at the risk of becoming gauche instead. But I'd love to be able to become at least more reserved, if not shy, and not take part in this crusade to make everyone feel as if they should be the life and soul of every bloody party. There isn't room for everyone to be that. The world needs less alpha people and more betas.
I expect I will do a few more poetry readings but I don't particularly want to. If I was shy, I wouldn't even be putting these unnecessary words onto the internet, and so it's not because of that. It's because I'm not convinced that anybody else should have to listen to me reading my poems, never mind analyse them afterwards, when I'm not even convinced about them myself.

It might seem contrarian to write poems, be a poet and go to the lengths of publishing them oneself in booklets but it's the words, I hope, rather than the me in them that I want to preserve.
Ben Eastman, in the TLS, reviews two books in a piece sub-titled Two approaches to self-conscious contrarianism. I haven't even read it yet but I'm looking forward to it.

It might be time to leave such things to others. But, meanwhile, I'm still thinking.