Mew, Mew, Football's Askew and a sonnet I might scrub

Another overly cautious delivery date was applied to the biography of Charlotte Mew by Julia Copus.  Originally due on the same day as John Sutherland's Monica Jones last Thursday, it was no great hardship that it didn't come then but the revised date given was some six weeks or more ahead. Then it was due on Sunday. Then it arrived on Saturday. They certainly err on the safe side.

It is a fine thing indeed and I'll explain more next week. Seven years in the making, Julia says on Twitter. (Twitter !!! What have I become).  I have something of a collection of poet's biographies by now, from Chaucer to three Audens, from numerous Shakespeares, through Wyatt, Herbert, those indulgent Romantic types to Mina Loy and later C20th. As a piece of work in itself, irrespective of its subject, this is as good as any of them and a high quality read. But next week is when to say why.

Charlotte Mew wouldn't have been anywhere in a list of favourite poets for me but I read a selection from the Selected recently as a precursor to the arrival of this and I thought I found a bit more, certainly reasons for the perceived kinship with Hardy. With the help of this life, though, which includes some insightful approaches to the poems, too, she comes into better focus and claims a place among the worthy names of the early C20th as a poet, not as a 'woman poet'.

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Slightly less high-mindedly, we don't spend much time on football here but I've been surprised at the coverage given to the plans for a new European Super League. I heard so much about it and what everybody thinks about it on the wireless that I searched for a station that wasn't doing current affairs and listened to Smooth FM for a couple of tracks until something unbearable by Chicago came on.

Surely such a league is what football has been edging towards for years, pitching teams of equal riches and capacity against each other rather than know the top three or four in the league before the season starts.

Fulham, Norwich, West Brom, Crystal Palace, Burnley and their like are middle-weights best matched against each other than having to play Manchester City or Liverpool into whose first XVI, none of their first XI would get.

Ideally, going entirely the other way, it would be preferable if aeroplanes weren't carrying extended squads and backroom boys across Europe each week for the sake of a kickabout. The Golden Age of Lawton, Finney and Lofthouse had them going to away matches by train. But, abandoning all hope of that, it is surprising how credulous the devoted supporters can be when they imagine it's 'their club'. It was made obvious when Manchester United were sold off and disgruntled purists went off to form FC United of Manchester that it was anything but their club. They are the customers in the same way that I am a customer of Tesco. I pay them for things I want just like those who want to watch certain people play football pay them for the privilege to do so. If that gives them some erroneous sense of ownership, belonging or tribal identity, they need to understand it is of their own making.

It doesn't matter to me whether the new league happens or not. I would have thought it stood every chance on the grounds that international football is a bit of an afterthought by now and I can't see many young players being put off by an international ban like Bobby Charlton might have been. It is an unashamedly commercial practice, rather than the art it might have once been on the playing fields of Gloucester circa 1970. But mainly, Boris Johnson has promised to do everything in his power to prevent it. I would be delighted to see him on the opposite side of a chess board or poker table. You only have to ask the Covid-19 virus how hard it is to outwit his best preventative efforts. I'm afraid it's too late to ask the 130000 victims it has so far claimed in the UK what they think.

Kerry Packer's rebel cricket circus didn't last long but cricket is now unrecognisable from the game it once was when a required run rate of six an over seemed out of the question. Things move on, mutate and can't be expected to stay the same. If the new league was UEFA's idea and there was relegation and promotion between it and the next level of European competition, rather than what seems to be a closed shop, I'm sure it would be fine. The Good Lord only knows what Arsenal and Tottenham are doing in it anyway.

Those upset about the selling off of their identity, if that's what it is, might want to consider how long any of the professionals stay at their beloved club once a better offer turns up. I could have been distraught at Arsenal's 97th minute equalizer against Fulham if I'd felt like it. But it makes no difference to my life whether my favourite team stay in the Premier League or not. Several managers have been in charge since I last saw them play and a few hundred players have played for them. I didn't make the effort to go and see them and none of them made the effort to read my poems, as far as I know. We have no relationship.

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But if Scott Parker, Ademola Lookman or Bobby De Cordova-Reid happen to have tuned in, here's one for them.

There is a train line not far from my house and I've seen them passing, concatenations of unoccupied carriages, for a year or more now. It's a bit of an obvious subject but I like the echo with Rod Stewart's Downtown Train. I knew there was a poem in there somewhere but couldn't get a first line. Eventually I did and then the other words formed an orderly queue and slotted themselves in. I'm rarely immediately convinced about any poem and like to come back a few days, or even weeks, later, to see if it looks any good.

I seem to have lost any motive to see my own poems in print so it can wait in a file on a memory stick with the others. Any thrill is in the making and then, if one is lucky, in the finished article but I need not bother any wider public beyond those who find themselves here.

Lockdown Trains

The suburbs look away as they pass through

on their way to countryside and stations 

still deserted but that is what they do 

and continue to go through the motions.

 

Like actors who only ever rehearse

a play from the Theatre of the Absurd 

the government chronically reimburse, 

they’ve lost the plot but yet can still be heard

 

ahead of their arrival as the lines

twitch with the knowledge of them imminent. 

They shatter headlong through the air empty, 

unconscious that the role that they refine, 

seething because they think it is urgent, 

is a mime of what they were meant to be.