Biography by Numbers

 In the increasingly far off days when I'd not only publish booklets of my own poems but send out review copies, one perceptive critic reduced the first few of my Tycho Brahe poems as 'biography by numbers'. Fair enough. I much prefer to read about reservations readers have about my poems than unmitigated approval. While it's possible for such a verdict to reduce what I'd thought of my efforts it's unlikely to work the other way round but it's not going to shift it by much.

Biography, whether by numbers or not, has been a 'way in' to poems perhaps more often that it should have been for me. I think there were seven Tycho poems in the end, steadfastly refusing to be a 'sequence', the very idea of which still has the effect on me that the full moon does on Lon Chaney. Then there was Buxtehude, Chagall and, more recently and not yet in print, Canute, Rosemary Tonks and now a first draft, let's call it, of Agnetha Fältskog, Agnetha Afterwards, celebrating the reclusive years after Abba.

The poem already accepts it's 'none of our business' by way of apology for the intrusion, as the Rosemary poem, I hope, accepts. While they are intended as tributes, one does have to wonder if it would be more respectful to keep them to oneself in the same way that their subjects wanted to.

All biography is partial, in the sense of being incomplete and being one-sided. Even the most exhaustive account of a life misses out some detail that might have told the story a different way to some readers. So, we must be careful, at the very least, and acknowledge that we weren't there and didn't know the whole story.

But we never do, do we. We never know, when writing anything, what it looks like to anybody else. We never know, when backing the wrong horse, that another horse in the race would run faster on the day. We never know, when beguiled by a flamboyant politician that they were a wrong 'un. I'm still bemused, 45 years after the fact, that I got Jeremy Thorpe wrong and so it's only reasonable to think that far into the future, devotees of Johnson, Corbyn and the Truss disaster yet to come will still not quite grasp how they were the more deceived.

So the poem will be wrong. But, unlike in mathematics, there wasn't a right answer. It remains to be seen whether Agnetha Afterwards makes a poem or not. I took no offence that at least one astute reader didn't find the Tycho poems entirely convincing and only hope there's enough worth having in any such attempt to compensate for the perceived shortcomings but it makes one think and think again, in our age of both grotesque offence and highly sensitized offence-taking whether one even wants to enter the treacherous colosseum of ideas.

Looking forward already to what might be the highlight of the year, the painting I bought, below, Winchester 2 by Frank Clarke, is about colour and composition. Wordless, it outdoes Willam Carlos Williams by having 'no ideas but in things'. Painters and musicians have always had the advantage over writers by being free of words. One can't help but envy them.