Oh, Babe, What Would Poetry Say

When the opportunity to take a break from the biography of Pushkin presented itself, I took it up. It is more detailed than I require and the broad sweep of a story is in danger of being lost under a welter burden of contiuning affairs, flirtations, controversies and much of what was once expected of poets, 200 years ago, before they retreated into universities. Never wanting to waste a good joke, when Pushkin came to Shove-kin, I decided to give him a rest for a while. With him now married and having published Eugene Onegin, halfway through seemed like an appropriate juncture. But corny jokes can be recycled from e-mails to friends, too.

Julian Barnes was a very good reason to leave off a story that will be easily returned to, then a Christmas present cataloguing all those brands and memories from our shared, generic, 70's childhood was the harmless diversion it was meant to be.

But then, there having been that review in the TLS purporting to survey 'the state of British poetry', I wanted to see it. Only TG Jones, the inheritors of the WH Smith's shops, in Southsea, stock the TLS so I went to the Central Library first except it's a couple of years since they had newspapers and journals one can look at. It turns out they have plenty online but not the TLS. So, not very much like WH Davies, free-loading on public transport, I took the scenic route to Southsea and found the words I so wanted to read.

I doubt if I'm ever going to be a Tristram Fane Saunders admirer any more than one of Ed Sheeran. I'm sure they are both talented at what they do but to me they seem young, safe, anodyne types like those who did their homework, came top of the class and went on to successful careers without having been interesting- see also, Coldplay. But I'm glad I saw Tristram's essay and it's not his fault if what he finds to say about the current condition of British poetry could as equally be appropriate to Business Studies as the English Department.

However, I'm grateful to it for how it brought my attention to Rory Waterman's reviews in Endless Present. One has it confirmed once more that one is no longer middle aged when you are reading books by middle aged poet-academics whose father's poems one once bought, like Andrew Waterman's in Faber's Modern Poets Five, 1981, where he appeared alongside CH Sisson, Craig Raine, Robert Wells, Tom Paulin and Andrew Motion which wouldn't be the worst six-a-side team one ever played in.

But Rory is very soon a most amenable guide through some books one knows well and others one hasn't seen. It's not really a look at the 'state of the poetry nation' in 2026, it being Selected Articles, Reviews and Dispatches, 2010-23. That period included a number of Larkin-related books and they form the foundations of the book early doors and references back to Larkin continue afterwards which some might think is backward-looking, as Larkin himself was said to be in his time. But without helping to establish where poetry has arrived at by 2026, I'm with Rory entirely about what is entirely still worth obsessing over.

He is judicious and wise. As a professional critic, he sets himself a standard of honesty and stands by it. He is ready to find fault with those bits of Larkin that were never meant to see print but also, as sympathetically as he can with the likes of John Agard and Patience Agbabi but it's not a racial thing because his is more caustic when he simply doesn't reckon much, as with James Sutherland-Smith who,

Since the poet is here congratulating his perspicacity, the tired language is particularly unfortunate.

The more of him you read, the more it becomes desirable for Rory to award those poetry prizes we must have.

The big shock comes in the review of James Andrew Taylor's Walking Wounded: The Life & Poetry of Vernon Scannell. Scannell was a name that had always been there, the name at least redolent of a tweed-jacketed, bespectacled composer of careful verses only designed to make Larkin look more Byronic or Hughesian in comparison. I knew he'd done a bit of boxing but I didn't know much of that art was rehearsed on a conveyor belt of victim female partners. It's unfortunate to have to find out as late as this what some of those names in The Listener or those booklets left his sixth form room by Linden Huddlestone at school were really like.

In those days I vaguely imagined poets as the gods who sent down their words from a place beyond our finding, partly so that we could do 'A' level English. I never imagined them much less than saints and never thought I'd meet one. But it wasn't like that at all.

Rory's very good, ever alert to non-sequiturs, the emptiness of what he resorts to calling 'poesy' and one would only want one's best stuff to come before his diligent judgement and even then you'd not be sure until you got some sort of pass, if you did. But if you did, you'd have deserved it. 

It's true to say I've been losing faith in poetry - not to mention a number of other areas of human activity- in recent years. I wouldn't like to think I wasted so much of my life on something that proved to be no more than a charade. But I've been having another look at some of the books here for the purposes of the Anthology list and then I wondered what Rory Waterman had to say about it all and it's turned out that I do still care.