Top 6 - Roger McGough

In the 70's we used to wonder what the Rolling Stones would do when they got old and having waited those 40 years to find out we know that they would keep on doing exactly the same thing. The same could be said of Roger McGough, a teenage hero of mine in the mid-70's but whose whimsical hippiedom hasn't aged quite as well as other claims on my affections. Now comfy and cosy on Poetry Please, some young gunslingers now might not believe you if you told them he was once really cool and state of the art.

Thus, this selection is a little bit of a nostalgia trip, but there's plenty still to like among the witty wordplay and cuteness. If he was partly e.e.cummings and partly Allen Ginsberg then the influence of cummings was always likely to be more beneficial.

Roger's biography, Said and Done, is worth a read for its anecdotes of zany sixties life on the road, particularly the story of the late night stops at motorway service stations, the homebound poets concocting the most outlandish dishes from the self-service, like coffees with celery sticks in them or steak and kidney pie and custard (but don't quote me exactly on that). The bored cashier would just take one look, key in the items and say,'one pound, eleven and six, please'. That is misquoted because I don't have the book here but I can vouch for his generosity in contributing a poem to our magazine at University and, at the end of the reading we arranged, just handing me a pile of books to sell, telling me the price and then not checking my takings once the crowds had dispersed.

40-love is an obvious selection, using McGough's visual effects of word arrangement to full effect, making the eyes move across the page as if watching tennis.

after the merrymaking, love? will always stay in the memory for its line, 'sleep./ In the onrush of its lava.'

The poem he let us have for the much unlamented Allusions magazine was Poem for a Dead Poet and it wasn't just any old outtake he had lying around because it made it into the New Volume follow up to the hugely popular Mersey Sound anthology,

St. Francis, he was

of the words. Words?

Why, he could almost make 'em talk.

Thank you, sir. The cheque might still be in the post.

.

But it's forlorn melancholy with the sad little joke that he did best, and still does.

In ofa sunday, it's

[i]... *

miss mass

and wonder

if mass

misses me

(*the typographical tricks on this occasion mine for editorial purposes);

.

in kinetic poem no.2, at his most cummingsonian, it's

without love

i'm just a

has been away

too long in the tooth

.

and although long poems are usually best avoided in this Top 6 feature, and so we haven't had Homer or Virgil yet, one probably can't avoid summer with monika, with such morose charm as 'your finger, sadly, has a familiar ring about it'.

He does rather lend himself to quotation because that is the whole point. Nobody apparently relished the job of 'poet' more and now that poets are more likely to be either po-faced creative writing tutors on university pay rolls or 'performance poets' few could have carried it off for quite so long.

Photo credit- Murdo Macleod.