View from the Boundary - Peter Reading Special

I see from the very useful news links on the Poetry Society website that Peter Reading has died. Not a poet that I've heard so much about recently but there could be reasons for that. To call him 'maverick' might be understating the case, his concentration on the dirty downside of humanity being coupled with an anarchic classicism that made him somehow proto-punk, 'punk rock' culture having possibly been a deliberate descent into miasma in strictly traditional forms that might have been a revolt against the way they saw the world going.

If poetry is already by defintion an outsider's genre then Reading was a genuine outsider in a world in which too many mistakenly believe themselves to be the different one. Without having any first hand knowledge with which to pay tribute to him, I do remember a story about him resigning or being sacked from his job as, I think, a weighbridge operator when he was expected to wear a uniform to do it. There are a few things that poets ideally shouldn't be expected to do and we've seen previously that drive cars is one of them but wearing uniforms is another. And, yes, there was Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen, Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis but that's not the point, is it.

I wonder if he would have appreciated the return of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, back on the wireless for a tireless umptieth series and apparently in the rudest of fourth-form health and Jack Dee now seemingly perfect in the role of Humph. Tonight's episode had a round based on the popular Radio 4 programme, Poetry Please, or, as Jack said, as most people know it, Poetry ..'click'.

Reconstituting radio repartee is a desperate and doomed art but I laughed out loud in the previous programme as well when it was explained how Jeremy Clarkson kept the Top Gear audience guessing about the real identity of the mystery car driver, The Stig, and indeed the viewers furrowed their brows and went into deep thought as they wondered whether it was a monkey's or a toss that they didn't give.

It's still a helluva show the old codgers are putting on and, I found this evening, even funnier on a Monday evening with a T with a bit of G in it rather than on a Sunday lunchtime without such a stimulant. It turned up in a quiz somewhere that there is a blue plaque to Willie Rushton at Mornington Crescent. I didn't know that but was glad to hear it. Keep up the good work, boys.