Having been at various times, and in a low grade, footballer, cricketer, bike rider and other things to an even less exalted standard, poetry is what I'm left with, my output as frugal as it ever was and not much of it to be found these days beyond this website. I don't mind that. The answer to the question I was asked at a university interview in 1978 - 'Who do you write for- an audience or for yourself?'- is obvious now, it is for myself. And so as long as I'm happy, that is all that matters, except, on those rare occasions when I read my own poems, it can sometimes seem completely dreadful, sometimes look okay and then, once in a while I remember an apposite line, wonder who wrote it, realize it was me and then feel inordinately pleased with myself. The only real confirmation one gets is from a review or if someone takes the trouble to say that a particular piece struck them as being worthwhile. So, thanks to those that have ever done that.
But, poetry is not always a good thing and there is a misconception that calling something 'poetry' is an endorsement. While it might be meant that way, the fact that something is poetry is no guarantee of its worth. I don't mean Pam Ayers and the like. Pam is fine by me and I hope her teeth are now well maintained. I recently bought the Collected William Empson, a poet whose work I was sure was exactly my sort of thing, a book I possibly thought I already had before realizing I didn't and one of the few poets whose Collected Poems is shorter than mine would be. But I don't like it at all. Stiff, mannered and unrewardingly difficult, it might have been the fashion once but it's no surprise to find it isn't any longer.
Which makes me think of the vibrant, latest generation of poets that were born into a world of allusive cleverness. While they are admired for their individual 'voices', the new ways in which they see the world and all the benefit that many have accrued from their Creative Writing courses, so much bewildering variety, inventiveness and studied style eventually amounts to a sameness. Oh, no, don't tell me that this one is 'different', 'new' or somehow invigorating. All the others are like that, too.
The problem with poetry is that it is very precious- and rarely more precious than it is to its author. I'm not usually a fan of haiku in English but the late Brian Wells wrote one about a poetry reading at which every poet privately thinks their poems are the best. At least Brahms had the decency to destroy some of his music because he thought it didn't compare with Beethoven. But before this turns into 'Why I don't like poetry', here are some examples of why I like it.
Thom Gunn is the example that made me want to be a poet in the same way that George Best made me want to be a footballer. I find it hard to believe that anybody suddenly takes to any activity without the example of a precursor. The loosening of Gunn's attitude from existential, separate protagonist, through masterpieces like My Sad Captains, to his later poetry of empathy, community and sharing, reflected in the way he moves between strictly metrical and free verse and stations in between ended all the stand-off debate about whether poetry should rhyme and scan or not. Because there was one who did both consummately.
Poems like Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden by Julia Copus, Martin Mooney's Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (amongst others), Muldoon's magnificent Incantata, the whole idea of Rosemary Tonks and much of Elizabeth Bishop, and, of course, Larkin in An Arundel Tomb and in any number of other places, were and remain ideals of some sort of artistic zenith with no other means of support than ideas exquisitely realized. But, to quote some lines, which I'll do from memory and only then check, the ending of Latinists by Sean O'Brien, his evocation of a schoolroom and the teacher of that dry, old, exhilarating essential language, explains the non-plussed with chiming erudition,
When the stare you award me
Takes longer than Rome did
To flower and vanish, I notice
The bells are not working in heaven today.
And I very nearly got it right. There won't be many others who have the choice between checking it in a copy signed, 'Hull June '97' or one inscribed as 'Sean's reading copy' that I saved from e-Bay. Because I don't regard poetry as such as 'something I like' but rather something without which I wouldn't even be me. It isn't my own poetry I like that much, I still think I should have been a journalist, something even less reputable. No,
The great thing about poetry is that it was always the finest thing in school, university or ever after, to do whatever you wanted to do, be whatever you wanted to be and associate yourself with whoever you wanted to because even if a good many poets were reprobates, mavericks, ne'er-do-wells or even deeply conservative types of a religious disposition, it was 'homework' or 'culture' or highly respected and it is Shakespeare and so, somehow, one is credited with having the moral high ground. And, as Ken Dodd would say, 'they couldn't touch you for it'
And so, that seems like a good place to end Why I Like. I hope you've had at least a small fraction of the enjoyment I've had writing them if you've been reading them.
The illustration here is The Poet by Fernando Botero (1987).