The Echo Chamber

As Radio 4's The Echo Chamber finishes another of its short runs of four programmes in the 4.30pm Sunday slot, it is an opportune time to congratulate both it and Paul Farley on an excellent series and wonder, not for the first time, if half an hour a week isn't too much to allocate to a proper contemporary poetry magazine on the BBC.
I doubt if such a tiny side issue would be part of the business plan of any newly reformed BBC under the new government's review of this insidiously leftist, arty, subversive, state sponsored bunch of militants. How outrageous it is that they waste so much time and money on the Proms, Radio 3, I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, The Danny Baker Show, Only Connect and some fine things on BBC4 whenever they can find enough to pay an academic to write a series on the Renaissance in Britain or Vicky Coren to do Bohemians. Why not have more shows on cookery, interior decor or buying antiques in order to flog them again. I must admit that the episode of 60 Minute Makeover that I contributed to some years ago was screened on Pick TV the other day but, luckily, only two people I know saw it. It wasn't my fault and there was nothing I could do about it, and, yes, it gets more awful every time I think about it. But that is more reason why we need more Echo Chamber, so that very minor poets are not diverted into, literally, wallpaper programmes.
The latest Echo Chambers included an interview with Clive James, the admirable Helen Mort, someone called Andrew McMillan and ended with no less than Tony Harrison reading a new poem.
Helen Mort is fine and managed to not quite lapse into the quagmire of Creative Writing-speak and even if she flirted with it, the poems she writes compensate for it.
Clive James continues to sign off quite gloriously and we must all hope he can continue to do so for some time yet.
I had to have some doubts about McMillan who claims a great affinity with Thom Gunn who had died before he discovered his work. McMillan, born 1988, can't be expected to have known much about Gunn before 2004, when Gunn died. But just how much he can claim to be a natural inheritor is another matter. From what I heard, and what little I've read, it's possible that McMillan's appreciation of Gunn was as a free verse, homo-erotic poet and not much more. I don't know enough about McMillan yet to say, perhaps he includes the strict metrical verse, the existentialism, the breaking down of the protagonist/antagonist divide and much more about Gunn. Anybody taking Thom Gunn as an exemplar needs to have developed through the discipline of metrical verse, much acknowledged in his debt to Yvor Winters and J.V. Cunningham, rather than assume one can go straight to free verse without any such grounding.  The reason why Gunn's apparently looser free verse poems are any good is because he could have also done it the other way. It's not good enough to see him only alongside Gary Snyder and the like and it's a trap for the unwary to think one can be as free as one likes without knowing what it's like to be formal. It means not much otherwise and tends to look like less than a pale imitation.
Whereas Tony Harrison returns with a monumental poem, Polygons, which is not in the heroic couplets we have come to expect of him. I find it was first published in the LRB and you can find yourself a copy on their website.
As far as I'm aware, Harrison's last published poems were in Under the Clock (2005), which looked to me then as if they were too close for comfort to the doggerel that Harrison's poems generally rise so far above. But then I went to a conference in Oxford and heard the book given thoroughly respectful, serious academic treatment and so was glad to assume it was my mistake.
Polygons is something of a career retrospective, going back over his attachment to Ancient Greece, his NT versions of Aeschylus and Sophocles as well as time spent with contemporary makars, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. If you remember a George Harrison song called All Those Years Ago, it's a highbrow version of that. I was concerned that such a significant statement from such a grand, old man of poetry would give me a decision to make about what has been the best poem of 2015 because that decision has been done and dusted for quite some time.
Luckily, it doesn't. It's prolix and can be heavy-going in places while undoubtedly containing many memorable moments. At the age of 78, Tony is giving himself perhaps 10 years or more before asking that his ashes be scattered at Delphi, is it, which is good to hear. Whether or not we can look forward to anything more as good as Cypress and Cedar or A Kumquat for John Keats remains to be seen but he surely doesn't owe us any more.
So, top marks to Paul Farley and The Echo Chamber and a note to the BBC and anybody whose intentions are to make it into the new Channel 5- half an hour, once a week, something like this, that would do.