Poetry Biographies

 The majority of Poetry Lives, I think it's fair to say, are biographies written by those acolytes or academics who see fit to do so. They aren't always approved of by their subjects' admirers and can suffer under a burden of detail, speculation, partiality and interpretation.

Not so many are written by the poets themselves and, although first hand, they risk being equally limited by their specific point of view.

Wendy Cope's Life, Love and The Archers doesn't make any claim to be an autobiography - it's 'recollections' - but it's as much as we need, or possibly want, to feel we know her well enough. She's not one to make great claims for her own significance but that's also very much part of the story and so she is better fitted than most to tell her own story in short essays like these.

There are books about other poets that go into more excruciating detail, analysing poems, that leave one feeling as if one knows less rather than more for having read them or perhaps even that one had stopped caring by page 200.  

It's no indicator that Wendy Cope wasn't T.S. Eliot that her poems or her life don't require copious footnotes, it makes the opposite point, if anything. But, no, not everybody can state their case quite so clearly. 

I'm not such a great admirer of Wendy's work but she's a long way above the likes of Geoffrey Hill. Not everybody sees fit to make themselves so accessible but neither are they capable of leaving so much left unsaid while we are left in no doubt she knows it, and she trusts that we know, too.

Absolutely top marks. This is how the Life of a Poet should be presented. It is the sort of book that looks as if it was easy to compile but there are several reasons why I hope I don't try to use it as a template for anything I might do. 

Some things that look as if they were easy to do prove not to be so. There is a lot of art in appearing artless.

I am still, even now, suffering from the late 1970's 'new critisism' orthodoxy we were inducted into at university that the text, the poem, is all there is, the Roland Barthes 'Death of the Author' and the verboten of any biographical footnote or context. I know that is nonsense and just a phase that Literary Theory was going through but my poems, I'd like to think, are artefacts made of sentences and syntax and whatever prompted them to be written can be jettisoned like one of those big, lower parts of a rocket that propelled a capsule towarsds the Moon in 1969.

But, mostly, one needs to be 'somebody', somebody like Wendy, for anybody else to want to read it. It doesn't have to be like that. A greengrocer could have led a more interesting life than a poet but not seen fit, or had the time, to write it down.