WCW and other stories

 William Carlos Williams is the subject of the last Portsmouth Poetry Society meeting of the current programme. Weds 2 July, St. Mark's Church, North End, PO2 8HR, 7.30, introduced by Kevin Rogers.

It's a chance to get more of an idea about a poet who has eluded me a bit over the years. Yes, the wheelbarrow and the plums. The much later Brueghel poems develop out of those. But what of Paterson. Heaven knows I've tried. The fact that some homework has only produced 500 words on WCW suggests that I'm not entirely on his wavelength but, important as he certainly is, one needs must try.

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Somewhat easier to do was a contribution to About Larkin 59. The Life of Larkin purporting to be in the style of Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets. I wish it were funnier but, having done it a couple of years ago, I sent it to see if such an idea was likely to be the sort of thing they'd use and a very slightly edited proof came back in short order, I just got in under the wire and it was in print within a couple of weeks. Not yet available on the Larkin Society website resource of back numbers but I can e-mail you the proof for the asking.

A writer who ceases to publish anything becomes as much of a non-sequitur or oxymoron as William Carlos Williams's 'variable foot', compared by one critic to the 'elastic inch', so it's good to have that to add to the bibliography, the ongoing internet music writing notwithstanding.

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Recent telly stored up on the recordings has included the 1952 film of The Importance of Being Earnest with Michael Redgrave, Edith Evans, Margaret Rutherford and, for the keen-eyed, a young Richard Wattis before he became Eric Sykes's next door neighbour. But, if that masterpiece of Oscar's is not the most perfect composition, packed with so many of his quotable lines, then really I'd like to know what is. Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, yes, but such things are rare. 

Also, the heartbreak of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, 2017, with Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle. Possibly the most convincing of McEwan's consistently good but not always hors catégorie output translating most movingly to screen. We don't all end up with the lives we might have had.