Scannell and Discipline

James Andrew Taylor's biography hasn't made Vernon Scannell any more appealing to me as it progresses but in real life there were plenty ready to be charmed by him and I'd like to think that any friend of Anne Stevenson's might be a friend of mine. None of us can do very much about what we are like and the upbringing he had augmented by his army experiences can't have been of benefit.

I haven't really regarded his poems as much more than a C+ - in what would be a rigorous marking system- until Chapter 12 pointed out the rhyme scheme of Enemy Agents. If nominative determinism is at work in a poet called Scannell, he could equally have been called Rimell. In the first three lines, 

Expert in disguise and killing blows,

Fluent in all languages required,

They wrote me ardent letters but in code.   

 he establishes the subtlest of rhyme schemes in which the consonant sound in 'blows' and the 'd' and the end of 'required' come together in 'code'.

That's good form for you in more ways than one and entirely puts into practice his repeated criticism of 'pop' poetry, like that from Liverpool, and the wider idea of vers libre that Eliot is quoted here as saying, 

No 'vers' is 'libre' for the man who wants to do a good job'. 

 Having set off on this rescue mission, Chapter 12 goes on to describe how Scannell, in a mostly disastrous brief period on a fellowship near Oxford in 1974, found it difficult with students who weren't interested in close reading or technical improvement but wanted to hear fulsome approval of their efforts. Never having attempted such a job, I can't concur with him first hand but I can see how it would be, up and down the country, with thousands of such homemade talents all thinking it was them and not the other thousands that were the naturally gifted one.

Scannell fits the certain stereotype of the poet as penniless, wayward and itinerant all too well but his application to his art is admirable. And it was all too little appreciated during this posting. Not just unappreciated but targetted by local no-marks who made a point of abusing him in public and taking their animosity s far as a sustained campaign against him whether or not they knew of his pugilistic prowess and propensity to use it.

And so it's taken some time to find a lot of sympathy for him but a degree of it arrived in due course.