Special Guest - Chris Martin

The revival of the Top 6 and My Favourite Poem features continues and I'm honoured by having Chris Martin here.

A retired librarian, editor of the old, pocket-sized Poems from Portsmouth magazine and much else besides. Some of his early poems were published in Poetry (Chicago) and are on the Poetry Foundation website.

Top 6 Films

The Searchers (John Ford)

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)

The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles)

On the Town (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen)

La Regle Du Jeu (Jean Renoir)

A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger)

My Favourite Poem

The Wreck of the Deutschland by Gerard Manley Hopkins

This cathedral of a poem has a thrilling and illuminating rhythm running through its 35 stanzas, and is packed with memorable images which I at first thought of as cinematic but now consider visionary in both senses. It is an intensely religious work that can appeal to both those of faith and those of none, and rewards repeated reading or recitation. Its heft and majesty has been justly rendered by Alan Rickman. I'm sure if I memorised it in its entirety, I would be high, such is its power. My desert island poem.

 

The Wreck of the Deutschland 

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Thanks, Chris, and please, if anybody else would like to contribute a Top 6- of absolutely anything- or a few words on their favourite poem, do get in touch.

Special Guest - Kevin Rogers

I'm always glad to revive the Top 6 and My Favourite Poem features here. Maybe I'll think about sending out some more invitations. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I am privileged to have here Kevin Rogers, the other half of 'the bad boys of Portsmouth Poetry', as I jocularly call us since I'm about as bad as Cliff Richard. But it's best he introduces himself,

Ageing punk rocker and sometimes poet. In the late 70s I was in the Von Trapp Family and later the ‘post punk’ Room 13. Like so many we were John Peel ‘superstars’ but ignored most everywhere else. I went to college in the 80s and then worked and brought up my family. I have recorded my first music in 40 odd years this year, a couple of my poems set to music and recorded on vintage instruments (60s and 70s guitars and synths), with the band Splore. It is released in October 2025. Splore, Backscattering (Blue Matter Records).  Bizarrely, I have had several poems published in various books about Tottenham Hotspur, bizarre because I am a Fulham supporter (a favour for a friend).

Top 6 underrated pop songs/performers

Death, Politicians in my eyes.

What Jimi Hendrix might have done if he had lived. Combination of Hendrix/funk and punk rock. They looked great, too, black punks in leather.

David Ackles, American Gothic.

I’ve always loved Ackles. Critics might say they are ‘showtunes’, if so, he is Sondheim not Lloyd Webber. Totally transforms this song about perversion and poverty with the last line, 'They suffer least those who suffer what they choose’.

Atomic Rooster, Winter

That sweet spot where melancholy meets clinical depression. OK, they had hit records ‘Tomorrow Night’ and ‘Devil's Answer’ but this is their first incarnation with Carl Palmer and Nick Graham. Vincent Crane has been a ‘hero’ since The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, a tortured genius - don’t play it if you are feeling low. Vincent committed suicide after many stays in psychiatric hospitals.

The Saints, Messin’ with the Kid.

That sneer in Chris Bailey’s voice makes Lydon sound like Richard Burton. Don’t leave early the guitar glissando at the end is something to behold. Best Punk band of all time?

Beacon Street Union, The Clown died in Marvin Gardens

Boston’s finest. Vintage psychedelia underscored by the funeral march on Hammond organ. Esoteric lyrics and the voice of an angel.

Wire, A Serious of Snakes.

 Wire was the first gig I took my wife to. One of those rare groups whose second phase of their career was as good as the first. Lyrically perfect; ‘You tulip, you pea brained earwig’ is an insult I still use today.

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My Favorite Poem

 I would say Gregory Corso’s, The Last Gangster. Corso is the most authentic of the Beats and the imagery of rusting guns in arthritic hands is beautifully crafted. That sense of waiting for that moment that never comes is universal. Surely if you are the last gangster, you are safe, but maybe yesterday’s sins are always with us?

Top 6 and My Favourite Poem - Alex Johnson

I am delighted to have Alex Johnson as special guest here today in a quick revival of our old features Top 6 and My Favourite Poem.
Anybody else who would like to contribute to either, or both, of these quaint parlour games, saying a few words if you wish, please e-mail them in and I'll deal with the avalanche over the weekend.


Favourite poem is, and I'm going to cheat here, jointly The Roman Centurion's Song by Kipling and the Popular Song from Edith Sitwell's Façade. Forced to pick one, it would be the Sitwell.

How about my top 6 characters in A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell? (my favourite novel)
- Hugh Moreland
- Dr Trelawney
- Pamela Flitton
- Uncle Giles
- General Conyers
- Dicky Umfraville

Alex Johnson is the author of A Book of Book Lists, among other things.

My Favourite Poem - Geraint Thomas

Geraint Thomas mentions a few possibilities, like Pope, R.S. Thomas or The Prelude before nominating Y Mabinogion.

http://www.webmesh.co.uk/Mabinogionhomepage.htm

I hope you all enjoy it.

I promise you I haven't started making these things up. There really is a Geraint Thomas and he does tend to make patriotic selections.

Next week- Hamish McSporran nominates Robert Burns.

My Favourite Poem - Mary Green

Having considered Masefield and things learnt at school, like Sea Fever and Cargoes, my mother has chosen If by Rudyard Kipling 'which has tremendous thoughts/ideals etc and takes a great deal of living up to'.

http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm

My Favourite Poem - Angie Fisher

Angie Fisher has chosen Madrid 14 September 1973 by Spike Milligan.

I walked along some forgotten shore.
Coming the other way
a smiling boy.
It was me.
‘Who are you old man?’ he said
I dare not tell him all I could say was
‘Go back!’

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To be fair, this is a considerably longer poem than some of her own.

My Favourite Poem - Selina Goodwin

Selina Goodwin has picked Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti, 'because for me it evokes childhood memories and it has a supernatural quality which is both scary, sinister and of a fairytale nature.'

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/gobmarket.html

My Favourite Poem - Gill Rimmer

Rather charmingly, Gill Rimmer has chosen The Cathedrals of Liverpool which is one of the poems that means I could, if I cared to, call myself a 'prize-winning' poet. But she's in it, too. In fact it was her idea, really.

Pictured here is the 'vault of air that broods upon its sinfulness'.

However, before we run through those immortal lines once more, she also gives an honourable mention to Dorothy Parker, and specifically the lines,

I wish I could drink like a lady,
I can take one or two at the most,
Three and I'm under the table,
Four and I'm under the host!

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The Cathedrals of Liverpool

That New Year’s Day eventually
the drizzle changed to rain and back
and just in time we came across
Scott’s protestant cathedral
-a vault of air that broods upon
its sinfulness, the height of bricks
too distant for the camera flash
to properly illuminate
which picked out only you.
So tiny in the universe,
you’d hardly think it mattered what
we did or said or thought about
between that monumental stack
of deep foreboding and the climb
up concrete steps to find ourselves
doing a lap round the next one,
taking another photograph.
Nevertheless you did suggest
that this religion might be best,
more flamboyant and glamorous,
that dares more gladly to express
and trusts in all its artfulness,
confesses out the bleak and drab
and lets late afternoon light in
through torn, dramatic shapes of blue.

My Favourite Poem - John Sears

John Sears first chose The Point, the Turning by Gregory Warren Wilson. It's in his collection Jeopardy, published by Enitharmon, but unfortunately nowhere on the internet at the moment.

So he kindly went on to pick a poem that we could all share, and also provided this commentary on it, for which I thank him very much indeed. I'm always grateful for any help I can get with Ezra Pound.

Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883-1917)

The Embankment

(The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night.)

Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In the flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

(from Ian Lancashire’s resource at http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1082.html)


Hulme’s poem, first published in January 1909, was one of The Complete Poetical Works of T E Hulme appended to Ezra Pound’s Ripostes (1915), which is where I first read it when I was a teenager, and it made much more sense to me then than Pound’s poetry did.

It’s a precursor of the Imagist style Pound will promote, a meticulously crafted poem that embeds in ‘small epiphanies’ and by implication an entire narrative on which the reader can speculate. It shifts from alliterative, Middle English patterning (all those labio-dental ‘fs’ in the italicized introduction and the opening line, returning in ‘fold’ and comfort’ at the end), through deliberate Keatsian archaisms (‘poesy’) and inverted word-order to facilitate rhyme, to an appeal in the last three lines that resonates harder when one knows that Hulme died at Neiuport in September 1917, after living what he described in a letter as ‘the most miserable existence you can conceive of’ in the trenches of the First World War.

The poem operates and achieves its effects with what seems to be a restricted sound palette, ‘cold’, ‘gold’, ‘old’ and ‘fold’ insisting throughout, three ‘Is’ asserting subjectivity, ‘small’ echoing ‘fallen’, ‘’found’ repeated in ‘round’. For all its imagistic force, other senses predominate: the conflicting tactility of the ‘hard pavement’ remembered and the ‘star-eaten blanket’ desired, and, at the centre, ‘warmth’, suggesting both heat and emotion.

It’s stayed with me for 25 years. Patrick McGuinness’s excellent edition of Hulme’s Selected Writings (Carcanet 1998) provides the essays and lectures, notes, poems and fragments needed to contextualize this remarkable little poem.

John Sears is the author of Reading George Szirtes (Bloodaxe, 2008)
http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852248149

My Favourite Poem- Pam Chadwick

Pam Chadwick has picked this unforgettable masterpiece, The End by A.A. Milne.

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/txt/1097.txt

And why not.

My Favourite Poem - Phil Green

In an unlikely coincidence that I certainly didn't see coming, my dad has chosen the same poet as me.

I'm guessing that since my father isn't known to be the most avid of poetry fans, his choice has something to do with the poem having steam trains in it but, you never know. Next time I'm visiting, if I find a copy of the Letter to Lord Byron left open on an armchair then I'll know that all these years we have been missing out on a shared interest.

Phil Green's choice of favourite poem is Night Mail by W.H. Auden.

http://www.sovereignty.org.uk/siteinfo/newsround/auden.html

Thank you very much to all who have contributed to this feature so far. And further contributions will be welcome.

My Favourite Poem - Dave Moxham

Dave Moxham has chosen Corfe Castle by Alun Lewis, of which he says 'it is a short and straightforward piece both pastoral and romantic with that perfect sense of place that I find attractive in any form of writing.'

I regret to say that so far neither the internet or my own collection of books has been able to provide a copy of the poem.

My Favourite Poem - David Green

I originally intended that this feature would be once a month, or someting like that, but it seems to have got off to such a good start that we might as well have our own little interweb festival right here and right now. So, please, anybody else who feels like contributing, let me know.

There is a crafty way of nominating more than one poem by mentioning one or two that were unlucky not to be one's choice and so podium places, or each way payouts, go to Gunn's Tamer and Hawk or one of Larkin's, like At Grass or Church Going. But I'm not going to desert Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts at this crucial moment.

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~creswell/auden.html

In reverse order of things that poems probably need to do, it says something I like but, more importantly, it says it in an exceptional way. I can see how Auden has built his casual, conversational tone into a disciplined form but I've never even bothered to analyse the rhyme scheme because in this there's simply no need to. It is full of brilliant observation and phrasing. It obviously contrasts the extraordinary with the very ordinary. It accepts the inevitable while admiring flawed attempts to do the impossible.

And, for anyone who doesn't know the poem or the painting, the leg of the disappearing Icarus is just in front of the boat.

It doesn't seem to have been decided yet who was the greatest poet of the twentieth century in English. When I was considerably younger, it was orthodox to think it was Eliot but the Modernist vogue has receded a bit since then. There is likely to be a big traditional vote for Hardy. It won't ever be Thom Gunn on a wide, popular sweep of opinion whereas Larkin and Betjeman will have their claims. But Auden, with his facility for great lines and beautiful love poems, could turn out to be the right answer.

My Favourite Poem - Leif Knauff

Well, I certainly wasn't expecting the first three poems chosen in this feature to be in three different languages. Or, for that matter, from three very different centuries. But that's pluralism for you, or diversity, or some other such thing that is to be celebrated.
Leif Knauff picks Stages by Hermann Hesse. Or Stufen, as its author called it.

http://moveablefeast.typepad.com/a_moveable_feast/2007/06/stufen_stages_b.html

My Favourite Poem - Colleen Hawkins

Colleen Hawkins nominates A Valediction Forbidding Mourning by John Donne.

http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/mourning.php

Both Sylvia Plath's Morning Song and Philip Larkin's Broadcast were strong contenders for the crown, but - to borrow a term from Mr Green's beloved horseracing - Dr John Donne wins it "on the nod" with A Valediction Forbidding Mourning. This poem never fails to move me and yet one would hardly expect a poem drawing so heavily on terminology and concepts taken from the seemingly rational and unemotional spheres of astronomy, metallurgy and mathematics to be quite so affecting. "Like gold to aery thinness beat" is possibly my all-time favourite line in a poem or song, but then again I also really rate "I was so upset that I cried all the way to the chip shop", so what do I know?

My Favourite Poem - Daniel Parsons

Friends, poets and readers of the website are invited to take part in this new feature in which you are simply asked to nominate your favourite poem. If you feel like saying a few words about your choice then please do but it isn't compulsory. You can e-mail via the address on the profile.

I am grateful to Daniel Parsons for starting us off with an appropriately early selection, The Iliad by Homer.

http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/iliad.html

Daniel remarks that he noticed a taste for violence in poetry in his choice, having also considered Ted Hughes and Daddy by Sylvia Plath.

It is Homer that is pictured here, not Daniel.