The Liverpool Poets

The Liverpool Poets- Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten but not necessarily in that order - are the subject of tomorrow evening's monthly meeting of the Portsmouth Poetry Society. St. Mark's Church, Derby Road, PO2 8HR. Introduced by me old mucker, Kevin Rogers, which is how Rod Stewart refers to Ronnie Wood. We ain't been together as such for very long but it already feels like we have, for good reasons not bad.

In the 1970's, as an embryo 'poet', the Liverpool Poets were like a godsend to me. They were pop music and yet passed for 'poetry'. Roger was once considered in the running for Poet Laureate. They weren't difficult. The fact that I passed over them in my university dissertation on British Poetry since 1945, in 1980, was questioned.

But, surely, we are talking about serious people, something a bit more 'highbrow', rather than these cheeky chancers who, as it turned out, made a good living out of coming from Liverpool, where the Beatles came from, being the English reply to the American 'Beat Poets', who definitely were taken seriously, and one of them becoming Top of the Pops with Lily the Pink. 

Quite why the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney and, still, Philip Larkin were  concentrating on writing such finely-crafted poems when one could attract multiples of the audience for that by doing a sort of music hall act, halfway between comedian and the sentimental idea of the 'poet' as the dreamy, thoughtful loner is hard to say but maybe they put art above box office.

Adrian Henri was the British answer to Allen Ginsberg in the same way that Cliff Richard was to Elvis Presley, and I'd rather have the 'safer' version, if that's what they were, in both cases. Roger's best claim to artistic success was how he re-worked e.e. cummings, like a sort of quirky, poetry Erik Satie. He almost could have got away with it but he was a commercial artist, had his act to sell and fell, quite successfully, really, between art, whimsy and 'comedy'. 

Having made a living out of it, and still working, I think, at 88, if I were him I'd be wondering if what I'd left behind was what I'd meant or if I could have been more honest about it and been more like John Gorman.

Which leaves us with Brian Patten, who was the upstart, pretty young one in The Mersey Sound, who - tempus fugit - died, aged 79, at end of September. How cute was he when he was the Davy Jones, the good looking one, who seemed somehow more traditionally 'poet' than the performance constructs the other two had set up for themselves.

I met them in 1979. I'm sure we all did. I was thrilled to. At that time, I'd have rather have met them than David Bowie. But we get over it eventually.

There might be such as thing as 'cool'. I suspect it's an apparition.

There was a time it applied to applied to the Liverpool Poets. And, yes, I think it was. 

The Fabulous Baker Boy

Another Fine Mess.
Not for the first time, Danny's got himself sacked from the BBC.
He should have known better and it wasn't big or clever but it shows how the second most dangerous thing in our culture, after all the things they rightly complain about, is the tendency among the politically correct to seek out offence where there is none.
In a generation of entertainers who have substituted swear words, gratuitous sexual references and there's also Framkie Boyle, many of who are not well-placed to pass judgement on Bernard Manning, Jim Davidson or Roy 'Chubby' Brown, for wit, Danny Baker has never needed to fall back on such strategies with 'nothing below the waist' one of his taglines, a fine line in the puncturing of pomposity and a wide range of reference points from when we were younger from the polite generation of Harrry Worth, Deryk Guyler and his sign-off at 11 on a Saturday morning taken from Leonard Sachs.
His chosen Desert Island Disc to save after Bernard Cribbins et al had been washed away was The Next Time by Cliff Richard, which he cited as the last hurrah of an age of innocence. This man is not a threat to our properness.
He has updated the tradition of Reithian values but now the BBC, who have been struggling in recent years, since the Cliff debacle, prefer to stick with the deadbeats they have rather than the greatest radio broadcaster of his generation. Radio 5 will struggle. I'm not doing Saturday mornings for them. I'll be off to Record Review on R3; some will presumably migrate to R4 and expect not much from the dull, slightly gormless Rev. Richard Coles while some poor sod is going to have to soldier on at R5 without the rights to the Sausage Sandwich Game. Five Live is up against it with Phil Williams leaving the late evening slot, the ingratiating Chris Warburton far too keen to impress whenever given the Breakfast slot where Nicky Campbell is at least clever, and now this.
The morning after Liverpool's miraculous result against Barcelona (which was actually news to me), all Five could do was broadcast Liverpool supporters shouting, in their chosen mode of celebration, so I turned over to R4 where they interviewed Roger McGough, who was characteristically fey, notwithstanding Evertonian, but endlessly preferable.
Very sorry to see you go, Dan. Saturday mornings won't be the same any more and I don't know where you will turn up next. At the height of my cycling career, in the mid-90's, I needed to get out on the road to pile up the miles of arduous endeavour of a weekend but my start would be delayed as long as possible to hear as much as I could of Baker and Kelly Upfront. 
I'll miss you is too easy to say.
--
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, last weekend's crisis of having nothing new to read was first of all filled by Daphne du Maurier, who I need to read more of, but then by Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters, which has waited patiently for donkey's years for my full attention.
I think it was worth waiting. Much longer and more complex than those beguiling essays like The Pastoral Symphony, The Immoralist or Strait is the Gate, I don't think I'm going to quite assimilate the whole diagram of characters available on Wikipedia but, being a novel about a novelist writing the novel that perhaps it turns out to be, one can't accuse it of not being many-layered, and it has memorable passages worthy of noting down,
he said my mistake was to start from an idea, and that I didn't allow myself to be guided sufficiently by the words

Look here, my dear fellow, I don't want to appear cynical but I have a horrror of reach-me-down sentiments

Whoever really loves abandons all sincerity

etcetera, etcetera

It isn't easy but it's worth the effort.
--
I hope to finish that before the arrival of This is Shakespeare by Emma Smith, which will mark a return to Shakespeare Studies for me after a hiatus. Prof Emma was on the wireless on Bank Holiday Monday. Luckily I was on R4 as I drifted in and out of consciousness. I heard Chaucer mentioned, some earnest talk about 'the canon' - yes, the bloody 'canon' which one minute is discredited as colonial, right-wing, nasty and insidious and the next is still there after all- and then something about Shakespeare. I thought, hello, this must be Prof Emma promoting her new book. Well, she sold one to me.
We will see what we think when it arrives and gets full attention, because it will because it sounds pretty good. It's going to need to be. She has some ground to retrieve but, unlike the self-proclaimed 'controversialist', Prof Sir Stanley Wells, I'm very open to listening to new ideas whether I like them or not. I don't regard myself as a controversialist.

There again, I don't regard Danny Baker as a controversialist, either. I don't agree with him that Steely Dan were the second best band after The Beatles or that Earth, Wind and Fire were the best Disco act.
I might go with T. Rex being the second best band after The Magnetic Fields and Odyssey being the best Disco act but I'm not going to go on Twitter to shout him down. He is very welcome to his point of view. 

Politics Explained, maybe for the last time

I'm finding it soothing, almost respite, just not to talk about it any more.

Sure, it still provides a grim form of entertainment in private but the game's up, not least after the half serious amount of cash the referendum and the American election relieved me of last year.

The joke is over about the blonde advertisement for himself whose name I'm not even going to use because the oxygen of publicity is all he lives for and those who still think he's a 'personality' are beyond our help. Oh, that's just him being him, they'll say.
Well exactly, so ignore him, then.

I had more time for Mogg in a post-ironic way, the way in which Vicky Coren meant 'I find you strangely attractive' but the emphasis has now shifted from the attractive to the strange.

I never thought the time would come when one could remember Ronald Reagan almost with affection.
It was impressed on us at school, under a series of subject titles that went from Civics, Economic & Public Affairs to British Constitution, by a seethingly right-wing teacher, that there were processes in place that ensured the way the country was run, in today's corporate usage, were 'robust'. It was not made clear that by the time we were his age all that vast edifice of protocol would be the plaything of vanity projects for bumptious inadequates.
One minute it's a ringing endorsement of a quite clearly beleaguered Prime Minister but the day before and the day after it is the transparent setting out of stalls in another vaunting bid for the so-called top job that Cameron beat him to in the first place and that last year he announced in ham-acting humility couldn't be him.
He stands for nothing whatsoever beyond his own opportunity. I'm a victim of his incessant campaign on his own behalf just by having to set it out, for my own benefit more than yours, when I could actually be listening to Toots & the Maytals.
I know that you know that I know that you know that and we all know he's two-timing us.
-

1967 seemed turbulent and dangerous at the time, we are told, but what a joy it was to hear Tony Blackburn recreate his first Radio 1 broadcast oin Radio 1 Vintage. Radio 1 kept me going until about 1974. The second ever record played, it turns out, was the masterpiece Massachusetts and it felt profound to be reminded of
When I think of all the good times that I've wasted
Having good times,
by Eric Burdon and the Animals alongside such other giants of the soundtrack of our pop-picking lives like Diana Ross & the Supremes and Cliff.

Also, seen in a good light last night on Sex, Chip Shops & Poetry; 50 Years of the Mersey Sound were some of the heroes of my teens who have been superseded by others since. But let's give Roger, Adrian and Brian their due, not necessarily in that order, for at least being in place to exploit the zeitgeist, make themselves a living from their finely-crafted bohemian image even if some of the reviews by snooty, elitist poetry critics of the time derided their work for reasons that never went away.
Some of my adoration of them was based on a realization that, Blimey, it's possible to get away with stuff like that and we don't all have to be T.S. Eliot and it was Allen Ginsberg, their godfather of Beat, that I probably thought I saw through first before reluctantly, years later, deciding to shelve my Liverpool poets books upstairs among the 'other books' because they somehow didn't seem to belong alongside Larkin, Auden, and now Elizabeth Bishop, and certainly not John Donne.
But maybe I'll bring them back downstairs. You have to like them even if it's only for the sheer nerve that you think you can see they know they're getting away with it. But Brian Patten, the young apprentice to the Ginsberg-Warhol surrogate, Adrian, for who I bought a spritzer in Cartmel College bar, Lancaster, in 1978 or 79, overawed to be in the presence of anyone quite so Adrian Henri, was perhaps the poet among them even if, like Don Paterson and any number of us since, he only had to see rain and he had a poem.

So, it's nostalgia, then, for me as my 58th birthday comes, as usual, just as the year goes colder.

Poets

for Roger and Brian
and i.m. Adrian

we told them we were poets
took trouble to go home
atleastaftermidnight
from parties in L8
and knew whimsicalwords
in sad thoughtful phrasing
would persuade birds
not to hesitate
itwasamazing
      

     

Poetry? Never heard of it

The Poetry community, such as it is, is an odd thing, fragmented, clique-ridden and with only a fragile centre of canonical names and household-famous poems but to say that these 11 names would be ones you've never heard of is, as one or two comments already point out, pushing it a bit,  http://www.partisanmagazine.com/blog/2015/6/27/the-10-best-uk-poets-youve-never-heard-of-plus-1-you-should-read-again-you-lazy-git


If the link doesn't work, it's a blog called 'Partisan'.
We are, of course, betting without Yeats but still, to suggest that Adrian Henri has become obscure suddenly makes me feel very old indeed. Has that much time really passed already.
He was most gentle in answering my naive and innocent questions in the bar of Cartmel College, Lancaster University in the winter of 1978/79 after a reading. I had bought him a white wine and soda and was secretly jealous of those who had cornered Roger McGough. The occasion is not likely to be found in any memoir of either Liverpool poet but for me, at that tender, impressionable age, it was like talking to McCartney when you actually liked Lennon better (or vice versa). When he'd finished his drink, he offered to buy me one but I declined the offer, awestruck and unable to see why Adrian Henri should be buying me a drink.
It would appear from this evidence found on the internet that the white wine and soda that I bought him wasn't the only one he ever had.

Sixteen Quid to see Roger McGough

http://www.newtheatreroyal.com/index.php/whats-on/roger-mcgough

I was just wondering whether to make a trip to LRB in London next month to see Don Paterson, Jo Shapcott and David Harsent. It's six pounds and the travel won't cost much more than that if arranged parsimoniously.
Then I picked up the programme for the New Theatre Royal and my eyes stood out on stalks as if in a cartoon on seeing that Roger McGough wants sixteen pounds for you to hear him read his pomes.

Sixteen Quid to see Roger McGough

Roger McGough
That Awkward Age
Sat 19 February7.30pm
Tickets £16

I know in a recession times are tough
and poets need to live and all that stuff
but that looks to me like a rip-off.
For that much I'd want Peter Ustinov.

For half that we saw Macbeth killed by Macduff.
This is beyond a joke. Enough's enough.
I don't know what they can be thinking of
- it's sixteen quid to see Roger McGough.

Top 6 - Roger McGough

In the 70's we used to wonder what the Rolling Stones would do when they got old and having waited those 40 years to find out we know that they would keep on doing exactly the same thing. The same could be said of Roger McGough, a teenage hero of mine in the mid-70's but whose whimsical hippiedom hasn't aged quite as well as other claims on my affections. Now comfy and cosy on Poetry Please, some young gunslingers now might not believe you if you told them he was once really cool and state of the art.

Thus, this selection is a little bit of a nostalgia trip, but there's plenty still to like among the witty wordplay and cuteness. If he was partly e.e.cummings and partly Allen Ginsberg then the influence of cummings was always likely to be more beneficial.

Roger's biography, Said and Done, is worth a read for its anecdotes of zany sixties life on the road, particularly the story of the late night stops at motorway service stations, the homebound poets concocting the most outlandish dishes from the self-service, like coffees with celery sticks in them or steak and kidney pie and custard (but don't quote me exactly on that). The bored cashier would just take one look, key in the items and say,'one pound, eleven and six, please'. That is misquoted because I don't have the book here but I can vouch for his generosity in contributing a poem to our magazine at University and, at the end of the reading we arranged, just handing me a pile of books to sell, telling me the price and then not checking my takings once the crowds had dispersed.

40-love is an obvious selection, using McGough's visual effects of word arrangement to full effect, making the eyes move across the page as if watching tennis.

after the merrymaking, love? will always stay in the memory for its line, 'sleep./ In the onrush of its lava.'

The poem he let us have for the much unlamented Allusions magazine was Poem for a Dead Poet and it wasn't just any old outtake he had lying around because it made it into the New Volume follow up to the hugely popular Mersey Sound anthology,

St. Francis, he was

of the words. Words?

Why, he could almost make 'em talk.

Thank you, sir. The cheque might still be in the post.

.

But it's forlorn melancholy with the sad little joke that he did best, and still does.

In ofa sunday, it's

[i]... *

miss mass

and wonder

if mass

misses me

(*the typographical tricks on this occasion mine for editorial purposes);

.

in kinetic poem no.2, at his most cummingsonian, it's

without love

i'm just a

has been away

too long in the tooth

.

and although long poems are usually best avoided in this Top 6 feature, and so we haven't had Homer or Virgil yet, one probably can't avoid summer with monika, with such morose charm as 'your finger, sadly, has a familiar ring about it'.

He does rather lend himself to quotation because that is the whole point. Nobody apparently relished the job of 'poet' more and now that poets are more likely to be either po-faced creative writing tutors on university pay rolls or 'performance poets' few could have carried it off for quite so long.

Photo credit- Murdo Macleod.