Tony Harrison

I was away for a few days during which I heard of the passing of Tony Harrison. Thus my brief appreciation and obituary are delayed but if anybody qualifies for such a thing here, it is surely him.

His poems first seemed almost shockingly anachronistic on account of their classical couplets in an age of free verse and sometimes gratuitous cleverness. The other shock value he became better known for- the vernacular obscenities in v - was an entirely erroneous scandal created by the less literary sections of the tabloid press who went out of their way to misinterpret a masterpiece and attack Channel 4, the perceived 'left wing' and contemporary poetry in general by taking some of its language at even less than face value.

Gladly, poetry readers don't turn to such publications for literary criticism.

In such poems as Cypress and Cedar, A Kumquat for John Keats and his continuous flow of sonnets that took on such issues as the 'ownership of language', Harrison established himself in a much longer and deeper tradition ahead of the other film-poems he made on such subjects as the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, Alzheimer's Disease, Prometheus and his Gaze of the Gorgon on the Iraq war.

The later years of the C20th were a period in which any vestigial stereotype of the 'poet' as a fainting hypochondriac regularly overawed by their own sensitivity should have been put away for good had anybody still been reading contemporary poetry. But precious few were. The broad generation that included Tony, as well as Don Paterson, Michael Donaghy, Carol Ann Duffy, Sean O'Brien and Paul Muldoon were 'tough guys' and not many put up a more coherent or resilient barricade than Harrison who was as much a translator of Aeschylus and Greek Tragedy as a major English poet in his own right.

He might have been an anachronism in that he took part in literature as something with so much longer and deeper perspectives. They simply don't seem to make them like that anymore. Suggestions that they might never do so again might be premature but at a time when literary giants are thin on the ground and dimininshing in number, the passing of Tony Harrison feels significant.

If only the merest handful of poets are remembered in any detail from each by future generations, I'd have the house on Tony Harrison being one of those still valued in a hundred, or two hundred, years' time.

As long as 'poetry' written by humans continues to be a thing. I think it will. 

Free Verse

 It was my star turn at Portsmouth Poetry Society this evening, some thoughts on free verse having been my theme for this year's programme. It went very well with a good turnout, not necessarily due to me being the advertised box office attraction.

I hadn't been entirely convinced about my introduction and so had circulated James Fenton on the subject, too, but it went well enough with the kindly people of PPS so here is another chapter towards some eventual Collected Essays.

--

 

Free Verse

Two of the best known remarks about ‘free verse’ are Robert Frost’s, regarding Carl Sandburg, that it is like ‘playing tennis without a net’ and that it is ‘cut-up prose’ which is less easy to attribute to anyone in particular. They both contain within them the idea that free verse isn’t quite the ‘real thing’ but it is for me because, after all these years, I’ve settled on a definition of a poem that says it is,

a statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end.

That might not be the most ambitious or Romantic idea of what poetry is and some will find it underwhelming but poetry is a wide church and ‘in my father’s house are many homes’.

In trying to find out where free verse all began I expected to find evidence of it before C19th France but I haven’t. Homer, Horace and Ovid didn’t see any reason to rhyme but they are devout in their adherence to their sometimes complex rhythmic patterns. In one of his most amusing excursions, Simon Armitage explained the structure of one of the medieval poems he has translated, possibly Gawain and The Green Knight, and for thousands of years, it seems, poetry was a very disciplined art.

‘Verse’ implies structure, the most easily found definition on the internet being, 

writing arranged with a metrical rhythm, typically having a rhyme.

‘Poetry’ doesn’t have to be that. The same source gives, 

literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm.

That might not be the whole story but a significant difference between the two definitions is ‘arranged’. Perhaps free verse likes to pretend that it hasn’t been quite so deliberately ‘arranged’ but I’d be disappointed if it hadn’t.

Wherever there’s an accepted rule there will always be somebody who sees fit to break it and claim for themselves some sort of revolutionary status. Artists, including poets, are often among the sort of people who enjoy being iconoclastic. That’s fine. Go ahead.France in the C19th might also have been where the other, equally apparently oxymoronic ‘prose poem’ emerged. They were busy, trying their damnedest to break rules. Neither those who think that poetry should rhyme or those who think that they’re part of a revolution need do any more than show us a good one.

Rhyme might also have come into English poetry from Italy or France in the Middle Ages, Italian and French being languages in which it can be difficult to avoid rhyme whereas in English one has to try a bit harder and, often to subtle effect, use ‘half-rhymes’. In English, with it being more difficult to achieve, it can be either richer if done carefully or look awkward if the rhyme has appeared to dictate the choice of words. And there are those who still think they don’t have anything to do with metre, syllable counts, rhymes or word patterning because their ‘voice’ is pure and natural.

Unfortunately for them, the language will have done it for them. Having accepted language, rather than, say, colour or music, as their medium, they have made themselves its prisoner. The late, great Roddy Lumsden once told of poets who showed him poems that they said contained none of the verbal effects traditionally associated with ‘poetry’ until he had a look and pointed out inadvertent assonance, rhythm and all such other linguistic ‘special effects’ taught in school as being those things to be identified and appreciated as ‘poetry’. The effect of such prescriptive teaching was to put many pupils off poetry for good, as if it was a homework exercise to be answered, an equation to be solved or some scripture that revealed wisdom rather than something to be enjoyed.

Perhaps language can’t help being poetry. Tony Harrison once reported over-hearing perfect iambic pentameter on a train in the sentence, 

He worked for British Gypsum outside Leek.

It happens whether you want it to or not. The point about poetry, or art of any kind, is that it is presented as such, as per the ‘found objects’ of Marcel Duchamp and the Modernist debt to France seems bottomless. We could spend less time worrying whether a poem is ‘poetry’ or not and concern ourselves more with whether it’s any good or not.

What ‘free verse’ needs to do is establish itself as something other than ‘chopped-up prose’ and it might do that by demonstrating that it has achieved cohesion and artistic effect however it sees fit. That might be deciding where the lines end, internal rhythms, semantic fields or even the failed attempt to avoid any such thing.

Perhaps there’s no such thing as ‘free verse’ and it lives a deluded life, like so many of us possibly do, believing itself to be free when it can’t be, a bit like Jean-Paul Sartre. 

--

What I decided in the end was that I don't first concern myself in music with time signatures or what key it's in. Neither do I worry whether, say, Billie Holliday is jazz, soul or blues. It's only a matter of whether it's any good or not and I found T.S. Eliot coming to a similar conclusion in his 1917 essay, Reflections on Vers Libre, that,
we conclude that the division between Conservative Verse and 'vers libre'  does not exist, there is only good verse, bad verse and chaos.

Great minds might think alike but also mine thought likke his did.

Sean O'Brien - Quartier Perdu

Sean O'Brien, Quartier Perdu (Comma)

While some poets write only poetry, others move into other genres, too. Sophie Hannah is now a crime fiction writer, which is presumably more lucrative than poems; Tony Harrison's films and theatre work are as well-known as his poems; David Harsent and Michael Symmons-Roberts have written libretti for composers amongst other things and Glyn Maxwell is a playwright. Although Sean O'Brien has published two novels, this is his second book of short stories, as well as plays for radio, translations and criticism, he is, like Auden, still primarily known for his poetry. Quartier Perdu deserves to put that glib assumption up for re-assessment.
By all means, these pieces, like his other fiction, fill out more detail from the world view available in his poetry, the surrealism and gothic horror coming straight out of an early-ish poem like Thrillers and Cheese, but if at first one is reminded of the way that a Murakami novel can rapidly develop from laid-back domesticity into a nightmarish adventure that is only the other side of a wall or lurking under a fragile surface of a recognizably ordinary life, one can't ever forget O'Brien quoting Douglas Dunn's poem, The River Through The City, as a major influence. O'Brien is forever in its debt.
But he is a literary writer, never knowingly avoiding any allusion that suggests itself. Having produced a version of Dante's Inferno, that is in evidence here, alongside The Odyssey, poets such as Tennyson, Marvell and Larkin and any amount of knowing nods and quotation from past literature, not least T.S. Eliot who most notably made his books from bits of other people's. But like Eliot, whose work is very much his own, O'Brien has by now created an idiosyncracy of which his is the only likeness. If you think you've spotted an intertextual reference, you probably have and at the bottom of page 1,
Her smug prettiness was all that was the case with her.
if you weren't sure if Wittgenstein was being subliminally hinted at quite so early doors then one can look back and assume he was.
If we are chronically on the brink of subterranean nether worlds, whether being rowed by faceless boatman to unknown places, undergoing a change of consciousness via the moly drug of Circe or encountering ghosts or the suggestion of them, we soon get used to it but O'Brien's prose writing here is often a gentler thing than the characteristically uncompromising realpolitik of much of the poetry. Despite the literariness and the genre mannerism demanded by tales of mystery and imagination, this is fine writing with an entirely convincing naturalness. Only perhaps in Change for Low Rixham does the action become a bit more comic book than necessary.
If it would be an understatement to say the stories share a sense of dislocation, it is no exaggeration to say that O'Brien has a bottomless stock of telling expressions of ennui,
the watery crepuscular light of this town with its air of perpetual valediction.

That is from the title story, an epistolary account of a girl who goes into mitteleuropa to research the papers of a bad poet, gets no replies to her increasingly anxious letters home and is never seen again.
Although one becomes aware that something unsettling is bound to happen once the pattern has been established it is perhaps only in Lovely that the first date is going so apparently well that the macabre ending is totally to be expected but if one is led into thinking that you've sussed it, the formula has been outed and motifs are recurring with ominous regularity, the rest of the book is going to be more of the same, no, the best pieces are actually still to come.
Ex Libris has turned into an encounter with Dr. Johnson and Boswell that uncomfortably brings in avatars but becomes a meditation on literature and the novelists' revenge on critics whereas Revanant makes no effort to disguise the figure of Maurice Ashover, the biographical subject of his surrogate as a poet, Macklin, as being based not very loosely on Larkin. Macklin might have all but given up on poetry but is invited to contribute to a radio programme and hasn't been able to escape the way his subject took over his own life. He disappears into someone else's poems and the story is shudderingly more worrying for its understatedness.
That masterpiece follows close upon A Cold Spot, which is a calmly beautiful ghost story but political themes are not forgotten for long. There is clearly going to be more to come from Certain Measures than the cut-price crowd doing their Christmas shopping in Oxford Street so disarmingly seen, in some vintage O'Brien, for what they are, the diagnosis of a 'cure for capitalism...downsized God' and erasure of 'me from myself' having come only a few pages earlier. When it does come, and civil disturbance is orchestrated by the Police, the news item presented as further high street horror we all need to be protected from, one might ask of O'Brien whether or not he is siding with conspiracy theorists and whether or not he appreciates living in a country that, imperfect though it may be, employs security services to allow him to write and publish as he sees fit. It's a pertinent piece but suggests to me more questions about the defence of liberalism than the sinister forces of perceived tyranny.  
And, in A Green Shade, the 'monetarization' of university resources is lampooned and the purpose of universities, nowadays ostensibly 'positioning themselves in world terms', considered in the light of whether Lord Pybus's Ground, an area made over for contemplation, reading and sometimes performance, should be 'developed'. The issue is settled, non-acimably but fittingly, in the masque peformed there, in most literary fashion.
And then, presumably significantly as the last story, is The Aspen Grove, by no means the first to use the idea of having finished doing what one used to do (Macklin, above, had done that) but Morgan has given up his university post, book reviewing and poetry readings and gone back to his novel, so far seven years in the making,
Morgan had given up women as well as everything else. It didn't occur to him that this renunciation might be reciprocal.
But the poem is about a statue, and perhaps he is infatuated with it and just in case we hadn't been sated with enough literary allusion, it is an inversion of Orpheus and Eurydice and, as we probably always knew we were due to be, we are left,
turned to stone and the stone would burn forever.

Being a tremendous admirer of Sean O'Brien at his best, and finding any thoughts of a correspondance with the Ashover/Macklin axis in Revanant harrowing and to be vigorously contested, I adored this book and read it not in one sitting but really only with breaks to look at e-mail and be delayed by a chess habit for which no cure has yet been found.
It might not rival the short fiction of James Joyce, George Moore, Katherine Mansfield or William Trevor, if they might be thought of as paragon examples, as some of the best in the language, not least because some knowledge of poetry, a subscription to the TLS and a bookish mindset might be required to appreciate it for what it is. But it might stand alongside Sean O'Brien's best poems as his most memorable work. It's rare for me to be still up gone 10.30 on a Sunday night, fuelled by Merlot, only because I wanted to get on and do it rather than wait until tomorrow night.
Quartier Perdu is a book to relish, sometimes sentence by sentence, for its dark humour, layers of irony, untrustworthy beauty and unashamed panache, never apologetic about being what it most obviously is, a book for book people, the brooding machismo still there somewhere and the nightmares only one more sleep away but we are a played-out generation, us, and the exquisite account of that trauma is what we have left to enjoy.     
   

Catullus translated by Daisy Dunn

The Poems of Catullus, a new translation by Daisy Dunn (William Collins)

There's a bit more to translating Latin than my grounding in the discipline from 40 years ago allows for. Having been told quite categorically that amo, amare was the verb for both 'to love' and 'to like', I immediately wondered, in Catullus 72, how a translator could differentiate two meanings from the same word in a line like,
                               Because such a wound compels a lover
To love more, but to like less.

So I go back to my Bristol Classical Press edition, with commentary by Kenneth Quinn, to see if amare was the word used both times. This remarkable volume was clearly a mistake purchase because it has Latin text only but the poems begin on page 1, the commentary on page 88 and the index on page 457, such is the magnificent detail of the notes.
Of course, the original line does not use the same word for both senses but we have,
sed bene uelle minus

which the note tells us has the sense of 'being fond of' before providing much further enlightenment.

It is a brilliant poem that captures a complex emotional contradiction but the eternal problem with poetry in translation is that, unless one is fluent in the original language (in which case you don't need a translation), one only has the translator's word for it. Poetry can only exist in its first language and the translator has to choose between a number of options how to render the poem into another.
Our versions of Ovid at school were accurate prose translations of the meaning of the words. Our aim was to get good marks in exams rather than create an alternative poetic masterpiece so we learned the whole set book in translation and in the exam only had to recognize the beginning, write down our version from memory and realize when we had to stop. That part of the exam was more a memory game than a test of translating ability but it worked and the results achieved by Mr. Winstanley's class were tremendous.
Nevill Coghill's Canterbury Tales reproduce Chaucer's couplets but such a strategy can lead one into needing a rhyme and not having any available word, and Peter Dale's versions of Francois Villon surely reduce the medieval French poetry in places to a condition of doggerel somewhat below the quality of the first-hand text. The other option is to make a whole new poem from the author's but that seems to me to make the translation more the poem of the translator than the poet. It is a difficult subject and one needs to be careful. When I wrote about Tomas Transtromer a few months ago, I found myself re-tweeted by a poet who does some translating and she said I was a 'poetry translation sceptic'.
Well, yes, I am. But having enjoyed Daisy Dunn's life of Catullus and finding that my edition of the poems didn't have translations, I thought I'd better get her versions. I was convinced there was a book of translations here somewhere because I thought I had a book so old and prudish that it refused to even Bowdlerize poem 16. But I can't find it and I don't know how anybody could produce a version of 16 in any other terms anyway although it must be said that Kenneth's Quinn's commentary is more than somewhat circumlocutory, and eventually decides,
We may translate line 1 with Copley, 'Nuts to you, boys, nuts and go to hell'. But the literal, obscene meaning, though submerged, remains available...
Oh, really.

Those of us who remember the outrage summoned up by some of the less literary daily newspapers when Channel 4 broadcast Tony Harrison's v, in 1985, can only guess at how many burst bloodvessels they would have suffered had Catullus been writing then.
It's no big deal, is it. Daisy's Catullus is a laugh out loud collection. I refer you to 15, 32 and 33, among any number of others but I'm not going to quote the highlights here because my mother and father sometimes look to see what I've been writing about. Catullus is forthright, frank and unabashed in such poems and probably best known for them but he can also be exquisite and when one sees, in 70, 
         'But what a lady says to a lover in the moment
Ought to be written on the wind and running water.'

one remembers that poems are made out of other poems, books out of other books, everything comes from somewhere else and either Keats' epitaph was not as original as we thought or great minds do think alike.
But Daisy is clearly a poet in her own right as well as a classical scholar. These new translations are elegant, very thoughtfully made and highly readable. In an inspired piece of translating, she uses modern French, as she explains in the introduction, to recreate Catullus' use of Celtic words where the usual Latin wouldn't do because his native Verona was 'a part of Gaul for as long as he lived'.
Poetry-in-translation-sceptic I may be but the point I was making about Transtromer, and it applies again here, is that a translator with both a complete grasp of the original and a genuine talent for poetry of their own can make hugely satisfying versions that represent the poem authentically in another language.
And, for those who get beyond the shorter poems, those pieces of reportage from his social life in which he was never backwards in coming forward or prepared to call a spade anything less than a combine harvester, there are the magna opera with titles in the 60's. It's as if Shakespeare was known for having characters called Bottom, some innuendo in Twelfth Night about 'her C's, her U's and her T's', and the range of insults that emanate from Thersites and was never given credit for the profundity of Hamlet or Lear but a genuine bad boy is only convincing if he can show he can do the proper job as well (let's have a footnote here to make it look more academic). Catullus was the real thing and as translator, scholar and poet in her own right, so is Daisy Dunn.
My own few versions of Ovid were 'poems' made into 10-syllable lines, to at least acknowledge that Ovid wrote in strict metre, but they were done from other translations and I only glanced back at the Latin to see if I hadn't strayed too far from the primary source. I wouldn't claim to belong anywhere in the same league as Seamus Heaney or Sean O'Brien but I suspect they had a similar strategy in their respective Aeneid's and Dante's if we really knew. I doubt if Daisy needed as many artificial (sic) aids, though, and that is evident from the freshness of these poems.
I've never had a book of translations on my shortlist for Best Collection of the Year before and I usually include only books of poems first published in the year, rather than poems written over 2000 years ago,    
but I'll begin this year's notes towards a shortlist with this book and make up a rule about that later.   

NOTE. Just attaching the 'labels' to this effortless exercise in shallow name-dropping, I did at least swerve the opportunity to list such names as George Best, Pete Doherty and Alex Higgins as examples of 'bad boys who could do the proper job as well'.

The Echo Chamber

As Radio 4's The Echo Chamber finishes another of its short runs of four programmes in the 4.30pm Sunday slot, it is an opportune time to congratulate both it and Paul Farley on an excellent series and wonder, not for the first time, if half an hour a week isn't too much to allocate to a proper contemporary poetry magazine on the BBC.
I doubt if such a tiny side issue would be part of the business plan of any newly reformed BBC under the new government's review of this insidiously leftist, arty, subversive, state sponsored bunch of militants. How outrageous it is that they waste so much time and money on the Proms, Radio 3, I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, The Danny Baker Show, Only Connect and some fine things on BBC4 whenever they can find enough to pay an academic to write a series on the Renaissance in Britain or Vicky Coren to do Bohemians. Why not have more shows on cookery, interior decor or buying antiques in order to flog them again. I must admit that the episode of 60 Minute Makeover that I contributed to some years ago was screened on Pick TV the other day but, luckily, only two people I know saw it. It wasn't my fault and there was nothing I could do about it, and, yes, it gets more awful every time I think about it. But that is more reason why we need more Echo Chamber, so that very minor poets are not diverted into, literally, wallpaper programmes.
The latest Echo Chambers included an interview with Clive James, the admirable Helen Mort, someone called Andrew McMillan and ended with no less than Tony Harrison reading a new poem.
Helen Mort is fine and managed to not quite lapse into the quagmire of Creative Writing-speak and even if she flirted with it, the poems she writes compensate for it.
Clive James continues to sign off quite gloriously and we must all hope he can continue to do so for some time yet.
I had to have some doubts about McMillan who claims a great affinity with Thom Gunn who had died before he discovered his work. McMillan, born 1988, can't be expected to have known much about Gunn before 2004, when Gunn died. But just how much he can claim to be a natural inheritor is another matter. From what I heard, and what little I've read, it's possible that McMillan's appreciation of Gunn was as a free verse, homo-erotic poet and not much more. I don't know enough about McMillan yet to say, perhaps he includes the strict metrical verse, the existentialism, the breaking down of the protagonist/antagonist divide and much more about Gunn. Anybody taking Thom Gunn as an exemplar needs to have developed through the discipline of metrical verse, much acknowledged in his debt to Yvor Winters and J.V. Cunningham, rather than assume one can go straight to free verse without any such grounding.  The reason why Gunn's apparently looser free verse poems are any good is because he could have also done it the other way. It's not good enough to see him only alongside Gary Snyder and the like and it's a trap for the unwary to think one can be as free as one likes without knowing what it's like to be formal. It means not much otherwise and tends to look like less than a pale imitation.
Whereas Tony Harrison returns with a monumental poem, Polygons, which is not in the heroic couplets we have come to expect of him. I find it was first published in the LRB and you can find yourself a copy on their website.
As far as I'm aware, Harrison's last published poems were in Under the Clock (2005), which looked to me then as if they were too close for comfort to the doggerel that Harrison's poems generally rise so far above. But then I went to a conference in Oxford and heard the book given thoroughly respectful, serious academic treatment and so was glad to assume it was my mistake.
Polygons is something of a career retrospective, going back over his attachment to Ancient Greece, his NT versions of Aeschylus and Sophocles as well as time spent with contemporary makars, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. If you remember a George Harrison song called All Those Years Ago, it's a highbrow version of that. I was concerned that such a significant statement from such a grand, old man of poetry would give me a decision to make about what has been the best poem of 2015 because that decision has been done and dusted for quite some time.
Luckily, it doesn't. It's prolix and can be heavy-going in places while undoubtedly containing many memorable moments. At the age of 78, Tony is giving himself perhaps 10 years or more before asking that his ashes be scattered at Delphi, is it, which is good to hear. Whether or not we can look forward to anything more as good as Cypress and Cedar or A Kumquat for John Keats remains to be seen but he surely doesn't owe us any more.
So, top marks to Paul Farley and The Echo Chamber and a note to the BBC and anybody whose intentions are to make it into the new Channel 5- half an hour, once a week, something like this, that would do.

Green on Harrison

The current programme of the Portsmouth Poetry Society finishes next Weds, 17th July, 7.30, St. Mark's Church, Derby Road, Portsmouth, with an evening on Tony Harrison. And I have inherited the very pleasant job of introducing it.
I offer my few minutes on the subject below but will also make mention of a story to be found in Romana Huk's essay Tony Harrison and the Leeds Renaissance, which can be found in the Bloodaxe Critical Anthology edited by Neil Astley. As well as a strong contingent of poets in Leeds in the early 60's was the emerging comedian Barry Cryer and Harrison appeared in reviews there at the time. It says that Cryer wanted to take Tony on tour with him as the straight man as part of his show.
How different things could have been if Cryer and Harrison had become an item.

Tony Harrison

Tony Harrison is probably best known for his film poems. These have included The Blasphemer’s Banquet, which gathered together a number of banned writers at a dinner party for Salman Rushdie; Black Daisies for the Bride, about Alzheimer’s Disease; The Shadow of Hiroshima, about the atomic bomb; Prometheus, about coal miners, and most famously, v., about the desecration of the cemetery where his parents are buried.

v. was the subject of outraged headlines in 1985 in some newspapers on account of its insistent use of a particular word that Philip Larkin had also used from time to time but the condemnation served mainly to demonstrate that The Daily Mail, amongst others, is not the best place to go for commentary on contemporary poetry.

Born in 1937, Harrison emerged in the early 60’s at a time when a group of young poets were based around Leeds University, like Geoffrey Hill, Wole Soyinka, Ken Smith, Jon Silkin, John Heath-Stubbs and more. These were perceived as considerably more politically engaged and challenging poets than the more sedate ‘Movement’ poets of the 1950’s.

In the 1980’s I remember reading that Harrisonwas the only person to have ‘poet’ recorded as his occupation in his British passport but I suspect there are many more now. But another part of his work has been adapting Classical drama for the modern theatre. The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus is an adaptation of Sophocles, and there are versions of The Oreisteiaby Aeschylus, Moliere’s The Misanthropeand further classical French and ancient texts.

His poems have predominantly had this political edge, the School of Eloquence being a set of sonnets on the ownership of language and the class divide; he also writes of his parents’ lives as well as meditations such as Cypress and Cedarand A Kumquat for John Keats that make apposite contrasts between life’s various sweetness and bitterness.

In 2000, he published Laureate’s Block which contained the poems written after the death of Ted Hughes and before the appointment of Andrew Motion as Poet Laureate. He had been widely suggested as the rightful successor but having published a poem in celebration the ‘Abdication of King Charles III’, he then issued the Laureate’s Block poem, expressing his vexation at still being associated with the post.

In fact, his sympathies are more with one of his other great heroes, the Roundhead Puritan, John Milton.

It has not been easy to find an illustrative stanza to quote that both shows Harrison’s passionate mode of expression and can be broadcast in our pre-watershed slot here, but these lines from Them & Uz are representative of much of his brilliant and polemical writing,

Green on Harrison

In a slight change to the programme of the Portsmouth Poetry Society, the last meeting before the August recess will now still be on Tony Harrison but it will be introduced by me.
I'm glad to be doing it as long as nobody thinks I've had more than my fair share of introducing subjects on the programme that is just ending. I promise to do fewer next year.
But, roll up, roll up. 7.30, Weds 17th July, St. Mark's Church, North End, Portsmouth.
I'll put the introduction on here then.

Honestly

Poems, by which I mean the best of them, are some of my favourite things. Some carefully chosen words chosen by someone quite good at choosing them and put into a shape by them and they are good at doing that, too, when words are already one's favourite and most interesting things.
There can't be much wrong with that, can there. It is a victimless offence if it is an offence at all.
But the word 'poem' has always brought with it associations of something a bit fey. I know that poems can be harder and much more atavistic, if need be, than the appreciation of the 'good shooting scene' I heard being lauded in the office today by two lads who like films, especially if they feature Al Pacino and Robert de Niro.
But poems, as we know, aren't all about daffodils and swooning and, if you want to take on harder blokes than me on the issue then I'd be glad to direct you to Don Paterson, Ciaran Carson, Sean O'Brien and Tony Harrison. And Carol Ann Duffy.
It's not so much that I don't feel happy to be regarded as someone who writes 'poems'. I just don't like thinking of myself as a 'poet'. When I met Ian Duhig a few years ago, he asked my name and thought for a moment and then asked, 'Are you a poet?' and I had to say, no, not really.

I have written some poems. I wish they weren't called that and I wish that Roger McGough, amongst others, hadn't made it sound even more camp by calling them 'pomes' in the 1970's, when fey was the much more the message. But it's too late now to ask for a re-wording, a move to re-name them 'word-structures' in some hopeless, politically correct move that could never hope to succeed. And so, poems, and thus, poet, it is.

But I don't want to be thought of as a 'critic', either. I put my brief summaries of books I have read on here and that is known as 'reviewing', which is fine, but also 'criticism'. But I don't want to be thought of as a 'critic', which is generally regarded as having something bad to say about the work under consideration. In most cases I wouldn't have read the book in the first place if I hadn't expected to like it and so I hope I rarely post serious reservations.
But, as I was re-reading Larkin's Further Requirements, the follow up book to Required Writing, the volume of collected reviews, interviews and sundry items, I was immediately impressed by the way he wouldn't use superlatives to describe the best recent poems or else what would be left to describe the best of all time, among which he mentions Tennyson. But he remains refreshing, after all these years, when reviewing the Guinness Book of Poetry 1958-59, presumably the Forward or Salt book of its day, and saying,
And yet there is not much in it. More potent factors are the rottenness of poetry in any year...

And wouldn't it be great if critics said so more often if given books to comment on that they didn't like. So many reviews these days seem to approach the challenge like an O level student who regards their job as proving that the author in question was a genius and it falls to them to establish the fact. 
Not everything is a new, mind-blowing revolution in the art of letters. Most of it is, inevitably, derivative, and if we must be called 'poets', which is flattering to some of us, or 'critics', which I don't like the sound of, then we ought to do the job properly.
Whatever dirt Larkin was attributed with, and I'll just about allow the Thatcherism into this bargain, there was a certain honesty to admire in him. And, with a curriculum vitae of good, old fashioned, left wing credentials to my name, it won't make me a rabid right-winger to say so.
I'm happy to say that in each year of doing this website I have had no problem in finding something to genuinely admire when picking a favourite to nominate as the year's best but it might be that I've lucky so far.

Top 6 and Poetry Please Review - Tony Harrison

Poetry isn't well-served by radio. Ian McMillan's tiggerish enthusiasm on The Verb would be best saved for the under-fives and Roger McGough's Poetry Please is a comfort zone that will from time to time throw up an item of interest and one is grateful for small mercies. However, the poems are mostly read by actorly types that make many of the poems sound the same.

Although not all poets are great readers of their own poems it is preferable to hear them try. So in the current series, it is most laudible of them to be featuring a poet or two doing just that. And Tony Harrison is one of the finest at it, his rich dark tones remaining with you whenever you read his poems afterwards.

Today's was a better than average Poetry Please, with Roger offering his biographical note on Thom Gunn after a reading of the surfing poem From the Wave and then Harrison introducing his powerful Newcastle is Peru.

But usually, the companion programme in Radio 4's poetry slot, Adventures in Poetry, is capable of doing more in half an hour by telling the story behind just one poem.

But, while we are at it, the venerable old leftist bard is overdue his turn on Top 6.

His most recent books have perhaps not been his best and the couplets and heavy rhymes that refer back to his classical background have threatened to descend into the doggerel they previously transcended. I was surprised to see his last book the subject of a paper at the British and Irish Contemporary Poetry academic conference at Oxford in 2006 because the earlier work is surely more worthy of attention.

A Kumquat for John Keats and Cypress and Cedar are somehow companion pieces thematically contrasting sweetness and bitterness in finely made meditations.

The Birds of America, about the profligate use of wildlife in Audaubon's artistic methods, and Loving Memory, where he walks the Malvern Hills in search of the grave of Jenny Lind, the Swedish nightingale, are both from a set called Art & Extinction. The latter is selected partly on account of his brooding reading of it and partly for its great opening line, The fosses where Caractacus fought Rome.

Whereas I'll take The Icing Hand for its last line, along with all its others, that makes fine music as well as punctuating itself so very conscientiously, and first, ebbing, salts, then, flowing, floods this line.

And it wouldn't be right to pick six Harrison poems without including v, the film-poem made unnecessarily controversial by tabloid newspapers, or one in particular, that found it shocking for its perfectly legitimate use of four-letter words when it really should have been celebrated for everything else about it.

Signed Poetry Books - Tony Harrison

Tony Harrison was good enough to sign this copy of The Trackers of Oxyrinchus at the National Theatre in 1990 but the thrill seems to have worn off eventually for Angela because it was for sale on e-Bay several years later.