All Corduroys and Blow-waves
The great script writers Galton & Simpson once provided a script entitled The Publicity Photographs for Hancock’s Half Hour. In that memorable episode, Hancock is introduced by Sid James to ‘society photographer’ Hilary Saintclair, played by Kenneth Williams. Hancock dismisses Saintclair as being ‘all corduroys and blow-waves’, telling him “I’ve come about the snaps” to which Saintclair angrily responds “Snaps! Snaps?I paint with light!”
Until a few years ago, as a jobbing writer, Hilary Saintclair had secured my mental image of the modern poet. Yet after wandering lonely as a cloud, in 2008, I began a three year contract as a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund at Lincoln University, helping students with their essays. There I shared a small office with a real modern poet, Michael Blackburn. Until then, I had regarded poetry as some prohibited subdivision of writing, governed by indissoluble rules. As an amateur musician, I had always written songs, yet songs have rhymes and choruses. I can rhyme all the time and that’s fine, yet much of the best poetry I studied did not rhyme. Playing my CDs of Dylan Thomas in the car, I despaired. I read Neruda, Eliot and Leonard Cohen. How do you lose your inhibitions and reach such emotional heights? I studied my new office colleague’s many books and pamphlets, and even bought Stephen Fry’s somewhat dispiriting book, The Ode Less Travelled, which nailed the pedantic colours of Iambic pentameter, villanelles and scansion to the mast. But I persisted, wrote poetry every day, and showed some of it to my neighbour, the poet and award-winning playwright Kevin Fegan. The result was that Kevin actually asked if I would co-author a book with him. This was published as a work sponsored by the Arts Council, Iron In The Blood, a collection of poems and prose based on the industrial history of the Derbyshire village of Ironville. Shortly after that I won a national competition with the website Poetcasting.com with a poem about the tsunami which had devastated the Indonesian coast. Thus I abandoned ‘the rules’ and broke the mental lock on a new zone (to me) of creativity.
There’s no money in poetry, but unlike many branches of writing, it does get you out and about. I was recently asked to give a reading at a travelling poetry slam called The Lyric Lounge, a veritable three-ring circus of performance poets aged 18 to 80. I’m doing another stint later this year in Nottingham. It’s terrific fun. I’m also extremely proud that my home town, Hull, has been made City of Culture for 2017. In fact, after living in the Midlands for 28 years, I’m selling up here and moving back. As well as Andrew Marvell, Hull inspired Philip Larkin, so I’ve written a collection of poems about the city. Yet recently the old doubts about poetic prowess bubbled to the surface. I thought I understood Larkin, but then I read the following, by John Osborne, Director of American Studies, University of Hull. He’s the author of Radical Larkin: Seven Types of Technical Mastery:
“…Larkin developed a set of poetic techniques that allowed him to instantiate unfixity … ellipsis, a four act structure with closing reversal, asymmetrical stanza lengths … a battery of disaggregative linguistic devices … split similes, negative qualifiers, oxymora and rampant paronamasia …”I’ve not yet got to grips with rampant paronamasia, but I do recall something the irascible Larkin said about such studies; “I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.”
Despite the semantic challenges of ‘unfixity’ and ‘disaggregative’ linguistics, poetry, especially in performance, is on the rise. Even my local folk club in Mansfield features poets every week. In print, things are not quite as positive. In 2013 one of the UK's most energetic independent publishers, Salt, cut back on publishing individual collections in favour of anthologies, much to the regret of poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and former laureate Andrew Motion. But with the rise and rise of the literary festival, plus the aggressive background clamour of rap and hip hop, this branch of the spoken word is rapidly gaining ground. How many of us tuned in to see Tom Hollander not only playing Dylan Thomas in A Poet in New York, but actually reading a newly discovered Thomas poem on BBC’s Newsnight? With the centenary commemoration of the Great War in full flight, the works of Owen, Sassoon and others are being re-launched to a new generation. The general public have a latent interest in poetry. It’s our job as writers and performers to puncture that veil because much of Britain’s attitude to poetry is a century out of date. Although some Radio 4 listeners still have an aversion to ‘regional accents’ reality is sweeping such snobbery away, thanks to voices such as Ian McMillan, Simon Armitage and Roger McGough. And let’s face it, if Pam Ayres can continue to tour and make a good living, there’s hope for us all.
Writing poetry won’t make you rich. Poets are immune to Samuel Johnson’s quip that ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money’. For those of us still on that treadmill hoping to write that one big blockbuster, writing a couple of decent poems every week is the literary equivalent of a sweaty session in the gym. Performing poetry live is an exhilarating experience, and a long way from corduroys and blow waves. In fact, I hope that one day, I may be able to paraphrase Robert Benchley …
“It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for poetry, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous …”