Reflections on the myth kitty

Following a recent Twitter thread about the myth kitty, I thought I’d use the longer format of a blog post to explain my approach to its use in contemporary poetry.

First off, I take Larkin’s notorious eschewal of the aforementioned myth kitty not as a destination but as a point of departure. In other words, I do favour poems that don’t explicitly draw on and invoke classical mythology. However, it would be absurd not to recognise that all our reading and writing is shot through with our knowledge of myths.

As a consequence, when I write poems about Aldershot F.C. footballers of the 1980s, about their triumphs and disasters, tragedies and comedies, qualities and flaws, many of their stories implicitly remind us of those same myths. This is inevitable and necessary. A renewed, highly personal myth kitty such as this doesn’t ignore what has gone before. Instead, it recognises our cultural baggage, enabling us to empathise and reflect on how classical stories are played out in contemporary settings.

Specific present-day scenarios are capable of refreshing the myth kitty via new perspectives. In my view, the implicit invocation of classical myth is therefore more powerful than explicit allusion, though it forces the poet to take a far greater risk instead of reaching for shortcuts that everybody immediately understands. What do you think…?

New essay on Wild Court

I'm pleased to report that I have a new essay up at Wild Court, titled Larkin Stateside: implicit dialogues between the poetries of Joshua Mehigan and Philip Larkin. You can read it in full by following this link, but here's a taster...

...As so often in the past, transatlantic poetic exchanges enrich both cultures, the differences highlighting just how much we have in common and to how great an extent our non-literary prejudices colour our enjoyment and judgement of exceptional poems...

Poems with lives of their own

I've previously mentioned that a poet ceases to have any control over a poem once they publish it. From that point onwards, the poem has a life of its own and (with a bit of luck!) initiates a relationship with its readers.

In this context, I'm especially drawn to pieces that weren't among their creators' favourites. Once such example is Philip Larkin's The Mower. It's been shared widely on social media in recent times (for instance, when the well-known American poet, Ada Limón, put it on Twitter the other day, it got over a thousand likes and 200-odd retweets) mainly because of its famous ending, which resonates in the current circumstances...

"......The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time."

However, the poet himself apparently didn't rate it. In his biography of Larkin, Andrew Motion wrote...

"...Larkin realised The Mower was only a qualified success, worth publishing, but not worth presenting on a national stage. He let it appear in the Hull Literary Club magazine Humberside."

I can't quite imagine what Larkin might think of the poem appearing all over Twitter! And that, of course, is the crux of the matter: he's no longer in charge of people's taste, and a so-called qualified success is fast becoming one of his most renowned pieces.

Another such example, meanwhile, is the excellent Welsh poet Sheenagh Pugh. If you type her name into Google, you're immediately directed towards the following search term: "Sheenagh Pugh Sometimes". This refers to her most famous poem, which was also widely shared in the aftermath of the latest General Election results, though I've no idea why! ;-)

From observing her reactions on Twitter, Sheenagh is less than enamoured of her own poem these days, but she can't stop it cropping up all over the place and many readers associating her name with it, even though she's far prouder of many other poems (she's got a lot of top-notch work to be proud of!). Yet again, the poet can't stop her poem having a life of its own...!

For the sake of the ritual

I spend a lot of time in Chichester - my parents retired there, so it's still my bolthole from an Extremaduran summer that's pushing 42ºC this week - and the cathedral could end up seeming something of a backdrop to life, a spire that can be spotted when approaching the city from almost any angle. However, I can never bring myself just to walk past.

I have to go in to the cathedral every time and find An Arundel Tomb. Larkin's poem is hung in a frame alongside. By now, there's no need to look at the text, as its words fall through my lips of their own accord, but I still do, line by line, for the sake of the ritual. I take David, my son, whenever he's with me, and we read it together. He learns how poetry can make such a shiver-inducing lump come alive...

The Whitsun Weddings: an invented history

The media recently featured a commemorative train journey from Hull to London to mark the 50th anniversary of publication of Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings. Part of the Guardian article reads as follows:

"The half-century anniversary of the poem will be celebrated on 6 June – a week late for the Whitsun bank holiday, but otherwise just as Larkin described: "All down the line / Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round; The last confetti and advice were thrown." At several stops along the way actors in period dress will board the train, and fill the time until the next station by telling stories of marriages glad and sad.

The poem was believed to be based on an actual journey Larkin took in 1955, but scholars have since argued about the date: the Whitsun weekend that year was hit by a truly British bank holiday event, a rail strike."

In fact, the above story of the poem's genesis has been "photoshopped" by the poet and swallowed by generations of readers and critics. This can be shown via a comparison between extracts from The Whitsun Weddings and Larkin's second novel, A Girl in Winter.

The Whitsun Weddings reads...

"I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat."

When A Girl in Winter describes Katharine's first train journey in England (from Dover to London), she observes that...

 "...new brick houses were brilliantly shadowed in the sun."

Katharine's journey then continues, moving away from London, this time by car:

"Occasionally she saw white figures standing at a game of cricket. These were the important things."

The Whitsun Weddings, meanwhile, brings us

 "someone running up to bowl".

In both examples (prose and poetry), Larkin lists objects in order to give the impression of places flashing past the window. A Girl in Winter describes

"...a row of houses, a church on rising ground, the slant of a field..."

And The Whitsun Weddings tells us...

"...a hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
and rose..."

In other words, Larkin is spinning us a line when he evokes a single clearcut experience as the origin for The Whitsun Weddings. The common ground between poem and novel goes way beyond a mere bibliographical coincidence. There's a clear indication that Larkin is using the accumulation of experiences and journeys to create fictions: he's inventing histories from Hull to London, from Dover to London and beyond.

Many people seem to love the illusion that verse is somehow truer than a novel. In fact, top-notch poetry feeds off fiction, as Larkin knew full well. Maybe Jorge Luis Borges did have competition when leading his readers a merry dance! After all, both of them were librarians and lovers of Chesterton. Now isn't that a strange coincidence too...?!



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Different heats

Having fled 42-degree heat in Extremadura, I've encountered sweltering Sussex. Different heats, different ways of dealing with them (few two-hour siestas are to be had in Blighty!) and different ways of expressing them.

For example, Larkin's "Long lion days" could only be about a British heat wave: summer days don't start with a "white haze" over in Spain. The light in both countries varies dramatically in tone, although you could argue the "hammer of heat" has a similar effect!

Review: The Dark Film, by Paul Farley

Ever since the publication of his first collection, The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (Picador, 1998), I've been a firm admirer of Paul Farley's poetry. Later books did seem to indicate he might be following the well-trodden path of an ever-increasing enjoyment of erudition. However, his new collection, titled The Dark Film, marks not only a return to form but a raising of the bar, at least to this reviewer's tastes.

So why is The Dark Film such an achievement? Well, first off, it's a reconnection with what made Farley's poetry so outstanding in the first place: a keen awareness of the individual within a wider social history and landscape, a distinctive set of voices, colloquial verbal gymnastics and a playful connection with the reader. Nevertheless, this time Farley manages to go further. This is in no small part thanks to his growing consciousness of his positioning in the canon, of how his work fits with that of his predecessors.

Three examples from The Dark Film will show what I mean. Adults is a good starting point. Its opening lines read as follows:

"I'd look up to them looming on street corners
or down on them at night though my bedroom blinds,
crashing home from the Labour Club, mad drunk..."

Here is a poet who's read Douglas Dunn's Terry Street and is aware of possible comparisons and contrasts. Unlike Dunn's outsider's eye and academic's perspective, Farley is situating himself as one of these people in his childhood. Nevertheless, he's also clear on the dangers of playing up to that role now he's left those surroundings. Big Fish is a superb piece and underlines the point:

"...your birth street greets you with an ambush of smells:
teatimes in doorways where no-one remebers your name."

Farley is also pushing onwards and forging his own vision of Britain, all in the context of other poets from previous generations. One such example is Gas. The first stanza reads as follows:

"Seeing the country from a train
I've grown convinced its gasholders
in fact are used to house the spite
and gloom of post-industrial towns..."

There's an obvious nod towards Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings in the opening line, a knowledge that the remainder of Gas must necesarily evolve in the light of the earlier poem. Farley is recognising the inevitability of those afore-mentioned comparisons and contrasts, and embracing them. This is a different, updated, "post-industrial" view of Britain. In simplistic terms, if Larkin was projecting "love, hate, love" for the country, then Farley's line is more "hate, love, hate".

The Dark Film demonstrates that Paul Farley is coming to terms with his own idiosyncratic capacity for projecting a personal vision of contemporary Britain. It's a terrific book in its own right, but the most exciting part is that the best should be yet to come from him.

Larkin on Betjeman

As part of their extensive web archive, The Guardian provide an online version of Philip Larkin's 1959 review of John Betjeman's Collected Poems. It's well worth a look and you can read it here.

I often feel that such articles reveal as much about the reviewer as his subject, and this is no exception. Larkin implicitly defends many of his own poetic values when highlighting Betjeman's virtues. I was especially drawn to his explanation of the way he feels many critics misuse the term "nostalgia" when dealing with Betjeman (and Larkin):

"the quality in his poetry loosely called nostalgia is really that never-sleeping alertness to note the patina of time on things past which is the hall-mark of the mature writer"

This is superbly put. Of course, it inevitably dodges the constant interplay in both Larkin's and Betjeman's work between their yearning for "things past" and their critical view of "things present". All in all, Larkin's review is a terrific piece of unashamedly partial and passionate writing. I invariably end up comparing his view of British poetry and society in 1959 with how he might judge where we are in 2012, but that's a different blog post altogether...

Larkin's influence

In the light of the recent publication of Philip Larkin's Complete Poems, it's interesting to note a changing attitude to his work among contemporary British poets.

Back in the 1990s, emerging figures rushed to reject his verse. For example, Bloodaxe's The New Poetry seemed very much a representative reaction against it. It appeared forever tainted by misogyny, lack of ambition, racism and an insular view of the world, representative of a Britain that was seen as being backward both in poetic and social terms.

In the last few years, however, a certain balance has started to be restored. Few would deny that Larkin's views on certain subjects were distasteful to say the least, but there does seem to be a growing awareness of how he played to the gallery and cultivated a persona, such as in his stage managed pretence that foreign poetry hadn't influenced him. As a consequence, his poems are shaking off the hubris. Their depth of ambition is being acknowledged beyond their simple facade.

This change is noticeable in the number of poets who mention him in interviews. Even if they do so with qualified disparagement, there's an implicit recognition of his importance. What's more, he's also quoted frequently without the poet in question fearing a pigeonholing of his/her poetics. For example, Allison McVety uses an extract from his work at the start of a section of Miming Happiness. In fact, she also quotes from Wallace Stevens elsewhere in the book, showing that both poets can be read alongside each other. 

Well, I myself first fell in love with poetry thanks to Larkin's work. Even back then, I was aware of not sharing much of his world view, but I was captivated by the way he achieved new and precise clarity via a mastery of his particular poetics. His influence is still there in my work, albeit under layers of further reading and experience, just as I now spot him more and more often peeking out from under the stanzas of certain other contemporary British poets.

I'm not hinting at the take-off of some new "Movement", but I do have absolutely no doubt that a fresh perspective on Larkin is at work in parts of new, emerging U.K. poetry, not rejecting or kicking back against other influences in some insular way, but blending and enriching. These are exciting times!

One language or two?

Just back from my latest trip to West Sussex, I've been catching up on reading and have encountered a thought-provoking piece by Michael Hofmann in the Guardian in which he discusses the value for a poet of speaking a second language. The following quote is central to his argument:

"We think and are and have our being in, and in and out of languages – and where's the joy and the richness, if you don't even have two to rub together? If you don't have another language, you are condemned to occupy the same positions, the same phrases, all your life. It's harder to outwit yourself, harder to doubt yourself, in just one language. It's harder to play."

Reading this article, I immediately recalled Larkin's Paris Review interview and his statement "A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him."

In my early years in deepest Spain I was the only foreigner in town. Before internet access and cheap telephone calls, I would often go for two or three months without talking to a native speaker of English.

That period of my life was key to my development as a poet. It firstly forced me to get writing if I wanted to find an English-language outlet, but it also then provided a counterpoint for my previous experiences back in Blighty. My views of U.K. society and the English language were challenged and enriched by my immersion in Spain and Spanish. Thanks, Michael Hofmann, for reflecting that idea so well!

Suburbia's poetic connotations

This article from Friday's Guardian might be slightly frothy and slanted towards fiction, but it does hint at an issue that's significant to me: the attitude contemporary U.K. poetry holds towards suburbia.

Bearing in mind that millions of us have been brought up in or live in such surroundings, why do so few British poets now write about them or set their work in them? I'm convinced suburbia is dodged through fear of negative connotations and labelling such as "banal", "unimaginative" or "Larkinesque".

Suburbia forms a key part of my poetic imagination, just as it has throughout my life. I try to unravel its intricacies and the way it's evolving. Here's to playing with those connotations and challenging them!

Poetic Failures

From time to time I have a trawl through my folders of old failed work on the off chance that some piece or extract might be worth reworking or set off a new spark.

Doing so this weekend, I realised how key themes, techniques and tones have developed in my work. Only now can I spot my first clumsy gropings towards them a few years ago.

Larkin was keen to insist on his disavowal of a poet's obligation to develop, but he also admitted that his percentage of failures didn't drop with time, in itself a recognition that we mustn't stagnate or repeat ourselves if we're going to be creative. I use this argument when wrestling with my current poetic messes: the encouraging aspect of the process is that maybe, just maybe, they are staging posts on the way to somewhere new and as yet unknown.