For some people, Poetry is Life. They buy books of poetry; they go to poetry readings and performances; they go to poetry clubs and societies; they write the stuff and pay to get it published; they care and worry and fuss about poetry.
These are the Poetry Fanatics and you must beware of them. If you live in certain parts of London, the lusher suburbs of other cities, or towns with literary connections or festivals (Cheltenham, Hay-on-Wye and Aldeburgh, for example), you may find them hard to avoid. They’re in the mould of the Ancient Mariner – mad eyes staring, dribble coming out of the corners of their mouths, seeking some poor wretch to whom they can recite at length. If you can’t avoid them, you may consider joining them.
HOW TO DRESS FOR POETRY
Don’t:
- Wear a velvet smoking jacket or thick cord trousers; people will think you’re a psychotherapist.
- Grow a beard. No great poet of the last 100 years or so has sported a beard. Okay, Ginsberg had a real faceful but you might challenge anyone on this point by observing that a great big beard doth not a great poet make.
- Slap on a beret. People will think you’re from the Royal British Legion or the local farmers’ market.
- Wear sandals. People will think you couldn’t afford a decent pair of trainers.
- Drip around in a silk dressing gown. People will think you’re emulating Ivor Novello or Noël Coward.
Do:
- Roll your own cigarettes, as messily as possible, if you happen to smoke.
- Kit yourself out in a Panama hat, white linen jacket, and two-tone brogues. People won’t know which poet you evoke, and that will disturb them.
- Whatever you do, though, you must ensure that nothing that you wear matches. Poets are renowned for their heightened powers of observation but this faculty must absolutely not extend to noticing that one’s lime-green chinos clash rather garishly when coupled with that favourite, and seldom-washed, puce cardie.
HOW TO TREAT POETRY BOOKS
The moment you buy a book of verse, mutilate it:
- Break the spine.
- Fold down the corners as though marking pages.
- Spill some dark brown (or, better, Burgundian red) liquid on it.
- Tear out a few pages.
- Scribble dates and obtuse references in the margins.
Most people who buy poetry books never even open them, let alone read them, so when you turn up with a volume that looks as though London Wasps have been playing with it, you will be regarded with awe.
WHAT TO DO WHEN SOMEONE THREATENS
YOU WITH A POEM THEY’VE WRITTEN
The vital thing is to prevent them reading it to you. If they do, you have to try to listen and then make a comment. So, when they say: ‘May I read you my latest oeuvre?’, firmly respond: ‘No. Don’t do that. I’ve just spent three days and nights reading The New Apocalyptics and my mind is completely shattered. Do you know The New Apocalyptics, by any chance ?’ They won’t.
HOW TO BEHAVE AT POETRY READINGS
Two or three decades ago, when performance poetry was in its heyday, one could turn up, quite innocently, at the Royal Festival Hall, the Barbican or any large theatre, hoping for some foot-tapping, lightweight, free entertainment while you guzzle real ale, and find two men (it was always two men) shouting bits of verse at each other and making strange and obscene noises into handheld microphones.
Unless you are an attendant social worker or conducting important research into egomaniacal behaviours, you must simply leave at once.
These days, the poetry ‘slam’ is the thing. If you have the misfortune to stumble upon one of these events where very unshy ‘poets’ vie with each other to declaim their right-on, self-referential tosh, there are two strategies open to you:
- Run away and drink elsewhere.
- Wait until they appear to have ground to a halt (it may take a very long time), then trot over to them and say how much you enjoyed it and could they please do something of Eleanor Farjeon’s?
Even when the entertainment on offer is of the more traditional poet-mumbles-a-few-poems-from-his-slim-book-interspersed-with-interminable-explanations-of-the-arcane-references-he-put-in-said-poems-to-make-himself-appear-more-interesting-than-he-really-is variety, the organisers of such events will more often than not devote some portion of the proceedings to an ‘open-mic’ (pronounced ‘mike’) section. This is where anyone with a mild-to-moderate mental-health problem will get up from the audience and spout a truly terrible and incomprehensible bit of drivel which has been repeatedly rejected by editors of poetry magazines up and down the land.
In this case – unless you are an attendant social worker or conducting important research into egomaniacal behaviours – you must simply leave at once.
POETRY COMPETITIONS
There are an enormous number of these, organised both nationally and locally. The Poetry Library at London’s Southbank Centre has a comprehensive list but it’s no good entering any of them as every poetry competition has about 2 million submissions, even if the first prize is less than a fiver (it usually is). Very often the entries are sifted by an undergraduate student who is currently enrolled in the creative writing course on which the poet-cum-adjudicator is a teacher, and thus only a handful or so of the poems entered ever pass in front of the big cheese poet supposedly judging the prize.
If you feel you must take part, however, here are a few pointers to increase your chances of success: ensure that the poems you enter are between 16 and 24 lines long. No poem shorter or longer than this ever wins a poetry competition: any shorter and the adjudicators will be scared that the entrants might think they couldn’t be bothered to read the medium-length ones; any longer and the adjudicators, who will have thousands of entries to wade through, will never read it to the end.
Alternatively, send in a totally inappropriate poem (obscene or blasphemous if it’s your local paper; coyly sentimental or nauseatingly anthropomorphic if it’s The Poetry Society). That way you can trumpet your lack of success to the poetry community by saying that ‘the Philistines’ didn’t have the guts to consider your stuff. A word of warning, though: don’t submit a coyly sentimental or nauseatingly anthropomorphic poem to The Spectator poetry competition. You may just win it. Better to enter a paean to the Labour Party or the union block vote (which will give you no chance). And make sure there is not a single rhyme.
ANTHOLOGIES
Never admit to having bought any of the general anthologies of verse (The Oxford Book of English Verse, The Faber Book of English Verse, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, The Reader’s Digest Book of Rhymes, etc.). Be sneering in your approach to them (‘One up from Poems for Children Under Nine, perhaps...’). Reserve maximum levels of dismissiveness for the slew of self-help anthologies that now exist with faux-dramatic titles such as Poems You Need to Make It through the Morning and Poems You Absolutely Need to Read Because this World is Very Cruel and Not at all Fair, aimed at convincing the troubled and faintly narcissistic poetry lover that this particular tome (and they are always tomes – who ever heard of a short anthology?) will solve all their woes.
In addition to these, there are hundreds of different sorts of anthologies, and the bluffer should go full tilt for the most unlikely (French Cowherd Songs, Burmese Love Poetry, CND Battle Cries, Boardroom Ballads, etc.). However, such is the proliferation of anthologies these days that you may find that your chosen bluff does in fact already exist (if you think this is a far-fetched claim, check out Poetry of the Taliban (‘Decapitation: An Ode’, anyone?), or There’s Rosemary: ‘An Anthology of Poetry, Published By The Monmouthshire Education Committee in 1969, the Year of the Investiture of the Prince of Wales’).
The only other way to use anthologies to your advantage is to make a careful note of the compiler and the date of publication. If you talk of Stallworthy’s 1973 Compilation of Love Poetry, Hadfield’s Sea Verse for Chameleon Books in 1940, or Weissbort’s Post-war Russian Poetry for Penguin in 1974, you will be exhibiting knowledge that no one else possesses, which to many poetry buffs (not bluffs) is the Essence of Life.
It doesn’t matter how obscure the anthology is; in fact, the more obscure the better. A Third Ladybird Book of Nursery Rhymes may be the only book of poetry you possess, but if you refer to it as Wills & Hepworth’s Folk Verse Anthology (‘1962, wasn’t it, or ‘63?’), people can’t help but be impressed.
UNDERSTANDING THE VOCABULARY
Bluffers should realise that poets not only find spelling difficult, they also use words and phrases that the rest of us don’t. Here are a few, with translations:
Fain would I I’d like to, but I really don’t think I can
Lo! I say! (or) Wow!
Muse I say! (or) Wow!
Behold Look
Ah! Oh!
Sith Since
Bootes Avails
Avails Benefits
Methought It occurred to me...
Roseate Pinkish
Hark! Please pay attention!
Goodly Dull
Plentious In stock, available
Such an one One of them
Doubt you? You sayin’ I’m lyin’?
Alas! Oh dear
Hoarie Freezing
For the nonce While I’m waiting...
Bosome Chest, lap, hill, sea bed, schooldays, heaven – anything but breast.
The poetic vocabulary also includes thee, thou, thereto, thy, doth, ye, commeth, whiles, twixt, makyth, fayrest, unto, eeke, begot, wilt, e’en, ere and heaps of other words whose meaning is nearly obvious; and certain constructions, such as ‘much was I’, ‘quoth he’, ‘twas so’, ‘your trumpets sound’. Most of these constructions stem from an understandable desire on the part of the poet to end the line with an easy rhyme; it’s much easier to find a rhyme for ‘so’ than ‘twas’, for ‘sound’ than ‘trumpets’.
The other philological vagary of poets is that they find it impossible to make other than classical allusions to certain objects – the sun is always ‘Phoebus’; the nightingale, ‘Philomel’; a canine, ‘Cerberus’; heaven, ‘Elysium’; a wedding, ‘Hymen’; a tease, ‘Nymphe’ or ‘Nimph’.
You just have to get used to all of this.