Notes

 ABBREVIATIONS
MC – Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (published 1986)
SC – Serious Concerns (published 1992)
DK – If I Don’t Know (published 2001)

 

PAGE 1‘By the Round Pond’. This poem was commissioned by Dr Trevor Weston as part of a series of poems about watercolours by Peter Rodulfo. Written ?1996. DK.

2 ‘The Uncertainty of the Poet’. Commissioned by the Tate Gallery for the anthology With a Poet’s Eye (1986) Written 1985. SC.

3 ‘The Sitter’. A Shakespearian sonnet. Commissioned by Weidenfeld and Nicolson and the Tate Gallery for the anthology Writing on the Wall: Women Writers on Women Artists (1993), edited by Judith Collins and Elsbeth Lindner. Written 1992. DK.

4 ‘Les Vacances’. This is a triolet (a French form that can be traced back to the thirteenth century). Commissioned by Headland Press for the anthology The Poet’s View (1996), edited by Gladys Mary Coles. Written 1995. DK.
– Maman et Papa au bord de la mer: Mother and Papa at the seaside
– Aujourd’hui il fait beau: today it is fine
– Voilà Armand: There’s Armand
– c’est le mot: that’s the word
– ce livre avec Mademoiselle: this book with Mademoiselle

5 ‘Tich Miller’. Tich Miller was not the real name of the girl in this poem. People sometimes ask me what was wrong with her and I tell them I don’t know. The teachers probably knew but they didn’t tell us. Written 1982. MC.

 6 ‘Names’. This is about my maternal grandmother. Written 1983. SC.

7 ‘Present’. Written 1995. DK.

8 ‘On Finding an Old Photograph’. Some readers do the arithmetic and work out that my father must have been very old when I was born, which is the case. He was one month away from his sixtieth birthday. Written c.1980. MC.

9 ‘A Christmas Poem’. Written 1985. SC.

10 ‘Loss’. Written 1986. SC.

11 ‘From June to December’. Excerpts from a series of ten poems. Written 1984. MC.

12 ‘My Lover’. The form is borrowed from Christopher Smart (1722–71), who used it in his lines about his cat, Jeoffrey, part of a longer poem called ‘Jubilate Agno’. Smart’s poem is wonderfully exuberant but I am not a cat-lover and I felt I would like to use the form to celebrate a human being. This is sometimes called a parody but I do not regard it as such. Written 1984. MC.

13 ‘Rondeau Redoublé’. I called this one by the name of its form, to make sure people understand what it is. Dorothy Parker also wrote one. She, too, called hers ‘Rondeau Redoublé’. Underneath the title she added, ‘And hardly worth the trouble at that.’ Written 1983. MC.

14 ‘Bloody Men’. Written 1986. SC.

15 ‘Valentine’. A triolet. This acquired its title when a newspaper asked me for a poem for Valentine’s Day. Written 1985. SC.

16 ‘Nine-line Triolet’. A triolet is supposed to have eight lines. This one breaks the rules a little bit because it is about breaking the rules a little bit. Written 1987. SC.

17 ‘Favourite’. Written 1987. SC.

18 ‘Another Unfortunate Choice’. A. E. Housman (1859–1936) is one of my favourite poets. He was homosexual. Although he was kind to his sisters, he seems to have had little time for other women. A classical scholar, he taught for a while at London University and never learned the names of his female students. He later moved to Cambridge, where he only had to teach men. Written 1988. SC.

19 ‘As Sweet’. ‘Narcissistic object-choice’ is psychoanalytic jargon for loving someone who reminds you of yourself. Written 1987. SC.

20 ‘In the Rhine Valley’. This form was used by Chaucer in the fourteenth century and is called a Chaucerian roundel. Written 1987. SC.
– Die Farben der Bäume sind schön: The colours of the trees are beautiful
– Burg: castle

21 ‘Postcards’. Written 1996. DK.
– Grüsse aus: greetings from
– Mit Liebe: with love

22 ‘Seeing You’. A triolet. Written 2006. Uncollected.

23 ‘The Orange’. Robert and Dave are former colleagues from one of my jobs. The poem is addressed to someone else, who is not named. Written 1989. SC.

24 ‘After the Lunch’. Written 1990. SC.

25 ‘The Aerial’. Written 1990. SC.

26 ‘Defining the Problem’. Written 1990. SC.

27 ‘Two Cures for Love’. The poet and translator Robert Wells told me about Ovid’s Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love) and suggested I try and write something on the same theme. Written 1990. SC.

28 ‘Faint Praise’. This was written as an entry for a Spectator competition, which asked for verse damning a member of the opposite sex with faint praise. When the results were published, the judge commented that women had done much better than men. Written 1990. SC.

29 ‘Some More Light Verse’. Written 1990. SC.

30 ‘Differences of Opinion’. I wrote both these poems in  1995. ‘He Tells Her’ is included in If I Don’t Know. At the time I wrote it, I didn’t want to publish ‘Your Mother Knows’ and I subsequently forgot all about it. Eight or nine years later I found a copy behind a bookcase. It is a pantoum. The form originated in Malaya. The two poems together, under this title, were first published in Poetry (USA). DK and uncollected.

31 ‘Flowers’. Written 1991. SC.

32 ‘On a Train’. Written 1999. DK.

33 ‘Being Boring’. The form I’ve used here is similar to a ballade. However, a ballade would have to employ the same rhymes in each stanza and have a four-line envoi at the end (see ‘Proverbial Ballade’, page 67). Written 1996. DK.

34 ‘Timekeeping’. Written 1997. DK.

35 ‘The Christmas Life’. Since writing this poem, I have learned that it is not a good idea to buy a Norwegian spruce. The needles drop and the tree is almost bare by Christmas. It is better to get a Nordman fir. Written 1995. SC.

36 ‘30th December’. Written 1997. DK.

37 ‘Spared’. Written a few weeks after the events of 11 September 2001. Published in the Observer. Uncollected.

38 ‘If I Don’t Know’. Louise Kerr is a friend, and also our gardener. Written 1999. DK.

39 ‘Tulips’. This poem is written in Sapphic stanzas, named after the Greek poet Sappho. Written 1996. DK.

40 ‘Haiku’. Written 2006. Uncollected.

41 ‘Haiku: Looking Out of the Back Bedroom Window Without My Glasses’. Written 1999. DK.

42 ‘The Month of May’. A villanelle. In the course of some research for a radio programme, I learned that ‘villanelle’ comes from the Italian villanella, meaning a rustic song or dance. That discovery made me feel like writing this poem. Written 2005. Published in Poetry (USA) and the Tatler (UK). Uncollected.

43 ‘Leaving’. Written in the departure lounge at Los Angeles airport, 1989. SC.

44 ‘A Nursery Rhyme: as it might have been written by William Wordsworth’. Written 1982. MC.

45 ‘A Nursery Rhyme: as it might have been written by T. S. Eliot’. Written 1982. MC.

46 ‘Waste Land Limericks’. One of my contributions to a book called How to Become Ridiculously Well-read in One Evening, edited by E. O. Parrott (Viking, 1985). The idea was to rewrite any great work of English literature, making it much shorter. Each limerick represents one of the five sections of The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. Written 1984. MC.

47 ‘A Policeman’s Lot’. Can be sung to the tune of ‘The Sergeant’s Song’ from The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan (‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one’). Written 1982. MC.

48–49 Jason Strugnell: Jason Strugnell is a poet I invented. He began as a joke to amuse a friend, and then started to get published. In 1980 the BBC radio producer Fraser Steel asked me to write a dramatised feature about Strugnell and his friends in the Tulse Hill Poetry Group. This was broadcast on Radio 3 under the title Shall I Call Thee Bard?, with Simon Jones as Strugnell. All the Strugnell poems included here were written in the late 1970s or early in the 1980s and are in Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis.

50 ‘Budgie Finds His Voice’. A parody of the work of Ted Hughes, in his ‘Crow’ phase. Crow was published in 1970.

51 ‘Uisce Beatha’. A parody of the work of Seamus Heaney, written just after the publication of his collection Field Work (1979). This poem was originally entitled ‘Usquebaugh’. Seamus pointed out that ‘usquebaugh’ is the Scottish Gaelic word for whisky, so I have changed it to the Irish Gaelic.

52 ‘The Lavatory Attendant’. A parody of the work of Craig Raine. His first book, The Onion, Memory (1978) opens with a series of poems called ‘Yellow Pages’, describing men with various occupations: ‘The Butcher’, ‘The Barber’, ‘The Gardener’ and so on.

53 ‘Duffa Rex’. A parody of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns (1971). In this book Hill interweaves the story of King Offa (757–96) with material about his own childhood in the West Midlands.

54 ‘God and the Jolly Bored Bog-Mouse’. This was not entered for the Arvon competition but for a New Statesman competition asking for verse that imitated the style of all four judges. The first line of each stanza imitates Ted Hughes, the second Philip Larkin, the third Seamus Heaney, and the fourth Charles Causley.

55–56 ‘Strugnell’s Sonnets’. These sonnets are dedicated to D. M. Thomas because he suggested to me that Strugnell should write some Shakespearean sonnets. The first line of each is borrowed from Shakespeare, and usually altered a bit. In the other thirteen lines Strugnell writes about his own preoccupations in his own way. The sonnets are not parodies of Shakespeare.
– Sonnet i: ‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ (Shakespeare, Sonnet 129). The selection of wine available in Tesco has improved considerably since I wrote this poem.
– Sonnet iv: ‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments’ (Shakespeare, Sonnet 55). O-levels were the exams my generation took instead of GCSEs.
– Sonnet vii: ‘Alas ’tis true, I have gone here and there’ (Shakespeare, Sonnet 110). I sent this to Andrew Motion before it was published. He was very good-natured about it.

57 ‘Strugnell’s Haiku’. There is more to writing haiku than counting syllables and making sure there are seventeen of them. Strugnell’s attempts to imitate the Japanese masters remind me of some of the failed efforts I have seen in schools and elsewhere.

58 ‘Reading Berryman’s Dream Songs at the Writers’ Retreat’. John Berryman was born in Oklahoma in 1914 and committed suicide in 1972 after a long struggle with depression and alcoholism. His book The Dream Songs comprises 385 poems, each of them eighteen lines long. The poems are about a character called Henry, assumed to be Berryman, detailing the ups and downs of his everyday life. Henry has a sidekick, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones – a device borrowed from minstrel shows. Hawthornden Castle is a writers’ retreat outside Edinburgh. I spent a month there in 1993 and wrote several poems, including this one. DK.

59 ‘Reading Scheme’. A poem that arose from my work as a primary-school teacher. It makes fun of the Ladybird reading scheme, as it was in the 1970s, and of other reading schemes of the time. It is a villanelle. I chose this repetitive form because reading schemes are repetitive. Written c.1980. MC.

60 ‘Proverbial Ballade’. As the title says, this is a ballade (not to be confused with a ballad). The ballade first appeared in Provençal literature and was, most famously, used by François Villon in the fifteenth century. By that time the form had already found its way into English literature in the work of Chaucer and Gower. This poem was inspired by a New Statesman competition asking for wise-sounding but meaningless proverbs. The competition was so successful that the magazine ran it more than once. I wrote dozens of silly proverbs, far too many to send in to the New Statesman, so I decided to put some of them into a poem. Written 1980. MC.

61 ‘Exchange of Letters’. Written 1983. SC.

62 ‘Stress’. The meaning of some English words only becomes clear when we hear where the stress falls. For example, ‘collect’, with the stress on the second syllable, is a verb; ‘collect’, with the stress on the first syllable, is a noun meaning a kind of prayer. My friend Henry Thompson made a list of such words and I decided to put some of them into a sonnet. I wanted to dedicate the poem to him without seeming to suggest that the unpleasant man in the poem is anything like Henry. I borrowed an idea from John Betjeman, whose poem ‘The Wykehamist’ includes the line ‘a rather dirty Wykehamist’; the dedication reads ‘To Randolph Churchill, but not about him.’ Written 2000. DK.

63 ‘An Attempt at Unrhymed Verse’. This isn’t in any of my collections because it was considered to be a poem for children. It has appeared in several children’s anthologies. However, I include it in all my readings to adult audiences and I can’t see any good reason not to include it here. Written early 1980s. Uncollected.

64 ‘Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis’. Sir Kingsley Amis (1922–95) was the author of more than twenty novels, including the ever popular Lucky Jim (1954) and The Old Devils, which won the Booker Prize in 1986. He also published several books of poems. More than once in the 1980s he said in newspaper articles that he wished there were more new young poets who could use rhyme and metre. I hoped someone would tell him about me. One evening I found myself at a reception where Amis was also a guest. I wanted to meet him but didn’t dare go up and speak to him. That night I dreamed I was making him a cup of cocoa. When I woke up I found the dream amusing because it was fairly well known that cocoa was not the author’s favourite drink (he preferred whisky). Then I wrote the poem. Written c.1984. MC.

65 ‘Sonnet of ’68’. In 1969 Harry Oberländer became a student in Frankfurt and got involved in the wave of student protest, sometimes called the movement of ’68. ‘Those who did not outgrow it’ is a reference to activists who were killed, like the student Benno Ohnesorg, shot in 1967 by a policeman in Berlin during the state visit of the Shah of Iran, or like one of the leaders of the protests, Rudi Dutschke, who was the victim of an assassination attempt and died of his injuries in 1979. These events pushed some in the student movement towards increasingly extremist violence and the formation of the Red Army Faction (also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang), which was responsible for several bombings and murders. Several of the leading members of this group committed suicide in prison in the 1970s. Others were killed before they could be arrested. Oberländer wrote this sonnet in the 1980s. The original German version, Das Achtundsechziger-Sonett, was included in his book Garten Eden, Achterbahn (Giessen, Edition Literarischer Salon, 1988). Translated 1987. DK.

66 ‘Anniversary Poem’. This was commissioned by a canon of St Paul’s cathedral (a woman) to be read at a service to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the ordination of the first women priests in the Church of England. It wasn’t used because, although the women at St Paul’s enjoyed it, it was felt that the humour was ‘too robust’. I saw their point. My anger about the way women priests have sometimes been treated inevitably got into the poem, making it unsuitable for a celebration. I couldn’t have written a less angry poem on the subject, and I don’t regret writing this one. The first lines of stanzas 2, 3, 4 and 5 use language borrowed from the Psalms. Written 2003. Published in Poetry (USA). Uncollected.

67 ‘How to Deal with the Press’. A villanelle. Written ?1996. DK.

68 ‘A Hampshire Disaster’. Nobody was hurt in the fire at the Royal Winchester Golf Club in 1994. If they had been, I would not have allowed myself to make fun of the language I found in the Hampshire Chronicle report. Written 1994. DK.

69 ‘Greek Island Triolets’. Written at the Skyros Centre in 1994. DK.

70 ‘Limerick’. When Brooke Bond stopped using chimpanzees in its advertisements for PG Tips, I realised this poem’s days were numbered. Written 1980. Uncollected.

71 ‘The Stickleback Song’. This arose from an inspection of the London primary school I was working in at the time. An inspector really did make the mysterious comment quoted at the top. It was before the days of Ofsted: inspections were less arduous and intimidating than they subsequently became. Even so, a General Inspection was something of an ordeal and I thought my colleagues might be glad of some light relief. Written 1984. DK.

72 ‘Traditional Prize County Pigs’. This was inspired by a calendar of pigs. There were, of course, twelve pigs on the calendar but I could only manage to write poems about ten of them. Written 1997. DK.

73 ‘Kindness to Animals’. Written 1988. SC.