Dear Mr McGough,
Our Poetry Festival goes from strength to strength and we are already making plans for the future. Adrian Henri performed this year and was very entertaining, and so of course we can’t have another Liverpool poet for at least three years, with that in mind, the committee wondered if you might come and read for us in ’88 …
Dear Roger,
Please excuse my familiarity but I feel that I know you having listened to you on the radio. Would you come and read for us at the Centre? If you are unavailable on the 24th of next month perhaps Brian Patten would come, or failing that, the other one …
Dear Mr McGough,
Our quarterly readings held here in the library have been well received by a small but appreciative audience, due mainly to the calibre of the poets who have read for us, including … and … However, to close the season we decided to move into the large hall next door for an evening of fun and light verse, pints and poems in the Liverpool manner and wondered if …
Tricky things, labels, and the Liverpool tag, though convenient at the time for journalists, became something of an albatross round our necks as our poems, and occasionally our personae, became confused in the public perception. If I had £7 million for every time someone said to me: ‘I love that one of yours about the beautiful girl petrol pump attendant on the motorway, “I wanted your soft verges / But you gave me the hard shoulder”,’ I’d be a rich man. And rather than refute ownership, more likely I would nod and smile modestly, because the enthusiast was so excited about remembering the poem and meeting its author that it seemed a shame to contradict (although I certainly would if it were an Adrian Henri poem with knickers in). Having lived there for most of my life, I remain proud of a city that has always tried to turn anger and confusion into art and humour, but I’m equally aware of the hostility it arouses beyond its parish boundaries. Alan Bennett, in Writing Home, talks of his dislike of a people ‘who have figured in too many plays, and who have a cockiness that comes from being told too often that they and their city are special. Every Liverpudlian seems a comedian, fitted out with smart answers, ready with the chat and anxious to do his little verbal dance.’ I take on the collective Scouse mortification that one of our leading playwrights didn’t enjoy his stay there, but, with respect, wonder if, seing a recognisably famous wordsmith, the locals weren’t drawn to him like bees to honey, or in his case, lambs to the slaughter. Liverpool has had more than its fair share of media mauling over the years and the fact that it stands up for itself on the verbal dance floor is something to be admired.
If I were a ‘Hull poet’ or a ‘Sheffield poet’, what would that mean? Presumably that I was born or lived in Hull or Sheffield. A ‘St Ives poet’? Mmm, writes about coves and seagulls, lots of colour, yellow and blue mainly, and you can almost hear the waves lapping against the bows of his sonnets. A ‘Cambridge poet’? Ah, tricky. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E probably, an egghead without the yolk, writing to slow the reader down and trip him up. But the sobriquet ‘Liverpool poet’ does not suggest geography, a town on the River Mersey in south-west Lancashire, so much as class, an era and an attitude. Brian, Adrian and I shared many views and influences, but we were never ‘the group’ that many thought us to be, and since those early days the differences have become more distinctly apparent. Brian in particular felt uneasy with the branding and during the eighties – ‘a lost period when I was re-inventing myself. I just wished I knew into what’ – he was averse to performing under that banner. So in the 1980s when ‘The Liverpool Poets’ toured Germany what the audiences usually got was Adrian, myself and Andy Roberts.
And audiences were not sold short, for Andy provided not only a guitar backing to some of the poems, but was a performer who could act when required, as well as sing his own songs, so when we played to audiences for whom English was a second language, the variety on offer enabled the British Council to combine school and university readings with large-scale events in public venues. Like the Richard Strauss Room in the Gasteig Konzertsaal in Munich in May 1989, for instance, when the literature officer from the Council arrived during our tech rehearsal, brandishing a sheaf of programmes and looking very angry. ‘Those printers have cocked it up again. I spent ages writing the programme notes, trying to give some idea about the show, and what I wrote was: “Tonight will NOT be an ordinary poetry reading, blah, blah, blah”, and what have they put? “Tonight will be an ordinary poetry reading.” I’m bloody furious and I’m so sorry about this.’ In fact, it didn’t matter at all, because the prospect of an unexceptional evening’s poetry may explain why the remaining tickets went like hot Kuchen.
I never kept a diary or a journal during the time I lived in Liverpool, although I would occasionally put my thoughts down in the hard-backed A4 notebooks used for writing the poems, alongside cartoons, stories, scripts, comedy sketches, shopping lists and running orders. (In fact, my collection of running orders for poetry performances as well as Scaffold and Grimms shows would make a delightful stocking filler should any waggish publisher be interested.) These entries were never a record of places visited, people met or things said, but rather internal jottings, first drafts that might resurface later as poems. But during the years that followed, when I travelled alone, writing became a displacement activity and ‘The ALWYCH book’ with the All Weather cover was always to hand.
Adrian, too, was a compulsively neat scribbler, whose notebooks were filled with drawings as well as tickets for trams and museums, sweet wrappers, die rechnungs from favourite restaurants, billets-doux in various languages, all fodder to be used in his collages. I never miss him more than when I’m in a foreign town: his artist’s eye for architectural detail, the way he would become transfixed by a shop window display of sweets or cakes. Even butchers’ shops would have him window gazing, forever searching for the poet’s sausage, ‘Blankwurst’. His surreal, photo-realistic paintings of the time reflect mortality by proffering a seemingly contradictory bouquet of raw meat, heavy with blood, and delicate spring flowers, freshly cut: ‘Of meat and flowers, I sing / Butchers and gardeners …’ I never miss him more than when visiting churches and art galleries, where he would be the enthusiastic guide and fount of all the knowledge you needed.
March 1982, Karlsruhe: Dorte Wiesehofer from the Council (‘Hello, I’m dirty’ is what we thought she said when introducing herself) took us to the Kunsthalle to see the Grünewald Crucifixion. Adrian could hardly contain his excitement, and when we turned into the main gallery and she pointed to the painting on the wall twenty yards ahead, Adrian ran forward, slipped and slid the length of the polished parquet on his back, crashing into the wall to join Our Lady at the foot of the cross.
May 1989, Bonn: In the dressing room before the show at the ‘Brotfabrik’ (not ‘Bread fabric’, which conjures up images of sofas made out of bagels, gluten-free cushion covers and self-raising curtains, but ‘bread factory’, recently converted into a theatre). The stage manager Manfred Klaus comes in to enquire if we need anything else to drink. ‘Do you have to drink?’ is what he says.
‘Oh, yes, we have to,’ we chorused, falling off our wholemeal chairs laughing.
It was during that same tour of Germany that yet another slip of the foreign tongue caused mirth and embarrassment, especially during the book signing after the show when everybody had a kind word for us and many offered to take us home for supper, or at least accept a handful of loose change. The British Council office in Cologne had rung the venues of the towns in which we were due to appear, asking them to print posters with details of the event. Unfortunately, the word Liverpool had been misheard, and on arrival in Aachen we were delighted to see posters everywhere advertising ‘The Little Poor Poets’.
Holland, too, always kept a welcome in the valleys for the Little Poor Poets.
June 1991, Rotterdam: ‘Slept like a clog. Missed breakfast so wandered down to the waterfront and bought a carton of fried fish from a herring stall. An old man sat next to me on the wall and nodded. We watched the seagulls screeching and fighting over fishtails and crusts before he spoke to me in Dutch. I apologised for being English and offered him some of my herring. “No thank you,” he said, “I have just passed some potatoes.” So we left it at that.’
Back at De Doelen (the concert hall where the festival is taking place) I meet up with Carol Ann Duffy, the naughtiest girl in the class and the most gifted. She is composing a letter to put into Adrian’s pigeon-hole. It is from a sixteen-year-old girl ‘of the hair blonde and the long leg’ who, when not at school, works in a strip club. She loves especially ‘BIG poets with horses’ tails’ and hopes to meet her favourite poet tonight after the concert, where she will be wearing ‘the white ankle socks and the black leather miniskirt’. The letter is completely and purposely over the top but Adrian is such a hopeless romantic that on reading it he can hardly contain his excitement, ‘I need to calm myself down, I think I’ll go back to the hotel room and count my guilders.’
That night, at the opening concert of Poetry International, Adrian, with Andy on guitar, was really out to impress, and before the applause had died down he was off the stage and into the bar before Miroslav Holub, Breyten Breytenbach, Carol Ann or any of us had time to bow, wave or curtsy. Disappointed though he may have been at the non-appearance of the fictitious sixteen-year-old schoolgirl stripper, there was always something for Ade to celebrate, like being within proximity of a bar, for instance, and at midnight-thirty when we all decided to head back to the hotel, he opted to have one more for the road with his new-found Dutch chums.
Surprisingly Adrian, famed for his powers of recuperation, was not down for breakfast and when he failed to appear for lunch we began to worry that perhaps at 4 a.m. in a seedy transvestite club he saw a tall blonde wearing ‘the white ankle socks and the black leather miniskirt’ sitting at the bar, and mistaking the truck driver for a schoolgirl had introduced himself and, oh dear … But later in the afternoon when he emerged gingerly from his room, the tale he told with some relish was horrific, if not quite on the scale of our worst imaginings.
After leaving the concert hall, Adrian had been taken to a string of bars, how many he wasn’t quite sure, nor could he remember at what time the students decided to throw in the towel, but he does remember the group farewell hug on the pavement and the offer to drive him back to the hotel on Kruiskade. ‘No thanks, the walk will do me good’ were his last words which, in retrospect, proved to be widely off the mark. Adrian set off along the main street and turned left. Had he turned right he would have found the hotel a hundred metres up the road, but instead, he kept on walking and walking. It occurred to him at one point that he might have lost his way, but the streets were deserted, so he kept on walking and walking. Then, it seems, he fell asleep, but kept on walking and walking. As Adrian explained later, he didn’t black out, but in fact had pleasant dreams, he felt invigorated as he walked, eyes closed, just walking and walking. It was a sudden rush of cold air that jolted him awake, the slipstream of a white van that missed him by a beard’s breadth, and as his eyes began to focus he saw a sign ahead saying Amsterdam … Amsterdam?
Having fallen asleep in a dream, he awoke to a nightmare, for he looked about him and realised that he was on the inside lane of a motorway. Dawn was blinking and the traffic was slowly building up as our hero had the sense to panic, scamper across the tarmac and scramble up the embankment. He was lost, he was in pain, he was in a foreign country and he could sense one almighty hangover crouching in the shadows behind, waiting to leap out and maul him to near death. But big poets don’t cry, they either write a poem or they seek help, and in this case Adrian wisely decided on the assistance option. Through the rising mist, in the far distance he could make out a farmhouse with a light in the window, so he set off across fields not of barley, oats or even tulips, but of hot coals, for each step now was agony, and on reaching the farmhouse he had to bang on the door for ages before it was eventually opened. Having reassured the farmer that he was neither a ghoul nor someone returning home from a fancy dress ball dressed as one of Vincent van Gogh’s potato eaters, Adrian was admitted, given bread and coffee, and a taxi was called. Waking in the hotel bedroom some hours later, he looked at the feet propped up on the headboard and thought he must have fallen asleep wearing a pair of red wooden clogs, but no, they were his feet, bloody, swollen and bare.
On a silent motorway stretching into infinity, lit only by the moon and a sprinkling of stars, a little poor poet shuffles along the hard shoulder in search of the soft verges.