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‘Boys and their reputations.’

– Helen Dunmore, personal correspondence

Monsterisation – the hideous caricaturing of the other – often receives its clearest expression

when its subject differs from us not in kind but by degree. This allows us to open up an easily fordable abyss,

which is to say we use our very kinship to hate someone with whom we closely identify;

thus they become a highly efficient means of externalising our self-loathing, as well as the fear on which it is founded.

All this is well known (our intratribal enmities traditionally are among our most vicious),

but what’s often overlooked is the extent to which those who most despise themselves

will identify their closest reflection as their perfect bête noire.

For all that I have foresworn hatred, I am often animated by the hatred of others for me. I note with dismay

that within the low-rent, high-maintenance world of poetry, or rather more specifically within its circle of male critics,

I seem to be addicted to giving offence, for someone clearly so desperate for approval.

For example (this is disingenuous; it was always my intention to address the matter):

I cannot understand why the minor English poet Alan Jacket hates me. Let me start that again.

I cannot understand why the minor English poet Alan Jacket hates me to quite the degree that he does.

I have maintained a classy silence on the matter for many years, but the trouble with silence is that,

as with keeping goal, one’s professionalism comes to be taken for granted, and recently mine has been positively heroic.

No more. Cocteau once said that we have to know how far to go too far,

and now that Jacket has finally gone far too far too far, he shall have what he badly wants –

my full attention: accordingly, I am giving up the supernatural restraint routine

that no one had noticed anyway. It was not its own reward. But since this is also a genuine attempt at rapprochement

I will try to write a strictly ‘honest poem’ in deference to Alan, since he claims to prize honesty above all else.

(Although what ‘Bomber’, as we call him – we don’t really – actually means is that he expects to receive praise

for what are mostly meticulous expressions of his disgust; but no one ever won a prize

for saying what absolutely no one wanted to hear, on matters after which absolutely no one had inquired.)

The reasons Alan has affected for his loathing of me over the decades of our entirely one-sided feud

are all plausibly noble. I once slandered a friend of his; I am without grace, wit, or indeed any redeeming human virtue;

my ‘ugliness is to the bone’; I am an unlettered bald clown who insults the language every time he lifts the pen.

But we both know that, true as all that may be, that’s not what’s really going on here. No, it all began years ago,

back when Alan looked like Jo-Jo the Amazing Dog-Faced Boy and wore nothing but Ruritanian military uniform;

towards the end of his immaculately undistinguished tenure at Stuntney Press, he knocked me back,

but wrote me a nice card noting my ‘absolutely accurate use of the word “calque”’, which I treasured at […]