My early poetic experiences were not “poetic” at all. They were, in the main, not connected to books, and were largely to do with what I now recognise as oral forms of literature. These included riddles and puns, lullabies sung by my grandmother, playground and nursery rhymes, and hymns sung in church. Up to the age of thirteen, I cannot remember being asked to read poetry at school, except as a way of practising “correct pronunciation”. My early experiences of what Auden calls ‘memorable speech’, were largely spontaneous, therefore, nearly always spoken, and frequently contained a mixture of simple rhyme, rhythm and humour.
Mostly this comprised what Michael Rosen calls ‘stuff’: adverts (‘Opal Fruits, made to make your mouth water!’); my father’s Max Boyce Live and Simon and Garfunkel tapes in the car; and playground rhymes (‘Georgie Best / Superstar /He looks like a woman / And he wears a bra’). I loved the recitation of the football scores each Saturday evening on Grandstand, their gorgeous unpredictive text simultaneously an exotic litany (with phrases like ‘Queen of the South’ and ‘Inverness Caledonian Thistle’) and prayer. They were as important to me as the shipping forecast was to Seamus Heaney, perfectly structured and endlessly variable, joy and disappointment hiding in their cadences and inflexions: ‘Chelsea 2, Arsenal 1’. But more often, as this was the 70s, disappointment.
My ‘linguistic hardcore’ (Heaney) did not find a counterpart in the literature of books until – aged 13 – I encountered the teaching of Tim Borton, who showed us John Logan’s ‘The Picnic’. It is not underestimating the case to say it changed me forever. Because of it, I still think of reading poems as like falling in love.
Lifesaving Poems began life as notebook, then a blog. Its impulse came from a remark made by Seamus Heaney in an interview. He wondered out loud if it were possible to quantify the number of poems that can affect one across a lifetime. Was it ten, he said, twenty, fifty, a hundred, or more?
As a way of trying to answer his question I began copying out poems into a plain Moleskine notebook, one at a time, in inky longhand, when the mood took me. My criteria were extremely basic. Was the poem one I could recall having an experience with the moment I first read it? Could I live without it? To make things interesting, I allowed myself no more than one poem per poet. I quickly realised it was an acutely subjective and unscientific exercise. Frequently, the poem that was copied into my book was not especially famous, certainly not representative or even the “best” of that poet’s work.
Lifesaving Poems is, therefore, not designed to be a perfect list of the great and the good. It is a group of poems I happen to feel passionate about, according to my tastes. As Billy Collins says somewhere: ‘Good poems are poems that I like’.
Readers of my blog and my memoir Love for Now will also know that, quite apart from the physical effort of copying the poems, the notebook and subsequent blog mean much more to me. This is because, during my treatment for cancer in 2006 I felt for the first time in my life that poetry was leaving me. By that I mean not just the desire (or ability, or concentration) to write poems, but the notion of reading and spending time with poems at all.
Lifesaving Poems is therefore an attempt to say thank you, ultimately to poetry for not deserting me but also to the poets who wrote the poems, and the people – teachers, friends, colleagues, poets, anthologists – who have influenced my reading, and therefore my life, so richly.
A word about Bart Simpson. The epigraph at the head of this anthology comes from an early episode of The Simpsons. In an effort to control the behaviour of their errant son, Homer and Marge Simpson agree to Bart trialling a ‘radical, untested and potentially dangerous’ drug called ‘Focusyn’. We see him morph in front of our eyes, moving from delinquent to angel to shivering paranoid wreck in double time. The episode closes with Homer and Marge deciding to take Bart off the drug trial, convinced that a mischievous Bart is better than a quiescent one.
Bart speaks the line in question at the midpoint of his story curve, as he reaches his short-lived zenith of manic politeness. He is sitting in class, listening to Mrs Krabappel talking about Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’, when Nelson points out two dogs fighting in the playground. Everyone except Bart rushes to the window to watch. At which point he yells to his classmates to return to the lesson: ‘C’mon people, this poetry ain’t gonna appreciate itself’. It’s a brilliant joke, not just because we see Bart behaving out of character. It is also absurd, ridiculous. But I happen to think it is true. A poem is a dead thing until a person reads it, then, hopefully, shares it with someone else. Poems do not appreciate themselves. For that we need someone, as Thomas Lux puts it, to love it ‘enough to make you love it’. This book is my way of saying thank you to the people who have shared that love with me.
ANTHONY WILSON