‘Art is a human product, a human secretion, it is our body that sweats the beauty of our works.’ Émile Zola
In his more curmudgeonly mode John Hewitt once said to me: ‘If you write poetry, it’s your own fault.’ By extension, if you are vainglorious enough to consider your poems and your plangent drone sufficiently titillating to tempt the punters from their firesides, then you should be beyond mortification. But of course none of us is.
Reciting my kind of lyric poetry requires being private in public without embarrassing either the listeners or myself. Once in a while I feel so discomfited I perspire Satchmo-style, sweat stinging my eyes and percolating through my whiskers onto the page. Apart from passing out or running away, there is no escape. I stand there stammering while self-humiliation irrigates the sheugh of my arse.
More often it is your supposed admirers who stoke up the self-doubt. Here are a few examples:
driving the length of Ireland to Wexford to read to no one. ‘You coincide with the opera,’ the two young organizers explained;
in North Carolina locking myself in my host’s lavatory – breaking the lock – and having to climb through the window and down a ladder to get to my reading;
in a Tokyo university reading to an audience of one, the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities;
being introduced by Fred Johnston in Galway as ‘quite well-known’ (true, but a somewhat derumescent overture);
in Arizona being announced thus: ‘With an audience like this one, Michael Langley requires no introduction’;
at the Cuirt Festival in Galway being interrupted mid-flow by an American voice: ‘Why are you so bitter?’ (Hm, yes, why?);
at the end of a reading in New York being asked by an ancient bag-lady: ‘Why don’t you read like Dylan Thomas?’ (Hm, yes, why not?);
prior to a group reading in Derry being cornered by a pretty young woman with tears in her eyes: ‘Are you Michael Longley?’ A fan, I thought. ‘May I shake your hand?’ A fan indeed. Glad hand proffered. ‘I’ve always wanted to shake the hand of the man to whom Seamus Heaney dedicated “Personal Helicon”.’
Mortification can cut two ways. Poetry readings used to be launched on a tidal wave of alcohol. Long ago in the seventies I was giving a joint reading at the Morden Tower in Newcastle. I was pie-eyed but, unfortunately, not yet paralytic. I could still stand up and communicate in a rudimentary fashion. I introduced my first poem and then went on introducing it. After more than twenty disconnected minutes I crumpled into my seat without reading a single line. I don’t know who my co-reader was. I can’t remember anything. A friend who was present tells me that someone made a tape-recording of my preposterous wittering. May it unravel and autodestruct as I did.
About the same time, I shared a poetry reading with James Simmons at Trinity College, Dublin, my alma mater. I had been an undistinguished student, but did not choose this occasion to make amends. The setting was more professional than it often is: two chairs, a lectern, a table, glasses of water, sympathetic lighting. I think I read first. I was in my cups. While Jimmy was up at the lectern reading his poems and singing his songs, I dropped off and started to snore. A sodden drone. A floodlit kip. Jimmy told me afterwards that I had snored all the way through his performance. ‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’ ‘You were making such a lovely rhythmic sound.’
Next comes post-reading mortification – more drink at the home of the resigned, forbearing host. On the campus of a great American university at a reception in my honour I challenged a world expert on the life and poetry of Robert Frost. A Guinness and whiskey man, I had forgotten that dry martinis consist of more than fortified wine. In no time at all I was telling the professor that he knew fuck-all about Frost or anything else. My host tried to humour me by suggesting that I recite one of my own poems. I wobbled through ‘The Linen Industry’ to the penultimate line but, with the end in sight, found myself back at the beginning. This happened three or four times. Refusing to step off my demented roundabout, I was led by the elbow upstairs to bed.
There were worse readings and worse receptions. They have vanished into the black hole of alcoholic amnesia. I was not an alcoholic, just a practitioner of what in Belfast we call ‘serious drinking’. After the deluge of a St Patrick’s Day bender in 2000 I decided to jump off the deadly dull merry-go-round. I haven’t had a drink for more than three years. Mortification still comes my way, but less frequently.