‘All poets are mad.’ Robert Burton
Plato warned that poets are powerless to indite a verse or chant an oracle until they are put out of their senses so that their minds are no longer in them, and ever since no one feels entirely comfortable sharing a cab with one. In fact, a cabbie once pulled over and ordered me out when my travelling companion introduced me as a poet. Incredible? Mind you, my friend had just introduced himself as ‘a philosopher’. Normal people don’t want to hear that sort of thing. But I’m sure it wasn’t always as humiliating as it has been in these days of professionalism, promotion and ‘bringing poetry to the people’, running after them imploring Come back! It doesn’t have to rhyme! The Moderns were dignified, right? Apart from Edith Sitwell’s turban, I mean. Tell me Yeats got a bit of diced swede stuck in his ear dodging a food fight on an Arvon Schools course. Tell me Pound saw his photo in the local Advertiser under the headline RHYMESTER EZ SEZ POETRY IS EASY AND FUN. Up until the end of the war Pound thought humiliation meant having to work in a bank. I guess public readings have changed everything.
Take the case of Dylan Thomas. But there’s a class/gender issue there. Sure, many (most?) poets take a drink, often to legendary excess. But name me three working-class male poets not already in AA who don’t routinely douse their brains out after every reading. And oh, afterwards! The waking up still drunk next to a strange woman, waking up next to a man, or an animal! Waking up beside a strange dead male animal in a pool of … well, in a pool. And teaching poetry! Coaching your students in the finer points of rhetoric and prosody so they too can experience the misspelled rejection slips, the personally inscribed copies of their books in the charity shop, the reading fee consisting of the festival souvenir mug and book token, the laid-on meal at McDonald’s, the floor spots who make up half the audience and who all leave before – no – during your first poem, and the MC who introduces you as Matthew Sweeney. Twice. And best of all, the waking up alone in the middle of the night biting and tearing at the sweaty hotel sheets whimpering no no no.
Am I confusing the humiliations visited upon poets with the humiliations poets create for themselves? The business already provides plenty without any help from me so I no longer mix drink and verse. Not much. But I used to put away a bottle of vodka during my readings. It wasn’t nerves. It was shame. I’d secretly fill the regulation pitcher by the lectern and appear to be knocking back water after every poem. As you do. But drink only ever made things worse. Once after reading at the Poetry Society I saw a pattern of pages laid out on the bookshop floor where a member of staff had been painstakingly collating his concrete poem consisting of large bar codes. I’m told I blurted something about hopscotch, broke free of the friends who were carrying me to the door, and executed what was later described to me as ‘an ape dance’ all over his efforts.1 I remember the shock turning to rage on his face as I slowly realized what I’d done. He would not forgive me, though I hung from his lapels weeping, pleading with him to accept my apology. I had subjected myself to another indignity. As for the concrete poet, I was the indignity poetry had inflicted upon him. In Keats and Embarrassment, a book I was once caught out pretending to have read, Christopher Ricks suggests that indignation drives out embarrassment, one hot flush drives out the other, as fire fire. And speaking of driving, a generous arts officer once gave me a lift back to the station the morning after a reading and for her kindness watched me sicken, open her car door, miss the tarmac, and fill the map pocket, drowning her Leeds A-Z in an acid indigo porridge of red wine, Jameson’s and aubergine curry. Many years passed before I was invited back to Leeds. And once I was sick on Paul Farley. He forgave me. People do. That’s the worst part, isn’t it? Phoning round the next day to grovel and being told ‘No no, you were charming!’
You were charming, darling, because you slotted into a little niche in the cliché centre of the brain. You impish rogue, you. You dangerous firebrand, you. You profound sage, you consumptive aesthete, you holy fool. You silly ponce. Get out of my cab.
1 Years later I turned a corner in a friend’s house and accidentally stepped on a newly completed stained-glass window which had been laid on the floor for a moment just prior to installation. It had taken a year to make. Why am I telling you this?