When he had finished delivering his speech,
Larkin stuck his two fingers up at us,
Shouting: ‘This be the prophecy!’
And now the agents became my friends, for one
Of them, a blonde, coiled herself round his neck
And started tonguing him, which shut him up for good,
While another, a brunette, coming from the front,
Entwined him in her arms so that
He could barely move a muscle.
Coventry, you crappest of crap towns,
Wasn’t it enough to give us Philip Larkin?
Did you really have to follow that star turn
With Paul Connew and Hazel O’Connor,
King, Dennis Spicer and Pete Waterman?
Will you not be content till you have ruined
Every art form? Losing his balance under
The attention of the agents, Larkin collapsed.
‘Berrigan,’ I said, ‘tell me something about
The shades in this pit, what brings them together?’
‘This pit,’ explained Berrigan, ‘contains thieves,
As Larkin said – but the worst crimes you’ll see
Punished here are crimes against literature,
That’s why the agents are here, as well as
Larkin, and some other Movement poets.
Just as literary agents, in their pursuit
Of an ever-wider readership, and ever
Increasing sales, reduce all writing to a
Commodity, and a formula, so Movement
Writers reduce all poetry to the
Formulaic: journey, minor epiphany, return.
So it’s fitting the two groups come together here:
The writers have their identities robbed by agents,
But the agents are made to suffer in their turn,
As these Movement poets are the ones who never move.’
Just then a cleaner darted past, shouting:
‘Where’s he gone to, that bald librarian?
I found some more mags in his room, hidden
Under the Auden.’ Not even the Hôtel de Nesle
Had as many cockroaches as she had on her back,
There was a giant one crouched on her shoulders,
Just behind the neck, with its wings outstretched,
That seemed poised to take a bite out of her.
Berrigan said to me: ‘That one’s Dolores,
She’s down here rather than with her mates
Because of all the stuff she stole from the
Store cupboard, mostly wine and Rancheros.’
As he was talking the cleaner passed out of sight,
Then right under our noses three shades appeared
Which neither of us would have noticed,
If they hadn’t cried out: ‘Who are you?’
I couldn’t recognise any of them,
But it happened, as it sometimes does by chance,
That one of them addressed another:
‘Where did your friend go, Thwaity?’
And then, to stop Berrigan from opening
His mouth, I put my finger to my lips,
Hoping they might say more.
Reader, if you’re reluctant to believe
What I’m about to tell you, that’s no surprise:
I hardly credit it myself, and I was there.
I was still looking at them when a black
Triple-barrelled agent, a New Yorker with a
Six-figure contract, darted up in front of
One of them and fastened herself upon him.
With the middle finger of one hand she teased
The author’s locks, with the other she grabbed
His neck and kissed him on both cheeks.
She then spread her legs and rubbed herself
Against the author’s thighs, stuffing the
Contract between his legs. Ivy was never
Rooted to a tree as round the author’s limbs
The agent entwined her own;
Then they stuck together, as if they had been
Heat-bonded, mingling their colours,
So that neither seemed what they had been at first,
Just as a brown tint, ahead of the flame,
Will advance across the white pages
Of a pile of burning manuscripts.
The other two looked on and each cried:
‘Oh dear, Andrew! If you could only see how you’re
Changing, you don’t look yourself!’
The two heads, already large, merged into
One gigantic one, and the features of each
Face combined together till neither was recognisable,
Rather they looked like a face made in a potato.
The four arms grew together to make two,
Then the thighs, bellies, chests and feet
Mixed together to sprout such members as were
Never seen before in hospital or freak show
Or photographs by Diane Arbus.
The former shape was all extinct in them:
Both and neither the perverse image seemed,
And such it limped away with slow step.
Just then, at the speed of a darting lizard,
Another agent, she was short with fiery hair
And a fuck-off belt, came charging towards
The two remaining authors. She shot up
And sank her teeth into one of them,
Right on middle stump, then fell down,
Stretched out before him, only to jump up at once,
Offering him a Balkan Sobranie.
They both began to smoke languidly,
Staring at each other, the author seemingly
Lost for words, blowing smoke into each
Other’s faces, their feet motionless.
Let Marie Darrieussecq from now on be silent
With her stories about changing into a pig,
And Ovid too can shut up about Cadmus
And Arethusa – he may have changed one
Into a snake and the other into a fountain,
But does my face look bothered?
He never transformed two creatures standing
Face to face so that each took on the features
Of the other: a change of perfect symmetry.
The agent split her tongue into a fork,
While the author drew his legs together,
As if he were standing to attention to receive
The Presidential Medal of Freedom;
His legs and thighs along with them so stuck
To each other that the join became invisible,
While the cloven tongue swelled out growing feet
Which hardened at their extremities to form toes.
Now the legs drew back into the body softening
And growing furry, as they took on the features
The agent had shed, while her pubis
Thrust out to make the member old men piss through.
The smoke from each was now swirling round the
Other, exchanging shape and complexion,
Hair growing on one who had none before,
The other balding before my very eyes,
The one’s pale flat chest filling out with young breasts,
The other’s youth collapsing into withered age.
The one rose up, the other sank, but neither
Let up staring right back at the other,
Fixed eye to eye as they swapped faces.
When the smoke had cleared I saw the one transformed
Into the body of the author shuffle off
As if in a pair of slippers, muttering:
‘Let Conquest now creep about at
Literary lunches on all fours
as I had to do.’
Just so I saw the cargo of the pit of thieves
Change and exchange form, and if my pen lets me down,
May the strangeness of it all excuse me.
But though my eyes could scarcely believe what they saw,
And my mind was sore perplexed,
I could still see clearly enough to notice
The one of the three who stood there alone
And was not changed, and if I am not
Mistaken, now I think on it, it bore a
Striking resemblance to Blake Morrison.