Edited by Barry Tebb

                                    © Copyright of all poems remain with the poets.

For some years now I have felt anxious about the state of English letters. If this sounds somewhat pontificatory then let it. If there are those who stand up and say that great writing is still being produced here then let us see what they have in mind for I do not know. Truly there are writers who can produce fine poems. Jeremy Reed is one and Brenda Williams is another and I am privileged to include new work by both here but for the most part there is a terrible dullness, work grandly published that seems no more than an elaborate defence against thinking and being. I will call no names, they are not worth recording.

Looking through The New York Review of Books at Smiths in Kings Cross I saw a full page advertisement for the Library of America, a not-for-profit publisher on the grand scale. The size and quality of their list is staggering.

Four days later, such is the determined efficiency of their publicity department; I had in my hand the three magnificent volumes listed above. I looked at the Millay first because she was the poet I knew the least about. Of course I had heard of her, as have we all, over several decades as something of a hangover from the previous century. It is only in the last few months that pressure to read her has been growing, planted and watered by that singular Irish-Canadian sage, Colm Golden, whose enthusiasm for her work has gone on unabated and was transmitted to me via a few transatlantic telephone calls.

The introduction is by I.D.McClatchy and in itself is a minor masterpiece. I cannot imagine anyone in England writing so concisely and yet so passionately –

If literary historians can agree on anything, it’s that the road to hell is often paved with good reviews.

Only a poet could write like that and giving I.D.McClatchy the chance to choose and present his choice was a stroke of editorial genius. After looking at Millay’s poem, who can gainsay her work:

‘Interim’

This is poetry as Claudel wrote it and Yeats and Pound. Millay, dare I say it? ‘bared her soul’

‘Interim’

She is a shape-shifter, flitting – no flying would be more apt – from the particular and personal to the universal but always there is feeling and intelligence and style. What wonders of style await the reader on every page:

‘Second Fig’

That is the whole poem, as imagist and any by Amy but so much greater. If I did not rein myself in I would end up quoting from every page. A few years ago I discovered twentieth century French poetry. I thought I knew the American scene but now I confess my ignorance. Millay is a great poet and a startling one and like no other.

‘Over the Hollow Land’

Harvey Shapiro’s Poets of World War II brings a startling galaxy of greatness into the tiny focus of hardly more than a couple of hundred pages. It has been reviewed at great length and with huge knowledge in the same issue of the NYRB as I saw the series advertised. The single Berryman poem The Moon and the Night and the Men is exactly the poem I would have chosen. I can say I know the work of almost all the poets except that of Lincoln Kirstein, an editor of Hound and Horn and founder of the New York City Ballet. His poetry is lyrical, insightful and a lot more but most of all is simply unputdownable. His long poem Patton is a jewel of biography:

‘Patton’

War is on every page, seen from the eyrie of the enlisted man, in bars and in brothels:

‘Snatch’

A snatch might also he best applied to the Pound: $45.00 for almost 1400 pages of poems and translations, except the Cantos. How can I write about the poet who for me was and always will be the greatest poet of the twentieth century? When I first read Hugh Selwyn Mauberley forty odd years ago I was training to be a teacher but wanting to be a poet. The poem blew my mind then and it blows it now. The dark prophetic parts have come true – the ‘tawdry cheapness’ has so demeaned us that sometime I wonder that we have any civilization left.

As an epigraph to The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcante stands the couplet

So far the library of America has brought out 142 volumes with the aim of their being in every school and college in America. On a dark November day these three volumes brought a lightness and a brightness to my life that I thought was gone for ever.

Bradford’s Upper Piccadilly

Makes London’s Piccadilly silly

The capital’s full of conners and pocket-pickers

But Bradford’s got mill girls

Displaying frilly yellow knickers –

It makes me know where I’m for living

In the north where love’s for giving

And all you’ve got to do is ask…

Jad's treadmill workout triggers endorphins.

Jacuzzi and a black masseur

under the city's nuclear corridors.

Viagra for gonadal aristos

he watches a film of Posh being fucked

by a crocodile of rappers

positioned backseat in a Cadillac's

customised leopardskin interior.

The fingers groove on his meridians,

release spinal space stations up his back.

He's part of Ruag Munition sales-floor,

the Modular explosive penetrator

his selling point -punchy warhead

adapted to shoulder-fired

anti-tank systems, ripping through concrete

to blast a reinforced bunker.

His DB9's bonded aluminium frame

is coloured silver. Nosing up the ramp,

the cabin's intergalactic hyperdrive jump

is like a Dorchester honeymoon suite

moulding him to centre console.

His gratis copy of the DVD

secure in a dossier, he disappears

somewhere oily underneath Eaton Square.

He checks the video signal in his hair.

He finds Hans waiting in a Jaguar.

Tonight the Stones play Docklands, the last night

as an apocalyptic finale

to unplugging the planet, fuses blown

on a scorching, amped-up 'Jumping Jack Flash.'

Jad's Mapam mortar's "superior lethality"

for the assassin facing centre stage.

Hans buys for salvation. He knows the plot,

the darkness at the end of things, the kill.

Jad's tongue is in his mouth and very hot.

for no-one shall remain.

Gladdens my heart!

This traditional Arabic riddle-poem from Yemen is translated by Debjani Chatterjee and reprinted from her bilingual oral history book, Who Cares? Reminiscences of Yemeni Carers (Sheffield Carers Centre, 2001).

[Nasir Kazmi (1925-72) is one of modern Urdu literature’s greatest ghazal poets. Translations of his ghazals may be read in Debjani Chatterjee’s Generations of Ghazals: Ghazals by Nasir Kazmi & Basir Sultan Kazmi (Redbeck Press, Bradford, 2003)]

For half a century now South Asian writers have excelled at writing novels in English. Most readers are familiar with the writers of Indian origin among them; novelists like Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry and many others have been regularly receiving awards for their fiction. But in recent years they have been joined by Sri Lankan writers based in Britain. A Sivanandan and Romesh Gunesekera have produced wonderful novels that have deservedly won prizes. Daisy Abey’s debut novel is a rich addition to this growing body of literature.

Like that great American classic, Gone with the Wind, Abey’s Like the Wind is a family saga and it is also a big book – big in length and in its panoramic scope. The novel moves between rural Sri Lanka and urban England. Leeds is described with gritty realism and village life in Sri Lanka with nostalgia. Rupa and Aruna marry in Sri Lanka and arrive in London in the 1960s. Their marriage falls apart and Rupa struggles as a single mother to bring up two children. Relationships are important in this book, as are plot and dialogue. Among other things, it tells the story of a journey from innocence to experience. Forced to give up her ambition of studying for a History degree, and desperately making job applications instead, Rupa tells Aruna: "Survival comes before everything else". Like Scarlet in Gone with the Wind, Abey’s heroine too is a strong woman and a survivor.

Unlike her much better known compatriots, Sivanandan and Gunesekera, Daisy Abey does not enjoy a big mainstream publisher – and this must surely hamper the distribution of her book. Consequently many readers will not come across her work – and this is such a pity, both because it merits serious attention and because Sixties Press have done a fine job in producing Like the Wind. I look forward to Abey’s next novel.

Leaf-death fills the air.

The bats no longer dare the dusk

chilled by the creeping frost. Husks of summer

seed the dying fields hung with dew,

stubble-stalked where once replete.

Subdued chestnuts stand in line

leaf-lorn and still. Their carmine colours fire

leafy pyres drifting to the sky.

And we invoke our God this day, and call

to mind a while all loved ones gone before.

Said the man on the bridge: "I understand why

you can't give money; wouldn't it be

like absolving this iniquitous regime

of all responsibility ?

But then, of course, I recognise your

face from this page in yesterday's Guardian,

cast aside, then rescued, a name renowned,

though mud-smeared, re-cycled, for Cardboard City.

Here we are ! Come and see, don't flinch - besides,

in local government, you may achieve

more lasting gains than guilty donations

for mere cups of tea in this cold weather.

Here's our flimsy city; who would intend

to live in a box; sometimes I freeze.

Two years it's been since I lost my footing

on that hazardous ladder - over-extended.

Gifts to charity - tax-deductible -

no use to us, unseen, we don't fit.

Don't tell me that to-morrow exists;

a day at a time is all I can take.

Let me shake your hand; no, I'm not really ill,

just famished, but thrilled you'll intercede

at Council; if I elect to survive,

I'll vote for you" said the man on the bridge.

(Up Snowdon)

Heavy mist began to float above our heads

the mountain peak beyond us sank behind grey cloud

we climbed steeply

loose stones hard hillside

careful to find a grip secure

enough to take us further

beyond this peak another

loomed we reach what seemed the top

There.

In a clearing of damp shroud around us

as we breathed wetness, another peak

higher than this

narrower now the path, large outcrops

of rocks to cling to

the path hard to follow as mist swirled

then suddenly, on either side, a foot away

a thousand feet

drop, for a while cloud lifted as we

perched, watching

feeling alone

onwards towards each time

what we believed

the final peak.

(Based on Cornwall's)

Standing motionless by the water's edge

she gazes at reflections

of the lost years

dead are the fish that

swam under those grey rocks

dead are the men who tried

for a lifetime to make

their lives out of those fish

dead is the air that

surrounds us now

say a prayer my friend

while you stand there

to our dead hopes

returned to my beloved of sea-sides

you alone must remember how

I longed to be there

and loathe being here.

A morning like this of silver shaking winds

This is one Christmas when you never heard carols

While decades of day glow shadowed by a storm

And she had gone early, a wind which never returned.

Along the same mysterious path how quickly you followed her

Down endless labyrinths to a closed door

The incredible journey, the inescapable departure

From a land of marked days to infinite space.

Between history’s landmarks no longer visible

Where your house is bereft beneath swirling December

A robin flits alone, on the frost hardened ground

Emptiness falls and fluid moon sails, entering memory’s terrain.

Only last summer I mourned the loss of your wife

The one who was with you for the last six decades of your life

As your frail body declined, you held me with your pale hand

And apologised in your final hour for your quiescent silence.

The minutes passed so slowly towards that midnight

Evening had drowned, curtains drawn in the hospital’s dim light

Releasing one day’s end that was unlike all others

With a calm smile you said your last good night.

A day glow smothered by the sentient night

These cold mornings of twilight

Waves of silence ripple and defeat

Those moors besieged by tides of mist.

Their magenta sheen utterly lost

Drooping paths of withered heather

Surround black rocks the ruins of gone days

History inscribed in walls of broken stone.

The sky shadowed over vast spaces

When a sudden flash of lightning and thunder

Drops marble rain falling with crystals of sleet

A blazing bronze flame of dying winter heat.

Haunted days with vivid horizons

Solid sculptures of the Brontes’ open books

Lie revealing their enduring passion for life

Gospels of fire, in arrows of burning desire.

I walk alone over the lush meadows

These lucid paths unchanged for centuries

A lapwing balances between currents of air

When a freezing wind blew me here and there.

My mind trapped in a broken morning

As I scanned a day in the tropical East

Green forests and peacocks dancing in the sun

Ripening rice fields and my abandoned home.

A polished pine coffin lays on a dais alone

Flowers in wreaths, posies and one single rose

Attached to loving messages on the crematorium

A sudden click breaks the silence.

Mourners with grief stricken faces

From Edinburgh, Austria and far off places

As a menacing hurricane of fire shook the tower

The sky drowned in fury of its volcanic power.

The empty house was lambent with evening’s glow

Crystal glass, serviettes and leftovers on the floor

The doors wide open, windows closed, nothing there

But a lone birch dying by the silent patio without her care.

He wore a wide-brimmed leather cowboy hat

flapping down over his ears.

An army-green shirt fatigued with private stripes

on one arm. stripes of a general on the other.

Workpants baggy blue and slippers hospital thin.

He too was thin - rib-bone thin.

Walked with cane guiding his gait slow and shaky.

Peaceful eyes face full of beard made him look like

Jesus Christ would have looked at age sixty-four.

Handshake weak though strong with tenderness.

He didn't bother with hello.

Instead in dreamy-violin voice asked -

"Care for a beer?" Followed right away with -

"By the way, would you happen to have a cigarette?

I was waiting for him to hit me for a buck.

When he did my arm hung around his shoulder.

Laughter ran out on my smile.

I gave him two smokes and a dollar bill.

Then sat down next to him and said - "Ray,

you're just like the Ray I've been reading about

in all those great big Beat Books -

ex-con,

outlaw

poet,

con-artist!

You and me are gonna get along just fine.

We're two of a kind."

In a whisper he replied - "Oh, I'm sure we'll get along.

but you must remember, ,

we're not two of a kind. we are all one of a kind.

Then he signed a copy of his book and gave it to me.

This volume is a magnificent achievement, a glorious glory-hole of minority language poetry translated into five European languages. The book is haptic and entrancing and taking a poem on its journey from language to language is a sheer joy for those who, like me, are entranced by the sound as well as the meaning of poetry.

I am hardly a linguist but if you take the English language text of a poem and work through the translations the original is hugely enriched by the additional rhetoric and resonance each language adds.

Daisy Abey’s Woodland Grove (p.82) is not an intrinsically difficult poem and therefore the translations are able to create parallels which keep the flavour of the original while building layer upon layer of sound-value. The French version (p.227) is sheer genius and Christine Pagnoulle is, to me, the best French translator. Pagnoulle knows French poetry and somehow in her version the voices of Eluard, Claudel, Bonnefoy, Frénaud and the whole gamut of twentieth century French poetry is employed to create a series of poems which are individually and as a group a garden of delights. As I read I translated back into English – it is an irresistible impulse because Pagnoulle’s translations are not only poem in themselves but I suspect, are improvements on the original – however absurd this statement seems. Without checking Debjani Chatterjee’s English from Bengali I translated the first verse as

This is very far from Debjani Chatterjee’s translation, of course, it is a ‘version,’ a gesture of salutation and exaltation which this book triggers – a chorus of many choirs singing Schillers ‘Ode To Joy’ as Beethoven used it to bring his Ninth Symphony to its glorious finale.

Karl Thielecke gives Abey’s poem a Goethe like presence that is most certainly not in the original:

Eleonora Chiavetta evokes the flow of riverine deltas, the liquidity of sparkling Italian wine.

This multi-textuality creates gateways to the future and to the past simultaneously.

"I am a poem, not a poet" Lacan wrote at his most enigmatic and somehow this strange, wonderful book is like the stars of the firmament shining in seraphic glory, immanent and transcendent as Claudel’s extaltations at their most flamboyant.

A special extra joy is in the CD nestling inside the book cover. I’ve long been a fan of the Gaelic poems of Crichton-Smith and Derek Thompson but Aonghas Macneacail is a delight to discover:

(an tùr caillte)

(the lost tower)

In this volume the reader swims in, I believe, twenty four languages in all:

it is for all poets a paradise of passion.

Community publishing is a relatively new phenomenon on the literary scene, but it is one of these things which when you see it you know it while it is not easy to define. Community publishers do not make a profit, indeed they often make a loss and tend to depend on money provided by those who run them, supplemented wherever possible by financial support from local or national sources. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this publishing genre is the variety of its subject matter. Clearly some ventures are unreservedly those which the reader would instantly place in this genre, e.g. collections of writing usually of a documentary nature gathered from a particular social group such as prisoners, refugees or mental health patients where the theme is that of shared experience.

Where does community publishing end and literature begin and is such a polarisation or the creation of such a spectrum necessary?

It seems to be in the nature of man to categorise a tendency which goes back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Certainly ‘literature’ in the accepted sense of the word has tended to mean work written by a single person with a certain type of reader in mind but even this needs to be qualified for the great, if not the greatest American novelist, Henry James, wrote scathingly of what he called the ‘associational process,’ by which he meant an author shaping his work to the taste of his audience. His ‘Ivory Tower’ view of literature might be seen as being at one extreme and community publishing at the other. Certainly there is a history of writers who have consistently believed that they write either to please themselves or for a small minority of discerning literati. This tradition is more associated with France than with any other country and developed during the second half of the 19^th century. The attitude of this group might be best summed up in the statement by Villiers de L’Isle Adam, "As for living, our servants can do that for us."

Symbolist poets such as Mallarmé wrote complex work, which even after a century of scholarship is not easy to understand but which has had enormous impact upon literature. England has produced few literary purists but perhaps the best example is the novella writer Ronald Firbank.

Whereas community publishing may often have a social function, e.g. bringing together the experiences of a particular social group like mental health carers for their mutual enlightenment, equally it can publish work by difficult contemporary writers such as Jeremy Reed and Brenda Williams.

A function community publishing has had to take over is that of bringing out translations, an essential literary activity that, in the UK at least, commercial publishers seem to have more or less given up on.

Sixties Press intends to bring out translation of a massive 1200 page Anthologie de la poésie francaise du XXe siècle, provided the necessary funding can be found.

Dr. Debjani Chatterjee is a well known literary figure who has won prizes for her work in community publishing and is deeply involved with the local community in Sheffield. She has contributed hugely to Sixties Press by her skills in publishing and her gifts as a poet, editor and translator.

Daisy Abey writes in both Sinhala and in English and Sixties Press has brought out a number of collections of her poetry and her first novel Like the Wind.

No more a nob than me, he stood grey-haired

With shining shoes, pinstripes and an overcoat fit for Eton

A poppy in his lapel. He beamed at me when I complimented him

On his attire, apologising for my many-pocketed anorak

Every pocket loaded with the impedimenta of my calling

Keys, multiplicities of medication, Seroxat for the blues,

Diazepan for panic, Zopiclone to free my sleep from nightmares

Of galactic wars, an address book full of out-of –hours intake teams’

Phone numbers, together with those of critical care managers

Psychiatrists’ secretaries, day hospitals and wards,

Pipe and pouch, the Penguin Book of Scottish Verse.

Rain begins to fall beyond the out reach of the platform’s canopy

As I pick a table in the smoker’s carriage, delinquents all

With Guiness cans, ‘Hello magazine,’ loud personal stereos, the lot.

I lay out CD’s of French chansons, strangely back in fashion

At least in the Gare du Nord if not in Kings Cross

Greco making a comeback at seventy six, a coffee flask

Bottles of fruit juice, Giovacchini’s siren song

‘The Current Therapies of a Quixotic Quest’.

After a fortnight’s hoarse whispering on the phone through flu,

Faxing to kingdom come I managed to get Brenda Williams’

Outdoor protest into print, the pile of ‘Ham n’ Highs’

In Smiths give me some comfort but her mental pain

Is growing after two months on the bench outside the ‘Royal Free’

And a fortnight’s hunger strike – losing all her care

For complaining about Erville Millar’s policy of cutting beds

And trying to shut down day hospitals.

Thank God for what Auden called ‘Our dear old bag of democracy’

At least I can write and phone who I like but, of course,

There are snares for the unwary – David Taylor,

Chair of the Trust Board, who has a professorial chair elsewhere,

Invited me to phone and discuss the problem

Then bawled me out with his hatred for our campaign

Well, David, I hope my two weeks’ rain of calls

Gave you a little pain – perhaps one of Mr. Tony’s aids

May think a bit of compassion overdue and make a call or two

And even kick the whole Trust Board into the dust

Where they belong – "England greatest sonneteer

Since Shakespeare", one critic wrote, sits in the rain

With her own pain, eight hours a day, five days a week

In wind and rain – our royal prince should take lessons

From Erville and David on how to sit on the press,

Public and patients for a three year stretch

Piranhas fat on the blood of Camden’s abandoned nameless,

Where’s Camden’s flagship council in all this?

Where’s the PCT?

Where’s the voice of democracy?

All, it seems, has been left to Brenda and to me –

I’ll take up motto not from Mallarmé but from the SAS

‘Who dares wins.’

I lay back and listen to Piaf’s "Je ne regrettte rien"

Nor do I at sixty one – all I can do is to write again,

The future bare, in this hyaline autumnal air.

They need some semiotic signifiers here

As well as Yorkshire Tetley’s well brewed beer

"Bradford from 11c," the ticket man said

But Timbuctoo via Zululand would have made more sense

9, 10, 11a and 11b beckon me where the hell’s the ‘c’?

The first girl I asked shook her head "Sorry I’m foreign"

Then I asked a loiner, who trenchantly replied

"There in’t no bloody sign, it got left out when they

Blew that hundred and twenty million – sithee

Dahn theer where they’ve upended a girder

Wi’ a aluminium foot rest round it, it’s supposed

To be a seat with steel knobs stickin‘up

An’ ye need a steel-plated arse to sit on’t bugger"

That’s what I like about the north

The warmth of strangers and their ready kindness

Especially you’re like me the wrong side of sixty

And occasionally a bit doddery

I still get a beaming smile from my neighbour’s

Ten year old daughter as she skips to school,

"Ey mister, want a strip o’gum? and dances on

Down Tempest Road, an ‘area of inner city regeneration’

Currently undergoing devastation with the devoted attention

Of six bulldozers crunching walls and gardens of weeds

To make way for silver gates with built in number plates

And slated front-yards – if they keep on for another hundred years

We might get back the Beeston of my childhood…

The Bradford cattle truck shunts along and I’ve managed

My usual table for four on my way to another Arts Council quango:

I’ll not get a grant, I never do – "You are already a star"

They say politely but the answer’s always a resounding no thank you.

The spread of Bradford leaves me speechless

Here I am six weeks from Christmas

Staring at a poster of Titus Salt, upright with virtue

A sepia-tinted Victorian photo posed in a studio

Slightly sepulchral, almost regal with his plan for Saltaire

A mill village with everything for his workers except a pub.

Next to Salt grins David Hockney, a juxtaposition

Of genius, Hockney’s debt to his native town

"All I learned in Bradford was how to masturbate"

And his much publicised sex tours to Thailand.

St. George’s Hall in stalwart Yorkshire stone

And the baroque town hall still faces everybody down

But the wide boulevards with pound shops

Are more of a pull for the tourist: in one I picked up

Catriona O’Leary singing ‘Táim Sinte ar do Thuama’ –

"I am stretched on your grave" – the Gaelic plaints

Of Dùlra inspire me as only Celtic can.

My childhood contacts with the city

Consisted of visiting a gin-soaked aunt with her high-church husband

Who never touched a drop and divided his time between church

And his allotment but strangely it was a marriage

Happier than most. They boasted a daughter gorgeous enough

To marry her millionaire boss and spent a life time jetting

Across the Atlantic in Concorde – when it finished

She said "A were getting’ bored anyroad, after t’first

’Undred trips it wor like catchin’ a trolley to Peel Park"

I prefer Carolan to Carol Ann that’s my problem

And Gaelic folk to Lesbos’ white hope

Who can indeed write well about her mistress,

A lovely soft-toned pearl of a poem,

A gem I envy but when she goes for men

It gets my goat, sees them all as beery bullies,

Cocky philistines, hopeless husbands.

A man can be as good as a mother as a woman

And Brenda Williams outdoor winter protest

Would take most men to the limits of endurance.

Sex is skin deep says Freud and Carol Ann

Should read him, even though he is a man…

Here am I, lying lacklustre in an unmade bed

A Sunday in December while all Leeds lies in around me

In the silent streets, frost on roof slates, gas fires

And kettles whistle as I read Bonnefoy on the eternal.

Too tired to fantasize, unsummoned images float by,

Feebly I snatch at them to comply with the muse’s dictum: write.

The streets of fifties summers, kali from the corner shop,

Sherbet lemons and ice pops, the voice of Margaret at ten,

What times will have done to you, what men

Used and abused you?

Solitary but not alone I read Lacan on desire

It is not a day I can visit the ward

Overcome by delusion’s shadow.

I am bored to the point of absolute negative jouissance – if I may borrow a term from Lacan by this, this…..what exactly is it? Who is Liz Cashdan the terrible editor and poetaster

It is all about residencies, enhanced disclosures, virtual reality schools and facilitation. And of course, a photograph of our simpering laureate at his most narcissistic, pages of names of non-poets who teach MA’s in Creative Writing. Who are they? How dare they? What do any of them know about anything?

Blackmur described poetry as ‘the meaning of meaning.’ I would describe this magazine as the essence of inanity. I taught poetry to ten year olds in the sixties. I was there. None of these was – or is it ‘were’? I neither know nor care.

Art is the eternal shrine of the immortal vision. It is Mallarmé and Valéry , Bonnefoy, Shakespeare and Keats. It is about the unconscious becoming conscious. It is about Freud and the unfolding of the Oedipus complex and the structuring of the psyche. It is the isolation of Henry James. It is about suffering and jouissance.

We need a third Surrealist manifesto. I will borrow a sentence from the second which defines the spirit of creativity as

THE TOTAL RECUPERATION OF OUR PSYCHIC FORCE THROUGH A VERTIGINOUS DESCENT INTO OURSELVES.

Jeremy Reed will know what I mean, as will Brenda Williams and a few more. We are in the trenches, in the front line.

As Reed wrote in ‘Doing Tricks’ (Tears in the Fence’ Autumn 2003)

We're too old

Too unhugged

And too near death

To bother

With either your graffiti

Or what you call my "Byzantine script."

Just send the poems that matter:

For example, "The coloured counterfeit that thou beholdest"

By Sorjunna Inés de la Crux trans. Sam Beckett

Speaks louder than volumes of correspondence

Or lifetimes of denial.

In this world of infinite amazability

I look around for the second hug

Of desire

All I find is the one hug print.

I know of a hug-seeking young man

Who was constantly being bombarded

By text messages

From a girl called Al Fred.

She had never once occupied her own body.

Was permanently invalid: dead to the world of hugs.

Need anything more be said, my darling?

No, nothing more need be said.

The hug-seeking young man ended up

In the arms of an old man called Winnie Fred.

But that was in a subsequent reincarnation.

Enough said.

William Empson was drinking a glass of wine and completing a crossword when I met him at his home in Hampstead. For the first ten minutes he continued with the crossword while talking away lucidly, relishing his choice of words as he obviously relished the challenge the clues presented him. He gets through at least four or five crosswords a day.

What he says lands home, but with delight rather than actual animosity.

"Crosswords, oh, yes. Well the chaps at the ‘Times’ seem to be Roman Catholics these days, and there are a whole lot of estate agents at the ‘Telegraph.’ Rather curious that."

He declined to make any comment about the ‘Guardian’ crossword.

He is in his sixties and there is a trace of Victorian camp about his manner. This certainly becomes more pronounced on the rare occasions he reads his poetry. While reading in Hampstead at the Pentameters Club recently his high degree of Donne-like wit and intelligence first dazzled but finally left most of the audience perplexed. They found it impossible to follow the intricate line of argument in the poems.

"Dodsworth got his facts wrong in his article in ‘The Review,’ I wrote none of the ‘Collected Poems’ at Winchester. I was cheek by jowl with Sparrow there who was editing the Devotions at the time, but I didn’t dream of writing anything remotely like that. I wanted to write argumentative poetry."

Empson spent much of his time at Cambridge writing film and book reviews for for "The Cambridge Review" and "Granta." He also wrote plays which were well received and in which he acted himself. None of them seem to survive.

"I got tired of mathematics and only got a second. As a result I lost my scholarship, so my patient mother had to pay for me in my fourth year. It was not so unusual combining mathematics with literature in those days. However, I was one of the weak sisters who fell by the way. Dear old Bronowski, he got a first in maths while editing ‘Experiment’ with me.

"It’s funny, I get asked to lecture in Oxford, York, Liverpool, but not nearly so often in Cambridge. Once I spoke at the Cambridge Union with the mayor. He was a rationalist and he was wearing his chain of office at the time. Well, we both denounced the English churches, and there was a considerable gap before I was asked again. It looks as if I am nursing a grudge. That won’t do at all. Old men must always give the appearance of looking tidy.

"I think I’m in the straight now. I’ve been in Sheffield since 1953 and I leave in two years time unless I am thrown out before. I regard Sheffield as the right place to be in as I come from Yorkshire. When I realized the British Council was leaving China I boasted I could only work in my own country. I’ve succeeded in carrying out my boast!"

"‘Milton’s God’ is the only book I’ve written while I’ve been there and that was first published eight years ago. But I find it very stimulating being a university lecturer. You’re forced to reconsider your opinions all the time. Mainly by people who are doing postgraduate research, it is true. No doubt your opinions do tend to harden, but you’re forced to look up the evidence again."

"I wish I had seen more of C.S. Lewis. You just can’t believe people are going to die and then they do! But it would have been rather a tricky operation getting on to terms with him. I rather liked his being reckless and unscholarly, but ‘The Screwtape Letters’ was a quite dreadful book.

"Christianity is a most harmful thing. It’s worshipping the God who is satisfied by crucifixion. That’s just about it. It’s much more harmful than, say, Buddhism. But I’m very undeveloped about religion. One can’t be quite sure that Aldous Huxley was right, but his ‘Perennial Philosophy’ provides some enormously interesting information. He’s so much smaller than the people he is quoting though. But at least there’s a start there."

"Parsons are harmless enough nowadays. It’s the Christian literary dons who do most of the damage both here and in America. They seem to provide the last stronghold for a dreadful parody of Christianity. The standard explanation of so many authors is twisted in the Christian interest, it really is a disgrace. Milton is an obvious example, of course, but there are many, many others. Coleridge and James Joyce are dissimilar in every other respect except that they are both completely misinterpreted by the Christian dons who poison just about everything."

"And if you have to read a great deal of criticism as I have to do in my work it becomes extremely oppressive always having to take the Christian point of view."

Back To Top