Mallarmé’s Tuesdays and the Descent into Institutional Philistinism

Barry Tebb - An Introduction

I was born in a back-to-back in Leeds in 1942. Our house was in the heart of South Leeds, literally a stone’s throw from the suspension bridge over the Aire that was to be a central symbol in my poems and novellas. The working class life I enjoyed was quite wonderful. It wasn’t of course a life of council estates, drug-gangs and ghetto-blasters. It was essentially a sense of community, of shared values and even - in hard times - shared food. Above all it provided a sense of being cared for and protected, not just by my parents but by neighbours and other children.

Among these children was Margaret Gardiner (‘Margaret Hopwood’ in my novellas). It is nearly half a century since I last saw her but she was the very first person to encourage me to write stories and she was my first audience sitting on the hot July pavements of our enchanted summers. She also taught me the dialect of working class Leeds and she was my first love. After twenty five years of not being able to write (1970-l995) it was a deep and powerful dream of her that started off my writing again. In the dream she appeared against a background of the Aire and the suspension bridge saying, - “I am here, I am waiting.”

Silver water lapped in the dream river, multiple rainbows arced in the air and diamonds danced as together we skipped down the steps to the towpath. The ‘working through’, as Freud would have called it, of the manifest and latent dream content provided the material for nearly all my recent poems, especially the long autobiographical poem, ‘The Bridge Over the Aire’ and my first two novellas, Margaret and Margaret Gone. I have walked and walked round the few bits of my childhood Leeds that remain, especially along the banks of the Aire and in Kirkgate Market, that living museum of the folk memory.

When I was twelve my family moved to a council estate on the edge of the city and at the same time I attended an horrendously repressive all boys grammar school. When I was sixteen we moved again, this time to the mill village of Yeadon between Bradford and Leeds, and it was at this time, sitting watching the glide of the swans on the Tarn, that I wrote my first poems. I began to read modern poetry, especially James Kirkup (‘My James Kirkup’, my contribution to Diversions, Salzburg University Press. 1998, a collection for the poet’s eightieth birthday), Auden, Dylan Thomas and Thomas Blackburn,  to name only a few. After a year’s unqualified teaching I went to Leeds Teacher Training College. It was the sixties and the atmosphere of the college was very liberal and one in which I flourished. I read widely, Proust,  Firbank, Dickens, Ginsberg, Sartre, Kierkegaard, and of course, ‘The New Poetry’ (Plath, Lowell and Berryman).

My poems and articles started to appear in magazines such as Peace News and The Poetry Review and Alan Tarling (of Poet & Printer Press) brought out my first collection, The Quarrel With Ourselves, which was fortunate to get a good review in The New Statesman from John Carey, now Merton Professor of English at Oxford and a future Booker Prize judge. This was the period of the Gregory Fellows in Poetry at Leeds University (why are there no more?) such as  John Silkin, David Wright, Peter Redgrove, and most importantly, the wonderful Martin Bell.

I tried my hand at editing a small anthology of contemporary poets and included Redgrove,  Angela Carter - who was a poet before she was a novelist, John Cotton, Michael Holmes, and Wendy Oliver (she was a first-class poet, I wonder what happened to her!). Tarling also brought out a ‘three poets from three regions’ anthology, Michael Longley represented Northern Ireland, Iain Crichton Smith, Scotland, and myself the North of England. Although the book appeared in the sixties, Tarling said he was receiving orders for it - though it was long out of print - until his press closed in 1996.

When I finished at college I went to teach at Wyther Park School, Leeds Five, the title/subject of a recent poem published in Poetry and Audience, a magazine which had published my work thirty years before. I was very fortunate in being given  an ‘A’ stream of ten year olds, and I taught almost nothing but poetry and painting from nine until four. My experiences in getting children to write were recorded in an article for Peace News, ‘Poetry in the Classroom’. The climax of this period was having my poem ‘School Smell’ included in the ground-breaking Penguin anthology, Children of Albion in 1969, alongside poets like Roy Fisher, Jim Burns, Lee Harwood, Adrian Mitchell, Edwin Morgan, Tom Pickard and Andrew Crozier. It sold more than a hundred thousand copies in a very short time, some indication of how hot poetry was in the Sixties!

D. H. Lawrence wrote of ‘the Spirit of Place’ and almost everything I have written has been inspired by Leeds and its people. I have given the title The Lights of Leeds to my recent ‘Selected Poems’ (Redbeck Press) and wherever I happen to be, those lights are etched in my memory.

Barry Tebb

POETRY IN THE CLASSROOM

 “Poetry is beauty, it is the rainbow after the sun and the rain have met, it is the green leaf on  the highest branch of the  tree, it is the cool breeze blowing against your face when you run across the moors…”

This attempt by a ten-year-old to say something about poetry arrived on my desk the morning I began to write this article. Sheila, the girl who wrote it has been producing work of a similar quality, both in poetry and prose, during the three months I have been teaching  the ‘A’ stream class she is in. Her first effort, written at home and presented to in astonished ‘Sir’ on a miserable Monday morning shortly after the beginning of term, at once suggested the presence of a very real and strangely mature talent:

 ‘Moses’ by Michelangelo

What patient, endless hours

have been endured

in the curves and curls

of Moses’s beard.

The sharp yet soft eyes

make the picture in or eyes

seem to come to life.

In marble a complete recollection

of Moses still lives

And will go on living, forever.

 Had there been only one such I might have passed it off as a freak, but the half dozen or so poems produced so far maintain the high standard set by the first - a short epigrammatic poem reminds me of early Pound:

 The Mouse

There it lies at my feet,

Worthless, lifeless,

Will it be missed?

If only the one child was capable of producing such consistently good work I would have little excuse for writing this article; but what has continued to astonish me during recent weeks is that, given time and encouragement, at least a dozen out of a class of 45 can produce work of interest to a serious adult reader of poetry -

From the very beginning Linda was writing vivid and original poems often at the rate of six or seven a day; but it was only after I had accidentally knocked over a vase of flowers and had the following presented to me (quite unsolicited) that she really seemed to come into her own:

Flowers

Growing in our garden

Bring them to school,

Tip the water over -

You have a swimming pool.

It is this sort of controlled spontaneity I had long been hoping for and which I had been hoping for and which I had been trying to make possible by exposing the class to an unceasing stream of poetry of all kinds to read, copy out, listen to and dramatise throughout the term. A few days ago Linda rather shyly brought me a poem in which all the vividness of her earlier work was maintained, but which had the additional force of an awakening emotional strength.

Gladness

Gladness in my heart

When you kissed me last night.

Gladness in my heart

When the stars shine bright.

Gladness in my heart

When wind blow through.

Gladness in my heart

I love you too.

Whenever I am asked to say anything about ‘getting children to write’ - especially when I’m asked this question by other teachers - I can’t help wondering to what extent creative writing is considered an ‘unnatural activity’ - something which, like rhubarb in winter, has to be forced. If manifestly poetry - doesn’t matter to the teacher, then it can hardly be expected to matter to the child. Certainly the teacher who relies on school anthologies - except for a very few of the  most recent - is unlikely to gain respect for poetry or for himself when he presents to the lively minds of children the studied deadness of Newbolt or the calculated triviality of the Georgians.

Limiting my choice to poems intellectually and emotionally within reach of the  most able children in this class, I read to them the poems I normally read myself. My first real ‘breakthrough’ came with the work of James Kirkup - a poet of rare  talent who is currently out of fashion - to whose moving lyricism the children responded readily. They soon began to bring to school anthologies containing his work culled from local libraries. (May I here put in a plea for more poetry in children’s libraries? I see no reason for librarians to assume that children will inherit the philistinism their parents have taken a lifetime to develop.)

I rapidly went through a selection of twentieth-century poets and was continually surprised at the popularity of  supposedly ‘difficult’ work:  Yeats’ The Song of Wandering Angus held them spellbound (only adults are baffled by magic) and then began to work through some of the classics, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Keats ranking top favourites so far.

By constantly exposing children to poetry in this way the idea began to get about that writing poetry - although great fun - was something serious, a vital and energy-consuming activity which really ‘counted’ and wasn’t just a time-filler after the ‘real work’ of eleven-plus preparation. Of course some established hierarchies were toppled; children who had previously gained high praise for fastidiously neat, rather prissy, ‘compositions’ found their laurels rudely snatched by some who couldn’t spell and one who could hardly write a legible word.

Of course  it isn't enough just to keep a pile of scrap paper handy and say ‘Write a poem when you feel like it’ - not even when this is supplemented by regular reading of good poetry. Every so often it’s worth devoting half a morning - or even half a day - to a quite formal exercise. Some real stimulus - and not just reading other poems - needs to be given on such occasions.

It is here that often the other arts may come into their own; music, either classical or talk, will provide the starting point, either before or after discussion. A more directly sensual stimulation - the handing round of objects as different as fossils and peacocks’  feathers- is often a good way of making children aware of poetry’s ‘physical voice’ and thus add a further dimension to their knowledge of what  property is about.

All these activities - and many more besides- contribute to the establishment of an ethos in which poetry of the  sort I’ve given examples of can  be written. None of the children I teach come from the sort of homes middle-class teachers idealise as being ‘nice’ - whatever that may mean - but the opposite is not true either.

Pressure against serious attention being given to the arts is almost as strong in some schools as in the outside world; but 1 feel that at least some of these children who have responded so enthusiastically to the craft of words will have the wit and strength to oppose its exploitation and corruption for materialistic ends in years to come.

 (Originally published in ‘Peace News’ September 1964)

Whenever I am asked to say anything about ‘getting children to write’ - especially when I’m asked this question by other teachers - I can’t help wondering to what extent creative writing is considered an ‘unnatural activity’ - something which, like rhubarb in winter, has to be forced. If manifestly poetry - doesn’t matter to the teacher, then it can hardly be expected to matter to the child. Certainly the teacher who relies on school anthologies - except for a very few of the  most recent - is unlikely to gain respect for poetry or for himself when he presents to the lively minds of children the studied deadness of Newbolt or the calculated triviality of the Georgians.

Limiting my choice to poems intellectually and emotionally within reach of the  most able children in this class, I read to them the poems I normally read myself. My first real ‘breakthrough’ came with the work of James Kirkup - a poet of rare  talent who is currently out of fashion - to whose moving lyricism the children responded readily. They soon began to bring to school anthologies containing his work culled from local libraries. (May I here put in a plea for more poetry in children’s libraries? I see no reason for librarians to assume that children will inherit the philistinism their parents have taken a lifetime to develop.)

I rapidly went through a selection of twentieth-century poets and was continually surprised at the popularity of  supposedly ‘difficult’ work:  Yeats’ The Song of Wandering Angus held them spellbound (only adults are baffled by magic) and then began to work through some of the classics, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Keats ranking top favourites so far.

By constantly exposing children to poetry in this way the idea began to get about that writing poetry - although great fun - was something serious, a vital and energy-consuming activity which really ‘counted’ and wasn’t just a time-filler after the ‘real work’ of eleven-plus preparation. Of course some established hierarchies were toppled; children who had previously gained high praise for fastidiously neat, rather prissy, ‘compositions’ found their laurels rudely snatched by some who couldn’t spell and one who could hardly write a legible word.

MARTIN BELL: A MEMOIR

Of the poets I met in the sixties during what has become known as ‘The Leeds Poetry Renaissance’ Martin Bell stands out for his giftedness, his humility his kindness and his ability as a teacher, Physically-as a person- my memories of him are vague but a sketch of him by George Szirtes which is included in the Bloodaxe ‘Collected Poems’ seems exactly right. The meetings I had with him were comparatively few and it is the intense luminous persona of Martin bell the poet, hunched over his beer, chain-smoking, talking about poetry, always and most intensely talking about poetry that I remember. His ‘Collected Poems’ had just come out from McMillan, a slim hard-back with a buff cover which contains the poems he is most remembered for, especially ‘El Desdichado’ (his ‘gothicised version of Nerval’). To me this is one of the very few examples of the transmutation of greatness from one language into another. Bell’s version of line 1:

‘Je suis le ténébreux-le veuf, l‘inconsolé’

as

‘Look for me in the shadow, a bereft one, disconsolate’

catches exactly the haunted quality and the precise yet passionate lyricism of the original. De Nerval was very much the poéte maudit, suffering bouts of insanity and finally hanging himself on a lamp-post and perhaps Bell was, too, though less dramatically. He came across to me as being very depressed and constantly trying to alleviate his depression with alcohol. Certainly his alcohol problem was serious and no doubt contributed to his continual poverty and his early death, but as Oscar Wilde said - à propos of Ernest Dowson - “You must accept a person for what he is. It is not regrettable that a poet is drunk, but that drunks aren’t always poets.”

I can’t remember Bell either drunk or sober but usually somewhere in between, always vague about practical matters, usually worried about people he felt he should be helping (he always did help people) but most of all entirely obsessed about poetry to the point of being possessed by it. He would give generously of his time, reading the work of student poets like myself, commenting  in detail, making tentative suggestions but most of all encouraging and that, of course, is what poets most need.

Bells ‘Poetic Voice’ is quite as odds with his vague, rather chaotic personality; inclusiveness, irony, passion, wit and humour are the qualities I would most readily associate with his writing but the sum total is their memorable quality. The very best are uniquely unforgettable - once read they become part or the reader’s personal anthology of great poems. Going through his work some poems leap from the page:

Noses in books, odd children in good schools

Get praise by being clever. And they sing

Revenge on the fortunate, the easy-going fools;

And think it passing brave to be a king.

King then, but of words only. There’s the rub.

Action is suspect and its end uncertain:

Stuck in a job, or browned off in a pub,

Or feted and then stabbed, behind a curtain…

‘Usumcasane as Poet Maudit’

Conspicuous consumption? Why? Volpone

Would splash it around as if he could afford it,

Wore himself out for his craft, a genuine phoney,

Who only wanted, gloatingly, to hoard it.

His son had sprung like a mushroom, pale in an ally.

Reluctant, they had to unload the stuff on him.

To cook the accounts, got Mosca back from the galleys-

These lawyers worried that the heir looked dim.

‘A Prodigal Son for Volpone’

Barnacled, in tattered pomp, go down

Still firing, battered admirals, still go down

With jutting jaw and tutting tooth and tongue,

Commanding order down cold corridors.

Superbly, O dyspeptic Hamlets,

Pause in the doorway, startle the Fourth Form

With rustlings of impatient inky cloaks-

Time and again you go into your act.

‘The enormous Comics’

Of course there are many, many more but these stand out amongst my favourites. Quite late in life I realised I share Bell’s passion for twentieth century French poetry, especially for Pierre Reverdy, of whose work Bell translated about 150 pages, none of which are included in Bloodaxe ‘Collected Poems’ but do get a mention in Peter Porter’s excellent introduction. The very obscure ‘White Knights Press’ at Reading University brought out  the ‘Reverdy Translations’ in 1997 (ISBN   0704901188).

Bell applied to the Arts council for a bursary to complete his translations and Porter comments, “By the sort of irony common to poets’ lives, the money arrived the day after he died,” If only the recent neglect of Bell would end and his work be granted the acknowledgement it so richly deserves! In the present climate I much doubt it.

Barry Tebb

 Mallarmé’s Tuesdays and the Descent into Institutional Philistinism

When I write it is with a growing conviction that those I address are getting fewer by the year, rather akin to Henry James’ perception, so small was the sale of his works, that his readers were preceding him to the grave. Indeed another phrase of James comes to mind, his warning to would-be writers that ‘There is one word you must learn to put on your banner and that word is loneliness’

The gulf between my perceptions and those of the current ruling literati yawns ever wider. If I have a model it is Mallarmé and if I have a motto it his ‘Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre’ ( the world exists  to end in a great book).  Mallarmé distained ‘the ordinary and the banal’ and believed that the core of poetry is ‘strange and inaccessible, a view not dissimilar to the view of the psychoanalyst

 D.W. Winnicot, who maintained that the core of the ego must remain hidden for its own safety, even in the deepest analysis.

Wallace Stevens wrote that ‘French and English are one language, indivisible’ and this seems as good as metaphor as any. The influence of troubadours of Provence on Pound, of Laforgue on Eliot begins a list that is almost endless. English language poets need to get back on track, via translation in the main, of course. I still find Anthony Hartley’s ‘Penguin Book of French Verse of the Twentieth Century  (1959) ‘with plain prose translations’ the most accessible and well worth searching for. It has Claudel and a reasonable selections from Milosz, Fargue, Jouve and Reverdy.

Paul Auster’s ‘Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry’ is also marvellous, the translations are mainly by poets - Beckett, Wilbur, Ashbery, Stevens, Rexroth, Kirkup to name only those in the first hundred pages and it has 600 large format pages. Its unobtainable in the UK but I finally got one for £18 from the States via Amazon. It is truly stunning in its range.

 The French psycho-analyst André Green wrote that “la psychanalyse est poésie pure (‘Narcissisme de Vie Narcissisme de Mort’) The concept that ‘psycho-analysis is pure poetry’ may be turned round, I contend, without losing its essential meaning and applied to creative writing in any context. When, in the early sixties, I began to encourage children to write poetry and prose in a Leeds inner-city school I little imagined that by the millennium the imposition of the National Curriculum and the pressures of SATS would have all but driven IMAGINATION, with all the implications Coleridge assigned the term - “the representation in the finite mind of the infinite I AM” - from the primary school to the arcane area it now occupies, somewhere between a university subject and the therapeutic field.

The British Kleinian analyst, Donald Meltzer, (in ‘Studies in Extended Metapsychology: Clinical Applications of Bion’s ideas’) explores the terrifying world of what Bion called ‘The Basic’ Assumption Group’ in which, instead of ‘the infinity of emotional  nuances... is a world of rules and measurements rather than principles and qualities. Learning is instilled by rewards and punishment and virtue is obedience.’ Is this not the world of contemporary British education? ‘Gradgrind by degrees’ is how I would characterise it.

Barry Tebb

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