Drinks with Dead Poets

by Glyn Maxwell

  The view is westward, there’s a patch of light behind the clouds, where the sun would be hiding mid-afternoon in autumn. Out beyond the village is that long grey lake in the distance. It’s got a little wooded island, I wonder if I can get there. There are some larger light-brown buildings in a row before the lake, square and squat, three or four storeys. Before those there’s a clear gap where that central green must be, and the inn and the coloured houses. Nearer still, the small spire of the church at the Cross.

  It’s still raining, but it’s brighter now and I think blue sky is coming, if what’s over there is coming over here.

  Is what’s over there coming over here?

  ‘What’s he say now,’ murmurs Kerri, trying to twist the key off the ring of keys without breaking her nails.

  Where’s – everything. Restaurants, shops, everything. The bonnet shop.

  ‘What? there’s no bonnet shop.’

  Keats says there is.

  ‘He doesn’t live here. You’re teaching in ten minutes. After that you can do what you like.’

  *

  Teaching in a dream isn’t that different from teaching in real life. I don’t feel ready and I don’t feel old enough. I won’t remember their names, I’ll upset someone. I want to be exonerated. I want to go home to my toys, I’m in the middle of a game with them.

  Anyway there they all are in the porch of the village hall, Ollie Faraday and white-scarf woman, there’s lavender lady and solemn bristly bloke, pale thin lad, scarlet dye girl and a maybe Indian woman in a pink silk headscarf who’s got an e-cigarette with the weird blue tip. I look at my white sheet.

  That’s only seven.

  None of them know who’s missing, they all met in the pub or the office or this morning on the train and they’ve all become fast friends like folk will do in these situations. They’ve got three injokes going and what else do you need.

  Finally there’s a big beaming fellow in overalls lumbering up the lane. He grins apologetically, like he’d run if he could run, ‘Wilby here!’ he exclaims, ‘Wilby here and always will!’

  The clock is striking three in the little bell-tower.

  ‘Barry Wilby!’ doesn’t look like he belongs with us, and he’s too late for the in-jokes, but here he is among us as they all bustle forwards around me, forming a grinning or muttering crew, through the dusty village hall to a cold decrepit side-room I believe we’ll be calling home.

  *

  First did anyone else see the kid out there in the cravat? No?

  ‘Professor, it’s – ’

  Well I did and he said he’s Keats. Perhaps he’s a teaching material. No one saw him? Okay, perhaps he’s a delusion. Either way.

  Dyed-scarlet girl has got her hand up.

  Yes what.

  ‘Can’t we all say our names?’

  They have names and they’re from places, what an excellent dream this is. I write them down as they say, and ask them to sit in the same seats next week. Though as I’m only dreaming there won’t be a next week. I draw a little chart to keep from falling to bits with laughter.

  Heath () Samira (ind)

  Iona (scarf) Lily (red)

  Barry (big) Ollie ()

  Niall (ssh) Caroline (eld)

  moi

  I finish off my chart and laugh anyway, trying to make it a cough.

  ‘What’s up?’ Ollie wonders. He looks sympathetic, like he knows me, can look after me in a way the others can’t.

  Oh I. I just had déjà vu.

  ‘I get that,’ say most of them.

  Okay Keats.

  ‘Yay we’re back!’ Orlando revels to himself.

  The thing about Keats is. Or one thing about Keats is. His real name wasn’t Keats. (Some of them start making notes.) No his real name was Bains. Johnny Bains.

  (Ollie pauses before making this note, is I think looking at me with a tilt of the head for a moment, then bows to these strange tidings, and makes the note in his brand-new book with a floral cover that appears to be made of metal.)

  The problem with Keats is Keats. The word Keats, John Keats, Keatsian. Say it, go on, say it to yourselves (two will, six won’t) till you leach all meaning from it.

  ‘Keats,’ says Ollie: ‘Keats.’

  ‘Keats. . .’ Caroline Jellicoe samples it thoughtfully . . . ‘Keats’.

  Because it comes at us just groaning with poetry, beauty, adieu, mists of adieu and what ye know on earth, it’s high, it’s beyond, it’s untouchable, it’s Keats. I don’t think we can hear much else when somebody says Keats. So remember: his real name was Bains. Johnny Bains from Norf London. . .

  (I wait for the scribbling to stop.)

  Look. It wasn’t, cross it out, I’m saying imagine it was, I’m saying imagine that’s how it struck the ear, because – that’s what they thought of him, the circles, the coteries, the tall posh diffident not-needing-a-job literati. And the lad is trying to make it as a doctor, he’s gotta make it as something or he’ll starve, right? His folks are dead and gone, dad at nine, mum at fifteen, his sick doomed brother needs looking after, his little sister does, his other brother’s soon to sod off to the New World forever, and the Bains dosh is tied up with some solicitor who never lets them near it. Poor Johnny, coughing little spluttering med student. He doesn’t want that life. He turns away from anatomy books by candlelight and tries his hand at this:

  New Morning from her orient chamber came,

  And her first footsteps touched a verdant hill. . .

  We all started somewhere. I in my aunts living-room in a house outside Geneva. Fifteen one afternoon, sitting alone by a grand piano, wrote on a piece of paper against the long black polished lid – ‘Its spring and the flowers haven’t opened,’ There’s one too many stars in the sky.’ Look we all start somewhere. Eight years later I got a poem accepted for some leaflet. I literally jumped for joy. (A quarter-century later I sent six poems to the London Review of Books and got one accepted. My first reaction was to wonder what’s wrong with these other five? Don’t become me.)

  Anyway it was quicker for Johnny Bains, and it needed to be. Johnny mate you’ve got a poem in The Examiner!

  O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,

  Let it not be among the jumbled heap

  Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep —

  Meanwhile in a nicer part of London: I say chaps, have a look at this ‘Johnny Bains’, he’s not just apprenticed to a sawbones, look he’s got verses in here! I say, have a read, Johnny wishes to be alone, but not just any old way. He feels the buildings are looking jolly murky today, oh you do, do you Johnny? So what he’s going to do is climb, shall we all climb with Johnny?

  They called him one of the Cockney School, spat it out like gentlemen, but little Johnny Bains is hiking on the slopes of Parnassus! He’s going to be a poet! He has less than five years left.

  *

  In a dream you can teach anything, no one’s watching, no one’s here.

  I thought maybe I’d teach poetry like I write it, try and engage anything, books, jokes and make-believe, show where it is I’m standing when I think, what the view is as I feel things, what the light’s like while I breathe, because nothing I can do or say takes anything from anywhere. I’m only giving back in the light of how it came.

  *

  So, in contrast to Johnny Bains, you all have the capability to vanish right out of poetry right now. Feel free to do so. You do that by taking an almost conscious decision to cease hearing. You do that by filing John Keats and his murky buildings and his mellow autumn and his drowsy numbness away in a file marked Old Immortal Poetry – adieu, adieu – and filing away with it every physical bodily element that make his work indestructible, unkillable, not leaving before you do.

  Then you go back to writing like you think the thing is done now. Like the thing is done since one day, phew, someone figured out life is ugly, has no beauty, needs no music, is simply not to be risen to.

  Example: I feel like shit, feel l
ike I’ve been drugged old-school. That bird’s kinda like me, making its one noise. That’s all I want to do, that or maybe die. I dunno. Probably dreaming anyway.

  Just a normal day in dreamland, we can access that. But how does that feeling arrive at the body, when you slow time down, when you put a hand on it as it marches by in its uniform, and you bemuse it with this?

  My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

  My sense, as if of hemlock I had drunk,

  Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

  One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

  ’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

  But being too happy in thine happiness, –

  That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

  In some melodious plot

  Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

  Singest of summer in full-throated ease. . .

  In saying this to yourself you take it very slowly, and you try to be aware what your throat, tongue, and lips are doing. Which means heeding the vowel-lengths, the consonant-clusters, because some words take a huge great while to say, they lie longer on the body, seem in no haste to leave you.

  And you feel the movement of the frown on your forehead, the wrinkles and eyebrows, the bouncers at the gate – ’what’s it like man it’s like hemlock – how long ago shit was it one minute??? – plot of green what green very green kinda beechen green, that green!’ -the hairs of your eyebrows act like the hairs up your nose, class, absorbing what comes in at you through the senses, whether it’s one of the senses or all five or all seven.

  Poems that stay stay because the body feels them.

  I said: Poems that stay stay because the body feels them.

  Because the body doesn’t want to move at the pace of time. It wants to be slowed down. That’s pretty much its only wish. Singest of summer in full-throated ease. . . Never end, never end, I am ending, never end. . .

  The body desires to be slowed down and to be graced, adorned, with language.

  It wishes, fair creatures of an hour, it wishes all its life to be at standstill.

  And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,

  That I shall never look upon thee more,

  Never have relish in the faery power

  Of unreflecting love; – then on the shore

  Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

  Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

  Two years left.

  So Johnny Bains writes poems to a season, to a month, to sadness, to a vase, to sleep, to stones, to laziness for Christ’s sake, to fame, to Milton’s hair, Mrs Reynolds’s cat and the Elgin sodding Marbles, he addresses things, he apostrophizes, O this, O that, O, O, O is awe, the maw, the craw, the oral, O is the open mouth, astonishment, horror, wonder, and it is the stamp and seal of Old Poetry to be filed away where you file Old Folks, but think of it another way. . .

  Johnny Bains, for his seven years of work, is telling the world I love you. He’s ill half the time, he coughs and hauls his breath back up, so his poems can gasp I love you. By the time he’s coughing blood on the cotton sheet he’s in love with actual Fanny Brawne – bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art - so he just goes on saying I love you till there’s no you, and no I, and no years left at all. See, you’re blushing by now. It’s oh these days, not O.

  *

  But I’m dreaming, I’ll say anything. Im dreaming I said anything. I think I like Iona, she’s Scots, Iona McNair, am I this old in the dream? And big Barry’s got his hand up.

  Big Barry. I mean Barry. (I get away with things in dreams.)

  ‘What is it you mean when you say he’s got two years left?’

  I step back to absorb this question, and you know it never does get answered, never would and never will, as right then the sun comes in, O – man alive does the sun come spreading in, fair floods our little room with gold, the low last autumn sunlight finally making it to my class. They have bronze in their hair, Ollie, Caroline, Iona, and their clean new pencil-cases glint in it and their water-bottles gleam with it, and the pages all turn yellow and some sighs and yays and murmurs mark the pleasure of having sun for the last, late, only time today. We move gently towards, like waterlife under the waves. Because soon it’s gone again, wrong side of clouds or houses, and we’re left with the blue-grey embers of afternoon, and eight strangers to get used to, and all these scrawled-on yellow pages suddenly everywhere.

  ‘What is it you mean when you say he’s got two years left?’

  Class. . . people. . . why is the paper yellow?

  ‘What’s that?’

  All these sheets of paper were white. And now they’re yellow, yellow-gold. . .

  Lily Bronzo opens her mouth: ‘Is it off hemlock you haff drunk?’ and they all laugh and chuckle and wait for me to. But:

  No I’m serious, look, I got them from the office, from Kerri Bedward in the office it was a big sheaf of white paper it came from a box in the corner!

  Ollie addresses everyone: ‘He’s had a bit of a rough journey, apparently right professor?’

  ‘Is it important, the colour?’ Iona McNair wonders with concern.

  Yes no it’s the – reading list. I gave it out at the start, did I not?

  ‘You did!’ says Barry Wilby, lifting his own yellow sheet and flapping it in the air, ‘got it handy. Reading Series!’

  Reading List.

  ‘Reading Series,’ says Barry, mournful like it’s his fault.

  Reading – ?

  ‘Series,’ confirms Samira, sitting back and looking out of the window.

  ‘It really is quite a series,’ Caroline bucks me up.

  ‘Cool game this sir,’ says Lily Bronzo.

  ‘Why don’t you look at it, mate,’ the bloke called Heath murmurs from the far end of the table as he doodles over his.

  Yes. Why don’t I.

  So I look at my yellow page with the Reading List.

  READING SERIES.

  Elective 711: Poetry/Maxwell Thursday, Village Hall times TBC.

  26th Sept. Mr. J. Keats.

  3rd Oct. Miss. E. Dickinson.

  10th Oct. Fr. Hopkins SJ.

  17th Oct. The Misses Brontë.

  24th Oct. Mr. S. T. Coleridge.

  31st Oct. Mr. E. A. Poe.

  7th Nov. Field Trip.

  14th Nov. Mr. J. Clare.

  21st Nov. Mr. W. B. Yeats.

  28th Nov. Mr. W. Whitman.

  5th Dec. Mrs. E. B. Browning and Mr. R. Browning.

  12th Dec. Lord Byron.

  Just testing, I knew that, guys. Of course it says Reading Series. Poe on Halloween, I get it, a Field Trip on my birthday yay, of course the page is yellow. . .

  ‘Sir.’

  Yes, urn, Lily.

  ‘Why do you keep saying you’re dreaming?’

  Do I?

  ‘I like it,’ says Niall softly on my left, the only thing he’s said.

  I don’t know, Lily. I think I’m going to stop now.

  ‘Also it’s like, we’ve paid?’

  I make appointments with most everyone, three next week, three the week after, three forever I shall look at their poems, that’s why they’re here, to meet me one-to-one and learn how to be poets, I shall no longer say I’m dreaming as it seems more likely I’m in some sort of long-term coma, between you and me and the gatepost with which I have evidently collided, and off go all my poets through the gloomy village hall again, out to the chilly daylight and away in twos and threes.

  *

  ‘Wasn’t so difficult was it.’

  Kerri Bedward’s in a light brown coat, she’s locking up her office. How do you know it wasn’t difficult, it was difficult.

  ‘It’s not difficult now, it’s over now.’

  I suppose. Where’s, um.

  ‘What?’

  Where’s.

  ‘What’s the matter. Say.’

  Where’s. Um. . . Oh for chrissake where’s Keats.

  ‘Who the vi
siting poet?’

  Yes the visiting poet.

  ‘He went past the window about an hour ago, towards where you were.’

  The village hall?

  ‘That’s where he’s reading. Look at the yellow sheet.’

  It was white when you gave it to me, Kerri.

  ‘Pardon? No it wasn’t.’

  I took it from that pile of – oh. They’re yellow. Very yellow. Long day.

  ‘Two hours, sure, exhausting. I was here at eight-thirty.’

  I didn’t exist then. Sorry – look I’m just thinking, Kerri, if he’s Keats – of course hes Keats, I knew that – its just I didn’t remind the students, I handed out the Reading Series, do you think they’ll come and hear him? He’s Keats.

  ‘Well you know, students. Also there’s a Meet’n’Greet tonight, like a big Orientation? All the writing students, all the professors.’

  There’s what?

  ‘A little party at the halls, white wine, sort of thing, get-to-know-you. Quiche. You should go if you’re not busy. There’ll be lots of folks there, it’s in Cartwright 202.’

  Fucking Keats is doing a reading.

  ‘Pardon?’

  Sorry.

  ‘You know what students are like, um, Glyn, they’ve got lots of options, they’re customers these days.’

  *

  I find him sitting on the stage in the village hall, we must have all walked right past him. He has a little blue hardback volume face down on the stage and his eyes are shut. It’s a low and dusty stage but then he’s not a very tall chap so his legs don’t reach the floor. I test the fluorescent lights a bit, good grief we’re doing this here, then I go and sit down next to Keats. My legs do reach the floor.

  Look John I should have asked you to the class, now I think, I’m a moron, what’ve you been doing?

  He picked up the little book, looked at it, and closed it.

  ‘Reading, writing, fretting. The last I intend to give up and stick to the other two.’

  That’s a plan. You – wrote this afternoon?

  He beheld his dangling legs in their grey velvet, frowned, and gathered them up beneath him until he sat cross-legged on the edge of the stage, swaying side to side with the effort. Then he broke into something like a little grin: ‘I say to the Muses what the maid says to the man: take me while the fit’s on me.’