Drinks with Dead Poets

by Glyn Maxwell

  ‘Shakespearean and the other one.’

  ‘Petrarchan,’ Peter gets there (bloke works harder than the lot of’em)

  Right, the one that tends to go ABAB-CDCD and the one that tends to go ABBA-ABBA. ‘The Blackcap’ rhymes this way: ABAB-BCDC-CDDC-EE. This literally isn’t the done thing.

  But what if John Clare regards the demands of traditional verse-form as something more like guidance, remembrance of a path? So you might rhyme or not, you might suddenly repeat, the point being you won’t know until you get there. Now it’s not his usual practice to improvise like this, but he does it where I like him best, so I listen, and I pass it on.

  Too many of us, of you, of me, think Form an edict to obey like a soldier or scorn like a refusenik. But aren’t your passing days more or less like old forms you think you know? Yet they carry shocks and joys within, stuff that jolts you from your expectations. Encounters might do it, the weather might do it. You should respond to what just happened, not what was meant to happen. So not strict Form. But never no-Form. That isn’t even daylight.

  What else. Clare’s couplet doesn’t arrive or conclude like say Frost or Milton, or go balancing into silence like the infinite custom of Mr Bard of Avon – it goes on describing, while lines are still left to work with. The poet doesn’t look away from the object and tell why I’ve told you this. He’s no more interested in our feeding intellectually than the bird is. The way Clare uses closing couplets is not as a destination, an expansion or conclusion, but as a stamp on the memory when the bird has flown away. They’re the edges of fields that shouldn’t be having edges.

  ‘Remembrances’. Eight stanzas, each ten lines, but every fourth line is fantastically rogue. AAAXBBBCCC, where X is a rhyme that does anything. But always for a reason. There are no couplets in the poem because all the rhymes are in triplets. In the first stanza, X rhymes with B to make up a four, but in the other seven it stands alone, and an unrhymed word among triplets is very alone, a notable intruder.

  The seven lonely Xs are stone, Swordy Well’, name, Hilly Snow, stone, prey, stay. Either proper nouns of threatened places, or the implacable stone, or prey (what the places are), stay (what they’re not going to do), or name (all that’s going to be left). In every case there is a reason for the loud isolation of the rogue rhyme X.

  General point: poets who have no use for rhyme have thrown a great big key-ring into the Thames, and with it went their ingress through hundreds of doors.

  More animals in daylight:

  The schoolboys still their morning rambles take

  To neighbouring village school with playing speed,

  Loitering with pastimes’ leisure till they quake,

  Oft looking up the wild geese droves to heed,

  Watching the letters which their journeys make,

  Or plucking ’awes on which the fieldfares feed,

  And hips and sloes – and on each shallow lake

  Making glib slides where they like shadows go

  Till some fresh pastimes in their minds awake

  And off they start anew and hasty blow

  Their numbed and clumpsing fingers till they glow,

  Then races with their shadows wildly run

  That stride, huge giants, o’er the shining snow

  In the pale splendour of the winter sun.

  ‘Schoolboys in Winter’. When I first saw this I noticed all the line-ending vowels were long except run/sun, and felt this was about boys going unwillingly to school and in cheery desperation trying to prolong the time before the bell. It is about that – how about that line 13, That stride, huge giants, o’er the shining snow, six long vowels, the poor line’s trying to last forever! – but in fact this listening poet loves long vowels at the ends of lines, which is I think an act of relish, a love of the sound as it flies away, a heat to help him across the gaps. And look at the descending scale of the last line – day passing in vowels of the Alphabet, the first thing children learn in school. Why wouldn’t it sound a deep-down chord?

  So, cussedly eccentric, but eccentric control. Find an old English word for the chutzpah it takes to rhyme a sonnet ABAB-ABAC-ACCD-CD. That to me is – riding the force of the ancient till you feel – God, why don’t I add MY force to ITS?

  Samira has her hand up: ‘What’s the meaning of clumpsing.’

  ‘Clumpsing, Sash!’ Lily storms in disbelief, ‘like this!’ How d’ya not know that?’

  *

  When for school o’er ‘Little Field’ with its brook and wooden brig

  Where I swaggered like a man though I was not half as big,

  While I held my little plough thought ’ was but a willow twig,

  And drove my team along made of nothing but a name —

  ‘Gee hep’ and ‘hoit’ and woi’ – O I never call to mind

  Those pleasant names of places but I leave a sigh behind,

  While I see the little mouldywarps hang sweeing to the wind

  On the only aged willow that in all the field remains,

  And nature hides her face while they’re sweeing in their chains

  And in a silent murmuring complains

  *

  So I watch the fields for John Clare, who wrote ‘The Fallen Elm’ and ‘The Mores’ and ‘The Lamentation of Swordy Well’ and ‘The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters’ and ‘Remembrances’ with the dead moles hung in chains from a willow and many other poems because the powerful and wealthy had begun in earnest carving England up for profit, which would threaten and then obliterate the England he knew. As it does, and probably will, and mostly has, the one I know.

  Knew. I watch the north-east field by which I met Keats all those weeks ago, as the rain fizzles out and weak sunlight deigns to put in an appearance, and I walk and I trot and I scamper and stride through chill drizzle till I’m watching the south-west field where we had the Hopkins picnic in a dream of late late summer, and I catch the silly old orb as it sinks in dark grey-lemon clouds.

  Not a lot to ask to be waited for, when you’ve gone to so much bother.

  Moving between these vigils I find myself stopping to sit on a bench by the lagoon to the west, looking out to that lonely wooded island like a fool, till I realize he’s not going to come wandering over the dark rolling water is he you twat, whatever his initials.

  Because this is not a fantasy, I state aloud for the record.

  As I’m skirting between the various watch-points, trudging through mud behind a lane of terraced houses with tiny gardens of scruffy washing-lines and rusty bikes, I think I hear a woman’s voice calling, but can’t see who or where. I’m about to reach the farmer’s fields to the south, beyond the railway station (it’s in the last place you look! my mother used to prophesy) when I’m called again, and there’s Samira walking thisaway in her shiny chocolate raincoat down the length of the station platform.

  ‘We have a crisis, professor,’ she calls, though this is slightly belied by the fact she doesn’t break into a run, or into much more than a brisk walk, but then she doesn’t really strain herself in the course of student life.

  What’s wrong, Samira.

  ‘Bronzo’s pride and joy,’ she says as she walks up, sighing at being the one to have to tell me: ‘her grand poetry slam. She’s having a meltdown. That bitch from Admin’s cancelled it.’

  You mean Yeager? Yeager cancelled the poetry slam?

  ‘She thinks we tried to dump her on that Field Trip last week.’

  You did try to dump her. In fact you succeeded.

  ‘No one meant to. They just forgot about her.’

  She says that’s why she pulled it?

  ‘Of course not, but we know that’s why.’

  Er, what do you think I can do?

  ‘You? Nothing. But Bronzo has you down for a man on a white charger.’

  The Academy Presents

  THE FACULTY AUTUMN POETRY READING

  AT

  THE VILLAGE HALL

  Pamela BANGLER (‘The Pond of Disavowa
l’)

  format (‘bye bye bye cell cell cell’)

  Suzi JUDAS (‘Unintelligibilities 5’)

  Dr Clyde W. MAPPING (‘A History of Hesitation)

  Jeff OLOROSO (‘Angels & Arseholes: New & Selected Poems’)

  Nikki PHAPPS (‘i’m melting’)

  Gough SLURMAN (‘The Virus Speaks’)

  Delphine WICKER (‘Cleopatra: The Lost Selfies’)

  7pm, November 14th Sushi and sake

  *

  It’s fair to say I don’t know how this happened. At the bright end of the darkened village hall someone’s reading to the faculty. It’s clearly not Lily’s poetry slam, The Night of the Living Living, which would probably have come with red lights and heckles and drunken whoops from the audience – most of whom would be on the bill sooner or later, we’ve all been there – but there’s a murmurous consternation, an undertow of protest. Eight professors are seated on the stage, clinging to or sort of climbing in their chairs, two now standing up, one sat back there grinning till it’s over – that’s Wayne aka format relishing the chaos – because in had walked John Clare, flushed and muddy from his endless walk, and now he’s planted there bolt upright in his rags very loudly reciting -

  ‘Here was commons for their hills where they seek for freedom still,

  Though every common’s gone and though traps are set to kill

  The little homeless miners – O it turns my bosom chill

  When I think of old ‘Sneap Green’, Paddock’s Nook and Hilly Snow,

  Where bramble bushes grew and the daisy gemmed in dew

  And the hills of silken grass like to cushions to the view,

  Where we threw the pismire crumbs when we’d nothing else to do –

  All levelled like a desert by the never-weary plough,

  All banished like the sun where that cloud is passing now,

  And settled here for ever on its brow. . . ’

  As Lily Bronzo would tell me later at the haven of the Cross Keys bar, ‘Titmouse stuck her reading on an hour before mine, chief right, Kerri says bitch said she knew nothing about it, but there’s like a shitload of flyers everywhere so she’s lying through her perfect little teeth right, anyhow I go looking for my poets to tell them it’s off, so I don’t see him coming, and you didn’t see him in the fields chief did you (you had One Job etc) so the bloke must’ve just seen the lamps and gone right in. He was speaking some poem aloud when he came through the door, he just went clumpsing up to the stage and went on speaking. And those wankers didn’t know how to stop him.’

  They didn’t, nor did I. And I wasn’t about to though most likely I’m one too.

  I saw Jeff Oloroso rise up in the stanza-break and make a gentle move towards John Clare but he wasn’t fast enough and on went the lamentation:

  ‘O I never thought that joys would run away from boys

  Or that boys should change their minds and forsake such summer joys,

  But alack I never dreamed that the world had other toys

  To petrify first feelings like the fable into stone,

  Till I found the pleasure past and the winter come at last -

  Then the fields were sudden bare and the sky got overcast

  And boyhood’s pleasing haunts like a blossom in the blast

  Was shrivelled to a withered weed and trampled down and done,

  Till vanished was the morning spring and set the summer sun

  And winter fought her battle-strife and won...’

  Once this stanza had begun Jeff’s smile steadied into place, and he raised his hands as if to say why not’, then made his slow beaming way along the side of the hall, doing an odd little rhythmic dance with his arms, as if dancing to the beat of the poem, towards me and Samira.

  ‘Oompa oompa, one of your special guests, Glyn?’ he didn’t whisper.

  Uh-huh. Is there a problem.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Samira began,

  ‘No problem on earth,’ said Jeff, ‘he’ll be out by midnight though right? we’ve got a good few to get through!’

  ‘Excuse me when will you reschedule Night of the Living Living?’ demanded Sami fiercely but Jeff enquired of me as if Samira wasn’t there: ‘We hear you’ll be joining us next term?’

  That’s John Clare there (was all I could think to say)

  Jeff glanced at the situation, turned back to me, weirdly put his hand on my shoulder and said, as if I saw this life like he did, ‘now he’d be good in a slam!’

  This observation lost him his chance to intercede in the stanza-break, during which John Clare had to pause to catch his breath and mop his brow, but now three stood up on the front row. One was Tina Yeager in a pale pink frock and a blue wrap, one a young man in a blazer saying ‘bravo, bravo, nice one to end on,’ but Clare wasn’t ending jack, he was gathering speed over sporadic heckling:

  ‘By Langley Bush I roam, but the bush hath left its hill;

  On Cowper Green I stray, ’tis a desert strange and chill;

  And spreading Lea Close Oak, ere decay had penned its will,

  To the axe of the spoiler and self-interest fell a prey;

  And Crossberry Way and old Round Oak’s narrow lane

  With its hollow trees like pulpits, I shall never see again:

  Enclosure like a Bonaparte let not a thing remain,

  It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill

  And hung the moles for traitors – though the brook is running still,

  It runs a naked stream, cold and chill. . .’

  During this stanza they tried all sorts – slow-hand clapping, loudly joking, strolling to the buffet to chat about sashimi – and when the break came I saw Mike, my new pal from Human Resources, whom I saw now was one of the three who’d risen from the front row, move to stand there almost blocking Clare from view, more than happy to bring things to a helpful close.

  But the third who’d risen up I recognized too – not at first, as I hadn’t expected to see him here – but when he intervened, seemed almost to bump Mike back to his seat, muttering ‘Sit the fuck down, mate, free speech,’ it transformed into Heath Bannen. He must have gone there because he’s format’s student. Mike simply grinned and obeyed, smiling ‘very well said, exactly,’ and Tina, left standing in her pink dress, had no choice but to sit down too, folding her arms to wait it out.

  ‘O had I known as then joy had left the paths of men,

  I had watched her night and day, be sure, and never slept again, And when she turned to go, O I’d caught her mantle then And wooed her like a lover by my lonely side to stay,

  Ay, knelt and worshipped on as love in beauty’s bower,

  And clung upon her smiles as a bee upon a flower,

  And gave her heart my poesies all cropped in a sunny hour

  As keepsakes and pledges all to never fade away -

  But love never heeded to treasure up the may,

  So it went the common road with decay.’

  Now Tina pounced, like she was counting lines for the break. She couldn’t know he’d actually finished the poem – only he and I knew that – but she’d gone quickly to the upright piano, canvas-draped in its shabby corner, smartly plucked the ageing flowers from the vase there, and had thrust them into the arms of John Clare before another word was spoken. Not just a pretty face.

  ‘That was such a sweet poem, give it up for our surprise guest!’

  Jeff went clapping to the stage to make sure: ‘As Tina says, a lovely surprise, that was fab, my friend, you’re like a rapper with all your rhyming, well done!’

  ‘I think we’re thoroughly warmed up now!’ Tina declared.

  He’d finished anyway (I hissed at her childishly as I reached the scene)

  ‘Any more up your sleeve, Maxwell?’

  Come to the pub, John, come to the pub,

  John was nodding at the applause because he took it for applause, but he also looked curiously at Heath and Mike and back at Heath and said to them together, though I don’t think eithe
r one could hear, All have liberty to think as they please,’ and then up came Lily and Roy Ford from wherever they’d been sitting, and Sami and Heath close by to help me walk him out of there.

  *

  This squad of doughty rescuers made a beeline for the Cross Keys, and though I began trying to explain the confusion I thought better of it, and made the best of where we’d got to:

  Brilliant reading, John, but these are the ones I want you to meet!

  He was frowning and glancing back at the hall as we crossed the road towards the green lamplight of the Cross Keys. Lily, still bristling at the loss of her main event, spoke up for the gang we were now: ‘Tossers in there, mate, you stick with us!’

  ‘Could see it in their faces,’ John said to her, or possibly to her cropped scarlet hair he was trying to make sense of, ‘Didn’t like his looks from the first.’

  ‘Which one, can you narrow it down,’ said Sami drily.

  ‘I’m a good physiognomist,’ he said more to himself, still holding the dead flowers to his chest.

  We got him through the door into the welcome heat, to the snug with the plum-upholstered armchairs, sat him down in the best one by a merrily raving fire, spread ourselves round in the others. Roy and I went for drinks, Lily perched on the arm of his armchair. When we brought our laden trays to the group it had been augmented by Niall Prester, deep in a fisherman’s blue jumper, and Caroline Jellicoe, whom we hadn’t seen all day. Lily was sharing her woes with Clare because they were woes and there he was:

  ‘And you’da been totally welcome mate, you’da totally headlined right,’

  John (I began, presenting him with two foaming pints so I could stay there for a while) a lot of my friends here are just starting out on, you know, the journey, so – d’you remember writing your first poems? Can you tell us about that at all?