Drinks with Dead Poets

by Glyn Maxwell

  *

  Today and Memory team up matily on the coffee, but begin very quickly to go their separate ways.

  Today boils the kettle, spoons instant from the jar, does everything, let’s not miss a second, last day, time to take your leave. . .

  Memory’s sod-all help with the coffee frankly, just slouched there seeing out of the window, setting off through the dark again, the lanterns on its mind. . .

  A company of six or seven staggering over violet snow arm-in-arm., we’re going to play a poker game, we’re going to deal till dawn. . .

  Today reasons: that was last week. Memory wonders: was it?

  Today adds: also you didn’t. Memory: right, I didn’t.

  Todays pouring: you saw reason, called it a night. Memory says nothing.

  Today milks and sugars and stirs and sips the only coffee. Memory sulks, whines: I wanted one. Didn’t I?

  Today says no, there was only me, hears Memory sniff. It’s fuming.

  MRS. GANTRY’S POETICAL FIGURINES.

  “The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.”

  Blimey, that’s impressive.

  This calligraphy is on silver card and glued to the base of a warrior, a fearsome armoured infidel-smiter with a shield and jagged scimitar. Peter Grain has arranged a line of ten toy figures on a plinth in Mrs Gantry’s stall, which is the first stall I’ve reached at the Christmas Market on the green.

  Are they all Byron-related?

  ‘They are! in celebration of his visit.’

  Do I get a discount?

  ‘Oh – well, yes, of course, I – ’

  I’m kidding Peter, I want to buy one. I want to buy her, the witchy one in the black robe.

  ‘Oh, good choice!’

  “She walks in beauty, like the night

  Of Cloudless Climes and starry skies;

  And all that’s best of dark and bright

  Meet in her aspect and her eyes.”

  ‘Bastard! Beat me to it!’ says Jeff Oloroso cheerfully, coming up beside me, blowing on his foamy drink.

  Sorry, Jeff. Peter have you got an Interim-Dean figure? He might well have, Jeff, he’s got zombies.

  ‘Interim? cries Jeff, ‘bollocks to that. Real thing, mate.’

  ‘Sold out of zombies,’ sighs Peter, sorting my change in his woollen mittens.

  What does Byron have about zombies Peter?

  ‘Oh, wait, yes, With curses cast them down upon the dust,/And gnash’d their teeth and howl’d. . . ’

  That’s ‘Darkness’. Man you so pass my course.

  ‘The chap is bloody gold,’ Jeff says, ‘we lost him! Fly away Peter! We’ll have to hire Paul. Look, can I have a word. . .’

  I’m still browsing Jeff.

  ‘At the gliihwein stall over there. . .?’

  Goodbye Peter.

  ‘Is there class at three, professor?’

  VHB, Peter. Unless it’s locked, is it locked, Dean Jeff?

  ‘It’s even heated, Poet Glynn. Feel free to call me Santa.’

  NORMAN S HOT YULETIDE BEVERAGES.

  SMALL (£5) OR LARGE (£7).

  ‘Cheers.’

  Cheers. Can I ask you something Jeff.

  ‘Fire away.’

  Was Tina married to you?

  ‘Oh another life. I think we separated. I hope we did. Nikki hopes we did!’

  So okay, so, what did it matter?

  ‘To me personally, zilch. She was always a stickler for rules, though. I guess she felt caught out.’

  I didn’t do that to her.

  ‘Me neither, squire, look, moving on: during the three days you were technically an employee you did show pretty good numbers,’ That’s nice.

  ‘Shall we give it another go, eh,’

  Here?

  ‘Spring term, Drama, word is you’re interested.’

  Drama? I’ve never had a hit, Jeff.

  ‘Well, I’ve never won the big one.’

  O.. .kay. I’ll think about it. Norman?

  ‘Small or large.’

  I know why you say small or large. Normally we’d say large or small, right, its a trick, isn’t it Norman.

  ‘Alright then large or small.’

  Ooh, large I think. Dean Jeff?

  DR MAPPING’S ACADEMY PRINTWORKS.

  Alright Clyde?

  ‘Morning. Can I interest you in any recent publications?’

  I’ll take an Oloroso, and. . . a Slurman and this Phapps here. ‘Excellent choices. I presume you possess the Mapping already. . .?’ I do, Clyde, it’s excellent.

  ‘Hm. What’s your favourite poem in it.’

  What.

  ‘What’s your favourite poem in the book of mine you purchased.’ ‘Favourite poem, professor.’

  I–

  ‘Ha! Only joking!’

  Good one,

  ‘Yay,’

  And what’s this card. . .

  ‘It’s a link.’

  A link to what.

  ‘I’m not sure. There’s no signal. But it would link you to format. Then you buy up units in a future text created by format.’

  Why would you do that, Clyde.

  ‘Well an investment, I suppose.’

  I have birthed a monster. What’s this?

  ‘Oh, do you not have one? There’s one in your pigeonhole.’

  I don’t have a pigeonhole.

  ‘That’s where you’ll find it.’

  JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE

  TO PLAY IN THE SNOW. . .

  IT’S THE FACULTY CHRISTMAS PARTY!

  ON THE TWELFTH OF THE TWELFTH!

  TILL MIDNIGHT AT THE MAPPINGS!

  31 East Cross Lane

  *

  You coming, Baggs?

  Bagg, you okay mate, you coming to class now?

  Baggs whats wrong.

  Do I have to do them poshchurs.

  No you don’t have to do the postures Baggs.

  Dorit wanna do them poshchurs.

  We won’t be doing the postures!

  *

  George Gordon, Lord Byron. . .

  Shortest lesson of all. First poet I read who made me want to do it myself. Because he mastered forms till they sounded like thought. Because he lodged in my mind. Because he made me laugh out loud. Because he pretended not to care and yet he cared so much it hurt. Because he lived so fast that in his last poem he could say his ‘days were in the yellow leaf’, pure song of the west, and the kid was thirty-three. He taught me to love it, savour it, give and not give a shit about it at the very same time, and, moreover, call a shit a shit – be that shit the King of England:

  He died! – his death made no great stir on earth;

  His burial made some pomp; there was profusion

  Of velvet, gilding, brass, and no great dearth

  Of aught but tears – save those shed by collusion;

  For these things may be bought at their true worth:

  Of elegy there was the due infusion –

  Bought also; and the torches, cloaks, and banners,

  Heralds, and relics of old Gothic manners,

  Form’d a sepulchral melodrame. Of all

  The fools who flock’d to swell or see the show,

  Who cared about the corpse? The funeral

  Made the attraction, and the black the woe.

  There throbb’d not there a thought which pierced the pall;

  And when the gorgeous coffin was laid low,

  It seem’d the mockery of hell to fold

  The rottenness of eighty years in gold.

  The Vision of Judgment. Ottava rima – or eighth rhyme’ – an Italian form. Easy to do in Italian, everything rhymes, but in English you have to really work the lexicon to make your trio of pairs. That’s why it’s great for comedy – the contortions are part of the fun, the feel of figuring life in it – and our lordship mines
it to the utmost, in this and his masterpiece Don Juan.

  The Vision of Judgment is eight hundred lines of wit and scorn and vitriol heaped on the grave of the recently deceased George III – and on the Poet Laureate Southey, whose poem of the same name had mindlessly praised the monarch like – well, like the English mindlessly praise monarchs. Byron wrote it in Ravenna and would never go home. It was published anonymously and the publisher was fined, the poet’s name – they knew who it was, ffs – shredded in the press. But Byron’s name could take it. Southey’s has never recovered. Yet something always struck me. When push came to shove – and where his satirical hero Pope would have fried such a man as George forever – Byron nudged the old king into heaven, not hell: with a sigh he folded what he most despised into life’s wider comedy.

  As for the rest, to come to the conclusion

  Of this true dream, the telescope is gone

  Which kept my optics free from all delusion,

  And show’d me what I in my turn have shown:

  All I saw further in the last confusion,

  Was, that King George slipp’d into heaven for one;

  And when the tumult dwindled to a calm,

  I left him practising the hundredth psalm.

  Oh I loved Byron for the cliched reasons too – what’s not to like at seventeen? he drank, he shagged, he took a bear to Cambridge – but this outlasted those, this compassionate, humane, low chuckle at the world. Not morally low like they thought him then – low as in deep, profound, like a well.

  Heath

  Samira Caroline

  Peter Barry

  Lily Ollie

  Baggs Iona

  moi

  I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know where you come from. I know some names of your towns and so on, I hear places in your voices, and I can see you all sitting here, I can extrapolate sweet long lives for you all like maybe you can for me – feel free to do for me – but none of it’s anything like your truth, or your facts, or, if such a thing can govern in this mist, your fates.

  I don’t know why you came to my class, I don’t know why I came to this place. I’ve told you the three, seven, twelve things I know. I don’t know how I know them. Tomorrow we’ll all be somewhere else. But we had good times, and we met great poets, you should keep this, look, look, keep this yellow – this golden souvenir, I’m going to be keeping mine. . .

  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 Bronte.

  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.

  Now lets do this. . .

  The white space. The nothing, the element you work in. It’s been good to us, it’s canvas, it’s sheet, it’s bed, it’s soil, it’s,

  It’s brought sorrow too. Our friend went somewhere and we don’t know where. I – too lost someone to it. It may be a busier place than this, more fun, less fun I’ve no idea, it won’t say, but – let’s – face it one last time, shall we?

  Let’s face it, mis amigos, let’s face it down. Let’s hear it out and take it out – waste it, right? Off it, yes? One last minute and then let’s fill it with the lines we learned this term, or the lines we wrote this term, or the lines each other wrote, or Niall Prester wrote, we’ll blacken it, pepper it, riddle it with lines! Find poems in your minds, your hearts, your notebooks, push them into the middle of our table for the last time, your minute’s starting NOW!

  *

  Now speak.

  And so they do. Iona plucks something from the pile and begins reading softly, Ollie blurts out random lines from his brimming notebook, Barry shuts his eyes and summons up some nursery rhyme from his planet where the cats have spats and the dogs have clogs and Caroline sighs aloud to the ceiling and I shall have some peace there for peace comes dropping slow and Heath growls the lines of Niall I’d save a good one for the end as if I knew how anything ended and Peter and Samira lean together politely to read from each others poems, Lily grabs and rips at sheets in a random fractured medley, then as I rise I hear she’s tearfully speaking Clare in the plaintive voice of Baggs – my friendsh forshake me like a mem’ry losht, I am the shelf conshumer of my woes, and as I contemplate them all in their beautiful tumult, and seek some lines of mine to free into the sound, I hear the voice of my once and future teacher, without whom which, without whom this, and without remembering I am simply reciting Then all the nations of birds lifted together the huge net of the shadows of this earth, in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues, stitching and crossing it and in came sunlight, in and throughout, along and across like the day I came, and it lit their hair and lit the arms of their coats as they read and read, and it didn’t stay long, it sunk behind the church now, because a winter’s day was ending, and by the time their unfathomable roar petered out their teacher was gone too and walking down the lane with an ordinary white sheet of paper in his hand –

  READING LIST for Elective Poetry Module

  3pm, Thurs, V.H.B. Prof Maxwell.

  – Reading List, not Reading Series, because his term was over, like last autumn is over, and the poets he’d taught are dead and gone, the poets he taught he’d never met, the poets he’d met he never will, and it was time to go now.

  *

  The spell is broke, the charm is flown!

  Thus is it with life’s fitful fever:

  We madly smile when we should grown:

  Delirium is our

  ‘Where the hell are you going in such a hurry.’

  I stopped dead on my frozen beeline to the pub. I turned and winced my eyes to make her out. Mimi sat smoking on a slanting gravestone in the gloom of the little churchyard. I could still hear the droning passion of my class from the room inside the village hall.

  I’m done, that’s it, that’s my last class.

  ‘They’ll ask for their money back, I would.’

  No you wouldn’t. What are you doing here?

  ‘Waiting for you. I don’t mean you, I mean you lot. Couldn’t take any more.’

  More of what.

  ‘The Keys. Chap’s getting the Bell treatment, sensurround, stereo Bella,’

  Who – what chap,

  ‘Who d’you think, your freakin Byron.’

  He’s here

  ‘You okay Max? you look like you’ve seen a ghost. You look like you did on Halloween when you fucked off with whatshername,’ Yes I – I – Lord Byron, is, is in the pub there,

  ‘No Max fucking Dale Byron, fucking Darren Byron, get a grip, what the hell are you on these days?’

  *

  ‘Know me? Everyone knows me, I’m deformed.’

  ‘Omigod I don’t believe him!’ Bella shrieks,

  ‘I’d have shot myself last year, had I not recollected that all the old women in England would’ve been delighted.’

  In the blazing laughter of the girls my eyes accustom to the winter heat, the Christmas light, the reality: he’s ensconced, enthroned in the snug, with wine and a cigar, in the place we place our visiting poets. ‘Truth is I’m too lazy to shoot myself, and it would annoy Augusta.’ Ecstatic Bella waves to me from her armchair by his side – I see Blanche, Kornelia, Molly, Roy, Kerri all close by, women I don’t know, Nikki and Delphine from the Academy, and I realize I’m no longer essential to the passage of events.

  Not sure I ever was, you know.

  ‘Small or large.’

  Infinite, Norman, endless.

  ‘I’il take a Savoy Corpse Reviver, barman, straight up, that’s brandy, crème de menthe,’

  ‘Mulled wine or sod off
, miss.’

  ‘Go on then.’

  We gaze on the wild assembly as we wait.

  ‘He doesn’t remember her,’ Mimi says, as we see Isabella lolling and drooping against him, ‘you know, from that wedding. She thinks he does.’

  (I watch, I don’t know what she’s on about)

  ‘Same action, same result,’ she mutters, ‘definition of madness, Bell.’

  *

  ‘I’m the very worst companion for young people in the world,’ George Gordon Lord Byron’s saying as he accepts the bottle I bring to the table, spares me not a glance, thus reducing me to a waiter, and Isabella, who’s giddily running the show here, gets someone to drag up a stool for me:

  ‘This is our poetry professor, Noel!’

  Hey Noel. (Noel?)

  ‘He’s also a poet,’ yells Blanche, ‘but he keeps that pretty quiet!’ Actually I don’t (I shout cheerily) but they’re my students so they’ve no idea!

  ‘I don’t draw well with literary men,’ says Byron, faintly acknowledging me with a nod, ‘never know what to say to ’em after I’ve praised their last publication,’

  ‘His is called Pluto,’ Isabella shouts in his ear, and he looks about as interested as he’d be in a night on that lost planet,

  ‘There are exceptions,’ he goes on, ‘but they’ve either been men of the world, such as Scott or Moore – or visionaries out of it, such as Shelley,’

  What’s Shelley like! (the waiter hollers in the din)

  Byron shrugs, fills the available air with cigar: ‘the mildest of men,’ he goes, ‘the least selfish. But I’ve nothing in common with his speculative opinions,’

  ‘We had Keats here!’ cries Bella,

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Keats!’ ‘Jack Keats?’

  ‘JOHNK KEATS!!!’ all but hysterical,

  ‘Keats, Ketch, or whatever his names are,’

  ‘His real name is Bains,’ Mimi murmurs from nearby, and the acolytes ignore her, goth bitch, no respect etc,

  ‘Little Johnny Keats,’ says Byron, ‘took the wrong line as a poet,’ What? Keats? How?

  ‘Cockneyfying, suburbing. . .’

  You know what, Noel, I (what, I come this close to telling him where I come from, but) I come from Pluto,

  ‘Ah, just like your book...’ Blanche is nodding, as if the mystery makes sense now, but Bella’s spreading into his Noelship’s eyeline, ‘I thought you were all of the Romantic School!’ at which he quite convulses with contempt,