PERSON OF THE YEAR 2019: KATE TEMPEST & GRETA THUNBERG

Every year at SUFFOLK PUNCH, as its multitude of readers know, I give out an entirely meaningless and unprofitable award to the person who I think has distinguished himself or herself in the previous twelve months. Last year the winner was clear for me. It had to be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This year the choice is a little harder. There are two clear winners, each of whom have moved and inspired me tremendously in their way. So I have decided to declare 2019's Person of the Year award a tie and give out absolutely nothing except my thanks to two separate people.

Kate Tempest (above) has been around for a few years now but I only became aware of her at the end of last year. When I bought her album 'Let Them Eat Chaos' it had an effect on me emotionally like nothing had since 1982 when I first heard Bob Dylan sing 'The Ballad of Hollis Brown'. I actually cried real, hot tears. And I still feel that way every time I listen to her. The poems she recites over music are intense, profound and beautifully written. 

The other winner of my award has won just about every other award as well this year. It's climate change activist Greta Thunberg (below):

Greta has inspired a generation of young people to believe in something other than the accumulation of property, white goods and knick-knacks. That alone is a miracle. In her epic quest to convince the old and the powerful that their greed and rapaciousness is going to kill us all, she has also given hope and a renewed sense of commitment and determination to those of us who have been to the barricades before and lost too many times. We may lose again. But Greta has made us realise that if we do, the planet dies. So staying at home warmed by our own cynicism is no longer an option. (Bruce)

NORTHAMPTON NEWS: KING'S GAMBIT ALBUM FUNDRAISER

image: www.walnut-tree.co.uk

Northampton band King's Gambit have announced a Kickstarter project to raise money for a new album. They need to raise £2,500 before December 17th (I think that's the date). Can anyone help? Clink the link below to see what special rewards different pledges will get you.And know that you will be adding to the general level of beauty in the universe.

https://www.kickstarter.com/…/kin…/kings-gambit-studio-album

To whet your appetite, here's a poem I wrote after seeing the band one day last summer.

KING'S GAMBIT PLAY THE MARKET SQUARE

King’s Gambit are tuning up on stage

as we shelter, cow-like, from the lashing rain.

We’re under the tarp of a market stall,

our coats zipped up. There’s a crowd of us.

I’m grumpy. I came to watch the band,

not drown. But over Jimmy’s End,

some blue appears in the Stygian gloom.

So maybe we will have our show.

Meanwhile, a New Orleans-style jazz band

marches through the deluge playing.

The rain soaks through their clothes,

but they are smiling anyway. This moment’s theirs;

if they get pneumonia, so be it.

On stage the band are looking ready.

But still it’s raining bloody cats and dogs.

They are facing forty empty seats

and the blue patch at Jimmy’s End’s gone black.

Will they play? We wonder what will happen.

I remember Justin at the Bardic Picnic,

his strip dance when the heavens opened.

I won’t do that, but we could chant no-rain

like Woodstock hippies to end the flood.

I’m building up to suggesting it

when the clouds part inexplicably

as if two hands had separated them,

as if King’s Gambit had brought the rain

to add a little extra showmanship.

Before the band have even started playing

their folkbeat with a Shoe Town vibe,

all the seats are full, and forty bums are wet.

But one song in and all the crowd forget.

I long to jump out of my seat and dance

in front of everybody, like a dick,

but wallflowers need a lot of beer for that.

I’ve just had Sprite for breakfast.

.

.

Review: Barry Tebb Collected Poems 1964 - 2016

This book represents 52 years of serious work by a poet of great skill and sensibility. Barry Tebb believes in the importance of his art in an age when cynical detachment is the requisite posture for a reputation, at least in the creative alleyways where I’ve made camp (more by accident than design). Elsewhere, it’s enough just to write increasingly insipid imitations of the generation that came before you these days. Maybe the readership no longer believes in poetry as a high and possibly holy work either:

Armitage, I name you, a blackguard and a knave,

Who knows no more of poetry than McGonagall the brave,

Yet tops the list of Faber’s ‘Best Poets of Our Age’.

Barry Tebb ‘James Simmons R.I.P.’

That’s from Barry’s poem ‘James Simmons R.I.P.’ It’s one of the great pieces in this collection, a paean to a poet largely erased from the histories because his style had become unfashionable and his personality difficult. Armitage challenges nobody; his demeanour and his poetry are radio friendly. The job of poets in the mainstream now isn’t to make the reader look up a reference or be truly and genuinely moved.

The only Simmons poem I have been able to find is about two people having sex on a train. It’s rambunctious and very funny. But Barry says of Simmons ‘You bared your soul in a most unfashionable way.’ This is something Barry’s own poetry does too (and mine, perhaps). We learn, reading from cover to cover as I have done, about his relationship with Brenda Williams, a poet of considerable gifts herself and one who, one day, absolutely must be ‘discovered’ by feminist scholars – if this doesn’t happen, there is no justice:

I remember the bungalow at Rawdon

Where we met, burning coals could never warm it,

Living there alone was like wearing a hair shirt.

I had reached the end of childhood, the part

With jelly, ludo and Rupert Bear. You came

With a friend who announced, ‘There’s no one here

Who’s not neurotic.

Barry Tebb ‘Cut Flowers’

The lives of these two extraordinary poets were as filled with love, sadness, tragedy, waste and beauty as all of our lives, I would imagine. But despite their problems, despite what might be called (though the term is perhaps uninformed) the failure of their marriage, Barry and Brenda remained intensely close, their lives interwoven, and when Brenda died, the poetry Barry wrote is heartbreaking and beautiful. Why such sincerity is no longer valued puzzles and annoys me. Reading his poem ‘Your Dying’ I feel my mother’s end beating hard in my chest:

You were strapped down and I strapped up, too far

To grasp your desperate hand. For once your terror was plain,

You’d never come home to your eight cats again.

Barry Tebb ‘Your Dying’

The centrepiece of these ‘Collected Poems’ is ‘Bridge Over the Aire’, an epic, 82-page, five book poem about Leeds and first love. Barry was born in Leeds, a Leeds he returns to as we all go home; but little of his Leeds remains:

My eyes wandered over the Aire at the

Coal barges as they snaked beneath the bridge

In black tarpaulin shrouds and clouds of steam

Hissed from Easy Road Laundry

Barry Tebb ‘Bridge Over the Aire, Book One’

In crisis, perhaps, facing misfortune (‘Luck, where did I leave you?’) Barry walks the streets of his youth, those that remain, reconsidering his own choices (‘I own no property but a book’); and the past and the present accompany him wherever he goes:

With every car alarm

I hear the air raid

Siren’s song, Waterloo Road’s

Bomb hole big enough to hold

A bus that could not stop

Barry Tebb ‘Bridge Over the Aire, Book One’

But most of all, on Barry’s journey home, he thinks of Margaret, his first love:

Why does your image haunt me

Night and day?

Lank February grass

Pale lemon straw

The colour of your hair

Your voice in dreams

“I am here, I am waiting.”

Barry Tebb, ‘Bridge Over the Aire, Book One’

The whole poem is haunting, filled with nostalgia and its attendant sense of desperate loss; it is also romantic, enormously so, in a way that no poet who wishes to be considered sophisticated would dare to be anymore. But those who practice a distant art, a carefully neutral or emotionally superficial art are lying to us about human experience. Life is as lovely as it is raw and terrible. In the midst of the beauty and the chaos we have poetry, which is flexible enough to glorify the magic and make at least partial sense of our despair. If it doesn’t speak to the core of our being about the things that frighten us, sadden us and ennoble us then it’s really no more important than balloon twisting at a children’s party.

We are standing on the corner of Falmouth Place

We are standing by the steps to the Aire

We are standing outside the Maypole

Falling into Eden.

Barry Tebb, ‘Bridge Over the Aire, Book Five’

Published by Sixties Press, 2016 

ISBN: 978-1-905554-31-7 

Northampton News: The Bardic Picnic

This year's Bardic Picnic takes place on Sunday 15th September, that's this coming Sunday, on the Racecourse at the Umbrella Fair Pavilion. The Racecourse is a perfect place for the artists of the area to meet and engage in friendly song, dance and poetical competition. The Bardic tradition goes back to medieval times at least. And the Racecourse has been a place of communal activity in Northampton for centuries.

Unofficial race meetings were held there until 1681, at which point they were stopped because of the number of accidents. As much as I disapprove of horse racing, I can imagine the roaring, cheering (and probably at times dangerous) atmosphere at the meetings. The sense of freedom gained by hardworking people as they watched those marvellous wild creatures charge must have been exhilarating.

Between 1778 and 1882, apparently, the area now known as the Racecourse was called Freeman's Common and local freemen grazed their cattle there. That name has resonances in the modern age even if ideas about farming and the use of animals have to change.

With the aid of Lord Spencer, the park had also been put back into service as a racecourse fifty-some years earlier, according to the histories, and races continued until 1904, when they were banned because of the number of fatal accidents involving jockeys and spectators.

What ghosts the bards and strummers and crafters will walk in the presence of on Sunday! You can sense them if you sit there alone for long enough anywhere in the park and open your mind.

For me as a poet it is the Racecourse's history as a place of public executions that resonates most strongly. Hundreds were killed there between 1715 and 1818 (and probably none of them rich).

My rhymers 'Jack the Bastard' and 'The Bastard's Return' were inspired by a gang of highwaymen who were hanged on the Racecourse. One of the Culworth gang, as they were called, left a poem when he stole from a farm. Artists and outlaws: don't they have at least a little in common when capitalism's clear mission is to flatten the human spirit and transform us all into homogeneous economic units?

Along with the annual contest to find a Northampton Bard who will hold the position for a year and a day, visitors on Sunday can expect live music from Jono & the Uke Dealers, Kenneth J Nash and Katie Paton, among many others, as well as vegetarian food and lots of stalls. It's free too, which is another great incentive to toddle along if you have nothing else to do that day.

Review: Once Upon a Nervous Breakdown

eBook from www.somapublishing.com

ONCE UPON A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN is a new book of poetry by John Patrick Robbins, boss of Whiskey City Press. It's a strong book. Occasionally it's an outrageous book (for all the right reasons), linked, if not sequentially, then thematically:

     What would I write about if not for women and whisky?

     Who the fuck knows but I doubt you would be reading my work.

      ('We All Got Issues')

Not all of the poems are about women and whisky. Some are about loyalty. Some are about the trials of publishing. But they're all about the poet's responses (or the responses of one of his characters), to what he encounters: a life lived in the raw, retold in the raw.

And it's an interesting quote, the one above, from somebody who founded a poetry site dedicated to 'all things bar-room.' Is John Robbins admitting he's just an entertainer giving the audience what he thinks they want?

No. But he's partly right about reader expectations. Some poets (and poets are the main readers of poetry) think that 'women and whisky' are the sole indicators of truth and authenticity, forgetting that to a lonely care assistant four walls and nights in with tea and beans on toast might be authentic.

There are at least three different voices in these poems. One is deeply, and credibly, cynical:

     […] large gatherings only seem to serve up victims to mass shootings.

     ('Zen')

Some poems push the boundaries of good taste so far, you might even feel a little guilty for laughing when you read them:

     Of course, I won't even go into that night I pissed in a friend’s fish tank.

     I believe I may have what some would describe as a drinking problem.

     ('Snub Nose')

That deliberately jejune humour is the hallmark of one of Robbins' other magazines 'Under The Bleachers'. It offends some and delights others and the magazine ploughs on regardless. But here it has an intent as serious as the poems that drip with cynicism. 

What's the intent? To be heard, I think, without being seen, or exposed:

     "The page is all I got sweetheart."

     ('And So It Was The End.')

I detect a fragile and deeply hurt man at the heart of these poems hiding his pain behind masks. He seems to reveal himself more than once and when he does, the effect is pronounced:

     I broke my soul somewhere along this journey.

     ('Mixed Signals')

     I contemplated suicide but you seemed more appealing than a fast ticket out.

     ('To My Best Gal')

But just when I think I've nailed him, through this book, I remember that Robbins is known to his friends as Coyote. Who's Coyote? The anthropomorphic trickster hero of Native American mythology. 

Have I been tricked? Is the fragile man I see another mask? Perhaps; perhaps not. Only John Robbins really knows that. And I have a hunch he won't be telling us any time soon. As he says in the final poem I quote for this review:

     Always keep them guessing.

     ('Disappearing Act')

Musicians Against Homelessness

A bunch of really fine musicians are putting this show on for an incredibly important cause. Admission is free but donations are appreciated. If you have a free night that night why not pop along? 

Rejection

I used to handle the rejection of my poetry very badly. I still don't like it; nobody does. But two or three magazines in a month declining my submissions won't make me question my right to call myself a poet anymore.

Once, in the print days, I had a lot of success publishing with Bryn Fortey in his legendary magazine 'Outlaw'. I thought I had cracked it; I thought I knew how to write good poetry and that everything I produced would be loved by everyone.

Then two editors sent my submissions back by return of post. One was brutal. I was so crushed by his demolition of my work I couldn't write for months.

Which is silly, really. I'd never met the man. Nor had I ever read any of his poetry. Why would his opinion matter if I had no measure of his right to offer one?

These days, roughly 50% of my submissions are accepted, or one from 50% of the bundles I submit, to be more precise. That's an average I'm proud of, though I'd like it to be higher. But I've discovered a remarkable thing about the ones that come back: usually they deserve to.

I read the poems again when they're rejected. I've selected the magazine I submit to carefully, so I want to know why they didn't think anything I sent was suitable. And almost always, there's something a little wrong with the poem. The rhythm falters, or the movement of the idea doesn't work, or the language is too lazy somewhere.

It's obvious isn't it? Rejection's not personal; they don't know us.

You could, of course, console yourself with the idea that all editors are philistines; that the small-press poetry game is just a love-in between a bunch of middle-aged white men who never quite got over Charles Bukowski's passing; that in a just world you'd have every award going.

But you'd be kidding yourself.

These days I try to take rejection as a sign that I have to work harder. And you know something? When I do work harder I write better poetry.

Book Review: 'The Two of Us' by Sheila Hancock

This week I've read The Two of Us. Sheila Hancock's memoir of her life with John Thaw. It was first published 15 years ago, but my love of the Inspector Morse franchise hadn't consumed me in 2004. I liked the show, just as I had liked The Sweeney when I was a teenager, but it was still just unusually intelligent tv. Television was an intellectual bete-noire for me in those days. I hated the way it was always chattering away in the background at home, forcing what I considered a mentally deadening consensual reality on its audience.

Besides,  there really was no Inspector Morse franchise in 2004. The Morse spin-off Lewis wouldn't begin for another two years, and I didn't even see that until 2010, having jettisoned my tv between house moves at some point along the line. Finally I did see it, and I thought it was wonderful, almost as good as the original (I was too loyal to allow for anything else). By the time the Morse prequel Endeavour began in 2012 I was deeply immersed in the Morse universe. Those of us who are make Star Wars fans look casual and disinterested.

The Two of Us, however, isn't about Endeavour Morse. It's not about Jack Regan either. It's about the complex, troubled man who created them both, and his twenty-eight years with Sheila Hancock, someone who all British people of a certain age will recognize even if they can't name very many things that she starred in. I remember her from her brilliant appearances on the radio show Just a Minute. More recently I have seen her in the inspirational little indie film Edie. She was in EastEnders, she writes, playing the mother of Martin Kemp, but I didn't have a tv at the time. She also appeared on tv in a number of sit-coms in the 60s and early 70s, always typecast as scatter-brained and -- from a couple of clips I've seen -- sexually flirtatious (if naively so). Her greatest work, apparently, was in the theatre.

Her book, written beautifully, looks back to their separate childhoods and the development of their careers to the point at which they met. Then we read about their lives together. Throughout, she shares extracts from her private diary, written when Thaw became ill at the start of the new century. In passages of great beauty and honest she records his slow decline and death, and the grief that paralysed her in the weeks and months that followed it. But Hancock clearly isn't the sort of woman to plead for your sympathy, or to wallow in self-pity. Slowly, painfully, with the help of friends and family, she starts to get better. Those passages, after the terrible sadness of the ones that preceded them, are joyous to read.

You probably won't want to bother with The Two of Us if you're not an admirer of either of the main players in it, and if you are, you've probably read it already. If you haven't, though, try it. And if you're a celebrity, about to hire a ghost writer to do your autobiography for you, have a look at this book first. Ghost writers rarely do a subject justice. The prose, even if it's your own speech taken from tapes and reordered, invariably comes across as flat and boring. This whole project, on the other hand, works extraordinarily well.

Guest Writer: Ed Markowski

Homage To Thompson

On January 20, 2017 at 12:00 pm the citizens of the world bid farewell to the Obama Nation and bore witness to the dawn of America's Abomination. In New York Harbor the inscription was amended to read . . . Give me your tired your poor your huddled masses yearning to breath fear when we arrived a one-hundred and ten story hotel and casino constructed entirely of Mount Rushmore granite had erased the faces by law dictionaries phone books news papers, magazines short stories bibles encyclopedias letters coupons and conversations could no longer exceed two-hundred and eighty characters regardless of faith race denomination and purpose kneeling on Sundays became a federal crime on July 16, 2018 in honor of the president millions of men women boys and girls had their hair dyed pale orange from Moscow to Minsk his last assault on Obama's legacy was the release of a previously classified National Inquirer that proved Hillary Clinton was the mastermind responsible for the terrorist attacks on 9 / 11 / 01 on the day the documents were released Osama Bin Laden was granted a full presidential pardon by executive order Betsy DeVos was finally credited in American History books as the creator of our star mangled banner two-hundred and forty-two years after the fact all of the surviving American service men who had been taken prisoner while serving in Vietnam were convicted of impersonating war heroes and deported to Hanoi on the promise of bringing good jobs back to America his electoral college victory immediately and exponentially expanded the language employment opportunities and self esteem of dunk tank clowns at every county fair in America from Tiny Tim's preschool to Harvard white boards now stand where black boards once stood in a joint statement from the White House Rose Garden the president flanked by Franklin Graham Jerry Falwell Junior Mark Burns and Pat Robertson declared all ten commandments antiquated and obsolete on July 27 2019 the Trump International Hotel added a new restaurant Little Rocket Man's Nuclear Bar B Que the restaurant's fare is described as ravenously scant radioactive and torturously spicy the enemies of the American people were armed with ink pens typewriters pencils erasers white out notebooks paper clips sandals hope habanero peppers snow shoes Labatts Blue and the Stanley Cup from sea to shining sea the sunshine sheen coating every seal's coat was pure crude from California's Coalinga Oil Fields regardless of grain every box of organic non gmo cereal by executive order will now be labeled and sold as Corn Fakes with one exception the food feds declared every burger on the McDonald's menu a super food being that exception the Big Mac was rewarded with the title of super super food in historical museums nation wide the truth was framed and hung as children were being confiscated kidnapped and caged on the southern border the name of that time honored tradition that teaches the rewards of an honest days work and the stewardship of their wages was changed from Allowance to Hush Money after he renamed Glad Bags Vlad Bags on Thanksgiving Day 2018 during a ceremony at Plymouth Rock he told the indigenous people of the Americas they'd better damn well thank the Pilgrims for teaching them how to grow corn after his presidential commission on the state of the family found that ninety-eight percent of confiscated children including infants and toddlers thrive and are much happier living in cyclone cages without their parents he signed an executive order that changed the name of the holiday to Martin Luther Day on the following Monday his sixteen character memoir Profiles In Sewage filled America's adult book stores when the nations prison term ended in addition to the real estate holdings hotels and squeaky clean billions the ex president owned and controlled the largest flock of fanged sheep on Earth his legacy was framed by this question George Washington was America's first President, who was America's first Dicktweeter ? and through the years following his freezing reign historians political scientists and the gilded minds of Washington's think tanks used one word to describe his presidency COVFEFE . . .

                                     another stranger
                                            coming into focus . . .
                                                      family reunion



                            
Written At The House
On Hadley Road
10/3/2018 - 10/14/2018                                   
                       

Tibet National Uprising Day

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the Tibetan National Uprising. The Parliament-in-Exile makes an official statement about the history and the current status of Tibet under occupation here.

References to the anniversary on British media, however, appear to be non-existent at the moment. Interest in the matter on the part of our political parties is equally hard to detect.

I had Sky News' Sunrise programme on in the background for an hour this morning and it didn't get a mention. I had Sophy Ridge on Sunday on for at least half an hour; most of that was taken up by an interview with Dominic Raab, in which he talked about Brexit, the 'Marxist' agenda of Labour under Corbyn and the 'good story' that the Conservative Party has to tell the electorate. He also coyly denied (looking all the time like an arrogant young murder suspect on Inspector Morse) that he had any immediate ambition to become prime minister.

I have The Andrew Marr Show on now. A newspaper review didn't talk about Tibet. Tory David Davis is being interviewed now and he has spoken only about Brexit. John McDonnell of the Labour Party is on shortly; he won't talk about Tibet either. He never has, as far as I know. (Since I wrote the first draft of this I watched his interview. Unless I missed something Andrew Marr questioned him only on Brexit and Labour's alleged problem with anti-Semitism.)

Brexit is a pressing news item, obviously. So is knife crime. So are many other issues around the world. But when the streets explode with violence in Venezuela the media gives it wall-to-wall coverage and the Right calls for intervention; supporters on the Left object. When the Palestinians clash with the Israelis the media only covers it if the violence is sufficiently large; and the Left expresses enthusiastic and unconditional support for the Palestinians.

60 years ago vast numbers of Tibetans were brutally murdered by the occupying Chinese. The anniversary reminds us that the torture and the killings continue on a daily basis in what human rights organizations consider the second most dangerous, least democratic place to live in the world.

But who, in the West, is reporting it? Who in the West with any power is committing themselves to doing anything about it?

D.R.M.

While book hunting the other day I found this little treasure. It's 'Job Morbid's Pilgrimage', a collection of poetry from 1857, a first edition if I'm not mistaken, by a poet who calls himself or herself 'D.R.M.' Now, I have a reasonable knowledge of English literature. But I'd never heard of a D.R.M. before. I was, naturally, intrigued.

I bought the book and when I got home, looked up D.R.M. on the internet. Perhaps I don't know where to look, but I found nothing. Only multiple copies of 'Job Morbid' on different Amazon sites around the world, some listing the author as D.R.M., some listing him/ her as R.M.D., and one that said 'author unknown'. Unfortunately, none of them have Amazon's 'Look Inside' facility. If they did I might be able to satisfy my curiosity by reading some work of diligent scholarship in an introduction.

A Twitter friend consulted the Bodleian digital library for me and found another book by the same author called 'Ephemeral Effusions'. The physical copy was admitted to the Bodleian in 1928. It was published privately in 1856, a year before 'Job Morbid'. I've read most of that now, seeing if I can find any clues about the identity of D.R.M., and I've begun to create a tentative picture of this lost--and it must be said, perfectly good--poet. It could be a wildly inaccurate picture, but I have no scholarly reputation to endanger by posting it here.

D.R.M. was either a public figure concerned about his reputation, or a woman. I'm inclined to believe it's the latter. She went to school in Henley, but her family was from Devon. One poem is 'Addressed to the High Sheriff of Devon for the Year 1845'. That was Edward Simcoe Drewe, of the Drewe family of Broadhembury, long-term residents of the Grange.

D.R.M describes herself, in the poem, as 'a humble scion of that house'. But she is not Edward Simcoe Drewe's daughter. She says, 'My father! oh! blest spirit now at rest,' before going on to praise Edward Simcoe's generosity and charity, saying he 'worthily supports the name he bears.' Might the D. in D.R.M. have been inverted? The need for that in a privately published book containing a poem so easy to decode is questionable. But still. Perhaps she hoped to use the book to help her find a publisher in London, in which case discretion would have been appropriate, given the restrictions placed on women then. A year later, she did find a publisher. I am tempted to read something salacious into her description of herself as 'humble', a possibility which would make my inversion theory even more applicable, but that's probably going too far

Where does D.R.M. stand in the family genealogy? Since I have no birth date for her, this is harder to pin down. Is she in her forties or fifties at mid-century? If she is, she might be the daughter of John Rose Drewe and Dorothy Bidgood. They are described, bizarrely, on genealogy sites as having left 'no male children.' Might there, then, have been a daughter? And might that explain the middle 'R' in her pen name? Is it possible I'm wildly off target and none of these suppositions are even close to the truth?

Hunter

Yesterday was the anniversary of the suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, who has been one of my favourite writers since I first came across his work in Rolling Stone in 1985. I remember the magazine and the year with an unusual (for me) accuracy because the article, a ten-year-old account of the fall of Saigon, made the sort of impression on me that readers only experience once or twice in their lifetime. His prose was remarkable. He used song lyrics as epigraphs. He slipped occasionally into bizarre flights of fancy. And behind all the showmanship there was an intellectual and philosophical depth I had only expected, up to that point, from poets and folk singers.

After that first article I read both Fear and Loathing books and The Great Shark Hunt. Shark Hunt collected then-contemporary as well as much older journalism by Hunter. It was a proper history of the previous twenty years in America from a perspective that became increasingly skewed as the author grew into his mature style. And that style, though it had evolved in very different cultural conditions, seemed a perfect response to the humourless, cruel, repressive social atmosphere of the 1980s.

Through his fantastic success, of course, and aided unwittingly by a newspaper strip which parodied him, Hunter created a public image which eclipsed his great talent as a writer. The public thought of him as a drug-addled maniac, celebrating him because he did everything they lacked the courage to do. I was guilty of that myself, to some extent. And to a large extent, the public image of Hunter was true; he even played up to it. In the end, however, he became a prisoner of it, like a master magician who does the same conjuring trick night after night because it pleases the crowd but forgets, eventually, how to do anything else.

One article about Hunter after he died was titled The Day the Fun Stopped. It was fun. And it has been much less fun ever since -- I sometimes watch Donald Trump on television and imagine the savaging he would have had from Hunter with such sadistic pleasure, it makes me sad all over again that Thompson has gone. Yes, it was fun when he was here. Probably the most fun a writer has ever given us. But it was so much more than that too. Hunter, to my mind, was a genuinely great writer until he burned himself out. Maybe one day we'll look through the fog of the years with enough clarity for a lot more people to see that.

The Artist and the Work

Can the artist and the work ever be separated? I have been having this discussion with other poets and a painter friend lately. I love the poetry of Ezra Pound. But Pound was an anti-Semite. Does enjoying his work make me an anti-Semite too? I love the poetry of Ted Hughes. Does that mean I approve of men having multiple relationships simultaneously? And are the achievements of either poet, or any of the other great poets, writers, painters and musicians of history to be nullified by our disapproval of the lives of their creators?

I can't really disapprove of Ted Hughes. I once slept with a woman knowing she was married, and I didn't give a moment's thought to her husband; she excited me, and I wanted her. But I do believe someone gets hurt when a trusted partner starts thinking it's all right to sleep with other people. It might not always be the person you expect, but it will happen. Ted Hughes lost a wife and a partner to suicide. He was unquestionably attracted to emotionally complex women whose apparent fire was a mask for terrible fragility. He cheated on both of them. Whether he bore full responsibility for their deaths or not is highly debatable. I've read widely on the subject and I don't think he did. But he was vilified for decades because of Plath.

I have believed for a while now that we are becoming more moralistic, more puritanical, more aggressively judgemental, on the political left. They've always played at that on the right while allowing for themselves licence to do anything they wanted regardless of the consequences. But we mean it, and we police ourselves as rigourously as we throw brickbats at the enemy. Do I want to belong to a movement in which I have to run every sentence I write by a committee before it's published? Should I have to prove my worth by making sure I tick every ideological box?

It's obvious to me that an artist's work is a product of the artist's mind, his/her experiences, perceptions, misconceptions. Pound's greatness (I think he's great) even in the early poems, comes from a set of attitudes and values which were ripe for conversion into fascism given the necessary external stimuli -- which, in my opinion, were the carnage of WWI and his move to Italy. His anti-Semitism, as he later said himself, was a 'stupid, suburban prejudice', and hardly uncommon in America or England; it was the decay of his mind that made it quite so virulent.

Hughes, likewise. His isolated Yorkshire upbringing, hunting animals with his brother in the woods, alongside the development of his colossal but unusual intelligence, made him ripe, in such a conservative, patriarchal society, for a self-serving and uniquely pretentious take on relationships . He wrote the best mainstream English poetry of his generation from a mind that saw the world as one in which primordial forces were at work, and male desire meant something, although I'm puzzled what. Hughes wrote in the programme of a performance of Gaudete:

This changeling proceeds to interpret the job of ministering the Gospel of Love in his own log-like way. He organizes the women of the parish into a coven, a love society. And the purpose of this society, evidently, is to produce the Messiah.

I can't read that without a straight face. To me, it's an excuse for a man to get his knob out and exploit as many women as he can. But Hughes took it seriously, at least as a mythical representation of some deeper truth, whatever that truth might be.

I doubt I would have liked Pound or Hughes very much as men. I don't think they would have liked me either. I refuse to give up on their work, however, just because their ideas don't chime with my own. Their books are too precious to me, and there's a sort of intellectual fascism in junking writers who take inconvenient or offensive positions which has no place in civilized debate. No one died because of Pound. I've heard his broadcasts; he would have been an irritant to the Allied generals and politicians, but only Ezra would have believed in his influence. People did die around Hughes, but people have died around me who I could have helped much more than I did. The hurt I've caused others in my life is incalculable. Is anybody such a paragon of virtue that they can dismiss a mad poet, or an arrogant poet, out of hand and damn them to Hell forever?

The Churchill Question

_{^{Boris Johnson tweets that Winston Churchill 'saved this country from a barbaric fascist and racist tyranny'. Sorry, mate, but Winston wasn't up in Lancaster bombers risking his neck night after night like my old history teacher Bill Lanning. Winston wasn't held in a German POW camp like Michelle's dad Bernard. Winston didn't lose his mind while being tortured in a Japanese POW camp like my great uncle Sonny. Winston didn't crack the Enigma code like Alan Turing, who our great country persecuted to death because of his sexuality. Winston didn't lose his country and then join the Allies like those Polish pilots who flew during the Blitz. But it was Winston who excluded them from the post-war victory parade because they weren't British. He played his part. But it is ordinary people who win wars and ordinary people who suffer and grieve because they're fought.}}