To James Fenton

The poet’s duties: no need to stress The subject’s dullness, nonetheless Here’s an incestuous address In Robert Burns’ style To one whom all the Muses bless At Great Turnstile. I’ve no excuses for this theme. Prescription is less popular than dream And little rhymes, God knows, can seem Much too laconic, Bollinger’s visionary gleam Turned gin-and-tonic. But ssch! you know and understand The way these verses have been planned: Gritty like little bits of sand Not shining quartz; No pulsing from a higher gland Just random thoughts. Let’s start by thinking of objectives. Poets hate to have directives: They’re on their own, not on collectives, Share and share about, And what inspires their best invectives Is what they care about. You,James, collapsed upon our sofa As though being driven by a chauffeur, Won’t fail to tell us what you go for: Managerial boobs And answers that you won’t take no for From Fine Tubes. Reporters never throw in towels. Their prose is written from the bowels. Ottava rima about owls Printed by Sycamore Is worlds away from Enoch Powell’s Plans for the blackamoor. But are you James Cameron or Flecker? Are you a maker or a trekker? What is the nature of your Mecca, Your verum pulchrum? I’m glad, of course, that you’re with Secker And not with Fulcrum. Poet and traveller have quarrelled And now you canter where you carolled. We’re waiting still for your Childe Harold, Though quests in Poland Find you fixated and apparelled More like Childe Roland. It is impressive, I agree, Although I know it’s not for me. I take the windfalls from the tree, I’m much too lazy, The prisons that I want to see By Piranesi. You say that Oxford has no marrow, Sucked dry by Trevor-Roper, Sparrow, And others of reaction’s farrow In their fat cloister, Though if my eye is just as narrow It may be moister. We never see our feelings through, And weeping only makes us blue. It may be beautiful and true But it’s not action, And nothing the bourgeoisie can do Gives satisfaction. How can we alter our behaviour? Should we deny our gravy’s gravier? Leave Cleopatra for Octavia? My life is inner, And someone I don’t think a saviour Is B. F. Skinner. Avoid that fashionable flock: To be refitted in their dock Your common-sense must take a knock As it took a course on The reflexes of frogs, and Locke, And P. F. Strawson. Much of the Left we can ignore (Sheer anarchy I don’t adore). The trendy educate the poor In greed and fear, While Labour’s entered on the war Of Jenkins’ ear. No. Righteous more than He who Hath, More reasonable than New Math, Momier than the Mome Rath In their outgrabing, Glossing the Variorum Plath From Krafft-Ebing, Apostles of determinism Whose hero’s Mao or Virgil Grissom Won’t interest your mind one rissom: You’re too empirical. What about Neo-Imagism? Impossibly lyrical. Such knowing brevity needs patience: As unfastidious Croatians Upon quite intimate occasions Shun body-talc, So leave your interpersonal relations To Colin Falck. For poetry to have some merit he Requires it to display sincerity, Each pronoun to convince posterity With deep emotion And an invigorating verity Like hair-lotion. Well, that’s unfair. I’m glad he lives. Just think of the alternatives! Those whose verse resembles sieves Or a diagram, And foul-mouthed transatlantic spivs Wooing Trigram. For they are all still with us,James, Fiddling among the flames, Brandishing the brittle fames They soon arrive at. It’s better not to mention names: They’ll wince in private. Orating offspring of Urania (No fault of yours that they’re not brainier) Have an immodest dogged mania For autobiography Disguised in concrete or the zanier Forms of typography. The wide-eyed audience they’re rooking Would secretly prefer a booking From a quartet like the backward-looking Rank Ailanthus They’d jump to hear what’s really cooking With the Black Panthers. Whatever props the poet uses, Whether he accepts, accuses Or gives up, he must know his Muse is A sensible girl. Even some antics of Ted Hughes’s Make her hair curl. And so you need a form to play About in but which will convey Something of what you want to say Without evasion, Adjusting like the Vicar of Bray To each occasion. The size you haven’t found as yet. What Nabokov calls the ‘triolet’ Is much too trim a maisonette To dawdle in, Unlike your shabby Cloisters set In Magdalen, Which made your poetry much dandier, Much like ottava rima, handier. You needed in its chilly grandeur To turn the fire on For times when you felt even randier Than Lord Byron. Still, you found sonnets quite inspiring Although some rhymes like ancient wiring Showed the circuits could prove tiring (Though not unduly, And no one could be more admiring Than Yours Truly). So carry on: your talents hum. No one will ever find you dumb While you avoid the slightly rum Like the White Goddess Or Black Mountain(and don’t become Roger Woddis). I’ll send a sub to the IS (Please let me know the right address) I shan’t turn up, but I confess I’m not a traitor. I just don’t want to think the less Of Teresa Hayter. Some day I’ll join you in the street Where suffering and truth must meet: It isn’t easy not to feel effete This side of anguish, When those who can’t choose what to eat Don’t speak our language. Meanwhile we have to try to bring Some order to that circus ring Where people think and feel and sing, For at its centre There’s no escape from anything, And we must enter.