Two top British poets are among those coming to Durban’s poetry festival
Merle Colborne
There was a time when poetry was thought of as something only people who spoke posh, wore tweed skirts or jackets with leather elbow patches and drank their tea from bone china cups could enjoy.
Now aficionados include those who talk common, wear dreads and live on mung beans. Or baked ones, spooned straight from the can. And like their poetry deadpan. Like this schoolboy’s delight Roger McGough wrote 200 years after William Wordsworth’s encounter with narcissi poetici: “Wandering along the road/ by the lake, I saw a load/ of golden daffodils/ Ten thousand, give or take./ Now and then/ I think of them again.”
McGough, who is in Durban along with fellow British Council-sponsored poet Benjamin Zephaniah for the Poetry Africa 2000 Festival, also wrote this 13-word poem recently voted among the top 10 favourite English poems of the 20th century:
out of work.
divorced
usually pissed
he aimed
low he aimed
low in life
and
missed
Not the kind of stuff that makes young men don stout boots to scale the mountain peaks of human achievement but a little something a bloke with a bibulous giggle might take comfort in in a 2am alley, a fragment that could give someone else a frisson of Schadenfreude as he takes out the garbage.
Poetry in Britain may have taken a knock recently with Oxford University Press’s announcement that it was canning most of its list, yet at the same time Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters and Seamus Heaney’s version of Beowulf have also found places on the bestseller lists.
The Sixties brought a new impetus to poetry – poems, like women’s skirts, got shorter, cheekier. McGough, 62, and an OBE, spearheaded, with fellow Liverpudlians Brian Patten and Adrian Henri, what became known as the Mersey poets group. Later, Jamaican reggae helped propel the burgeoning of “dub” poetry, which made names like Linton Kwesi Johnson famous. Old conventions were cast aside, as in this work by Birmingham-born Zephaniah (42), who is being talked about as a real possibility for the position of poet laureate one day:
i. HAve poetic licence.
i. put my commers where i. like,,((()).
(((my brackets are write ((
i. REPEAT When i. likE.
i. can’t go rong.
i.look and i.c.
It’s rite.
All of which rather dates the shorter Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of poetry as the “the expression of beautiful or elevated thought, imagination or feeling, in appropriate language, such language containing a rhythmical element and having usually a metrical form”.
So what is a poem? McGough says it’s all about intention. “If someone determines to write a poem, as opposed to a letter, a shopping-list, or a novel, then the result will be a poem. Whether it is a ‘good’ poem (original, effective, moving or witty) is a value-judgement that others will make.”
And others do make these value judgements, sometimes loudly in caf,s where brave souls become performing poets. “Slam” poetry drifted across from New York into British pubs and coffee shops. The film Four Weddings and a Funeral had viewers thumbing through their anthologies to find WH Auden’s lament:”The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;/ Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun …” Poetry does still have a role: many ordinary British people, most of whom probably never read poetry, were moved to express in verse how they felt about the death of Princess Diana.
While this seemed like a spontaneous outbreak, there were in fact several public initiatives popularising poetry. Poems on the Underground gave commuters trapped in the London tube a chance to read short poems rather than fixate on the pay-off lines for panty liners or Rennies tablets.
The highly successful two-year programme Poetry Places has just ended. Organised by the Poetry Society and funded by a R5- million arts grant through Britain’s national lottery, it brought thousands of people into direct contact with one or more of the 124 “poets in residence”. The residences varied from the cardigan department at Marks & Spencer to a tattoo parlour where one customer had an entire sonnet tattooed around his arm. One poet worked down a tin mine, another up a 30m crane on a North Sea gas platform. Here for five nights he held poetry workshops for the men who produced some wonderful robust stuff and gave new meaning to John Keats’s belief that a poem expresses a man’s highest thoughts.
McGough (who couldn’t type until then) was Internet poet-in-residence at British Telcom and Zephaniah shadowed Michael Mansfield, QC, in his court appearances. Zephaniah also read his poem about the black youngster who died in police custody, What Stephen Lawrence Has Taught Us, on Channel 4’s 7pm news bulletin.
Zephaniah left school at 12 and would like his epitaph to say: “He tried to luv everybody.” If previous years – when the Sneddon Theatre on the University of Natal Durban campus was packed with 300 to 400 people responding to rasta poetry – are anything to go by, Durban’s going to luv him too.