Poetry for Pleasure and the Odd Fiver

“Awake!” cried my mother in her bright Edinburgh voice, “for morning in the bowl of night hath flung the stone that puts the stars to flight.” And she flung open my curtains on the new day as I cowered beneath the covers before dragging myself unwillingly to primary school. This would be around 1957, when Supermac ruled and we all liked Ike. My mother had many another poetic tag at her fingertips: “Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill”, “His strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure”, “The lark’s on the thorn, the snail’s on the wing” (that one was a joke), “The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel’s dead … Play up and play the game”, “East is East and West is West”, and again from the Rubaiyat,

The moving finger writes, and having writ

Moves on, nor all thy piety nor wit

Can move it back to cancel one half line,

Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

This was also the favourite verse of John Mills, the short actor with the stiff upper lip.

After primary school came secondary school and the realisation that modernism had dawned with the new century and that good poetry was now difficult and free and needed a course of lectures for its elucidation. “‘His true Penelope was Flaubert.’ What does Pound mean by that, Whitworth?” I always liked “The Waste Land”, but why does Eliot keep sashaying into foreign languages? Including Sanskrit, for God’s sake.

I exaggerate. Of course I do. Larkin, Betjeman and others kept alive the Victorian flame. Nevertheless …

But alongside difficult poetry, and free verse poetry—often, though not of course always, ever so slightly dull—there existed the poetry competitions. There are the poetry competitions with big prizes, often many thousands of pounds, which cost you around five pounds a poem to enter. I enter as many of these as I can and sometimes I win, especially if the judge is the sort of poet who likes rhyme and metre—and it is generally easy to ascertain who these are. I could not live on the money I win but over the years it has been substantial.

There are also the weekly or monthly competitions for light verse on set subjects in Punch, the New Statesman, the Spectator, which all flourished in my boyhood, and later the Literary Review and the Oldie. Punch has long fallen by the wayside and the Literary Review, losing its generous grant of money from a popular newspaper, which allowed it to offer big prizes (I won £5350 and a free lunch for a single poem) to subscribers, no longer has a competition. But the rest flourish still. The going rate for a prize used to be a fiver, now it is twenty-five or thirty pounds; not a lot, but there is no entrance fee. I repeat that. There is no entrance fee. If you have e-mail you do not even need a stamp.

Stanley Sharpless, Katie Mallett, Mary Holtby, Lieutenant-Colonel W.F.N. Watson, E.O. Parrott, Maud Gracechurch, Roger Woddis, relentlessly leftie, and, most ubiquitous of all, Martin Fagg, the Chichester schoolmaster who had once, so it was rumoured, won all five of the prizes in the New Statesman by means of pseudonyms—these were the alternative poets, resolutely ignored by the mainstream.

I must not forget that Gavin Ewart and Wendy Cope have also competed and won.

It is a very English phenomenon. In America and Australia there are no such competitions, though poets from the USA, Canada and Australia do win prizes from time to time. They have to get sight of the English magazines, or at least the competition page, and how do they do that? Mostly they do that by looking on a page of the internet (God bless the internet). Eratosphere is the place, a blog (I suppose it is a blog) for poets, mostly of the sort that rhyme and scan. There a few years ago I began printing the competitions as they came up, and I do still with help from other Eratospherians, if I can so term them.

The modern winners who use Eratosphere, I mean those who win a lot, are Basil Ransome-Davies, Bill Greenwell, Chris O’Carroll (he’s American) and Brian Allgar, who is English but lives in Paris. And then there are the more occasional winners, among whom are my friend Ann Drysdale and me. And quite a few more Americans.

We are talking about Light Verse here. The great Wendy Cope objects strongly to the term. Never use it in her presence. But I am easier with it. A.A. Milne and P.G. Wodehouse wrote Light Verse. The king of the genre was W.S. Gilbert, of whom I have written here before. It is distinct from true poetry. Is it? No, it is not. The “true” poets often like to pretend it is, but they are wrong.

Back to those competition winners, people who versify who would probably not claim to be “poets”. I’m the one who does that.

I sit and think, I think, therefore I am,

Therefore, I think, I am because I think,

And then I think my thoughts are all a sham,

For all the thoughts I think rely on drink.

These four lines are by V. Ernest Cox. I suggest you look up Stanley Sharpless’s poem about Cocoa the Aphrodisiac. This stuff is poetry, for my money. On a personal note, I have had many poems which started life as attempts to win magazine competitions accepted by “real” poetry magazines.

A book, How to be Well-Versed in Poetry, edited by E.O. Parrott, was published in 1990. It is a very good way of learning about verse forms and is entirely made from examples by competition winners, of whom Parrott was one. Here you will find the redoubtable Martin Fagg, D.A. Prince, Mary Holtby, Katie Mallett and Fiona Pitt-Kethley, proving this is not just a man thing. And “Maud Gracechurch”, who was not a woman but a canal boat belonging to Parrott.

It has always seemed to me that Larkin’s poem that begins, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” is actually a bit of light verse, full of comic overstatement and irony:

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Is this a “serious” comment on life? Of course it is not. It is Larkin disporting in his Eeyore persona. He does it in other places. Gavin Ewart thought so too; he included three poems in his Anthology of Light Verse. And Kingsley Amis seven in his, all different poems.

Larkin’s friend John Betjeman is a different case. With him the light and the serious are inextricable. He will write a poem in Scots dialect just for the hell of it, and one of his best, “How to Get On in Society”, the one about fish-knives and doilies, was written for a magazine competition. But he was not really a respectable poet (though always a popular one), until Larkin made him so in a 1959 Guardian review (the Guardian is a small-circulation though influential British daily newspaper of the intellectual Left) where he said:

the quality in his poetry loosely called nostalgia is really that never-sleeping alertness to note the patina of time on things past which is the hallmark of the mature writer. It is my considered opinion that it would do no harm to over-estimate Betjeman’s poetry for a bit.

That is Larkin’s English irony. He means estimate it at nearer its true worth.

We might consider Gavin Ewart too. Do you know that until recently there was no selection of his poetry still in print? What he called “the Heavy Brigade” have been trampling all over him, beating him down with the weight of their degrees and professorships.

Larkin, Betjeman and Ewart are all dead. And it has to be admitted that most of us who enter these Light Verse competitions (I will accept the term though not the implicit condescension) have one foot (however lightly) in the grave. Why is that?  Because we are backward-looking? Because we are indulging in a hobby like the building of model trains? There is nothing wrong with building model trains, but no.

You see, so many of the younger versifiers are not very good, do not even want to be very good, if we are talking about craft and skill. They think it gets in the way of their tinpot sincerity about, oh I don’t know, windmills and internationalism and free school dinners for all. The message is the medium. And they can’t do parody, a staple of these competitions, because they haven’t read enough to be able to parody anything. Oh dear. Though there is Nicholas Stone, who has recently joined us in the winners’ enclosure at Eratosphere. I had thought he was a schoolmaster at Westminster, one of our best public (that is, private) schools, but no, he is actually one of the boys there. Bless him and any others like him.

So we Traditional Versifiers have these competitions in England and you in Australia don’t. And Americans don’t either. There is a competition run by the Washington Post, but it isn’t for poems, though scraps of verse can come into it. On the other hand, I think it is easier for us Traditional Versifiers to get work placed in Australia and America than in Britain. Our poetry magazines are more and more inimical to it, to us. Or so it seems to me, and such is my experience. In America they have good magazines that take only rhymed metrical poems and others who are sympathetic to it and print it. In Australia you have Quadrant. I have had well over twenty poems placed in America and Australia in the last two years. Over here (excluding the competitions) my score is two, both in the front half of the Spectator. Does this matter, except to me? I think it does. Of course I do.

I return to my Edinburgh mother and her quotations. Fitzgerald, Tennyson, Browning, Stevenson, Newbolt, Kipling. Are poems now what Matthew Arnold called touchstones? Some are, but not so many. What can we do about it? Perhaps nothing. But we can try. Every time we write a line which rubs it in to other people that poetry is not for them (like writing stuff in Sanskrit, say), every time we gather together in groups and talk crossly of the non-poetry-loving people “out there” we should be ashamed of ourselves. If they don’t like it, then write something they do like. Shakespeare is our man, not Ben Jonson, As You Like It our battle-cry.

And meanwhile I am off to do battle with Basil Ransome-Davies:

Shall I compare thee to a bag of chips,

A battered haddock and a pickled onion,

The classic face that launched a thousand ships,

The classic nag that won with all my money on …

That’ll learn him.