How did you get into your passion? Mine's poetry, but it wasn't always the obvious choice. I was into drama as a teenager, and if I wrote anything (apart from the turn-your-toes-round-90-degrees poem of the “He is so beautiful but he doesn’t even know I exist” variety) then it was a script. Apart from a novel I started when I was fourteen, conceived as the story of a Northern family from 1900 to 2000, (“But Master Cookson, it’s 1911, and there could be a war in three years”) but the least said about that, and the poems about straight crushes, the better.
I vividly remember our teacher in primary school (bless you, bless you, bless you Miss Turpin) reading us Roald Dahl's ‘Revolting Rhymes’ on World Book Day 1995. I bought an anthology of First World War poems when I was fifteen. Apart from that, I was all about the drama.
Drama took me to Joe Orton (I asked for his diaries for my seventeenth birthday; why I ever had to go to the trouble of coming out is beyond me) and Joe Orton's diaries (“When you are old you will regret not having fun with your genital organs”) took me to Kenneth Williams’s diaries, which I read in my first year of Sixth Form when I should have been doing another A-level.
Kenneth would have been a hundred last week. The diaries are a wonderful achievement in their own right: they start in 1942, and apart from a hiatus between 1943 and 1946, run uninterrupted for over forty years from 1947 until his death in 1988. He's as great a diarist as Pepys, and there are more laughs. We wouldn't have agreed on politics if we'd met as adults; but I spent a lot of time with Kenny.
Kenneth loved Philip Larkin. He references him six times in the diaries. He did a talk on Larkin on BBC radio in 1984 - I wonder if the recording exists.
I went to Waterstones on Albion Street (I'm old enough to remember when there were two, plus Borders on Briggate near Top Makkie’s) and bought High Windows. I loved it so much I went back the following week and bought the Collected Poems—the one with stuff Larkin hadn't chosen to publish in life. From then on, aged seventeen, poems have always been part of my life.
I think Larkin was, on balance, a git. Not one of the people on my list to have a pint with, but then there are plenty of those, and some of them are poets. I don't go back to his poems often. But some of them are wonderful—’Aubade’, with its almost flawless and barely noticeable end-rhymes and iambic pentameter. (Note to self: must get round to finishing that gay version of ‘This be the verse’ called ‘This be the vers’.)
But the fact I bought the earlier Larkin Collected, rather than the later one with just the poems he chose to publish, was significant. In it were poems he wasn't happy with, poems he wrote for friends or partners, juvenilia. I got to see a broader selection of a poet's life's work. Studying at GCSE, taking poems to bits and speculating on possible meanings, didn't give us any sense that a poem has to be made by a person who is always, no matter how experienced, learning as they go. Or that for that one poem that's cracking (Williams’ favourite Larkin poem was MCMXIV), there are a hundred others, ranging from okay to awful (see straight crush poems above). So that's how poetry happened for me. Happy birthday Kenneth, and thank you.
I read at the Albert Poets in Huddersfield, at the Rat and Ratchet, with Jeanette Hattersley, Mike Farren, and John Duffy, on 18th February. John was one of the founders of the Albert Poets, along with Stephanie Bowgett, Phil Foster, and the late John Bosley. The Albert Poets began in 1994, went online during lockdown, and started in-person readings at the County. Regular readings resumed at the reading last week. Running a poetry night for over thirty years is an astonishing achievement for everyone who has kept the flame burning, and we are forever in the debt of the organisers who work so hard for free to give poets an audience. Join their Facebook group for details of the next reading.
I heard at the Albert Poets that another venue that gave its name to a long-standing and much-loved poetry group, the Beehive pub in Bradford, which closed ages ago, has had a lot of its interiors ripped out, and will never now return to being a pub. This is a tragedy and a disgrace: the Beehive was beautiful and unique, with its gas mantles and wooden benches. The last time I was there for the Beehive Poets, on a cold night in early 2020, they got a roaring fire going. But the Beehive Poets continue - another poetry group displaced from their eponymous home. Their next meeting is on Friday 6th March, 7:00pm to 9:00pm, at Bradford City Library. The guests are Sean O’Brien and Kristina Diprose.
Now we’re in March, the Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage reading is drawing closer - it’s on Saturday 11th April at 1:30pm, in person at the Jerwood Centre, Grasmere. Tickets are free.
I have a couple more readings in the works - thank you for the invites! If you’re looking for guests for your poetry night, let me know.