Richard Wilcocks writes:
Roger McGough did not disappoint: the capacity audience at the magnificent Howard Assembly Room loved him to bits. As he read from As Far As I Know, adding witty commentary and extra personal narratives, the laughs and murmurs of appreciation came at frequent intervals, in spite of (because of?) the melancholy subject matter – moving poems on growing old, lost youth, love and death. At one point he reminded me of the comedian Paul Merton, not in appearance but in the wordplay, the wit and the ability to see things afresh, from interesting angles. At another point I was struck by the dark cloud I saw looming behind some of the poems, Knock Knock for example:
The man from the
murder
Still on the
loose
The man from the
nightmare
The man from the
fear…
…Did I hear
someone knock
Who’s that at
the door?
Or in Nice
Try:
As we speak,
they’re out there
Scythes at the
ready, playing hide and seek.
Me under a bush,
you in the shade
Someone counting
to ten, sharpening a blade.
And I amongst
many was deeply impressed by Not For Me a Youngman’s Death, an update on possibly his most famous
poem of the Sixties, when he was more fast-living and went to all-night
parties, Let Me Die a Youngman’s Death. It was suggested by Carol Ann Duffy, and he tells
us about what it’s like now:
My nights are
rarely unruly.
My days of
all-night parties
Are over,
well and truly.
No mistresses
no red sports cars
No shady
deals no gangland bars
No drugs no
fags no rock ‘n’ roll
Time alone has
taken its toll
Creating a
league table of top contemporary poets is likely to be at best contentious, at
worst woundingly humiliating, but that is what the poetic powers-that-be did
four decades ago. They were connected with Poetry Review, the influential
magazine of the Poetry Society, and included the likes of Andrew Motion, our
previous poet laureate. Roger McGough, often associated by commentators with
The Beatles, popular and famous as a member of The Scaffold with its Lily
The Pink and Aintree
Iron, a Liverpudlian
with working class origins, was put into the ranks of the second division, at
the bottom. That’s the problem with popularity – some people think you can’t be
profound as well, and that to be clever you have to be arcane. Perhaps it was thought
simply that the scousers were getting above themselves.
It rankled with
him, and now it comes out in this latest collection. One poem in it which he did not read – Scorpio – begins with what the popular John
Betjeman wrote: ‘Our poems are part of ourselves. They are our children and we
do not like them to be made public fools of by strangers’. McGough continues:
...
I will never
reveal the names of those strangers,
Fellow poets
some of them, and literary critics
Who have made
public fools of my children.
They know who
they are. Those still alive, that is.
Their names
inscribed on the base of a paperweight.
But McGough
rises above mere spleen-venting, which is not his style, as anyone who has been
charmed by him as the presenter of Radio 4’s Poetry Please well knows. He is, in fact, a bit of a
saint, the ‘patron saint of poetry’ in the words of today’s poet laureate,
Carol Ann Duffy, and the wheel has turned: in addition to being a CBE, he is
the new President of the Poetry Society. There are certain ironies to savour
there.
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