I'm glad you could come this evening.
You have a great treat in store.
I wish you could have spent the last three days with us.
We've done the grand Arizona tour.
Which I know some people have lived here for years
and not seen what these three citizens of Great Britain
have seen in the last three days.
And it's all been great fun for me.
We have three readers tonight.
Adrian Henri, Patricia Beer, and Pete Morgan.
I hope that you can come to the Terrace Room in the Student
Union to meet them and have some punch and cookies afterwards.
Our next reading is one week from tomorrow.
The third of November, and the reader is Primus St. John.
Young Black poets from Oregon.
Adrian Henri was born in Birkenhead, Cheshire,
and educated in North Wales.
His first book is Tonight At Noon,
and it established him as one of the strongest young voices
to come out of the Liverpool scene of the 1960s.
He's a poet, a musician, and award winning painter.
His books of poetry, his recordings, his plays,
and his performances have all explored the sound and pace
of modern life and speech.
His books of poetry are City, Talking After Christmas Blues,
Poems for Wales, Sick Landscapes for Susan,
an Autobiography, America, and The Best of Henri.
I'm very happy to welcome Adrian Henri.
[APPLAUSE]
I've been told to move it, you see.
I feel like an oldest inhabitant of Tucson.
I feel like I've been here for months and it's three days,
and it's very sad because we have
to be leaving in the morning.
But it's probably very difficult for you
to imagine what it means for someone from England
to come to this particular town, because this
is the kind of thing which from the age of five
when you're taken by a mother to a Saturday morning movie,
and left there while she does the shopping
and then she collects you again, all these names are
burned into your consciousness, you see.
So to actually go to the place that you've heard about all
these years is very amazing.
And I swear the best thing I can say
is that it's not an anti-climax.
It has lived up to everything I ever thought it might be.
And anyway, lovely be here.
So I will start by reading a very old poem which
was printed-- you've all got your little printed hand out,
no doubt from the Poetry Center.
It has to be [INAUDIBLE] gone.
This is a very old poem that is a much anthologized poem,
and I'll start with this one.
It's called Tonight at Noon.
Tonight at noon supermarkets will advertise three pence
extra on everything.
Tonight at noon children from happy families
will be sent to live in a home.
Elephants will tell each other human jokes.
America will declare peace on Russia.
World War I generals will sell poppies
in the streets on November 11.
The first daffodils of autumn will
appear when the leaves fall upwards to the trees.
Tonight at noon pigeons will hunt cats
through city backyards.
Hitler will tell us to fight on the beaches,
and on the landing fields.
The temple of water will be built in Liverpool.
Pigs will be sited flying in formation over Wootton,
and Nelson will not only get his eye back, but his arm as well.
White Americans will demonstrate for equal rights.
In terms of the blackouts.
And the monster has just created Dr. Frankenstein.
Girls in bikinis are moon bathing.
Folk songs are being sung by real folk.
Art galleries are closed to people over 21.
Their poems in the top 20.
Politicians are elected to insane asylums.
There's jobs for everyone, and nobody wants them.
In back alleys everywhere, teenage lovers
are kissing in broad daylight.
In forgotten graveyards everywhere
the dead will quietly bury the living.
And you will tell me you love me tonight at noon.
[APPLAUSE]
This one is a ballad, and it's just a little cautionary tale.
If it's about anything it's about
pupil-teacher relationships.
Since you're all pupils or teachers,
I'm sure you understand.
This is called-- do come and sit down, boys.
[INAUDIBLE] This is called Love from Arthur Rainbow.
In a villa called "Much Bickering," in a street called
Pleasant Street, living with her wicked parents
was a princess, small and neat.
She wanted to be an artist so off to a college she went.
And as long as she got her diploma they considered it
money well spent.
One day she met a poet who taught her all about life.
He went down to the station, then
went back home to his wife.
He came from the end of the rainbow,
at least that's what she thought.
The kind of love she wanted, the kind that can't be bought.
The time and the last train to the suburbs
killed the love that would never die,
and she'll find another lover, and she'll sit at home and cry.
Now she's reading through his letters
in her small school teacher flat.
Dusty paint tubes in the corner, worn out welcome on the mat.
On the day she met Arthur Rainbow there
were roses all over the town.
There were angels in all the shop windows,
and kisses, not rain, coming down.
Now it's off out to work every morning, and back
home for dinner at eight.
For the gold at the end of the rainbow
lies buried beneath that front gate.
[APPLAUSE]
This is very different.
[INAUDIBLE] This one's for Lois.
She's lovely and she's been universal provider for us
for a few days.
And she told me she liked this poem, so I'll read it.
It comes out of my last book, which
is a kind of collected poems thing.
It's called The Best of Henri, and when
I was in Nashville somebody said it sounds
like a country western album.
And I said, well, yes, because I want
to try and get out of that English literature thing.
To say the collected poems of Adrian--
I mean it sounds like [INAUDIBLE]..
Anyway, what follows is an old Irish folk song, actually,
which I wrote.
It's all about the fact that there are certain people who
affect you and you live your life by
and you look up to and influence you and revere.
And it's called Me.
If you weren't you, who would you like to be?
Paul McCartney, Gustav Mahler, Alfred Jarry, John Coltrane,
Charlie Mingus, Claude Debussy, Wordsworth, Monet, Bach
and Blake.
Charlie Parker, Pierre Bonnard Leonardo, Bessie Smith,
Fidel Castro, Jackson Pollock, Gaudi Milton Munch and Berg,
Bela Bartok Henri Rousseau, Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
Lukas Cranach Shostakovich, Kropotkin, Ringo, George,
and John.
William Burroughs, Francis Bacon, Dillon Thomas,
Luther King, HP Lovecraft, T.S. Eliot, D.H.
Lawrence, Robin Kirk, Salvatore, Giuliano, Andy Warhol,
Paul Uzanne, Kafka, Camus, Ensor Rothko, Jacques Prevert
and Manfred Mann.
Change of rhythm.
Marx, Dostoevsky, Bakunin, Ray Bradberry, Miles Davis Trotsky,
Stravinsky, and Poe.
Danilo Dolci, Napoleon, Saint John of the Cross
in the Marquis de Sade.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Rimbaud Claes Oldenburg,
Adrian Mitchell, Marcel Duchamp.
James Riswick, Hemingway, Hitchcock, Antonio, Donald
McKinlay Thelonious Monk.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Matthias Grunewald, Philip Jones Grifths
and Roger McGough, Guillaume Apollinaire,
Cannonball Adderley, Rene Magritte, Hieronymus Bosch,
Stephane Mallarme, Alfred de Vigny,
Ernst Mayakovsky and Nicholas de Stael, Hindemith Mick Jagger,
Durer and Schwitters, Garcia Lorca, and last of all, me.
[APPLAUSE]
This is-- where am I?
More recent poem that is a visionary poem,
I suppose you might say.
Actually what it is, it's a tribute to a painter.
As you gathered that I have lots of heroes,
and I really write two kinds of poetry.
I write love poems, but ladies and gentlemen,
and I write occasional poems which kind of come out
of my admiration for a particular artist's work.
I can't write poems about nothing.
Do you know what I mean?
I have to be, in some sense, involved in what I'm doing.
This one is a strange poem that came to me literally
in a vision, in that I was in bed ill
and I saw just one little image, which is part of this.
And a vision at the end of the world, and it
takes place in Liverpool.
And you have to forgive that, because it's
just I don't know anywhere else that well.
And I couldn't be at the end of the world in Tucson.
Anyway, it's more-- it actually came from the thing
where I had a kind of daydream in the middle of the day
when I went out the door and looked downhill
and there was a skeleton peeking up there
on the street corner looking up.
And the view from my front door is
down into a kind of down a hill, the local stockyards,
shipyards.
And when I came to work on this about six months later,
I remembered this Bruegel painting
called The Triumph of Death which is-- you do know it?
It's a view over the harbor, and it's all these death figures.
And so this is it.
And the reason I'm reading this actually
is that this morning we went out to a mission,
and we're talking about this Day of the Dead thing,
and this whole business, the fact that
Mexican how people in this part of the world
make a big thing out of dying.
And the Day of the Dead.
This is my little contribution to that [INAUDIBLE]..
It's called The Triumph of Death.
Birdsong dropping into the space between the sodium lights.
Footsteps echo on the wet yellow pavement.
Down the hill, lights from the unknown hometown,
bright across the river.
First faint chords drift into the orchestra.
Woodwinds high in the air, light from the evening sun
catching the river, dockyards at the end of the street flicker
with the first images of flame, certain skull head peering
from around the street corner, seen
for a moment in the top of the street, shopping bag in hand,
white beckoning skeleton hand and noticed
beyond the parked cars, darkening sky,
clouding the silver water.
Fanfare of French horns.
Cars pile relentless into each other at traffic lights,
grinning skeletal policemen ride ambulances and pedestrians,
klaxon horns blaring.
Music full of strings, brass, timpane, hoarse screams
of owls from parks, despairing wail of sirens from sinking
ferry boats, roar of exploding oil tanks, walls of flame
and abandoned tankers, figures of men
broken on wheels against a lurid sky.
High above squadron upon squadron of dark figures
wheeled triumphantly, [INAUDIBLE]
derisively amongst the carnage.
Fish leap despairingly from the boiling waters.
In the deserted cinema, a trap, a charrette smashes
shattering the waxen mask, grinning hideous face
beneath football crowds, melting like waxworks,
faces running marble eyeball and from sockets, rooftops
of crazy angled, dark figure in the bedroom window.
Classrooms burst into flame.
A skeleton explodes with rotting pelvis
to the helpless gaze of a class of schoolgirls.
Typists, shop girls and boys scream helplessly
run toward ornamental gardens from appalling buildings,
bright mocking figures insistently riding the debris.
Meat gardens in St. James's cemetery torn apart.
Wreathed in cellophane, flowers tumble the side of gray plots,
burst into the light.
White pink blinking stumbling figures
queue at the grave mouth.
Black crows perch on the remains of department stores.
Dying seagulls fluttered helpless against the sky.
Vultures wait at the cathedral tower.
Just loads of dark robed skeleton
figures raping, laughing, dancing, singing.
A revolving door spins unheeded, the hotel lounge
littered with [INAUDIBLE].
Gibbets long as birming poles down the middle of streets,
mocking roar of music behind the explosions,
thundering in the dark, light only from the burning earth,
dark, dark, dark, dark, white vermin mocking
faces everywhere.
And you beside me, my morning girl of the shadows.
The inscrutable nurse always at the morning bedside.
What breast sprouting naked beneath your black cloak.
Head thrown back, swirls of river mist in your hair.
Take me.
Fold me forever in your warm darkness.
Suck the cold light from my willing veins.
Lost in a final dark embrace.
Black barge, straining, waiting at the riverbank.
[APPLAUSE]
That's very dismal.
So I'll give you something slightly less dismal.
This one's another fancy poem.
A lot of fancy poems in Liverpool,
and I have great temerity about reading this, but will.
Because if I don't read it here, where should I?
Like I said, ever since I was five or something
I've been aware of Tucson as a legendary place.
It's where cowboys walk up and down Main Street, wearing
these big leather things.
And people kind of challenge with the gunfights and things.
And I always wanted to be a cowboy, you see.
And I spent the day shopping [INAUDIBLE]
I'm going to go back to England an outfit.
But anyway, the thing is there's not
a lot of call for cowboys in England.
My-- so I never got to be one, but I always
had this idea-- that I think is very unfair,
you have a lovely place names, and it's
always like Tuscon, and Black Rock and Tombstone and places,
you see?
And Yuma.
And we have places like Wigan, and Burton Hampton,
and Rochdale.
And you can't-- say, well, this is a western movie set
in Liverpool.
It's called, you have to forgive the accent,
because I can't do it but I try.
Wild West.
Noon.
Try it again.
Noon.
Two tall gunmen walking slowly towards each other down Matthew
Street.
And then he grabbed her, and then he tied her up,
and then he lit the fuse to the dynamite,
and then, and then, and then along came Jones.
William H. Bonney alias Billy the Kid hitches his horse
to a parking meter, strides through the swing doors
into Yates's wine lodge.
Bar maids slowly back away from the counter.
Drunks rush out into Charlotte Street.
He drinks a glass of Australian white wine and strides
out, silent as he came.
The next bit needs a footnote.
Black Bart you may or may not have heard of that,
was an early highwayman, and he used
to rob stagecoaches with the poem behind the exchange.
And when I wrote this I'd never actually read a Black Bart
poem, but I was told they were very bad.
And so I just saw myself as him, you so.
So I wrote this one for him.
And I also, Black Bart is being played by the late Gabby Hayes.
So this is really a [INAUDIBLE].
This is called Poem for Black Bart
to Leave Behind on the Stagecoach.
I hope you ladies ain't afraid of the wicked men who've
made this range.
Yup.
But I'm like nature, quick and cruel.
Believe me gals, I need them jewels.
The Daltons riding down Church Street,
bullets ricochet off street signs,
shop windows full of cardboard walkers,
bottles shatter, Bob, Grant, Emmet,
thunder across traffic lights at red, shootin' down traffic
wardens.
Hoof beats die away, slowly clattering down Lord Street.
[APPLAUSE]
And why should I read this?
I don't know.
Again, it's quite an old poem, and it
has very beautiful music, and if you're over 40
I used to be part of a kind of very strange rock group called
Liverpool Scene, and the very marvelous guy,
and he did lovely music for this.
The poem isn't very good, but the music's nice.
And I just happened upon it.
If you look around, it used to be on RCA,
and if you look in the discount bit in record shops,
you probably find one for $0.60 if you try very hard.
Anyway, this is [INAUDIBLE] And as I say, it had a nice music,
and I don't know why I thought of this tonight,
because it just came into my head
as I was sitting waiting to go [INAUDIBLE]..
So the only thing that I regret about it at all is
a title, because I wrote this poem and a couple of years
later, a really awful book came out,
and it was followed by an even worse film called Love Story.
And I wrote it first, and I'm not going to change my mind.
Love Story.
You keep our love hidden, like the nightdress
you keep under your pillow.
No word, none at all.
But one, sun-filled day, you took me to your magic room
at the end of the yellow corridor
and showed me enchanted still lifes,
[INAUDIBLE] body mist sprays, cold cream jars glowing
like jewels.
Your body singing pink in the sunlight,
opening to me like the red pulsing
heart of a flower in public garden
where peacocks open their thousand eyes for us,
and bird people move noiselessly through the dripping palm
house, feeling your body under me, warm and alive
as the grass under us.
I love you.
When listening to Bruckner in the sunlit bathroom,
from the hills and valleys of your morning body
are hidden from my gaze by body mist.
Well, I don't have to ask who it is on the telephone.
When we can't wait till the program finishes.
When I slip out quietly, leaving you to sleep
and certain dreams till morning in your darkened room.
When I walk out into the dark shining street,
bright signs from petrol stations,
lamp light on leaves, hard and yielding lights
from city flats.
I love you.
Walking home, yellow moon over the rooftops,
cars crawling, girls stopping, everywhere smelling of you.
Going up to sleep, still smelling the rich luxury lager
in your hair.
Walking, holding your mini hand, standing
in the Saturday morning bank hopped with people worrying
about money, walking for the [INAUDIBLE] and winter January
Lancashire park, seeing half a bottle of gin
smashed on the pavement.
Even when seeing schoolgirls on buses, their black stocking
knees in mourning for their lost virginity, I love you.
Dark red door, wave breaking, half step backwards,
laughing invitation.
I love you on trains, in cars, on buses and taxis.
I love you in the midnight hour when all clocks stop.
And it was mist.
Quiet.
[APPLAUSE]
This is a poem about a [INAUDIBLE]
for a couple American superheroes.
Some of my heroes already, but these are two more.
They're Batman and Robin.
What it is, you see, that in England we got your television
serial, and I really loved the music for it,
and I was a Batman fan anyway.
And I wrote my poem to go with the music for the series.
You remember the music?
Can remember the music?
Da na, da na, da na--
you don't have to sing along, but just do it in your head.
OK.
This is called, Bat Poem.
Take me back to Gotham City, Batman.
Take me where the girls are pretty, Batman.
All damsels in distress, half undressed or even less.
The bat pill makes them all say yes.
Batman.
Help us out in Vietnam, Batman.
Help us drop that fat napalm, Batman.
Help us bomb those jungle towns, spreading pain and death
around, coke and candy wins a round, Batman.
Help us smash the Viet Cong, Batman.
Help us show them that they're wrong, Batman.
Help us spread democracy, get them high on LSD,
make them just like you and me, Batman.
Show me what I have to do, Batman.
Cause I want to be like you, Batman.
Flash your bat sign over Lime Street,
batmobile's down every crime street.
Happy bat day, that's when I'll meet Batman.
[APPLAUSE]
[INAUDIBLE]
This one's a poem-- again, it's a love poem,
but it's also a kind of--
there are some poets who spend all their lives
writing about writing poetry.
I don't ever do that, but this one
is kind of similar in back of it.
It has reference to what one does with love.
And I happen to be a painter, as well.
And this-- I wrote this poem and a kind of vivid image
stayed with me.
That the painting was based on it.
And Louis very kindly said I was an award winning painter,
and the award I won actually grew out of the painting.
You know I got this very large painting came out
in this poem, that went off to competition,
I got all this money.
No doubt of one little idea really, which is just
a kind of opposition thing.
It was really just a poem I wrote for a particular lady.
And although it's [INAUDIBLE] It's called Morning Song.
Of meat and flowers, I sing.
Butchers and gardeners.
Well aware of the body's process,
the long journey into red night, the unfamiliar pounding that
may cease at any moment, drift off
into the night full of sounds, tickings and murmurs, whispers
and gurgling.
With my mouth open against the open world of you,
into the darkness of rose petals,
continents against white continent
shudder in perspective.
When the curtains are drawn blossom into morning,
eyes unveiled from sleep, flower beds thrown back,
white lilies against your hair, [INAUDIBLE]
I will rise and moisten the warm, wet soil to perfection.
Of meat and flowers I sing.
Butchers and gardeners.
Songs thrown bleeding onto counters,
reaching up to the sun whose city backyard.
[APPLAUSE]
And I'll finish with this one.
This one is a [INAUDIBLE] auditorium
it's a change, because it's an auditorium poem.
This again is a visionary poem, and again it
derives from somebody else's work.
This time it's another painting.
In fact, I think--
no, is not in the next country.
Belgian painter James Ansel who is arguably
my favorite painter, and he did an amazing painting
which is called The Entry of Christ into Brussels.
And he did this painting they started in 1898,
and he did-- it was Palm Sunday, it was a vision of Christ
entering Jerusalem, except he did it in his own town,
and his very odd vision of the world.
And part of it was that everybody
was trying to get in on the act, and it
was as if somehow our Lord appeared on November the 1st.
You know, Carter and Ford to be out in the street
campaigning with him.
So Ansel did it as a political thing,
there were always political parties
out trying to get in on the act.
And partly it was a kind of a nightmare of his own,
because there were crowds and crowds of people
in the streets, and every one of them was wearing a mask.
Like a Halloween mask.
And one person wearing a Halloween mask is funny,
but thousands of people is cumulative effect
of very scary and nasty.
So the strange things are kind of very nightmarish vision
of this thing happening.
So I did my version of it with the poem.
It's again, in terms of my town.
You don't have to know the town.
You supply your town.
Thank you very much for listening,
and this is called The Entry of Christ into Liverpool.
City morning, dandelion seeds blowing through moist ground.
Smell of overblown privet hedges,
children's voices in the distant sounds from the river.
Around the corner into Myrtle Street sunning shoppers,
head scarves, shopping baskets, dogs.
Then down the hill, the sound of trumpets.
Children running, ice cream, bands,
floods breaking out of the buildings, blackened
red, green, and yellow, Union Jacks red end signs,
long live socialism stretched against the blue sky
over St. George's Hall.
Now the procession, the marching drums,
hideous massed royal faces of old ladies
in the crowd, yellow masks of girls in curlers
and headscarves smelling of factories, masks, masks, masks,
red masks, purple masks, pink masks, crushing, surging,
carry me along, down the hill past the Philharmonic,
the labor exchange.
Excited feet crushing the geraniums
in St. Luke's gardens.
Placards, banners, posters, keep Britain white,
and the war in Vietnam.
God bless our Pope, long live Ian Paisley.
Words painted on the road.
Words painted on the wall.
Stop, go, halt.
The sound of pipes and drums down the street.
Little girls in yellow and orange dresses,
paper flowers, embroidered banners,
loyal sons of King William Lodge,
Bootle masks, more masks, crowding in offices,
standing on walls, climbing fences,
faces of my friends in the crowd,
familiar faces, the shades of Pierre Bonnard and Guillaume
Apollinarie, Alfred Jarry cycling carefully
through the crowd.
A black cat picking away under foot.
Posters, signs, gleaming salads.
James Ensor, maker of masks, hail Jesus, King of the Jews.
Straining forward to catch a glimpse
through the crowd, red hair, white robe, gray donkey,
familiar face.
Traffic lights, zebra signs.
Guin-- Guin--
Guinness.
Guin-- Guin-- Guin--
Guinness, Guinnes is good for--
Guiness is good for--
White bird dying unnoticed in a corner.
White feathers dropping, blood running,
mingling with the neon signs in the puddle.
Guinness is-- Guinness is good--
Guinness is, Guiness is, Guinness is good.
Guinness is good.
Guinness is good for--
Mask, mask, mask, mask, mask, mask, mask,
mask, Guinnes is good for--
Guinness is good for--
Guinness is good for you!
Brass bands cheering, loudspeakers blaring,
cluster of police horses, all parts
of the constituent assembly, masks, cheering, glittering,
teeth, daffodils trodden underfoot,
patches of Jerusalem, banners cheering,
drunks stumbling and singing, masks, masks, masks, masks,
masks, masks, masks, masks!
[YELLS]
Evening thin sickle moon, pale blue
flocked sky flecked with dark orange clouds.
Streamers, newspapers, discarded paper hats,
blown slowly back up the hill by the evening wind.
Men with big brooms sweeping the gutter.
Last of the crowd waiting at a bus stop.
Giggling schoolgirl.
Quiet businessman.
Me, walking home, alone, empty chip-papers
drifting around my feet.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Patricia Beer was born and brought up in Devon.
She works full time as a poet now,
but she has taught as a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths college,
and for several years in Italy.
She's written two critical books, Introduction
to the Metaphysical Poet, and a study
of 19th century fictional heroine,
called, Reader, I Married Him.
He has six collections of poetry,
Loss of the Magyars and Other Poems, The Survivors,
Just Like the Resurrection, The Estuary, Spanish Balcony,
and most recently Driving West.
When you come to the reception to meet poets tonight,
I hope you will also meet Patricia's husband, Damian
Parsons.
Since Mr. Parsons is a distinguished architect,
we thought we should take him to see this,
the finest example in town.
So we had lunch today at Bum Steer.
I'm very happy to introduce to you Patricia Beer.
[APPLAUSE]
I'd like to start by reading two poems from--
is this on?
Yes-- from Just Like the Resurrection.
This poem is called A Visit to Little Getty,
and is exactly what it says it is.
I'd been doing a pious pilgrimage around the places
of the four quartets, and East Coker and Little Getty
and have got no further since then.
Little Getty is a quite extraordinary place,
and I tried to capture something of the atmosphere in this poem.
A Visit to Little Getty.
This is a place of departure, not of arrival.
Even the signpost saying Little Getty, a shock to any poetry
lover, seems meant to be read retrospectively
by tourists on their way back.
As we rise from the fens to where the hills begin,
the flatlands give the impression
of leaving us rather than being left,
and they carry the sun away on them,
warmth going, not cold coming.
The pilgrims have gone.
They have been here this afternoon with flower
[INAUDIBLE] too, so large a wreath
they were either rich or numerous, we do not know which.
They have gone, and their flowers are bright and dying.
The scouts camping in the next field
are lugging tea urns and dismantling trestle tables.
It has been visitors day, but the parents
have gone now, leaving their stalwart sons jesting shakily
like survivors.
And we must go, if we want to be home before dark,
for home is not here.
Less here, in fact, than in most places.
We are visiting the famous poet who
followed a famous king who sought out a famous good man
and so on back to the beginning, which is the end.
Where the line vanishes heroes stop reflecting,
and the prayers, the escape route, and the poem
were perhaps not light coming, but darkness going.
[APPLAUSE]
This poem is called Four Years After,
and it was based on the following caption
extract that I found in a newspaper one day.
This is what I saw in the newspaper.
The perfectly preserved body of a British mountaineer
was found near Cormier yesterday more than four years
after he fell to his death on the [INAUDIBLE] glacier.
Four Years After.
Yes, this was my husband.
I cannot say is, though he has not changed since his dying day
four years ago.
Certainly ice is strong as saintliness
to keep corruption away.
I have altered in these years, better or less rightly wed,
uglier or handsomer than I was then.
All my tears rolled, grief like cargo
shifted, grew and was cut like my hair.
I have moved, but he not once.
For 50 moons not one cell.
Look at his glassy aplomb which has not
been splintered since out of death and life
he fell to nothing.
I could kill him.
[APPLAUSE]
And I'll just read one poem from [INAUDIBLE]..
It's called Arms.
I was very much struck as a child
to hear the story of my Devonian great-grandfather
who was master of a brig that carried anything to anywhere,
a sort of taxi service, really.
And mostly took coal to Naples.
He was-- his brig went down and there was only one survivor.
I wrote about this in my first book, quite a long sequence,
but the subject still seemed to need to be written about.
And so to Naples.
He was-- his brig went down and there was only one survivor.
I wrote about this in my first book, quite a long sequence,
but the subject still seemed to need to be written about.
And so it turned up in this form, a great many years
after the first book linking up with all sorts of things
in my own life like loss of religious faith.
Arms.
I was brought up to believe in the everlasting arms,
and took comfort for some years in the fatherly muscle
and grip, but fell out of them gradually and in slow motion
as God dissolved.
[INAUDIBLE] into nightmares about arms
and especially one picture of the world lying
flooded with all the animals drowned, visible still
in one foot of water, frozen, never to wriggle with the tide
or rustle to pieces.
Stiff legged, the sheep who could not embrace and flex
as the lions could, nevertheless lay
in their ramrod protectiveness holding each other like bars.
These limbs were not immortal, and perishing they woke me.
As in a story I heard, when my grandfather went down
with his brig in the North Sea on a calm, clear evening,
there was no wireless to send last love on.
He put his arms around his son and there he stood, protector,
up to his knees in death, and that was the last
that anyone saw of him.
[APPLAUSE]
And now I'd like to read a group from Driving West, which
is the current book in print, and then I'd
like to finish off with something
from work in progress.
This poem is called Middle Age.
Middle age at last declares itself as the time
when could have been is not wishful thinking any more.
Is not, say, I could have been at Oxford
if my parents had been richer, or if the careers mistress had
not thought Exeter was good enough for me.
It is not misunderstanding, either,
as when at night in the first year
war bombs could have been thunder, and later on in peace,
thunder could have been bombs.
Sights and sounds are more themselves now.
There have been real alternatives.
They have put on weight and yet faded.
Evening walks go past where we could have lived.
The coach house that the mortgage company said
had too much charm, and not enough rooms.
Everywhere I look it is the same.
The churchyard or the other side of the bed.
The one who is not lying there could have been.
[APPLAUSE]
This poem is called Female Extinct
and it's based on the giant sloth in the Natural History
Museum in South Kensington.
The skeleton, I should say, which
is much more like the skeleton of a dinosaur.
I think that's the most helpful visual picture to have.
I started writing the poem as though the giant sloth was
masculine.
In fact, they can't tell because the skeleton is
rather vestigial, and the poem was rather hanging fire.
So then I realized that what I was really afraid of
was the possibility of my own extinction,
either as cosmic extinction or personal extinction or both.
And then when I made the giant sloth into a female,
the poem went forward.
Female Extinct.
Her rib cage is eked out with bits of wire.
Only gloves have no marrow in them.
You can take her home on a postcard separately.
She once stood up with hundreds, as if to bellow the Hallelujah
Chorus.
Her voice fell forward into the mud.
Her sons, little dragons, all lumbered away.
Her skull was probably left out for seasons in a far pasture,
or on a battlefield, to be gathered up by wilier beings.
The air of the museum snuffles in her nose.
Her passionate jaws shout, give me time.
[APPLAUSE]
This poem describes a visit to the south of Spain last year,
and why would like to particularly this evening
is that the very high mountains in the south of Spain
towards the evening give very much the same effect
as the mountains that I've seen here over the past three days.
And I felt I would like to read it for that reason.
To the South.
We have seen nobody the whole afternoon.
Nobody picks the olives nor tends the trees.
Grove after striped grove stays neat by magic.
Where could they spring from, in any case, the husbandmen?
This vegetable kingdom is vast and has no creatures.
The water is too far down.
Coming south through La Mancha it was the same.
There were sheep, diligently eating
nothing, each one the [INAUDIBLE] a globe of dust,
but no men, though fires from the stubble fields
stood yellow in the glare and did not walk.
A battleground of sunflowers sagged black and dead.
The sun moves now, and rolls down towards the olive trees.
Ladder rungs of shadow link the rows.
And now at last the mountains rise up blue.
Two dimensional only, but there is ice in them.
Beyond them the works of man wait from supercilious
arches to candied courtyards where
children and dolls look right.
And the white doves will sleep heavy in the palm
trees like fruit.
[APPLAUSE]
And to conclude the group from this book Driving
West, two poems that I wrote in the Isles of Scilly
when we were there not long ago.
The first one is called The Accident.
It isn't entirely autobiographical.
It's autobiographical to the extent
that the accident I describe was one which
actually happened to myself.
I fell off a rock and hurt my leg rather badly.
But the woman in the poem is speaking to her husband,
who was not there at the time.
Which wasn't so in the case of my accident.
And there's a strong sense of guilt in the poem.
I wondered for some time where it came from,
but I attribute it to childhood guilt. When one falls down,
one is likely to be ticked off rather than consoled for having
not looked where one was going.
The Accident.
Dear husband, please come to me.
Yesterday I fell on these stern rocks and lie in hospital.
I was wrong to walk here alone.
Please come, for both our sakes.
As I fell I noticed the seagulls above me,
legs dangling, wings pumping, they
yelled out of white breast feathers and spotted beaks.
Then their cliff drew them back.
They wheeled over the bay of quiet sails
and outboard motors, over the coarse grass
and the pink flowers, and went home.
I was the subject of these rocks.
They love theirs.
I fell in obedience to a law like any weak citizen.
Sympathy was their metaphor.
Flesh to stone.
Forgive my clumsiness.
Please come to me.
[APPLAUSE]
And this poem is called [? Precorus ?] Thompson.
Notice [? Precorus ?] Thompson.
He has won a competition with the smallest
bones in the whole churchyard, and the man
sized grave he shares with none tops all the tombstones.
Three months of life, 200 years ago.
From harvest time to ailing in November,
he came to nothing much.
Even that Christmas, not much for anybody to remember.
But little [? Precorus ?] Thompson bides his time.
He is the right length for sightseers
who pay no attention to the corpses that lived for 50, 60,
speaking years.
Evergreen and rank are the paths between the ewe trees,
and lichen creeps like evil over men who
worked hard and dropped dead.
Women at menopause who saw the devil.
The balance of the churchyard must be righted.
May the full grown dead seem interesting.
May all children live longer than [? Precorus ?] Thompson.
Strangle the church tower and the passing bell.
[APPLAUSE]
And now to finish, just two poems from the book
that I'm working on at the moment.
This poem is called Telling Them.
And I wrote it in connection with the book
I'm working on at the moment, a prose book,
because I found it in a book of old, old Devon legends.
Telling Them.
Every twilight the old weaver came back to his attic,
worked till the sun rose on medieval dew and hairs.
Never having been told he was dying,
he did not know he was dead, and left always
in the rhythm of returning.
His son, at first touched, later maddened,
called for the parish priest who brought his bell, his book,
his candle to the full house where
he read and he lit and he rang to tell the old man the truth.
To tell him that we were left [INAUDIBLE]..
His son succeeded.
The handloom and the trappings make
it seem like quite enjoyable story,
but today it is no entertainment.
Not to have told your father that he had terminal cancer.
Night after night he innocently bounds into your dreams,
confident as a dog that he exists and is welcome.
You suffer and sweat and cry out,
but at last you suspect that he knew all along, the old ghost.
[APPLAUSE]
And I'd like to finish with a poem called Parson Hawkers
Farewell.
Parson Hawker was director of the parish of Morgan Stowe
in the 19th century.
Morgan Stowe is a little parish just inside
from the Cornish, Devon border.
He was an eccentric.
From the cradle I would think, but his eccentricity
was greatly intensified by the fact
that he lived so far away from the civilized world which
he loved.
In those days it was quite a common
saying in England that for every 100 miles
you lived away from London, you were a hundred miles back
in time, and I used to think it was very probably true.
What finally-- well, his spirit never broke,
but what made him peculiarly idiosyncratic
towards the last years of his life
was the series of shipwrecks that
took place on that very wicked piece of coast.
It's terrifying even today.
And of course as the clergyman, he
was called in when even a piece of somebody was [INAUDIBLE]..
His anniversary was celebrated in Morgan Stowe parish church
last autumn, and I was commissioned
to write this poem for it, and I read it
from the pulpit, which gave me great pleasure.
And it was written from a spirit of great affection
that I had felt for Parson Hawker in the course of reading
enough about him to be able to write the poem.
Parson Hawker's Farewell.
Let no one wear black at my funeral.
I have not let blackness be the friend to me
it could have been.
The black storm crawling with demons
clambered up the sky each day.
My eyes shrank.
I turned away, and the prince daemon
tore the roof off my house.
I have passed purple and gray to white.
I'm as white now as the ship's figurehead the sea spat out
on the shore one day.
All its paint licked off, it had a body still,
better without gaudiness, a face hinting
at what was behind the colors.
I have been compassionate at the lich gate.
I have been made hateful by drowned sailors brought to me
every one, some in good clothes, others piecemeal
out of the murk of rock pools where
the biting and shaking sea at last
left them, limbs, dispossessed hearts, all begging for burial.
Those stones.
"A corpse ashore, sir."
The words make me cringe even as the gap narrows
between me and the men I every day sent to Resurrection.
All ended with me and I have been alone.
Even my loving wife cannot ward off the blown leaves that
presage storm.
My fellow clerics care mostly about food.
They eat pigs faces, cannibals, narcissists.
With gluttony they disgust their own angels.
What can I call them?
Some Latin name with a prim mouth and filth in the tail.
They know enough for that.
Pig's feces might do.
You see, I have rage still.
At lifeboat men, at coroners I have
raged, at those who stole my books,
at the demons who chewed up my fields, forcing me to buy corn.
I shall always be angry, but perhaps with a white heat
that Seraphim will sociably glare back at.
Farewell to the bad roads and the steep [INAUDIBLE]
and London remote.
I shall never walk on the cliffs alone again.
My last cats, whose language I spoke fluently,
will outlive me.
Peace and defiance be with you all.
What matters is not money or being feasted, but soul safe.
[APPLAUSE]
Pete Morgan was born in Lancashire,
educated in Derbyshire, and now lives
in York where he's associated with Loughborough University.
He's written four books of poetry.
A Big Hat or What, Loss of Two Anchors, Poems for Shorty,
and The Gray Mare Being the Better Steed.
I don't want to take up any of his time,
I'm very happy to introduce to you Pete Morgan.
[APPLAUSE]
Right.
Yes.
I want to begin by reading a poem, which
is from my most recent publication, which is the Gray
Mare Being the Better Steed, but I'm not
going to read it from the book because it's not
published in the form I originally
wanted it to be published.
It's called Ring Song and originally it
was to have been like that.
The thing about it is that it was
to have been a limited edition of 100 copies produced
for the Edinburgh Festival in 1971,
but the printer made a mess of it
and it finished up as a limited edition of two copies, signed.
Signed and numbered by the author.
The idea behind the poem was that you
could come into it wherever you wanted
and leave wherever you wanted.
But I know.
Ring Song.
Once upon a time, there was a story.
It was not a long story, it was a short story, a good story.
It had neither a beginning, a middle, or an end.
First of all the story was told to a child.
The child smiled and said, tell me another.
The story was told to a man of influence.
The man of influence ignored it.
The story was told to a critic.
The critic stuffed his shirt with it.
The story was told to a theologian.
The theologian doubted.
The story was told to a soldier.
The soldier tore off its wings and wore them on his helmet.
The story was told to a politician.
The politician also smiled but said nothing.
The story was told to a government who debated it,
amended it, and finally refused to pass it.
The story was told to a policeman.
The policemen took out his notebook.
The story was told to a judge.
"What is a story?"
asked the judge?
The story was told to the hangman who wove it in his rope
like hair.
The story was told to the man in chains
who made good his escape in it.
The story was told to a juggler who threw it in the air
and caught it, and threw it in the air
and caught it, and threw it in the air.
The story was told to an acrobat who suspended it below him.
The story was told to a sculptor who hammered it
into the shape of his mother.
The story was told to a painter who signed it in the corner
and hung it on the wall.
The story was told to a man of the sea who opened the story
and sailed out upon it.
The story was told to a young girl whose mirror it became.
The story was told to a bird.
The bird built a nest in its branches.
The story was told to a poet and the poet passed on the story.
And this was the story.
Once upon a time, there was a story.
It was not a long story.
It was a short story.
The child smiled and said, tell me another.
You're ahead of me.
What I want to do now actually, because I am out west
where I've never been before, is to read a very old poem that I
have never, ever read before.
And it's a sort of wild west poem
because it must be 14 years ago I
went to live in Glasgow, which is
an industrial city in the south of Scotland,
and not a terribly pleasant city as
far as the aesthetics of architecture, way of life,
et cetera are concerned.
And in Glasgow there are numerous little gangs of 11
to 14-year-olds but who really run rampant through the town.
And one of them is called Cody.
And I didn't know this, and when I first went to live in Glasgow
and I went to Scotland I suddenly saw these signs.
There are all kinds of gangs, some of them are called Tongs
and then there's another gang who
are younger called Tiny Tongs, and they work in aerosol paint
spray and things like that.
But it was the idea of this gang in such an industrial waste
being called Cody.
And also something in which I think
is particularly English, British, Scottish,
in this case, are the words Cody Rules.
Cody Rules OK, and that seems to be something that is spreading.
You see it all around Britain and I've never yet seen it
in America.
And this poem is called Cody Rules, Cody is OK.
A chill wind up gallowgate.
I read your name outside Malachy's bar.
Cody lives.
Cody rules, OK.
Rain on Argyle Street.
I read your undying tenements.
Cody is, Cody is OK.
Cody rules, striding down Sauchiehall Street,
12 foot tall on his Palomino, bringing down stars
to dance about our heels, watching the children,
doffing his hat to their 10 gallon dreams.
Cody rules, roping the buffalo ghosts on Glasgow green,
riding shotgun on the last late stage
down the great western road.
Cody rules, and little sharp shooter Annie
stands hand in hand in the neon sunset outside the Cosmo
Cinema.
Cody rules OK.
Where are the high heeled buckskin boots?
Where is the $1,000 rhinestone coat?
Where is the blue eyed Colonel now?
Cody lives, Cody OK.
Selling green and white rosettes outside parkhead on [INAUDIBLE]
writing tongues here bass on chromium
plated bingo halls with an aerosol paint spray.
Cody rules, Cody OK.
Shuffling among deserted tenements,
the last blue tier, still wet on his snow white whiskers.
[APPLAUSE]
I'm going to go back to the book, which is called The Gray
Mare Being the Better Steed.
You can tell I've never read that poem before, actually.
Some of the poems in this collection
are particularly musical, and I work fairly extensively
with music.
Not as much as Adrian Henri, who you've already heard from,
who at one time was a singer with a Liverpool rock group
called Liverpool Sin, but with a different kind of music.
And this is one poem.
It's called the White Stallion.
There is the word horse, in it and I shall want to say hoss.
I will kindly refrain from doing so.
It has a lot to do with the title of the collection.
It's an early love poem.
That was that horse that I found there, my white one,
big, tall, and lean as, and mean as hell.
And people who saw me would stare as I passed them and say,
look at him.
How he rides his cock horse.
But my steed, the white stallion,
stormed into the moonlight, and on it was me.
There were those girls that I found
then, my loved ones, small fat and mean ones and maidens
as well.
And those girls who saw me would weep
as I passed them, and cry, "Look at him.
How he rides his cock horse."
But my steed, the white stallion,
went proud in the still night, and on it was me.
There was one girl that I loved then,
a woman as tall and as light as a woman should be.
And soon as I saw her I dismounted my stallion
to stay by the woman whose love I required.
But my steed, the white stallion,
rode off in the moonlight, and on it was she.
Goodbye to the horse, to the woman and stallion.
Farewell to my cock horse and loving as well.
To people who see me and stare as I pass them,
I wail, "Look at me.
I once rode a cock horse.
But my steed, the white stallion is lost in the moonlight,
and on it rides she."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
The first poem in the book is called Disguise.
It really ought to have been dedicated to my parents.
And it's a bit of an oversight that Disguise,
it's a poem that came out on some of the broadsheets
you will have received.
So I don't know whether it will be nice for you having
read it to hear it, but anyway.
Having penetrated my disguise with lengths
of predictable steel, and not a little wit,
they, in their indefinite wisdom,
scoured my skin with intricate designs of their own choosing.
Having failed to obliterate their scars
with numberless additional disguises,
and frequent unsuccessful experiments with water, fire,
and love, I discovered somewhat later and quite by accident
that each scar was moveable.
Ah-ha.
Carefully, now, and in complete privacy
I move the markings over my body and slid them
one by one into the darkness inside it and very much out
of sight.
Children, you need no longer be afraid.
You can have a laugh with Lumpy now.
Come closer.
Look at my disguise.
Never let me catch you looking in my eyes.
[APPLAUSE]
Tell us some water down here if Adrian hasn't [INAUDIBLE]..
I said that some poems were musical,
and this is one that has been--
I always want to say that a poem has been set to music,
and then somebody put me wise the other day
and said no, music has been set to the poem, which is
a lot nicer way of putting it.
But this is a poem which originally was in this form,
and then it was a singer-songwriter
called Al Stewart who I believe now lives over here
in the States, has recorded it on one of his album,
called There As She Flies.
And he made it into a song that sounded very much like-- he's
not here, is he?
Which sounded very much like Hit the Road, Jack.
It's very funny actually, why I say is Al Stewart here,
because I was once present at one of Al's concerts
when he didn't know that I was in the audience,
and he told the most terrible lies.
He said-- I actually was there and he said something about,
this is a poem that was written by a guy called Pete Morgan,
he's on the breadline, I don't know what he's doing now.
He's probably driving a bus in Glasgow.
All this kind of thing, and there I
was at the back of the hall, and when
I went over backstage during the interval and saw him,
he was quite--
as we say in Yorkshire, gobsmacked.
Anyway, here's the poem as it was originally intended.
It became a sort of signature tune of mine,
and it's called My Enemies Have Sweet Voices.
A bar called Paradise, the fiddler from the band asked me,
"Why do you stand here crying?"
I answered him, "Musician, this may come as a surprise.
I was trying to split the difference
when it split before my eyes."
My enemies have sweet voices.
Their tones are soft and kind.
When I hear, my heart rejoices, and I do not seem to mind.
I was playing Bragg in bedlam.
The doctor wouldn't deal, asking,
"Why does he kneel down Weeping " I answered him, "Physician,
I think you would have cried.
I was falling back on failure when
the failure stepped aside."
My enemies have sweet voices, their tones are soft and kind.
When I hear my heart rejoices and I do not seem to mind.
I was blind side to the gutter when Merlin happened by,
asking, "Do you lie there bleeding?"
I answered him, "Magician, as a matter of fact,
I was jumping to conclusions, and one of them jumped back."
My enemies have sweet voices.
Their tones are soft and kind.
When I hear, my heart rejoices and I do not seem to mind.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
I would like to move on now to something.
I read from this big mouth work in progress.
This is a sequence of nine poems.
You won't realize from out there, but each one of them
is based on a very strict form of 136 syllables,
or something like that.
I can't remember.
I remember when I wrote it, but I can't remember now.
It's called A Poet's Deaths, and there are nine of them.
It's very significant that there are nine of them
because in the way that the cat has nine lives,
so I hope the poet has nine deaths.
In a way the poems are nothing to do with death at all.
They're something to do with the indulgences of being
a poet who earns his living from his writing,
as I do-- as we all do.
All three of us that you've had on tonight.
Some of the poems need a little explanation.
And one or two of them have been Americanized,
because I very quickly ran into a problem of sort of words,
like you don't know what a Foden is.
Yeah, a Foden.
So without interrupting the syllable count
I was able to make that Mack Truck.
Little things like that.
So when I get back home, I revert to Foden.
The thing is, that as I was sort of traveling
around the country doing readings,
I began to think that I wasn't writing very much.
And if I wasn't very careful, I was
going to die before I had done completed my life's work,
you see.
And I got these visions.
Dizzy visions of my own death in the most unlikely
places, and worried about them terribly, and then
began to write about them.
So Adrian mentioned poets who write about writing poems
all the time.
Well, this isn't exactly that, but it's something
fairly closely akin to it.
Explain.
North.
The industrial north of England is
where I live, a Morris convertible,
you probably all know is a small soft top Morris car.
One.
A hay wain trundles from a hay field to a farm.
Two farm workers have been drinking cider.
They are content in evening sun.
They laugh, they point, they block the road.
The poet, the troubadour, returning to the north
has seen it all before.
He waits for change.
His foot is hard down to the floor
of his Morris convertible.
The smell of summer wafts in [INAUDIBLE] Discord blossoms
trouble in the air.
The poet is about to overtake, a pitchfork
pins the canvas of the roof and pins the poet to the door.
Two, the [INAUDIBLE] is a forest in Scotland.
The poet, the pyromaniac, is impressed by the dry potential
of the [INAUDIBLE].
His way into the woods is barred by brittle undergrowth
that snaps like sparrow bones behind him.
Already lost, the poet plunders on and somewhere
near the center of the wood he stoops,
and with his fingers rakes the bracken and the touch
dry lichen.
A match spits fire.
The quick flames lick.
A bird breaks cover for the sky.
The [INAUDIBLE] cackles.
The poet sees the final joke.
His eyes at last are full of fire.
Three.
There's a literary reference in this, and those of you
who know your Kenneth Patch and will
get the literary reference.
The poet, homing in on home at 1:00 AM
is gnawed by guilt. He would have sooner
had an evening with the wife who won't believe him.
Across the street, he watches, young man watching him.
He thinks of lemon colored gloves.
Wait, wait.
He grins at trouble through his teeth.
Wait, wait, now.
Light on the steel is like quick fish at his eyes.
The poet falls, the boots come in.
Crap, run.
From where he lies the poet watches one last street lamp
watching him.
It's flicker cuts on cobbles, then dissolves as on his lips
the dark blood bubbles, bursts.
Four.
The poet, the performer, returning from the festival
where he has told it like it is with his white suit,
his starry shirt, his glitter and mascara,
clicks on the Hitachi ultrasound and swings his Mercedes 2000 SL
into the path of an oncoming Mack truck.
The vehicles clash and bounce like rams.
The glitter of that final night spurts from the poet's head
like water from a dam.
The head is haloed in small stars.
He does not see the glitter fall.
He freezes frame on that and on himself.
Five.
Reluctantly, the poet flies.
Hauled from an age of steam by pride and lust for money,
he fastens the seatbelt and stubs his [INAUDIBLE]..
A fairyland of bright suburbia slips and diminishes
beneath him.
All of altitude has lost authority.
From his window seat the wingtip fold like foil,
spin off slowly into blue.
The poet, falling, wonders if his name will
be noted from the list of passengers,
and if he will rate an obituary, and of how many column inches.
Six.
The poet is a host to pain.
Pain travels through the poet like a rat through a sewer.
In dark, it visited the wrist, a string of pain like fairy
lights flicked on, flicked off.
In light the poet wakes to find that all that pain packs tight
between the finger and the thumb.
A nub of pain.
Stretching the hand in half light at the window,
he turns the hand.
He graces pain with art.
The poet has his game with pain.
Where will pain next be?
He wavers between the brain, the groin, the heart,
and one day will awaken and be right.
Seven.
The poet, the gigolo, absent from the wife and the mother,
absent from the black might of the Holy Roman Empire,
somehow keeps his head and holds his vulnerable charm.
Absent from the husband and the father,
and the children sleeping in the next room, she comes to him.
Later, she will tell him he is the first,
and not as he presumed the last of a long, long line of poets
and singers, fellow sufferers.
He will be quickly terrified, as 'round her door there slowly
looms the wrong end of a shotgun.
Eight, explain Maritza.
It's an all metal American typewriter.
The poet in his garret is by beauty of the quick light
cracking the horizon, closing in and entering.
Entering his window, entering his Maritza, ramming into him.
His white fingers weld to the machine
as the poet is thrown backwards to his books.
About his ears, his friends' slim volumes slide.
He had been contemplating death and will not
crawl from slow flame curling at his heels.
He will lean back and will seem to sleep.
He will slip into that dark like slipping in to water
to the eyes.
Nine.
It was not that he became a lesser poet,
neither did he consciously stop writing.
Seven years in that same city and he
hightailed out for anywhere.
For 18 months he kept the back door open,
let the task as a bond in case the country palled.
The country was his death.
It did not pall.
100 miles from the nearest poet, friend, and therefore critic,
he found a new freedom.
A freedom to write what he wanted, when he wanted.
A freedom not to have to write, to keep his poems in his head.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much.
I'm going to close with this one poem, which
is, I owe you an apology, because I've been reading
this poem some considerable time and it mentions 168 pounds.
If you listen out for it you might hear it.
The thing about 168 pounds, why the apology is due
is because that is the average weight of the American male.
It must be true, I read it in the papers.
We sort of like the New York Times
publishes the rugby league results,
and I was able to read that my home team, which
is a place called Leigh in Lancashire,
drew 12 all with Castleburg when I was flying somewhere
over Florida.
So the English press is full of useless information,
like the average weight of the American male.
But you see, this is supposed to be a poem
about us, and about everybody.
The thing is that we don't produce statistics like that,
and you do, so I used 168 pounds.
And anyway it's probably changed by now.
The thing is that the poem was originally conceived
as a radio piece, if it was conceived at all.
And it had lots of sound effects going on behind it.
It needs a sort of boxing match ramble going on in the back,
and it also needs a bell.
I have done this with a bell.
I used to have a man who came round with me
and whose job it was solely to ring the bell,
but he wasn't very good at it.
And on one occasion I sort of said, "Look,
when I say ring the bell, I mean--"
because I got a bit carried away in it,
I said, "I mean ring the bell."
Swung the bell and in his horror of having let me down
he let go the piece of string just as I hit the bell,
and I saw this brass bell whipping across the auditorium,
and it hit a member of the audience
over the bridge of the nose.
Real blood cascaded.
But we gave him his money back.
And I met him a couple of years later
and he seemed all right about it.
In fact he could seem quite proud, really.
He said, "Do you remember me?"
And I said, "No, I'm sorry," and he said, "Look."
And I did.
Now the other thing is that right at the end of the poem,
it needs a small nuclear explosion.
I hate to tell you this, but it's true.
I've tried that as well.
But with one of those magic smoke
boxes where nobody notices that there's an electric lead and I
put my foot on a button, and up goes a mushroom cloud
of a tiny flash of smoke.
It has a nice little effect, mushroom shaped effect
about it.
But on this occasion when it didn't work,
I was working with an English band called The Bonzo Dog
Doo-dah Band, who are a bunch of nutters
you've ever met in your life.
And I put my foot on the button and the thing didn't go off.
Well, it really ought to very quickly
after the end of the poem.
So I leant forward and--
[INAUDIBLE]