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Episode image is a detail from the cover of Polishing October by George Gömöri.
This week Charles Adrian puts on his poetry voice to read from some poetry pamphlets that he has found beneath Waterloo Bridge. That’s it. He encourages his listeners to embrace poetry.
Charles Adrian reads a longer version of his poem Camomile Tea as part of Museling 27 - Writing From My 30s, which you can listen to and download on Apple Podcasts here.
Some more writing by Charles Adrian, 7, is featured in Page One 100.
This episode has been edited to remove music that is no longer covered by licence for this podcast.
This episode features a jingle written for the podcast by the band Friends Of Friends.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode released: 29th April, 2014.
Poetry listing:
Camomile Tea by Charles Adrian Gillott
From Quartet in B:
Conversation by Eileen Bedford
A Net Curtain Requiem by Richard Bradshaw
Harbour by John Broadhouse
The Fog by Wendy May Bushnell
From Polishing October (trans. Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri):
Daily I Switch… and Expectant Mother by George Gömöri
From Gate Hours
November Night by Denis Griffiths
From A Question Of Blue Tulips And Other Poems:
At The Lucien Freud Exhibition by Nadine Brummer
Links:
Episode transcript:
[NB When producing this transcript, I no longer had access to most of the original poetry so all punctuation and line breaks are guess-work except for Camoile Tea by Charles Adrian Gillott, which is the podcaster’s own, and parts of At the Lucien Freud Exhibition by Nadine Brummer, which is reproduced (in part) here: https://www.glass-poetry.com/journal/reviews/fechik-brummer.html and here: https://londongrip.co.uk/2020/06/london-grip-poetry-review-nadine-brummer/]
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 78th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and I'm here on my own again to talk about poetry.
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
So... poetry. What is it? How is it made? What does it look like? How does it feel? How do you know whether or not it's any good? These are all questions that I don't know the answers to. And I'm not even going to try and answer them today. I'm happy to say, ‘I don't know. Make your own minds up.’ However, I will offer you, as ever, a definition snatched from Wikipedia:
Poetry (from the Greek poiesis meaning a “making”, seen also in such terms as “hemopoiesis”; more narrowly, the making of poetry) is a form of literary art which uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language—such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism and metre—to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.
There you go. It's quite nice, isn't it? So... so I've answered my first question. Tick.
On the whole, though, I should probably say that I don't read very much poetry. And that's been reflected, I think, in this podcast. Of the 240-odd books that have been introduced and read from since I started doing this, only one has been a book of poems. [whispers] It's in the 61st Page One. [normal speach] That's not to say that I don't like poetry. There are poems that I absolutely love. Lullaby by W. H. Auden is probably my favourite poem. I love quite a lot of Ted Hughes's Crow, T. S. Eliot's Prufrock, Wendy Cope's At 3am – that's... ah, that's beautiful. Some of Shakespeare's sonnets. Actually, quite a lot of the Italian sonnets that I read at university. But I feel, despite this, woefully ignorant and a little scared. Poetry takes an effort that I'm not sure I'm prepared to give much of the time – or not anymore, at any rate. All of the poetry that I've just mentioned is stuff that I read when I was still an earnest teenager or an earnest twenty-something. I just don't look for poetry now. Unless a friend of mine has written it – about which more later.
This hasn't prevented me from writing poetry, of course. And before we really get going I wanted to offer you today what, in a poetry slam, would be called a sacrificial poem. This is something that I wrote when I was probably 17 years old and studying for my A levels. I think we can use it as a yardstick to measure everything else that I'm going to read today.
Camomile Tea by by Charles Adrian Gillott
The soothing vapours seep
Into my
Tensed mind
And linger, calmingly,
Comfortingly even as
The sun-blessed flowers,
Selected and pressed with their
Potency intact,
Release their essence into
The soul-warming
Water.
Oh, I quite like that. There's far worse that I'm too ashamed to read you.
So let me explain what I've done this week. Essentially, I've bought – more or less at random – four collections of poetry from one of the book stalls under Waterloo Bridge. That's... that's as scientific as I have got. And I realise that what I'm doing this week is very different from what I do any other week. I can't read you the first page of any of these poems. None of them are longer than a page. And each of them is a universe entire unto itself. But what I'm going to do is just read you poems from these collections and... as a kind of toe dipped into the water, as it were, of the world of random poetry, published in pamphlet form and sold second hand underneath Waterloo Bridge.
The first pamphlet is called Quartet in B. It was published in 1994 by PFC Publications and contains work by Eileen Bedford, Richard Bradshaw, John Broadhouse and Wendy May Bushnell, who drew the cover illustrations. BBBB, you see. Here's the first poem by Eileen Bedford:
Conversation
Unsure, I thread my way with accustomed care through others' minds.
The weight of time hangs still.
Words hang on threads like dew on gossamer and as substantial.
The weight of time hangs still.
The feel of hand on stone, of hand on heart, words in the wormwood and nearer to me.
The weight of time hangs still.
I wonder at the fine-spun threads that weave from mind to mind.
A wild word drops, the word-web breaks.
Uneasy silence settles.
The weight of time hangs still.
I like that. It makes sense to me. Eileen Bedford was born just off the Old Kent Road, apparently, but evacuated to Devon during the war. Then she married a farmer and had five daughters and a son. She became a teacher and retired in 1991, apparently.
Okay, Richard Bradshaw was born in Wood Green in 1935. He was evacuated for a brief period to North Wales and also became a teacher after working for a couple of years for Tottenham public libraries. Has it survived the cull? Perhaps. Listeners in Tottenham can go and have a look. Here's the first poem from his section of the pamphlet, A Net Curtain Requiem:
The dying visitor had never been invited into my home.
Gatecrashing – but when discovered, a welcome entity just the same.
Succumbing, yet doing so with the quiet dignity of its kind.
Not curled up in some dark corner, bemoaning its inexorable fate,
But displaying abstract finery on the crinkled landscape of my curtain.
A dandified playboy stranded when the last cab had departed –
that summertime cab filled with blossoms, nectar and heady scents long gone in search of warmer climes
but forgetting this passenger.
Bewildered, as outside sparkling frost proclaimed the rain of winter.
Inside, digestive rumblings of central heating heralded the battle for heat.
Between them, a no man's land of icy glass and netting.
Here, the delicate gaudy visitor felt its life slowly ebbing away.
Death from starvation or cold: not an easy choice to make.
I looked on with the prying ignorance of the ghoulish masses.
Textbooks stated that death should have claimed it in November.
Yet with Christmas decorations close at hand, it still lived on, colours fading like some old master in urgent need of restoration.
Insipid winter sun caressed the window with feeble fingers of warmth but freezing night would mark the end of this transient life.
Next morning, upon the windowsill, a body lay at peace.
Summer's lingering rear guard had gone and my heart felt heavier.
The corpse cradled against winter's icy breast?
A tortoiseshell butterfly, its tiny spirit now flying free in eternity's paradise gardens.
Mmm. The third poet in this collection is John Broadhouse who was born in Wandsworth in 1947 – another London poet – and was, apparently, a musician, folk singer, artist and sign writer at time of publication. I prefer his second poem to his first so I'm going to read that one.
Harbour
To dream of a time when peace descends upon our torments,
Covering them with a blanket so soft, so light that our minds cannot feel it.
If love can touch our inner emotions but leave us insecure,
What treasures are left to calm the troubled waters?
As I rode the storm, you were my harbour, where peace reigned supreme.
Yet tired and battered through many a long journey, I felt an urge to continue
Pushing all the past behind me, believing I would reach your harbour before
My ship sank.
How false love can be when it's one-sided
And a harbour strewn with rocks lies in wait.
I stood a better chance on the deep seas
Than to be ripped upon your jagged form.
Oh, that's nice. I like that. Okay, another... [The] last ‘B’ of the quartet is Wendy May Bushnell. She was born in Birkenhead and says that: “The ships, their foghorns, their comings and goings, the river, the sea, all seem to be in my blood.” She's a vegetarian, in case you're interested. I'm going to read The Fog, which originally I thought was called The Frog because I wasn't paying attention.
I am enshrouded in your misty romance.
Your greyness, bringing solitude and a longing to be part of your cold vapour body.
Damp from the river, you insidiously swirl,
encircling and engulfing in a transient spell.
Peace, calm, tranquillity.
A magical aura pervading the atmosphere,
Frescoed blanket hanging on the sea.
Lights flicker and fade.
Ships emerge and pass from view.
Colours in the distance paint the canvas of the night.
A foghorn sounds, muffled, heavy in the dense air, its signal of retreat to passing visitors.
The lonely cry of a gull.
I am enshrouded in your misty romance.
Fog.
This may sound silly but I particularly like that the last line of that poem is ‘Fog’ all on its own. And I like the sentence: ‘The lonely cry of a gull.’ I think that's wonderful.
Okay, so we've had some poetry. Now for a little music. This is Soldier's Poem by Muse.
Music
[Soldier's Poem by Muse]
Charles Adrian
That was Soldier's Poem by Muse.
The next collection that I have is Polishing October by George Gömöri. He was born in Hungary in 1934 and, after taking part in the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, he was forced to leave. He ended up teaching Polish and Hungarian at Cambridge. The poems have been translated by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri himself so I'm assuming that they were written in Hungarian. This is a signed copy of Polishing October, published by Shoestring Press. It's inscribed “For Irene with best wishes, George. London, Dec 2008.” I don't know why Irene doesn't have it anymore. The first poem here is by way of preface, I think. It's called Daily I Switch...
Daily, I switch languages.
Call them masks.
At times a mask can feel like your own skin.
At other times, the spirit has to struggle,
Saved only by the tongue it calls its own.
The mysteries of life, of the universe, I can describe in English now,
Although in my mother tongue alone
I can stammer out the words that compose the sunset,
Make it glow.
So that poem, I think, brings up the question of translation. It evokes – rather nicely, I think – what it can be like to live in two languages. I think in literature, though, translation is particularly tricky because the original words chosen by an author always have resonance that equivalents in other language can't match. And so translation of poetry seems to me even more problematic because a poem is so often just a narrow skein of words. And so much of the power of it is in the echoes that it sets up in our minds as we read it – or listen to it. I know a lot of people in this country are fans of Pablo Neruda's poetry in translation and I recently discovered that there are more German translations of Shakespeare's sonnets than almost anything else in the world. I'm exaggerating, of course, but not much. And some of them are okay but they're not Shakespeare. Here, though, we've... This is a poet who's translating his own work, which is interesting – and supervising, I assume, the translation of his own work. And I suppose I have to wonder, maybe... so maybe the images do have power, maybe I get a bit stuck on words. I like words. And so maybe I could spend a bit more time thinking about images. I don't know whether that first poem was written in Hungarian or English. I have the sense that it might have been written in English to stick at the beginning of the collection but even if it had been written in Hungarian, what of that? It's still nice. I still like it. And here's another poem from the collection that I guess must have been written in Hungarian. But I still like it. It's called Expectant Mother.
I am cold.
All the time the foetus has been in my womb, I felt the cold.
I see the world through glass, from underwater.
He can't grasp this, the man I call husband.
He thinks he's superfluous.
I can't share my joy with him
And there are no words to express my pain.
I await the Sixth Day anxiously.
How much can happen by then? Oh God!
In the dream, my doctor brings flaming roses.
He whispers in my ear that he loves me only.
We elope at nighttime.
Our gondola sways.
Okay, the next poet is also a Cambridge man. But he was Head Porter at Jesus College, apparently. And the foreword is written in exactly the kind of prose that people always seem to produce when members of this kind of academic institution go into retirement. It's jolly, patronising and just a little overblown.
Foreword
I am most glad to introduce this book of Dennis Griffiths' poems edited by Arthur Gibson, which has been produced as a mark of esteem and affection from all of us in Jesus College on the occasion of his retirement as Head Porter. Ancient colleges are uniquely able to attract loyalty and devotion from their members and no one has exceeded Dennis Griffiths in such contributions. He has been the ideal Head Porter: firm yet gentle, decisive yet considerate, wise yet receptive, and dignified yet friendly. On the college cricket field – the object of some of his most refreshing poems – he has led the staff team with all a captain's prowess, shrewdness, and tenacity – as I know all too well from having captained its traditional opponents in our glorious annual clash. But underlying all this have been his deeper feelings: sharing in all the life of the college from the bustle of Hall dinner to the quietude of chapel service, thrilling to the inspiration of the college's long history, and delighting in the beauty of its buildings, gardens, and groves. All these are given recollected life in his poems. Dennis Griffiths is a true scholar at his best in his studies of the life of Thomas Cranmer – in the college half a millennium ago. And he is an imaginative artist in the poems collected here. Released from the duties of the Porters' Lodge, he will surely find extra time now for his great passion: enjoying Jesus College, its people past and present, its environs near and far, and writing about them with such charm and affection.
Alan Cotterell 5th March, 1985
One can almost see the manly tear in Dennis Griffiths' eye as he is presented with a copy of his own poetry to polite but loving applause from the below stairs maids. This pamphlet is also a signed copy from July, 1985, and is a Jesus College Cambridge publication. I liked several of these poems but I'm going to read you the last one in the collection, which I particularly liked.
November Night
On this November night,
The gentle, soft repentance of the rain
Weeps on the boughs and on the garden grass.
Half silenced in the tears,
The rhythm of a distant train
Strains with a freight of memories, of rice
And bamboo days, shovels and picks, and death in the bright sun
And steam green jungle land where Buddha was and Christ an Englishmen
Who slaved because he lost a fight
And died in his deliriums of cake,
And great white elephants, bacon and eggs,
And fearsome snake-curled tigers leaping from the night.
The train has gone and I am left to share
The gentle, soft repentance of the rain.
My last pamphlet for today is also published by Shoestring Press and is A Question of Blue Tulips and Other Poems by Nadine Brummer. Isn't that a wonderful title? A Question of Blue Tulips. It's also signed, of course: “For Joe, poet and friend, with love Nadine. March, 1999.” Oh, Joe, what happened? Why did you release it? I'm going to read you the first poem.
At the Lucien Freud Exhibition
Head, hands, genitals and feet
are main events – he does them well.
Excess between is fleshed like meat.
And even now, it takes some nerve
to look at turkey gizzards limp between
men's legs and women opening
to a swarm of black. Oh, there's a buzz all right.
Once, at another show, I heard a woman in a hat
enthuse about a clever orchid. How lips form
a helipad for flies, which land in ruts,
are trapped then sucked where male and female parts
are fused, though none are needed for the helleborine
quite self-sufficient with its seed.
Can flowers be both
gorgeous and obscene?
Lee Bowery's back is overgrown with flecks,
an orchidaceous pink. Buttocks sag
into an off-white stool. You sense the cracks
of old enamel bowls and chipped chrome taps
behind a drape. In front a red-brown rug
bristles. These genteel props
touch my eyes. Below each covering a frame,
upholding surfaces of this and that
lies coiled, and I am forced to look again
at how I live. This cold October day
I'm in a crowd well heeled and buttoned up
engrossed with such carnality
I fear our coats might flake and tear
and eyes, preoccupied with doubt,
find bodies we'd not bargained for.
Oh, like that. I like the way she turns us around. And the last line makes me particularly happy.
So I don't know if you feel any more immersed in the poetic world than you did at the beginning of this half hour. I don't know... None of these poems has changed my life, probably. But maybe that's okay. I enjoyed them. I like them more now that I've read them out loud. Maybe one of the reasons that I'm scared of poetry is that I think it should change my life. I approach it so much more reverently than I do prose fiction, for example. And maybe I should just skip into poetry in the way that I skip into other books - certainly more often, I suppose - and then I'll see what grabs me. Some will, I imagine. Some won't. And that's probably okay.
Already, I'm subscribing to something called Belleville Park Pages, which is a lovely collection of short writing – some poetry, some prose – that comes out once a month, I think. I recommend that. Look it up. Belleville Park Pages. And I'm subscribing to Bare Fiction, which is a magazine containing poetry, plays, short stories and articles. That comes out quarterly. I also recommend that. And I'm exposed to the work of Francesca Beard, who I interviewed a couple of weeks ago, and Selena Godden, who I want to interview, and Gloria Sanders, who introduced me to Belleville Park Pages, and Vera Chok, who introduced me to all of these people – and whose own performance piece Vera Chok's Dance Party XXX is a mixture of poetry and prose and just straightforward shouting and dancing and is, I have to say, hugely inspiring and very, very exciting. So I guess what I'm saying is, it's fine. Poetry is finding me. Maybe I can stop being uptight about it. I'm sorry that I've spent so long displaying my neurosis on the subject.
But I'll finish now. I'm done. This is... Just to play us out, this is a track that I found on my computer. I've no idea how it got there. I don't recognise it. I don't remember where it came from. It's on its own. It doesn't seem to form part of any playlist or album. It's called Iambic 9 Poetry Fade. [laughing] Isn't that lovely? And it's by Squarepusher. If anybody knows anything about this, please get in touch. This has been the 78th Page One. I've been Charles Adrian. Thank you very much for listening. This is Iambic 9 Poetry Fade.
Music
[Iambic 9 Poetry Fade by Squarepusher]
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]