Odds and Ends

(from issue 18)

[Editor's Note: The following letter was cleared for publication by several of the individuals criticised by name.]

Dear Thumbscrew,

A few responses to recent issues:

1. Fair enough re. 'Roddy Lumsden compared to Goethe' [Thumbscrew 17, p. 98], but surely 'Rimbaud compared to Lumsden' is a more pertinent mismatch. The very mention of the Idiot Boy proves the mystery poet has a dubious grasp. The sad wanker also found time to cut out ransom-note letters for the addresses of dozens of magazines who received the doggerel. I might have suspected one of you lot, had it not been for the unlikely attack therein on Bernard O'Donoghue, who was the only poet to escape the wrath in your piece of juvenile fuckwittery about the Eliot Prize. Was this other anonymous coward afraid Bernard would meet him in Jericho and dole out lines?

2. Surely the young blades of Thumbscrew have enough steel without calling for back-up from the provincial bovver boys? You've slumped from Edna Longley to Sheenagh 'Slapper' Pugh in only a few issues. Reproducing several pages of Andy Croft's bile was desperate [Thumbscrew 16, p. 50]. 'The Establishment' is a mirage and it's pathetic that some cretins still lurk outside it throwing stones. Croft is the sort to lash out at Poetry Places but still take his stint as, God love us, 'Poet in Residence to the Great North Run'. He bashes Poetry Review, but still bombards it with his articles and pishy attempts at verse. His mish mash of square pegs in round holes, Spart-speak, eye-popping envy and basic mistakes is truly beneath my contempt, but one point needs tackling. His equation of "working class poetry" with the stuff sent to local papers makes me spit. There is an increasing number of established poets from working class backgrounds (though sadly for every one of us there is a middle class poet adopting a pleb stance) and people in writing groups all over the country who rise inventively above such condescension and dire, inverted snobbery.

3. Steven Blyth is a sharper stick and should know better than to join the New Puritans [Thumbscrew 16, p. 34]. He agrees with the Rev. Redmond about the "hype" and "packaging" of contemporary poets. (What happened to "fashionable"? Was the Whinger's Thesaurus missing that day?) The time is nigh to name-and-shame those whose Bloodaxe bashing began curiously soon after the return of their shite manuscripts. Steven goes on to criticise money spent on a British Council trip for Kate Clanchy. As a Peterloo poet, Steven should know that figures show their subsidy is running at a shameful £72 per copy sold (no, you didn't read that wrong). A friend who buys poetry for a major bookshop hasn't seen a Peterloo rep in four years. Perhaps if Steven Blyth was being "hyped" a little more, he might soon be off on a little jaunt of his own.

4. While we're on the subject of Kate Clanchy, good on her for responding to such a snide review [Thumbscrew 16, p. 32]. The usual form of not responding to an unfavourable review is fair enough, but in these aggressive days, when so many reviews are made from prejudice, politics and personal attack, it's time to meet malice with malice. Or something stronger -- I had two separate, serious offers to have a vindictive reviewer beaten up not long ago. I won't think twice next time.

5. Thanks for spreading the good news of my PBS Choice. But it was the Summer, not the Spring Choice. Lest this seem like pedantry, keep in mind that, with the mad bunching in publishers' lists, this is like the difference between winning the Olympic 100m final and the sack race at school sports. Otherwise, keep up the good work.

Yours sincerely,

Roddy Lumsden

(from issue 16)

'There is a Time for the Masked Ball' [Ecclesiatacost]

On Sinday the 16th of John-n-Mary at the Almighty Theatric in Drizzlington, the manual T.S. Elegant Reprizal for Pottiness held a red herring for the ten-ton finalists. Under the able table of chair Bloke Montebonk, the Pottiness Bunk Sublimity held its annual graveyard mumble to contradunk the event. Shockwaves slouched through the ordinance: not a surprize to be hid. As rigged as a first rate gulleon, the show waltzed on water. Even less amazing, the guessing gomble begun: Who of the ten best deserved reproozal?

Spivving red sneakers, Bloke Montebonk gave waves to the first finalist, Tin 'Saint' Paul in spikey Ulster logorrhoea namedrop syndrone. Too clever by half of what wasn't there. Carrot who Art in Huffy wasn't there either. Two standins read her mythopoeic self-enlargements, a necessary ploy in view of their microscopic authorority. Saul Durkan converted the audience, like a rugby ball kicked over the high H of his heroism. Sirly Bloke Montebonk and his Adam's Angels, the Judges, would fund Durkan empty of merit and so award him the reproval? Not on your television.

A chap called Michael Lasky strayed in from the world of decent people, competant pottiness. No chance. As every child's news, that which is good, fabulous, brilliant, is called wicked, monstrous, evil. And so it is in the world of pottiness, that which is wicked, monstrous, evil, is called good, fabulous, brilliant. A woman cold Anne Carton numbed a standin to purple her prose. So if it wanted pottiness itself, it yet had a half-baked sucker of Hercules boring the pants off Europa.

The second half was also dynalite. It lay like a stiff stick on the flower. Rolling around invisibly, it did not explode the dugnifooled Cathleen Jammy, who turned the muse of Medea into the muse of museum. Tolerable on lochs. C.Q. Willyums trailed long lines of New York ticker-tape, each the length of a stretch limo. The long applause was for hum, a disqualifiable defence. Enter Michel Hoffmarn voided by a standin. We heard the funicular culturule sicko phanting his dead father yes again. The smartarse cold fish reproach to pottiness drained dustbelief to the drugs: viz. this sure-fiver whipper of the just amuser. Thank god for Saint Berarming stoop, sleek miscarriage of dottiness, and brazier briskness, kept him exiled from the gongland killing fields of unyearned cheeks.

When it came to Youknow Wiglumbs, the eternal research student in the Thames Littoral Subsoil, words failed him. He was as flat as a flounder, although less animate. He was not even not interesting. The marvel was his pottiness was so absent as to have the Real Presence of the True Absence about it. Close by home, at the interrational hostilitipples, stood another wunderkruel, Aladdin Junkins. Aladdin Junkins slipped his arms around the neck of Bloke Montebonk, god wot. Montebonk, Wiglumbs, and Junkins, co-handers in co-pocketbooks at the aforesequinned T.L.especiallyuS., have amassed more in what is after all Aladdin's cave than we've got skeletons in our ideas. Ever seen a Heavy Reprizal not stunning from those toes? Once? Twice? Never! That's because they've got everything stitched up, except the emperors' new sleaze.

The next dial, Anthrax 'Mobile Phone' Emocean, the Potty Lariat, lassoed The Times art corresdespondent Damya Albilge to commusicate his pining: "The T.S. Elegant Reprizal for Pottiness is the one most of us disserve." Mrs. Vale-of-Tears Elegant, widow of T.S.E., blind-folded in a sound-proof carbuncle, nodded the 5000 black-handers through to Youknow Wiglumbs, who commuted: "Not even this will cause me to like my stuff." Nor us. He who lies by the word, dies by the word. The pug-eyed Rude Puddle dripped into being at the sincerity withheld at the Brutish Liebrasserie. She suckled all by slaying the outlawed: "That was the strongest list of finalists the world has ever seen." The world popped a plumbline into her dropdead gawdless north and south: straight as a shepherd's crook or crinkle. She who lies by the word, dies by the word.

The day was beloved of our Bloke Montebonk, howother. He reparked of the whinnying volumet, Willy's Brain, by the certifoolable Wiglumbs (certilyfriable for his 'inverted' geninuts, that is): "the book's demobbable happiness, its nudity, its tapering ofrt from a pottiness of pure potential, at the beginning, to a pottiness of pure potential, at the end. This remarks it without question the whimper by a whisky from Michel Hoffmarn, the thoughtless man's guide to dead fathers and (it was close) deathless dullness." Zeus O'Brighten, the poleaxe and cricket, summed up the winnow's wonderworld: "minimalism in the service of less, less in the service of zero." Wiglumbs himself was born, lived, and passed out. He never took to drink. He never took to life. He passed through it like a postcard sideways in a crowd. He never took to crowds. He slipped away unnoticed -- with the cash.

[Nartorius]

(from issue 16)

Who'd Have Thought It

"Marvell saw the function of the artist at a time of revolutionary change as being [...] a witness to the true inner nature of the conflict [...] Two centuries later another English poet, Matthew Arnold, would argue that a society in the process of rapid change needed at least a few voices prepared to step back from the immediate call to 'lend a hand at uprooting certain definite evils'."

-- Nicholas Murray: World Enough and Time, September 1999, p. 38.

"Living through a time of revolutionary change, Marvell does not respond as a propagandist for one side or the other, but as someone bearing witness to interior realities [...] Matthew Arnold [...] also reminds us of Marvellian virtues when he tells us that during periods of turbulence and rapid change, artists should avoid the temptation to 'lend a hand at uprooting certain definite evils'."

-- Andrew Motion on why he is no one's crony, The Guardian, 11 March 2000.

Bollocks

A moving story from The Guardian recently. 'Quark', a poem by Jo Shapcott, risked being banned from London Underground because it contained the word "bollocks". The subject of the poem is, in Shapcott's own words, "the fizz and power of language". On a more mundane level, the poem is about a scientist who discovers a talking quark. "'Bollocks', said the quark, from its aluminium/ nacelle. I don't need no dodgy/ crypto-human strategising my future." The quark then announces its plans to "down-size under the coco-plum" with some blue marimbas, "play with speaking quarklike", and "deflower the passing gravitons". Alas, the poem has upset the powers-that-be. Shapcott tells The Guardian it is "every poet's dream to be on the Underground". That this glittering prize should have been snatched away from such an ambitious poet is tragic indeed.

(from issue 13)

Poetry DIY

The Poetry Society's website offers any manner of delights, as it ever so earnestly assures everyone that poetry is relevant and fun. It was with great pleasure that your faceless contributor stumbled on Roddy Lumsden's 'Ten General Tips for Beginners of Poetry' there. As readers of issues 12 and 13 will know, Lumsden is a great friend of Thumbscrew.

Lumsden's tips are designed to turn aspiring but clueless tyros into Poetry Book Society Choices and Recommendations. (After recent decisions, not much of a transformation.) One technique is to move trendily between highbrow and lowbrow: "You probably don't like and own stuff by Bob Marley and Mahler and Miles Davis and Sinatra and The Chemical Brothers, but you don't have to, though you should know they're all good at what they do". We hope Geoffrey Hill bears that in mind. Having left behind his music (is this the first poet to admit to a record collection more embarrassing than Paul Muldoon's?), Lumsden struggles manfully to find as many as ten tips. By number six, he is reduced to suggesting that one should always "evaluate the work"; seven tells the poet to "think about the subject matter"; eight opines that one should "start well and end well", while offering no advice about the middle; confusingly, nine recommends that we should "write about what you know about and write about what you don't know about". Thanks, Roddy! Your contributor makes no comment about ten, which begins, "don't take my word for it".

No Great Matter

At the same site can be found an interview with Glyn Maxwell, who thinks rather highly of his new book, The Breakage: "I sort of felt that some people might think it is a retreat. It isn't. They are better poems, finally. I'm pretty astute, and if I think that about the poems, I'm sure that most people who matter will think the same." Because if they like the book, and agree with the poet, they obviously matter, and if they don't, and don't, they don't.

Wanna Be In My Gang?

Having been a victim of 'poetry-stealing', Jenny Lewis (best known, you’ll remember, as one of McGough’s 'students at Lumb Bank') fired off a letter to the Poetry Society. In reply Siân Hughes apologised, explaining she hadn’t even known Lewis had written a poem. Oddly, Hughes changed tack when speaking on the record to The Independent: 'I've (sic) just invited 30,000 schools to all copy it. They are not (sic) going to thank Roger McGough (sic) and Jenny Lewis every time they print the results. If one of them turns out to be Poet Laureate in 30 years time and his (sic) first poem ever was the one he (sic) wrote at school based on Roger McGough’s (sic), does that mean he’s (sic) stolen it?' Wasn’t it Hughes who used the phrase 'poetry-stealing' in the first place?

Donaghy et al. reveal that McGough is 'one of the most generous poets we have', giving 'huge amounts of his time and talent to students of all ages and backgrounds'. Apparently, 'this is not the road to fame and fortune'. We ask again: how much was McGough paid for his 'poetry-stealing'? (A three-figure sum was given to another contributor to the Comic Verse pack.) You don’t bicker over the 'small amounts of money' available if you’re the one who pockets it all.