A Show of Culture
by and published in Edition Ten of Pomegranate
The BBC’s Poetry Season earlier this year has been met with some hostility by commentators. An article in Oxford University’s Cherwell newspaper, for example, accused the BBC of claiming poetry is “seasonal” by simply having a Poetry “Season” at all. This morphed the televisual label “season” into something entirely divorced from its meaning. Such polemics were easy to find and easy to disagree with. Yet, despite enjoying a lot of the programs broadcast, I was left with a lingering feeling that the programs weren’t meant for me, but for people who weren’t really all that in to poetry. Dan Hitchens’s article in the last issue of this magazine hit the nail firmly on the head, noting how the BBC implicitly treated the material as if it should be “used” for a one time hit and not truly taken in and lived with. To put it another, more disturbingly memorable way, the BBC’s presenters provided a series of fun but unfulfilling one night stands, rather than a serious, fulfilling relationship. In fact the things I enjoyed the most about the season were the bits where things I already knew about were being discussed. I assumed that televisual coverage of poetry was simply better suited to this type of provision, perhaps it was too much to ask to expect to actually learn something.
I am pleased to say this opinion has been reversed by the recent coverage of poetry on television’s most under appreciated program (apart from Clever Vs Stupid on BBC3), The Culture Show. Recent weeks have seen a feature on the Faber New Poets and a new poem specially written for the show by Carol Ann Duffy. I could write at length about the lovely sepia lenses used to film the Faber poets in a host of romantic locations such as parks and hillsides, a visual that complimented the poetry without distracting. But instead, I won’t let it distract me (as it tried so hard not to) and I will focus on the poetry and how this coverage has actually managed to teach me a couple of things about the poems and poets who appeared.
Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, John Barleycorn, is a charmingly delicate composition that structures itself around the names of British pubs. It was written for an edition of the show entirely about pubs in Britain. You might be thinking this sounds like a dull topic for a whole show. You’d be entirely right. John Barleycorn, however, is fascinating. The poem has a lot to do with the dissemination of language and ideas. All of those pub names are grouped together in clusters to demonstrate their shared legacy. There’s pub names that play on animal names, agricultural terms, types of tree, types of bird and all sorts of other groups of things. By showing these names thematically linked, Duffy is demonstrating how the names form a sort of cultural history of their locations, an index of the values held by those people who named them and drank there over the decades and centuries. For example:
He knew the Ram, the Lamb, the Lion and the Swan,
White Hart, Blue Bull, Red Dragon, Fox and Hounds.
I saw him in the Three Goats’ Heads, the Black Bull and Dun Cow, Shoulder of Mutton, Griffin, Unicorn.
Note how the groupings, like these names, demonstrate only what is valued, not what is physically real. The “Ram” and the “Lamb” take up the same cultural and mental space as the “Griffin” and the “Unicorn”. In fact, all of these names inhabit a space that is far more like fiction than fact: a symbol for something else, its own compressed narrative of how it got there. Their overt function is to describe a pub but the poem is really interested in language that has gained a currency beyond its functional meaning
John Barleycorn himself exemplifies this approach to reading titles. The words “John Barleycorn” are weighted with a host of cultural significance, with the correct contexts more readily available than the etymologies of the long list of pub names that the poem presents. The figure of John Barleycorn was commonly used to describe the barley crop that is used to make beer. He is enshrined in our verse culture in a popular folk song, the most famous version of which was written by Robert Burns in 1782, although earlier broadsheet recordings exist. A good modern version featuring Paul Weller is available by folk collective The Imagined Village. In the song the process of beer making is described as a series of bizarre tortures thrust upon the character John Barleycorn. This is referred to at the opening of Duffy’s poem:
Although I knew they’d laid him low, thrashed him, hung him out to dry,
Had tortured him with water and with fire, then dashed his brains out on a stone,
In the song, the figure of John is presented rather comically. In some versions he even gets his own back on his torturers by making them fall over and make fools of themselves. What Duffy does is to draw out the darker undertones of the song but then to revive John Barleycorn not as something mischievous, but something socially binding and important to our social culture. Of course, whilst the poem talks about John Barleycorn as the “ale in glass”, it also can’t help but talk about the folk song, which is as likely to come out at the occasions discussed (in the most traditional vision of English pub culture anyway) as the beer. More than anything, John Barleycorn, as a traditional figure in vernacular language and culture, is a figure for Britain and British culture. He is this apparently dead entity that still seems to echo in the songs, in the poems and in the pub names: “where he supped the past lived still.”
This idea of the voice of the past makes the poem’s relationship to the song all the more fascinating. It echoes in the whole conception of the poem. Just as the song moves away from realism by extending the figure of the personified John Barleycorn into circumstances that are comically unnatural, the Duffy poem strives to fit the literal meanings of the pub names into a more surreal narrative. The result is an entrenchment of both their value as the title for a pub and of the object or sentiment that individual names depict. The poem therefore prompts us to think of words in terms of the ideas that echo behind them, speaking from the dead like John Barleycorn It presents an idea of a sort of inevitable intertextuality that presides over anything that is of importance to the language culture from which it originates.
This also echoes in the other thing that The Culture Show’s coverage of poetry introduced me to. Initially I wanted to see the Faber New Poets feature because I was already interested in their work, another thing I’d enjoy because I already knew all about it. At least that’s what I thought. But at the top of the feature I found my favourite of the Faber poets, Jack Underwood, talking about Larkin. Larkin’s a poet I previously had little interest in: I’d written his work off as ineffectual occasional verse and was intrigued only by the reason why so many people could be so wrong about such a bad poet. It was a surprise then to hear the skinny-jean-wearing, quiff-topped figure of Jack Underwood discuss this seemingly boring old man. He expressed the sentiment that in the twentieth century Larkin destroyed the seriousness of the poetic voice. Now, this may not sound new to people more familiar with Larkin. It may even seem a contentious oversimplification to some of the legions of die-hard Larkin fans (and I hope, without a transcription to quote from, that I have reported what Underwood said correctly). But, most importantly, it has opened up new avenues for me as a reader into some of the tensions and difficulties I’d previously had with Underwood’s work.
The most striking poem in Underwood’s pamphlet is Your Horse. The poem’s guiding symbol, a horse trying to fit in with the functions of a human house, is cryptic but I find it impossible to read this poem without reading the symbol as a figure for a disabled person. The horse is embarrassed to go to the bathroom, and strives but fails to form “Man-words”. Furthermore the physicality of a wheel chair permeates the poem’s language: “low and steady”, “rolling back”, “the arm of a chair”. The figure seems to exist as part of a general divorcement of the state of the disabled person and their former healthier state: the narrator and the horse sit at the end of the poem “remembering the way your body used to move.” The horse and subject of the second person pronoun in this line, I would argue, are one and the same.
The difficultly for me lies in the playfulness of the poem’s language. That childish compound “Man-words”; the image of the horse “hoofing” through the photo album. The image is bizarrely comic, not laugh-out-loud funny at all, but crafted in a mode that is not, by any means, entirely serious. Yet, this has become less of a source of confusion for me, and more a source of interest, since hearing Underwood’s sentiments on Larkin expressed on The Culture Show. It may be one of the defining characteristics of Underwood’s authorial voice that it is trapped between wanting to express something very serious and yet finding mainly comic means to do so. But rather than remove anything from his poetry, this playfulness creates a shield, which on examination is fairly transparent and therefore adds considerably to the pathos of his work in the very contrast between comic tone and poignant topic. Larkin, if you’ll indulge me, stalks Underwood’s poetry like John Barleycorn stalking the pubs of Britain. He often trips him up and makes him play the fool, more like the Barleycorn of the traditional song, I suppose, than the solitary figure of Duffy’s poem.
What The Culture Show has really achieved here is one of many things television does incredibly well: it has brought together ideas that would never usually share the same space (like those pub names in John Barleycorn). By doing so it has prompted me, as a reader, to explore ideas that I would not otherwise have explored. In the final line of Duffy’s poem she describes Barleycorn (or maybe herself) as “spellbound”. The pun is an apt one for the effect televised poetry, when presented intelligently and inventively, can have on a viewer. Spellbound in the sense of being enchanted and captivated, but also bound with spellings, within the words of the poems themselves.