Life In Poetry Motion
by and published in Edition Three of Pomegranate
(a response to Wendy Cope’s article You Like My Poems? So Pay For Them in the Guardian Review, Saturday 8th December 2007)
I would like to start with a small confession.
I own Mika’s album.
This probably comes as a shock to most of my friends. The other day one song from it, ‘Billy Brown’, came on my iTunes and my friend leapt away from my desk in surprise; this is not, you see, the sort of thing I usually listen to.
But I came across ‘Grace Kelly’ on the radio and I thought that was pretty cool and then I was at this party and ‘Happy Ending’ came on and I thought mmm, yes. Then I went home and looked up all Mika’s music videos on YouTube, and then I happily trundled over to Play.com and decided to part with a tenner to buy the album.
It was a good purchase. It is listened to very happily indeed, and I can always count on it to get the last, unwanted guests out of my room at three in the morning. Thank you, Mika.
On the other hand, I once bought Come Clean by Puddle of Mudd just off the strength of ‘She Hates Me’ and that was a disaster. I put ‘She Hates Me’ onto my iTunes and I put Come Clean into a box for the Oxfam shop. This was a bad purchase. I resolved after this incident never to buy a CD without listening to at least five tracks from it.
I mean, you’d never buy a car without going for a test drive, would you? You’d never buy a house without looking inside and looking around for particular features you liked and checking for any damp or dry rot or anything. And you shouldn’t buy a CD without knowing whether or not the artist is any good, or appeals to you. Or is gorgeous. (I also own several Enrique Iglesias albums, probably just for this reason.)
I think that poetry is a lot like music and that collections are a lot like albums. You find a poem in an anthology and you love it, you try and find that poet in more anthologies, but you only find the same poem. The one poem that everybody knows, that you’ve already seen, and heard, and got. The single of the poetry collection.
SO, you realise with a heavy sigh, you’re going to have to buy their individual collection.
Well… okay.
So off you go to Borders or to Foyles or to Waterstone’s or to the kitchen to get a cup of tea before you sit down in front of the computer and order it off Amazon, and that’s when your jaw drops open when you realise that not only is this collection incredibly, incredibly hard to get hold of, but it’s going to cost you. It’s going to cost you a lot.
Like, just now, I’m looking up a couple of books, and this is what I found: Vicki Feaver, The Book of Blood. Sixty-four pages and it’s… £9. £9! For sixty-four pages! Rip off! Vicki, I’m sorry; I love you, but I can’t afford you. You’re just way out of my league. I’m sorry, but… it’s not going to work out. I can’t see you anymore. I’m a student. I live off £25 a week. My room is filled with sugar packets stolen from coffee shops and ketchup sachets from restaurants. Do I look, then, like the kind of person who can spend nearly half of my weekly living allowance on sixty-four pages?
And let us just consider for a moment those sixty-four pages. Am I getting my money’s worth? Is it all continuous text? Are these sixty-four pages literally packed with poetry, packed FULL with poetry in tiny, tiny writing and pressed in at odd angles in order to fit, like, twenty-four poems on a page?
Well, I don’t know, I’ve not got the book. But I’m thinking that they’re probably not. I’m thinking that probably at least some of those pages have less than twenty lines on them. And how long are those lines? How many words am I getting?
The last collection I bought was Michael Hofmann’s Acrimony, which was £8.99 from Foyles in November. I bought it because I’m now a student with a student’s Natwest account and an overdraft and when you pay for things with a card that’s not like real money changing hands, is it? And anyway, I read the first poem, ‘Ancient Evenings’, and I liked that and my friends wanted me to hurry up so I made a spur of the moment decision. This book had a nice bright yellow/green cover and that combined with the amazing first poem was enough to win me over. I will buy this, I thought. And a Foyles book bag for good measure! And a Moleskine notebook! And a HAT!
Sadly, Foyles do not sell Foyles hats. You missed a trick there, guys!
Anyway. This book looks very nice indeed and yes, it’s generally very presentable and pretty and I quite like having it around because it fits in with the colour scheme in my room, and yeah, the poems are all quite good and stuff, and yeah, you know, it’s nice to take to the laundrette and flick through while I’m waiting for my whites but, really, I only really like ‘Cinders’ and ‘Ancient Evenings’ from it and the rest of them are nice, but, frankly, I could live without them. I only want those two poems.
Now, it seems to me that there should be a facility for people who only want to buy a few poems. There should be the opportunity, as there is in the music world, to buy the poetry singles.
I know, I know, it’s a sad truth, but most people have only heard of Mika because of ‘Grace Kelly’ and most people have only heard of Jenny Joseph because of ‘Warning’ or Auden because of ‘that poem John Hannah reads in that film’ or Yeats for that awful, awful poem about treading on dreams (UGH). Maybe if poetry books were cheaper these people would be tempted to pick up, say, Jenny Joseph’s Selected Poems (£8.95, where you can get it) and think ‘Oh, less than a fiver! She was quite good in that poem, I think I’ll buy that!’ rather than thinking ‘Christ, that much?! There’s always the internet…’.
So. I have an idea.
iPoet. Like iTunes, but better, obviously, because it’s poetry.
Imagine. Download a poem cheaply… the poets are happy to have their royalties and the public are happy to have their poems.
This would make poetry cheaper, so it would make me happy. It would still, however, mean I was paying for them, so I’ll be happy because I’m not breaking the law and poets like Wendy Cope who caused such a big fuss with her article in the Guardian Review last December will be happy because they’ll get their cheques and they’ll also make sure their name stays on the poem. Both of us will be happy because it would bring poetry to a wider audience, and it would make it generally easier and quicker to get to.
I mean, there is always something to be said for having the whole collection in paper form to take to the laundrette with you. But I know that I for one am just not generally willing to invest money in a collection when I’m not really all that sure if it’s exactly what I want. I want to read a couple of poems first. I want to get the gist of it. I want to know if it’s something that I want more of.
I know I sound now like I’m completely obsessed with money, and I guess I probably am, and I guess that because of that I ought to understand where poets are coming from when they get out their placards and shout that they want their copyright. I understand them wanting recognition that it’s theirs and they wrote it and those amazing, delicious ideas came from their heads, but I don’t understand why they should care so much about getting money off those ideas, because… I don’t know, I think I’d rather have someone come up to me and say ‘I loved your poem so much that I photocopied it and sent it to all of my friends’ than get a cheque through the post that told me that only two people have bought my collection because it’s so stupidly expensive and, actually, only one poem in it is any good.
At the end of they day, I’m just one of those people who would go over to iPoet and think, ‘Hmm, Neruda! I would rather like one of his love sonnets!’ and instead of having to put on a coat and trek into town for a book that no bookshop will stock (except Foyles – lucky bloody Londoners) and then having to go online and find out that it costs nearly £14 and then realise that really I’d rather be able to eat this week, I could sit down with a biscuit in front of iPoet, select the poem I’d like to try, pay the considerably smaller fee, wait a second while it downloads, and then, huffah, there is the poem for me to read over my shortcake in my afternoon break.
On the downside, with my friends, Neruda probably wouldn’t clear the room quite as quickly as Mika would.
Isobel Norris
Isobel Norris is Welsh, and don’t you forget it, cwtch. She’s read at the Dylan Thomas centre and was specially commended in the Welsh Poetry Competition, and even once wrote a poem about a dead sheep, which is about as Welsh as you can get. She likes running, swimming, cycling, Auden and the word ’fantastic’, and dislikes Yeats and things with gluten in them (because they kill her). (Gluten kills her, not Yeats – Ed.) Izzy lives in Swansea, where the highest-quality rain is.