In the eighth of our series of funny-serious poems, Roy Marshall, Kathryn Gray and Mark Antony Owen choose poems by Suzannah Evans, James Fenton and Connie Bensley
Roy Marshall chose ‘The Last Poet-in-Residence’ by Suzannah Evans. He says, “I’m not always a fan of dark humour, but Suzannah Evans explores unspeakably horrific possibilities in a way that is both poignant and somehow funny too. I imagine readers will recognise the insular ‘poetry world’ concerns of the speaker of ‘The Last Poet-in-Residence’, who, despite an apocalyptic event, continues to work earnestly and diligently at their task. Using inventive, skewed language and a title that does so much work, it is a self-knowing comment on futility, but also an affirmation of a creativity that has no choice but to continue to express itself, regardless of the very worst thing imaginable having already happened.”
The Last Poet-in-Residence
At red stump of the burntree
sit on rock and write songits, ghuzzles,
new words like shakeso.
No applecharge or anything, just pen.
Writersblox gone when the radio died.
Stopped worrying about the lyric eye
postbox in the valley slot-deep
with poems put in
at first for the guard, the stakesman
and the review, then for keep safe.
no tastemakers left to read them
no mailbringers
no acceptances, rejectances.
Been eating on the dry meat
inside old stiffskins of bunnrabs
black cawbirds
evergrowing potates!
Marauding gangs burn the distance.
OK here, own me, in Residence
heat humming out the wall-stones
hillside like a ripped seam
sky always dayending
redder norange.
From The Near Future (Nine Arches Press, 2018)
Kathryn Gray chose ‘In Paris with You’ by James Fenton. She says, “I’d like to spend forever in Paris, in a “sleazy old hotel room” with James Fenton’s monologue of rebound desire, ‘In Paris with You’. The poem describes both a feeling and a recovery strategy that will likely be familiar to many a reader. Here’s a poem of lost love and new eros that subverts; where neither object is centre stage; where an uncomfortable but, all the same, very funny and revealing truth is instead told about ego injury and need. Fenton makes interesting choices – ones that many a poet would balk at: witty wordplay risk-taking (“talking wounded”, “maroonded”) and the unashamedly demotic (“Do you mind if we do not go to the Louvre, / If we say sod off to sodding Notre Dame”). Even the final diversion into a reimagining of romance as the cheap lyrics of a song yet to be written is interrupted by a euphemism for sexual organs that might also serve as the coordinate for the departed lover and a statement of the catastrophic reversal of fortune. When Fenton asks, “Am I embarrassing you?” we nod: the very best poems make us recognise ourselves.
In Paris with You
Don’t talk to me of love. I’ve had an earful
And I get tearful when I’ve downed a drink or two.
I’m one of your talking wounded.
I’m a hostage. I’m maroonded.
But I’m in Paris with you.
Yes I’m angry at the way I’ve been bamboozled
And resentful at the mess I’ve been through.
I admit I’m on the rebound
And I don’t care where are we bound.
I’m in Paris with you.
Do you mind if we do not go to the Louvre
If we say sod off to sodding Notre Dame,
If we skip the Champs Elysées
And remain here in this sleazy
Old hotel room
Doing this and that
To what and whom
Learning who you are,
Learning what I am.
Don’t talk to me of love. Let’s talk of Paris,
The little bit of Paris in our view.
There’s that crack across the ceiling
And the hotel walls are peeling
And I’m in Paris with you.
Don’t talk to me of love. Let’s talk of Paris.
I’m in Paris with the slightest thing you do.
I’m in Paris with your eyes, your mouth,
I’m in Paris with… all points south.
Am I embarrassing you?
I’m in Paris with you.
Listen to James Fenton read ‘In Paris with You’ on The Poetry Archive
Mark Antony Owen chose ‘Shopper’ by Connie Bensley. He says, “I’d thought humour in poems was possible only with sing-song metre and telegraphed end rhymes. One had to look to Pam Ayres – Betjeman, even. Nothing, then, prepared me for Bensley’s ‘Shopper’: its comedy stitched to a freshness of imagery (roads as throats, by God!). This tongue-in-cheek vignette of retail therapy on the never-never would teach me two things. The first, that anything goes in a poem; no subject need be off limits, nor too prosaic if handled with imagination, originality, skill. The second was that NO WORD should be barred from poetry – the final one here a blazing, brilliant example.
Shopper
I am spending my way out
of a recession. The road chokes
on delivery vans.
I used to be Just Looking Round,
I used to be How Much, and
Have You Got It In Beige.
Now I devour whole stores—
high speed spin; giant size; chunky gold;
de luxe springing. Things.
I drag them around me into a stockade.
It is dark inside; but my credit cards
are incandescent.
From Finding a Leg to Stand On: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2012)
