Postscript
A sock and a park
P. J. Kavanagh Presenting your identity card at the barbed wire, the respectful touching of peaked caps, the whistling up 12 floors in the shining lift, the lines of secretaries and Visual Display Units — no, arrival at the Spectator offices is not like that. That paper is put together in an old narrow house near where Dickens used to live. It is pleasant there and I call in three or four times a month, partly for the company and partly to go through the piles of poems that may have arrived, in order to select some for publication.
I am still at the stage of opening the letters eagerly, like Christmas presents; there are usually some good surprises and sometimes a laugh from Wendy Cope, our most skilful (our only?) paradist. There are sadnesses too, like the long poems hand- written on hotel paper from someone with a Polish name, who often writes at the bottom, 'Some more rubbish.' They are not quite rubbish, but old-fashioned in diction, and are returned to the address he or she gives, usually with a word or two intended to be cheering, for the poems and the handwriting give a lonely impression.
Now these have been sent back by a puzzled householder who says that no one of that name has lived at the address, at least since 1970 when he bought the house; which makes the poems even sadder.
There is pleasure in the job, also, be- cause it serves as disguise for the mild wonder we all feel when we observe how others live. I sit there, a stranger, hos- pitably welcomed, in the corner of the Literary Editor's office, staring into the garden whch is as long and narrow as the house; indeed, if it fell down it would fill the garden exactly. The new owners of the Spectator discovered the house was about to do just that, so they are underpinning and refurbishing it. At least, that is the plan. My first visits were made to the sound of drills, of cheerful shouts, and Radio One. A man in a suit frequently appeared in the garden, a foot away from me on the other side of the glass, a paint pot in one hand and a brush in the other. He never painted anything but stood, brush poised, and then went away. Perhaps he was a poet? Perhaps he was the Pole?
Anyhow, his paint pots are still there in the garden, and, on trellising overhead intended for a vine, but now sagging from some accident of refurbishment, hangs a single black sock.
It fascinates me. How did it get there? Why has no one taken it away? Why only one? To call for a ladder and remove it would be officiousness in a visitor. Pos- sibly, sitting where I do, I am the only person in the building who can see it. Anyway, there was in the poem pile this week a Faber collection of the poems and parodies of Wendy Cope, called Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, which distracted me from my contemplation of the thing.
It could be said that you have to know more about contemporary poetry and poets than most people do, in order fully to enjoy her parodies, but I don't think this is true, her verses are so skilfully made. You don't have to know that in 'E Pericoloso Sporgersi' Peter Porter is intended (I think) because you soon see it is a good send-up of all poets who sprinkle their work with cultural references. In 'God and the Jolly Bored Bogmouse', her cod-poet Strugnell's cod-entry for the Arvon/ Observer poetry competition in 1980, judged by Hughes, Larkin, Heaney and Causley, she manages a simultaneous parody of all four, in that order, one line for each of them in each of the four four-line stanzas. Brilliant. She is deadly, without being bitter. Her love poems have charm, especially one which is a pastiche of Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno. Even her apparently casual explanation of her book's strange name is right, both in brevity and tone:
It was a dream I had last week
And some kind of record seemed vital. I knew it wouldn't be much of a poem But I love the title.
From opening lines of sonnets by her awful Strugnell, which I enjoy — 'The expense of spirits is a crying shame' — she goes on to do something with him and them, pressing rueful comic poetry out of Upper Norwood and Brockwell Park. This last place Lam- beth Council may rename Zephanie Mothopeng Park and she could do some- thing apposite and unsneering with that, as she could with the single Spectator sock, which could be Strugnell's.
Previous page
