His wonders to perform
Oliver Bernard
CAN I COME DOWN NOW, DAD? by John Hegley Methuen, £7.99, pp. 88 One evening in 1990 a meeting of the BP Speak-a-Poem Competition Committee at the Poetry Society in Earls Court Square was eclipsed, quite happily, by a John Hegley reading across the landing. It must have been the best attended reading at the Poetry Society for a good while, and I noticed how young the customers were.
Probably the Hegley following — from the Hackney Empire or the Edinburgh Fringe or wherever — outnumbered paid-up Poet- ry Society members in his audience, but everyone seemed to be enjoying it.
I've been reading John Hegley since 1984, and for much longer than that I've been wondering whether the categories 'Poets' and 'Performance Poets' really exist. Performers of poetry — readers and speakers that is — need not be poets, that's clear. Poets can be bad readers, too; differ- ently bad compared with amateurs, actors and news-readers, of course. But are the likes of Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Hegley really to be segregated from, let's say, poets like Norman McCaig and Gavin Ewart — both of whom are quite sparkling performers of their own stuff?
John Hegley's latest volume with its cheerful bad taste jacket illustration seems a suitable book to dip into while consider- ing these questions. It contains over 80 short poems, none of which occupies more than two pages. Some of the shortest first appeared in the Weekend Guardian. All are jokes of one sort or another. Some- times the joke is an innocent one about dogs and spectacles and the oddness of rhyme:
my doggie don't wear glasses so they're lying when they say a dog looks like its owner aren't they
Other jokes, embodied in other poems, are more complex, tendentious and amus- ing. This is the title poem, which suggests that there is more to the dust*jacket illustration than bad taste: Can I come down now, Dad?
My first memory of the toilet dates from the beginning of training in its use, being sat over the bowl and told that this was where a big boy went to the toilet and not in his nappy, and I was unhappy and I cried and said, 'Daddy I'm scared I shall fall down the hole!'
I must have beaten my fear of the toilet somehow
because I've never been worried
about falling down the hole since except once when I was very depressed.
Some people would not accept these as poems, perhaps, though I think Geoffrey Grigson was right to be 'sceptical of the poet who never produces or enjoys a jeu d'esprie. I find the whole of this collection worth reading and not boring, and I wish there were more books of poems I could say that about, whether poets or perfor- mance poets are responsible for them. I admit that Hegley does not pretend to write Important poems'; and it may be that they are not 'profound' either. But I think that some are deeper than a pub crowd on a Saturday night would even realise, except that they laugh with a little pain. There is some pain.
Previous page
