Poetry for the sheer pleasure

The inaugural Lyttelton Arts Festival takes place this weekend. The organisers are called Bonnie and Skye. Both those facts seem cause for celebration. Some weeks ago, when taking a break from evading the cops, Bonnie and Skye asked me if I’d like to run a workshop.

‘‘Thank you for asking,’’ I said, ‘‘but no. Because of my vow.’’

‘‘Your vow?’’

‘‘On reaching pensionable age,’’ I said, ‘‘I took a vow that, for however many years remain to me before the reaper slices through my ankles, I will do only things I want to do and not be talked into doing things I don’t.’’

‘‘So what do you want to do for the arts festival?’’ they said.

‘‘Why not some poetry?’’ I said.

‘‘A poetry workshop?’’

‘‘Good god, no,’’ I said, throwing salt over my shoulder, holding up a crucifix, crossing my fingers, knocking on wood, avoiding a crack in the pavement and not walking under a ladder, ‘‘not a poetry workshop. I’d just like to present some poems that I like, and then wallow in them. I’ll call it Eight Great Poems.’’

‘‘Why eight?’’

‘‘Because it rhymes with great,’’ I said. ‘‘There may be two poems or 20, but no-one will mind. Euphony beats arithmetic. We are lovers not accountants.’’

And so, this Sunday at the Lyttelton Arts Festival, I shall be presenting Eight Great Poems purely for the pleasure. But which poems? I’ve got a skullful of them, poems that have pleased me over the years by being sweeter, neater, clearer and truer than the everyday mess of the world.

Housman had a bristle test. If a line of poetry came to mind while he was shaving and the bristles stood up on his chin, then it was the real thing.

The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

The desert sighs in the bed,

And the crack in the teacup opens

A lane to the land of the dead.

That’s a bristler for me. It’s Auden, and I’ll have to have some Auden. And he will remind me that none of it matters. For, as he observed,

Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives

In the valley of its making, where executives Would never want to tamper.

Robert Frost called poetry a way of taking life by the throat. I have no idea what he meant by that, but I like it. Here’s a throat-grabber:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-Sailed unfamiliar, towing at its back

A huge and birdless silence.

That’s Larkin, of course, who knocked me out at 17, and I’m still on the canvas. So there is sure to be some Larkin. And some TS Eliot. At 17, I had no time for Eliot. I thought him a cryptic fogey. Today I have abundant time for him, and I still think him a cryptic fogey.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

And now that I’ve let Eliot through the swinging stock gate I can hear the others all gibbering and clamouring to get in. Boomy old Tennyson, contorted, thwarted Hopkins, bardic Whitman, drink-sodden MacNeice and all the merry rest of them. I’ll choose by no criteria but pleasure.

Should anyone care to attend they’ll find the details at laf.co.nz, along with all the proper festival events. And if no-one comes, I’ll tell the poems to the empty seats.