Bringing great poets back to life over a few stiff drinks
DRINKS WITH DEAD POETS by Glyn Maxwell (Oberon £12.99)
POETRY is a noble calling, but it doesn’t necessarily pay the bills. Across the centuries, all but the rock starriest of poets have had to turn to other occupations to support their writing, from Chaucer (civil servant) to T. S. Eliot (bank clerk and publisher) and Philip Larkin (librarian).
The poet and playwright Glyn Maxwell has taught at Princeton, Columbia and New York universities, and it is an imaginary poetry seminar that provides the framework for his latest book on the who, why and how of poetry.
The seminar begins at the start of the academic year — the autumn term of the subtitle. It is taught by ‘Glyn Maxwell’ — but this is a Glyn Maxwell who inhabits a parallel poetic universe.
He feels certain that he is asleep and dreaming when he finds himself in what seems to be a traditional English village with a shop, a church, a couple of pubs and a peculiar educational institution — ‘The Academy’ — that has apparently hired him to hold a weekly poetry class.
An efficient administrator hands him a reading list that he does not remember preparing.
He is due to give lectures on Keats, Emily Dickinson, Byron (pictured), Walt Whitman and a handful of other dead poets to a motley group of poetry-fanciers. They include Lily, a scarlet-haired urchin with a passion for poetry slams, Heath, a brooding hipster who sneers at Glyn’s preoccupation with metre and rhyme, and Caroline, a middle-aged divorcee who has written a bitter cycle of poems about her errant ex-husband.
If all this weren’t disconcerting enough, the poets themselves begin to turn up at Glyn’s lectures and take over. John Keats downs rather too much cherry brandy while explaining Negative Capability.
Emily Dickinson offers a definition of good poetry: ‘If... it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry . . .’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge triumphantly subverts a dumbed-down attempt to make his poetry ‘relevant’, involving a celebrity rap version of The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner: ‘So I heard this tale from my man Sam / That there’s this old-time sailor-man’ — and so on.
There is a nod in the title to Peter Weir’s 1989 film Dead Poets Society, which starred Robin Williams as an unorthodox English teacher.
But the book also develops an idea from Maxwell’s earlier work, On Poetry, in which students at a workshop become entangled with the poem they are studying.
The result is a funny, touching, readable and thought-provoking hybrid — part fiction, part memoir, part defence of poetic form, part love story (or, rather, love stories: as time goes on, the seminars tend to convene in the pub and a good many unexpected alliances spring from the heady combination of poetry and strong drink).
When it comes to poetry, Maxwell (and his fictional namesake) are passionate advocates of craftsmanship. All his visiting poets are, in their different ways, brilliant mixers-up of form and feeling. At a time when emotion has become the only valid poetic currency, Maxwell is a fierce defender of technique.
His students, at first exasperated by his back-to-basics approach involving highlighters, toys and simple rhyme schemes, end up beguiled, seduced and entranced by the grand simplicity of poetry.
And so do we, his readers. If you love poetry, you should read it. But if you think poetry is too hard, too boring, too old-school, then you must read it. It might just change the way you see the world.