With their kiosks…they know it,
The little bars as full of dust as a stale cake,
None of these places would exist without Orpheus
And how well they know it.
…when the word goes ahead to the next city,
An underworld is hastily constructed,
With bitch-clubs, with cellars and passages,
So that he can go on searching, desperately!
As the brim of the world is lit,
And breath pours softly over the Earth,
And as Heaven moves ahead to the next city
With deep airs, and with lights and rains,
He plunges into Hades, for his search is desperate!
And there is so little risk…down there,
That is the benefit of searching frenziedly
Among the dust-shops and blind-alleys
…there is so little risk of finding her
In Europe’s old blue Kasbah, and he knows it.
Dressing-gown Olympian
I insist on vegetating here
In motheaten grandeur. Haven’t I plotted
Like a madman to get here? Well then.
These free days, these side-streets,
Mouldy or shiny, with their octoroon light;
Also, I have grudges, enemies, a religion,
Politics, a new morality – everything!
Kept awake by alcohol and coffee,
Inside her oriental dressing-gown of dust
My soul is always thinking things over, thoroughly.
No wonder my life has grandeur, depth, and crust.
Ah, to desire a certain way of life,
And then to gain it!
What a mockery, what absolute misery,
Dressing-gown hours the tint of alcohol or coffee.
Am I an imbecile of the first water after all?
Yes, I think I can claim – now that all this grandeur,
Depth, and crust is stacked around me – that I am.
Farewell to Kurdistan
As my new life begins, I start smiling at the people around me,
You would think I’d just been given a substantial meal,
I see all their good points.
The railway sheds are full of greenish-yellow electricity,
It’s the great midday hour in London…that suddenly goes brown.
…My stupefying efforts to make money
And to have a life!
Well, I’m leaving; nothing can hold me.
The platforms are dense to the foot,
Rich, strong-willed travellers pace about in the dark daylight,
And how they stink of green fatty soaps, the rich.
More dirty weather…you can hardly see the newspaper stand
With its abominable, ludicrous papers…which are so touching
I ought to laugh and cry, instead of gritting my teeth.
Let me inhale the filthy air for the last time,
Good heavens, how vile it is.… I could take you step by step
Back among the twilight buildings, into my old life…
The trains come in, boiling, caked!
The station half tames them, there’s the sound of blows; the uproar!
And I – I behave as though I’ve been starved of noise,
My intestine eats up this big music
And my new bourgeois soul promptly bursts into flames, in mid-air.
No use pouring me a few last minutes of the old life
From your tank of shadow, filled with lost and rotten people,
I admit: the same flow of gutter-sugar to the brain…
I admit it, London.
No one to see me off – Ah!
I would like to be seen off; it must be the same agonising woman
Who does not want to understand me, and who exposes me in public,
So that I can turn away, choked with cold bile,
And feel myself loved absolutely; the bitch.
These carriages, that have the heavy brown and black bread
Up their sides! But look out for the moment of cowardice,
It’s Charon’s rowing-boat that lurches and fouls my hand
As I climb on – exile, Limboist.
…The way these people get on with their lives; I bow down
With my few deeds and my lotus-scars.
Last minutes…last greenish-yellow minutes
Of the lost and rotten hours…faro, and old winters dimmed,
On which the dark – Yes, the black sugar-crust is forming, London.
I’m leaving! Nothing can hold me!
The trains, watered and greased, scream to be off.
Hullo – I’m already sticking out my elbows for a piece of territory,
I occupy my place as though I can’t get enough of it
– And with what casual, haughty, and specific gestures, incidentally.
Tradesmen, Pigs, regenerative trains – I shall be saved!
I shall go to the centre of Europe; gliding,
As children skate on the diamond lid of the lake
Never touching ground – Xenophile, on the blue-plated meadows.
Oh I shall live off myself, rainclothes, documents,
The great train simmers.… Life is large, large!
…I shall live off your loaf of shadows, London;
I admit it, at the last.
Black Kief and the Intellectual
I shall fill up that pit inside me
With my gloomiest thoughts; and then
Spread myself, prostrate, inert, on top of them.
Ah, miserable at last! Felicity.
Those who drink the sea with its fishy breath
Cannot know with what dread I gorge to death
On ideologies – bitter dogma, dialectic, creed;
H.P. sauce, ketchup, mayonnaise, chutney,
Filthy kitchen work that swindles, that says ‘feed’,
Dried-up certitude, monkish inhibition, duty,
That helps us to fall downhill, mad as swine.
There, alone, I see my obligation. But let me begin
By describing my tiredness…a word on my depression.
The Drinkers of Coffee
We talk openly, and exchange souls.
Power-shocks of understanding knock us off our feet!
The same double life among the bores and vegetables,
By lamplight in the coffee-houses you have sat it out
Half toad, half Sultan, of the rubbish-heap,
You know the deadly dull excitement; the champagne sleet
Of living; you know all the kitchen details of my ego’s thinking,
When, with our imaginations shuddering,
We move arrogantly into one another’s power,
And the last barriers go down between us….
More at home in a jazz pit than with you,
Hotter on the Baltic, when it fries in ice,
Better understood by cattle, grocers, blocks of wood,
My refrigerated body feels the coffin’s touch in every word
You utter, and backs away for ever from your bed.
You know me far too well, O dustbin of the soul;
My sex, her nerve completely broken by it, has constructed
Barriers, thick walls, never to be battered down.
On the other side (with a last mouthful of the double-dutch to spit!)
She looks away; and in a wholly opposite direction.
To a Certain Young Man
(or The Carrier-bag Eros)
I can hear the Eros of grey rain, Veganin, and telephones
Inside your voice.
His wings, once cut out of Greek frost,
Are now the tint of an old, polished street.
Softly croaking out clichés, in the narrow passage
With its gas-pipes and fuse-boxes, he makes us
Zoophytes – sponging up gravy, nightmares, dullness!
We fill our veins with soapy water, anxious
; To be good enough…for this latrine whore, Eros.
Always, Arabia Desetta; the solitary table
In the restaurant is where we end up,
At the mercy of a salt and pepper pot.
Hosanna! I accept, without quibbling, fly-scrawl,
The carrier-bag of cheap sentences,
On these terms, unless…there is a way to lower them.
I accept. For my Eros is atrocious….
If water-clear moonlight and streets
Sharper than greengages are your drink,
Drunkard, you can be cured. One wound from Eros
And your breast can only drink arrows
With its illiterate and fragrant mud,
(Teetotaller, dead drunk on your own blood.)
It’s ludicrous! It’s hopeless.
Shut up your underworlds! Close your hearts!
The century is over. Doors are slamming
In the tragic, casual era. The Eros of dead café tunes
Is in your voice.…
He salts and peppers me another pair of arms.
A Few Sentences Away
What a night! My past is very close.
Dark rag-and-satin April in the city
Moves its water-lily breezes, one by one. My fading letters!
My café-au-lait sentences that groaned for love and money.
There are nights when…
Lying an inch or two above the ground inside my head,
Heavy, but rippling with levitations, philosophy’s
Bokhara carpet flies my past in and out of Time.
My past, no older than an April night!
A few streets away – boulevard scab of a hotel
She lived in; her armchair voyages inside a bottle;
Her pride, its great sciatic nerve ready at a word to –
……England is darker than a thrush, tonight,
Brown, trustworthy hours lie ahead. Suddenly
My past hurls her dream towards me!
I steady myself:…but how tender, carnal, blasé it is.
Let me hide, well away from a past that dreams
Like that. Away from streets that taste of blood & sugar
When the glowing month smashes itself against the hedges
In the dark. I need ink poured by an abbey;
For…April, old greengrocer, I throw ahead of me a universe
Above your dripping clouds in flames, below
The deep, opulent engorgement of your soul in rut; & so lasting
Time snatches its hours there, like a poppy, when it can.
Selected Prose
Note on Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms
My foremost preoccupation at the moment is the search for an idiom which is individual, contemporary and musical. And one that has sufficient authority to bear the full weight of whatever passion I would wish to lay upon it.
Every poet who has been confined – at the mercy of form when he has come of age emotionally – and has found half the things he wants to say well out of his poem’s range, knows the immensity of the task. And I am not speaking here of metrical skills, but of absolute freshness and authenticity in handling diction.
What I write about must develop from my life and times. I am especially conscious of the great natural forces which bring modern life up to date. My concern here is with exact emotional proportions – proportions as they are now current for me. Ideally, whatever is heightened should be justified both by art and by life; while the poet remains vulnerable to those moments when a poem suddenly makes its own terms – and with an overwhelming force that is self-justifying. For this reason certain poetic ideas have little validity when lifted out of context. I am consequently uneasy when discussing the logic of a poem with those whose intellectual equipment is purely mathematical. If you say that the English have a love of order which is puritanical, and the French a love of order which is imaginative, that does not make one more orderly than the other. The progress of feeling in a poem may be no less logical than the development of argument.
Telling the truth about feeling requires prodigious integrity. Most people can describe a chest of drawers, but a state of mind is more resistant. A hackneyed metaphor is the first sign of a compromise with intention; your reader damns you instantly, and though he may read on with his senses, you have lost his heart. Some poets do manage to converge on their inner life by generating emotion from an inspired visual imagery; in this instance the images exist in their own right, but may be thought to be in a weaker position as the raw material of the emotion in preference to a larger existence as illustration of it.
Poetry Book Society Bulletin (Spring 1963)
Interview with Peter Orr
TONKS: I think it diabolical, this getting of a poet out of his or her back room and the making of them into public figures who have to give opinions every twenty seconds. I know this is what the French do, but I don’t approve of it.
ORR: You don’t think it helps, do you, for a poet to talk direct to his public, otherwise than through his poetry?
TONKS: Well, I avoid this on every possible occasion, first of all because it means a loss of something like two weeks’ work, during which time I worry about it, and then I get over it. When one is writing one is an introvert, and when one goes on to a stage one must make oneself into an extrovert.
ORR: Unless, I suppose, one is a Dylan Thomas kind of person who enjoys that sort of thing enormously?
TONKS: Yes, but it killed him eventually, the enormous strain of each performance, for a man who was both, of course, but who found it progressively more strenuous and who wrote less and less poetry, so that every time he went on the stage he knew that he was giving up another poem, practically, which he could have written. You either read and you give talks and you become a public person, or else you write consistently and every day and think on a certain level. You can’t go back to that deep level of thinking if you are too much a social person.
ORR: Does this deep level of thinking preclude the idea of an audience?
TONKS: I could communicate if only the English weren’t quite so English, but you know they don’t finish their sentences; and anyway they are not passionately concerned with their subject, and so the conversation tends to turn into a series of already-hammered-out academic platitudes, which means to say you are not going to break fresh ground, you are only going to exchange academies.
ORR: Does this mean you keep away from the society of other poets as much as you can?
TONKS: No, I try to seek it out. At one time, of course, when I was alone, I frightfully wanted to meet other poets. Now I go and meet them occasionally as a duty but they are rather a lost set, you know, here in London. They form movements.
ORR: Do you feel, then, that contemporary poetry is a bit of a dead end?
TONKS: It could be a great deal more exciting. I don’t understand why poets are quite ready to pick up trivialities, but are terrified of writing of passions. I remember it was Stendhal who was praising Byron at the time, because he said here is a great contemporary who writes of human passions, and this is something which has completely gone out of fashion, if you like. You can write if you are disgruntled, in the present day. This is quite enough to carry a poem, so current thought has it. You can have a tiff with your wife and that is enough. But all the really tremendous feelings you live by have been ignored, or people just get round them.
ORR: So the real poetry to you is a kind of elemental poetry?
TONKS: Dealing with the things which really move people. People are born, they procreate, they suffer, they are nasty to one another, they are greedy, they are terribly happy, they have changes in their fortune, and they meet other people who have effects on them, and then they die; and these thousands of dramatic things happen to them, and they happen to everybody. Everybody has to make terrible decisions or pass examinations, or fall in love, or else avoid falling in love. All these things happen and contemporary poets don’t write about them. Why not?
&nb
sp; ORR: You don’t feel now that we are more conscious, say, than people were two or three hundred years ago of the world around us, the world outside us, of things which are happening in the world like starvation and (a trite thing again to say) the shadow of the hydrogen bomb?
TONKS: I think they are academically conscious of these things and that is no bad thing, because to be conscious of them at all is very important. But that is a dry consciousness. Mass starvation is an enormous theme and you need a large soul to be able to tackle it. You can’t tackle it with a trivial, off-hand sensibility.
ORR: You mean you have to be able to comprehend this effect of starvation, and to feel it?
TONKS: You must feel it: otherwise how are you going to make a poem about it? It’s better in prose.
ORR: And is this something that you would feel would be, for you, material for a poem?
TONKS: Well, you see, I would have to experience it. I have been to countries like India, where people are deformed and ill, and I became ill myself. It was, frankly, almost too terrible to write about.
ORR: You mean, it was too close to yourself there?
TONKS: Yes, you see, essentially, although my poems are a bit dark in spirit at the moment, I want to show people that the world is absolutely tremendous, and this is more important than making notes on even the most awful contemporary ills. One wants to raise people up, not cast them down. Or if you are going to write of these desperate things, then you must put them in their context and show the other side of the picture. This is very much a duty, isn’t it?
ORR: How much of the tone of what you write depends on how you yourself are feeling at a particular moment? I mean, if you get up in the morning bad-tempered, do you write a bad-tempered poem?
Bedouin of the London Evening Page 7