What I really needed, I thought, was an involvment in the entire process, so that I could join up all my fragmentary film experiences. And this is exactly what began to happen when I started to work with Peter Symes, first on Loving Memory (1987), then The Blasphemers’ Banquet, Gaze of the Gorgon and Black Daisies for the Bride, a collaboration with a brilliant and patient colleague with whom I shared locations and cutting room in an increasingly creative partnership. We began from scratch with no ideas of models and slowly evolved a way of working that became increasingly organic, open and fluid.
In enterprises as collaborative as theatre or film I like to work with the same people, and go from one project to another, taking the discoveries made from project to project. In theatre it was the twenty-year relationship with the great designer Jocelyn Herbert, who also designed my feature film, Prometheus, which grew out of both my verse for the theatre and my TV film poems. With films it has meant rich, fruitful collaborations on eight films with the director Peter Symes, on five films with the cameraman Alistair Cameron, with the Bristol editor Peter Simpson and the composer Richard Blackford, who has worked on A Maybe Day in Kazakhstan (1994), The Shadow of Hiroshima (1995), Prometheus (1998), Metamorpheus (2000) and Crossings (2003), as well as plays like The Kaisers of Carnuntum (1995), The Labourers of Herakles (1995) and The Prince’s Play (1996), and who will be working on my new play, Fram, for the National Theatre early in 2008.
The irony is that now I have found a brilliant team to work with, no one seems to want me to make any more films. The ranks of producers swell up with the stupid, the timorous and the mercenary. Few people, except those that were a part of it, understand how these film poems were made. Neither film people nor the sad poetry world. This volume, Collected Film Poetry, could well have been called Complete Film Poetry, as I don’t think it’s likely that I’ll ever get funding for another film poem, though I am fuller of ideas than ever. There is much more for me to discover in the film poem.
The most apparently prosaic can be poetic. The camera’s eye can make the most familiar or unregarded object or person worthy of new attention and regard. It was a feeling of this kind that I had when I wrote one of my ‘couplays’, solicited by a Cukor cable for Elizabeth Taylor in her role as Light in the ‘transcendental pantomime’ of Maeterlinck:
I am the Light that helps men see the radiance in reality.
Sadly, this ‘couplay’ is still in the film, but I had taken the idea from the main theme of the original play. Even Maeterlinck was saying that the trail of the transcendent leads back to the illuminated, transformed ordinariness of home. When the two children in The Blue Bird, Tyltyl and Mytyl, return from their adventures in the Land of Memory, the Palace of Night, the Forest, the Palace of Happiness, the Kingdom of the Future, they have in Act VI, scene ii, ‘The Awakening’. Maeterlinck’s stage directions read: ‘The same setting as in Act I, but the objects, the walls and the atmosphere all appear incomparably and magically fresher, happy, more smiling.’ Tyltyl looks at his turtle dove in its cage: ‘Hello, why he’s blue … But it’s my turtle dove! … But he’s much bluer than when I went away! Why that’s the blue bird we were looking for! … We went so far and he was here all the time!’
It is here and now all the time, not in any hereafter. It is the nature of the combined prosodies of film and poetry to keep on making this simple discovery. It is not in the hereafter, it is here and now all the time in both its ghastly agony and its glories.
When I did my Lysistrata of Aristophanes in the predominantly Muslim northern Nigeria in 1964, I put an epigraph in the programme and the published text from a translation of a sentence in the Koran about the Greeks: ‘They care for this fleeting life but of the life to come they are heedless.’ Which also describes my own feelings about this life and the hereafter, and I went back to the phrase when searching for something to be sung by a life-affirming voice against the ugliness of fundamentalist rant that we filmed in the controversial film Peter Symes and I made defending Salman Rushdie and blasphemy in The Blasphemers’ Banquet:
Oh, I love this fleeting life!
The recognition of the fleeting nature of this life is certainly the most fruitful condition for the loving of it. The flickering momentum of the flicks is a condition for the framing and focus of the camera lens, and the metrical beat of poetry makes the mind both aware of the inbuilt transience of temporal motion and also relishingly sensible of the sensual sounds of combined vowels and consonants carried by that unstoppable beat. Metrical ictus and screen scansion reflect what is fleeting and can keep up alongside savouring the detail each passes through. ‘Prosody’, wrote Joseph Brodsky, ‘is simply a repository of time within language.’ Committing to metre is to emphasise the time that ticks away as our lives get shorter. It opens itself without panic to the time that is counting down to our ends. Again, as Joseph Brodsky has written in the same wonderful essay on Akhmatova, ‘prosody absorbs death’. It was no accident, I think, that I began to realise these connections in a really organic way when Peter Symes and I made our first four films of the Loving Memory sequence. Loving Memory revealed this structure to me more clearly than ever before, partly because it involved so many graveyards and cemeteries. What I dramatised in the films was the struggle between memory that resists time and oblivion that lets time have its way. The scansions of the screen and the prosodies of poetry co-exist to create a third kind of mutually illuminating momentum, which is the film poem, whose potential range and depth have not been fully explored. These texts only partially represent my own various attempts at the form. They will always require the films they are an organic part of to be fully understood.
[Newcastle-upon-Tyne]
The Inky Digit of Defiance
* * *
2009
Harold Pinter said in the speech he made in 1970 on receiving the German Shakespeare Prize in Hamburg: ‘If I find writing difficult, I find giving a public address doubly so.’ I could double that again! Or quadruple it. I’m the most reluctant of speech-makers.
But because this prize bears Harold Pinter’s name, I am touched and honoured to be thought worthy of it, and I can feel it as a continuation of that warm encouragement and support I had from Harold during his life. I would like to humbly acknowledge the kinship I felt with him during his life and that I feel now in accepting this prize in his name. Harold Pinter not only was an inspiration through all his own work, but also encouraged me in my work both publicly and privately.
I feel that he is still sending those immensely generous postcards I’d receive: for example, after the Oresteia opened at the National Theatre in 1981, or my Selected Poems was published, or a film poem went out on the BBC or Channel Four. I have one that I will always treasure that I got after The Shadow of Hiroshima, in 1995: ‘Tony – Brilliant! In all departments! Harold.’
When the full force of the Daily Mail and Tory rent-a-quotes descended on me in November 1987 and there were questions in Parliament about the broadcasting of my reading of my poem v. on Channel Four, Harold was a prominent public supporter. These were typical quotes from critics and MPs, etc., on my poem v.:
‘a cascade of obscenities’ (Teddy Taylor, MP)
‘another probably Bolshie poet seeking to impose his frustrations on the rest of us’ (Gerald Howarth, MP)
‘the riff-raff takes over’ (Sir Gilbert Longden, MP)
and:
‘disgusting programme’
‘surely nobody wants to hear this tripe’
‘isn’t there enough sadness in the world without showing this’
‘totally disgusting’
‘totally disgusting rubbish’
‘unnecessary and obscene’
‘a torrent of four-letter filth’
‘Scargill poem is the pits’
What aggravated many even more than the language was that they thought I had dedicated the poem to Arthur Scargill, the leader of the miners’ union. I hadn’t dedicated the poem, but what I had don
e was to quote from an interview Scargill had given to the Sunday Times in 1982 and use it as an epigraph to the poem. Speaking of his father, Arthur Scargill said: ‘My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.’
Mastering words is an important struggle. It has been my struggle for over fifty years and I first witnessed it early in my two uncles that I celebrate in my poem ‘Heredity’:
‘How you became a poet’s a mystery.
Wherever did you get your talent from?’
I say: ‘I had two uncles, Joe and Harry,
one was a stammerer, the other dumb!’
My Uncle Joe, who lived with us when I was a child, had the worst stammer I have ever seen in anyone. Nonetheless, he worked in a printer’s in Leeds and could set type brilliantly fast, without a single falter. His jaws would stick on a consonant for so long that the baulked energy would go through his whole body and make him stamp his feet, but as a compositor he was astonishingly fluent.
My Uncle Harry, deaf and dumb, was a window cleaner in Ilkley, and he wielded a thick Funk and Wagnalls dictionary in one hand, pointing to the word he wanted with the other, when I didn’t have enough fluency in sign language. The boards of the dictionary were long ripped off. The pages were of tattered India paper. He licked his fingers frequently so as to be able to flick through the pages fast, and a little of the ink of the lexicon darkened his defiant digit. The defiance was always directed against what he called with two jabs at the brandished dictionary ‘Tory error’.
I heard a phrase on a late BBC World Service programme about the recent election in Afghanistan. The reporter spoke of women coming from the polling booth proudly displaying fingers marked with indelible ink to show they had voted. ‘The inky digit of defiance’, the reporter called it. I thought that also described my Uncle Harry’s finger, darkened by his manic lexical need. These early experiences of family inarticulacy were what drove me, I see now in retrospect, into a passion for language and languages, and for what is still for me the supreme articulacy and eloquence of poetry.
We poets acquire our inky digits, especially perhaps those like me who still use a fountain pen and notebooks in a digital age, through our own form of defiance.
The two inkiest digits are those of the V-sign (turned the wrong way round) or the ‘Fuck you!’ single middle digit. When Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize, a Steve Bell cartoon appeared in the Guardian, exactly four years ago today, showing Bush and Blair gloating over an award which was a mounted golden hand whose defiant middle digit had the head of Harold Pinter, and Bush saying, ‘Great news! They’ve given us the Nobel Prize for World Statesmanship.’ The golden hand with the Pinter-proud digit would make an appropriate trophy for this prize.
Richard Eyre, who directed my almost banned reading of v. on Channel Four, found film footage to include Mrs Thatcher giving the V-sign (no doubt directed at the British miners) the opposite way round from Churchill’s V-sign in the war. But my choice of the quotation from Arthur Scargill was as much connected with my uncles as with mining, though the poem was written at the time of the miners’ strike. My granddaughter, who wasn’t even born when all the fuss about v. happened, has just received her A-level English reading list and it includes the poem heaped with condemnation twenty years ago. Harold was one of the writers who prominently defended the poem and the right to broadcast it.
His own poetry raised similar hostility.
I admired his laser-focused rage in those war poems, which I was proud and honoured to have read on his behalf at the Royal Court in October 2005. But, of course, it is that rage which makes the poetry world flutter, unable to understand that there is a necessary poetry to be made out of political fury. I had similar patronising responses: ‘The fury of his polemic has been detrimental to his verse.’ The poems of Harold’s which raised the same literary hackles were such poems as ‘Democracy’:
There’s no escape.
The big pricks are out.
They’ll fuck everything in sight.
Watch your back.
(March 2003)
or ‘American Football (A Reflection Upon the Gulf War)’:
Hallelujah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!
Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things.
We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.
Praise the Lord for all good things.
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.
We did it.
Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.
(August 1991)
Harold had great problems getting this poem published, as he recounts in ‘Blowing Up the Media’, in Index on Censorship (1992). The London Review of Books, the Guardian, the Observer and the Independent declined to publish it.
I had a similar experience with one of my poems, though it wasn’t one of my anti-war poems. It was a republican squib on what would be a laureate occasion: the second marriage of Prince Charles.
‘Legal Ruling’
Our future King de jure may be dunked
into his spouse’s cunt no more his whore’s.
O let Law make this monarch as defunct
as Camilla’s tampon after menopause.
My own problems in this department include not only the onslaught on v. and its broadcast on Channel Four, but also letters from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the prime minister recommending that my film poem in defence of Salman Rushdie and blasphemy, The Blasphemers’ Banquet, in 1989, should not be broadcast. And on the twentieth anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie – marked by PEN at the National Theatre in February of this year – the BBC chose not to repeat the programme for fear of offending increasingly vociferous religious groups.
A poet’s rage has as much place in his poetry as the ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. We would all like to concentrate on moments of beauty in our lives and poems, maybe small haiku perceptions of wonder and joy and love. There are such moments in Harold’s poetry and in mine. There are tender lines to Antonia in Harold’s poetry, and tender lines to Sian in mine. Harold called my poetry ‘outrageous and abrasive’, but added that my family poems were ‘immeasurably tender’.
And I sit at my desk and write and look at my apple trees, my figs, my mulberries, and want so much to make poems from them, but as Brecht wrote in ‘Bad Time for Poetry’:
Inside me contend
Delight at the apple tree in blossom
And horror at the house-painter’s speeches.
But only the second
Drives me to my desk.
The same tension between delight and horror, between blossoms and dangerous political bullshit, that Brecht talks about must exist in us all. At a time when my delight was in my apple trees, whose fruits I store and live on during the winter sliced into my porridge, many of the horrors came from Blair, Bush and their coalition cohorts, and the illegal occupation of Iraq.
But I do try to write about my apple trees, and in fact I was writing about one of my apple trees, and about love, in a poem which was called ‘October 2006’. It tries to make a moment hang as if preserved in the amber of millennia:
This ladder creaks. Take that ring off
I bought for you in Gdansk,
first token of my growing love,
with the forty-million-year-old fly
embalmed in its amber,
resin oozed before Man,
not to bruise the apples I drop
for you to catch from the Bramley
I planted after that Polish trip.
I was tinkering with this poem when I heard Geoff Hoon saying
on the radio that the mothers of mutilated children in Iraq would one day live to be grateful to the coalition cluster bombs. That drove me to my desk. I wrote four lines full of fury which I faxed to the Guardian immediately, and it appeared next day with a photo of a smug Geoff Hoon beneath an enormous tank. It was called ‘Baghdad Lullaby’:
Shhh! Shhh! Though now shrapnel makes you shriek and deformity in future may brand you as a freak, you’ll see one day disablement’s a blessing and a boon sent in baby-seeking bomblets by benefactor Hoon.
But I have actually written many poems about trees, like ‘Cypress and Cedar’, and about fruit, for example, ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’ or ‘Fig on the Tyne’, and have coined a word for what is my basic existential philosophy – ‘fruitility’:
Meaningless our lives may be
but blessed with deep fruitility.
Again, thinking about a long poem I’ve been writing on and off about my compost heap, I was driven to my desk with the same ferocity when I saw the picture of the wide-eyed, beautiful Iraqi boy Ali Ismail Abbas, a victim of coalition cluster bombs, lying with no arms in his hospital bed. This was ‘PM am’:
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 36