Funny poet
Peter Levi
Collected Poems Peter Porter (Oxford University Press £12.50)
T f you take poetry now as a serious enter- 1 tainment, which satisfies curiosity and bemuses you with newness much as modern music does, then you must admire Peter Porter. Other poets have admired him greatly since 1961. There is no comfort and little instruction to be had from him. His strength is technical. He is the furthest point of distance from Tennyson or from Milton that English poetry has ever reach- ed. He is sharp, sarcastic, and egg-bound with culture. One of his poems that fits in- distinguishably among the others is a pithy verse statement of the world of Simon Raven. His style often resembles late Roman satire, full of grit and gravel and sudden baroque soarings, and bespattered with vinegar. His translations of Martial, usefully reprinted here, have the right mor- bid brilliance.
It is said that Matthew Arnold in his generation introduced poetry as a substitute for religion; by comparison, Peter Porter's poetry is a believing man's substitute for atheism; there is something bright and Six- tyish inside much of his work, though he is too deep a poet to be dogmatic about a modern view of life. His mind is disap- pointed, angry and alive, `to all it suffered once a weeping witness'. He is almost never boring, very seldom impertinently obscene. He can hardly have lost a reader in his career. And yet something must be wrong, because in 22 years I have never learnt a poem by him by heart, and after constant re-readings over that period I find few familiar phrases except for titles. Maybe he is simply too demanding for the way we use books, as modern music is for the way we use the wireless. These collected poems of- fer a new kind of opportunity; they stand well together and reveal a continuous human strength.
What lasts in literature as in alcohol, as some ancient critic remarked, is a dryish taste verging on the formidable. That would include Peter Porter, though per- sonally I prefer Herrick or Cotton for everyday use. But Porter's foundations are sound; he has been able to express more about the world than most writers since 1961. It may be that his career has been one long experimentation: to incorporate Auden's cleverness and aridity, Larkin's sourness, the concentration of Wallace Stevens, the fire of John Marston who ad- vises anger, the surrealism of Christopher Smart, the simple and truthful baroque of Henry King. Peter Porter's most convinced fans find in the poems of grief for his dead wife, who died in 1974, particularly in An Exequy, based on Henry King's, a leap for- ward of his style, an admirable breakthrough of straightforwardness and grief. Certainly these poems are moving, but they could not possibly have been writ- ten without a long and varied series of ex- periments. They are just one mood, one model, among many, and Peter Porter's most recent poems have departed in other directions.
Some poets believe one has very few things to say in a lifetime, most poetry be- ing a mere necessary exercise, however much more important it may seem, which awaits the few moments of truth. Sifting through so full a collection as Peter Porter's, one is not inclined to accept that. The diversity of his technical power is part of what he has to say about life. It is dif- ficult to see how poetry or a poet's progress could be very different nowadays without being undesirably limited. It takes us 20 years to reach Love's Labour Lost. Almost every poet goes to London, and Peter Porter has exaggerated only slightly by more or less staying there. His poetry is a chain of self-ironic statements which most writers could echo if they had the talent. 'I am fond of the over-done .. , they live by arguing with the sea.' A public worthy of its/artists would consist of whores and monsters.'
But some of his informal and syllabic rhythms lose in the memory more than they gain in the attention. Too much cleverness undoes him, and his recent admiration for John Ashbery adds a further depressing ele- ment. There has been a certain obstinate dullness at the bottom of the souls of many greater writers in this century, more so in England than America no doubt, and more so in Dorset and Hull than in London to be sure. And yet what a relief towards the end of such a century to read completely in- telligent, absolutely modern poems. One may have sympathy for generation after generation of the poetical English, stronger on education than on brainpower, labour- ing at bad imitations of Horace in their cold, rustic writing-rooms, but what a relief Juvenal and even Martial must have been to the late Romans. At the least, Peter Porter is an antidote and a reviver.
The label of satiric verse applies mostly to
his early manner, which reaches a climax in a series of sarcastic sonnets exploding like barrels of smooth gunpowder, his Sanitized Sonnets published in 1970. Since that time his experiments have involved a broadening of range and a trial of confident tones. Some of the poems are occasional and deflating, but some attempt a new range and are more direct. They do seem, by hindsight, to lead towards The Exequy four years before that event. Even if we disallow simple grief and prefer complexity, two benefits tilt Peter Porter's account heavily into credit. He is a true poet's poet; to other poets his experiments always look worth- while. And he is often extremely funny.
They are taking the varnish off Shakespeare, their oracles have
p
`Anything too silly
to be said or sung can alwaysrbo be so tu an gc ee dd One of his funniest poems is Gertrude Stein at Snails Bay, one of three Transpor- tations to Australia. Peter Porter and Clive James are the two Australians I know most about. Typical they may not be, but to a simple eye they have a good deal in com- mon, and in both their writings the abrasive, ground-level humour of the Australian armies of 1914 and 1939 is still alive and kicking like a mule. Maurice Bowra used to say that Australian humour was the best thing about the 1914 war. Now it has injected an alarming vitality into English poetry. Geoffrey Hill may be deeper, Ted Hughes more exclusively car- nivorous, but there are more laughs in Peter Porter. That is an aspect of his seriousness, his refusal of dishonesty. Greatness is surely a kind of dishonesty, unless one is born Shakespeare, and Peter Porter seems to refuse it. What he attains is depth, the best that art can do. He does so by bravura with his technical means, by irony and contrast of many kinds. Small wonder there is little agreement about his best poems or his central statements. Those flash past between one line and the next. They say the only kind of thing poetry can say,
With love to come and snake-bite and the bitches flying As calm as tapestry, in light-soaked Poussin shades.
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