Poetry

POEMOTIONS

Text of book

POEMOTIONS
BENNION UNDRAPED

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To my dear wife Mary

My sole ambition was to write poetry and more poetry. I was blind to the fact that in England the poet has scant chance of survival - his power and his glory are over.

Harold Acton (1948)

Contemporary poetry is written to impress other poets or would-be poets, not to please the ordinary reader . . . a poet should not write in any special writing way, a way that you would never speak.

Kingsley Amis (1980)

Poetry is more philosophical and more serious than history, for its statements are in the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Aristotle

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Introduction

These here are the honest (if therefore sometimes embarrassing) poems of my life, which began on 2 January 1923. Most were written in the second half of the twentieth century, during what I like to think of as my mature years.

This collection of my life poems might have been given the obvious title Life Poems. I did indeed think of doing that. When adrift in the world, not suitably advised, I see no point in dissembling - and life poems are what they are. Let's be truthful, is my feeling. Magna est veritas et prevalebit (great is the truth and it shall prevail). We hope.

Fortunately I am now suitably advised. Knowing much of the world (if, as he admits, little of poetry) this man my current adviser prefers to act behind the scenes. So I shall disguise his identity in what follows. He asked me to do that. I shall call him X, since he is not concerned with gaining a reputation.

Under the worldly, possibly even jaundiced, professional advice of X, I gradually came to realise that the title Life Poems might be seen by some coveted readers as mundane, jejune, even picayune - and very likely boring. These valuable people would then turn aside.

We can't, said X, publish clever things that are wrapped up as obvious, boring poems, now can we? They wouldn't sell. Anyway poems, X added, are meant to make you sit up and think, not set you sleeping and snoring. I thought of riposting that poems don't sell anyway, but desisted. Poets are trained by experience not to mind unsaleability. Anyway some few poems do sell.

Couldn't you possibly, X went on, come up with something better than Life Poems as a title? Well can't I do better than that I soon afterwards thought, somewhat dazed (for the poems are what matter, not the name of the collection). Can't I invent a title for this special assortment which is something in itself special - even unique? Well, can I or can't I?

I rolled about in sweaty blankets, kicking my flat skinny soles against the starry sky, addressing this problem. I agonized, as you can imagine, then at last fell asleep. Following the ensuing dreams, I came up with what you see.

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These are poems mostly prompted by emotions. Robert Graves called poetry the transformation into symbolism of some disturbingly emotional crisis in the poet's mind, whether dominated by delight or pain. So shall we run the two words together and try calling the collection POEMOTIONS? Pretty obvious really, isn't it? I wonder why no one thought of it before. Perhaps they did, and I haven't noticed. But I don't think so.

Some of these poems have been published in little magazines, but without much notice or acclaim. Ditto for the two small collections published some years ago. In truth I have made little effort to get these things known. It seemed more important to write than to publish them. Now at last I have collected them all together, and shyly offer them to the world. I accompany them with a few explanations, here and there. Explanations of poetry are futile really. One cannot explain the Muse: she has her own laws. Still, as you will see, I thought I would try explaining - to some extent at least.

Up till now such few of my poems as have been published have appeared under the pseudonym John Quainton (quaint un - geddit?). You could say, if you were a crass obvious creep - which I'm sure you're not - that that was because I was ashamed to publish them under my real name, which has been in Who's Who since 1968 and is highly respected and needs to be protected. But now I'm nearing the end of a long life and feel more strongly the need to come clean. So I'm emerging into the open at last, blinking of course - and dazzled by the light.

* * *

Glancing through the above, just prior to publication, it struck me that it was open to misconstruction. So I add what follows.

I must make it clear that these poems are Art, not raw Life. They are Art as it used to be, not as it is today (which is often indistinguishable from raw Life). In these debased times any untreated rubbish gets called Art, but I lived mostly in a loftier age. Some of it has rubbed off.

What that means is that these poems are not, as might appear to the untutored eye, raw untreated Bennion. The I of these poems is not the Bennion I. Rather it is the product of the Bennion eye. It aims to configure some small part of the universal

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I, or at least the I of our European culture.

Poets aim not to express themselves, but to subsume humanity: otherwise the poetry is no good. Not many readers are interested in how Joe Bloggs agonises over his black soul in his back kitchen. More ambitiously, the poetic imagination seeks to capture the aims and urges of hosts of human creatures. This is absurd because it assumes a knowledge of humanity that cannot truly exist. Still, it is a worthy aim because it manifests a desire to look outwards on mankind rather than inwards on the limited soul of dear blinkered Joe Bloggs (with whom I empathise).

So, just to dot the i's and cross the t's, when in the following collection the I figure purports say to lust after some hapless pubescent boy do please remember that this scenario is the product of poetic imagination. The poet is dwelling on the fact that out there hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of men are quietly doing just that.

Himself the poet is trotting quietly home to his usual tea of sardines on toast, looking forward to reading his new library book or listening to BBC Radio Three.