National Poetry Day Diary

Hilary Alaric MacFaddean Spume’s National Poetry Day Diary.

By

Hilary Alaric MacFaddean Spume.

5am. I’ve been up and down all night like a bride’s nightie, and it’s not just the effects of a National Poetry Day Eve party in Ledbury. Mother has been bad again, and was calling out in her sleep for Sir Stafford Cripps, with whom she had a brief walkout in her far distant youth. My Father didn’t like her to speak of it when he was alive, as he felt Cripps to be a fellow traveller.

5.45am. Awake. Always awake at this time now, watching the dawn bruise my curtains. Awake; and thinking of Larkin, and our long ago bus ride to Goole. Especially on this, our special day. He always made a great thing of it, though Monica dreaded it because of all the cooking.

8.30am Great excitement as the postman delivers a bundle of National Poetry Day cards. There’s one from old Les Murray in Balarat, with sheep on, and the dearest verse inside. My old friend E G Pugh did not forget me, and has sent a privately produced volume of his erotic verse. And dear Ritchie Edwards from the Manic Street Preachers went to the trouble of dropping me a note. A nice boy; I well remember the night in the library here at Botolph Hall when he lay in front of the fire, sucking a pencil, and asking for my help with an early draft of ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’

One rather unpleasant note; Alvarez seems to have snubbed me again. Perhaps his card will come in the next post.

12.30pm As is well known, I’m poet in residence with the Potato Marketing Board, and today is the honorary lunch thrown by the Board on behalf of the resident muse. These things always take place in Potato House, just off The Strand, where they tend to do quite well by yours truly. I think its to make up for the paucity of my stipend, which is not impressive. Still, I’m always grateful for lunch in the West End, and was more than happy to deliver the annual poem, which I have the consent of the Board to reproduce in full here.

‘What kind of jacket does my jacket potato come with?’

I asked the girl.

‘Is it

Leather jackets

Wax jackets

Flax jackets

Flak jackets

Jack flackets

Jax flackets

Jax wackets

Jeather lackets?’

‘No. It’s,’

the girl replied,

‘the kind of jacket that all jacket potatoes come with.’

This was received with a deep, profound silence. I settled back with my cognac and cigar, content in the knowledge that there is still a serious audience for formal sound poetry in this country.

(Incidentally, please do not see the reproduction of this poem as a come hither for aspiring versifiers; poems submitted unsolicited will go unread. I am a professional poet, so that’s different. How would you like it if you were a dentist, say, and I set up on your lawn and said I fancied a go at drilling peoples teeth? Poetry is a dangerous business, my friend! Stay away!)

4pm Tea with the Laureate and a few select contemporaries, though I can’t touch the stuff myself. I always insist on a drop of the malmsey, of which there is a butt, hidden in the depths of the Laureate’s modest home. Cecil Day Lewis drank a great deal of tea, of course, as did dear old Sir John. But Ted liked coffee thick like mud, which put him in mind of the waters of the River Calder.

I suppose it’s fairly well known that I was in line for the Laureateship after Ted Hughes, and that the Prime Minister couldn’t decide between me and Pam Ayres, so he went for the present incumbent, who is, nonetheless, a splendid fellow and a superb ambassador for poetry. That said, it cannot be denied that a certain froideur exists between us, and I think we were both relieved when over excited poetry boy band Aisle 16 let off the fire extinguishers.

7.30pm A private dinner for a few friends, marred somewhat by my Mother insisting that she be present. A great beauty in her day, National Poetry Day has always been one of her favourite times of the year. As a child, my mother played petanque with Lady Ottoline Morrel and Bertrand Russell (with whom she had a brief run in, or so my Father always insisted). Lady Ottoline always gave the Garsington downstairs staff the day off, so that poetry could be more naturally expressed. My Father was a Naturist of course, as I remember with a great deal of distaste.

10.30pm Supper, then dancing till dawn at the Poetry Café. A truly memorable evening, and one which live long in memory. So long as evenings are remembered, this is one which will be. Remembered that is. I met this bloke at the bar who told me this joke about something or other. Ha ha! No wait, I’ll get it. It’s very funny. I told it to John Cooper Clarke, then he told it to Ursula Fanthorpe, and she laughed so much she had to sit down. Not so Spume. I like to strut my funky stuff. I find that my work with young people has kept me very much in touch with the streets, and it wasn’t long before I found myself in the moshpit next to Salman Rushdie, our greatest rock writer. Laudi, the first Scandinavian Death Metal band to win the Eurovision Song Contest gave us a set based, not entirely successfully in my view, on Ezra Pound’s Cantos. God, he was an awful man. My father visited him in Rome on occasion. Rushdie and I leapt about with great abandon, until, most unfortunately, I was unwell over the great man’s shoes; a rerun of the occasion when I was similarly so indisposed over Steven Spender in the Green Room at Hay. Then it was a pie; this time it was probably the Laureate’s malmsey.

3-ish. Back in Botolph Hall. Feel dreadful. Mother is restless once more, and is calling for Cripps. Must try and grab a few hours of sleep before the dawn bruises again my curtains; ( and how many more dawns can there be for Spume?)

And again I think of Larkin, and the day we went to Goole together on the bus.