I want to semi-formally remark how much I appreciate the
work that has gone into the editing, the writing and the publishing of this
wonderful and substantial critical work on my writings. I provided the headache
– to quote Beckett – but the contributors provided the aspirin. I also know,
having edited a similar book on Lee Harwood, and having written literary
critical chapters to similar collections (as the detailed bibliography, another
wonder, shows!), just how much work goes into this kind of writing. It is good
to see new essays rubbing shoulders with ones that were written in previous
years (and decades), and to see some reminiscences alongside critique. Although
I am the focus and occasion for the book, it is also a portrait of a
collaborative poetry scene, and many of the contributors are poets also, and
part of that.
For the record, I should say that I have read the book from
cover to cover (and had so before the launch; see here for an account) and found it a fascinating read.
Of course, I read the book as no other person can. But just as I believe that,
as a writer, one mustn’t believe one’s own publicity, one mustn’t believe other
people’s. Or rather: the essays should not function as publicity at all, so far as I
am concerned, but as spurs for me to do better.
I do have a tongue in cheek reference to the book, in one
poem from my current project, my Brexit versions of the poetry of Michael
Drayton called Bad Idea. The speaker is partly MD, partly me, and partly a modern-day Drayton.
While the first five lines allude to chapters in the book, the sixth is a
certain modern critic’s negative characterisation of Twentieth Century Blues. I hope it amuses. 'XLII The Michael
Drayton Companion (1619)' begins:
Some like my multiform methods,
and commend my social poetics.
Some say I’m a funny old translator,
‘expanded’ like a supersized codpiece.
Some that I excel in explicit vitality....
