The Road to Leatherhead
Frogmore: wreathed in the impenetrable enigma of its own genesis, peopled by towering mythic figures chiselled from the rock of a barren cultural heritage by the sublime magic axe of its own imagining; gave birth to a thousand legends, like the divine sculptor fashioning humankind from the primordial clay, and, like the demiurge, thus the creator of both the myth and the means by which the myth attains its universal meaning. Indeed, Burgess went so far as to enthuse: ‘We can see each of them as nothing more or less than great tools’ whilst the epileptic idiot- savant and charismatic parson Bernard of Byfleet uttered in a trance: ‘Though they could not lift heavy things, surely no-one made up so many lies as they did’ - a remark described -by Bob Mitchell as ‘the only true compliment ever paid to Frogmore’. Of all the legends, perhaps none is stronger than that of the wandering poet. Soon after the volcanic eruption of the Frog- more Group from its south coast seismic zone, rumours began to circulate amongst tearoom cognoscenti of a shabby vagrant of indeterminate sex, age and origin, who was wandering over the face of planet Earth shouting instantly created and instantly disseminated poetry to the four winds. Interest was aroused. Who was the poet? Could his or her poetry be found and published? Did the poet actually exist? And why? Wild claims were made, many of them outrageous. The poet was dead, the poet did not wander at all but lived in an ex-servicemen’s hostel in Whittley Bay, the poet was an agent of the C.I.A., and even, sensationally, that the poet was really Nick Spokes, a claim made by a tearful Pinky Benson to a disbelieving audience of middle-eastern financiers and based, reputedly, on a new interpretation of a hitherto unpublished early draft of his controversial poem ‘Silent Mermaids’. In Frogmorian terms the controversy is, of course, irrelevant. The objective reality or identity of this vagabond of verse, this rhymster of the road, is a red herring. The meaning of the poet is central and may only be devined through a visualisation of the way of the poet, briefly e ceaseless wandering over the Earth, responding to the moving, shifting, ever changing landscapes of the planet by the equally ceaseless creation of art. In our own age, dominated by the twin paradigms of technology and violent infantillism, the poet stands as a metaphor for everything that is accenting, non-judgmental, creative, fertile, that rejects acquisition as a purpose of existence.
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