Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Wendy Cope’s poem ‘Being Boring’ has a Chinese curse as its epigraph: ‘May you live in interesting times’. The first two verses describe the poet’s happiness with a new romantic partner. This is the last verse:

     I don’t go to parties. Well, what are they for
     If you don’t need to find a new lover?
     You drink and you listen and drink a bit more
     And you take the next day to recover.
     Someone to stay home with was all my desire
     And now that I’ve found a safe mooring
     I’ve just one ambition in life: I aspire
     To go on and on being boring.

   It’s risky for a poet to give a piece of work the title ‘Being Boring’, but Cope gets away with it because her poems are never boring. This is true of very few contemporary poets, and it’s why Wendy Cope is my favourite living poet. I’m not saying she’s the best poet alive today – I can think of several undeniable geniuses who might deserve that title. The trouble is, when I try to read their work, my eyes slide off the page and fix on the television screen instead – I suddenly become fascinated by the spectacle of an overweight person in unflattering underwear being ordered to eat only mung beans by a skinny Scot. I’m no philistine, but I am someone who, when reading, likes to be interested, engaged and entertained all the time. I can’t stand the dreary, worthy, ‘I’m–an–important–poem–check–out–my–imagery’ tone of a lot of set–text or prize–winning poetry. The poems I love are those that hook you
from the start:

     ‘There are so many kinds of awful men.
     One can’t avoid them all. She often said
     She’d never make the same mistake again.
     She always made a new mistake instead…’

     ‘He tells her that the earth is flat.
     He knows the facts, and that is that…’

     ‘Cuddling the new telephone directory
     After I found your name in it
     Was going too far…’

   All these are the beginnings of poems by Wendy Cope and signal to the reader that down–to–earth, gossipy fun will be had by all; it’s the poetic equivalent of watching the start of an episode of Seinfeld or Sex and the City. And, like both, Cope’s poetry is not merely entertaining – it is as clever, well–observed, sensitive, memorable and profound as…poetry that is much less entertaining. (It’s outrageous that I feel I need to say this – as if entertainment precludes other more lofty goods.)

   A lot of Cope’s work deals with personal unhappiness, but her skill is in crafting pain into a rewarding, life–enhancing experience for the reader. We recognise our own unhappiness in hers, just as we recognise our happiness in her happier poems. Nobody universalises the personal like Cope. My all–time favourite of her poems, ironically entitled ‘Some More Light Verse’, is the funniest, most accurate description I’ve ever read of the way in which we all try to project–manage the frustration and disappointment of everyday life:

     You have to try. You see a shrink.
     You learn a lot. You read. You think.
     You struggle to improve your looks.
     You meet some men. You write some books.
     You eat good food. You give up junk.
     You do not smoke. You don’t get drunk.
     You go to yoga, walk and swim,
     And nothing works. The outlook’s grim.
     You don’t know what to do. You cry.
     You’re running out of things to try.

     You blow your nose. You see the shrink.
     You walk. You give up food and drink.
     You fall in love. You make a plan.
     You struggle to improve your man,
     And nothing works. The outlook’s grim.
     You go to yoga, cry and swim.
     You eat and drink. You give up looks.
     You struggle to improve your books.
     You cannot see the point. You sigh.
     You do not smoke. You have to try.
 
From this perfect poem we learn more about life than we do from the entire oeuvres of certain heavy–verse poets, who – let’s face it – would be incapable of writing a line as brilliant as ‘You go to yoga, cry and swim’ even if their lives depended on it.

   When you read her poems, you meet Wendy Cope. ‘Being Boring’ contains the phrase ‘all my desire’; in her poetry, Cope shares all her desire with the reader, as well as all her insights and experience. Her poems give the reader so much of herself. This is why they need to – and do – communicate so directly and accessibly. If Cope were talking to you face to face, she wouldn’t
dream of subjecting you to a pointless descriptive monologue, so she
doesn’t do it in her writing either.

   Another reason I love Cope’s work is that her poems are set in a world I recognise and inhabit – one that’s full of absurdity as well as pain and pleasure. She writes about the difficulty of finding a parking space, vegetarianism, psychotherapy, how annoying it is to buy a T–shirt only to realize later that it’s dowdy. I’m not saying that most poets set their work in different worlds – times gone by or futuristic dystopias. Rather, it seems to me that many contemporary poets’ work is set in a universe devoid of humour, self–mockery, eccentricity, gossip, insight and local detail. When I read some poets’ work, I feel as if their words are hidden behind a gauze veil. Instead of writing about new lovers who leap into one’s car too quickly and squash one’s saved–from–lunch banana (see ‘Song’ by Wendy Cope, in her collection If I Don’t Know), they write about watery pebbles, or pebbly water, with a somnolent poignancy that I find puzzling. ‘Is there more to these wet stones than meets the eye?’ I ask myself time and time again, before quickly concluding ‘Who cares?’

   I recently had dinner with a poet who disagrees with me about most things and complained to him about the preponderance of watery pebbles in contemporary verse. ‘There’s only so much you can say about damp rocks!’ I yelled, startling the waiters in the small Nepalese restaurant. ‘No,’ he corrected me. ‘There’s only so much you can say about human relationships.’ What I should have said (but didn’t because I was flattered that a serious poet was still out after midnight with the lowbrow likes of me) is, ‘That may be true, but which is more important and interesting?’ If only I’d said that!

   Did Shakespeare believe that there was only so much one could say about human behaviour? Did Jane Austen? And what about hypothetical human behaviour? Often what doesn’t happen is as significant as what does, as in Cope’s ‘Flowers’, which is surely one of the all–time great love poems:

     Some men never think of it.
     You did. You’d come along
     And say you’d nearly brought me flowers
     But something had gone wrong.

     The shop was closed, or you’d had doubts –
     The sort that minds like ours
     Dream up incessantly. You thought
     I might not want your flowers.

     It made me smile and hug you then;
     Now I can only smile,
     But look: the flowers you nearly brought
     Have lasted all this while.