Ben Hoare » Poetry

A certain kind of sense

Ben Hoare — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:00:38 +0000

Yesterday I mentioned the first kind of nonsense – the kind that, like much satire, actually makes perfect sense when you look at it in a certain way.

The second kind of nonsense I’m interested in is explored in my poems ‘With unction down the purple lane‘ and ‘Down, Down and Down‘.

You might say that these poems make no sense at all, which is why I used to call them “utter nonsense” to distinguish them from the first kind.

But when I look back at those poems, which still satisfy me in a way, I see that they are not “utter nonsense” at all. The semantic meaning may elude us, but there is another kind of sense in the regular rhyme scheme and metre. The form of the poems conveys meaning.

Moreover, the words themselves still mean something, even if they are being put together in unfamiliar combinations. The words “duck”, “spasm”, and even “rug-swept friends”, evoke images and feelings and, in that sense, still tell a kind of story.

Finally, you’ll notice that I struggled to finish these poems off. How can you make the ending seem final, when there is no coherent narrative? In both poems, I artificially created a sense of ending by telling how it “ended”, or talking of the “answer”. This was a way of making those endings seem final.

I wanted to explore other poetic forms, to see if it was still possible to write this so-called “utter nonsense” and still convey a certain kind of sense.

So I wrote a sonnet:

I tried a nugget in the fold today;
It didn’t take the pleasing listless trek.
Believing hurried fortunes on the wreck,
But nothing re-appeared upon my tray.
A hundred pleasures fluttered in the clay,
Galumphing penguins wrestled on the deck;
A hungry dolphin wriggled down my neck,
But all the ladies folded up the hay.
And yet, there is a leigh-way for the ride:
A much-ignited whistle lies around;
The beacon with the thistle steps aside,
And slowly all the angels run aground.
I never give a comprehensive lie,
But all the same, these dentists tell you why.

To give this poem direction, I still relied on those ‘direction’ phrases: “And yet”; “But all the same”. Equally, one might argue that the form of a sonnet is as coherent as that of my earlier two poems – perhaps even more so. The form of a sonnet does tell a story, intrinsically: the rhyme scheme breaks the poem into segments, with the final rhyming couplet signalling an obvious conclusion of some kind.

So there is a certain kind of sense to these poems, too, because even without semantic meaning, the form of our writing conveys meaning, tells us a story.

These are very early experiments in the art of nonsense. I hope I will have a chance to explore it more.

10 “literary stars”

Ben Hoare — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:02:00 +0000

My friend Tom has produced a guide to the ‘Top ten literary stars of 2008‘. I don’t know them all, but have seen three of them perform, and certainly agree with Tom’s verdict.

Joe Dunthorne and Emma McGordon were two of the more down to earth performers on last year’s Generation Txt tour, and I love the sound of Dunthorne’s new book, Submarine.

I should make it my mission to check out the seven I don’t know.

An Evening in London

Ben Hoare — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 21:08:00 +0000

On Friday evening, I went to see Roger McGough and Brian Patten perform their poetry at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank. I went on my own, which is something I’m no longer averse to doing if nobody I know is interested in going to something, but still I am not comfortable in my own skin. I’m more likely to spend £3.50 on a plastic cup of wine so that I have something to do with my hands, rather than just going to stand outside, looking out at the river.

I remember Roger McGough as a nonsense poet, although this is not entirely accurate. As a child I knew him as a poet whose work revolved around witty puns – Grace Darling / grey starling; a potato clock / up at eight o’clock, etc. Brian Patten first came into my consciousness when I was seventeen or eighteen, and he opened my school’s new library. I had too much homework to do that night so I did not attend the opening. I think this probably reflects more on my attitude than on that of my school, and I have since learned (in a manner fitting of Patten’s own stance) that doing all your homework is not necessarily the best way of educating yourself.

It was the largest scale poetry event I can remember attending, and I wondered as I watched the other people filing in whether, like me, they were more familiar with the names of these poets than with their work. In retrospect I think this was a little naïve – I was not alive in the 1960s, so did not experience the poetry buzz created by the Liverpool poets McGough, Patten and Adrian Henri. But the applause that met their appearance onstage – before a single line of verse had been uttered – provided a clue as to the personal feelings associated with these poets.

I always find it difficult listening to live poetry. Perhaps I listen in the wrong way – semantically, trying to take everything in rather than listening for aural pleasure, capturing the overall sensation and letting the details slip. My main feeling at the end of tonight’s performance is of wanting to know more – I will buy these poets’ celebrated anthology, The Mersey Sound; I Googled their names as soon as I got home. It felt a little like going to see a band like The Rolling Stones – there was a sense of history here, of which I have not been a witness. There was reverence not only for their work, but also for what they have lived through, the sheer number of years that exist between now and when they first began this. At 25, I cannot imagine standing on a stage and performing from a body of my own work that spans 40 years.

I will leave a detailed consideration of their poetry for another day, once I have bought some of their work and let it spread through my consciousness. What this performance gave me was a single impression: of poignant humour. Like many poets, McGough and Patten inspire laughter, but this is always offset with the necessary poignance of memory.

With their final set complete, the two poets went to leave the stage. Knowing from the scale of the applause that an encore was inevitable, I watched them as they walked. They did not even leave the stage, instead pausing at the edge then turning back to perform a poem by their friend Adrian Henri (whose presence had been felt all evening, in the third chair set out onstage and in the picture projected on the wall behind the performers, portraying the three of them). They again walked away, this time leaving the stage, and I imagined them going to their dressing rooms. Suddenly I realised that I could picture those rooms accurately, for as a teenager I used to perform in this venue with the ensemble I played the tuba with. Whenever we played here or elsewhere, I would sit backstage with my friends, not one of whom I still see.

I walked along the South Bank, then over the bridge to Blackfriars. Whenever I am walking in this area, I am inspired by its man-made beauty; but this process is always self-conscious, as though I must point out to myself that it is beautiful rather than simply enjoying it. Almost every time I have been here, I’ve intended to write something about it, almost composing the words in my head as I walk. Friday was the same – as I experienced all this, my mind was already planning how it would translate that experience into writing. Like my reading, it is as though I can do nothing simply for the pleasure of it: everything must signify, must become meaningful.