Looking at England, from China (by Martin Stannard)

Good morning. It's very pleasant to be here.

I thought you might like to know all the latest poetry news, gossip, scandal and theoretical debates from British Poetry World. And I'm particularly well-placed to fill you in on all of this because I live in China. Oh, I wrote that wrong. It should be ill-placed, I think.

But the internet is a marvellous and indispensible monster, and when I feel inclined I can have a look at British Poetry World from a safe distance and it's almost like being back in England, apart from the red buses, the rain and umbrellas and bowler hats, an occasional Royal Wedding, and endemic obesity. Oh, and a riot every now and then. Actually, where I am in China has plenty of rain this time of year, thank you very much, albeit carting it ("carting it" being an expression, in relation to rainfall, I picked up only recently) in temperatures of 30 plus. I love these sub-tropical storms. I want to put one in a poem but I haven't done it yet; I've only been here six years. We don't have riots here, as far as I know; if they happen they sure as hell aren't reported.

Anyway, as for British poetry, I know very little about it these days, except that as usual a lot of what I see is pretty good if you're having trouble sleeping. But new stuff, and "trends" or the like, are as difficult to keep pace with as new music, and I gave up trying to keep up a long time ago. In the mainstream, whatever that is, the other day I read that Simon Armitage "stands head and shoulders above the rest of his generation". It immediately struck me that this is the kind of nonsense life is full of. It's just not true. Armitage is no taller than your average poet, even when he's wearing his trademark platform shoes.

This led me to thinking how so much of what happens in life is imaginary. Really, it is. For instance, I must have imagined how in response to the recent riots in England (England, not "Britain", or "the U.K.") the poet laureate wrote and published a poem you can find here:

Seriously, please tell me I'm imagining that.

An occasional friend or acquaintance (I can never decide which noun is the more accurate), the poet Jeremy Twill, also wrote a poem about the riots but it remains unpublished, as does the majority (if not quite all) of his work. My favourite lines from the poem are: 

The little fluffy kittens playing with their balls of wool,
they're still lovely, aren't they?

This, perhaps, is the essence of "the English" (who apparently invented irony). They're not so much appalled by what's being destroyed on the television as comforted by the continuing existence of fluffy kittens, come what may, and the freedom to have them. Riots may come and go, but fluffy kittens are a constant. (Another friend has pointed out to me that fluffy kittens grow up and turn into cats that rip innocent birds to shreds. I think he's missing my point, unless it's that I'm missing his.) The first words of Twill's poem (which, before you ask, he has insisted I don't print in full because he's "still working on it") are "I'm not surprised, so why is everybody else?" Here speaks a poet of the real world, someone who has walked through an almost deserted English city centre early on a quiet and sunshiny Sunday evening and been subjected to indiscriminate verbal abuse and threatened with physical violence by examples of English so-called manhood and, I hate to say it but it's true, womanhood. It's an experience that makes one think seriously about fluffy kittens, and what they mean.

In my next post, I'm planning to write about how it's apparently okay to leave your home country and go live inside an escapist bubble in another country – and preferably another country with even bigger political and social problems than the one you're fleeing.

Comments

[Nin Andrews]

I love these posts! Esp. love the explanation of fluffy kittens . . . of being comforted by the eternal existence of fluffy kittens. I wonder what the U.S. equivalent is.