When I began writing poetry many moons ago, for some reason I deemed allusions infra dig, unbecoming. I suppose like all young poets I wanted my stuff to be anti-academic, to be a breath of fresh air – and I was mindful of Kenneth Koch’s poem on the subject, ‘Fresh Air’, in which he imagines a strangler dealing mercilessly with any poet he surprises alluding to Orpheus, Cuchulain, Gawain or Odysseus. Accordingly, my first collection, Landlocked, is largely allusion-free, though there’s a stray reference in one poem to Charlotte Brontë, and another borrows its title from a song by Olivia Newton-John. No casual dipping of my young and fevered hand into what Philip Larkin once derisively called ‘the myth-kitty’.
Then I began to brood – particularly on the oeuvres of 20th century poetry’s giants, on the careers of Eliot and Pound and Lowell and Olson and co., and on the vast quantities of criticism their work had inspired. Much of this criticism focused on their deft use of precisely the resource I had forsworn; throwing in a bit of Dante, quoting a line of Pope, furnished just the sort of grist the critical mill craved, and without appreciative criticism, what hope of immortality? None
I decided, therefore, that to be taken seriously I needed allusions, and plenty of ‘em; what’s more I decided to remedy matters in one fell swoop by writing a poem that would consist almost entirely of allusions. But I also wanted this poem to do more than just make up my allusion-deficit. It had often occurred to me that no one had ever written a poem addressing a faux pas we all occasionally make, particularly when attempting to appear more knowledgeable than we really are. I’m talking about mixing up famous people who happen to have the same surnames, like Rod and Jon Stewart, or Marianne and Michael Moore… Surely such mix-ups, often harmless, occasionally amusing, deserved a poem of their own. Enough, you might think, and yet I wanted more, still more from this poem. For again brooding on what went into the kind of verse that achieved celebrity and critical acclaim for its author, it struck me that mention of foreign locations always went down well. References to Locarno or Kyoto or Aix-en-Provence make one look cosmopolitan, Byronic, au fait with the treasures and history of civilization. Though I’d done my fair share of travelling, indeed grew up many different countries, I’d so far made pitiful use of the places I’d visited. And even if I hadn’t visited them, who would know?... And what about, come to that, all those films I’d seen, often ones in foreign languages?... Anyway, here is the result of these weighty cogitations, and only the most sober and industrious of critics, one who is early to bed and early to rise, is likely to do justice to it:
Early to Bed, Early to Rise
It was in Berlin you mixed up John and J.J. Cale,
And we found ourselves watching Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past
yet again.
I, on the other hand, confused Teniers the elder and Teniers the
younger
In Amsterdam, where I saw Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys on my own.
On the outskirts of Moscow we failed to distinguish clearly between
Charles and Burl Ives:
Our punishment was to sit though Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible,
Parts I and II, twice.
I met a man in New York who couldn’t tell the difference between
George
And Zbigniew Herbert; his favourite film was Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu
Monogatari, which he insisted we see together.
In Cardiff I confounded Edward, Dylan, and R.S. Thomas;
To get over my embarrassment I went to a performance of Jean-Luc
Godard’s Alphaville.
People continually mistake the work of Antoine Le Nain for that of his
brother Louis, even in Los Angeles,
Where most films are made, including Doug Liman’s Swingers, which I
recently saw for the first time, and really enjoyed.
(Mark Ford)
from the archive; first posted Thursday, June 16, 2008
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