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"Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets..." says Dudley Moore
in the film Arthur. This probably derives from an Oscar Wilde quote : “It is not regrettable that a
poet is drunk , but that drunks aren’t always poets.” Well , Martin Bell was certainly a poet and more
often drunk than sober. His alcohol intake was prodigious and , along with habitual chain-smoking , contributed to his continual poverty and early death. I met Martin in the late
1960s , after he had been appointed to a post in the Art Department's Complementary Studies at what was then the Leeds Polytechnic. Those were different times , when a stammering
poet in residence could be hired to join a number of Art Historians (including my wife , who specialised in Tribal Art) and a philosophy tutor. Each one of them would be considered
inappropriate to modern requirements of Higher Education and swiftly made redundant by new-broom management.
For a man described as writing "a rather bitter , tensely colloquial verse based , it seems , on a radical dislike for both himself and pretty much everything else" , there is an
ironic humour in much of that verse :
Noses in books, odd children in good schools
Get praise by being clever. And they sing
Revenge on the fortunate, the easy-going fools;
And think it passing brave to be a king.
King then, but of words only. There’s the rub.
Action is suspect and its end uncertain:
Stuck in a job, or browned off in a pub,
Or feted and then stabbed, behind a curtain....
When our first son was born in 1973 , we invited Martin to act as his godfather (a secular role of keeping an eye on a child's personal development) but he was increasingly ill
and died five years later. For those of us who live in Leeds , his most resonant poem (referring back to the nineteenth century poet James Thomson's long poem about London , The City of Dreadful Night) was his City of Dreadful Something :
They have perpetual winter here in Leeds
So that they can talk about football all the year round.
So we have rain one day , snow the next , and sleet and fog the next day ,
And wind all the time ....
Hell , dear sir , is what I say it is.
Hell is you , my friend , when I am in that mood.
Why , Leeds is Hell , nor am I out of it.
Why , I am Hell , nor is Leeds out of it.....
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Archive
Poets' Corner #1 – Poetic Pessimism, 13th September 2012
Poets' Corner #2 – The Workman's Friend, 10th October 2012
Poets' Corner #3 – On The Trail of Two Dylans, 12th November 2012
Poets' Corner #4 – Omar Khayyam, 14th December 2012
Poets' Corner #5 – William Blake, 25th January 2013
Poets' Corner #6 – A Minor Poet, 19th February 2013
Poets' Corner #7 – Thomas Hardy, 20th March 2013
Poets' Corner #8 – Shakespeare's Sonnets, 21st April 2013
Poets' Corner #9 – Edward Thomas, 20th May 2013
Poets' Corner #10 – Harry Smith's Anthology, 19th June 2013
Poets' Corner #11 – William Plomer, 21st July 2013
Poets' Corner #12 – Ghosts , 20th August 2013
Poets' Corner #13 – William Dunbar, 20th September 2013
Poets' Corner #14 – Bathtub Thoughts, 20th October 2013
Poets' Corner #15 – Bagpipe Music, 20th November 2013
Poets' Corner #16 – Sylvia & Emily, 20th December 2013
Poets' Corner #17 – The Fall Of Icarus, 16th January 2014
Poets' Corner #18 – Those Gone Before, 20th February 2014
Poets' Corner #19 – Rudyard Kipling, 20th March 2014
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