Below are two extracts from A High Calling (or Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?) by John Greening, recently published by Renard Press.
Sharing what Greening has learnt during half a century’s creative work, A High Calling provides anecdotes and literary insights interwoven with autobiographical sketches and original poems.
An online launch for the book will take place on the evening of 23rd September; Greening will be joined by Stuart Henson, Hilary Davies, Penelope Shuttle and Dana Gioia. Details and free tickets here.
Pavement Artist
Rain has filled all the streets
With mirrors
– Charles Tomlinson
Looking through holes in the road
into the sky, I walk back
from the doctor’s. Too many old
poets are still trying to dance
round chimney pots. Faking
cheery grime in their emissionless
cartoon world, they weep free
verse for the children, the homeless and pigeons
when they should be putting their feet up
or resting their repetitively strained
imaginations. But it’s the holes
in the everyday that set us off –
like Mr Banks flying his kite,
or that other Tomlinson, who looked
until the light went out of his eye,
and showed us the way in.
Watching
These days people tend to watch more than they look. ‘Watching’ suggests the action is elsewhere, probably on a screen. The distinction is a subtle one, however. Bird-watchers might just as easily be said to be ‘looking at’ movement in the hedge or above a copse. But the word ‘watch’ carries some suggestion of ‘watching over’, of staying awake and alert, which is what poets need to do. I admire those who can, like Edward Thomas, Geoffrey Grigson – or Molly Holden.
Rather a forgotten figure today, Holden was one whose attention to her immediate environment was second to none. Obliged to slow down by her multiple sclerosis, she produced a distinctive body of poetry about the natural world, low-key but of high quality. She could write an entire poem about the difference between the bark of a pear tree and a crack willow. ‘It is not bred in me to overlook/the close at hand, the particular’, she wrote, lamenting that given her condition it’s ‘just as well’. Holden is part of that community of poets who are happy to sit back and watch the others court fame and acclaim. Some of the best are still watching from the antiquarian bookshelves centuries after their deaths. Holden’s own work – she died in 1981 – has been long out of print, the individual volumes resting with other ‘Phoenix Living Poets’ (Bowden, Broade, Couroucli, Earley) awaiting their resurrection from the ashes of oblivion. An illustrated fine press limited edition of the work appeared in the US in 2021 at around $1000. The 1987 Carcanet Selected is only available secondhand for around £50. That suggests there is a demand out there for her kind of attention to minutiae. It also suggests that we may have been distracted from some genuine poetry by glitzier, noisier, more ‘relevant’ alternatives.[1]
By the late 1980s, having spent some years watching over classes and then sinking down in front of a TV, I had myself rather lost the art of looking. A decade earlier when Jane and I were working at the BBC, we’d had a number of artist friends and were always being encouraged to look closely at their work or pictures they recommended. It sometimes felt as though we were being drawn into their vision – literally so when on one occasion we found ourselves coming down a footpath near Mapledurham House towards distant figures with an easel. It turned out to be our friends, Gill and Ian Edwards, who were painting the view we had walked into and who didn’t even know we were in the area.
We had a particular friendship, too, with a Russian couple, exiles Jane came to know through the BBC Russian Service: Oleg Kudryashov specialised in etchings, and presented us with a series of them which he had titled ‘Windows’. They are memories of Moscow, but also a reminder to stay watchful, and to keep looking. Living in Egypt for two years, we had no choice: the experience forced one to take note of everything and put it on paper. I wrote, but I also sketched in pen-and-ink, as my grandfather had done before me – his were caricatures, chiefly, like the one reproduced here from when he worked for Mercedes – and as our younger daughter, Rosie, still does. Thereafter, the habit rather fell away. Was it just laziness? Or growing up? As a child, a teenager, even as a young man, I had been able to look without knowing I was doing so, which is perhaps why so much of the imagery in my poems is from those Hounslow years. Was it because we now had a daughter and I was watching her as she studied the world for the first time, that I suddenly remembered the importance of using my eyes?
In autumn 1988 I began writing my thirty-two ‘Huntingdonshire Eclogues’, consciously trying to make myself look properly at where we had settled, whether I liked the place or not. That place happened to be Cromwell country, and while there aren’t many lessons on the art of poetry to be learnt from the Lord Protector – Andrew Marvell would be a better guide – his remark that he should be painted ‘warts and all’ is sound advice. I don’t have a bad eye, I can still draw a quick sketch on a jotter or a chalkboard, but I haven’t always described effectively in my poetry. My imagination is such that when I look hard at something, say an apple, rather than seeing the ‘appliness’ that Paul Cézanne would have seen and tried to capture, I tend to begin making comparisons. The apple turns into a face, a planet, a bomb, a ball or takes me to Eden, to Avalon and Robert Graves’s ‘Apple Island’, to the Beatles’ last LPs, to Isaac Newton or Alan Turing.
I can date my first ‘proper poem’ to March 1977. I remember composing it in an orchard beside the bungalow where I was living with two fellow postgraduate students in Brampford Speke, near Exeter. It was a magical place, more convenient for Dartmoor than for the university, and with little else nearby other than The Agricultural Inn. This was essentially the front parlour of an elderly woman’s cottage and remains the most extraordinary pub I’ve ever visited. Our bungalow was perched on the banks of the River Exe, which flooded regularly, rising dangerously close to my bedroom window as I sat reading Ted Hughes’s Crow. That experience was diverting enough and something I would later write about, but it was the orchard that fascinated me at the time. The area of West London where I grew up had once been orchards, and the two apple trees in our garden were thought to be survivors, so it could be the word made me feel at home. Anyway, I wanted to convey what I was feeling by capturing what I was seeing and I sensed there was poetry in those trees. I watched them develop, willing myself to look closely, to attend. Wasn’t it D.H. Lawrence who described poetry as ‘an act of attention’? There wouldn’t have been any apples in March, but I certainly recall staring very hard at the patterns the twigs made, sensing that I had finally found what I was looking for. It wasn’t just the tree coming into bud.
‘The Orchard’ was published in Bananas, and was one of my very first appearances in print. It felt like a watershed and the publication seemed to impress Ted Hughes when we exchanged letters a few months later, but that may have been because he was having an affair with the editor, Emma Tennant. I still have a copy of that striking tabloid style magazine, from Spring 1979, No. 14, priced 50p, and about the size of today’s Daily Mail. Its yellowing cover carries a photograph of the same Edwardian model of typewriter I had worked on at home for years, alongside the names of some contributors: Jenny Joseph, Alan Sillitoe, Martin Booth… And inside are Maura D. Dooley, William Scammell, Helen Dunmore, Yehuda Amichai, Peter Redgrove, whose glorious poem ‘The Apple Broadcast’ appears in full for the first time, and puts mine to shame.
I had never reprinted ‘The Orchard’ until Kevin Gardner chose to include it in my 2023 American Selected, The Interpretation of Owls. I had preferred to begin my earlier selection, Hunts, with a later poem, ‘Baby-arctic’, which appeared alongside it in the same issue of Bananas. Looking again at that original smudgy typed-out A4 sheet (yes, A4 had just about replaced foolscap) there are things I still like about it, such as the opening nine lines:
Thereafter I am showing off too much – something else to watch! – and it betrays the influence of Eliot in the declaratory, sermonising manner. Then it veers towards the Georgians, whose verse dramas I had been reading for my dissertation, and the Metaphysicals must be behind that ersatz computing conceit which I will refrain from quoting. There’s also an uncomfortable mixture of colloquial and rather fastidious diction. Yet I’m quietly impressed by my efforts to use, as Ted Hughes might have put it, both sides of my brain. And I’m pleased by the wit of ‘two twigs that make an equals sign’, by some nice use of internal rhyme, by verse that does feel genuinely free. Some of the phrases even linger in the memory. If we happen to spot a bird hopping around our fruit tree, Jane can still be relied on to quote the ending: ‘pecks all the eaters/and sings’ […]
[1] A new Molly Holden Selected is scheduled for her centenary in 2027 from Renard Press, edited by John Greening.