A job is just a task that needs doing, or a service that needs providing, and the service that I've been providing is that of poetry con... Photo / Getty Images
A job is just a task that needs doing, or a service that needs providing, and the service that I've been providing is that of poetry con... Photo / Getty Images
A DOG'S LIFE
I've got a new job. It doesn't pay but who needs pay? (I do, of course, but God will provide. He will drop ham rolls from the sky at lunch and strawberries in season. God is good).
I have been doing this job for years without noticing, or rather withoutrecognising it as a job. But a job is just a task that needs doing, or a service that needs providing, and the service that I've been providing is that of poetry con ... golly that was close. I nearly wrote, and I apologise for doing so, consultant.
It would be hard to choose a worse word than consultant, a word more drained of meaning, a word that does more to deceive, to hide or fudge reality. Sales consultants, real estate consultants, consumer consultants, solution consultants, this is language as smokescreen, pap-language, language with the consistency of sofa stuffing.
Nevertheless I almost said it because for once in its sorry life it would be the apt word to use: a consultant is one whom people consult about a matter, and people do consult me about poetry. But the word is unusable so that's that.
I don't know what other title to give the job but I don't care. Titles are for hiding behind. If I need one God will provide. He'll drop the right words in all unexpectedly among the strawberries and rolls. It's how the darling works. So let me tell you straight about the job itself so good old God can eavesdrop.
People consult me about poetry. Not about writing the stuff, of course. If they tried that I'd give them short shrift. But they consult me about poetry that others have written, often hundreds of years ago, and I give them long shrift. Limitless shrift, in fact, because I like being consulted.
W. H. Auden, considered by many to have been one of the world's greatest poets. Photo / Getty Images
Typically they phone or write or email with a half-remembered line, the ghost of something they were taught at school or that their mum recited, and that moved them once upon a time. We remember being moved, or touched. It's the strawberry of surprise that falls from a cloudy sky.
They ask me if I can identify the beast they half remember. It is nice to be asked and nicer still to succeed.
Yesterday a man rang. The half line that he half recalled was about the wind being behind you. He'd Googled it with no success, or rather with too much success: the billion search results were a haystack too far. I was his last hope of a needle-finder and here I have no choice but boastery. I asked a couple of questions then I guessed and guessed it right. It was that lovely ancient lyric translated from the Irish. I expect you know it:
May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face; the rains fall soft upon your fields and until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.
The man was grateful and I was smug. But we were both also gratified. For we had arrived at what we all love, the distillation of a feeling or a truth in words both memorable and beautiful. That's poetry.
Poetry's everywhere, or at least attempts at poetry are everywhere. Pop music is poetry. Most of it is corny eighth-hand cliché-ridden worthless poetry, but poetry nonetheless. Advertising jingles are formulaic, manipulative, dishonest poetry. The words in greeting cards are poetry of a cloying saccharinish half-truth sort, but still they're poetry. None of these will swim down time's gutter.
But the best stuff does. It lodges in the skull and it is handed down for generations and it persists when all the stuff that's meant to matter, all the money, power and politics, have long since crumbled to oblivion. The good stuff lives because it's true and beautiful.
I've got a headful of it. I'm drenched in it. A while ago a woman rang and said, "Please help me, Joe" and I said I would try and she said, "All I've got is reindeer running."
I didn't have to try. I knew immediately. "It's Auden's Fall of Rome," I said, "a masterpiece from first to last, and here is how it ends:
