A trip to the supermarket sparked a poetic conversation for Joe Bennett.
Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton-based writer and columnist. He has been writing a column since 2017.
OPINION
Our eyes met briefly in Meat. She smiled, I smiled, she headed off into Baking Needs and I went back to bemoaning the pork belly strips. They were too lean. The essence of pork belly is thick white fat.
Ten minutes later I came out of the supermarket with asparagus, salad stuff and some compromise chicken and there she was again. She smiled and I smiled. She was in her mid-70s, I’d guess, nicely dressed, gentle-faced.
She asked if I was Joe and I admitted it. Could she ask me a question? Of course, I said, of course. “What’s Philip Larkin’s greatest poem?” she said.
Well now, there I stood outside Woolworths Ferrymead, across from Mitre 10 Mega and assorted other stores, being asked about poetry on a windy Tuesday afternoon. So where should I begin (to misquote another poet)?
I was keen to answer. I was also qualified to answer, for Larkin didn’t write that many poems and I’ve read every one of them, including the bits of doggerel he never meant for publication, and I have much of the best of his stuff by heart.
At the same time, how could it be right, or even possible, to rank poems? No two are trying to achieve the same thing, to tell the same truth. To put one above another is like saying a fish is better than a bird.
Nevertheless, we do rank poems and poets, simply by going back to them, learning them by rote. Objectively my favourites may not be Larkin’s best poems but subjectively they are. And presumably, that’s what the lady was asking – what, in my view, was his single best piece of work.
I have written before about how I first opened Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings on a train going home from school in 1975. The first poem I read was Days.
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us,
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in;
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
It grabbed me then; it grabs me now. The stark simplicity, then that final image, rich with both absurdity and truth.
On that same brief train trip, I read Ambulances (”all streets in time are visited”), and Afternoons (”Their beauty has thickened. Something is pushing them/To the side of their own lives’) and I knew that I had found a writer who inhabited the same world I did and was unafraid to tell the truth about it. My mind meshed with his. What else is writing for?
But his best poem? As we stood amid shoppers rumbling past with trolleys piled with groceries, a whole flock of known poems clamoured for my attention: Next Please with its image of the “black-sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back a huge and birdless silence,” or Deceptions (”Stumbling up the breathless stair/ To burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic”) or … but the list was long, and the lady was waiting and I was saying nothing.
I thought of Larkin’s last great poem, Aubade, a distillation of his terror of death:
“..this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.”
That last line is superb, but the line before is the one occasion in all his published work when Larkin’s ear let him down. “Link with” is a forced rhyme, disqualifying.
The pause had stretched for too long, Church Going, I said, “That’s his best. Church Going.”
“Church Going,” the lady said, and smiled. “Thank you. I’ll look it up. Very nice to meet you” and she turned and walked away towards the car park with her bag of groceries.
And even as she did so, I wanted to call after her, to say well, actually, I’m not sure. I mean, Church Going is very good, but there is good, there is better and there is best and the best is, but the chance had gone, and besides there is no best, no perfect answer, to this or anything. There are only the simple truths:
The day the flowers come,
And when the birds go.