THE WAY THINGS ARE - ZOË KING TALKS TO
ROGER MCGOUGH
When the sky is looking the other way, do not enter the forest.
No, the wind is not caused by the rushing of clouds.
An excuse is as good a reason as any.
A lighthouse, launched, will not go far,
I am your father and this is the way things are.
The Way Things Are is the title poem in the latest book from one of the UK's most popular and gifted poets, Roger McGough. To promote the book, he's been touring the country, and when I saw he was to appear at The Norwich Arts Centre, I booked, and went along with four other members of Diss Writers.
When Roger came tripping onto the stage, dressed from head to foot in black, it looked as though we were in for some heavy stuff. Instead, he grinned and launched into a short - A duck walked into a pub… That one was brand new, not yet published, so you'll have to wait for the rest of it but he followed up with An Ordinary Poetry reading -
Tonight will be an ordinary poetry reading
A run-of-the-mill kind of affair
Nothing that will offend or challenge
No language as far as I'm aware
which needless to say, this being McGough, couldn't have been further from the truth. He went from there to In Case of Fire (2), Every Day Eclipses, and The Mini Metro, both of which were commissioned poems.
We then heard The Sad Astronomer, written for Patrick Moore, followed by Fatal Consequences which for me perfectly sums up Roger's quirky way of looking at things.
I don't believe that one about the butterfly -
The air displaced by the fluttering
of its wings in Brazil
causing a tidal wave in Bangladesh.
Mind you,
the day after I shook out
a tablecloth on the patio
there was an earthquake in Mexico.
(Or was it the other way round?)
In no time at all, the first session was over. After a short break, Roger came back and gave us more humour and more to think about, ending with the heart-stopping Man Defying Gravity.
I've no doubt that if you've seen Roger in performance, you'll agree that he makes the stage his home. He has an easy rapport with his audience, and moves almost seamlessly from one poem to the next. He gives the impression of someone who is very much at ease on the stage, but this isn't actually true, as he told me.
'I've always been quite shy in a way. It's not like being a singer or an actor, they enjoy being up there. I think I'm like many poets, I'd rather not, thank you very much. But at school I used to do drama, and later, with Scaffold of course, that gave me experience of standing on stage in front of lots of people, learning to use a microphone… you get used to the technical side of it, and the rest of it is simply rapport. I just come on and read through the poems.'
Does he actually enjoy performance while he's up there? His reply to that was archetypal McGough.
'You know those questionnaires where they ask you what your favourite journey is? Well my favourite journey's the one from centre stage to the dressing room. But then again, I do enjoy it really. It's this balance between the writing part, the isolation, and getting the poem out there. I would miss it if I didn't do it, even though I feel I'm a writer, essentially that's what I'm best at, but I can perform, and that's part of what I do.'
MCGOUGH ON TOUR
I was surprised to discover that Roger only tours about 50 days a year, as his name seems to crop up everywhere, including festivals such as Cheltenham and Hay-on-Wye. Most of his touring is geared towards promotion, which this year will include several overseas trips. He's just back from Italy, in May he's off to Durban, then in June, he's running a week-long poetry workshop at La Rivolte, a villa in the south of France set in park-like gardens with olive and palm trees, and its own 40ft jade green pool. I suggested to him that June in the South of France sounds more like a holiday than a workshop, and he agreed.
'Breakfast is at nine, half nine, then we have a session for an hour or so, by which time, people have things to do, and they go off in the afternoon… then we meet again in the evening. In the afternoons, I meet people individually and discuss their poems.'
With a maximum of 10 people on the course there is plenty of time for one-to-one tuition with Roger, although there's no pressure, it is up to the individual how hard they work. He says he does treat it as something of a holiday himself.
'The swimming pool and the food help. There's always a good mix of people, from early twenties to retired, and the groups have always melded well together. We've never had a group that didn't work, and they usually keep in touch afterwards.'
Roger added that he is often influenced by the people he meets.
'I always come away enthusiastic. It's good that people want to write poetry. And there's often a spiritual element too.'
Although he and his poetry do travel, surprisingly he has never taken it to the States.
'I've never had any success over there. My books are never published there. Viking America always says the books are too English. They just don't translate.'
He agreed with me that a lot of American poetry is different from English, that much of it is narrative based, so the lack of an American audience isn't perhaps so surprising.
ON THE STAGE OR THE PAGE?
One of the problems poets have to address is assessing whether or not a poem will work in performance. There are poems which depend for their effect on visual punning, and obviously much of their power would be lost without the written word. Roger did agree that some poems just don't work in performance.
'I think what's important is how a poem fits into the context of what you're doing, and this takes time and experience to work out. You can put a poem in that may seem quite light-hearted about one thing, but next to something else in a series of poems, it comes over as something darker. And often, such a poem on its own just won't work.'
Another thing he mentioned was how performance can change a poem. He talked about 40- Love.
40- Love
middle aged
Coupleplaying
tennis…
'The tennis poem started off as just a five line, straight poem, then I had the idea of setting it out on the page, then when I was reading it, years afterwards, I started looking from left to right, so the tennis poem didn't come as one idea.'
Regular BuzzWords readers will remember that we had just this discussion in an earlier issue of the magazine, of how a poem is never finished, and Roger did echo that.
'People who don't write poems always assume that it comes to you as one draft and you write it down, but that's not how it is.'
One thing that struck me forcibly about Roger's performance was how balanced it was in terms of content, how he moves from light to dark, from poignant to funny, and back again, which must be a nightmare in terms of assessing audience reaction to what works and what doesn't.
Although he can hear the laughter, he can't hear the intakes of breath that follow his more poignant poems and he can't always judge the nature of the silences.
'I still haven't quite worked that one out. People tell me, 'you should give longer between the poems, let people digest them', but I'm not an actor. An actor would use the silence, milk it, but I just want to get onto the next thing, just let the poem sigh away and move on. But it's right, you don't quite know the effect you're having on people.'
I asked Roger about the fact that although he's promoting his new book in this tour, he included a lot of his older work, although he said there was nothing more than five years old. In common with most writers, he does move on from his earlier work, but he finds himself harking back to it on occasion, simply because a poem he thought he'd forgotten will sometimes remind him that it perfectly 'fits' with the theme he's working on.
A SUITABLE SUBJECT FOR POETRY
It's often said of Roger McGough that he seems to be able to write poetry about almost anything, the simplest ideas can become fodder. Part of this ability comes from the surreal way he looks at things, the way he is able to turn language on its head. He says it's something he's always had, without necessarily knowing it.
'I know people who I used to knock around with who were much better than I was. It is a surrealism. It's very much a Liverpool thing.' So can you write poetry about anything? 'Maybe you can,' he said, 'but the way you do it is to find a way into it that isn't obvious. The first thing you do when you write about anything is to start off like a journalist, but you have to get rid of all that and find a way into it that takes you into a poem.'
Having said that, he did admit there had been at least one time when he found himself stumped. He was asked to write a poem to mark National Breastfeeding Year, and found it virtually impossible.
'But generally, it's a question of craft. Once you have the skills, you can do almost anything.'
We went on to talk of his favourite poems, and although at first he said he didn't actually have favourites as such, he then backtracked, and mentioned Hearts and Flowers, the story of Aunty Marge, which I was delighted about, as it's my all-time favourite. Here's a taster:
...... Deep down,
She would like to have been a nun
And talked of missing her vocation
As if it were the last bus home:
'It passed me by when I was looking the other way.'
...... 'Besides,'
She'd say, ''What Order would have me?
The little Daughters of the Woodbine?
The Holy Whist Sisters?'A glance at the ceiling.
'He's not that hard up.'
...... We'd laugh
And protest, knowing in our hearts that He wasn't.
The Way Things Are, is published by Viking and is available from Amazon and all good bookshops.