HIP POETRY READS
Glimpses of Notes – an autobiography in verse
By Alan Corkish
Large format hardback, erbacce-press 2015, £25
scream before they kill your poetry
By Pete Donohue
Limited edition chapbook, Holy&intoxicated Publications 2018, £5
Reviews by John Cornelius
Screams From Outside: From Bad to Verse
Alan Corkish’s full-length autobiography in verse is something I’ve wanted to review, i.e. bring to the attention of a wider audience, for a long time if I could only find the appropriate platform, which turns out to be HIP literature. Getting on for 200 pages, it is utterly unique for its sheer uncompromising readability on the one hand with its grasp of integrated, meaningful and inventive typographic expression on the other. Geographically, the biographic elements drift from the Isle of Man across the Atlantic to New York then back to London and Liverpool.
CAROL ANN DUFFY…PULLING PINTS
A tough early life which a lesser writer might have moulded into a commercial misery memoir is glimpsed through a prism which offers fractured insight into the life of a whaling-ship hand, battles with alcoholism and authority, whether as a late-starter mature student – a fellow University class mate happened to be Carol Ann Duffy who, he claims, said she’d always remember him for his nose-picking habit – or as a disaffected school teacher (funny what sticks in your mind: my memory of former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy is of her pulling pints in the bar of Peter Kavanagh’s pub The Grapes, in Liverpool 8).
Corkish sets out his stall in a deeply considered introductory manifesto of what he believes poetry to be and to be for. The poet recalls the time in his early teens on Mona’s Isle: having stolen a copy of Lord of the Flies the fates got their own back by almost drowning him in the Irish Sea, throwing him into a delirium of terror:
‘…before the green water rushed up and closed over my screams I saw a one-eyed fat boy and a pig’s head on a stick mocking…and a woman on the end of a rope with her tongue lolling…then wondering if this time (that’s the way with the kids you know) they’d let me drown (like brother Abbey who on a still March evening following a mackerel sky couldn’t swim either)…’
[I haven’t attempted to reproduce the descriptive concrete format or varied typesetting here. You’ll have to read the book!]
Two other horrendous references to death stick in my mind: (a) The picture of young deckhands using the eyeball of a whale as a football, like the kickabout with chunks of ice on the Titanic and (b) the senseless murder of John Lennon. As a lonely disaffected school teacher Corkish heard the dreadful news; saltwater welled in his eyes* as the indifference of staff and pupils alike formed a mindless backdrop. This mirrors my own experience. As a reluctant and inept art teacher I began the first day of my secondary school teaching practice on 10th December 1980 – John Lennon’s death-day – and experienced (what turned out to be years of) total alienation as the only person who seemed to be moved by the event. I was also a bit of an anti-whaling campaigner, so the association is complete. The book includes extensive notes to provide a current affairs background/timeline relating to the topics mentioned in the text. This is truly a voice from outside and a formidable tour de force.
ESSENTIALLY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND OPINIATED
Another voice from outside is that of Pete Donohue whose name will be familiar to readers of these pages as Literature Editor. Whether consciously or not, Donohue, who is experienced in the field of mental health, has illustrated the front cover of his book with a drawing that, while echoing Edvard Munch’s The Scream, recalls some of the intricately agonised drawings of Unica Zürn (1916-1970) the schizophrenic and suicidal partner of the erotic surrealist painter, Hans Bellmer.
While Alan Corkish’s subtitle is …the vanity of life demands a record of all that i am, taken from Robert Burns’ Tam o’Shanter – a riposte to anticipated charges of narcissism, often hurled at the autobiographer – Donohue’s work is also essentially autobiographical and opinionated. It seems to me that narcissism has its place in the arts and is probably an unavoidable and harmless adjunct to any delving into the soul. It only becomes a problem when pragmatism is what is required, for example in the fields of law or politics: we need look no further than the current jostles for power at Westminster for rampant narcissism…
Donohue is concerned here with personal relationships (the honey & whiskey graveyard), addictions, sanity, and life and death, literally in the case of scream:
‘…slip back
through that
interconnecting
channel
between
the difficulty
of birth
& the ease
of death
to realise
life
is but a scream
until
we know
true
silence.’
carcrash describes a close shave when a near lethal tumble in an ill-advised joyride ends with the poet and his chums finding shelter and succour in the home of a family of generous strangers.
CLOSE TO THE BASIC HUM OF EXISTENCE
Both of these collections reward close reading and a readiness to be open-minded about a punky, close to the edge account of lifestyles which while possibly offensive to the minds of the bourgeoisie are close to the basic hum of existence in tone. All of which recalls the work of the Los Angeles underbelly poet Charles Bukowski – you wouldn’t want to be him but you envy him his clarity and ability to hit the nail squarely on the head. In fact my first encounter with Donohue’s work was in an anthology of tributes to Bukowski (Sunny Side Down – Patchoulitea Press 2017) which in turn reminded me of an anthology to Bob Dylan to which I contributed long ago (Jewels and Binoculars – Stride/Westwords 1992 ed. Phil Bowen.)
*quote from Julian Lennon
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