Farewell fame, hello principles!

Having just written a post about the exploitation of our willingness to undertake unpaid labour for corporations - such as by using automated tills and thereby causing the redundancy of till operators - I've just turned down the chance of national fame.


BBC Countryfile Magazine (circulation: 60,000 or so) contacted me:

Hi we would like to use one of your photographs of Simon Armitage reading 3, on the 23rd July at Mytholmroyd, ref:4834034893_e78851aae2_o in our August issue of BBC Countryfile Magazine. 

We will of course credit you and send you a copy of the magazine once it has been printed.

Now the magazine isn't a BBC publication: it's part of a commercial group called Immediate Media, and the magazine costs almost £4.00. I'm not a greedy man - thankfully, as my earnings from photography wouldn't keep a gnat fed - and I always give my pictures to non-commercial outlets for free, such as the fencing shots I take, which grace websites and publicity releases up and down the country.


But I object to a profit-making organisation not paying for content, however flattering it is to be asked. It's not actually a great picture - conditions were awful and I didn't know what I was doing - and Armitage failed to turn up the next day as promised, so I'm conflicted anyway.


So… farewell glory.


Meanwhile, don't think of this an an isolated incident. It happens to you every time you tag a photo on Facebook or mention a brand on Twitter. They aren't charities. They sell a product, and that product is you. The buyers are corporations - and they want to know who you are and what you buy. We think of social media as leisure, but they're actually work: you're doing market research on yourself, on behalf of the company. 

Elegy Written In A Pub Carpark

Inspired by these particular lines, I've written a poem for Simon Armitage.

One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill,
Along the heath, and near his favourite tree;
Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;



(With apologies to poor old Gray and his 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard'). I've kept some of the original lines (with a tiny change) and the iambic pentameter.

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
Alone we drank the bitter dregs of pain,
From this bleak place we all must go away
Abandoned by him for whom we came.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
Si, for thy sweet words we all caught colds!
Honeyed words mean naught when oaths haply take flight
A promise from a poet us despoils.

Let not Ambition mock our useful toil!
The poetaster, ARMITAGE take heed
Legs ache; thy feet, one trusts, are one vast boil!
Think of thy faithful lest no more they read.

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife
With hearts aflame and hampers full of nosh
Came three Map Twats, one more with JO, Ben's wife.
In dark and age shoulds't thou now fear my cosh!

Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
Shall some wag say in mirthless northern jest
He'll truly rue the day he e'er was born
Lines to 'scape our fury need be his best.

There at the foot of yonder nodding beech
Lies POETASTER, heeding not our thirst
His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
Afore ye wake let buzzards eat you first.

Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,
ARMITAGE scoffs at fame, and sales, and trust,
While drunk on fumes thy congregation yawn,
And vow 'No more our lucre, 'twould be just'.

As you've probably worked out, Armitage disappointed us. We went to his reading in Mytholmroyd, which was sheer delight: excellent poems, good banter, warm white wine. I took some pictures, which I'll post on Tuesday when I'm back with my own computer.

On Saturday, Cynical Ben had arranged a picnic for Armitage along his Pennine Route way, as he suggested. Two more poetry fans were there, and mighty good company they were as we waited for three hours, cheering on the labouring cyclists as they staged private Tours de Lancashire, drinking beer and fantasising every more baroque accidents which might have befallen our lyrical hero.

Alas, three hours is enough even for the hardiest poetry fan and we trudged wearily home, perhaps musing on Catullus's words, slightly changed: 'the words of a poet should be written in wind and running water'. From now on, I'm sticking with Andy McNab.

I've just thought - perhaps he's been swallowed up by the same black hole that's claimed by errant and elusive MP, Paul Uppal?

Then we went to Manchester to drink Hawaiian cocktails in honour of Jo's birthday. Which was nice. On the way, we saw some of the fighting Mancunian spirit I admire so much. Passing three police vans dealing with a pub brawl, I noticed a woman bleeding profusely from the huge cuts on her arm (probably from a pint glass). Pained and wounded as she was, she clung on to her cigarette for dear life. I salute her.

To rhyme is not a crime

A while back, I mentioned that I really rated Fflur Dafydd's Twenty Thousand Saints, a radical novel set on Ynys Enlli, a prime site of Welsh religious and historical interest. I'm not the only one - she's just won the Oxfam Hay Prize. There's a little old colonialism bound up in the award though - she's an established novelist rather than a newcomer, but there's just a hint in this article that it's writing in English that matters. Even more patronisingly, the BBC story is headlined 'Singer-songwriter wins book prize'. I'm sure Dr. Dafydd will love that faintly dismissive tone…

Anyway, mention of her specialism (R. S. Thomas) reminded me that a comment on another post asked me to list and justify my favourite poets. So here we are:

R. S. Thomas. I met him a couple of times, and very unpleasant he was too. I don't agree with some of his attitudes, but I think that he's up there with the greatest poets of the twentieth century - hounded by his position as an anglicised Welsh nationalist, an agnostic vicar, a cold man with deep feelings, a radical conservative in many ways, everything is poured into poetry which is simultaneously calm and heartfelt. I have a CD of him reading many of the poems, and it's spine-chilling.

MacSpAunDay - I'm a 1930s specialist, the time when poets and artists were forced to take sides by history - often damaging their work in the process, but sometimes liberating them from the parlour games of older English literature. MacSpAunday was a sneering nickname for the leftwing, often homosexual, Oxford educated poets of the 30s: MacNeice, Spender, Auden and C. Day-Lewis.

Malory - I'm a sucker for medieval literature (and further back), especially the Arthurian romances that twist and embellish Celtic myths to deal with pressing current concerns.

Edna St. Vincent Millay: burst in on an all-male preserve, demonstrated that she could do all the strict-metre formal stuff, and turned the tables on all the poetry that objectified women as passive, sexless commodities. She's funny too.

Which leads me to Sappho - fragments of whose poetry survived because a parchment was wrapped round a mummified crocodile, 3000 years ago. Passionate, heartfelt, sometimes angry and sometimes loving and technically gifted, she really is out on her own.

She was paraphrased by Catullus - who could go from writing funny filth to passionate love in a heartbeat. I also rate Whitman, Donne, Duffy, Muldoon, and Simon Armitage, who always surprises me by conveying depths of emotion in the most ordinary of phrases, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg for their exuberance and surprising seriousness. Larkin I find interesting but can't warm to, if you see what I mean. Then there are lots of others I'm getting into slowly, like the Brownings (Robert and Elizabeth). I could go on for much longer but I have marking to do…