A poet who made things happen
When I started writing poetry, Adrian Mitchell was a figure in the landscape, someone I partly took for granted, and partly felt as an encouraging presence, not just because he was a gifted and deeply humane writer, but because he offered a counterpoint to what someone with my interests and background could not help but see as "the Establishment".
Nobody understood better - nobody felt so surely - the intimate relationship between poetry and song. It was that understanding, as much as his political vision and his deep compassion, that singled him out on the one hand as an English poet in the tradition of William Blake, and on the other as a particularly European English poet, close kin to Prévert, say, or Eluard, in his wise engagement and intuitive musicality.
Auden famously declared that "poetry makes nothing happen" - by which, I think, he meant that we cannot expect from a poem some simple process of cause-and-effect. In "Talking Back (To WH Auden)", William Meredith counters with the suggestion that
What it makes happen is small things,
sometimes, to some, in an area
already pretty well taken
care of by the senses
and he continues -
It is like finding on your tongue
Right words to call across the floe
Of arrogance to the wise dead,
Of health to sickness, old to young.
Poetry makes things happen, in other words, by equipping us with right speech, and so preparing us for right action - and, as such, it is an essentially moral discipline.
When I was starting out, a rookie poet with my head, as the French saying goes, "full of everything and nothing", I met Adrian Mitchell at a school in Surrey. By some mishap, we had been booked on the same day, with the same classes, and I remember the confusion that ensued when I arrived, far too early and not quite sure what I was getting myself into. By confusion, of course, I mean dismay. As one teacher put it, when I walked into the staff room clutching my folder of workshop ideas: "You're not the poet!" And, of course, I wasn't.
Now, looking back, I am a little surprised by what Adrian Mitchell's work, and his example, meant to me. Perhaps the best measure of "the poet" is how much and how well his work makes things happen, in that subtle and cumulative way that Meredith talks about - how it helps us discover the right words on the tongue for an "order revealed by the closest looking" - and Adrian Mitchell always lived up to that standard.
I am sure there are many who saw him just as I did, at that first meeting, and on the rare occasions when our paths crossed over the years - as a fixture, someone we could depend upon to speak out, honestly, and with that rare mix of good judgment and engagement that so few of us achieve - and I am sure that there are many more for whom, sometimes, in an area pretty well taken care of by the senses, his poems made small but significant things happen, things we have all been
changed by and had never seen,
might never have seen, but for them.
The Guardian
23 December 2008
****
Tell Me Lies About Vietnam
Adrian Mitchell first read his excoriating To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies About Vietnam) at an anti-Vietnam protest in Trafalgar Square in 1964, and kept changing the final verse as the years passed and events demanded. He referred to this version as "the 21st century remix"; it will appear as the title poem in his new collection, Tell Me Lies, to be published by Bloodaxe Books in June 2009.
Come all ye -
wartbrain psychics
with astroid sidekicks
prostate agents
and plastic Cajuns
royal doggerellas
cluster bombsellers
alternative surgeons
torturesport virgins
heavy vivisectionists
columnists, Golumnists,
priests of the beast
who are secretly policed
by highranker bankers
playing pranks with tankers
ghost advisers
death advertisers
vampire preachers
sucked-dry teachers
beheaded dead bodies
of blank-hearted squaddies
billionaire beauticians
fishing for positions
from poison politicians
with obliteration missions –
I'm alone, I'm afraid
And I need your aid
can't you see – can't you see – can't you see?
I was run over by the truth one day
Ever since the accident I've walked this way
So stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam
Heard the alarm clock screaming with pain
Couldn't find myself, so I went back to sleep again
So fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam
Every time I shut my eyes, all I see is flames
I made a marble phone-book, and I carved all the names
So coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam
I smell something burning, hope it's just my brains
They're only dropping peppermints and daisy-chains
So stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam
Where were you at the time of the crime?
Down by the Cenotaph, drinking slime
So chain my tongue with whisky
Stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam
You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out
You take the human being, and you twist it all about
So scrub my skin with women
So chain my tongue with whisky
Stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about –
Iraq
Burma
Afghanistan
BAE Systems
Israel
Iran
Tell me lies Mr Bush
Tell me lies Mr Blairbrowncameron
Tell me lies about Vietnam