Is poetry in good enough health to be made fun of in this way? The irony is that this long, funny poem describing the incestuous peccadilloes of contemporary poetry’s social purlieus deserves to be read, and almost certainly will be read — and purchased — by far more readers than all but a few collections of poetry, even those by rather good poets.
Christopher Reid was known originally as a poet of the ‘Martian’ school, which sought to find new ways of looking at the familiar: ‘Splitting an apple, / I find a cache of commas.’ More recently he gained wider attention as the author of the award-winning A Scattering, a moving collection of poems about his wife in her last illness and his own life as an ‘inhabitant/ of an empty house’.
In the world of poetry he is revered for his work as poetry editor at Faber, a position that certainly would have provided him with any amount of material for a satirical work such as Six Bad Poets. He seems to have waited for time to pass before using it.
For Six Bad Poets has a feel about it as of a world bypassed by the modern. There are poofs and boobs and gin-and-port, but this is all somehow appropriate to its principal story, that of Charles Prime, a poet who perhaps never had one, and who, at 77, has just emerged from a ‘brief fling with Her Maj’ for crimes never described but probably of a sexual nature, and has a ‘Weather eye turned to the main chance’.
Charles turns up wherever there is a free drink, from funeral receptions to art openings (‘but be fair, a man must eat’), and is constantly on the lookout for places to stay and old flames to bed.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in