[Clive Watkins]

Whether one considers its lack of coherence, its manner or its handling of metre and rhyme, this is, as others have said, dire. Two of the comments it received at the Society of Classical Poets website – “this is a wonderfully wrought poem that captures the essence of the marvelous John Whitworth perfectly – great meter, great rhyme, and an educational message with a witty delivery” and “a brilliant reflection on a brilliant poet” – only confirm how low the bar is in those parts.

Anyone who writes such a eulogy must address two familiar hazards: first, seeming to co-opt their subject in support of their own personal agenda, one perhaps not entirely congruent with that of their subject, and, secondly, by association to seek to attach some of their subject’s glamour to themselves. Barrick fails to avoid this double pitfall. But beyond this, he does not, either through the quality of his own writing or in what he struggles to say about John’s verse, convey any sense of the sheer copiousness and fluent invention of John’s verbal imagination.

I have only one of John’s collections on my shelves, Tennis and Sex and Death (Peterloo, 1989), which I bought in June of that year, though I have read a good number of other pieces elsewhere. He wrote some startlingly vigorous verse – acerbic, often deliberately confrontational and, indeed, scabrous, qualities he clearly relished transmitting. The existential paranoia and the sense of being forever cheated by hidden powers, half-comically presented in “The Examiners” (to which one of those who commented on Dwayne Barrick’s eulogy referred) seems to have been a frequent theme. Perhaps it also drove or reflected some of his political attitudes insofar as he made those known. His keen desire for the UK to leave the EU after nearly fifty years of membership and his delight at the outcome of the 2016 referendum perhaps sprang from a similar impulse, as I think it perhaps did for many who voted as he had done to leave.

The closing poem of John’s 1989 volume riffs off Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” from his 1974 collection High Windows. (On the back cover of my copy, Larkin is quoted approvingly from an Observer review.) It is called “They Fuck You Up, Do Publishers (A Farewell To Secker and Warburg)”. Though Secker and Warburg had published John’s first three books, they and he parted company with Tennis and Sex and Death. The epigraph John gives the poem indicates that the poem appeared in The Times Literary Supplement in the summer of 1989. John quotes himself: “I would not part acrimoniously from the publishers who brought out three books for me. Let me dedicate to them the following verses.” Here is the poem:

They fuck you up, do publishers.
Against them there is no defence.
No letter, postcard, phone-calls stirs
The puddle of their indolence.

Each author’s fucked up in his turn.
Each contract is a poison pellet.
Especially must poets learn
That verse don’t sell, and they don’t sell it.

Man hands on manuscript to man,
Who leaves the thing in St Tropez.
Get out as quickly as you can
And write a television play.

I have no idea if John’s MS of Tennis and Sex and Death was inadvertently left by the publisher’s agent “in St Tropez”, but the wittily expressed bitterness and a kind of inverted cynicism make for an amusing valediction. Harry Chambers at Peterloo would stick by John through a further five entertaining books.

Clive Watkins