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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Nonsense Wins

Nonsense Wins

L.A.G. Strong and John Pudney are both competent writers. Yet their poems lack the power to pierce the skin of events and reveal a hidden world. One can forgive a poet anything but ordinariness.

Walking where he could not choose,
Aaron Geake wore out his shoes.
Now his bare and easy feet
Pad along the golden street.

Mr Strong’s epitaph on a village postman depends for its effect solely on whimsy and the automatic structure of the verse.

I’ve got new weapons, mother, in my pack,
As good as money can buy
To improve my chances of getting there and back.
Mother, don’t cry . . .

Mr Pudney’s ‘Twentieth Century Valediction’ establishes a different set of mannerisms – modern, with a jolting slangy rhythm, but still without a centre. Mr Pudney’s poetry was a war rocket, dazzling the popular imagination when any poem about death in the Armed Services could get a quick response. Now he holds up the rocket stick for us to admire. Much less competent writers succeed, where these two have failed, just by being bold enough to concentrate on the core of personal experience. Stevie Smith, bless her, is one of these.

Dark was the day for Childe Rolandine the artist
When she went to work as a secretary-typist,
And as she worked she sang this song
Against oppression and the rule of wrong:
‘It is the privilege of the rich
To waste the time of the poor . . .’

page 343

She is a jewel, a joy and a delight. The large solemn remarks of Mr Pudney and the rural epitaphs of Mr Strong have no chance at all in her company. By simply writing down her real thoughts she has produced nonsense poems as good as those of Edward Lear, several exemplary satires, and a few lyrics which could have come from a lost Blake manuscript. It all seems to depend on being yourself; but not all of us have her gift for it.

1958 (169)