Ian Seed

Only in the Sun, Selected Poetry 1964-74, by William Wantling, 186pp, £30

Tangerine Press

www.eatmytangerine.com

I first came across William Wantling’s poetry back in January 1975 when I was a sixth former. Up until then, most of my scant knowledge of poetry was confined to what I had learnt at school. For ‘A’ level English, I was studying the Selected Poems of Edward Thomas (a poet I admire, by the way). I still remember going into WH Smiths in the High Street in Leicester, picking up Penguin Modern Poets 12, opening its pages at random, and coming across this:

Camille Camille Camille Camille

(Cream Honey Butter Fruit Drool Camille

Hoo!

Ha!

Oboy!

I’m a dog)

(From For a Girl Who Doesn’t Like Her Name)

What I loved about this was its crazy, zany quality and the fact that it was completely different from anything I had associated with poetry before. It strikes me now that this has a kind of 2^nd generation, New York School quality about it, though Wantling would never normally be linked with the likes of Kenward Elmslie. In any case, in those days I had never heard of ‘New York poets’, and knew next to nothing of ‘beat’ writers, with whom Wantling is usually linked as an ‘outsider beat’, nor had I heard of the British ‘underground’. It was, in fact, probably Wantling’s poems which first put me in touch with all the exciting (and not-so-exciting) things going on in the so-called small presses when I ordered a copy of Wantling’s Sick Fly from Peter Finch’s Second Aeon Books.

Anyway, to return to the bookshop, the next poem I came across was called Conversation upon brushing against the taut form of a susceptible stranger on a crowded city bus. This was not the sort of title I would ever have imagined Edward Thomas or even Ted Hughes using. I was suddenly made aware of the possibilities of poetry not only in terms of playfulness, but also in being able to write about all sorts of weird things. Again, ‘playful’ is not a term one would normally use when referring to Wantling’s poetry, though this was one of the qualities that first attracted to me to him.

I suppose that what drew me at another level, however, and what shocked and disturbed me at the same time, was his subject matter - war, drugs, crime, sex and alienation –, his raw emotion springing out from the page, and his direct, colloquial (I suppose one would say ‘anti-literary’) language (this was the pre-punk era), for example:

All the fucking time

I was in San Quentin

I kept remembering my

stinking bitch of an

old lady and how I’d

rode the beef for her

and how she’d stopped

writing in 9 months

(from All the fucking time).

Or:

To-

day I got funny looks when

I walked around the town in

my go-aheads. The whore-

houses have been closed

since 1953 and when I

offered to eat a girl

up she looked shocked

and asked me if I’ve

seen a doctor about my

sex problem. The boys

don’t play my game

either.

(from In the Enemy Camp).

Wantling’s dilemma - in some ways comparable to that of the First World War poets - was how to transform his experiences into poetry while at the same time remaining true to the ‘reality’ of them. In Poetry, he articulates the problem thus:

I’ve got to be honest. I can

make good word music and rhyme

at the right times and fit words

together to give people pleasure

and even sometimes take their

breath away – but it always

somehow turns out kind of phony.

Edward Lucie-Smith suggested (in his Introduction to The Awakening, 1967), that many would ‘hasten to condemn such a contrast as sentimental and naïve’. However, as Lucie-Smith goes on to point out, ‘Poetry is a poem about a man who is stabbed in a prison exercise yard, and who dies with the bright froth of lung-blood on his lips. His breath has been taken away from him as well, and one of the problems which he leaves behind him when he dies is the matter of how to turn the event into art without violating its essential ugliness’ (Lucie-Smith in Wantling, p. 8).

For obvious reasons – subject matter, anti-literary language – Wantling is often compared to Charles Bukowski, and has indeed been relegated to sit somewhere in Bukowski’s shadow. But there are important differences, which make them very different poets. Firstly, Wantling, unlike Bukowski, is hugely attentive to form (though this is less the case with some of his later poems of the 70s), a point often missed by those too obsessed with the larger-than-life myth of Wantling. For example, he wrote sonnets, haiku, poems in syllabic counts, short-lined free verse, long lines in the manner of Robinson Jeffers, prose poems, and could use rhyme skilfully and unobtrusively:

There

high on a hill

a man plows his field.

The sun warm, the day still

and the air

still also, a shield

for the earth.

And below

blind from new birth

hide the young of a hare.

(from Dirge in Spring).

Even the seeming casualness of his free verse is deceptive. In just a few lines, Wantling is able to sum up a relationship, a situation, or a state of mind, while at the same time making a statement about the way we live:

this time

they want me

for Living without Believing

for Working without Slavery

Playing without Patterns

and loving without Misery

please don’t give me away?

(from Letter from Kickapoo (pop. 250))

Another important difference between Wantling and Bukowski, one that to my mind makes him a more rewarding poet than Bukowski, is his concern which goes beyond the immediate world of war, prison or whatever, to a kind of transcendent reality. This is shown clearly in his poem The Awakening, where he picks up a wounded bee, holds it in his palm and thinks of the suffering he has witnessed in his life. But there is then a move beyond the suffering, which leads to a sense of release:

I became angry at the unfair conflict suffered

by will and organism

I became just, I became unreasoned, I became

extravagant

I observed the bee, there, lying in my palm

I looked and I commanded in a harsh and angry shout –

STOP THAT!

Then it ceased to struggle, and somehow suddenly

became marvellously whole, and it arose

and it flew away

I stared, I was appalled, I was overwhelmed

with responsibility, and I knew not where to begin.

(from The Awakening)

Linked to this sense of transcendence is an awareness of his own, all-too-human limitations, which are, of course, our limitations too:

Like you I am quite vain

Kind only when frightened

Thoughtful only when necessary

Humble only in pain

(from Dialogue)

Wantling can write badly – and when he does it really is quite awful. Some of his first poems look as if he has, in the words of Professor Kevin Jones, ingested too much early Yeats too fast. I also think that the later poems of the 1970s are of a far lower quality than the poems of the 1960s, though I know a few people who would disagree with me on this. In the poems of the 1960s, one has the feeling of a man and a poet who is on a journey of discovery after some experiences (war, incarceration in San Quentin, heroin addiction) most of us in the western world have never had to go through. We are taken with him along his journey, and emerge somehow the better for it. In the poems of the 1970s, I have the feeling of a man who is falling apart, and the loose structure and Bukowski-tone of the poems have a frighteningly self-indulgent quality. Yet just before his death in 1974, with his last poems such as Style 1 and Style 7 ALIVE ALIVE, published post-humously in 7 on Style, we once again have that sense of form and of reaching beyond:

[…] Everything delighted

you: a rock. a tree. a bird. a

brown and freckled face. a pear. a

plum. a belt-buckle. Sea foam on

your tongue.

(from ALIVE ALIVE).

I have been talking so much about the poems that I have forgotten to say that Only in the Sun is the first substantial collection of Wantling’s poems to be published for over thirty years (Wantling died in 1974, aged 40). The fact that this collection is published at all seems to me nothing short of miraculous.

It is also truly a Blakean labour of love. Michael Curran of Tangerine Press has not only published, but produced the book himself. It comes handbound with cloth-covered boards and is a beautiful volume to look at and hold in your hands. Published in a limited edition!