Tag: poems

Brian Patten, Poet of Human Nature

On October 2nd, it was National Poetry Day in the UK. Even the Archbishop of York took part by reciting a poem on his internet postings. Wisely, he chose to recite a poem by our Poet Laureat, Simon Armitage, who is a Yorkshireman.

The day was observed just a few days after the death of one of my favourite and influential poets, Brian Patten. He died on September 29th.
We shared the same birthday year and month and I was privileged to meet him in the 1970’s not long after his first published poems, Little Johnny’s Confession. I have my signed copy along with several others he also signed.
He had already made a name for himself through an anthology of poems which he shared with Roger McGough and Adrian Henri. ‘The Mersey Sound’ earned them the title, The Liverpool Poets, and it keyed into a remarkable time in that city’s life which began with The Beatles, Cilla Black and all who played at the Cavern Club. The vibrancy of Liverpool is legendary, especially  because so much emerged from characters formed from hardship, poverty and in the face of an under-dog mentality conferred upon it from elsewhere. It is a city of broad culture, amazing architecture and deep humour. The Liverpool poets captured all that and their stated aim to make poetry accessible to all bore great fruit.

Brian Patten was to go on to write poetry which addressed the human condition with humour and with a sense that, at heart, it is love which holds things together. Sometimes this love is mixed with loss and with a searching that gives impetus to our exploring. So, Brian would say that it is often in times of stress people turn to poetry, including many who have dismissed it as, ‘not for them’.
He also said that “poetry helps us to understand what we’ve forgotten to remember. It reminds us of things that are important to us when the world overtakes us emotionally.”

In the 1970’s when I was attempting to deal with what direction my life was seeking to take, including wrestling with what my vocation might be and who I am as a person, it was the poetry of Brian Patten which became one of the anchors in a time of uncertainty.
So I discovered in his collection, The Irrelevant Song, a poem which told me that It is time to tidy up my life! At a pivotal time of personal change I read:

Into your body has leaked this message.
No conscious actions, no broodings
have brought the thought upon you.
It is time to take into account
what has gone and what has replaced it.
Living your life according to no plan,
The decisions are numerous and
The ways to go are one.

The whole poem contained a huge message for me as it addressed inner thoughts, issues and feelings that I had deliberately not dealt with. At the end of the poem I was directed that You must withdraw your love from that which would kill your love.
That came to mean for me the distractions, the claims on me that was wasted in Irrelevance! Time to get serious in my intentions. Otherwise I would discover the power of hurt which leads to self-hate. I was reminded that tenderness is the weapon of one whose love is neither perfect nor complete.
The way forward then was to cultivate that tenderness and kindness, that would set me on a journey towards discovering more and more the power of love. It didn’t take long for me to discover that seeking perfection in love leads to God.

What I discovered in the poetry of Brian Patten was really two things.
One was that poetry has a way of reaching into the heart and soul of life and revealing new meaning. Brian’s style was partly playful and hints of Liverpool humour abound but there is a seriousness which I cannot ignore. It directly touches my very being with challenge and with a call to become more true to oneself.
The other thing I discovered was the power of words and, in their use, the responsibility  that brings. So much pain is caused by the misuse of words! Deliberate hurts thrown into peoples’ lives. There is a warning in Brian’s poem, Having taken to necessary precautions, (Notes to the Hurrying Man p.23)
“Flowers won’t cover the hurts, the half-inch deaths
we pile up; a rose the size of two fists
won’t cover a pinprick of hating.
Dreams larger than ourselves we killed,
not wanting our smallness measured against them…”

So, in another poem, “The Astronaut,” (Little Johnny’s Confession) he suggests,
We will take a trip
to the planets inside us
where love is the astronaut.”

It is this profound insight, which takes me towards an understanding of a poet who began life in poverty and turned loneliness into aloneness and who through experience used words to express the almost inexpressible, which has drawn me to him and helped me on life’s journey.

I do not know where he has gone now. There are hints in some later poetry of a kind of searching for faith, particularly in Storm Damage. Or maybe he still believed what he wrote in a poem in Little Johnny’s Confession, that “death is the only grammatically correct full stop.!
I rather hope not. A poem he wrote is often used as a reading at funerals.
So many different lengths of time:

How long does a man live after all?
A thousand days or only one?
One week or a few centuries?
How long does a man spend living or dying
and what do we mean when we say gone forever?

Adrift in such preoccupations, we seek clarification.
We can go to the philosophers
but they will weary of our questions.
We can go to the priests and rabbis
but they might be busy with administrations.

So, how long does a man live after all?
And how much does he live while he lives?
We fret and ask so many questions –
then when it comes to us
the answer is so simple after all.

A man lives for as long as we carry him inside us,
for as long as we carry the harvest of his dreams,
for as long as we ourselves live,
holding memories in common, a man lives.

His lover will carry his man’s scent, his touch:
his children will carry the weight of his love.
One friend will carry his arguments,
another will hum his favourite tunes,
another will still share his terrors.

And the days will pass with baffled faces,
then the weeks, then the months,
then there will be a day when no question is asked,
and the knots of grief will loosen in the stomach
and the puffed faces will calm.
And on that day he will not have ceased
but will have ceased to be separated by death.

Photo: National Gallery

Not separated by death…Roger McGough spoke of being laid low by his friend’s death adding, “RIP – Rest in Poetry”
May he find love and joy in the poetry of heaven and in God who gave him the words.

[Mr G ~ 4th October 2025]

The Poet who couldn’t be silent.

Osip Mandelstam, a Russian poet who could not be silent.

Osip Mandelstam was one of the most important and inspiring Russian poets in the 20th century. He was born in Poland but moved to St Petersburg where he was educated.
He was introduced to me in one of Bishop Richard Holloway’s books. He was writing about how ideas for sermons develop and he likened the process to the way Osip approached his poetry. According to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Osip’s wife, in her memoirs Hope against Hope and Hope Abandoned, Mandelstam he began his poetry process by listening to the ether and the words came to him. He acted as a midwife bringing those words to birth. Quite often, he didn’t write them down. He recited the poems to his wife who acted ‘like a Dictaphone.’ This Process , minus the dictaphone, is not dissimilar to that of writing a sermon, hence the illustration by Richard Holloway.

As well as learning that insight, I brushed against the poetry itself and the revelation of his life. It has been written of him that he had a prophetic understanding of the suffering  of the twentieth century ‘which he transformed into luminous poetry. The same commentator said of him that he was, ‘childish and wise, joyous and angry, complex and simple. He was outspoken and brave which bordered on foolishness. He was unhappy about the way Russian Society was developing under Stalin and he felt a prophetic need to use his poetry to warn people of how dangerous it all was.
Needless to say, he became a person of interest to the authorities and he suffered persecution at a time when the dictator, Stalin, was growing in power.
In view of this, it was probably unwise to write a poem, a lampoon about the dictator. In  May 1934 he wrote, of Stalin,

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.
But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,
the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,
the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.
One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom
He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.
He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

It was, of course, the most dangerous thing he wrote. When he chanced to meet his fellow poet, Boris Pasternak, he recited the poem to him. Pasternak was filled with dread and fear. Stalinism had eyes and ears everywhere. It was even suggested that the very pavements had ears! Russia was fast becoming a heinous dictatorship. Pasternack immediately told Mandelstam, “I heard nothing, Strange and terrible things are happening right now, You said nothing!”

Though the poem remained unpublished, the authorities, proving Pasternack right, got wind of it.
Stalin began to play with Mandelstam as a cat plays with a mouse.
He was arrested, interrogated, tortured and labelled a subversive to the State.
He was imprisoned in Moscow and then exiled to the provincial city of Voronezh. Here and previously in Moscow, he was at his most creative. The Voronezh and Moscow notebooks, published still today are the outpourings of the poetic genius of a man who perhaps sensed he had little time but with much to say.

Eventually Stalin’s insecurity got the better of him. Like so many dictators,  he fed only on hatred, fear, lust and an inner weakness which needed power to sustain it. It is hard to get into the inner being of such a person. Perhaps poets manage it because so many who challenge society do so through the medium of poetry (alongside art and music). A generalization, I know!
At the age of 48, in a transit camp in the east, he died of a ‘heart attack’, His body was dumped in an open grave, identified only by a tag marked on his big toe with his prison number. Stalin could rest, at last. easy in his bed! Or could he?Nadezhda took up her pen. Osip would be remembered. His words would be read, quoted, pondered over. His creativity would be celebrated. His desire for justice, light and peace would be struggled for.
Stalin? Only the suffering he inflicted is remembered. Who he was as a human being was never fully known whilst he was alive and certainly is not of interest now.

This week, along with many, I am thinking of another Russian. He was 47 when he died. There are similarities in his story and that of Osip Mandelstam. Not least that what he stood for lives on through his wife, Yulia.  Osip Mandelstam / Alexei Navalny cannot be silent and nor  must we.

One day people will forget Putin. Dictators fade away but those who stand up against them for goodness, kindness, generosity and love. They will always matter. So Mandelstam wrote:

Having deprived me of seas, of running and flying away,
and allowed me only to walk upon the violent earth,
what have you achieved? A splendid result:  
you could not stop my lips from moving.

[Osip Mandelstam. May 1935]

Maya Angelou said that birds sing because they have a song. Mandelstam & Navalny have much still to sing to us.

[Mr G]

From Mr G: There are quite a number of translations of the poem, the Stalin Epigram. The one here is from Against Forgetting, edited by Carolyn Forché, translated by W.S. Merwin and Clarence Brown, published by W.W. Norton & Co. Copyright © 1989 by W.S. Merwin.

The photo of the Robin is from the collection left to us by my friend Joyce Smith. A remembrance that she was one of those who never failed to sing of God’s love.