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I don't understand why poets
are quick to pick up trivialities,
but are
terrified of writing about
passions. I remember it was Stendhal who
was praising Byron at the
time, because he said here is a great
contemporary who writes
of human passions, and this is something
that has complete gone
out of fashion
[Rosemary
Tonks interviewed by Peter Orr]
No I É go to the cinema,
I particularly like it
when the fog is thick...
...the fogs! The fogs! The cinemas!
[from 'The
Sofas, Sogs and Cinemas']
Rosemary Lightband
(nee Tonks) died in April 2014. Rosemary Tonks will live forever. I, self
appointed president of the Tonks Preservation Society, first entered into her
gaudy coloured, high art glossolalish, impressively contradictory world in a
light and lithe anthology edited by Edward Lucie-Smith (Hello twitter
friend!). I believe it was called British Poetry since 1945 and it had a horrible blue and yellow
striped cover, presumably inspired by vomiting in the bathroom.
My first thoughts on the book after a nonchalant flick through were: What's
with the idea that these poets are modern? can a book remain contemporary? No. In
a hundred years it will be in the bin, along with the rest of the scum my
parent's generation pissed into the flower filled gutters of the 60s.
Fortunately for our facebook generation, poetry from our parents era will be
buried with all the horrible acres of miserable art in divans deeper than
tombs, mixing with all their cheap wine and unimportant chit chat. What
offended me most about the anthology other than that no-one had managed to
improve on (or get anywhere near) Eliot, was that Sylvia Plath was missing
(she was added to the second edition), but then, she wasn't actually British,
or was she (by marriage?). I'm confused. I remain confused.
Fame. The anthology contained several poets who made it big, which can't have
been particularly hard in the bleak decades of art and verse that followed
the swinging sixties. Anyway, somehow, despite the casual ineptitude of the
Group, the Movement and other idiotic, bardic criminals that dogged the era,
some poets from the Penguin anthology stumbled down a road to nowhere. I
don't remember their names and neither do you. The famous anthologized poets
were Seamus Heaney (just getting started with his potato digging shtick),
Basil Bunting (who!?) (BB had an absolutely incredible poem in the
anthology), Roger McGough, Ted Hughes, Dylan Thomas (verbally accosted by a
lesser poet in the introduction) and, arriving fashionably late to the word
table, Rosemary Tonks. 'Fame fame fickle fame', as Morissey would have it,
and as Rosemary equally might have hinted at in 'Done for!':
Take care with whom you
mix in life
...
If you make love to the
wrong person
In some old building with
its fabric of dirt,
As clouds of witchcraft,
nitro-glycere, and cake
Brush by (one autumn
night) still green
Not so much as make love to the wrong person, Rosemary Tonks married the
wrong man (at least for poetry's sake), divorced him and then abandoned
poetry (a la Rimbaud) to live a sedate Christian life (definitely not a la
Rimbaud). Stylistically always highly assured, Rosemary Tonks was certainly
never going to forgotten. She was far too chic and lively for the boring sods
around her (including many critics). Tonks wrote for a different audience, or
as Auden suggests, her poetry created its own, more refined, audience.
However, as previously mentioned, she didn't try too hard to be remembered.
Instead she pissed off into the distance, leaving just two complete
collections and a BBC documentary explanatorily titled the Poet who Vanished.
Whether she vanished
or not, the only decent argument worth having about Rosemary Tonks is the
most facile one. The meta question: Was she a good poet? Unfortunately, if
fortune favours the trite, the verbs and nouns that surround the Tonks legacy
have split apart so waywardly that the answer, if there is an answer, will
always end up being elusively both yin and yang, both oui and non. Was she a
good poet? Yes and no.
I sniffed you to quench
my thirst,
As one sniffs in the sky
huge, damp sheets of lightning
That bring down the
Chablis
[from
'Hydromaniac']
Perhaps a poet can be good and bad at the same time. Perhaps in the same
three lines. Tonks' imagery is splendid as a summer rose on a H.D.-enamelled
Pound-pounded coin. Here she uses big colour concepts concepts like the sky
and storms, coupled with a classic francophile-style decadently dazed
eroticism, it doesn't fail, but then imagine her antecedents failing
(Eliot/Pound Dadaists, Baudelaire), failure is completely out of the
question. However Tonks' poetry is also quite bad, listen to the line ending
noun Chablis,
listen again, Chablis. Do you hear it wobble? it's a bad note, it's not poetic, not
there, not then. It sounds effing shite, the dull ring of the word puts me of
my Chablis (it's Champagne for me), though Rosie, it could have been Rose,
or, well, anything but Chablis.
The most pressing influence on Tonks in terms of style and tone were not the
grand French poets and artists she cited in interviews. Stylistically Dame
Edith Sitwell is her most formative forbearer, here is the great dame dancing
with Gods in 'Neptune - polka':
Where the waves seem
chiming haycocks
I dance the polka; there
Stand Venus ' Children in
their gay frocks
Whist the younger poet encounters 'Orpheus in Soho':
The little bars as full
of dust as a stale cake,
None of these places
would exist without Orpheus
And how well they know
it.
Roman gods, Bacchanalian orgies, self conscious exoticism. The decadent
flowering of Sitwell runs so strongly through Tonks' hedonistic cafe
outpourings that it is hard to imagine Tonks as a separate entity, or the
same poet, without Edith Sitwell. Therefore it is no great surprise to learn
that the poets lived around the corner from each other in trendy Hempstead
and, according to Neil Astly, were regular 'hobnobbers' in the extremely naff
seeming, London literary (read cheddar and Chablis) scene.
The problem with dismissing Rosemary Tonks verse out of hand is that it
disregards one of the most colourful poetic lives. As the poem 'Bedouin of
the London evening' alleges, she spent 'ten years in your cafes and your
bedrooms'. It is important to recall that poets are not just figures on
paper, that is why boring shits like Francis Berry do not make good poets. We
want poets to be mad like Byron (at least, I do). Tonks was a Wildean
aesthetic minstrel with looks, great taste and a port addiction, she could
never truly be bad, she knew how to live. Life is a primary colour, knowing
how to live is more important than knowing how to write. She also talked up a
storm in interviews:
I want to show people
that the world is tremendous, and that is more
important than making
notes on even the most awful contemporary ills.
One wants to raise people
up, not cast them down.
[Rosemary
Tonks interviewed by Peter Orr]
The contradictions in her world were everywhere. Whilst protesting not to
like or enjoy, promoting her work via talks and recitals, (something she said
'killed' Dylan Thomas), Rosemary was also one of the biggest party animals in
the poetry world. In her twenties and thirties she embodied every quality of
the ideal poet: Mystical. Essential, yet somehow not quite on point. Tonks
crafted her own magic but seemed equally happy to squander it (in verse as in
life); her inevitable descent into madness led her to disown her entire back
catalogue, something a number of sixties poets should have had the decency to
do:
Devils gain access though
the mind; printed books carry,
each one, an evil mind,
which enters your mind
[Rosemary
Tonks quoted by Neil Ghastly
in 'Bedouin of the London evening']
Forever aloof, spinning with the fickle literary world and then turning her
back on it, like a Royal Ballet Principal slipping in a pas de deux. In the
end, to deliberately misquote Larkin, what will survive of Rosemary Tonks is
art.
©
Charlie Baylis 2015
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