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 ‘Music is what I live for,’ says Peter Porter, whose collection of CDs and records of symphonies, string quartets, concertos, cantatas and operas overwhelm the books at his home |
Poet Porter keeps faith in music
Peter Porter’s latest collection of poems, Better Than God, reflects his ongoing worship of great composers, writes
Piers Plowright
Better Than God. By Peter Porter.
Picador Poetry £8.99
IT'S a truth universally acknowledged, says Peter Porter, that a Commonwealth poet coming to London must, sooner or later, live in Belsize Park Gardens.
For Porter it was sooner, shortly after he arrived from Australia at the beginning of the 1950s. But he didn’t stay there long.
For more than 40 years he has lived in a top-floor flat in one of those Paddington squares that were sleazy then and now shimmer with fresh paint and scaffolding. To reach the flat there are eight flights of stairs, one for each of Porter’s decades, and he reckons he’s been up and down Everest at least 10 times in the half of his life he’s been there.
No sign, though, of creative faltering. Better Than God, his latest collection of poems, is witty, profound, serious and light and there’s an unwritten question-mark behind the title. “Perhaps”, Porter writes in The Apprentice’s Sorcerer, a poem about the recent attempt by scientists in Switzerland to recreate the beginning of the universe, “the world will see/ A proof beyond its statutory Big Bang/ And hear that what the Morning Angels sang/ Was more than some wide-screened banality./ The love which moves the sun and other stars/ Is syntax-negligent, and may never parse.
This poem also points to a paradox in Porter’s work: brilliant with words, he knows their limits. “Music is what I live for,” he says. “I’d have been content to have been at a second violin desk in some great symphony orchestra.”
All round his big white easy chair, overwhelming the books, are LPs and CDs of symphonies, string quartets, concertos, cantatas, and operas, and if he had to choose one name to stick with, it would be Bach. Porter admires the Lutheran tradition that Bach worked in and if he himself is drawn to religion, it’s through the words of Cranmer’s Prayer Book, nearly as rich and muscular as Johann Sebastian’s music.
It was his great, great-grandfather, Christopher, who left Nottingham for Australia in 1853 and his great-grandfather, Robert, an architect, who built, among other necessary things, the Boggo Road Gaol in Queensland, and is the subject of another poem, one in which Porter drily sums up his ambivalent attitude towards Australia: “It’s all gone now – gaol, stockade/ The Porters cut to stem./ A moral, is there one? Invade!/ Australians know their land was made/By History for them.”
Not that Porter would reject his Australian-ness. He sees himself as part of both poetical worlds and had written hundreds of poems, most of them, he says, mercifully forgotten, before he left the New Country.
His poetic release, though, came from the discovery of WH Auden and the realisation that poetry could be about contemporary events and blazingly relevant to the way we live. “I don’t hold with Pure Poetry.” Here he mentions a name that I won’t, as well as Yeats on a bad day and at his most mystical.
The discovery of Auden and, alongside him, Robert Browning, is what may have turned Porter into a poet, it certainly released him from hack-work on the Brisbane Courier-Mail – “a far from Parnassian journal” – and prepared him for the freedoms and excitements of 1950s London, where he lived for a while on the fringes of Camden’s Bohemia with his then girlfriend, the writer Jill Neville.
He also became part of The Group, a circle of poets, including Alan Brownjohn and Peter Redgrove, who met to argue, criticise, and define the nature of poetry.
In 1964 he moved to west London with his first wife Janice and threw himself into the life of a full-time poet, with a little help from literary criticism, reviewing, and what he calls “gabbling away on the radio”.
Janice’s suicide 10 years later and the struggle to bring up two young daughters, must have had painful parallels with another loss, the early death of his mother in 1938 and his own subsequently difficult childhood. But Porter came through, winning a chain of awards in the 1980s, getting married for the second time [to Christine], and publishing a dozen highly praised books of poetry.
Since the millennium, he has produced three more poetry collections, been Poet in Residence at the Albert Hall – I forgot to ask him if that included declaiming verse through a megaphone in front of the bust of Sir Henry Wood – stood unsuccessfully for that poisoned podium, the Oxford Professorship of Poetry, and been made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.
And now, Better Than God. It’s a book to revel in, fun for believers and iconoclasts alike, full of the music he loves so much, obliquely and directly, and a hymn to the continuing power of poetry in a shallow image-laden age.
Porter ends the last poem of the book – River Quatrains, a witty and poignant flow of rivers past and present – with this verse: “I’m on a river bank. I think I see/ The farther side: a choice of nothingness/Or Paradise. My poems wait for me,/ They look away, they threaten and they bless.”
And should be read.
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