FROM THE GUARDIAN
Peter Porter: the ultimate conspiracy theorist
One of the glories of his poetry, and the joys of his conversation, was his ability to see connections everywhere
A few weeks ago a BBC radio producer and I went to interview the poet Peter Porter for a Radio 4 programme on his work. One of the finest poets since the second world war, Peter had been ill for some time and at 81 was increasingly frail, but the sight of the microphone stirred his interest and he spoke vigorously and at length, ranging far beyond the prepared questions. Several other recent visitors confirmed that he was still wholly engaged in thought and argument. At a very late stage he added a new poem to the text of The Rest on the Flight: New Selected Poems, which is to appear in May.
He also found time to loathe the prospect of a Tory victory in the election and had sent a pair of canvassers away with their tails between their legs. "We can't believe you live here," they said, but Peter had occupied his flat in Bayswater for half a century and seen off Dame Shirley Porter among others. An undoctrinaire socialist, Peter recorded: "I have never said sir to anyone since I was 17 years old"
In a sense Peter was the ultimate conspiracy theorist: everything, his conversation showed, was connected. Life was both blessing and nightmare; art offered both a near-divine transcendence and a stained confession. There sometimes appears, he wrote, "a shape to the world, / more real than time, more absolute than music". At the same moment, behind the fabric of reality, "creatures with shears spit and wait".
The first poem of his I was really excited by was "A Hoplite's Helmet", about the surviving metal helmet of an ancient Greek soldier. The thing that excited me there, and in the rest of his work, was that it was fundamentally dramatic: it was written as it were from within its subject, so that the poem was an experience rather than a summary.
This is true throughout his work: in the early satires, in the reflections on art and literature, in the elegies and elsewhere. His great literary inspirations were Shakespeare and Robert Browning, and it shows.
Peter was not a conventionally religious man, but he made use of the imaginative scale offered by the meeting of religion and art. In his elegy for his first wife Jannice, he adopted the form used by the 17th century Bishop Henry King in "An Exequy". Elsewhere, less soberly he noted: "God's a super-director /who's terribly good at crowd scenes." Whatever his theme, his language could modulate from high formality to low demotic and back. As to poetic form, it is not quite true to describe him as a formalist: the vast body of his work contains poems of many kinds. He was also an extremely open-minded critic, both in print and on radio where he was a familiar voice for many years.
I knew Peter as a friend and teacher for over three decades, first visiting him in the same aerial cave in the late 1970s to interview him about his work and his contemporaries. In a sense that conversation never stopped. He made me laugh, he made me think and he seemed to have read everything.
There are those (mainly the English) who don't like to hear about things they don't know, and Peter was wasted on them. It was not that he was a conversational monopolist: he was as generous a listener as he was a friend, but he supposed that an interest in poetry, painting, music, politics (and the passing show of vanity that he satirised so well) was the stuff of life. Not having been to university himself, he also believed that knowledge was available to anyone who cared to seek it out: "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, / for which I thank the public libraries of Paddington and Westminster."
In our final interview Peter listened to a BBC archive recording of himself reading in 1960. We smiled at the RP accent he had gradually shed over half-a-century in England. In later life, his reputation in Australia rose as his absence came to seem less problematic, and he was a frequent visitor, haunted both by the landscapes of his birthplace and a difficult upbringing.
His was not a temperament that could be reconciled to the world – he was too much the perfectionist, too aware of mortality – but marriage to his second wife, Christine Berg, and the lives of children and grandchildren, brought him great happiness, though that was a feeling he tended to express with wry carefulness, as not to be taken for granted, "a cautious colour like afternoon", though he knew his good fortune, as his many friends knew theirs.
Peter Porter: the ultimate conspiracy theorist
One of the glories of his poetry, and the joys of his conversation, was his ability to see connections everywhere
A few weeks ago a BBC radio producer and I went to interview the poet Peter Porter for a Radio 4 programme on his work. One of the finest poets since the second world war, Peter had been ill for some time and at 81 was increasingly frail, but the sight of the microphone stirred his interest and he spoke vigorously and at length, ranging far beyond the prepared questions. Several other recent visitors confirmed that he was still wholly engaged in thought and argument. At a very late stage he added a new poem to the text of The Rest on the Flight: New Selected Poems, which is to appear in May.
He also found time to loathe the prospect of a Tory victory in the election and had sent a pair of canvassers away with their tails between their legs. "We can't believe you live here," they said, but Peter had occupied his flat in Bayswater for half a century and seen off Dame Shirley Porter among others. An undoctrinaire socialist, Peter recorded: "I have never said sir to anyone since I was 17 years old"
In a sense Peter was the ultimate conspiracy theorist: everything, his conversation showed, was connected. Life was both blessing and nightmare; art offered both a near-divine transcendence and a stained confession. There sometimes appears, he wrote, "a shape to the world, / more real than time, more absolute than music". At the same moment, behind the fabric of reality, "creatures with shears spit and wait".
The first poem of his I was really excited by was "A Hoplite's Helmet", about the surviving metal helmet of an ancient Greek soldier. The thing that excited me there, and in the rest of his work, was that it was fundamentally dramatic: it was written as it were from within its subject, so that the poem was an experience rather than a summary.
This is true throughout his work: in the early satires, in the reflections on art and literature, in the elegies and elsewhere. His great literary inspirations were Shakespeare and Robert Browning, and it shows.
Peter was not a conventionally religious man, but he made use of the imaginative scale offered by the meeting of religion and art. In his elegy for his first wife Jannice, he adopted the form used by the 17th century Bishop Henry King in "An Exequy". Elsewhere, less soberly he noted: "God's a super-director /who's terribly good at crowd scenes." Whatever his theme, his language could modulate from high formality to low demotic and back. As to poetic form, it is not quite true to describe him as a formalist: the vast body of his work contains poems of many kinds. He was also an extremely open-minded critic, both in print and on radio where he was a familiar voice for many years.
I knew Peter as a friend and teacher for over three decades, first visiting him in the same aerial cave in the late 1970s to interview him about his work and his contemporaries. In a sense that conversation never stopped. He made me laugh, he made me think and he seemed to have read everything.
There are those (mainly the English) who don't like to hear about things they don't know, and Peter was wasted on them. It was not that he was a conversational monopolist: he was as generous a listener as he was a friend, but he supposed that an interest in poetry, painting, music, politics (and the passing show of vanity that he satirised so well) was the stuff of life. Not having been to university himself, he also believed that knowledge was available to anyone who cared to seek it out: "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, / for which I thank the public libraries of Paddington and Westminster."
In our final interview Peter listened to a BBC archive recording of himself reading in 1960. We smiled at the RP accent he had gradually shed over half-a-century in England. In later life, his reputation in Australia rose as his absence came to seem less problematic, and he was a frequent visitor, haunted both by the landscapes of his birthplace and a difficult upbringing.
His was not a temperament that could be reconciled to the world – he was too much the perfectionist, too aware of mortality – but marriage to his second wife, Christine Berg, and the lives of children and grandchildren, brought him great happiness, though that was a feeling he tended to express with wry carefulness, as not to be taken for granted, "a cautious colour like afternoon", though he knew his good fortune, as his many friends knew theirs.
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