I don't even like Daniel Craig
Matthew Stewart, Annie Fisher and Chris Edgoose chose their favourite funny-serious poems by Maria Taylor, Luke Kennard and Norman MacCaig.
First off, Matthew Stewart chooses 'Hypothetical' by Maria Taylor.
Hypothetical
A friend of mine asks me if I’d sleep with Daniel Craig,
would I make love to him or kick him out of bed?
Before I have time to answer, I’m in bed with Daniel Craig.
He’s stirring out of sleep, smelling of Tobacco Vanille,
he flatters my performance, asks if I’d like coffee.
‘Hang on,’ I say, ‘I did not sleep with you, Daniel Craig,
this is just a conversational frolic.’ My friend stands
in the corner of my bedroom. ‘You’ve gone too far,’ she says.
I’m pulling the duvet away from his Hollywood body
at exactly the moment my husband enters the room
I say, ‘Yes, this is exactly what it looks like, darling,
but it’s hypothetical, a mere conversational frolic.’
He’s threatening me. There are lawyers in the room.
My children begin to cry. I don’t even like Daniel Craig.It’s too late. The sheets are full of secreted evidence.
There are forensics in the room, covering my body
in blue powder, checking my skin for finger prints:
they match Daniel Craig’s. He doesn’t even know
he’s slept with me. My marriage is a dead gull.
My neighbours come into the room shaking heads,
oh dear oh dear oh dear. My husband has drawn lists
of all the things he wants to keep: a plasma screen,
an X Box, a collection of muesli coloured pebbles
from our holidays in Truro, ‘When you loved me!’
he snaps. My children will see a therapist after school.Daniel Craig is naked in a hypothetical sense,
telling me we can make this work. My friend smirks
behind a celebrity magazine featuring lurid details
of our affair. There are photos. We are on a beach
in the Dominican Republic, healthy and tanned
both kicking sand at a playful Joan Collins.‘I don’t even like Daniel Craig,’ I tell the ceiling.
Matthew says, "Maria Taylor’s ‘Hypothetical’ is terrific fun but with an unsettling streak running through the entire poem. It’s a play on what might or might not be possible, questioning the foundations on which we build our relationships, merging fantasy and the everyday. As such, it’s typical of her knack for challenging our view of reality. What’s more, it offers us a delicious blend of sex and humour, which only adds to its attraction. The erotic is often painfully funny, and Maria Taylor’s poem makes me wince and grin in equal measure."
Watch and listen to Maria Taylor read 'Hypothetical' on YouTube
Next, Annie Fisher picks ‘My Friend’ by Luke Kennard.
MY FRIEND
My friend, your irresponsibility and your unhappiness delight me. Your financial problems and your expanding waist-line are a constant source of relief. I am so happy you drink more than I do and that you don’t seem to enjoy it as much. When I hear you being arrogant and argumentative, my heart leaps. Your nihilism is fast becoming the richest source of meaning in my life and it is my pleasure to watch you speaking harshly to others. When you gossip about our mutual acquaintances I sigh with satisfaction. Your childish impatience delights me. The day you threw a tantrum in the middle of the supermarket was the happiest day of my life. Sometimes you say something which reveals you to be rather stupid – and I love you then, but not as much as I love you when you are callously manipulative. Your promiscuity is like a faithful dog at my side. When you talk about your petty affairs, you try to make them sound grand and important – I cherish your gaucheness and your flippancy. At times it seems you are actually without a sense of humour: I bless the day I met you. You bully people younger and weaker than you – and when others tell me about this, I am pleased. Sometimes I think you are incapable of love – and I am filled with the contentment of waking on a Saturday morning to realise I don’t have to go to work. I often suspect that you do not even like me and my laughter overflows like water from a blocked cistern.
Annie says, "I love the delicious pomposity of the voice and the way the whole thing gathers speed without drawing breath – no room for line or stanza breaks. I love how it glories in the unspoken joys of schadenfreude, nudging us knowingly in the ribs and reminding us of something we’d not readily admit – that our friendships are not always all they might appear to be; that we are comparing ourselves all the time; that our spoken words conceal mean-spirited thoughts. It’s a good antidote to Carol King’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ which always makes me feel guilty!"
Lastly, Chris Edgoose chooses Norman MacCaig’s ‘Ballade of Good Whisky’.
Ballade of Good Whisky
You whose ambition is to swim the Minch
Or write a drum concerto in B flat
Or run like Bannister or box like Lynch
Or find the Ark wrecked on Mt Ararat –
No special training’s needed, thin or fat,
You’ll do it if you never once supplant
As the basis of your commissariat
Glenfiddich, Bruichladdich and Glengrant.My own desires are small. In fact, I flinch
From heaving a heavenly Hindu from her ghat
Or hauling Loch Ness monsters, inch by inch,
Out of their wild and watery habitat.
I’ve no desire to be Jehoshaphat
Or toy with houris fetched from the Levant.
But give to me – bis dat qui cito dat –
Glenfiddich, Bruichladdich and Glengrant.I would drink down, and think the feat a cinch,
The Congo, Volga, Amazon, La Platte,
And Tweed as chaser – a bargain, this, to clinch
In spite of nota bene and caveat
(Though what a feast must follow after that
Of Amplex, the divine deodorant!) –
If they ran – hear my heart go pit-a-pat! –
Glenfiddich, Bruichladdich and Glengrant.Envoi
Chris! (whether perpendicular or flat
Or moving rather horribly aslant)
Here is a toast that you won’t scunner at –
Glenfiddich, Bruichladdich and Glengrant!
Chris says; “This isn’t a laugh-out-loud poem but it is my favourite kind of humorous verse – the kind that doesn’t take itself seriously while taking Life and Poetry extremely seriously indeed. Its humour is carried on a sense of awe at the extraordinary technical skill and learning of the poet. It’s poetry confident enough in itself that it is willing to take enormous risks with prosody and rhyme – risks which pay off with more than just a smile, there is a sense that the arrogance of virtuosity – of human hubris itself – is being pricked, and when deflated, found to be nothing more than silly (for example, see how the poet rhymes ‘horribly aslant’ with ‘Glengrant’). Poems like these are in the tradition of Byron, which comes to us filtered through the likes of WH Auden. They’re poems which bring us down to size by confining profound insights within such tight structural parameters that they seem ready to burst. Also, I love that I get a namecheck in this, written in 1962, ten years before I was born – I believe MacCaig is toasting his friend Hugh MacDiarmid (whose English name was Christopher Grieve).”
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These. Are. AMAZING. Poems!!!!