Anarchy 66/Adrian Mitchell, poet 1966

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Adrian Mitchell, poet 1966

JOHN GARFORTH

Poets can be dan­ger­ous fel­lows, not wash­ing, ques­tion­ing the basic struc­ture of our so­ci­ety, travel­ling on trains with­out pay­ing their fares, re­fus­ing to con­form and lead­ing dubi­ous sex lives. Lun­atics, lovers and so forth. Plato was the first aspir­ing polit­i­cian to sug­gest ex­clud­ing such people from so­ci­ety.

    … the people of Britain, who were never con­sulted,

    are paying for the cold war
    paying in every sense
    while the cost of the cold war goes up and up.
    We will pay for kicking Red China in the teeth
    We will pay for arming the South African fascists
    We’ll pay eventually

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    If we don’t first have to make the final payment
    of our own lives and our children’s lives.

  The man­darins of our cul­ture may claim that this is not real poetry. Its tone is so dif­fer­ent from The Waste­land. “I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones.” They claim that all propa­ganda is bad art. Which is not to say the poems must not have a theme, or that poets must not try to change our way of see­ing the world. It means only that poets must not write about polit­ics or com­ment on the so­ci­ety around them.

  But since Chris­to­pher Logue col­lec­ted a £1 from each of his friends and pub­lished his first volume of poetry at their ex­pense, estab­lish­ing him­self as a poet, the man­darins have been los­ing in­flu­ence. In 1958 Logue pub­lished a broad­sheet, “To My Fellow Art­ists” and went around sell­ing it him­self. Now his latest broad­sheet “I am going to vote Labour be­cause God votes Labour” has been sold in all the best book­shops and has re­ceived at­ten­tion in the press.

  Logue is well known through­out the coun­try as a per­former, be­cause of his read­ings in can­teens for Centre 42 and be­cause of the Poetry and Jazz re­cit­als. He and Yevtu­shenko and Allen Gins­berg found a new audi­ence for poetry, leav­ing the way open for new poets. The fin­est of whom is Adrian Mitchell.

    On the wall of a dripping cave a stunted man with weak eyes wrote:

    “It’s your standard of living

    Don’t let the Bronze Age ruin it.”

  Mitchell’s shy, tense and mum­bling per­form­ances are now fam­il­iar to a wide audi­ence. His slight build is em­phas­ised by the jeans and boiler jacket that he af­fects, mak­ing him look like the be­wild­ered Johnnie Ray on a massive and alien stage. (He would no doubt pre­fer a com­par­ison with Brecht’s pro­letar­ian gear.) A flatly re­gional ac­cent is ideally suited for snarl­ing out lines such as, “Tom Sawyer’s heart has cooled, his in­genu­ity flowers at Cape Can­averal.” Each time the audi­ence laughs, or ap­plauds the end of a poem, he seems to grow more bitter. Any re­cent sign of relax­a­tion, the hint of a smile, do not alter his in­tensely sav­age per­sona.

  A master of the Tra­falgar Square rallies and the Beat bar­be­cues at the Albert Hall, a pup­ular draw at the St. Pan­cras Town Hall—he is clearly doing some­thing quite dif­fer­ent from T. S. Eliot, who wrote for his six friends. Mitchell’s emo­tion is not shared by The Times or the BBC (those arbit­ers of good taste), which is why they would call him hys­ter­ical, but he speaks with and for a massive sec­tion of the com­mun­ity who have no place in the Stuffed Poets’ scheme of things.

Most people ignore most poetry
because
most poetry ignores most people.

  Mitchell is, of course, hys­ter­ical, and he is naïve. There is none of the aw­ful know­ing­ness that we find in the New Move­ment. His power as a poet lies in the strength of his emo­tion, rather than in his verbal ele­gance. But this should be easy for us to ap­pre­ci­ate since

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Allen Gins­berg broke through the form bar­rier. We can com­pre­hend the slack rhythms, run­ning lines and sud­den, jagged stops (just as we com­pre­hend that a lack of rhyme can still be poetry). If we ac­cept this, the things that seem weak­nesses in Mitchell be­come part of his arm­oury.

  His pras­ing and his wit some­times parody the ad­man, and some­times have the slick­ness of an ad­man. “Snow white was in the News of the World—Virgin Lived with Seven Midgets, Court Told. And in they psych­iatric ward an old woman drib­bles as she mum­bles about a family of human bears, they ate por­ridge, yes Miss Goldi­locks of course they did.” From a poem that com­mun­icates to every moron who failed his eleven plus, never learnt to read more than the Daily Mirror, and has his ignor­ance ex­ploited by the moguls of the colour comics and com­mer­cial tele­vi­sion. Salts of the earth, of course, but Mitchell com­mun­icates through a ver­nac­ular that is al­most uni­versal (it sells every­thing from bras­si­eres to Bent­leys), and thereby demon­strates that lan­guage is the class bar­rier rather than in­tel­li­gence.