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THE PHILIP LARKIN SOCIETY

March 2010 Nomination: Livings [16 October/23 November/10 December 1971. From High Windows] Larkin always said that he hadn’t wanted to be a poet. What he hoped for was a life as a writer of prose fiction, a novelist: but after the two early novels it just hadn’t worked out. But the wish may have survived to give strength to some of his very best work. The late poems may be better, in their grounded richness, than the early novels were, or the unwritten ones might have been. The three poems that make up ‘Livings’ open like fictions, short stories perhaps. It is hard to get more matter-of-fact than ‘things like dips and feed’. The narrator of this first poem, business-man or commercial traveller, even locates himself as might the hero of a 19th century novel, at the —— Hotel in —ton’, where he reads his newspaper, the –shire Times. The scene he welcomes for

December 2003 Nomination: Love Songs in Age [1 January 1957. From The Whitsun Weddings] I’ve always had a soft spot for ‘Love Songs in Age’, which was written in the year I was born. Just three sentences, with the first continuing right up to the last line of the second stanza. One of the things I noticed about the poem when I was setting it to music was the high incidence of words containing the ‘s’ sound, which conveys a certain sadness, sympathy or resignation, in as much as it resembles a sigh. Remarkably, in the second stanza of the poem almost 20% – 1 in 5 – words begin with the ‘s’ sound; with nearly as high a percentage in the first stanza. And when you add the number of words containing the ‘s’ sound within them… As usual with a Larkin poem, because of the register, rhythm, rhyme sequence and cadences,

June 2002 Nomination: Like the train’s beat [1943–4. From The North Ship] When I first read it, the image leapt to life, so much so that I dreamed of writing a novel in which a character would see a young woman, somehow see her as familiar, and later learn that her mother was a Polish airgirl in England during the war… Reading it again now, it’s the last four lines which speak strongest. Stephen Brown

December 2011 Nomination: Winter Nocturne [December 1938. From Collected Poems (1988)] My choice reflects the month of shorter days, Philip Larkin’s first published poem, now 73 years old in its original incarnation as printed in his school magazine The Coventrian of December 1938. The embryonic Larkin imagery is already there — the winter nights, the bleakness, the graves of faded summers — as well as what was to become his poetic trade-mark, the killer last line. And remember this is the work of a 16-year-old. The scenes evoked were no doubt inspired by Larkin’s exploration of the local Coventry countryside, its woods and commons. Given sufficient inspiration, imagination and information, armed of course by detailed maps and wearing sturdy footwear, you can still walk in the young poet’s footsteps. Try tracing the muddy paths to Canley Ford or trek over Hearsall and Stivichall Commons to conjure up the sort of atmosphere described in ‘Winter Nocturne’. If

August 2003 Nomination: Going, Going [25 January 1972. From High Windows] ‘Going, Going’, being a government-commissioned poem originally titled ‘Prologue’, is seldom considered by literary experts to rank amongst Larkin’s finest work. This may be, but the poem puts over a hard-hitting environmental message and lines from it are frequently in the media, often in the context of some campaign currently raging. Larkin wrote the poem in 1972 at the same time as he was composing the even bleaker ‘The Building’, and the two could be read together to get some idea of the sense of finality he wished to convey to his readers. You wouldn’t think that a simple request for a poem to preface an HMSO report on the human habitat called ‘How Do You Want To Live?’ would create problems – but it did. The commissioning committee deliberately deleted Larkin’s lines about ‘spectacled grins’, ‘takeover bids’ and ‘Grey area grants’,

March 2003 Nomination: Talking in Bed [10 August 1960. From The Whitsun Weddings] I chose ‘Talking in Bed’ because it is at once so simple and so profoundly philosophical, obviously situated in the context of two humans, fighting against their own alienation and against a hostile environment, but extending to some eternal human dilemmas. The projection of how difficult it can be to tell the truth and keep your friends too is one of the finest achievements of the poem. Bahaa-Eddin Mazid

January 2005 Nomination: The Explosion [5 January 1970. From High Windows] Not the first time this has been chosen, I know, but particularly and tragically relevant. What originally drew me to this poem had been an adolescent, D.H. Lawrence inspired fantasy which may have been partly responsible for my falling for (and marrying) the son of a man who worked underground at Silverwood Colliery, near Maltby. I liked the way that Larkin ennobled the miners, mythologizing them through his imagery and also of course through the allusive metre. As a child I always thought the cowboys were the baddies (not least because they had such short hair); so what with Lawrence and Hiawatha this poem couldn’t fail. But today, with thousands of people dead, lost, missing, bereaved I return to ‘The Explosion’ and its extraordinary capacity to freeze-frame the pivotal, apocalyptic moment between life and death; the nano second in which life is

April 2008 Nomination: I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land [1943. From The North Ship] I used to be inclined to take Philip Larkin’s remark that his rhymes more or less find themselves as a variety of intimidation, until I read his earliest poems. Then I realized that what he’s talking about is mastery, and that he achieved it through intense practice early on. You can form some idea of how intense this practice was by checking the dates of the juvenilia (handily supplied in the Collected Poems, 1988). From the awkward versifier of sixteen (clever phrasemonger, though: the sky in ‘Winter Nocturne’ is hard as granite and fixed as fate’), to the twenty-year-old who writes ‘I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land’: it’s enough to make you wish you hadn’t wasted your own teenage years memorizing sports trivia. What’s remarkable about this poem as juvenilia is that the only thing that

December 2002 Nomination: Aubade [29 November 1977. The Times Literary Supplement 23 December 1977] It’s sometimes said that Larkin ‘dried up’ after High Windows and wrote nothing worth preserving thereafter. But there were three or four outstanding poems between its publication in 1975 and his death 10 years later: ‘The Mower’, ‘Love Again’, ‘The Life With a Hole in It’ and (best of all) ‘Aubade’. The subject of ‘Aubade’ is death, which he’d visited many times before. But this is a late poem, with neither the controlling symbolism of ‘Next, Please’ nor the brutal distancing of ‘The Old Fools’. Here he faces death head-on, with naked dread and almost shaming self-pity. With a stab at Keats, who found the prospect of it ‘easeful’, Larkin calls death ‘unresting’ and itemises its horrors. His morbidity sounds almost Victorian in places. But that doesn’t stop him being Shavianly quotable (religion is defined as ‘that vast moth-eaten musical brocade/Created to

June 2001 Nomination: Afternoons [September ? 1959. From The Whitsun Weddings] ‘Afternoons’ in some ways is a time capsule since in the poem Larkin observes such things as mothers “setting free” their children at swing and sandpit, a scene that is now perhaps dying out since in today’s world young mothers tend to go into the workplace rather than spend time with their children. [The] poem reminds me about a cinema in my town’s centre that closed down about a year ago and hasn’t been touched, though when you look inside it’s like looking into the past, seeing all the films from a year ago and all the fashion photos. Jonathan Winn

August 2013 Nomination: Talking in Bed [10 August 1960. From The Whutsun Weddings] I admire this poem because it frames so precisely, and with poignance, the problems of “honesty” that almost inevitably attend intimacy. ‘Talking in Bed’ appears in Philip Larkin’s 1964 volume The Whitsun Weddings. The title of the book speaks of couplings; the title poem concerns them. Whitsunday falls, of course, on the seventh sabbath after Easter. Whitsun week—coming, as it does, in full spring—is notable for weddings in England, as (say) June is in the United States (my native country). Into this general context, established by the title and title-poem of the book, falls ‘Talking in Bed’, which does not necessarily have to do with a marriage at all, of course: only with a couple de-coupling. In speaking of that “emblem of honesty” that a couple “talking” or “lying” in bed together “ought” to constitute, Larkin doubtless has in mind for

May 2003 Nomination: Mother, Summer, I [August 1953. From Collected Poems(1988)] For anyone who enjoys reciting Larkin, as I do, this is a delightful little poem whose simple construction and language make it easy for listeners to absorb at first hearing. It seems a particularly personal poem, both tender and sad, in which the closeness of the bond between mother and son is evoked more clearly than anywhere else in Larkin’s work. His mother’s foibles, so often exasperating to Larkin, are here treated with affectionate sympathy, as he recognises the similarity of their distrust of apparent perfection. For all the poem’s simplicity, there is richness, too. Take the fine ambiguity of that surprising word “confront”. Does Larkin see happiness, or its emblems, as an adversary – a threat to his habitual, treasured sense of disappointment? Or is he regretfully admitting his inability to face up to the possibility of being genuinely happy? As

September 2002 Nomination: This Be The Verse [April 1971. From High Windows] For millions, this terribly British poem encapsulates both the agony of parenthood and our rage at our parents for having, inevitably, deranged us at times. It cleverly leaves open the question of whether our parents filled us with the faults they had (and added some extra just for you) through their negligent care or by passing on dud genes. The most memorable lines, ‘man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf’, have a resonance equal to any of the greatest poetry, yet Larkin’s crisp, dark humour throughout allows us to be in on a joke, avoiding American earnestness and providing British authenticity. Oliver James

March 2014 Nomination: This Be The Verse [? April 1971] They fuck you up your mum and dad … has always struck me as a fantastic opening line for a poem. It’s there in your face from the very start. A startling but, at the same time, thought-provoking piece of truth. After working with children and their parents for nearly 40 years, I’m sure that much of what happens to them is down to their parents. The line too that they didn’t mean to is probably equally true in most instances. Most of us choose one of two approaches to being parents. Firstly, we either do it as our own parents did (If it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for them) or we do the direct opposite, taking the view There’s no way I’m going to bring up my children like I was brought up. I always thought it would be nice, once

November 2013 Nomination: Next, Please [16 January 1951] The title although appropriate to its subject, almost does a disservice to the poem. This banal Next, Please, having associations with dreary commercial and bureaucratic exchanges is not much of an invitation to read. Once Larkin has us at the edge of the cliffs however, we remember so well the hours spent waiting for the teasing armada to dock and unload its cargo of opportunity. How loudly this message chimes for those of us who regularly submit to poetry journals and who must wait months for a reply. Will one’s work ever be considered for a collection? I am certainly guilty of investing too much mental effort in anticipation of the future and too little in appreciating the riches of the now. But it’s not just a matter of strong recognition. The final stanza is so cinematic and chilling. The black-sailed unfamiliar, the birdless silence.. Like so much of

December 2009 Nomination: Here [8 October 1961. From The Whitsun Weddings] Being an exile from Hull of more than forty years this poem has had many resonances for me over that time since I headed South in ’68. I had very little knowledge of Larkin or his work while a student at the Art College although this big bloke was once pointed out to me at a College Ball as being the Librarian at Hull Uni and a poet. Well poets then, as far as I was concerned, were called Henri, McGough and Patten and came from Liverpool with Spike Milligan adding a bit of weird hilarity from elsewhere. Having discovered this poem through a friend’s girlfriend who knew Ted Tarling, a friend of PL and having actually read it many times while travelling its journey it will forever remind me of returning to my hometown: ‘That chip shop fifty miles up a

January 2010 Nomination: For Sidney Bechet [15 January 1954. From The Whitsun Weddings] Larkin’s poems with jazz connections reflect the enormous importance that jazz played in his life and work. In his Introduction to All What Jazz (1970), his scalding attack on modernism in all the arts, he says: ‘Few things have given me more pleasure in life than listening to jazz. I don’t claim to be original in this: for the generations that came to adolescence between the wars jazz was that unique private excitement that youth seemed to demand.’ As his letters show, Larkin shared this subversive enthusiasm with Kingsley Amis and they were both insistent about their rigidly traditional tastes. I’ve always felt that the colloquial and ironic aspects of Larkin’s poetic language derive from both the stance and the language of the jazz musician much as the informality of popular song lyrics are reflected in some Auden Sidney Bechet, who played

February 2003 Nomination: No Road [28 October 1950. From XX Poems and The Less Deceived] I became interested in Philip Larkin’s poetry only three years ago by way of a novel I was reading at the time called Holy Smoke by Jane and Anna Campion. On one of the introductory pages they printed Larkin’s poem ‘Ignorance’. Wanted to read more of his work so went to the library and picked up a collection of his poems and read every one. Usually I like a few poems in an anthology but I found myself typing in my computer (before scanning!) more than twenty of my favorites. ‘No Road’ is the poem that touched me the most for personal reasons and the one that shows off his talent for describing inner thoughts so succinctly. Maura Verderame

January 2006 Nomination: The School in August [1943 From Collected Poems (1988)] The School in August is, I think, the best of Larkin’s early poems, and the least typical. This is the kind of poetry he was desperately trying not to write in his Auden-esque youth: flowery, sing-song, literary. And it has all the surprising charm of a teenager who forgets to be sullen for a moment and lets his natural temperament get through. ‘Make it new’, said Ezra Pound, and his advice has been so taken to heart by poets that even orthodoxy seems too weak a word for it. Poetry should above all be original; the hackeneyed and the threadbare are the supreme foes of art. Turn away from daffodils and churchyards, and disover the poetry lurking in the computer screen and the inner city. And don’t use words like soul or heart or joy; they’re weak from over-work. But what if

May 2006 Nomination: Aubade [29 November 1977. The Times Literary Supplement 23 December 1977] ‘Aubade’ was published in the Times Literary Supplement in December, 1977. Regarded as his last great poem, it is constantly referenced and deeply revered: for many, an unnervingly unambiguous work of art. The opening line, which sets the stall for the whole piece, must surely have satisfied the expectations of most Larkin enthusiasts at the time: I work all day, and get half drunk at night Straight away we know that this is going to be an honest, intensely personal piece of work. It’s only after several readings, however, that it becomes clear how beautifully written it is; how all rules of rhyme and meter are, forgive me, religiously adhered to and yet, read aloud, it sounds like free form. Constant reference to it is easy. Not unusually for Larkin, there are no lines wasted here. Death pervades his masterpiece just as