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THE PHILIP LARKIN SOCIETY

January 2012 Nomination: I Remember, I Remember [8 January 1954. From The Less Deceived] Although Philip Larkin and I come from different worlds and diffferent decades, we share one close affinity — our Coventry birthplace. How many other Philip Larkin Society members can claim that, I wonder? Accordingly, ‘I Remember, I Remember’ (previously and provisionally titled ‘Reverent’ and ‘At Coventry’ by Larkin) means a lot to me.There are other personal affiliations, too. The Gaffneys were an itinerant bunch and soon I was gone elsewhere so Coventry was ‘just where I started’, and it was many years later before I came back to investigate not only Larkin’s origins but mine as well. And I suppose the poem’s last two lines summarise lots of people’s feelings whilst in a reflective mood — or resentful as perhaps Larkin was — about an unlovely birthplace: ‘It’s not the place’s fault. . . . / Nothing, like something,

July 2011 Nomination: Days [3 August 1953. From The Whitsun Weddings] As Director of the Philip Larkin Centre I am always pleased to discover new writing that spins out from an appreciation of a Larkin poem, some call and response from across the decades. I was struck to find David Nicholls’ moving and best-selling novel One Day has the entire ‘Days’ as its epigraph. For me it is a wilfully cheerful poem. It sings of a simple take on life we all can share, and then takes a rueful look at the professionals, our lawyers and doctors sweeping on to the scene in their long coats to add complexity and so confuse us. The ‘Ah’ is such a touching note, a sigh from a poet looking out from that simplicity of the first verse and smiling as he gives us an image of professionals in the fields. The poem is raised above the sentimental, the

August 2006 Nomination: Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair [15 December 1947. From XX Poems and The North Ship (1966)] Larkin famously divided his poems into the beautiful and the true. To some extent the distinction probably reflected his private feelings about different poems, the different kinds of pleasure or consolation he had found in writing them. But we know what he meant, and we know too that the greatest of his poems, the peaks in his Collected – ‘Church Going’, ‘Here’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘Dockery and Son’, ‘To the Sea’, ‘High Windows’, ‘The Old Fools’, ‘The Building’, ‘Aubade’ – are both beautiful and true. Like all his admirers, I’m sure, I love these poems, and they have had a profound effect on what I think poems can and even ought to be. Even more, sometimes, I love the “beautiful” ones among the others – more modest pieces maybe but just as perfect, ‘The Trees’, ‘At

August 2010 Nomination: The Dance [30 June 1963–12 May 1964. From Collected Poems (1988)] On 15 February 2010, I received an email from Andy Newlove, the owner of Fairview Studios in Willerby. It consisted of two short sentences, containing just 25 words. The second sentence said simply: Matt Edible thinks he’s got his track down to 12 mins! Matt Edible is the singer and songwriter with The Holy Orders. A month earlier, I’d asked Matt if he would contribute a song to all night north, an album of twelve new songs using poems by Philip Larkin as lyrics. Matt had responded by saying he would love to be part of the project and that he was considering using ‘The Dance’: I really like the unfinished poem ‘The Dance’ but it is rather lengthy and I’m not sure that if I attempted to wr After receiving Andy Newlove’s email, I said to my wife, Julie: “Well, that’ll be the

April 2012 Nomination: Afternoons [September 1959. From The Whitsun Weddings] This poem was written when Philip Larkin lived in his top flat in Pearson Park in Hull. He loved living in a high room, where he could observe the comings and goings of other people. As he walked through the park he used to pass a children’s playground, and what he saw there inspired this bleak poem. I often thought of it when I myself was a young mother in the late 50’s and 60’s, and knew exactly what he meant by “the hollows of afternoons”. But how did Philip know? This poem is an example of his acute observation and imaginative ability to get inside the skin of his subjects. It is a poem that will never date as long as there are young mothers and children and play-grounds. Winifred Dawson [2001]

July 2003 Nomination: Take One Home for the Kiddies [13 August 1960. From The Whitsun Weddings] I have chosen this seemingly simple Larkin poem because it beautifully exemplifies the way I feel about animals and just how cruel humans can be to them. It makes me feel “Yes, I know what you mean, life is like that”. I also like it because it shows a side of Larkin that is all too often ignored – the caring, compassionate, loving and gentle side; the man Maeve Brennan knew, who was sad that he had accidentally killed a hedgehog. And yet the poem is cutting, incisive and sharply focused. Every word counts. The word “huddled” for instance is perfectly chosen to create an image of misery, distress and despair, whilst the “empty bowls” add to the sense of neglect suffered by these animals. When I was a girl there was a pet shop in West

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

January 2003 Nomination: The Explosion [5 January 1970. From High Windows] You really could not accuse Larkin of being Religious. To prove the point, he did read the Bible from cover-to-cover (over several months, each morning, while shaving – and not just any Bible – a £150 Oxford lectern Bible) before dismissing it as balls (beautiful balls, but still balls). Larkin’s belief in complete effacement at death was rarely stated as less than absolute. One can agree (I do) or demur. It does not seem to inhibit Larkin from feeling fully for those from whom we have been cut off – whether a rabbit (‘Myxomatosis’) or miners – a body of people not notably among his usual sympathies. In this, his response to a TV documentary about a distant mining disaster, he shows others’ experience may be both different from his and still be valid. He just may have been prepared to admit

May 2014 Nomination: Aubade [29 November 1977 Times Literary Supplement, (23 December 1977)] ‘Aubade’ is a poem that makes me happy. No line in the poem is happy. None of the poem’s thoughts are designed to express happiness. Novice student readers find it repellent. The way a crow shook down on Robert Frost the dust of snow from a hemlock tree once rescued Frost from a day he had rued. So too has ‘Aubade’ lightened my mood and refilled my sails. I don’t need to wait upon grace to send a crow since ‘Aubade’ is one of the few poems I have committed to memory – not an easy thing for this sluggish mind. It is a poem that begs to be memorized. I love exclaiming my lines while walking the always deserted back road outside our summer house on the Bay of Fundy. The words are a choir of beautiful sound, a

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

January 2002 Nomination: Dockery and Son [28 March 1963. From The Whitsun Weddings] ‘Dockery and Son’ succeeds in surprising and delighting us because (and although) it is a such a typical Larkin poem: the themes of youth and age, involvement and isolation, then and now are all characteristic and powerful – and so are the grand but wistful tone, the rising conclusion, the formal dexterity. If I had to choose one Larkin poem to show what he was like at his best, this would be it. Andrew Motion

June 2003 Nomination: Home is so Sad [31 December 1958. From The Whitsun Weddings] I nominated this poem as it shows how Larkin saw existence as being empty. How the concept of being was to please others, it tries to draw back the occupants by remaining unchanged. Larkin shows the fears people have about change (something he to was sceptical about) especially modernisation. He makes the poem personal, as if we are already aware of what is contained in the house – the last line especially. ‘ That Vase’. The poem illustrates how Larkin could often personify the Home into the grief of non-existence. Something we can all relate to. James Blythe

March 2012 Nomination: The Building [9 February 1972. From High Windows] Having suffered a minor stroke at the beginning of the month, I spent the first two weeks of December 2011 in Hull Royal Infirmary. This was my first stay as an in-patient in any hospital for over 50 years. I was occasionally shuttled by porters from the stroke ward to various other departments in order to undergo scans. It was hardly surprising, as I was being manoeuvred through the corridors of the hospital on those short journeys, to find words from Larkin’s ‘The Building’ coming to mind. Specifically: For past these doors are rooms, and rooms past those, And more rooms yet, each one further off And harder to return from; Consequently, ‘The Building’ was the first poem I re-read when I returned home, and one of the first I turned to in the Commentaries section when I took delivery of the recently published Philip

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

December 2005 Nomination: Reference Back [21 August 1955. From The Whitsun Weddings] I love the way Larkin likens music to time, how he ‘bridges’ the gap so to speak not just with music and time but with his mother (I presume) and himself and then again with the reader. The sense of loss and emptiness so familiar to Larkin fans is never stronger. It speaks to the heart of everyone’s memories and stirs within the ultimate truth that time never slows and things around us stay the same even as we age. I always think with this poem Larkin is implying that we often think our lives would be remarkedly different/better had we acted differently but we are still the same person and the outcome would always have been the same. It reminds me to savour each second of life and not cling onto regrets. Rebecca Moore

April 2002 Nomination: An April Sunday brings the snow [4 April 1948] This short elegy is one of Larkin’s most directly moving poems. It is also his first attempt to write in what was to become his characteristic voice: realistic, melancholic, demotic. Hardy had by now firmly replaced Yeats in Larkin’s affections, and there are strong echoes here of the Hardy of 1912-13. Yet the ‘you’ of the poem is no dead spouse – it’s Larkin’s father – and however much the piece may strike us now as a breakthrough, it signalled twelve months in which its author could write no more verse. Such is the pressure of feeling here, in fact, that Larkin commits an extremely rare metrical lapse, adding an extra foot to line three. I think I’m most impressed by the simplicity of this poem, the way it achieves so much in so few lines. I’m also deeply in

September 2012 Nomination: Aubade [29 November 1977. First published in The Times Literary Supplement 23 December 1977 I was terrified of death from a very young age. My parents used to put me to bed and I would often lie awake wide-eyed with fear at the fact that one day we would all be gone; me, my parents, everyone in the world, and none of our thoughts or memories would survive. I must’ve only been about four years old the first time it happened. I remember I used to run downstairs in fits of tears and have to be hugged and calmed down by my parents, but even then I would be thinking ‘why aren’t you freaking out too – don’t you realise how bad this is?’ I couldn’t believe everyone wasn’t running around scared out of their minds. These days I am better at controlling those moments of sheer panic, but they still

July 2004 Nomination: Born Yesterday [20 January 1954. From The Less Deceived] I am a member of the Larkin Society. I included ‘Born Yesterday’ in the episode of Coronation Street for 19th March 2004. It was the christening of Tracy Barlow’s baby, and ‘Born Yesterday’ is the reading. Unfortunately the obligatory soap fracas curtailed its beautiful ending, but I scripted it so we heard the lion’s share. I was delighted to be able to plug my favourite Larkin poem – and it was perfectly suited to the storyline. If you missed the episode, there was an omnibus the following Sunday. You may of course prefer to stick pins in your eyes, but I’m proud to write for Corrie and honoured to honour Philip Larkin. ‘Born Yesterday’ has been my co-favourite (alongside ‘The Whitsun Weddings’) for many years. Congratulations on the web-site – it’s great. What would the great man have made of email and the

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

September 2014 Nomination: As Bad As a Mile [9 February 1960. From The Whitsun Weddings] In the aftermath of the 2014 World Cup, sports journalist Barney Ronay in his Monday Guardian column cited the first four lines of this poem as a pretty fair summary of the England team’s performance over the years: not so much misfortune (‘it went over the line, ref!’) as endemic incapacity to play well. We can have another shy in four years’ time but we’ll end up skidding across the floor. Delighted, as always, to see Larkin once again become part of normal discourse, I rushed back to remind myself of the rest of the poem, a tiny perfection shaped for contemplation, tempting repeated consumption and all that despite the whimsy of a title which promises so little. For the last month, I’ve revisited the poem daily half-hoping that I’ve found the equivalent of Timothy Clark’s experiment with Poussin’s Landscape with