Peter Reading's mean streets

Perduta Gente means Final Demands and is Peter Reading’s fourteenth book of poems since 1970. So it is positioned about halfway through Reading’s oeuvre. This story of England’s dispossessed is woven into a sort of apocalyptic narrative that feels like middle class voyeurism when read from the comparative security of one’s own home. A perusal of the accompanying notes next to the poems would seem to indicate that Reading spent some time observing or listening to the yarns of some of the “old hands” living on the street. According to Isabel Martin in the introduction to Peter Reading: Collected Poems 1970-1984, Reading has a talent for eavesdropping and can mimic a wide variety of spoken registers. So conceivably he could observe or mingle without actually having to doss down with his subjects, who he terms as a legion of the “bankrupted, batty [and] bereft” whose beds he symbolises as a “huddle of papers and rags in a cardboard spin-drier carton”. Meanwhile, we carry on by as though nothing is wrong is because “that is what we [British] are good at”, Reading writes.

Perduta Gente has no page numbers, which implies that it is meant to be absorbed in its entirety, not to be dipped into. It can be read in less than a couple of hours. Isabel Martin writes that Reading’s favourite literature is eighteenth and nineteenth century novels, which would help explain Reading’s comparison with Dickens. Reading apparently got up close enough to his sleeping subjects to read what was written in the newspapers they were wrapped in to stay warm. Or perhaps that was simply an artist’s imaginative focus at work. Whatever it was, it worked well:

Newspaper, wrapped around the torso between the
Fourth and fifth jerseys
(night attire for doing a skipper in icy December
under the Festival Hall),
carries a note to the Editor, from ‘Ex-Soldier of Telford’ ...

Towards the end of the book, Reading turns his gaze directly to the reader, warning us of our potential vulnerability:

And don’t think it couldn’t be you:
grievously wounded veteran of the Battle of Bottle,
jobless, bereft of home, skint,
down in the cold uriniferous subway ...

There’s no getting away from the misery, but by offering these poems to us, Reading is doing a public service, firstly by keeping a huge social problem to the fore, and secondly, by warning others not to fall victim to it. For some respite I flick over to the online edition of the New Zealand Herald and read of the lonely death of Brent Andrew Beattie. ‘The 38-year-old father of two died while living alone under a footbridge on the edge of Hagley Park in central Christchurch,’ the Herald reported. Beattie had lived under the bridge for at least six months and it was almost a month before anyone even noticed that he had died. A fireman had found Beattie’s decomposing body in a crouching position with his knees drawn up to his abdomen surrounded by glue and methylated spirits containers. His mother had indicated she might attend the coroner’s hearing but did not show up. The only people who were there was the coroner, a court registrar, two policemen and a reporter (NZ Herald, 17/07/08).

There is something unnerving about the crouching position the fireman found Brent in. It is as if he simply gave up on life one Christchurch night, and, resting his head on his knees, froze into a macabre statue. For days on end he stayed like that, unnoticed.

Poetry Session 4: Muldoon / Reading

[University of Iowa, Iowa City]

My sister-in-law Therese Lloyd, who's just been studying at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, tells me that while she was there Paul Muldoon came to do a reading.

The convention was for each of the students to take turns hosting the post-reading party (Therese had to host the one for the novelist John Irving, but that's another story ...)

Anyway, at this one she saw the poet cornered by the three biggest nerds in the whole group, who were quizzing him on the most intimate details of his poetics, and decided that it was up to her to rescue him.

So she went up and told him how much she'd enjoyed his reading.

"Tank you, tank you ... And what accent would that be you have." [You have to imagine all this in a rather more plausible Ulster brogue than I can muster, tempered by the 20 or so years he's spent teaching in the States, at Princeton].

"A New Zealand accent."

"Ah, New Zealand! C. K. Stead, now, he's from New Zealand, isn't he? I remember having to read his book The New Poetic when I was an undergraduate, and a fine book it is, too ..."

Luckily Therese had read the book, and so was able to concur.

They had quite a nice little chat after that, it seems. She introduced him to her fiance, and generally let him off any more hard questions about his poetics ...

The only other detail she had to report was that during the reading he used the word "coyote" in one of his poems. Only he pronounced it: "KOY-oat."

"Is that the correct way to say it?" he mused aloud.

The crowd shouted "Ky-OH-tee."

"Koy-OAT" he said.

"KY-OH-TEE!"

"KOY-oat," he continued. "I can;'t get that at all. I tink I'd better keep on saying it my way, so, KOY-oat ..."

I don't know what all that adds up to, but it's always nice to rub shoulders with greatness - you never know what you mightn't pick up.

Remember to check out my earlier post, with a link to the Listener interview with Muldoon.

Is he purely a game-player, or is there more to his poetry? "Incantata" seems heartfelt enough, but what of the other poem I've included in your anthology, "The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants" -- what's that about? The troubles? Or postmodernity in general?

*

As for Peter Reading, I guess it's difficult to judge the success of his technical innovations without reading at least one of his books as a whole. He does seem to have something of the novelist's temperament - or at least an interest in overarching narratives.

Perduta gente (1989) is still probably his most celebrated single volume, with its critique of Thatcher's Britain, the nuclear industry, and the monstrously proliferating cardboard cities in the great cities of Europe.

More recently, in -273.15 [absolute zero] (2005) he's shifted his attention from social engineering to ecology.

He's an angry man, but there's (arguably) a lot for him to be angry about ...

See you on Monday 14th July (Bastille Day), then. Bruce is booked in to give us a seminar. We may have some guests for the discussion, also.

Reading, Peter

[Lannan Foundation]


Peter Reading (b. 1946)

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Bibliography:

POETRY:

Water and Waste. Outposts, 1970
For the Municipality's Elderly. Secker & Warburg, 1974
The Prison Cell and Barrel Mystery. Secker & Warburg, 1976
Nothing for Anyone. Secker & Warburg, 1977
Fiction. Secker & Warburg, 1979
Tom O'Bedlam's Beauties. Secker & Warburg, 1981
5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5. Ceolfrith Press, 1983
Diplopic. Secker & Warburg, 1983
C. Secker & Warburg, 1984
Ukelele Music. Secker & Warburg, 1985
Essential Reading. Secker & Warburg, 1986
Stet. Secker & Warburg, 1986
Final Demands. Secker & Warburg, 1988
Perduta Gente. Secker & Warburg, 1989
Shitheads. Squirrelprick Press, 1990
Three in One. Chatto & Windus, 1991
Evagatory. Chatto & Windus, 1992
Last Poems. Chatto & Windus, 1994
Collected Poems Volume 1: 1970-84. Bloodaxe, 1995
Penguin Modern Poets 3 (Mick Imlah, Glyn Maxwell, Peter Reading). Penguin, 1995
Collected Poems Volume 2: 1985-96. Bloodaxe, 1996
Chinoiserie. Bay Press, 1997
Work in Regress. Bloodaxe, 1997
Apophthegmatic. Bay Press, 1999
Ob. Bloodaxe, 1999
Repetitions. Cleveland State University, 1999
Marfan. Bloodaxe, 2000
Faunal. Bloodaxe, 2002
Collected Poems: 1997-2003. Bloodaxe, 2003
-273.15. Bloodaxe, 2005