The Point of Poetry by Joe Nutt

Author:Joe Nutt [Nutt, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783527038
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2018-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

I lived in Brixton in central London for twenty years and though I sometimes heard gunshots I never actually saw a gun. But now living in Lanarkshire, Scotland, right in the middle of the country I see lots of guns. Almost all the men seem to have a shotgun. And then my own husband got a shotgun and brought it into the house, and at first I felt very afraid of it and then gradually my whole attitude changed as I describe in this poem.1

I lived and worked in central London for nine years, another four in north London and then another nineteen in south London. I never heard a gun in all that time and I’m even the proud owner of a commendation from the City of London Police for a preventing an armed robbery, under Blackfriars Bridge, which is about as central in London it’s possible to get. The only guns I’ve ever seen in London have always been cradled tenderly like a babe in the arms of police officers who know exactly where the safety catch is and how to access it quickly, unlike the two French police officers I once saw strolling around Charles de Gaulle Airport dandling their assault rifles in one hand. I know which of the two I’d trust in an emergency, and this digression into the story the poet weaves behind the poem is, above all, a matter of trust.

Brixton is a part of south London that retains something of a poor but culturally ‘cool’ reputation, strangely as a result of rioting that took place there in 1981. That specific reference to hearing gunshots smacks all too loudly to me not of the genuine article, but of every middle-class Bohemian’s urge to descend to street level in search of working-class credentials. It is the same urge we saw from Edith Nesbit in chapter four, stepping into a world of rural peasant traditions that attracted her to write ‘The Things that Matter’, but which she really knew little about. The condescension Rebecca Watts complained of, writing about Hollie McNish in the PN Review, involves the same kind of social class-skipping. Doubt any writer’s honesty and their work quickly starts to unravel.

The entry on Vicki Feaver in the Poetry Archive online lists her favourite sayings about poetry. Amongst thoughtful words from writers as varied as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Stevie Smith, they include this quotation from the radical American feminist, Adrienne Rich.

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