Speccie Culture Shock by 1st January
 

Yet another Larkin, folks.

No. 2829: Culture shock?
Peter Porter called Hull ‘the most poetic city in England’ but what would Philip Larkin have made of his adopted home city being named 2017’s City of Culture? Please email entries (16 lines maximum) to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 1 January.

They formed another daft committee
Mandated to name a city
Rich in culture, music, art -
Excuse me while I pause to fart -

Four candidates were in the race,
Progressing at a snail’s pace,
And when at last the judges gave
Their verdict, I turned in my grave.

How could the fools have chosen Hull,
A city that’s extremely dull
With all the sparkle of a hearse?
Of course, the rest are even worse.

I must admit I’d rather be
In Hull than in the other three
(That’s Swansea, Leicester and Dundee),
But as for culture... Well, there’s me.

At the drop of hat, Brian. And bloody good, too.

Have at you, Brian.

The City of Kingston-on-Hull
Is quite unbelievably dull,
As weary, nay wearier
Than a night in Siberia,
Or a wet Sunday morning in Mull.

And whenever I hear the word Cult-
ure, it conjures a horrible mulch
Of opaque foreign plays
And they go on for days,
Like being pegged out to die in a gulch.

It's as slab and as sticky as parkin,
Or a tentative grope after dark in
An old people's home,
Scarcely worth a full pome.
So these are the limericks of Larkin.

The third piece to offer a Hull/dull rhyme, I'm afraid.

I worry Hull will get a boost
The like of which it’s never seen
Ahead of twenty seventeen
When Whitehall cash is introduced.

Investment means we’re bound to be
Delivered from this fiscal rut.
That suits the local council, but
It’s sod all good for poetry.

The Turner Prize might help revive
The city but I’m losing sleep.
I need despondency to keep
My creativity alive.

I like to wallow in a trough
Of misery, abhorring cheer.
The only fillip needed here
Is Larkin. Tourists, bugger off!

I think we have to take the rhyme head on. I knew about Marvell but not about Stevie Smith. Great final stanza, Rob.

When Whitehall cash is introduced
Ahead of twenty seventeen,
This city’s set to get a boost
The like of which it’s never seen.

Investment means we’re bound to be
Delivered from this fiscal rut.
That suits the city council, but
It’s sod all good for poetry.

The Brits and Turner will revive
Hull’s fortunes, so I’m losing sleep.
I need despondency to keep
My creativity alive.

I like to wallow in a trough
Of misery, forswearing cheer.
The only fillip needed here
Is Larkin. Tourists, bugger off!

"needed", Rob?

Thanks Ann.

By strange chance I have just re-read The Arundel Tombs. Following which -- and rather too quickly, I suspect :--

Side by side, uneasy pair,
Hull and Culture, fish and fowl
stuck fast together cheek by jowl
by wild ill-fortune's mad decree
to breathe a marriage's sour air
of mutual disharmony.

Their conjoined miseries will reign
while Beowolf in modern dress
and street-art outside M and S
will show Hull's fucked-up kids that here
could lurk a far more tiresome pain
than unemployment, fish and beer.

One year of Art's pretentious ills
on show in bar and park and street
where Hull and Culture failed to meet ....
and all that will survive are bills.


And a happy New Year to you all!

Interesting one, Martin. Beowolf? Beowulf? I got the impression that fish and Hull had largely parted company and came across a local's post complaining that outsiders thought the town still stank of it. Hence the penultmate line in the following. Did PL ever directly quote himself? Probably not . . oh well.

City of Culture? Can some pompous pricks
Have chosen here for 2017
Although the river Humber’s like the Styx
But both banks melancholic misty-mean?

This place in eastern flatness is a bore
That squeezes out quotidian despair,
However true, as back in ‘54,
Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.

Since it no longer reeks of stinking fish,
So little left now, even for a gull,
And surely answers no-one’s prayer or wish,
Best not disturb the bloodiness of Hull.

Jerome,One of my earliest traceable ancestors was a Lord(?) Mayor of Hull in the late 18th or early 19th century and was buried in its aptly named Scullcoats Graveyard. Perhaps I should claim that some sort of droit de seigneur entitles me to do a series of readings there during their year of culture. But maybe I shan't bother.

I always thought that Tesco would be a good substitute for Grendel in any modern dress version of Beowolf. But perhaps for Hull a more suitable villain would be a composite of Edward Heath and Geoffrey Rippon who "negotiated" away our fishing industry. If satire is alive in Hull ..... who knows what amateur attempts at theatre may try to pass themselves off as culture?

So Hull's been named the capital of culture?
Now hordes of gawking tourists will descend.
The council must be pissing in their knickers
At the thought of all the money that they'll spend.

There'll be no decent jazz, just mindless pop songs
With thuggish, thumping basslines (what a bore!)
And "artists" building childish installations,
As no-one's ever taught them how to draw.

I have no Truck with gurning, shrieking luvvies
Who gobble public funding for "the arts"
And populate their gaudy, blaring freakshows
With a cast of brute Neanderthals and tarts.

In fact, I loathe this "culture city" business -
A vulgar stunt to lure the bored and thick...
But, if they must perpetuate the circus,
There's places worse than Hull that they could pick.