‘For John Whitworth (1945-2019)’ by Dwayne Barrick
 

For John Whitworth (1945-2019)
by Dwayne Barrick
March 21, 2021

https://classicalpoets.org/2021/03/2...wayne-barrick/

Interesting. Isn't this the same site that was being discussed here just the other day? Surely there is a better place to celebrate his work if you want to celebrate his work, or would he be at home there?

I'm not kidding.

Good grief.

A touch of wit is worth its what in gold?

John, yes, it's the same site that was being discussed on another thread.

Ann, I was thinking the same thing about "writ" in the first line.

By the way, I know at least one Spherian has several poems on that site. Mark Stone had his first published poem there, but more have appeared there since.

https://classicalpoets.org/2019/10/1...by-mark-stone/

I, myself, have some old poems there, which I submitted quite a while ago, but haven't submitted there lately.

Oh, now I remember where I'd seen The Society of Classical Poets before. It published another Whitworth tribute that caused some discussion here a while back.

https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showt...tworth+whitman

https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showt...tworth+whitman

They both have the same weird bitterness in common, where they feel obliged to praise Whitworth by sneering at something else (free-verse/postmodernism...yawn)

John was kind-hearted, clever and hilarious, whatever his politics. He deserves better, I reckon.

I do admire the intention and courage behind this tribute. Honoring greatness through art is not for the faint of heart because comparisons can't help but be made--particularly when one is attempting to do honor to a great artist by means of his or her own medium.

And John really was inimitable, wasn't he?

I do wonder if the poet's admiration was more for John's political outspokenness than for his poetic craft, since this tribute has many traits that John's work did not. But it did give me occasion to think of John, which I consider a good thing.

Re: venues: I'm not a fan of the SCP, and presumably they wouldn't be a fan of me, either. But if I thought that that venue was the best way to reach an audience for whom a certain message was intended (and if their editors didn't immediately reject such a message, or messenger--big "if"), I might submit something there. I regard First Things in the same way. If you want your work to change minds, or even just to invite people to reconsider their positions, you can't spend all your time talking to people who agree with you.

On the other hand, I also accept the fact that my work's association with a venue with an obvious editorial point of view will inevitably be taken as an endorsement of that editorial point of view, no matter how furiously I issue handwaving caveats and explanations elsewhere.

Personally, I won't be participating in badmouthing anyone else for making publication decisions that I would not have made myself. I like to give others the benefit of the doubt. But I understand why others are far less forgiving in that regard, and I think everyone has a perfect right to express vehement disagreement with my publication decisions, or those of others.

This is a ridiculously terrible poem! I have to admit I did not find John to be "clever and hilarious regardless of his politics" but even with that caveat, he deserves much better than this. It looks as though this group, as have so many, has sunk so deeply into the cesspool of their own anger and petulance about the modern world they have decided to forego any notion of what makes a good poem, be it in meter or non-meter or by word splatters of the deranged. It isn't a fitting tribute to anyone unless it's said in jest at a roast of someone who is still with us.

John, I didn't hear anyone say the poem was good. I completely agree with your assessment of it. I couldn't even finish reading it.

I got through it, though it was torturous.

You're right, Roger. I didn't need to point out how bad it is.

Two years. Time flies. Jayne and I attended his funeral. I remember when people could gather together.

John would almost certainly not have felt a comparison to Theodor Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) flattering. And a poem that ends on the word "thee" after decrying "bad formalism with its bulk / of fossilized remembrance of things past" might take its own advice to heart.

But I've written memorial poems that have missed the mark far worse than this one.

I didn't attempt to write one for John, as I knew how far my best efforts would fall short. I enjoyed the ones others wrote for the Better Than Starbucks tribute, though.

Julie: "And a poem that ends on the word "thee" " ... not to mention the fact that the final couplet uses "you", "ye" and "thee" indiscriminately and inconsistently.

Dear John, when you were here, we truly knew ye.
Forever through your words, we’ll always keep thee.

Why on earth didn't the writer simply stick to "knew you" and "keep you"?

Whether one considers its lack of coherence, its manner or its handling of metre and rhyme, this is, as others have said, dire. Two of the comments it received at the Society of Classical Poets website – “this is a wonderfully wrought poem that captures the essence of the marvelous John Whitworth perfectly – great meter, great rhyme, and an educational message with a witty delivery” and “a brilliant reflection on a brilliant poet” – only confirm how low the bar is in those parts.

Anyone who writes such a eulogy must address two familiar hazards: first, seeming to co-opt their subject in support of their own personal agenda, one perhaps not entirely congruent with that of their subject, and, secondly, by association to seek to attach some of their subject’s glamour to themselves. Barrick fails to avoid this double pitfall. But beyond this, he does not, either through the quality of his own writing or in what he struggles to say about John’s verse, convey any sense of the sheer copiousness and fluent invention of John’s verbal imagination.

I have only one of John’s collections on my shelves, Tennis and Sex and Death (Peterloo, 1989), which I bought in June of that year, though I have read a good number of other pieces elsewhere. He wrote some startlingly vigorous verse – acerbic, often deliberately confrontational and, indeed, scabrous, qualities he clearly relished transmitting. The existential paranoia and the sense of being forever cheated by hidden powers, half-comically presented in “The Examiners” (to which one of those who commented on Dwayne Barrick’s eulogy referred) seems to have been a frequent theme. Perhaps it also drove or reflected some of his political attitudes insofar as he made those known. His keen desire for the UK to leave the EU after nearly fifty years of membership and his delight at the outcome of the 2016 referendum perhaps sprang from a similar impulse, as I think it perhaps did for many who voted as he had done to leave.

The closing poem of John’s 1989 volume riffs off Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” from his 1974 collection High Windows. (On the back cover of my copy, Larkin is quoted approvingly from an Observer review.) It is called “They Fuck You Up, Do Publishers (A Farewell To Secker and Warburg)”. Though Secker and Warburg had published John’s first three books, they and he parted company with Tennis and Sex and Death. The epigraph John gives the poem indicates that the poem appeared in The Times Literary Supplement in the summer of 1989. John quotes himself: “I would not part acrimoniously from the publishers who brought out three books for me. Let me dedicate to them the following verses.” Here is the poem:

They fuck you up, do publishers.
Against them there is no defence.
No letter, postcard, phone-calls stirs
The puddle of their indolence.

Each author’s fucked up in his turn.
Each contract is a poison pellet.
Especially must poets learn
That verse don’t sell, and they don’t sell it.

Man hands on manuscript to man,
Who leaves the thing in St Tropez.
Get out as quickly as you can
And write a television play.

I have no idea if John’s MS of Tennis and Sex and Death was inadvertently left by the publisher’s agent “in St Tropez”, but the wittily expressed bitterness and a kind of inverted cynicism make for an amusing valediction. Harry Chambers at Peterloo would stick by John through a further five entertaining books.

Clive Watkins

Thank you, Clive. A fine piece of writing.

John was a much-loved friend. My small comment further up the thread is all that I finally posted of a tearful, angry diatribe against the god-awful poem. The scansion (or lack of it) feels like an insult to the man whose verse skipped like a barefoot elf on an Aga. Even the "Fred and Ginger" reference was nicked (and wrecked) from Les Murray, whose original, exquisite blurb John treasured.

John, too, would have appreciated your words above. Again, thanks.

Your comment has already been taken down, Ann. The rules are, you have to acknowledge the brilliance of the work, or you don't get to post. (Somebody actually has called the poem brilliant there at the site.)

This site really bothers me. Probably because I'm so racked with self-doubt. Some of the places I've published, how (apart from the vanity commenting policy) do they differ from this crap site? An editor likes my poem and posts or prints it. In those publications, my poem appears alongside good stuff (or else I don't submit again), but the writers of the shit on this site tell themselves the same thing.

That's one of the things that bothers me, too, about that site. Several years ago they seemed more discriminating. But of late the bar is much lower and more inconsistent.

I would like to add, however, that I am grateful for the fact that they had published several of my poems, some of which have subsequently appeared in other journals, and a couple of them actually winning a prize. I appreciate that there is a venue for formal poetry (even if some of the poems are not to our standards). What's more, Ralph La Rosa and Siham Karami gave me very nice comments on a couple of mine.

https://classicalpoets.org/2014/03/0...martin-elster/

So thanks, Ralph and Siham!

This doesn't happen very often:

That poem has rendered me speechless.

Jayne

You are most welcome, Martin.

They are upfront saying they prefer work that's anti-Russian and anti-Chinese communism, any form of socialism and for something they call beauty. They took one of my anti-Russian communism things, my first and last to them.

I'm not sure about that. I didn't say it was "brilliant", but brought up some critical points about the last couplet, and my comment was received very politely.

But there is no Russian or Chinese communism to be opposed to and that is why it's so silly. Russia is full of thieving capitalists who only have to stay in Putin's good graces to continue to maintain the imbalance of wealth, and although the party controlling China calls itself the Chinese Communist Party that has about as much relevance to what they're doing today as the name Democratic or Tory or Republican. The Cultural Revolution was sixty years ago. I have a few friends who have made loads of money working with Chinese capitalists over the last decade so, while Fox and the other propaganda arms of the Republican Party make a point of emphasizing the name Chinese Communist Party, they are no more communist than Trump is honest.

This is what they say in the submission section:

This may have had some relevance in 1955, but I'm sure they would have then, as they do today, ignore all the totalitarian nations that preserve the ruling classes and the social orders that exist on the backs of wide and deep poverty.

Oh dear, how pathetic. From what I've heard about John Whitworth, it seems he deserves better.

What's pathetic about being upfront and honest about having a political and moral position?

That's subjective. Flowers die, poems aren't perfect, memories can be distorted, etc. . All gifts and attempts at honouring someone's memory have imperfections. How do you draw the line and determine that only one standard is acceptable and deserved?

Point about online civility taken, Kevin.

I do wonder whether your civil criticism would have been found acceptable without those feints toward praise of the poem. Your post there is skillful.

We accept submissions on any theme you may choose; however, we recommend these themes:

(1) Obsolete political scapegoating, especially those pieces that can combine the demonization of the non-existent with displays of the total misapprehension of historical moments.

(2) Human rights struggles from places we don't really know or interact with that can be used as a screen to place in front of the human rights abuses we actively support and salivate over.

(3) The beauty of our own portfolio: Idiosyncratic arts, found in the realms of extra rhymey patriotism, Christain rock, goose stepping, prison design and so on, that cherish a clear sense of mimicry of the archaic and a Hobbsean sense of our fellow mensch. At their best, they inspire us with their lofty ideals, strengthen the basic moral foundations of society, and, of course, delightfully entertain us. Yet, today, fascist arts are often neglected and treated as defeated or out of style. We seek poetry that celebrates the beauty of power . “Classical” here is in the broad sense and refers to arts or methods from the Riefenstahl period or earlier, or approximately pre-battle of Stalingrad.

Nicely done, Andrew.

Bit of an aside but it might be worth thinking that:

The site is ad-supported so every bit of traffic you drive there will add to their page-view stats and potentially bring them sponsors (although I’m not expert on how this works). So be careful, or you're unwittingly supporting them.

It reads like a grooming site for right-wing extremism in places. But ultimately, for me, it looks like a peculiarly poor poetry journal, some okay work, some terrible work, placed at the very low end of the online market, out to make money partly through preying on vanity/the vulnerable. Suspect the anthologies are print-to-order, profit-making, and include lots and lots of authors who are keen to see their work in print. It also looks to have its own thriving community and all the hierarches/customs that occur naturally in any kind of space.

Their Duotrope stats (although these can be very volatile and not reliable) show they reject about half of the submissions offered to them. So they have some kind of selection process. It might be an ideological selection process rather than a poetic technique-based process, though. Accepting half of submissions is a HUGE amount of acceptances in context, anyway, for something that's relatively established. Usually that kind of stat is for start-ups, as fewer people know about them and so they're solicited subs from friends.


Putting it within the wider narratives of open submissions/metrical poetry journals is tricky for me to do accurately - you will all have better knowledge of this space - but it seems to me that Able Muse is the highest, most critically selective side of a continuum (D/T stats reflect this, too) and this journal at the lowest. There’s a gap in the market for something in the middle. A good online journal specialising in metrical poetry that is more selective, with robust editorial process (and is less politicised!) They exist for wider poetry-markets, that kind of higher-level print/online hybrid.

I am enjoying the particular bitterness - not quite vitriol - but stronger than citric acid - in Whitworth’s poetry very much. I hadn’t read him before.

One thing you could say for them at least is that they have periodic contests, like an annual poetry competition, riddle poems, and ekphrastics. There may be others, too, though I can't say for sure, since I haven't looked lately.

Few will see this "tribute," but if it steers anyone to John's verse I say fine.