[Stephenie McKinnon]

Note To Jerome,
I read this and roared with laughter! The "Rime" was a favorite of my nerdy literary family.. a topic of family dinner discussions. [Just one sad example: my brother came home from a date one night and told my mom it had reminded him of the poem. She replied, "Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink?" He grumbled, "NO! 'Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The nightmare, life in death was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold!'"] Yes... As you might imagine, bringing any of my dates home to meet the family was pretty much social suicide.

Mr. Lister's version is a hilarious, delightful read. I'll have to share this with the crazy bunch I grew up with. Thanks for posting it.

To Steve: Thank you again! Wonderful that you got to speak to him, you lucky man. Wonder-full. I'm with Janice... contemplating calling this a spiritual experience. I hope you get to meet him, soon, talk poetry, life, and love in person. That would be amazing. I'll expect an update. Have fun in Greece. Is it warm enough there to swim?

[Steve Bucknell]

Thanks again, Jerome, for your research and posts. I think your:" What a fascinating transition from metallurgist to master of light verse up there in the New Yorker etc with Nash and the others..." is spot-on. I hope to ask R.P. more about this. The more clues I pick up he seems a fascinating mix of down-to-earth scientist and almost-mystic. There's a transformation of base metals into....much improved base metals!

I read "Allotments" while I was in the British Library. A skillful and pretty coffee-table book with nice verse about life on allotments, celebrating the small, disorderly and particular. He describes the characters on a typical suburban allotment :" the orderly, the disorganised, the laborious, the lazy, the experts, the simpletons, the practical, the philosophers, the experimenters and the traditionalists." Sound like anywhere you know?

Thanks again, Steph.

And I leave you for now with a touch of R.P.'s mystical side:

"Be of good comfort, for the light once lit
May shine when life has long extinguished it,
And, being a kind of lingering reflection,
Prove the sole evidence of resurrection."

[Alex Pepple]

Steve, this is a wonderful thread, a historic quest for Eratosphere ... all the more so for the happy ending. I especially enjoyed the poems of R.P. Lister posted in this thread!

Cheers,
...Alex

[Ed Shacklee]

Steve,

If you talk with R.P. Lister again, please let him know that people who found copies of The Idle Demon enjoyed it a great deal (one of them, anyway; people, I mean, not demons).

Ed


The Rhinoceros

I love to wallow in the mud
xxxThat borders on the stream;
I love to lie and cool my blood
xxxAnd meditate and dream.

Wrinkled and horny is my flesh,
xxxAngry my eye and wild,
And yet my soul is smooth and fresh
xxxLike that of any child.

Man looks upon me with a frown
xxxAnd holds me as a foe;
And yet I only knock him down
xxxBecause I love him so.

Many a human I have hurled
xxxTo earth, and trampled flat;
And is there, friends, in all the world
xxxA purer love than that?

xxxxx- R.P. Lister

[John Whitworth]

I like the verse of R.P. Lister,
Who well deserves the title Mr.
So thank you, thank you Mr. Lister.

[Orwn Acra]

That Judgement poem is just fantastic.

[Jerome Betts]

Some more Lister snippets pending Steve Bucknell's return from Corfu:

His career included Royal Navy Torpedo Factory metallurgist 1940, Royal Aircraft Establishment metallurgist 1941-43, Ministry of Aircraft production scientific officer 1943-47, British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association liaison officer 1947-9. Went freelance in 1949 but had another spell of staff employemt 1954-57 as general editor at Macdonald and Evans Ltd , Publishers.

The torpedo work presumably explains title of his second book, the novel The Oyster and the Torpedo (1951.

I asked for Lister books in Exeter Central Library yesterday. They had only one (The Idle Demon) and I was apparently the first person to request it in 50 years

[Jayne Osborn]

Hi Steve,

I've only just managed to catch up with your marvellous thread here (don't want to harp on too much about having shingles but my skinniest pair of specs that weigh only a few grams feel like a ton weight on my face, so reading is difficult) but I'd just like to add that the story, the poems, the whole thing is brilliant. You've done a fantastic job; thank you for sharing it.

[Julie Steiner]

Lately cornered in his cloister,
Lister, author of The Oyster,
graces the computer screens
of countless fervent Listerines.

[Jerome Betts]

I've now got a copy of RPL's The Albatross and other poems (1986) to add to The Idle Demon ,and it's full of good things. Of the poems quoted in this thread The Albatross includes the eponymous bird, 'I thought I Saw Stars', 'The Judgment', 'How Not To Deal With Closed Doors'. (The latter also appears in The Idle Demon, p.100).

'The Revolutionaries', 'The Rhinoceros' 'Lament of an Idle Demon', 'Ballade On Experience', 'Sister Come Soon' ', 'A Toast to 2000' and ' Defenestration' all appear in The Idle Demon.

But 'Taxidermy' and 'The Origin of Species' are nowhere to be found. Can't believe RPL would have rejected 'Taxidermy', much praised in the thread, so I am left hoping there is another collection we haven't noticed. (My copy of 'Taxidermy' is a cutting from Punch pasted into a Penguin anthology.)

I thought The Rhyme and the Reason might be a verse collection, but it seems too long at 246 pages. I should know for sure in a couple of days.