All the Versuses of Life.

The poet Tony Harrison has come up here before (and I am sad to learn from that Wikipedia article that he died last year); all poets deal in language, of course, but his attention to language as such was uncommon and uncommonly enjoyable. I think he was first mentioned here in 2005 for his Yan Tan Tethera libretto, and I quoted his poem “Them and [uz]” in 2024; I have now discovered his long poem “Y.,” first published in the LRB in 1985 (archived), and it is (among many other things) so gloriously filthy I can’t resist sharing some of it, while hoping any interested parties will click through for more. It begins:

  My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.
  Arthur Scargill, Sunday Times, 10 January 1982

Next millennium you’ll have to search quite hard
to find my slab behind the family dead,
butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard
adding poetry to their beef, beer and bread.

With Byron three graves on I’ll not go short
of company, and Wordsworth’s opposite.
That’s two peers already, of a sort,
and we’ll all be thrown together if the pit,

whose galleries once ran beneath this plot,
causes the distinguished dead to drop
into the rabblement of bone and rot,
shored slack, crushed shale, smashed prop.

Wordsworth built church organs, Byron tanned
luggage cowhide in the age of steam,
and knew their place of rest before the land
caves in on the lowest worked-out seam.

This graveyard on the brink of Beeston Hill’s
the place I may well rest if there’s a spot
under the rose roots and the daffodils
by which dad dignified the family plot.

If buried ashes saw then I’d survey
the places I learned Latin, and learned Greek,
and left, the ground where Leeds United play
but disappoint their fans week after week,

which makes them lose their sense of self-esteem
and taking a short cut home through these graves here
they reassert the glory of their team
by spraying words on tombstones, pissed on beer.

This graveyard stands above a worked-out pit.
Subsidence makes the obelisks all list.
One leaning left’s marked FUCK, one right’s marked SHIT
sprayed by some peeved supporter who was pissed.

Some further bits:

The language of this graveyard ranges from
a bit of Latin for a former Mayor
or those who laid their lives down at the Somme,
the hymnal fragments and the gilded prayer,

how people ‘fell asleep in the Good Lord’,
brief chisellable bits from the good book
and rhymes whatever length they could afford,
to CUNT, PISS, SHIT and (mostly) FUCK!

Or, more expansively, there’s LEEDS v.
the opponent of last week, this week, or next,
and a repertoire of blunt four-letter curses
on the team or race that makes the sprayer vexed.

Then, pushed for time, or fleeing some observer,
dodging between tall family vaults and trees
like his team’s best ever winger, dribbler, swerver,
fills every space he finds with versus Vs.

Vs sprayed on the run at such a lick,
the sprayer master of his flourished tool,
get short-armed on the left like that red tick
they never marked his work much with at school.

Half this skinhead’s age but with approval
I helped whitewash a V on a brick wall.
No one clamoured in the press for its removal
or thought the sign, in wartime, rude at all.

These Vs are all the versuses of life
from LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White
and (as I’ve known to my cost) man v. wife,
Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right,

class v. class as bitter as before,
the unending violence of US and THEM,
personified in 1984
by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM,

Hindu/Sikh, soul/body, heart v. mind,
East/West, male/female, and the ground
these Fixtures are fought out on’s Man, resigned
to hope from his future what his past never found.

[…]

Some, where kids use aerosols, use giant signs
to let the people know who’s forged their fetters
like PRI CE O WALES above West Yorkshire mines
(no prizes for who nicked the missing letters!).

The big blue star for booze, tobacco ads,
the magnet’s monogram, the royal crest,
insignia in neon dwarf the lads
who spray a few odd FUCKS when they’re depressed.

Letters of transparent tubes and gas
in Dusseldorf are blue and flash out KRUPP.
Arms are hoisted for the British ruling class
and clandestine, genteel aggro keeps them up.

And there’s HARRISON on some Leeds building sites
I’ve taken in fun as blazoning my name,
which I’ve also seen on books, in Broadway lights,
so why can’t skins with spraycans do the same?

[…]

What is it that these crude words are revealing?
What is it that this aggro act implies?
Giving the dead their xenophobic feeling
or just a cri-de-coeur because man dies?

So what’s a cri-de-coeur, cunt? Can’t you speak
the language that yer mam spoke. Think of ’er!
Can yer only get yer tongue round fucking Greek?
Go and fuck yerself with cri-de-coeur!

‘She didn’t talk like you do for a start!’
I shouted, turning where I thought the voice had been.
She didn’t understand yer fucking ‘art’!
She thought yer fucking poetry obscene!

[…]

‘Listen, cunt!’ I said, ‘before you start your jeering
the reason why I want this in a book
’s to give ungrateful cunts like you a hearing!’
A book, yer stupid cunt, ’s not worth a fuck!

‘The only reason why I write this poem at all
on yobs like you who do the dirt on death
’s to give some higher meaning to your scrawl.’
Don’t fucking bother, cunt! Don’t waste your breath!

‘You piss-artist skinhead cunt, you wouldn’t know
and it doesn’t fucking matter if you do,
the skin and poet united fucking Rimbaud
but the autre that je est is fucking you.’

Ah’ve told yer, no more Greek … That’s yer last warning!
Ah’ll boot yer fucking balls to Kingdom Come.
They’ll find yer cold on t’grave tomorrer morning.
So don’t speak Greek. Don’t treat me like I’m dumb.

The more I quote the more I want to quote, just as the more I read the more I want to. But I’ll stop now… oh, one more stanza then:

If love of art, or love, gives you affront
that the grave I’m in’s graffitied then, maybe,
erase the more offensive FUCK and CUNT
but leave, with the worn UNITED, one small v.

It’s an “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” for our time; I am amused to read the following in the Wikipedia article on the poem:

A filmed version of “V” was broadcast by Channel 4 on 4 November 1987. Prior to the broadcast, both tabloid and broadsheet press articles openly criticised the move. An early day motion entitled “Television Obscenity” was put to the house on 27 October 1987 by a small group of Conservative MPs. The motion was only opposed by one MP, Norman Buchan (Labour), who suggested that MPs had either failed to read or failed to understand the poem. In the midst of the controversy, The Independent published the poem in full in the newspaper to allow readers to judge the poem for themselves.

Conservative Party MP Gerald Howarth said that Harrison was “probably another bolshie poet wishing to impose his frustrations on the rest of us”. When told of this, Harrison retorted that Howarth was “probably another idiot MP wishing to impose his intellectual limitations on the rest of us”. Despite continued protests from conservative factions of the press and parliament, the broadcast went ahead, and there were very few complaints from viewers. Since then, the poem has been selected for study in some schools.

Ah for the days when bolshie poets could shake the foundations of things!