Greta Stoddart – Bag of Tricks

London, City University, early 1990s, Monday night. Michael rushes in — he always rushed in, as if late, or in a hurry, just stopping by— throws off his old tweed coat and swings a battered black briefcase onto a table.

When Maddy asked us to come up with a poem Michael had brought to class, from which we’d maybe learned something, I thought immediately of that briefcase and, as I remembered it, the objects it held. Maddy went hunting for it in the loft. I really didn’t think she’d find anything — who’d hold onto a bunch of random useless objects, never mind a knackered old briefcase, from over 20 years ago? Amazingly, she did — not the case, but the things — and sent me this photo. Straightaway I was back in that classroom, pulling out an old ticket stub, hearing Michael talk about the power of ‘an object you can hold in the palm of your hand’.

Other former students I sent the photo to were struck too: ‘it knocked me for six’, it was ‘a massive start of recognition, like a lightning bolt’.

Things held a real potency for Michael. An object in a poem was more than a symbol – it was, first and foremost, something you held in your hand, an object that might possess a kind of magic if only you, the poet, could become — for the duration of the poem – magician, transform this thing into something alive and ‘reeking with meaning’ – a line he’d often quote from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Crusoe in England’.

I look at the objects in the photo now and notice how many of them have the potential to ‘reek’ of Michael’s own particular search for meaning: a tarot card, a hand-cranked musical box, a wristwatch, a snowglobe … Just invoking these things, I can hear him: ‘Hair oil, boiled sweets, chalk dust, squid’s ink …/Bear with me.  I’m trying to conjure my father’ (‘Caliban’s Books’, Conjure, Picador 2000).

In Paul Farley’s poem ‘Night Class’ he has the briefcase ‘producing sandpipers, egg timers, black silk vests’ — not the real things, of course, but the poems in which these things featured so prominently.  He remembers Michael ‘fishing out photocopies of Bishop or MacNiece or Harrison or whoever. It was often the first time I’d ever seen any of those poems. I thought the answers to the mysteries of poetry were stored in that briefcase.’

Night Class by Paul Farley
 
It’s strange going back
the corridors still shiny and mopped
to a smell and institutional squeak
 
not known to be conducive to poetry.
I can never find the room, and retrace
my steps. They’re starting without me,
 
the teacher opening a briefcase
and producing sandpipers, egg timers,
black silk vests, even a jaguar …
 
And I could so easily have missed it,
the janitor stacking chairs, the teacher
dead going on twenty years.

In Paul’s memory, then, the briefcase held poems, in mine it contained things, and in Paul’s poem the alchemy happens: the case contains the poems that contain the things.  But in the end, as Michael might’ve said, the poem is the thing, the form in which — through which — the magic happens. Right from the start, from the first poem in his first book, Michael was asking us (or rather, his ‘Dearest’) to compare ‘a harpsichord pavane by Purcell/And the racer’s twelve-speed bike’ — two unlikely things from which he conjures a singular love poem of extraordinary truth and beauty.

So we learned from things, from things in poems, from poems. Poems would, in fact, teach us all we needed to know. That was something else I learned from Michael — that the poem is the best teacher.

‘Night Class’ captures the sense we had of Michael pulling things out of a hat. ‘My people were magicians’, the speaker says in ‘The Excuse’, the opening poem of Conjure, acknowledging an uncle’s trick of running a ‘wire beneath the table to/A doorbell’. And in his essay Wallflowers he talks about Tony Harrison performing ‘a kind of magic trick, by sleight of hand’, in his poem ‘Timer’, before inviting us to ‘watch another magician’, Roger Mitchell, at work in his poem ‘The White Cup’. In fact that section (4) of his essay is called When I snap my fingers you will open your eyes… poem as spell, poet as hypnotist or conjurer.

Conjure is, as its title suggests, full of tricks and the illusions he liked to break almost as much as create.  And it’s this third collection that comes to mind while thinking about all this, maybe because of those objects that’ve been lying for so many years up there in that attic, boxed up, forgotten, until now — and here they are again, being photographed, written about, remembered. As he is, by us, in this 20th year since he died. As he’s always there, speaking, whenever we read his poems. 

But what about the briefcase which held the objects? Maddy couldn’t find it. I asked others what they remembered of it — turns out I’ve remembered it all wrong.

Róisín Tierney recalls ‘a red velvet bag with a drawstring and we each had to dip in a hand and take something out. Then ask ourselves questions: what does it look like, what does it feel like, what does it smell like. If it had a voice what would it sound like/what would it say? I seem to remember there was a feather in there, that led on to a whole discussion about your heart being weighed against a feather in the Egyptian book of the dead …’

June Lausch pulled out some Fool’s Gold (also known as iron pyrite) in a little pouch, which inspired her to write a poem about King Midas and a dog-training episode … 

Katy Evans-Bush remembers a doorknob (see the photo!) and being flummoxed by the exercise at the time but, a week after Michael died, she went to visit him in the funeral home, an experience which led to her poem, ‘The Brass Doorknob’, from her first collection Me and the Dead.

The Brass Doorknob by Katie Evans-Bush
 
When (‘alas!’) I held it to the light, and you
asked what I saw, I couldn’t tell. Nobody knew.
 
I can’t help thinking as you meet my hand
of all I’ve put my palm against and not dared ⎯
 
and of all the rooms behind them that I never tried
⎯ the lives unlived and, even more, the deaths un-died.
 
You give a shock. So still and cool you are.
 
But what of those I’ve ventured? (Every door
once opened shows the future ⎯ or the past
the present is the minute the threshold’s crossed.)
 
The light behind me’s on you like a scar.
The scar is like an Alice band, or star
 
or galaxy to light your yellow face
with some cold light, some sickle coup-de-grace
 
reflecting what I hadn’t seen. It is
what I don’t know if you don’t know the words.
 
This yellowness, this silentness ⎯ they lie
across your mystery ⎯ our mystery ⎯ on my
 
familiar hand, placed on this ordinary door
that is your message, word and messenger.

I can’t hold these things — the feather, the Fool’s Gold, the doorknob — in my hand but they’re there now in my mind. ‘Thinking about the past […] through things is always about poetic re-creation. We acknowledge the limits of what we can know with certainty, and must then try to find a different kind of knowing.’ (Neil MacGregor, introduction A History of the World in 100 objects).

So I see Michael, standing in that strip-lit classroom, holding an imaginary skull in his hand, intoning like a kind of third-rate Hamlet, Alas, Poor Yorick … In performances such as these he led us to intimate the mystery inherent in things and how, through our close attention, they might act as a kind of portal to the metaphysical or, as suggests Coleridge — a poet and thinker Michael hugely admired — ‘translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal’ (Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Lay Sermons).

But the hourglass, where’s the hourglass? We all remember the hourglass. That too, it appears, is lost, but you can find it there in Tony Harrison’s ‘Timer’. 

Paul still catches himself talking to his students about ‘an object you can hold in the palm of your hand…’ And I’ll often invoke that old court jester’s skull, though I can’t hope to match the delivery. How did Michael manage to make a moment in that late sad scene so funny? Which makes me think about how he could impart some invaluable point about poetry without seeming to take it too seriously (that sleight of hand again). Never mind telling it slant, Michael was a master of a kind of oblique teaching — through a joke. Before we knew it we were laughing — and learning — about something at the same time.

What I became aware of in that classroom, during those rainy dark evenings — seems it’s not only in my memory those evenings were dark and rainy (or perhaps we’re conflating them with those we found ourselves in in his poems) —yes, maybe the most important thing I discovered was this tension between the temporal and eternal that seemed to be evoked by the relationship between the concrete and the abstract, something he showed us with his bag of tricks. But again, like so much of what I seemed to have learned from Michael, I don’t remember it being explained, but somehow absorbed, through the poems, I suppose, but also from the casual — or hilarious — remarks he’d make, or the little chats we’d have about our lives in the pub afterwards.  Sometimes it doesn’t feel true to say that I was taught by Michael because it never felt like that. Just being in the same room as him you gleaned things. Perhaps he was a kind of magician after all.