The Mersey Sound-In A New Dimension

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31380, 27 May 1967, Page 4

The Mersey Sound-In A New Dimension

(RevUwtd by F.AJJ The Liverpool Scene. Edited by Edward Lucie-Smith. Published by Donald Carroll, London. SO pp. According to American beat poet, Allan Ginsberg, “Liverpool is at the moment the centre of the consciousness of the human universe,” a statement which possibly reveals more about Ginsberg than it does about Liverpool, but appropriately it is the city which is celebrated in the title of this unusual collection of poems by Liverpool writers. During the years that the Beatles, and in their wake a host of other popgroups, were becoming international phenomena, at home in Liverpool a small group of poets were adding a new dimension to the Mersey sound. Using no more sophis-

ticated a sound equipment than their own voices, these young writers emerged, as rivals to the pop-singers in the beat dubs of Liverpool. Their poetry was written for performance to a specific local audience and it exports less well than pop-songs. Certainly much has been lost in the translation into print Many of the poems are so dotted with local references and in-jokes that they die on the page. Also, sloppy and repetitive writing which might pass undetected in performance is a distraction to the reader. The best poems, however, are strengthened by the directness and topicality which results from the occasion of their invention, and at least support the modest claim of their editor that it is “poetry which is worth reading.” The Liverpool flavour

comes out not only In the explicit references to a local environment hut also in certain stylistic habits made familiar by too books and lyrics of John Lennon. Roger McGough, for instance, by far the best of the eight writers included, shares with Lennon a cheerful irreverence, a delight in word play and a taste for surrealist fantasy. Hera is "Let Me Die a Young Man’s Death": Lei me die o voungman'e death not a clean and tn-between-the-eheete. holy-water death, not a JamoiM-laet-worde, peaceful, out-of-breath death. When I'm n and tn conitant good tumour map I be mown down at dawn bv a bright red eporte ear on my wav home from an all-night party or when I'm II with eiloer hair and sitting in a barber's chair may rival gangsters with ham-JUted tommy-gune buret in and give me a short back and insides or when I'm IM and banned from The Cavern may my mistress catching ma in bed with her daughter and fearing her son cut me up into little pieces and throw away every piece but one. Let me die a youngman's death not a free-from-sin tiptoe in candle-was-and-waning death not a eurtains-drawn. by-angels borne, "what a nice wav to go" death.

McGough’s poems are the most Inventive, the best written, the funniest and the least "occasional.” His main weakness is not knowing when to stop. “What you are,” for instance, uses toe old pop-song device of adding metaphor to metaphor. (Compare “You are toe promised breath of spring time,”) McGough’s metaphors are more original (for example, “You are the moment/before cattle were herded together like men”), but the technique palls long before the last of the 50-odd verses.

Adrian Henri, also well represented, is more intellectual, more literary, more “serious” than McGough, but less entertaining. His most common device is a kind of Lewis Carroll-like inversiocFor example:— Tonight at noon Supermarkets will advertise Id ZXTRA an everything Tonight at noon Children from happy families will be cent to live in a home elephants will tall each other human jokes America will declare peace on Russia . . . The Liverpool poets have certain obvious similarities to the American Beat poets, especially to Corso and Ferlinghetti; they aim at immediacy, they celebrate content at the expense of form and so on, but they lock the disgust for society and the pretentious mysticism which informs so much Beat writing. Few of these poems have much survival power; in a few years they will be as obsolete as this week’s hit parade, but in spite of its obvious flaws this book makes likely and amusing reading. It is very well got up, the poems being interspersed with photographs and excerpts from conversations with the writers, which are often as entertaining as toe poems themselves.