Massa Damnata

An exclusive scoop for the blog! I can reveal that Septic Bubblegum, the forthcoming collection of Grayson’s verse, will include a previously unpublished series of poems composed in response to the so-called 'War on Terror'.

Grayson of course opposed the American response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, though, as usual, his objections were largely aesthetic rather than moralistic.

Here's a sneak preview of one of the poems.


Massa Damnata

Watch the hell out.

Run like foxes to dens.
The eagle is about to
fuck us up.

I lost my left shoe in the race
to the stinking bunker. Fuck that.



Grayson Ellis, December 2002
Unpublished.

Pensées of a People-Watcher - No.9

You have
dirty-blonde fronds.
But are you, I wonder,
A dirty blonde?



Grayson Ellis, 1972
Reprinted, with permission, from ‘Deflation’

There but for the Grace - a 'Problem Poem'

There but for the Grace has been classed by some critics as one of Grayson’s ‘Problem Poems’, along with the likes of Midnight at the Convent (1972), A Gap in the Hedge and The Barn Owl has the Softest Down (both 1981).

For me however, Grace is more emblematic than problematic. The themes of individual liberty, mob morality and ‘victimless crime’ have recurred sporadically in Grayson’s work, as have issues around animal rights and rural traditions. It is well known that Grayson has, at different times in his life, been passionately in favour of, and violently opposed to, foxhunting - though generally on aesthetic rather than moral grounds. But, as Grayson himself has famously put it:

Consistency is the both the most inconsistent virtue and the most consistently misunderstood vice. The artist, who most certainly should not be consistent, too often is; while the critic, who must be consistent if he is to be anything at all, too often isn’t. (1)


Here's the poem, decide for yourself!


There but for the Grace

They had old Bert in cuffs.
Dragged through fool-thronged streets
to Shrewsbury gaol,
For the crime of loving Nature just
six inches too much.

We are all bestial. Oh
the greybeards, eyeglassed
collectors, cold scientists,
They divide up life, wallcharts,
Nets and belljars, microscopes,
Pronounce names, rule on ‘species’,
Freeze them in catalogues.

But there’s no catalogue
for love. Seed is seed, and love is love.
The horse covers the ass: the mule is no great sin.
Old Bert knew badgers, sheep, otters,
Deeper than any scientist knows their ways;
He knew their love.

At the steps of Shrewsbury gaol
old Bert caught my eye.
I know why: For there but for the Grace
go you, go I.


(C) Grayson Ellis, 1989
‘Confessions’
Reprinted with permission.



(1) Grayson Ellis Fishing for Dead Trout: Critical analysis in the Post-Thatcher World (1992). Originally published in the Times Literary Supplement 14/5/92

Your Eternal Crow

For Ted Hughes

Marshalling old reserves, the Crow old cried
Infinity splitting guttural bullets of air
Inflaming his spirit, trapping wing
Until he soared to talon formation up there.

‘I sing because the feathers are as few
As the counting wind days
Of masking earth with the span
Of my flight.’

So he rose, immaculate black, a jest
Of shadow and light, until
On milked cloud he nested
And was eternal Crow.

Grayson Ellis, 1973
Reprinted, with permission, from ‘Deflation’

Keep Scotland

You can keep Scotland,
Aye! That’s no light bequeathment,
I ken. For I give you the Eagle Owl, the stag,
I give you the Bens, even.
As God gave them.

But that God is a hard God,
His palm the stiff rod that
Spanks the wayward bairn.
I cannot bend that way.

No! I’ll stay a Shropshire lad
And you can keep Scotland, just
leave me the Shire.
For my God is the soft Hand – blessed sacrament –
that cradles the new-hatched Tawny,
That clutches the buttock, the heart.



Grayson Ellis (c) 1963
Reprinted, with permission, from ‘Pikey’



When I’m invited to give lectures on Grayson’s oeuvre, or if I’m leading student discussion groups, I often start with Keep Scotland.

It is an early poem and, while Grayson’s styles and preoccupations varied widely over the following decades, Keep Scotland hints at many of the themes that resonate throughout his later, more mature work. Nature obviously, but more importantly the complex questions about the relationship between the religious and the corporeal that have occupied Grayson throughout his life, and the answers to which he seems only to glimpse in his beloved Shropshire. If there can be any ‘answers’, that is!

It is a great shame that in the late 1990s the English Independence Party adopted the opening line of the poem as a slogan in their campaign for a separate English Parliament. Grayson himself has shunned organised politics throughout his life and is certainly not anti-Scottish. Indeed, his admiration for the landscape and wildlife of that great, ancient country is obvious for all to see.

A Reader Requests...

Sally P. from Humberside emailed me to ask if I could reprint one of Grayson's poems that she remembered from school but has been unable to find. I think the poem Sally refers to is called 'Innocence 14:11'. The text is from 'Badgers & Owls', which is sadly no longer in print. However, I can confirm that it is in the forthcoming collection of Grayson's work, 'Septic Bubblegum'. It's typical of modern education that a writer like Grayson should fall out of favour. Hopefully, such a major volume of his work should reignite the public's interest.

I spoke to Grayson today on the phone and he was delighted by the blog (kudos to Simon who helps us with the graphics) and he hopes to send us some of his unpublished poems in the near future. When I mentioned this poem, he growled 'why the hell do you want to reprint that s***?' which I think says much about the humility of the man.

Innocence 14:11

I lost my virginity at Whipsnade Zoo,
To tigers, llamas, the Peruvian gnu,
Long before Vera took it that night
In the back seat of her red Austin Sprite.
For what is innocence but the belief
That we are so much more than beast,
Before passion rears its ugly head
Staining the sheets in my unmade bed?
I saw that day, as a wide eyed child
That we are but one hunger from wild,
And that ours is a true sexual intellect
That makes men walk perpetually erect.

Grayson Ellis (c) 1979
From ‘Badgers and Owls’

Father Dada

For Tom Stoppard

Molten cheese dripping from a carbuncular sky,
Weeping lizards and men with hairy clock faces,
None of whom know their way to Stalybridge.
Beneath the cryptic bridge with alligator clip ties
A morose anchovy salesman, broken about the knees,
Holds up the variegated nozzle to a Czechoslovakian hose
(Three eighths diameter, not an inch over a whistler’s thumb)
And wonders if it will ever pump muesli again into Bratislava.

Meanwhile Bogart stands in line beneath a pelican sky
Rubber jowl, simian brow, hazy smoke percolates
In steady circuit from mouth to nostril, twitch lipped
And freak ready to break bone. That other word
Men say, ‘do’, is to exist where adult is all that
I remember from those liquid soap absolutions
In the choir each night: ten boys playing poker,
Pollination of the flame breasted candles,
Running with unctuous self-congratulation.

(C) Grayson Ellis, 1989
‘Confessions’
Reprinted with permission.

The Book of Revelation

Grayson writes:

Finding oneself represented online has a sobering effect on the poet. Or, at least, that is how I feel about this nefarious thing called fame. Our landscapes are internal to us. What we produce, these little chaffish flecks of existence, drift away, published and republished in anthology, cherished by some, abhorred by others. It never occurs to the writer that they may affect a human soul a thousand miles or even a lifetime away. One thinks of posterity but does any artist consider the product of his existence beyond the yearly stipend from publisher or agent? What would Nietzsche have felt if he had witnessed the horrors of a world war?

I don’t expect wars to be fought over me, though, in my darkest hours, like any writer, to be immortalised in a bloodbath seems like a pleasing alternative to the assumed obscurity. So, I arrive at this blog, created in my name by others, adorned with my face, striated by my words, and I feel an outsider in my own world. I have not reached an age – nor may I ever – when having people stare at me feels anything like normality. Instead I recollect the moments in my life of which I am most ashamed. It is not unlike standing before an audience, to lecture or to recite, when I imagine that eyes see into the very depths of my soul and are repelled by what they see.

What do you see? I make no great claims for my amorality. I’ll leave that for others to catalogue, as I am sure they will. Instead, I will simply say, of my occasional immorality, my intentions were never spiteful. As a poet, I believe I have made it my theme to simply portray life in its cruellest agonies of circumstance, rarely of our making, usually of our suffering, etching away at an atomic on the substance of our soul.

[UPDATE: Sat. 18th July, 18:19. Grayson emailed me this note late Friday and in my rush to post it, I forgot to thank him for the interest he's showing in our blog and the wider blogging community. When I helped him to set up an account, I hardly expected him to use it and I'm encouraging him to respond via comments here as I've seen him do on other blogs.]

'M'

Mr. Mitty masturbates
Most Monday mornings,
Manipulating medium manhood
Modestly, maintaining
Moderate motions,
Mouthing muttered moans,
Mercurially measuring
Memorised models
Mechanically massaging
Monumental moist mammaries
Mimicking megastar
Marilyn Monroe.

Grayson Ellis, 1973
Reprinted, with permission, from ‘Deflation’

Christ on Ilkley Moor: An Analysis of Grayson Ellis’s ‘Innocence Lost’

Innocence Lost

Do you remember it? I cannot remember
anything else. That cold spring
of it all. On Ilkley Moor
I hiked all day. Through the rich
Yellow spikes of Bog Asphodel, 5
following the badger trails and chill cries of the
Redshank. In the limited shelter
Of a brazen hillock
I gave up my innocence
To poetry, and to nature’s cruel Muse. 10
And after, starving and wide-eyed
as a tawny owl, flew raggedly back to
Your uncle’s cottage,
Where you were waiting, reading Proust,
For a cheap cabernet and a can of meat. 15
You blessed our entwinement
twice, you blessed the can
of meat. Then, thrice blessed, we went to bed.
It was bacon grill, I remember.

Grayson Ellis (c) 1969
From ‘Porcupine’
Reproduced With Permission

It has become common practice to place Grayson Ellis in the tradition of nature poets stretching back through Ted Hughes, William Wordsworth, John Clare, and including figures such as Andrew Marvell or even John Milton. However, there is an argument one might make which places Ellis in a different tradition altogether. In this essay, I will argue that, in his poem ‘Innocence Lost’, Grayson Ellis foregrounds the Catholicism often latent in his work but rarely explored given the critical bias towards his misanthropy, bisexuality, and his early political activism and later isolationism.

Ilkley Moor is an unusual setting for Ellis, given that he is generally recognised as the ‘bard of Shropshire’. However, though set in Yorkshire, the poem treads familiar ground. ‘Bog Asphodel’ (l. 5) calls to mind, naturally, Sir Phillip Sidney’s sonnet sequence, ‘Astrophel and Stella’; only, to Ellis, one of the most anti-romantic poets of his age, love does not fit into fourteen lines. Love is akin to a cruel conquest, since, as Ellis would surely know, Bog Asphodel is also known as ‘Narthecium ossifragum’, the Latin name meaning ‘weak bone’. This playfulness is typical of Ellis. Sex is reduced to the hard slog through the bogged mire of lust and whatever his penetrative ambitions (alluded to by the spiked plant), his ‘bone’ is weak, flaccid.

During the mid-1960s, Ellis reveals in his diaries that he experienced long periods of impotence.

I write poetry when my organs scream out for satisfaction but nothing works for me. I can only harden at the appearance of my landlady come to demand rent. How can I lust after such a creature I do not know. Perhaps it’s a form of absolution for what happened in Sardinia.
(Grayson Ellis, ‘Diaries’, Volume 1: 1958-69)

It might be too much to assume that the ‘brazen hillock’ is the same woman, but one has to bear in mind that landscape to Ellis is often sexualised. His tropes are those of the lustful man. Even the word ‘hillock’ has a sexual edge, the pregnant push of the double ‘l’, ending with the ‘lock’ to which perhaps only he has the key.

The poem reaches its consummation, as it were, with the two lines which stand proudly like an accusation, and are so reminiscent of Eliot:

Where you were waiting, reading Proust,
For a cheap cabernet and a can of meat. (ll. 14-15)

The Catholicism is apparent with the explicit reference to the sacrament. Here we have both wine and bread, though the bread (symbolic of flesh) is made quite real in the form of a can of meat. Critics, notably Professor Granger, have noted that Ellis takes ‘great satisfaction in elevating the ridiculous to almost religious levels of significance’ (‘The Barn Owl’ [Pengrove, 1982]). His 1975 poem ‘Tinned Meat’ includes the line: ‘twist me open, my spirit bled its last jelly’.

Here, in ‘Innocence Lost’, the ‘can of meat’ becomes a metaphor both for the virile manhood but also for the human spirit contained in the hard shell of corpulent matter. Yet there is a paradox here that is doubly apparent. The bread of the transubstantiation has become meat, yet meat had also been transformed to spirit and the ‘body’ is now the cold container of the tin. This confusion is deliberate. To Ellis, sex is not separated from his being. There is no attempt to attain a higher being. The meat is both his spirit and his manhood; his manhood, as many have pointed out, is the essential spirit of Grayson Ellis. This, I think, mocks the notion of the blessing, found in the last four lines of the poem.

You blessed our entwinement
twice, you blessed the can
of meat. Then, thrice blessed, we went to bed.
It was bacon grill, I remember. (ll. 16-19)

The blessing of the meat has ancient associations in rituals. However, with typical abandon, Ellis does not reach for the language of the church. The urbane ‘it was bacon grill’ demands to be read as straightforward understatement. His meat is tortured in the hand of his lover.

However, Ellis is never one to shy away from heresy. He is an avowed agnostic and here it’s as if he deliberately wishes to offend the practicing Christian. The bacon being grilled directs the mind towards a language of sacrifice, in which the spirit is subjected to torture. It is surely the image of Christ on the cross, the flesh suffering under the burning heat of the midday sun high on that hill in Golgotha. It would be a stretch to assume this had we not the evidence of the 1978 unpublished verse, ‘Christians Love Bacon Sandwiches’, which ends with one Ellis’s more sardonic lines, the order to ‘Chew the meat, salvation in tooth / Gristle, muscle, sin and tomato satisfaction’ (l. 37-38).

Only, on Ilkley Moor, there is no ‘tomato satisfaction’. Even sex, once endured, becomes the fading remnant of a memory.

Shelly Greene
The University of Preston

July News

The website has been quite these last few months, mainly due to my own ill heath (I’m feeling a lot better). Whilst we’ve been gone, we’ve received quite a few emails. I’m doing my best to answer them all and to forward any requests to Grayson who is currently in the country.

Shelly Greene, an undergraduate student of English at the University of Preston, has sent us an essay to reprint (I shall do so shortly). It’s good to see a new generation of scholars emerge. Though Grayson has often alluded to his cynicism towards critics, I think there is much to be said about studying a poet of Grayson’s standing. I want to thank Shelly for allowing us to reprint the essay and I have sent her a signed proof copy of Grayson’s collected verse, ‘Septic Bubblegum’, which will be available in the Autumn.