Bookworm: ‘Today’s poets are much better at reading from their own work than they were a century ago’

MAYBE it’s just me, but I don’t tend to associate poets with sociology. But that’s what Matthew Hollis (See Page 4) studied when he was at Edinburgh University, and it was while there that his own deep love of poetry began.

Not only did he run the university’s poetry society, but he started a literary magazine – ibid – and submitted poems to it pseudonymously. One of the names he chose was Garcia Lorca: only later did he discover, to his embarrassment, that there actually was a Spanish poet of that name who was both dead and very famous indeed. In fact, embarrassment seems to have followed Hollis around for some time. When he got the job as poetry editor at Faber, one of his first tasks was to reject the poems he had sent in as “not nearly good enough”.

His career since then has, however, been exemplary and garlanded with praise. But there is also a pleasing circularity to it too. One of the poets he works with as an editor at Faber is Don Paterson. And back in 1993, when Hollis went to his first poetry reading in Edinbugh, it was to see Paterson reading from his own first collection, Nil Nil.

Incidentally, today’s poets, Hollis notes, are much better at reading from their own work than they were a century ago. “In 1913 poets reading their own work in public was a relatively new thing, and many were very bad at it.

Some of the bestselling books at the time were on elecution and how to declaim poetry. They’d tell people to clasp their hands across their chest if referring to the heart, or raise their hand horizontal to their eyes if referring to mountains. It must have been awful.”

METEORIC RISE

A new book – yet another – about Hitler, this time from AN Wilson. What could there possibly be to say that’s new? Yet his Hitler: A Short Biography, out in a couple of weeks from Harper Press, is at least enlightening about the Fuhrer’s gastric problems. “Hitler suffered acutely from meteorism,” notes Wilson. “Perhaps he did not suffer so acutely as those around him as meteorism is uncontrolled farting, a condition exacerbated by Hitler’s strictly vegetarian diet.”

Dr Morrell – his doctor from 1936 to 1945 – proscribed Dr Koster’s Anti-Gas pills, which apparently contained strychnine, although sadly only in tiny proportions.