Sunday/Whitworth

As full of fun as a pair of glazed tap shoes”, was how the Australian poet Les Murray described the poems of John Whitworth (b. 1945). A committed formalist, Whitworth’s work is firmly in a tradition that runs from G. K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling and W. S. Gilbert to John Betjeman, Gavin Ewart and Kit Wright (whom Whitworth describes as “a small genius”). But Whitworth sees light-hearted verse not so much as a genre in itself as a stylistic choice sometimes made by more serious poets (Philip Larkin and W. H. Auden, for example) keen to exploit its insistent music and often heavy rhymes for ironic effect. And what may look light – or even nonsensical – is often just the result of letting the language have its head. “Rhyme and metre have the function of getting you to work on the form and letting the content creep up on you unawares”, Whitworth says. “Poems are made up of words, not ideas.”
“The Examiners”, which won second prize in the 2007 TLS Poetry Competition and appears in Whitworth’s most recent collection Girlie Gangs (2012), is about the various enemies of energy and imagination which, if you let them, “will desiccate your passion, then eviscerate your soul”. Hardly the stuff of light verse, you might say. But the rhythmic bounce and sheer glee of the poem lift the reader far above all that is, in the end, no match for this delirious, bravura display of the seriously silly. (tls)




The Examiners


Where the house is cold and empty and the garden’s overgrown,  
They are there.
Where the letters lie unopened by a disconnected phone, 
They are there.
Where your footsteps echo strangely on each moonlit cobblestone,
Where a shadow streams behind you but the shadow’s not your own,
You may think the world’s your oyster but it’s bone, bone, bone: 
They are there, they are there, they are there.




They can parse a Latin sentence; they’re as learned as Plotinus, 
They are there.
They’re as sharp as Ockham’s razor, they’re as subtle as Aquinas, 
They are there.
They define us and refine us with their beta-query-minus,
They’re the wall-constructing emperors of undiscovered Chinas,
They confine us, then malign us, in the end they undermine us, 
They are there, they are there, they are there.




They assume it as an impost or they take it as a toll,  
They are there.
The contractors grant them all that they incontinently stole, 
They are there.
They will shrivel your ambition with their quality control,
They will desiccate your passion, then eviscerate your soul,
Wring your life out like a sponge and stuff your body down a hole, 
They are there, they are there, they are there.




In the desert of your dreaming they are humped behind the dunes, 
They are there.
On the undiscovered planet with its seven circling moons, 
They are there.
They are ticking all the boxes, making sure you eat your prunes,
They are sending secret messages by helium balloons,
They are humming Bach cantatas, they are playing looney tunes, 
They are there, they are there, they are there.




They are there, they are there, like a whisper on the air, 
They are there.
They are slippery and soapy with our hope and our despair, 
They are there.
So it’s idle if we bridle or pretend we never care,
If the questions are superfluous and the marking isn’t fair,
For we know they’re going to get us, we just don’t know when or where, 
They are there, they are there, they are there.


JOHN WHITWORTH (2007)