It feels only natural that when I ask for a ticket to Exeter the man should tell me, “You do know there are no trains out of Paddington?” A woman has thrown herself under a train, bringing everything to a standstill – not a good omen for my poetry course at the Arvon Foundation. He says the trains are turning round at Ealing Broadway: I could go there. Three thousand other people have been told the same thing and we all surge off into various bottlenecks. At Ealing, I learn I have just missed a train from Paddington, where the crisis is now over.
At Exeter, the minibus for Totleigh Barton has left and the station phone is broken. I have a coffee in the buffet and a tall blonde woman in sunglasses approaches me. This must be the first time for many years that Jerry Hall has not been recognized in public, and by someone who is supposed to know her. We met two years ago on a reality TV show called Kept. The idea of the show was to find her a toy boy by putting twelve finalists – American male-model types – through various tests. I was hired to teach them how to write an ode to Jerry – a thankless task as the boys all thought it would diminish their masculinity (and hence their chances of winning) if they did too well at this effeminate art. “What on earth are you doing here?” I blurt, looking round for the cameras. “I’m taking your course”, she says. “Don’t you remember? I told you last year.” “I didn’t think you were serious”, I say truthfully. She tells me she was on the train the woman threw herself under. She has a taxi ordered and so it is that I arrive to take my course in her company.
I am shown to my quarters in the Old Goose House, where I used to stay often in the 1970s and 80s. I stand in the familiar wooden cabin, looking out on the same peaceful field of cows. Nothing has changed, except that now there is a bathroom and an arrangement of mirrors causes the cows to wander amiably through the room from time to time.
Our first meeting is for introductions – names and reasons for attendance. Jerry says it is like an AA meeting: “My name is Jerry and I’m a poet”. I am aware of fifteen complex backgrounds, all with smiling faces, like the tips of so many icebergs. We play poetical journeys, passing pieces of paper, adding a line, folding it over: “In the frozen wastes of Antarctica / sits a man with a harmonica”.
Tuesday. Greta Stoddart, my co-tutor, has drawn up a chart for the one-on-one sessions and everyone fills in their names. Our blurb for the course, which I think I wrote, seems to be addressing the problems of Iraq rather than those of poetry: “Not so much slash and burn as hearts and minds. How to move on. How to develop your own solutions. New starts. New endings. Courage to fail for the greater good. Greta will discipline formalists. Hugo will liberate free versifiers”.
Arvon courses have a tried-and-tested routine which usually works like clockwork. The tutors give workshops and tutorials, evenings are for readings, and the participants do all the cooking and washing up. What happens in practice is that a half-hour tutorial inevitably spreads into the following one, so that you become aware of a poet loitering on the edge of the lawn, clutching some papers. Different levels of verbal skill test your adaptability and you have to go easy on the old negativity.
Wednesday. Greta and I take it in turns to run the morning workshops round the massive oak dining table. Greta makes them write a sonnet. I tell them to write six good things, alternating with six bad things, about a house they know well. I wonder is there any real connection between writing exercises and writing. One thing is certain, this game is a doddle compared to teaching toy boys to write on reality TV. Vix, a blind woman with a kindly black labrador, is particularly impressive in the improvised exercises. Her computer translates what she writes into the voice of “Hal”, which she can then play back through headphones and read out loud when asked to do so. The efforts of concentration, not to mention the technology, are humbling to behold. Her dog George is stoical but ill at ease in the creative-writing context.
Thursday. I pass round two versions of Paul Muldoon’s “Cuba”, one from Why Brownlee Left, the other, longer one published earlier in an Irish magazine. It is instructive to see what lines Muldoon has seen fit to dispense with in his quest for the perfectly balanced object, excising the merest suspicion of prose along the way, but several students disagree with his improvements. On the subject of rhyme, I point out how he has changed the line “And him with only to give the nod” to “And him with only to say the word” in order to avoid the numbing rhyme with “God” two lines later. Not everyone agrees with this change either. Jerry is excited and fearful because she has written a column for the Independent in which she includes a poem about a certain popular “icon”.
Friday. The Independent arrives. The Jerry Hall column takes up a whole page, with a drawing of her by Tracey Emin. She writes that she is just off to do a course with me in Devon, but is terrified because “I can’t write poems when I am happy, but luckily I have a deep well of sadness from my childhood and lots of disappointments in love to draw on”. The poem, “Icon”, ends as follows: “he fucks their women / and fights their battles against mediocrity / but when he comes home to me / all that’s left is v.d.”. Everyone says they like the surprise ending.
Vix comes into the kitchen with George to wash her hands, reaches for the soap dispenser and accidentally sets off the fire alarm, which is located next to it. A couple of attractive young firemen turn up, not at all put out, looking like stripogram firemen. They are freelance firefighters who take an interest in the course and say they wouldn’t mind joining in. After apologizing for the disturbance, they leave.
Saturday. Spring has happened while we’ve been here, a green haze on the wood, the tinny cries of pheasants etched on the peace and quiet we must now leave.
_________________________________________________________
Hugo Williams's new collection of poems, Dear Room, was published last year.
