Serious Concerns

Photograph: Adrian Harvey

In all my years of book-wormish nerdom, I had not, until very recently, been to a poetry reading. I think I had consigned poetry readings to the territory of performance art and local avant garde theater — embarassingly earnest and unintentionally hilarious  events featuring Very Serious Artists. But I’m delighted to say that my lazy conjectures were proved completely wrong when I attended a reading of the  English poet Wendy Cope a few weeks ago at The Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds. It turns out that poetry readings are rather more like book clubs –middle-aged-women (and a few men)  wearing art fair necklaces and fantastic flowy garments sipping wine and gossipping. Right in my wheelhouse. And, in the hands of the sharp-witted, clever Cope, the many laughs of the evening were completely intentional.

Cope is a popular poet and some critics have found her work too light-hearted and slight. It is true that Cope, famous for parodies of “serious” poets like T.S. Eliot and Wordsworth, (Her first collection, published in 1986, is the deliciously titled Making  Cocoa for Kingsley Amis),  is not concerned with estatic pronouncements on life’s big questions or awe-inspiring meditations on nature. Her poems feel like the wry asides of your wittiest friend — she is quick to suss out hypocrisy or pretension and put it in its place with her  sharply observed  humor and spare style. When congratulating Cope on the publication of the 1992 collection Serious Concerns,  the poet Ted Hughes is said to have written her, “I like your deadpan fearless sort of way of whacking the nail on the head — when everybody else is trying to hang pictures on it.”

I bought Serious Concerns at the reading because I found I couldn’t resist poems like this one (relationships between men and women are most often in her sights):

Flowers

Some men never think of it.
You did. You’d come along
And say you’d nearly brought me flowers.
But something had gone wrong.

It made me smile and hug you then.
Now I can only smile.
But, look, the flowers you nearly bought
Have lasted all this while.

Or this:

;

When  Cope read “Bloody Men” at the reading, she followed it with a set of questions that she had unearthed from a school textbook analyzing the poem. She had the audience in stitches as she read out, “What does the author mean by indicators?” and “What does she think of men?” And perhaps you can think of this one next time you hear a  finding your car keys, changing  Coke to Pepsi testimony  at church:

When I went out shopping,
I said a little prayer:
‘Jesus, help me park the car
For you are everywhere.’

Jesus, in His goodness and  grace,
Wants to find you a parking space.
Ask Him now to reserve a place.
Sound the horn and praise Him!

Sharp and funny, but perhaps not so light?

One funny note  from the reading, when Cope signed my copy of Serious Concerns, she seemed to hesitate over the spelling of my name, which happens to me all the time — is ie or ei? When I nervously jumped in and spelled it out, she gave me a withering look and said, “Yes, of course we all know how to spell your name, we all read Joanna Spyri’s novel as children.” Cope does not suffer fools or suggestions that she cannot spell your name, but it didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the evening or my sense that the sharp insightfulness behind Cope’s humor comes from a well of serious emotion and thought.