In July, BBC radio’s
current affairs programme ‘File on Four’ featured ‘Funerals without any
mourners’ exploring the increase in ‘funerals for
people who have died alone with no known next of kin or family’. What is
tragic, the programme revealed, is the sometimes painfully long periods before
their deaths are noticed. When, on 12th of August the body of
Margaret Griffiths was discovered by police at her home in Poole, Dorset, having
lain undiscovered for some time, it would be easy to dismiss the event as
further evidence of this bleak social trend. No relatives could be traced;
Margaret’s funeral was sparsely attended; only a few neighbours and the
solicitor entrusted with winding-up Margaret’s estate gathered at the
graveside on September 7th. Undoubtedly, the extraordinary reaction
on the internet a week or two later when news of Margaret’s death was reported
on the poetry web board ‘Eratosphere’ would have come as a complete surprise
to this small band of mourners.
Although her talent may have been
little appreciated locally, she had reputation as a poet which spanned the
English-speaking world and was named in 2005 by The Academy of American Poets as
one of the ‘greatest internet poets’. This was not an accolade which
Margaret would have sought, for although she was a keen participant on internet
poetry boards, edited the poetry ezine ‘Worm’ and had occasional pieces
published in print magazines, she kept her personal life to herself and sought
anonymity rather than fame. Moreover she seemed almost wantonly unaware of the
extent her abilities or of her growing reputation amongst fellow writers.
An unfortunate side effect of the
poet’s belligerent modesty was a tendency to mislay great swathes of her own
work through a variety of computer mishaps. In the weeks since her death a
concerted effort has been made by admirers and friends to gather together her
work, published either in print or on-line, and create an indexed archive of the
poet’s extant work. With the assistance of magazine editors and the moderators
of the web’s leading formalist poetry boards such a Gazebo, Sonnet Central and
Eratosphere. the aim is to publish Margaret’s work in book form and bring to
the wider public and literary establishment a better understanding of Margaret
Griffiths’ much overlooked talent.
After only a few weeks over 300 poems
have been tracked down, some finished, some in the making, gleaned from workshop
archives. Early publication, however, is fraught with difficulties. It is less
than clear to whom this considerable body of work belongs as no living relatives
have been traced and as you might expect from the poet’s unassuming character
she gave little regard s to what might happen to her work after her death. I
suspect she would have treated the notion of needing a literary executor with a
characteristic hoot of derision.
Given the tragic manner of her passing
it would all to easy to characterise Margaret as reclusive and anti-social.
However, to those of us who corresponded with her on-line, ‘Maz’ as she
preferred to be called, was clever and funny; her personality was both kind
hearted yet quick to unmask pretension. In workshops she was a canny critic; as
editor of ‘Worm’, an email based poetry ezine, which ran to 40 editions,
Margaret treated all contributors with equal respect. Many would be poets,
myself included are grateful to her ezine as the place which was willing to
print poems by complete unknowns.
Those of us who came across Maz in the
odd and somewhat hermetic world of cyberpoetry will mourn the passing of a
pioneer, a delightful spirit and a generous critic. It is Maz’s poetry,
however, that I believe will be her lasting legacy, it is only as the larger
body of her work is gathered together that the significance of her writing
becomes ever more apparent.
Margaret’s talent was wide ranging,
her work eclectic; if she had been a chef, then fusion would have been her
forte. Her on-line ‘handle’ was ‘Grasshopper’ an apt avatar for a writer
who never stayed still, was equally at home with free verse or formal, whose
poetry ranged from the screamingly funny to the darkly disturbing. Her
manipulation of language enabled her to write at times in a styles which
bordered on archaic, yet never descended into pastiche; she was inventive enough
to produce nonsense poems that revelled in the street language of imaginary
sub-cultures or dystopian distant planets.
Above all else Margaret Griffiths’
poems are a joy to read, morsels to savour, little gems of poems that glitter
with invention - vivacious and immediate. Here she manages a synopsis of Hamlet
in 14 lines; as appropriate to a revenge tragedy the action seems to have been
re-invented in a butchers shop.
(A
Tragedy in 4 Lamentable Fillets).
Act 1:
What fowl noisette's abroad this night? I walk
the battlements. Porked lightning! Next appears
my father's goose. O
Veni, son,
he says. We talk
of
offal oxtails - poussin in his ears!
Act 2:
I ham a madman's veal. My plans are laid.
I rib Orphelia, my lamb, and swear
that she's croquette and worse, that sweetbread maid.
She drowns, a bouquet garni in her hair.
Act 3:
The barons and the burgers beef. I do not quail.
Words
dripping on the tongue,
I tell the cast.
I steak my all upon my play. It mutton fail.
I'll pluck my uncle's heart and crown at last.
Epilogue:
The thyme is out of joint, and drumsticks thrum.
Did Bacon write this tripe? The butchers come.
It
was Margaret’s sonnets that I came across first when I began posting my own
work on Sonnet Central some years ago. Maz was a moderator; her advice and
thoughtful criticism proved invaluable; above all else the range and variety of
the work she produced provided an exciting and challenging model for those of us
trying to hone our sonnet writing skills. Perhaps her most celebrated work in
this form is the superb, ‘Opening a Jar of Dead Sea Mud.’
The smell of mud and brine. I'm six, awash
with grey and beached by winter scenery,
pinched by the Peckham girl who calls me posh,
and boys who pull live crabs apart to see
me cry. And I am lost in that grim place
again, coat buttoned up as tight as grief.
Sea scours my nostrils, strict winds sand my face,
the clouds pile steel on steel with no relief.
Sent there to convalesce--my turnkeys, Sisters
of Rome, stone-faced as Colosseum arches--
I served a month in Stalag Kent, nursed blisters
in beetle shoes on two-by-two mute marches.
I close the jar, but nose and throat retain
an after-tang, the salt of swallowed pain.
Unsurprisingly, Richard Wilbur
picked out the sonnet for particular praise in Eratosphere’s 2008 annual
‘Sonnet Bakeoff’. The ‘Spherians’ themselves voted the poem their
overall winner. Margaret Griffiths was well recognised on both sides of the
Atlantic as a gifted and versatile writer.
Like D H Lawrence, Maz wrote
wonderfully about animals and birds. Her own domestic pets appear in her poetry
as important members of the household. Here she takes on the persona of her
Persian cat, in the aptly titled, ‘Ding Dong Bell’. It takes a wry sideways
swipe at the absurdity of Maz’s own overanxious preparations for a dinner
party.
Great Bast, today she pulled out
all the stops,
all faff and fussle to impress her friends;
the bedrooms were a whirl of cloths and mops,
much bathroom bleach sploshed all around the bends,
great waspiness of Hoover on the stairs.
She wore a gypsy scarf to dust and clean,
to brush the suite and tut at velcroed hairs.
I split, aloof, -upheaval's not my scene.
She's donned a dress, a closet lecher's dream,
the pristine kitchen's pregnant with fine food,
the startled rooms and furniture all gleam.
Ding Dong. Her guests arrive in festive mood.
Ah, that's my cue to squat with blissful hiss
and souse the Persian rug with pungent piss.
In case the few facts we know of
Maz’s life - that she seems to have lived alone with a collection of domestic
pets, that her death went un-noticed locally, that she seems to have had few
face to face social contacts - tempts anyone to invent some kind of buttoned-up
spinsterish existence for her, then the energy and humour of ‘Ding Dong
Bell’ must lead you to quite the opposite conclusion. Maz came over in all my
dealings with her as funny and outgoing, yet honest about her fears and
anxieties. She had one more quality in common with D H Lawrence; Maz wrote about
sex… quite often, sometimes with disarming candour!
Today we'll talk of princes, pets, it's story time
and magic lurks in millponds. Here's a frog
cold-humped by well-wet walls: how such things slime
and slither, silver-muscled, damp as fog
and just as hard to grasp! The waking kiss
is easy--overstressed, I think. The lesson
is rather how to catch, how not to miss
a golden chance, and never mind the mess on
your dainty digits. Holding frogs and newts
takes skill, as slippery as an eel's ringed squirm:
a female art, my dears, that bears rich fruits.
The needful squeeze is confident and firm
to seize control, but not so tight it hurts--
so wise princesses earn their just deserts.
If we try to seek out common threads in Margaret’s varied
work then the preceding poem touches upon what seems to me to be a recurrent
theme. Many of her poems explore the female psyche through figures derived from
myth, folklore, fairytale and legend, often using dramatic monologue. In many
poems powerful, female archetypal figures take control. In ‘Hippolyta at
Dawn’ the Queen of the Amazons dominates her lover:
He sighs, he yields; this skirmish ends
so soon.
Engagements call me from the field for now
so battle royal should wait till after noon.
‘First Woman’ celebrates
Lilith as Adam’s mate before Eve. A mysterious, powerful presence,
….Lilith prowls her realm, the night yields stars
to settle in her hair like sleepy bees,
and by their light, she counts the latest scars
gouged in the planet's pelt by human greed.
Even in more homespun tales the tables are turned in favour
of the female characters. In ‘Fairytale’,
Did you ever believe that
the wolf ate Grandma?
She'd have told him off,
polished his personal buttons
with a spit-damp hankie,
In other poems male, demon-like creatures, hound the female
protagonists, sometimes, as in ‘Demon Lover’ to comic effect,
I knew you were a demon when your eyes
went black and something vipered into view.
Of course I felt a soupcon of surprise
but Honey, what the hell, I still loved you.
However, in ‘A
conversation with the dark’ the fears are more palpable, and a sense of terror
threatens to overwhelm the poet’s characteristic poise.
You
sit like dust again behind the door.
I yank it wide to seize your hair, and roar,
I
have you now!
And slighter than I knew.
It was your shadow I had feared, not you.
I grasp you, grip you in my termite jaws,
you pissant prick. I seize you in my claws
and squeeze, you rat-turd, arse-wipe, moldwarp, minge.
Yet
for all this ‘Anima rising’ I doubt that Margaret would have been happy to
be regarded as a feminist poet. Indeed, in ‘The Woman’s Circle, she mocks
the hypocrisy of the group’s prurient interest in pornography,
tuts with the others at the sordid scene,
the squalid pumping of the actors' loins.
Stern-faced she watches like a widowed queen
and feels with pique, as personal affront,
the creeping liquefaction of her c***.
Margaret
Griffiths spoke rarely in public about either her life or work. A rare exception
occurred when Margaret agreed to be interviewed as the Poetry Kit Featured Poet in
July 2001. We learn a few tantalising facts about the person behind the poems,
that she was born in central London, that she’d visited relatives in South
Wales frequently as a girl and came to love nature and the countryside.
Interestingly she reflected ‘I suppose the biggest single literary influence on
my childhood was one of my father's friends, a writer of elegant social history,
who bought me books every time he visited. They were wonderful illustrated books
about the Greek Myths, Tales from Shakespeare, the Arabian Nights, Perrault's
Fairy Tales. Later he brought me classic novels, reference books and
dictionaries. I would often pick a dictionary as bedtime reading, as I
found words so fascinating’.
Perhaps the most telling statement in the interview
is, in fact, the opening sentence, "I hope that with all my poems,
whatever else I am trying to communicate, I will communicate some of my delight
in language and the magic of words." To me this sums up the essence of
Margaret’s gift. Whereas many of us work over a long time to find a particular
poetic voice, Margaret was much more interested in experimenting with radically
different voices and personae in her work. Her facility in this respect was
remarkable.
In ‘Family feeling’ she created a kind of faux
street talk, which seems to languish half way between 'The Sopranos' and Raymond
Chandler.
So Bobby has the case. The trouble is
it's not his case. Who did the switcheroo
and when? On Bob--my tricky dick, a Wiz
who fixed scores coast to golden coast--and who
could match his balls, who beelined all the biz?
So I can't trust him now? My number 2.
Sweet Jeez, we had it stitched, the fuse had fizz
but now the nose-cone's in the shit. What's new?
‘Spaced’
recreates, within a few opening lines, the ‘space-punk’ world of Hans Solo’s
Millennium Falcon or Blade runner.
Carpenter rode the starstorms round the outer rim
of Ryga, traded blue-rockers and wreckers
and the real estate of dreams. He hard-hustled
with the skin tribes who ply, Altair to Actureus,
and mojammed all the dives that stud the systems,
sawing mean riffs on the Les Steele cithern
he'd salvaged from an ExFed skimmer, drifting
like a black gardenia petal on the dead Allurian sea.
Yet
Margaret also reveled in rich, romantic diction. The following lines from
‘Longing’ would not be out of place in a late Victorian piece, they have a
fin de siecle yearning about them, a century too late.
You always lingered just beyond my sight,
a promise at the golden edge of light.
My hands reached out. My heart was huge with need.
At last I wearied of desire, and grew too tired
to hope. The business of the world, its grind
and grief, devoured my time. Grey sirens mired
my course and I was lost, but now I find
your presence at my side, where you have always been,
to crown me with the stars that I had never seen.
She wrote extensively about scenes from history, and revealed in later years an enthusiasm for a lost medieval world of chivalry, hunting and falconry.
She cuts the morning wind, a grey-fletched arrow
dispatched to strike the prey. She stoops, kills cleanly,
then mantles jealous wings to claim the sparrow.
A merlin stirs and snites. He eyes it keenly.
The Duke A-hunting
Her
ability to write convincingly, apparently at will, in a bewildering variety of
voices made Margaret wickedly good at parody. When Sonnet Central became even
more besieged than usual by egomaniacal poets with a penchant for posting truly
terrible ‘traditional sonnets’ in the style of Shakespeare or Keats,
Margaret parodied their efforts as follows:
As Shakespeare wrote, forsooth, so shall I write.
His hem up lifting, I'll his robe assume,
My verse infuse with his poetic might,
And mind me not that Moderns fret and fume.
Like Circe's pets, they scorn my polish'd feats
And grunt at each inversion and elision;
Such Swine will call Time-temper'd touches cheats,
And claim Tradition's sweets may need revision.
These Creatures value not my antique jew'ls:
"'Tis not contemporary speech." they cry.
I write for the Elite, not vulgar Fools;
The more I Shakespeare ape, the more Bard, I.
Enough! I have great Sonnets to compose.
Bring me my quill, my doublet and my hose.
Who
else but Maz could have come up with ‘The more I Shakespeare ape, the more
Bard, I.’?
She was returning to the gauntlet when
some dolt yee-hawed a horn. She slewed left, fetched
off course, alarmed, towards the misty fen.
I heard the sharp cries of the crowd, and stretched
my ungloved wrist out wide. She landed there
as softly as a stork re-sits its nest.
She gazed at me and I absorbed her stare.
She preened her wind-combed quills, then came to rest
sphinx-still, her eyes a blaze of feral gold.
The handler bustled up to break the charm.
He mentioned luck, unlocked her talon-hold,
and claimed the eagle from my unscathed arm.
Between her wingbeats, Nature spurned the rule
that beauty shows no mercy to a fool.
There is much here that typifies Margaret Griffiths’ art.
The subject matter seems both ancient and modern simultaneously. The sonnet
itself is wonderfully well organised, metre, form and meaning honed into a rich
amalgam. Most of all the poem is beautifully phrased.
She landed there
as softly as a stork re-sits its nest.
She gazed at me and I absorbed her stare.
She preened her wind-combed quills, then came to rest
sphinx-still, her eyes a blaze of feral gold.
Perhaps it is far fetched to suggest the way the startled
eagle settles upon the poet’s ungloved wrist is a metaphor for the power of
art over nature; nevertheless, there is something mythic about the bird’s
return. It is a magical piece in the best sense of that overused word.
I still can’t quite believe that Maz has gone; I’m
still shocked at the circumstances of her death. What happens now? I have no
doubt that the copyright issues will be solved in time. I am confident that a
small press will be pleased to publish a selection of her poems; it will be well
received and her reputation will continue to grow. What I fear is that the grim
circumstances of her death may overshadow her life; that she will be cast as a
latter-day Emily Dickinson, a fine poet little known in her lifetime but much
appreciated after her death. But Maz was nothing like that. Her situation is
more analogous to the Arctic Monkeys circa 2003 than Emily Dickinson in 1886. In
other words Margaret Griffiths is not an undiscovered poet; but she may be the
first major poet whose reputation on her death was almost entirely based upon
her web presence and not on print versions of her work.
What would I like to happen? In five years I would like to
be browsing in the poetry section of a Borders store somewhere seriously
unliterary, like Ellesmere Port. Just before I reach the Faber 'Collected Works of
Ted Hughes' I would like to come across the Faber 'Collected Works of M A
Griffiths'. Hopefully its plain coloured cover will be green, bright grasshopper
green.
The poet should have the last word. Margaret did leave her
last orders in sonnet form. Given the sad circumstances surrounding her death
there is a sickening irony about the piece, a tragic reminder that life rarely
follows art. As for the poem itself, well, it’s very ‘Maz’.
I’m ordering a Hollywood decline.
The symptoms are ideal: not being sick,
the application of a pale lip slick,
some floaty scarves, a duty to recline
against silk pillows being brave, while friends
and family troop in with gifts and flowers
and wet-eyed memories of golden hours –
stock shots of surf and seabirds when it ends.
Spare me the vulgar things, like diarrhoea,
depression, pain; they’re for the hoi polloi.
A dying will seems such a good idea:
I want a starry close, so please employ
soft-focus, and cue choirs’ Ave Maria,
then fade me out with Ludwig’s Ode to Joy.
Alan Wickes
September 20th 2009