Analysis and Creativity

Wendy Cope

WENDY COPE is one of Britain's leading poets. Her books Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis and Serious Concerns (Faber and Faber, 1986 and 1992) are both best sellers, and she has won several awards. She began writing poetry three months after the start of her analysis. A brief, moving - and amusing - account of her analysis will soon be published in Mind Readings (Secker, 1996). The following is an excerpt from a conversation with the Editor about the contention that an analysis is bad for an artist's creativity.

When I went into analysis there weren't any questions about whether it would be bad for me as a writer because I wasn't a writer. I was completely inhibited, paralysed really. I wanted to be a writer when I was a little girl but I'd forgotten about it. What happened was that quite quickly, within a few months, I began writing. I was getting in touch with some powerful feelings and I didn't know quite what to do with them. One afternoon I felt like writing a poem. I'll tell you what the important thing was - it was to do with my feeling that I had a right to my own way of seeing things. Up until then I had allowed other people to impose their view of things to such an extent that I didn't very often see things for myself.

The first breakthrough was to understand that I was entitled to my view of what was going on between me and the man I was involved with. I didn't have to accept his view and I didn't have to argue with him either. I was entitled to have my own view privately, which was not the same as his. I found that I wanted to write it down and that was, I think, the first poem I wrote.

Incidentally, there's a point I want to make because I know that feminists worry about psychoanalysis, and I have certainly had some concerns myself. One thing analysis has done is make it a lot more difficult for men to exploit me and I would imagine that's true for quite a few women. So whatever your worries are about your analyst's theories about women, if in practice it has become a lot more difficult for men to exploit you, then that is a gain.

Being able to see things for myself, feeling I was entitled to my way of seeing things, was also very much bound up with getting in touch with my feelings, with my emotions. I imagine that very often in the early stage of analysis the patient says: 'no, I'm not angry - that would be unreasonable'. At a certain point I realised, and this was a revelation to me, that when someone asked me how I felt about something, I was coming up with a plausible answer but actually I didn't really know how I was feeling. I asked myself what would be reasonable. I thought I was telling the truth but then I realised that's not how I'm feeling, that's just what I think. I began to see that I did not actually know where to look for the answer to the question, 'what are you feeling?'

I didn't know that if you accidentally drop a cup of tea over someone it may mean that you're angry with them. Once you understand that, you notice what you're doing, and you notice what thoughts cross your mind. And those are clues and then you get better at it. I think I'm pretty well in touch with my feelings most of the time now. I don't usually have to wait till I drop something to find out that I'm angry.

I want to tell you about an afternoon when I sat in Battersea Park, looking at a tree. It was if this was the first time I'd been able to see a tree. How I felt about that tree, I realised, was mine and nobody could argue me out of it. It was an important moment, very moving. I sat there crying, and later that day I wrote a poem about that tree.

Truth to feeling is the important thing and that is why I don't see how analysis could make anyone a worse poet. Poetry is about telling the truth. The poet and the psychoanalyst are both seekers after truth.

Another parallel between analysis and writing poetry is that you have to be prepared for surprises. I think it was Robert Frost who said that there's no point in starting a poem if you know how it's going to end. It's a commonplace among poets that a poem takes on a life of its own. You have to be prepared for things to come up and for the poem to go off in a completely different direction from the direction you're expecting. And it's the same in analysis - you learn to expect surprises. You don't know what's going to come up and there's the same kind of excitement.

Some people are afraid that analysis or psychotherapy will make them more ordinary and boring. There's a problem about the word 'normal'. Some analysts, I think, use the word to mean perfect mental health. But to a lot of people 'normal' means ordinary and boring. They don't want to be 'normal', they want to be special. In fact, of course, if analysis helps someone to be more herself it'll make her more special.

The Journey

Wendy Cope wrote this poem during the first year of her analysis. 

Something wicked

When Wendy Cope was finding her voice as a poet, around 1980, the status of "light verse" was low. The readings boom that got under way in the 1960s had been given considerable wing by the comic talents of the Liverpool poets, and a leavening of humour was thought desirable for almost any poetry event. But the public staging of poetry had encouraged extrovert "performance poetry" - a different matter altogether.

Performance poetry relies for its success more on the panache of its projection to an audience than on the quality of the words. It should never have been mistaken for authentic light verse, but it often was. When it amounted to no more than stand-up comedy claiming to be poetry, it gave light verse a bad name.

With a few exceptions, good poets didn't seem to write any light stuff any more. One exception was Gavin Ewart, the genius to whom Cope dedicates a poem in this enjoyable collection. Her range is narrower than his, and she is less prolific, but she has achieved something important by helping, in her own concise and witty fashion, the effort to re-establish light verse as a respectable genre.

She has done that by showing it can make poetry popular without insulting the intelligence. She has an impressive mastery of apt and wicked parody: her first book, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986), brought parody out of its cosy corner at the back of the weekly reviews and proved to readers that they could recognise the styles of an Eliot, Hughes or Heaney, and delight in a rise being taken out of them. Cope's alter ego or presiding anorak, the Tulse Hill amateur poet "Jason Strugnell", was adept at hilarious pastiches of almost any poet. Readers appreciated the technical skill, warmed to the personality, and appreciated the sheer approachability of this poetry. Her verses rhymed, they had audible rhythms, they met the challenge of sonnet, triolet, villanelle.

Although there were moments of satirical sharpness, Cope's humour was usually good-natured. The feminist barbs, more frequent in her second volume, Serious Concerns, were gentle and time- honoured: as in her protests against "Tumps" (typically useless male poets) and her woman's wail of seasonal misery: "Bloody Christmas, here again. / Let us raise a loving cup: / Peace on earth, goodwill to men, / And make them do the washing up." These gentle complaints could convert into unmistakeable sadness under a wry disguise ("The head does its best but the heart is the boss"), and there were yearnings after conventional nature poetry; although she pictured herself confined to "keen observations of animals (mostly / The dead ones because they keep still)".

If I Don't Know takes up all of these strands, and follows a few more. Lovers of her parody mode will have to make do with just one excellent example, a spot-on take-off of John Berryman's Dream Songs: "Wendy went a-swimming. It was dreadful. / One small boy careless under her did surface / and did butt her on the chin. / . . . Why no school? cried agey Wendy / to herself, not loud. Why little beggars / swimming into me on Friday afternoon?"

But the quietly zany anecdotes are still there; so is the sharpness, in How to Deal with the Press, with its echo of Belloc: "Hostile, friendly, sober, pissed, / Male or female - that's the rule. / When tempted to confide, resist. / Never trust a journalist."

For the first time she is translating (two poems by Marina Tsvetayava) and trying a longer narrative poem, The Teacher's Tale. The latter shows a simple generosity of spirit that reads a little strangely after her satires; it should remind attentive readers that Cope admires Wordsworth and John Clare. Nature is explored with a set of poems about "Traditional Prize Country Pigs" and set in gardens, where the mood is at first uneasy - there is "a ghostly figure on the garden wall" - but ultimately serene: "Asked to imagine heaven, I see us there".

Alan Brownjohn           

 The Sunday Times, 3-6-2001

Of headless squirrels and men

Unlikely nature poems and a chalkface Chaucer prove irresistible. Kate Kellaway praises If I Don't Know, Wendy Cope's latest collection

Sunday June 3, 2001
The Observer

If I Don't Know
Wendy Cope
76 pp, Faber, £8.99
 

Wendy Cope's poetry used to be required reading for anyone enduring an unsatisfactory romance or without a love life at all. She may have dreamt of making cocoa for Kingsley Amis, but she served up something more intoxicating to the rest of us. She was funny in an angry, slightly chippy way. I loved her poetic comfort food. I used to recite 'Bloody men are like bloody buses' to myself and friends, which pointed out that you wait and nothing happens and then suddenly several buses / men roll up at the same time.

But now she has left the bus stop. Cope's new book is about a more settled life. Once she wrote: 'There are so many kinds of awful men one can't avoid them all.' Now she takes it all (or some of it) back. These lines were commissioned by the Salisbury Festival to appear in fireworks: 'Write it in fire across the night: Some men are more or less all right.'

If I Don't Know is her third collection - the first for more than nine years - and it testifies to doubt and a faltering attitude to her reputation. In 'A Mystery' she disarmingly explains herself:

People say, 'What are you doing these days? What are you working on?

I think for a moment or two.

The question interests me. What am I doing these days?

How odd that I haven't a clue.

If anyone can dramatise blankness amusingly then Cope can and does. She even writes a poem with the title 'Being Boring' which ends:

I don't go to parties. Well, what are they for,

If you don't need to find a new lover?

You drink and you listen and drink a bit more

And you take the next day to recover.

Someone to stay home with was all my desire

And, now that I've found a safe mooring,

I've just one ambition in life: I aspire

To go on and on being boring.

But the jauntiness cannot disguise her defensiveness. The 'safe mooring' is not always safe for her poems. Cope enjoys sending poets, including herself, up. Her parodies (of T.S. Eliot, Wordsworth, Seamus Heaney and others) made her name. Remember paunchy, talentless 'Casanova of Tulse Hill'? In 'Reading', she listens to someone who could be his cousin:

Everybody in this room is bored.

The poems drag, the voice and gestures irk.

He can't be interrupted or ignored.

It is amusing but does not compete with the poetry reading she survived in her first collection:

Don't ask what it was all about

I haven't got a clue.

I spent a blissful evening, lost

In carnal thoughts of you.

Something has been lost - and Cope is looking for it. She tries to translate herself into nature poet but the natural world comically refuses to comply. In 'The Squirrel and the Crow' she hopes to derive 'solace' from a walk but instead comes across an unobligingly headless squirrel and a dead crow.

When she comes to write nature poems in praise of her garden, her pleasure in what she sees is guarded to the point of flatness. If I Don't Know is constructed around helplessness in the face of beauty. She seems stunned in more ways than one. 'The rose. The gardenful. The evening light. It's nine o clock and I can still see everything.' She writes like a convalescent. But she - and nature - come up trumps on the subject of different breeds of pig which ends with the unlikely, elegiac words: 'All the golden pigs are gone.'

The best poem in the book, 'The Teacher's Tale', takes up almost half of it and was commissioned to mark the six hundredth anniversary of Chaucer's death. I am not sure if Paul is an invented character, but everyone knows someone like him. It starts off in the tone of a Middle England reporter praising Paul's respectable parents. Then it starts to change gear...

Cope's protests are worth attending to. She shows that 'respectable' parents are not always good. She was once a primary school teacher herself, and there is informed sympathy in every line. This is an agile, modern Canterbury Tale and the end brought a lump to my throat. I loved 'Stickleback Song', too (also about education).

I won't give its unusual message away here, but it ought to be pinned on the noticeboards of every staff room in England.

On the theme of humour

Wit and ironic defiance in the scourge of 'The Bard of the Year' competition

WENDY COPE knows how to keep us waiting. It is nine years since Serious Concerns appeared on the bestsellers list. The interval has mellowed her sensibility. Her new collection, If I Don't Know, is less openly satirical, more settled and contented.

Not that Cope is one to accept the impositions of middle age without an ironic cry of defiance:

And, now that I've found a
safe mooring,
I've just one ambition in
life: I aspire
To go on and on being boring.

All the familiar Cope pre-occupations are here. Christmas, nature, the foibles of men, the business of being a poet. In "A Poem on the Theme of Humour" she berates the organisers of the "Bard of the Year" competition for banning comic poems. "Your message to the reading public," she suggests, is: "Real poetry is no fun at all."

Cope is an outstanding miniaturist, but a poet who writes great short poems may be prey to the suspicion that true greatness requires great long ones. Hence "The Teacher's Tale", an extended narrative written in Alexander Pope's favourite metre of rhyming iambic pentameters. But Cope, alas, is not quite Pope. Her light and easy wit seems to have gone missing here and even the versification - usually so exact and ingenious - lapses into blandness. I turned instead to "The Sitter", a sonnet that shows Cope at her best. The poem is inspired by a nude portrait painted by Vanessa Bell in which the unfortunate model appears, shall we say, less than svelte. Cope imagines the thoughts of the frumpy model (feeling "depressed, disagreeable and fat") as she poses for the stylish society artist.

I'd rather have been
posing on a couch
For some old rake who
wanted me in bed.

This burst of rhetoric is so heartfelt and colloquial that the ear barely notices how precisely the lines conform to the metrical scheme. It is a salutary example of an antique form used to accommodate the rhythms of modern speech. The technical precision isn't merely a trick, but an artistic instrument that subtly imposes the lines on the memory.

It is also wonderfully funny. This is why Wendy Cope is so treasured and why she has done more for poetry than a thousand arts council grants. She combines all the virtues of lyrical craftsmanship with a higher virtue still - whopping sales. That said, her timing is pretty lousy for a comic poet. Nine years? Come on, Wendy. Get weaving.

Lloyd Evans                 

Telegraph, 4-6-2001

She's got rhythm

The latest collection from Britain's most popular contemporary poet

JUDGING by the sales of her previous two collections for adults - Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986) and Serious Concerns (1991) - Wendy Cope must be, by a long chalk, the most successful poet in the country.

In their press release her publishers announce that the second of these books has sold almost 100,000 copies, the kind of figures usually associated with airport fiction or cookery books by television celebrities. This extraordinary popularity cannot be put down to her being a prominent performance poet, though she does, like most of her well-known peers, read her work in public at literature festivals and occasionally on the air. How, then, does one account for her phenomenal appeal?

The poems in her new collection, unresonantly entitled If I Don't Know, might provide clues. First, most are written in prescribed forms using regular metre and rhyme, while those that dispense with these traditional devices are reassuringly familiar in their rhythm, imagery and diction. Many are amusing in a mild, rueful way and none makes uncomfortable demands on the intellect or the emotions. They are not likely to puzzle, intimidate or shock anyone.

In fact Wendy Cope is in direct line of descent from those minor English poets, popular in their time but finding few heirs today, accomplished writers of light verse such as Winthrop Praed, C. S. Calverley and J. K. Stephen. One of the poems in this book, Being Boring, with its fine anapaestic prancing rhythm and chiming rhymes, might have been written by any of the above except perhaps for the sentiments expressed. Here is the last stanza:

I don't go to parties. Well,
what are they for,
If you don't need to find a
new lover?
You drink and you listen
and drink a bit more
And you take the next day
to recover.

If I Don't Know is presented in two parts. In the first are the shorter poems which display an impressive command of various traditional forms, sonnets, villanelles, skeltonics and so on, and the last 22 pages are reserved for a single narrative poem called The Teacher's Tale.

Most of the shorter poems are pleasurable and a few, such as The Christmas Life, John Clare, Colour Chart and How To Deal With The Press are delightful. Some of the others, though, are not much more than rather tame versified jokes.

The long poem in the second part of the book is less easy to assess. It tells the story of an only child, a boy, who is brought up by parents who are - the mother especially - ambitious for their son but are unimaginative, insensitive and inflexibly disciplinarian. The poor boy is the victim of a kind of parental abuse that perhaps goes largely unrecognised. The poem recounts the story of his descent into misery, petty crime, humiliation and his final small redemption. It is written in rhymed couplets using regular iambic pentameters and it begins with a few cliche-ridden lines which are, quite simply, doggerel:

In London SE5 there lived
a boy
Called Paul. He was his
mother's pride and joy
When he was born in 1961
- Best baby ever, Mrs
Skinner's son.
He had a dad, too, living
with his mum.
In this our Paul was
luckier than some . . .

After the depressing start the poem picks up and the story unfolds briskly enough. The strict metre still manages to accommodate something of the rhythms, syntax and vocabulary of the poem's milieu, while the narrative holds the attention and finishes affectingly. However, it is the shorter poems - versatile, skilful and entertaining - which contain the best of her work.

But the huge popularity of Wendy Cope's poems still seems to me a bit of a mystery.

Vernon Scannell     

Telegraph, 28-5-2001

Rarely can a new poetry book be accurately described as "eagerly awaited", but Wendy Cope's new collection certainly is. Her two previous collections, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis and Serious Concerns, were both best-sellers, and If I Don't Know deserves to be one too. Cope's fans will find plenty of the sort of witty, rhyming poems about men, relationships and the literary life for which she is well-known, but anyone who is waiting to cry, "Light verse!" will find it hard to make this accusation stick; for every witty rhyming poem in this book, there is a quieter, more elegiac and philosophical one:

Months ago I dreamed of a tulip garden,
Planted, waited, watched for their first appearance,
Saw them bud, saw greenness give way to colours,
Just as I'd planned them.

Every day I wonder how long they'll be here.
Sad and fearing sadness as I admire them,
Knowing I must lose them, I almost wish them
Gone by tomorrow.

('Tulips')

Whereas Serious Concerns dealt with the misery of being single and looking for love, the main theme of If I Don't Know is how difficult it is to be happy when you know that happiness must end. Poem after poem is a celebration of life balanced by an awareness of its transience:

The book I've been reading
rests on my knee. You sleep.
It's beautiful out there -
fields, little lakes and winter trees
in February sunlight,
every car park a shining mosaic.

Long, radiant minutes,
your hand in my hand,
still warm, still warm.

('On a Train')

There is a simplicity, a descriptive minimalism, about Cope's poetry that is extremely effective; in 'Idyll' she gives us only a few concrete details, yet manages at the same time to make the whole scene spring to life:

...We won't talk all the time. I'll sit back
Contemplating shadows on the red-brick path.

And marvel at the way it all turned out.
That yellow begonia. Our gabled house.

Asked to imagine heaven, I see us there,
The way we have been, the way we sometimes are.

A less talented poet would have described the red-brick path for four lines, the begonia for another four, and the house for five or six, burying all three under piles of words until they were hardly visible. Cope doesn't need to. When, in 'If I Don't Know', the title poem, she writes, "I sit on the swing and cry", such is her creative authority that, without a single physical detail, the swing becomes not merely a swing, but the swing, and we can picture it clearly. This is so refreshing in the current poetic climate, with so many alleged poets overdoing the physical description because they are desperate to give their work some poetic flavour, like bad cooks who put too much sherry in a trifle just to make it taste of something - anything.

Though Jason Strugnell does not feature in this book, Cope is still very funny on the subject of poets and poetry readings:

Everybody in this room is bored.
The poems drag, the voice and gestures irk.
He can't be interrupted or ignored.

Poor fools, we came here of our own accord
And some of us have paid to hear this jerk.
Everybody in the room is bored.
The silent cry goes up, "How long, O Lord?"
But nobody will scream or go beserk
He won't be interrupted or ignored

Or hit by eggs, or savaged by a horde
Of desperate people maddened by his work.
Everybody in the room is bored

Except the poet...

('A Reading')

Cope, unlike the poet in 'A Reading', can get away with calling one of the poems in this collection 'Being Boring', which is a conceit that works well because the poem contradicts its title so comprehensively. It's a moving, funny and satisfying love poem:

There was drama enough in my turbulent past:
Tears and passion - I've used up a tankful.
No news is good news and long may it last.
If nothing much happens, I'm thankful....

Someone to stay home with was all my desire
And, now that I've found a safe mooring,
I've just one ambition in life: I aspire
To go on and on being boring.

Despite the contentment and sense of romantic fulfilment in some of these poems, Cope can still be her acerbically critical old self when commenting on the relationship between the sexes, so those of her fans who are still disillusioned with romance and seeking solace shouldn't lose heart:

He tells her that the earth is flat -
He knows the facts, and that is that.
In altercations fierce and long
She tries her best to prove him wrong.
But he has learned to argue well.
He calls her arguments unsound
And often asks her not to yell.
She cannot win. He stands his ground.

The planet goes on being round.

('He Tells Her')

It is hard to write poems of two, three or four lines that feel substantial and satisfying, but Cope manages it in this book as she did in her two previous collections. 'Firework Poem II' (which was commissioned, and had to be short enough to fit on a firework) reads, "Write it in fire across the night: /Some men are more or less all right". 'Timekeeping' is hilarious, instantly memorable:

Late home for supper,
He mustn't seem drunk.
"The pob cluck", he begins,
And knows he is sunk.

The range of this outstanding collection is incredible - from translations to the long narrative poem 'A Teacher's Tale' - but the poems all have something in common: they could only have been written by Wendy Cope. Her authorial persona - plain-speaking, serious-minded, contrarily witty - is unlike anyone else's, and the most refreshing thing about her work is that it effortlessly avoids the limp homogeneity that seems to infect so much contemporary poetry. Who but Cope could have written 'A Hampshire Disaster' (inspired by the headline "Shock was the emotion of most" in the Hampshire Chronicle)?

When fire engulfed the headquarters
Of the Royal Winchester Golf Club
In the early hours of Wednesday morning,
Shock was the emotion of most.

But fear had been the emotion
Of some who saw the flames, and admiration
For the courage and skill of the firefighters
Was another emotion felt.

At the loss of so much history -
Cups, trophies and honours boards -
Sadness is now the emotion Of many Winchester golfers.

Stoical resignation was the emotion
Of the club captain, as he told the Chronicle
"The next procedure will be to sort out the insurance.
Life must go on".

Delight is the emotion of this reviewer.

Sophie Hannah's latest collection is Leaving and Leaving You (Carcanet, 1999

'Happiness writes good poems'

Has Wendy Cope mellowed? A settled life with a partner and stepchildren - and her new work - suggest that she has. Robert McCrum mets her

Interview by Robert McCrum
Sunday June 3, 2001
The Observer

Wendy Cope's first collection, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis was published in 1986 and became a surprise bestseller. A second volume, Serious Concerns (1992), gave her a kind of audience rarely achieved by British poets in their lifetime. She has also edited anthologies of poetry for children and is sometimes spoken of as a potential candidate for Poet Laureate