I rather enjoyed last night’s South Bank Show about Ian McMillan. I can’t honestly say I’ve read or heard an awful lot of his poetry, although I do remember him reading on Mark Radcliffe’s Radio One evening show years and years ago. And there was a poem of his in The North a couple of years back, in one of those issues where you have to turn to the back to see who has written what, and I loved it, so I must dig it out tonight.
Two things about the programme were particularly interesting. One was Rachel Cooke, of The Observer, saying she thought that sometimes he rather overdid the Barnsley accent (she also claimed to have a Yorkshire accent herself, though God only knows what part of Yorkshire. Farnborough, by the sound of it). The thing is, how on earth does she know? I’m willing to take him at his word when he says that he talks on the radio exactly how he does at home – I’ve got a couple of Barnsley-born and bred mates, and if anything their accents are even stronger than McMillan’s. And why are regional accents STILL worthy of comment?
Second was hearing him talk about the Miners’ Strike. For some reason, it’s been playing on my mind recently, and last week I wrote a poem – 1984 – partly about it, or rather about how it touched my little corner of the world. I’ve started another, too. I think, as time goes on, it appears more and more to have been a real turning point (unfortunately for the worse) in recent British history. I’ve read plenty of poems about it, but have there been any novels on the subject? Or maybe there’s a rich vein of them waiting to be uncovered just about now…
3 comments:
I'm kicking myself 'cause I completely forgot about that programme, depsite having noticed it in the schedules!
The miners strike... as the son of a miner I remember ut very well.... it was the time when i think i really got into politics.... i remember my dad claiming scargill was a plant, put there to help shut the pits... why else did he not call for a national ballot...?? Also remmeber the flying pickets turning up (not the a capella group!!) and wrongly calling the Leicestershire miners "scabs".... as for novels, I remember there being two or three "young adult" novels, mainly dealing with Yorkshire or Wales.... but titles evade me... best I can come up with is U2's song Red Hill Mining Town, and the wondeful Comic Srip Presents Strike! Did write som poems about it myself at the time... will have to lok them out and see if they're worth working on....
It was excellent, Andrew. He had some interesting things to say about 'populist' and accessible poetry, and also rather contradicted what Paul Farley was saying the other week at that John Clare reading. McMillan remembered his working class childhood as being one in which learning was valued, revered even, and people around the town seemed genuinely proud of the fact of him being a poet. Of course, there's no reason why they can't both be right.
I agree Scargill did the government's work for them - his miscalculation gave them and his other enemies the chance they needed. What I was thinking about, though, was the way I think it changed a lot of people's views of authority, and the police in particular. I can remember there being huge numbers of police (from London) camped near Coalville to stop flying pickets. When the expected trouble never quite materialised (at least, on nothing like the scale there was in Yorkshire and Notts) they went looking for it.
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