from Second Book of Odes: 6. What the Chairman Told Tom

By Basil Bunting 1900–1985 Basil Bunting

Poetry? It’s a hobby.

I run model trains.

Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.

It’s not work. You dont sweat.

Nobody pays for it.

You could advertise soap.

Art, that’s opera; or repertory—

The Desert Song.

Nancy was in the chorus.

But to ask for twelve pounds a week—

married, aren’t you?—

you’ve got a nerve.

How could I look a bus conductor

in the face

if I paid you twelve pounds?

Who says it’s poetry, anyhow?

My ten year old

can do it and rhyme.

I get three thousand and expenses,

a car, vouchers,

but I’m an accountant.

They do what I tell them,

my company.

What do you do?

Nasty little words, nasty long words,

it’s unhealthy.

I want to wash when I meet a poet.

They’re Reds, addicts,

all delinquents.

What you write is rot.

Mr Hines says so, and he’s a schoolteacher,

he ought to know.

Go and find work.

Basil Bunting, “6. What the Chairman Told Tom” from Complete Poems, edited by Richard Caddel. Reprinted with the permission of Bloodaxe Books Ltd., www.bloodaxebooks.com.

Source: Collected Poems (1968)

Biography

Basil Bunting, described as "the last minor master of the modernist mode" by Donald Hall in the New York Times Book Review, achieved his greatest popularity in the mid-1960s as one of the leaders of the new British literary avant-garde. Bunting's work was not always well-received; much of his early writing went largely unnoticed for years due to a mistaken association with Mussolini. Ezra Pound, an admirer of Bunting's poetry, . . .

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