Here’s a round number to celebrate: Poems on the Underground was launched forty years ago. “Up in the Morning Early” by Robert Burns, “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, “This Is Just To Say” by William Carlos Williams, “The Railway Children” by Seamus Heaney and “Like a Beacon” by Grace Nichols: from February 1, 1986, this was the first quintet of poems to start “jostling for attention”, as Lorna Sage noted in the TLS at the time, “with Underground ads for language courses, duty frees, mouthwashes, Harrods, and secretarial bureaux”. The ads have changed – or some of them have. The poetry has persisted.
Few such projects do: they cost money. In the beginning, despite some charitable support, Poems on the Underground invited donations to cover the costs of design and renting ad space. It now has Arts Council England, Transport for London and the British Council behind it. A celebratory documentary was broadcast last month on BBC Radio 4.
Perhaps it helps that the scheme straightforwardly lives up to its name, and aims “to offer a mass public glimpses of an imaginative world different from the common pressures of life”. So says one of its co-founders, Judith Chernaik, in her preface to the revised edition of 100 Poems on the Underground (The Poetry Business, £9.99). This anthology, co-edited with Ms Chernaik’s fellow founding Undergrounders, Cicely Herbert and Gerald Benson, draws on their first five years’ selections. We learn here that Philip Larkin encouraged the scheme but didn’t live (by a couple of months) to see it put into action. Denise Levertov, meanwhile, who was born in the UK and emigrated to the US as an adult, was “totally thrilled” to hear that her poem “Living” had made the cut: “I spent innumerable hours in the Tube from age 12–23, and a good many before and since, too … Appearance in American trains and buses means little to me – but London, ah, London! – that’s different”.
It’s different again on the Tube this month for Rachael Boast, Jonathan Davidson, Mircea Dinescu, Jane Hirshfield, Kobayashi Issa and Blake Morrison, the last of whom we take some rueful pleasure in quoting in full (“Narcissus” is the poem’s title):
Thinking the boiler had packed up from lack of oil
I climbed the rusty tank to peer down the hatch
and there I was, bright-faced and young again,
in the viscous black pool at the bottom.
Big news: “Faber no longer uses full stops”. So ran an audacious post on the publisher’s Instagram account, to which we were directed last week.
This is not a declaration of war against all full stops, full stop. In Faber’s sights are “cover quotes”, to which, in the past, it has “valiantly insisted” – so runs the tongue-in-cheek announcement online – on adding a full stop “even if they were fragments”. (Full stop = full sentence.)
Far from being universal among publishers, this practice is said to have been the subject of “many furious editorial debates” at Faber, and it is now clear which side won: from July, “the much more reasonable practice of styling cover quotes without a final full stop” will be adopted in “all review quotations on covers, in paperbacks and reissues, and across all social media”. So instead of finding a paperback adorned, say, thus:
‘Piercingly beautiful.’ Yiyun Li on Said the Dead
expect to pick up a new-style volume that claims something like this:
‘Pristine’ Niamh Campbell on I Want You to Be Happy
Faber’s examples, as given above, may be a little misleading – or revealing. Faber covers of old exhibit a preference for extracting from reviews full sentences rather than the odd, breathless adjective – the latter being potentially a dubious practice, suggestive of a publicist’s sleight of hand in removing the desirable word from a qualifying critical context. The full stop seemed grammatically appropriate enough to those longer quotations. Is Faber really confessing that it can no longer rely on attracting such reviews?
In any case, the TLS has endured comparable quandaries in the past, so we can sympathize with both sides in what has undoubtedly been a hard-fought struggle over le point final. Trivial as it sounds, indeed, we see that many people have strong feelings in this line: Faber’s announcement about the demise of the period has attracted more comments on Instagram than all its other posts from the past few months put together. Wait until they discover commas.
We have described Archive Bookstore at 83 Bell Street in London as “Pandemonium in miniature” (June 30, 2023). We meant that as a compliment. On our return, after many months’ abstention from sticking our nose through that delightful door, we found the place to be as magnificently jumbled as ever, at least at first sight; order is apparent on the shelves if you care to look at them. There is poetry in the poetry section, and so on. Just don’t be put off by the clutter towering overhead, the impenetrable den behind the desk, or the sign towards the back of the shop suggesting that it would be foolish to venture any further.
This time round we laid hands on English Pronunciation Illustrated by John L. M. Trim – the charming illustrations in question are the work of Peter Kneebone.
Published by Cambridge University Press in 1965, this booklet speaks entertainingly of its times, as well as “the sound contrasts essential to intelligibility in English”. Professor Trim guides the reader from simple trees and sheep to longer, trickier phrases (“Why is the worse verse / worse than the first verse?”), all via Kneebone-drawn scenarios with a “distinctive English flavour”. Hence the “professional burglar” infiltrating “the comfortable apartment of Sir Edward Anderson at Aldeburgh”; hence the observation that “fish and chips are cheap and easy to eat”; hence a trip to the theatre (“A dreary peer sneers in the grand tier”).
Most of this is delightful, not least for our statutory budget of £5 for a second-hand book – although we do wonder what language-learners made of the scenario in which “Ken quite likes Kate” and “Kate doesn’t care for Ken”, but, after both are shaken by some imposed intimacies, “Ken cures Kate with a quick cup of coffee and a cream cake”. How English is that?