Feature: Poetry - Family Values. By Wendy Cope
Published: 14 April, 2011
by JOHN HORDER
HUGO Williams, the gifted poet who, like Balzac, deluges his nervous system with steaming hot coffee when writing, recently risked everything by asking the wickedly insightful satirist on men’s faults, Wendy Cope, for advice about writing villanelles. I learned this from reading Wendy’s new book, Family Values.
Hugo, bravely going where angels fear to tread, wanted to pick Wendy’s brains about what it takes to write villanelles.
What is a villanelle? An extinct dinosaur, according to one literary journalist who writes for Private Eye.
Hugo could have saved himself a lot of trouble by tracking down the villanelles mentioned by Dinah Birch in her new post-Drabble edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. These role models include ones by Auden, Empson and Mahon, and, most amazingly for its tearjerking toughness and tenderness, and usefulness at funerals, Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”.
Villanelles involve a great deal of repetition, which is why Wendy finds them addictive. Here is her “Villanelle for Hugo Williams”:
What can I say? I’d like to be polite
But have you ever seen a
villanelle?
You ask me "Have I got the rhyme-
scheme right?"
Is that a joke? You’re not a
neophyte
Or some green-inker who can
barely spell.
What can I say? I like to be polite.
No, not exactly, Hugo. No, not
quite.
I trust this news won't plunge you
into hell:
Your rhyme-scheme is some miles
from being right.
What’s going on? I know you’re
very bright.
You’ve won awards. You write
supremely well.
What can I say? I like to be polite
And this is true: your books are a
delight,
In prose, free verse and letters you
excel.
You want my help with getting
rhyme-schemes right.
You seem dead keen to master
them, despite
Your puzzling inability to tell
Which bit goes where. These lines,
if not polite,
Will be of use, I hope. The rhyme-
scheme’s right.
At least she refrains from referring to him as pet.
Family Values is for me Wendy’s least-entertaining book to date. Not only is her latest diet at 61 giving her cause for real concern – “Will I end up thin or fat?” – but there is something amiss about the tone of “My Funeral”: I hope I can trust you, friends, not to use our relationship /
As an excuse for an unsolicited ego-trip.
She sounds cross with the thought of any friend outliving her.
The poems that slip off her pen express her old joy in living, as in “Two Ann(e)s”:
For Anne Harvey and Ann Thwaite: (who were at school together):
Anne with an e and Ann without
Were clever girls and good at
spelling.
Their teachers couldn’t catch them
out –
Anne with an e and Anne without.
I hope that you are clear about
Which Ann(e) is which and won’t
need telling.
Anne with an e and Ann without –
Don’t trifle with them. Watch your
spelling.
It’s not surprising that former teacher Wendy (at a primary school in London) is still wagging her finger at us in this beautifully wrought miniature of two accomplished literary stalwarts who have gone unrecognised for too long.
• Family Values. By Wendy Cope. Faber £12.99