No labels, just poems

For centuries the bullet remained quietly confident that the gun would be invented. A drowning surrealist will not appreciate the concrete lifebelt. No guarantee my last goodbye is au revoir, I am your father and this is the way things are. - from `The Way Things Are'

The way things are for poet Roger McGough is unique to him, and he manages to express those differences in a voice that has been distinctive for almost four decades. Liverpool-born McGough, who is now in his 60s, was knocking round the city at the same time that The Beatles were becoming a modern legend.

"National Service had come to an end," he explains. "I just missed it. There was a sense of freedom at that time - art colleges, education for everybody, music." He went to Hull to study French and geography and came back to Liverpool to teach in a boy's comprehensive school. At the time, he was starting to write his own poetry, and he found a ready-made audience in his pupils.

"There were an awful lot of erudite Oxbridge poets around at the time," McGough says. "I tried out some of my own poems on the kids, and they liked them. They spoke directly to our own tribe."

Together with fellow poets Brian Patten and Adrian Henri (who died last year), he brought out The Mersey Sound: Penguin Modern Poets 10 in 1967, and sat back to watch as sales rose over time to one million copies. This is phenomenal by any standards, but for a book of poetry, it's a fairy-tale figure.

"It was the time of cafes and candles. The poems we were writing worked in those surroundings," he says.

The first poem in Blazing Fruit: Selected Poems 1967-1987 is `Let Me Die A Youngman's Death', from The Mersey Sound. McGough reads it down the phone from London, in a flexible bell-clear voice which still makes the poem sound inky-fresh, even though he must have read it countless times. Few poets can read their own work really well; McGough definitely does.

Also in the 1960s, McGough played in a band called The Scaffold. It was famous on two counts: band member Mike McGear was Paul McCartney's younger brother; and the band had a hit with the maddeningly catchy tune, Lily The Pink. He knew The Beatles and often saw them perform in Liverpool's Cavern.

"The best sort of fame is local fame. They were definitely famous even then," McGough says.

McGough himself did some work on the script of the Beatles film, Yellow Submarine, to give it a Liverpudlian blas. His contribution was uncredited and, in recent years, with the re-issue of the film, he has been trying to get some financial acknowledgement and credit for that work second time round.

This early background in a band is probably the reason that McGough started to become known as a "performance poet", a term he's not wildly happy about.

"It's used as a label, often to differentiate us from `serious' poetry," he says. "I guess, in the beginning, we were called `pop poets'. That came from the music, and from being popular. Here-today-and-gone-tomorrow kind of stuff. Then we were called the `beat poets' - it was the wacky, drug-orientated days. `Performance poets' - I think it sounds as if it has something to do with fire-eating." McGough prefers to think of himself as a poet, straight and simple. Since the 1960s, he has made his living entirely from writing, reading and teaching poetry, which is a situation to be cherished. There were none of the compromises that poets often have to make to keep the hairy hungry wolf from the door.

McGough has published some 19 books of poetry, both for children and adults, edited four anthologies, and won the Cholmondeley Award for Poetry. He has been awarded an OBE for services to poetry, is British Telecom's poet laureate, and has just been told he is going to be made a Freeman of Liverpool.

McGough plays with language, treating it as if it was something physical. "Writing, like skinning beer-mats, is displacement activity," he writes in Coach And Horses. His poems are nets/in which he hopes/to capture girls begins one poem.

He works on books for children and adults simultaneously, finding no difficulty in commuting between the two audiences.

"Poems for adults are more about developing ideas," he says. "Kids are more playful with words. I'd know straight away which lines belonged where."

OFTEN, what goes under the loose description of "performance poetry" is as disposable as the container for fast food. Eat the food, throw out the container. Food served on a plate is eaten, but the structure of the plate remains to facilitate another serving. A good poem is like that: you have the measure of it the first time, but it offers something different every time you return to it.

There are, for instance, some beautiful love poems in Blazing Fruit, which repay any number of re-readings. McGough's long sequence of poems tracking the beginning and end of a relationship is the subject of his second book, Summer With Monika. The title poem celebrates all the joy and fun of new love:

Somedays we thought about the seaside/and built sandcastles on the blankets/and paddled in the pillows/or swam in the sink/and played with the shoals of dishes. So who was Monika? McGough laughs. "Ah, Monika!" She didn't exist.

"They're all honest, those poems, but not necessarily truthful. A lot of experiences came together, and were worked out in poems," he explains.

The poems he's written that he's most fond of are the title poem of his latest collection, The Way Things Are, and `Hearts And Flowers' from Melting Into The Foreground. Both are about family members. The former - lullaby, clarion cry, compass bearings for life - is written for his fourth child, his only daughter: No, the red woolly hat has not been/put on the railing to keep it warm./When one glove is missing, both are lost./Today's craft fair is tomorrow's car boot sale./ The guitarist gently weeps, not the guitar,/I am your father and this is the way things are. `Hearts And Flowers' is a bitter-sweet elegy for his unmarried aunt, Marge: Everybody's/Favourite aunt. A cuddly toy adult/That sang loud and out of tune./That dropped, knocked over and bumped into things,/That got ticked off just like us.

McGough has two books close to completion and say he's going to be trying out lots of new poems in Kilkenny. He has not read in this country for several years, and will be here at the invitation of the far-sighted Steve Cullen, who is the manager of the Kilkenny bookshop, The Book Centre.

"I wanted to do something for World Book Day," Cullen explains. World Book Day is today and Cullen, a long-time fan of McGough, thought it would be a good idea to bring him over to celebrate the day that's in it. "He couldn't make it today, but was really keen to come back to Ireland, so he's coming tomorrow," Cullen says. "Writers fly in and out of Dublin all the time, but they don't often make it out of the capital. I'd like people in Kilkenny to associate us with bringing over writers, as well as selling books."

Roger McGough reads at the Parade Tower in Kilkenny Castle tomorrow, 8p.m. (more information from 056-62117). His latest collection, The Way Things Are, is published by Penguin.