A terrific piece in the Guardian about James Fenton, the official poet laureate of crabwalk.com. He has earned the title by (a) being virtually the only living poet I know anything about, and (b) leading what I daresay is the most interesting life of any of his contemporaries.

I prove (b) by citing a few of the subjects covered in the piece:

— He “rode the first North Vietnamese tank into the Presidential Palace when Saigon fell in April 1975”

— He is “the one-time film critic of Socialist Worker, slapped over the wrist by the comrades for an over-enthusiastic meditation on the joys of the Carry On series”

— He “was kidnapped in Belfast by the IRA”

— He stormed the Marcos palace alongside Filipinos on the day Ferdinand and Imelda fell

— He spent years as a foreign correspondent in southeast Asia, then covered politics, theater, and books for various British newspapers

— He translated a Verdi opera into English

— He was the inspiration for and costar of one of the greatest of travel books, Into the Heart of Borneo

— He “purchased and ran a prawn farm”

And, on top of all that, he is broadly ranked the finest living British poet. That’s the kind of poet I can get behind.

The article mentions the judgment of Alan Jenkins, that “the best poem about war since Auden’s ‘Journey to a War’ is Fenton’s ‘In a Notebook.’” That prompted me to track it down; it’s below in image form to keep the Googlebots from finding it.

28 November 2007

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