'And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds.'
The first podcast of 2025 is out with guest Rishi Dastidar.
So we’re into the new year now, and I’m writing this morning listening to Nick Cave on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4. Nick is our newest Honorary Vice President at the Philip Larkin Society and we were immensely excited when he agreed to add his name to our fantastic list of HVPs alongside poets and writers Andrew Motion, Imtiaz Dharker, Ann Thwaite and Blake Morrison, sculptor Martin Jennings, comedian Stewart Lee, actor Tom Courtney, our President journalist Rosie Millard and more. Nick Cave has talked about his admiration for Larkin’s poetry many times over the years and we are in awe of his humanity and creativity. Larkin was Roy Plumley’s castaway back in 1976 and he picked a range of jazz, classical and folk music, with his favourite track being I'm Down In The Dumps by Bessie Smith. Nick Cave’s deeply personal choices include Johnny Cash, Karen Dalton and Nina Simone. Have a listen https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0027cgl
So, our new podcast episode features poet Rishi Dastidar who was one of the many people who generously responded to my December shout out via social media, and he has started us off with a fantastic blast of poetry analysis and general chat about the current UK poetry landscape. We had planned our topic list quite carefully and then threw most of it out of the window. As we were chatting before we started recording I said, ‘I’ve spent the last few weeks immersed in the world of Rishi Dastidar,’ to which he replied, ‘I’m really sorry about that.’ Which I thought was suitably Larkinesque.
But it was actually a great few weeks particularly reading his social media posts and articles, some poems he kindly emailed to me and and his latest collection Neptune’s Projects (Nine Pens Press) which is a wild and witty journey through Rishi’s ideas about the world, through the eyes of Neptune, the god of the sea (don’t call him Poseidon, he hates that). Neptune watches the small boats, Brexit, coastal erosion, climate change and all the crazy things humanity does, with a air of paternal concern and exasperation. As he despairs of ever being relevant in our modern world, Neptune comments,
‘Modern Britain is all about hot tubs now. There’s no room for a god with a trident and a bad temper. Except perhaps as the face of your local chip shop. Sad times.’
I highly recommend.
https://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/neptune-s-projects
We also talked about the wonderful world of poetry journals, periodicals, pamphlets and fanzines. In my Larkin library I have a number of these that either published Larkin poems or essays or articles about Larkin, such as- Critical Quarterly Winter 1975 (JR Watson, The Other Larkin), London Magazine Feb/March 1975 (Colin Johnson, Philip Larkin and Jazz), The Paris Review No. 19 (Reference Back by Philip Larkin, in this edition entitled Referred Back), The Cornhill Autumn 1971 (Larkin’s essay about Betjeman It Could Only Happen In England). I love their retro artwork and genuinely high production values. I’m struggling, as they sit next to me, not to just start reading.
We never quite got to the Larkin poem we had initially planned to discuss from The North Ship, but instead we delved into Friday Night In the Royal Station Hotel, which Rishi had just read that weekend. It’s not a poem we have looked at in great detail on the podcast. Our HVP Alan Johnson, MP for Hull West 1997-2017, loves this poem and has recorded it for us, with his wonderful statesmanlike tones. Graham Chesters, our chair, messaged me after the podcast to say he felt it can be linked with Here, Bridge for the Living and the foreword to A Rumoured City, as a ‘compressed shot at capturing the very special loneliness of Holderness’. Graham said the puzzling final lines are a ‘desperate literary coda that asserts the lonely sanctuary of the poetic. With irony. Keep your fags, I’m off to the untalkative’. If you like the rich imagery of the poem, you might like the lovely collage print made exclusively for us by artist D J Roberts for sale on the PLS website.
https://philiplarkin.com/product/dj-roberts-prints/
NB Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds now tour the world playing hugely euphoric concerts at packed out arenas, as they should. I don’t want to be a ‘back in my day’ person, but I am very grateful that I have also seen them in much smaller venues. Here is a ticket from a rowdy gig at the Sheffield Academy from 2008, where I was down the front, secretly recording the show on a Dictaphone (subsequently lost) and Nick fell off the speaker stand in front of me, locking eyes with me for a thrilling moment.
Off to the Scottish borders in a week with Gavin and Maggie the spaniel where I will be reading and researching the next podcast guests. Keep warm, everyone.