Click here to listen to So Here We Are on Miporadio. Please give time for the link to download. So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England So Here We Are 1 You are listening to So Here We Are: poetic letters from England on Miporadio: where poetry tunes in. Hello. My name is David Caddy. I am an English poet and editor. In these poetic letters I shall be talking about English poetry. I should say that I love both English and American poetry and that I read both in equal measure and delight. I suppose that that already marks my card as a figure concerned with what might be usefully called the melting pot of Anglo-American poetry and poetics. In England there is great hostility from the poetry establishment and mainstream towards Anglo-American poetry, not to mention modernist and post-modernist developments. In this sense, by my very interest, I am an English outsider. Indeed I have been called the outsider’s insider and I do like to challenge accepted versions of literary history. Given this position I may be able to shed light on aspects of English poetry, Anglo-American poetry and the state of the art. Having said that, we all have our prejudices and I shall be trying to curb mine. I rather like the idea of being a reporter from the frontline, an Alistair Cooke producing a poetic letter from England. So Here We Are. To start with in this first letter or two, I want to talk about my poetic heritage, the one that impacted during my childhood and beyond, and hopefully through this approach reveal some things that are peculiarly English. I have lived most of my life in tiny villages and towns in rural north Dorset, which is situated in central southern England, and some twenty fives inland from the Jurassic coast, as it now called by those eager to drum up tourist trade, and some thirty miles south west of Stonehenge, the Neolithic and Bronze age megalithic monument. I live in an ancient landscape where the past looks at you from every angle. I look out of my study window at wild deer grazing and at the Neolithic hill fort, Hod Hill, with its visible Roman settlement from the first century AD. In England you feel you are part of the long march of everyman. When I went to Sturminster Newton primary school, the first poetry that I can recall hearing and reading after nursery rhymes, hymns and folk ballads were the poems and songs of William Shakespeare. When icicles hang by the wall And Dick the shepherd blows his nail And Tom bears logs into the hall And milk comes frozen home in pail. This comes from the end of the play Love’s Labour Lost and I suspect my teacher thought was suitable for us country boys and girls. Coming from a family where there were no books and no one had ever gone to University, I resisted such things. I recall complaining about the irrelevance of such old writing and saying that I would never become a poet. However, I was crestfallen at not being selected ever to appear in any school production or sports team. I felt excluded and was. I was surely as good as the others. I loved that magical school play, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, which I could only watch but not be part of. Access to the heritage is closely guarded and if you can find a way in to this, it may not be easy. I think we may have read some of the Sonnets but cannot remember for certain. I was a dreamer, looking out of the window. I was also a playground fighter, hitting back hard at the bullies, trying to be left alone. I am more certain that we read The Passionate Pilgrim poems VII and VIII: Fair is my love, but not so fair as fickle Mild as a dove, but neither true nor trusty Brighter than glass, and yet, as glass is, brittle Softer than wax, and yet, as iron, rusty: A lily pale, with damask dye to grace her None fairer, nor none falser to deface her. Shakespeare was standard fare for eleven year olds at the time. I did know creative writing and when it came to the age 11 plus examinations I recall writing a story (a composition) where the ch