Poem of the week

Steve Bailey - aka regular commenter cynicalsteve - was a much-appreciated contributor to this blog, and an accomplished poet. He was always self-effacing about it, but as you can see, the modesty was misplaced

This week's poem is by a writer familiar to Books Blog regulars as 'cynicalsteve'. As many of you will know, Steve died of a heart attack in the early hours of August 12. The loss has been keenly felt among the many friends who contributed to his own blog thedoggerelsbollocks and by those of us who didn't know him, but somehow imagined we did. Above and below the line, he was courteous, genial, modest - and yet a real presence.

Steve's unusual career was filled out for me by his wife, Michele Bailey, nee Krepich, who kindly provided material for the following, necessarily potted, biography.

Stephen John Bailey (he preferred to be called Steve) was born in 1959 in Newton Abbot, Devon. He gained his first degree at Cambridge in the science tripos, and went on to receive a PhD in Pharmacology from University College, London. He met Michele while he was on a placement at the University of Graz, Austria, and she was there as an exchange student.

Michele, originally from Pennsylvania, began her studies in journalism and graduated from Rider College in Communications Theory. She and Steve were married within a year of their meeting. Steve found work in West Germany but he always missed England, and eventually took up a research post at the University of Surrey. In slack periods between grants, he developed his passion for gardening and collecting rare plants. In 1995, he decided to give up scientific research and move back to Devon to create with Michele a garden and nursery. When he became ill, and could no longer spend so much time on horticulture, he increasingly turned his talents to poetry, lit boards and blogs.

The result was the creation of one of the funniest, friendliest and most visually appealing literary blogs around. Hospitable to other artists and writers, with a lively social gathering of commentators, it is also the portrait of a marriage, including examples of Michele's lovely artwork in glass and gemstones and some gorgeous flower photography. Then there are the poems. With typical modesty and generosity (and a typical delight in puns) Steve styled himself a doggerelist, providing "a lamp-post for doggerelists everywhere." But his verse amounts to a lot more than doggerel.

He had a special flair for parody - see, for example, the January 29 Poem of the Week where Emily Dickinson gets a good-humoured pasting. Wordworth's Daffodils and Poe's Raven are also soundly spoofed. A recent Keats discussion resulted in the hilarious narrative,"That Damn Bell's, Sancerre and Me". Like all the best parodies, these pieces are a form of literary criticism - hugely entertaining, but astute.

Steve enjoyed playing with words and inventing new ones (as you'll see in this week's poem). On the mysterious edge of nonsense poetry, his December 6, 2007 post, "Some Poetry of Osmeterium Form", hints at something true, if surreally odd, about the writing process: "twaigless, in grey the stanzas come/ away from one who moves the pen;/ some letters make a break for freedom/ who knows why, or when?" He was, I think, quietly serious about poetry, and believed in it as a force for good. "Is it that hard,/To ditch the politician, keep the bard?" he asks at the end of "Today and Yesterday". But pretentiousness and self-importance were out.

The poem I've chosen, "Come the Revolution" relishes the human comedy - especially when human aspires to be poet. Steve explained on his blog that it originated in the line, "the first thing we do, let's kill the lawyers" but that he "wasn't in the business of advocating (even spoofily) wholesale bardicide". Poems that work on the "listing" principle accumulate great energy and are hard to wind down to a conclusion.

I like the firmness with which the poet calls a halt, and that little touch of ambiguity that he adds in the last two lines. Will "we" be "free at the end" because we're philistines, or because there are some poets who transcend all the categories and stereotypes - as Steve himself did?

Come the Revolution

A new day is dawning, the fawning will cease, You'll soon get a call from the Bardic Police. They wander around like a Cumbrian cloud; Their remit is simple: no poems allowed.

The first thing they'll do is, they'll jail all the poets, The free-versers, free-cursers, go-with-the-flowets, Sad tree-huggers, mad buggers, plods and emoters, Those limerick loonies and I'll-get-my-coaters,

De-dum, de-dum merchants, the ones who can't spell, The nuts who write epics on heaven and hell, The angries, the Musies, the minimalists, Declaimers who froth at the mouth and shake fists,

The delicate flowers on a spiritual high, Unspeakable egotists, pregnant with 'I', The ones who write verses in praise of their dogs, Back-of-an-envelope types with crap blogs,

The ones that on reading inspire you to think, The ones you daren't read lest they drive you to drink, The beardies, the weirdos, the hermits in caves, Radical poets who fail to make waves,

The rhymers, good timers (and good-timers too), The ones you can't read unless feeling quite blue, The ranters, the ravers, the cravers of fame, The ones only published because of their name,

The naturists (naturists? Not them in the buff; The greeters of tweeters and all that there guff), Outdoorsers who chronicle beauty in midges, Modernists copying notes left on fridges,

The adjective addicts and those who use none, Depressive metricians, those just having fun, War poets, poor poets (wholesale and retail), Those who describe anatomical detail,

Those who hide poems in densely packed prose, Those who write vertically, those who use rows, Sky writers, wry skitters, Myspace abusers, Prize-winners, runners-up, also-rans, losers,

Brutalists, Fruitalists, isn't-this-cute-alists, Original Beats with their varied offshootalists,, Kid-bards, yard-bards, older-is-betterists, Chip-on-the-shoulderists, bold crossword-setterists,

Embarrassing teenagers, lovelorn and spotty, Victorian throwbacks who frankly seem dotty, Those who think writing's a job for the pissed; (They're automatically top of the list.),

The dry wits, the sly gits, the two-fag-knock-offers, I've-done-my-day's-quota-it's-time-to-clock-offers The sci-fis, the singers, the bringers of laughter, The ones that confound you, becoming yet dafter,

Romantics, fanatics, ecstatics and hicks, Visual poets with eye-catching tricks, The druggies, the huggies, the bad ones who mug us, The ones who think language is just there to bug us,

The doggerel dabblers, writers of vision, The prolix, the proles and the Lords of Concision, The chattering rappers who ape MC Hammer; There's room for them all in the ex-poets' slammer.

The ancients, the moderns, the ones in between, The ones whom you've heard of, the ones never seen. The Day of the Philistines coming, my friend; And it's just you and me who'll be free at the end...