Didsbury, Peter
DIDSBURY, Peter
Nationality: British. Born: Fleetwood, 10 April 1946. Education: Balliol College, Oxford, 1964–68. Family: Married 1) Susan Raleigh (divorced); 2) Patricia Ann Cooley in 1982, two daughters and one son. Career: High school teacher, Hull, 1973–81. Since 1982 archaeologist, Hull Museums, Hull. Address: 16 Ventnor Street, Hull, North Humberside HU5 2LP, England.
Publications
Poetry
The Butchers of Hull. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1982.
The Classical Farm. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, and Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour Editions, 1987.
That Old Time Religion. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1994.
*Critical Studies: "Epigraphs for Epigones; John Ashbery's Influence in England" by Ian Gregson, in Bete Noire (Hull, Humberside), 4, winter 1987; Peter Didsbury issue of Bete Noire (Hull, Humberside), 6, winter 1988; by Ian McMillan, in Poetry Review, 84(2), summer 1994.
* * *Peter Didsbury is closely associated with Hull, where he moved at the age of six and where his occupations as a teacher and an archaeologist have thoroughly immersed him in the urban and domestic life of that city. It is the images of Hull's rain-drenched farms, ditches, drains, and dykes that are so powerfully depicted in his writing. The city has come a long way in its public and literary consciousness since the early 1950s. Hull poets have been labeled "provincial" with respect to London and Oxbridge, which are centers of conservatism in poetry. Nonetheless, the leading consortium of Hull poets—Peter Didsbury, Tony Flynn, Douglas Houston, and Sean O'Brien—are drawn to more radical European and American styles even while they remain loyal to working-class values and hostile to the presumptions of the metropolis.
Of the influences on his writing Didsbury has said, "I started writing poetry at school. Just before going to the university. An exceptionally gifted English teacher set us to imitate Gerard Manley Hopkins as a literary exercise. Like many poets, I was largely concerned with epiphanies at first and then with the self-justifying products of the autonomous imagination. It's the dangers of the latter that have begun to be borne in upon me more recently …."
Didsbury is considered to be a postmodernist poet, one influenced by the American John Ashbery. His technique of rendering the complexity of experience with the mind's bafflement in the face of it, and with its difficulty in finding significant connections between one experience and another, is an element used by Ashbery. This is applied to phenomena when objects clear for a moment and then blur, resulting in a puzzling homogeneity in which adjacent outlines turn illegible. Didsbury also has learned some technical elements from Ashbery: rhythmical flexibility and colloquial nonchalance, an outlook on subject matter, a belief in a self-conscious inclusiveness, and an apparent openness to experience as the poem is being written that can allow for improvisation.
In "The Flowers of Finland," from The Butchers of Hull, Didsbury uses Ashbery's method when he evokes the moment of composition in which ideas are proposed and then modified or even erased:
Taken. Under-taken. Taken.
Words from a dream …
Stop. All wrong.
Words from a reverie.
Work on in Shapeland
Anywhere will do to start
It always has.
Language is the propensity.
We have the template,
then anything you care to mention.
Other ideas whose status is in doubt are introduced, and there are bits of narrative or metaphors for what proceeds or follows them:
After my head hit the windscreen
I thought of Auden's words
that without a cement of blood they would not safely stand.
Didsbury is a creative and original poet in his handling of language. He uses language as a medium of delight but is very much a maker of poems and of crafted objects. He uses devices that can be labeled as "historical-surrealist" and as "anecdotal-pastoral." In "The Specialist Heart" he exploits a cultivated disparity between flatness of tone and a soaring, playful imagination:
My inside pocket is my specialist heart.
I feed it with papers.
We have filled our jackets with regularity
my fathers and I,
we make wardrobes into libraries …
Our pockets swell to the old afflatus
of a war against women:
hushed tones, and angry glances.
Once a year, on Mischief Night
we frighten ourselves on the old stories
of female victories: jackets gone to jumble
and vanished patrimonies.
Didbury's prose poem "A White Wine for Max Ernst" is a surrealist and allegorical work in which he bares his imagination in the same way as the objects he writes about are laid bare in a tactile environment, although the two are dissociated from each other: "A clockwork train on the green tiled floor of a swimming pool. A loco / pulling just three carriages chugs busily around in chlorinated wine. The / bath is square and uniformly six feet deep. There are not tracks. The large / key … It is large / enough with its butterfly wings for a child's small fingers … From here I can only taste it."
In The Classical Farm Didsbury continues a further aspect of Ashbery's method. "The Smart Chair" questions the way in which poems connect distinct experiences. Its improvisational quality emerges from this because the experiences appear to enter randomly, so that the poem links a remark by an eleven-year-old girl and a visit to a small island. The prosaic experience is juxtaposed with the conventional poetic experience:
My chair looked smart because it had a tie hanging over the back.
She's eleven years old, and although she knows that I don't wear ties
she didn't know I'd been to a funeral, wearing that tie
which now improves my furniture.
The second experience is made more "poetic" by having a fantasy attached to it:
… a white farmhouse stood in the middle of the bay
on a rock that was little larger than itself. Not a farmhouse,
unless they farmed seaweeds, rats, and the voices of drowned sailors—
there wasn't enough room—
In That Old Time Religion Didsbury writes with the same sense of adventure and imagination as in his other two collections. His inventiveness is surrealist and powerful. In this work there is a glimpse of an alternative history in which Catholic Europe and the East are strangely mixed, in which matters of faith and damnation are still alive yet meaningless. A vision of pastoral England is also apparent in his invention of pure play in which there are disparate celebrations of estuaries, farms, estates, and city streets.
Didsbury sums up his poetical beliefs in statements such as these:
I have a strong belief in the poem as a "made thing," a coherent, independent object that it is necessary to release from the "stone" of the world … Linguistics and history (in its broadest sense) are the vehicles in which my poems travel.
For me, the writing of poetry is essentially a spiritual undertaking, and I have slowly come to realize that I have a "religious" nature that can find no other formal expression.
—Renu Barrett