“You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain.”
-Harvey Dent
When I was a student, I was lucky enough to become friends with the poet, James Brookes. Over the course of three years, several bottles of the House Red, and discussions of poetry and poetics, it became obvious that Geoffrey Hill was a real hero of James’.
In the time since, James has published a debut pamphlet of poetry, The English Sweats and a bloody good one it is too. Thinking back a few years to our conversations on Hill, it makes me (and him) smile to see that every reviewer I see handle James’ work has a “cor bleedin’ blimey, this fella ‘ere don’t ‘arf sound like that Geoffrey ‘ill geezer off the telly!” moment (see here, here, here, here but, to be fair, not here).
Artists always have interesting relationships with their heroes. Some surreptitiously diffuse their admiration over their oeuvre and some are less subtle. Take this press-shot of Vincent de Souza for example:
Can you give me a very ‘matter-of-fact’ look please Mr. de Souza?
Charles Bukowski, you say, Vincent? Well, let’s have a quick dip into your collection, Weightless Road to see if there was any thinking in having that book clearly in shot for your press-photo…
“After whiskeys, he treated his Eve like shit;
taking the turn of a reptile deviant,
he did stuff to her, demonic slithers,
the tame or angelic avoid in sex…”
from Against Adam
Yup, Bukowski, got it.
Let’s not kid ourselves though, this is one of the tamest examples of hero worship at play within the world of poetry. Wilfred Owen was fairly certain he was one of the Romantics until old Boschy turned up, Hugo Williams gained a lot of his transatlantic poetry swagger after discovering that Thom Gunn had written a poem about Elvis Presley and Lowell and Bishop informed a lot of their writing from a certain form of mutual hero worship.
My favourite of these is probably Blake’s relentless riffing on Milton.
‘I love you, man’
Like many, I first encountered Blake through ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ as a teenager. I was truly blown away and, being told by my English teacher that Blake was properly into Milton’s Paradise Lost, I thought I’d have a little flick through J-Mil’s opus. Word of warning… there are A LOT less pictures in Paradise Lost than in Blake’s work, but it’s still worth a read if you’ve got a spare couple of months knocking about.
Fatuousness aside, once you’ve read Paradise Lost, you cannot help but see themes and fragments of the poem echoing through everything Blake ever did, from most noticeably The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and obviously through Blake’s most fan-boy-ish manoeuvre – Milton, a Poem.
So, onto my heroes.
I’m actually going to veer into the world of music here, but as our music editor talks extensively about poetry I think this is allowed. My reason for this is that I have recently discovered some incredibly embarrassing home videos of me playing guitar at various open-mic nights in pubs as a teenager… it’s got me thinking about the way my musical heroes have influenced me.
So the hero I will be discussing here is Ben Gibbard who is most famous for his role in Death Cab for Cutie, but it is his side-project, The Postal Service, which I keep returning to.
For those of you unfamiliar with The Postal Service, they are an indie-electro two-piece from America. Their only album to date was made with the two members on opposite sides of the country re-mixing and editing the songs and sending them back and forth in the mail (hence the band’s name).
The result is an incredibly soulful digital experience. I personally prefer this to much of Gibbard’s more conventional indie-rock output just for the sheer uniqueness of juxtaposing the voice and nuanced lyricism responsible for such tear-jerkers as I Will Follow You Into the Dark, and a dance beat. I find it hard to choose which of The Postal Service songs I prefer out of The District Sleeps Alone Tonight and Sleeping In… so make sure you listen to both of them.
So, for the benefit of you, my dedicated readers, I hit the studio to see if I could transform my hero worship into something creative and write and produce a song in the style of The Postal Service.
For your delectation, I give you ‘Recognize me’ by The Phil Brown Service:
Phil Brown
Poetry Editor
