White Space for the poet Adrian Mitchell

by Ken Evans

Early mentors in writing can be forever. Mine is Adrian Mitchell.

Adrian, when ‘slant/sorry/not really slant’, as in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslavakia (1968):

To a Russian soldier in Prague

You are going to be hated by the people.

His titles and openings angry, declarative.

I was sheltering from sun, melting tarmac – this, when hot summers were unusual – before catching the train to a ferry (Eurostar is light years away), in the cool aisles at Foyles, Charing Cross Road. The bookshop, a bibliophile bedlam then, tomes overflowing shelves. 

The Children of Albion anthology (Penguin), with its ‘Glad Day’ William Blake cover, was an injection of serotonin to a sixteen-year-old pulse. I was read the ‘canon’, as kids were, then: Larkin, Betjeman, Hughes, Gunn, Plath. But this collection of voices was incandescent, a world apart.

The anthology, already a decade old – the 60s’ came late to the ‘West Riding’ of Yorkshire – included Tom Raworth, Edwin Morgan, Tom Pickard, Libby Houston, ‘a true survivor of the Age of Beats.’

Adrian contributed. He was known since the ‘Happening’ at the Albert Hall (1965) when Ginsberg presided over 7,000 guests (no running order and the ‘running’ lasting 4 hours!) Mick Jagger met Marianne Faithful there. Some Beatles dropped by. Indira Gandhi, Christopher Logue and George Macbeth, Ferlinghetti too, was there. Vosnesensky showed, though forbidden to perform by the Soviets.

Hall Manager Christopher Hopper worried: ‘Would you send your teenage daughter to hear that sort of thing?’

It seized this truculent teen. Mitchell’s poem, ‘To Whom It May Concern’, lacerated the Vietnam War (which had a year to run, then). It was full blast but with a weary/quietist, ballad-like refrain:

So coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.

Nursery rhyme to nightmare. Adrian reprised it to excoriate Afghanistan this century. A great anti-war poem. But this memorialises the poem as only of a time and place. More, it reflects on truth, or the noises and lies offered by alternative ‘truths’ or 'fake news.’ Very now, as well as then.

John Gummer (a Tory Minister!) said nearly 20 years ago that we should be on a ‘war-footing’ to tackle climate change. “This is the biggest threat human beings have had… the stuff of the Genesis myth. This is about how human beings handle knowledge.” (Independent, April 2006).

Set in Derbyshire’s Peak District, my eco-poem in my latest collection, A Full-On Basso Profundo called ‘The Invisible Fury’, I hope borrows some of Adrian’s outrage. It attempts to harness, like him, the demotic with the grander ‘statement’. It aspires to a little of his unmatched capacity for contextualising issues in a way anyone could understand.

Adrian wrote plays, libretti, later, for the National Theatre, but I miss his poems on our dark times, where the most savage satire seems tame compared to terrifying realities; where polemic seems lame, lost to clamour. His interest in and ear for the absurd would, I think, be spiked by today’s calamities. He above all felt poetry was sound and breath and the intervals between – and should be heard. His eye for a story would not have missed the grim, poetic possibilities of Sunset Boulevard in flames (as I write), the Hollywood sign on the hill, possibly ash, tomorrow. As right-wing US voices claim help was hampered by DEI initiatives (Diversity, Equality and Inclusion). Vile times, Adrian. Thanks for the ‘tenderness of animals’, your kindness to a newbie. But that’s for another poem from my new collection, White Space for Adrian Mitchell.

Ken Evans featured in Broken Sleep’s Masculinity anthology and won the 2018 Kent and Sussex Poetry Competition. He has been published widely in magazines including Magma, Poetry Scotland, The Alchemy Spoon, Frogmore Papers. He began to write poetry ten years ago after donating a kidney to his sister who has lupus.