An accolade, not a job description

Extract from Chapter 16, Walking Wounded – the Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell

Scannell wrote on the big themes – “Death, courage, art, sex. C’est tout!” he once suggested sardonically – but he found them, above all, in everyday life and the experiences of disregarded, forgotten people …

… He had a sharp eye for the significance of the unregarded detail: Proust famously recalled the taste of a madeleine, but with Scannell it was the mingled smell of tobacco, wine and piss in a sleazy Paris bar. Like the child in his poem The Gift, he would rather weave his imagination around a collection of clothes pegs than play with a box of finely-painted toy soldiers, with all their weapons and equipment; in Apple Poem, he sees the orchards hiding within the single fruit …

… He also demanded the highest standards of those who dare to call themselves poets. For him, the word was less a job description, more an accolade that should be earned hard and bestowed sparingly. If it sounds like faint praise today to say that he was a master-craftsman, a poet who understood and valued the technical framework of poetry, the demands of metre and the subtleties of rhyme and near-rhyme, it’s only in the last few decades that that would have been so. Scannell took the craft of poetry seriously; he believed in the discipline of difficulty, which makes the poet search for the precise word or phrase that he needs, and keeps him honest. Poetry, he believed, should be hard – for the poet …

… “I want to be a poet,” he told the court martial trying him for desertion. In his diary, he scribbled, “I’m no novelist. Or anything else, I suppose, except, just possibly, a poet. Once in a while.”  At other times, drunk and depressed in the bleak hours of the early morning, he would scrawl in his diary that he would never achieve that aim, that he was giving up – but he never did.

First, last, and always, he was a poet. He had earned the accolade.