All the Versuses of Life.

The poet Tony Harrison has come up here before (and I am sad to learn from that Wikipedia article that he died last year); all poets deal in language, of course, but his attention to language as such was uncommon and uncommonly enjoyable. I think he was first mentioned here in 2005 for his Yan Tan Tethera libretto, and I quoted his poem “Them and [uz]” in 2024; I have now discovered his long poem “Y.,” first published in the LRB in 1985 (archived), and it is (among many other things) so gloriously filthy I can’t resist sharing some of it, while hoping any interested parties will click through for more. It begins: My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words. Arthur Scargill, Sunday Times, 10 January 1982 Next millennium you’ll have to search quite hard to find my slab behind the family dead, butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard adding poetry to their beef, beer and bread. With Byron three graves on I’ll not go short of…