Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (33 page)

The film director, screenwriter and playwright Neil LaBute (b. 1963) first came to prominence with
In the Company of Men
(1997). His subsequent credits include writing
and directing
Your Friends and Neighbors
(1998),
The Shape of Things
(2003) and
Some Velvet Morning
(2013) as well as such plays as
The Mercy Seat
(2002),
Fat Pig
(2005),
reasons to be pretty
(2008) and
In a Forest Dark and Deep
(2011). He is also the author of the short story collection
Seconds of Pleasure
(2004).

JAMES FENTON
(1949– )

DAVID REMNICK

When I was younger I used to read a great deal of contemporary American and English poetry. I still do. But I also used to go to readings, which I no longer have as much time
for. Ginsberg, Snyder, Levertov, Robert Hass, Louise Glück . . . The best was Joseph Brodsky, a cross between Akhmatova and
the Kol Nidre. Years went by without going to hear more, which is a
foolish self-deprivation. I had an excuse, I told myself. Too often poets read in a fashionable lament, humourless or blandly incantatory. But then, about fifteen years ago, I went to hear James
Fenton, a favourite of mine, at Columbia University. He was extraordinary. In the Russian way, he knew his work by heart and, as he
paced the stage like the caged beast in the Kafka story, he
seemed to radiate that language, to exude it rather than read or perform it; the language came up from inside his deepest self. Years went by. Then, on 20 April 2012, I went to a memorial service
for Christopher Hitchens at Cooper Union. And, because Hitchens was Hitchens, there were wonderfully ribald anecdotes of two-thirds-true journalistic
escapades, well-lubricated evenings of talk and
friendship. And then there was Fenton, who stepped to the microphone, all business, but clearly shaken, and recited this poem, a poem that had been published years
before in
The New York Review of Books
. It was not written for Christopher, but it was revived and recited for him, the perfect lament for the lost friend. I think of it, and am shaken
by its rhythms,
by James’s inimitable voice, every time a friend of mine is lost or in danger of being lost to the thing that consumes us all sooner or later. I couldn’t be more grateful for a work of
art, for a sustaining, insistent voice.

Formerly Moscow correspondent of the
Washington Post
, David
Remnick (b. 1958) has been editor of
The New Yorker
since 1998. His six books include the Pulitzer
Prize-winning
Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
(1993) and
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama
(2010).

JOHN UPDIKE
(1932–2009)

JOSEPH O’NEILL

I first read this poem in the days following the news of John Updike’s death in January 2009, and I had the confused idea that it belonged to the brief, light snowfall of
verse that came from him during his final hospitalisation. In fact, he wrote the poem some fifteen years before, at around
the age of sixty. He could equally have written it at age twenty or
thirty: Updike seems never to have been free of either mortal dread or, to flip the coin, of an intense love of being alive – a love that extends, in this poem, to the bittersweet taste of a
postage stamp on the tongue that licks it. Updike’s poems usually bounce off a hard spot in my sensibility – they’re a touch trifling, as
he would have happily admitted –
but this one is wonderful and terrifying.

A qualified barrister, who practised in London for ten years while writing his first two novels, the Irish-born,
New York-resident Joseph O’Neill (b. 1964) is the author
of
Netherland
, which was named as one of the
New York Times
’ Ten Best Books of 2008 and won the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He has also written a work of nonfiction,
Blood-Dark Track: A Family History
, as well as literary and cultural criticism, and teaches at Bard College in New York.

BRIAN PATTEN
(1946– )

PAUL BETTANY

I was introduced to Brian Patten’s work at the age of twenty and since then his poems have kept me company. In real life we are twenty-five years apart, but I always meet
him in a place where we are both the same age. The love poems he wrote forty years ago saw me through my twenties, and now the poems he wrote
in his forties speak to me with an equal resonance.

‘Armada’ is a poem about the death of his mother, but it’s also about the importance of time and the insignificance of the days and weeks and years with which we measure
it.

When I read it I usually start crying at the line ‘I kneel beside your bed’ and continue howling until its perfect end. It’s then that I think of my own childhood
and my own
children, and how ironic and awful it is – and yet right and proper – that they should take my love for granted. That sort of love can only be fully understood in hindsight.

Reading Brian Patten’s poetry does that trick that art should do, which is to sort of adhere you to the surface of the planet, just long enough that you don’t go spinning off into
the loneliness of space
– ‘somebody else has felt this too,’ you think. And you breathe a little easier.