Stan Smith

Re E. Winter’s nunclish poem and your letters column passim:Rhyme’s dry couplings find G. Ewart even hard put to surpass him,The solitary substitute for the copulative ‘deathly’Being nothing but a wet weekend (and dirty) in Llanelli.But surely it is time to cap, put an end to, this lubricityAnd starve Ms F. Pitt-Kethley of the oxygen of pubicity?This short epistle puzzled but ejaculated pithilyI...

I read a pastiche from an Arctic landThat conjured Uncle Wiz from the dim distanceWhen poets swapped Lawn Tennyson for abandonedmineshafts, pen and ink for flange and pistons.I liked the lines; and certainly our Wystan’sVerbal contraptions have worse flattery sufferedFrom francs-tireurs less frank than Francis Spufford.But (echoing Robert Post upon Post-Modernism?)He sends his letter to a man of...

John Bayley says some excellent things about some of my own favourite poems in his piece ‘Pffwungg’ (LRB, 19 January), and I wouldn’t want to spoil his delight in what he calls ‘the rich nonsense magic’ of the eponymous stanza from Auden’s ‘What siren zooming’, were it not for two things. The first is the misquotation which transposes ‘time’ and ‘town’ in the first line. It...