![]() ![]() No one would believe it in a poem, let alone warm themselves with the illusion that it was written especially for them. The trouble with fact is that it is so strange. It might even, if you can bear the idea, be the story of a man’s life, subject to times, places, coincidences, grief and confusion. It won’t even tell the story of the “real” Roger McGough, the poet who exists solely for you, who rode a thousand or so miles of train track in the pocket of your coat, or kept you company those critical few nights in SheffieldAlabamaHelsinki. I look in a poem for the truth about myself, not the writer.Īnd the shock of a poet’s autobiography - prepare yourself - is that the book will not be about you, the reader. This book, which has the flavour of a live gig, confirms that McGough is, as he has suspected all along, a walking work of art. It was produced by art students in Sunderland who were briefed to trail McGough after a visit in the early 1970s, buy exactly what he bought and send the package to him on each anniversary of the performance. It emerges that he has been pursued by a work of art, in the shape of a plastic bag containing chewing gum, rail ticket, newspaper and music festival leaflet, with the title “An Incident Regarding Identity”. Later on, we read that he has been plagued by a bag of seemingly random items that keeps re-sending itself to himself, asking him first “Are you sure you are really Roger McGough?” then “Are you still sure.”. He begins the book by reading a letter from himself excusing his absence and introducing his stand-in. He is unusually good material for an autobiography as he seems to have lived most of his life dressed up as himself, pretending to be someone called Roger McGough. For everyone who knows a poet by his writing, a hundred more know him as a teacher, TV presenter or tin-plate cutter in a toy factory, to take examples from Roger McGough’s other lives. It comes from spending a lifetime bound up in an art form that does not pay. But does he discover Roger McGough? Sian Hughes is fascinated by the search Roger McGough discovers the terrible honesty of prose in his autobiography. Poetry has the power to rework memory and transcend the limits of a straight portrait. ![]()
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