Pleasure! pleasure! pleasure! everywhere

So Much for Life is the most extensive collection to date of the late Mark Hyatt’s flagrantly embodied, daringly vernacular poetry. Hyatt was born in 1940 and committed suicide in 1972. His body was found in a cave in Lancashire; he had overdosed on sleeping pills and aspirin. Though he lived to be only thirty-two – and so occupies the same gloomy biographical territory as John Keats, by whom he was inspired, and Sylvia Plath, who was among his contemporaries – So Much for Life testifies to his scrappy and durable spirit. Throughout his nomadic life in London, Blackburn, Manchester and Hexham, Hyatt dealt with homelessness, drug addiction and poor job prospects, all against the backdrop of a classist, homophobic 1960s England. Nonetheless he was a poet who sought “pleasure! pleasure! pleasure!” everywhere.

Hyatt was a “filthily sexy” poet, in John Wilkinson’s words. This can be taken in two ways. Firstly, it is hard not to linger over photographs showing Hyatt’s proto-Beatles haircut, green eyes and strong jaw. (The editors of So Much for Life, Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts, suggest that on one occasion James Baldwin took a liking to him.) Then there is the fact that, throughout the collection, Hyatt is unafraid to discuss love, death, the mind, random sexual encounters (usually, but not exclusively, with other men) and the body’s manifold processes of bleeding, urinating, defecating, etc (often in the same poem): “Wet / the hand / rubs the sperm / back into its own hairs / & dries its-self … / Dead / like squashed maggots / he shoots / which smells like – / one’s own rot / of the mind” (“My Auto-Biograph Hours”).

He was even at ease writing about masturbation. These poems derive their import not from shock value, but from their deliberate opposition to the polite veneer that characterized English society – especially English literary society – as exemplified by the imaginary suitor whom Hyatt rebuffs in “A Definite Choice”:

I want to understand a man
And his pain,
Not the other kind of man
Who says: “I will have another
Cushion for my arse dear,
And close the door when you bring
The coffee in, while I write
An Ode to Mummy.”

Many of Hyatt’s poems proceed in this manner: the single-sentence stanza allows his poetics a feverish improvisational quality; an urgency; a sense of outcry. Here is the entirety of “The World Is at War”: “The world is at war / what a waste of sex”. This is bleak, as jokes go, but Hyatt’s work is not devoid of lighter humour: “when cornflakes fart / boy how I sing” (“Poem”). He could be profoundly pithy. His long poems demonstrate an equally profound discursivity, however, often reflecting on the facts of fatherhood and his concern for the son he had with the poet Cressida Lindsay:

My son, I am not a man that will give love,
in fact I feel you as being strange.
Sometime in your life you must hate me.
All you can say is “I am from your sperm”.
…
The prize of life is to be able
to eat, laugh heartily, then have a good shit
reading to yourself some soft poetry.
My son, I am not a man that will give love.

(“Between You and Humanity”)

Hyatt’s existence was evidently not an easy one. In “Bring Back Youth Robbers”, a song to a lover, he reminds the listener or reader that “you know I am living grief”, trapped in an “empty poverty brushing along”. The title of this collection, too, might suggest a ho-hum poet ready to give up. But in spite of – or perhaps because of – material lack, Hyatt was committed artistically to going all-in. (He ends “Bring Back Youth Robbers” with this declaration: “We are into shit arse and soul”.) His was a voice “fighting nearly all humanity” – through withdrawals, through run-ins with the prison system, through diverging family units. But it was also fighting for his own humanity. As he writes in “Once I Did This”:

All I want to do
is only to do it,
don’t feel like hanging
onto anything,
only to get down
to the bottom
and do it right,
break it clear.

That persistent voice, its active aliveness, can still be heard clearly fifty years on from Mark Hyatt’s death.

Oluwaseun Olayiwola is a poet, critic and choreographer living in London. His debut collection of poems, Strange Beach, is forthcoming in the UK and US

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