Responding in kind to Mark Halliday

When Mark Halliday decided to become a poet

he should have given more consideration to the fact

that his name is not poetic, offers no immediate sense that

here we have a poet of degree, a poet of quality.

Wordsworth, on the other hand, strikes the poetic mind

from the outset: if Wordsworth hadn’t been called

Wordsworth he’d have had to change his name to

something more apt, like Lord Byron (whose name

always struck me as odd until I realised Lord wasn’t his

Christian name). Lord Byron immediately tells us that

here we have a poet willing to rage amongst the ladies,

to fight in real live battles with a sword, ˗ or maybe a gun

if he was lucky; to swim the Hellespont, or some equally

improbable water. (Though not to die of as miserable a

thing as a cold, and it wasn’t even caught in the

Hellespont.) Those are the sorts of things

aroused by the poetic name, Lord Byron: a true poet.

Robert Louis Stevenson, though he has the

advantage of a triple-barrelled cognomen, used the word

nice in one of his poems, so I discovered yesterday;

this rather undercuts his literary integrity.

Rudyard Kipling, on the other hand, could have

written what he liked (and used nice) and we would have

continued to read his poetry simply on the basis of his name.

See what I mean, Mark Halliday? The only

notorious thing your name reminds me of is Doc

Holliday, the whisky-slurping, gun-toting, gambling dentist (yes,

dentist!), the sidekick of Wyatt Earp ˗ another man who could

have taken up a career as a poet if he hadn’t had the poor

judgement to have several brothers who plainly desired more

strongly to appear in the Darwin Awards than to savour life,

marriage, family and a bunch of cattle on a largish ranch.

So before you decide to write any more poems, Mark ˗

if I can take advantage of our mutual poetic status ˗ I

suggest you consider rebranding yourself. Mark isn’t

too bad (Mark Antony springs to mind, a verbose man

capable of considerable blank verse) but Halliday is

too close to holiday, as in relaxed, I can’t be bothered,

I’m doing well just lying on the beach, speaking malarkey,

thanks very much. No one wants to read a poet whose

name bespeaks vacation, relaxation, can’t be botheredliness,

the mundane. Our immediate assumption, on seeing a

poem by Mark Halliday, is, well, he won’t have anything

to say ˗ just look at his name. It’ll be all malarkey

and wine biscuits, plain arrowroot, Graham crackers

(I included those since you’re a North American and

they’ll mean something to you even if they don’t mean

a thing to me, a person from the South Pacific,

where people go crackers, but don’t eat them with the

seeming obsessiveness of the average American).

See, this is what happens, Mark, when I read your

poetry and try to respond in kind. I find myself

meandering, unable to stick to the point, bringing in

beaches and Byron and a bunch of bogus baloney.

Instead of interaction between two poetic minds, it

becomes All Me, barely A Kind of Reply.

Written around August 2015