3 - Travelling Between Places: Poems 1967–1976

Summary

Leaving nothing and nothing ahead;

when you stop for the evening

the sky will be in ruins,

when you hear late birds

with tired throats singing

think how good it is that they,

knowing you were coming,

stayed up late to greet you

who travels between places

when the late afternoon

drifts into the woods, when

nothing matters specially.

(’Travelling Between Places’, Little Johnny's Confession)

LITTLE JOHNNY's CONFESSION

Little Johnny's Confession was published in a fanfare of publicity that drew attention to Patten's youth. ‘Brian Patten is younger than the atom bomb’, proclaimed the cover of the first edition somewhat unwisely – perhaps taking its cue from Patten's overgrand subtitle to ‘Little Johnny's Foolish Invention’: ‘A Fable for Atomic Adam’. The image was then further recycled by Allen Ginsberg in his own dust-jacket tribute, which declared Patten's poetry to be ‘real magnanimity worded by an Atomic Adam’. Edward Lucie-Smith, editor of The Liverpool Scene, was also quoted:

In his work, Brian Patten has been able to get at and describe an entirely new experience: something which simply isn't there for poets older than he is: something which couldn't exist at any other place or time. The ‘Little Johnny’ sequence has an amazing and very moving detachment, considering how young the author still is. It's quite a feat for any poet, whatever his age, to tell so much truth so simply.

Some of these claims are excessive, of course. Patten is himself much more realistic about the successes and limitations of his first collection – commenting merely, in an interview with the Observer in 1983:

Looking at some of the earlier work I think to myself that I wouldn't write that now, but I don't dismiss the poet who did write it.

It would be pointless to deny that the poems in Little Johnny's Confession were written by a teenager, and that sometimes it shows. The embarrassingly unfunny ‘Chief Inspector Patten and the Case of the Brown Thigh’ and the awful ‘The Astronaut’ (’We will take a trip| to the planets inside us| where love is the astronaut …’) are ultimately the stuff of school magazines, for example – and both are notably absent from Grinning Jack, Patten's later selection of poems drawn from his first five volumes.