Kingsley Amis' "A Bookshop Idyll"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2025

⏱️ 5 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s poem is a roller-coaster of machismo and vulnerability in that most singular of places–the poetry section of a small bookstore. Happy reading.

Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) was a popular and prolific British novelist, poet, satirist, and critic. Born in suburban South London, the only child of a clerk in the office of the mustard-maker Colman’s, he won an English scholarship to St John’s College, Oxford, where he began a lifelong friendship with fellow student Philip Larkin. Following service in the British Army’s Royal Corps of Signals during World War II, he completed his degree and joined the faculty at the University College of Swansea in Wales. Lucky Jim, his first novel, appeared in 1954 to great acclaim and won a Somerset Maugham Award. Ultimately he published twenty-four novels, including science fiction and a James Bond sequel; more than a dozen collections of poetry, short stories, and literary criticism; restaurant reviews and three books about drinking; political pamphlets and a memoir; and more. Amis received the Booker Prize for his novel The Old Devils in 1986 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990.

-bio via NYRB

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:08.5	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, January 10th, 2025.
0:13.6	Today's poem is by Kingsley Amos, and it's called A Bookshop Idol.
0:19.7	I'll read it just once because it's the kind of poem that has a great final stanza, twist, turn, punchline that really deserves to be the last word of the episode that features it.
0:37.2	So I'll only say on the front end that, though this is a poem from earlier in his writing career,
0:43.8	it fits well with Amos's reputation for having a complicated history with the opposite sex.
0:52.5	But it is a great playful examination of what is going on in popular
0:59.3	poetry at the time that he's writing. And in the middle, we have some potentially inflammatory
1:07.4	descriptions of the difference between men's tastes in poetry and women's tastes
1:11.4	in poetry, both the kinds of poetry they like to read and the kinds they like to write.
1:16.5	I think it's crucial to the enjoyment of this poem that you don't take those sections too
1:21.4	seriously. And thank goodness for Amos's own sake.
1:28.4	By the end of the poem, I think he reveals that he has not taken himself or his opinions too seriously,
1:34.7	because the final stanza upends and overturns the stance that he has been carving out for himself.
1:42.7	And really reveals women to be, in many cases,
1:46.4	much more capable as poets.
1:49.0	He mocks them slightly for missing the distinction between their love and their life
1:55.5	and trying to write about the two together.
1:58.2	And then we have in the final lines the revelation that if men aren't writing
2:03.5	about their love, it's largely because they have been unable and that men may really just mean
2:12.3	Kingsley Amos. Here is a bookshop idol.
2:24.1	Between the gardening and the cookery comes the brief poetry shelf.
	...

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