When I retired from my newspaper job a dozen or so years ago, and was looking forward to pursuing my new life as a poet, of sorts, my colleagues gave me as one of my parting gifts a copy of the selected poems of Pam Ayres. I took this in the spirit in which it was intended. Yesterday I went to see her perform her poetry for the first time.  

For many people, Pam Ayres is the kind of poet they like, and hers is maybe the only kind of poetry – the rhyming kind – that they think of as poetry. Yet as she herself told an audience at Hexham book festival: “I never at any time thought that I would be described as a poet. I didn’t know anything about poetry, I wasn’t drawn to it at school, but I loved performing and I loved the power of writing.”  

She has had books in the Sunday Times bestseller lists in almost every decade since the 1970s. Her latest, Doggedly Onward, A Life in Poems, is an impressively sized tome that includes many of her poems, with a series of informative and engaging introductions to them. Her life in poetry is all there, apart from a few poems, which, as she confided at Hexham, “were hysterically funny in the 1970s, but could get you cancelled today, so I’ve pruned them out”.

She came to the nation’s attention in 1975 via the TV talent show Opportunity Knocks. Since then she has won great acclaim and success as a writer, comedian and broadcaster. Earlier she had discovered her love of performing poems in folk clubs, where audiences welcomed a change of pace and a funny poem or two as a break from traditional, doleful ballads. Before that she first took to the stage at a theatre club in Singapore while she was serving with the Women’s Royal Air Force. “People laughed at something I had pulled out of my own imagination. It was so thrilling. I’ll never forget it.”

She was soon earning £12 a night for 20 minutes in the folk clubs, before, as she says in her book, “my first thin book was published in 1976 and remained in the Sunday Times bestseller lists of forty-six weeks. People were calling me Pam Ayres the poet. It was an extraordinary time.” She was aged 29 and bought a house, and “the car of my utterly impossible dreams”, an MGB GT.

It was then that she stopped treating her poems “as a joke … I knew so little about poetry but from the sales of my books I could see that many people liked my daft take on it. Of course, I knew it wasn’t poetry as most people thought of poetry. Mine had to be performed, and though it may have looked simple enough, it needed the right vocabulary, timing and subject. You had to find irresistible the endless tinkering with words. Which I did.

“I also felt determined to learn everything I was going to say to an audience. I didn’t want to put on a pair of glasses, stand at some lectern, take up some book and read to them because that meant losing the all-important connection, the eye-to-eye contact, the feeling of talking to people, and not reading at them.”  

At Hexham Pam delivered the poem she is perhaps best known for, ‘Oh, I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth’ early on in her set, and then gave us a series of funny but also affectionate and touching poems about her family, children and grandchildren – cosy, domestic subjects perhaps, but ones that many people relate to. I particularly admired her magnificent rhyming of “feather boa” with “Krakatoa” in a poem about matrimonial snoring.

Then there was a Q&A. What does your family think of your poems? “I try to keep them separate, to compartmentalise my life.” Have you ever thought of going into politics? “No, although there’s a lot of things I’d change. I sort of snipe from the sidelines.” Would you consider writing a poem about losing your hearing? (Pam had confessed to being a little deaf) “I haven’t, but I will give it some thought.”  

And then a question that seemed to discomfit her for a moment: “I do write some serious poems, but not very often.” She then explained that the date for this event had had to be moved from Thursday to Friday, “because I’ve lost my lovely sister”. She had written a poem for her, but she didn’t want it to be a eulogy “because she wouldn’t hear it. But she did. And she loved it.” Shen then read the poem to us. It was poignant, and very personal, and remarkably, apart from the final couplet … it didn’t rhyme.   

Pam may be 77 now but remained standing throughout her set, looking trim and fit, hindered only by a slight cold or hay fever. A lot fitter than myself, several years her junior. She mentions at the end of her foreword to Doggedly Onward that “recently, I read in The Bookseller magazine that after Ted Hughes, I am the bestselling UK poet since records began. Long live people’s dreams.”

Her rural Berkshire accent has always added to her appeal, and that background undoubtedly influences a concern for endangered wildlife that appears in many of her poems. With her priority being a performance poet, you could argue that she predates John Cooper Clarke, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Attila the Stockbroker in that department.  

I’m still not a fan of Pam’s poetry, although I have great respect for its rhythm and metre, choice of words and humour, and recognise that it has encouraged many imitators. Even when I bought my copy of Doggedly Onward after her show, I stashed it away in my man-bag, rather than walk with it openly through Hexham’s streets. But that’s just me. Many, many thousands of others would disagree.

 

Pam Ayres, Doggedly Onward, A Life in Poems, Penguin