Jacob Polley and his Jar of Honey

Back in those heady days of 2009, with the news dominated by bankers’ bonuses and MPs’ expenses, the BBC launched a campaign to bring poetry into our lives. On 28th January that year, BBC Director-General Mark Thompson announced a deeper commitment to arts and music on the BBC, with a range of initiatives to support cultural Britain.

Let Poetry Into Your Life was one such initiative—a series of short films that portrayed celebrities of the day reciting their favourite poems. Brief enough to nestle between scheduled programmes, they recited into the living rooms of 10.9 million viewers.

I remember Damian Lewis reciting Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress and Robert Webb reading William Carlos Williams’ Love Song. But what I remember most, and had, as the BBC must have hoped it would, that shock and awe moment, was comedian Phill Jupitus, sitting down for breakfast in a greasy spoon cafe, being asked by the bloke at the next table if it’s ‘alright if I take the honey, mate?’

You hold it like a lit bulb,
 a pound of light,
 and swivel the stunned glow
 around the fat glass sides:
  
 it’s the sun, all flesh
 and no bones
 but for the floating
 knuckle of honeycomb
 attesting to the struggle. 

A Jar of Honey © 2003 Jacob Polley

Twenty seconds of spine-tingling paresthesia. Like the first time I heard Anthony Heggaty sing Hope There’s Someone, and Thom Yorke sing Creep. But even more incredulous, this young poet, Jacob Polley, acclaimed as one of the ‘next generation of poets’ by the Poetry Book Society, lived in my hometown of Carlisle.

The Brink ¹ is a wonderful first collection. A Jar of Honey opens the collection with instant accessibility, his words etching a restrained sensuality onto everyday domesticity. Whether a jar of honey, an old wood-burning stove or a trip to the Spar, Polley writes poetry that ‘imbues the everyday, the tarnished and burnished, with the possibilities of the transcendent.’

I searched online for Jacob Polley and found the one thing not imbued with transcendence was his website. So in the spirit of making his work more accessible to the public, I wrote to Polley. I thought of Thomas de Quincy and his fan-boy letter to Wordsworth in July 1803:

Though you may find many minds more congenial with your own, and therefore proportionately more worthy of your regard, you will never find any one more zealously attached to you—more full of admiration for your mental excellence and of reverential love for your moral character—more ready (I speak from my heart!) to sacrifice even his life—whenever it could have a chance of promoting your interest and happiness—than he who now bends the knee before you.

Thomas De Quincy was barely seventeen when he dispatched his fan mail, having made a single, aborted pilgrimage to Dove Cottage where he lost his nerve and turned away before knocking. Like me, he had first encountered the magic of poetry through the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The young De Quincy would evolve into a notorious opium addict and one of England’s premier prose stylists; my own reach across the literary divide was far more modest: I sent Polley an email.

I wrote to compliment him on his amazing first book and ridicule him on the state of his website. So we struck an agreement where I would create and update a new website in return for a free signed copy of all his future publications. And who knew then that after 3 poetry collections and one novel, Jacob would win the coveted 2016 TS Eliot Prize with his 4th collection, Jackself.

It took some searching to find any of the original Let Poetry Into Your Life videos. I only found a low-res Damian Lewis on YouTube. But I did find Phill Jupitus, Jacob Polley and his jar of honey, and saved it for posterity. Cheers mate!

1. Polley, J. (2003). The Brink. Pan Macmillan. ↩︎