How many poems has Peirce written?

Thousands, he says. But brutally in the past few years, he has pruned them down to only a few hundred. The good ones, to his mind, anyway. And maybe even many of those need an eagle eye in editing.

But therein lies a cunning trap. If one tries to make I a poem more "technically" perfect, one runs the risk of losing its spontaneity and naturalness and exuberance. And losing those elements would be a very bad bargain indeed.

Those "thousands" of poems – were they all beautiful and tender and loving and gentle and kind and. filled with the wonder of love?

Peirce hoots in almost helpless laughter.

"I once wrote a poem about that, saying, if we hadn't known the bad times, how would we know just how good the good times were?"

What stays within him now? After that avalanche of love poems? His eyes go far away, into a strange and private inner land.

"The good times" he says softly, "always the good times".

That many love poems. To thousands of women?

A hollow laughter, self.-mocking. A gentle smile, warm, remembering.

"Hardly" he says." "I’ve been graced by many ladies who shared their loving with me. And I gave them all the love there was inside me at the time. And they to me. Sometimes it wasn’t enough, for either of us. We needed either more, or less, then.

"In that moment it was all we wanted or needed. Those ships-passing moments in time, they’re beautiful.

"Strangely, though, almost always, we’ve remained most excellent friends. We were, quite simply, honest with each other. It is only, the lies that hurt, irrevocab1y, inside.

"To this day, we share the poems of love that came out honest from something far deeper than the heart. When I read them now I sure believe that moment is alive again within us. I’d like to believe it works both ways.

But, for all that, many women?

"Oh no. Most of them to one lady. My Patcat. Our gift. For twenty years, since first we locked eyes together. In literally across a crowded room of several hundred people. Until the day she died. It happens, alas, to so few in a single lifetime. The thunderbolt.

"She is as alive in me now as she ever was in life. I still write love poems to her. Always will."

Does that block his writing love poems to others?

"I write love" he says," People, birds, fish, rocks, animals, mountains; they all have life in them, and I rejoice in them. I love the life in everything.

Are his poems therefore insular, written only within?

"I write love poems, "he says. "If a reader identifies with what I’ve written and feels the words, then the poem communicates. That’s all that matters."

Love is regarded often as slushy sentimentality, no more than mawkish and maudlin meanderings into a very privacy that should be kept private. Peirce has often been accused of that. What does he say?

"Those people to whom I’ve written them have loved them. Others who have read them or heard them loved them.’ Where’s the argument? Critics? Oh well, they were paid to be critical. But does that mean that they were not in sympathy with the emotions of what I'd. put down in words? Have they not yet been touched by love?"

Love, love, love. Romantic love. Found love, lost love The emotions of love. The cerebral rnemoried touch-strings-of-the-heart that either was or is? Is that only what the poetry of Peirce talks about?

He explodes into ribald laughter.

"I've written, over many years, a whole volume of it called ‘The Wicked, Wicked Ones’ and all of it has been straight from the heart. I’m not ashamed of a word of it."

"0h , sure, some people call it arrant pornography, because it is so wild and graphic and joyous - but they are the same kind of people who condemned Henry Miller and Anaïs Ninn, because they told the truth about their physical encounters. And their love, which came out so poignantly in the film Henry and June."

The United States Supreme Court validated the their work as "holding inherent literary merit". How does Peirce regard his work within those parameters?

They wrote prose. I write poetry. I think that’s the only difference. When my collection is ready, I believe readers will see it as such. They’re damned good poems — and that is the only yardstick."

What is he going to do with the collection?

"Five poems still to work on. Then we’ll see."

He has written the lyrics for four songs, all of which were recorded. Call it Spring and A Silence in my Life with the internationally renowned composer/arranger Jeremy Lubbock and Ballad for Patcat and And Then Came You with exuberant master musician and singer Rupert Mellor.

Together with Lyn Hooker, he presented a live reading of poetry by Phillip de Bruyn called Weren’t there footprints here before? at the Nobleman restaurant, and which was later released on LP.

His voice was heard on two highly successful commercial radios releases with trumpeter Murray Campbell, Goodbye My Love, for which Peirce wrote the lyrics.

As stage actor, he appeared in three successive roles which illustrate a stunning versatility … as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as Biff in Death of a Salesman, and as Mortimer in Arsenic and Old Lace.

"I was working as a radio producer with an ad agency at the time, he recalls with a smile. "For my performance as Biff, drama critic Roy Christie awarded me his ‘ personal Oscar' — a brilliant artist/cartoonist in the agency named Lorraine Gower ‘sent me up’ with a plaque of me in the Oscar position. The strange thing about it, though, was that had not yet started my writing career, but in her cartoon she had me holding a fountain pen. Oddly prophetic."

During the following years, whilst crafting out those multitudinous scripts, Peirce also appeared in several thousand acting performances on radio. 

He has recently recorded, with Michael Mayer, a collection of 46 of his romantic poems under the title of "Sounds like love to me". The printed poems and audio versions are available on the Internet.

After this mammoth outpouring of work, is Peirce now planning to retire?

"When I die!" he snorts.

He is currently working on a novel and a stage play, as well as having a great many of his poems published. And seeing each new one in print, he says, gives him as much of a kick as the very first one he wrote at the tender age of nine.

"Being a writer, and especially a poet, isn’t simply a job. It’s a gift. Lawrence Durrell said that it didn’t matter whether you’re first rate, second rate, or third rate, but that it's of vital importance that you do the very best you can with the powers that are given you.

"He went on to say that it’s idle to strive for things out of your reach, just as it’s utterly immoral to be slothful about the qualities you have. I’ve used that as a credo all my life."

Slothful is most certainly not a quality that applies to the many-facetted writings of Beverley Peirce.

Nor, he vows, ever will.

ENDS

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