Today's lesson - don’t eat a Mills & Boon book on an empty stomach - Ian McMillan

The thing to note is that if Peter Finch himself had dashed to the post box with the aforementioned affirmative reply, he’d have paused before he posted it and sung the address;

then he’d have torn up the letter and read the words out in all kinds of different orders, then he’d have invited passers-by to do the same and, although some would have crossed the road, quite a few would have joined in and by nightfall a pamphlet of the joint work would have been published.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I’m so keen to write a foreword to this book; for me, Peter Finch exemplifies the phrase “serious play”.

He writes and performs poems that stretch what language is and what it might be asked to become. On one level, I guess you’d call him an experimental writer but this doesn’t mean that he’s a grim avant-garde type who doesn’t want anybody to listen to his work and who would count it as a failure if more than five people read one of his books, and there are people like that, believe me.

The other thing about Peter Finch is that he is, I think, a bit like me, and maybe that’s why I’m such a fan. I like weird and experimental writing but at the same time I want writing and poetry to appeal to everyone and that’s a very difficult tightrope to walk without a safety net.

People who haven’t written much before can be put off if you present them with difficult and weird modernist work in the first meeting of a new writers’ group even before you’ve got everybody’s names and had a little chat.

Mind you, Peter Finch once came along to a poetry course I was running and, perhaps mistakenly, I asked him to do a performance that would, and I wish I’d never said this, “shake them up a bit”.

He proceeded to get a Mills & Boon romance book out of his bag, read random bits from it, then tear the book into shreds and eat the shreds, all the time reading (or rather mumbling and swallowing) the words from the shards of paper he was tearing into tinier and tinier smithereens.

It didn’t, in the understatement of the year, go well. Apart from one woman at the end of the aghast row who laughed until she cried. And maybe that’s the answer with this kind of work: make it funny.

That’s the lesson for today. Oh, and don’t eat a Mills & Boon book on an empty stomach.