An unmanifesto. Wilful obscurantism for fun and profit. Reactive clarity for much the same reason.
I’ve been struggling for a few years with the idea of what my writing does, what it is for. More fundamentally, I’ve been struggling with the idea of what it is. At the risk of sounding precious, I’ve been wondering what my “voice” is, as such.
Years ago, around the time when I was writing the poems which would make up the bulk of my first chapbook, L39, I had a clear vision of what I was doing. I’d hit upon a style which suited me, the poems were deadpan, bleak in parts, with fantastical elements but rooted in the prosaic, that was what interested me at the time. I had an abiding love of Beckett, and an obsession with what lay behind mundanity. It was very much inspired by Ormskirk, that market town sine qua non, it was in part a reaction to moving up here from my childhood deep in the wilds of Cornwall.Not just from country to town, but from south to north. I’ve often felt it would have been less strange moving to Manchester or Liverpool. The city is further removed from the country, but the North is more Northern away from the cities. The whole existence felt alien, and so the poems were an alien, but still recognisable, reality.
I tired of the style fairly soon, it was becoming too easy, I was writing poems which were pastiches of the original ones. It was best to leave L39 where it was, I felt. I looked around for something else, and I found it in the procedural techniques and text alterations of the Oulipo, this held my attention for a while, and formed the basis of the two long poems at the heart of the second chapbook, Delete recover delete (the title a fairly obvious allusion to the amount of time I spent working and reworking those poems. So was I then, a procedural poet instead? One concerned with how to build and dismantle language? One for whom the text is a malleable thing, not necessarily an end in itself?
No, not entirely. Other poems in the chapbook were straightforward, clear in intent and delivery. Some of them I remain fairly happy with, one or two I itch to take apart and try again.
So I suppose you could consider this an unmanifesto. I look back, before I carry on, on a pretty slim body of work, but one which varies wildly in style and tone. I think for years I’ve wondered whether or not I was a dilettante, without a clear poetic vision, a magpie dipping in and out of movements and styles, a pasticheur rather than a poet. And then the lightbulb moment, which occurred halfway through the writing of this blog post.
Fuck it. Just write some poems.
See, I have no idea if I’m linguistically innovative or not. I’ve no idea if I’m avant-garde or not. I’ve no idea if I’m mainstream or not. But what I am going to do is stop worrying about it.
Years ago, around the time when I was writing the poems which would make up the bulk of my first chapbook, L39, I had a clear vision of what I was doing. I’d hit upon a style which suited me, the poems were deadpan, bleak in parts, with fantastical elements but rooted in the prosaic, that was what interested me at the time. I had an abiding love of Beckett, and an obsession with what lay behind mundanity. It was very much inspired by Ormskirk, that market town sine qua non, it was in part a reaction to moving up here from my childhood deep in the wilds of Cornwall.Not just from country to town, but from south to north. I’ve often felt it would have been less strange moving to Manchester or Liverpool. The city is further removed from the country, but the North is more Northern away from the cities. The whole existence felt alien, and so the poems were an alien, but still recognisable, reality.
I tired of the style fairly soon, it was becoming too easy, I was writing poems which were pastiches of the original ones. It was best to leave L39 where it was, I felt. I looked around for something else, and I found it in the procedural techniques and text alterations of the Oulipo, this held my attention for a while, and formed the basis of the two long poems at the heart of the second chapbook, Delete recover delete (the title a fairly obvious allusion to the amount of time I spent working and reworking those poems. So was I then, a procedural poet instead? One concerned with how to build and dismantle language? One for whom the text is a malleable thing, not necessarily an end in itself?
No, not entirely. Other poems in the chapbook were straightforward, clear in intent and delivery. Some of them I remain fairly happy with, one or two I itch to take apart and try again.
So I suppose you could consider this an unmanifesto. I look back, before I carry on, on a pretty slim body of work, but one which varies wildly in style and tone. I think for years I’ve wondered whether or not I was a dilettante, without a clear poetic vision, a magpie dipping in and out of movements and styles, a pasticheur rather than a poet. And then the lightbulb moment, which occurred halfway through the writing of this blog post.
Fuck it. Just write some poems.
See, I have no idea if I’m linguistically innovative or not. I’ve no idea if I’m avant-garde or not. I’ve no idea if I’m mainstream or not. But what I am going to do is stop worrying about it.
posted by Matt | 8:07 AM
|
0 comments
