An excess of sincerity

It's the problem that I'm trying very hard not to think about, but it's there, nonetheless. We all have an unspoken background level of dread and uncertainty in our lives now, all the more worrying for how quickly it came upon us. There we were, minding our own business, living our usual lives and before you know it this happens. I speak, of course of, the very real, very genuine worry that, as the country sails towards its second week of lockdown, there are people out there right now writing poems, stories and, God help us all, state-of-the-nation novels about it, and, even more worryingly, some of them might be good.

Don't act like it's not crossed your mind. There are tens of thousands of things with titles like "The Plague Pages" being written as we speak. Someone's writing a state-of-the-nation novel about it, someone's writing a "Corona" of sonnets, I'm prepared to bet my mortgage that there a dozen takes on pandemic-as-planet's-revenge being written at this precise second: it's inescapable, it's inevitable and my main problem with it is that it's something that I wouldn't be able to do with a straight face.

For, you see, in order to write something like that, one has to truly believe that they're doing good work. Belief is the one thing that can't be faked in writing, and these people, writing their Lockdown Lullabies and Intubation Odes will believe firmly in what they're doing. Others will have dismissed the idea as hackneyed or obvious, and will continue to think so right up to the point that a bidding war erupts for a young novelist's "Love in the time of Corona", or until "Covid Diaries" wins the sodding Forward prize. At that point they'll curse themselves for doing so, and wonder why they couldn't.

This is, I fully understand, something of a niche concern at a time like this. But it's there, nonetheless.

The problem, as I see it, is one of sincerity. Sincerity is amazing, it's tangible, it's real, it's something which can link a writer to a reader, and it's something which I, personally would never be able to muster on this particular topic, I don't have any experience of it (and, with a bit of luck, this will continue to be the case), and even if I did, I'd be too acutely aware that a whole bunch of others are beavering away on the same topic. Unless you've got something new to say, best to leave it, is how I tend to feel about this sort of thing. Camus already wrote La Peste guys, why not leave it at that?

Call it the editor's curse, in another life I helped edit a poetry magazine, and I had to wade through so many heartfelt, earnest (and almost uniformly terrible) submissions that it got to a point that I found that I couldn't read anything unless it was wrapped in allusiveness, unless it was "difficult", purely as an antidote to the sheer volume of earnest emoting. I lost the joy of direct simplicity (or, rather, had it beaten out of me by a tonne of joyless simplicity). Direct clarity was something which didn't sit well with me as a reader, and as a result I shied away from it in my writing life, the baby was very much thrown out with the bathwater, But as I took joy in the linguistically innovative, I forgot that I could enjoy other things, too

It's a nonsensical position to take, as anyone who's ever read any Lee Harwood would know, but I never claimed to be particularly sensible. I think of it as the writing equivalent of being the obsessive teenage music nerd wo dismisses all chart music as rubbish, not realising that they're painting themselves into a corner, and that a fairly sizeable climb-down is just around the corner.

(Reader, yes, of course that was me, too. And years of sneering at the music girls chose to dance to meant I didn't get to dance with girls. It's a crude lesson, but an effective one).

The problem is not sincerity, it's an excess of it. The problem is bad writing, it's failing to temper one's treatment of the subject with context and nuance. It's believing without questioning. It's failing to search one's motives, to know precisely why you're writing what you are. Perhaps I was wrong about belief being the one thing that can't be faked, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it's Purpose.

Because whilst there are undoubtedly a gazillion awful poems currently being written about our present reality, the truth is there will be some good ones, too, and I look forward to reading them without rolling my eyes.

I'd like poetry a lot more if it wasn't for all the poets.

Okay, a slightly contentious title perhaps, though I am only half-joking. I know a fair few poets, and I rather like the vast majority of them, what I'm referring to here is a matter of quantity, as opposed to quality. For a while I found it a bit of an issue, though looking back it was another excuse. I should explain myself a little.

As this blog has already explained, I dropped off the writing radar for a while, whilst doing this, social media happened, by the time I turned round, there were poets everywhere. Coming out of the trees of Facebook, swarming the walls of Twitter (I imagine that they're infesting Insta as well, but I haven't dared check, Instagram is strictly for the other half of my dual life, and when the poetry world meets the chef world, mutual incomprehension and head-scratching is often the result).

I am not, in any way shape or form, anti social-media, despite its undoubted contribution to division in society and the cheapening of debate, I regard it much as the American firearms enthusiast does their beloved guns. Social Media doesn't ruin everything. Idiots ruin everything. However, it has served to highlight precisely how much poetry there is out there. How many presses, how many poets. How much to read and try to keep up with. How much to sift through. How much is absolutely terrible.

I didn't think I really had the time to keep up.

Faced with all this plurality, it's easy to retreat to what you know, to rely on established networks of trusted respondents to point out things you may have missed; there is an interesting discussion to be had about the intellectual morality of this, are you deliberately narrowing your vision, are you deliberately self-limiting, will your reading, and, by extension writing life be degraded as a result, or ,rather, not be all it could be? It's an interesting question, and one to which I have yet to fully settle on a satisfactory answer. Because as I sort of said just a paragraph above, the fact that there's a lot of poetry out there means that there's a lot of bloody awful poetry out there. I'll defend to the death people's right to write it, but I don't have time to wade through it all to get to the stuff I'll like it. Hpwever, I feel a sense of unease, of feeling that by not reading everything, I may be missing out on something

For a while this was a handy excuse for me. I even wrote about it, tongue only slightly in cheek, for the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics research group journal, in "Not-writing: an anti-poetics" I took the view that the act of not writing a piece is in and of itself a creative act, and a necessary response to the vast amount of poetry out there. The unwritten poem could be brilliant, it's also an act of not inflicting an act of reading on an as yet undecided reader.

I was largely joking, but I was also working through something I was finding slightly vexatious at the time, in a scrap of unfinished poem I wrote it was "the quantitative easing of language", I was reading a lot of crap at this point, and not all of it by choice, as the internet does have a tendency to inflict people on you. It was becoming a frustrating experience.

Part of the thinking was summed up by a brilliant tweet I saw recently in response to the current outbreak of COVID-19:

"The first poet I see writing a 'Corona of Sonnets' is going to get beaten to death"

It's been a trying few years, politically, and it's only natural that poetry as a whole reflects that, some respond brilliantly, others less so. For every brilliant exploration of the state of things, there are two hundreds spleneticf rabnts.Maybe, to paraphrase the marvellous film Airplane, I picked a bad week to give up reading stuff I know I'd like.

In the face of all these words, it can be easy to feel slightly overwhelmed. It also begs the question of whether writing anything at all is a good idea. Is it a good idea to contribute yet more when there is already so bloody much? Is it even morally a good decision, to inflict oneself upon potential readers, who've already got their own things to be dealing with? For a while, these questions preoccupied me, I really wasn't sure if the world needed yet another sodding poet.

I got over it, obviously, I'm inflicting this on you, after all.

Herd immunity

We’ve all had enough of the comfort
Of experts, sunlit uplands demand untold depths
Of bracing misery: as exquisite as the cane
That’s good for you. Remember Dunkirk

And pack your little boat with bog roll
There’s no crisis that
Can’t be solved by shopping
Think how we bought through the Blitz

Golf as the bombs dropped
Bowls as the ships neared
Britain where pain ends up
As an anecdote and we’ll

All lose loved ones (wipes a tear)
Before their time
But it’s how they’d
Want to go, doomsters, gloomsters

Remoaners, we’ll beat this thing with sang-froid
This is about us, this British crisis
And uniquely us, this is our time
You’ll laugh about this, in a few weeks

(and if nothing else
Think about the inheritance, eh….
I mean, it probably won’t
Be you…)

So chin up chaps
Toss your experts over the side
(something about White Cliffs
here, it’ll be such a comfort)

Regular as clockwork

I mis-sold the idea slightly in my previous post.

The title implied that there would be some sort of regimented structure to these revived blogs; this, experience tells me, is almost certainly not the case. In my defence, when I started out writing it, I probably still held fondly onto the hope that I might be able to do what all the books and courses say and have a regular writing routine, it's a forlorn hope, though.

What I have struggled with most down the years of under-achievement is finding time. This isn't presented as a whinge or excuse, merely a statement of fact. Even when I am disciplined and get up early and try to stick to a writing routine something will often happen to bump me off course, life gets in the way (yes, I am blaming my children for my short-comings, it'll do until I come up with a more plausible excuse). This, in turn, has led to me feeling something of a failure.

I don't know where this idea of needing a strict routine came from entirely (in part, of course, from the books and courses), but I imagine it was a need to impose order on what, due to the unsociable hours I work, was a fairly chaotic sort of existence. However, what I failed to take account of, for many years, was the inalienable fact that it simply didn't work, it ran counter to life itself. You can't sit sternly at your desk Thinking Great Thoughts when a two year old is unhappy that Octonauts is on because they're scared of the fish.

I often think that when teaching writing, we neglect some fairly vital parts of a writing practice, ongoing development and consideration of poetics is a must, and interaction with other writers and work vital, but they don't amount to much if you never get five minutes sodding peace. Possibly some modules in how to carve out space without offending any family members, or ensuring that enough housework's done that you don't spark an argument about being self-indulgent. These, to my mind, are the real problems of the part-time writer with the full-time job.

So the paradox here is that to be regimented, I have to be less regimented. In order to ensure that I work, I have to be flexible in how I do so. I spent years as a late-night writer, only able to work when everyone else was asleep.As fatherhood and employment pulled my bed-time ever earlier, I became a semi-dedicated morning writer in response. Rising early to try and get a bit done. As I've already mentioned, this didn't always work out.

So I need to embrace a new and more flexible identity. To try and keep the gears turning, and try to keep even a trickle of productivity to stop the writing seizing up altogether, it's necessary to grab the opportunity when I can. I'm writing this after a shift at work, a little bit of typing before bed. An unusual time for me, this is normally a less productive part of the day, but needs must.

Needs, and must, are both highly loaded words here. It's important (to me, if not, I suspect the world of poetry in general) to keep going, and it's high time I recognised that I can't afford to be dogmatic about how I do so. Abandon routine to keep a routine. It's not the catchiest of slogans, but it'll have to do for now.