Trawling the archives pt 2: Delete Recover Delete

Following on from last week's look at my first chapbook: L39 , this week I want to have a nosey through it's follow- up.

Delete Recover Delete came out four years later, in 2013, from the estimable Knives Forks and Spoons Press, you can still buy it here, were you minded to. Having re-read it for this blog, I reckon it's worth the money

Its a very different beast to L39. Edgier, more experimental. Reading it again I realise how angry it sounds in places. This isn't a massive surprise, many of the poems were written in the years after my brother's death in 2010, an event which is directly referenced by the poems O brother where art thou and Weeks/Months but which, I now realise, also hangs over a lot of the work here. The language is often violent, or despairing: In The birds in my garden disagree with you "a system / of tiny disasters has / developed" in City "great hanging jaws/ have already killed once", in Ten lyrics we have "empty rooms / distinct with horror".

I'll be completely honest here. I hadn't actually realised until this moment, that a large amount of the chapbook is me grieving. Hang on, I need a minute.

It's also evident in the hesitant tone of some of the other poems, there are incomplete lines, abrupt changes of direction, as if looking for something (To start again's "again again I / again again I" being a typical example). This wasn't a conscious decision on my part, it's just how I was writing at the time. Looking back, it seems obvious.

Set against this are a number of contemplative, softer works, possibly me writing my way out of the anger. These were the early years of family life. My eldest son was six in 2013, the middle son just one. There is domesticity here, the aforementioned birds is ultimately an optimistic poem, as the dawn chorus wards off misery. The final poem in the book, the almost splenetic Blue Blood Furniture is, at its heart, a plea for more of this sort of thing. Almost me admonishing myself for the anger evident elsewhere: "Depth of summer grass / more of it"

The third, and possibly most interesting to me now is the experimental poetry. A lot of this was as old as the poems in L39, if not older, but hadn't really fitted in with the tone of that book. Too "other" in tone, they would have jarred with the overall feel. They fitted right in  here, though. Stark and abstract in places, they complemented the non-experimental works entirely. 

In much the same way as L39 is largely Roy Fisher's fault, a large portion of the blame for Delete Recover Delete can be laid at the door of the Oulipo, that wacky bunch of French scamps who wrote according to strict constraints. There are a number of Oulipian poems here (indeed, many of the poems first appeared in Philip Terry's "After Oulipo" edition of the magazine, Ekleksografia). I smiled to myself last year when I read reviews of The Penguin Book of  Oulipo, possibly I should have kept at it.

I remember at the time of creation finding the use of constraints immensely freeing, and the texts generated are among my favourites from this book. 27 variations (a direct rip-off of Harry Mathews' majestic 35 Variations on a theme from Shakespeare) is one of my most performed poems, in many ways it,s the single from the album here (much as " A Mexican Funeral in Ormskirk" was to L39). But there are other poems here which don't wear their devices quite so obviously on their sleeves. January and March are all that survives from what was originally a year-long attempt to "write a year" (I write more completely about the processes in the very first post on this blog, back in 2006). The opening poem of the whole book is Mr Sincerity which is, loosely, an antonymic translation of The Charlatan, by Unsi al-Hajj which, if nothing else, proves that I used to be a better reader than I am these days.

I've always rather enjoyed it as an intro to the book, as its final line is the slightly threatening "The lights have come on and the gloves have come off" which, given what follows, seems quite apt.

I was just wondering to myself why I don't seem to write in this sort of mode any more before I remembered that my next chapbook is basically an extended Oulipian text, it even references Georges Perec in the title, but I'll get to that next week. What's certain is that I once revelled in writing to constraints, and it's not something I tend to do any more. Possibly this is due a rethink as, on the evidence of this book, there's something to recommend it.

Trawling the archives

With a little more time on my hands than is usually the case, I've had a chance to reflect on my writing life of the last ten years or so.

I am, as I have often said here, not particularly prolific, so it didn't take very long.

Weak gags aside, I have managed to accomplish a couple of things, and I'll be going over them on the blog over the next few weeks, by way of taking stock on what's happened so far, and perhaps by way of helping me work out what to do next.

Looking back, it's interesting to note that each of the three chapbooks I've managed to publish so far are tonally very different. From the injokes and bravado of L39 through the experimentalism of Delete Recover Delete up to the extended formal conceit (and homage) that is last year's 99 Postcards....I have, I feel, been doing something a bit different each time.

The jury's out on whether or not this is a good thing, as we shall see.

Today, chronology demanding that I do so, I'm going to have a bit of a mull over L39. Published by Erbacce Press in 2009 (and still available to buy here should you wish) it was a disparate set of poems. A by-product of the painful slowness with which I get round to doing anything is that by the time a poem gets to press, it's knocking on a bit. Some of these poems are getting on for twenty years old now.

The bulk of the work here is what I came to think of as "The Ormskirk Poems", which came fairly fully formed from my work on the MA at Edge Hill. I blame Roy Fisher. His poem "On the neglect of figure composition" proposed a "fresh Matter of Britain" before going on to describe images from a surreal civil war between Zoggists, inspired the late King Zog of Albania and their mortal enemies the Ianists, followers of "The real Ian", "a part-time polytechnic lecturer called Trevor Hennessy". This fusion of grand drama with utter mundanity was gloriously absurd yet utterly serious, and it set something off in me.

My Ormskirk became a place where grand guignol met the depressingly quotidian, and it was personified by the ludicrous recurring character of Don Ignacio. A fat, dignified Mexican nobleman who was, for reasons never explained (or explicable) forever turning up in Ormskirk and dying. It seemed to me to be a way to (none too subtly) flag up the dramas of everyday life, gently tease humanity's tendency to mythologise.

These were very much the poems that characterised my early twenties, the beginning of my writing life proper after I'd got the teenage solipsism out of my system. It was a pretty exciting time for me, I was taking in new influences daily, reading voraciously, diving headlong into what would become the next phase, and you can see it starting here.

Whilst the Ormskirk poems are authentically my "voice" (a concept I have some trouble with, as it implies one can't sound any other way), there are the beginnings of something else here. In fact, reading back, I can see the roots of the sort of thing that I'm starting to write at the moment (basically, not as many jokes), which is interesting. Possibly this is something cyclical, the middle aged man's urge to explore his life echoes the young man's recent influences.

I can see what came next, there's writing about writing (and thinking about writing), the self-questioning, the tentative exploration of wondering what a poem might do and where it might take me. There are a few here which would make a collected, I think, possibly with a little polishing. I note with mild surprise that I use the word "diptych" twice, again, I blame Roy Fisher. Some of it reads as pretty derivative (or, rather, I can see the influences too clearly), a lot of it I'm still pretty pleased with. It does contain an interesting outlier, WLTM being the only time I've attempted anything approaching anything non-linear (it's laid out in a grid). I wonder why.

It'd be fairly remiss of me not to include some poems in this blog, so here are three from L39. One a typically "Ormskirk" poem, and a couple which do something else:

A Mexican funeral in Ormskirk

 Don Ignacio Silvestre y Cartagena

was a man of quite extraordinary height

and the night he died

we heard the crash all the way back into the snug.

We raced into the street,

Deano and Millsy and me, to see

the Don, face down, choking his last

in a packet of chips. Prometheus

dead drunk.

 

And the funeral procession was eight miles long.

And the air was heavy with the scent of gardenia.

And the vast coffin was inset with gold.

And his sister Carmen threw herself over it

beating and crying and trying

to scratch her way in, yet all the time

the rose never fell out of her hair.

 

No point caring for music

 

The flat bay as always

Lights are always strung

It’s always dusk

The park has always just closed

They’re always dead

They’re always not coming back

 

It’s always d minor

It’s always a flag at half mast

It’s always a procession

It’s always the chat

The shit beer and the chat

 

It’s never sunlit lawns

It’s never a full chord

All four fingers

Tightly tuned and ringing out

All the dead bowing

Waiting for applause

Review

 

After Edwin Morgan

 

- So what then?

A flat horizon, a mudflat, I think

a rounded driveway, an indeterminate sachet

an incline

-Yeah?

Oh almost always, steeped banked Cornish hedges

flat seas, surfers, sun, moving, a progression.

- A progression?

Certainly, from, let’s see, wide slabbed paving to

narrow alleys, yes, taller buildings. Diptych

to triptych, panelling, level of detail

- Foreground?

Scapulae, seabirds, ripped baize, a little black dress,

serbo-croat modes of address, denominacion de origen,

waitresses, bad standup comedians, worse guitarists.

- Background?

Static mostly, a need for foreground, but shapes to the static

Euclidean forms, that there is an untidy pile of books

I think, that there is a flat line, a bed probably, maybe

a pavement again, that line there is walls. There’s

a depth of colour, there’s a soundtrack

 - A soundtrack?

The worst kind of dawn chorus, the best kind of encore, I think

I think there may be applause, but it’s hard to be sure

- what does it sound like?

Like a firing squad from distance, or maybe a bad band,

or a sound which started out as one thing, but ends up

as something else entirely.

 

The three Stride poems

If nothing else over the last few months, I've finally gotten round to submitting work to various places. A couple of short stories have seen the light of day here and here and I had some poems accepted by the ever-excellent Stride. Not a huge amount of return by most people's standards, but dizzyingly productive by mine.

As Stride scrolls relentlessly and wonderfully onwards, my three are receding back into the mists of time, so I thought I'd stick them up here where they're not going anywhere, as much to remind myself as anybody else. It's probably a bit remiss of me using a blog post to do house-keeping of this sort, but there you have it.


Commodities

Google Rana Plaza, he says
all commodities
are of a piece a scrap of
shirt pulled from the rubble (four
quid to you, squire: Pretty Little Thing)

as much an artfully tattered part
of Trade as anything else

(yes, as hardwood furniture is
sold in the park, North Face jackets
clustered round illegally logged teak)

the stream of goods equals
the concept of matter

and one can argue that cocaine
beak, gak, lemo, whatever
is much of a muchness
no worse than a garment
or unethical coffee

but langue and parole the money keeps
flowing as it must and if it
salves your conscience to say whatabout
and get the column written then

write about the kid here hanged himself
five grand in debt to furniture dealers
they smashed up his house, threatened
his mum

the necessary outcomes of trade


30 questions for the customer service robot at Narita Airport, Tokyo, Japan

Good morning, do you recognise me?
Do you remember when we first met? I was wearing this shirt
Where is the nearest place I can buy something that will make me happy?
Why do birds suddenly appear, is it the proximity of feed?
What do you think of the impact of increasing use of AI on a growing global population?
What do you find funny?
Which way to the nearest changing rooms? Rooms for the purpose of change?
How far is it to somewhere I can purchase a branded beverage?
Can you recommend some ethnically diverse food?
Where can one perform ablutions?
Why should one perform ablutions?
Do you fancy the hand-dryer in the men’s toilet?
Is this it?
Are you sure?
What is your preferred branded beverage, given the weather?
What is your favourite book? Not the one you tell everyone
Can one play Tetris on you, or is that an abuse?
Can you pinpoint your greatest regret?
Is it serious, with the hand dryer?
Would you try to trick me, if I asked directions?
Are you lying?
Do you know the way to the departure lounge for the flight to San Jose?
What purchase do you recommend for instant gratification?
What does the fox say?
Can one purchase an end to loneliness? Where?
Have you ever, you know, thought about it?
Can I be honest with you?
Where could I smoke, if I did?
You’re serious? You regret nothing?
What about me? Of course I do.


All of a sudden it’s all yes

An abrupt cancellation
the abnegation
of a curated reality realised as a fully
formed version (or vision) of what
had become something else

I can blame myself for previous
failures of empathy but really
It’s society’s fault as the
aftercare was explained and I signed

off on our brutal misunderstandings
under the top line

spinning off into other’s desires
their small affordable wants
funerals equity release the
definite desires of ownership

imploring the histories
old debates rewritten and scoured
backslaps for candidates I’ve
re-seen the night soundlessly

colour-shifted a weak representation
of easily riven images
the reinstatement of desire willing
the maps to change shifting

the patchwork staring in horror
trying to mine hope
rewriting history on the fly
before it’s fully formed

ditching the notebooks attending
the panels what else nothing