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.