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.