Trawling the archives pt 3: 99 Postcards for Georges Perec

I'm not having to go too far back for this one, as my most recent chapbook 99 Postcards for Georges Perec came out two years ago. This isn't to say it's still fresh in the memory though, it was a long time being written.

The idea for it first came to me in about 2010-ish when reading the eponymous Perec's collected essays and odds and sods Species of Spaces. Regular readers of here or sister blog Coastalblog, will probably be aware of my fondness for M. Perec. So it should come as no surprise that I decided to rip him off royally for this chapbook, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and all that.

I may be being slightly unfair on myself here. Let's say that I was inspired by him. "99 Postcards" does something quite different from Perec's piece. His "Two Hundred and Forty-three Postcards in Real Colour", was a procedural piece, generated according to a strict constraint, as befits this writer synonymous with Oulipo. The end result was, therefore, quite regimented (albeit with traces of Perec's sly humour intruding, and after a while the overall effect is comic). The texts consisted of five elements: Place, Consideration, Pleasures, Particulars and Greeting. For each of these Perec gave himself three options (For example, "Greetings" could be love and kisses, regards, or the date of return). Five components, each with three possibilities generates 3 to the power of 5 options, so 243 postcards.

The end result of this is such "postcards" as:

                                  We're in the Aegean. Getting ourselves a tan. I go water skiing.

                                   It's smashing. Expect to return the 11th.

For this reader, the overall effect of this carefully basic detail was to wonder what else had happened on that holiday. There is, presumably, a story behind the water skiing. The strict generative method also ensures a degree of repetition. Given Perec's subtlety, the generative process isn't easy to spot, but you get the impression one's there (I am indebted to Mireille Ribiere's excellent blog here), and the whole effect, of repetition of structure, of recurring vocabulary, adds to the mystery.

It's at this point that I'm reminded that my first chapbook L39 was, in no small part about the the absurdity and fantasy of every-day life, the idea that the humdrum hides the transcendent (more on this here). So Perec's piece was catnip for me.

But I did something different, a simple recreation of Perec's idea would have resulted in similar texts, but I loved the idea of the compression, of each postcard containing multitudes. So, for me, the postcards were essentially a series of short lyrics, which is what I set out to write.

I didn't follow a process to generate the texts. Rather, each postcard is a discrete event (though reading back through it, I can see that there's a nod to Perec's process in my repetition of sign-offs "kisses" "miss you" "see you soon" recur. Some are rooted in reality, others are works of pure fiction, not that it's necessary for the reader to discern which is which.

The poems were written over a period of roughly eight years. Aptly enough, I started writing them while on holiday, and each trip away added to the pile. But there were also memories of childhood, current affairs and even conversations with other poets, in a sense, as Skip Fox, Ian Duhig and Alec Finlay were all referenced.

The form meant tying to do a lot with a little. Whether it be commentary or a joke. Two of the most successful ones for me are one of each, the serious:

                                                    Quick note from Gaza

                                                    This is murder

                                                    Please Stop. Love.

And the definitely not-serious

                                                    In Stoke

                                                    Not sure how

                                                    Will write soon

This mix can read unevenly, as I lurch from absurd joke to social commentary to family memories, but overall I rather enjoy the chaos. The aim was to cover a lot of ground, but always stay grounded, and I think I pretty much pulled it off. Ironically for a globe-trotting selection of  poems, it's the one which is centred most resolutely on home, with my wife and children making rare appearances. I think, reading it back, that it follows on from the first two quite nicely, the absurdity and goofiness of L39, followed by the harder edges of Delete Recover Delete and then this, more grounded, gentler and reflective. I can see myself growing older through the three chapbooks. And it only remains to ask myself, what next?