Coming around again

(Or, further steps on the road back from wherever it is I was to wherever it is I'm going)

I've had cause of late to think a little about how things can come back round, how concerns which you thought you were done with can suddenly be back in your writing, as if from nowhere. 

It was while idly just doing a bit of daily writing, I'd managed to grab a spare bit of time and had the opportunity to just get a few words down, I wasn't thinking anything in particular, but for some reason I found I was writing in a tone and register that I'd ceased using a long time ago.

Now, it's not for me to say what I'm "like", I've been cornered by far too many bores who are convinced that "their" way is the only way to be convinced that one should only ever write in a particular style. I've always found that a very constrictive view, and I'm pleased to say that what little I have come up with to date has wandered around a lot in terms of style, concerns, formality. The idea of being "the same" throughout one's entire writing career is one which I find somewhat stifling.

So it came as something of a surprise when a little bit of free-writing slowly started to take on a tone and style that I thought I was done with. Not because I dislike it but more because, well, I was done with it, I'd done my work with it and it always seemed redundant to continue. I'd done that, to keep going with more of the same would essentially be to be pastiching myself, or so I thought, whenever I thought about it at all, time to do something new.

At the risk of getting too cryptic, I started writing in the style that defined my first chapbook, L39, most of the poems for which were written over twenty years ago, so you can see why I was a little surprised at this turn of events, it felt like having a conversation with my younger self, in a sense. 

Still, as I did so, it felt a little like coming home. It was an easy tone and rhythm to fall into. I'm wary of pursuing what comes easily and naturally, because it's all too easy to become glib, to become a caricature of oneself. The original concerns of small-town weirdness and parochialism, and the slightly mock-heroic tone, they've been done, so it's not really something I intend to do much of, but I enjoyed a brief foray into my writing past. Not sure I'd pursue it any further though, so here seems as good a place as any to park them for a bit while I think on.

Two asides

1

Sat, marinating in the stale bath of the sermon

drawn up through soil and down through air by indifferent hands

to my horror, I felt the words slip in, incubate

and after a while, I grew gravid with Middle England

my belly swelled with boundary disputes, I carried

complaints about noise, borrowed lawnmowers

and to be frank, I felt put upon to be poked by midwives

as a hitherto disinterested bystander, why me, but within me

parked next to their swelling grudges, pushing on my bladder

I knew why various experts prodded and tested

my urine, my semen, I was a wonder of the age

but they never hung about, couldn't meet my eye

Papers were written, but in truth I knew

that I was set up for this

 a sacrifice on the altar of politesse

For without me, bursting and groaning and crying to Heaven

they'd have had to carry their spite with them

and it would have drowned them, each in turn

2

and here at the crossroads we can see

through the sheeting sleet the site

where Roscommon, lecher and gossip

was hanged for the sheer malice of his words

lack of intent not precluding guilt

his protestations of inanity, insignificance

were swallowed by the rising tide of townsfolk

a scrum recalling ancient games of football

he should have known better, a man of his vintage

so refined in many ways, well-dressed, a lover

of fine coffee when so little was to be had

(his delivered by liveried men in red bags)

but the irresistible taste of slander

the flavour of sensation, the way

that lewd descriptions of the widow Fairfax

felt in the mouth...

he was a sommelier of gossip, revelled

in the viscosity of Rimmer the Carter's son's dalliance with Carter 

the Rimmer's daughter -  and her not yet sixteen

and on the altar, I heard

Bliss, the floral top-notes of Billy Chisholm's

eye for the lads, the lengthy, languorous aftertaste

of Dredge's bankruptcy - but it's all hidden somewhere

just ask the widow Fairfax

And they say, if you wait at this site, all these years

after the mob swallowed him whole, you can still hear

his last cries on the evening wind

But none of it matters! None of it!